The Corponations Hegemonic Rule Tightens in The Rip Roaring Twenties of Disaster Capitalism.

Do you remember Peak Oil? Or at least, peak oil production? Well, perhaps not. There were not that many people who cared to listen, during that time of maniacal frenzy, madness inspired by a rush to accumulate piles of fiat cash by means of  stock "investment" and rehypothecation, that took place during the GW Bush Administration. But the theory of peak oil was used to spark a speculative fever to run the price of a barrel of oil from the $11/bbl it cost at the onset of the GW administration up to the near $150.00/bbl it was manipulated to by its close by using the same panic-button goad that land speculators used to inspire people to pay outrageous amounts for a spot of land, namely, that  "They're not making any more of it". And markets, you know, those all-knowing conglomerations of ignorance and greed, were stoked to snakepit ferocity by convincing "investors" that the black gold was running out, so you 'd better get your hands on some of the unctuous unguent before it was too late. 

The same template had worked so well for Reagan/Poppy Bush to separate naïve investors from their hard-earned cash by stoking the fear of Communism, that it became a formula that the Poppy's seed, with the aid of the Reagan years' alumnus Cheney, adopted: use half-truths with a sprinkling of real science to stoke a boom, then make a fortune by selling assets at prices far exceeding their actual worth, then buy those same assets back for pennies on the dollar when the inevitable bust collapses their stratospheric valuation. Rinse. Repeat.

The same trick is being played on a much more dangerous scale today. As one major country after the other experiences "once in a century" flooding, drought, and/or wildfires, year after year, the public's been deluded into thinking that it's the normal result of the heated atmosphere caused by climate change. But just as the POP (peak oil production) was true, but had nothing to do with the frenzied escalation in oil prices during th eaughts, or as Communism really existed, but never came close to posing the existential threat it was presented as being, currently, it is not climate change, so much as climate change amped-up by frenetic fracturing and Corponations' mandated growth at any cost, that is wreaking havoc with the earth's weather system far in advance of what any sane prognosticator had ever envisioned. Yet, although you will see many scientists and journalists posit that the intensity of wildfires, droughts and floods "have been accelerated by climate change" ...  nowhere, in our Corponation-controlled-and-owned news-as-entertainment complex, will you hear it suggested, despite its staring us right in the face, that climate change has been accelerated by hydraulic fracturing-gone-wild, which in turn has been given an methamphetamine shot in the arm by the push to develop Green/clean tech industries so that mankind can continue its burgeoning growth in energy production and usage.

The two nuclear-powered PetroStates of Russia and the United States are, with complete impunity, bringing forward the catastrophic repercussions from overheating the planet by the combustion of ever increasing stores of fossil fuels of every form: gas, liquid and solid, being frantically dug up and incinerated, from the perceived once-safe far off date of 2100 to spark these Roaring Twenties of the 21'st century. 

But unlike the analogous situation with Covid, where the lab-leak theory, as in what most likely brought our own little man-made catastrophe right into our living rooms (and not in the Vietnam War sense of the phrase), there is no debate about what brought this weather-gone-wild level of destruction forward by more than a century. Instead, more than any Qanon conspiracy theory, the idea that the USA and Russia are, by their joint exercises in hyper-CorpoNationalistic expansion of fossil fuel energy production and the concomitant fossil-fueled energy combustion necessary to bring it about, is ridiculed as untenable. The mere suggestion that the rampant fracturing of enormous swaths of the earth's crust to let loose billions of tons of oil, while allowing methane to unimpededly leak into the troposphere, is considered, when it is contemplated at all, to be nothing more than just a frackpot theory. 

Instead, even as one weather-related calamity strikes on the heels of another, again and again, the fracturing operations of the American Corponations not only fails to contract even the slightest under the Green Biden administration, but has ramped up its efforts to goose its output to challenge the levels achieved during the former failed administration's pre-pandemic days so as to fuel each and every one of the Covid-stymied heavily CO2-emitting enterprises of air travel, Ocean Cruises, and tourism for the ignorant masses, who now resemble not in the least the cultural curious and scholarly tourists of the past, but bear instead a remarkable resemblance to the rabble of English football fandom, making hooliganism an international phenomenon as unnecessary travel takes off in a parabolic arc with the speed and insouciance of a billionaire brat rocketing into the stratosphere. All for no purpose whatsoever other than to say they did it. Like crypto-currencies, they destroy without bringing any benefit from their destruction, pure destructive creation, their outsized carbon footprint kowtowed to as though it confers upon them an aura of the divine. 

"I'm from a Corponation and I'm here to help ... myself."

But not to be outdone, the Green Machine is simultaneously burning fossil fuels at a pace fast approaching that of the fossil fueled fossil fuel industry; so much so that the new energy platforms wrought by wind and solar are being used, in no State more than Texas, to augment the rampant fracturing of the earth's geologic rock formations, using windmills to enable the flaring of enough natural gas to satisfy the electricity demands of the most energy-hungry State in the Union. With windmills to provide the power needed to generate electricity, why bother collecting the billions of cubic feet of natural gas the Texans, along with their fellow petroleurs, the Russians, find it cheaper to flare? They then move onto the next well, and the next, leaving the State and federal governments to plug the methane sieve they leave leaking into the atmosphere in their wake. And nobody (except this nobody) anywhere says a word, even as their world is burnt to a cinder or crushed under megatons of cascading waters from rivers in spate brought about by receiving a month's worth of rain in a matter of hours, not wrought by climate change so much as by weather amped to a heat-induced fury by the accelerating volumes of methane being added indiscriminately to the 40 billion tons of CO2 resulting from the burning of fossil-derived fuels.

