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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Casa Blanca's Play it Again Uncle Sam: The 'Coalition Of We Will Again' .

 

A Grave Error is Afoot.

 As though to prove my assertion that the Trump State is no different than his Republican predecessors, our DJ has started playing yet another of Arbusto's tunes, whistling past the graveyard the delightful ditty, "Coalition of the (un)willing" to pretend that he has allies in his mad rush to pretend Iran sanctions have anything whatsoever to do with Iran's behavior. I tried to find out the truth of the matter by consulting the Iranian equivalent of WhinSec (Western hemisphere for Secrecy and Cooptation), but couldn't find one. What I could find was that the United States of Armamentaria is so flush with destructive engines, chemicals and spycraft that not only a War but a more satisfying, full spectrum all-consuming War is in its best economic interest: What's good for America's well-oiled War Machine is good for America:

 

 Notes from America:


The USA has > 20,000 plutonium pits (up from 12,000 just 15 years ago) in storage in the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Tx, (home to plutonium cores from thousands of dismantled nuclear warheads ... it’s the only location that then puts plutonium cores into new warheads) and ~200 tons of highly enriched uranium @ the Oak Ridge reservation in TN. Tritium, a material that heightens the explosive force of nuclear weapons is being produced @ the Wats Bar nuclear reactor in Tn. The government plans to produce about 450 plutonium warheads /yr.

(Like all nuclear, in order to legally falsify the Dept of War's budget, these are held under the  auspices of the DOE, despite they're having nothing to do with energy production).

Anniston Army depot in Alabama stores 2200 tons of deadly VX and sarin nerve gas and mustard gas loaded onto 660thousand chemical weapons stored in concrete bunkers called "Igloos" with more stashed in Tooele, The Greatest City in Utah, and Johnston Atoll in Hawaii.

The USA has the largest bio-weapons program in the world, and the American army has a patent for a new rifle-launched gas grenades and has an aerolized anthrax.

The military might, the peoples will:

More than 80,000 civilians died in a single night of bombing in Tokyo during WW2, a civilian casualty greater than the 74,000 incinerated in Nagasaki by the A-Bomb. (Unlike the Germans, the Japanese never targeted US civilian populations with aerial bombardment: The preferred method of modern CorpoNational Terrorism). In the Vietnam War, America dropped more bomb tonnage than was dropped in ALL of WW2.

The depleted uranium we dropped on Iraq rather indiscriminately is a very dense material, denser than lead and its burns on impact and penetrates thick armor. In 1989 alone, the US used 320 tons of DU.

Cluster bombs - a thousand pounds contains palm-sized canisters called bomblets, 16% of which remain in the ground exploded (yet the death caused thereby will be referred to as "collateral damage": FMN: Fake Military News).

For more than 10 years in the 80's, America companies shipped chemicals and biological agents' seed supplies to Iraq including: Thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor. GW just knew Saddam had chemical weapons, because he had the receipts his father left in the top drawer.

The United States of Armamentaria has the largest bio-weapons program in the world, part of which are the rifle-launchers for gas grenades of aerolized anthrax.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe freedom molecules:

US is once again the world's largest emitter of pollutants.

Pentagon''s oil use, in this relatively peaceful time, is still > 100mln bbl/yr. It is  the world's largest consumer of refined oil products and accounts for > 80% of all Federal government use. Making the military's securing of petroleum reserves more in its own self-interest than that of the rest of the country in whose interest it supposedly operates.

All War is powerfully and inextricably tied to Money, so putting a billionaire bankrupt in the Casa Blanca is tantamount to supporting more Wars.

And then there's Diego Garcia:

A UN court has ruled the UK must return the territory -- which hosts a major US military base -- to Mauritius .. yeah, like that's gonna happen.
 

Diego Garcia, access to which is only permitted to those with connections to the military:

Facilities on the island include an anchorage and a port housing a U.S. Navy support force, a flotilla of Navy prepositioning ships mostly carrying Army and Marine Corps equipment, barracks, an airfield, separate U.S. Air Force detachments supporting Pacific Air Forces and Air Mobility Command flights, an Air Force satellite relay and a powerful telescope that the flying branch operates to keep track of spacecraft.

The U.S. Navy is trying to build up its own carrier fleet to 12 ships to support global power projection. Iran, whose neighborhood the island is actually in?  None.

Diego Garcia reduces the need for U.S. military personnel while maintaining a large footprint on the ground in order to project America’s spread of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction proliferation into area, as it, like the Nazi's whose philosophy it has embraced, has embarked on its aggressive invasion agenda because "Homeland Security is threatened" (a phrase the Nazi's  used to the same effect, only instead of calling it National Socialism we prefer the term National Security: Military expansion where no military aggression against the homeland is even possible, nevermind contemplated. It was the US allies, either Iraq/Afgahanistan/Saudi Arabia whence the 9/11 attacks were instigated, NOT Iran, our "enemy").  

Easy to see how the Pentagon's oil use, in this relatively peaceful time, is still > 100mln bbl/yr.

Diego Garcia enables the U.S. to pursue its regional interests with a less provocative and less visible presence, mainly to its own allies in the region who will tolerate no presence on their soil of an ally that demands SOFA agreements in which they give up their own sovereign rights..

As Greed has become the only value worth fighting for, plausible deniability becomes a fulcrum against which to lever the substitution of image over substance as legions of hired liars labor to disconnect reality from all manner if images.


 Enmity mobilizes the energy to strike, and that energy is being stored as though in an emotional capacitor with his base the foundation of a unified body from which to derive a violent unanimity to easily sway to approve the collective destruction of his chosen sacrificial victim; those who dissent, already being called treasonous, will be turned on and eliminated. For, as we see in Afghanistan, or don't see, War is cruelty, the deliberate and malicious infliction of mental or physical pain upon others, including our own "Warriors", a cruelty in which our Leader revels in as much as he derides compassion; cruelty, being, after all, the offspring of Greed.

Thus can the nonsense of the country that is by far the largest arms dealer in the world, the pre-eminent Merchant of Death, its foreign policy based on maintaining itself as the longest-lasting War Machine of any culture anywhere, whose Leader backs the murder of an unarmed journalist by a vicious Saudi "Prince" by using the fact that he buys military hardware from our Corpornational trusts as a public reason for his condoning the bludgeoning of someone to death because he simply doesn't like what he said about him. The country providing arms to that same entity to wage another useless war, another contrived Yemeni of the people, once again on a helpless, impoverished people.

Enmity mobilizes the energy to strike, and that energy is being stored as though in an emotional capacitor, with his base the foundation of a unified body from which to derive a violent unanimity to easily sway to approve the collective destruction of his chosen sacrificial victim; those who dissent, already being called treasonous, will be turned on and eliminated. For, as we see in Afghanistan, or don't see, War, the Cult of Death, turns human beings in to parts; spare parts; human resources manipulated by inhuman sources, making it easy to kill the living because it's so much harder to kill The Deal.

War's sinister godfather and secret sharer in its spoils is religion, making the Ganrtyfication of American society far more disturbing than its gentrification. Because as war clouds gather the lightning bolts of  religious enmity electrify the air with self-righteous lies of justification, martial energy mobilizes, as doubt becomes traitorous, an enemy to be silenced, and Western Christianity's god come to the fore when War is in the Air, the last Republican President claiming god spoke to him to go and smite the Iraqi's, this one is never so cozy with his base "Christians" as when he's fulminating for biblical terrorism, slaughter, and military strikes on civilian targets.

After all, Love conquers all, and Love of War is one that no other Love has ever been able to conquer.





