The Oppermans ... Book Two: Today

Punked: Donald Trump pardons two war criminals and the country shrugs but the world is watching


Days later the newspapers announced that Richard Karper, editor of the Tagesanzeiger, had been stabbed by a young hothead. The youth, a certain Werner Rittersteg, what was in the Lower Sixth of Queen Louise School explained that he had remonstrated with the editor about his notorious article on the Leader and that Karper had seized and attempted to strangle him, so that he had no choice but to use his knife in self-defence. The papers reported that Rittersteg, after examination, had been discharged.

Rittersteg père, a wealthy merchant, who held four honorary appointments, gave his son a good box on the ear on the impulse of the moment. Rittersteg mère burst into tears on account of the disgrace which the Lad had brought upon her. But soon it turned out that Long Lummox, (his nickname) was no scoundrel but a hero. The Nationalist newspapers, Fox News of the day, published his photograph. They pointed out that, although the young man’s deed could not be unconditionally approved of, it was nevertheless easy to understand that a German youth would be aroused to do violence on account of the dead man’s dastardly assertions. Rittersteg père’s acquaintances rang up to congratulate him. He was appointed to two more honorary positions. After 24 hours Ritterstag’s parents had forgotten how they had first reacted to what had happened. To them, too, the lad was now a hero . After 48 hours Rittersteg père would have been able to swear, with a good conscience, that he had always expected his heroic son to accomplish some such patriotic act. In spite of the bad times he rashly promised to let the lad have an outboard engine installed in his rowing-boat for the spring.

Dr. Voogelsand was filled with the deepest dissatisfaction. The case proved how impressionable  German youth  was if only one knew how to manage them. A mere hint was enough to get them off in the right direction. Werner Rittersteg was one of those youngsters who would be certain to efface everything evil, corrupt, and disintegrating in Germany.

What does not suit you
You must abjure;
What harms your soul
Never endure.

18 of the 26 boys in the Lower Sixth were now Nationalists.

(Excerpt from Lion Feuchtwanger’s, The Oppermans)

An Unpretty Ditty.

                                            

Thyme leaves but Tax returns

Olive Oils what Grecians earn

Parlsey flakes from unbleached flowers

Donald Trump and Austin Powers.

Thee 'n 'D'.

Bias currents: In case you missed her, She's my TranSister.

 Garden of Earthly Delights

 

 

 As the Midwest braces itself for more tumultuous weather, the words of their Furor ring out loud and true:

 "It's called weather, [it] changes and you have storms and you have rain ... "

The defining attitude of his hoax that climate change is a hoax gets closer to home, as it spells out exactly the plight of those who ignore the changing climate to focus on the weather: Using the troposphere as a private enterprise dumping ground and thereby changing its molecular composition leaves the problem of climate change one for future generations to worry about. For as the President makes so clear, it is the Weather that we are changing with our profligate wasteful consumption, as in combusting of, petroleum and its byproducts.

Many have expressed skepticism as to my pet theory that the mad rush to produce hydrocarbons at any cost by fracking ie shattering the very bedrock to release its stored hydrocarbons, giving a whole new meaning to the term pet rocks, is wreaking havoc with the weather, have stated that disbelief by pointing out that the vast quantity of water is brought from the Pacific Ocean, the moisture being flared into the troposphere at an ever-accelerating level, not being close to enough to cause the catastrophic flooding we are seeing.

But that's a misunderstanding of my thesis.

I'm not suggesting that those miles and miles of seepage, and those H2O/CO2 manufacturing facilities, their actual activity disguised by the euphemism, "flaring", that have sprung up all around the Midwest, forming a littoral bulwark around what is becoming the vast Toiletbowl of the Farmbelt, are alone responsible for the deluge (Although one would think the term HYDROcarbons would be kind of a clue). But that's not what I mean, precisely. What I mean is best exemplified by the term bias, one we are all becoming more and more familiar with as we watch politics and the media convoluted by the same phenomenon, it should be easier to understand how it is used in electronics.

Most circuits involving transistors typically require specific DC voltages and currents for their operation; these can be achieved using a biasing circuit. As an example think of the transistor amplifiers that power your I-phone speakers. In linear amplifiers, a small input signal, gives larger output signal without any change in shape (low distortion): the input signal causes the output signal to vary up and down in a manner strictly proportional to the input. However, because the relationship between input and output for a transistor is not linear across its full operating range, the transistor amplifier only approximates linear operation. For low distortion, the transistor must be biased so the output signal swing does not drive the transistor into a region of extremely nonlinear operation. For a bipolar junction transistor amplifier, this requirement means that the transistor must stay in the active mode, and avoid cut-off or saturation.

Saturation being the keyword in our example, with run-off instead of cut-off . The Jet Stream is a current and it swings in oscillation in not that different a manner from any AC voltage you can see on any oscilloscope. When it arrives fully laden from the West into the biased troposphere of those States surrounded by others that are fracking with a flare, the output signal swing drives the entire weather regime of the region into extremely nonlinear operation, resulting in extreme flooding as their heavy burden of water is wrung out of the sky.

Maybe this 'll help you not see.

