Recent World News Links and Blog Entries

Recent US News Links and Blog Entries









The US killed 3-5,000,000 people in Vietnam and surrounding countries (mostly civilians) and created over 5,000,000 refugees (about a third of the population of South Vietnam at the time) because 'we had no choice but to finish the job we started'. This was a heinous, terrorist war crime many orders of magnitude greater than anything that has happened since--almost 1,000 times (!) as many civilians as were tragically killed in the WTC. It barely seeps into the consciousness of the newly hawkish 'baby bombers' who witnessed it in the 60's from college campuses. Reasoning by analogy with the recent US military action, perhaps Vietnamese air strikes on US student unions, radio stations, and hospitals could have stopped it. It would have been a small price to pay to avoid the needless slaughter of 3-4,000,000 other living humans and the mutilation and burning of that many more--along with 60,000 American deaths and 60,000 subsequent suicides of Vietnam vets who fought there. The US carpet bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1975 is estimated to have killed over half a million Cambodians--mostly civilians. Obscene US war crimes were perpetrated in Laos in the same years. What rationale is there for putting those deeds into a different category than the 'killing fields' (or the recent events) engineered by the other bad guys? Because we killed them from a distance as opposed to using knives? (letter to NPR). The Kerrey (not Kerry!) revelations suggest that knives were used, too. Which level of the civilian and military hierarchy is most at fault for his particular deed can be disputed. But let's cut the crap about 'war is hell'. Much of the 'American war' as the Vietnamese call it involved US servicemen slaughtering unarmed women, children, and old men in their home towns during a protracted invasion of their country halfway across the world. Kerrey's unit was likely part of the infamous Phoenix program. What he did was a war crime, period. If a Serb or an Iraqi did something like Kerrey did, wouldn't he be a war criminal? Milosevic and Saddam are small-time next to the likes of Kissinger and McNamara. Then to top it off, the US, through its IMF economic hit men, forced through a neoliberal 'reform' program in the mid-80's that caused a dramatic drop in real salaries, demanded repayment of debts incurred by the US-supported puppet government, increased malaria, left all the Agent Orange on the ground, and preempted ng any liability for it. Disgusting. Someday in the future, the world may savor the 'favor' being returned.
The US killed 3,000,000 civilians in Korea (out of a population of 30 million). That's about 700 WTC's in terms of people or 7,000 WTC's as a percentage of the population.
The main scene of the Nazis' defeat wasn't Normandy or anywhere else Americans fought, but rather the Eastern Front, where the conflict was the most terrible war fought in human history. It claimed perhaps as many as 50 million Soviet civilian deaths and almost 30 million Soviet military casualties (the actual numbers, amazingly, are not known to within plus or minus 10 or 15 million people). But more to the point, Americans should recall that about 88% of all German casualties fell in the war with Russia. (Benjamin Schwarz in the LA Times)
The death of one million children in Iraq as a result of US-imposed sanctions (on top of the 130,000 civilians the Red Cross estimates to have been killed in the initial bombing) and the starvation of an entire people hardly rates a comment these days. This unbelievable genocidal violence against an innocent civilian population didn't resulted in getting Saddam Hussein, our former handsomely paid ally, to step down. When the history of the end of the twentieth century is written 100 years from now, I'm afraid the 'good Americans' who let this happen with a slightly uncomfortable yawn, will be remembered for who we really are.
The US State Dept had the opportunity to remove Saddam Hussein from power in 1991, following the Gulf War, and chose not to. The Bush administration explained that it did not want Iraq to become fragmented and that it felt the Baath party was the only group that could hold it together. They continue to want the current regime to be strong internally and weak externally. They want to keep Saddam Hussein in power, crippled, but as a convenient excuse to maintain the economic sanctions and US dominance in the region. This is their policy, but they don't want to verbalize it. This is what they've achieved, but they've achieved it at a terrible price for Iraqi children.
--Kathy Kelly, Voices in the Wilderness
The Russian Defense Budget is $4 Billion, the American--$284 Billion" (New York Times 1/16/2000). We should transfer at least a billion of that to the study of the brain!
More than $1 billion in military aid has made its way to Columbia. Not a peep out of the press sheep following the candidates. In my dreams, I imagine Clinton and his advisors being banished to rural Columbia for a few months next year. In reality, Clinton needed 5000 (!) soldiers and police, and 6 helicopter gunships overhead to survive an 8 hour stay. He was too afraid to even spend one night. And so soon after 'feeling the pain' of the victims of our previous adventure in Guatemala... What a sickly, gutless, cowardly thing you are (now, were), Bill.
Americans now spend $120 billion a year on fast food, more than on higher education, PCs, computer software or new cars, or on magazines, going to see films, recorded music, newspapers, videos and books combined. --Fast Food Nation
Half of the people in the world survive on $2 a day.
In the past year, 90% of Iraqi oil output has been bought by the US.
The current military budget is $344 billion--8 times as much as what we spend for education ($42 billion).
2.5 million people have died in the past 3 years as a result of an ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The carnage has barely registered on the world's stage. The WTC disaster was evil, but not the greatest evil of our time, by far.
95% of people living with AIDS reside in developing countries; 95 percent of AIDS prevention money is spent in industrial countries.
My speech at the Feb 15, 2003 downtown San Diego anti-war demonstration.

Life in the US

The incarceration rate at the end of the Clinton administration was 476 per 100,000 citizens (the highest in the world), versus 332 per 100,000 at the end of Bush1's term and 247 per 100,000 at the end of Reagan's administration. The incarceration rate for black males is an amazing 3,620 per 100,000 (3.6%). An additional 1% of the entire population is on probation or parole. The current incarceration rate is over 5 times what it was in every year between 1920 to 1980.
--from a study by the Justice Policy Institute

"What we're seeing in California is price manipulation by the handful of power producers who exert total market control over the wholesale market. This manipulation is clear: The amount utilities paid for wholesale power in November and December 2000 exceeded by 28 percent the amount the utilities paid for wholesale power during all 12 months of 1999.... The seven biggest unregulated energy companies operating in California posted $4.6 billion in after-tax profit since the May 2000 price spikes -- a 57 percent increase from the same period in '99.... George W. Bush has said that the crisis is a state, not a federal, issue. He couldn't be more wrong. The federal government, through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has the authority to set cost-based rates on California power producers."
Tyson Slocum, Public Citizen, more info here

"When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there."
--George W Bush, January 21, 2000 Iowa Western Community College

"I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."
--Dick Cheney commenting on his four regular deferments and a fifth for expectant fatherhood during the US/Vietnam war. Actually war is a very important priority, one too important to be left to regular people--only generals and war secretaries should be allowed to fight.

When people tell me that I'm wrecking the Democratic Party, I ask them, 'What's left to wreck?' -- Ralph Nader

The number of Americans in prison for drug offenses has multiplied by 10 since 1980, from 41,000 to 458,000. The 458,000 men and women now in U.S. prisons on drug charges are 100,000 more than all prisoners in the European Union, whose population is 100 million more than ours. The annual cost of incarcerating them is $9 billion.

The great irony of the growth in imprisoned drug users--much of it occurring under Democratic administrations, is that it probably cost the Democrats the Presidency and the Congress.

Texas ranks first among states, not only in executions, but also in the number of uninsured children.

"Our children will gaze back aghast upon our own time, a period of waste and abandon on a scale so vast it knocked the planet out of whack for a thousand years." --Kalle Lasn, www.addbusters.org

There were about one million personal bankruptcies in 1999 in the US. One half of these (half a million) are due to the crushing burden of medical expenses. Most of the others are due to loss of a job (which usually leads to loss of medical benefits). Seniors, women, and families headed by single women are the groups hardest hit by medical expenses. One main cause is that medical expenses now have a much larger dynamic range then they had 30 years ago. For example, it is now easily possible to run up a $500,000 bill in one week.

In March 2001, the Senate passed a 'get tough' Bankruptcy bill. As in 1999, the main reasons for bankruptcy are medical bills, divorce, and job loss.

AOL Mind Filter
America Online provides "youth filters" that are supposed to keep kids out of dangerous Web sites--but they seem designed to eliminate creeping liberalism. For example, if you've set up AOL to restrict your children to "Kids Only" Web sites: Your children can easily view the site of the Republican National Committee, but the Democratic National Committee is blocked. Children can call up the conservative Constitution Party and Libertarian Party, both of which are promoting their own U.S. presidential candidates. But if they attempt to view Ralph Nader's Green Party or Ross Perot's Reform Party, they see only a "not appropriate for children" error. AOL's "Young Teens" filter, designed for older children, allows a few more Web sites to be viewed. The apparent political bias, however, remains the same: Sites promoting gun use are available, including Colt, Browning and the National Rifle Association. But prominent gun safety organizations are blocked, including the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Safer Guns Now and the Million Mom March. Common Dreams NewsCenter is blocked for teens by AOL while the rightwing gossiper Matt Drudge is not.
Brian Livingston (!), at cnet mirrored by www.commondreams.org

A spectator at the arraignment of several hundred activists [arrested at the April 16 anti-IMF demonstrations], heard the presiding commissioner Ringelle imply that if activists did not cooperate he would place them with the general jail population, where they they would be raped. "He told us 'For a day or a week or a month [Jail] is not a pleasant place. People get sodomized. The inmates run the D.C. Prison. In the prison, the weak are preyed upon". Another group of activists was also threatened with incarceration with the general population, and told "they love to kill white boys over there, you pussy-faggot protesters." Nearly 1,300 people were arrested. commondreams, www.a16.org
[cf. US complaints about other countries like China]

"The [Orange County] Register reports that a typical [organ] donor produces $14,000 to $16,000 in sales for the nonprofit agency, but yields can be far greater. Skin, tendons, heart valves, veins and corneas are listed at about $110,000. Add the bones, and one cadaver can be worth $220,000. Good grief -- if they're going to use your body, the proceeds should go to your estate or your favorite charity. No one signs up as an organ donor so some jerk can make $533,000 a year [the salary of a top official at an LA tissue bank]". --Molly Ivins, Forth Worth Star Telegram.

Less than 1% of the of the world's assets are held in the name of women. From 1993 to 1996, 1.6 percent of the venture capital raised in the United States ($33 billion) was invested in businesses led by women.

If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates (title of a book by Jim Hightower)

16,000 gun murders last year in the US:
  • 15,500 killed by someone they knew (husband, boyfriend, neighbor, at work)
  • 500 killed by stranger who broke into home (300 of which killed by own gun)

    It's more dangerous to be a fisherman or a convenience store clerk and esp. a taxi driver than to be a police officer (a higher percentage get killed). Somehow, tho, I don't see virtual state funerals for those poor Seven-Eleven guys...

    A $1 change in Microsoft's stock price leads to a market capitalization change of $6 billion since there are 5.2 billion shares plus almost a billion employee options out there. Gross annual sales are only $20 billion. A large amount of teacher pension funds are invested in Microsoft. Bubble. Eeek. [written in 2000...]

    From 1980 to 1999, the average CEO compensation went from 42 times the average worker in the company to over 400 times the average worker--a yearly wage paid every day including weekends (it's even more extreme now). Michael Eisner's bonus in 1999 was half a billion dollars (again!). We need a maximum wage, not a minimum wage. Time to 'out-source' some of those over-priced CEO's. In the most recent figures out in 1999, the ratio has risen once again, to 475. As Holly Sklar has said, "How big a gap will we tolerate?"

    Since 1990, more than 80 countries now have per capita incomes lower than a decade ago. Average world per capita income has increased 3.0% per year, but the great majority of this wealth increase was in already rich countries. Increased free trade since 1990 has generated more wealth for rich people and less for poor people. Time to change the rules. Wealth doesn't trickle down by itself.

    The UN Developing Nations Program reported that in 1998, the world's 225 richest people had a combined wealth of $1 trillion--equal to the combined annual income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest people. That's not right (more stats here).

    According to Gallup polls, about 44 percent of Americans believe in a strict biblical creationist view. But at the same time, genetically engineered food has come to be considered harmful to pets: "Even Iams Co., the Ohio-based pet food maker, recently told its grain suppliers it would no longer accept genetically engineered corn for use in its premium dog and cat chows unless the corn varieties were among the few approved by the European Union." [Rick Weiss, WashPost]
    -------------------
    The irony is immense. Monsanto's molecular biologists, who have a spectacularly intimate knowledge of the low level details of evolution, are driven back by the the same suspicious public that believes in creationism. Wrong reason, positive outcome.

    Bill Gates now owns more wealth than the combined wealth of the bottom 40% of the US population (and he probably doesn't believe in creationism).

    Two years ago, Disney's Michael Eisner made $575M, or $250,000 per hour.

    Ralph Nader had a ticket to the first debate and was also invited by several news organizations to appear on their broadcasts, but upon arriving (via the Boston subway system, not a limo) he was met by a representative of the Commission on Presidential Debates as well as the state police. He was informed that despite his ticket and invitations, the commission would not allow him on the premises. He was also threatened with arrest by the state police on two occasions during the evening for simply being there. Now that's democracy for you.

    Whites in high school are seven times more likely than blacks to have used cocaine, eight times more likely to have smoked crack, and there are more white high schoolers who have used crystal methamphetamine than black students who smoke cigarettes --Tim Wise, St Louis Post Dispatch

    If the whole world consumed oil as does America, the Earth's oil reserves would be gone in 10 years.

    America's farm animals consume roughly 10 times as much antibiotics as the human population.

    Microsoft donated about 5 million dollars to the last campaign cycle to many people, such as Dianne Feinstein ($8,000), John Ashcroft ($9,000), Edward Kennedy ($6,000), and Trent Lott ($5,000). That was cool.

    The Internet was invented as a highly dependable, high-speed, distributed, secure, and powerful network so that in the event of a nuclear crisis, military officials would always have access to pornography.

    "Newly arrived in New York City, I puzzled, 'Where are the Americans?' for I met only Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans." --John Ashcroft, our Attorney General

    "Negroes, Asians and Orientals (is Japan the exception?), Hispanics, Latins and Eastern Europeans; have no temperament for democracy, never had, and probably never will..." --John Ashcroft, our Attorney General

    The CIA knows that polygraphs don't work. Aldrich Ames sailed through his tests, for example. Polygraph tests are used mainly for intimidation.

    If you get to an emergency room on foot (or by crawling), they have to take you eventually, whereas an ambulance can be diverted, esp. if you are poor. Reminds me of Chicago police policy in the 80's. If you called 911 from the South Side saying you had been shot, they would send a paddy wagon, not an ambulance-- and people died this way. To get an ambulance, you needed to call the fire dept. Using a similar logic: "Do you think you could you just drop me off about half a block away from that emergency entrance, I think I should be able to crawl the rest of the way..."

    So-called "internet worms" and "email viruses" not named properly. They are virtually all *Microsoft* bugs--poor, sloppy, insecure program design.

    Bush says: I had no relationship with that man, Mr. Lay before I became governor in 1995. Tee hee.

    "That's when I first got to know Ken and worked with Ken and he supported my candidacy for -- and -- but this is what -- what anybody's going to find if -- is that this Administration will fully investigate issues such as the Enron bankruptcy".

    "To the layman on the street, it will look like we recognized funds flow of $800 million from merchant asset sales in 1999 by selling to a vehicle (Condor) that we capitalized with a promise of Enron stock in later years. Is that really funds flow or is it cash from equity issuance?" -- a quote from an internal Enron memo as things began to collapse. Man on the street, indeed!

    "Enron was able to play fast and loose in a financial boom and Clintonian moral climate" -- the Wall Street Journal.
    So Enron is actually Clinton's fault! And you can't have unions in the Justice Department because they represent a security risk. Class war, man.

    "Companies come and go. It's part of the genius of capitalism." -- secretary of the treasury, Paul O'Neill on Enron. The pension-less 10,000 must realize now realize they were lesser geniuses than the executives who walked off with $1 billion.

    Enron has 2,832 subsidiaries, of which 874 are registered in the Cayman Islands or other tax and bank secrecy havens.

    "How did Enron lose so much money? That question has dumbfounded investors and experts in recent months. But the basic answer is now apparent: Enron was a derivatives trading firm; it made billions trading derivatives, but it lost billions on virtually everything else it did, including projects in fiber-optic bandwidth, retail gas and power, water systems, and even technology stocks. Enron used its expertise in derivatives to hide these losses." --Frank Partnoy

    What with all the talk about maybe we might have to resort to torture in the homeland to protect the homeland (as opposed to torture out in the marches to protect the homeland) (Dershowitz, etc), just think how much stuff Kenny Boy would tell us if the Congress threatened to attach electrodes to his privates. Some people had problems with us torturing people here, so maybe we should send him to another country--say Columbia--and have them do it. We spent enough cash training them, eh?

    "Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation." --Clarence Darrow

    Many years ago there was a TV show called the Prisoner where these guys on a see-saw looked into monitors while a bald intelligence guy with glasses intoned "orange alert" into a phone, and called up Rover to chase down escapees. Today (3/12/02) we are on 'yellow alert' according to our Home Security guy, Tom Rigid. Only one more notch to orange (!)

    Microsoft Word dumps Windows runtime data structures directly to disk with block writes -- which makes it virtually impossible to write a program not on Windows that can *write* the format. Even Microsoft can't do it! An operating system patch that affects runtime data structures might end up getting written out to a Word file, making it unreadable by an unpatched system that reads the Word file directly into memory. It's easier for a secondo party program to *read* the format because you can pick and choose from among the sewage in the file, and not crash. This is the real Microsoft monopoly--disguised as bad programming practice, 101.

    "We have about 50 per cent of the world's wealth, but only 6 per cent of its population...In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is to maintain this position of disparity without detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming.
    "We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better...." -- George F. Kennan, 1948.

    CEO compensation rose 571% from 1990 to 2000. That's *108* times the rate of gain for workers.

    "The government took music out of the schools, and kids have no way to learn an instrument or theory and harmony. So they have to resort to sampling. If music were taught in the schools, kids would learn how to create on their own" -- Rick James.

    "At least the original Caesar could speak his own native language" -- Josef Stromberg.

    American, about 4% of the world's population, consume 50% of the worlds illegal drugs.

    [--------- chronological "Life at Home" blog entries follow ---------]

    [Jul06'02] In 1990, the collective value of all homes was about $6.7 trillion. It increased to only $7.6 trillion by 1995, and then shot up to $10 trillion by 1999 and now stands at more than $12 trillion. In some real sense, it is clear that 2002 houses and property couldn't possibly be worth twice what they were in just 1995. The deflation of the dotcom bubble resulted in the loss of over $4-5 trillion in stock value. The housing bubble--perhaps the largest bubble in human history--may be in for a similar popping.

    [Jul14'02] Guess crony capitalism's got the herd a'fearin'.

    [Aug20'02] Attempts to make un-copy-able files/CDs/etc have not been that successful. But even if better digital copy protection becomes available, the high quality data still has to come out of a wire and go into a speaker at some point so you can listen to it legally. There, it is vulnerable to re-digitization. If Microsoft's Palladium (encrypting your own files with a key that you don't get to see) is a clue, this suggests that someone right now is trying to figure out how to take over the speaker market with speakers that only accept encrypted inputs.

    [Aug25'02] Have you heard about the new product that guarantees firmer thighs while putting an end to war? It's called a protest march. -- Carol Schiffler

    [Sep10'02] Well, it finally had to happen. We're at 'Orange Alert', like the evil guy with glasses would say in 'The Prisoner'. I just hope that 'Rover' isn't soon on the way, too.

    [Nov16'02] "With $345 million worth of U.S. Air Force contracts, MIT received a larger amount of Air Force contracts than did IBM or General Dynamics in 1999. And in 2000, MIT's $339 million worth of U.S. Air Force contracts was a larger amount of Air Force contracts than either Rockwell, Littleton, Carlyle or Textron received in 2000." -- Bob Feldman

    [Dec20'02] When it costs 5% more to buy a share of a company than it did yesterday, that is considered growth -- good economic news. When wages rise 5% a year (as opposed to a 5% a day), that is considered inflation -- bad for the economy. The only problem with this is that when people have more money, they buy more things, which means that companies can sell more things.

    [Mar22'03] This February, the US budget deficit increased by 90 billion dollars -- that is, a deficit *increase* equal to almost 1/6 of the yearly federal budget in one month of spending. The stock market soars now. But the human mind is an wondrous thing. You can implant the idea that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis into half of the infantile brains in this country, getting them mad enough to punch out a peacenik, but then 6 months later, they turn on you in favor of someone whose smirk is less disgusting.

    [May18'03] Test animals cannot distinguish between the effects of cocaine and Ritalin.

    [Jul19'03] The federal deficit is currently estimated at 450 billion This does *not* (!) include Iraq and Afghanistan and various other "black" expenditures. If we include those, the deficit probably approaches the size of the budget itself. Instead of worrying about that, the focus of the White House is on how to placate the yahoos who suppported the war and who are not happy now that we appear to be 'pulling our punches' while one soldier a day gets killed. This reminds me of pro-war talk during Vietnam where we 'pulled our punches' and still killed 2-3 million civilians (I hate to think of what not pulling our punches would have meant); likewise, we are killing a lot of non-Americans every day in Iraq -- a lot more than one a day. The yahoos just want to nuke Iraq and they don't really want to hear that the whole point of the war was to establish a bases there, near the oil, and that we can't nuke the oil.

    [Jul23'03] Yahoos are placated for this week (see above). Most observers think it is unlikely to reduce the lethality of the daily attacks, and in fact, two more Americans were killed today.

    [Jul26'03] Basic facts about the re-distribution of wealth: --US income tax from corporations: 1952, 1960, 1970, 1985 => 32%, 23%, 17%, 9%
    --number of billionaires: 1983 - 1990: => 15, 12, 13, 26, 49, 68, 82, 99
    --richest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90% (US record)

    --next richest 9% also own more wealth than the bottom 90% (US record)

    [Sep24'03] "Ironically, Microsoft's efforts to deny interoperability of Windows with legitimate non-Microsoft applications have created an environment in which Microsoft's programs interoperate efficiently only with Internet viruses" [commenting on the virus-driven shutdown today of government computers involved in issuing visas] -- Dan Geer [he was fired/resigned from the Boston company he founded the next day]

    [Sep25'03] The latest suggestion to deal with music file copying (see Charles Haddad below) is to try to mimic the Monsanto 'terminator' gene in seeds. With farm plants, the idea is to prevent plants from generating fertile seeds. This is 'normally' done in the US [but not Europe] by selling hybrids, whose main advantage is not imaginary 'hyrid vigor', but the fact that they generate sterile seeds. This superseded the practice of farmers over the millenia of saving a portion of their crops as seed in order to sow it the next year. With songs, the idea would be that you would have to repeatedly pay to download a song. The license to listen to it would rapidly expire, making it worthless to copy. Just think of the possibilities. Books could be printed with disappearing ink, special vinyl- and mylar-eating bacteria and mp3-ablating viruses could be released to deal with any pesky remaining records, tapes, and computer files. Hey, maybe you should get your brain erased ever so often! You never know what sort of revenue-denying stuff might accumulate in there.

    [Sep28'03] Whiny American yahoos make me sick. First they get whipped into idiotic patriotic fervor by a bunch of transparent lies. Then the lies get outed -- by the chimp, himself! (but the lies, amazingly, still continue to gain in the polls after that). That leaves going over and stealing/hording/securing/dog-in-the-manger-ing the oil and the land around it as the only real reason for the war. Deep down, they know it: people in the government government (or at least rich people worried about their businesses' future) are trying to plan for the all-too-soon future of scarce oil (while sopping up a ten billion here and a ten billion there in tax receipts for a job not very well done). So why all the sudden cold feet about it costing $1 billion a week? Grow up, guys! Either stop complaining about the so far relatively moderate cost in money and (American) lives of stealing the oil, or stop trying to steal it. Stop your sobbing.

    [Oct12'03] Listening to the CBS world (!) news yesterday (LA's KNX on AM). The top headlines, in total, were: (1) Kobe Bryant's trial (this year's Gary Condit), (2) the preparation for surgery to separate third-world twins joined at the head (this year's third-world conjoined twins) (3) a report that supposed letters from different troops saying how well things were going turned out to all have the exact same wording, and (4) a jokey tag story. Not even any sewage from Mark Knoller! And, of course, nothing about 1,500 people having been ethnically cleaned out of their homes this day in Rafah with (US-made-and-paid-for) helicopters and bulldozers. It made me feel like I was an American.

    [Oct27'03] "I knew it was wrong, but it was accepted practice" -- that is, cutting off baby's heads to get jewelry, using slaughtered women's scalps to decorate your rifle, etc. -- see new report of Vietnam era atrocities by the 'Tiger Force' here. However, this was hardly an isolated incident, as implied by the authors of the report, given that two to three *million* civilians were killed by the US in the American war on Vietnam -- it was the *official* policy. Like the kid soldier said, "it was accepted practice".

    [Nov13'03] The brave American Congress decides to stand up to Israel and demand that they move the exact position of some of its Wall so that that only 97,000 people have to apply for permits to their own homes instead of 100,000 people -- or else they will trim the 9 billion dollar 'loan' package to 8.95 billion. Sometimes you just have to stand up for what you believe. After all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

    [Nov30'03] The unseen third party at the grocery store strike is Walmart. Their *only* 'innovation' is that they pay their employees less and they give them less health benefits, mainly because they have no unions. As Walmart advances like a fast-growing cancer across the US with intent to deeply penetrate food marketing, they want you to think that their attempt to turn the US into a third-world country is inevitable and good. We should play more like they do! The world is hurtling toward a precipice as hydrocarbon resource extraction peaks, yet business gallops on faster and faster without the slightest embarrassment. So should we. Join a union, live a little, and position yourself better for deglobalization. Party will soon be over, man.

    [Dec04'03] Bush's poll numbers are starting to rise again in the wake of him carrying a camera-ready turkey (not an edible one, it turns out). I guess there is no way that you can ever really get around the turkey brain that lies deep at the center of every American brain. Sometimes, the turkey genes just win out, despite our best intentions.

    [Dec10'03] In an average flu epidemic year, the flu virus kills 36,000 people. That's 100 people a day, mostly older people. This year may be average. From the coverage, though, you'd think that the flu was as common as a shark attack. 100 people a day in North America have continued to die from non-treatable viral pneumonia (comparable to the total number of people that died of SARS -- but every day). Luckily, though, the threat of SARS has passed.

    [Dec13'03] Current 'news' reporting is *so* dismal and ahistorical and unobjective and ascientific that I've lost the will to even yell back. If there ever was a unusally severe flu epidemic (like the one right after WWI), the flu shots wouldn't work and the anchors would be soiling their shorts on screen (which we would no doubt, have the opportunity to view in close-up: "Peter, you seem to have water running down your leg... are you OK?). Perhaps the reality of the situation is simply way over the heads of concerned parents, since almost half of them don't even believe in evolution (flu vaccines are made by infecting chickens months in advance, using existing viruses, not the slightly mutated versions of the virus that herald the start of the flu season; the reason they work at all is that the mutations are *usually* small enough that the antibodies that are generated still bind to the newly mutated virus coat protein).

    [Jan01'04] "If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota." -- Dick Cheney to Paul Wellstone, one month before Wellstone died in a plane crash.

    [Jan09'04] The new Bush plans to put people back on the moon and possibly on Mars -- in the year that oil may have peaked -- just goes to show you how hard it is to predict the future.

    [Jan14'04] Sadly, Bush is not the problem. Except for cosmetic differences on abortion, gay marriage, and stem cells, the positions of Kerry are barely distinguishable from those of Bush. After Kerry's unique input (and that of his near-billionaire wife) have been filtered through the power structures of US government and global finance, it is not clear that 'anybody but Bush' will make a bit of practical difference (he will sound less stupid, but that's not an advantage). Sure Kerry is now sort of against the Iraq war (the one he voted for only a few months back), but there is no way he will withdraw if he were to be elected. Complaining about the pre-war intelligence is *totally* beside the point. We didn't invade Iraq because of WMDs. We *knew* they had none (which was why it was safe to invade!). When the first big oil shocks hit in a few years, and we try to steal China's or Europe's or Japan's (not to mention, Iraq's) oil, and the Iraqi resistance continues resisting, and we have to send more troops, and the dollar collapses, and northern Europe starts to glaciate again, Bush versus Kerry will sure seem like small potatoes. Rome is starting to burn. Electing Kerry is just fiddling.

    "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." -- Keynes.

    Nature bats last [bumper sticker]

    "There will be cars, they just won't be running" -- Jan Lundberg

    [Industrial civilization] is a one shot affair.... there will be one chance, and one chance only." -- cosmologist Fred Hoyle, in 1964, on human evolution and course of energy use on Earth.

    The vehicle you deserve: the Ford "Extinction" -- from Phil Rockstroh

    [Mar17'04] "The chief problem with this movie wasn't so much the content, but the title. It was too drab, too serious, too liturgical. So I spent a long time trying to come up with alternatives. There was Bravechrist, Die Really Hard, The Golgotha Chainsaw Massacre, Starsky and Christ... -- Matt Taibbi

    [Mar18'04] "No blood for oil" is a crock! Once the shortages hit, every US-ian will line up obediently behind "lot's o' blood for oil" in a split second.

    [May28'04] 1 out of 75 US men are now in prison, a world record. The prison population is disproportionately poor and non-white: 12% of black men in their 20's are in jail versus 1.6% of young white men. There are twice as many *male* victims of rape as there are female victims of rape in the US because of the record male prison population.

    [May31'04] 33% of homeless men are veterans. I'm sure that 'war work' had nothing to do with this, and this is why it's not worth mentioning on Memorial Day. Or if it is, then the PC solution is to hire counselors to help feel their pain. That's what the problem is: not enough military social workers!

    [Jun05'04] Walmart's warehouse on wheels must be quaking in its enormous boots as the increased cost of oil starts to draw blood. However, I worry that those are the same trucks that bring me my food. Luckily, Reagan's death today provides a kernel around which our fine 'liberal' press has already built a huge, valium-filled pacifier for Americans to suck on for the next month (seasoned lightly with an armored bulldozer rampage, except that it slightly reminds one of a certain squished American who went up against an armored bulldozer with a megaphone). Meanwhile, yesterday, the Pope religously told George Bush to get out of Iraq while George's minions were guarding the nuclear 'football' -- the briefcase containing the codes required to destroy the non-US world -- in a Vatican antechamber. This shows why we're better than animals: because language gives us the ability to commit such ineffable situations to the page.

    [Jun06'04] Next weekend, there is a first-400-in-get-free-beer dance party on the USS Midway for San Diego postdocs funded by Invitrogen, Fisher Scientific, as well as Scripps, the Salk Institute, and UCSD. I hear they know some cool party games, so bring your hood and dress sexy!

    [Jun09'04] "In this country, tens of millions of people choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness" .... "Spending time watching Sean Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than he really is. The left won't accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix 'if only the people knew the Truth.'" -- Mark Ames

    [Jun13'04] There are reports that the Abu Ghraib scandal is about to blow up again this week. I sure didn't expect that! The 'immune system' of world business seems to have turned on Bush as 'non-self'.

    [Jun18'04] Well, the reports mentioned in the UK press didn't materialize, Iraq's oil is now completely turned off this week, the new US-appointed 'coalition' government is about to declare marshall law (it's a natural step on the way to democracy), Iran denies reports that it's massing troops on the Iraq border (shades of the faked photos used to get Saudi to approve and pay for the first Iraq war), the UN/IAEA says time is running out again for Iranian compliance (compliance sure helped Iraq, didn't it...). Sheesh, it's like a re-run, and I don't even watch the damn TV.

    [Jun20'04] We've spent $200 billion in Iraq in the past year mainly to get military bases around the oil, and maybe $500 billion/year on the military and the black budget agencies. During the same time, we've spent a teeny, tiny fraction of that total on alternative energy source research (much less alternative energy source developement). On Easter Island, when all the trees got cut down (their only energy source since they were 1000 miles away from any other speck of land), the end came so fast that there were stone axes dropped in place around partly finished statues). It's kinda creepy watching the huge lumbering social organism of all of us market-savvy humans Easter-islanding our whole damn selves in slo mo.

    [Jun25'04] The amount of oil needed to *make* a new car is about equivalent to the amount it will use during the lifetime of the car. Thus, from the perspective of running the oil down and adding to greenhouse gases, it's probably worse to get rid of a currently running, less-fuel-efficient car (provided it's not a super-size SUV), and replace it with a hybrid, than it is to just drive your less efficient car into the ground.

    [Jul01'04] We walked by the carrier Midway parked in SD harbor last week to get dinner. It's so big that it looks like a computer-generated animation as you walk past it. There was a party on board with a live band -- including horns -- playing "She's a Brick House". This is the ship that among other things, launched some of the planes that lead to 2 to 3 million civilian deaths during our 1963-1973 war on Southeast Asia. Party on, dude, at our very own floating holocaust museum! Sick. Of course, the whole decade of our half-a-holocaust of atrocities can be explained by 'the fog of war'. That's some pretty nasty fog.

    [Jul03'04] Only 16 months late, the LA Times comes through with a report about the faked/psyop 'civilians toppling the statue of Saddam' operation. A little late guys, esp. given that this info was available *at the time* of the fake toppling. Also, the new report came straight out of an internal Army report -- true bravery in reporting! If this is a 'liberal' media, I'd sure hate to see what a 'convervative' one would look like. Few people will read this 'retraction' of the press participation in psyops, and just like the faked psyops 'incubator massacre' story which solidified public support at a key point for the first Gulf war/massacre, most people will still believe it years later. Shame on the press for 'getting in bed the with fascist insect' -- *esp.* now when finding out what really happened is easier than before.

    [Jul11'04] The yearly world oil usage is about 1 cubic mile. This is easier to remember than 30 gigabarrels.

    [Jul20'04] A car is a 100,000 watt device (1 horsepower is about 1,000 watts). When you press the accelerator, it is the same as turning on a *1,000* hundred watt light bulbs. Cruising smoothly uses less energy (e.g., 20,000 watts). For comparison, a 1000 sq foot roof covered with photocells generates about 1000 watts (about 1 horsepower). Powering one modern car for an hour, including stop and go driving would approximately require an hour of bright sun on 50 such roofs, or a fifty hours of sun on one such roof (one hour of driving equals 5 days of sunlight on your house photocells), and that's assuming no transmission or storage losses. For reference, converting electricity to hydrogen and back involves a loss of more than 50% of the energy. [Jul24'04] Current (2002) US inputs and outputs (http://eed.llnl.gov.flow) give some idea of what level of losses (well over half of energy input) are currently achievable by the US. The number are in quads (10^15 BTU's). Since the total input is 97 quads, the numbers are also close to percent of total energy inputs.

    Inputs: (97 quads):
    -- imported oil and liquid-gas (24.3)
    -- US coal (22.6)
    -- US oil and liquid-gas (14.9)
    -- US natural gas (19.6)
    -- US nuclear (8.1)
    -- imported natural gas (3.6)
    -- US wood/waste/alcohols/geothermal/solar/wind (3.2)
    -- US hydro (2.6)
    Outputs, lost energy: (56.2 quads)
    -- electrical system losses (26.3) (power plant efficiency less than 40%)
    -- transportation losses (21.2)
    -- residential losses (4.9)
    -- industrial losses (3.8)
    Outputs, useful energy (35.2 quads):
    -- industrial (15.2)
    -- residential (14.7)
    -- transportation (5.3)


    [Jul26'04] "You want an American Empire -- the safety, anyway, of being able to impose our will on any possible opponents? Then don't be upset when the old goals invoke the old means, but modernized: with drugs and electrodes and sexual humiliation replacing the crudities of whip and cross." -- Richard Erlich. Our fine ABB Kerry knows about Project Phoenix first hand, and wants to send 40,000 more troops to Iraq.

    [Jul28'04] Be careful of what you ask for, ABB's: do we really want to have a kinder-gentler-Bush-Democrat in office (probably with a Republican congress) if the economy contracts sharply in 2005? Home mortgage debt for Americans has risen almost 100% since 1997. This rate of debt growth is not sustainable. The rate of increase in housing prices has increased in the last year, looking ominously like the NASDAQ before the pop. When the rate of new debt acquisition slows, the effects of less spending will ripple powerfully through the world economy with unpredictable effects, and an almost certain change in the party in office at that time. Strategically, it might be better to wait until after the pop, when a real non-Bush-like candidate might be competitive. This would be risky, too, though depending on the size of the pop. People make poor choices under extreme, sustained economic stress (cf. 20th century European history).

    [Aug09'04] Ann Veneman, the current Secretary of Agriculture came from the board of directors of Calgene, a part of Monsanto, which is the world's largest GM seed producer. No doubt, she has our interests in a safe food supply near the top of her list. Besides, "safety" and profitability are, no doubt, the same thing. African food aid is being tied to the acceptance of GM crops. This shows that "concern for the less fortunate" and profitability are the same thing. It would seem that promoting expensive, energy-intensive GM foods is a very poor way to plan for less energy-intensive food production likely to be necessary when the "great economic contraction" sets in permanently in a decade or two, as we run down our finite fossil fuel energy supply to virtually nothing (which is the way it will stay for all future generations) in the next 30 years. This in turn will make it impossible to drive long distances to buy food and stuff, and more importantly, to grow that food and make that stuff on the other side of the globe and transport it all the way back here, but hey, who asked me. I'm just hoping that "starvation" and profitability don't turn out to be the same thing.

    [Aug11'04] "[Kansas] watches impotently as its culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser and more offensive by the year. Kansas aches for revenge. Kansas gloats when celebrities say stupid things; it cheers when movie stars go to jail. And when two female rock stars exchange a lascivious kiss on national TV, Kansas goes haywire. Kansas screams for the heads of the liberal elite. Kansas comes running to the polling place -- and Kansas cuts those rock stars taxes" -- Thomas Frank

    [Aug21'04] The brains of more than half of all American continue to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or a program to develop them before the United States invaded last year. This is a stupefying fact. Modern society is about using some of the most complex and rarified fruits of human thought -- mathematics, physics, and engineering of computers, broadcasting, receiving, internet, displays; art, design, writing, and acting of media content -- to stuff a hundred million brains, each several orders of magnitude more powerful than the best computer, straight down the toilet. What's so great about 'natural computation', emotion, and human language? Sometimes, the object of study seems beautiful; sometimes it positively disgusts me.

    [Aug23'04] Insider energy investors warn us that alternative energy sources are still years away from being commercially viable (NYT, yesterday). These insider investors are showing us the genius of the market -- wait until we are well on the downward slope of oil extraction before even bothering to start research and development of alternative energy sources (hydrogen is not an energy *source*). Genius! The market is smarter than geology and physics combined because it takes not only them but also the stinky butt cracks of moneybag investors optimally into consideration. Over the past two years, the worldwide market value of companies developing renewable energy technology dropped from $13 billion to $10.7 billion. Genius!

    [Aug30'04] Recent raw oil production numbers for 1995 to 2003 in this pdf (from Petroleum Review, based on numbers originally from British Petroleum that were converted to thousands of barrels per day) show that the US still produces a lot of oil -- almost as much as Saudi Arabia -- even though the US peaked in 1970 and has began steadily dropping every year after 1985. There was an unusual spike in world production this year (+3.6%) compared to the previous rate of increase (actually, there was a small drop last year from 2 years ago). Given that a little over 1/3 of the total production this year came from countries that are already in permanent decline (past their peak and past the start of an every-year decline like the US), it meant that countries that are still increasing had to increase even more than they were already increasing in order to achieve this. The increases were remarkable in the Mideast, where Iran, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia all increased their production from 10-20% in one year. Obviously, this can't be sustained. In fact, it may have already stopped; Saudi production appears to have leveled off this quarter. The other big-producer increasers were Russia (+10%, but it's already past its peak, on a small secondary bump that won't reach the 1980 peak; the secondary peak was caused by the recovery from Yeltsin, not from recovery of oil out of the granitic basement rocks, a la Joe Vialls), Libya (+8%), and Mexico (+5.7%). These 10% year-to-year increases aren't going to hold for very long. A real danger is that when the inevitable dropoffs come in Mexico, the Mideast, and Russia, they may be much more catastrophic than the nice smooth US dropoff (1-2% per year), because of the different technologies involved. In the US, "primary production" (first let it ooze out and then just pump) was allowed to run its course before progressing to "secondary production" (pump water or nitrogen or natural gas down to rejuvenate wellhead pressure, drill horizontal holes, etc). In both Mexico and the Mideast, they are doing simultaneous primary and secondary production to maximize output now. This can result in a more sudden decline when peak production is reached (unexpected 5-10% drops in a year; 50% drops in 10 years; cf. the North Sea). This may very well happen to some of the big remaining increasers in the context of the whole rest of the world permanently on the downslope. But why conserve now? That might cause market 'distortion' and deprivation of incentive, right? We will probably only get one chance at an advanced civilization on this planet. Too bad it just might flame out with a huge loss of life later this century because of the fleeting (in terms of the 100,000 year history of modern humans) political and social dominance of a short-term-greed-based economic system that plans no more than 6 months into the future. I think we blew it.

    [Sep13'04] Kerry is wobbling downward right now near the 270 electoral votes needed to win (see pollkatz, who runs the polls through the winner-take-all-by-state electoral college -- why don't the idiotic media just do this routinely? If the overall popular vote isn't the thing that legally determines the outcome, why report *only* that? Sheesh.). Bush's numbers on his handling of the war are going up, in the midst of the deadliest battles of the entire war! Could Kerry's dismal numbers be because of Kerry's positions? -- (1) he voted for the Iraq war, (2) he said he would have voted for it even if he had known in advance there were no WMDs there, (3) he initially said he planned to commit *even more* troops to Iraq, for 4 more years, but then recently talked about reductions during his 'first term' (tchya, right), (4) he plans to try to involve the UN and a world coalition in Iraq, despite the fact that everybody knows neither would touch Iraq with a ten foot pole now, (5) he voted for, and even wrote (!) part of the Patriot Act, (6) he has no plans to substantially increase taxes on rich people like himself and his billionaire wife (how could any sane person *not* regard being very rich coupled with the ability to set tax policy on rich people as a conflict of interest?), (7) he plans to end our dependence on foreign oil by finding more here (one tiny problem with this plan: US oil production peaked in 1970 and has been dropping ever since and geology always wins over campaign promises). Nah, that can't be why he's flailing. It must be because of the way his face and hair look, which is, admittedly, something that distinguishes him from Bush. The bootlicking spaniel press -- who dutifully stopped reporting on the war in Iraq when Bush told them that it was really over now that Iraqis were 'sovereign' -- should be added to the list above.

    [Sep15'04] There is something darkly humorous about the oil price gyrations this week (down, after back up, after drop from record highs [though not record yet when inflation factored in]). At the current moment, the oil markets are actually somewhat *over*-supplied because OPEC has jacked up its output to record levels (2 million b/d more than their official limit of 26 million b/d). Despite all this, the stinky butt cracks of the oil moneybag people got sweaty earlier in the week because of bombed Iraqi pipelines and a big hurricane. But then, the price went *down* again, because the shutdown of refineries (also caused by the hurricane) reduced demand for oil. Genius. The bombed Iraqi pipelines will continue to be bombed (no change, that is), and the hurricane'd rigs and pipelines and terminals will be quickly repaired (unlike Iraq). What can't be easily fixed, and what still, sadly, is having virtually no effect on the market compared to these idiotic day-to-day gyrations is the long term (well, if you think of one decade as 'long term'...) picture. Amazingly, almost 3/4 of the total oil on our planet will have been used up during the span of my life. I guess I just don't feel that the lives of us boomers are so much more valuable than the lives of all future humans on this planet.

    [Sep23'04] Two tons of 'oil sands' must be dug and processed (using a lot of water) to get one barrel of oil (that is, the oilsand-to-oil weight-ratio is 14:1). Because of this, the energy required to get the oil out of the sands is pretty close to the amount of energy you get from burning the oil. The daily US gulp of oil would therefore require about one hundred thousand *tons* of these sands (200 million pounds) to be processed be *per day*.

    [Oct04'04] Unintentional black humor: "I think we need to get off this planet, because I'm afraid we're going to destroy it." -- Washington State physicist Kelvin Lynn, who works on storing antimatter for the defense department so that they can make extra super-duper-powerful 'clean' matter-antimatter bombs (which just emit gamma rays, allowing soldiers to storm immediately into obliterated target zones) -- but it could also possibly be useful for space propulsion.

    [Oct07'04] US oil production went down to 5 million barrels a day this week. The US peak production happened in 1970 (10 million barrels a day). Since 1970, US production has declined gradually to about 7 million barrels a day last year (this is still a lot -- almost as much as Saudi Arabia, which produces about 10 million barrels a day). Only about 10% of US production normally comes out of the Gulf of Mexico (the hurricanes caused a drop of 30% in that 10% which is only 3% of total US production). The storms also caused Mexico's oil production (usually 1.7 million barrels a day) to drop 25%. However, together, these drops are small compared to the world production of about 80 million barrels a day. Therefore, the recent price spikes sugggests that the world oil market is quite tight -- surplus production production capacity is essentially gone. This can lead to extreme price spikes since the demand for oil is pretty inelastic. Of course, a situation like this is also the perfect breeding ground for parasitic businesses like Enron, and no doubt, part of the recent run-up in prices ($53 a barrel today -- high, but still below inflation-adjusted $80 peak in the 1970s) reflects the careful efforts of Enron's bold successors. But just because there are Enron-like bedbugs feeding on our carcass doesn't mean we won't run out of oil. The fact that oil companies are going to get very rich off of peak oil -- aided by the hordes of oil company businessmen that infest our government and regulatory agencies -- is unfortunate. Left-ish peak oil doomsayers like Michael Ruppert are getting moderately rich, too. But even if we were able to impose more sensible limits on oil profits, it wouldn't save us from the ugliness coming our way on the downslope, and it won't cause depleted oil fields to refill with 'abiotic oil'. "Peak oil" is a scam -- and, unfortunately, it's also true.

    [Oct08'04] Kerry says we will wean ourselves from reliance on Saudi oil in ten years. He's right -- in ten years we will all be on the roller coaster that always goes down.

    [Oct11'04] Commenting on the reduction in spending over the past 5 years by the world's biggest for new oil exploration, Robert Plummer, a corporate analyst at Wood Mackenzie said: "a number of constraints will continue to act on exploration performance, the most important of which is being access to material opportunities". This takes a little explaining. The background is that the results of recent exploration have not been profitable. Twice as much was spent exploring for new oil as the value of the new oil that was found. This means that oil would have to be over $100 dollars a barrel for any new oil exploration to be profitable. There *is* a place where exploration is profitable -- that is what is referred to as "material opportunities" -- namely, the Mideast and Venezuela. The only fly in the ointment is "access". Got blood?

    [Oct15'04] "Taking a leaf from his record on sustainable energy, John Kerry now wants to make the war in Iraq sustainable" -- Greg Bates.

    [Oct16'04] Jon Stewart's performance on Crossfire (wmv below) was amazingly masterful. It gives me a ray of, what do call it, hope?

    [Oct31'04] Many conspiracy sites were mistakenly expecting a more expensive, elaborate, and splashy 'October surprise'. They (and I) failed to notice that since the election has remained nearly a tie, only a small well-timed nudge would be needed. The video may be just the ticket, esp. if the spaniel media spins the terror side of it (how could they fail to rise to the occasion...). Once again, I bow to the genius of Rove (even *Cronkite* fingered him!). And if a resuscitated Osama doesn't work, a few lost ballots and hacked machines here, a few blacks blocked from voting by 'faulty' lists there, will.

    [Nov03'04] The day after the election. Eeesh. Two days before the election, the price of oil started to drop, in expectation of a Kerry victory. Then, ominously, at the start of election day, and continuing even after the exit polls began showing Kerry ahead, oil started to rise again. Somehow the oil-money-heads figured it out before it happened. As Stalin said: "it's not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes". The impossible-to-audit nature of the partial electronic vote will make a challenge virtually impossible. Situation looks bleak, but remember that only *one year* after Nixon won every state but Massachusetts (against McGovern in 1972), he was booted out of there to quickly become a bad memory. And then his temp replacement, Ford, even lost the following (1976) election.

    [Nov04'04] Gay marriage became the Nader of 2004. Now all the week-kneed SUV-driving Kerrycrat security moms and dads in NY and SF are wringing their hands about Kerry not having been rightwing enough (et tu, Juan Cole?!), and how we *must* fix that next time. Why couldn't Kerry have campaigned on nuking Mecca? Why didn't the Dems nominate Jeb instead of Kerry? (Jeb would have played better in the South since he's from from a good suthern family, right? -- not!). But why all the sobbing, you cowardly right-o-phile 'Dems'? You should be *thanking* all the Red State trash that we got Bush back because he *is* rightwing enough. If you can't stand up and be counted like Robert Byrd (!), then just step and fetch it. The 'Dems' lost the election more clearly than last time despite (1) a 50% presidential disapproval rating, (2) massive jobs losses, (3) massive debt increases, (4) unprecedented oil price increase, (5) continuing disaster in Iraq, (6) a win in all three debates, (7) and a billion campaign dollars to spend (what a waste!). What do these guys need? The loser 'Dem' strategy of out-righting the right is hereby fired.

    [Nov05'04] Many people have worried about the effects of higher oil prices on the economy. However, it seems more likely that rising oil prices will initially be coupled with strong economic *growth*. And oil is still not that expensive at all, even at $50/barrel -- the cost of housing has tripled over the past thirty years but the cost of domestically produced US oil has stayed the same (at about $30/barrel) until just this year. All good things must come to an end, and the expected spurt in economic growth and oil usage accompanying $80-$100/barrel oil will deplete oil reserves even more rapidly, eventually leading to an even steeper decline when geology finally rises up and grinds the market under its stony heel. Then you will tell your kids: "no one told us it was going to happen, so it's not our fault that we used 75% of the world's energy and fresh water reserves in the span of one boomer (human?) lifetime".

