Survivors' Gilt Cage: Making Gain from Others' Pain.

Energy Use: The Elephant in the Zoom.

 This week, China’s State Grid and National Development and Reform Commission (The three names alone demonstrating the problem with State bureaucracies, as The State Grid (which provides power to Private Companies), National Development, and Reform, should their names be taken literally, would each have contradictory agendas) pledged to ensure power, especially for residents, and said they would take measures such as allowing greater production of coal and increasing coal imports.

Luckily here in the US we have no Socialism, and private enterprises can shutdown the grid so as to hike prices and create an atmosphere rife with possibilities for even more price-gouging energy-outage plays in the future:

Unconventional oil is more expensive and slow, with a small energy balance and a large environmental footprint, one, were it to be objectively measured, easily surpasses that of coal. But just as no one has named the elephant in the room of hydraulic fracturing as causing the sudden surge in climate-derangement events, neither have you heard a single news source mention the curtailment of the burning of coal by China, along with its concomitant cessation of the release of cooling aerosols into the atmosphere that are therefore not delivering their benefits, as a factor in the Climate chaos visited upon China this past summer. (Henan province was experiencing floods yet again this week, although not as horrendous as those caused by July's torrential downpours).

Energy-saving measures in China include suspended elevator services! So how do the markets, those entities relied on to inform everything, the Stock Market itself the only measure our disgraced ex-president gave any credence to, react to such news? Like this:

On reporting the news that China is facing an energy crisis, with more than 10 provinces and regions imposing restricted power use, the only thing Reuters reported on was how to "play the market", the most important resource in our existence being but a game to them, while Morgan Stanley picks 5 global stocks to "play" the gas price (Natural and automobile gas prices, it doesn't matter, they will position themselves, with the help of their elected stooges, to make gain from your pain). "Play" being a Wall St euphemism for how to profit from the pain and suffering you inflict on that same society without which your business wouldn't exist. Par example, both the New Orleans power outage following Hurricane Ida and the Texas freeze outage were events each of those states' molly-coddled energy sectors positioned themselves to profit from. That is how Corponations are structured now, their largest windfall profits are gleaned from their own failure and the bonanza to be reaped by raking their own customers over the coals of the resulting outages. Enron was, as you may recall, a Texas entity entirely backed by its then Governor, GW Bush, whose CEO, Kenneth Lay, then helped put into the White House, with the expectation of being named to a Cabinet position by the man on whom he'd larded huge piles of criminally-procured cash. Stop the steal, indeed: but only after it gets one illegally elected:

If the main source of campaign funds are illegally obtained, then the Presidency it secured one's election to was, like the cash itself, stolen. Using the Texas Mafia's cash to ensure your election is not politically correct, yet that is exactly what GW Bush did).

 In the tight oil fields of Texas and North Dakota (both now sizzling, by the purest of coincidences, in triple-digit heat having nothing to do with the fact that they are both not only the two State where fracking's contribution to their economies is the largest, but that allow the most prodigious amount of flaring, unrivalled by anywhere else on the continent. The GOP elephant is not only in the room, it's ensconced in the seat of power) with North Dakota, (despite being one of the states situated in the highest latitudes of any state in the continental US), currently the hottest spot in the Northern Hemisphere. Oil drillers must replace about 40 percent of their production PER YEAR just to maintain their output. The decline rates for shale gas are no more encouraging: 79 to 95 percent depleted after three years according to a comprehensive survey of 65,000 oil and gas wells in 31 shale "plays". Shale natural gas and tight oil drillers face a task similar to climbing up a down escalator.

 "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

Each must frequently replace enormous fractions of their current production, via enormous outlays of both money and energy, just to keep production from falling flat. A path to persistently rising global production of oil and gas, and the resulting low consumer prices for them, as we face our energy-constrained future, cannot be built on production from such fields. A fact staring us in the face as winter approaches and the output from both renewables and coal falters.

