Dearth Day: The Day the Earth Still Stood.

 

Although not the UN Secretary General at the time, Guterres' words are more appropriately positioned at the start of the eighties, with an attitude toward energy transition reflected by the solar panels already ensconced on the White House roof, a future for the species of the earth was still possible. A full two generations later, following a fossil fuel incineration on a geologic scale, surpassing the CO2 output every year of what was at the time, a spike caused by the insane amount of ordnance dropped and fuel put to the torch by the Warring Nations in WW2, this is no longer the case. Senor Guterres is whistling past the graveyard at this point. 

Along with the rest of the world. As mankind, using the empty goal of self-determination to justify ratcheting up the pace of our headlong flight to self-extermination, fiddles while homes burn.

No one knows this more than the Ukrainians, who are being, or have been, used most shamelessly by the Petro Powers, who are both using "self-determination" as a pretext for their dual partnership in the destruction of yet another sovereign State. And for the same reason that the Bush/Reagan junta took those solar panels off the White house roof: to ensure the continuation of the fossil fuel regime until the last lump of coal is incinerated and the last sheet of thin-film plastic is melting in the rays of UV lightwaves that will reach the earth' surface, by then shorn of its ozone layer of protection. 

It didn't have to end this way, of course, but when Bush, then head of the CIA decided that he was fit material to be President of the US, he knew, by virtue of his position at the Spook factory, that the US militarized capitalistic economy was on the path to destroying the world, he asked his cohorts in the Reagan administration, Rumsfeld and Cheney, if they thought the Presidency was worth the deaths of millions and the ultimate destruction of earth's ability to sustain complex life, they responded, much the same as Madeleine Albright did to the question of the whether the death of half a billion Iraqi children was worth it ... "Definitely!"

Thus was the turn onto the warpath, which the USA has blundered down ever since, taken.

The Putin parallel with the Bush regimes is unheralded, but unmistakable.

In both cases the "humiliation" of their defeat in the previous decade must be first used to obtain power, and then, once that power is obtained, the defeat glossed over or simply denied.

Then, the centralization of power, effected by Reagan/Bush by the deployment of the nascent internet developed under the auspices of the CIA by the DOD in the form of Darpanet, granting "Champion " status to the "right people" ("Corporations are people too, my friend" a quote from another RNC PE champion, Mitt Romney, following Bush's example (Carlyle Group) of using his position as chairman of a private equity firm (Bain Capital, the homophonic irony of such a name escaping them) to destroy companies and enrich himself and his cohorts).

Both Putin and Bush leveraged their position as head of their respective country's goon Squad, using it to further their own political ambitions. Just as Putin used Medvedev as a placeholder, Bush used Reagan. Unable to garnered the public support that a movie star could in the celebrity-addled US, Bush adopted the Voodoo economics of Reaganism to usurp power, setting the stage for Cheney, who would run his son's Presidency in much the same way Bush ran Reagan's. Bush by funneling vast sums of borrowed  money, gleaned form the ultra-rich by offerings of 15-20% interest rates on what were basically risk-free investments in 30-year Treasury bills, the US VP destroyed the credit unions, while pouring money into the military to develop technology that he could turn over to his cohorts on the board of Carlyle to grift the fruits of taxpayer-funded research into the development of technology for civilian deployment, all empowered by the banks; he tore apart the phone companies, and put into place a financial scheme built on the back of the alliance of oil, the military, religious fund-a-mentalism and banking fraud.

Putin merely used the same template to create his Russian "Champions", whose success has made him even richer than the Criminal Bush family, boasting a net worth of at least $71 billion.

But the crown on this enterprise, the cherry on their sundae, was, and is, of course, hydraulic fracturing on a continental scale. A crime against humanity for which neither Bushes nor Putin will ever be held accountable. A crime against Mother Earth ... which , I'm pretty sure includes Mother Russia ... on a scale never before even contemplated, never mind being perpetrated right in front of the entire globe with never a murmur of dissent that's ever made the slightest difference (Sorry Greta).

The last crime of such dimensions, enacted on a global scale with the full cooperation and backing of a centralized government, was John Law's Mississippi scheme, described as “delirium,” sheer “madness,” "a veritable carnival of money and speculation".  IE, the current US economy. Ever since the Reagan/Bush de-industrialization and S & L fiascos that gutted the backbone of the economy and transformed it into the interwoven skein of deceit, rehypothecation, and other crimes encouraged by the widespread epidemic of financial delirium and money madness their "Decade of Greed" ushered in, the game has been afoot to impose Full Spectrum Domination via military production on a gargantuan scale, using religious End-of Days sermons to justify the fiery conclusion endemic to the scheme of excavating and incinerating every vestige of fossil fuel the state-sponsored, but privately owned, fossil fueled companies could produce, all while holding the free press in the palm of their hand, whose news mantra has been reversed from using their podium to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed to their new mission to unabashedly comfort the comfortable and utterly destroy the disturbed.

Ukraine is simply the international expression of that philosophy: the latest disturbed country to be lined up for evisceration. 