    [Nov05'04] Policing who you have sex with in private is an American "moral value". Slaughtering 100,000 humans in Iraq in order to establish military bases in order steal Mideastern oil on the basis of obvious lies is a war crime, but hopefully not immoral, right?

    [Nov06'04 -- commentary submitted to NPR Morning Edition and rejected because 'mailbox full' -- presumably because I had sent one previous commentary, which was not run] "On Saturday morning (Nov 6, 2004), there was a report by Anne Garrels about the impending assault on the 50,000 to 100,000 people that remain in Fallujah after 200,000 women and children were allowed to flee the daily US bombing. Most of these are men, since all men under 45 were not allowed to leave. Having reporters embedded with our storm troopers doesn't give NPR listeners a full picture of what is going on. Garrels carefully explains how the US troops are going to have a difficult time because they are being extremely careful not to kill civilians. Without context, you would hardly know that the last time we tried to subdue Fallujah, we were forced to withdraw when the rest of the world responded with outrage to the criminal slaughter of more than 500 civilians there -- 20% as many civilians as died in 9-11. A short internet scan is sufficient to reveal the extremely biased nature of these kinds of reports. For example, on the same day, the BBC reported that a Fallujah hospital was razed to the ground in one of the heaviest US air raids yet on Fallujah (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3988433.stm). There were no reports whether or not people were inside. Likely there were, given that the BBC and many other more objective news outlets have reported daily civilian casualties from months of continuous bombardment. Even if the Harvard-educated Garrels knew about the US having demolished a hospital (a war crime by standard definitions), her embedded status would have prevented her from reporting it. NPR manages a facade of objectivity -- worrying, for example, whether it should be associated with Slate since most of Slate's staff said they supported Kerry -- yet it serves as a propaganda mouthpiece for the war crimes of the administration. The press was braver during Vietnam. I think history will not look kindly upon media outlets such as yourselves who serve as cheerleaders of imperial war." -- Martin Sereno

    [Nov18'04] In the past two years, we have tossed an *additional* $250 billion into our already amazingly huge military so it could trash an essentially defenseless Iraq (I hate to think of what a war against a worthy foe would cost). That $250 billion should have been put toward a crash research, development, and manufacturing program for photovoltaic cells and solar heat concentrating devices instead of trying to site military bases around somebody else's oil. The current best guess is that peak extraction of oil will happen within 5 years, natural gas in about 10 years, and coal (which is responsible for all that mercury in fish) in about 15 or 20 years. The downside of those curves is likely to be very rough, with disruptions of world trade, Walmart (yeah!), food production, car transportation, suburbs, and with the probability of (more!) resource wars. It takes a lot of energy to make factories where solar-energy-generating devices are manufactured, a lot of energy to make the devices themselves, and a lot of energy to distribute and install the devices. *All* of that needed energy will have to come in the near future from fossil fuels (current solar energy provides a tiny fraction of 1% of our energy). Instead of trying to exert even a tiny bit of rational control over the slavering, greed-based market, we worship it. The wonderful intelligence of greed has led to a 30% *reduction* of investment in alternative energy in the past few years! And our gropinator governor just floated a proposal this week to tax gas by miles driven instead of by the gallon, because more fuel-efficient vehicles will reduce gasoline usage and gas tax revenues. This will remove part of the economic incentive to buy fuel-efficient vehicles. There are other more subtle problems with the impending fossil fuel peaks. It is little mentioned that helium is a byproduct of oil and gas wells, that it escapes into space when exhausted into the atmosphere, that it cannot be manufactured, and that it is currently required for things like MRI machines and magnetic containment coils for fusion reactors. Bummer. Because, as Richard Heinberg has said, peak oil will finally put some real teeth into that namby-pamby, green-washed word, "sustainability". Also, don't forget that our military is about 70% hydrocarbon fuel by weight, when it's out and about, doing its dirty deeds.

    [Nov19'04] The Pentagon reports that it is now spending $5.8 billion a month in Iraq (not counting Afghanistan). That's a burn rate of $70 billion dollars per year up from $48 billion a year. At that rate, we're spending more money each year destroying Iraqi cities and people (so that the survivors will be able to vote, of course) than we spend on all scientific research in this country. That's so insane that even the *market* would do better of allocating this money :-}

    [Nov23'04] Each *day*, the US imports $2.6 billion in cash -- 80% of the world's savings -- while the dollar is falling. This finances our current account deficit with the world. The scene where Slim Pickens rides the bomb down comes to mind. But, who knows -- as a lefty doomsayer, I always seem to be crying wolf and nothing happens. Maybe this will just be inflated away slowly without any catastrophic effects because there is no other credible place for savings to go to. Maybe.

    [Nov26'04] The tremendous irony of the election follies is that the red states as a whole actually get *more* tax dollars back from the Federal government (up to 2 times the amount that they collect) than blue states, which, by contrast, actually subsidize the red states. Meanwhile, the red states complain about taxes, which if they were all ended, would actually result in a net dollar *loss* for the reddies. The red states are actually the 'welfare queens'. This is by design and supported by blue-ies (summary here ). Most of the paid-out money is redistribution of wealth from the blue states to not-the-lowest-income strata of the red states, by way of social security to old people, education, science, technology, and transportation, military bases, medicare to old people, interest payments on the debt. Only about 15% of the total redistribution goes to poor people in the red states (so you red-state yahoos who want to kill the poor should know that we blue-ies are doing our best...). When I'm feeling esp. misanthropic, I look forward to the collision of peak oil with "our lifestyle is not negotiable". Our lifestyle is not only negotiable, it's going to be dictated. But it's not clear if the reddies or the blue-ies are going to come out worse here in the US. The reddies rely heavily on oil, which is going to go up and up. However, the blue-ies rely heavily on oil, too, for, among other things, food. Hard to say which way people of both colors will be running when the s*** hits the fan.

    [Dec03'04] Tar sand oil production accounted for 1.2% of world oil production this year (about 1 million barrels/day). Tar sand supporters predict that they should be able to double that to 2 million barrels/day by 2010. The world oil production (usage) is currently 83 million barrels a day. Go, tar sands. Just think where they could get to by 2030 (maybe 4% of daily world usage). Tar sands won't save us. The best always comes first. This is the rising part of the tar sands production curve. Then there's the falling part -- when the EROEI (energy return on investment) gets close to 1.0 (that is, it takes the same amount of energy to get the oil out that you get back out of it when you burn it).

    [Dec03'04] "Be studious, stay in school, and stay away from the military. I mean it." -- an Iraqi marine's advice to his son, shortly before he was killed last month.

    [Dec06,04] Coal and gas prices (the other red meats) have tripled in the last year and a half. Oil actually increased the least. Peak coal and peak gas are supposed to be a little further out than peak oil (about 20 years) so it's probably just the genius of the market causing the increases. If we start replacing oil with coal and gas, however, it might bring the coal and gas peaks closer to the oil one. That will probably make for a particularly nasty 'triple witching hour' -- one that lasts forever. For some interesting background on peak oilers (that however does not refute the basic discovery vs. production facts), see this 2003 article, by the late sociologist Walt Contreras Sheasby who died of West Nile virus in June 2004.

    [Dec08'04] Veterans of the second Iraq war are already arriving at homeless shelters. A majority of homeless are war veterans (almost half of the homeless are Vietnam veterans). Yups pass them thinking "get a job". The appropriate response is, "you and *your* kids should fight your own damn wars".

    [Dec08'04] Before the election was decided, Alex Pelosi caught a slightly drunk Peter King on film saying: "It's already over. The Election's over. We Won." Nancy Pelosi asks, "How do you know that?" King replies, "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."

    [Dec09'04] The return of veterans from Vietnam in the late 1960's and early 1970's was associated with an all time peak in the murder rate in the US (and a recession).

    [Dec11'04] "We shouldn't be here. There was no reason for invading this country in the first place... I don't enjoy killing women and children. It's not my thing." -- marine infantryman to the Christian Science Monitor. Probably wasn't their thing either. Probably wouldn't be the thing of a hypothetical Iraqi soldier machine-gunning your sister or mother in their car or your home. That this can be printed without comment shows that Iraqis are un-people -- it's at most a bit inconvenient to have to casually slaughter them. People in the US think they are the master-race. Do onto others, man, because sooner or later, they are going to do onto you.

    [Dec13'04] Oil is amazingly localized. Today, the world produces 82.5 million barrels of oil a day. A full 11% of that comes from just 4 oil fields: Ghawar (Saudi), Cantarell (Mexico), Burgan (Kuwait), and Da Qing (China). Oil is not localized because people haven't looked in enough places. It's just localized. 'The market' isn't going to make it less so because it's running out. First, it will just get more and more expensive. That will of course help stimulate increased exploration for the remaining needles in a haystack. But then a critical rubicon will be crossed at more and more oil fields, where it takes a lot more energy to get it out than you get back out of it by burning it. This can happen, for example, when the level of the 'water table' being injected underneath the remaining oil (to keep up the wellhead pressure up so production doesn't slow down) reaches the extraction pipes, and suddenly, you are just pumping out the water you pumped in. When the water hits the pipes at Ghawar, no amount of economic mumbo jumbo will turn the remaining oil in that field back into an energy *source*. When the first huge oil price spike finally arrives (it hasn't happened yet -- oil at $50/barrel is still well under its all-time inflation-adjusted peak of $80/barrel, hit in the 70's), it will hopefully cause people to step back and begin to think about 'negotiating our lifestyle'. And perhaps it will put a spike into the number of operating Abrams tanks (gas mileage: 0.5 miles/gallon). I suppose another possibility would be for our fine body politic to demand that we gas up the tanks and dust off the nukes and eliminate all 'lesser races' because they're using up 'our' oil too fast. This is probably why the 'lesser races' want their own nukes.

    [Dec16'04] Michael Neumann says it right. 'Collateral damage' is expected, not accidental. If you shoot at your cheating wife at a party and accidentally kill a bystander, it's still murder, because you were shooting at a party. Collateral damage is purposeful, pre-meditated killing of civilians. Just because we tear off the skin of children using remote-control bombs doesn't make it different from tearing off the skin of a child tied down to a torture table. It just makes it easier on the torturer.

    [Dec18'04] Don't fight a rich man's war; they'd never fight one for you.

    [Dec21'04] In the 'free election' about to take place in Iraq -- which has cost US taxpayers a mere $200 billion (at $2.5 billion, our recent election/whatever was a steal!) -- only candidates' feet and torsos are shown in campaign ads, for fear they will be identified. Why can't we have that kind of respect for candidates here?

    [Dec21'04] So it looks like Rumsfart is going to get booted -- not for slaughtering 100,000 civilians, but instead, he will fall down the Earl-Butz/James-Watt toilet chute because he rubber stamped US soldier death condolences instead of signing them. He should be strung up for ordering the flaying of kids, the burning of mothers, and the disemboweling of aunties with high-tech people-shredders -- as well as for the much smaller number of equally horrible casualties among the attacking US soldiers. But good Americans *approve* of all that, while being horrified by the rubber stamps. What is wrong with you people? Of course, everything is dual purpose, and perhaps the flesh-eating ghouls running our fine country want him booted because he didn't agree to shred *enough* low-value people. He probably had an illegal nanny, too, omigod.

    [Dec26'04] "And I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten -- indeed the word "terrorized" is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be." -- Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq visit speech, Dec 24. Who shot down what plane where??!

    [Dec26'04] "US soldiers took my fingerprints and checked my eyes, and then asked for more than one document". Welcome to newly democratic Fallujah. I'm glad our tax dollars are being put to good use for iris scanners in Fallujah. Probably, if we invested instead in alternative energy, it would only distort the genius of the market.

    [Dec30'04] With all the breathless disaster porn on the teevee, they never give you key numbers (whatreallyhappened.com): the US will generously send $35 million to help the survivors of the tsunami that killed 125,000 people (about how many civilians we killed in Iraq war II). This compares unfavorably with the $45 million that is being spent for the inaugural of our chimp, and even more unfavorably with the $177 million we spend *each day* to keep up the Iraq war. What an expert performance, with your flying logos and empathic shots of non-white women with pierced noses, you media types. May you rot in hell, etc.

    [Dec30'04] Unintended humor dept: while searching for information on the web about lemur brains, I got to a site that had auto-inserted some "Ads by Google", which presented me with a helpful link entitled "Discount Spider Monkeys". More specifically, "New & used Spider Monkeys -- Check out the huge selection now!" at eBay. I suppose it will be a loss when AI finally does semantics.

    [Jan03'05] So now, perhaps out of embarrassment, the US is upping its diaster relief to $350 million -- about what we spend in Iraq *two days* ($177 million/day). Also, they will be taking up a collection of private donations. Fine. But why don't they take up a frigging collection for the whole damn war? That way, the reddies could give till it hurts. Put your money where your yellow ribbons are. The problem is not the bat guano Congress (can't be fixed -- it's bat guano by definition), but the fact that the war has no immediate effect on the great majority of people; they can't see blown-off limbs and squished babies, there is no draft, and the bad economic effects are delayed. There needs to be a more immediate emotional and financial cost (just like the economists always say!).

    [Jan06'05] Reinventing doctors. According to Dr. David Mengele, I mean, Tornberg, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, when a doctor participates in interrogation, "he's not functioning as a physician," and the Hippocratic ethic of commitment to patient welfare does not apply (from today's New England Journal of Medicine). Kewl. I suppose there will be a lot of other professions that need to be reinvented, too.

    [Jan11'05] "Imagine a world where such ferocious attacks [like those on Fallujah's hospitals and water supply] become common [they left out the implied "here"]. Imagine the Puget Sound region's hospitals and clinics as targets, our water supply fouled. Imagine our outrage. Let's not walk any farther down that path." -- Jim McDermott, M.D., and Richard Rapport, M.D.

    [Jan17'05] It's been *months* since the last story on conjoined third-world twins. C'mon media guys, get to work! They're not paying you to sit around! Shouldn't you guys at least *check* if Michael Jackson had a conjoined twin over for tea?

    [Jan18'05] The US peak in natural gas production was 1994, at 55 Bcfd (billion cubic feet per day). Today, production is at 50 Bcfd. Because gas is hard to transport (it must be liquified for long-distance transport), gas prices have spiked to triple the average of the 1990's, despite the fact that many other gas producers have not yet peaked. We use gas for electricity, heating, and making fertilizer.

    [Jan18'05] My peak oil/energy presentation is now online in both powerpoint and pdf format.

    [Jan23'05] World oil production/usage increased by 2.5 million barrels a day from Dec03 to Dec04 (over 3%). This *increase* is more than the current output of Iraq (1.5 million barrels a day, which as a result of sabotage and infrastructure decay is substantially less than Iraq's peak output of 3.5 million barrels a day in the early 80's). This didn't make the evening Matrix-news for American putty-brains. Even if you know nothing about geology, you probably have a sneaking suspicion that we're not finding an Iraq's worth of new oil production each year. Party on, dude. link

    [Jan26'05] "This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees." -- Rudolf Hoess, SS Kommandant, Auschwitz

    [Jan27'05] What *really* worries me is the possibility of a peak-oil/global-warming double-whammy exacerbated, paradoxically, by the peak-energy-caused end of particulates. The atmospheric heating effects of increased CO2 seem to have been partly offset by increased particulates in the atmosphere, mostly as a result of increased fossil fuel (esp. coal) use. Last year, for example, there was an unusual 'darkness at noon' from particulate fog across all of China, which shut down flights across the country. When fossil fuel (and wood!) use finally winds down, however, the particulates will precipitate (cf. the Pinatubo eruption -- which cleared in a few years). The extra CO2, however will take 50 to 100 years to clear. So then, right in the middle of chaotic energy/food shortages, we may also have to endure a really nasty heating session like the one at the end of the Permian, when life almost ended. 90-95% of all species went extinct and the oceans were almost sterilized. Hopefully, a few initial scares (the end of Ghawar, a big Antarctic melt) will bang some long-term sense into people before then. Currently, we're running around like a bunch of economists in an airtight room -- "breathe harder guys! -- the genius of the market can't work unless we increase demand..." link

    [Jan31'05] The survey of 112,003 high school students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get "government approval" of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion. Kewl. Government censors rawk. I wonder what they think about blogs? link

    [Feb01'05] Quote of the day: "We now are told, according to my sources, that the administration has been reaching out to Mr. Chalabi, to offer him expressions of cooperation and support and according to one report he was even offered a chance to be an interior minister in the new government." -- Judith Miller from the NYT explaining how the US makes appointments in the new government just elected by the Iraqi people. There were a few "wake up! time for your insurgent ass to be electrified in Abu Ghraib, oh, I mean sorry lady, time to vote!" and "vote or we cut off your food rations", but overall, it was a smashing success, which included daily bombing of Iraqi cities like Ramadi, and their not-worth-counting, low-market-value untermenschen.

    [Feb14'05] The value of the oil in the ground discovered by the major oil companies was *exceeded* by the costs of exploration for the past 3 years, because the finds were smaller, and harder to find and verify. Economists are correct that this is 'merely' a problem of oil prices, which are not high enough yet (at $50/barrel, which is still under the late 70's inflation-adjusted alltime peak of $80). This is an ROI (return on investment) ratio of less than 1.0 -- more money spent on exploration than money expected for the sale of the entire discovery. This imbalance would normally have the effect of increasing oil prices or reducing oil exploration. Currently, both oil prices *and* exploration seem to be increasing (probably because oil companies realize that oil prices will soon go much higher). At some point in the not-too-distant future (probably around 2025), however, the EROEI (amount of *energy*, at whatever cost -- cost is immaterial -- returned on *energy* investment) will go below 1.0. No increase in the price of oil can fix an EROEI ratio below 1.0. It will no longer make sense to extract oil for the purpose of providing energy, period. That doesn't mean that drilling will stop. For example, some rich slob hiding on a South Sea island might want to to pay for his own private oil supply (probably along with a private army from DynCorp to protect it). But when that point comes, humans as a whole will begin to stop using oil as an energy *source*. link

    [Feb15'05] The problem with outsourced US jobs is annoyingly obvious. With no controls on capital movement and lots of controls on low-income people movement, it's trivial to see that the best business strategy is to move capital overseas where wages are less. Duh. The only way to stop this is to raise the minimum wage in poorer countries by threat of capital control, or by threats of a multi-country strike. This was obvious to many workers in 1910! (IWW, etc). Instead, the carefully curried knee jerk reaction among the reddies now is the fervent desire to completely seal the borders to people while at the same time removing any small remaining contraints on the flow of capital -- exactly what multinational corporations need to make their operations even more lucrative. We have massively regressed, maybe because iPod is a better religion than religion itself. This basic analysis is now utterly beyond today's working Americans. On the positive side, I suppose it shows that human nature really is nice and trusting at heart, very much *unlike* what evolutionary psychologists say! (you're trusting the wrong guys, people...).link

    [Feb16'05] While reading an article about tasers for the home (which worried in a peecee way about 'off label' use of tasers for child discipline, whatever) -- it dawned on me that tasers are going to become the perfect politically-correct gun! No self-respecting pwog house will soon be without one! Of course, they'll be of little use in keeping the barbarian hordes out of the organic victory garden when the SHTF....

    [Feb17'05] Maureen Dowd quote: "I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the "Barberini Faun" is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?"

    [Feb17'05] James Howard Kunstler quote: "Globalism was never an 'ism,' by the way. It was not a belief system. It was a manifestation of the 20-year-final-blowout of cheap oil. Like all economic distortions, it produced economic perversions. It allowed gigantic, predatory organisms like WalMart to spawn and reproduce at the expense of more cellular fine-grained economic communities.

    [Feb17'05] Akeel quote (Christian Parenti's Baghdad translator): "Ah, the freedom. Look, we have the gas-line freedom, the looting freedom, the killing freedom, the rape freedom, the hash-smoking freedom. I don't know what to do with all this freedom."

    [Feb18'05] "Radio frequency identification (RFID) and satellite tags allowed the Department of Defense (DoD) to transform its patchy, paper-based logistics system -- in which troops were forced to go "container diving" through thousands of unlabeled "mystery containers" -- to one where they had total asset visibility of every item in every container as it moved across the world to Iraq." -- William Eggers in Public CIO explaining how the attack on Iraq went so fast.
    Seems like RFID is ready to go domestically. It will surely be a great impediment to terrorism when every citizen and employee is protected by "total asset visibility". RFID only works at very short distances. But I wonder what those "satellite tags" are? They sound kinda longer range. Probably tags will be needed for both assets and liabilites. Just think of it like Santa, who knows whether you've been bad or good.

    [Feb19'05] 5 years ago, a survey of what was floating in the North Pacific Gyre found that the mass of small floating plastic fragments was *6* times the mass of floating plankton there. Plankton are probably comparably weighty to plastic elsewhere, however, since the ocean currents probably concentrate the 'plas-ton' there, and plankton productivity is higher elsewhere.

    [Feb21'05] "I feel like [Fallujah] was the pinnacle of my existence -- that nothing I will ever do will be like what I have done," says the religious marine from Spotsylvania, Virginia. "I'm pretty sure there will be times just as good ... just as awesome -- and I'll appreciate it in a different way". -- Cpl. Christopher DeBlanc to Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor. Dude, that's a pretty scary religion you've got there. It's awfully hard on the women and children.

    [Feb22'05] There was an interesting and detailed comment in Monday Feb 21's urbansurvival.com -- purportedly from an oil exploration company executive. After whining about not enough rigs and personnel because of the heartbreak and fear of a repeat of 1980's low oil prices (it's just the genius of the market, man -- stop your sobbing; plus, there's no danger of that any more, as you yourself say!), and then whining about not being able to make the east and west coast shoreline both look like Gulf of Mexico (be patient, my friend), he makes a key point about the economics of drilling as oil prices increase. At first, you might think higher oil prices would drive more drilling. But as oil prices rise, they drive up the prices of a lot of the things required for oil drilling, including plastics, steel, transportation, and chemicals. Thus, fields that have been bypassed previously as uneconomic to drill because the traps are too small may remain that way forever, even as oil prices increase to astronomical levels. I'm glad to see that the more fundamental EROEI (energy return on energy investment) ratio is seeping into the subconscious of the focus-only-on-money crowd. Extracting hard-to-get oil is expensive precisely because it takes more and more energy to do it. This oil guy expects the s*** will hit the fan in less than ten years. He concludes: "Just wanted to get that off my chest. I have been maligned and spit on by too many people who drive cars and use electricity, and then bitch about prices or claim some kind of 'Big Oil Conspiracy'. I can tell you that the collective consensus within my business will be 'let the bastards freeze in the dark' when the big wail arises." Or as another anonymous petroleum geologist said upon seeing recent 3D seismic data from Ghawar: "It's over! Kiss your lifestyle goodbye!". link

    [Feb28,05] Whatever you think about what should be done with/to the 'feeding tube woman', the idea of killing a brain-damaged person by removing the tube so that the person dies slowly over several weeks from dehydration does seem pretty sick. According to hospice nurses and doctors, non-brain-damaged patients who have lived through it (well until the last bit) report that death by dehydration/starvation is actually less unpleasant than it sounds (though note that this is compared to whatever horrible disease was actually killing them, and probably, this was assessed by them while they were on an opiate drip...). Such conscious terminally ill patients often refuse food and water on their own, except to keep their mucous membranes wet, because they say that they actually feel more comfortable (note here that opiates can induce nausea). In any case, it is common enough of a practice that there are many hospice-supplied descriptions). What irks me is that if euthanasia by removal of a feeding tube is allowed, why not also allow a sensible overdose of Nembutal? For reference, you wouldn't generally be allowed to kill an unanesthetized animal by dehydration/starvation for a research project, even if it had a severely damaged neocortex. It's important to keep in mind that there are rare but well documented and terrifying cases of 'locked in' syndrome, the result of damage to the lower brainstem interrupting spinal motor output pathways but leaving the thalamus, midbrain, and forebrain intact, where patients have reported awakening from a coma but finding themselves paralyzed (except for eye movements), but fully conscious. Patients sometimes recover to some extent, but many remain paralyzed and conscious for many years, like Julia Tavalaro. It seems extremely unlikely that this is the case here, given the massive cortical damage sustained (apparently after cardiac arrest apparently brought on by a potassium imbalance possibly triggered by chronic bulimia), and lack of paralysis. At any one time, there are perhaps 35,000 people in a similar vegetative state after massive cortical damage in the US, so there is quite of bit of medical experience out there. It's also good to remember that ideas about what is 'natural' and 'moral' have changed markedly over the years. For example, in the 19th century, some doctors argued against painkillers and anesthesia, because it used to be thought that deep wounds couldn't heal properly without the experience of severe pain. Anesthesia by isoflurane is not any more 'natural' than driving a car is, but I doubt anybody wants to go back to 'natural' (unanesthetized) surgery (we will eventually have to give up driving cars, though :-} ). Also, before the infection process was well understood, there was the medical idea that the (formerly inevitable) infection that accompanied a deep wound was actually good; it used to be called 'laudatory pus'!

    [Mar01,05] "One of the reasons I did not refuse the war from the beginning was that I was afraid of losing my freedom. Today, as I sit behind bars I realize that there are many types of freedom, and that in spite of my confinement I remain free in many important ways. What good is freedom if we are afraid to follow our conscience?" -- Camilo Meija, imprisoned for refusing to return to Iraq.

    [Mar14'05] In the year 2004, total world discovery of oil was 7 Gb (3 months world supply). 2 Gb of that was deep-water finds for which the cost of exploration (*not* including development and production!) exceeded the value, at current prices, of the oil found. The world consumed around 30 Gb of oil in 2004, a 2.5% increase over 2003. This was caused by an all-around demand increase (e.g., US petroleum demand grew at its strongest rate in five years). ANWR is optimistically estimated to contain a total of 10 Gb, somewhat more than a year of US usage, though a more realistic estimate of practically recoverable oil is more like 4 Gb (about 6 months US usage). Note, however, that oil can only be pumped out of an oil field at a finite rate. Thus, at top speed, ANWR might be able to provide 1 million barrels a day (0.37 Gb/year), which is only 5% of current US usage. For comparison, the top producing field in the world produces 5 million barrels a day (Ghawar, Saudi), and the second produces 2 million barrels a day (Cantarell, Mexico). Both of these fields are much bigger than ANWR. The unreality of the idiotic discussion about 'the market' somehow 'fixing' these frightening facts reminds me of a quote from the Feral Metallurgist: "Economics is the game of tiddly-winks that we can afford to play only in the midst of easy, abundant energy." We are currently spending about $2.5 billion a week on the Iraq occupation. The current value of Iraq's total current oil output (1.5 million barrels/day * 7 days * $55/barrel) is $0.58 billion a week. Just to recoup our 'investment' without any profit, (assuming we eventually end up stealing Iraq's entire output), oil 'only' has to go up to $240/barrel. It will probably get there sooner than anyone is expecting. Of course, the part about stealing all their oil is still going to take some 'work'. As one of the soldiers whose heavy-metal Iraqi snuff videos turned out to be a bit shocking to their wives said: "This isn't some jolly freakin' peacekeeping mission." link

    [Mar18,05] "The bottom line is were were very concerned about the *perceptions* that somehow we were doing this to steal the oil" [my emphasis] -- Amy Jaffee, James Baker Institute, interviewed by Greg Palast, commenting on why big oil companies opposed selling off Iraq's oil (to big oil companies, but maybe not US big oil). (quote from BBC Newsnight video linked on this page). Palast seems to imply that if we had just taken over the oil fields like the neocons wanted, oil prices could have been kept down, but that oil companies stopped the neocons. Aside from the fact that they hardly seem 'stopped', I don't see how running Iraq back up to its maximum ever output of 3.5 million barrels a day from its current 1.5 million barrels a day (which would have taken years anyway) would have dealt with year after year increases of world consumption of 2.5 million barrels a day. True, it might have worked for 6 months. Do the numbers, man. The other thing is, do you, Palast, have the slightest idea where the proceeds of Iraq's oil (currently, $0.58 billion a week) are actually going today? Who are you going to ask?

    [Mar20,05] The Fed and the commercial banks have great jobs. When banks come to the Fed's "discount window" for a loan, computers create money out of nothing, and the banks pay the Fed interest for the newly created money using already existing money (previously created in similar fashion; when the banks pay back the loan, the money disappears into the same hole from which it was created). Then the banks that have borrowed this money into existence (now called "cash reserves") can lend out 10 times the amount that they have borrowed/created, in effect, creating even more money. This means if a bank gets $1,000 of created money from the Fed, they can actually lend out $10,000 ($1,000 + $9,000). Another way of looking at it is that out of the $1,000, they only need to keep $100 as true "reserves", and so $900 is "excess reserves". Now, the key part. When anyone deposits money into the bank, the same thing happens to it (only 10% of it needs to be kept as reserves). After many cycles of converting 90% of each deposit into "excess reserves", 9x as much money has been generated as was originally 'injected' into the bank by the Fed. This 'second generation' money (beyond the initial creation by the Fed) is much more interesting to banks than the standard kind of money they get from deposits, because they don't have to pay interest on it like they do with deposits (or borrowings from the Fed). Also, banks typically loan out the created money at a higher rate of interest than the Fed (compare the Fed's interest rate to the interest on a mortgage). Cool 'jobs' these guys do, eh? And you thought post-modern critical theory was a hard job?

    [Mar21,05] GM market capitalization (value of all its stock) is now $16 billion, after a loss this week of around $3 billion. Its debt is $300 billion. Its main money making business is loans, not cars (how Enron-y). If it goes bankrupt, its bondholders will own a company worth much less than $300 billion. That would be a loss bigger than than the losses of Enron, Global Crossing, Long Term Capital Management, K-Mart, and the Iraq war put together. Hey, that's getting close to the size of the yearly military budget. Eeeeeww. Definitely time for the plunge protection people!

    [Mar22,05] The wealth of the world's billionaires reached $2.2 trillion, which was a 57% increase over 2 years ago. At that rate, the entire world will be owned by billionaires in a few decades (world GDP is about $40 trillion). Meanwhile, 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day (this is almost half of all humans alive today), and the bottom 1 billion of those live on less than $1 a day. This polarizing trend is not due to a sudden increase in the intelligence of billionaires, or a sudden decrease in the intelligence of poor people, but is largely the result of legislative trends in the past two decades of reducing taxes on rich people, increasing burdens on poor people, and allowing rich people to skim off the often tax-supported efforts of scientists and artists and hide away offshore, without paying anything back to the society that helped create that knowledge and art. It's all a matter of boundary conditions. We can set them however we want. As industrial society reaches peak energy and begins to head down the 'slope that always goes down' over the next 30 years or so, perhaps this discussion will be seriously opened. Right now, it's completely off the table. We are buzzing along like yeast cells reaching their peak population in a fermenting vat -- just before the resources start to run out and everybody starts getting killed off by waste products. But we're intelligent yeasts, right? In theory, that means that we have brains that can figure out how to stop self-destructive greedy behavior in time. Hopefully, reining in greed will be on the table 10 years from now.

    [Apr02,05] The continuing religious faith that the 'the market' will somehow trump oil geology and physics and save our behinds continues to amaze me. The discovery of oil is basically uncoupled from market forces. The peak in world discovery occurred in the 1960's. Sure there was demand back then. But there's a lot more now, and the supply is shorter. The world discovery peak occurred back then because that was when we finished finding the easier-to-find stuff. After that, despite spending *a lot* more time and more energy and using more tech, we've found a little less each few years for the past 40 years. The insanity of thinking that 'the market' will somehow change this is like believing in creationism and your cell phone at the same time. The second physical/geological fact that the market can't fix is the rate at which oil can be pumped out of small holes drilled several miles down into the earth. It doesn't matter if demand spikes relative to supply. The oil has to be pumped out through those tiny holes and it's time-consuming and energy intensive to drill them (imagine drilling a 3 mile deep hole in solid rock by hand) and to pump them. Demand all you want, suckers. The third false tenet of economic faith is that higher oil prices will directly lead scientists to discover new or more efficient forms of energy. Maybe, maybe not. No matter how much 'the market' wails, it's not going to change Maxwell's equations or the energy density of sunlight. Hopefully, scientists will come up with a efficient, easier-to-fabricate photovoltaic cells that don't use as much silver (according to one calculation, the world's silver would be entirely consumed if we made enough current-model photovoltaic cells to replace just 1/3 of the world's electric power). I'll relax when someone actually demos a photovoltaic-cell-powered photovoltaic cell manufacturing plant. We've still got a good 20 years to do this. Not like it's an emergency or anything.

    [Apr06,05] Norman Church makes the point that the just-in-time, globalized features of modern living have only existed for a few decades. Virtually every aspect of our life and food and water is now highly dependent on long-distance, oil-powered transport lines and the fossil-fueled internet and computers on which we type and bank. This modern system has not yet been tested as to its robustness to perturbation. As oil peaks in the next decade or so, the system is going to be strongly perturbed. As Norman Church says, "The division of labor is at risk. It means our civilization is at risk". There is little historical precedent as to what might happen. In a few decades, globalization may end up being generally seen as a much greater evil and much more fundamental failure of human society than WWII, communism, or capitalism. Scientists, engineers, and businessmen have a lot of experience making individual system components (disk drives, power plants, satellites) that perform robustly. The problem is that in every case, these system components rely on immediate (seconds, minutes, days) external inputs completely beyond local control (the electrical grid, the internet, phone lines, long-distance trucking and rail and shipping, food production, water pumping and distribution). And many of these 'outside' systems rely on each other. If one of those 'outside' systems fails, as they very well might in the event of an interruption in our daily gulp of fossil fuels -- even if it was (initially) an interruption of just a week or two -- it is quite possible that it could lead to a rapid, cascading failure of industrial society analogous to the one that recently brought down the Eastern US grid. Such a breakdown would have to be rapidly repaired to prevent further permanent damage (dehydration, looting, nobody showing up to work). Industrial civilization is becoming more and more like an enormous integrated living organism. This in itself is not a new phenomenon. All human cultures have these qualities. Like individual cells in a multicellular organism, individual humans have always relied on each other. And this is not just a human feature; individual dogs in dog packs are similar. A female dog will risk her life for the offspring of another dog that is genetically unrelated to her (this doesn't occur in non-human primates). The main new thing about globalized industrial civilization is the scale of this integration, and ever-increasing speed of the long-distance interconnections. In a tightly integrated multi-cellular organism like a mammal, the system that runs the heart can *never* 'crash' for the entire life of the organism. If the heart goes down for even a minute or two, irreparable damage to the brain and heart occurs. Major body systems are permanently damaged after a few more minutes of stoppage, and the rest of the body then begins to die. Animal bodies are as reliable as they are because they have been tested trillions of times by natural selection. This is our very first run of the networked world organism. It's too complicated to model. Could be a rough ride.

    [Apr08,05] Custer Battles (yep, that's the name -- the two last names of the founders of a security company with contracts in Iraq) has been accused of setting up a shell company in the Cayman islands to bill US taxpayers during the time of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The company and the Bush admin argue that since CPA was an 'international organization', US fraud laws don't apply. This is just a little spatter of slop out of the huge trough in which our 'captains of industry' are feeding. It's simple business logic. First the US government collects a small donation from each taxpayer (say $20 a week). Together, our donations add up into a giant gushing money pipe ($2.5 billion a week). The pipe ends up in Iraq, where the fraud laws (and water and sewage and electricity and hospitals and security) have all been going downhill since Saddam (who could have known Saddam was a tough act to follow, eh?). Even small taps into this high pressure money pipeline siphon off lots of loot in no time. Meanwhile, back at home, we're removing evolution from textbooks (and from the standardized tests our more and more de-skilled students constantly take). Mad Max 'business ethics' for those in the know, while the rubes watch what's left of the Pope (and Michael Jackson's nose) on teevee (don't you think we need more closeups on what feeding tubes actually look like?). The problem with history is that it moves just slowly enough that people don't notice if they're not paying close attention.

    [Apr20'05] Well, after a respite of a few days, the "bull market" in oil is back. I could rail on about the complete lunacy of calling the beginning of the end of high industrial civilization a "bull market in commodities", but whatever. I am afraid it's only a few years until we get to the "s***-in-your-pants market" for commodities (perhaps after a brief world recession, which will temporarily moderate demand), when businessmen with their fine quarterly (3 month) look-ahead finally get their first good glimpse of the roller-coaster drop off ahead. Using the fruits of our fine human brains -- human language, human civilization, and human science -- it is trivial to step back and look at the whole damn roller coaster track at once. But the chimps are in control now, and these chimps command a pretty mean military machine. If you know anything about common chimpanzees, you'd probably would think twice before putting one in charge of 12 aircraft carriers. Who knows what they might do to the chimpanzee troop the next valley over.

    [Apr27'05] The supposed 'liberal press' doesn't even utter one peep about the fact that Gannon checked in but he didn't check out, or that he was there on press conference videotapes, but hadn't checked in. He could have stayed overnight multiple times at the White House. Somebody there probably knows in which room. Instead of investigating the possibility that a high class male prostitute may have stayed overnight in the White House, the 'liberal press' says things like "Sometimes the [checkout] machine doesn't go beep, and you leave anyway" (that doesn't explain being at a press conference without having checked in), and "The most plausible thing is that these aren't complete records" (both, Dana Milbank). You can say that again, Dana. We want webcams and stained cloth. And who actually does (normally) stay in the White House overnight anyway? ...

    [May01'05] The US now has 7 times as many people per capita in jail as Russia and China do -- an all-time high that is approaching 1% of the population (much higher rate for poor people). The US incarceration rate per 100,000 population is 726, compared to 142 for Britain, 118 for China, 91 for France, and 58 for Japan (at that rate, why can't they dump Phil Spector's a** in there, too). The new bankruptcy legislation doesn't yet include jail time for being poor, but Republicans can always hope. Just think how much safer the streets would be! It *would* make it more difficult for Matthew Perry, who just purchased a $2.5 million 2 BR condo in Hollywood with "a service entrance" (according to the LA Times real estate section).

    [May10'05] It appears that, even with all the news about having a larger reserve than last year (the largest in 20 years, though still well under a year of US oil usage), oil is still flopping around, and can't manage to stay under $50. But this is all just the market j*rking off. Today, for example, oil prices leaped $3 to $53 because of a problem with a *refinery* (something that takes oil as *input*; that makes a lot of market sense, right?). In the next recession, the price of oil may even crash for a year or two. Then we will have to grit our teeth as the 2-week-look-ahead press waahhh-s about how the "bear market in commodities" is leading us to ruin, and how we should all save GM's butt by patriotically buying more we're-not-going-to-negotiate-our-lifestyle SUV's again. None of this market self-pleasuring is going to change the basic facts. Oil discovery peaked in the 1960's and there is no obvious replacement on the horizon, except for a temporary spurt of coal synfuels. If we hit synfuels hard in a decade or two when the final oil crisis kicks in (it *will* happen -- the market will demand it!), we will generate an even bigger belch of greenhouse gas, because the coal-to-liquid-fuel process is very energy-inefficient. Then, as industrial civilization begins to wind down because somebody (who us?) yanked the power cord, there will be a great many earnest prayers from cargo cult economists for 'scientists to please come up with something', and then our grandchildren and their kids (and a lot of other species) will begin to fry as big-time global warming hits. Serves 'em right, those profligate generation Z losers, because they forgot to deposit oil into their individual retirement accounts to run full-city air conditioners. Capitalism would be a great system if we had an extra backup planet or two. Since we don't, it will probably turn out to be the biggest disaster in all of human history.

    [May10'05] "It just doesn't look good to the public" said Seattle's Sgt. Donald Davis, of the case where a Seattle police officer tasered an 8 months pregnant women in the thigh, neck, and arm, leaving electrical burn marks, while trying to drag her out of her car after she refused to sign a traffic ticket. She was rushing her son to school at the time when she was caught speeding. But Sgt. Davis also worried about *not* being able to taser pregnant women, kids, and old people in the future: "If in your policy you deliberately exclude a segment of the population, then you have potentially closed off a tool that could have ended a confrontation." Great, sarge. Wonder what you'd say if someone tasered *your* granny, your pregnant wife, or your little 'Jessica'. There was another story last week about police coming into a class room and handcuffing a grade school girl for crying and acting up. I'm getting that creeping police state, boiling frog kind of feeling. It happens slowly enough that people don't notice how big the changes are from year to year. They just agree, 'well, I guess it's OK as long as you had to do it to keep us safe' (from pregnant women and grade school kids).

    [May12'05] Today, Larry Flynt outs Bolton with allegations that Bolton forced his former wife to engage in group sex at Plato's retreat. I guess Bolton could argue that it was all part of his job at the State department (vetting new interrogation techniques?). In the end, I agree with one of the commentatators, Wonkster, at rawstory.com: "Bolton's ex wife, Larry Flynt and sex stories, another Bush pr*ck lies, SO THE F WHAT? Where's the outrage over Peak Oil?" :-}

    [May15'05] With 55% of the public disapproving of Bush's handling of the Iraq crisis, the planaria-like 'Democrats' can't bring themselves to utter even a timorous little peep against the war. What disgusting cowards. Meanwhile on so-called pwog radio, Al Franken is still fighting Nader! (last week on the Oy Oy Oy show). His antiwar comments about the American invasion and occupation of Iraq are about as enlighting as those of Kerry, who "would have done *eveything* different" -- by using even more troops, equipment, and bombs. And don't forget, the biggest problem is our cultural sensitivity. Kerry and Franken would no doubt make sure that home invasion, strip searches, and firing randomly into passenger cars were carried out in a more culturally sensitive way. This is what now passes for left?? Oy! And Air America filters out all calls asking that the US withdraw from Iraq. During the US invasion of South Vietnam, I would often hear, "how can we possibly withdraw from Vietnam *now*?". Back then, the correct answer was: "with ships and planes." Works great today, too. [May16'05] Yesterday, Condoleeza Rice showed that like Laura, she can do comedy too, when she told the Iraqi government that US forces would remain until Iraq can defend itself. I can see that the Iraqis *have* been getting better at defending themselves. The dust-up about flushing holy books is its own dark comedy. Slaughtering 100,000 civilians and torturing mostly innocent civilians swept up in Gestapo-style home invasions doesn't rate a comment on the nightly news or cause changes in policy, but now Newsweek is forced into piously eating its own words -- which were nothing more than a re-tread/re-publication of something that originally came out last year! Of course, talking about getting more peecee with books takes the focus off of the daily torture and slaughter. The idiotic, vicious unreality of it all almost makes me want to see us stupid humans get banged over the head by the reality of energy depletion. It's the same urge that drives you to pinch a denervated patch of skin in order to get *some* kind of sensation out of it.

    [May17'05] According the the US Treasury dept, international investments in U.S. securities dropped to $46 billion/month in March from $84 billion/month in February, a larger drop than expected. About 75% of the US economy's borrowing is met by foreign central banks buying dollars. If this keeps up for a few months, a guy could get a little nervous (phrasing from "How to Speak Minnesotan" -- I was raised in Illinois). On a much more positive note, George Galloway's performance in the US Congress today blasting lickspittle Norm Coleman who replaced Paul Wellstone when Wellstone was killed in a suspicious plane accident) *totally* rocked! (see link below). I only found out that Galloway had also used the fine English word, "lickspittle", himself when I read the apathetic account of the Senate hearing in the LA Times :-}

    [May20'05] Rob Kirby (Pirates reprise below), alerted by Willem Middelkoop, has noticed that the Treasury Dept silently altered their months records of the total holdings of US Treasury bills by (in order of holdings) Japan, China, Caribbean Banking Centers (natch!), and the UK, by 20 to 60 billion each (which sounds like awfully big errors -- around 10% -- for presumably well-monitored transactions...). The new figures suggest that China and Japan suddenly stopped accumulating US debt since the beginning of the year. This would seem like big financial news, but it isn't.

    [Jun03'05] In the story below by Mitchell E. Potts, a religious, now antiwar, Iraq war I Navy veteran, are reports of his conversations with currently deployed injured teenagers outside Walter Reed hospital. One of them described how he felt bad about raiding schools (because that's where insurgents hide -- e.g., the US military still occupies all the schools in Fallujah, and any classes taking place there now happen in tents). The same veteran said he felt the worst about the US military "routinely round[ing] up the kids [to] use them as human shields" because "the Muslims would not shoot their own children". Most people, illogically to my mind, find this more repugnant than dispensing high tech death to children from a safe distance in a plane, helicopter, navy ship, or artillery piece, without seeing the resulting little blown up bodies. At least the human shields thing has a personal touch -- and the number of kids killed and injured this way is no doubt *much* smaller than the number shredded by our electronic Darth Vader weaponry. Furthemore, it has an evolutionary foundation! Of course, that argument won't mean much to most of the country. A NYT poll last year showed that the 55% of Americans believed that "God created us in our present form," while 13% believed that "we evolved from less-advanced life-forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process" (referenced in Matt Taibbi article below). But piffles aside, monkeys with certain social structures (e.g., baboons), where male-male agression is common under circumstances where infants are present will routinely grab infants to use them as a 'baboon shields'. It works well; the attacker will typically back down, and the infants are rarely injured. I certainly don't like high tech soldiers grabbing kids and strapping them to humvees to save their own butts but if I had to rank things, I think tearing up children's bodies with electronically guided antipersonnel bomblets launched from from a safe distance is worse.

    [Jun09'05] "Wow. You guys are breeding yourselves some *good* Good Germans over there." Comment by Derek in response to previous comments about police in Taserland (for now, esp. Florida -- 17 Taser fatalities there since 2000, kids tasered in ER's, female bartenders who called police for help tasered instead, etc). I agree with Lanya at Banality of Evil -- it pretty much ruined my day. Welcome to tortureland (pace Daniel Hopsicker). Also remember that policing isn't even close to being the most dangerous profession. Maybe I need to get a taser for stopping students from from using cell phones, mouthing off, and of course, sleeping in my classes...

    [Jun10'05] Here are the latest confidence ratings for different professions: the military (74%), police (63%), organized religion (53%), Preznit (44%), US Supreme Court (41%), newspapers (28%), TV news (28%), Congress (22%), big business (22%), HMO's (17%).

    [Jun14'05] Here is something both the left and the right don't like to acknowledge: the Iraqi resistance, through daily bombings against US military convoys using whatever they had lying around, has forced the American public (including red state guys) to begin to favor pulling out of Iraq. The reason is that it shows that the most powerful, high tech, and expensive army in the world (by a long shot), is still not able to completely dominate another country -- and even one weakened by a previous war in which its power generation, electric grid, and sewage facilities were heavily damaged, which was then followed by a decade of sanctions and more bombings, following by another high tech war against which they had even less defense. All that, and we still are not decisively winning. A hard pill to swallow, which is why both the left and the right can barely utter the words. I suppose there is even a little dread about whether Americans would be able to similary rise the the challenge of a similarly technologically dominant foreign invader. The US losing world military dominance certainly can't happen overnight, but remember: the US military on the move is 70% fossil fuel by weight, and there will never be battery-operated tanks, aircraft carriers, or fighter jets.

    [Jun22'05] The popularity of Bush continues to plummet, now approaching the lowest-ever numbers which were reached before the election during the first disastrous invasion of Fallujah in April 2004. The war in Iraq is also more unpopular than ever, much lower than in April 2004. Even the "Freedom Fries" guy recanted! The number of troops killed by IED attacks reached an all-time high this June (700 IED attacks in June). Meanwhile, the trade deficit continues to balloon at a record rate, and the Fed continues to pump huge amounts on cash into M3, even while continuing to raise interest rates. All told, this seems like a very dangerous time for the Bush administration, and therefore, for you and me. They will stop at nothing to retain power. One blogger has suggested that Bush will change tack and begin to continously announce an Iraq pull-out for the next two years, but not actually pull out (shades of the Gaza 'pullout' that is always about to happen, but somehow never does). This will allow another neo-con-controlled Republican drone to take over. The polyp-like Democrats -- who have just about screwed up their enormous courage to the sticking point of starting to think about getting ready to make a few feeble whispers under their breath about the general concept of a pullout (did they say pullout? I think they meant reconfiguration and right-sizing and doing *everything* completely different...) -- will be deprived of their main issue, even before they manage to utter a single word about it out loud. Maybe. But things could continue to go downhill in Iraq -- and in Afghanistan, where the per capita troop fatalities have been higher than in Iraq this year. Continuing deterioration of the Iraq and Afghanistan situations during two years of withdrawal talk may fight its way through an expected media black-out, forcing more drastic action by the Bushies -- which is frightening to contemplate.

    [Jun24'05] I wrote a letter to Boxer and Feinstein against the new war on Iran.

    [Jun30'05] The US has shown no sign of intent to abandon the huge permanent military bases Halliburton is constructing in Iraq. The insurgency will therefore continue. My guess is that -- barring some kind of terror stunt in an American city -- things will go as they have, with another 1,000 American deaths and maybe another 25,000 Iraqi deaths by this month next year, and an escalation of the US war on Iran. The beginning of the Iran war will probably pump Bush's popularity back to 50% for a year and probably reduce the number of people (now over 40%) that agree that Bush should be impeached "if it can be shown that he lied about the reasons for the Iraq war" (you gotta give these pollsters credit for for their hallucinatory questions). However, we will be one year closer to Peak Oil (probably in 2008). Because Americans have such finely tuned minds, they will take all this in stride, and then elect Frist to 'stay the course'. That will allow us to stay in Iraq and Iran for another several thousand American deaths and another hundred thousand Iraqi and Iranian deaths. Peak oil will hit in the first year of Preznit Frist's term. Just then, it might be 'head for the hills' time in an old jalopy (well, maybe a 1989 Honda Civic :-} ).