But as usual, when our Grand Pooh-Bah gives us the gift of his own twisted vision, we are so biased as to our response, we fail to see that there's some truth there: it is not just the climate, anymore than it's the planet, that is or should be, our immediate concern; it is, as is becoming more and more obvious, the weather. And as we continue to turn up the heat under the kettle, we shouldn't be so surprised that the weather system that was can never return, nor can the weather system that now is be relied on to be the one that will be: It is not only changing: it has already changed, as anomalies become the new normal and the closed system called earth responds to the increase of energy by an energetic increase of unstable weather as it reconfigures itself to a new stasis. But no stasis is static when you keep injecting ever more heat, until, in exact parallel to the international increase in pressure and tensions, something breaks, at which point we have all already been biased to wring our hands in unison and exclaim, in what has become the catchphrase of the Projected New American Century for anything caused by our own activities but whose ramifications we have assiduously blinded ourselves to: "No one could have seen it coming."

"Climate Change is a hoax", Trump's Flare for Gaslighting.

 

A certain New Yorker's idea of a Funday on Fifth Avenue.

The reason, well, one of them, I started writing this blog was because, thanks to an accident in my childhood, I see the world from a uni-ocular, as in Cyclopean, perspective, so thought, Well, I quite literally see the world differently than almost anyone else, so I think I'll record it ... the same reason applies to why I started to draw.

My understanding of the term Gas-lighting seems to be a case in point. The term is used, as per the definitions I've found online:

"To manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity."

It comes from the movie Gaslight wherein Ingrid Bergman's husband tries to do the above. My exception to the way the term is used, and has come to be cemented into place as to its meaning, is that in that movie the gaslight wasn't used by the husband to try to drive his wife coo-coo. Au contraire, it was the gaslighting that gave him away and provided the clue that exposed his nefarious plans to the person he was supposedly "gaslighting".

Leaving his wife alone in the house, the scheming husband would sneak into an adjoining house and work on his plans, leaving her alone. When he turned on the gas in one place, it would dim the lights in his own, leaving his wife to wonder what was causing it to happen. This, however, given the various tricks and subterfuges her husband was using to cause her to question her own sanity, was the least of her worries. But the kicker is, he was completely unaware that the secrecy of his activities was being  jeopardized by this tell-tale sign. But what the term implies is that he was using the dimming of the gaslight to drive his wife bonkers, despite the fact that the complete opposite was true: when one of her friends, well, her only friend really, informed her that he saw hubbie entering the second house, it was the dimming of the gas lighting that helped clue her in to the dirty trick her husband was pulling on her, as he had informed her he was going elsewhere (his ability to access said house not being known to her until then).

So now she knew! Every time he left and the dimming threw the light onto activities he wished to keep secret from her, it exposed his lies and gave her the confidence to see through his other cruel tricks as well: It was the gas lighting that SAVED her sanity, not what made her question it.

Ergo sum of its parts: Gaslighting someone should be considered a GOOD thing!

So it's just a bit of irony that lighting gas throughout the midwest is gaslighting the public, in the manner of its defined, but erroneous, meaning:

Four Corners Methane Hot Spot: a highly concentrated plume of greenhouse gas hovers over the region where there’s a 155,000-ton gap between the emissions these facilities collectively report to the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas inventory, and the amount of emissions the scientists estimate is needed to produce a plume as concentrated as the hot spot. The industry, of course, blames the gap on geologic seeps.  

Water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, both by weight and by volume, account for 66 to 85 percent of the greenhouse effect, compared to a range of 9 to 26 percent for CO2.

The amount of gas flared,  burnt off in the flare system to produce water vapor and carbon dioxide, in the Permian rose about 85 percent last year reaching 553 million cubic feet a day in the fourth quarter, according to data from Oslo-based consultant Rystad Energy.

and, it's being known that,

If there is a high amount of waste heat and water vapor is released in copious amounts it affects the weather and rainfall in its area.

But,

It would have to be an immense plant with an enormous release of heat and consequent water vapor.

However,

The Permian, the North Dakota, the Marcellus shale fracking operations, as well as the Four Corners, 
are all equivalent to exactly that: immense flaring operations generating enormous releases of heat and its consequent CO2 and water vapor directly into the atmosphere. Yet which fails to take into account the un-flared methane that is released in now unregulated amounts, as the Obama-era regulations have been so mangled and their intended lack of enforcement so broadcast as to leave them, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. And all these Greenhouse gases are being released in such enormous unprecedented quantities to produce a product for which there is no demand (No. Dakota's oil, for example is so constrained by its remoteness that there is a sizable discount, currently at more than 20% of the already low price of oil, the low price being a function of its plenitude on the world market). It is being produced solely to make America grate again by producing oil its refineries are useless for processing, thus making it necessary for the US to import growing levels of Russian oil.

So, in case you were wondering what Putin and  Trump discussed during  their closed door conference, it was surely this: pull the same trick on Venezuela that the Trump administration did in
Iran: use oil politics to ensure private gain for his cronies. By placing sanctions on Venezuela,
Russian oil, despite sanctions being on Russia right now, is being imported in copious quantities to
Texas to keep their refineries in operation, since the oil produced in the US is useless as far as these refineries' capabilities are concerned and is at the crux of the reason the ban on exporting oil was
lifted during the Obama presidency.

These sanctions have no more justification than that Venezuela is a Socialist Country, even as the President ladles cash to his constituencies in the farm belt for the losses they are incurring because of climate change and his tariff regime: that's Socialism.

Even as his administration uses "Defense" of National Security to keep the Auto industry from choking on its fumes: Socialism,

Even as the Boeing Executives get ladled cash for their warplanes while manufacturing killer Jets for their customers: Socialism.