Monday, June 24, 2019

Spectacular Fireworks as America's War of Terror Escalates.


US celebrations of the Go Forth with New Lie started off with a bang in Philadelphia, one eerily reminiscent of the Deepwater Horrorizons, the interwoven criminal network that has kept US energy prices ridiculously low start getting teased out, not by our famously locked down Corpornationalistic media, but as a result of Sharon Kelly of  DeSmogBlog publishing an article highlighting Steve Schlotterbeck's presentation of what disastrous effects the shale gas revolution has had on investors.

Kelly takes an innovative approach to exposing the mindless exploitation, without mentioning once my two bĂȘte noires of flaring and suppression of electricity rates via unsustainable overproduction of the feedstock for electric production, Natural Gas. Which statement isn't meant to suggest that Kelly is remiss, but rather to point out that the rot that is eating away at this entire industry, as corrosive as that which Bush used to topple the housing sector, needn't even address the burning issues that will flare up specifically because they have, not ignored market forces, but deliberately, albeit temporarily, defeated them as though they were an invading army.

During the aughts, otherwise known as the years the criminal Bush enterprise and its associated Texas Mafia were busy skewering the entire global economy to enrich themselves and their cronies, there wasn't a peep about the coming financial imbroglio anywhere in any of the print media that I was hungrily digging through for even a crumb of information regarding the debacle staring us in the face. Like Kelly, I started to look at the only place I knew there would be some truthful reporting (it certainly wasn't in the pages of any Newspaper of record, which only printed articles encouraging citizens to keep up their mad borrowing/buying sprees, because the USA!USA! was the bestest, most resilient economy in the world! Nothing could stop the Tony Tiger economy: "We're GRRRRREAT!" And yes, housing prices really CAN keep going up and up and up ... and oh yeah, somehow that's a good thing! In other words, fuck your own kids' aspirations of ever owning a house of their own, they'll just have to wait until you're dead. That place was online where there were dozens of sites that were reporting  not only on the shenanigans that were taking place half a world away in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US was shoveling enormous piles of cash into any Bush-related enterprise that came up with even the flimsiest of business plans, but, as with the Oildrum.com website, reporting regularly on the disconnect between the need for ever-growing supplies of crude and the remarkably similar, albeit in the opposite direction, falling number of new oil discoveries: something had to give.

Oil Rigor Mortis
 
But Oildrum.com was only one of the sites, Mike Shedlock, Doug Noland, Yves Smith, Agora Financial, the Testosterone Pit, and many more were all ringing alarm bells, and not in the manner that I do, but with reams of data and factual analysis the CorpoNational press chose to ignore to keep the "Party" going as Bernanke kept spiking the proverbial punchbowl with LSD.

The new LSD  is Laughing Gas.

And Sharon Kelly uses the "blunt message about shale gas drilling and fracking" delivered by Steve Schlotterbeck to a petrochemical industry conference in Pittsburgh to report on just how ludicrous and bald-faced this new fossil fools rehypothecation really is.

Schlotterbeck starts his address by pointing out that "the shale gas revolution has frankly been an unmitigated disaster for any buy-and-hold investor", which, by the way, is all of us, as the main source of rehypohecated funds was the Federal Reserve that conjured up trillions of QE dollars in pseudo-cash to pump into the ground to make the so-called "shale revolution" appear like anything other than what Schlotterbeck calls a "disruptive technological change that has done so much harm to the industry" (Gresham's Law prevails again). And he should know. Schlotterbeck "led drilling company EQT as it expanded to become the nation’s largest producer of natural gas in 2017."

Claiming that, "The amount of shareholder value destruction registers in the hundreds of billions of dollars," Schlotterbeck states what no one else wants to hear, as, in case you're unfamiliar with Gresham's Law mentioned previously, bad money chases out good: The flood of QE dollars destroyed the investments of people cajoled into throwing their money into the "shale oil Play" (note how they love referring to the deadly serious business of investing as though it's just some kind of game, even as they use the word "Killing" to refer to that point in time when they step in and pull the rug out from under investors they've hoodwinked into surrendering their hard-earned dollars as if it were only so much Monopoly money ... "Are we having Fun yet?").


Bill Griffith's: A Nation of Pinheads.

Drillers’ own numbers speak for themselves:

Spending outweighed income for a group of 29 large public shale gas companies by $6.7 billion in 2018, bringing the group’s 2010 to 2018 cash flow to a total of negative $181 billion, according to a March 2019 report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

‘Destroyed on Average 80 Percent of the Value of Their Companies’"

The response from the industry sounded more like it came from the ADA: "Drill moremoremore, Baby, Drill moremoremore" (How dya like it? How dya like it?).

"The at-the-wellhead price of natural gas in the Marcellus region was around $8/MMBtu back in 2008, and has plunged to less than $2/MMBtu today.

“And producing gas @ $2 does not make economic sense.” No. But it does make geopolitical sense.

Even as each shale "play" (if it is indeed a play, it is surely a tragicomedy) flares off enough gas to meet the energy demands of entire States in order to keep its price from collapsing to below 0, (which it already has in the Permian), the rig count to produce that gas just kept rising as the USA abrogated its treaty with Iran: shipping its Permian fracktured fairy tale oil bonanza to India, to replace the Iranian oil they were burning, even as the LNG facilities built to ship the last natural gasp of the US energy resources overseas comes online to replace the shut-in-by-trumped-up-sanctions resources of the country with the largest stores of Natural Gas in the world: Iran.

Following the exact same scenario of the Reagan/Bush, Bush/Cheney strategy of cynically using the "Free Market" manipulation of energy resources to draw down in rapid order the remaining fossil
fuels of the US bounty, not to supply the energy needs of their own country, but in order to wreak
havoc on its enemy-of-the-month-club choice, the USA once again, and goes once again uncommented on by the Corponational press that has a stranglehold on independent reporting, is pretending that the country is in immediate danger from a foreign adversary so as to use this propaganda to fly in the face of reality, construct their own cartoonish sequence of events, and rally the USA!USA! enthusiasts to take part in the deliberate and cowardly destruction of yet another country using such a flimsy facade of a puerile moral superiority that is so transparent even a Comic Book publisher would laugh if not for its deadly serious and deplorably malignant nature.

 “Nearly every American has benefited from shale gas", Mr. Schlotterbeck states. But like the wife of a Mafia Donald draping herself in furs and festooning herself with ostentatious baubles to parade around in egotistical splendor, the citizens of the USA could care less whence such fortune is derived, convinced as they are that nothing more than their exceptionalism could be the reason.

But the denouement from adopting the very same policy is hardly likely to be different than the previous Republican administration's: Failure resulting in a recession so deep, that there is no possible way to dig out of it other than the one currently in use: Deception and fraud on a continuing basis, fraud so intractable it can now not be rooted out, as it isn't fraud pulled by malefactors on legitimate enterprises, but the enterprises themselves that are fraudulent; as Schlotterbeck himself demonstrates, without ever saying the word, the entire Fracking industry is BASED on fraud, hence the entire recovery, one that would be non-existent without the phenomenon of fracking, is fraudulent ... necessarily so, otherwise, we would have Hoovervilles, such as the one depicted in the movie My Man Godfrey:
 
A "Great Recession" is Newspeak for a Depression.

You won't see the partying rich slinking down to the homeless encampments in shimmering gowns to hunt down a derelict to drag back to soirees as scavenger-hunt trophies as though Celia FĂȘte was the hostess.