    [Jul03'05] I just saw a remarkable graph on urbansurvival.com showing the percentage of program trading on the NYSE. In 1999 and 2000, it was running around 20%, if you exclude spikes. From 2000 to 2005, it increased to about to about 60% of all trades (with spikes, like last week, at over 75%!) -- a slightly more than linear rate of increase. At this rate, trading will be entirely done by computer programs in a few years.

    [Jul07'05] The Plame case has turned out strangely indeed. One idea is that Judith Miller (who previously was responsible for a long series of NYT scare articles that built support for the war using information now uniformly shown to be faked or false) actually told the administration about Plame, not the other way around. Then Rove told Novak, the one who actually released the information to the public, and who has strangely somehow avoided any fallout.

    [Jul11'05] Well great, Supersize-Me Morgan Spurlock has been serialized and now has a show in which he does other things for 30 days, like going off the grid. How lame. Living off the grid is going to be more like a plot where you have to live in a house with Gary Coleman, Ron Jeremy, and Tammy Faye for 30 years, and there are no cameras...

    [Jul12'05] I've posted my (oversize) response to comments on my energy presentation here . The main point is that the reason why renewable energy is expensive, is that it takes a lot of energy to make renewable energy-generating devices because they include things like steel, high quality silicon crystals, rare metals, glass, precise machining, transporting heavy things over long distances, and so on. Economists often say that increasing fossil fuel prices will help renewables, because then renewables will become more price competitive. This ignores the fundamental fact that renewable energy devices are currently made exclusively using oil, gas, and coal energy as inputs! As fossil fuel prices increase, the price of renewables is likely to increase in parallel with them. Of course, if it is actually possible to make a solar-cell-powered solar-cell-manufacturing plant (including the steel and silicon furnaces, the machine tools, the silver mining, etc), then the day is saved. This is not to deny that actually constructing such a plant would depend on getting a sufficient return on money investment, or a government subsidy, or both. I'm not against money. But whether it is ultimately worth making solar cells depends more fundamentally on *energy* return on *energy* investment. If it takes more *energy* to make a solar cells (counting everything needed including getting the raw input materials) than you can get out of the resulting photocells over a reasonable period of time, then no amount of money/price or greed or self-interest or altruism or fear will make such energy a *renewable source* -- it will instead just be another way of spending non-renewable oil, gas, and coal energy. I hope the answer to this question is "yes".

    [Jul13'05] Economists, unfortunately, find the concept of EROEI as "meaningless" as "mass return on mass invested" (econobrowser, today). As one poster quipped, there is no reason economists shouldn't also rev up their perpetual motion machines while they're at it...

    [Jul25'05] The US defies a judge's order to release torture pictures because "they could result in harm to individuals" tortured in the pictures (girls and boys who were raped and sodomized in front of other prisoners to coerce them, etc, as leaked almost a year back by Seymour Hersh). Sounds more like protection for our "boys" who did the sodomizing (and the administrators who ordered them to do it). 2,000 vets have called for the release of the information.

    [Jul30'05] [rant follows] Just returned from an excellent talk in SD by Dahr Jamail. He, along with David Enders, is one of the two total currently unembedded US reporters in Iraq. All the rest stay inside the Green Zone, never leave their hotels in Baghdad (not sure I would be brave enough to venture out myself), or go on patrols with the US military and submit censored reports. Even at a left/peace meeting, though, it was hard to put the two main points on the table. First, the only reason there is *any* public opinion against the war is because the Iraqis have fought back. If we had been able to invade their oil patch and set up our 14 permanent military bases along with the largest US embassy in the world, and the locals just got McDonald-ified without a whimper, even at more than $100 billion in tax money a year, good Americans wouldn't be 50-50 against the war now. The peace movement (of which I am a part) has had virtually no responsibility for this change of opinion, and the 'peace movement' basically collapsed to 'regulars' immediately after the start of the war. And we *are* building the bases and embassy anyway. Second, at the current moment, 95% of the population has not even heard of peak oil, sitting right here on the peak! It was the main reason for the occupation of Iraq. Instead, oil demand in the US so far this year, even with the higher prices, even before the middle of the travel season, is already *up* 2.5% (0.5 additional million barrels a day on top of the usual 20 million barrels a day of US demand compared to last year). When the population finally does hear of and understand just how dire the situation with respect to energy is, it will only take a small event to bring most of them back into line, to goosestep our way into Iran. Just because the US bases, even in the south ('mortaritaville'), are mortared every day, and the US supply lines are often cut, forcing helicopter supply, and US forces are a long way from the coast doesn't mean that the US can't bomb and partly invade Iran. An Iran bombing/invasion would be a self-tightening noose that will bring out a patriotic burst. So party on, dudes. Burn through the last of the easy oil. Plan to burn through twice as much coal as now when the oil runs out and inefficient synfuel production (cf. Germany in WWII) begins in earnest. Roast the whole damn planet while you're at it -- you're worth it. And your grandkids can build character by rising from the ash heap at the end of the century.

    [Aug01'05] Apologies for ranting. Over the weekend, I began getting spam about oil. At this rate, by fall, there will be an oil reality show. This is beginning to remind me of an old science fiction story I read in high school about an advanced culture that had lost the ability to do actually do anything but rather just vicariously experienced other people doing violent and sexy things (but they never said what their energy sources would be then... :-} ). Things *have* turned out a bit blade-runnery. My guitar effects processor imitates the distorted sound of a Marshall tube amp head, and then that output put through a particular speaker cabinet, and finally, the transformation due to having a dynamic microphone put in front of the speaker -- either centered or off-center (which goes to the big PA). Sounds pretty good (1 guitar track, direct to disk), and I didn't even turn it up to 11.

    [Aug10'05] Hundreds of truckers have blocked the road in South Florida today to protest high gas prices. I'm sure this will help cause all those depleted oil fields to begin refilling. A similar, but more concerted blockade in the UK in 2000 brought the economy to a virtual halt for a few days. Unfortunately, it had little effect on North Sea wells, which peaked in 1999.

    [Aug11'05] Oil spiked to $66 a barrel today, and once again, the media explained this as partly due to outages in *refineries*. Refineries take oil as *input*. I fail to understand why a slowdown in a business that *buys* oil would cause oil price to go up. Whatever. I suppose it makes about as much sense as Google hiding Cindy Sheehan's comments behind a 'only for adults' shield (probably because she made a mention of Israel). Swift-boaters are no doubt soon on the way.

    [Aug12'05] James Hamilton, here at UCSD, argues that Peak Oil people are naive about how demand affects price. He thinks that as oil depletes, prices will rise, causing oil usage to be restrained (since "demand" is defined as equivalent to what is supplied). This will delay the peak and give more time (e.g., than the Hirsch study has suggested) for alternatives to be researched, engineered, and implemented. I hope he's right. I see four main outstanding problems. First, oil prices are quite volatile, as he himself admits. Right now, oil prices may be in a bit of a speculative bubble (broke $67 today). But there may very well come a dip, and then people/businessmen/gov't will be lulled again. Second, the alternatives all take time to ramp up. Even well-understood ones like nuclear fission won't be back for at least a decade. Third, the alternatives to liquid fuel for transport (fission for electrical generation is not currently a viable replacement for transport) all seem like they might have considerably worse EROEI ratios (these are hard to determine and controversial, but almost certainly much worse than late s`20th century oil). Finally, as the cost of fossil fuel inflates, it will likely *raise* the cost of renewables, since they are all currently made exclusively using non-renewable fossil fuel energy sources. Hopefully, as non-renewables start to come online, they may be able to counteract this trend. Hopefully.

    [Aug15'05] An AP-AOL News poll on public attitudes about rising gasoline prices showed that the public thought the following things were responsible, in order: too much oil company profit (30%), foreign countries (22%), politicians (21%), environmentalists (9%), SUV owners (7%), other (3%). That the demand for oil might be running up against limited geological resources didn't make the named list! And environmentalists are thought worse bad guys than SUV owners. We do live in a flat-earth country, just like Thomas Friedman says; and unfortunately, we're about to fall off its edge. Meanwhile, Cindy has Bush hunkered down on his latest, record-breaking vacation. He had to take a helicopter to a little league game 20 miles away from Crawford to avoid her. His handlers are terrified of what he might say in an unscripted encounter. The swift-boaters haven't been able to take her out yet because she's turning into a Natalee Holloway. Google put her comments behind an 'adult' shield, probably because she took a certain country's name in vain. Meanwhile, sensing the mood of the country, top Democratic lawmakers demanded that *more* troops be sent to Iraq (Biden and McCain). Like Kerry in 2004, they no doubt "would have done *everthing* different in Iraq". Too bad they can't both go over there themselves and help out -- I think they're short of help. We should be OK here, though, thanks to eagle-eyed, large-brained airport security people who are busy protecting us from terr'ist babies! I think the proper word is "de-skilling" -- the turning off of whatever small amount of brain was still independently functioning in order to more closely follow instructions. I'm sure not looking foward to the time when these automatons get issued the latest, new and improved tasers ... Could take a bite out of the travel business ("We decided not to fly after grandma messed her pants after being tasered for mouthing off to the security guard who was feeling her up...").

    [Aug17'05] Just for scale, a medium-sized oil tanker holds around a million barrels of oil. That means that our daily gulp of oil here in the US (about 20 million barrels a day) sucks 20 such oil tankers dry every single day. The strategic petroleum reserve holds enough oil for about a month, or around 600 oil tanker's worth.

    [Aug18'05] "I am not a hero. Guys like me are just a necessary part of things. To maintain this way of life in a fine community like this, you need psychos like us to go and drop a bomb on somebody's house." -- the response of a marine who just returned from Iraq to a request to speak to a wealthy community, as told to Evan Wright. On a completely different, sad note, I just read that Michael Brecker is very sick with bone marrow cancer. He is looking for a bone marrow donor of a rare type, not matched by his brother or other family, and has had to stop performing. And yet different again, the Aug 17 San Diego City Beat published my response to a clueless July 27 column on Iraq by MsBeak.

    [Aug20'05] Lately, I've been watching daily oil prices on theoildrum and 321energy. For something as tangible and slowly changing as oil production and global oil usage, the wild flopping around in price amuses me. Somebody farts in a refinery causing the secretaries to leave early for lunch, and the price shoots up, despite the fact that refineries *use* oil, meaning that refinery problems should *reduce* demand. A few hours later, some dufus who knows nothing about geology writes a bumbling puff piece about 'reserves building up' and the price plummets. The last upward jump came after three small, inaccurate rockets missed a US warship and hit a taxi (the occupants survived). I don't look forward to what a bunch of self-pleasuring 'geniuses of the market' will do to oil prices when they finally wake up and realize the true gravity of the situation. They should be forced to go to college and learn something. It's embarrassing -- like football players that supposedly got a degree but never went to class. Meanwhile the price of photoelectric (solar) cells has been *increasing*. This was explained in a NYT article by Chris Dixon as a textbook supply/demand curve (more people buying them, leading to a shortage of silicon crystals), but it is more complicated. Photoelectric cells currently use waste silicon crystals from the semiconductor industry. As demand sops up the throwaways, the price will go up permanently, because the throwaways are being sold for less than they cost to make. They are expensive because it requires a lot of energy to make them. The energy comes from fossil fuels. As fossil fuel prices rise, it is likely that photoelectric cell prices will increase even more. The Onion had an article about "Intelligent falling" -- a new religious theory of gravity. Sometimes, the way economists talk about oil, energy, and the markets makes them sound awfully religious. They're like the priests on Easter Island who said, "don't worry, nothing bad will happen if you cut down all the trees -- the guys with the doomsday scenarios are only tree huggers who don't know anything about the genius of the moai..." They act like "Intelligent energy" can detect that we need it, and so will therefore virtually invent itself into existence. There *are* some positive developments on the horizon. Solar heat-concentrating devices are probably better long-term solutions than photoelectric cells, at least for sunny places. They don't work at all when it's cloudy. And there is a lot of research and development going on with thin film copper/indium/gallium/selenium photoelectric cells. These may be cheaper to manufacture than current silicon crystal cells.

    [Aug24'05] For better or worse, I posted several times in response to an amazingly clueless article by one of the Freakonomics authors in his blog. My posts in that endless discussion are here: ( post1 , post2 , post3 ).

    [Aug25'05] The credit derivatives market more than doubled last year to $8.4 trillion dollars (yep, that's about the same size as the GDP of the US, and this is just a particular subset of derivatives). Kewl rate of growth. Thank god the "The Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group" is in control. These are the people that helped 'fix' the 4 billion dollar mistake made in 1998 by Long Term Capital Management, a company run partly by the Nobel laureate who invented a derivative pricing equation, and which, somewhat counter to its name, made huge short bets that went bad when things went the 'wrong' way with the ruble, of all things. They got a $4 billion dollar bail out and nobody went to jail. The only punishment was that a few people lost their jobs (I wonder where they doing their genius thing, now?). Bankruptcy no problem, as long as you're down more than a billion. The "Counterparty" guys have 'explained' that now "urgent effort is needed to tackle the serious accumulation of trade confirmations". If you can understand what this means, then maybe you could tell me whether I should take what little money I have out of the bank now :-}

    [Aug28'05] Bye-bye LA Times. With opposition to the war approaching the levels only seen late in the Vietnam war, Doyle McManus' front page column today explains, "War critics have backing but not much of a following". The Opinion section has been bizarrely modified and neutered, with its front page containing an article by Leila Beckwith explaining why the State legislature needs to add an amendment prohibiting professors from supporting the Palestinians. Probably needs to also have a rider prohibiting discussion of how huge amount of our taxes were first used to bulldoze houses and illegally settle people, and then huge additional amounts of aid is then sent to remove them ($2 billion in new aid for the removal alone). Bush's numbers have fallen to scary, stunt-inducing levels. Besides the war, part of the reason for his low ratings is the high price of oil. Americans are in a pissy mood. The war is going badly, they know deep down it was in part about oil, but oil price is waaay up, anyway. They're mad, but they can't really come out and say why -- it's because the Iraqis are successfully fighting off our Death Star Darth Vader empire. They intuitively know that this looks bad to the rest of the world (the people who were getting their oil from Iraq before we blew in there). The rest of the world has not been weakened by two wars, ten years of sanctions, and thousands of tons of 'depleted' nuclear waste. The US would have a much less easy time taking on the rest of the world than destroying Iraq. This is a sensitive point in history. With respect to oil, things will probably get much worse on Monday, when the enormous category 5 hurricane, Katrina, slams into New Orleans, some Gulf of Mexico oil platforms and oil terminals, and the Port of South Louisiana. This will likely cause a spike in oil prices and disrupt manufactured imports and exports, all bad for Bush (and us!). But all the breathless CNN babe coverage will greatly help Bush, taking the focus off the war. Bad weather is a little like a terrorist event, and it may temporarily decrease the chance of him doing something extremely destabilizing. I'm not looking forward to the aftermath, though, in late September, when the situation is likely to get critical again.

    [Aug30'05] Eeesh, things look bad in New Orleans. The entire city is being evacuated. Floating dead bodies are being ignored as they try to rescue many people who are still trapped. There are thousands of dead, maybe even 10,000. Bad timing for Bush to have sent 4,000 Louisiana National Guard people to Iraq, and to have instituted the steepest cut ever in funding for levee strengthening and repair in Feb 05 in order to spend it on the Iraq disaster instead. There are reports that a recent Iraq line item was $75 million to try to bribe Sunnis to sign their new Constitution (written in English!); it didn't work. There is widespread looting but not enough National Guard to shoot looters because they're too busy shooting Iraqis. MSM won't touch these things yet ("confirmed dead now over 50"), of course, except to bemoan the fact that not enough looters have been shot -- if we could only have shot more looters, that would have fixed things, right? All of New Orleans is slowly flooding now, long after the hurricane has passed. If the levee breaches can be repaired, this will just stop the rise in the water level. It still all has to be pumped out. That will take months. This hurricane essentially created 1 million US refugees (a little more than the original 1948 Palestinian diaspora). They're not going to be going home for a long time, if ever. It looks like the biggest natural disaster in US history, yet the media feel like they are getting ready to move on to the next Scott Peterson; they just don't quite know what to do with a story that is 100,000 times as big as Aruba. The latest Pew poll of our populace shows that 42% believe that "living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time", 38% think that creationism should be taught instead of evolution in school, and 64% are open to teaching both creationism and evolution. I wonder if half of these lemmings also think that God is punishing the South for voting for Bush? (Trent Lott's house was knocked down). I think that people who believe in creationism should have their cell phones confiscated, their teevees darkened, their internet pr0n disconnected, and their OnStar service cancelled, because the Maxwell equations are not consistent with the Bible, either. Put your money where your mouth is. The cowardly, doddering Todd Gitlin warns antiwar protestors to be civil. Thanks for all your help, Todd.

    [Sep01'05] $250,000 of US tax receipts for each 'settler' to leave their stolen land last month, but black Americans in New Orleans don't deserve anything because they didn't have the 'personal responsibility' (e.g., cars) to run away. Red state libertarian whiteys should watch their backs, though, because the blue state whiteys that are subsidizing them could decide at some point to demand even more 'personal responsibility' (e.g., when the power goes out in Phoenix and Phoenix starts to feel like a holiday in Fallujah). Louisiana was a red state in 2000 and 2004, but they're still getting screwed by Mr. Red. For *1.5 days* worth of Iraq tax receipt spending (a quarter of a billion dollars), the levees could have been strengthened and most of the damage averted. Ethnicity and its interaction with and exploitation by the media is a complete disaster for humans. And you can bet, we're going to see a lot more race-baiting (whites 'finding', blacks 'looting'), which is basically 'poor-baiting' as the long emergency starts to slowly get underway.

    [Sep02'05] Hearing some of the voices of 'the people' is sure scary, eh? I'll put words into the people's mouths, if I may. San Diego gets around 10% of its water from local sources. When people nearer the source of the other 90% decide they need more of it, stupid San Diegans will probably riot. Shoot 'em. Big earthquake in San Fransicso has people looting sushi restaurants? Stupid for living there -- shoot 'em. Fossil water from the giant Ogallala aquifer in the middle of the country is being pumped at many times its replenishment rate. Illinois is now having the worst drought in 50 years. Stupid midwesterners -- they couldn't think ahead, even with all those agricultural subsidies. When a 200 year drought comes, they may not be too happy. Shoot 'em if they get out of hand. New Yorkers have a lot of buildings that are virtually uninhabitable without air conditioning in the summer. There may be grid problems again in a few years, and they may last for more than a day this time. Tough luck, stupid New Yorkers. Shoot 'em if they misbehave. Tornados are more common in the middle of the country. Only stupid people live near tornados. Serves 'em right (no need to shoot 'em). The reason poor people and old people don't have cars is that they are stupid and lazy. Because of this, they can't get away, and therefore, they shouldn't be helped if they get into trouble, and they should be shot if they straggle into your town. This isn't the 'reptilian brain' -- a total crock perpetrated by Paul MacLean and popularized by Carl Sagan -- but rather the characteristically linguistic human brain running with only teevee input (it's all about language and naming and culture, which turtles and snakes distinctly lack!). There are already a chunk of people in this country who think that what we really need is to have a national quick response police force that can immediately step in anywhere and shoot people as soon as trouble breaks out (Wired has an article today about how the military is taking sound weapons to LA for testing on poor people, oh I mean, to help broadcast 'instructions' over long distances). It's hard to know what percentage currently harbors these fascist sentiments, which predictably bubble up in times of crisis, because pollsters are too 'civil' to ask real questions (political polling is like s*x research in this respect). This is similar to the support for the Iraq war -- people have no trouble 'supporting' having other people's teenagers kill other people's kids. Well, at least September is "National Preparedness Month".

    [Sep04'05] Yesterday, the Red Cross was stopped by 'Homeland Security' from bringing food and water into New Orleans. Bush must be so desperate to avoid Labor Day pictures of even one of the 10,000 (or even 30,000) dead, that he is willing to kill more low-market-value people. Katrina will have a death toll *at least* several times that of 9-11, but because the dead are mostly poor and black (old ladies trapped in their apartment blocks knocking on the ceiling until the water went to the next higher floor), they hardly count. The official propaganda death toll for New Orleans is 59. This is completely ridiculous (compare 9-11 when the initial estimates were 5,000 dead). There won't be a months-long nightly empathetic story about a personal tragedy because the victims have the wrong skin color for empathy. Not that swat teams are clearing everybody out that is not dead or dying, we may never know the real death toll. The federal government gets most of the $5 billion in yearly royalties from oil operations in the Gulf of Mexico, but it couldn't even cough up a 1/20 of that for one year to fix the levees. Instead, the disgusting puke mainstream media subtly whips up race hatred with a shrouded comment about looting and shooting -- Katrina's 'incubator babies' -- at the end of every crucial initial report on the disaster. Then, later, they 'correct' the record (e.g., yesterday and today's LA Times, with multiple admissions that initial reports of lawlessness were exaggerated). Too late, media scumbags. Your swill is permanently installed in the brain puppets of good Americans. Everyone will remember black looting and no one will remember the actual gist of what happened: like 30 poor black old people drowned in their beds in an unevacuated old folks home -- times a thousand.

    [Sep05'05] Dianne Foster makes an interesting point (in Xymphora comments) on putting people in the Superdome. I thought about this at the time, but forgot the uncertainty after events played out. When people were being put into the Superdome, the storm was still Category 5 with some remaining uncertainty in landfall longitude. If it hadn't weakened as much as it did, or if it had hit a mere 50 miles to the west so that the characteristically stronger east side of the eyewall had hit NO (instead of the west side), or both, then the Superdome may well have collapsed on all those people. The decision was taken anyway (versus emergency bussing). The jamming of various emergency frequencies as well as Citizens Band (CB) continues around New Orleans (heard by truckers on Interstate 10 -- update: NOAA claims solar X-ray flare may have been disrupting Gulf emergency communications). Aaron Broussard's well-publicized interview told that FEMA cut emergency telephone lines to his community after denying him the food and water he requested for the peole still there. Broussard had the lines hooked back up and he posted an armed guard to stop FEMA from doing it again. Mayor Nagin (Bush-contributor, lifelong Republican until just before his election in Democratic N.O.) has sent away the local police. The hapless remaining peole say they are being treated like Al Queda, hearded out of their non-flooded homes, and stripped of their possessions. Imagine doing that to white New Yorker professors after 9-11. Wouldn't fly.

    [Sep06'05] The US is slowly turning into a third world country -- a banana police state, as some have quipped. If the current trends in manufacturing/engineering/software outsourcing, loss of health insurance, wealth inequality, debt, and homeland militarization continue unabated -- even assuming an unlimited supply of oil -- in another 20 years, the place will be a complete wreck. Add in a long-term peak-oil-caused contraction and it *really* looks ugly. This is fine for the estate tax crowd (this week, Bush is working on making sure this top 1% get 95% of this latest giveaway). The richies can move their booty somewhere else and find another host to parasitize, or come back and buy cheap after a collapse. Not such a good outlook for the great majority of us, though. It's slow-motion class war. Don't get fooled by the slow part. As Michael Ruppert has warned , all the reasonable calls to expand and un-gut the disaster relief part of FEMA (and get rid of the incompentent patronage-appointed director who was fired from his previous decade-long job as, uhh, head lawyer for the International Arabian Horse [show] Association!) will result not in better disaster relief (what reasonable people want), but rather better Continuity of Government (COG) operations -- that is, SWAT teams to cut emergency lines, shoot starving looters, drive around in armored personnel carriers, crowd-control you with microwave and sonic weapons, cancel the Bill of Rights, stick you in temporary prison camps without trial, and of course, rescue pets -- when the next big bad something happens. I think what most reasonable people want instead is a government response analogous to what Cuba delivered last year when it evacuated a million and a half people from the path of a Category 5 landfall hurricane (Hugo) with virtually no loss of life (but without other repressive parts of the Cuban government). All the yahoo sheep who were calling for black blood last week may have a surprise in store one day when they run into the wrong side of the Continuity of Government police in their home town.

    [Sep07'05] In the days before Katrina hit, I was assuming (stupidly as usual) that the disaster would result in a big uptick in popularity for Bush and would take the focus off Iraq. I think he somehow flubbed this 'opportunity'. After leaving Crawford to come to San Diego af few days after the disaster (where his tottering public appearance forced the cancellation of a raft of chemotherapy patients' treatment, but then he was too unsteady to actually appear at the place where the treatment cancellation occurred), Bush got into high gear. He went to New Orleans, where his appearance forced the suspension of all ongoing aquatic and aerial rescues. His Goebbels team set up a fake levee-fixing scene and a fake food distribution center. Both were disassembled as soon as he left, and then real rescue operations could resume. Given the many stories of apparently premeditated interference with rescue teams, it seems like the plan was to respond slowly or even hinder the first responders, let things get out of hand, whip up some always-dependable race hatred, bring in troops and seal things off, evacuate everybody at gunpoint, and then when all the locals were gone, give all the reconstruction contracts to out-of-town Halliburton buddies in order to reconstruct a New Orleans Lite, with a jazz theme, but a lot less black people (no right of return for Americans, if they have the wrong ethnicity). Most of this seems to have gone through, but a good chunk of the general public seems to have become a little bit revolted by the spectacle (after their race hatred ebbed a little), and the complete control of the media seems to have suffered a temporary lapse. Also, Mayor Nagin's (remember: a 'Democratic' Bush contributor) recent order to forcibly evict all the remaining residents (maybe 10,000) is being disobeyed by people in the army, esp. those from the region. However, I've been wrong so many times about how things look to the 'common man', that I will wait until I see the real numbers on pollkatz next month. It it still possible that despite disapproving of Bush's handling of Katrina, they may not increase their disapproval of him. If there is a big dip, then I might get worried, seeing as there was this weird early August firing of U.S. Army General Kevin P. Byrnes, just before his retirement, over an extra-marital affair (?!) (his divorce has now gone through), with many different speculations as to what the real reason was, including something about a middle August Northcom nuclear terror exercise based in Charleston, S.C. that may or may not have been cancelled.

    [Sep14'05] Things grind depressingly along. Bush's poll numbers are down a little, but not that big of a drop. Despite all the blowhard press on this, not one of those endless, breathless, useless reports *ever* shows you a decent graph like pollkatz , even for their own polls. How can you possibly understand what polls mean without looking at them this way? Shame on you 'reporters'. If businessmen can understand a powerpoint graph of one variable as a function of time, then so can the unwashed masses. In Houston, Katrina evacuees are being serviced by a huge amount of volunteer work. I don't know about you, but I would *sure* like to see Cheney 'volunteering' (at gunpoint would work) to clean toilets and disimpact a few bowels. Bush allows 'Brownie' to 'resign' instead of firing him. Privatized Blackwater mercenaries blow into New Orleans to eject people from their homes (where are the damn libertarians when you need them...). FEMA outsources the body cleanup and counting for about $1 million/week to an 'outstanding' firm, SCI, one of whose subsidiaries was recently convicted of piling up hundreds bodies in sheds and in the woods in instead of cremating them (SCI settled by paying the relatives $100 million). But you can't photograph the bodies, or the 82nd airborne will stomp your camera, a**hole. The libertarian yahoos started squealing at the idea of a windfall oil profits tax (like the one announced in France that immediately dropped fuel prices a notch there). They should put their whiny money where their whiny mouths are and not only privative all our trains and busses but all our roads and road repair and traffic lights, too -- get our highways off our backs and off the dole, right? (actually, it would probably reduce the amount of driving we do -- a good thing). And finally, the 'Brownie' replacement is the pathetic 'duct tape' guy! In Iraq, most reconstruction projects (e.g., electrical, water and sanitation) have been shut down and the money diverted to private security companies who are guarding the people who are no longer doing these projects. We're still spending almost $2 billion a week in Iraq and Afghanistan -- money which we should obviously be spending on renewable energy, instead of trying to hopelessly encircle the paltry 20 or so years worth of oil that remains there. The don't-talk-about-the-elephant-in-the-room aspect of it leaves me speechless and depressed. It's all part of our one shot at high civilization on this planet courtesy of fossil fuels -- the product of solar energy collected over hundreds of millions of years and turned into highly-energy-dense oil, gas, and coal, and which is about half used up now. The second half will be mostly gone before the midpoint of the century, leaving us to stew in our global-warming-heated juices. The University just repaved all the still-in-good-condition roads around my office and built three new buildings, all with fossil fuels. Tons and tons of the stuff was used. Elixir of the gods. Makes me proud to have the power of language and be a human, I suppose.

    [Sep15'05] Dang. Karl Rover is now in charge of a $200 billion dollar fund for reconstruction. I'm sure he will use this discretion wisely. This is class war, plain and simple. It's time for the villagers to turn off Big Brother, get out the torches, and smoke out the Frankenstein monster. It's alive and gaining power every day.

    [Sep17'05] Are Americans truly 'getting it'? As a result of higher gasoline prices, SUV's have been depreciating more rapidly (as discounts on new ones are offered), and car shoppers have elevated fuel efficiency all the way up to 23rd-most-important factor in what kind of car they will buy (the usual position of fuel efficiency is about 35th-most-important). Who knows, in a decade or two, fuel efficiency might make it into the top three -- right around the time the grid starts to get intermittent as result of chronic natural gas shortages...

    [Sep21'05] Rita has ballooned up to a category 5, and more intense (though currently slightly smaller) than Katrina -- Rita is currently the 3rd most intense recorded hurricane in American history (behind Gilbert, 1988 and Labor Day, 1935). Unfortunately the predicted path runs way close to my sister's house near Houston. Perhaps God is talking to Bush and Cheney in the only language they understand -- oil and money. As searchers recover bodies from Katrina, they are finding mostly old people and children. Though our putrid scumbag media will never say it, shooting more looters wouldn't have helped old people and kids to leave when they had no means to do so, and when no one came to help them.

    [Sep25'05] Yesterday I went marching with the about 2,000 people -- the largest antiwar demo in two and a half years -- through the deserted streets of downtown San Diego, ending in Balboa Park. There were 2 or 3 pro-war protestors. We didn't even know they were there until KSWB gave one of them equal time to our 2,000 on the nightly newspeak. Whatever. Today, Phoney Tony Bliar officially withdrew from global warming treaties by putting his faith in "science and technology". The price of oil has continued to drop as self-pleasuring oil traders wrap their you-know-what's in dollar bills and get themselves off. The price drop is presumably because some refineries have been temporarily disabled, temporarily lowering demand for oil. The idea that something like this should radically change the price of oil seems insane to me. A barrel of oil contains 42 gallons. It can be made into about 20 gallons of gasoline (more or less -- this varies a little depending on the grade of the oil). A gallon of gasoline contains about 36 kW-hours of chemical energy. An internal combustion engine turns about 9 kW-hours of this energy into useful work (the rest is lost as heat). One horsepower is equivalent to about 3/4 of a kW. However, a human working hard continuously can only put out about 1/10 to 1/5 of a kilowatt (compare the power output of a human to a one-horsepower horse). So, the 20 gallons of gasoline from one barrel of oil contains about 180 useful kilowatt-hours, divided by say, 1/8 of a kilowatt per person, which gives about 1400 hours of hard human work. Divide this by 6 hours of continuous hard work per day (no breaks), and you get about 230 days, or approximately one year of 5-days-a-week hard labor by a human. This boils down conveniently to: ONE BARREL of oil = ONE YEAR of hard human work. This makes sense when comparing digging a foundation or grading a road by hand (Roman-style) to doing the same thing with an oil-powered bulldozer and a backhoe. A barrel of oil currently costs $64. Clearly, this price *waaaay* underestimates its true worth to us humans (how much do you have to pay a human to do one year of hard labor?). I could give two hoots what the economists say about how money is more important. I look forward to discussions about the true worth of oil while doing hard labor alongside an economist when scientists fail to come up with a replacement. Watching the newspeak people read their teleprompters had gotten me depressed (I don't normally watch teevee), but then I got back on the web and came across this gem . As many as 36 trained Navy dolphins may have been freed by hurricane Katrina. The Navy has trained dolphins for many years to attack divers (humans in wetsuits) using small electrodes implanted under the skin for reinforcement. This works because dolphins are naturally aggressive. But the recently freed/escaped dolphins are apparently armed with 'toxic dart' gun harnesses. You divers and windsurfers in the Gulf and Caribbean should watch out, because a bunch of 007 Flippers are coming to getcha. No details/confirmation are available because, natch, they're classified. There is not too much to see or eat down there, however, since there are huge dead zones where fertilizer-laden runoff has led to anaerobic conditions, killing virtually everything in huge swaths of the Gulf coast (John Coleman, retired to San Diego 'weather' teevee, has even suggested that the dead zones might partly explain why Rita weakened just before landfall). So the 'Flippers' will probably head out to resort islands in the south Atlantic in search of fish and enemy divers. Perhaps the yacht-people and their concubines will match close enough... link

    [Sep26'05] It would seem to be the case that higher gas prices will soon be on the way, given that 100% (!) of Gulf of Mexico oil production is currently "shut in" (1.5 million barrels a day, with average total US consumption around 20 million barrels a day), up from about 60% shut in from Katrina, just before Rita hit. US Natural gas consumption is about 62 billion cubic feet per day, and maybe 10-15% is currently shut in as well (since the Henry hub where a lot of the pipelines come together may have been damaged). High gasoline and gas prices will make Bush much more unpopular than the disaster in Iraq. The ironic thing is that it's not really Bush's fault that oil demand finally starting to bump up against all-out production capacity this year (well, other than not preparing for the inevitable). Rather, it's just the predictable consequences of industrial civilization. No matter how mad the people get, the remaining oil in the ground isn't going to listen; it won't come out of well bores any faster because people are mad. Let the anger of the people increase and seethe. Meanwhile, the Fed has been creating money this year at the rate of about $20 billion dollars a week, and credit (which is created from the money that the fed creates, and which works just like money, and which comes in too many varieties for me to remember) is being created at an even faster rate (fractional reserve banking eventually multiplies fed-created money by a factor of at least 10). Other currencies somehow even seem to be inflating in tandem with the dollar (?). In this light, who could bother about a mere 2 billion a week down Halliburton's maw in Iraq and Afghanistan? It doesn't seem possible that this rampant creation of money can continue forever; but it's worth nothing that it's been running like this non-stop since 1996. I really don't understand how it works well enough to guess what will happen next. At least Bush and Chertoff are back from their scary visit the past few days to Peterson Air Force Base (underground nuclear war central -- headquarters of US Northern Command) in Colorado Springs. They went there just before Rita hit the coast/oil.

    [Sep27'05] The story below says that Rita damaged more oil rigs than any previous storm in history. You would think that would be a bad thing (AKA "bullish for oil" by the money people). Also, it appears that virtually all oil from the Gulf of Mexico remains "shut in", along with much of the natural gas (the Henry Hub may have sustained some damage). Again "bullish". In the past, oil prices have shot up even after a small refinery fire. Here, with production equal to 7% (!) of total US oil consumption turned off, prices are going down or just wavering. It just doesn't make sense to me.

    [Oct03'05] Imagine the media firestorm that would have erupted if Al Sharpton hypothetically suggested aborting every white baby or every Jewish baby. By contrast, Bennett's genocidal suggestion however hypothetical that aborting every black baby would cut crime sadly won't even slightly bite into that swine's opulent speaker fees. The objective scientific reality of races -- that 80% of the variation within the average human gene is *within* 'races' as opposed to *between* 'races' (or the fact that Israelis and Palestinians in the mideast are genetically indistinguishable) -- are irrelevant. This is about a *socially* defined concept of race, AKA class war. On *completely* different note, a small car efficiently tooling down the interstate burns about 1 gallon of gasoline per hour, while a large jet plane burns about 1 gallon kerosine per second at takeoff and about 1/3 gallon per sec when cruising. However, the plane goes a lot faster and carries a lot more people, and this basically cancels this difference. The fact that planes and cars are roughly equally efficient demonstrates how fundamental liquid fuels are to modern life. The main outlier is rail, which is a major win over cars and planes -- 5 to 10 times as efficient -- for long distance because of the markedly lower friction and wind resistance (wheel flexing and drag in cars/trucks, large aerodynamic drag in fast flying planes). Find out here how trains go around curves (on a good day) without a differential. However, largely as a result of our current pavement/airport subsidy structure, long distance rail is currently *more* expensive to the enduser than planes and cars. On the positive side, people have been buying a lot more bicycles recently, which is excellent news.

    [Oct06'05] Reading the lastest Gulf of Mexico oil/gas DOE situation report ( pdf ) while looking at a picture of rigs and hurricane paths, and then looking at the price of oil continue to *drop* really emphasizes just how short the outlook of the markets is. On page 2 of the report you can see that the cumulative shut-in loss ("bbls" confusingly means "barrels") over the last month and a half has been 48 million barrels of oil. This should be compared to our daily gulp of 20 million barrels as well as the 5 month cumulative loss from Ivan of 44 million barrels. Since Katria+Rita was *much* more severe than Ivan (111 oil platforms destroyed vs. only 7 by Ivan), the total loss from Katrina and Rita may approach several percent of our yearly usage. The fact that oil prices remain low reflects demand reduction, Saudi selling oil to us below world price, refineries using less because they're still broken, backed up tankers because ports are broken, European donations, and strategic reserves withdrawals. From a three-day point of view, given those facts, it is logical that oil should drop. But *someone* should be talking about the longer picture, because it could mean life and death. The mainstream media yammers on in a drug-induced haze. It is as if a person jumped out a window and then half way down, noted that things so far were going quite well. Think about conducting other parts of life -- e.g., agriculture -- with a 3 day look-ahead. Agriculture is not possible with a 3 day look-ahead. We shouldn't worship such extreme short-sightedness. It's going to be extremely dangerous to our health. Meanwhile scientists have reconstructed viable, approximate copies ( pdf ) of the original 1918 flu virus that killed 50 million people worldwide in 1918 (more than WWI, and the worst pandemic in human history), and have killed mice with it, showing that it is much more virulent than current flu strains. This same week, Bush announces that martial law will be imposed if there is a flu outbreak. Given that the anthrax mailed to Senator Leahy was a strain developed in US biowarfare labs, a guy could get a little nervous, and hope that it was a joke instead of the real thing in a Biosafety Level 3 lab in Georgia.

    [Oct09'05] The Senate unanimously approved a defense spending bill containing another $50 billion for part of the coming year in Iraq and Afghanistan. For scale, this is more that we spend on all biomedical research every year. And all to kill extremely low-tech poor Iraqis and make a complete shambles of their country and government, halfway around the globe.

    [Oct11'05] Gulf of Mexico oil production is recovering slowly. Currently, about 1 million barrels a day is shut-in (about 70% of total). From Sept 26 to now, the cumulative shut-in is 55 million barrels, or about 1% of total yearly US usage. The total loss may end up around 2% of yearly US usage (0.5% of global usage). Projected percentage loss of natural gas is similar. This is significant, but so far, we may just miss actual shortages and pipeline shutdowns this winter, in part because of other other countries helping us out. I don't know if this will be enough of a stimulus to get the general public to face up to the long continuous downslope that we will be facing in the next decade.

    [Oct16'05] In Alex Cockburn's Counterpunch diary today, among other things, he proposes that global warming is not CO2-caused but rather 'natural variation', that ethanol would be a plausible replacement for oil, and that anyway, peak oil is not true because oil is abiotic. What a howling non-sequitur that last one is! Even if oil was abiotic, which it's not (Ghawar, for example, is almost pure plankton dung, and plankton never lived underground the last time I checked), how would that help with observed depletion? Alex is a cultured writer who effortlessly draws on many historical references, doesn't like too many commas, and writes in a refreshing, fun-to-read style. Fine. But it's pretty weak writing and thinking to ignore the views of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and geologists without giving any reason. That's worse, even, than, say, using way, way too many commas. Alex would get equally upset if someone completely mangled recent history. I have nothing against a contrarian. But many times, science has found reasonably good answers were before here were arguments and uncertainty. Then we have to move on, and the contrarians concede; you can't go back to the old way of thinking (unless, I suppose, we first run out of oil...).

    [Oct18'05] Recent spygate revelations that Cheney aide Hannah will snitch, and rumors that Cheney might be replaced with Condi suggest that the administration is in desperate straits. This may push forward the upcoming war with Iran. It makes sense (from their perspective) to act now to avoid a Republican wipe-out in the midterm Congressional elections. I fear we are getting close to a turning point. You would hardly know anything was amiss from the mainstream media (see, for example, Google news). And what a continuing disaster for industrial civilization this will be! Right now, we should be intensely planning and testing and designing and manufacturing and optimizing alternative energy sources and alternative transportation and manufacturing methods to cushion the great contraction. Intead, we are flushing ourselves and our children and grandchildren right down the toilet. What a shame. Sometimes, I feel I should be more sad about it. Probably, when the fourth reich gets really cranked up, I will regret not having done more to stop it. As the avian flu scare gets cranked up on the eve of the war on Iran, I think back to the SARS pneumonia scare, which occurred right after the start of the second US invasion of Iraq in early 2003 (aided and abetted by none other than Judith Miller). Every year, 36,000 North Americans die of regular pneumonia (about 100 a day). And every year, another 40,000 North Americans die of the regular flu (mostly older and immune-compromised people). So far, less than 100 people have died of avian flu *across the planet* -- that is, a whole year of the dreaded avian flu (or SARS) is less than one *day* of regular flu or regular pneumonia in North America. What a strange and fishy replay of SARS. Why aren't we worried about SARS or Ebola now? Where did *they* go? What will the Asians come up with next? Why do we need martial law for avian flu but not SARS? It is true that I am a little worried about the possibility that the recently reconstructed and reconstituted *1918* flu could get out -- no doubt during a 'well-meaning' attempt to make a vaccine to it.

    [Oct21'05] Economists often claim that we can deal with oil shocks better now because we have gotten more efficient with fuel use since the 1970's oil shock, and remain so, even with SUV's. However, to deal with another oil shock, we will have to replace current vehicles with even more efficient ones. There are about 130 million cars and 80 million light trucks on the road in the US (210 million vehicles). The US produces about 5 million cars and 7 million trucks annually (12 million vehicles, about 6% to total on the road). From these numbers, it is not obvious that we (or the rest of the world) will be able to respond quickly enough to an oil shock, esp. when you consider that it takes a lot of energy to manufacture a car (a substantial portion of the energy it uses in its lifetime). Finally, you can't wring more efficiency out of a standard 80,000 pound payload truck without reducing its payload. Trucks got about 5 miles per gallon in 1970. Trucks get about 5 miles per gallon today. Suggestions that the auto makers are withholding 100 or 200 mile per gallon cars are utter cargo cult fantasies -- if by a 'car', you mean something that encloses at least 4 people sitting upright plus some of their stuff and that can cruise at 65 miles per hour. Now, if a 'car' includes something about 2 feet off the ground that you lie down in, with thin bicycle tires pumped up to 120 psi, that cruises at 30 miles an hour, then 150 miles per gallon is no prob.

    [Oct22'05] "It does no good to ask the weakling's pointless question, 'Is America a fascist state?' We must ask instead, in a major rather than a minor key, 'Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen'". -- Lewis H. Lapham.

    [Oct23'05] From all the saber-rattling accompanying the lapdog UN report on the Hariri assassination, it is looking more like the US may attack Syria first, instead of Iran. Hersh and Ritter originally suggested Iran in June 2005. By the end of August, Tarpley was still suggesting Iran on Nov 1 or Dec 1, which is still vaguely possible. However, the hurricanes and the momentum of the bizarro leak investigation were not predictable in early or mid-2005, and this may have somewhat interfered with war planning. Hersh's and Ritter's articles -- possibly motivated by leaks from military people opposed to another invasion -- also may have slowed things down (or they may have merely been smokescreens). It is worth noting that Syria is a much weaker target than Iran. The US military is only confident of attacking extremely weak opponents such as Iraq, which had been economically starved and bombed for over a decade, and which was known before the attack to have no air defenses, no air force, virtually no helicopters, and of course, no WMDs. It has been suggested that perhaps the US will use small nuclear bombs on Iran and then just run away, but that would likely have very negative impacts on US troops who only remain in Iraq largely on the good graces of the Iran-sympathetic Shi'ites. If the entirety of Iraq was united against the US occupation, US troop concentrations, which are in bases a long distance from the southern ports, could be starved of fuel and supplies and seriously endangered. Of course, the US could 'win' by carpet-bombing or even nuclear bombing Iraqi cities. At first I was going to write that this would be impractical because of world opinion, but maybe that's wrong. Look what the US did to Fallujah without any significant reprisals from any other country. It is not clear that a small nuclear bomb would have been worse. But I think the most likely scenario is not an invasion of Iran, but rather a half a year of partial invasions and provocations of Syria (already begun), which will continue to be studiously ignored by the mainstream media, and then an outright confrontation only be mid-2006. We are now where we were with respect to Iraq in mid 2002. I distinctly remember thinking then "it sure looks like they are planning a war, but I don't see how they will be able to drag everyone along". It took about 9 months of continuous propaganda to whip the American mind into shape. Also, average Americans never get mad when they have been fooled/taken/chumped.

    [Oct24'05] The US prison population has continued its inexorable growth -- up almost 2%, which is in line with a 3.2% annual growth rate over the past decade. We now have 1 out of 128 people in prison (2.3 million people). This compares with China's 1 out of 866 (1.5 million people). We have more total people in prison than China because we imprison almost 7 times as many people in jail per capita. But there is still room for growth. If we work hard, we can make this the best damn prison country in the world! In a recent poll , a majority of Americans rejected the theory of evolution (just 15% believe in God-free evolution). They should also poll people on quantum mechanics, which people understand about as well as evolutionary biology. I wonder what the response would be to: "Do you believe that measurements taken at a distance can be correlated without the invention of God?" Also, they should probably find out how many people think it would be OK to put people who believe in evolution in jail. Hopefully still under 10-15% of the 80-85% of people who think that God is responsible for evolution.

    [Oct27'05] While the synthetic bird flu scare continues, 106,000 people died of adverse drug reactions and 115,000 people died this year from *bedsores*. Bedsores and drug reactions are not as good for scaring our non-numerate populace -- but they kill a quarter of a million North Americans *a year*. How many US-ians killed so far by bird flu? None.

    [Oct28'05] Just like the case of Nixon getting booted for a two-bit burglary instead of for killing 1-2 million South East Asian civilians, the press is now slavering over the outing of an already-outed-by-Aldrich-Ames (!) spy instead of over the lies that led our bin Laden'd populace to war and the killing of 100,00 to 200,000 civilians. For shame, guys, since you damn well know better -- just as you knew better when Clinton's support of the Iraq sanctions that killed a lot more Iraqis than Bush so far did.

    [Oct31'05] The current hot topic on the UCSD campus is whether the student-run television station piped into dorms should be allowed to air pr0n, home-grown or otherwise. This fine example of student activism comes courtesy the right-wing Koala student newspaper. There is not a peep from the left about the war (or energy) on campus. Complete silence. I admit I am a little disconcerted by the thought of pr0n free speech coming to my classroom. So far, my students have only been getting upset if the lectures aren't delivered on PowerPoint... (yes, they specifically want Microsoft, whose profits rose 30% this one year, keeping pace with those of oil companies).

    [Nov11'05] Finally, the odd softness in oil and gasoline prices is explained! Petroleum imports have increased 60% (YTD) over last year (!). Demand (a ridiculous name for actual usage) has recovered from the effects of the hurricanes and is now up once again. But the enormous increase in imports has increased the supply even more, leading to lower prices. The huge import increase has already started to tail off. It will take a while for that bolus to work its way through the digestive tract. I will be surprised if oil prices don't resume their upward trend in another few months once it does. The latest data from the UK and Norway suggests that production is down almost 20% from last year (ouch!). Before long, we will be in the situation were we are in Prudoe Bay (US 1980's Alaska oil) where the 'whatever reserves' keep increasing (see Prudoe graph in my oil presentation ) but the actual oil production and water cut keep getting worse (so much water gets pumped down in depleting fields like Prudoe that the water-to-oil ratio coming back up can be as high as 10 or 20-to-1). Oil fields never recover from downslopes like those; rather, more oil is found elsewhere. But at some point, there is not enough elsewhere. When Alaska/Prudoe was found, it helped US oil production to not decline faster; it *didn't* reverse the decline that started in 1970.

    [Nov18'05] Recent reports suggest that the US has snatched with no trial or public charge 83,000 people , transporting some of them in unmarked planes to secret detention and torture centers in other countries and possibly in the US itself. That's a lot of people. 108 of those snatched are known to have died in US custody, some probably tortured to death about the location of non-existent WMD's. Although Cheney knew there weren't any, the torturers probably didn't know. I've worried about getting on the Kafkesque always-search or no-fly lists because nothing you can do will get you off of them (there was a baby on one of the lists, and the airport drones dutifully searched it). But this other list is much worse. Good Americans should be wary of the creeping police state they are implicitly approving. Many approve of torture: 15% say it is often justified, 31% say sometimes, 17% say rarely, and only 32% unconditionally oppose it. This is worrisome, esp. since the going hasn't gotten tough yet -- such as an energy shortage, another synthetic terror event, a housing bubble burst, a dollar crisis, another war or two, and so on. On a wry positive note, it is a bit fun to watch the Sony PR dept scrambling to disassociate in consumers little minds the following two things: (1) the recent Sony rootkit DRM (that came on 2 million movies Sony disks sold this year), the 'fix' for which opens up people's computers to cloaked viruses courtesy of the DRM cloaking functions, and, (2) the unclean spyware and viruses themselves. Also Sony got caught using freeware (LAME) in their distros without attribution. At least the freeware they stole ran without bugs while Sony's dufus rootkit used a few percent of a 3 GHz CPU continuously. Sheesh, programming standards sure have fallen. For another laugh, check out this GE ad from a few months back with sexy models mining coal (!?) in tank tops flexing their glistening muscles in almost non-existent US shaft mines (virtually all US coal is strip mined). You can't make this stuff up. Meanwhile, in China where they still *do* have dangerous shaft mines, 4000 people have so far died mining coal this year.