There would be no fracking industry if not for the government research in fracking as well as the QE the Fed larded the industry with to the tune of trillions of $$$$$$$: How is that not Socialism?

The Military Industrial Complex, including such obvious industries as Chemical plants, the Nuclear industry, Oil companies, electric utilities, none of which would exist without Socialism, because none of them would make the necessary investments to even make them insurable, never mind going concerns: unless they get the government to assume their risk they threaten to close shop, as they can't then make a profit. This even includes Banking (the Fed: a private Corporation whose employees are paid for by the taxpayers), housing (Fanny Mae, etc: buying up mortgages the banks issuing them would never extend if they couldn't offload the risk to the taxpayer); industry after industry would be non-existent, as would their much-vaunted profits, without Socialism, for the simple reason, that, as in any Socialist country, those deriving the benefits aren't the same as those  who assume the risk. Dividends (hell the richest Corporations don't even pay taxes) from all these Corporations don't go to the taxpayer, but to shareholders who, thanks to the PPT, all but have even their share prices guaranteed by the Central Government. And that is Socialism. Calling it the Military Industrial Complex is a fancy-pants way of hoodwinking the public into accepting policies that in any other country would be accepted for what they are: Socialism.

Without Socialism, the US, nor any other economy, would be competitive, as Industry, from the Fossil Fuel industry (Suing Exxon without suing the Federal Government that built the Interstate Highway System that made the acquisition, fueling, maintenance and insuring of a personal automobile pretty much mandatory, demonstrates the lawsuit for what it actually is: pure political posturing; Showboating) to the housing industry, would be right now, flat on their backs.

Venezuelan sanctions have nothing to do its being a Socialist country anymore than Iranian sanctions have anything to do with ... well, whatever the trumped up reason is, as with all of DJ's decisions, they are made to position his offspring and the companies they keep to profit from his tenure in the White House to the detriment of not only the sanctioned countries, but most of all, his own constituencies, because, in a political demonstration of the adage You only hurt the ones you love, the ones you should hurt least of all, he knows that hurting the ones that love him will cost him nothing, even as the repercussions of his policies are flooding their homes, destroying their livelihood, making their purchases more expensive by the day,  they all dutifully support him because he will defend the unborn, even as the water-borne, as in diseases and molds, houses and family cars, are killing his ardent faithful, who are being gaslighted to death by this insane level of savoir flare.

Hot Air about Gas Stoves.

When a Range Rover meets a Roving Range.

A good article on the method used to spread fake news was printed by our "All the Fake News we deem fit to print" avatar, that ran an article claiming that Your Gas Stove Is Bad for You and the Planet. Fair enough. Of course, the real fact is that any stove is bad for you and the planet (that's redundant, actually, as if it's bad for the planet, it's automatically bad for you: no planet, no you) which I might perhaps comment in passing, is the first lie. The planet being, after all, just a planet. So whether anything is "good" for it or "bad" for it is decided only in relationship to whether or not it is conducive to supporting LIFE on said planet, something without which the planet itself goes right on existing regardless. In fact, from what we've witnessed so far, it would have a far easier time maintaining its equilibrium without any life on it at all. And human life in particular is disruptive to the extreme ... so there's that.

But the NYT is not interested in the truth. It's interested in selling newspapers, and that means pandering, in far worse manner than any politician, even the DJ, to those most inclined to purchase them: ie to their base. And their base is maniacally convinced that we have to "Save the Planet". But as we will see in this particular article, it amplifies the false rhetoric of policies that advocate wiping out vast tracts of rainforests and the ripping up of the only wild areas left in the farmbelt to produce fuels for CARS, the most atrocious insult to LIFE on this planet, yet ranks as a mere annoyance to the planet itself, which spins and spins and orbits around its star no matter what the intelligent life it fosters does to destroy everything that lives and breathes upon its surface. Those who are the most vocal about saving the planet just happen to be the same crowd that most vehemently pushes for policies that continue the rapacious march of destruction that the manufacture, deployment and powering of our ever-growing fleet of carbon-bons necessitates, whether they're fueled by gasoline, electricity, nitrogen or sugarcane.

So even if there were a danger to the planet itself, if the steps advocated by this next "Green" Revolution", the "Green" New Deal, were taken, it would, to judge by the success of its two greatest mind-boggling boondoggles, mono-cropping via intense usage of fossil fuels, and the manufacture of biofuels, do nothing whatsoever to ameliorate its peril, but would in all likelihood, continue to accelerate its environmental destruction. All while insisting they are "Saving the Planet".

The article starts with the specious statement that, "We have some good news that sounds like bad news: Your gas stove has to go." Which statement is followed by the startling revelation, even as it prints this piece of propaganda, that "the" industry is already issuing propaganda with gauzy pictures of blue flames". ("The" industry? Which one? "The" ad industry? (which the NYT has no problem with printing their propaganda, so a rag that will print any propaganda as long as it's paid to do so, isn't part of "the" industry? "The" fossil fuel industry? "The" Fracking industry? (largest producer of natural gas in the country?)) First red flag: vague reference as to who the villain in the piece actually is.  