Oh no. There are no "Bushvilles", despite the fact that the plunge in the economic fortunes of a huge swath of the American population can be directly laid at the doorstep of Bush family planning. Instead, because a "Recovery" is in full swing, all those homeless people thrown onto the streets of the country and propping up the tents of the OWS movement have been all-but forgotten and the new disease-ridden and rat-infested tent cities of desperation and unremitting poverty can now in good conscience be deemed their own fault. The idea of the economic system working for only a few is a nice slogan, but what that actually means, in the sense people understood it in the 30's, has evaporated. There is no compassion, no helping hand, only a desperate "blame-the-victim" mentality fostered by a trumped-up Recovery that leaves those with jobs and opportunities patting themselves on the back for their own superiority, ignoring the fact that  the vast majority of those homeless people were doing the exact same thing during the Bush expansion ... an expansion just as ballyhooed, just as fraudulent, and just as doomed as the Trump boomlet.





And just as surely the Iraq War and the incipient Iran War have the same genesis: shut in the production of competitors to fuel the profits from the fracking "revolution" in the USA. It worked spectacularly for the Bush administration for oil, to the detriment of the citizens of the US, but their fate never really mattered, any more than it does now: Shoot them down on Fifth Avenue, and they'll still believe in Capitalism being the BEST way to run an economy (into the ground ... at least we can party 'til we drop). As the fuel used to generate electric power in the US continues to migrate to Natural Gas, the same strategy, this time being inflated by a Gas bag, is in full swing. The economic impact of the switch taking place, as America continues to swaddle itself in the worldwideweb of everything even as the glut of plastic being produced as a direct result is strangling the world in its hydrocarbon embrace, the inevitable rise of the cost of that resource is already baked into the cake, as you can see from Schlotterbeck's presentation. And this is occurring simultaneous with the push to transform the transportation sector to be dependent, not on gasoline, but on Electricity. Electricity whose price is set to rise, not gradually, but, in a replay of the oil price escalation that helped bring the economy of the entire globalized world to its knees in order to provide the opportunity for the Bush cadres to rake in their fortunes from the Midnight Massacre Bernanke foisted onto the country, cataclysmically.

That is the promise of Trump's second term. A second term that is all but assured. Something which, if you doubt, one must simply look at the slate of opposition candidates to read the future (remember, the Republican slate was of a similar size), and despite all the brouhaha about boorishness of the man the GOP decided best exemplified its values, they have no one to replace him (One of the reasons the Democrats will never impeach Trump must surely be because the VP is Pence. And a Pence presidency could easily be imagined as far worse than the current one: Better a Blowhard than an Ideologue).


CellMates
So as we step up to join in another Dance Macabre of first cowardly eviscerating an entire country in order to leave it helpless as we continue to build up an armametaria of colossal proportions to fling at it while proclaiming their intractable evil, the continuing, never-ending US War of Terror prepares to rampage through yet another country while its own citizens stare at their tiny I-phone screens in order to feel "connected", even as the biggest disconnect between reality and Americans' perception of such unfolds right in front of their averted eyes.




Friday, June 21, 2019

Notes from The Revolution: What's Turgenev We Lose the World?






The Revolution Cafe

Unable to restrain myself, I have sat down to record this history of my final steps on life's careen, though I could as well have done without it. You have to be all too ballsy to write about yourself without shame. My only excuse is that I'm not writing about myself, nor for the sake of the readers' praises but for the sake of the readers' exposure to one of the greatest writers in 19'th century literature with whom only the literati are familiar. I have suddenly decided to record this moment so struck was I by the beauty not only of the language but of the scene that Turgenev used to illustrate a raw youth's power to transcend his sordid surroundings and create the sublime while in an environment admittedly subprime.

The small city of San Francisco has a large fraternity of music lovers, many of whom are shut  out, by virtue of its stratospheric costs, from the commercial music scene. But in the Mission neighborhood, now being inexorably nibbled away in a slow-death version of how the South of Market music scene was snuffed out like a sputtering candle by the Dot-com boom a generation earlier, entirely extinguishing it so that there's not a remnant left;  there are still in the Mission a couple of places that are bravely holding on and offering a few locales to eat, drink, and be made merry with melodies and airs from different eras. One of these, (locales, not tunes), is The Revolution Cafe, a nook of a place located diagonally across the street from a City College neighborhood extension, and an easy lope from the Library's Mission branch . Boasting a lively crowd that overflows onto the sidewalk, and featuring live jazz on Wednesday nights, Classical music on Sundays, and in the afternoons, opening its piano for the use of students whose teacher sits right next to them sipping her cappuccino, trying not to grimace at the musical murder taking place right in front of her ears while the other patrons go about their sexting and texting, perhaps betimes enjoying a tasty melted brie on dark rye toast.

It is patronized much more assiduously than the few other establishments of this kind in the locality, and the reason for this is its almost non-commercial nature, although, of course, it does have to pay the rent, but that's a fact not so blatantly impressed upon its clientele as it would be in any other part of our once-quaint city that's become far too eager to morph into the Hong Kong of the West, where money reigns supreme and music and its practitioners, purveyors, and aficionados, are considered losers.

I have to admit that The Revolution at no time offers much of a spectacle to please the eyes, despite the art, all created by locals, festooning its otherwise drab walls. It's not in the healthiest or wealthiest part of the City but its sidewalk sports a mini-park, fashioned out of a trifecta of parking spaces requisitioned for this purpose by the city, and a friendly atmosphere overflowing onto the adjacent sidewalk, alive with the chattering of music appreciators hobnobbing and reefering with the musicians during their breaks.

One Sunday night, in an attempt to delay arriving at the Bart stop that's conveniently situated but a couple of blocks away, I meandered over to the Cafe for no particular reason, I just wanted to pass it and see what, if anything, was going on, when I heard an anxious voice, touched with more than a bit of annoyance, urging someone onward, it inspired me to offer a redo, a reboot, a purloining or maybe just coining of Singers, a short story from Turgenev, from his A Hunter's Sketches, and I thought, well, why not?, so here goes:

'Come on, come on, now!', he blurted out in a querulous voice, and only then did I see him materialize in the Cafe's doorway, a tall behemoth of a bohemian wearing an overcoat that gave him a lumpish  appearance, tied with a blue silken sash, an adornment of pure affectation, as his coat, despite its apparent vintage, still had its full complement of buttons, which dangled, conspicuously unused, from their appointed spots. "Come on, Willie, will you? Pick up the pace a bit, couldn'tya?, they're waiting on you to be waiting on them, and here you're movin' at a crawl ... Come on!'

'I'm comin', I'm comin', remonstrated the source of the exasperated musician's rancor, from directly behind me, who I saw, as I glanced over my shoulder, to be a smallish man walking with a limp and grimacing with every step he took, as though to walk was an exercise in self-torture, but dressed more nattily than his tormentor, and sporting a ballcap he was wearing backward that, as it contrasted so sharply with his otherwise tasteful attire, lent his round, bespectacled face a slightly comic look. 'I'm coming, my man,' he continued, limping in the direction of the Cafe, 'Why're you rushin' me? What's the big deal?'

'Why'm I rushing you?", Big Brother, as so I dubbed him, answered, 'All the bigwigs are waiting for you - Parsons, the pianist; Ulf, our drummer; Fiona, the Cellist; and Adam and Marc, our dueling vocalists. All good talent, and they're waitin' on you, and you ask why'm I calling you? There's a bucket o' tips from the night's performances, and they're betting it all on who gets the better of whom; who sings the best ... See?'

'Adam'll be singing?' Willie asked with a more lively interest, 'Really?'

'Yeah, really,' Big Brother answered, (whose name I'm shortening to BB, not having heard his real one yet, and in deference to the newly departed blues singer), and raised his eyebrows theatrically in mock rancor, "Course he'll be singing, if he's made a bloody bet, you old bumbler.'