    [Nov28'05] After 3 years in secret detention with no charges, Padilla is finally indicted for conspiring "to commit at any place outside the United States acts that would constitute murder". No scary dirty bomb, but just that he conspired to try to kill an unspecified person in an unspecified place? I suppose that's still pretty scary, boys and girls. If they told us any more, they'd have to kill us.

    [Dec05'05] Maybe Rumsfart and his ghoul generals should go back and read Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), published in 1486 and written by two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger (go here or here for extracts). They could brush up on technique (e.g., the one where you repeatedly break a woman's shin bone using a special metal boot). Works almost every time (well except when the woman dies on you before you get a chance to burn her). One small problem that emerged was that there weren't any witches. Estimates of the female death toll range into the millions. *Lots* of women confessed to being witches, and were then burned to death if the torture hadn't already killed them (though 'kinder gentler' executioners would often strangle them before the flames rose up). Given that only 32% of Americans unconditionally oppose torture now, a guy could could get a little nervous that one of the new Ayatollah Asscroft a**holes they've been hiring lately might have a new 'Hammer' up his sleeve. This will come to tears and worse at home if you don't run 'em out now, Good Americans.

    [Dec12'05] A recent USDA report ERS-ERR-11 "Household Food Security in the United States 2004" reports that hunger increased almost 15% in one year (2004) in the US, during the 'recovery' from a recession. 13.5 million households are currently "food insecure". That's a pretty hefty growth rate. Meanwhile, about the torture thing again (just saw Syriana). Torture has always been a part of US foreign policy, and people who piously say how torture is ruining our image need to read a little history. The difference is that before, we used to officially say that torture was bad, while still using/funding/teaching it. Now, at a time when we are probably torturing less people than we did in Vietnam, we are starting to say it's OK (e.g., 82 percent of FOX News Channel viewers said torture is acceptable in "a wide range" of situations). That's an ominous development given that things have yet to get really tight with respect to energy. The recent execution of Alpizar was almost a carbon copy of the tube execution in London with respect to brainwashing the populace. The 'I have a bomb' disinfo planted after agents shot Alpizar dead after he was surrounded in the jetway is collapsing (report in Time!), but as usual, it already did its job. The story is being reported as showing that homeland security works -- because an innocent person was gunned down (!). No passenger confirmed the bomb story despite hours of prodding, after having to sit terrorized in their seats with their hands over their heads at gunpoint for an hour while they cleaned up the blood in the jetway. Instead, passengers reported that Alpizar's wife had run after him saying "My husband's sick. He's sick. He's bipolar. He didn't take his medicine. It was my fault. I made him get on the plane. You know, we just came from a medical mission. Oh, my God! They've killed my husband!â" (quote from Orlando architect Jorge Borrelli). Soon after the fact, we had the execrable 'Lionel' on supposedly left Air America (not!) riffing on how Alpizar sounds like a Muslim name. How cute. But maybe you should get a little skin bleach the next time you fly, Li, eh? Sheep Americans, you shouldn't keep your heads down and go along with this! Sheep eventually get slaughtered.

    [Dec14'05] "How can you support the troops and not support the war? What is it that the troops were doing, except waging that war?! Those soldiers who should be supported are those who are resisting -- or seeking the means to resist -- the war." -- Bob Avakian, on Vietnam. Right now, the US military is escalating bombing raids across Iraq, and the press has barely reported it. This an escalation from about 2 *million* 500 pound bombs dropped last year (Hersh). This has been killing mainly civilians (see the Lancet study). I don't support that order or the people carrying it out. The arguments about 'supporting the troops' are carbon copies of the arguments about Vietnam. We killed perhaps 2 million southeast asian civilians and perhaps 2 million soldiers in our lost war on Vietnam (both numbers plus or minus 1 million). It was more than half a Holocaust. It was a horrible wrong against humanity. It happened because people supported our troops and the troops followed their orders. It only stopped when our troops *stopped* following orders and the military hierarchy started losing control of the army (e.g., 'fragging' -- killing of superior officers by troops). The mental toll on the troops that survived was substantial -- as many committed suicide after the war as were killed in the war (about 60,000). It is likely that the Iraq war will continue until something similar to the late stages of Vietnam occurs. Democratic hawk Murtha's recent turn against the war suggests to me that this may be a little closer than most people think. That probably explains why the US is escalating the bombing now. As Dahr Jamail has commented, it is interesting to see that the military propaganda machine (sorry, the mainstream media) hasn't highlighted this latest 'shock and awe' campaign. The whole war is now completely politically radioactive. It surprised me that Bush's poll numbers popped back up to 40% this week. Perhaps lower gas prices and various republican scandals have temporarily focussed people's attention away from the war. Meanwhile, after their huge success in gunning down a panicked bipolar missionary (!) off his meds, Air Marshals are being deployed to "counter potential criminal terrorist activity in all modes of transportation". Sheesh. 'Running while Brazilian' is now a capital crime in London, but at least I'm not Brazilian (well, I'm part Portuguese). But at this rate, it won't be too long before 'running while looking like someone not from a red state' becomes a capital crime here. I may soon have to curtail my own 'running around campus' habits. Then I'll be really tardy marty.

    [Dec15'05] With all the discussion lately of hypothetical scenarios about whether it's nobler to torture an about-to-be terrorist who might have information about a ticking nuclear fission bomb capable of killing, say 100,000 people in New York, than to not do it, how about let's consider for a change things that actually happened. About 100,000 civilians similarly innocent to those in a hypothetical New York attack actually *were* killed in Iraq (Lancet study) after an invasion which the Bush and Blair administrations orchestrated on the basis of lies. Let't forget about the primary reason (oil) and just admit that 100,000 people were killed in a pre-meditated way for a lie. Shock and awe and cluster bombs and laser guided bombs and artillery shells are known to kill mostly civilians, whether or not the high-tech attacking country deigns to count the shredded and burned dead people. Given that many people in the US knew before the start of the war that there was a possibility that Bush and Blair might be planning to kill 100,000 people, and that they were probably lying, it looks a lot like a ticking time bomb scenario to me. Hypothetically, could we could have prevented the loss of those 100,000 innocent lives by torturing Bush and Blair? Probably no need to rip out fingernails. Merely enhanced interrogation -- in Syria, for example.

    [Dec16'05] As the public begins to turn against the Iraq war, but still without a conscious realization of the original reason for it -- namely, oil, staring them right in the face -- it's blackly hilarious to read stuff like this or this from the supposed 'left', carefully dancing around the elephant in the room. With our half-a-trillion dollar a year military sitting right on top of the Iraqi oil patch and awfully close to the Saudi and Iran oil patches (which are actually all part of the largest oil-producing region in the world), how on earth could oil *not* rate a mention? Shameful. This is the kind of stuff historians dig up years later to ogle at.

    [Dec18'05] As mentioned above in several posts, the 'only' reason we are losing the war in Iraq is that we haven't actually pulled out the big guns -- like indiscriminate carpet bombing of cities, neutron fission bombs, chemical weapons, or even hydrogen bombs. I have often heard hawks bemoaning the fact that it's not politically correct to simply do the modern version of Carthage on 'them' (cf. Gary Brecher). My worry is that the only thing that has so far stopped the General Turgidsons from doing a country-sized Carthage -- a 10x Vietnam -- is that the US's dominant position has not previously been at risk. However, as a result of the ongoing Iraq disaster, there is a new $100 billion/year drain on the economy, and we still don't have a stranglehold on their oil. Some of this giant firehose of tax money is of course being recycled into the maws of the principal shareholders of the Halliburtons and siphoned off to the Caymans. But much of it is just being spent. As this flesh wound continues to drain blood, the organism will eventually have to bandage it (and not because the populace demands it -- e.g., the most recent NBC poll just after Bush's speeches showed that only 27% of USians were in favor of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq). A weaker and slightly dizzy US is a much more dangerous US. If the situation deteriorates further, the restraints on the General Turgidsons will gradually be loosened. Then the mindless hawks may get what they've been lusting after all these years. And unfortunately for more humane humans, it will probably initially 'work'. Several small mini-nuke fission bombs exploded in a ciy of dark-skinned people will not be horrible enough to make the entire world immediately rise up against us. A small fission bomb (we now have mini-nukes much smaller than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) might kill 'only' a 500 or 1,000 people -- many less than the 100,000 we've killed using conventional explosives and bullets (and cluster bombs and phosphorus and land mines and depleted uranium rounds, etc etc) in just the past few years of the current Iraq war. And even the 100,000 was only perhaps 1/5 the number killed by the pre-war Iraq sanctions, which were approved year after year by the UN! A small fission bomb would only destroy a portion of a medium-sized city (a city like LA could 'laugh off' a small fission bomb). But once the 'gloves come off' of a weakened, slightly staggered US, a worldwide reaction would eventually develop (uhh, continue to develop). If the rest of the world decides to economically cut us off, bombing them probably won't make them start trading with us again. And our piddly army is way too small to 'invade the world'. But though we have only moderate amounts of natural gas and even less oil left, we still have a lot of coal and iron, and the best farmland in the world and lots water, so even hated and cut off from the rest of the world, we will make a pretty good Gilligan's island (probably more like 'KKK island') for a while, until the battery runs down. As Jorge Hirsch recommends, we should discuss these things -- unpalatable as they may be -- more frankly, out in the open. Do we want to live on KKK Island or do we want to behave like grownups? Though there is a certain black pleasure in imagining the desparate yahoos here clamoring to find somebody who still actually knows something to help them pick of the pieces of industrial civilization after a partial collapse, I would rather have it not collapse in the first place. And anyway, the yahoos won't just be "clamoring" -- they'll have us all at gunpoint. Here's hoping we can get through March 2006 without a nuclear attack by the US.

    [Dec24'05] In just two days this week (Tues and Wed), the Fed Repo-injected a total of $38 billion dollars into the US money 'supply'. That's about as much as we spend in 5 months in Iraq or more than the entire NIH budget for a year -- or in other words, a lot of money creation in just 2 days (I know, probably not the units that normal people use to judge amounts of money). Those are close to 9-11-sized injections. M3 (of which repos are just a part) normally grows at a rate of 'only' $1.4 billion a day. Hopefully, it was just a temporary cash-flow problem and not a sign of something bad about to happen. Meanwhile, the average USian mind appears to be not worrying (see the always amazing-to-me graph at pollkatz); a few utterly generic propaganda speeches to hand-picked audiences about how we will actually eventually win the war in Iraq and the approval polls jump discontinuously upward like clockwork -- and this during the week that Iranian fundamentalists won the Iraq elections. Almost 60% of USians now think we are *already* winning. Utterly depressing how propaganda just works. On the positive side, by stopping the continuous approval decline, the need for more extraordinary measures is perhaps temporarily postponed.

    [Jan02'06] Here is where we are importing our oil from these days (in Gb, where yearly US usage is a little over 7 Gb, with over half imported): Canada--1.6, Mexico--1.5, Saudi--1.4, Venezuela--1.3, Nigeria--1.0, Iraq--0.5, Angola--0.4 (note that we don't really get any oil from Iran; China is a main buyer of Iranian oil). Thus, we get about 7% of our yearly oil from Iraq (this constitutes around 1/3 of Iraq's total output). Embezzeler Chalabi was just made permanent oil minister of Iraq a few days ago, ousting the existing minister, who had balked at rapid IMF-mandated increases in fuel prices, in what was described as a coup. It is true that Chalabi got 1% of the vote in the most recent election, so it stands to reason that he should control the oil -- the main cash-generating business in Iraq.

    [Jan03'06] The evidence is now in that the US has increased bombing raids across Iraq by more than a factor of 5 since the summer (500% increase), slaughtering hundreds of civilians in each 'campaign'. Meanwhile, back at home, merry little US war criminals sport their yellow ribbons. I only wish there was a God ("But Mr. God, sir, everybody else was supporting the troops, too!").

    [Jan04'06] Demand for oil shows no sign of letting up, either in the US, EU, or in developing countries. The only place where real demand destruction has occurred as a result of recently increased oil prices is in places like Eritrea, where high oil prices have cleared the streets of cars. Meanwhile, improved recovery methods such as horizontal well terminations have increased the extraction rate of existing well and kept up production. As Simmons and others have been warning for a few years, better extraction technology results in faster fall-off rates when the peak for such a field finally does come. For example, horizontally drilled UK North Sea oil has been declining at an astounding 10% per year -- far faster than the shallow post-US-peak post-1970 decline in older-style US oil production at that time. There is still about half of the oil left in the world, so we are not about to run out next year. However, you'd have to be an economist not to get a shiver down your spine at the thought of 10% per year decline rates running into 10% per year demand increases in the near future. It is true that people slowed down their buying of SUVs with the recent hurricane related gas price increases, but it's going to take a lot more than not buying a few SUVs to fix 10% per year declines. As much as I respect the market as an efficient short-term optimization method, I'm worried.

    [Jan13'06] This picture, which shows Jose Padilla, says a lot. You can see that, in contrast to the ubiquitous Photoshop-darkened perp photos, he is almost as light skinned as his guards. Dressed in an orange terr'ist suit, he is so dangerous, even handcuffed and ankle-chained -- after all he is accused, literally, of 'conspiring to do something to somebody in some other country' (pretty scary boys and girls) -- that both guards have to have headsets on and... kneepads?! Maybe it's a recruitment photo for other wannabe stormtroopers. After all, stormtroopin' for the man is one of the last things to get outsourced, and all that math just hurts your brain anyway...

    [Jan21'06] I've assembled some graphs from Bud Conrad and the St. Louis Fed. They show the cumulative current account deficit and the M3 money supply (the most inclusive) on the same vertical and horizontal scale. The graphs do not look stable in the long term. It should be noted, however, that M3 has been inflating at this same rate this since 1996 (starting before the end of term one of Clinton). And except for a brief respite during the early 1990's (end of Bush1, most of Clinton's first term), M3 was inflating (albeit at a somewhat slower rate) since the 1970's, well *before* the current account deficit ballooned. The M3 graph shows surprisingly little effect of the Clinton-to-Bush transition or 9-11. Also, the cumulative current account deficit took a steep downward turn *before* the end of Clinton's second term and then substantially increased its negative slope with Bush. This resulted in M3 growth and cumulative current account deficit being virtual mirror images of each other. So for the past 10 years, we have been 'printing' electronic money to send over the internet to foreigners' computers, and then, amazingly, they ship actual physical stuff to us in return. I don't see how things can go on like this for too many more years, but it sure is good 'work' when you can get it! :-} However, the Economist has recently 'explained' this by citing a paper by Hausmann and Struzenegger (pdf here), who develop a theory of economic 'dark matter' (hehe -- see critique of that paper here). Is economic dark matter something like naked shorting? Maybe I've underestimated the relation between economics and physics. Physicists have a theory of 'vaccuum energy' whereby complete emptiness is in fact filled with a seething background energy of particles coming into existence out of nothing and disappearing back into the empty void in times so short that energy conservation is not violated. This is a little like money borrowed/created by the Fed -- these dollars are emitted from a vaccuum, you pay interest on them, and then they disappear back into the void when you pay them back. Well, except for the interest. I guess the Fed is more like a black hole where one of the pair of a created-out-of-nothing particles can escape if the pair is created on the event horizon.

    [Jan24'06] Out of curiosity I just googled Roger Boisjoly (cv here), the Morton Thiokol solid booster engineer who tried to stop the launch of the Challenger in 1986 because he thought the rubber O-rings would fail (even more severely than previously) because of the extreme cold. The O-rings were supposed to keep the joints in the solid rocket booster air-tight during their slight flexing during firing (fire resistant putty inside of the O-rings actually took the heat). On the cold day of the explosion, the cold rigid rubber failed to seal, allowing hot gases to burn through the O-rings, the booster support, and eventually the adjoining liquid oxygen fuel tank, which caused it to explode. Boisjoly had refused to sign the launch papers that day because of his reasoned assessment of this risk, despite extreme pressure on him. But he was overruled by a supervisor who was advised 'to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat' -- which the supervisor had already done. It was rumored that some of the pressure for take-off was that Reagan wanted to talk to the Christa McAuliffe, the "teacher in space" live at his upcoming state of the union address. But no hard evidence of that emerged (Feynman went looking for telephone records but didn't get anything). Boisjoly explained what happened at a Congressional hearing on the diaster. The result was that he was promptly and permanently black-balled from industry. He remade his career as a lecturer on professionalism and organizational behavior -- and on explaining to other people how to recover after your professional career has been ended by doing the right thing. People like this make me proud to be a human.

    [Jan25'06] "Doug [Douglas Barber] was in a traffic jam one day, feeling very vulnerable, and the US units dismounted to clear the traffic jam -- angry and afraid and waving weapons at the civilians -- when a woman in a bus held up her baby for them to see... like that window-sign we see in cars on American highways: 'Baby on Board'. Only she wasn't cautioning other drivers to be careful. She was trying to prevent an armed attack that could kill her child." -- Stan Goff. Classic primate behavior! This is exactly how macaques defuse a tense situation when males are about to fight -- they grab a kid and hold it up. Unfortunately, this only works up close and personal. It's hard for our boys to see the kids when they're on a bombing run for da man, esp. at night. When they *do* see them (sometimes they do get up close and personal), they often end up like Doug. It's intrinsic to the nature of any war and the people who implement it. An equal number of Vietnam vets committed suicide after the war as were actually killed in the war (about 50,000). Unfortunately, a majority of American's still think 'it' is worth the price -- or at least they are willing to let it go on. I think that's mainly because they can't see 'it'.

    [Jan26'06] It's blackly hilarious watching the oil, gasoline, and natural gas prices wobble around in synchrony on theoildrum.com. Gasoline is refined out of some kinds of oil, but it takes time. Natural gas comes out of some oil wells, but is largely decoupled in place, time of extraction, and transport methods. The chance that coupled intraday movements in price of these three commodities reflects something 'real' about production, transport, refinement, or demand seems remote to me.

    [Jan28'06] The polls published in the LA Times and elsewhere suggesting that a majority of Americans support an attack on Iran leave me stunned. As usual, I poorly gauge the man on the street whose pliable sponge-like brain soaks up the nightly newspeak which I don't watch (I should). How did we get here so soon? The stunning irreality of it all! Attacking a country supplying a couple of percent of of the world's yearly oil production to every other industrialized country except the US? While the occupied territories of Iraq are in chaos? While things are so bad on the ground that the US military has doubled its per capita fuel used (by avoiding ground transport) since last year? No prob! Just do Iran! I had been worrying that people are too much like yeast, living in the huge beer barrel of Earth without understanding or having the time to investigate how the purchasing choices they make every day are affecting the entire barrel/Earth. But I was secretly hopeful that the same mind that sometimes makes beautiful words and pictures and music and science might still shine through. No way, baby! Human minds are so weak! The Blitzer puppet injects a handful of words every day: "must. attack. Iran". They don't even have to be in the right order. Stick in a random satellite photo. It doesn't have to be the right one (sometimes it wasn't). Over half the peeps are already convinced and they haven't even brought out the big propaganda guns! People don't even know where Iran is. Doesn't matter. It's enough to fire up the mini-nukes and get the battle-plan drones to do their dirty deeds. The AIDS virus has less than ten genes but it takes over a certain kind of cell and eventually can bring down the whole Leviathan. The 'attack Iran now' meme is only 3 friggin' words! That's like a virus containing 9 base pairs. Maybe language would have been better off it had been comprehension-only, like DNA/RNA/protein. For something completely different, here is Richard Rainwater, a 5 billionaire talking about peak oil: "This is a nonrecurring event. The 100-year flood in Houston real estate was one, the ability to buy oil and gas really cheap was another, and now there's the opportunity to do something based on a shortage of natural resources. Can you make money? Well, yeah. One way is to just stay long domestic oil. But there may be something more important than making money. This is the first scenario I've seen where I question the survivability of mankind. I don't want the world to wake up one day and say, 'How come some doofus billionaire in Texas made all this money by being aware of this, and why didn't someone tell us?'" I hate it when the richies start going all soft and guilty on you. Are they worried about an undersupply of trained servants? An oversupply of villagers with torches? Whatever it is, it's not good.

    [Feb02'06] Isn't there *one* reporter out there that got through high school physics?? Can't *any* of them calculate simple ratios?? The reporting on the state of the union address was worse than what a fifth grader could have done. This isn't rocket science. The US uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day. About 12 million barrels of that (60%) is imported and 2.4 million barrels (20% of imports, 3% of total use) comes from the mideast (mostly Saudi). Reducing our mideast imports by 75% (state of the union speech) therefore means reducing our total oil usage by 1.8 million barrels (2.2%). Then, hilariously, the idea of reducing Saudi imports was withdrawn the day after the speech. Let's put aside oil and batteries and ethanol for a minute to consider the most critical shortage on the horizon -- natural gas. It wasn't even mentioned in the speech. Despite the fact that oil is more depleted worldwide than natural gas, natural gas will be the first truly generally visible fossil fuel problem in North America because it is much harder to transport than oil. When the gas pipeline pressure goes down, increasing the price won't make it go back up if there is not enough gas to put in the other end. That is, it's not like when the Russians recently turned down the pressure in the pipeline to Ukraine to get them to pay more. When shortages come to North America (because of depleting US and Canadian production) it will be a massive shock. Natural gas wells deplete much faster than oil wells (2-4 years), and require constant drilling to keep production up -- that is, until there is no more to drill. To use an odd analogy between energy use and anesthetia, oil is more like barbiturates and natural gas is like isoflurane; it takes a long time to groggily awake from barbiturate anesthesia; but when they turn off the gas, you're awake in less than a minute. Turning back to batteries, hydrogen, and ethanol, the speech contained the usual non sequiturs. C'mon reporters -- call him on it! Better batteries and hydrogen are merely lossy energy storage media -- they do nothing to increase energy *supply*. Finally, there was ethanol, which is potentially a new source of energy. Missouri has mandated that fuel there contain 10% ethanol and it plans to produce even more ethanol from corn than it is already. They are currently producing 0.31 million gallons of ethanol a day using 11% of the state's entire corn crop (info here ). Ethanol has comparable energy density to gasoline (actually 70% the energy density of gasoline but let's say it's the same). We get about 20 gallons of gasoline out of a 42 gallon barrel of oil. Ignoring the other energy-producing stuff we get out of a barrel of oil to be favorable to ethanol, the current Missouri ethanol output is therefore equivalent to 0.015 million barrels a day of oil, or 0.075% (1/1330) of our 20 million barrels of oil daily usage. When the newest Missouri ethanol plants go online, it is prediced that they will use 25% of Missouri's corn crop to produce 0.71 million gallons of ethanol a day or 0.18% of our daily oil gulp. Let's assume that this planned increase in ethanol production (0.4 million gallons a day) goes directly into replacing the called-for-then-retracted-the-next-day 75% reduction in mideast imports. That ethanol, made from 14% of Missouri's corn, would account for only 1% of the planned mideast oil reduction! If 100% of the corn of Missouri was used, it would generate only 8% of the now-retracted mideast reduction suggestion, which is only 0.71% -- less than 1% -- of our total daily oil. A high school student could see some problems here in expanding this to other states, not the least having to do with, uhh, food. Also, none of this takes into account the fact that corn is grown using gasoline- and diesel-powered farm machinery, and fertilizers and pesticides made from oil and natural gas (as opposed to Roman Empire style); and it is turned into ethanol in plants powered by natural gas, and more recently by coal (because natural gas prices recently quintupled). The energy return on energy investment (EROEI) of the state subsidized ethanol from corn process is disputed and hard to calculate, but it is near 1.0 (that is, break even). It could even be negative (Pimentel) -- that is, you use more fossil fuel to produce ethanol from corn it that you get back from it, making burning the fossil fuel directly more efficient. Now, one could complain that a hypothetical switchgrass biodigester using processed cow manure fertilizer (switchgrass typically needs 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre per crop) would have a better EROEI than corn. Perhaps, if you don't believe Pimentel. But it's still way hypothetical. And though switchgrass is better than corn, switchgrass is still basically a photosynthetic plant collecting solar radiation, which has a fixed, low density. Some plants do this a little bit better than others. But we are not going to get 10x corn, or probably even 2x corn. And it's going to be a decade before currently nonexistent switchgrass ethanol plants are scaled up to even the current trivial-with-respect-to-oil size of ethanol-from-corn. And scaled up real big, it would still compete in a big way with food. Not doom and gloom -- just straightforward, sensible-shoes worries about our continued existence. Actions speak louder than words: $0.3 billion promised for alternative energy vs. $100 billion a year actually spent for Iraq occupation -- that's a ratio of 330 to 1. I think the priorities are clear: we have decided to occupy the land around the remaining oil with a trivial token investment in alternative energy.

    [Feb04'06] I was surprised to read in a report on a talk by Steven Jones that even half of that audience -- definitely not a cross section of the population -- had not seen the WTC7 collapse video. I guess that's why MSNBC Tucker Carlson at MSNBC was so adamant about not showing it when he interviewed Jones a few months back.

    [Feb06'06] There was a confusing ethanol puff piece published in Science last week out of Dan Kammen's group at Berkeley that has gotten a lot of publicity (with a front-of-the-magazine 'scientific editorial' by Steve Koonin from BP). The most bizarre graph is in Fig. 2, where it is shown that gasoline has a negative net energy of 0.2 MJ/L (!) while current ethanol production has a net positive energy of around 4 MJ/L (positive, but not that much more than Pimentel's slightly negative net energy value). They arrived at this bizarre 'conclusion' by including the total energy of the input petroleum into the energy 'cost' of gasoline. This totally ignores the fact that we drill for oil so we can make gasoline and get a lot of energy out of it! It *is* true that a small percentage of the retrieved energy is lost in refining. But a huge amount is left! (over 34 MJ/L for gasoline). Subtracting out that huge majority of the remaining energy in the gasoline is just perverse. This is all a matter of deciding where to set the boundaries of the system. Shouldn't the real net energy of gasoline be 34 MJ/L minus the fossil fuels that were used in drilling for oil and producing gasoline from it??? That's definitely not negative (yet!). Then if you want to show that using oil and natural gas and coal to make ethanol is better than using the fossil fuels directly, you would get a net energy calculation that would show something like 30 MJ/L for gasoline (34 minus refining, discovery, and transport) and something similar for natural gas and coal (after conversion into equivalent liquid energy units), and then this would be compared to something like 38 MJ/L for ethanol (that is, the 34 MJ/L previously subtracted out plus the 4 MJ/L net gain). That would put the actual percent net energy gain -- from using oil and coal and natural gas to capture energy from the sun via photosynthsis -- in better perspective. Assuming you believe the positive 4 MJ/L net, then this would be a 1.26x gain in energy over burning the fossil fuels directly. That sounds good, but cost would be huge. To actually retrieve this 1.26 times gain using current methods, we would have to convert all productive agricultural land to ethanol production. As outlined in a previous post, using 100% of the corn in Missouri to generate ethanol would cover only 0.71% of our daily gasoline needs. Thus, to replace all our daily oil with more efficient ethanol, we would need to use the complete corn output of 140 Missouri's). Even with some as yet completely hypothetical switchgrass process that was more efficient in fertilizer, water, land space, soil degradation, planting, harvesting, and processing, I don't think we will ever get close to this coverage since the density of solar radiation, water, and arable land are hard limiting factors -- and we still have to use a lot of water and arable land to grow food (unless you want to just eat the ethanol production leftovers...). So a practical magnification of our energy sources by passing oil, natural gas, and coal through current ethanol production methods is probably more like 1.1 or 1.05 times gain -- again, assuming the positive net gain they calculate for ethanol is correct (almost all of it comes from energy credits for the co-products: dried distiller grains, corn gluten feed, and corn oil). That would cover a few years of current growth in US energy usage. And all of this *completely* depends on having fossil fuels on the input side -- unless you want to plant, water, fertilize, harvest, crush, and cook the corn or switchgrass by hand. Publishing something like this in Science in this form is a political statement, similar to the "don't you scientists worry your little heads about peak oil" article by Leonardo Maugeri last year (disclosure: I knew Dan Kammen when he was a post-doc with Christof Koch when I was at Caltech). link

    [Feb06'06] Here is an example of how the confusing statements in the Kammen article lead to a garbled public translation. A news report describing the Kammen study says: "Producing a gallon of ethanol 'gas' from corn requires 95 percent less petroleum than producing a gallon from fossil fuels, a new study finds." Well, duh. That's because the fossil fuels used to produce ethanol are mostly natural gas and coal, not oil. The Kammen study states that 1.1 units of petroleum are used to produce 1.0 unit of gasoline, while 0.75 units of fossil fuels (0.05 oil, 0.4 coal, and 0.3 natural gas) are used to produce 1.0 unit of ethanol (which is how they got "95% less"). Ethanol could still be a good thing, if you buy the current positive 4 MJ/L net energy calculation (mostly from energy credits for the ethanol coproducts since the energy of the output ethanol is basically equivalent to the energy of the fossil fuel inputs). But the headline is way misleading, esp. when you don't mention that this 4 MJ/L net is riding on top of 30 MJ/L available from both gasoline and ethanol (ethanol is less energy-dense than gasoline but it can be made to burn a little more efficiently). Also, the article fails to point out that you get a similar amount of CO2 from burning ethanol and gasoline; and this end-use CO2 is much more than production-related CO2 (else there would be no point in burning fossil fuels to extract and refine fossil fuels, since the CO2 bascially indexes how many energy-releasing bonds have been broken). It's all a matter of establishing the overall picture before snowing people with irrelevant and misleading details.

    [Feb09'06] A soldier, who was forced to pay for his body armour because a medic threw it out because it was a 'biohazard' (because it was soaked with the soldier's blood), said: "I still love the Army, loved being a soldier and loved my unit". He was refunded after Senator Byrd questioned Army Gen. Peter Schoomaker about it. The former soldier has had seven operations on his arm and still has movement problems and pain. Can you imagine an intrepeneurial corporate CEO making these statements? Me neither. That's why we need more CEO's on the front lines. Our wars would be 'right-sized' in a jiffy.

    [Feb11'06] Here is a list of Bush's proposed program cuts. The AP didn't give a total, but I added it up and it comes out to about 14 billion dollars. All these programs would be cut in order to allow us to continue spending almost $100 billion tax dollars a year for the occupation and bombing of Iraq under false pretenses. C'mon press guys! You need to mention the names of the programs for $14 billion, $100 billion for Iraq (for giant, permanent bases like al-Asad), and "lies" in the same damn article for once. All we have is Helen Thomas, and not one of her wimpy colleagues ever utters a peep in support of this fine old lady for fear of losing their jobs as what? -- court jesters? Is it such a great job?

    [Feb15'06] A Ford Explorer with three people in it is better than three Priuses with one person each. Why should single-person Priuses be able to use the car pool lane?

    [Feb16'06] The military is a major user of fossil fuels. Each of our 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers needs to be filled up every three months with 3 million gallons of jet fuel for the planes it hauls around.

    [Feb21'06] The power goes down in Denver and upstate New York probably because of natural gas shortages, catching Kunstler of all people with his grid down (!); he was heating his house with his stove because his electric furnace igniters didn't work, and none of his phones were usable without electricity. Also, all hell breaks loose in Nigeria's oil patch over the weekend. None of it makes the mainstream media news. Move along, nothing to see.

    [Feb23'06] The money guys have lately been worrying about the "yen carry trade unwinding". This has to do with a very abstract way to 'make' money (indeed!). You borrow Japanese yen at almost zero percent interest and then invest them in US treasuries at about a 3% interest rate gain net. Since Japan's economy has perked up, it is considering raising interest rates, which would make this "carry trade" less lucrative. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around such disparate activities as this, and, say, trying to localize food production. Yet the money guys' "unwinding" could very much affect my food supply, so I try to listen up.

    [Feb28'06] Almost 90% of US troops in Iraq think the war they are implementing is a retaliation for Saddam's role in 9/11. Only about 30% of their loyal 'supporters' back at home think this. The troops also think the war should end. Wrong on both counts.

    [Mar02'06] This year, we used about 30 Gb of oil and discovered 4.5 Gb. That's about 6.5 used to 1 discovered. I've updated my peak oil intro to include more info on global temperature changes.

    [Mar05'06] Our Guantanamo gulag is partly powered by renewable energy (25% of electricity from windmills in windy months). Great. Green torture.

    [Mar06'06] "Making ethanol from corn is a process by which a certain amount of energy in the forms of natural gas and diesel fuel are used to create an equivalent amount of energy in the form of ethanol, with the primary output being money from government subsidies." -- Bob Hirsch.

    [Mar16'06] Bush's approval polls are looking pretty dire; and 43% are currently in favor of outright impeachment. But the last time the approval polls got this low (just after Katrina), all it took was 5 or so speeches to hand-picked audiences (this makes me think of the speech Bush recently had to give in an Indian zoo to avoid the demonstrators...). The 5 or so speeches were then amplified and re-re-re-re-broadcast by the scumbag media to bring Bush back to just over 40% in a few weeks. The lapdog press has now even taken to 'pre-announcing' the next set of Bush speeches about preemption, even before he reads the stupid things. Good show, guys! Worms! The largest airstrikes since the 2003 Iraq invasion are underway today (probably what some of the AC-130's were for), and the speeches/media in the pipeline will probably get robotic North Americans to rise to the occasion. What's all the to-do about 'man the thinking animal'? It makes them so much less cute.

    [Mar18'06] I don't don't know what to think about the Operation Swarmer psyop/photo-op/assault. It is true the US stormed and blew up few houses and killed a few women and children, or rather "collateral", elsewhere (Tikrit), and they dragged off a bunch of men, I mean, "terrorists", from Samarra to the torture prisons, but it is an open question of how widespread the airstrikes were/are. Some Iraqi sites say it's real. The level of mainstream disinfo/BS is so high (the Time article suggesting it was a photo-op/disinfo operation could easily itself be disinfo), trying to be objective makes you feel just a little bit schizo. There are essentially no non-embedded independent Western reporters in the area, so we won't know what really happened for a month or two.

    [Mar20'06] Oil prices had their biggest drop today in 7 months as stockpiles of oil rose to a 7-year high. Those supplies jumped 4.8 million barrels to 340 million barrels. That sounds like a lot. However, we use 20 million barrels a day, so our current supplies are equivalent to 17 days of US usage. That sounds like a much smaller cushion (just in time, man). Of course, it is unlikely that all domestic supply and all imports would be shut down simultaneously, so supplies are no doubt safe for at least a few months. Another thing to consider about the price drop is that the second quarter of each year is normally a quiet time for oil since winter demand fades and summer demand has not yet started. So that's what oil prices are fundamentally driven by: a few months look-ahead. You'd have to be a rabid anti-capitalist to think -- living here on our finite blue sphere -- that it's worthwhile trying to look/plan any further into the future, right?

    [Mar24'06] The flow of idiotic bird flu propaganda continues without stop -- from the regular media as well as the blogs, left and right. Politics and mind control is fundamentally based on the fact that many people can't remember anything but television shows for more than two years. The reason they *can* remember television shows (often used in tests of long-term memory) is partly because they practice with them more. Unfortunately, there are no nightly 're-runs' of recent history -- where an explicit piece of recent history is re-run with a title indicating that this actually happened. Remember SARS? It killed a tiny handful of people, like the currently 'dreaded' bird flu. Then and now, thousands of humans are dying every day from diarrhea and regular old incurable viral and somewhat more curable bacterial pneumonia, and of course, regular non-bird flu. Never a peep about those diseases in the daily effluent -- or anything about SARS. Where did SARS go? Isn't SARS still out there waiting to getcha?? (or West Nile!) Well, maybe they are after all! -- in about 2 more years. Oceania, Eurasia, and East Asia, indeed.

    [Mar27'06] The commentator Westexas had an interesting comment about peak college enrollment at theoildrum.com. The massive building out of the physical plant is sure visible here at UCSD! The peak of US college graduates will probably hit in a few years, right about the time that natural gas really starts spiking in price (natural gas will probably ding us in the US before oil, even though there is more of it left in the world because it's hard to transport). In 5 or 10 years, young academic people are going to be very mad at us (I'm 50). They will have some justification. We should probably should have been trying to control our academic reproduction -- esp. at the graduate level -- for the past few years -- right as the undergraduate boom was occurring. But that wouldn't have made anybody happy (parents, applicants, current undergraduates, current graduate students, campuses, journals, granting agencies), even though it was probably the right thing to do. Currently, things are pretty quite in energyland. But we just had one of the mildest winters on record. Oil has been wobbling around just above $60 for the last few months. When it gets hot in summer, it could really take off (along with natural gas). Right during the stupid election contest between two equally execrable parties. The democrats will be trying to outflank, out-war, out-surveillance, out-Israel, and out-rightwing their republican opponents who will instead be setting up to fix voting machines in key races -- all right when oil and/or natural gas prices hits them both in the face. Great stategies, both of you bozos. Of course, the oil companies *will* be making out like (even fatter) gangbusters when oil goes above $100. Yet, trying to hold their muzzles away from the ever-growing trough of money will unfortunately not make any more oil appear underground or make it take less energy to get the remaining harder-to-get second half out. Also, capitalists and politicians and consumers won't budge on large-scale alternative energy until fossil fuel prices get painful. Higher energy prices will cause many other prices to increase, and may very well increase the price of alternative energy, too. One can hope that those prices won't go up faster than fossil fuel prices. Peak oil *is* a big oil scam; but it's also true. But I always like to end on the positive side. Light rail is being built in *Dallas*. If they can build more light rail in Dallas (and use it to sell houses), they can build a more across the rest of the country, too.

    [Apr11'06] The price of steel, aluminum, nickel, zinc, and copper (and silver and gold) are all going up along with oil (which went above $69 today). All of these have doubled or tripled over the past few years. The cost of energy certainly factors into the cost of other things that require energy to get them (e.g., copper), but it seems hard to believe that all the increased cost of copper comes from the increased cost of energy. So the parallel price runs also probably have to be explained by us starting to run out of copper and other things.

    [Apr13'06] I am worried about the combination of a tepid public response to the Iran nuke leaks/disinfo and upcoming oil supply problems. Though catatonic US-ians have finally begun to dislike the Iraq war (they forgot that they started off perhaps 5 to 1 in favor of it) because it has continued to kill a few of our boy stormtroopers (and thousands of Iraqis every month, but that doesn't matter), dazed slack-jaw CNN-ified US-ians currently support an attack on Iran 48% to 40%. The numbers supporting an attack on Iran are distressingly identical in the UK. In general, people didn't want to send troops (and certainly not their own precious Camerons and Williams), just remote control bombs. How nuanced. With continued saturation coverage of 'Iranian nuke within 16 days' no doubt soon to be followed by 'Iranian nuke here in 15 minutes' (how quickly the sheep forget) by our disgusting state/corporate media/sewer that never even whispers a word about the permanent bases being constructed across Iraq, these numbers will slowly 'improve'. But there is also oil (and gas) trouble on the horizon. Canterell in Mexico (2% of current world oil production) is about to fall off a 40%-decline-per-year cliff; Saudi intimates that it may have peaked; Kuwait calmly announces it has only 5% of total world oil reserves instead of 10% (and nobody burps); the former Soviet Union is near peak; 2006 is shaping up to be another nasty hurricane season; and the rest of the world is already in 'depletion'. The problem I see is that if a plurality of US-ians and UK-ian *already* support an attack on Iran, just think what will happen when they get a little economic shock to their shorts. Things could get Reich-y here in a hurry! The 'whatever' response to torture and imprisonment without trial of darkies is small potatoes compared to what Good Americans might approve under serious economic duress. Intelligent people are beginning to think about getting out ahead of the game, like many did in Germany in the late 30's. But where to go? The UK has an even better surveillance state underway. And the world is a lot more filled up then it was then...

    [Apr15'06] I think that the market is a fine optimizer when the boundary conditions are set right. I don't think they currently are, since environmental costs are not included. But let's set that aside. The main hope is that correct boundary conditions or not, as fossil fuel prices increase, businesses will surely 'innovate'. With respect to fossil fuels and their replacements, however, there are two giant question marks. The first is that as fossil fuel prices go up, they will also drive up the prices of renewables, since renewables are currently exclusively made with fossil fuels (for steel, copper mining, silicon smelting, etc). This may keep the cost of renewables higher than the cost of fossil fuels for a long time. It is also likely to drive up the price of lower EROEI fossil fuel sources like tar sands. Second, as total energy peaks and starts to slowly run down, it will slow down the replacement of fuel inefficient cars, buildings, power plants without carbon sequestration, and more generally, fuel-inefficient city designs. This will make it harder to avoid running down the remaining fossil fuel supplies. A tax on fossil fuels that could be used to develop alternatives before the market gets to them would seem like a good idea. But we are far away politically from being able to implement something like this given how politicians are funded; and there is no political change in sight (Democrats in Congress would not be a political change in this respect). Also, it is obvious that this strategy has led to distortions in the past. Take the case of corn-based ethanol, where a process with a dubious energy-return-on-energy-investment (0.8 to 1.25) exists mainly because of subsidies (N.B.: a lot of energy used in making ethanol goes into boiling the ethanol out of the ethanol-water mixture that is initially generated by fermentation; all the other non-corn processes also first generate an ethanol-water mixture). So it's more new iPods for the time being. Peak oil-ists often talk about all the oil we could save with more efficient cars. But the main way to use less energy is to simply have less people in the world! There is no reason populations can't contract gracefully. Just a few percent a year for a few decades would make a huge difference. It's amazing to me that people don't discuss this more. Instead, they have idiotic discussions about going to live in the woods when most of them have barely been hiking. It all gets hopelessly bogged down when they find out about ticks and Lyme disease (hilarious comments on Anthropik). Why not just try to get everyone to have less babies? It's all good.

    [Apr18'06] Several days ago, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 9 Israeli civilians and injured more, which rightfully made the mainstream news and was rightfully condemned. But over the last three weeks, when Israel rained hundreds of shells a day on civilian Gaza neigborhoods last week (2,000 artillery shells on civilian neighborhoods since the beginning of April), killing 27 Palestinian civilians and injuring more (a college student lost one of her eyes to an Israeli sniper), it wasn't mainstream news. How is an artillery shell more moral than a suicide bomb? Because it's fired out of a computer-aimed gun? Palestinian civilians don't count -- after all, there are no Palestinian civilians by definition: they're all terrorists, even the kids (because they were thinking about becoming terrorists when the shells landed in their house). And besides, the kids have terrorist uncles, so tough luck, for sleeping in a house on the same block, untermenschen -- you don't exist, you're not news.

    [Apr19'06] All but one or two of our Democratic worms are in Congress are digging deep into the soil to avoid mentioning anything about Iran. When you can get them to say anything, they all say they are leaving all Iran options 'on the table', including the US use of nuclear weapons! Disgusting worms. What are they scared of? Cheney? With an approval rating lower than OJ (and even lower than Congress itself)? I wonder what would it take for them to crawl out into the light? There was a peace march sign: "Would someone please give the President a blow job so we can impeach him?" Funny as this is, it wouldn't work! The Democrats would still be hiding under the soil, since it could be anti-gay to denigrate blow jobs. And anyway, Gannon-gate came and went, and Bush is still here...

    [Apr20'06] The US is a TP Nation! The US has about 5% of the world's population, uses about 25% of the world's oil, but 50% of the world's toilet paper (from Amanda Kovattana). The US is Mr. Clean. In other news, two men from Houston were arrested after setting off alarms at a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. They were carrying $500K in small bills in a bag from Chicago (which they hadn't opened, Big Lebowski style), and dogs detected drugs in their vehicle. They were released without charges. Huh? Finally, a few days ago, Michael Alan "Savage" Weiner said this on Talk Radio Network about Muslims: "They say, 'Oh, there's a billion of them.' I said, 'So, kill 100 million of them, then there'll be 900 million of them.' I mean, would you rather die -- would you rather us die than them?" Hey, that's only 16 holocausts worth. You can go to jail for holocaust denial, but calling for 16 new holocausts is no prob, as long as you are careful to only call for the genocide of Muslims (and despite that fact that Arab Muslims are Semites, it's not even anti-sem itic). This is the same Michael Weiner who once was a beatnik, frolicking nude on the beach with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Why not go back to the beach, guy? It's easier on the women and children (though perhaps not on the eyes at this point).

    [Apr21'06] The Washington Post today had an interestingly titled article by Rick Weiss on climate change: "Climate Change Will Be Significant but Not Extreme, Study Predicts". He explains that the most extreme of the climate change predictions (more than 11 deg F increase this century) have only a 5% chance of being correct and that the most likely outcome is about 5 deg F. This is not news. This has, in fact, been the mainstream scientific consensus for the past decade (not counting the musings of that famous 'climate researcher' and sometime presidential science advisor, novelist Michael Crichton). The story, however, coyly fails to mention that a 5 deg F change is close to the difference between no glaciation (where we are now) and glaciation, except that it will be added onto no glaciation, making the globe hotter than it has been in millions of years. Half full or half empty, I guess. This reminds me of oil prices, which are constantly 'easing' but somehow always end up higher than a few months ago. Today, they 'eased' their way up to $75 (from $73 yesterday). Yergin was hauled out of storage; and the Economist put out its yearly 'there is plenty of oil article'. Finally, I was a bit worried to read an article by John Dean suggesting that there might be a synthetic terror event to win elections or justify an attack Iran. My worry was tempered by his mention of the possibility of a bin Laden capture October surprise. That would be a smelly surprise indeed, since OBL's probably been dead since 2001 (it is true they could capture a lookalike, and how would we ever know?). Sniffing the web for the last few days, there seems to have been a slight pull back with respect to an Iran attack. Dean is correct that a new synthetic terror would change that in a hurry.

    [Apr26'06] There was a sort of article in Newsweek by Michael Hirsh introducing the sheep to the idea of permanent Iraq bases, though these were only 10-years-permanent, and then only for attacking other places as opposed to mere occupation -- how comforting. On a completely different note, a while back I read and linked an article by Rob Kirby called "Pirates of the Caribbean" about debt buying. I don't think I really explicitly understood what he was saying. I think the idea is that the Fed creates money and then somehow transports it to 'offshore' Caribbean banks, who then use the created money to buy American debt. I think the problem I had was understanding the meaning of "using created money to buy debt" -- the first time you read it, it's just nonsensical. Recently, it appears that UK has taken over from the 'pirates' who have not even been keeping up with Saudi, much less China and Japan. Here is the clearest, shortest article I've ever seen on the Fed, repos, and fractional reserve banking.

    [May02'06] Bush's popularity is at its lowest ever (about 33%) and yet the spineless Democratic worms can't even vote against the ridiculous Iran resolution. What unbelievable cowards! What would it take for them to vote against Bush? If a crowd of villagers stormed the White house, d'ya think they might finally 'revolt'? It's stuff like this that makes me thing the boat really is going down. As Michael Donnelly writes below, this is not a new thing: The Democrats only finally voted to end funding for the Vietnam war in 1975, several years after the generals had already ended it! The main reason the peace movement consists largely of a bunch of fossilized anybody-but-Bush oldies is that there is so far no draft (not mentioned by Donnelly, despite the fact he was a Vietnam conscientious objector). That might change with a few more back-to-back wars, though.

    [May07'06] James Hamilton (econbrowser.com) presents the case for possibly lower oil prices (new fields coming online, price-driven reduction in demand). Some small price drops are not out of the question. I just wonder what will happen to child-like Americans when the price inevitably starts to go back up. With Cantarell going off a cliff and Ghawar soon to follow, Venezuela having to buy oil from Russia (!?), the use-to-discovery ratio running at 6:1, a price rise seems likely by years end -- even if the lunatics in currently charge decide not to attack Iran. Then, who will tell Americans, that even after getting rid of the porker from Exxon, oil prices may still not go down because there just isn't enough oil left given how many people are using it? Certainly not the Republican here's-a-hundred-dollars rats or the Democrat let's-drop-gas-taxes mice. This will require an adult discussion of how to negotiate our lifestyles, which is *completely* out of the question given our current system. Unfortunately, not discussing it won't make the problem go away.

    [May09'06] Kyle has some great tidbits on biodiesel at the oildrum today. Dynoil is planning to build a 1.5 billion gallons a year biodiesel refinery in Houston. The main type of input oil is soybean oil. The current US production of soybean oil is 2.5 billion gallons/year, so this plant will consume 60% (!) of that total. For comparison, our yearly use of gasoline is about 150 billion gallons a year (10 million barrels a day refined from 20 million barrels of oil a day). So... 60% of our total soybean oil will generate, uuh, 1% of our daily liquid fuel gulp? Well, I never really did like tofu or veggie burgers that much... A ways down, Robert Rapier points out that the price of ethanol -- even subsidized, as ethanol has always been -- moves in lockstep with oil (and always higher than oil). This is because the EROEI of ethanol is close to 1.0 (mainly because you have to distill a water/ethanol mixture to get the ethanol out), and is an excellent illustration of my repeatedly expressed worries above about the problem that all 'renewables' are currently made with fossil fuels.