Which is followed by the statement that your stove is a danger to the world’s climate ... ah, so we've advanced a little at least, now it's not the planet, but the climate of the planet that is in danger. Naturally the same arguments apply as to those stating that the planet itself being in danger. The climate exists ... and the climate changes. So the climate can be in danger of changing, as in relation to those it will thereby affect, but the climate itself isn't capable of being in danger, as it will always be here. There is a climate on Venus, and it is changing. It is not in any danger, as it's incapable of experiencing danger. Any life that exists on Venus might thereby be put into jeopardy, depending on just how the climate changed, but the climate would not be in danger, any more than it is in any danger here on Earth. 

This is all leading up to convincing the readers of our responsibility for stopping climate pollution (what does that even mean? Pollution may change the climate, but you can't pollute the climate any more than you can "pollute" the weather. You can, however, pollute the discussion of the difference between the climate and the weather by claiming so).

But not to worry:

"A new wave of ambition to address climate change is sweeping across state legislatures this year as more and more commit to 100 percent clean electricity or debate doing so."

Too bad all the gas expelled bloviating about (non-existent) 100% "clean" electricity, (the same adjective, btw, that both coal and natural gas like to associate with their own particular brand of energy-poison). The clearest way to see that electricity is not now nor ever can be whatever it is they mean by "clean" is to imagine that we, as in the inhuman race, were to tap into the only really natural source of electricity every man, woman and child is aware of: lightning. 

Lightening would need no solar panels or wind farms, nor would it need to convert one form of energy into another. Yet even with those advantages, if we were able to build dynamos with enough capacitance power to buffer them from the enormous power of that first strike and then power the grid by disseminating the resultant power surge throughout the interconnected system it would be insufficient as a reliable source of electricity, as lightening doesn't strike all the time. And the same can be said for both solar and wind, and, more and more, for hydro, as drought strikes nation after nation reducing their ability to generate sufficient electricity to meet growing demand.

But somehow the article's author considers State legislatures simply discussing the impossible as progress:

"But despite this progress, the Rhodium Group estimates that climate-altering emissions in the United States increased 3.4 percent last year from the year before, one of the biggest jumps in decades." (With that kind of progress, our orb'll be a flaming firebrand by the end of the next decade: IT'll be that little blue flame they use to represent "clean-burning gas" ... I had to stop typing for a sec, 'til I stopped laughing).

Why? Well, Burning gas is now a bigger source of such pollution than burning coal, and nearly a third of that gas is burned in homes and commercial buildings.

Well, first of all, if you replace coal-burning power plants, which the author himself states we are doing, with gas-burning power plants, it would indeed be a brave new world if burning gas didn't at some point in the conversion not become a bigger source of CO2 than coal combustion.

 And as he states, "stoves actually use very little energy", unless, of course, they're electric stoves. Ah but now there's Progress:

"The perceived advantage of gas stoves is pinpoint control of heat, but induction cooktops are more precise." 

I'm sure it's merely accidental that Gillis conflates stoves with cooktops: they are not, however, synonymous. An electric range is not an electric oven, by any stretch of the imagination, yet Gillis completely sidesteps the question as to how does the actual stove, if there even is one, works. This despite the fact that the article's title specifically references Stoves!

As always as from anyone who dreams that technology will "come to the rescue", Gillis (he is after all being published in the NYT, the #1 purveyor in the country of fake news by omission) somehow neglects to mention the fact that in order to actually use this technology you must throw out all your current cookware. Now, I've had mine essentially for my entire life (much of it used when I got it), but to save energy I now have to jettison it and buy completely different cookware:

Induction cookware must be made of a magnetic-based material, such as cast iron or magnetic stainless steel. (The intensive energy use in the manufacture of this entirely new array of products, is, like the manufacture of EV's, completely ignored by the little Green men who seem to have invaded from another planet).

That's from Amazon, btw, Gillis doesn't deign to mention this tiny detail.

He goes on to insist that Heat pumps are going to save us: never mind that they don't work in environments that need them the most, they are, to bring the concept back down to earth, nothing more than electrified swamp coolers (which have been in use for more than 20 years now) that people in such desert climes as Phoenix are hip to because in extremely dry climates, evaporative cooling of air has the added benefit of conditioning the air with more moisture for the comfort of building occupants. Not surprisingly, they likewise, in extremely humid climates, have the added inconvenience of conditioning the air with more moisture than the comfort of building occupants can tolerate, necessitating their procuring and running a dehumidifier simultaneously.

Yet Gillis acts  as though this is some whiz-bang new technology that'll, yes, that's right, "Save the Planet."

 Nowhere in the article does Gillis see fit to mention that the main contributor to the rise in CO2 emissions he begins the article with, is most egregiously being caused by the specialized burning of gas commonly referred to as flaring: burning gas with NO purpose: just burning it up. 

But that's because Mr. Gillis, like anyone else jumping on the bandwagon of turning Climate Change into their own little money tree, is an author, one working on a book about how to solve global warming (Lol ... if this moronic article is any indication, I can see why he has to print his ad, which is all this article is (Oh, as a PS, despite it's paucity of any real objective data, it got printed because the dobie Gillis that wrote it was a one-time employee of the paper)).