"Well get outta my way then, dimwit,' Willie chortled, and, having reached the couple of steps in front of the veranda, he pushed BB aside with his elbow and they both made their way through the door, the opening of which revealed a crowded dim interior that exhaled a hubbub of voices intermingled with a din of tuning instruments, clinking glassware, and an easy-listening jazz radio tune.

All of which served to arouse my curiosity, as I had never heard of any singing contest, no matter how impromptu, which this one certainly sounded like it was, ever having been held there, and it was a pretty good bet that, if nothing else, I would hear some good music while enjoying a foamy pint.

Upon entering I was astonished at how many people were gathered there, as it's not a terribly large place, and I'd never seen this kind of turnout before; but then again, I usually went down for the jazz combos on a weeknight, whereas this was a Sunday event, and it looked like a melding of the Classical and Jazz audiences into one boisterous, eager crowd, anxious to hear their favorite genre's singer outdo the star of the competing, well, to be more accurate we should say, dueling, discipline.

Despite the sense of its being packed beyond capacity, the air was almost cool, and my fears that a suffocating and oppressive atmosphere might spoil the enjoyment of the music dissipated like late-morning fog as I sidled closer to the bar to get a Black Butte. My arrival seemed to have momentarily disconcerted the gathering, as though I had crashed a private party, but when Michael, the pianist, welcomed me with a smile and a wave, the other patrons went back to their ease and paid me no more attention. So I got my beer and took out my sketch pad and sat down (why was there still a seat?) in the corner next to a grey-haired woman with a sprightly face and nervously anticipatory demeanor. As usual when you take out a sketch pad, people think you need them to talk to you to get encouraged to actually draw anything, and she was about to do exactly that, when BB suddenly roared above the din, having emptied his glass in a few deliberate gulps, 'Well what's the holdup?', waving his arms like a berserk conductor, 'What're we waiting for? Let's begin if we're going to, huh?'

And Adam declared from the front of the room, where he was lolling lazily next to the piano, 'I'm ready.'

'Me too,' added Marc, somewhat less enthusiastically.

'Good, good,' exclaimed Willie, as he reclaimed his post behind the bar. 'Begin.'

But, despite the consensus that now would be as good a time as any, no one moved to start the contest, neither the musicians nor the singers, and I wondered which singer was going to perform what, until Michael, as if in response to the air of expectancy dominating the room like a cat slyly eying its prey, sat down at the piano, arranged some music, drew a deep breath and softly exhaled as if to purge himself of the last scraps of his just-ended conversation. Adam nodded at him to show he was ready, and immediately Michael's fingers were summoning from the upright that looked as though nothing but dissonant shards of sounds could ever again be coaxed from its dissembled (the front of it had been removed, revealing all of the padded hammers to the audience's view) hulk, gently rocking chords that eased all the tense anticipation into a serene mood of approval and a silence fell abruptly and left him on his own. His long introduction gave the impression that it was the invention of the pianist himself who was now unfolding it for the first time just for us. 

The timing of the tenor's entry was perfect.

With a quiver of his whiskers he took a pace forward, half-closed his eyes and  began to sing in an exceptionally high falsetto, a tenor leger. It was a pleasant, sweet voice, although a trifle husky; he played with it expertly, twisting it round and round like a top, ceaselessly running up and down the scale but always returning to the high notes, which he successfully endeavored to hold and prolong, dropping into silence and then suddenly catching up the earlier refrain with a certain carefree, arrogant audacity. These shifts from one to another were fairly bold, and sometimes quite amusing and gave the audience quite a bit of pleasure, so they listened to him with great attention as he and Michael dissolved into the music with no apparent effort, bearing their audience downstream on a current of notes, as if discovering for the first time Berlioz's setting of the "Villanelle," all the sorrow of the steeply falling "Lament", the title of which elicited the remembrance of what the music had helped me forget, that something awaited my return, even though the lovely sounds made it appear far below, a mere speck on an otherwise unmarred landscape. Perhaps it really wasn't there, perhaps it had just been my imagination that suggested it were.

But then the performers emerged as from a dream and stood side by side to face the audience which emitted a loud and unanimous shout of approval in one, almost orchestrated, fierce outburst. Ulf threw himself at Adam's neck and began to hug him to the point of suffocation until a blush appeared on his face making him look years younger in a flash of crimson, while BB started shouting from the back like a madman, 'Oh yeah, Whoo-hoo, Oh Boy!' Even my neighbor, the wizened witch in her ragged coat, couldn't restrain herself and started banging the table, demanding, "Huh! Draw that if you can. Bravo!', followed by a raucous cackling. 'That was a delight,' she then sat back and sighed, as if her outburst had worn her out, 'That was sheer delight, no denyin it,' although no one was seeking to anyway. 'He's won,' she suggested enthusiastically, perking up on remembering the stakes, 'That pot o' gold's as good as his,' she insisted. 'That  poor sucker Marc won't come near him.'

On the other side of the room I noticed Willie had reached a swift poke over the bar into Marc's shoulder who then took  a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face while the patron sitting next to him drank down a glass with greedy swiftness and, after the manner of heavy drinkers, grunted and assumed a sadly preoccupied look.      

Marc stood up but said nothing, glanced around the room and covered his face with his hand. We all drank him in with our eyes, none more so than Adam, on whose face appeared, through his normal self-assured look now complemented by the triumph of his success, an involuntary faint uneasiness. He leaned back in his chair, placed both hands under his thighs, and closed his eyes as though unconcerned with the goings-on around him. When at last, Marc took his hands from his face, it was pale as death; his eyes scarcely gleamed through his lowered eyelashes. He drew in a deep breath and began to sing.

As Fiona started plucking a few notes from her bass, the first sound his voice gave was weak and unsure, seeming to emerge not from his chest, but from somewhere far away, just as if it had flown by accident into the room. This quivering, ringing sound acted strangely on all of us; we glanced at each other and I saw BB visibly stiffen. This first note was followed by another, much firmer and drawn-out, but still clearly sobbing like a violin string when, after being suddenly plucked by a strong finger, it wavers in one final, quickly fading tremolo of sound, after which there followed a thread and, little by little growing in intensity and volume, the plaintive song poured forth, and each of us felt a wave of sweetness and shivery anticipation creeping over us. I had never heard, despite many years of attending concerts that spanned the gamut from Joan Armatrading to Wagner's Ring, such a voice. Although slightly broken, with a hint of sickliness to it in the opening notes, it also revealed unplumbed depths of passion and youthfulness, strength and sweetness, combined with a kind of attractively uncaring mournful piteousness. His honest fiery soul resounded and breathed through it and quite simply seized us by the throat, plucking our heart-strings raw. The song grew and overflowed, but it was Marc's voice that was obviously possessed by inspiration; all shyness gone, he was giving himself completely to this exultation; his voice no longer quivered - it sobbed, but with that scarcely noticeable, inner tremor of passion which plunges like an arrow into the soul of the listener, piercing his heart on the way and eliciting memories long buried, and causing feelings never expressed to rise closer to the surface, but only vague, flitting feelings, not given a chance to have their origin discovered before a change in the tempo and tone of the music takes Marc soaring into vocal acrobatics as he drags us up to previously unreachable heights along with him.

