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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Friday, August 28, 2020

Laura Daland





                                         Donald Jim-Jones Trump's Kool-Aid Stand



 It's curious how I've turned to rhyming of late to make my blog entries. I like it, but can understand why readers may not, as the effects on my mood are so much nicer when I versify than when I cursify, although I don't know why. Waxing poetic, I suspect, puts your brainwaves on a different level than attempting hard-hitting prose where every statement of fact needs to be backed up by a link to an article or be cited, or the writer whose data you've used to buttress your arguments needs to be given a tip of the hat. Which fact shouldn't be misconstrued to mean I resent doing any of those things, just to mention that they are not only a lot of work, but they can often lead one to lose one's train of thought, something very important when you a have a one-track mind that rails as much as I do on the same subject. Even thought that subject encompasses every aspect of our lives: transportation, communications, air pollution and therefore, health, the economy, agriculture, and planning for the future even as it changes before we get to tomorrow, never mind next week, or next decade. How do you plan for retirement when its main component of your continued contribution, Social Security, is being actively undermined, the eventual destruction being the goal of one of the major political parties? Or buy into a stock market that is kept artificially high by design, effectively blocking out newcomers unless they're willing (and able) to buy assets they know are priced higher than the earnings of its constituent companies will ever make them worth?

So although my main point of interest is the US methane monster that fracturing the continent's crust has created, it's mostly the lack of reporting on the fact and the resultant finger-pointing at everything else but the actual culprit for the climate derangement that is no longer an anomaly, but a persistent fact of life (such as the current global temperature ... one that used to be, as little as a few years ago, dependent on the ENSO cycle, but has now, for the 2'nd year in a row, resulted in a world that's now hotter than any El Nino-year in history).

For example, it's my contention that the methane releases of tens of thousands of drills fracturing the earth's surface across a broad expanse of the continent are, judging from the increased emphasis on the industry doing the fracturing on not having to plug the methane leaks its leaving in its wake, nor be held accountable for the deleterious effects of it on our environment, having a disastrous effect on our environment, and going beyond that, are in fact responsible for the events happening in our country from one ocean to the other. 

The location of the heat dome that  has wreaked havoc with the weather of the Pacific coast and the mountain states is not coincidentally located at the heart of the fracturing spree in the four corner region of the country, and fanning out to include the environs of East Texas, Western New Mexico, Oklahoma, and even Kansas. This is not just CO2 that's wreaking this destructive havoc, but CO2 heavily augmented by a veil of methane that acts like a super booster, enhancing the already CO2-laden atmospherical effect.  

When the corona virus was first threatening to shutdown the economy, Limbaugh, Fox and other heartless GOP stalwarts were minimizing its threat by likening it to car accident deaths, ignoring the fact that it represented a +1: a whole new string of deaths on top of the others, not replacing them. Methane is the same way, and is played down the same way: it isn't the increased methane alone that is responsible for the wildfires and overheated ocean waters: it is the addition of it on TOP of the heightened CO2 numbers that make it so potent. With more than 414 ppm of CO2, an amount that sits at the highest it has ever been in any July of our entire lifetimes, or of mankind's entire existence, in fact, and its concentration is greater in the center of the fracturing frenzies going on in both the USA and Russia. Both those centers of the fracturing mania have heightened levels of methane, a gas with a far more powerful greenhouse effect: one that is wreaking havoc in both of the epicenters of the planet's only earth-fracturing nations. And both of them are currnetly burning to the ground. 

Unlike Russia, the USA has other options it could have pursued, but decided to provide a bonanza for a few well-placed billionaires and rely on the discretion of the reporting of the "Free", as in ad-reliant, press to shut up about the costs that are being imposed on the entire country by the most energy-intensive industrial activity on the globe. After all, the financial system is set up in exactly the same way: all the risk and costs shoved off onto the shoulders of the public while a few TBTF industries, buttressed by being in the favor of the Fed, skim their artery-clogging enrichment off first, and leave the public to pick up the tab for their defalcations, gambling losses and bankrupt schemes. Why would fracking be any different? 