Like Robert Scribbler, who has become little more than a shill for the Tesla Corponation, Gillis is the spokesperson for a range (now you know I wouldn't purposely use such a horrible pun, right?) of (let's shamelessly refer to them as "Green") products that bespeak of Progress. What that progress is, is a progression of ever-more disastrous steps to eliminate the use of fossil fuels with the substitution of them by a blend of renewable fuels that will never be able to produce the requisite Power (it's ultimately about power, not just energy) to feed an increasingly voracious appetite of the OECD nations and their acolytes for electrifying everything everywhere and excluding anyone unable to pay their power bills from the conversation (Speaking of conversations, to see what they have in store for the future, note the almost complete absence of any public/pay phone system, despite our once having one that was the envy of the (developed!) world: it was ripped apart, and then sold piece by piece back to the original owner, transforming AT&T's regulated monopoly into an unregulated monopoly, thereby depriving the even marginally destitute among us from being able to make a phone call with one thin dime ever again: this is what that dobie, Gillis, and all the little green men who will lap up his propaganda as if it were Holy Writ, considers "Progress"). 

If only it were. But like all such solutions, and they are easily identified by the rush to pour yet more billions of dollars into the coffers of the Corponationals before a single action is taken, they leverage the fantasy of a free lunch: the desire to have our yellow cake and eat it too. Just make them believe it and they will come, fully loaded with the conviction they are doing something "For the Planet".

Static Electrickety: The Shocking fact that a Green Economy is a Boeing Economy.

                                                         Transmission Impossible.

As I was beating some egg whites to make a  lemon pudding cake last Saturday, I thought of Ilargi and Yves Smith of Naked capitalism fame. I simply didn't have time to do my usual by-hand whipping of the helpless albumen of the separated ova, so resorted to pulling out the electric mixer (It had belonged to the landlady in my Cambridge apartment who died while we were there (that's why it's "the" electric beater instead of "my" electric beater) ... that was in 1972; it still works perfectly well), and as I beat the helpless fluid into a froth, it occurred to me that generations' worth of both electro-mechanical and gear-propelled products had been needlessly wiped out when the world decided that nuclear, and therefore, electricity so cheap it wouldn't need to be metered, became the rage after WW2. (Yes, you younguns, that's what they were telling grown adults, who readily believed it, when I was a child). I once owned a rotary beater, you simply turned a crank (and I don't mean to be self-reflective) and it spun the beaters. Had I had one on Saturday, it would have beaten those whites just as efficiently as the electric mixer .. oh , wait a minute, if redesigning a jet engine so that it will get better mileage, even at the cost of radically increasing the risk of that engine propelling the jet along with its human cargo, at an accelerating rate into the ground, then I think that it's not an exaggeration to claim that the mechanical devise, since it uses not a jot of juice, and therefore releases only my self-generated CO2 into the troposphere, is in fact the far more efficient method.

Last week I had been wanting to drill a hole, but the electric drill was in the basement put away in its black case, so I was trying to start the hole with a screwdriver and a boring screw (by which I don't mean a tediously garrulous prison guard).  Likewise, I remembered when I was a kid how handy it was to just pull the hand drill, operated in the same manner as the above-mentioned rotary beater, off its nail on the pegged backboard, and rapidly drill my hole (somehow that sounds obscene). All that technology, and these are only two examples, has been jettisoned as we've tied ourselves to the mast of everything electric ... and the new push to do exactly the same, even more so, continues today in the face of, whether you "believe" in peak oil or not, constrained, and increasingly expensive, oil. Now, why did this make me think of Yves? Because she's one of the few, out of reams and reams  of  "Green" energy claims, to have found the only solution that I agree with:

"The only way to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions is radical conservation. No other approach could make enough of a difference quickly enough. Ilargi makes a more radical version of the argument that reduced energy use is ultimately the only remedy".

Now is that so hard to grasp?

Ilargi begins his  argument with the radical statement that "those among us who tout renewable energy should pay more attention to the 2nd law of Thermodynamics", leaving me asking myself, "Pay more attention to it!? Do you really think 98% of those touting Green energy even know that the law exists, or, more to the point, have ever heard the word 'Thermodynamics'?". Just who, do you suppose, he has conversations with? Entropy, to anyone who gives me anything more than a quizzical look when I use the word, is to most people how the Tree shepherds in Tolkien's trilogy water their charges. But what it really means, he lets Shrodinger explain:

“Erwin Schrodinger (1945) has described life as a system in steady-state thermodynamic disequilibrium that maintains its constant distance from equilibrium (death) by feeding on low entropy from its environment – that is, by exchanging high-entropy outputs for low-entropy inputs. The same statement would hold verbatim as a physical description of our economic process. A corollary of this statement is that an organism cannot live in a medium of its own waste products.”

In our case, it's not just the organism that's creating the waste product, but every other organism on
the globe that has nothing to do with producing that waste ... in fact, as we're seeing, if we cared to
pay attention, is that those the least responsible for the untrammeled venting of CO2 into the only air we have available to breathe, are those we unthinkingly put the most in peril. Thousands of species have gone extinct while mankind has been in charge of the husbandry of the planet. And the 6'th extinction has already begun, yet we continue to insist that mankind is completely capable of living in the atmospheric soup that becomes progressively more saturated with our own waste products.

And renewables, at least in the way they've come to be defined and implemented in any of the OECD nations, only add to that waste stream, none more than the much-touted EVs that will, if anything, prove to be even more disastrous than the billion or so Internal Explosion Engines plying the world's byways that they're meant to "replace". If the burgeoning of alternative power generation has made anything clear during this century, it's that none of these technologies are being implemented with any intention of replacing the incineration of fossil fuels: augmenting them, exactly how ethanol does in the US, at the cost of wreaking great environmental damage, these heavily subsidized programs are being surreptitiously funded by the oil industry itself through covert funding of so-called Green political candidates and NGO's.