As he sang, his posture seemed familiar, and I remembered driving down the road in Westford, and as I went by a stretch of lake glistening in a sunset too early for summer, I glimpsed the first cormorant I'd ever seen drying its wings, head up, seemingly oblivious to everything around it except the delicious sensation of the wind caressing the water from wings held aloft, feathers splayed, which rippled in synchronous harmony with the gentle waves that lapped the far shore; it stood motionless, it's glistening breast turned to the violet sky - washed pink at its extremities by the sinking rays of a prodigal sun. This is what watching Marc sing brought to mind. He sang, quite oblivious of both us and the money for which he performed, borne aloft on the sound waves he himself was generating, while we participated with a silent devotion that allowed him to remain under the spell of his own instrument, which he played upon with utterly tranquil resignation until he suddenly finished on a high, achingly thin note, almost as though his voice had broken.

Not a soul moved, no one shouted; we just all waited, almost as if we wanted to make sure he didn't have more, before the spell was broken by him opening his eyes and gazing at us in surprised silence at our own stunned stillness. With an inquiring glance around the room, the silence and visible emotion of his audience told him, right before we suddenly, spasmodically burst into a calamitous applause, that what he'd hoped it meant was indeed true, as he recognized that, whereas Adam had taken the accolades, he had taken the prize.
































Thursday, June 20, 2019

Face it: There is no, "If we stop/slowdown our use of Fossil Fuels ..."



Promethe-us: Bound in hydrocarbon chains of our own making.


While watching a few videos about rising sea levels, I noticed that they all prefaced their presentations with the proviso, “If we keep putting CO2 into the air”, or, "If we haven't eliminated/curtailed our use of fossil fuel ...  "

Which leaves one to wonder where exactly they are located. Perhaps they're the Muskatelles and are making their queries from Mars? It's been three years since the signing of the Paris peace accords, and to celebrate the anniversary, as though whisking an ever-expanding coterie of the well-heeled around the globe for nothing other than sight-seeing had anything to do with the accords signed here, Paris just hosted the airshow where Airbus recorded orders and options for 123 planes. Air Lease Corporation alone, which leases hundreds of planes to airlines around the world, placed an $11 billion order for 100 Airbus planes. Do you think they're considering any slowdown in the use of carbon-spewing activity?

Axios, the only news organization that seems to have any idea that there is a link between fracking/petrochemical production/natural gas surfeit and rapidly accelerating carbon accumulation in the atmosphere, posted a special report illustrating some important facts salient to that connection.

Here I can't help but point out as yet another buttress to my argument that the Trumps are merely following and leveraging the Bush agenda's template, with but slight modifications: As I've stated in previous posts, the number of coal-burning power plants, according to our own government's EIA statistics, built during the Bush administration in order to process the "GREEN", make-us-energy-independent fuel (ie, pandering (telling us lies they know we want to believe) to the right and left wings of the electorate simultaneously), ethanol, adding up to roughly one every week, the result of which is the rising CO2 emissions emanating from a USA! USA! that has relocated its highest 
polluting industries to the Communist regime of China. This dynamic is now echoed in the Trump era, only this time with not-so-PC PC plants: Seven new PetroChemical plants have come online in the U.S. since early 2017, with at least a couple more expected this year, per the EIA.

You can see how the one is an echo of the other.

Just as at the end of the Bush regime, the enormous amounts of borrowed money had been used to construct and fund fracking operations such that, once they had brought the rest of the economy to its knees with the help of the oh-so-complicit Bernanke, Obama was presented with the scenario 
Frack or Go Back to Uganda, You Birther.

The petrochemical industry is cut from the same cloth, a continuation of the same conspiracy to lock the USA! USA! into yet another highly toxic, environmentally destructive cash-cow for the Corponations of the world while the citizens themselves, who have in the space of but a decade become the pariahs of the world, are hell bent on remaining, proudly even, exactly that.


Activist consumer groups are pushing for less platic use, and to some extent, less production, while industry aims for increased recycling. (Guess who's going to win? Hint: neither group even mentions the most energy-saving, viable alternative: re-use. Similar to energy conservation, or even to the suggestion of conserving water during California's 5-year-long drought: Re-use isn't even on the table).


Lets see how that works:



From a simple paper label to a plastic shroud.
Guinness bottles used to have the same style of label as the Newcastle Ale bottle pictured above. In the name of Marketing, however, of a product that's already the best know beer brand in the world, and as a ruse to distract its customers from the fact that the actual amount of product they were buying was being reduced, from the standard 12 oz to 11.2 oz, with their new bottle design, spending millions in order to put .8 oz less simply in order that their customers not notice they've raised the prices on them (in order to pay for all the new-fangled designs and redesigns no consumer ever asked for), the Guinness Corporation started wrapping their entire bottle in a dissoluble sheath of plastic. Why? It was so CHEAP, thanks to fracking ... but how is that possible? The retooling necessary to dip a bottle in plastic, or however they get it on, being the least of their worries. They were now shipping less product in a bottle that weighs the same, following an industry trend that has become a tsunami: consumers mindlessly paying an ever-larger percentage of their dollars, not for the product itself, but for the packaging: the smaller the volume, the more you're paying for the packaging and shipping ... that's just physics.

                                                                                                                                                                    But at least you can just not buy any more bottled Guinness, but how do you have any control whatsoever over this:





The wave card in the upper left-hand corner is the size of a credit card, so you can extrapolate the size of this plastic mailer from that. This item, of which I've received dozens so far, were brought by the USPS right to my door. USPS subsidizes the postal costs of businesses, so they don't even have to pay anything close to the postage you or I would have to slap onto it to get it delivered. So here we have the Federal Government paying to deliver plastic cards (and this is no flimsy plastic) by the millions, all of which will end up in land fill, yet they serve essentially no purpose whatsoever. There is no justification for using plastic instead of a simple paper mailing. Any costs associated with the increase in landfill or the rapid despoiling of the environment is not something that either Wave nor the Federal government has to concern itself about: That 's YOUR problem. If the plastic mailer is possible because of the completely mad overproduction of Natural Gas, well, just join in on the Insanity!


But let's not forget Starbucks, Burger King, McDonald's, GM, GE, CITI, Chase ...

Then of course there's the War Machine: Unstoppable, unaccountable, and veiled in secrecy. It is intricately involved in the production of fossil fuels on all levels, from DOE, basically an arm of the Dept. of  War, to the bases around the world located at strategic points for the transportation of energy resources. There is no justification, nor need any be given as the question is never asked, as to why oh why, if the world is choking on oil while its price plummets from rampant oversupply doesn't the USA halt its mad rush to extract its last remnants of petroleum until those prices rise? Or until it can capture the Natural Gas it's flaring into the atmosphere, burning tremendous amounts of energy supplies, on top of the already tremendous amounts of energy consumed to frack/build pipelines, construct multi-billion-dollar LNG facilities on the taxpayers' backs, transport in excess of 100 billion pounds of fracking sand and ceramics needed to be pumped into the ground, along with the  9.6 million gallons of water per well, in the first place?

 It is not a “conspiracy theory” that democracy is manipulated by hidden powers, it is in fact called Capitalism, the boardrooms of which are labeled War Rooms (No joke: Cisoco, AMAT, basically all the silicone valley firms are so besotted with militarism they salivate at the sight of firearms, the crack of a rifle shot) wherein they plan the elimination of competition, the continued use of fossil fuel-derived power, the expansion of every known carbon-polluting industry in the world, the funding of their "Enterprises" by the secret and ofttimes quite overt manipulation of public funds to take their own risk off the table and lay it on the backs of consumers, and other forms of collusion against the people of the United States. Why oh why, one must ask is it such an outrage that Russia tried to interfere in our Democracy, yet these companies that we ladle tax dollars on, and who hire phalanxes of lawyers to avoid taxes ... despite the fact that the cost of employing phalanxes of lawyers far exceeds their tax bill, never have what they consider their right to interfere with our governing bodies investigated?