So while the world was applauding Bush père as he invaded Kuwait, the real story never made it to the front pages of the war-mongering press, whose concern for the heads of Iraqi children the US government would be soon-enough dropping ordnance onto was non-existent (the same press that is oh-so concerned over Russia's war crimes ... can you say "Fallujah"?), the plans of Bush and his cohorts, to regain US supremacy by using US-taxpayer-developed technology to extract the last dregs of the US oil supply by deploying more drilling rigs across the landscape of North America in a mere generation than had been used in the entire 150 years since the first rigs were drilled in Titusville, proceeded. 

But unlike John Law, whose Mississippi Scheme depended on slave labor to produce tobacco in a part of the US where it had never been grown before, resulting in the failure of his monetary madness, the extent of the bonanza the Bushes used to back their schemes actually existed. And the benefits to the population of US citizens of low-priced energy products with which to fuel their FUN!, was so assured that today we see ATV's (well, even cars, for that matter, when one considers that SUV stand for "Sports" Utility Vehicle, despite its neither being used for sports, nor even closely resembling anything that could be considered "utilitarian") flying off the sales rooms floors, their sole raison d'être being to enable bored, spoiled adult children to romp mindlessly over pristine unpaved surfaces, crushing the life out of the rest of the environment, because apparently the paving over of millions of miles of the earth with a toxic black goop that kills everything it covers, not being quite enough to supply them with the necessary room to express their self-determination to rock and roll with their mechanical monsters over anything that moves. 

Just as John Law used the introduction of paper currency, which, with the use of stock as collateral, created what Law called “a new type of money", the Reagan/Bush financialization used "moneyness" or leverage, as though it were a new phenomenon, even though its denouement in disaster was well-known. But in the politics of the US, such matters are of little concern, as those who devise such schemes know that they will be long gone from power, and the US citizens are far too financially illiterate, and power-hungry, to ever hold them accountable. The likes of George Bush can paint pictures in the comfort of their expensive homes without the least trepidation that they will ever be held accountable for their monstrous crimes.

Thus have we arrived at our current state of affairs wherein the war criminals Bush and Cheney are comfortably ensconced in their respective homes, their families assured a place in the firmament of the elites, and the planet getting seared like a white-ass dear fallen asleep under a sun lamp, or a burger abandoned to the coals at an Aussie barbie, while everyone wrings their hands despairing that, "Nobody could have seen it coming":

Oregon's state climatologist, the larry O'Neill, told Gardner, a journalist for the New Yorker, that, "What happened in June (an off-the-chart heatwave that killed hundreds from heat-related illnesses) was startling" (Seriously?! Poor fool. It was baked into the yellowcake all along for those who cared to notice what ingredients were being piled into it). 

O'Neill continues, "We weren't expecting to see events on this scale for another 20-30 years".

Well, why not? What has happened over the last 20-30 years that wasn't in those calculations?

Not the amount of carbon ... that's actually far less than what was, as recently as 2005, estimated to be in the atmosphere, as the amount  of oil the world would be burning in 2020, per the published estimates of the World Economic Forum, was projected to be 120 million bbl/day. It is instead not even burning 100 million bbl/day. 20 million bbl's/day of oil that are not being burned, two years after 2020.

 Which means they are not burning the fossil fuels to transport, refine, and bring to market that additional 20 million bbl/day, and yet the damage escalates every year as the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere continues its inexorable climb: 

https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2:

Apr. 24, 2022 420.51 ppm

Apr. 24, 2021 418.41 ppm

... with yet another month or so to go before it starts its annual decline (But not below 415 ppm).

So it is very apparent, made apparent by Russia's War on Ukraine as much as the pandemic made the real status of "essential workers" apparent, that, since the world economy can't function in its current configuration without Russian oil, that, the amount of oil Russia supplies to the world market being essentially the same amount as the US supplies, and that both of them are obtained by hydraulic fracturing, (a technology, btw, illegally transferred to the Russian oil companies by Exxon, whose CEO our last President made Secretary of State, just to rub our collective noses in the shite that goes on behind closed doors), the cessation of hydraulic fracturing would mean the cessation of the global economy as we know it.

Hence do we get the feigned incomprehension of the scientific community as to the genesis of the "pay it forward" climate change scenarios being played out right in front of our eyes:

While the number of oil rigs continues to climb across the US, the States with the largest increase of drill points in the USA, are all, every single one of them, ablaze:

Colorado

Utah

New Mexico

Texas

Arizona

Nebraska

Oklahoma

California

Alaska

 

All ablaze; all leaking unparalleled amounts of methane from wells badly capped, or abandoned, and flaring enough natural gas to power the domestic consumption of entire States: Texas alone flaring enough to power its own outsized consumption, on top of which,  they leak methane to a larger degree than any other state, their "regulatory" mechanism being in the pockets of the industry they supposedly monitor. Enron as an entity went under, but the pride in its own criminality it projected is alive and well in the fossil fueled businesses and government of the Stone Tar State.

Meanwhile, Russia flares more natural gas than any other country on the globe, and leaks methane to an equally egregious degree while the same scientists that claim, 

"We weren't expecting events on this scale for another 20-30 years",

also claim that "If we stop increasing the amount of methane in the troposphere, it will keep the earth's temperature close to a degree cooler in the next decade."

The obvious corollary being that HAD we not started fracturing the earths crust to an extent unappreciated by the vast majority of mankind, the temperature would right now be cooler by that one degree, and consequently, we wouldn't be seeing the events we are seeing now for another 20-30 years.