In order to smokescreen the constrained availability of hydrocarbons, and to siphon political steam from Clean Energy stalwarts, it is to OPEC's advantage, for example, to see that as much green tech gets installed as possible. That explains two phenomena: the largest windfarms in the country are installed in Texas (even as it flares enough natural gas to supply its entire domestic electric demand), and the lock-step growth of Renewable electric generation with fossilized: Every joule of electricity provided by green energy brings an increase in the number of bpd's of oil  (and tonnage of coal, and cubic feet of natural gas, the overproduction of which has caused its price to collapse and that is why the world is awash in plastic: it's so cheap its wasteful and careless use is all but encouraged, as it would be with anything so massively over-produced) the world incinerates on a daily basis.  And the same is no less true for EV's: they will never replace the diesel/gas-powered fleet (they were never meant to, that's just a fairy tale we like telling ourselves), they will only make it that much larger ... already have, in fact, and thereby make the ravaging of every untouched location on earth far more inevitable as the rare earth elements they require aren't exactly buried in the backyard.

The key word in EV's is, although it's been somehow overlooked, electric.  Yet, here in California, which has mandated a certain percentage of Green Energy be included in the juice PG&E delivers to its customers, we are, at the moment, experiencing double digit increases in electric bills. The reason? The wildfires that raged throughout the state the last coupla years, the cause of which have been laid at PG&E's feet. But the base cause, which no one has seen fit to mention, is that very Mandate.

You see, because California doesn't have the so-called Green fuels in sufficient quantities to meet the State's requirements, it must import energy, despite having it in plentiful supply in-State, from other States in order to meet those State Mandates, which importation requires the stringing of miles and mile of high-transmission power lines through territory that soon enough became filled with dead trees as California's drought persisted and deepened. That's how the fires started, making the State as much to blame for it as is PG&E as it opted for the appearance of being Green, most likely to deflect criticism for being both the 2'nd largest producer of fossil fuels in the country, and the State most dependent on personal transport to enable its amoeba-like sprawl across a vast, water-challenged landscape.

The same scenario is taking place in the Wunderkind of Green Energy, Germany (where, Energiewende notwithstanding) emissions haven’t fallen and the number of private cars is rising).

The upshot of which is that the more the world attempts to replace and even surpass (lol) the energy output of fossil fuels with green fuels, the more EXPENSIVE electricity is becoming ... unpayably expensive, in many cases.

Now at the very same time that electric costs are rapidly escalating, the Greenies are insisting we all switch to electric Cars. If only ten percent of us did so (and it's more likely that even 1% would be catastrophically disruptive), the added strain to the electrickety grid that everyone complains about but no one addresses, a difficult thing to do when  hurricanes, strong winds, flooding, droughts (as we've seen in California, the one weather phenomenon one would think wouldn't affect electric delivery, has turned out to be the most catastrophic) all grow more intense, the job of maintaining even the grid as it currently (no pun intended, of course) exists , we are proving incapable of doing.

In other words, in order to force people into EV's we first need to expand our electric production and that expansion will prove to be onerously expensive, pushing the rates charged to deliver it through the roof, and certainly past the point most people will be able to afford. This, together with the dubious wisdom of ensuring that if, or more accurately, given our more and more unstable weather, when, we lose electrical power, we will all be, and the economy will be, moribund.

Just as those who chose to go "all-electric" in their homes learn: when you put all your eggs in one basket, you leave yourself needlessly vulnerable to a single source of energy, and the more we substitute every single action with one that needs us to enslave electrons to do that simplest of things for us, effortlessly as it were, once the juice dries up, we can't even get into our own houses because the door is electronically locked. (Exactly what happened in the early aughts (2004, maybe) when New York City experienced a blackout and hotels couldn't accommodate their guest, as the electronically secured doors couldn't be unlocked).

... and there's another factor to consider (and I'm sure there are additional ones I'm not taking into account), which is that in all of the OECD nations, but none more so than the US whose political class has betrayed their base to an egregious extent, the amount of energy being generated is more and more being produced not to power production but to be uselessly consumed by promulgation of unwanted ads, to power Gameboy consoles, TV's the size of walls, cryptocurrency mining, constant downloading of I-phone apps and the resultant dependency that seems to mandate 24-hour phone surveillance, by which I refer not to the NSA, but to individuals mono-maniacally, at every opportunity afforded them, whipping out and aimlessly scrolling through reams of useless data. In other words, non-productive energy use long ago surpassed the productive (As a society, we're rapidly using up all the gas in the  tank to take a Sunday drive to nowhere, so, come Monday, there's no way to get to work). As the Baby boomers retire, this situation will only grow more and more untenable, as a larger and larger contingent of the population will be using energy but producing nothing other than highly inflationary hospital and healthcare bills, which, being paid by Medicare, will continue to make our hi-energy and plastics-intensive healthcare something the ordinary citizen simply doesn't have access to.

The entire economy seems to be BOeING BOeING'ing along: becoming so distracted by efficiency that it fails to realize that the very steps it's taking to make it more The American Dreamliner (implementing AI and the "internet of things" wherever possible are two examples (Isn't Artificial Intelligence synonymous with Fake News?)), the more it makes its plummeting to the ground in smoking ruins, taking everyone who trusted in its high-flying claims of effortless soaring among the clouds to a fiery death, inevitable.

The Mueller Retort: Exploring new ways of Getting around (the Law)..