    [May12'06] Well now it looks like Rove might go down for some stupid Watergate-like Plame-related idiocy. This would be like getting rid of Nixon for a two-bit break-in instead of getting rid of him for slaughtering an extra million or so South east asians. But the worst part is that as all the pukes still left in the current administration start to get a little fidgety, they might consider doing something really rash. As much fun as it is to look at Pollkatz and see Bush's numbers going below 30%, the latest dip is making me a little queasy. Where are those life-style-non-negotiating, richie-loving, gas-guzzling, anti-evolutionist glass-half-full backwash kinda guys when you need them?

    [May21'06] The predicted Rove indictment didn't happen, which was obvious by May 15 when Rove went on conspicuous parade instead of hiding. Initially, it seemed like it might be a classic Rove stunt (leak disinfo, then out it), but other people have speculated that Gonzales was involved in actually stopping Fitzgerald or that Rove has turned state's evidence. It certainly is strange that Joe Wilson might have have been Jason Leopold's source for the indictment story. It's bad to ever underestimate these guys. Also, bad to overestimate US-ians. Though Bush's approval numbers are low (around 30%), Kerry, Gore, and Hillary's number are *all* slightly lower (!). One wonders what Bush would have to do for US-ians not to prefer him.

    [Jun14'06] The DOD has instituted a de facto ban on all new wind power installations in the because they might affect nearby radar bases. Really bright.

    [Jun19'06] The pollkatz graph never ceases to amaze. The sizeable Zarqawi uptick is now visible. The sudden upticks were, in order of size: 9-11, invade Iraq, capture Saddam, post-Katrina road show, and Zarqawi (the 2004 election campaign was the only slow upslope of 5 percentage points total; it was expensive and the whole thing was smaller than Zarqawi). In the absence of a stunt, the downward slope is relatively constant at 2 percentage points loss per month. That would put him at zero in a year and a half. A new stunt will be needed before the year is out.

    [Jun30'06] I laugh when I see the latest 'bin Laden' tape talking about 'Zarqawi', but sometimes I think the joke's on me, because nobody else seems to be laughing.

    [Jul03'06] Jokes on me again (second 'bin Laden' tape). Polls have now recovered to near post-Katrina-road-show levels.

    [Jul09'06] The cost of producing oil from oil sands has sextupled in about 6 years. A little more of this and making oil from oil sand will become uneconomic, even with high oil prices (currently about $74/barrel). The likely cause of this is that higher energy costs have increased the cost of obtaining energy from a low EROEI (energy return on energy investment) resource. The point at which oil sands reach EROEI = 1.0 (i.e., no longer be an energy source) may be closer than some think. It is likely to occur long before the 'reserves' are depleted. It is a cruel joke to call EROEI-less-than-1.0 things 'reserves', though I suppose they are the best kind -- ones that you can never deplete...

    [Jul17'06] A senior State department official said today: "I don't expect there's going to be any requirement for the United States forces" in Lebanon to defend Israel. I wonder exactly what forces he had in mind? This is beginning to sound a little draft-y. Of course, we could just rubble-ize whatever hasn't been rubble-ized yet, and this wouldn't require additional non-existent ground troops. Also, it wouldn't be terrorism because countries with air forces are by definition incapable of terrorism and only carry out strikes with "surgical precision" -- which translates to "strikes requiring surgery without anesthetic or electrical power".

    [Jul26'06] When I was younger, I read a lot of history in addition to science. I always found it incredibly depressing. Sure there were uplifting bits about nice buildings, but it was impossible to ignore the constant wars, genocides, tortures, enslavements, and the towering, ubiquitous inequality (I have no problem with having 5 or 10 times as much, but having 1000 times as much is simply obscene to me, and it will always be). Back then, I still had a feeling that despite all that, an alternate human social organization might be possible where things could be better -- less violent, more equitable. And I still get a tear in my eye when I see a wonderful musical performance or read a finely written-down idea. At moments like those, I am briefly proud to be a human. But taking the whole human picture into consideration -- on the threshold of peak energy and impending irreversible, catastrophic climate change -- humans and language have been a disaster for the planet and for themselves. Here at the acme of civilization, overweight humans take an SUV to the exercise place to watch Wolf Blitzer talk to some minister of propaganda on a flat screen in a not very stylish building. This is this high point of language and the primate brain! I am not proud to be human. When human animals first accidentally acquired the increased power of language and linguistic thought, which led eventually to dominion over other animals, plants, minerals, rivers, shoreline, and oceans, there was no requirement that things work out in the end. If history is a guide, the hotter, drier, lower-energy road ahead is likely to be pretty rough. It might work out, or it might not. If it doesn't, it won't be a tragedy.

    [Jul27'06] Well, now that Floyd Landis has tested positive for doping (testosterone), I should probably revise my calculation on theoildrum (based on his measured wattage) of how much human power there is in a barrel of oil... :-}

    [Aug09'06] Creepy Palast goes on his usual bait and switch on the Alaskan pipeline shutdown and peak oil. Sure, the pipeline inspectors were a little lax in their inspections and some repairs were postponed. But the widespread problem appears to have been caused by a complicated, unexpected turn of events. Insiders suggest that increased acetate from water in the oil and lower flows interacted to lead to the development of sulfide-generating metal-corroding bacteria (see theoildrum.com). Acetate feeds the bacteria and lower flows of lower grade (more viscous) oil allow them to stick to the pipe and then build up a protective coating so they can do their anaerobic work. This doesn't prove that peak oil is an oil company scam. In fact, the problem was *due* to depletion! The acetate is from sea water injected to fix declining well head pressure and the lower flows and lower grades are because the oil field is past its peak. Of course the companies were trying to get away with as little maintenance as possible. But I highly doubt a complete pipeline shutdown was planned, even if the expected result would be a temporary few percent bump in oil prices. And it is not clear whether it would have been more efficient (in terms of not disturbing oil prices) to shutdown the pipeline multiple times for smaller repairs. Finally, spilling all that ink over a temporary interruption in 0.5% of world oil production (Prudoe) distracts attention from the much more serious permanent problems at Ghawar (~5% of world total oil plus more in 'gas liquids') and Cantarell (~2% of world total oil plus more in gas liquids), which never make the news (or appear in Palast's articles).

    [Aug12'06] Given (1) all the lies about previous terror scams (e.g., random Brazilian guy executed by UK secret police in the tube, Florida dummies, fake NY tunnel bomb), (2) the biggest lies of all that convinced John Q Idiot to donate half a trillion of his hard-earned dollars to occupying and destroying Iraq, and (3) the obvious boost to the sociopaths in charge, why would anyone with half a brain believe any of the load of cr*p that is being shoveled out at us about 'liquid explosives'? That said, it truly was genius to do it in the UK, where the population is slightly less out of it than here and Blair is floundering with internal party desertions, but then still use it to make all Americans dump out their orange juice, lipstick, toothpaste, and laptops. Genius. If people keep uncritically swallowing all this bullsh*t without making fun of it or asking hard questions, another real event could lead us down the slippery slope real quick. The purpose of these events and the coordinated media Blitzer is to train people to become subservient slaves. Use it or lose it (your mind).

    [Aug13'06] Liquid explosives and Hezbollah have been linked -- by being used in the same sentence by Bush. C'mon you human monkeys! Use the gift of language. Are we not men? Because some were deceived last time is an excellent reason to think ahead this time.

    [Aug17'06] The terror alerts are getting more cartoonish, but I'm worried that not enough people are laughing. Two days ago, a woman on a London-to-D.C. flight was so dangerous (she was said to be carrying a screwdriver, matches, a note from al Qaeda, and a jar of Vaseline), that her London-to-D.C. flight had to be escorted by two fighter jets to Boston. Fox said she was Middle Eastern. Then yesterday, she was a woman from Vermont having a panic attack (the screwdriver, matches, and al Qaeda note had disappeared). One wonders who that stuff in the story in the first place? Could it be... Satan? Today, she turned out to be a 59 year old mentally ill woman who urinated on the floor when the flight attendants made her use a different bathroom (terr'ist training is sure going down the tubes these days). I suppose we should be grateful she wasn't shot to death. Also yesterday, women were warned not to wear gel bras when they fly (in addition to not urinating on the floor, I suppose). Sounds funny, but read some of the comments on the bra story. Half the people are just about ready to bring on cavity searches. Perhaps we need these lie detector sunglasses (this company can detect "love" too) or this lie-detector booth. Since these are at least 85% accurate according to the companies, that should only have the airport goons working over a couple of hundred thousand hapless non-white travelers a day. All to make the the rest of us safer (I guess the fact that Aldrich Ames passed all his lie dectector tests is irrelevant). What is wrong with you, Americans? Can't you see where this is going? Several people in the bra story comments mentioned the possibility of explosive breast implants. Clearly, this means that only men and extremely flat-chested women should be allowed to fly since "it will make us safer". Well, penile implants are actually extremely common (one of the most common operations, up there with by appendectomies). OK, so maybe just castrated, thin, senile, naked old men that made it out of the Israeli-made Cogito1002 lie-detector booth without cracking a sweat because they couldn't remember the questions... (and since the bathrooms will be locked, everybody gets adult diapers).

    [Aug22'06] Today, there is a terr'ism drill on campus with helicopters circling even lower than they would in a bad neigborhood (normally we only hear fighter jets taking off from the nearby military airfield). This was presumably so they could better see the terr'ists under every bed. In the UK, Blair is so unpopular, and Labor so pusillanimous, that the moribund Tories are finally ahead of Labor in the polls. In Israel, Netanyahu is about to come back after the IDF, which had gone soft in their daily job of humiliating and terrorizing Palestinians, actually ran into somebody who could fight back. Netanyahu could be stopped if Olmert manages to start another bombing campaign. In the US, the Iraq war is the most unpopular it has ever been, but the daily bogus terror follies has actually given Bush's polls an uptick (vs. in the UK, where Reid's and Labour's fake terror gambit seems to have penalized Labour). Life sucks all around.

    [Aug25'06] I get tired of reading about 100 mpg 'cars'. The amount of force it takes to push a car through still air at 60 mph is not going to change because the price of oil goes up or Vinod Khosla decides to skim off some tax subsidies by investing in almost-energy-neutral ethanol plants. Sure, you can make a 'car' that has racing bike tires pumped up to 150 psi that looks like a giant roach standing two feet off the ground that can get 100 mpg. But there will never be a real car that will get 100 mpg -- if by a 'car' you mean something that is big enough to hold 4-5 people sitting up, plus some cargo. Of course, we *already* have vehicles that get *200* mpg per passenger -- trains (this is because of less wind resistance and steel-on-steel wheels). The practical limit for a real, affordable 4-person capable car is around 50 mpg (which is about what the aerodynamic, lightweight, high-tire-pressure, small-engine Prius gets in real life).

    [Aug30'06] After having the JonBenet guy shoved down our throats for weeks, it turns out he didn't do it, so forget that, and on to an unsightly polygamist. Teevee -- an open corporate sewer that pours right into your brain. Forget about peak oil, forget about climate change, forget about WWIII, lookie here at this Mormon. While the rubes are are catatonic and drooling, the federally funded Dr. Strangeloves are hard at work on the 'Terminator' gene technology. Monsanto just bought the seed company, Delta & Pine Land, that has been working on this technology with the USDA for several decades. The basic idea is to create a biotech version of a hybrid -- that is, a viable plant that produces edible seeds, but seeds that won't germinate -- so you have to buy new seeds every year. In Europe, instead of using hybrids to keep people from saving seeds, there are laws to protect breeder's rights (US 'hybrid vigor' is a PR crock). People have saved seeds since the dawn of agriculture (it's nature's way after all), and they still do so in most countries of the world (e.g., India, Europe). The Terminator gene is nothing more than a (potentially) more general way of making any plant produce non-germinating seed -- a peculiarly American obsession. It would be a bad idea, even if the world *wasn't* on the threshold of world food problems, with climate-change-induced droughts killing off Midwest crops (dust-bowl-like conditions in Nebraska this month), grain surplusses at twenty year lows, and depleted aquifers and reduced snowmelt threatening future water shortages and conflicts. There could be a world of pain on the horizon as oil- and natural-gas-fueled industrial agriculture (fertilizer, cultivation, processing, transport) begins its slow and potentially catastrophic descent. Instead of doing something useful, we've got a bunch of evil nincompoops spending our tax dollars for several decades trying to figure out how to put 'copy-protection' into the plants that we eat, so that Monsanto, Bayer Crop Sciences, Syngenta, and DuPont's Pioneer Hi-Bred International can spread the joy of sterile food crops to the rest of the world (i.e., China or India or Brazil) and protect the investments of these wonderful companies (who also just happen to make the Roundup that 'goes well together with' Roundup-Ready genetically modified food crops). The whole scheme is revealed as a scam because the performance of GM food crops is actually no better or slightly worse than non-genetically-hacked crops. It's like a bad sci-fi movie -- except that these sickening suicidal sociopathic drones currently control the world. Ignore all the crap about the genius of capitalism. This is the genius of class war, pure and simple -- their going right for your food.

    [Sep14'06] The capital expenditure per barrel of oil produced per day from deep water wells (like the new 'Jack' discovery in deep water in the Gulf of Mexico) is about *thirty times* that of the shallow water wells that include almost every every other well in the Gulf of Mexico. The reason is the distance from the shore (175 miles -- right in the middle of where hurricanes are the biggest), the deep water (7,000 feet), and then the deep hole into the seabed: the Jack #2 hit oil at 20,000 feet below the seabed. This is below the usual 'oil window' which is 7,500-15,000 feet below the earth's surface; as a result of the depth, the oil is very hot (390 degrees, Fahrenheit) and at very high pressure (20,000 psi). Dealing with all this is expensive. For example, Chevron has invested an estimated $1 billion in its 'Blind Faith' project (cool name, eh?) that is expected to yield 30,000 barrels per day. The fact that companies are willing to go after such expensive oil is perhaps the best evidence that oil has indeed peaked. Meanwhile, take a look at these remarkable statements by Secretary of the Air Force, Michael Wynne, who wants to test non-lethal crowd control weapons on American crowds. The incredible reason given is so that there won't be an outcry from peecee whiners in the 'world press' when we start using them on the untermenschen (we haven't been?). Together with a recent pictorial in Vogue Italia showing us police state as fashion statement, I'm, like, thinking, first they came for the super-models, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't, like, a super-model (pace Pastor Niemoller).

    [Sep17'06] Only one out of ten people on the planet currently drive cars. That number will begin to be *reduced* as oil passes its bumpy peak in the next ten years. Despite all the squawking in the business press over the temporary drop in oil prices last week, a one-week or one-month or one-year drop in oil price is going to do precious little to change the amount of oil remaining in the ground that is easy enough to get to that more energy is released from burning it than you use up getting it out. Even Econobrowser thinks the recent price drop is partly due to a demand reduction indicating economic distress, not a result of an increase in supply. 50 years from now, it will be patently obvious how ridiculous it is to *drive* to the *exercise* place.

    [Sep20'06] Well, pollkatz' poll collection has spoken. By confiscating lipstick, coffee, and hand lotion, by making a new fake bin Laden tape (he's dead, Jim), and by pasting the public with endless idiotic 9-11 festivities, Bush's polls numbers have experienced a definitive uptick -- of almost the same amplitude as the one from Zarqawi. Sometimes I just hate our stupid animal brains, despite all my efforts to study them. Looking over what I wrote above just before both of these upticks, I predicted there would have to be some kind of stunt to keep Bush from going below 30%. As always, I failed to appreciate just how *cheap* effective stunts can be. I hate to think of what would happen if there was (another) expensive one! (it's not facism when we do it).

    [Sep23'06] Sure seems like an attack on Iran may be moving forward once again. If Bush moves to attack, there will be little opposition from mostly pro-Israel Democrats, just as was the case with Iraq. There isn't a peep of antiwar protest here. I agree with JoAnn Wypijewski that the 9-11 black t-shirt people have functioned to some extent as a distraction (esp. the Pentagon no-plane people), but not with the idea that the topic is unimportant -- after all, 9-11 is being re-used for the third time -- Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran. Who benefits? The truly Reich-y feeling I got here during the original Iraq invasion will come back with a vengence if Iran is bombed. Right now, instead, I just feel like people are tired and worried about the economy and housing prices (as we are!). But that could change. An Iran strike would almost surely be a big hit to the economy, and the resulting fear and loathing could easily be used to power more rapid moves toward a police state here and in the UK. I like Alexander Cockburn with his snappy writing style and all. He doesn't think an attack on Iran will happen. But then, he doesn't believe in global warming and thinks that peak oil is just an oil company plot. Sure it's an oil company plot; but the fact that we used up about half of the world's oil and that our current rate of usage is the highest ever is also *really* important -- much more important -- for the future of industrial civilization than a few fatted oil company executives (read some damn geology and www.realclimate.org, Alexander) or some professional traders getting rich (or losing their investor's shirts) on preposterously rapid swings (relative to the underlying geology) in commodity prices.

    [Sep30'06] The Congress' latest legislation about secret detention and torture without trial defines an "enemy combatant" as anyone who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." That's awfully general. A lot of what I have written above could be construed as hostile to some Americans in the United States -- like the ones that have spent 500 billion of our tax dollars to slaughter people in Iraq. All joking aside, this is an extremely dangerous law that sets aside habeas corpus and makes it possible to detain and 'disappear' anybody without public due process. It is somewhat stupefying to think that Bush's success in ramming this through will benefit the Republicans and Bush because it returns the emotional focus to fear and submission. The current polls suggest that only 20% of Americans approve of the way the current Iraq war is being run, but an additional 33% approve of it 'if a new strategy were used' (if it were Kerry-ified). So that means that a majority approve; Less than half disapprove. This is quite amazing, considering the actual 'facts on the ground' and is omninous with respect to a possible attack on Iran, which in older polls cited above was even more popular than the Iraq war.

    [Oct04'06] Foley says he wrote the dirty love emails (and had cyber sex while voting on the Emergency Wartime Supplemental Appropriation for Iraq in 2003) because he was molested by clergy. So to fix this, he resigned and checked himself into an alcohol rehab run by Scientologists (better clergy?). Sounds like Frank Zappa. And how do we know that he's not lying to cover up the fact that he was actually molested by conjoined Amish twins? (oh, mercy). The great majority of child molesters are heterosexual but this isn't useful Repug spin. Teehee. While this hallucinogenic circus goes on, out of view of the news, 17 US soldiers were killed in Iraq from Saturday to Tuesday, and 263 other humans were killed in Iraq Tuesday -- all in just one day. Amazingly, Bush's poll numbers have continued their rise from his all time low in May 2006, which was partly due to a spike in gas prices, which are now easing. Unlike gas prices, sex scandals have no affect on an already-made-up Republican mind. In fact, I fear that Republicans may not lose control of either house of Congress if enough media chaff is blown into the air in the next few weeks. For example, alert viewers noticed that on Tuesday, Foley was repeatedly listed as a Democrat on Fox 'News' O'Reilly Factor. Kewl Rove effect. Americans sure are cheap dates -- the 'laughing terrorist' tape released last week was already in US possession at the end of 2001 as explained (!) by expert Evan Coleman on NBC "Ladies and gentlemen -- this is a psyop; do not attempt to adjust the controls; we control the vertical". Of course, depending on how pesky those daily polls look, some stronger medicine may be required, but I doubt it will be needed. I suppose the thing that depresses me the most is the leisurely mechanical way in which policy works. For example, the "Salvador option" for Iraq was announced by John 'Death Squad' Negroponte almost two years ago (see above). Now we see its full expression.

    [Oct05'06] Drudge explains today that the "naughty emails" were just a prank. Works for me. An 'insider' responding to Drudge said it couldn't be a prank but insisted on anonymity. It worked for him/her, too!

    [Oct07'06] There is a useful book "Where There is No Doctor". But that's a little premature. First we need "Where There is no iPod" (yes, I own an early model). It is insane to be spending $100 billion a year to make a shambles of Iraq instead of spending $100 billion a year on upgrading non-car transport, given predictions about near future oil production. Why do people look at you dirty for trying to plan ahead? Why is it considered immoral and anti-business to even think about planning more than 1 year into the future?

    [Oct09'06] Bush's polls took about a 5% hit from PageGate. But I think the NK test may reverse that and resume the upward trend stimulated by low gas prices over the past few months. We will have to wait for another week to see. The aircraft carrier Eisenhower and its escort set sail for Iran a week ago and will get there around October 21. That's seems a little small for an Iran attack. Perhaps the attack has been put off until after the election.

    [Oct20'06] What's up? The continuing Pagegate dribbles suggest some kind of internal squabble amongst the ruling junta. I had expected that the neocon Republicans would have been pushed out years ago in favor of equally pliant Clinton-style 'Demopublicans', but I was mistaken. But now that it looks looks like they may finally be on the ropes, I'm not sure I am looking forward to the alternative. The 'I can't believe it's not torture' Military Commissions Act sailed through with hardly a comment. Most Democrats voted against it, but Hillary voted for it. It is worth noting that the people who are probably doing the pushing in Pagegate are the same people who book rendition flights to Syria. The Foley follies may have served a dual purpose as both house-cleaning as well as a smokescreen for the creeping police state.

    [Oct25'06] The news that ethanol producers are being hurt by the recent drop in oil prices fills my brain with a weird feeling that combines ennui and disgust. Ethanol from corn is a pretty stupid idea since currently you have to put in about 4-5 units of fossil fuel to get 4-5 units of ethanol plus 1 energy unit worth of brewers grains (fermentation leftovers -- yum). This is mostly because it takes a lot of energy to distill the ethanol-water mixture generated by fermentation. It's obviously not practical to scale up an EROEI = 1.2 to 1.25 process that much, even ignoring the cost to soil fertility and water supplies. And as soon as the market for brewer's grains saturates, you'd end up with an energy break-even (EROEI = 1.0) process. But the news that ethanol is taking a beating because of a few weeks dip in oil prices strikes me as absurd -- even given that ethanol from corn is a very bad idea. This is how we plan to power our fine civilization? Changing our plans on the roll of an oil hedge fund's dice? What insanity! Even Vinod Khosla -- so recently a major ethanol booster -- has suddenly turned against it this week. Imagine if people treated infrastructure like roads this way. Luckily, roads are harder to tear up that quickly. Besides, they will eventually make fine bicycle paths if we can get a hold of them before road maintenance goes away :-}

    [Oct29'06] The elections are almost upon us. The Democrats have graciously promised to continue the war in case they 'win' (gee thanks, you disgusting worms). But it has been apparent for over a month that a pre-election Saddam surprise was being planned. It is a testament to the power of government-corporate media that things like this can be planned in advance, basically in public, *but they work anyway* -- even with the internet. The 'bin Laden' tape shown a few days before Nov 2004 election (plus a little vote machine fraud) was all that was needed back then. It is true that Bush himself couldn't win now because he is about 13 points below when he was at breakeven in Nov 2004. But the Republiworms still might survive the midterms with a little help from the Saddam verdict, the ongoing counter-barrage of sex dirt, and another 'bin Laden' tape. From an anonymous comment by "w" at informationclearinghouse: "Oh, how I love the smell of human nature in the morning"...

    [Nov02'06] Boy, the rats are really leaving the sinking ship! Bechtel, Halliburton and Kroll are exiting Iraq after prying their mouths loose from the money spigot. And redundant scumbags Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens get on Paula Zahn and say they oppose Bush and the war without mentioning how, when it counted in the run-up to war, they supported it all the way. It's skin-crawlingly embarrassing to watch. The likely bill for the Iraq war will come in at at least 1 trillion dollars. That would have paid for about 3 years of total US oil imports (15 billion barrels of oil at 75 dollars a barrel). We certainly have not managed to steal anywhere near that much oil. Total Iraq production numbers are unreliable, but is likely to have been less than 2 billion barrels of oil total since the war started. I have always suspected that the chaos was part of the plan to keep the oil in the ground for when the crunch really starts to hit in a few years. Conventionally, Iraq's reserves are thought to be around 100 billion barrels, though this is after the mid-80's doubling of reserves when oil prices crashed. If the real reserves are closer to 50 billion barrels, then we could have just bought everything remaining for 3 trillion, and nobody would have gotten hurt. The permanent bases and the biggest embassy in the world are still under construction, so it is hard to believe the war is over yet. I'll believe that the US is leaving when *those* construction projects (as opposed to electricity and sewage for Iraqis) end. If we stay for a while longer, the total cost easily get up to 3 trillion.

    [Nov08'06] Well, the most expensive midterm election in history ($2.8 billion dollars) is over and looks the Democrats have taken the House, partly because opposition to the war is growing and partly out of disgust. The news sites all mention the war, but not the fact that a number of the gained seats are occupied by pro-war Democrats, courtesy of Democrat master planner, Rahm Emanuel (though his pro-war war-injury wheelchair candidate lost). So the war will go on for the foreseeable future. Phased redeployments will occur. That means staying. The Democrats may end up devoting *even more* resources and troops to the war, to 'do it right'. I'm sure that the Iraqis would have liked us *so* much better and would have been happy to have us steal their oil if only our troops had had better body armour, and if we had only used more robot drones to sneakily blow them up at night instead of shooting them in their beds up close and personal, and if all our troops got counseling for PTSD not only after but also *before* slaughtering families. Riiight. The Democrats do have a problem, though -- if they don't make *some* kind of antiwar noise, they may be back out the door soon. It should be interesting seeing the centrist neocon-like core of the Democratic party trying to weasel their way around this one. They will have to repeatedly explain their votes to pay for the continued occupation -- since we can't leave all that oil just sitting there 'unprotected', can we? -- yet they will have to explain every time that the war it is just about to end, any minute now, and that it's all Bush's fault. Iran fired a large number of surface-to-air missiles in a test and the US armada in the Persian gulf seems to have temporarily backed off. Perhaps that Iran tests had something to do with the back down.

    [Nov11'06] The U.S. armed services have requested a staggering $160 billion supplemental appropriation to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan just for the second half of fiscal year 2007. For context, this half-a-year request is roughly 10 times what we spend in half a year on all biomedical research in this country. This request is on top of the half a trillion or so appropriated for 'defense' each year. Way to go, America. Thank god we no longer have to fight this war 'on the cheap', Rumsfeld-style, since he's gone, right?

    [Nov13'06] I have begun to curb the misanthropy that can sometimes well up when I read that the best way to fix finite energy, water, soil, and food resources in the face of growing human population and growing human demands is to keep on buying *even more* things in order to help creative businessmen innovate. If only *even more* plasma screens could be bought on credit, our cunning businessmen would be able to make *even more* money, which would help them to solve the peak oil problem for us (we don't have to do anything ourselves -- just buy), because that's why we pay them the big bucks. Instead of letting my brain react to this crap as if it had smelt something bad, I am learning in my old age that it's better to take complete control of my mind, sit back, and watch the river flow. One or two billion people are just starting to slowly and desperately creep northward in search of water and food. In a decade or two, more will moving faster. The northerners will try to keep them out. Eventually, cars and roads and chip fabs will begin to be abandoned. Some humans may embrace earlier patterns of living. It's neither bad or good, beautiful or ugly. They don't call us Baby Doomers (from Jas Jain) for nothing!

    [Nov17'06] Hoyer (pro-Israel, liberal, hawk) crushes Murtha (conservative, ABSCAM-swift-boated, antiwar, former Marine) for House Democratic majority leader in a secret vote. Standard labels sure are strange these days. Matt Barganier wrote on antiwar.com a few days ago, "Here's a plan: leave". But now that the election is safely over, the mainstream media blitz against withdrawal has reached a new screeching crescendo to make it clear why now we have to spend more than twice as much on Iraq (the latest *half-year* extra-for-Iraq request will be for $125 to 160 billion!) and send 20,000 more troops on top of the 150,000 already there. As usual, I'm amazed by how pliable the public is. While Al Franken is distracting the proles with his stupid victory dance on Colbert, the war is *escalating* (in order to end it, of course). The rats are boarding the new ship. A great election victory! How Orwellian.

    [Nov22'06] The 'I can't believe it's not apartheid' Dems have jumped over themselves to rebut the title of Jimmy Carter's new book. The destruction of the two-state solution has left only the one-state solution (or the final solution for Palestinians, a la Avigdor Lieberman). The eventual one-state solution will simply be a public recognition of the 'facts on the ground' -- the shelled bombed walled Bantustan prisons of Gaza and the West Bank will never be a Palestinian state. A (even bloodier) assault on Gaza is likely to occur soon under cover of Thanksgiving and the Gemayel assassination in Lebanon It will probably look something like this accidental attack on BBC reporters in Iraq in 2003. It will be on teevee everywhere but here in the US [update: Nov29 -- more killings on Sat, none on Sun, more on Monday]. And as Nancy Pelosi has explained, the original and ongoing seizure of Palestinian land has *absolutely nothing* to do with the conflict.

    [Nov29'06] It is difficult to curb the tendency of the human mind toward black and white. Sometimes, things *are* basically black and white. In the case of the Iraq war before it started in late 2002, I was virtually positive (see above) that there were no WMDs. This was based on all the faked propaganda as well as the fact that the US was preparing to invade without any obvious fear of WMD retaliation. Anyone with a scientific attitude and an internet connection could have come to the same conclusion before the war started. Not 100% positive, but 99.9% positive. With respect to the current situation in Iraq, it's important keep similar probabilities in mind. I think that there is no question that a divide-and-conquer strategy of encouraging Shi'a vs. Sunni vs. Kurd sectarian violence was an explicit strategy of the US and UK -- e.g., see the "El Salvador option" comment of Negroponte, or UK soldiers caught by Iraqis dressed as Arabs carrying car bombs. Over the past 6 months, however, it looks like things have gotten slightly more out of control than even the Rumsfelds and Negropontes planned. The Negropontes et al. have their own probability estimates, but they are hardly perfect either. The US and the UK appear to be somewhat less in control of the oil than they were initially planning to be. But the problem comes in estimating just how out of control things actually are. This is currently very difficult, since there is virtually no independent non-propaganda information coming out of Iraq and virtually nothing is known about what is really going on with their oil industry, aside from reports of pipeline attacks and repairs. Patrick Cockburn took a dangerous drive along the Iranian border and talked to a few people on the way this week. He said it was too dangerous to go into many towns. That's as good as it has gotten for the past few months. So, I maintain a high level of uncertainty with respect to what is currently happening and what will happen next. It is possible that the US could have its Vietnam evacuation moment in the next year as a result of an interruption of the main supply line north from Kuwait and Basra, should the US significantly attack their Shi'a death squad allies. Or the Green Zone could suffer a major Ba'athist attack on the Shi'a death squad administrators housed there. Currently, it seems somewhat more likely to me that the US military will hang on without a major disaster, and retreat somewhat into its permanent bases and into the Green Zone to cut casualties. I am virtually certain that the US will not voluntarily leave all that oil behind. They will only go if they are forced out militarily. Oil prices appear to be on the way back up. If prices get up to $100 next year, it probably won't be difficult to convince the proles to start changing their mind about the occupation. The oil card has already been floated by Bush.

    [Dec01'06] Natural gas prices have jumped up because it got cold for a few weeks. Just the warm (cold?) feeling of the invisible hand at work. This graph of conventional and non-conventional gas production in the US is not comforting (notice how non-conventional is not compensating for the drop in conventional). Natural gas is also the feedstock for making fertilizer. I'm not looking forward to when the invisible hand starts grabbing my food.

    [Dec03'06] The world is getting pretty weird. Perhaps Rumsfeld was fired partly because he was planning an Iraq drawdown!? As expected (by me and others), the 'commission' doesn't suggest withdrawal, Bush ignores it anyway, and the Orwellian press explains it all to the proles. Bush's numbers are down but still haven't breached the post-Katrina low.

    [Dec12'06] World 'oil' production is holding steady as larger and larger amounts of 'condensate' or 'natural gas liquids' are substituting for traditional crude oil. In the depleted US, only a quarter of our 6 million barrels of a day of 'oil' production comes from *crude oil*. The rest is 'condensate', which is slightly shorter chain hydrocarbons that condense from a gas to liquid (e.g., pentane) when they come up the well bore and are cooled to surface temperatures (don't get these 'natural gas liquids' mixed up with 'liquified natural gas', which is cooled, compressed methane). The earth is hotter and hotter with depth. For example, it can be 180 deg centigrade -- well above the boiling point of water -- in a deep gas well. Natural gas liquids come out of gas wells, which are generally deeper than oil wells. They mostly produce gas (methane) and 'natural gas liquids' because the higher heat at greater depths 'cracks' the oil to shorter chain hydrocarbons. The lastest way to make oil production look like it's not dropping is to not only include condensates (natural gas liquids) but also ethanol (!). This total number, which is available for liquid fuels for cars, trucks, and planes, is called 'all liquids'. The problem is that ethanol is made using a lot of natural gas and coal, and is mainly a conversion product of fossil fuels, not a big energy source (energy returned on energy invested, EROEI, is only 1.2-1.3 for corn ethanol in the US, and this is only after including spent brewers grains as an energy output). The rest of the oil-producing world is inexorably headed to where the US is now. Gas wells also deplete much faster than oil wells, because the gas comes out of porous rocks more quickly. Thus, the production from a typical US gas begins to drop off markedly after only 5 or 6 years. Move along, nothing to see here.

    [Dec19'06] Stuart Staniford returned to posting on The Oil Drum after an absence and had a few recent posts on how we are spending too much money on public transit and should instead count on smaller, better gas mileage vehicles. Ooooh! Don't get the scary American consumers mad! Ooooh! Don't anger the godlike venture capitalists! (Stuart do you really think that that dufus Vinod Khosla is godlike in anything else than the ability to line his pockets with the money of stupid people?). Stuart didn't include all of the subsidies given to cars and highways, or the costs associated with the fact that there are 750,000 maimings a year on US highways (defined as the loss of at least an arm, a leg, or an eye), but he is probably right that better mileage will give us the biggest bang for the buck in the next few years. Also, Stuart had it right about scary Americans, but for the wrong reason. Sure they won't support a large tax on fossil energy. But down the line, I'm worried about what they might support when the sh** really starts to hit the fan as the world arrives at the endgame of peak 'all fossil energy' (coal+oil+gas+nuclear). That's still a ways off (2030 by the sensible estimates I know). My worry is that then, the US will still have the world's best WMD's, but will likely have continued its ongoing contraction in percent of the world gross national product (currently, about 22% down from 60% in the middle of the 20th century and will probably have lost its ability to outbid other major powers for energy resources. Scary indeed. Of course, Stuart can't imagine planning that far ahead because that's not how capitalism works, currently, in the US and UK. Too bad. Another thing that irks me about The Oil Drum is the studied avoidance of the elephant-in-the-room topic of the ongoing occupation of the country containing 12% of the world's remaining oil. Sheesh! It's the *oil* drum. It's embarrassing to see otherwise smart people with all their graphs (I like graphs!) skirting around the issue. This doesn't mean that the Iraq oil steal is a slam dunk -- though the operation has not yet failed and we are now getting a lot of oil from Iraq (again), it's not completely out of the question that the US military could actually lose.

    [Dec20'06] Bush announces that 70,000 more troops are going to Iraq along with an extra $100 billion (on top of the regular half-a-trillion Bloat-a-gon budget), the Democratic worms hide in their own night soil (that's what we elected them for, right?), and for a distraction, Wolf Blitzer interviews David Duke, who accuses Wolf of still working for AIPAC and of having him on to try to spin 'Iran' (he probably meant Iraq). Good Americans yawn uncomfortably as they prepare to pay for the holocaust of another half a million Iraqis because underneath it all, they know they value their SUV's more than other human lives. Why protest? Good Americans.

    [Dec21'06] In a talk at Berkeley last month, Peter Dale Scott made the point that by 9:59 AM on 9-11, the time of the second collapse, the FBI already had a list of the alleged hijackers (Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, pp. 13-14). But according to the 9-11 Report, NORAD only became aware that Flight 93 was hijacked 9 minutes later at 10:08, after it had already crashed (the 9-11 Report says it crashed at 10:03). Those FBI guys sure got that list out quick.

    [Dec28'06] "Troposphere, whatever. I told you before I'm not a scientist. That's why I don't want to have to deal with global warming" -- Supreme Court Justice Scalia, 2006. Don't worry, Tony, you won't have to deal with global warming. Your 9 kids and their grandkids will deal with it (whether or not they're scientists...).

    [Jan04'07] The virtual silence of the antiwar movement is dreadful. Just about the only visible resistance is Cindy Sheehan (go Cindy!) closing down an Orwellian Rahm Emanuel event with a moment of clarity. Nancy Pelosi flexes her biceps for the camera, which is fine, but the upcoming escalation of the Iraq war merits hardly a peep from her. The only thing she will say about Iraq in her acceptance speech is: "It is the responsibility of the President to articulate a new plan ... that allows us to responsibly redeploy American forces". What complete trash! I'm sure the preznit is articulating a new plan for redeploying troops. The 2006 election was completely irrelevant! Bush will propose a troop increase, the Democratic worms and roaches will bravely force him to increase a tiny bit less, and then they will vote to pay for it all, which will be an increase over current funding, without ever bringing up the elephant-in-the-room fact that the whole multi-trillion dollar war was based on outright lies (WMDs and Iraq/9-11). The only way to end the war quicker is to vote *against* appropriations, not to increase them! That's exactly how the Vietnam war ended. The Democratic guy with the blown arteriovenous malformation will be replaced by a Republican worm, and the Democratic worms will just wriggle a bit. Oil is actually dropping. It went down $5 over the past two days (over 8%, $61 -> $56). So life is good. And blowing that trillion or two to demolish Iraq and continuously terrorize all of its inhabitants is, oh well, it's impolite to bring it up during the shopping season. Bush's numbers numbers *are* almost down to his post-Katrina all-time low (which was, averaging across polls about, 34% approval). If they go down another 10% into the twenties -- which would be quite possible if there were to be an oil price spike -- there might be some actual unease in Washington. Since the largest two currently producing oil fields are crashing (Ghawar at 5% and Cantarell at 2% of current world production), and since crude oil stocks are rapidly dropping, the spike may be just around the corner. However, it's good to remember that Congress routinely polls in the twenties and even below, and that doesn't mean people care enough to do anything about it. Just drive the SUV to the exercise place.

    [Jan10'07] This article by Robert Parry is profoundly depressing. Among other things, it confirms the notion I suggested above that Rumsfeld was fired because he had 'gone wobbly' on the Iraq war (!). And the disgusting vicious Negroponte -- originally associated with the Vietnam CIA Phoenix assassination program, and after that, architect of the Central American death squads in the 80's -- may have been demoted from intelligence czar to Condi's helper because he argued that intelligence suggested that Iran was still many years away from bomb-grade uranium enrichment. As Chalmers Johnson (former CIA) and others have written, as empires start to decay as a result of the run-down of energy, food, metals, soil, and climate change, they often find it impossible to avoid over-allocating resources to foreign and domestic militarization. This diverts resources -- at the most critical point in time -- from constructive efforts to reorganize the empire to avoid collapse. As an example, the enormous drain of tax money into Iraq (3-5 times the entire budget for biomedical research, a comparable amount of money to what is spent to import oil!) has resulted in the freezing of science budgets, esp. in the physical sciences (e.g., better renewable energy, better batteries, etc.). When per capita energy begins to decline in a decade or two (it has been flat since 1980), it will be more and more difficult to undo the infrastructure decisions -- such as low density spread-out suburbs -- made in a time of higher per capita energy consumption, because undoing them requires so much energy. Society will likely get less complex. The reduction in complexity of societies has happened very many times in human history. Sometimes it was fast and disorderly; other times it was slower and more dignified. Many people think that the development of modern technology and science in the twentieth century has moved us beyond the possibility of complexity reduction. Certainly, there are more smart, technologically capable people alive today than there were at any point in human history; and smart humans are more fully interconnected than they have ever been in history. But that interconnection relies primarily on late nineteenth to mid twentieth century energy supplies -- coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium -- that are running out (humans now use oil at a rate of 150 tons per second, every second). As someone recently pointed out, an avatar in Second Life uses as much energy as a real Brazilian. I don't think that complexity reduction is unavoidable. And there is still a lot of 'slack' in the system (e.g., cars that are way too big). But watching the Democrats cave on increases in militarization (Pelosi is 'against the war' but will not cut funding for it -- WTF?), and seeing the late-Roman-empire-like imperial overstretch overseas and the militarization of domestic life (daily innundation with images of SWAT teams and hazmat suits; the latest '24' is about domestic internment camps), it seems clear that at this point, we are still moving in the wrong direction.

    [Jan15'07] Today was the Orwellian "Martin Luther King" parade. Over the years in San Diego, it has gradually attracted larger and larger numbers of the military and prison industrial complex, which finally this year prompted the peace community to withdraw (King opposed the Vietnam war early on, in 1967 -- the war ended in 1973). The US now has 5 to 10 times as many people in jail per capita as any other Western country -- the highest percentage in the entire world (3x China, 2x Russia). The US was more or less like other Western countries from 1920 to 1980. Since then, the number of people in jail per capita has gone up over 500%, a lot of it, the result of the war on pot. In California, prison guards make more money than University full professors. In 1980, we used to spend twice as much tax money on the Universities as we did on prisons. Now we spend more than twice tax money on prisons as we spend on Universities. In this light, it was perhaps not surprising to see the a prison transport bus, decorated as a float, with people waving happily through barred windows -- in the "Martin Luther King" parade? How sad. War is peace. Imprisonment is freedom.

    [Jan16'07] Every day is a decision. The problem with ballots is that they just have stupid face contests and bozo propositions on them instead of issues. There should be votes in which you have to choose between health insurance and invading a foreign country to make sure we get the oil and someone else doesn't. Or, 'do you want to change over to coal-to-liquids as regular oil depletes thereby ruining the Earth for your grandchildren, or do you want everybody to buy smaller cars'? Decisions, decisions.

    [Jan21'07] Here is my annotation of Stuart Eugene Thiel's (Pollkatz') Bush approval poll compilation for today, showing the Mighty Wurlitzer in action over the past 6 years. By my calculations, it looks like the uptick from the 'war on shampoo' was almost exactly nullified by the downtick from the Abramoff/Page-gate/Republicans-feeding-in-the-money-trough scandals. The graph sure looks like is ripe for another uptick to me...

    [Jan22'07] Global carbon emissions are currently about 1 ton per person per year on average. But we Americans put out and average of 10 tons each per year once indirect output (CO2 generated when stuff is made elsewhere and transported here) is included. We could reduce global carbon outputs in a fair way by having Americans reduce a lot and having other people not increase too much. Unfortunately, I think this is very unlikely to happen voluntarily on either end. However, looking on the bright side :-}, oil+gas will peak soon, which will start to force a slow decline in CO2 output from oil+gas, perhaps as soon as by the end of this decade (ASPO). What happens *then* with respect to coal will be critical for the quality of human (and other) life on the planet after the middle of this century. If we burn all the remaining EROEI>1.0 coal or convert most of it to liquids in an attempt to keep our current lifestyle going for another few decades, our kids probably won't forgive us for ruining the Earth, and why should they? That is exactly what we are currently setting up to do! Large numbers of coal plants without CO2 sequestration are being planned and built, and coal-to-liquids is the next big thing, in America and elsewhere (e.g., see Stern report, or the fact that a new coal power station is coming online every 5 days in China). This winter has been very warm (December 2006 average as much as 10 degrees higher than previous averages) in northern America and northern Europe, and this has spooked some people there a little; but it was also unusually pleasant (I grew up in Chicago). But I am afraid it is not scary and not nearly unpleasant enough. Given that weather has some chaotic features, the best I can 'hope' for is a really shocking event -- a once-in-a-millenium storm that causes a dam to fail or a freak once-in-a-millenium winter that causes a worldwide crop failure. It won't be directly attributable to global warming, but people will think it is a sign from the gods, and might start to wake from their daily walking (I mean driving...) dreams and do something to avoid leaving their grandchildren a fried earth. Alternatively, peak oil+gas could cause an economic collapse that prevents the immediate atmosphere-i-fication of all the remaining coal. Hmmm... I'm not sure which I would prefer (an act of god or an act of economics). But I think both are preferable to business as usual for the simple reason that the bad effects of CO2 additions take many decades to kick in (this is what the climate scientists really mean when they say that the system is now 'not in equilibrium with current forcings'). Business as usual is likely to result in a terrible coming together of global warming, sea level rise, increased storminess, crop failure, water shortages, and energy starvation in the second half of this century.

    [Jan24'07] SWAT teams are called out 40,000 times annually -- over 100 times a day. There have been essentially no terrorist incidents for years, and so most of the time, the SWAT teams are serving warrants, often drug-related. The great majority of the drug-related late night home invasions are based on tips from snitches (people trying to cop a plea), and many have resulted in mistakes and murders (next old lady door neigbor, the address provided the snitch was drawn at random). Here is a map map of where the SWAT teams murdered innocent people (e.g., after being startled by their own flash bang grenades) and where they broke into the wrong house. Sometimes, a snitch might sell a small amount of pot to a person to create a suspect (and some income). At its height, the East German Stasi turned a substantial portion of the population into snitches and had enormous paper files on just about everybody. The real problem is providing 'market incentives' to people to become snitches. There are various kinds of incentives. In the bad old days of El Salvador, death squads would torture each suspect they kidnapped until they came up with a few names. Then they would kidnap those people and torture them. We really don't want to (continue to) go there, people.

    [Jan24'07] Well, so much for the hydrogen economy (that was a few state-of-the-unions ago). Hydrogen is *soooo* 2004, man! This year, it's corn ethanol. The energy return on energy invested for ethanol is at best 1.3, after counting dried distiller grains as output (the market for them as cow food is already saturated). If you just the count fossil fuel input, the EROEI for corn ethanol is more like 1.1 (from the pro-ethanol Kammen lab study in Science), so you need 10 units of fossil fuel to make one unit of ethanol. This is so you can replace one unit of fossil fuel. This idiocy of it all is stunning. By contrast, Brazilian ethanol is more energy positive because they harvest a lot of the sugar cane by hand, and then they burn the bagasse leftovers (instead of fossil fuel) to distill the ethanol. Scaling this up would result in at least 2x the CO2 output of fossil fuels (cane bagasse burnt for distilling, then the ethanol itself burnt as fuel). To scale this up much at all would cut deeply into soil fertility, cropland, and water supply. But who needs food and water as long as you can *drive*?

    [Jan25'07] No reasonably well-to-do middle-class US- or UK-ian would think of *not* driving a kid around in a giant SUV with a special car seat to 'make them safe'. They're doing it for the children! At the same time, not one of these people thinks twice about destroying the earth for those very same kids by moving to a huge house in the suburbs and driving them around in a giant SUV. In *that* case: "it's not our problem; somebody will figure something out; everybody else is doing it; it's child abuse to discuss such a scary topic with a child; it won't happen for a while anyway; it's too inconvenient to not do it; public transportation is for poor people and therefore unsafe; blah, blah". When our kids grow up, they will find us disgusting.

    [Jan26'07] Chomsky is always babbling on about how the world is getting so much more civilized (smaller and smaller holocausts). It is true there is nothing to compare with the biggest holocaust of all time -- the reduction of the population of the New World from 80 million to about 10 million in the first 100 years of the occupation by Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, and British in the 16th century. But sometimes things decisively turn around, for the worse. It looks like the vulcans in the US and Israel are slavering over themselves once again as they contemplate using small nuclear bombs on a non-nuclear-bomb-possessing country, Iran -- a place where in a poll this month, 70% of the population has a favorable view of the US (that seems higher than here!). A fear that I voiced a few years ago is that this just might 'work'. It will be unbelievably horrible. But then, somewhere upwards of 2/3 of a million Iraqis have already perished horribly -- and nobody here cares. There would probably be similar level of casualities in a small nuclear attack. Will Good Americans care? I doubt it. However, Iran will survive such a nuclear attack if large hydrogen bombs are not used. Just as our oil-reserves-driven attack on a starved, defenseless Iraq made us look weak, a nuclear attack on a non-nuclear Iran will make us look even more weak (Scott Horton interview with Gordon Prather mp3). Contrary to the brayings of hypercapitalists, maintaining the position of the US requires a huge amount of good will from other people -- i.e., altruism. A nuclear attack will use up what is left of that. Stupid chess move, vulcans (not to mention, it's *wrong*). 'Give us your oil and food, or we'll hydrogen bomb you' is not a plausible negotiating strategy for a teetering empire.

    [Jan27'07] I just read a story linked to from Rawstory. A toddler reached for an electrical cord and the parents gave the kid a swat on its diapered bottom. Their grandmother in law was there and threatened to file a child abuse report. She was asked to leave. She wouldn't. So the father tasered her. The whole sequence starting with the grandmother's threat just puts my mind off balance. What will happen to us when we start facing real problems? Where is common sense? I feel like people's minds are losing their coherence under the onslaught of media, marketing, and modern life and are becoming brittle and drone-like. I see this in my classes. My students in undergraduate and graduate classes come in knowing less and less about basic biology, much less evolution. Some of them haven't even heard of the idea of evolution! This is in part because textbook manufacturers -- bottom-line people they are -- were scared by the creationists wanting front cover stickers saying evolution was just a theory, blah, blah. That's bad for sales. So instead of adding creationism to the biology texts, they simply took out evolution, along with a lot of the biology. Understanding biology without evolution is like trying to understand electricity and magnetism while carefully avoiding any reference to the Maxwell equations. A similar thing is starting to happen with global warming. After an evangelical who works as a "computer consultant" complained in Washington state, a local school board sent out a ban on showing 'controversial' films about global warming in science classes for 22,000 students in the district. The stupefying reason for the complaint wasn't that the parent disagreed that the earth was heating up! He was just ticked off because he believed that the warming wasn't caused by lefty carbon dioxide, but rather that it was "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day. I'm thinking we should try to postpone it (judgment day) for a bit. Probably even that guy's 7 kids would appreciate it when they grow up.