Of necessity these operations have to be  planned and the road laid a full generation ahead of time for these industries to succeed, and that's exactly what the Bush administration did. Texas is now not so much a United State as a Blue-lighted State where everything is on sale at heavily discounted prices. Texas is used as a conduit, much like  the Mississippi River is, that, like an  opened vein, is used to siphon off the energy resources of an entire continent to feed the hunger of the world for fast cars, or any cars, really, exporting polluting resources to countries that don't have even our continually assaulted environmental protection laws (most of which Texas is foremost in ignoring, abrogating or lobbying against). The malinvestments made, must now be made stamped "PAID", but the only way that can happen, the so-called investments having been made with borrowed money, is to sell sell sell, even at a sinking price so as to keep up the cash flow to service those sour Notes, while bankruptcy after bankruptcy gives Exxon the Jurassic Park-sized footprint in the Permian it now enjoys thanks to buying up all the losers.

 As Baker Hughes and Exxon plants get bombed in Iraq, it is the citizens of the US that are told they must protect these "Corponations'" property. The citizens of the US whose Federal government is in an open conspiracy with the GOP to make sure they are left without any health insurance, that the social security they've paid into for their entire lives is done away with, and that goods they buy get subjected to ever-increasing levies called tariffs to raise their prices so as to allow those same American Corponations to enjoy the full protection of the US military, which has morphed into a band of mercenaries hired to protect only Corporate interests, while putting the rest of the country in the crosshairs of adversaries they've create by their arrogance and raw Greed, as they rampage across the globe, making enemies in every country they swoop down on. Because just as they've ransacked every ounce of conventional oil from this continent as if there were no tomorrow, they're hell-bent on sucking it out of the rest of the world even faster.

 And this is the state they are planning for the US in the future, so you can pay no heed to the little "Ban on Plastic straws", or on single-use plastic bags (I have a Target bag that claims it can be used 125 times .. it's years old ... I've never found a use for it):


Do you think this bag could hoist a 12-pack of even canned beverages without the handles snapping off?

 I  have canvas bags that are far superior in that they can carry far more weight without the handles snapping off (as those little cheap ones surely would with this plastic one). I have been using it for 15, yes that 's FIFTEEN fracking years. So 125 times, though it may sound like a lot, considering that the plastic will never breakdown whereas my canvas bags do, yet I've used them every week, at least: = 15yrs x's 52wks/yr, comes out to their being used 780 times, and nowhere near their life's end ... and, lest you think they're used for light items, the one I have from the Cambridge Bookstore, I use to carry 12-pak bottles of Bass Ale, not a light load by any means (bottle plus contents is ~7oz/bottle and 12 0z in each one weighs ~ 20oz X 12 = 240 0z divided by 16 = ~ 15 pounds):

It even includes a very handy outer pocket.
All those bans on anything plastic are whistling in the wind: the sheer enormity of the current and extrapolated output of the PetroChemicals companies and the overwhelming size of the investments made in the construction of all things ancillary to the fracking industry pushes out every other possibility, crushing it like a beetle underfoot. Our once resilient economy, now calcified by transforming it into a Petro State, completely dominated by one State: Texas, with its Octopus tentacles' cups sucking the life out of the rest of the country, has transformed what used to be a robust and diverse healthy economy into one that easily buckles when energy demand or price deteriorates. You'll hear the snap as it cracks and shudders to the ground:

 "The collapse of Lehman's was like the fall of a gigantic boulder into the still waters of a lake. The suddenness of it sent waves of desperate fear moving in ever-widening circles throughout the world. Billions of people still do not know what to make of it, and the waters of the lake have closed over the fallen boulder while most people have gone about their daily work just as usual.

But the waves of fear have touched them, and life is not quite the same. Security, even the sense of it, is gone, replaced with dread and an ominous foreboding in the air. It is in this atmosphere of false calm and desperate anxiety that Obama began his presidency. He had seen the boom-mad economy tottering on the brink of ruin. He had read in the eyes of people on the campaign trail the fear and guilty knowledge of the calamity that was impending and that they are still refusing to admit even to themselves ... especially to themselves."

 But the repercussions in terms of Weather Gone Wild and the havoc it is wreaking as a direct result of the USA! USA!'s fracking mania have already begun, and though it will still take years before any connection is made between the two phenomena, despite they're having occurred simultaneously,  years in which the profits will already have been wrung out of the industry and only a wrecked landscaped, CO2-saturated troposphere, and destroyed environment will be left, at least we can all breathe a sigh of relief that nobody in the world will be clutching a plastic straw as they sip their Corpobeverage out of their plastic single-use "recyclable" (but never recycled) cups. Whew! Thank god we took action.








Monday, June 17, 2019

Free 'Dem Molecules: Chemical Bonds Debtrimental to Freedom.


The current brouhaha about plastics is once again thanks to Trump: nothing else has changed other than China's position on accepting our exports, thanks to the tariffs. They will no longer accept our waste plastic. That decision concatenated its way down to Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, as the waste started pouring into their countries and now we have, all of a sudden, actual NEWS, yeah, that's right, on a problem that's been extant and growing for a decade, has at last hit the newscycle. And for that we have President Trump to thank ... yet again.

Topic after topic that the MSM is unable to let out the slightest peep about, for fear of upsetting the cornucopia of cash flowing from their advertisers, that their agenda of All Trump All the Time gives them, the opening has now been made by the dummy running the DOE, to actually broach a subject, and once it's broached, like a roach coach, it fills up rapidly, with one article after the other springing up like mushrooms in a forest to cover a topic as though they only became aware of it overnight .

And freed dumb molecules coincides with bonded molecules:

Plastic is the visible manifestation of the same atoms, different molecules, as those accumulating unseen in the atmosphere:

The Freed Dumb molecules exported directly into the Atmosphere are deliberately excluded.
The natural gas exports and the link between them and the growth in natural gases exported into the atmosphere is a subject best avoided, and that's what's been done for the last decade. But now that the plastic mountain of indissoluble waste that's no longer going down the streams of China into the other side of the Pacific Ocean , remaining on th eside that generated it, the link between the untrammeled fracking of the American landscape with the explosion in amount of excess natural gas it produces in such egregious volumes it must be flared, should have long ago made clear the link between it and the coating of the earth in layers of plastic wrap from the near-zero cost of the feedstock to that plastics' PETRO (that should have been a bit of a clue right there)Chemical industry.

Every bit of the exports represented in the above graph represents added CO2 to the atmosphere, so it should come as no surprise, although it apparently does, that as those exports go up, CO2 in the atmosphere goes up; as those exports climb exponentially, the methane in the tropospherre climbs exponentially; as the methane climbs, the CO2, in a positive feedback loop, since methane hydrolyzes (in a few years to a decade or so), into CO2 and H2O, producing the same molecules as flaring does, so the CO2 increases even faster.

Now, it should come as no surprise to anyone living in the 21'st century that combustion is an oxidation reaction because Any reaction which includes oxygen as one of the ingredients, is known as an oxidation reaction. Now, combustion is a process in which chemical substances, otherwise referred to as molecules, are burned in the presence of oxygen, which means in the atmosphere, which is 20% O2, results in the oxidation of those molecules. 

Furthermore,   it should come as no surprise to anyone living in the 21'st century that hydrocarbons consists of hydrogen and carbon ... most schoolchildren could tell you that. So flaring, which is the combustion of hydrocarbons in the atmosphere, ie, includes oxygen as one of the ingredients, is an oxidation reaction. 