One would think because it is easier to see its results. You can't hide a heat dome scorching the west, one so intense it damped the usual upwelling of the waters of the Pacific ocean that keep San Diego's waters cool. Without that upwelling, two tropical remnants of East Pacific hurricanes were able to churn their ways up the California coast unleashing a barrage of lightening storms in an area that has never experienced such an onslaught, setting off one fire after the other, resulting in more damage in the Northern California counties than ever before. Meanwhile, East Texas was doing its own super-heating of that part of the US, throwing a methane veil over the Gulf of Mexico that heated those waters to close to 90 degrees, enabling a Category 1 storm to power up to a Cat 4 in less than 24 hours.

But the Confederacy of Donald Jim-Jones Dunces don't miss a beat (As Citi's Prince said in 2008 as the Bush Ponzi scheme was unravelling, "I'm still dancing") and slurp up the Kool-Aid, feeling themselves immune to the ravages the scheme to sell-off the last dregs of American energy to China has resulted in: They can fly to wherever they like and stay at one of Big Daddy's gaudy palaces, so what do they care? 

Watching the Corona Coronation, I realized that Michael Moore, was indeed right: this fat-assed lard-belly is actually going to be driving the country further into the ground for yet another four years. Wow! I guess that's what BLM wants. What better revenge on Whitey than straddling them with their avatar of grift for another four years: they think they have nothing to lose, a curious position, since nothing has made it more clear how pervasive black  people are in our country's media, sports, entertainment, and manufacturing industries than Black people complaining how they aren't included. You would be hard-pressed to find any other country in the world that has elected a member of a minority group that constitutes little more than 10 per cent of the population as its President. OBAMA: Only Black Americans Matter Anyway. About ten percent of the population and yet you are featured on every channel, every hour; even on  Fox, who has to keep their tokens in play. 

So thanks guys. The statue of Liberty's iconic hand raised high above her head doesn't mean you should torch the place; but mass rioting, senseless looting, and arson seem to be your favorite sports, and well, that's gonna get Biden the boot. Congrats. You've been played so easily by this administration and its cohorts it's embarrassing. Do you really think that a cop shooting down a black guy, firing seven shots in his black back in the middle of the RNC was just coincidental? This was planned long before the virus hit, long before Donald had a clue as to who his opponent was even going to be. And you've played your part wonderfully ... and totally predictably. And once again have made a far greater impact on the outcome of the election than your numbers warrant. So good work. Your revenge is sewn into the outcome as surly as Betsy Ross' stars in the flag; and yet you can still demand reparations during the next election cycle. Why give up on a sure thing?

(Update: I so love it when I'm WRONG! Whooo-hoooo).







Tuesday, August 25, 2020

A/C DC: Solar Panels: The Lost Generation.


Fires started by the remnants of two East Pacific hurricanes, Faustus and Genevieve, vie for news coverage with the one-two punch of Atlantic hurricanes Marco and Laura spinning on the other side of the country while the RNC waxes eloquently about the state of an economic landscape cratered by its candidate's denial of reality. Both Texas and California, the States with the largest populations of the country, containing close to a full 25% of the country's inhabitants, are the foci of these ongoing weather-related disasters.

    
                                                    Fire in the Hole: The Mentally Handicapped


                                                           Conventional Whiz-dom

One's red, the other's blue, their twin catastrophe's long overdue.
Driven by a climate obsessive driving created 
The resultant whirlwind was by ourselves fated. 
So as the rancor morphs from name-calling to bile
The main driver remains delusional mass denial.

As one coast is battered by devastating lightening
Smoke and fires that become ever more frightening
The other battens down for yet another deluge
Amid a Corona pandemic that leaves no place of refuge.

Yet not a whisper is heard, nary a single word uttered
About How we achieved this "Energy Independence".
It's never implied, inferred, nor stuttered,
Becoming "Saudi America" has imposed a Death Sentence.

But we still don't care; we never will see
That our adoption of greed as our number one goal
Has unloosed a beast, as nothing is free.
We should all thank our children, whose future we stole.

When Reagan ripped solar panels from the White House roof
He declared Morning in America, "We'll all get rich";  
A booming economy was the ultimate proof,
As for the future, "What do I care, bitch?"