    [Jan27'07] The richies in Davos fattened up by globalization are getting worried about global warming. Something must be done. De-globalization and boiling a little of their own fat off? I don't think so. These parasites will be coming after the small amount of fat remaining on their hosts.

    [Jan29'07] An article today in the Wall Street Journal has a shocking graph showing that Cantarell -- the super giant oil field in the Yucatan that accounts for more than half of Mexico's oil output -- peaked in 2004 and is now rapidly declining (it's output was boosted by nitrogen injection starting in 2000). The output of Cantarell declined a stunning 25% in 2006 (though partly due to scheduled maintenance -- the expected continuing decline rate is 'only' 15%). Cantarell accounts for 2% of total world oil production and like the North Sea, began its decline unexpectedly. Not worthy of the US teevee news, of course (after all, Mexico is just one of our largest oil import sources, whatever). Here is a graph from a Pemex report (now taken down) from 2005, showing the rapid increase between 2000 and 2004 (as a result of the initiation of nitrogen injection -- 'secondary production'). Here is the sorry tale of what happened after 2004. In June 2005 (see my recently updated peak oil talk), based on that Pemex report, I expected Cantarell to start declining in 2008. Little did I know that Cantarell was already past peak at that time! US peak oil in 1970 was like that; and it peaked despite a huge (more than 10 times) increase in the number of wells drilled in Texas as well as the discovery of a super giant field in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Omninously, Saudi Arabia has been on a drilling binge. World peak will likely sneak up on us in a similar fashion. Hopefully, it's still a few years off (I guessed 2008 a few years ago; most of the curve fitters at theOilDrum are currently guessing 2010-2012).

    [Feb02'07] Dang, another Robert Parry article, combined with the chimp grabbing extra executive powers earlier this week is sure starting to move me from being incredulous about an Iran attack to being resigned. It seems we're at the stage of November or December 2002 with respect to Iraq. But seriously, screw the resigned B.S. people, we *really* shouldn't let this happen! We're getting near peak oil. We need to start planning ahead constructively, not trying to squat on other people's oil halfway around the globe. From a strictly military perspective, that's a *mighty* long supply line to defend when the rest of the world finally begins to take action against us. Note that they are still with us now; a recent poll in Iran of all places showed that 70% of the people there had a favorable view of the US! One of our Darth Vader attack flotillas just sailed unmolested through the Suez canal toward the oil, I mean, toward Iran. I wouldn't bet on something like that happening without a hitch in 2015 once real oil shortages have begun to bite -- or that tankers will be able to leave from there to come here unmolested. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the plan is to spend $170 billion this year (not counting money used from the gigantic 'defense' budget). That means that each year, Iraq alone is sucking up more than 5 times what we spend on all biomedical research every year. Really, really, really stupid.

    [Feb04'07] Zbignew Brzezinski said this last Thursday in the Senate: "A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq, or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a 'defensive' U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD's in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the 'decisive ideological struggle' of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America's involvement in World War II." -- Zbigniew Brzezinski, Senate Foreign relations testimony, February 1, 2007 (transcript from senate.gov here). Zbig's not your average conspiracy theorist but the very guy that set up al-Qaida against the Soviets in Afghanistan -- he's a conspiracy construction worker. That's the funny thing about the US. You can softly explain how things work ahead of time, but they will still work their magic anyway, because the big media will voluntarily keep a tight lid on the key wink wink, nudge nudges.

    [Feb05'07] It's absurd that Bostonians should be rewarded with $2 million dollars because the police and the people acted like complete idiots lacking all common sense, while more sensible police and people elsewhere (e.g., Chicago) used common sense and they got nothing. Don't reward those mental midgets! Penalize them! Bostonians should have been sent a *bill* for ninny-ism, not a check!

    [Feb06'07] The disconnect between global warming physics and policy is both amusing and terrifying. We have already added an amount of CO2 that distinguishes warm periods from glacial periods -- on top of a warm period. The warming effects of that extra CO2 have mostly not been felt yet, but are on the way this century and next no matter what we do. The climate scientists therefore say we should stop adding CO2 immediately. So how about hybrids? Well, as Alan Zarembo in the LA Times notes, if *all* 245 million cars in the US were instantly replaced by Priuses, that would get us less than 3% of the way there (to not adding any more CO2), and assuming growth in car buying stopped cold -- that is, we would still be adding more than 97% of what we are now adding each year. I guess we can always hope that that maverick 'climate scientist' Michael Crichton is right about global warming being a hoax, and that the other 99% of climate scientists who actually study climate science are all wrong. And besides, we're 'well on the way': 1% of vehicle sales are hybrids now. So this year, we will be reducing our CO2 output by just under 0.03 percent or 1/3500 of our total, well on the way to reaching zero by 5506. It is true that most of those savings from hybrids will be eaten up as soon as General Motors 'responds to the green challenge' and introduces large-engine hybrid SUVs, but hey, look on the bright side of life, or lookie here instead at something more important -- like an 'astronaut gone wild'. Seriously, on the bright side, methane seems to have stopped increasing for now (it's 21 times worse a greenhouse gas as CO2, but there is a lot less of it), for unknown reasons, perhaps because Russia fixed some of its leaking gas pipelines and garbage is being burned instead of being put into methane-emitting landfills (though that makes CO2 instead).

    [Feb07'07] As much as I find Joe Lieberman's warmongering disgusting, I'm actually in favor of a big war-on-terr'ism tax, but only if it was from a separate tax table so you could see how much it was. Since the war on terr'ism seems to involve a lot of probing, including making sure old man terr'ists aren't hiding things in their fistulas, perhaps proctologists should be able to get deductions for making us all safer. But the whole probing thing..., hmmm, d'ya think the TSA guys are actually aliens posing as TSA guys? A new angle for Rense? :-}

    [Feb09'07] The Pentagon explains that killing half a million people in Iraq (so far) based on faked intelligence was "inappropriate" but not "illegal". Woohoo. I'd hate to see how many people the Pentagon has to kill before it becomes "wrong". The US killed 2-4 million people in Vietnam. They never said that was "illegal" or "wrong" either. Maybe if they killed 10 million people, that would actually be "wrong". We should probably have have a ten-million-strikes law -- if you dare go over that, bub, yer in jail for a real long time.

    [Feb15'07] While huge piles of military hardware are being hoisted over to the Persian Gulf towards Iran, Pelosi bravely 'restricts' Iraq war funding -- oooh, the drama! -- by making sure that it is 'spent properly for training and equipment' in a non-binding (!) resolution. What utter worms these people are! But thank god she supports the troops. Because, instead of 'never again', it's oops, we did it again. The killings unleashed in Iraq (3/4 of a million people) by our 'well-supported' Universal Soldiers have reached a level worse than the Rwandan genocide. Some day, the rest of the world may get around to holding us responsible for the rape of Iraq. Perhaps for a change, some of the people who gave the orders will get their due, too.

    [Feb26'07] The vicious, blood-stained Negroponte is rumored (Hersh) to be leaving his National Intelligence directorship to accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State because he is worried about 'off the books' operations with 'no finding' like the ones he directed in central America (death-squad-Negroponte worried about 'off the books'?! WTF?). When scum of the earth like that start jumping ship, things must really be out of control. I suppose this should be taken as a good sign. The problem is the giant nest of cockroaches that remain.

    [Mar02'07] There are real headlines buried alongside Anna Nicole: "House Democrats seek more war funds than Bush". Karen Kwiatkowski's recent interview interview cuts through the crap: we're staying there. The Republicans, Democrats, and the American people all support staying, once you strip away the window dressing. The number of US troop fatalities and injuries is tiny in the greater scheme of things. *Hundreds of times* more limbs and eyes are lost in domestic car accidents every year than in Iraq. The almost one million dead Iraqis don't matter to US-ians at all. The US will retreat to the giant self-contained concrete air bases and the troop deaths will subside. They will continue bombing the natives. The Iraqi resistance can't effectively attack the giant bases. The US can attack Iran from Iraq and still seems likely to do so this month or next month, on a new moon.

    [Mar06'07] The Department of Transportation has wisely decided to place an indefinite moratorium on the installation of Windows Vista on any of their machines. From Peter Guttmann: "Driver revocation is a lose/lose situation for Microsoft, they're in for some serious pain whether they do or they don't. Their lawyers must have been asleep when they let themselves get painted into this particular corner -- the first time some 'feature' of Vista's content protection inadvertently takes out a hospital, foreign government department, air traffic control system, or whatever, they've guaranteed themselves a front-row seat in court for the rest of their natural lives." -- Peter Guttmann from his cost analysis of Windows Vista content protection.

    [Mar13'07] Worried about its possible impact on Israel, Democrats removed a requirement that Bush gain approval from Congress to attack Iran. This is the beauty of the controlled media. Such a non sequitur can be printed and broadcast across the land without evoking any official comment. A more accurate headline (and what historians will write 50 years from now) would be, in order to protect the financing of their political campaigns, the US Congress turned over its constitutional duty to declare war to a dangerous, barely mentally competent, lame duck president and his vicious puppeteers. I guess the whole checks and balances things was only really meant to be applied to things like the minumum wage and not little trifles like declaring war. Bush should be able to handle another war since the last one worked out so well, right? (for his bidness cronies). Thank god we sent a message by electing Democrats, right?

    [Mar23'07] The 'liberal' democratic worms completely caved on Iraq funding. The logic for surrender expressed by David Sirota in support of the Iraq war spending bill is Orwellian: lawmakers should accept the congressional world as it is right now and not insist on the world as they wish it to be. Huh? That'll teach 'em! War is peace! We'll stop the war by funding it *even more* ($124 billion) than they originally asked for. After all, that's what the people voted for. How disgusting and criminal. Almost one million people were killed by worms like this. The US has created an Iraqi holocaust. Maybe one day, we'll see these limp cowards in the war crimes dock. The whole charade is blackly humorous to watch. The US has no intention of ever (voluntarily) evacuating the huge military bases it has built in Iraq, but these disgusting lumps of flesh in Congress have to stand there on the teevee studiously avoiding ever mentioning this reality, day after day after day.

    [Apr03'07] Moved to London.

    [Apr09'07] The UK also is not planning to leave Iraq anytime soon. The UK's North Sea oil peaked unexpectedly in 1999 and output has been dropping at 10-15% *per year*. The UK has begun to import oil. By tagging along on the US's coattails, the hope has presumably been to get some of the spoils, too. The danger is the unknown rate of decline as the entire world hits peak oil+condensate in the near future. If the decline rate is steep enough, the US may not be in a mood to share the spoils.

    [Apr10'07] When Walter F. Murphy, an emeritus Constitutional scholar from Princeton (and a Korean war verteran) who has been critical of Bush, asked an airline clerk why he had apparently been put on the no-fly list, Murphy was asked if he had participated in any peace marches. "We ban a lot of people from flying because of that", the clerk said. He eventually got on his plane, but the clerk said his luggage would be "ransacked". It ended up 'lost'. For now, it's just petty harrassment for criticising the fuhrer (as long as you're not a Muslim). People are not putting up enough objections to each slide down the slippery slope. There is extreme danger ahead.

    [Apr15'07] Wolfowitz. He engineers a policy to slaughter nearly a million people, and the press has no problem with the morals of that. But when he arranges to pay his girlie a few extra thousand dollars, the press nincompoops go ballistic. Give her the money, I don't care. Then put Mr. Creep in jail for arranging to murder that many people. He can serve the 1 million sentences concurrently.

    [May16'07] Gareth Porter (if you can believe him) reports that the more aggressive policy toward Iran (3 carriers in the Gulf) was tempered by Admiral William Fallon, head of CENTCOM, in February 2007. The 'tempering' consisted of keeping the number of carriers there at two, so that when the Nimitz arrived, another one would leave. Any progress away from an attack -- however small -- is good news. It is a truly sad day when Admirals are the only thing standing in the way of disaster.

    [May19'07] Money talks. With all the DemoRepublocrap hand-wringing, the war is still fully funded -- in fact, with the highest budget ever. The Senate is planning to hold war funding talks in private. What a charade. The US is like the monkey grabbing onto the oil treat in the jar. It can't/won't let go of it, no matter what the consequence. If Chalmers Johnson is right, it may end up turning the US into a dictatorship.

    [Jun12'07] The Iraq occupation and base-building has continued on schedule. US military spending in Iraq is at record levels. The death rates for US soldiers and Iraqi civilians are up. The second number is usually 50x the first, which reflects the reality of all modern hi tech wars -- extra tech makes it possible for a small number of soldiers to kill a larger number of civilians with only small losses of their own. The antiwar left (e.g., Kos) is now 'disillusioned' with the Democrats, who actually managed to *raise* the amount of money appropriated for the war over what the Repubs asked for. Wow, disillusion should sure make those Dems sit up and take notice, right? Meanwhile, left foggers like Cockburn write nonsense about global warming ("since aerosols cause temperature to drop, and bad coal companies generate aerosols and want to generate more, the science of global warming must be false"). Great logic Alex. Ever consider that A and B do not imply C? Did you forget that the idea that aerosols cause a temperature drop is actually part of global warming science? Alex also doesn't believe there is any oil problem. I don't have a good feeling generally about how things will begin to play out in a decade or two as total fossil fuel usage (oil+gas+coal) starts to go flat. The trends of the last three decades have pointed toward more polarization of rich and poor. Despite suggestions from the left that flattening energy supplies will somehow cause people to cooperate better, it seems more likely to me that fossil fuel constraints may further increase wealth polarization to levels never seen before in the history of civilization. However, we are entering a new era not exactly like anything that came before. We have have better tech. Getting rid of one 100,000 watt car makes it possible to run a whole lot of 50 watt laptops. If we start reducing consumption now, we might be able to keep the computers.

    [Jun27'07] The National Academy of Sciences report on coal includes the following important statement: "Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have not been reviewed or revised since their inception in 1974, and much of the input data were compiled in the early 1970s. Recent programs to assess reserves in limited areas using updated methods indicate that only a small fraction of previously estimated reserves are actually minable reserves." As conventional oil continues its decline (the probable peak was 2005), and natural gas liquids (e.g., pentane) and natural gas (methane) peak in the near future, the focus will be on coal and mine-able oil (tar sands -- not oil shale, which will likely never be touched because of it's poor energy-return-on-energy-investment ratio). There is a lot less coal left than people usually assume. China is currently bringing online one new coal electric plant per week. Peak fossil fuel energy and peak energy, period, are closer than people realize. Now is the time to act to reduce energy usage voluntarily before geology does it for us. To quote the title of my peak oil presentation: Mother nature bats last.

    [Jul01'07] Bankers have made huge amounts of money from "collateralised debt obligations" (pdf defining some terms and tricks of the trade in English for dealing with financial 'toxic waste' here) where they have bought subprime mortgages but somehow still maintained high credit ratings. The reason they bought these risky mortgages was that the interest rate was higher because the people taking out the mortgages were poor (relative to the size of the mortgages). Saski Scholtes notes in the Financial Times that it is "ironic" that "many of these new-fangled instruments" of the uber-capitalists "have never been priced through market trading." Ironic? Normally, if you go into a store and grab some cash, they don't call it 'ironic'. The only difference here is that the scale of cash-grabbing so enormous, these guys are hauling away semi-trailers of cash -- and there are never any police sirens.

    [Jul08'07] The focus on Libby is utterly idiotic. We are killing 10,000 Iraqis every month. That should be the focus. Who cares if Libby gets out? Give him a bonus bigger than Wolfowitz's girlie. Libby's pardon is about as newsworthy as Paris Hilton. I could care less.

    [Jul17'07] The 'new' bin Laden video is a laughably bad composite of tapes previously released more than four years ago (one from 2001) -- though I didn't hear much laughing. The problem is that I usually underestimate how effective these stupid fart stunts are. They are not disinfo but more like movie music, creating a mood, not consciously perceived. It is amazing how *cheap* these things are to make. Who needs real fake events when this ultra-low-budget crap just works? Maybe they could pull out all the stops and have Robert Fisk interview him again next time. (wouldn't cost much more). It would be like that old Second City skit where the crime photographer says "Work with me, work with me" to the corpse he is posing. Bush's numbers are already starting to jog up a bit from the stupid London stunt (which was barely perceptible here in London). This will keep up the momentum and keep him from going below 30%. It's quite amazing that after all that has happened, 30% of Americans still view Bush favorably, and enthusiastically approve of killing 10,000 Iraqis a month -- more deaths than ever. Another maybe 30-40% only disapprove of the killing because it seems not to be 'going well' and has not 'delivered the goods'. I'm not sure how killing 10,000 a people a month could ever 'go well', and we still seem to have our bloody mitts around 'the goods', but whatever. The peace movement has virtually collapsed in embarrassment and cowardice after supporting the Democrats, who immediately turned around and gave Bush even more funding for the war than he asked for, just like many of us warned. I shudder to think what would happen if there was another one or two 9-11 sized events (9-11, bad as it was, was only equivalent to several weeks of US automobile accident deaths). Overnight, good Americans would be ready to send their neighbors off to the camps. Unfortunately, a small number of camps (so far) have already been constructed by Cheney's military contractor companies, supposedly for unruly immigrants. Nothing to see here, Americans, move along.

    [Jul20'07] The US is still a major oil producer with a output almost as large as Saudi Arabia, despite being long past (almost half down from) its 1970 peak. It's interesting to see where it currently comes from. There are about 880,000 producing wells in the world, but a full 520,000 of them are in the US. 502,000 (most) of the US wells use mechanical pumps (e.g., the rocker arms on 'stripper wells'), which indicate that the wells are depressurized (normal live wellhead pressure is 2000 to 3500 pounds per square inch -- real wells don't need a pump, but rather a series of very large stoppers or BOPs [blowout protectors]). Stripper well produce a mere 1 or 2 barrels a day. The US also drilled 36,000 new wells last year. The average per-well output of all US wells was therefore a tiny 100 barrels a day. Contrast this with Saudi Arabia which drilled 300 new wells and has a total of only 3,000 wells (see map of Ghawar wells in my peak oil pdf here). The well numbers are from an article by Alex Lightman here. But that writer then assumes incorrectly that Saudi's 260 Gb reserves (which were doubled arbitrarily in the 1980's and not decremented since) are vastly underestimated and will balloon when they start doing a lot more drilling. He fails to cite what happened when oil peaked in the US in the 1970's. There was a massive increase in US drilling -- a 10x increase. That together with the discovery of the super giant Prudhoe Bay oil field in Alaska, however, failed to reverse the US peak, which didn't look like smooth Gaussian but rather a sharp peak followed by an almost linear decline. Ominously, Saudi has begun a massive new drilling program (for them) in the past two years, quintupling its oil drilling rig count (graph here from Stuart Staniford). It is unlikely that a massive increase in Saudi drilling will fix the Saudi peak either. To his credit, Lightman does also suggest that we start conserving now, before we slam into the wall. He sells a meeting badge for large conferences that records who it comes in contact with and lights up when two people pass each other with similar interests (to alert them that they might want to strike up a conversation). I attend several large yearly meetings myself. Though they are enjoyable and intellectually stimulating, I think there will be less of them in the future (because I think the true Saudi reserves are less than they say).

    [Jul23'07] Like friggin' clockwork, as I predicted, the Beavis and Butthead London stunt and the Osama-sings-the-classics greatest-hits tape have caused an uptick in Bush's ratings, visible here. If this low budget crap can arrest Bush's decline, imagine what another *real* stunt could do! Some left writers say things in the US are about the blow and people there are finally mad. I just don't see it at all. Besides, what would people do if somebody told them the truth? If somebody said, "yeah, we lied to you, there's actually less oil, there is nothing obvious with which to replace it, your SUV and large house and new spread-out suburbs are a bad idea, you have to start driving less, riding your bike more, taking public transportation, living in closer to where you work, and in a smaller house", it wouldn't play well in Peoria. It's true that most US-ians want the Iraq war to go away (though they have probably forgotten how enthusiastically they supported it at one time), but they certainly aren't about to get onto a damn bicycle (I just rode mine home through a light rain, which was actually refreshing, and my clothes are now dry). They won't get on their bikes en masse until it is clear that oil price spikes will never go away. And that is not going to happen until we've had continuous oil price spikes every year or so for a decade, and oil costs $200 or $300 a barrel (its true absolute minimum value, since one barrel of oil is equivalent to about one year of human work; for comparison, the US yearly minimum wage is over $10,000). And after a few more oil wars. This won't happen until maybe 2020 or thereabouts (the current oil war is already four and a half years old). And even then, there will still be a reasonable amount of (expensive) oil around for another decade (though less than there is today). So there will be no revolution until maybe 2030 when peak all-energy begins to bite and oil production is down a lot. By then, the revolution may very well not be televised (esp. if we get a few more of these).

    [Jul24'07] Today, 50 activists including Cindy Sheehan (out of 400 present) were arrested for not leaving John Conyers office after he so much as told them that he can't support impeachment because 'it was more important to get a Democrat in office in 2008 than to end the war in Iraq'. Accurately said, John Conyers, limp lifetime member of the Oceania party.

    [Aug05'07] It looks like US M3(b) *growth* has flattened out (at 13% a year!) over the past few months. I think M3 (total money) growth is a truer measure of inflation than the ridiculously named 'core rate of inflation' or the consumer price index, which seem to have had all the things that inflate like food, energy, and housing taken out of them (after all, who actually *uses* food, energy, and housing?). This temporary pause in the increase in the *rate of growth* seems to have been associated with and/or caused by a slowing down of credit creation (sub-prime/prime mortgages, commercial, leveraged buy-outs) and serious heartburn in the the stock/money/hedge markets over the past few weeks. I can feel that something a little different is starting to happen, but I don't really know what it is. It just makes me nervous when people like Doug Noland seem more nervous than their usual industrious, tut-tutting selves. Since cash only makes 5% per year when the currency is inflating at 10 or 12% per year, it's obvious that smart money only stays in cash when it gets really scared. It seems to be getting a little scared now. However, the Euro and pound are inflating at about the same rate as the dollar, so the between-currency fluctuations must be due to slight inter-country delays (e.g., housing already topped in the US vs. housing still going up -- for now! -- in the UK). And most of the money guys have hardly heard of peak oil and climate change since they involves thinking more than 6 months (or 2 weeks) ahead. I suppose it's better not to get them too upset.

    [Aug07'07] There is a lot of talk about the recent FISA revisions with respect to warrantless tapping of overseas phone calls (see Scott Horton in Harpers). But sometimes I feel like I am in a house of mirrors. The NSA has long monitored all foreign phone calls without warrant -- probably for decades. The significance of this change is that they can now do it 'officially'. For many years, the US supported oppressive governments abroad (Central American death squads, South Vietnam, Afghanistan). It looks like similar methods are slowly being re-imported to the homeland (US and UK), and people are being slowly introduced to accepting it as normal. The significance of this development is not that the NSA is doing some new bad thing, but rather that they are brazenly advertising their exploits.

    [Aug08'07] US troops in Iraq have reached an all-time high. This has been supported by both Republicans and Democrats. Ignore the propaganda miasma. The numbers talk.

    [Aug12'07] Looking out the window in London at all the cars going by gets me down. I really don't see how the ships of state and industry can possibly be turned around quickly enough. It takes a long time to make large scale wind, solar, and nuclear power plants. North Sea oil just north of here is depleting at almost 10% per year. I am really afraid there won't be enough time for people to react in a sensible way. Take bicycles. Sure, London car drivers hate them. As a daily cyclist, I, too, hate the cyclists that dangerously totter through red lights. But what would London look like if you 100-tupled the number of bicycles, and added bicycles with trailers and a zillion mopeds and small electric carts? People aren't planning ahead. The household-debt-to-personal-income ratio in the UK is even larger (1.62) than in the US (1.42). Not that this really applies to central London, where 80% of purchases don't even use mortgages...

    [Aug14'07] Glad to see Rove gone. I didn't expect it. I can't imagine that he left voluntarily. But that leaves open the question of who forced him out. Above, I had speculated that Rumsfeld might have been forced out for not being hawkish enough on Iraq. I find it difficult to believe that Rove was not enthusiatic enough, but maybe it's true. The latest world oil production figures show that we are now at, or perhaps even slightly past (!) peak "all liquids" (i.e., crude oil + lease condensate + natural gas liquids + other liquids [e.g., ethanol]). In 2004, I had expected that this wouldn't happen until 2008. Things now seem to be precariously in balance. We are only one event -- e.g., a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, a war in another oil country, an unusually cold winter -- away from chaotic price oil price fluctuations. The only 'good' news is that the US seems to on the verge of a recession, which should slightly lower the US's 25% demand on total world oil production.

    [Aug19'07] John Mauldin has a table of adjustable mortgage resets by the month here that suggests that the peak in resets won't occur until March 2008, at a peak rate of $110 billion/month. Compare this with the average rate of resets from Jan-Aug 2007 of $37 billion/month. This suggests that the forces that have seem to have precipitated the recent turmoil will be more than twice as strong 5-10 months from now, as the the presidential election gets into high gear -- normally a time when the economy is pumped. Feb-May 2008 sounds like an awfully dangerous time to me, with enormous whipsawing forces, political and economic. The Fed does have some room to drop interest rates, though that could have bad effects on the dollar. Perhaps this is overestimated, though, since the pound seems to be coming down relative to the dollar despite the fact that US interest rates were dropped and UK interest rates are still being increased. Note that both the dollar and pound *have* dropped relative to the yen. For comic relief, look here for feats of squirrel cognition. And don't forget about US patent 6,970,105 granted in 2005 to a certain Valletta for a passenger control system to prevent hijackments (yup) by putting a neckband on every passenger with sensors to determine each of their "emotional conditions" and if necessary, inject "sedatives, narcotics or strong tranquilizers" by "pelvic contact" into the "evil-minded persons". The joke is, it's not a joke.

    [Aug23'07] Despite the fact that nothing fundamental has changed (US mortgage resets are still a long ways from their March 2008 peak, peak oil is still here, the Iraq war into its fifth year, the Democratic worms are just as cowardly as before), the fear so palpable a week ago is subsiding. Nothing to see here. Wouldn't it be great if fossil fuel reserves *did* go up an down as a function of how good people felt about them?

    [Aug29'07] The bump upward in the polls predicted above (from the London stunts and the nightly Fox news 'minute of hate') is now even more clearly visible here. When you read the internet on on your own and don't watch teevee, you expect these things, but they are still amazing and amazingly depressing to see in the flesh as it were. There was a good article on capitalism in Iraq in the Rolling Stone, though it shamefully fails to mention the fact that we've killed more than a million people of the non-US persuasion there, and the fact that 4 million people have been run out of their homes. You might get the idea reading the thing that it would have all been OK, if we had only done it more efficiently and with less corruption. It wouldn't have been OK. The people in the US should be ostracized for decades for overseeing the holocaust of a million people. Skimming tax money in the process and charging the cannon fodder to repair their own shredded limbs is unfortunate, but not what will be remembered as the main point in the fullness of time. Today, hardly anybody remembers the fact that 1-2 million German men were marched and starved to death in US-run concentration camps after they lost WWII.

    [Sep01'07] With the new $50 billion dollar Iraq war supplement Bush just requested, the US is spending over 1 billion dollars every 2 days to occupy/destroy Iraq. Americans are not up in arms about it at all, and won't be until we start to actually get driven out. That's a contribution of several thousand dollars a year from every adult in the US. For the cost of the Iraq war, those tax receipts could have paid for a halfway decent solar power setup for most families in the US -- an eleventh hour rescue for the grid problems that will be on the way. But like the Archdruid says :-}, unfortunately it's already the *twelfth hour*. While this article about wind turbine problems in Germany is a little FUD'y, it does accurately point out how many years it takes to wring faults out of even relatively old technology. And wind turbines currently generate only a tiny fraction of energy in the EU (less than 0.5%). Even that tiny contribution is a lot more than solar, however, which is so tiny it's irrelevant. And in the spirit of the twelfth hour, there is currently a silicon panel shortage (in the process of being remedied), so we could hardly have paneled everybody's roof this year. But one can always dream.

    [Sep03'07] The anti-Iran propaganda is definitely on the increase again over the last month, though still not quite at the level of anti-Iraq propaganda in late 2002. Enough carriers are still probably in place (I'm not aware of any recent news about where they currently are). Bush's numbers are still drifting upwards (amazing, innit?). There is an endless drumbeat of predictions of another 9/11 from the *mainstream media*. The usu. disinfo sources are catapulting the propaganda, too (e.g., DisinfoKos) -- and I don't particularly trust the motives of Dan Plesch (next door!) or Robert Baer or Sarah Baxter or Todd Gitlin (ehh), who have all recently announced that attacks are coming. I think this September is too soon, still. The movement of (additional) men and materiel is always an unexpectedly leisurely affair. I remain most worried most about what might happen in the run-up to the election early next year when mortgage resets will be at their peak as the elections get seriously under way. The key question is how to sustain the patriotic idiot juice long enough after an attack so that it colors the election. A quick several day blitzkieg in a few weeks doesn't seem like it would do that. Certainly, Bush doesn't need majority support to start another war, maybe just another 5 or 10 more points (cf. Mr. Hilter). Reading online comments suggests that there is already a solid chunk of support or at least a green light for an attack, unbelievable as this may seem given the events of the past 5 years, and also because all these people have access to the internet. And hard as it is to believe, maybe Rove really did resign because he thought it was a bridge too far. Last time (Sept 2002), I remember the big but absolutely ineffectual anti-war movement (of which I was a small part) just sitting there watching the armaments and people being put on ships and sailing over there. I see nothing to stop something similar from happening again. The only way it could be stopped (if they decide to to it), would be a long general strike, and that seems unlikely. In any case, the consolidation of US Iraqi bases into 6 megabases is continuing at full speed, consuming half of the money spent in Iraq. The Balad/Anaconda base is the second most busy airport in the world after Heathrow, and is guarded by 20,000 troops. The US is planning to stay, period.

    [Sep09'07] Yet another fake Osama dead Laden reappears, this time with a curly Grecian formula beard (an actor or maybe just very old tapes). Reading the LA Times article on it reminds me of how they wrote about Reagan -- when his Alzheimers had gotten bad, but the newspaper whores picked through the crap he said, and pretended like his brain was still there.

    [Sep13'07] I'm feeling ill at ease this week (Barksdale joyride, Libor way up, 'withdrawn' UK Basra troops head instead to Iranian border, partial air force standdown on Sept 14), but hopefully nothing will happen. The rhetoric on the Iraq war is absolutely dismal. The air war has been increased in size by a factor of 5 since the beginning of the year (!). There is effectively bipartisan support for the war. Any Democrat capable of getting into office 2008 will by definition be incapable of making the slightest difference to the conduct of the war, given how the election and Democratic party is funded. Despite the fact that the midterm elections were in large part a vote against the war, Rahm Emmanuel among others made sure that Democratic candidates available were 'realists' -- that is, Democrats who 'opposed the war' as window dressing, and then turned around and voted *even more* money for the war than preznit chimp asked for! All the viable Democrats have tripped over themselves rushing to say they will be the first to nuke Iran. And the elephant in the room that no one talks about (as stated many times above) is that the only reason that Good Americans are a bit sour about the Iraq war now is that it is going somewhat badly. They could care less how many Iraqis they have annihilated or driven out of their homes. They could care less about how much it costs (most hardly know the difference between million, billion, and trillion). Some of our troops have been killed and maimed, but the total numbers so far are small -- equivalent to only a month's worth of car accidents in the US (people who survive car accidents also end up with hideous injuries). Most Americans don't care at all that the war is wrong. Finally, and most importantly for thinking about how things will play out, most Americans have no idea how close we are to the beginning of permanent declines in oil, gas, coal, uranium, copper, indium, gallium, soil, water, fish, forests, food, helium (boo hoo, eventually bye-bye fMRI!), etc. etc. Many of them, left and right, think high oil prices are a conspiracy to enrich piggish oil company executives. High oil prices *do* enrich piggish oil company executives. So what? That has absolutely no relevance to the prospects for maintaining industrial civilization as fossil fuels production starts to go over to the downward part of the curve. It has no relevance to geology. As I have said many times, if Americans actually knew how dire the energy/soil/food/metals problem actually was, they would get in line behind our present (and future) resource wars in a snap. They would be happy to nuke the whole rest of the world if push came to shove. In retrospect, it's amazing that the Iraq war has been able to be waged for more than 4 years without any official mention of oil. That may finally have to change in 2008.

    [Sep14'07] I hear lots of left talk about Americans finally getting fed up enough with the current administration to 'not take it anymore'. What exactly would 'it' be? An oversized portion of the world's resources? Do Americans *really* want to leave all that oil behind? I'm relieved nothing happened today.

    [Sep19'07] Nothing to see, so far. The Fed is has been injecting a little more money than it normally does. It also just cut the discount window interest rate by 0.5% to 4.75%. But the peak in mortgage resets (which involve multiple-percent upticks in interest rates that only very roughly follow the discount window interest rate) is still not until Mar 2008. And long term bonds actually went *down* -- i.e., long-term interest rates went *up* -- in response to the fed cut, which will actually hurt mortgage rates. Oil production is continuing to decline (slightly down from the 85 million barrels/day 2006 all-liquids all-time peak) while oil prices continue to rise. Perhaps "probable" and "possible" reserves aren't as tasty as "proven" reserves, after all. Or maybe there is still one more several-year production increase left after the current plateau. That would be great, but even if it happens, society will likely only use it to party on, instead of bowing down in thanks for a few extra years to prepare. The exact moment of the peak doesn't really matter. We are at or very close to the beginning of a permanent, grinding decline. The only concrete societal response in the US so far has been to invade and occupy Iraq and to commission 235 new corn ethanol plants on top of the 111 already operating. By 2008, those plants will (literally) be eating half of the entire US corn harvest, but supplying only five percent of the energy in our liquid fuel use. Tax subsidies for this 1.25x energy-return-on-energy-investment process is absolute insanity as we approach the energy/food/soil/water precipice of industrial civilization. Reading the summaries of introductory presentations at latest ASPO conference in Cork Ireland gave me the willies -- what happened to these people? What are they smoking? OPEC is supposed to go to 50 million barrels/day by 2020 (Mike Rogers) given that it seems to have trouble keeping production at 30 million barrels/day, much of it from 40-year-old fields? And after 12 more years of depletion from now? Sheesh. A.M. Samsam Bakhtiari bowed out of ASPO events after some unexplained altercation in Florence in 2007. William Engdahl has discovered abiotic oil (huh?!). I know, I should just be watching the river flow. It's impossible to reason with an over-sexed deer herd on an island heading for a food crash by explaining the mathematics of population biology to them. People, businessmen, and bankers aren't any different. We must all party on. As a footnote, the vote to restore habaeus corpus (the idea that the government can't hold people without a formal public hearing) just failed in the Senate (not enough Repubicans supported it).

    [Sep24'07] Alan Greenspan says Iraq was about oil, and that he lobbied for the Iraq war. I wonder what the current fed governor is lobbying for now? Off-shoring the majority of productive US industry as supported by Greenspan was merely wage arbitrage for the short-term gain of the super-rich. It has gutted the productive ability country. Apple now designs the outer half-a-millimeter of a laptop (and a fine half millimeter it is!) and then ships off the substantive design of this advertising 'skin' (like the one I'm currently typing on!) to Taiwan where the working guts of it are designed to fit inside the skin and the circuit boards and other working parts are then manufactured and assembled, in Taiwan, China, and Thailand. This is *not* a sustainable course for the US empire; it looks more like the endgame of empire. I imagine that the growth of private police forces to guard rich people and their estates is going to explode in the decade ahead.

    [Oct02'07] Tad Patzek has a long-winded paper on biofuels, "Can we outlive our way of life? (pdf here). One critical fact that was new to me is that the cellulosic ethanol process (at least currently) only gives a 'beer' that is about 4% alcohol while the corn ethanol process gives one that is 12% to 16% ethanol. Since distillation is a major energy loser (actually using up more energy than the energy in the resulting ethanol when applied to a 4% alcohol-water mixture) cellulosic ethanol only gets barely net-energy-positive by getting a credit for all the heating value of the lignin (wheat straw). Since a 1:1 replacement of fossil fuels by biofuels is utterly impossible for more than a few years if we want to still live on the planet in addition to just driving on it, and since we are now at peak oil, he suggests that Europe aim to ramp up to a reduction in fossil fuel usage of 6% per year (over 8 years) and then stay there, every year after that. Having just bicycled home right alongside a bunch of yahoos in cars gunning their engines to madly accelerate their ugly heaps for one block at a time so that they have to slam on the brakes half a block later (using alomost 100,000 watts every time the numbskulls step on the accelerator), I say, it's not a moment too soon to start that reduction! (and yes, I stopped at every light, too). Given that Londoners have passed extreme laws requiring every hallway in new buildings to be made wide enough for *2* wheelchairs to pass each other (resulting in ridiculous office buildings that have as much as 60% of their area as hallways), you'd think it might be possible pass a practical law to really start reducing fossil fuel usage, too, before we run our stupid monkey heads right into the wall. If we *can* think. Reading about users finally finally finally revolting against Microsoft and downgrading from Vista to XP gives me hope.

    [Oct05'07] The rate of stock trading seems to go up with no end in sight. The entire issue of stocks like Google and Apple now turns over 5 to 10 times a year. Stocks are being held on *average* for only a few days. This is not "investment".

    [Oct07'07] Gordon Brown is now behind a joint UK/US/(French?) attack on Iran, but only if Iran was proved to be behind a big militant attack or another stunt similar to the kidnapping in March of British sailors. But, uhhh, the 'kidnapped' British sailors were halfway around the world from Britain and admitted they were trespassing on Iranian coastal waters (for an analogy, imagine Iranians in gunboats picked up by the British Navy in the North Sea). Gordon is finding his inner poodle! What's got him so excited? The French poodle's recent dog tricks? Jealousy of the French for not having helped to cause Darfur? Feeling not manly enough in comparison to those incomparably manly Blackwater storm troopers who have the true grit needed to boldly shoot up women and children in passenger cars? Or maybe it's just that recurrent itch to 'bring Democracy' to another country? Given that the last time Democracy was brought, a million Iraqis were murdered, I do sympathize that you might need an even bigger army to deliver it this time, in case the natives decide they don't want it just yet...

    [Oct10'07] Here is a hopeful article about photovoltaic power. Photovoltaic power is increasing in popularity. However, it is still a tiny fraction of our total power (0.05% or 1/2000 of total world electrical generation, which itself is about one third of total fossil fuel power). In fact, it is currently increasing at a tiny fraction of our *increased yearly usage* of fossil fuels. It is currently accounting for only 0.5% (1/200) of newly installed capacity. It's rate of increase *is* increasing some. But at current rates, it is hard to see how in 20 years it could account for a substantial fraction of the energy currently gotten from fossil fuel -- right around the time oil and gas will be a lot scarcer than now. Here's hoping the rate of increase itself increases -- a lot, starting very soon. There are a lot of possibly cool ideas. For example, V2G (vehicle to grid), where electric vehicle batteries are used for distributed storage of extra power for the grid (pdf here) Most people don't realize that the amount of power used each day by cars is several times the amount of electrical power used out of outlets and the grid (a car can generate a 100,000 watt burst of power and uses 10,000 to 20,000 watts on average [=13-26 hp]). Huge numbers of electric vehicle batteries plugged into the grid could store and buffer intermittent wind and solar power, which are harder than fossil fuels to turn on at will. However, this would require a fundamental re-orientation of people's attitude toward their vehicles. Rather than being something you (just) tear through the wilderness with, they would also be part of the shared grid on which their community relies. This also implies that people would be allowing their expensive vehicle batteries to be cycled (i.e., some of the batteries' available life used up) by other people on the grid. It would take a lot of experimentation -- physical and social -- to figure out if something like this could every be practical. I fear that such 'commie' ideas will be laughed out of court until it is too late and the grid has already been Iraq-i-fied, and it's every man for himself.

    [Oct11'07] As someone very poorly schooled in economics, this graph (of 3-month US Treasury Bills yield and the Fed funds rate) is perhaps the most amazing money graph I have ever seen. The Fed seems completely passive, slavishly following short-term interest rates with a very short delay! It sure looks like the Fed will have to continue lowering. What the global effect of that will be is hard for me to guess.

    [Oct14'07] I'm feeling blue, watching the river flow. Big banks are colluding to 'fix' their greed market so that they don't accidentally shoot each other in the face by denying each other credit. I thought the market fixed all, without the need for any interference? Their solution won't be in our interest ("our" means people like you and me that don't own or run banks). It reminds me of an old scene from The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe where the assassins all accidentally end up in one room: "we're all professionals here...". In the midst of various economic indigestion, the severity of the oil problem will finally come into view back in the US because, paradoxically, low gasoline taxes couple oil price signals more directly to gasoline price signals (the large, fixed-size gas taxes in Europe mean that oil price increases are damped for the enduser). People in the US will not be in a constructive mood when they finally realize what the situation is. And when oil prices finally break through the European tax damper, I doubt the response here will be much more charitable (in the UK at least, think back to 2000, when the lorry drivers shut down the the economy for a week over fuel prices). And for something completely different, the pharmeceutical companies have turned in a big way toward the nasal epithelium, targetting it with anti-obesity, diabetes, and even anti-autism drugs (oxytocin work-alikes). Before long, there will be hundreds of companies fighting for membrane space inside your nose. I wish I could instead get that positive emotion that brings a tear to my eye and makes me proud to be a human when I see a remarkable musical performance or come to finally understand a remarkable turn of scientific thought. Instead, I'm dejectedly thinking about the other, equally notable technologically-enabled, violent side of my fellow man-apes. I feel sad for us -- apes with language and immensely more powerful minds -- having worked ourselves into the same situation as deer herd on the threshold of overwhelming the resources on a small island, all just munching away, all just barely aware of the terrible cull that is almost surely on the way.

    [Oct20'07] Bush took an unexpected, discontinuous plummet in the polls from an average of about 34% to an average of 26% in two recent polls (Zogby, Harris) -- the lowest number ever -- after a slow sustained rise from May to October of 30% to about 34%. It must be housing+oil. It could also be red-state faithful getting hammered by the "Exceptional" drought (Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, and Idaho) visible here (the scale is: abnormally dry, moderate drought, severe drought, extreme drought, and finally, exceptional drought). But a desperate Bush and Cheney could take desperate measures. The fact that such a large number of people (70) were punished for the supposedly 'minor' mistake (leaked first to The Military Times) of flying nukes arounds the country suggests that it wasn't a minor mistake. Several people have noted that for the leak to come out in The Military Times, it had to pass several high level military censors. Perhaps this was a sign of internal conflict. Bush's poll numbers worry me. On the positive side, things have been thankfully completely quiet during the dirtie balm exercises in Portland and Guam.

    [Oct21'07] Here is another article pointing out that for the past two decades, the Fed funds rate has *followed* the short term credit market rates with a small delay. These graphs are completely contrary to the generally accepted view that the Fed rate somehow controls/throttles the economy. Maybe it does by other actions that affect the short term credit markets that I don't fully understand (perhaps involve 'repos', whatever they are, and/or the banks of the 'Caribbean', heh). And I don't really understand the recent 'master liquidity enabler conduit garbage collector structured investment vehicle'... But returning to the Fed funds rate, why this strange fiction??

    [Oct28'07] The torture methods of the US have hardly changed for 40 years. And they were in turn largely adapted from methods originally developed by the Nazis. Here is an excellent article by Fred Morris about his experiences in Brazil in the 1970's, face to face with American-trained Brazilian interrogators. Torture has long been a major American export. Instead of outsourcing it, however, it looks like a domestic market is finally being developed. Tasers are just good old electric shock torture, now in the hands of every police dept in the country, and in widespread use -- so much so that 300 people have already been killed in the US with tasers (here is an example from last year where police tasered a handcuffed epileptic man 5 times until he passed out and died -- and then got off without the grand jury even viewing the video). Perhaps some of my buddies in machine learning are already working on auto-targetting tasers for the genitals to make Tasers exactly equivalent to what was already being taught at the School of the Americas thirty years ago. And maybe the police need to hire some doctors like the professionally trained torturers often do, so that their poor victims can be tortured again and again.

    [Oct29'07] "Be green. Drive green." says the Prius ad now running on The Oildrum. Then, top it off with the "carbon-neutral car insurance" that they sell on the teevee, and we're all set to consume this year's cubic mile of oil in style (there are about 30 cubic miles left). The market is fixing everything, getting everybody to agree on a fair price (which hit $93/barrel today). Of course, since the market value of 'our' people is a little higher than 'yours', we might have to grab your oil because we have a much bigger military than you (merely a background fact for the market, like when the market determines prices after the harbor has been fired upon in the olden days). The US+UK have so far killed a million people building permanent military bases to control (steal) Iraqi oil. And that atrocity got started even before peak oil hit (happening about now). Imagine what the oh-so-greens will want to do to the world when the pressure really goes up. We have just now reached an equilibrium where oil demand is starting to bump into maximum oil production. Maxmimum oil production is set to go down from here, relentlessly, permanently, and demand is set to go up. If *I* were the rest of the world, I'd be thinking about getting me some atomic fire of my own before furious Mr. Green arrives at the door threatening to kill my kids and atomize my house. Even if the world tanks the dollar, it won't do anything to US+UK (and FR) big guns and bombs. Tanking the dollar or the pound is like beating the schoolyard bully at Scrabble. He'll just knock the pieces off the board unless you've got a big stick. It's the only language he understands. If Iran already had the big stick, we wouldn't be threatening them. Without it, the 4 million barrels a day coming from the Iranian oil strip (in Khuzestan on the western edge of the country, bordering Iraq) are a mighty inviting target. After all, perhaps we could dismember their country in a fashion similar to the way the men with the shriveled little thingees in the US Senate are now planning to do to Iraq (after their heartfelt attempt to rebuild Iraq using the 1994 Lonely Planet guide failed). Little thingees on little Eichmanns.

    [Oct30'07] The idiocy and criminality of a slight majority of my fellow Americans who support a strike on Iran is breathtaking. Their minds are open sewers down which teevee propaganda is flushed, even as the source only rates a 25% approval by the very same people. But it doesn't matter! Hard to believe, but unfortunately, accurate to plus or minus a few percent. Flush the whole country down the toilet, fools, in order to get your war on. Doesn't mean it will happen. I still think it probably it won't happen. Also, maybe this reflects the beginning of a mostly unconscious realization, alluded to many times above, by the pissed off zombies that there actually *is* an oil problem, and that it's not going to go away. Trying to also steal Iran's oil will not work. $100 a barrel oil is not a stopping point. We have to use less.

    [Oct31'07] Today Warren Buffett says he wants to pay more tax. Richies only say stuff like this when they are scared that something is about to blow. When they get scared, I get scared.

    [Nov08'07] I am extremely worried about what will happen as the python continues to digest the pig of (1) rarely traded investment vehicles of still-not-yet-known value, but getting lower all the time, (2) still yet-to-peak mortgage resets, and (3) continued oil volatility. There is perhaps $500 billion (or more) of risky junk on bank balance sheets, potentially bigger than the 1980's savings and loan disaster, where $125 billion in tax money was used to bail out a bunch of crooks who had sold off mortgages in order to reinvest the money in more exotic instruments. Given that half of Americans support an attack on Iran, it's clear they're not afraid of any of this. Amazing!

    [Nov14'07] As the dollar falls, it is just beginning to stimulate reverse globalization. Just think, Americans, too, will soon have the pleasure of talking to people that have just spent 10 minutes fuming on a phone menu. But seriously, the worldwide energy crunch is going to impact poorer nations more severely than rich western countries (we haven't had fuel riots like the ones in Myanmar or Iran). I think it it likely that right when the rest of the world is really down and hungry, the rich west will be itself a little pinched and less likely to help out. That is, reverse globalization is unlikely to go very far.

    [Nov17'07] The decomposition of trees damaged as a result of Katrina and Rita will generate as much CO2 as all of the living trees in the US take out of the atmosphere in one year (~1 billion tons). -- James Cummins, Wildlife Mississippi

    [Nov23'07] There have been about 300 deaths from Tasers. Since they usually don't kill people, police must be Tasering people constantly. The distraught Polish guy in the Vancouver airport recently killed by a Taser was unconscious within 20 secs of the police arriving. At this rate, everyone is going to need a Taser to defend themselves against sadistic cops. Tasers for everyone! Of course, it wouldn't have helped the guy the UK cops Tasered for having fallen into a diabetic coma.

    [Nov26'07] Things are sure looking shakey! Maybe that's why Taser will soon be bringing out taser flying saucers. This is what machine learning is getting used for. We pay taxes to fund people to understand how visual perception and the brain works and then it gets applied to crap like this. Surveillance and now torture from the sky. Lovely. Sometimes makes me wonder whether the end of fossil fuels might actually be a good thing that will save us from ourselves.

    [Nov27'07] Rig count figures from Baker Hughes show that 1762 out of 3124 rigs drilling in October 2007 were drilling in America -- that is, over 56% of all rigs in the world were drilling in US. But I thought peak oil is happening because environmentalists are not allowing oil exploration, blah, blah. The US is the most well-drilled place on the planet (which is why the production curve up, to 1971 peak, and down is so smooth).

    [Nov29'07] "We are not your problem. We are Israelis. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem" -- an explanation from the 'dancing Israelis' from 'Urban Moving Systems' for why they were laughing, high-fiving, posing for photos with a cigarette lighter in front of the ruins as if lighting them, while videoing. "Our purpose was to document the event." Many people would like to see how this confiscated but never-made-public video document begins.