But because we can't run the economy, as illustrated by the effects of even the threat of the cessation of Russian supply, without hydraulic fracturing and the concomitant release of the unprecedented amounts of methane it engenders, no one will ever point out that correlation.

What we are being made privy to, yet are in total denial about, is the fact that the middle class must shrink dramatically, even as governments around the globe pretend to be enacting policies to expand the middle class. But the middle class would not exist even now, if it had to pay the true price for the fuels they are combusting in order to try and attain the Good Life of ease and unaccountability they have fostered as the be-all and end-all of modern life.

Rather than focus our collective imaginations and intelligence on using less power, we have done the exact opposite, requiring more and more energy to carry out the simplest of tasks, funneling ever-larger loads of cash to the military and the billionaires the military-produced technology spawns, while goosing their fortunes by John Law-style funny-money creation and asset appreciation via the Fed-enabled clamp on interest rates to keep the unaffordable seem affordable to the suckers buying poorly constructed domiciles with poorly understood financing in soon-to-be climate-ravaged locations. TBTF Banks such as Chase sell those loans and then shifts all the risk to the public for loans they know will never be repaid to federal agencies such as Fannie Mae that they sold them to, and then those selfsame banks rake in billions more in zero-interest federal dollars for Covid relief, and then turn around and charge their customers 17% for borrowing that same cash.

As India swelters under cruel heat waves that occur earlier in the season with each passing year, and South Africa loses more than 400 lives to flooding on one part of the country while Durban, its capital city, claims it has less than 22 days of water supply left, and Australia is flooded, its corals bleached yet again, and manatees die off in Florida, while Caribbean corals are infected with a killing fungus, and fires rage not only in the states listed above, but in Russia's Siberia and Yamal regions, Argentina, Chile, India, Portugal, Greece, Italy, even as snow blankets the northern tier of the US as the polar vortex continues to weaken, unleashing its brutal cold to the lower latitudes, while the Jet stream sways and meanders as lazily as a conga line, world scientists will continue scratching their heads in feigned puzzlement because that's the price they must pay if they wish to keep their jobs.

We need to continue to fracture oil rock to obtain rock oil, (the name it was called pre-Titusville ... whale oil predominated prior to that). The fact that it accelerates climate change by decades is rather inconvenient, it's true; but the only time anyone mentions climate change, they are holding their hand out, but not to solve the problem, but to exploit it; to have their palm greased by government pork barrel incentives, not to remove a single molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere; so in the atmosphere is where it will remain. We all know this, because we all know that the price we pay for fossil fuel is subsidized so egregiously that, sans government largesse toward the very entities that could care less (are not even allowed to care less, as profit and market domination are their only goals) about the damage they inflict, means that expecting the amount of harm caused by a climate stoked by ever-increasing amounts of additional heat to decrease, is akin to expecting a pandemic caused by a constantly mutating virus to disappear simply because we wish it so. So just as providing the virus with an ever-larger pool of infected people for it to gestate and mutate in makes its continuation and spread inevitable, the similar desire to continue to use more energy every year than the year before, means what energy generation in a closed system always means: more waste heat is created, and that waste heat is added to the additional heat resulting from mankind's geoengineering of the atmosphere to one that's now overloaded with not only CO2 and methane, but nitrous oxide, and other heat-trapping VOC's as well.                                                                                                                      , 

Which means that we are, blinded by our own vanity, causing the suffering and death of billions of sentient creatures who have done nothing to us, have done nothing to deserve the fate we have prepared for them. It's not just the cute Koalas, burnt to a cinder in the branches of Australia's eucalyptus trees, but wild horses dying of thirst in dried out river beds, cattle starving in plains that no longer can produce the grains they once fed on; whales, manatees, otters, starfish, corals, bird species by the dozens, bees and other pollinators, you can add to the list what you wish, but the length will increase with each passing year while American, German, French, Italian, manufacturing corponations continue to produce their ATV's, their firearms, their munitions by the hundreds of tons, nuclear missiles to be buried in the desert, where nothing else can live; producing fashions to induce customers to discard perfectly good clothing for the empty reward of being in "style", etc, etc. There is no indication on any level whatsoever that anyone on this dying planet has a care in the world about the effect their self-determination is having on anyone, nor anything, else. 

PBS recently aired Dirty Dancing. No one was killed; not a single firearm appeared in the film. Such a movie, despite its low cost, could never be made today. If nobody is being threatened or murdered, there is nothing to keep our attention. Say what we will, mankind, not you, mind you, and certainly not moi, but mankind, looked at dispassionately, deserves exactly what it has uncaringly inflicted on the rest of the living world, you know, the one on which we are entirely dependent  upon for our very existence. EARTH. Perhaps, thanks to the indigenous peoples we care so little about, we will survive the mass extinction event we ourselves have created, but there is no joy in Mudville in that thought, as there is no reason to believe the cycle will simply not start over again and create another round of despair and death for anything that moves simply so that mankind can engage in its endless pursuit of Happiness. Or what Erasmus more cogently called, In Praise of Folly.

The Omicron Olympics.