I'll have long ago shed this mortal coil
By the time the earth's oceans are all aboil
Meanwhile we have cars and computers and aluminum foil
None of them possible without waves of oil.

So California ablaze, the Gulf States inundated,
Although inconvenient are a small price to pay
For a pool in the yard, our borders crenallated 
Our Markets all rigged, our feet made of clay.

Not a new foot of rail, nor mass transit construction
For this auto-nation. We need profits to tax
to pour into building arsenals of mass destruction
So should anyone object we can just drop the Ax.

The "New" Nationalism sports innumerable flags,
Festoons poles, backyards and traitor's lapel
Harking back to the thirties' Partietags;
The half-hidden swastika the surest Tell.

So whether kneeling on my neck or taking a knee
In the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free
We tune up our voices Singing sea to rising sea,
 Me-me-me-me-me. Me-me-me-me-me. 






















Friday, August 21, 2020

Empowering Infernos: Blazing Addles The US West.

 

 As scientists keep predicting the onslaught that the changed climate will work on our pathetic little lives as we drive the earth's system into overdrive by annually injecting billions of tons of what was once sequestered CO2 into its troposphere, and then adding a healthy dollop of methane into the mix just to spice it up a bit, the continued refrain of, "Nobody could have seen it coming," is once again being taken up as fires char an ever greater acreages of The American West's parched lands and the concatenation of catastrophic failures lays bare the fact that systems put in place to present a facade of emergency preparation collapse like a house of cards when confronting actual dire situations. 

The Keystone Kops approach to the corona virus pandemic spread the disease throughout the prison system of California, a population it depends on to fight the fires savaging its lands, jumping its freeways and flaming its citizens homes into charred skeletal remains, as failure begets failure. 

Choking on the smoke and driving through flaming landscapes gives Californians little time to ponder the scale, never mind the cause, of the environmental derangement manifesting itself around them to have time to clear the smoke from their bleary eyes long enough to catch a glimpse of the historic weather occurrences transpiring elsewhere on their continent. No time to notice the historic twin tropical systems churning their way toward the US Southeast, nor wonder how can a storm that was so historic in its genesis, as Faustus certainly was, be followed so quickly by Genevieve threatening to follow the same track. Regardless of which, it is unheard of for there to be hurricanes/tropical systems churning up both sides of the continent simultaneously: one side threatening even more raging infernos while the other two systems come ripping through the Caribbean and racing toward the gulf on the other side, even as the center of the country wails about still not having electricity restored to thousands from the unprecedented 100 mph windstorm that went barreling through the country's hinterland. 

As the Democratic convention winds down, Gavin Newsom almost made an historic first connection by a politician between climate change and the mauling of the continent. However, he stopped short of linking the US and Siberia's burning to the methane monster that massive oil exploration, excavation and transportation on such a vast destructive scale has created. It is my thesis, as readers of this blog will attest to, that the manic pace of fracking, done as it is, to pay down debt, enrich investors, and fill government coffers with the resultant tax bonanza, is such that its production has come completely unmoored from actual demand. So much so that methane leaks are left to seep into the atmosphere unplugged, and wells are dug that release so much natural gas it is flared in ever greater amounts, so much so it is even beginning to embarrass Texas where they still hold firm to the belief that bigger is better: the more you flare, the greater you make America. Yet oil sits filling every storage nook available such that ships burdened with it run aground in Mauritius simply because they have no choice but to meander the globe aimlessly searching for somewhere, anywhere, to offload their cargo. Until it finally ends up in the ocean. While cargo trains full of petro production derail, spilling their contents onto North  Dakota's frack frack fractured surface ... all despite the fact that demand is so constrained that it could be met far more efficiently with supplies from cleaner sources that require far less energy-intensive production methods.