    [Nov30'07] Once again, I was wrong about the Bush approval polls. In October, I thought they had experienced an almost discontinuous drop. But in fact, that was just 3 outliers. Instead, Bush's numbers have actually, amazingly, drifted up a bit, to about 34%, from a steady diet of 'news' about the surge 'working' (despite 2007 resulting in the most US casualties of any year!), Iran war talk, and worries about the economy. I would guess that now a majority of Americans approve of torture, both Repug-worms and Demo-worms. This is frightening, given that the recession has not yet happened in a big way. Under serious economic duress, I imagine that Americans would be willing to go a lot further.

    [Dec02'07] It's worth summing up 2006 and 2007. Supporting Democrats did absolutely nothing to stop or even slow down the war. In fact, Democrats actually helped *increase* funding for the war as well as the number of troops on the ground. Despite an actual Congressional majority, the Democrats didn't once even threaten to filibuster a war funding bill, much less actually do it. They only need 41 solid votes to sustain a filibuster. They tabled impeachment. That's just the facts. The US -- and the UK -- antiwar movements were co-opted into supporting the official 'left' (Democrats, Labour) in the 1960's sense of the word. The utter failure of this strategy to even slightly slow down the war(s) has completely enervated the antiwar movement. There are less people on the street than ever before. What's next? Support the Democrats again? They didn't deliver the goods. Facts on the ground are more important than the spin in the air. Supporting the Democrats was a mistake. Sometimes people make mistakes. This one just happened to occur at a particularly crucial time in history. At this point, the main ongoing resistance to an attack on Iran is coming from the military, of all places! The constant Goebbels-like propaganda from the mainstream media already has over half of the American sheeple in favor of it, which is quite amazing given their generally unfavorable view of the ongoing Iraq disaster.

    [Dec05'07] The organ donor thing sure creeps me out. Whether it's getting organs from the third world or grandparents asking their grandkid for a kidney, it's just sicko. In about 20 years, the average boomer (like me) is going to be 70. I'm sure by then, there will be web courses about how to conduct these negotiations in a politically correct way. If things continue along the path they're currently on in America, in another 5 years, maybe there will be enough terr'ists in jail to keep a bunch of ugly boomers alive as their organs begin to fail. Why can't they (we) just die normally?

    [Dec06'07] The NIE report sure had the Bush decider-idiot more fumble-mouthed than usual. It seems like a clear strike back from the military to slow the push toward the Iran war. Ah, my antiwar friends -- the military industrial and surveillance complex. Sheesh. I hope they do stop the (next) war. However, given that there were more than 5 words in the NIE report, and given that it only takes something like 2 or 3 words for effective propaganda (e.g., "9/11" + "WMD" + "Iraq"), all the verbiage in this report may end up being easily bypassed, for example, by "nuclear" + "Iran" + "wiped-off-the-face-of-the-map". And yes, wiped-off-the-face-of-the-map counts as one word because the media has defined it, through incessant repetition of this mistranslation, as a fixed idiomatic expression.

    [Dec07'07] Features of fascism (Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, Pinochet) according to Lawrence Britt: increased patriotism, racial/religious/minority demonization together with homeland racial/religious supremacy, glamourization and increased funding of military, increased emphasis on punishment, decreased emphasis on human rights legitimizing torture and extra-judicial imprisonment and execution, increased sexism, deemphasis of academia and arts, government control and censorship of media, national security obsession, protection of corporate power, cronyism between government and security/war businesses. Recent changes in the US and UK are currently all going pretty much in the direction of fascism. As an example, there is currently a debate in the UK as to whether the already-lengthened limit for holding somebody without charges (1 month) should be extended to almost 2 months. But why stop at 2 months? Wouldn't a year, or ten, help keep 'us' even safer? And it wouldn't inconvenience 'real' Brits, right? Check out this excerpt from a 2006 Popular Mechanics article on NYPD routinely deploying SWAT team storm troopers onto city streets where there is nothing to SWAT at, just in order to scare people and then see how they react (you looking suspicious? you videotaping?). This is how sheep are trained to live in a police state (original putrid article here).

    [Dec08'07] The latest USA today poll shows a just-statistically-significant loss of support for attacking Iran, probably because of the unexpected release of the National Intelligence Estimate report a week ago. And CNN hilariously had to re-schedule and re-purpose footage from its planned 2 hours of sewage/propaganda about a future nuclear Iran this weekend because of the report (they are no doubt furiously shuffling video cuts as we speak). Israel is upset that, as Uri Avnery writes, "they stole the bomb from us". Ehud Barak called the report a "blow to the groin", while the Shas party minister Yitzhak Cohen pulled out all the anti-semitism stops, saying that Americans' attitude to the National Intelligence Estimate was reminiscent of Auschwitz. Yeah, yeah. But the polls are still uncomfortably close to 50% of Americans supporting an Iran attack -- and that's without any real stunt having occurred. It's possible that the neo-crazies might strike back in the next month or two. They (e.g., Podhoretz/Abrams/Ledeen/Kristol/Bolton/Murdoch-WSJ) are currently all spluttering in unison about the CIA plot against Bush. And Wolfowitz is back in town (at the International Security Advisory Board); and now France has Sarkozy and Bernard Kouchner. I think there is a small chance of another false flag. The pressure will really be on around March 2008.

    [Dec09'07] If Ron Paul were to become a third party candidate, we might end up with a Ross-Perot-1992-like situation. He wouldn't win but he might actually draw away more disaffected Democratic than Republican votes. The dismal performance of the Democrats (yet another pusillanimous sell-out on war funding this week) has begun to sour even the most faithful. The failure of the Republican attempt in California to have (only!) Democratic California proportionally allocate its electoral college votes (instead of winner-take-all) has failed (this would be a good idea, of course, if all states did it). Also this week, the Senate 'blocked' a House bill that included such commie provisions as requirements for better fuel economy -- 35 mpg by 2020 -- which is sensible, practical, uncontroversial, etc, etc. To be fair, it did also contain an utterly ridiculous and impractical plan to 7-tuple the amount of ethanol production by 2022 that would use most of our farmland for cars, doesn't have a chance of happening given that world grain stockpiles have already fallen to record lows, and that was in any case not the reason the bill was blocked. There were also reasonable incentives for wind turbines and solar power. There were 53 yes votes, but it needed 60/100 to overcome a Bush veto. You go, lemmings. Stop those commies. Don't dangerously distort the market with incentives. Let it creatively destroy the entire planet. *Something's* bound to survive.

    [Dec11'07] Wow. The NIE report even has the Guiliani-worm-thing back-sliming on attacking Iran! Go spooks. I'm hoping this all sticks, despite the shrieking from the neocrazies.

    [Dec13'07] The complete lack of an effect of the Fed having tightened from 1% in 2004 to over 5% on M3 total money (note that the graph at the top that page is money M3 *growth*, not M3 itself!) suggests that the Fed has considerably less control over the creation of money -- at least via the Fed rate -- than is usually portrayed. Also, as mentioned above, the Fed rate seems to actually *follow*, not lead changes in interest rate of short-term treasuries, which are set by the market and probably influenced by non-public Fed actions other than Fed interest rate changes. One of those new "liquidity injection methods" was introduced by the Fed this week, possibly to be a "permanent addition" to its "monetary policy toolkit". The Fed now generates money from the void (as it always does), but instead of a bank just borrowing the money for a short term to cover withdrawals with a public record of the loan, the Fed directly buys toxic financial waste that nobody wants (because it's almost worthless), and does it secretly. That kind of counterfeiting seems hazardous.

    [Dec15'07] The third pic down (discount rate spread) clearly shows two sudden events in August and just now. The response of the money people has been to increase trading of derivatives by 27% in the third quarter to a record 681 trillion. For reference, the yearly US GDP is around 13 trillion. The derivatives traded in one quarter amounted to almost one quadrillion (as in 681,000,000,000,000 dollars in one quarter).

    [Dec16'07] "The larger problem here, I think, is that this kind of stuff [torture] just makes people feel better, even if it doesn't work." -- CIA officer quoted here. Don't support torture to make a bunch of fake he-men producers and fake he-men writers for tripe like "24" 'feel better'. Make them feel bad by not hiring their pitiful asses.

    [Dec17'07] As noted above, the smart money seems to have piled into derivatives after fleeing the toxic waste that the Fed is now secretly buying. What a scheme! What a complete rip-off of people who actually work, make things, help people, or do music, art, and science! Why do we let these turds skim off all the proceeds? What they do is selfish, dangerous (to us, not them!), and shouldn't be rewarded. We need to make it more dangerous *to them*. When they screw up, we should seize their yachts, cars, estates, and bank accounts, just like they do with petty criminals and drug lords, and make them do some real work. The rough sequence of events since 2000 seems to have been: (1) stock market tanks, (2) Fed drops interest rates to the floor, (3) hot money flows into housing, (4) as the growth of normal mortgages starts to flag, the subprime carcass is constructed and then fed upon by more exotic blood suckers, (5) housing finally crashes (now including commercial real estate), (6) the parasites drop off the 'exotic' carcasses and flee into derivatives (!), leaving the Fed to clean up (i.e., by devaluing everybody else's money by buying the drained carcasses in secret for 10 times what they are currently worth). Who would have guessed that derivatives would be considered 'safe' at this point in time? (well, not me, which is why I'm always one step behind). Derivatives a safe haven! But they don't have to be safe (and won't be safe) for very long. They just have to be stable enough for a year or two to allow the parasites to suck another few hundred billion out of the body politic. Given the massive increases in money creation (M3 *growth* is running at 15% per year, which is a doubling of money in 5 years), real growth has already stopped. Real growth stopping is actually a good thing. But I remain very worried about 2008 (my original prediction of peak oil). By early 2008, prime ARMs (along with yet more subprimes) are going to be in trouble, raising economic pressure even further. Even some fixed rate mortgages are under water. 2008 is shaping up to be a truly a dangerous year of slow motion economic hangover. I doubt if the destruction will be creative. But I have been wrong more often than right w.r.t. economics.

    [Dec19'07] Throw the torturers out, now. If Latin American mothers of the disappeared can do it, then so can cowardly American men. If Americans don't rise up soon, even men and blondes are going to be in deep doodoo.

    [Dec27'07] Consumer confidence rose unexpectedly in December.

    [Dec28'07] Peak oil humor: JD, who is a peak oil debunker, complained that TheOilDrum has turned into "Disasterpedia"... :-}

    [Dec30'07] There is a very good article by Richard K. Moore (rkm) here about, among other things, (Northern) energy and (Southern) food. It reiterates a point I have made many times that once US-ians (and UK-ians) finally read the peak oil writing on the wall, they will support policies that lead to the holocaust of the South. It's only matter of finding a politically correct way in which it can be Blitzer'd. At an enormous human cost, the North will keep its (slightly smaller) motors running for another 20 years, all while 'fighting global warming' and 'becoming energy independent' and making a zillion more iPods out of Chinese coal. Unless something changes drastically in our economic system, our way of life will not be negotiated, but rather fully prosecuted over giant piles of dead bodies, until geology has the last word with us. If (when) oil prices double or triple (again), it will cause people in the North to drive less and to finally prefer better mileage cars (as in Europe, where oil prices are already 2-3x those in the US because of taxes); but in the South, doubling or tripling real oil prices (again) will cause riots (e.g., see Myanmar, 2007) and the beginnings of widespread starvation. But I don't see a way that oil prices can get high enough (e.g., 10x or 50x as high as now) to motivate people in the North to fundamentally retool their ways and their economic system without at the same time killing huge numbers of people in the South.

    [Jan02'08] To start off the new year on a good foot, here is a positive article about how solar could help save the day.

    [Jan05'08] "National security isn't going to mean much if we have a generation of kids so physically incapacitated [by obesity] they can't go to war." -- Mike Hukabee. But McDonald's is free enterprise! Is Huckabee a closet librul? I don't usually read Kunstler, but he made a good point in a recent column about the final suburban phase of US history: "40 percent of all new jobs after the year 2000 were created in the final burst of suburban expansion". I saw it in San Diego. I moved there in the late 80's and left last year. During that time, all the mostly empty space between the 5 and the 15 freeways north of the city was filled in -- an amazing expansion into an area much larger than the original footprint of the city (it's not just San Diego -- the same thing happened just outside the 'green belt' around London). Perhaps it will all work out, even as transportation becomes more expensive. The price of oil doubled in 2007. It *might* temporarily dip because of demand destruction during a serious world recession, but even if that happens, it soon afterwards has nowhere to go but up -- even if the recession never ends.

    [Jan07'08] The Persian Gulf of Tonkin-y thingee, plus two F-18's crash in mid-air over the Gulf, plus a major fire in the largest Iraqi oil refinery -- and oil goes down (!?). The oil traders must have some inside info on a serious near-term economic contraction (very near term is all they can see). Here is a more quantitative look at how the current exponential growth corn ethanol and other biofuels are well set up to starve the South (as noted a few posts back). The key point out of all of Stuart Staniford's too-many graphs is that gasoline proice elasticiy in the US is -0.05 while price elasticity for food consumption by poor consumers is -0.7. The -0.05 means that large price increases don't affect how much people buy very much, while -0.7 means that large price increases strongly reduce the amount people will buy. Growing corn for ethanol competes directly with growing corn, wheat, and rice for food. It's already happening. Americans have and will continue to easily outbid (for biofuels) what poor people can bid (for food). Americans are burning up the food of the world to move their oversize butts around in their stupid oversize cars. It's truly sick.

    [Jan10'08] The (Rupert-Murdock-owned!) Times Sibel Edmonds article is getting remarkably little play in the US, given that is is supposedly about 'nuclear al-Queda in Pakistan'. There was also: "We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can't afford for them to spill the beans." -- as told to Marc Grossman (former number 3 at the State dept) by spy handlers for people in Turkey, Israel, and Pakistan. "Them" was a bunch of people arrested by the FBI in connection with 9/11, then released from jail and sent out of the country after this call from spy handlers came in (now, if you were a random taxi driver grabbed for cash in Afghanistan, tough luck). The timing and location of this partial and extremely confusing release of information make it a major play, like the National Intelligence Estimate. But I can't really figure out what it means (or why it is not being played up in the US, given how well it would fit with in with Drool-iani or Obama calling for an attack on Pakistan). Some have suggested that she was (maybe unknowingly) a part of a counterintelligence operation to sell defective plans (the Pakistani A-tests *were* very small).

    [Jan11'08] The Pentagon-assisted (cf. CIA-assisted NIE) unwinding of the shoddy Tonkin-lite (ironically, or not-so-ironically coinciding with a report admitting the original fake!) does look like Bush is losing his grip. With a lot more bank funny business still to unwind/unload, 2008 could be a doozy. On the bright side, a world recession could temporarily bring down oil prices -- right at Peak Oil!

    [Jan13'08] Unfortunately, I noticed a hit from somebody that was previously at hzzp:||sviolett.com (don't go there if you have a Windows machine -- it will install a trojan in the form a codec, even if you try to cancel and close the browser), which means my page may have been linked from there. Google drops links on known Trojan-installing sites.

    [Jan14'08] Americans are now worried more about the economy than about the war, as if the two weren't related (almost a billion a day in American tax dollars go to support our daily genocide in Iraq). Americans want 'leaders' who will 'fix the economy' and go after oil companies who are driving up the cost of oil. It's positively embarrassing.

    [Jan21'08] It sure looks like there is about to be some more violent price whipsawing in the world's stock markets (a lot of downs, but also some sharp ups) after the 5% one-day drops on Monday (the US markets were closed). The much greater suddenness of these worldwide changes compared to changes in the underlying fundamentals (sure oil is running down and grain supplies are dropping, but they can't possibly have fallen off a cliff in 3 days -- and as before the drops took oil along with them!) re-emphasizes what a complete casino (at the rest of our expenses) the stock market is. It's not about investing but rather in taking advantage of panics with time courses of hours or days -- petty little greed and fear cycles of the psychopaths running things that have nothing much to do with what I like to think of as reality. The world is not decoupled at all -- the greed oscillations of the psychopaths resonate across the entire world now like an epileptic fit. Unfortunately, those greed cycles actually *are* our reality. Stuart Staniford's tedious piece in the oildrum today explaining how industrial agriculture will actually profit from rising oil prices must have required wearing holes in his tongue licking the boots of the greedy psychopaths (don't mention the subsidies, the soil, or water, Stuart... you mentioned them once but I think you got away with it). Maybe his religion made him do it. The rest of the world can eat cake. A little Eichmann-y for my taste. Good for his CV, tho.

    [Jan22'08] A sharp up it was indeed for the Dow, after the more-than-expected Fed cut, which cancelled the opening-bell (overnight) downward spike (though leaving the previous week of US losses intact).

    [Jan27'08] First Obama girls, now, uhhh, peak oil girls (?!) on youtube! Even the Rupert Street Journal is getting in on the peak oil bandwagon. I think they thought the survivalist bit showed some skin. Anything to distract attention from FED graphs like this one and this one and this one, which suggest that business is seriously 'not as usual'. These sudden spikes don't look like anything that has happened in the past 50 years. They look like the first expression of the kind of kind of instabilities I had been worrying about for years above. By contrast, the set of energy graphs in my peak oil pdf are on a much longer time scale than those wild Fed graphs. Smoothing the feathers of the poor little jittery financial wizards so they won't shoot each other in the legs is one thing; dealing with the crushing long-term downtrends in the peak oil/energy graphs is another. Like the peak oil girl says, I suppose.

    [Feb02'08] US banks are now basically out of reserves and are borrowing from the Fed to pay for withdrawals. They are technically insolvent. Since 'innovations' like 'sweeps' have already lowered effective bank reserve requirements to maybe 3%, perhaps this is no big thing, just a few percent difference. Just a flesh wound. My main worry is that as bank reserve requirements have declined (or been worked around), a singularity is approached. Bank reserve requirements effectively define the factor by which banks can multiply the money supply (10% reserve requirement means banks will multiply the amount of money borrowed into existence from the Fed by 10 after multiple cycles of deposit and withdrawal). At zero reserves, banks can multiply money infinitely. There are big differences between 3%, 2%, and 1% reserves (money multipliers of 33, 50, and 100). It does seem that something like this has started to happen in derivatives, where their nominal 'values' of $500 trillion are many times larger then the world's GDP or world M3 equivalent.

    [Feb03'08] From Chalmers Johnson: By 1990, production for the Department of Defense amounted to 83 percent of the value of all manufacturing plants and equipment in the US -- that is, 17 percent of the US manufacturing base made products not meant to kill. The US is in the late stages of pissing away its unique intellectual, artistic, mineral, and agrarian resources. It won't get them back. It's sad. And all to fill the pockets and pay for hookers for a small number of stinky old hair-transplant men who are already drafting plans for their offshore concubines and vacation/retirement castles. But there is one unfortunate difference from the Roman empire (or the former British empire). The US has nukes. When the barbarians finally came to the gates of Rome demanding all of Rome's treasure, the cashiered Romans didn't have any serious doomsday firepower. If they *had* had them, everything might have turned out differently. This time, even the richies' tropical safe havens might 'get their hair mussed'.

    [Feb09'08] I have a feeling that articles like this by Matthew Rothschild in the Progressive and films like V is for Vendetta, either knowingly or unknowingly, serve as psychological acceptance training for a police state. The great majority of people that read them don't get mad, but scared and helpless. No fear, as they used to say.

    [Feb10'08] Sheryl Crow's (!) sorta kinda peak oil song (third line: "And oil was way beyond its peak") written by Ben Harper, incongruously hooked "Gasoline will be free" (I like the bluesy 1970 feel, even if the concept is dorky).

    [Feb15'08] I graduated from NIU with a degree in geology and good grades and I play guitar. However, I think it would be premature at this point in time to tar all NIU graduates with a label of NIU-white-guy-slamofascism.

    [Feb17'08] This graph of non-borrowed bank reserves (was 40 billion, now zero!) and this graph of total borrowings by depository institutions from the Federal Reserve (now at 45 billion -- a giant spike 11 times the 9/11 and 1987 spikes, and 5 times the 1984 spike) suggests that 'regular' banks are now all truly insolvent (both from here). They have no reserves other than those borrowed into existence last week from the Fed. And this emergency borrowing has recently been made secret, so normal people can no longer identify which banks are going bankrupt (all of them?). In contrast with the LEAP 2020 people, I think the situation in Europe and the UK is virtually identical (if anything, the UK and EU central banks have created even more money via this route than the US has so far). It looks like a giant freeway pileup, but in slow mo, with no sound. I suppose people will object that the numbers here ($40 billion of US small people and family business bank deposits) are trivial compared to trillions of real estate equity, $3.5 trillion in money market funds, the US or world GDP ($10-ish trillion, $40-ish trillion) or derivatives ($400-ish trillion) or interest rate swaps ($600 trillion-ish). It still creeps me out. And peak oil hasn't even started to bite. What will happen when there is real pressure on the system? I have no clear idea whether to expect inflation or deflation. Creating money is generally inflationary, but problems obtaining credit mean deflation. I suppose I still feel deflationary, like Genesis at Market Ticker. It's true US/UK/EU central banks are creating huge amounts of credit/money to buy distressed things of zero value rather than wringing them out of the system. But I don't agree with the gold idiots (like the tedbits guy who posted the graphs above) who ridiculously group gold and oil together as 'commodities' and then see inflation relative to them. I don't think gold matters much at all now (in the long run you can't eat it or power a truck with it), and oil is going up because of simple supply and demand (we are near peak oil), not because of money games. Housing still has a huge way to fall to get back into historical alignment with salaries. People can no longer spend extra by taking out home equity loans (consumers are 70% of the GDP and home equity withdrawals maybe 10% of that). Municipalities are having to pay 20% interest on loans (NY Port Authority this week), which will lead to municipal bankruptcies (only banking richies can get secret low interest 'loans' from the Fed printing presses because they are such good people and have invested money so wisely; working people by contrast have to pay 20% interest to the banks because working people are 'risky'). None of these huge deflationary 'meals' are even close to having made it through the python yet (we haven't even reached the peak of 'funny' mortgage resets yet, much less the consequences of them). Meanwhile, back in Washington, yet more war and defense spending bills are being prepared and will be passed. As Elaine Meinel Supkis says, the entire Congress and Bush and Greenspan/Bernanke should be arrested for fraud for cutting taxes and lowering interest rates to almost zero, all while launching *two* wars. Eat the rich before they eat us.

    [Feb25'08] Sad to see that the violent, pointless piece-'o-crap movie, no country for old men was given a bunch of awards. For what? It's the emperor with no clothes! I'm very sorry to have paid them money to see it without finding out about it first. Complete trash. I loved the Big Lebowski. This one sucked. As one imdb commenter suggested, it seemed like a joke -- they make a vile movie that abuses the audience and then they watch as the self-flagellating idiots explain to themselves how deep Tommy Lee Jones stupid lines are. It's Federico Krueger, chumps. I can't wait for the sequel -- Anton Chigurh vs. Predator *and* Alien.

    [Feb27'08] As expected last year by anybody who could fog a laptop screen (e.g., me, above) the number of foreclosures is skyrocketing. The number of mortgage resets is about to hit its peak -- but the people who suddenly can't pay now aren't the ones foreclosing now! -- the current interest rate resets won't foreclose until this Fall. Banks have already been completely drained (and more!) of their non-borrowed reserves over the past two months. The worst could still be yet to come. The weird complacency I get when talking to people about this sets me on edge. I really wish we could get the next 6 months out of the way quickly. And I especially don't like it when the richies announce to you that you're about to be f***ed (but of course, they still get to keep theirs).

    [Mar03'08] Scott Horton wrote an insightful piece on the embrace of torture by Americans, noting that Fox's "24" gave Americans 67 torture scenes in its first five seasons (up from virtually no torture scenes on teevee in the 90's). Widespread torture was given up (at least in the homeland of western countries) because: (1) it doesn't work, (2) once rooted it spreads like kudzu, (3) there are no ticking time bombs, and (4) it doesn't fit well with a free society. Many Americans now shamefully think otherwise. Unfortunately, these tastes have a nasty way of bubbling into a craze like the witch trials. It doesn't help media broadcasting identical copies of these memes into everybody's bedroom at the same time.

    [Mar05'08] Interesting stats on the costs of using a car here. 43,000 deaths a year and several times that many serious injuries a year costing each big city person about $1000/year and each smaller city person over $2000/year. At $164 billion/year, crashes are a visible chunk of the GDP. For comparison, prisons -- another big component of state budgets that has far outstripped what is spent on higher education and put the US on the world map as the country with the highest percentage of its population in jail -- cost a mere $50 billion/year.

    [Mar08'08] Things certainly do look shaky when the regular press starts echoing whacko blogs like mine. But things have looked shaky before -- e.g., late 1970's, 1987, 1998. In all those cases, financial people got whipsawing psychological oscillations back under control and life went on. Things seem hugely more precarious then they were back then (esp. oil, food, unprecedented global size of housing inflation and hedge fund leverage, the fact that at the *top* of a huge housing bubble people have ended up with a record *low* percent equity, the $200 billion Fed action this week, people squatting in their multimillion dollar seaside mansions because there is a year delay for the bank to get a court date) but who knows? Maybe still not the big one? The fundamentals of oil, food, and housing are all slow moving. The slopes either side of their peaks are very shallow (even though the slopes from unwinding huge leverage on them can be violent). A glance at this chart shows the largest recorded swing in summer/winter ice coverage change in 2007/2008, coincident with extremely rough weather in China (which destroyed 10% of its forests) and the northern US. If the rough weather continues into summer, it could be a real doozy of a hurricane season. Global warming means more precipitation in addition to warming. Like I said above, I wish we could just get through the next 6 months real quick...

    [Mar08'08] Now that there is a peak oil video game (KAOS Studios in New York just spent $15 million making Frontlines: Fuel of War) my job is done: I guess there is no need to update my peak oil pdf anymore :-}

    [Mar10'08] A recent meme is that since the move to ethanol was prompted by concerns about global warming, and since ethanol is bad and competes with food, global warming must be a scam. Ethanol is certainly very bad. But it's hardly being done because of concerns about global warming. It would be better from a CO2 point of view to just burn the fossil fuels used to make it directly, since burning ethanol of course generates CO2 (and the EROEI is almost 1:1). This is a little like claiming that peak oil must be wrong because oil companies are run by pigmen. The second is true but is completely unrelated to the first, which depends on geology and maximum flow rates, not greed.

    [Mar12'08] Admiral Fallon has resigned, perhaps, because like Rumsfeld, he didn't feel it was strategically optimal to 'crush the ants' at this particular point in time (Fallon's own words from the recent bootlicking article written about him in Esquire). In Rumsfeld's case, what happened after was the surge (more of the same). In this case, it could be worse. This is just a few days after a US navy attack group arrived in the mideast. The recent jump of oil to $110 may be related. Most senior military officers seem to oppose a strike, so getting rid of Fallon doesn't mean a strike is imminent. It also indicates that there is dissension at the top. But on balance, I don't think it's a good sign. A successful attack on an American ship (false flag or otherwise) could rapidly change the situation (this came close to working). The threat of fast water-skimming cruise missiles has been well rehearsed. Because of this, some have suggested that an attack on Iran will only come when all the US ships in the Gulf *leave* :-}

    [Mar15'08] The poor wittle freemarket pigmen at Bear Stearns are getting bailed out by the gubmint, just a few days after the $200 billion announcement. These are the same guys who say, "tough luck bucko, the free market won't allow us to pay your health insurance". Socialism is only for pigmen. The reason they are failing is because their equally flush New York hedge fund rat-friends (e.g., Renaissance 'Technologies' [heh] Corp.) ratted them out to save their own a$$es, last Wednesday and Thursday. Toss them in jail! Take all the away all the huge bonuses they paid themselves just before the sh** hit the fan! Don't bail them out by effectively taxing everybody else by devaluing our money! Take their bonuses! Why should we pay more for food so these scumbags can keep their 7th house? The irony of it all is that the recent crisis seems to have been caused by various players in these complex ponzi schemes turning on each other. On a somewhat positive note, many commentators seem to agree that Fallon's resignation doesn't indicate an imminent Iran attack (e.g., Robert Parry). Hope they're right. But Parry also says that this may just be (another) postponement.

    [Mar19'08] Supposedly, 2/3 of Americans oppose the war. But at the same time, stay-in-Iraq-for-100-years McCain leads both Democrats in the polls (46% to 40%)! Americans don't seems to think that the Iraq war has anything to do with the plummetting economy. It's positively stupefying. Maybe people realize that voting Democratic won't end the war. Plus, I'm sure they feel that the rich have not been given enough tax cuts and bailouts, and they feel that their own standards of living are still too high and that it's unfair that more rich people don't have yachts like they really don't deserve health care and that the thiss.

    [Mar22'08] The rates on three-month treasury bills yesterday went to 0.387 percent, the lowest level since 1954, and for the first time since 1993, lower than in Japan. This means that some people are scared. Oil has 'plunged' to $101 as a result of speculators (probably using some of the funny money recently doled out to them by central banks) having to take profits to make margin calls (for other risky investments). This shows, of course, that peak oil is wrong. And since I saw a few flecks of snow riding my bike this morning in London, it means that global warming is wrong, too. Whew, those two things had me scared there for a while.

    [Mar23'08] The New York State Teacher's Retirement System owns almost half a million shares of Bear Stearns stock. They will lose over $50 million if J. Pirate Morgan (from Elaine Meinel Supkis) pockets the remaining loot for $2 a share ($300 million). Their NYC building alone is thought to be worth $1.5 billion. Where's Eliot Spitzer when you *really* need him? Indirectly, taxes are being used to bail out the guys with the yachts while stiffing the teachers. If socialism isn't good enough for us, the bankers shouldn't get it either! The gov should seize the yachts and the bonuses and sell them off for the teachers! Just like they do will ill-gotten drug money. Ignore the suits and see the reeking pirates underneath. The Amurrican people might even start to get mad after they have funded another 10 or 20 of these.

    [Mar25'08] I went here to see a video of the beginnings of what might be the sudden breakup of the largest Antarctic ice shelf yet (the Wilkins Ice shelf, the size of Northern Ireland) but first I had to sit through a commercial... for a Land Rover SUV like thing. OK, I know I'm just being an old fogey who doesn't get google gen humor.

    [Mar30'08] On Monday, Henry Paulson will announce that the US government is essentially planning to hand over the control of its banking system to a the very private pigmen owners of the Fed that got us into our present state, reducing the power of the SEC bank regulators in the process. There will be no vote. This is like the beginning of the Iraq war. Anybody whose mind was clear enough to think straight could see that it was a very bad idea. A record number of us even got out onto the streets, unprecedentedly, before the war had even started. Most of the rest now admit privately it was a mistake (but won't, of course, give us any credit for foresight, or remember or take responsibility for what they thought back then). In any case, the demonstrations had absolutely no effect because they immediately went away (mainly because there was no draft). People now seem even more passive than back then. Is it because there is about to be a huge explosion of discontent and I'm just not hearing what people are actually thinking? One can always hope. That the polls put McCain ahead (not that I think that the other two would make much difference) suggests that the American mind remains more seriously dazed and confused than ever. If people can even think about voting for McCain, how could they possibly come to grips with the concept of the peaking of world per capita energy use? Or the coming collision between that and an economic and money system based on the concept of continuous growth? Support for McCain is probably partly support for a strongman in uncertain times. It's embarrassing that *he's* the best strongman available! (not that I would have preferred a better strongman).

    [Apr01'08] In addition to stiffing each other and the New York Port Authority, banks have suddenly stopped lending to students. And these are the kind of ultra secure loans where they come after your parents and kids if you die! (but they are not as profitable as credit cards with 25% interest, and so out the door they go). The ripple effects of this are likely to hit universities hard. The cost of a university education has increased at several times the rate of inflation over the past 15 years. Expensive as they are, universities are truly one of the few great things that are really still 'made in the US', and long admired the world over. The time has come to outsource them, too, I suppose. This is getting awfully tunicate-like. Tunicates are animals whose larvae have certain similarities to early vertebrates. One difference from vertebrates, is that when the tunicate larva finally settles down and attaches itself to a surface to become an adult sea squirt, the first thing it does is jettison its brain. Americans can't you see that spending huge amounts of money killing Iraqis -- not to mention it being a war crime -- is wiping out the country and your retirement? You can't pay for your war crimes and your universities, too (graph by RandomViolence).

    [Apr05'08] We are now close to the peak of mortgage interest rate resets. House prices in the US/UK/EU are still way (two to three times) over 3x yearly income, the historical rate at which it is possible to pay a mortgage (plus or minus variations in interest rate). Mortgages are getting harder and harder to get. At the same time, people are much less enthusiastic about buying in a falling market. Foreclosures have ballooned and are now as common as sales in many places in the US. Personal saving rates have dropped below zero (a 20% down payment is hard to amass with a negative savings rate). Banks would seem to have major problems on their hands given how mortgage credit was used to spin out huge amounts of additional debt/money creation. The recent moves to allow banks to not declare all of these losses or to 'sell' them to taxpayers hardly seem to be long term solutions. By any measure, we would seem to be at a Wile-E.-Coyote suspended-in-air moment. The amount of unwinding that has to happen to get things back to historical averages is truly breathtaking. Yet, the general mood seems not *that* dark. And this is all assuming that growth will resume once all the bad debt gets destroyed. It's not clear to me that rapid growth can resume after the great unwind is done. In another decade, we will be hitting the beginning of the plateau of peak all-energy. This will constrain growth potential. On positive side, at least peak all energy and peak per capita energy is a gentle peak (compared to pigmen fear-greed oscillations).

    [Apr12'08] Interesting numbers from a long (naturally :-} ) H.C.K. Liu article "Between 1925 and 1929 the total amount of outstanding installment credit more than doubled from $1.38 billion to around $3 billion while the GDP rose from $91 billion to $104 billion. Today, outstanding consumer credit besides home mortgages adds up to about $14 trillion, about the same as the annual GDP". That is, in 1929, outstanding installment credit was 3% of GDP in 1929, while outstanding consumer credit is now 100% of GDP. Americans need a raise, not another loan. As Mike Whitney says, power has to be taken from the financial pirates that put us in this mess or they will continue to increase their share of the loot until they have to abandon our sinking ship on private lifeboats overloaded with booty. Just because the teevee doesn't call it class war doesn't mean the lampreys will voluntarily detach themselves from the body politic. They have to be forcibly knocked off.

    [Apr20'08] Despite the continuing moral, not to mention fiscal, drain of the US/UK-directed Iraq genocide (over 1 million dead), Americans still can't bring themselves to demand a withdrawal. I've read that people are afraid to complain because they might 'get on a list'. This will be looked upon unkindly in the fullness of time. I wonder what would have to happen before Americans (and Britons) will speak out? House prices halved? Weekly bank collapses? Things that really count? (as compared to the mere lives of a million low-market-value human beings). At the current rate, Americans and Britons will never demand a withdrawal. The war occupation will end only when their economies collapses so far it can't be maintained (or the troops revolt).

    [Apr22'08] This remarkably Orwellian article about the death of Riad Hamad reads: "Activist under FBI investigation found dead in lake, hands and legs bound, eyes covered with duct tape -- police leaning toward suicide ruling". War is peace.

    [Apr23'08] Recently, the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana has been hyped. It is not a new find. The oil bearing beds are mostly rather 'tight' rock (i.e., not very porous and therefore hard to get oil out of). So far 110 million barrels of oil have been produced from Bakken over the last 50 years. Sounds like a lot, but don't mix up your millions and billions. The *total* production so far is equivalent to just 5 *days* of current US usage (about 20.7 million barrels a day), or just 1.3 days of current world usage. Of course, there is a lot more oil in there, but little of it is recoverable at a reasonable energy return on energy investment ratio. The USGS estimates that there is 3.6 recoverable billion barrels left in Bakken (180 days of US usage). This is similar to other highly inflated USGS numbers that have turned out to be inconsistent with flat world production in the face of skyrocketing oil prices over the past 4 years. A more realistic estimate here is that the ultimate recovery from Bakken will be around 500 million barrels (i.e., 390 million new barrels past the 110 gotten over the past 50 years, or about 20 more *days* of current US usage). It's criminal to have these glowing reports without even the most basic context (US usage of 20 million barrels a day, Bakken a well-known oil bearing formation that has produced 110 million barrels total, etc). Simple grade-school-level division shows that the wolf is at the door, and even 30 more Bakkens wouldn't make him go away.

    [May16'08] The parallel reality in which this article exists is amazing to me. I link to Evans-Pritchard sometimes, but the unbelievable ignorance about oil reserves and possible oil production rates on display here (which includes most of the comments) is dizzying. For Evans-Pritchard, I guess it's just an occupational hazard of being an economist. For the rest, study some physics, chemistry, geology, and agriculture!

    [Jun03'08] I'd have a tough time making up stufflike this: Halliburton sells $1.2 million worth of toasters to the government for $2,000 each, after stealing them (!) from a discount appliance warehouse, under the cover of an FBI consumer protection raid. To justify the price, they have 4 Pentagon generals inspect one, eventually resulting in database programmers inventing over 200 components, all priced separately, some of which contain expensive "heat resistant platinum alloys". Fearing for her life, the attempted whistle-blower on this scheme flees to Canada.

    [Jun04'08] There are currently 18.5 million empty houses in the US. Young people need about 1.85 million new houses a year. About 0.5 million homes are demolished per year to build something new on the lot. About 1.1 million homes are vacated per year by old people. Even in recession, home builders are still adding about 1 million homes per year. Add all these together and you get 0.35 million net empty houses occupied. That's an awful lot of inventory still to clear (it would take 50 years at current rates!) (stats from here). It is a relief to be (just) past the peak in mortgage resets mentioned in previous posts. But the numbers in this post suggest that the housing market will remain distressed for a long time.

    [Jun08'08] As pension funds and other speculators (heh!) pile into oil and food, even going as far as buying actually food, not just futures (the Enron-i-zation of wheat!), oil and food prices have bumped up a little faster than they would have otherwise. The main source of the long term rise, though, is simply that demand is bumping up against max supply. Oil and food may slump back a little ("oil plunges to $110! we're saved! the commie hippies were wrong!"). This will take a little pressure off of countries that subsidize gasoline. Those subsidies effectively increase taxes there, however, and as oil prices increase, they effectively increase the cost of labor. This is beginning to finally put the brakes on the global labor arbitrage that has gutted the industrial economies of the US (and UK). A temporary oil price pullback in a few months (if this even happens!) will not change the long term contours of the drawdown of oil reserves. Despite the constant drone of tabloid puff pieces about "a fantastic new oil discovery has just been discovered" and "hippies have prevented us from drilling giant reserves in ANWR/Californa/whatever", total world oil reserves numbers are *very* slowly moving (well except when OPEC doubled its reserves during the 1980's oil glut). That means yearly discoveries (now running at best at 1/5 of yearly usage) are never going to make it safe to buy SUV's again; but it also means that the falloff will be gradual, too (at first...). Note that all this is about *oil* prices, not gasoline/petrol prices. There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil. It is possible to make about 20 gallons of gasoline/petrol out of a barrel of crude oil. Dividing a $130 barrel of crude by 20 gallons gives $6.50/gallon -- before refining and transportation costs, taxes, etc. Gasoline/petrol made from oil delivered today is going to cost well over $4/gallon.

    [Jun13'08] It mkes me laugh to see comparison between the dot com run-up and rising oil prices. Sure, both computers and oil are useful. But computers as we know them are not possible without oil and other fossil fuels. Oil is the lifeblood of industrial civilization, which now, includes computers. I hope we can find a replacement for this lifeblood. In Portugal, Spain, the Philippines, and Thailand, angry truckers blocked roads and set fire to the truck of a scab. As oil gets more scarce, the price will fitfully go up, eventually dwarfing taxes, subsidies, until it gets beyond the means of most of the world to pay for it. That is the real meaning of demand destruction -- not piddly 2% reductions in North American miles per capita. These riots have already happened with only tiny reductions in overall demand. It's tempting to make fun of people who would seem to be threatening geological formations (and I confess I have done so above). But that's not really their target -- the true target is other people (like me) who are using the same dwindling resource.

    [Jun22'08] Watching things turn out like I feared 5 years ago is sure depressing. Mere price increases can't increase the *rate of flow* of oil. The rate of flow of oil from tar sands will never reach above a few percent of daily usage. Economics isn't physics. I'm still hoping the attack on Iran will be foiled by conservative elements of the military. It certainly isn't going to be stopped by the public or by the civilian government; the Democratic worms just bent over again and continued their unbroken record of fully funding the war, and followed that up with support for a naval blockage of Iran. Election? What election? There is only one ruling party.

    [Jun27'08] Oil at $142 implies gasoline at $7 or $8/gallon (~20 gallons of gasoline can be made from a 42 gallon barrel of oil). I predicted a number of years ago that peak oil would really begin to hit in 2008. I'm not at all happy to probably be right. I don't care that everybody said I was too much of an alarmist. If the crazies can be prevented from attacking Iran, oil should fall back a little. But the main reason for its high price is that we have reached maximum flow rates. Unless demand goes down, prices won't go down either (they will go higher even if demand stays flat because flow rates may soon begin to slowly go down). Sure there are a bunch of useless parasites sucking money-for-nothing out of oil price volatility. It's unlikely the rabble will treat them kindly at the end of the day. As much as this parasitic occupation disgusts me, it is not the primary driver for oil prices. It's merely high rollers at the craps tables on the Titanic, right before the tables got really wet...

    [Jul03'08] It's pathetic to see all the talk about the 'inflation' threat from high oil prices. High oil prices aren't inflation -- they simply mean oil demand is bumping up against oil peak flow rates, period. As I've said many times before, oil isn't an optional purchase, but the lifeforce (literally) of industrial society. As oil prices increase, businesses will close. Wages will *fall* as unemployment increases. Banks will fail because unemployed people will get (further) behind on their mortgages. The supply of credit (AKA money) is constricting. Banks are rushing to find some way of making sure rich people don't lose any of their tax-free, ill-gotten gains. In the face of all this, the central European bank is warning of the danger of a (poor people) wage spiral. To show that they got the message, EU truckers should picket and blockade the banks instead of the ports.

    [Jul10'08] Cantarell in Mexico, (formerly!) the world's second-largest-producing oil field after Ghawar, is now declining at an average annual rate of 14%. Eeesh. I was worrying about -- and writing about -- this almost 4 years ago. Now Cantarell really is "falling off a cliff". That's a *nasty* lot of depletion to make up for, esp. when you consider that it has to come from a large number of new wells that are tiny cousins of a super giant like Cantarell. I wish I hadn't been right. This is not because 'the Mexicans don't use up-to-date 'murrican technology'. In fact, the rapid decline rate is precisely because Mexicans *did* use up-to-date technology -- like horizontal wells and early nitrogen injection. And that's why many of us could see the cliff coming 4 years ago. In another few years, the same thing will start to happen to Ghawar. Just great. The lower overall decline rate of existing wells (around 4-5% per year) means we have to find the equivalent of a new Ghawar -- the largest oil field ever found in the world -- every two years, forever. Somehow, I think this won't happen, eh? How on earth can the 'planning' nincompoops *possibly* think about building new runways now? What are they smoking? Their ignorance of basic geology is just stunning. At these rates, we're looking at the possibility of serious social unrest in five or ten years. Now I know, that's the far distant future. Whew, I was worried there for a while.

    [Jul13'08] Meanwhile, back with the money geniuses, IndyMac gets bailed out, taking out 10-20% of the total capitalization of FDIC. Not bad! The FDIC maintains reserves of a little over 1% of the value of the deposits that it insures. So that means that it is currently insuring about 350 IndyMac-equivalents with 5 or 10 IndyMac-equivalents of reserves. That won't cause anyone else to panic I'm sure. We're all professionals here, you know...

    [Jul15'08] One thing I didn't forsee above was the advent of the Peak Oil self help book (can a Suze Orman book on Women and Oil be far behind?). I always knew I was terrible at business (tho the internet helps). Speaking of the internet, I recently found out from it that Martha Farah was at the 2008 Bilderberg meeting. Now that's different! And also that vision researcher Joe Atick is now at L-1 -- the company behind airport retinal scans -- from Fallujah to Heathrow.

    [Jul19'08] A recent estimate from Bridgewater Associates is that bank losses may reach $1,600 billion (earlier estimates were in the range of $500 billion). For comparison, the Savings and Loan disaster from the 80's was $125 billion, largely paid by taxpayers. Even after inflation adjustment, the current disaster could turn out to be 5-10 times as big. If banks and bank-like thingees are bailed out by taxpayer money, it could turn in one of the largest transfers of wealth from poor and middle income to rich in the history of the US (similiar slow motion poor->rich bailouts will likely occur in the UK and EU). Just because it's slow doesn't mean the bankers aren't rifling through your wallet every day. National health care? No chance. National bank share-holder care? *Now* you're talking. Socialism only for rich people. Even though truckers blocking deliveries to protest high oil prices is aimed at the wrong target, any actual action trumps words (like mine, I suppose).

    [Jul22'08] Roubini now estimates $2-3 trillion in losses and no housing bottom until 2010. On the bright side, he says it won't be as bad as the Depression. The UK and the EU have similar problems. Germany -- the head of the pack -- actually contracted in the second quarter. The global game of chicken is on. Last Sunday, Evans-Pritchard said "If we are lucky, America will start to stabilise before Asia goes down. Should our leaders mismanage affairs, almost every part of the global system will go down together. Then we are in trouble." I would say we are in trouble when the major way of making money today is to bet that another company will fail (particularly profitable when you haven't even bought the shares that you are selling short, i.e., 'naked shorting'). It has such a decline of the Roman empire feeling to it. Don't do anything that might slow the decline of industrial civilization -- instead we have a bunch of decadent fatties reclining and stuffing their faces and betting from the sidelines on who will crash and burn, between trips to the vomitorium. But the really sad thing about this whole mess is that it is happening *before* peak oil or peak natural gas has really begun to bite! Significant year-on-year production *declines* in oil probably won't start in earnest until 2012.

    [Jul28'08] When I went to college in the 1970's at a state supported university in Illinois. I was able to make enough money at a just-over-minimum-wage summer job to pay for both tuition and room and board for the year (about $2,000/year). I stayed an extra year as an undergraduate (no longer allowed there) and learned a lot from excellent teachers who had more teaching experience than many teachers at better-rated universities. Thirty years later, the minimum wage is only 50% higher but the cost for tuition and room and board at that same university is *1000%* higher (over $20,000/year), in part because the states including Illinois have withdrawn funding for Universities and diverted it to things like prisons (California used to spend twice as much on universities as prisons; now it's more than the other way around). Professors' salaries have more or less kept pace with inflation (too bad they didn't go up 1000%, too :-} ) but permanent 'temporary' non-tenure track workers have fallen considerably behind. Meanwhile, the students emerge from college massively in debt with 30 year loans with usurious rates (some ballooning to 11% after a few years). Like the situation with housing, where house prices doubled or tripled while salaries stayed the same, this is *not* a sustainable situation and will have to unwind at some point. Too bad universities can't charge 10% interest per year on ideas generated there like banks do on the money they generate. It's certainly more mental work generating ideas than generating money (the automatic consequence of fractional reserve lending). And it doesn't take much mental effort to borrow money at 3 or 5% and then charge some poor student 11%. I learned that kind of math back in the third grade. With current trends, universities will be once again turned back into the luxuries for the rich they were a hundred years ago.

    [Jul28'08] There was an interesting report here about how funds for repairing roads are being impacted by people driving less (3.7% fewer miles than this time last year). Trucks do a great majority of damage to roads (over 99%), because road damage goes up as a high power of axle load, but they are not taxed proportionately. So car drivers are subsidizing the trucking industry through gas taxes and road-repair taxes (you never hear libertarians complaining about this compared to the way they complain about taxes for railroad maintenance). This is an excellent example of the unrecognized mechanics of peak oil -- and it already became obvious after only a tiny drop in driving! I hate to imagine what the roads will look like when oil prices reach $400/barrel. It's such a shame. Instead of leaving us great, big, beautiful bicycle lanes, industrial civilization might end up instead pounding unmaintained roads into big dusty, cracked up messes and then leaving us to pick our way around zillions of potholes (a lot harder in a bike than an SUV). Instead of addressing any of this, the Pentagon (=government) has unveiled a 2009 military budget of over half a trillion -- the highest ever, even after adjusting for inflation. Note that this huge tax bill *doesn't* include funds for the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the CIA, the surveillance agencies, the spy satellites, etc, etc, much of it now privately contracted, and not even overseen by the government (most signals intelligence is collected by SAIC not the NSA). As I've said before, Americans are pouring their country down the toilet, without a whimper. It should be pretty obvious to even a ten year old that all that military spending isn't helping the country. Once the country's been flushed, it's going to be awfully hard to put all that sh*t back together. In virtually all historical cases, it never came back out of the sewer in one piece.

    [Jul30'08] Here is one of America's finest slowing down a bicyclist. Before this video came to light, the cop filed a report that the bicyclist had assaulted him. How about mister fat guy gets to ride a bicycle for a year as community service! It's the same idea as requiring people getting a driving license to ride a bicycle in traffic. If there had been a similar video for the following raid, perhaps we could have avoided the travesty of 8 Minneapolis police SWAT team members being awarded bravery medals (WTF?) for shooting up the wrong home. 'Bravery medals' for cowardly storm troopers. Disgusting. Don't these guys have any shame? Just remember, make sure a friend gets a video, else you're toast (this guy, for example, tasered 19 times *after* he broke his back, unfortunately lacks a video).