Meanwhile every independent news source in the world has been destroyed or swallowed whole by a Corponation: bookstores by the hundreds driven into bankruptcy by Amazon and the US Congress that granted Amazon a monopoly by making them exempt from sales taxation (and every other form, apparently, as they paid $0 in federal income taxes last year ... one of the largest employers in the country); newspapers by the dozens driven into the ground by the internet, local radio stations turned into nothing but screeching banshees of discordant anger, misdirecting the animosity of their listeners away from the Corponations destroying the economic systems of local businesses and replacing them with the extraction template of Corponational Capital rape machines that operate more like a sqiddy from The Matrix, sucking out the Wealth of Nations before its citizens ever get a chance to enjoy or build upon it for their own prosperity.

Amid the world's botched handling of the Covid crisis, the Long Emergency,  the tent has been blown off of the Circus of US politics revealing the thunderous sky above, showing its inhabitants and the world via flashes of lightening that it isn't a circus at all, it's an arena. And a damned grim one. I often used to think, when I heard a MAGAt raving about the glorious USA!, USA!, about Freedumb and all that crap, what it must sound like to a meat-packing worker, or an employee of Amazon working in henhouse conditions while Bezos rockets off into "space" on what should have been his workers' salaries. While they cheer. No wonder the world sees us all as crazy. We are crazy. We're just a roiling pack of spoiled brats and senile idiots. What we call life is a five-and-dime-store romance. That enthusiasm underneath ... what is it? What to call that cheap optimism bordering on idiocy which turns the stomach of any ordinary human being? It's mere illusion. No; illusion's too good a name for it. Illusion means something. No, it's not illusion, it's delusion. Sheer Delusion. We're like a herd of wild horses with self-installed blinders over our eyes. Entire nuclear-armed nations have gone on the rampage ... stampeding ... right over the precipice, right over anything of beauty or value that happens to get in their way. Nurturing only whatever feeds the love of violence and descent into utter confusion. The entire population addicted to Limbaugh ravings. On! ON! No matter where. While foaming at the mouth with inchoate rage the whole time. Shouting Hallelujah! Hallelujah! For no reason whatsoever. It's just in our fervid blood. It's the climate. It's the virus. It's a whole lot of things ... It's the end, too. And we're intent on  pulling the whole world down with us. We don't know why, and we don't  particularly care. It's our destiny, as the world's exceptional Nation. Everywhere else is just a shithole country, so what do they matter?

It's as though the leaders ushering in our End of History have sported so long with life that even when thought and wisdom do try to intervene, these unwelcome guests are lured astray by the same vanities they sought to put to flight. Discerning thought and accumulated wisdom are made to put on masks and play the fool. Espousing a wild philosophy of pleasure, they crawl from under their rock to act out their latest daydreams, gathering followers from that giddy tribe of revelers whose entire lives are more riotous than even the holidays of more sober men, who seem to have been so maddened by events they've plunged willingly into a chasm of gay despair.  Yet their mirth is darkened by undercurrents of delirium. The young deem themselves happy, the elders, who have all but forgotten that mirth is only the counterfeit of happiness, follow false shadows willingly, because even if all that glitters is not gold, it lends a sparkle to their otherwise drab lives. In this milieu it's no wonder the Corponations of the world feel enabled to set acres upon acres of rainforests ablaze simply to turn crops into fuel so that it can in turn be set ablaze under the hoods of a vast army of automobiles, with nothing to stop that internal combustion short of a deluge washing them away by the hundreds of thousands. Millions of sheaves of corn grown with dwindling and non-renewable water supplies and nurtured by fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers that will never nourish a single starving, "food insecure," human being because those ears too are destined to be processed via the incineration of yet more fossil fuels into even more combustible tinder to be torched in ICE machines. Thus has mankind used government-subsidized monetary excess to make game of their own stupidity.

As England proclaims its day of "Freedom" amidst skyrocketing Covid cases, thousands of jet flights have been chartered to whisk COPout26 attendees to yet another Climate Accords Circus in Scotland. Heavy as their carbon footprints are on land, they tread even heavier to cross the seas. They will gather together, a train of minstrels, not unlike in the London streets of yore: wandering players, whose theater is now in Glasgow, in the guise of noble men, but who are little more than mummers, tightrope-walkers, and mountebanks, pretending that a humanity that fecklessly carries one variant after the other of a known deadly virus from country to country, accelerating its mutations such that the vaccines that promised humanity an end to the pandemic's ravages instead insures its untrammeled ascendancy, have even the slightest chance of changing behaviors to ward off what was, less than a mere eight months ago, decried by the world's Soulless Super Power as being nothing more than a hoax. And nothing but another election separates the Beacon of Democracy from regressing back into that same demented mindset. Yet a convention that holds sway over none of the countries attending it will change the course of the all-powerful and unaccountable Corponations' drive to extinguish life as we know it from the face of the earth? 

Absolute Nonsense.