Following in the path of both the Bush and Obama administration, Donald had decided that he would amp up America's status as a petro-state - choosing an economic future for the country that best served his own needs. Oil and gas could be wielded as an international cudgel to force other countries to respect and deal with America no matter anything else the Donald's administration did. The industry historically generated enough easy cash to generate almost instant, almost limitless corruption wherever needed … without the need for endless active Wars. And when you have those kinds of goals to make one indispensable industry, and you run that industry like a Mafia chop shop, eventually the actual business side of your dark little authoritarian scheme is going to suffer. But bankruptcy is what Donald does best. It is all  his resume consists of. Skim the proceeds as you suck the country dry of its last hydrocarbons, selling them to the very country, CHInuh, that your castigating out of the other side of your malignant mouth.

Donald uses American natural gas and oil not only to make money for the State but also to keep neighboring countries corrupt and dependent. It solves so many problems. It reduces expectations for democratic governance and the rule of law while it creates a corruptly empowered political class invested in preserving the fossil-fuel-dependent system that has enriched its practitioners and their families. It also created comfortable space for organized white collar, Wall St, and Fed-enabled crime to flourish. The US government, under Donald’s control, has steadily become more integrated with all kinds of transnational organized crime and right-wing government autocracies. The beauty of Donald’s ever-deepening kinship with the world's dictators gave him a whole new set of levers with which to settle problems—and to make problematic people go away—whenever it might be unseemly to wield the overt powers of the state.

Fraud is now America’s most profitable export in world affairs. The counterfeiting for which George Lloyd was murdered by the state is penny-ante when compared to that perpetrated by the Fed. This can be clearly seen as the nation's dwindling GDP starts approaches the size of the Fed's balance sheet which has exploded to such an extent that on their current trajectory, they will meet: but you needn't wait for that to happen to see the enormity of the counterfeiting operation: close to half of the GDP is now accounted for by Fed printing. And the GDP of a country is what determines the interest rate at which investors in its debt are paid. So simply conjuring up half of the GDP is now at the heart of what they still laughingly refer to as Free Enterprise, because it comes, as it does, free of any enterprise. So only those concerns with ties to the Central Bank have any hope of continuing their businesses. The term, "Don't fight the Fed", takes on an entirely different character under such a regime.

Donald's America has become warped and stunted— monetary malfeasance on such a massive industrial scale it can bring down the whole nation - the entire world ... again. And when coupled with exotic assassinations by drone, weapons systems sold to the richest country in the world to use against the poorest, illegal out-of-uniform military incursions onto a State's soil, and the dissolution of bonds and treaties and Western norms whenever they’re considered inconvenient, it confers close to dictatorial powers onto a President that is inclined to usurp them anyway. 

When the Resource Curse takes hold in a country as big and influential and aggressive as 21st century America, it turns out to be the entire world’s problem. America's fracking mania has become a malignant tumor, spreading CO2 and methane throughout the rest of the world. But it has currently decided to come home to roost, and the guns of August weren't ever as apocalyptic as the fires of 2020; fires similar to those which started the year off a world away in what seems a lifetime ago, on the continent of Australia … another country, not coincidentally, afflicted with the resource curse. One that, like Donald ordering pupils back into schools rife with Covid, continued to entice tourists to its beaches even as its citizens floated offshore under hellish skies, forced there to escape the flames engulfing their homes. Fires similar to those that have raging all over that other Petro-State - Russia - in Siberia since early spring, releasing enough CO2 in the process to more than make-up for the decreased CO2 generation caused by the economic slowdown resulting from Covid-afflicted populations. 

The United States is in the grips of payback. It is being buffeted by forces of its own creation while its citizens are kept in the dark as to the enormity of the experiment they have been unwittingly made subjects of. As the corona virus started its rampage though the American States there were many who observed that we were part of an experiment as they saw cities devoid of activity, highways empty of traffic, streets silenced by inactivity, yet nowhere do we see the like comparison to the fracturing of the entire North American continent as being likened to that exact same thing: an experiment to which we have all been subjected to like caged rats in a mad scientist's laboratory. What I would like to suggest is that the experiment is not going well. Oil production, like viral reproduction, continues apace. Whereas the destruction it is wreaking, is either ignored, white-washed, or denied: the parallels are striking because they are aspects of the same phenomenon: the deliberate separation of activities from their consequences: Denial and delusion. Globalization and hydraulic fracturing on a continental scale. But the masking effect of these two all-too-human tendencies last only so long before reality, denied or blamed on other reasons, must finally become so obvious to all but the most greed-obsessed that they must bow to their awesome power to destroy everything they were initially hailed as saving.