 While the hand-wringing over the disastrous consequences visited upon the entire globe by the unacknowledged goosing of Climate Change that has resulted from the hyper-pace of hydraulic fracturing of the earth's crust on a continental scale in both the US and Russia continues (with nary a comment on the obvious connection between the two), the connection between a zero-Covid infection rate in Pre-Olympics China, and the dramatic reversal in Post-Olympics China, is also being studiously ignored.

Holding a major international event at the height of the latest, and most virulent, iteration of the virus responsible for a worldwide pandemic surely can't have anything to do with its sudden appearance and spread in a country that's had no sign of it for two and half years, even while the rest of the globe suffered millions of deaths resulting from their citizens' contracting it, now can it? But just as the Trump campaign in 2020 was a super-spreader event that ravaged the country, yet resulted in nary a word from our oh-so-watchful media, neither is the state-controlled press in the communist regime of one-party rule in China making that oh-so-obvious connection lest the arrests begin and the tanks get rolled out to flatten the regime's critics into Chinese pancakes.

Similarly, as one country after the other loses its ability to provide its citizens with enough electricity to keep the lights on, the great USA plans to, somehow (there's no actual plan, that being what is called "Central Planning," and only private enterprises are allowed to plan for the future in a Democracy, not the government, since that would make it too "socialist"), "electrify" its transportation system ... without fossil fuel of course. Which is good, since , a fact we are being made privy to by the energy deprivation going on around the word by the curtailment of Russian supply, peak oil is in fact very real ... you can tell how real it is by the fact that the afore-mentioned amazing media, has assiduously avoided making any reference to it whatsoever, even as entire countries go dark from lack of fuel.

But thanks to Russia, and the West's feckless response to its unprovoked attack on its sovereign neighbor, we are being made privy to a foreshadowing of things to come. 

The bonanza of energy products released by hydraulic fracturing are, in the most optimistic of scenarios, not going to outlast the decade. Light Tight oil is so different than conventional crude, it can't even be processed by US refineries, which must import the thick tar sands goop from Canada, despite the ongoing environmental disaster, high costs, and civil protests involved, to keep its refineries running. Now why, if tight oil is to be the fuel powering us into the future, would those US refineries not be re-tooled to process its own output? Well ... Because the costs would never be recouped in time: there simply isn't enough product to justify the outlay. 

Both the lockdowns in China and the oil renaissance in the USA were surprisingly successful. But in both cases, because of the depth of ignorance of the public in both countries, each of which have spent more in the past generation to educate their citizens than the GDP of the majority of the world's countries, the steps necessary to leverage the breathing room afforded by their good fortune have not been taken, and a fortuitous opportunity has been thereby squandered.

The whole purpose of lockdowns is to  keep your population safe until you can get them vaccinated.

Then, when it come roaring back, as it alwaysdoes, there is a level of immunity in the population that didn't exist prior to vaccination, allowing for a less draconian response when the next wave crashes ashore. But that's not what China did. Half of the most vulnerable population of elderly Chinese have yet, a good two and a half years into a major worldwide pandemic that started in its own Communist Republic, China has yet to be vaccinated against the microbe for which their own country was responsible:  not only for its genesis, but its spread to the rest of the world ... again. (It's called SARS TWO for a reason).

Similarly, in the USA, the flood of energy products released by an energy-intensive, hyper-polluting procedure dubbed "fracking," is being squandered to power over-sized, military-style vehicles marketed to the deluded public so that the large profit margins thus obtained can goose the dividend checks of the insider traders known as shareholders, but who are in reality slave drivers (remember, the Supreme Court itself decided corporations were people. Yet these "people" are illegally bought and sold on the criminal NYSE on a daily basis, in total disregard of the US Constitution that has outlawed exactly that. Stock market indeed: human beings are considered so much animal stock. Like Gogol's Dead Souls, human beings are bought and sold along with the enterprises they're part of).  

One could liken the stripping of the last energy products from under the earth and the marketing of them to the lowest bidders around the globe to the current administration's draining of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, because that's what the dregs of our nation's oil bounty amounts to. Blessed with such an abundance of petroleum that its Seven Sisters were once able to set the price of oil worldwide, even going so far as to use it as a tool to bring down the Soviet Union, the US has squandered its El Dorado. A fact that is a secret to none of its competitors, but one that its own uneducated citizenry is in complete ignorance of. Which ignorance is essential to the Russians, as they are now in the process of doing what they did with Afghanistan: turning the tables, and using the exact same ruse to collapse the US empire that the US was so spectacularly successful at using on them. For it was the double whammy of the draining of resources to fight their own War in Afghanistan, and the US-contrived collapse of oil prices (their only source of foreign exchange, since the Soviets made nothing anyone actually wanted to buy) that resulted in the loss of the Soviet's empire, and, now, using its energy reserves to blackmail the EU into compliance. 

Which would be a problem if just one person would have the temerity to point out that that's what Russia's doing. But they don't so they won't, so what is obvious to the rest of the world is invisible to the US, which has become so deluded by the glitter of its own obscene stockpile of fiat currency, that it can't recognize the same dynamics are now at play as when it hoarded the world's gold reserves between the last centuries' two Whirled Wars.   

