La Chatreuse Chanteuse: Absinthe of Malice in Macronland.

Essence D'essence. Ceci, Ce n'est-pas jaune.

Paris is burning. Even as COP24 goes unnoticed, at least here in the land of the Free Press,where every year comes to more and more resemble the one described by Eric Blair, as all news that isn't US news gets harder and harder to find.  How reassuring to know that the Free Press, which is shorthand for the Free Market Press, as it always prints only what the Free Market will bear, not the truth, which is something that's just bandied about like a shuttlecock.

Oops, beebeebeebee ...breaking news, just as I was typing that the doorbell rang: it was the mailman with 20# bag of birdseed: free delivery. If I send a one-pound box of chocolates to my brother in Massachusetts, it's $16 ...  how can that be?  Because just as there can be no 10% discount to Amazon Prime members at Whole Foods without the rest of Whole Food shoppers paying out of their pockets to deliver those Prime savings (this is Free Market capitalism where the INVESTORS, those receiving dividends, should be the ones subsidizing Prime members, not Whole Foods' other customers who not only don't get the dividends, they don't even get the savings!) there is likewise no free delivery as more and more Corporate customers provide it, the cost of an individual to send the most trifling of packages has rapidly climbed to where it is impossible for any of us to send someone a package directly without the cost of shipping costing more than what's shipped.

That's how Corponations operate, underhandedly, just as Wall St and the entire financial industry strives mightily to hide risk from those incurring it, costs are now Monte Carlo'd around to hide them. This is the essence of a Centralized economy, supposedly anathema to one that is a Free Market (as though markets can't be rigged). So when you see Paris on fire even as the COPout24 leaves nothing changed and the world continues digging up and setting every form of fossil fuel on fire as rapidly as it can be disinterred, releasing an ever-increasing burden of CO2 into the air, the real cause of Climate Change comes more sharply into focus: the liberal democracies that Fukuyama claimed to be the end of history are proving themselves to be exactly that, just not in the way he had in mind.

At last, only a decade later, the truth is finally emerging: There is no Austerity, this is the Best it will ever be, the Aristocracy, the ruling classes as a hole (sic), have abandoned all hope of anything like a Liberal Democracy long ago, in fact the fall of the Soviet Union was the one cataclysmic event that assured there would be no more liberal Democracies, as the USSR was, as it had been against the depredations of Hitler and the Nazis in WW2, the last bastion standing against the Nationalistic Fascism that is overtaking a world where energy resources are at the heart of geopolitics and the one leader who says so, Donald Trump, is derided as stupid, clownish and an Insult to humanity.

But Paris in flames gives the lie to those who would say we need only drive electric (in a world where more than 35 million internal combustion engines are manufactured each and every year, and EV's a mere 1% of that amount, somehow you, not  the manufacturers, have control over what the auto fleet is comprised of) to continue the waste cycle of this, our Mad mad mad mad whirled.

As protesters vilify US climate policy in Poland, peacefully, more or less, chanting, "keep it in the ground", mass rioting is occurring in another corner of EuroLand militarily insisting that they do the opposite, pull it out of the ground and keep it cheap with federal government subsidies, because we are the middle classes and we are the end of history.

Watching this is so striking, given its Alice Through the Looking Glass penumbra, occurring simultaneously as it has, with the hagiography of GHW in Bushland while the release of Mueller tidbits titillate with tintinnabulations of electoral tinkering with a tincture of treason mixed in, it is difficult to overlook the fact that the man after whom an airport in Texas is named, colluded with the Iranians for the non-release of the hostages being held in order to assure the release of the American electorate from the Carter Presidency, he then sold them (the Iranians, not the electorate, who would only receive the bill), surreptitiously, American missiles, a US enemy to this day, while VP under Reagan. He was also the Chairman of the Carlyle Group when he declared a Peace Dividend, specifically to crash defense stocks, which it did, and which Carlyle bought up for pennies on the dollar, after which the Bush declared War on Iraq, assuring those Defense stocks would skyrocket in value.

In other words, Trumpelstiltskin's done nothing that he wasn't shown how to do by our "Gentleman" President, who understood "civility" even as he bombed a nation in the dead of night with Stealth technology developed by extracting huge sums from the American taxpayer in order to "Fight Communism", even as the Reagan administration, of which he was a part, moved America's manufacturing base, lock, stock, and barrel, to China. That same China that was then, as now, ruled by a Communist dictatorship, one Bush made stronger, so much so that it is now one of the richest, largest economies on the globe precisely because the President they just got finished falling over each other to add their own tidbit of adulation to, wanted to enrich himself and his criminal family on the backs of the American middle class. Because of such outrageous juxtaposition, such that abuse is heaped on the one president (and, as anyone who has read this blog knows, I never have been nor ever will be, a supporter of this odious creature, but such monstrous calumny as is now being flung at this man while the Ogre that destroyed the US Savings and Loan industry, sold arms to fascist guerillas, (who his son, Poppy's Seed, would have to later call Terrorists), gets praised for destroying the country) while the other gets praised to high heaven for doing exactly same thing, only "nicely", without letting the public see his true face, which had cast upon it the most hideous shade of dorian grey. But by so doing, we've demonstrated to he who must be obeyed that he can do whatever he likes, and we will bury him without opprobrium and blithely cover up all his crimes. Why do we feel street criminals need deterrence, yet fail to apply that to financial and political criminals? There is no deterrence when the president knows he will be honored in Death no matter how dishonorable he was in Life. It's become more and more apparent to me that the reason the middle class is so pissed off at his trumpery is because he represents the lumpen. Cynically, and to their detriment, to be sure, but representin', nonetheless, albeit with a rather heavy emphasis on the resentin' part.

So now, because of GHW Bush, a Chinese military, one that was for all intents and purposes, non-existent when the great anti-Communists duo of Reagan/Bush took office, the very real possibility of War with China has been created. Ooh, and for those of you too young, you can search for articles on America during the nineties regarding the desperation of the US military to find and exploit enemies with which to justify the enormous outlay in military expenditure the country was making. Outlays that a then far more productive economy was finding onerous, yet which have now blossomed into full-blown militarization of the entire economy, from BurgerKing to Walmart, The Corponation is fully cosseted in the arms of the arms manufacturers and the enormous unpayable debt they incur in our name. For it is we the people who have to work to support the war-mongering of Wii the People Of the Corporate States of America (the State of Tennessee has supported the criminal enterprise of VW with more billions than they have spent for the Healthcare of their own citizens ... why aren't these illegal immigrants targeted?)

Paris has proven this to be the case. At last we can see that it is the very class, the middle class, and specifically the middle classes of the OECD nations, that are the most outspoken about the necessity for fossil fuels to remain in the ground, yet is the same class that has its entire lifestyle completely  indebted to processes that continue to extract and combust them: no fossil fuel? No Bitcoin, no internet, no more racking up debt you have no way of paying, no more conjuring trillions of currency and then "investing" it; in a word, no more ZoomZoom.

 Well, only until the peasants are revolting, because their cars aren't capable of re-volting, as they're not electric, but ICE machines. Melting ice in the Arctic as they propel us into a wall of our own construction.