So while China takes measures to beef up its energy supplies, the US, scraping the bottom of the barrel of its own energy resources, is exporting them hand over fist to the energy-hungry Asians and Europeans, while my own little useless endeavor here shouts, "Stop the Steal!" only to land on, I would say deaf ears, but blind eyes would be more appropriate, although equally nonsensical, yet strangely enough, I think you get my drift, which ain't snow, blind or no.

What the US politicians and media, no matter how far left or how wrongly right, refuse to report on is the fact that the US is exporting the last of its fossil fuel legacy, well, not quite, "its legacy", as per, according to our blind adoption of self-destructive Vampire Capitalism, they are not "ours," as in US citizens', resources, at all. They are all in private  hands to be "played" with howsoever the Corponations see fit to play with them. And if that means exporting them all to China, excavating the last dregs of US energy resources from our own soil to deliver them over stormy seas to China to add them, at today's rockbottom prices, to their own Strategic Oil Reserves (while we deplete our own to cover private enterprises' failures), all while simultaneously blaming that same China for everything from Covid to Climate Change. This comes on the high heels of  our US-based corponationals positioning the People's Republic as the chokehold on every manufactured good necessary to run, not only our everyday lives, but our War Industry as well. Everything from semiconductors and drams, roms and rams to soldiers' uniforms and ammo are produced in the country we have increasingly singled out as our "enemy".

How smart is that?

You scream how China is our enemy, that Communism is Evil, and then you excavate your most precious resources, resources without which we cannot run our ever-increasingly energy-reliant economy, and deliver them to Communist China, the only nation in the world completely under the control of its Communist Party, while kowtowing to their demands for technology transfers from R&D, paid for by extorting money from US workers by claiming it was necessary, why?: to defend us from Communism.

How smart is that?  (Smartest Elephants in the Room: the Story of ENRON; now the story of the USA).

Luckily the vast majority of the US population is too befuddled to even make the connection.

Our disgraced ex-president likened the Covid crisis, for which he explicitly blamed China, as a War.

So, taking the big fat liar at his word, what does the US war machine offer its citizens to protect them from the virus manufactured by a Communist country in a time of War? KN-95 masks manufactured in China! A country which eschews standards control to enhance profits. Delivering to the US pet food that poisons pets, and to its own citizens, baby formula that poisons infants (it was adulterated with melamine to increase the nitrogen content of diluted milk, giving it the appearance of higher protein content so as to pass quality control testing, thereby making money for its manufacturers). It's akin to the USA, during WW1, buying gas masks manufactured by  BASF,  Bayer and IG Farben, the manufacturers of the poison gas choking its soldiers, and distributing them to combatants whose lives would depend on them, and expecting them to protect them, despite their being manufactured by the same country that the virus, I mean the gas, came from.  

How smart is that?

MAGA: Make American Gas Available ... to the rest of the world. So that when the fracking stopped (or was even curtailed, since then the US gas supply would contract disastrously), it would ensure fossil fuel manufacturers a bonanza while US corporations, such as Morgan Stanley, advises the richest of US citizens on how to "play" the gas price so as to profit from their fellow-countrymen's pain and suffering ... even unto death, as Texas so heartlessly demonstrated while its citizens froze and its fossil fuel industries rose in value despite catastrophic failure. To paraphrase Zippy the Pinhead, "Are we 'all in this together' yet?"

LAME. As in, Leak America's Methane Egregiously, was the ignored result of MAGA, and as Covid continues to result in the deaths of 2000 US citizens a day, even as we approach the one-year anniversary of the vaccines' release, survivors' gilt cages are beginning to lose their luster, as we put our trust in Chinese-manufactured masks to protect us from a (purportedly) Chinese-manufactured pandemic: masks that may well be as ineffectual at protecting us from actually contracting Covid as the vaccines have proven to be. Making the casualties much worse, since people think they're protected when they're not. Yet while the disappointment over the vaccines' inefficacy at stopping the virus' spread is loud and wrathful, criticism of the sale by Amazon of an inferior Chinese product that may well prove just as disappointingly ineffective are totally absent.

And that's how Amazon and China one-up even Wall St on "How to Play the Pandemic."