As the number of rigs drilling into the earth to extract its riches have doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, from their lows after the price of their output plummeted to negative $35/bbl in March/April 2020, the barely rising output resulting from this prodigious effort are, for the most part, being exported:  US distillates exports are at a 45 month high, leaving domestic distillates supplies at an 8 year low (and prices at a 15 year high); natural gas drilling is at a 30 month high, yet supplies are at a 3 year low, 24% below what they were a year ago; and, less than 6 months after all the folderol of the COPout 26 imbroglio, every single one of the IEA countries have joined the US in an unprecedented release of "emergency" fossil fuel oil reserves. All the while silently thanking Russia under their breath for providing them the necessary cover.

What this demonstrates for us is that when one leg of the production trio of the world's Petro States of the USA, Russia and Saudi Arabia is even partially constrained, the entire edifice of worldwide petroleum production and distribution is left teetering. More than 25 years after the Kyoto protocols were announced, entire countries are unable to provide juice to their citizens on a reliable basis, demonstrating that despite more than a generation of "effort", humanity is no closer to being able to function without enormous amounts of fossil-fueled energy inputs into their not-so-modern economies than they were before taking such "drastic" actions as making useless climate pledges.

That you can't even partially embargo Russian production without wreaking chaos across the planet points out the fact that when the US fracking booms inevitably goes bust, as it is in the process of doing, the world, despite the knowledge that the fracturing of the US would provide at most, a temporary buffer from the exigencies of peak oil, is in no better, if not far worse, shape to weather an energy crisis, than before wide scale fracturing of the continent ever began. Like China with its zero Covid policy, the US with its zero energy conservation policies (a grand understatement of the problem, as the US  has made itself increasingly reliant of what it knows to be a transient energy spike), has left itself wide open to be overwhelmed by its own excessive combustion of a fuel we know is not only killing us, but changing the planet so profoundly that one country after the other is seeing its crops either destroyed in floods, frozen by cold blasts, desiccated like autumn leaves in historic droughts, or swarmed by voracious insects and population explosions of rodents. 

Yet the overriding concern of the majority of American citizens is to get back to an ugly American maskless "normal". Meaning no masks, as the economy can't function otherwise (apparently), bigger and heavier vehicles, larger and impossibly expensive homes, built exactly where they are in the most danger from the exigencies of Climate Change, jet flights around the country and the world to attend their grandchildren's graduation from Kindergarden(!), and an increasingly "effortless" existence provided by electronic fossil-fueled slaves.

So while the policies of the Chinese government periodically releases one microbe after the other to ravage the globe, the US energy regime, powered by an increasingly expensive fuel, the obtaining of which is poisoning the atmosphere, resulting in an exponentially destructive heating, the Russian War on Ukraine is but a blip. Like the Iraq War, and the Syrian War and the War on Libya, or Yemen, it will end. But the human race's War on the World will go on until it has destroyed the planet's ability to sustain life; and it will intensify, with Russia in the vanguard, as its Ice Capades exploits the last of the world's fossil reserves in the Arctic, utterly destroying not only their own vast taiga, but the globe's capacity for weather stability and hence, mankind's ability to continue its mad experiment with monoculture: soil-destroying, pesticide and fossil-fuel-derived fertilizer-dependent, deadzone-creating, agriculture.

Laura DaLand:
If you want to live like the folks on the hill,
 You first have to learn how to smile while you Kill.

.
Thus will the original "Green" Revolution be brought to its knees by the calamitous, energy-intensive, fossil-fueled, "Green" New Deal, same as the old Deal, dealt from the bottom of a fixed deck by a gang of three-card MonteBanks, suicidally monikored as "People" by the Law of the Land, giving the economic system priority over actual living persons. And seeing how watching Covid kill millions precisely because the economic system is purposely structured to serve but a handful of Corporate entities, did nothing so much as stoke the literally insane notion that "The American Way of Life is Non-Negotiable," there is nothing to prevent humanity from being destroyed by the very products of its own making. The best we can hope for now is that the life forms that evolve to replace the human species aren't so blinded by their own vanity that they can't see that the remaking of the entire globe for their own self-serving interests, regardless of the dire impacts on every other living organism we share this blue dot with, won't find the idea of sharing the world "Non-Negotiable."  

RNC: Russia's Novorossiya Commitee: GOP's Devils Blare Pravda.

Object lesson in why not to rasPutin.

CO2: February 24: 420.85 ppm 

Well, well, the NYT's has finally caught up with reality. In an article published this morning, they make the claim that Russia and Right-Wing Americans have Converged on War in Ukraine. But, as my republishing of my own blog posts from the start of the war in 2014 helps illustrate, the nexus between the Russian propaganda machine and the US far right, as epitomized most strikingly by Reagan cabinet member Paul Craig  Roberts (PCR), has been in full swing since long before the 2016 election. The illiberal, THeoCon and oiligarch sentiments have been being unabashedly pushed by America's right wing using the same techniques they used in their anti-communist broadsides against the USSR under that same Reagan administration that PCR was a member  of. Every thing they said then wasn't an echo of Tass, 'tis true, but only propaganda of a most insidious type can squeeze tax dollars from an educated citizenry in the name  of fighting godless communism while simultaneously moving its industrial base  to the last Communist-run regime in the world. The Russians emulated this sleight -off-hand, and with the help of such nefarious anti-Americans as PCR, who's writings echo the Russian perspective more faithfully than even China's communist rag, the SCMP. I might add here, that the South China Morning Post ran the above-mentioned NYT story weeks ago. But the utilization by America's minority party as the main propagator of Russian propaganda so as to drive their own illiberal agenda has been  more than obvious since at least 2015 when Breitbart, and that scurrilous marauder, Steve Bannon, would simply change a keyword or two in Russian articles before publishing the exact same garbage on their Trumpian site, and for the same reason as the Russian Orthopedic Church: maniacal opposition to Gay marriage and trans-rights. They will gladly bring the world, oh wait, they have brought the world, to War rather than allow sex between consenting partners: all sex must remain the provenance of the State, in the guise of the churches, which, with their non-tax status, are merely arms of the government, able to do what the government cannot: enforce sexual predilections via child brutality, including genital mutilation of males while they are still helpless to do anything to stop it. 