                                                      The Face of 21'st Century Leadership:

"This will never be a Socialist country!!"

While the media focuses on one Mueller, I prefer to mull over another one: Volkswagen, having eaten throught its WinterKorn, replaced CEO Matthias Mueller who formerly headed Porsche, Volkswagen’s sports car division that was forced to recall about 60,000 diesel-engined Cayenne and Macan sport utility vehicles (What, may I ask, does "sport utility" even mean? Fold-down seats so capacious one can hold a soccer match in the space thus provided? Practice your putt while you putt-putt along? Improve your drive(train), your passing game, or maybe producing foul air during your home run? ). The company sold 10.74 million vehicles and made 11.6 billion euros ($14.3 billion) in profit. Proving once again, as FB recently did, that breaking the law and poisoning humanity for profit is well, profitable, and comes with the full blessing of the government of the people you're poisoning. Germany was given carte blanche to poison Americans (the software designed to allow more CO2 into the atmosphere than what was allowed by law specifically targeted American sales) created barely a blip in the shareholders' dividends, and so the company continued to produce vehicles that did so, by simply moving the s/w to a different make and model of VW products ... NEXT! Who knows, or more to the point, who cares, where they'll next break the law to feed their own already well-heeled investors?

But Germany's Mueller will experience none of the opprobrium heaped on our Mueller, because he was "successful": he made money, his company and its shareholders made money, its workers' pensions and high salaries and six-week vacations all got paid and their customers' saved money, all  at the public's expense. The perfect Capitalist scenario, push the true costs of doing business, not onto your customers, but onto the general public.That's what the entire system is built on, as illustrated by the lack of any action whatsoever besides lip service to the continued untrammeled venting of CO2 into the atmosphere, a process for which the entire human population is set up to pay for the profits of a small monstrosity, oh I mean minority, of the world holding shares in criminal organizations, such as VW.


The NYT just quoted one of those feasting at the smorgasbord: "I’m a card-carrying capitalist,” Warren Buffett, who hath a way with words, said. “I believe we wouldn’t be sitting here (In the fatcatbird seat) except for the market system.”

 Really, the market system? Not the Free market system, just the market system, since we all know there's only ONE type of market system. But that has nothing to do with Capitalism, over the seven C's: Cronyism, Corruption, Confiscation, Criminality, Class, Credit, and Capitolism, provide the fumes that an economy, that was once capitalistic, continues to run on.

FREE (to Corponations, but not to you and me) Enterprise aka Capitolism/Corponationalism:

At close to 0% interest rates paid for the coin of the realm, while the Fed pushes for a 2% annual inflation rate, what other than malfeasance and criminality can explain even a seven year auto loan made at 4%/per annum by the same banks that pay nothing for it, and yet can't, even at that rate, make money because the same entity it borrows from is actively engaged in trying to make their own customers' (the banks) business model untenable? In a mere two years, that 4% is eaten up by the Fed's planned inflation, and the banks get paid back with dollars of increasingly less value, until, at the end of the loan, they are paying the 4%, not the borrowers (Which means it has to be made up in other realms, which is the non-banks check-cashing franchises (all owned by actual banks, the SIV's of post-2008 finance, and why your credit card interest rate is so nose-bleed high ... YOU are paying that arbitrage between the real cost of interest on that which is charged to the car-buying public, which otherwise would be unable to afford the gas-guzzling, high margin livingrooms they drag around with them wherever they go ... empty livingrooms 98% of the time). Thus the War on Cash.

Both the Auto industry and the financial industry in America is still extant because it coerced the public to "invest" in them (why is the public's investment not right now paying it dividends that the criminal VW organization is paying out to its investors? Instead the industry claims it "paid back" all the "loans". Meanwhile shoveling dividends into the pockets of GM's investors such as WarrenBuffet, whose risk was assumed by the Federal Government, which is you, and paying as few dollars in taxes to the entity that rescued it as possible).

And that 's not even counting the Tesla or any other EV s that get enormous government subsidies, so much so that the market valuation of Tesla is more than Ford, resulting in one headline I read today stating that Tesla is more valuable than Ford. The dire implications of monetizing everything under the sun is most perfectly illustrated by this absurdity.  Ford employs 85,000, in the US alone, Tesla, worldwide (it doesn't provide the number of US employees anywhere on its website or anywhere else I've looked) 37,500. It is keen to keep the fact of its exploding cars from the headlines while it struggles to produce, with a worldwide workforce of half of Ford's US workforce, far less than a quarter of a million vehicles a year, as opposed to Ford's producing the same number of vehicles every two weeks; Ford Motor Has a Dividend Yield of 5.53, whereas Tesla has never declared dividends on their common stock, and brags that it intends on retaining all future earnings (lol) to finance future growth, regardless of profitability (who needs it when you have subsidized sales?) and therefore, do not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future.

If Ford went out of business tomorrow the repercussions would be felt worldwide, if Tesla did, who'ds care except the fools that bought a much-hyped and techie-ballyhooed stock despite its being hopelessly underwater? Yet it's Tesla that is the more valuable enterprise? That is the result of Capitolization: the collusion between Corponations and the Centrally-Planned economy to shell-game costs, with a sleight -of-hand multi-card Monte game to shift the real costs of production and finance to those not purchasing the products being sold: the costs and risks are borne by the public, the profits and dividends, allocated to private bank accounts of those who insist that any tax burden, by which they are made rich, is not to be borne by themselves: a double whammy as that means individuals must make up that difference as well. So what does Value mean then, except monetized value, which is obviously manipulated by Centrally-Planned Government forces, not Market forces, and is in fact in complete opposition to market forces?