Now since natural gas is composed 90% of methane (CH4), -said oxidation produces CO2 and H2O.

So even if there were NO flaring, that increase in production of natural gas represents an increased burden of those molecules in the atmosphere. 

Plastics are composed of the same molecules, but bound into polymers that are produced nowhere in nature, meaning that the plastic waste we see is simply a visible manifestation of the same process we are not seeing in the atmosphere, but the accumulation in the atmosphere is every bit as foreboding. Like plastics waste that could be shipped to China, where they have no problem with poisoning everything in their environment (that is, after all, why US Corporations moved their most noxious operations there in the first place), as long as we remained their export chumps, taking all their manufactured plastic garbage while they took our waste plastic garbage, then they acquiesced. But now that the problem is made visible, it, and the link between it and Fracking, is finally beginning to be publicly aired. It was always there, and it was always obvious. But it is only now being connected to fracking, and the costs of fracking are only now beginning to be seen as going far beyond their upfront costs. And it is not the fracking companies that are going to pay them. It is, as always, in our Cowboy Capitalist Culture, going to be, is already being, paid for by society, in the form of accelerating climate derangement.

Not that reporting on it will do one iota of good, mind you, but at least the source of the problem is becoming  topical. Therefore, the probability of Trump's "Climate change is a Hoax" being laid bare as nothing more than a conspiracy to enable his con's piracy  increases too.

This is the ClimateGate that no news organization cares to talk about, as it is at the heart of the energy-trumps-all administration. And not just energy, but American energy, specifically American Oil, as in Fracking: "I'd take the Oil," he said, and that's exactly what he's doing. "This election is Rigged", he intoned, and this administration is Rigged - oil-rigged - as the economy gets tied to the mast of fracked oil production that has bound us in bonds of debt issued to pay for the enormous capital outlay, all funded with QE-issued dollars that are the liability of the entire American public, while their energy reserves are siphoned off to produce all those imported-from-China plastics stuffing the shelves of Walmart (that's right, the largest receiver of US natural gas is CHINA ... even as the administration heaps tariffs on imports from China it exports to China the (un-tariffed) feedstock that helps keep those exports so cheap).

But it's not bad enough that the capital-intensive buildout of both the LNG infrastructure and the petrochemical plants, all are being done via a debt machine set to rival the home mortgage con, or that the danger of transporting LNG by rail in the very part of the country where there are more oil and gas pipelines crisscrossing the landscape  than anywhere else on earth, the obvious danger, as highlighted by incidents in the Straits of Hormuz and the attacks on the oil tankers there by what was obviously a drone, of a drone attack on these floating hydrogen bombs is completely ignored.

Graphene batteries and 3D printed parts included!

Because, once again, as with the internet, nuclear bombs, cellphones, a technology developed for no other reason than US Full Spectrum Domination, the US Pentagon has handed the world technology which anyone with a 3-D printer and a facility with graphene, can now assemble and deploy, with a fraction of the cost of what simply having a roof over your head now extracts, a veritable air force of pilotless pilot lights to ignite these floating bombs, which btw, together with fracking, was also developed by the US military industrial complex. That's what defense means: extracting the R&D dollars from the taxpayer, and handing over the resultant data to Private Industry to then siphon the profits derived from those technologies to Insiders.

The same dynamics at work: The profits to be derived from delivery of the last of the US energy reserves are all delivered to the corporate coffers and their shareholders, but the liability for the enormous capital expenditures, none of which would have been feasible without natural gas prices plummeting through the groundfloor, which is a direct result of unimpeded fracking for oil, are all constructed with borrowed funds, obtained by a compliant Fed keeping interest rates far below what the risk premium would normally demand, and those bombs that are afloat on the oceans' surfaces are all insured as well, but at well below the true costs of the "accident" waiting to happen.

 And those energy exports that have been escalating as the graph above illustrates? Have they been good for our economy? Funny you should ask. Because as anyone can see, even as the most profitable component of the US export regime goes steadily up, the US debt goes up even faster. So, far from being a boom, it's a disaster.

















Friday, June 14, 2019

The Law of the Land, Gresham's, Trumps All.


Ramblin' Rows:

Arctic Talk: Our Tic Toc Walk to the Blue Ocean Event. Or, mass suicide : the effortless slide, the A/C'd ride to extinction. Freedom Fries, Democracy Bakes, Industry Lies, Phoebe Snow Flakes. I'm sitting here pondering on how to pull all this together, how to best illustrate the connection , best reflected by the disconnect, between politics, economics and the rapidly accelerating overburdening of the troposphere with our gaseous waste (one of the funniest rebuttals from the climate-change denying, "Prolife" (lol, as they tool around in ginormous vehicles spewing poison gasses, CO2 being but the most publicized one) crowd being that the methane from the ruminants of the planet far exceeds our own, purposelessly ignoring the fact that all those ruminants and their domination is in reality the same source: mankind. It should come as no surprise that all those farting cows are sporting a brand, seared into their flesh by their all-too-human owners. They are there to provide milk and meat to the ever-expanding billions of humans and so themselves number in the multiple billions, far exceeding the humans that produce them, a number they would never have gotten to without the direct intervention of mankind, the upshot being that their methane contribution, together with that of the vast rice bogs of Asia, should be added to or included in, the amount of methane which humankind is responsible for venting into the atmosphere, not subtracted from it. Both these sources of greenhouse gases are as man-made as the exhaust from automobiles).

I wanted to show how the Administration's insistent lie that climate change is a hoax while simultaneously exclaiming the fact that the rapid decline of ice in the Arctic is an economic opportunity fly in the face of each other: You can't claim BOTH without proffering a reason for exactly why the opportunity now exists for exploration in the Arctic because its ice is melting. If not CC, t hen exactly what has caused the ice to melt to such an unprecedented degree that it is now economically feasible to consider using it as yet another source of carbon extraction and combustion?  Yet not a single Democratic voice, not a millisecond of MSNBS/CNN airtime, has bothered to point out this fact; how, as they bang their collective heads against the border Wall, for an excuse to impeach, the very real reason of a President directly and admittedly involved in a conspiracy (Just as the Birther Movement was a conspiracy against the duly elected President of the US, the promulgation of the conspiracy (a hoax is a conspiracy ... a specific kind of conspiracy, but in a Venn diagram of Conspiracy, hoax would be entirely within the circle: every conspiracy isn't a hoax, but every hoax that isn't the product of a single mind, is a conspiracy). A conspiracy to accuse scientists of being in a conspiracy, in order to aid and abet the Neo Con's piracy ...  at the heart of which is the entire fracking industry.

Why, for example do Democratic candidates for the Presidency of the United States not decry the Pentagon budget?

Half of all federal discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon: the epicenter of the hoax called Climate Change. it has a budget of more than 3/4 of a trillion dollars and is using that money to prepare for the nation's #1 security threat: Climate Change and their attendant State-spanning and ever-longer-duration disasters, during enemies can then take advantage of us, is all, has always been for the more than decade they've held that belief, and yet, the US congress has nary a peep to say about the  enormous funding for no other reason than to perpetrate this hoax on the American people and the World.