Russia was already at War with the rest of the world. Now it's a Hot War. 

I guess it takes a war for people to notice what's been right in front of their face for a decade. The Red Party of the USA is officially the party of the Red Menace, the GOP. It is only because a mere 3 Americans actually watch RT news that it hasn't been broadcast over the newswires that the platform of the RNC has for some time now taken their cues from the propaganda reporting of  RT and Tass. Which is to say from Putin, as any news source that is allowed to operate is a defacto arm of the Russian government, or, as we are seeing, it would be peremptorily shut down by that same government. So, like everything Russian, must report only what Moscow says to report, otherwise their journalists receive stiff prison sentences. Up until the financial crisis, I was reading RT quite regularly, as they actually were reporting the news, instead of the dreamscape the official US organs of the NYT and Wapo were painting, wherein home prices keep rising and the Fed was actually chiding the public for not taking out more Variable rate loans, loans that would leave them  at the mercy of the "all powerful" market forces our well-sinecured financial officials were setting up to steamroll over them.

 As we all know now, they, as in RT, were printing what was far closer to reality than any news outlet in the US, and so I kept reading RT for years after the Wall St-engineered market destruction that left, like the pandemic, millions in poverty while insider trading billionaires continued "Doing God's Work", making a killing by skimming their winnings from the destruction they wreaked on their fellow citizens' savings. So when the 2016 election maneuverings  began, it came as somewhat as a surprise that the DNC never bothered to mention that Trump's "Platform" was like reading RT: it came directly from its propaganda, never even bothering to hide where its "news" source was. Why bother? The corporate-owned press had no interest in it, as the tRump-bump was making them billions in ad revenue. There is no standard for News, the only test a newspaper must pass is whether it is making money, hence the destruction of news outlets all over the country and its monopolization by a paltry handful of "news" organizations. Dividends to share holders in any publicly held company take precedent over everything else. Poisoning their customers made federally-subsidized tobacco conglomerates and their shareholders rich, while smoking marijuana resulted in imprisonment, which the smokers of tobacco products were happy to allow. To this day both they and the rest of the public are still burdened with paying  private prison companies to house and feed the millions of men still languishing in prisons as a result. The drug was then misclassified purposely, at the insistence of the Pharmaceutical industry, lest, as we are seeing now, its medicinal value be exposed. As you read this the cannabinoids found in marijuana are being tested, because of preliminary positive results, as a treatment for Covid. If it were not for the evil greed of these major corporations and their shareholders (who should also be held unaccountable: you take the money, you take the punishment, just like for any other crime) this would already be known. But the Federal gov't disallowed any testing to discover the remarkable pharmaceutical potential of this product by placing it in the same class as heroine and cocaine.

In that other Red Square, Moscow, not Ted Cruz, a neon sign in 2016 depicted the US President as a chimp with a banana, while stories of Hilary Clinton, as well as the abiding hatred of her, were a mirror image of what the GOP was using as campaign rhetoric. The exact same fake news (that's where the comically  overly-coiffed ex-Pres got the term) that RT was printing would show up on Fox News; but MSNBC never bothered to point that out.

 I never saw a single story, even years afterwards, when the MSNBC absurd "coverage" of the Russian investigation was wending its torturous path through the courts with no proof of wrong-doing (which isn't to say there wasn't any, but to prove it, as the failed ex-president is himself learning, is an entirely different ball of wax) highlighting the obvious and quite remarkable similarity between Fox and RT.

So when I read yesterday that the BBC was banning broadcasts of RT, I wondered why RT, and not Fox news?  They are the same in all but name.

Could it be because this newly invented crisis takes the heat off the actual crises mankind is facing, allowing them to fester and setting the stage for the next, "Who could have seen it coming?" disaster?That disaster is already in progress, similar to how the globaloney economy was unraveling before the dawn of the Covid-19 outbreak:

The EIA  announced once again that "Methane Emissions From the Energy Sector Are 70% Higher Than Official Figures".

That, of course, is in the US. The figures for the explosive, literally, release of methane in Russia's Yamal peninsula, however, aren't even tracked. Yet,

"Methane is responsible for around 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, and quick and sustained emission reductions are key to limiting near-term warming and improving air quality."

Now, if that's true, then so is its corollary: 

Methane is responsible for around 30% of the current rise in global temperatures, and the rapid and sustained acceleration in emissions brought about by the rampant deployment of hydraulic fracturing throughout the continental US and the USSR (oops, I mean Russia)  are key to the acceleration in near-term warming and the resultant wiled wildfires exploding around the globe.