The FED: As the Chairman tries to normalize rates, no one asks why in Buffet the Vampire Capitalism's Player's market system, the most fundamental commodity of all, money itself, is Jerry-rigged, manipulated, and centrally-controlled to a value decided by everything else except market forces, which are quite consciously, conspicuously, and shamelessly manipulated to a value they feel is appropriate, since otherwise it  would crash the system specifically because a free market system would collapse the house of cards the seven C's straddle.

Finally, ignoring the most fundamental of reasons, the military complex that IS the heart of our Corpornation's economic system, so much so that BOeINGBOeING's engineers, so intent were they at making the far more profitable jets that kill people by design using The Terror from the Air Force as our main branch of diplomacy, resulting in the fact that their new commercial design dangerously put the lives of their passengers (passengers? Well THEY'RE not our customers!) in jeopardy for the sake of efficiency, was nary a concern. When killing people is your bread and butter, it's so easy to forget that you can't go around killing everyone.

So instead, I'll just mention my favorite bête noire, Ethanol. A product for which there was no market, no need, and no road to profitability. A complete boondoggle that used fake science to slather federal dollars over a huge swath of Red State territory to buy their votes far into the future by mandating that the rest of the country adulterate their gasoline with an inferior dilution, thereby reducing their mpg's, all supposedly in order to make America "Energy Independent" by a group of Texans that cared not a whit, and in fact had no interest whatsoever, in making the US Energy Independent. Yet every Red State that voted for "This will never be a Socialist country" Trump, signs on to make the market system anything but. It is a mandated tribute to a Midwest peopled by anti-federal government stalwarts so completely at odds with their stated definition of what the US economic system should look like, that it is never mentioned, never mind decried, even by their Democratic opposition, as they know they will thereby lose any support they have in those states, while gaining no votes in the states they already control.

But we will continue to concentrate on the foibles of the MAGAstrate, squabbling over inanities while the Corponation, that has no political allegiance to any but its corpocitizens continues to plunder the remaining of the country's energy resources even as they pile debt onto debt, leaving yet another generation to pay them with an economy that will by then have no energy reserves except those that can be begged borrowed or stolen.


A scenario that perfectly explains the country's foreign policy, bandit mentality and hyper-hypocrisy, and the media's unremitting obsession with everything Trump, which at the moment means Mueller, tomorrow, who knows, Guaido anyone?

420 illegality is a Smokescreen: Corponations 20/20 Vision: 420 ppm by 4/20/2020.

Predictions are often tricky, but when they are in the realm of climate forecasting, the more dire, the more likely, so it seems not too terribly adventurous to suggest that in the next year the amount of CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere of the planet earth will, given its current value of 415 ppm (that's parts per million) touch the milestone of 420 ppm by 4/20 of 2020, even while more ppm's are produced to keep people from smoking the chronic, otherwise known as 420.

As governments around the world continue to throw citizens in jail for the "crime" of smoking mj, the Crime against Humanity known as War-mongering, oil-extracting, fossil-fuel-incinerating Capitalism continues to spew an accelerating and untrammeled burden of Carbon into the atmosphere, while nothing more substantial than bromides are deployed to even pretend there's any effort to curtail them. 

That's the problem with giving  person hood to a concept and then giving it absolute power over the economic and political landscape over which it casts its long shadow of malfeasance and corruption. Corporations are not, however, despite being peopled, people. They need people to survive, but fewer and fewer of them, and with the rise of supply-side economics, wherein you build it and they will come, having no choice in the matter, because in the building of whatever the "it" is, you have pulled the rug out of any alternatives that may have existed beforehand. As each new step on our escalator of progress is added, plans for other stairs that would have been built had demand been leading instead of following a carrot held out on a stick, are jettisoned. Derided as Flights of Fancy. When the power fails the escalator stops running and, since the elevators don't work either, are soon too packed to allow movement, and never designed to hold the weight the overcrowding of them occasions, they are soon groaning under their burden, before the inevitable collapse cascading their human freight onto the flights below, a concatenating  catastrophic failure.

That's spun as a good outcome: priorities and proprieties must be observed, after all, and at least it can be said that no one is getting high any more. Good Governing has prevailed.

Corporate sponsorship of well, everything, as that's all that's left, will continue to bring you the best of tomorrow today. Democracy Inaction works, but only to silence the majority, drowned out as it is, by its squabbling minorities leaving them unable to coalesce into any form of opposition, because the only thing they/we can all agree on is that the centralization of power and authority, technology and innovation, represented by the corponations of the world, are a perfect marriage with a political system that grants them the freedom to steamroll over anything considered low-tech, or (ugh!) primitive. Should a snag develop, no worries: National Security is always waiting in the wings to be invoked should any group think they have "rights"  or any other such old-school hesitations about ceding their liberties to Supranational Corponations. So Shut up and drive, it's the only way to thrive.

AI: is all that's left when the native version has been all but squelched. And it, like all "your" FB data, is owned exclusively by Corporate entities, their sole proprietorship of it enforced by "your" democratic institutions (yours by virtue of you paying for them - only the little people pay taxes -  even though they function solely for Corponational interests), operating in their behalf to keep you in line and on-line.