But that path is too muddled, the reasoning too tortured for me to present it in a convincing manner, so I've instead decided to start looking for sources that will publish such work and write to that instead of continuing to post to a blog that no one has the least interest in reading. The time I need to do just  the above, being a case in point.  Not just the time, but the increasing magnitude of the changes we have wrought making it more and more important to concentrate my efforts on getting an audience that will both acknowledge and heed the danger and take action against our legislators and news monopolies referred to as the MSM, the acronym blithely termed "mainstream" when  part of the problem is that it is just mainstream, mediocre. It should more accurately be referred to as the Monopolized News Media: The M'NM's: encased in a candy shell of ads that dangle distracting   baubles to tantalize (like newspaper ads for Pringles next to newspix in a feature about starving Yemeni infants) that keeps their hands from getting sullied by the dark things they purvey to give /deliver to us the  for which we tune them in, as if it's America's Funniest Home Videos, vicarious thrills of violence kept safely remote ... we're not remotely connected but remotely disconnected with but a push of a button, until now, the effort of having to even lift a finger to have our desires effortlessly fulfilled becoming too onerous, a voice command now will work. Hopefully we'll soon be able to just bark at it. The advertisers dream. A customer base that actually desires to have its every word picked up, its every desire attended to.

"It only starts listening after I say "Alexa" ...

"Ummm, ..., How does it know you said "Alexa" unless it was listening?"

 Seriously though, well, maybe not seriously, but not facetiously either, when you look up MSM it specifically states mainstream as one word, so it is the MM: (Monopolized Media?). This makes my semantically-wired brain ponder on the difference between mainstream and main stream, the former being, "the ideas, attitudes, or activities that are regarded as normal or conventional; the dominant trend in opinion", while the latter implies a scenario similar to the one we seeing flooding the interior of the country, as the grand Mississippi gets swollen to unprecedented proportions from its many tributaries, the main stream may be overwhelming, but that's because it carries within it the waters draining from many States it doesn't even border. Ergo Mainstream is what our monopolized Corporate media is in actuality; Main Stream is what the Monopolized Corporate media would have us believe it is: just the principal source of news, one that incorporates other, tributary sources, hence the inaccurate acronym, the one both dreamt up and promulgated by that same MCM. Case in point:

PBS, which is part of the MSM, stands for Public Broadcasting System and is referred to as Public television, yet if you look at their own figures, PBS receives less than 8% of their funding from the government, all the rest of their revenues comes donations from Private  Sources, yet it still refers to itself as Public television, despite its sponsors that we have to listen to ad nauseum (no pun intended ... (I'm such a liar)) all being Corporations, so it's actually the Corporate Broadcasting System: sponsored TV is not Public TV, even if  the closest to any Public Broadcasting System is Fox News, as  it is the only news source that takes directions and plans its broadcasts to suit the whims of the nation's top public official, the trained Seal that's the President of the US. The first Chief Executive who is completely and unabashedly foremost a representative of the Corporate class of billionaires (the most base of his base) to which he belongs. He is the first President to openly display his cringing obeisance to what they used to call "The Money Interest" (but that now they call Free Speech), to the complete exclusion of any others. The rest is all showboating. A circus that the MSM has gone to the bank with every year since he first flashed his orange bouffant at the Republican "Debates". Those he rapidly transformed into the political version of a Comedy Central's Roast (of which he was a seasoned veteran), with him now taking center stage as  the Master of Ceremonies.

Natural gas saw the largest usage boost but all fossil fuels saw increases. So rampant production of our so-called "transition" fuel, Natural Gas, is accelerating even as growth in the use of the renewable fuels it is supposedly replacing grow in tandem with it. If one were to listen to such writers as Robert Scribbler, the growth of "renewable" fuels is growing at a rate more than double that of those same fossil fuels they are, again, supposedly, replacing.The joined-at-the-hip growth of energy demand, renewable energy, US oil production, US Natural Gas produuction, explosion of US petrochemical industry, and the intractable intertwined growth of  plastic waste and CO2 are totally ignored.

Climate change is a National security Threat per the Pentagon: denial of this by the Commander of chief of US armed forces is simply ignored completely by the so called "Opposition Party" despite the fact that said denial makes the US President the #1 threat to the Security of the United States of America.

 Department of Defense, “Report on the Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense,” Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, January2019

So the President is overseeing the funding of the largest hoax on the planet by showering billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to generate "reports" to propagate that hoax. And not a contra, in the basement, "Oh we didn't know about it!", hoax, in order to fund a few "freedom fighters". Oh no. This President is running an administration where everyone else is afraid to say "boo!", where he has no intention of pretending that what they do he knows nothing about.

Until comes the crash. The tune our DJ's playing if it were a record, would be getting sued for copyright infringement. The fracking fiasco, billed, like the Bush economy, asa boon, for its temporary methamphetamine unsustainable last boom of the boom and bust boomer generation: the same genesis, the same use of oil, the same malinvesment to force a generation's dependence on eking a livelihood out of fracking, flaring, and the poisonous plastics industry, a destroyed farmbelt,  are all reminiscent of the War-All-the-Time-is-good-for-ShoPPINIG! Who knew ? An economy of all cons all the time, til Daddy Fed pulls the plug. Take away the punchbowl? They dumped it on our heads!

That tale of the aughts, hasn't changed anything, it just continued the con, hid the pea under a different cup, palmed the card up their sleeve.

Launder. Rinse. Spin. Repeat.

The tellltale heart of the lie is always in its invisibility on national media even as it overtakes reality.

Exxon's Attack Against Climate Change Suit Narrowed by Judge: Exxon gets sued, but the President of the United States never has to worry about any reporter, Democratic or Republican, Conservative or Progressive, ever asking him how this case isn't simply thrown out as a frivolous lawsuit? 

Only by pretending that climate change doesn't exist can you nationalize our DJ's playlist. It is the central policy of his administration, yet nothing has been done to stop funding the largest purveyor of this stupendous hoax of Climate Change as a threat: The Pentagon.

Since the heart of the military perpetrates the Hoax that climate change is a "Threat" a threat for which we must funnel trillions of dollars to the Pentagon to "protect" us from it while the US President knows, broadcasts, and insists that it is just a HOAX, why has he increased the defense budget even more than what they even asked? And why has the Congress and the media remained absolutely silent on the subject?

This isn't just some "Oh, I was just kidding", birther bull, this is the rejigging of the entire US landscape and economy to gear it to expanding fossil fuel development and export at the exact same time that the country's largest investor and provider of such services, Exxon, is in several US courts being sued for providing vital energy resources that have no negative impact?

The enormous disaster we, as in the world as well, are being set up for rivals anything his hero, Schicklegruber, ever devised. The drop in  price, not it's escalation, will be the death knell: hence the single-minded obsession to get every oil producer possible off the market: Libya, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, all the OPEC nations have agreed to lower their production, in the teeth of which the US continues to por money into expanding theirs: for export ... onto a market brimming with oil while trade and economies that are "booming"panic at even the whisper of a mere .25% increase in interest rates, ie: they can't make a profit, so the banks can't so the oil industry can't: we all love the energy, but less and less are we able to afford it. even as we become more and more reliant on it for absolutely everything. Including feedstock for the spanking new Saudi-owned (see why Kashoggi could get killed with impunuity? MSB knows the Business of America is synonymous with Trump Enterprises; so who cares if , "All ah wanna do is kill someone"? ... we need another refinery) Texas petrochemical plant.

Gresham's Law is a monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good." ... Gresham’s law was originally based on the composition of minted coins and the value of the precious metals used in them. ... At the core of Gresham’s law is the concept of good money versus bad money.

I first noticed it during the housing mania while the Bush junta was ransacking the place, but now it's enveloped everything, as bad policy pushes out good, because all that bad money hasn't been earned, it's just wished into existence and leveraged on debt so that investment that would be made based on market decisions, research, and data are shoved aside with the phony-generated money, which is indistinguishable from the money generated via productivity, and hence hopium becomes dopium and the falling in line of all dissenters begins.


Alexa ....Clean up this Mess!.



In a  Guardian article on plastic waste, (I'll be back)