But you won't be hearing that. Both in the USA and in Russia, fracturing the landscape as far as the eye can see and far beyond and pumping in fluids so toxic they refuse to reveal their ingredients, is the mainstay of their economies. Together with the ethanol program in the US and the Russian energy investments in both port dredging and refinery construction, there is no other project, other than the Canadian tar pits, that has such an outsized effect on CO2 forcing, and none that come close to matching their methane seepage, high energy usage, and flaring operations (Remember, all flaring operation are CO2 and water vapor production mills: two GHG's more powerful and ubiquitous than methane).

Neither petro-power relishes the thought of their fossil fuel production activities being curtailed by something as easily deniable as climate change. (Most people think the denialists are now admitting it, but that is untrue, as anyone can see by the press's completely ignoring what stamps LIAR onto the very "issue" that brought the failed ex-president to power. Neither he nor the RNC has needed to come up with an explanation to detail how such an enormous FAIL doesn't show them up for the pandering populists they are ... but they don't need to, as no one has bothered to ask them), and so now we have before us this icing on the cake of international destruction of yet another country. Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and now Ukraine. The list grows as globalization leaves one country after the other a pile of rubble, while the global North continues its increasingly pathetic, desperate attempt to "return to normal."

 What are the repercussions of that normal?: 

As I read the weather report on Accuweather.com this morning, the "horrifying" destruction wreaked by three winter storms that hit northern Europe is full of examples of ruined roads, uprooted trees and demolished bridges from a series of three storms. Nowhere in any news reports that I've seen (I'm fairly certain I'd have no idea of these events were it not for climateandeconomy.com and its intrepid reporting) is there a mention of Malawi, Madagascar or Mauritius. The events I'm referring to however, since they have nothing to do with Europe, but Madagascar, were three hurricanes (oops, now its FOUR), in the same timeframe as the three storms monopolizing the weather news, struck  this besieged island off the eastern coast of Africa.

As the warming in the Arctic accelerates from twice the rate of the rest of the planet to thrice the rate, to a now astonishing quadruple the rate as the rest of the planet, there is not a word whispered as to the lion's share of methane pollution being sourced from the Arctic's number 1 fossil fuel producer, ice-breaking capacity, and Northwest passage promoter, Russia. Nor does one ever see it mentioned that Russia's population is less than half of the other major polluter, the US, and but one eight the population of the #1 polluter, China, ergo, the same amount of methane production = 2 to 8 times' the citizen's carbon footprint compared to the other top competitors for Methane Queen. 

Next one must consider flaring. No country in the world even approaches the amount of natural gas the Soviets Russian oligarchs' companies oblast into the atmosphere every year. With entire villages living surrounded by blackened snow from industrial activities, the rest of the Arctic gets warmer from the warming in Siberia that is blowing holes in Yamal, melting the no-longer-permafrost, spilling toxic soup into a pristine environment, and turning what was close to a 100% albedo effect on its head, as blackened snow retains almost all the heat a white surface was once reflecting back into space. 

These countries, all the high-emitting countries, are criminals. But because the criminal economic system delivers dividends to shareholders who are little more than insider traders, their shares openly buttressed by deliberate governmental policies that run roughshod over anyone not fully invested in the deliberate alteration of our planet's climate, it won't be altered. Even while the workers producing that wealth are forced into working environments rife with a deadly virus are left without healthcare, and paid a pittance, out of which their can be no "pension" saving, since they can barely eke out an existence from their paltry paychecks. 

Yet despite all  this, the very simple fact that it is only the three PetroPowers: the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia that are, have been, and will continue, to drop destructive ordnance onto the heads of helpless civilian  populations. As long as the world, and by the world, I mean Europe, continues to play house, refurbishing their entire economies to run as B&B's, sucking up foreign exchange as they serve as quaint tourist havens instead of producing the goods their citizens consume, no one can stand up to the all-powerful purveyors of fossil fuel who will send sorties of bombers to appear in your night skies and drop incendiary, phosphorous, depleted uranium, and other chemical weapons of mass destruction, ie bombs, onto the heads of their unarmed citizens and critical infrastructure, should you simply be too "socialist". 

Even as a U.N. report urges 'immediate and deep emissions reductions', OPEC, with boneSawdi Arabia at its heart, is being chastened for not increasing their output, the US is plundering its own Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and Russia, while hammering yet another country into dust, has never had a more robust energy portfolio, exporting larger quantities of coal, natural gas, and oil than ever before in its entire history.  

No one in the world has the power to stop these three military juggernauts from their path of destruction. Any who tries has already seen the fate that awaits them and their citizens: they will be paraded across the headlines, proclaimed as heroes for their brave resistance, and then pummeled into the ground by cowards in aircraft committing crimes against humanity for a weekly paycheck; all while being hailed as heroes for the slaughter they deliver, safely ensconced in jets so high you can't even see them, drones launched from so far away you don't know their origin, and missiles so powerful they pulverize the ground as though an earthquake had struck. 

Can we not get even this one fact into our collective heads?:

AERIAL BOMBARDMENT OF CIVILIAN POPULATIONS IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.