Whether a change of administration has any hope of reversing the whirlwind we have yet to see. But it could hardly, barring some military madness (which is always a possibility in War-addled America), make the current state of derangement any worse.


Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Tiresias Wrecks: Blind to the Minsk-y Momentum Passing right by Us.




A row of humped shoulders sitting alone together waiting on trams amidst dusty trees while rats slither along the parallel tracks and pigeons squabble for discarded crumbs and moldy crusts. 
Commuters as intent on ruining their postures as they are on perusing their devices ... peas in their pods, smart phones for stupid people, watches that have no time for you, PDA's that show no affection, secretaries adorned with ornate drawers take down not a word of dictation. I saw my future was as oxidized as a pile of rust, bloomed, as it did, from a lack of trust, a life that made a welcome of indifference, took a lack of response as a sign of surrender.

People neither talk nor look at one another. Existence is sand-boxed as reconfigured quartz in a smudged glass panel aglow with marshaled electrons. A touch pad as cold and unyielding as Russian justice, as enervating and alienating as trying to revive a drunk relative passed out on the couch.

An apparition seems conjured from a bank of fog, a flesh and blood ghost that as rapidly melts into mist as the grey matter wisps its wreaths of suspended moisture around the form that no longer has one. 
that I can see.

And seeing is believing, even if you can't see him leaving, me pacing around in the gloom alone. I insert my buds. The loneliness I invite in I have been unable to show out. He sits there like a Raven mouthing the word Evermore! He's come to bust my Palace, steal my crown and digitalis, catch the thrown room, pitch the court, finger the prints, tumble the queen bee out of her castle, shake the jelly that's royal, the serf that was loyal. Once.

On one side of the Continent a hurricane begets flooding, while on the other another sparks wildfires even as a derecho rages through the plains, flattening fattening stalks as hunger stalks half the globe. A non-mentionable that the billions of dollars plowed into the plains to rake in fuel from the resultant grains is now left rotting sans capital gains.
Yet the CO2 remains. 
Mingling with CO too from burning remains of COvid COrpses. 

So they hold a political convention where they fail to mention society's disintegration from climate change acceleration happening right in front of our i-verted eyes.

 A climate that has benefited mankind since it developed agriculture disappears with barely a shrug of our rounded shoulders.

Rhapsody Rapt in Blue Planet Meltdown 

Is this the real life? Are we in wr-ecstasy?
Caught in the downside of a manscaped reality
Self-blinded eyes, look up at the skies; don't see
Everything we destroy, never know empathy
It's all easy come, easy go, just get high, never grow
Fierce as the wind blows doesn't really matter to me, you see

Gaia, we've killed off Man
Filled with Fun his empty head, filled a jigger, now he's dead
drunk
Gaia, Life had just begun
But now we've gone and thrown it all away
Gaia, ooh, didn't mean to make you fry
The world of men has made this clime of sorrow
Carry on, carry on as if mankind never mattered

Too late, our time has come
Sends shivers down my spine, body's aching all the time
Goodbye, everybody, your time to go
Gotta leave it all behind and face the truth
Gaia, ooh  
I don't wanna die
I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all
  
I see a Minsk-y Moment of a man
Belarus, Belarus, can you see the Man dangle
Thunderbolt and lightening 
Very very frightening 
Me!
Lukashenko, Lukashenko
Your people say that you must GO!
He will not go
Never, never, never, never will he go!

I'm in a Lazyboy gaming to the tango
Squared with this life of man's monstrosity
Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?
Ruby Princess knows, We will not let you go.
Rock and rolling blackouts
Shut off electricity
From me, from me, From Me! 

So you think you can drone me and flit while I fry?
So you say that you love me yet leave me to die?
Crybaby, How can this be, maybe
Anything that matters, I refuse to see
Since only that which flatters
Is all that really matters
To me
Hurricanic wind blows ... sea to rising sea.