Guernica

Aerial Bombardment is a NAZI tactic.

The most famous painting in the world was painted in response to the aerial bombardment of a civilian population by the most powerful air force in the world. After that orgy of destruction was finished, the US and other powers involved in WW2, wreaked similar mayhem via carpet bombing and so, decided that to "keep the peace" they needed an all-powerful WEHRMACHT, led by a Luftwaffe of unparalleled strength, one replete with arrogant, aggressive, born-to-kill Top Guns, solely for "Defense", of course, yet that has been used, on every single occasion it has been deployed, for offensive warfare; always, starting with Granada, then moving on to Panama, and then bombing Libya, against countries that lack any ability to strike back.

Just how the IPCC thinks that the world has any capacity to stand up against cowards wielding such unparalleled armamentaria, supported by populations with utterly no concern whatsoever for the lives they incinerate, believing, as they do, that only America Lives Matter, is quite a riddle.

Yet Biden and company excoriate the Putin while never once mentioning our own avatar of senseless destruction and imperial hubris, the Bush/Cheney regime, while simultaneously ignoring the execrable destruction of Fallujah, the casual attitude with which the USA "cakewalked" into Iraq, while bragging that we would "bomb them back into the stone-age," our citizens laughing in their sleeves at such stellar wit as though it were hilarious, (our own selves being so Superior to those "sand-niggers,"), it is obvious from whom rasPutin takes his cues.  

Just as Hitler did in the thirties, each major oil-producing nation of the trio of Petro States is a protector of the unborn while it simultaneously bombs babies to death, makes its own country "great again" by knee-capping everyone else, silences dissent by imprisonment and murder (reporters not "embedded" during the Iraq War were "accidentally" killed, with more reporters losing their lives than in all the decades of the Vietnam imbroglio). 

Those three, which together produce more than a third of the globe's oil supply, have no economic means with which to retain their power over the lives of the billions of people outside of their borders without the combustion of a vast ocean  of carbon-spewing fuel: there is absolutely no plan on how to organize their economies, politics, trade relationships, or militaries sans the constant sucking up and burning down of enormous stocks of fossil fuel. There is no amount of "green" energy that will enable them to continue forcing the populations of other countries to labor for the benefit of the Petro-Powers' citizens, leaving them to languish in the "developing nation" status ad infinitum (China arguably has the largest economy in the world yet is still referred to as a developing nation).  

In such a context, the U.N. report urging 'immediate and deep emissions reductions', would be laughable were it not so dire. But like the pandemic, which is now being referred to as endemic, as it has been rolled into our everyday  lives, the cap on Social Security the Red Menace has been advocating for decades has now been emplaced, crowned by a corona virus that will ensure the population over 65 will be scythed down, like a ripe field of hay, on a regular basis, saving the country trillions in senior support, as they are to be wiped out of existence. Simultaneously the billions of overpopulation of the world are being similarly winnowed while scientists dutifully urge an 'immediate and deep emissions reductions' that they know will never be allowed to happen. 

The world is in the throes of an epidemic of sadism not seen since the witch trials of Medieval Europe. To read what today passes for journalism is akin to reading the accounts of those witch trials, in both cases you begin to feel slightly insane as you begin to ponder how entire populations that purport to believe in a deity can find human beings redeemable. What for? so they can murder anew? The human mind was never intended for such narrowness, and becomes trivial and vicious when trapped into the darkened corridors the constant propaganda of every major news outlet ushers it into. Like Noah we stand by utterly passive to the planned destruction of our world. For it is the Noah story from which Hitler devised the idea of destroying entire groups of people. He didn't have to think it up himself, the bible did it for him. The bible, in light of this, is like Mein Kampf writ large, as here we are made privy to the mind of the Judaeo/Christian god of wrath, the one that, in the throes of one of the Deadly Sins for which he condemns us mere mortals, simply wipes off the face of the earth anyone not Noah enough for his liking ... and this is the myth that has been propagated and worshipped as sacred down through the millennia, thousands of years, the social glue that keeps together a chosen people comes down to little more than the intent to utterly destroy anyone not in their tribe, yet who can't understand how the Holocaust could have happened to them.

And just as Evangelical religion was 100% behind the Bush regime's attack on helpless populations of poverty-stricken "others", never once decrying Bush's assertion that "god told me to do it," as the depraved blasphemy it was, neither does the Russian Orthodox Church voice even a whisper of dissent against their champion Putin, as, far from rejecting murder and destruction wreaked purely for its own sake, each of the major religions of the world are steeped in blood, and have as their future plans the spilling of oceans more of it until only their fellow practitioners remain to repopulate the lands that are their god-given right to rule over (Again, just read the bible ... the passages THEY quote!), and you will see that their most fervent wish is to have you dead). All supernaturalists have this same contradiction: to claim that only the after-life matters, while simultaneously claiming the right to rule over the real world, claiming, with not a shred of evidence, to be instruments of the divine, even as they accumulate every worldly luxury imaginable while filling up the coffers of their own sect. It is such evil, not some soul for which there is not the least sign of which exists, that is immortal. But for us? It is only life after death we have to look forward to ... but unlike immortalists, it doesn't frighten us into abject submission to charlatans to stand toe-to-toe with the fact that the life after death won't be our own.