    [Aug01'08] The temporary oil drop may be a good sign that the Iran war lunatics are in temporarily in retreat, as evidenced by various recent leaks: signs of informal negotiation with Iran, Admiral Mullen (a strong supporter of Israel) going to Israel and warning against a second USS Liberty, the Hersh leak of Cheney's shooting-at-SEALs-dressed-like-Iranians plan. Let's hope it sticks as the housing/credit bubble continues to unwind, racheting up the pressure. Looks like there's still a ways to go in that process...

    [Aug06'08] Alt-A mortgages (e.g., pay option adjustable rate mortgages) have started to implode in the US, keeping default rates up, even as subprime defaults have started to fall. Pay option ARMs have insane schedules where you pay less than just the interest until the principal gets to say, 125% of the original loan, then suddenly you have to pay full interest plus principal. I remember when these came out. From the beginning, it was clear that they were time bombs. US house prices are already down over 30%. Many commentators worry that prime mortgages are next. To get mortgages back into historical alignment with salaries, prices must continue down. Ouch. Of course, salaries could be raised. That, of course, is completely off the table -- socialism is only for rich people (corporations have begun raiding their own pension funds to pay extra dividends to the smelly pirates that run them).

    [Aug20'08] A brilliant member of the proud, the few, the TSA ("thousands standing around") decided to perform an impromptu overnight 'security check' to see if someone could break into parked aircraft. Or perhaps he was was on a mission to plant something on a plane (that he himself was guarding, of course) to see if pilots would find it, which would generate a fine if the pilots missed it (makes sense if you think that finding things hidden by TSA numbskulls is one of a pilot's main jobs...). Anyway, back to to TSA idiot. He climbed up onto the cockpits of a bunch of planes using delicate flight control sensors as a ladder, damaging the sensors on 9 of the planes, grounding them, and creating havoc at O'Hare. The pilots were furious, saying that the TSA was endangering air safety. Why can't these fine Americans just stick to keeping us safe from our suntan lotion and bottled water and little girl's snow globes?

    [Aug20'08] Now that Obama has picked "I am a Zionist" Biden as VP, I suppose McCain can go for Lieberman. I don't see how Biden could posssibly rescue the votes of Democrats who have problems with Obama's skin color. Amazingly, it looks like the doddering and dangerous McCain could win. If it's any consolation, Biden is probably worse than McCain on the Iraq holocaust (1.5 million people dead).

    [Aug24'08] The new NIST explanation of the 5 PM collapse of 47-story WTC7 (a building not hit by a place) now gets rid of diesel fires (the original FEMA explanation) and damage from the earlier WTC1 collapse (many other reports) as explanations of the collapse, and attributes it instead to stresses (changes in length) caused by thermal expansion, caused by office fires. A collapse from office fires due to thermal expansion stress is unprecedented for a steel framed building (steel is an excellent conductor of heat). The NIST explanation also doesn't explain reports of molten steel (slag mixed with melted concrete, extremely high surface temperatures weeks after the collapse, and iron-rich microspheres in dust collected immediately after event) in WTC7 debris, none of which could have resulted from office fires.

    [Aug30'08] Here is an amazingly clueless Will Greider article in the Nation about McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as vice-president, calling it a desperation move. As some of the commenters pointed out, it's naive to call it 'desperation' when McCain is tied or even ahead in some polls. I think it will probably be the thing that clinches the election for McCain. Of course, I completely failed to predict something like this in my comment above, not having a working political strategist's bone in my body. But I'm good at recognizing the fruits of that expertise. A genius move. It will be hard to pick on her obvious lack of experience from the 'left' and because she is a woman and not the presidential candidate. She has the strong support of AIPAC. Unbelievable that that a doddering scumbag carpet bomber baby killer war criminal will probably win. Hurricane Gustav bearing down on the Gulf coast offshore rigs and pipelines creates some uncertainty. But even there, a (semi-)natural aspects of a disaster will distract attention from the underlying cause of high oil prices (we're running out). It remains beyond me why anyone would want to be president of any country given the economic s-storm bearing down, laid on top of the real start of Peak Oil. I know, think of the bright side of life -- all things must pass, but they will pass at a more stately rate than anyone expects (I'm hoping).

    [Sep01'08] Well, OK, the McCain-thing wasn't looking too bouncy here, but maybe he forgot to take his pills.

    [Sep02'08] By any objective measure, the scenes from St. Paul show that the US is slowly turning into a police state. Almost 1000 people were arrested. The creeping militarization will be difficult to turn back, esp. as conditions get hotter as we begin a long slow energy descent. Not looking good. And as the California continues without a budget, several *billion* a week is still being spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars/holocausts (more than 1.5 million killed so far). What wars? You'd hardly know we were in two wars for longer than WWII from the vile, supine press. Bringing that tax money back home could repair the California budget in a few weeks, even with housing continuing to plummet. Shame.

    [Sep08'08] Well, sadly, as I had suspected above, Obama has for now fallen decisively behind in the latest Gallup poll. McCain-Palin -- mostly the result of Palin and the failure of leftish attacks on her! -- now have a crushing 10% lead amongst likely voters. It makes me angry that the left is so completely clueless -- even when it comes to seeing that they have been knocked upside the head! The left's attacks completely backfired, as even a political numbskull such as myself immediately predicted they would. The bad thing is if the 'slightly left' loses, I doubt they will learn a lesson. Americans deserve McCain and Palin. They deserve creationism in the schools. They need to downsize all their major universities. They need more prisons and more people in them. Then need even more testing in schools because children are not far enough behind. They need to stay in Iraq for 100 years. They need to protect Israel because protecting Israel is a 'biblical imperative'. Americans have a God-given right to run the country down the toilet.

    [Sep14'08] Fingers crossed that everything doesn't go haywire with a bunch of jittery money creeps all trying to suck each others blood on Monday. Looks like the Barclays Lehman bid has been withdrawn.

    [Sep17'08] The central European bank injected 30 billion euros (about 1/3 of what they injected in August 2007) on Monday to try to head off interbank chaos caused by American problems (collapse of 158 year old Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest US investment bank and the biggest bankruptcy in history, and the fire sale of Merrill Lynch to BofA). Today, $75 billion dollars were proposed to be injected by the Fed for the same purpose. Sadly, my business-friendly friends who assured me that derivatives were a safe way of milking billions of dollars out of people who actually make things (Lehman paid out $5.7 billion in ill-gotten bonuses in 2007) seem to have been wrong. Lehman had a trillion or more in derivatives nominally worth a substantial fraction of the US GDP, which are now in an 'uncertain' state. The US stock market dropped 4.4% on Monday. The dollar, somewhat mysteriously, remained strong relative to oil, the euro, and the pound, for now at least. Meanwhile, the slaughter to control the oil in Iraq and the opium in Afghanistan continues to the tune of a billion dollars every 2 days (the Chimp Who Can Drive has it right here as does Chalmers Johnson here). At this rate, the endless war won't stop until the US and the UK completely collapse economically. Despite all the central bank attempts to inject money, it looks like money is currently being destroyed faster than it can be made. Overnight interbank interest rates doubled to 6.4% on Monday evening -- their highest since 2001 and then went over 10% on Tuesday evening (normally, this number tracks the Fed, or vice versa!, which is currently at 2%). European banks are being hit up for dollars because there are so tight in the US. All of this makes money scarcer and causes the value of money to increase relative to things -- like oil, AKA deflation -- even despite things that would normally be highly inflationary like the Fannie and Freddie takeover. Others argue that it's not really deflation but only temporary efforts to raise money (deleveraging) by selling profitable things like oil-related investments. I suppose we'll know in a year or two for sure. Smells like deflation.

    [Sep18'08] It's worth noting that the total amount of money used by the public-US-gov-slash-private-Fed to feed the slavering money trolls ($1-2 trillion) is approaching the amount of public money invested in the Iraq/Afghanistan holocaust/oilgrab ($1+ trillion, including a massive $0.6 trillion dollar 'defense' bill passed this Wednesday!). It's has also, unfortunately, used up most of the short term reserves available to the Fed. No tumbrils for money trolls yet (the sh*t-carts symbolically used to haul the aristocracy to the guillotine), but history has a nasty way of returning for a visit. The yield of 3-month US treasury bills has fallen to 0.02 percent, gold shot up almost $100 dollars, and oil went up $10, indicating that all the trolls have run for cover at the same time. The last time short term interest rates were that low was 1940. Normally, short term interest rate moves like this are quickly followed by the Fed dropping interest rates to match. However, since the Fed is already at only 2%, there is not much leeway. When the Fed interest rate reaches 0%, then the money that it loans into existence out of nothingness truly *is* being "printed". That's a bad thing. That trolls are willing to accept zero interest for their ill-gotten stash is a bad sign for normal people. Danger ahead. the housing market can't stabilize when people are being fired. Transferring even more money from small people to the trolls won't help. Things remain unstable. The vampire trolls can't control themselves. As long as the bailouts continue, they will pick off weakened companies one by one. They don't care if the entire country is destroyed. They'll leave with the loot. It's pure, uncreative destruction.

    [Sep20'08] If the wars continue, the US is in serious danger of a major economic collapse. Voting in Obama won't help at all! -- he will continue the two current wars and has said he is strongly behind starting the next one in Pakistan. There aren't enough police to stop a true public uprising like a general strike. At this point, that is the only thing that would make the rulers stand up and listen. The problem is, that can't happen until people are more desperate. Right now, they are uselessly talking about Palin. She's completely irrelevant. It's a delicate balance between collapse inspiring people to act to prevent further collapse and mere galloping collapse. Historically, distracting events have 'happened' at times like these to avoid public action.

    [Sep22'08] "Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social." -- Gaetano Salvemini explaining fascism in 1936.

    [Sep23'08] "It's the best game in town. Take a huge amount of risk, be paid exceedingly well for it and if you screw up -- you have absolute proof that the government will come in and bail you out at the expense of the rest of the population (who did not share in your profits in the first place). -- Daniel Amerman.

    [Sep23'08] Unfortunately, US home prices, at least on the coasts, are still way out of kilter with salaries. Either home prices come down by another, say, 50% or salaries go up by 50%. There is little chance of increased salaries happening if the small remains of US industry continues to be offshored. The bailout won't increase salaries, so I don't see how it can possibly help home prices. It will *cost* the average family $10,000 to pay for the yachts of Goldman's executives (the man behind the bailout of Goldman, Paulson, was formerly a Goldman exec) -- without counting interest. Whatever was caused by the current drop in home prices will continue to be caused, for at least another two years. It seems we are perhaps halfway through at best. Congressmen will publically complain about the bailout, but since the richies in need of the bailout have them all by the b*lls, it will pass (just like last week's record 'defense' spending bill -- passed in the midst of the biggest crisis since the Depression). About the only thing that would convince the congress worms to vote against it would be an insurrection. This is disgusting bailout of the piggies, paid for by people making $50,000 per year. And as I never tire of saying, all this stupidity is occurrring before peak oil has even hit. We're fiddling while industrial civilization burns. Even though it's yet more fiddling, I wouldn't mind seeing a few bankers get their yachts seized. I don't care about that constitutes a direct a economic attack on the rest of us normal people (people for whom the FDIC limits were written). As things start to unravel further, there is going to be an unstable competition between (1) people grabbing for their 'pitchforks' (2) people getting in line behind the next Mussolini (of course, eventually, the Italians took 'pitchforks' to Mussolini himself and hung him and his girlfriend from meat hooks), and (3) people realizing that the continued powering of industrial civilization is an even bigger problem than stupid money games/cheating, because thermodynamics is the one place where cheating and inflation truly isn't possible. You'd think now, with everything poised to blow up, that military spending (at almost $1 trillion, about equivalent per year to the proposed bailout) would be on the table. No chance. The Congress worms (approval rating: 15%) just approved the biggest military spending bill *ever*. Absolutely insane.

    [Sep29'08] What I really meant to say in the last comment was, since large banks demanded (and got) that their credit default swaps markets, etc., not be regulated or overseen, they should not derive the positive perks of regulation -- a giant consumer-funded bailout. They should have to figure out how to unwind all the problems privately as well. See? much more temperate sounding :-} . Instead, as described fawningly in this article, the brave titans (e.g., Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman) went directly to the gubmint once they faced a sure loss. Of course, Blankfein "participated in the Fed discussions to safeguard the entire financial system, not his firm's own interests." How do we know? Well, we don't! -- since virtually all of the things the public is going to be bailing out are secret, not publically traded! The deal was conducted at night, under virtual martial law in Congress, with dissident congressmen (bit of an oxymoron) being escorted by police out of hearing rooms. It's hard even to imagine a petty criminal telling crap like that to a judge. Here is the best I can do: "your honor, I was only stealing this particular DVD player for the health of the entire consumer electronics industry" (actually, it should be, 'I was only stealing all the branches of this particular store chain' ...). I suppose getting mad is one notch above generalized misanthropy.

    [Sep29'08] The close (yes-205, no-228) House vote-down of the bailout was came out like this: Democrats: yes-140 to no-95, and Republicans: yes-65 to no-133. Pelosi and Reid look like two sycophantic sidekicks for the rich people coup. They demanded no changes (even the tiniest bit of oversight, actual ownership, legality!, etc). It is crystal clear that having wall street billionaires (Paulson) bailing out other rich wall street gambler/billionaires (from the same frigging firm!) is not going to help average people with now-falling salaries to take out normal loans to buy houses that are still at least 2 times the price they were before the bubble (back when people took out normal loans). The whole idea of gambling is that you can win *or* lose. Instead, the bailout will take money from public health and Social Security -- just like Russia under Yeltsin. Immediately after the bill failed, the Fed announced it was creating/pumping $630 billion into the financial system anyway. Nya-nya, stupid peasants. Note that a lot of this came from temporary swap lines of credit with Bank of Japan and Bank of England contributing the most, but also Australia, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. These are short term (until Jan 2009, woohoo). The fact that the US has to go to foreign banks to get dollars suggests that dollars are still rapidly disappearing. After the deal failed, stock in Goldman -- now supposedly a 'normal' bank -- sank 24%. That tells you something about where insiders thought a chunk of the $700 billion would go to. The real purpose of a good part of the money would have been to prop up share prices so the that the lampreys who run them could dump their shares at a good price and escape the burning country in their private jets to their Costa Rica compounds. But the game's not over yet. The people united behind the bill were -- if you can believe it! -- Shrub, Pelosi, Barney Frank, Paulson, Obama, McCain (McBama), and Warren Buffett. It was opposed by over 80% of the public. Amazing. There is an excellent summary of Bush's speech by Craig Murray here

    [Sep30'08] Just because I was against the crony bailout doesn't mean I think there isn't a danger of deflation. If a normal (i.e., smallish) bank fails with $100 billion assets (assuming standard, conservative 10% reserves), it potentially removes $1 billion dollars from the economy. And some of the things concocted by off-duty physicists that are now swirling around in the depths of the unconscious have effective reserves ratios 5 or 10 times that. Depending on the ratio of money destruction to money creation, even a $700 billion injection can end up being deflationary. That may explain why the dollar just strangely went up (they were getting rarer). How all this unfolds depends on how much the monkeys trust each other. Since deflations are good for rich people, they may even be looking forward to one. Deflations are not good at all for normal people that don't have a lot of money. But for an unstable system with very large opposing forces, hyperinflationary episodes are equally possible, since they can be caused by small differences.

    [Sep30'08] There was a lively discussion in dailykos about some fine print in the bailout bill that would have allowed zero bank reserves sooner (zero reserves were originally proposed to start 2011 in a 2006 bill I didn't know about, changed in the failed bailout bill to start in a few days, Oct 1 2008). The standard 10% fractional reserves rule for banks allows Fed generated-from-nothing money to be multiplied by 10 as it cycles in and out of the bank, which is argued to be good when the economy is growing, since it matches money to more things. Zero reserves increase the multiplier of Fed-injected money as high as borrowers and lenders will allow. Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of all this stupid mess is that it is terribly destructive to the real economy and distracts attention from it, *just* when we need to invest in new real energy systems and new real transport systems. We don't need more bankers -- we need small cars, more electric rail, solar electric and heat, heat pumps, better windows, and wind power. We have plenty enough bankers for that. Same for the UK. Americans have a relatively short amount of time to prevent a Russian-like collapse from occurring where a rapacious financial mafia harvest most of their assets.

    [Oct01'08] The fact that the pound and the euro have continued to drop relative to the dollar after the failure of the $700 billion bailout bill should also be viewed in light of the strong foreign (British, Chinese, German) component to the bailout given reports suggesting that 1/3 of the bailout would have ended up in British banks alone (the other factor implied by the 'also' above is that dollars may be being destroyed currently at a faster rate than pounds and euros). People have been looking for reasons for the strong administration/Paulson support such a large US-taxpayer-funded payout to foreign banks. One reason might be threats of foreign retaliation/legal action for fraudulent sales. It's funny the things that don't really make the news. Today, Ireland performed a 400 *billion* euro bailout of its major banks. That's the same size at the proposed US bailout -- even more remarkable given Ireland's smaller size (24x as big as the US bailout!).

    [Oct02'08] The second hack at the bailout (now 400 pages long) passes, as expected. It contains such gems as "Sec. 308. Increase in limit on cover over of rum excise tax to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands." and "Sec. 503. Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children." That'll make this giant rich-person bailout OK. Obama was behind it all the way. Pig Paulson now has the last laugh. The overseas banks will get their hush money. As soon as it was passed, the stock market went down -- a third of a trillion dollars.

    [Oct08'08] Okie-dokie. Not a good week. Plus, there's serious S about to HTF on Thursday [Oct09 update: that particular S (the settlement of Lehman credit-default-swaps) now isn't planned to HTF until Friday]. Hopefully, next week will be better [well now, maybe not]. Several stock markets have been closed to stop crashes (which often occur immediately on their reopening). It's hard to concentrate! People are scared and broke, and have suddenly stopped spending, scaring exporters like Japan, whose stock market dropped almost 10% today. Bailing out rich people won't fix this. It could only be fixed by giving money to the lower 70% of the population, who could then buy more things and pay their mortgages. Rich people don't buy Priuses; and they buy their houses with cash.

    [Oct09'08] What a depressing mess. We've destroyed Iraq and killed a million and a half people there. A horrible war crime approaching the size of our Vietnam holocaust (3 million Vietnamese people killed). Hardly a peep out of the candidates/media over the last two years about this (except about protecting our 'boys' who followed the orders to do it). OK, so utter moral depravity isn't newsworthy. But amazingly, neither is utter fiscal depravity. Barely a peep out of the candidates/media about the fact that we're *still* pouring 100+ billion a year down the drain in Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan to destroy countries and kill all those people, plus another 500+ billion visible and 150+ billion hidden to fund an insanely bloated military -- all in spending bills passed the same damn week as the economy starts to fly apart! The UK is doing exaclty the same thing on a somewhat smaller scale. What is wrong with Anglos?

    [Oct11'08] There is a rumor going around that much of the sudden market drops of the past two weeks ($5-7 trillion lost in world shares last week -- more than 10% of the world GDP) were due to forced selling of stocks to raise cash to cover suddenly-changed margin requirements for broker dealers (changed by large banks from 15% to 35%), rumored to peak this Monday. To be honest, I don't really understand what these words mean in a deep way. Who writes these rules? How have they varied over the past? Are these rules even public? Then there is the more 0.4 *trillion* dollar Lehman insurance claim. Well nobody has volunteered to pay yet -- all that happened at the vaunted 'auction' was that each exposed bank bought its own offerings for 8% of their full value. The amount due is about 1/30 of the GDP of the entire US, or 10 times as much as the US spends yearly biomedical research every year, or almost as much as the US spends yearly on its ridiculously bloated military. These super bankers are worth it, though, since they perform such an important duty of inventing things that are 10 or 100 times as expensive as all of the stuff in entire the world, and by skimming off massive amounts of money from people who actually make things. If they weren't helping us this way, we might be wasting money on fixing and updating the infrastructure so that industrial civilization stays going 20 years from now. 20 years, however is almost an infinitely long amount of time into the future and therefore impossible to visualize. There is no need to bail out people losing their homes (one family every 10 seconds) because these people don't count. Only mortgage *bonds* get bailed out -- not the mortgages themselves.

    [Oct13'08] The Nikkei went up 14% on Tuesday (canceling the equivalent drop the previous Friday) so Europe and America will probably follow later today. It seems that the waterfalls of central bank money have finally stabilized things for a while. This won't fix underlying problems (US and UK housing still insanely overpriced compared to salaries and savings, number of people underwater on mortgages still increasing, a US home is still being lost to foreclosure every 10 sec), but Newspeak now says 'this week of fear has officially ended, back to work'. Not a peep about the possibility of recapitalizing the economy by straightening out the tax code. Why should capital gains taxes be much less for rich people (15%) than taxes on the much smaller 'capital gains' (i.e. wages) of poorer people? Unfortunately, the next 'week of fear' has already probably already been scheduled to keep the bottom 3/4 of the population from asking for this. Also, I think there is some danger of a military action over the next month.

    [Oct15'08] The Baltic dry goods index has crashed 82% down (!) since May, reaching a 5-year low. This measures how many goods are being shipped. This means that people are buying a lot less things and that producing countries will have to start producing less things. This is actually a good thing overall, given the upcoming energy crunch. However, the costs of this shrinkage are distributed extremely unfairly. The richest 1% of the world have almost doubled their piggish share in the last two years. The laws have to be changed to rein in the pigs before the place turns into Argentina (with even more guns).

    [Oct16'08] The Democrats look like they might win (even after subtracting a 7% race factor from the opinion polls). It's unlikely to make much difference, though. Look at the UK. The 'Democrats' have been in power continuously (Blair, Brown). I have great difficulty detecting much difference between the US and the UK with regard to continuous support and funding for the wars, support for torture, support for detention without charges, support for 'rendition' flights, support for an all encompassing surveillance/police state, corporatization of every part of life, and basic style of bank bail outs. There *are* some differences between the countries (e.g., more socialized medicine in the UK); but Blair/Brown had nothing to do with them.

    [Oct18'08] Banks are now borrowing (into existence) almost half a trillion dollars every *day* from the Fed. At this rate, banks are borrowing slightly more than the total US GDP -- *every month*. These are supposed to be short term loans. However, these two graphs are not reassuring. In order to properly compensate the wise bankers for bringing us to this point, they are being given pay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of the US government bail-out package! London bankers absconded with a similar amount of loot. Of course, if they weren't paid such outrageous salaries, we wouldn't have been able to retain their 'services', right? That's some serious pitchfork material, banker guys. If this continues, it could turn away from simple plunder of the rubes to real class war. Put Paulson and all the Gollum Sachs pals he hired to hand out money in jail -- now! Martial law won't work in the US. The country is too big, people have too many guns, and there are simply too many people. The US hasn't been able to control Iraq after utterly destroying its infrastructure, cowardly bombing it daily since 1991, killing a million and a half people since 2003, engineering Negroponte-style death squads, and fomenting inter-religious wars. And that's only 27 million people. If night raids, smart bombs, and scorched earth didn't work there, a few crowd control 'ray' guns and some tear gas will be just a drop in the bucket if a real insurrection starts at home. Don't let the right wing free-markets-will-solve-everything guys off the hook -- the failure of the market is obvious (even with all the behind-the-scenes cheating and drug money laundering!). A number of the largest, meanest banks have been nationalized/socialized with a fascist private corporation in full secret control of public finances. The market has failed utterly by completely seizing up. The 'toxic wastes' are not being traded at all. Their value is therefore undefined. The wonderful new things the unregulated bankers invented have brought the entire world to the precipice. Banks are so scared of each other that they won't even lend each other money for a day (and they wonder why people don't trust them?!). This is a time when major social change is actually possible -- for the better, or for the worse. In order for things to get better, the rot has to be brought entirely into public view. The 'candidates' aren't going to do it, since they are just worm-like vestigial appendices attached to the colons of Goldman-Sachs and JPM. Their 'debate' was utterly laughable given the current situation. People have to get really mad. Before peak oil hits.

    [traveling]

    [Nov04'08] Election is today. There are surprisingly small policy differences between McCain and Obama on some of big issues of the day -- 'defense' spending, continuing the occupation of Iraq, bombing Pakistan and/or Iran, position on the Palestinians, 'bank' (=rich person) bailout, supporting big pharma over universal health insurance, supporting big Ag. Of course the doddering, cancer-ridden McCain is a disgusting lump. But Goldman-Sachs is Obama's largest contributor. Many of the bailed-out banks spent a majority or even all of their public bailout cash (e.g., $10.7 *billion* at Morgan Stanley) paying bonuses to the greedy rich pigs that have literally brought capitalism and world trade to its knees. Obama is behind this overt class war all the way. It is true that Obama is more friendly to science, which would benefit my kind, and arguably humanity. But I don't look forward to almost the same policies as Bush, but with a politically and EU-ally correct (Obama was polling 99-1 in France) black Democratic face. In the UK, Brown was elected largely to get out of Iraq. He completely ignored this charge once in office, as will Obama. I *do* love the fact that redneck red states will probably have a black man as preznit.

    [Nov05'08] Obama wins by 4% percent in the popular vote -- closer than the polls but thankfully a clear win. As Kent Ewing wrote in Asia Times, "it is once again cool to be an American living abroad". The giant election industrial complex slash morality play finally ends, and the rest of the world breathes a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, under the radar, over the past few pre-election weeks, something brand new occurred with the US money supply, perhaps the first example of real 'helicopter' money (from a comment a few years ago by Bernanke). The following Fed graph shows that bank borrowing from the Fed erupted in November/December 2007 (after a small blip in August). The only other blip visible at this scale is the tiny one around 9-11. This huge increase in bank borrowing correlates with an equally large plunge of net free or borrowed bank reserves far into negative territory (I find the whole concept of 'negative reserves' blackly humorous) that started a month later in January 2008. This was somewhat correlated with a drop in the dollar [e.g., Euro vs. dollar] that started in in September 2007 and picked up in early 2008. However, something completely new occurred in the month before the election. The total amount of US cash dollars ("base money", which means notes and coins only, held outside of the central bank and outside government, similar to M1) made an unprecedented discontinuous upward jump from 0.87 trillion to 1.18 trillion -- a jump of 0.31 trillion, which should be compared with a normal average smooth monthly increase of .000003 trillion (i.e., the jump was 100,000 times larger than average). This increased the number of paper dollars in circulation by a factor of 1.36. The only other visble blips in base money are the (relatively) tiny ones for Y2K and 9-11. Here are 5 years of those three times series plotted on the same graph. This could be due to panic withdrawals of 1/3 of a trillion dollars in cash (that would be 16 billion $20 dollar bills). Or it could include the first examples of true 'helicopter' money. Unlike credit injected into banks to cover paper losses, this would be actual printing of paper money. If so, it would be quite inflationary for the dollar. The key question for me is whether other central banks (e.g., UK, EU) might have done something similar.

    [Nov07'08] The appointment of Rahm Emmanuel is a very bad sign. He is the Democratic master planner who among other things engineered the Illinois pro-war legs-blown-off-in-Iraq female wheelchair candidate at the midterms (who lost anyway!) and who is a 'realist' -- meaning, you tell people you are against the war, but then you vote for a larger and larger amount of money for it each year. It also concretizes an ultra-hard-right policy with respect to Israel (he is an Israeli citizen). Other news reports news reports agree that the basic change in Obama foreign policy is going to be style -- that is, no change from Bush! How's that for 2 days after the election, suckers? (suckers includes the rest of the world). Just because Obama can actually speak in coherent English sentences *doesn't* make him the slightest bit better than Bush if his policies are essentially the same (I have heard many people in America and outside of it saying how thankful they are that they have somebody articulate to replace the chimp). In fact, it's probably worse. With respect to the domestic economy, as US carmakers sink into the muck, I sometimes wish there was some way that all the SUV-people could be singled out for having made the wrong decision on what they bought, so that only *their* wages would be garnished to bail out GM/Ford etc. These things have to be retroactive else how can people learn, right? The reason US carmakers did what they did was that it was profitable (slap decorative crap around a truck body and sell it with less pollution control and less hardware for gas efficiency for an inflated price), but also -- and this is key -- because a bunch of rubes fell for the stupid advertising and bought zillions of them. The the Orwellian/corporate/surveillance/nanny state has already started collecting the necessary database. Imagine what additional profits could be made for the corporate/fascist state by taxing the rubes for having fallen prey to its very own advertising. This reminds me of the corporate state duking it out (fast food advertisers versus big pharma anti-fat drugs) inside your very own brain.

    [Nov08'08] The disgusting fact that most of the bailout/hostage/tax money arranged by pig Paulson from Gollem Sachs is brazenly being used by his capitalist banking slime buddies to pay themselves insanely large bonses and to acquire other more solvent banks is a crime. It's the largest financial theft in history! Paulson is an ugly criminal. The people he's giving our money to are criminals. He's Tony Soprano auditing his own books. He and they should be put in jail. Whatever shard remains of the free press must not let this die. As I've repeatedly said, this is class war, plain and simple. They're breaking into the bank, taking our money, and running. We must not let this aggression stand, man!

    [Nov09'08] I'm beginning to wonder whether the huge October jump in cash mostly represents rich rat-people and drug money (C IA and otherwise!) bailing soom of their loot out of the sinking ship into paper cash (that would be 3 billion $100 dollar bills as opposed to 16 billion $20 dollar bills :-} ).

    [Nov10'08] Here is a report that pension funds are set to flee equities for, uhhh, hedge funds and commodities? That's so this year, guys! Didn't you hear that Warren Buffett of "derivatives are weapons of mass destruction" and "advisor to Obama" fame, just lost a billion or so of his own and Berkshire Hathaway's money in derivatives last *month*? I was already planning for my pension to be worth less, but do you scumbags have to toss the whole damn thing into the sh*tter?

    [Nov11'08]
    US 2008 Federal Budget  $3200 billion
-------------------------------------
Medicare/Medicaid:       $624 billion
Social Security:         $644 billion
Department of Defense:   $515 billion
Intelligence, Energy:    $101 billion
Iraq/Afghanistan etc:    $294 billion
Dept Education:           $59 billion
Dept Health Hum Serv:     $68 billion
Interest on ext debt:    $260 billion
Other:                  $1043 billion
Estimated deficit:       $408 billion
-------------------------------------


    [Nov20'08] Insightful comment from Stoneleigh at The Automatic Earth on perverse incentives in the derivatives markets: "Allowing a third party to take out a credit default swap against a company they do not own is analogous to allowing me to take out fire insurance on your home, thereby giving me an incentive to burn it down for profit. We have yet to see the 'burning down for profit' phase..."

    [Nov22'08] GM is failing now not just because they make cars that no one wants now, but because stupid people fell for the mind control and bought stupid, oversized, cheaply constructed cars that *the very same people* now no longer want to buy or are able to buy. I'm fine with bailing out the carmakers (but only after firing the idiots currently charge and taking their severance pay and private jets) and converting them into manufacturers of electric cycles, carts, and small trucks, solar cells, wind turbines, and a few small cars. But if we wanted to be fair, the SUV buyers -- who intimately participated in creating the current disaster -- should have to pay more of their taxes for the bailout/conversion.

    [Nov23'08] Obama looks like he will have crony capitalist Tim Geithner -- currently thickly involved with pig Paulson in shoveling huge piles of tax money down the overstuffed gullets of his rich pig banker friends (oh sorry, I meant to say he was expertly dealing with the recent difficulties at Bear Stearns, Lehman, and AIG) -- as Treasury Secretary. Ugh. Put them both in jail! Seize their money and their yachts! They're criminal kinpins! The Obama white house, not unexpectedly, is looking a lot like Clinton's.

    [Nov23'08] Trading in hedge funds has suddenly and massively slowed in September and October. The selling of these kind of assets to get cash is what must explain this bizarre and unprecedented 1.7x jump in cash (as opposed to regular people withdrawing cash from their bank accounts). Good riddance, pirates.

    [Nov24'08] The festering cancer of the Iraq war/genocide/oilsteal still rages. Stop the Iraq war! Stop trying to steal Iraq's oil! Stop Israel from strangling Gaza! Start fighting back in the class war! The richies have already taken it to the streets (the media). Appeasement doesn't work with them. They won't stop when they have 5 houses. They won't stop when they have 30 houses and 5 boats and 2 planes and 50 billion dollars. They've got a mental sickness that will destroy our world.

    [Nov25'08] Reading gobbledygook like this makes me really mad. I'm a reasonably intelligent person, and willing to suspend judgement and work hard for long enough to try to understand how something like the Fourier transform works. But the thought of these money pipsqueaks crashing the world around us make me want to reach for a pitchfork. Today, Sh*ttygroup gets a third of a trillion from the taxpayers and then thanks them by increasing interest on credit cards to 29%. Seize their yachts! The bailout is now 10 times as big as it was last month -- $7.7 trillion -- fully half the US GDP released in two months to bail out a bunch of bank pigs. These pigs should be in jail. Pouring tax money down these idiot's gullets won't fund wind farms, solar energy, more light rail, and smaller cars. It will merely allow these pigs to escape with the loot. Our loot. Our pensions. Listen to those hedge fund sh*theads on the business channel talking about how 'we' all have to give back our pensions. Better watch it or you might have 50,000 auto workers coming to your house asking about *your* 'pension', bucko.

    [Nov27'08] Obama's cabinet picks suggest little change in economic policy (more bailouts for the rich) and no change in foreign policy (Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine; Gates is Mr. Afghan surge -- yet more killer drones to shoot up wedding parties, and 20,000 more troops to raid the homes of people who complain). With the kleptocrats recently appointed to his cabinet, Michael Hudson notes the more than passing resemblance of Obama to Yeltsin -- Obama has actually appointed some of the very same people who advised Yeltsin to hand over all the valuables in Russia to the oligarchs! All my friends say they can now breathe a sigh of relief, and stay in the country after all. This despite the fact that the only change on the way seems to be a little itty bitty trickle down -- a few billion (only promised) while 7 trillion today goes down the Godzilla-sized maws of flailing investment bankers. The planned trickle down -- if it even gets funded! -- is hardly a different than the recent Bush tax rebate. Now if if we only could have had McCain, he probably would have died in office from his metastasized melanoma, and then we could have had Palin as preznit. That might have actually led to more change.

    [Nov30'08] One can make fun of the stupid greedy Americans trampling a Walmart employee to death in search of bargains. But the richies running the country should take note. Crowds are the same everywhere. So far, we have only had moderate lack of affordability. In a real crunch, dangerous crowds could become much more common. Just like the richies mouth their threats on the teevee about taking our pensions, we have to respond in kind.

    [Dec01'08] Data center servers in the US and UK now use 5% of total electrical demand. That doesn't include electrical costs of powering the internet and the user computers needed to view the data. Centralized server farms are currently set to grow. Ground was recently broken for a new data center in Chicago that will draw 100 megawatts (the power output capacity of the 83 coal-fueled electricity generating plants in Illinois currently averages about 200 megawatts each). The plan is do disempower everyone in a google-like manner by hosting everybody's desktop, documents, schedules, applications, and life on centralized servers beyond individual control -- a throwback to the original 'time-sharing' systems of the 60's. People locally would only have a passive portal to the central systems and will eventually have to continually pay to rent applications. This will work fine until "the machine stops" or rather 'the machine hiccups', as electrical grids begin to fail more often (they have less overhead than ever before). Watching the deer-like computer consumers and sysadmins (I see it around here) going along with this flow reminds me of watching real deer, or little fish in a stream. Our linguistic overlay helps (I can hear and read about and vicariously experience this without actually having to live in central server hell); but the macroscopic result is just like little fish in a stream that is too big for one fish to understand. And if DNA/RNA/protein is really closely analogous to language, then perhaps it couldn't ever have been any different: the creativity of the individual code-using systems is bound to lead to the evolution macro systems that are too complex for their component individuals to understand.

    [Dec07'08] Here is a an explanation of the bizarrely discontinuous graph in BASE money supply (the AMBSL graph Mauldin shows is virtually identical). His point is that it includes bank reserves (I had missed this point). Recently, bank reserves have been generated by the Fed by trading them for other so-called non-cash 'assets' the banks had (which actually were of much reduced value...). This, then, not hedge fund collapses (my second guess), must explain the discontinuous jump. My original guess -- that it was the first true helicopter money -- was basically correct.

    [Dec13'08] The existence of a substantial number of pay option loans (described here here) that are set to blow up in 2009 and 2010 suggests that the cresting subprime blowup will be supported by a new wave of pay option blowups over the next few years. If housing prices and job losses were to stabilize, these booby traps would still be set to go off. The further drops in housing and jobs expected in 2009 and 2010 will exacerbate that problem. In 2007, I was hoping that we could begin to recover from the worst of the subprime blowups after spring of 2008. Now, this doesn't seem possible. This was *so* avoidable. In 2005, I made this graph of the deficit and M3. It was obvious back then that the oppositely trending lines (cumulative debt and cumulative money) were completely unstable and unsustainable, and I said that then. I worriedly showed it to a lot of people and posted it on my office door. Unfortunately, my worries were correct. In the 1960's, the financial sector was 2% of US corporate profits. Now it is 40%. But like energy extracted from the vacuum, it now has to go back there.

    [Dec14'08] What should American car companies be doing? From even a moderately rational perspective, it's pretty clear. It's also totally impossible to do this right thing from a 3-6-month look-ahead business perspective. This is why business didn't figure out molecular biology. Government did -- because it was willing to invest further into the future. When government scientists figured out how DNA and proteins worked after many decades of work, then the companies piled in to take profits. And they complain bitterly when they are called on to pay taxes -- the very thing that made their existence possible. Imagine raising a kid with a 3 month look ahead -- sorry kid, we have to downsize, so you're going to be sleeping on the street and not getting any health care. It's called child abuse. The only problem is that business is in control, and people have gotten used to human abuse as the norm. First, car companies should ignore current low oil prices. We'll be lucky if they last a year -- until our one-cubic-mile-per-year oil usage catches up with ongoing oil field depletion and the dollar begins to gradually lose its world reserve currency status and its status as the only currency in which oil is denominated. Second, they should immediately stop what they are doing and begin to retool to make all manner of tiny cars and trucks and carts, and busses, and electic scooters and bicycles and bicycle taxis, light rail, wind turbines, and solar cells. They are capable of this (cf. the car => tank+airplane+boat switch during WWII, which happened without the help of all our fine new computer-aided tools). It's completely obvious that if we don't do that *RIGHT NOW*, in about 15 years when oil falls to 50% of its current production rate with continued population growth, that we will be in *really* deep sh*t (of course, we should have started 30 years ago, when these problems first became apparent, but that's water under the bridge). Why is this completely impossible, even now? Because of our -- now failing -- economic system. If we don't change it right now, it's going to take down industrial civilization, possibly forever. There isn't much time left. Instead Republican business types are slavering at the mouth at the opportunity to kill the auto workers union, one of the few left. Great. Chop off the very legs that could carry us back from the brink. All to perpetuate a failed system. Why is business so against people getting health care and living indoors? Sometimes you'd think they were anti-human, eh? Some of the humans are finally starting to take offense.

    [Dec17'08] Why crucify just Bernie Madoff? What did he do that was so different than the rest of the 'innovative banking' crooks? His $50 billion dollar fraud was big, but not the biggest (cf. AIG bailout at $500 billion and Sh*itigroup at maybe $1000 billion). He doesn't get bailed out because he didn't steal enough? Are hedge funds that collapse the minute people try to take out money different? And what about hedge funds half invested in Madoff? Or 'insurers' (CDS's) that collapse on their first partial payout? Meanwhile, the Fed has just cut its interest rate to 'a range between 0.0 to 0.25%'. At 0.0% you get a loan without paying any interest. The next logical step is negative interest -- you get paid interest when to borrow (created) money (this isn't very different ahn 1% interest since it just means a small extra amount of money had to be created at loan time). People may still not be persuaded to borrow, however, if they are worried that they might not be able to pay it back, or if the bank they deposit the zero interest loan in doesn't pay any interest, or charges them more for keeping the money than they got for borrowing it (the only way a bank would be able to make money in a negative interest regime), or if the bank has a chance of collapsing (because it wasn't charging depositors negative interest!).

    [Dec20'08] Oh dear. This is not a good sign. The temporary respite in the growth of the BASE money supply last month was welcome, but the resumption of 25% growth per *month* (where the 50 year average is 3 percent per *year* -- that is, money is growing 100x faster than normal) is a sign that things remain insanely out of equilibrium. The Fed must have resumed pumping money directly into (insolvent) banks. Another very bad sign is that hedge funds can now borrow directly from the Fed -- for essentially zero interest! What absolute criminals! Peak oil? Retooling cars, transportation, energy generation? Persistence of industrial civilization? None of that matters. These guys shouldn't get free money!!! They should be put in jail! Their remaining assets should be seized, just like they do with drug dealers. These guys are *much* worse than drug dealers. Clearly, the market has utterly failed. The Fed should be disbanded. I want to hear people say -- esp. in the mainstream main-sewer media -- that 'the market has failed'. Just like I want to hear them say that 'the Iraq war was a bad idea' and that those of us against the war were right. Of course, they never will -- not even on the day that angry crowds storm the studios.

    [Dec23'08] There is a lot of talk of 'saving capitalism'. But why? Why save a system that *right at the moment of peak oil* generates prices (mostly via the unwinding of non-productive speculation/betting) that cause *disinvestment* in real oil exploration and real alternative energy companies? That's one seriously broken economic system! In the fullness of time, the Darwinian evolution of non-linguistic living things ruthlessly prunes out stupidly unstable systems that behave like this. The problem is that we don't have millions of years to get it right. We have at best another 5 or 10 years to utterly change course (i.e., course change done, not started, in 5 or 10 years!). In 30 years, most of our 100 million year old fossil fuel inheritance will be used up. In 30 years, there will no power source available to make a transition to a sustainable industrial society. Industrial society will just end. The capitalists will have won.

    [Dec27'08] Jim Kunstler has recently argued that all the in-your-face cheating may end up having an erosive effect on public morals, such as they are. As long as rich people cheating is wink wink nudge nudge, it's less likely to cause a social eruption. Seeing richies haul off giant pillowcases of TARP money in public is more dangerous because the common man might be led to conclude that anything goes. I'm less convinced people will do anything until things are much, much worse than they are now. And whipping out another 9-11 would put everybody back on track in a jiffy.

    [Dec30'08] Maybe this quote from a Louise Schiavoni report (on Lou Dobbs) from several months ago relates to the Kunstler post above. "The primary purpose of this force is to provide help to people in need in the aftermath of a WMD-like event in the homeland." -- Col. Michael Boatner from Northern Command explaining the relocation of the 5000-strong first brigade combat team of the Army 3rd infantry division to the US after it spent almost 3 years in Iraq. Colin Powell said there will likely be a crisis/terror event on Jan 21-22 and mark-my-words Joe Biden said there will surely be "an international crisis, a generated crisis" within 6 months.

    [Jan02'09] Here is a Fed plot of the BASE money supply plotted against the M1 multiplier (money_supply/monetary_base, or 'velocity of money' where money_supply is 'currency in circulation + demand deposits' and monetary_base is 'actual reserves + currency in circulation') showing that they are almost perfectly anti-correlated, including the tiny temporary reversal/blip last month. This is a case of the sudden helicopter drop of money into banks artifactually showing up as a sudden slowing of the velocity of money (the denominator suddenly went up but the numerator stayed the same). That is, the banks just kept all the extra money and the velocity of what already existed went along at approximately the same speed. Actually, the ratio went slightly below 1.0 because the banks increased their rate of hoarding to slightly higher than the rate at which money was/is being printed into them. The worrisome thing is that the BASE has 'only' been expanded by a little less than $1 trillion ($830 billion) in a few months. Even though that was almost a doubling, it is still only a tiny fraction of the losses in real estate, the stock market, bonds, not to mention derivatives, which together get into the range of $50-$100 trillion. Trying to guess what is going to happen now is a bit like predicting global warming. It's impossible to predict monthly weather, but given the easily measured forcings, it's not hard at all to predict the overall trend.

    [Jan15'09] Patrick McGoohan died in LA.

    [Jan18'09] I hear lots of Americans whining about Bush and happy to see him about to be flushed. Well, half of you voted for him *both times*, give or take a few percent! But you can't win: the new guy just hired virtually the same people. Rahm will ensure that another billion in US tax money is used to buy gasoline to send to Israel, to fuel their militants (oh, I mean their army) and reinforce their sicko apartheid system, and even after they publically brag about pushing the US president around. After all, it's not like the Americans economy has any problems now. Obama is also committed to re-re-re-winning the war in Afghanistan, since the American public can't remember that we've already killed half a million people in 'East Asia' already. Obama is hiring the very same money pigmen (e.g., Rubin) that brought us to the precipice so that the very same pigmen can continue to put your tax money directly into their offshore back accounts, yachts, mansions, and gold bars. But, thank god there's a Dem in charge now. Change me harder! It's the same in the UK (which party was Tony the poodle from anyway?).

    [Jan19'09] California cuts benefits to people on welfare, the blind, and students, because those people don't deserve support but, by contrast, it's crucial to bail out banks so that their banker pigmen leaders can continue to receive their giant bonuses for bringing the economy to its knees, so that they can keep their fairly earned private yachts, mansions, and offshore fortunes, otherwise the economic system will collapse. This is the basic narrative of the corporate news over the last few months. It looks ridiculous if you write it out like this, but that's exactly what's gets injected into peoples' heads as a sequence of single sentence conclusions from a sequence of teevee pieces. It's amazing that people accept this without rioting. Well, they've actually started rioting elsewhere and the acceptance may begin to come unglued in America before long.

    [Jan20'09] Here are five radical articles/videos from wildly different political positions motivated by the one-sided slaughter of civilians in Gaza -- by John Mearsheimer, Ali Abunimah, Yvonne Ridley, Alex Whissons, and Max Keiser [pt1], [pt2] -- that given their disparate sources, reflect a qualitative mood shift beginning to occur across the world that is similar to the one that eventually resulted in the de-legitimation and dissolution of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the establishment of one person, one vote. Oh sorry, I left out Bono. :-} This mood shift is also likely to be destabilizing to the surrounding repressive collaborating regimes in Egypt and Saudi. One can always hope for change. Crazy man-of-non-sequitur Max Keiser sums up the Gaza assault the best for me (in pt2 above): "it's not that I'm ashamed to be American -- at this point, I'm more ashamed to be a human being".

    [Jan21'09] Contrast Obama's weirdly staged contentless and boring blather about defending the American lifestyle with this speech, by Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, given the day before. The first was so disconnected from reality (I hardly ever watch the teevee) that it made me feel a little schizophrenic. By contrast, I could actually recognize the world the prince (!) was talking about. I guess this is the way the world ends -- slow, unconscious recognition by masses of people that things have changed, for the worse, every year, until the human deer herd gets to the right size.

    [Jan24'09] Merril Lynch got a $10 billion dollar bailout. They turned around, and unbelievably, paid themselves $15 billion in bonuses -- after losing $21 billion in 2008. This was the bailout that was supposed to stop the collapse of our financial system! Instead, as many of us predicted, it turned into a simple transfer of a huge block of tax money (about a third of what the US spends yearly on biomedical research) to a bunch of undeserving corrupt dufus pigmen criminals (did I get enough in there?). These guys should be sent to gladiator training school! Wouldn't you like to see a thumbs-up thumbs-down battle to the death between a few of these pasty bozos (Thain vs. Geithner)? I think many Americans would pay good money for that.

    [Jan26'09] Bring back Solar thermal! Our previous San Diego house was built in 1915 -- it came at that time with a solar water (long gone by the time we got there). We should be thinking about stuff like this instead of stupid bank 'industry' tricks. Banking is not an industry.

    [Feb01'09] Perceptive first comment on Elaine Meinel Supkis' blog entry here: "When 'Justice' finally comes to America it will be like that break in the coal slurry dam and it will be very very ugly. Europeans know how to riot but Americans don't. When Americans finally start rioting there will be zero restraint."

    [Feb03'09] Well I suppose it's a good sign that after more than *doubling* the amount of money pumped directly into banks by the Fed (blue graph here -- showing increase in BASE money supply from $0.85 trillion to $1.75 trillion in a few months, completely unprecendented in US history), the rate of injection has stabilized this week. Note that this also happened for a week at the end of 2008 (christmas bank holiday?).

    [Feb10'09] The US taxpayer bailout of failed rich-people gambling bets has reached $10 trillion. This is closing in on the US GDP and is enough to fully pay off 90% of the home mortgages in the US! But rich people are sooo much more important. I would call it class 'war', but that would be like calling Israel slaughtering defenseless civilians in Gaza with US-made remote control missiles and phosphorus bombs a 'war'. The proles aren't fighting back even a little in the class 'war'! Consider pitchforks, gentlemen, or these rich creeps are going to grab *another* $10 $trillion (also known as 10,000 billion dollars). I wish my often stated fears about the insane M3 + cumulative account deficit graph I taped to my office door in 2005 were wrong. They weren't.

    [Feb14'09] [update on Feb03 post] Looks like the catastrophic growth in BASE Fed-injected bank reserves has decisively turned around for the first time since Sept11'08. 'Velocity' hasn't turned around yet and is still anomalously below 1.0. I suppose it's a good thing that the growth rate of BASE is now only 100x what it's supposed to be...

    [Feb21'09] Some criminal bankers need to get in jail pretty quick or things could get ugly.

    [Feb27'09] Never underestimate stupidity. In the midst of the biggest economic crisis in 100 years, almost 2/3 of Americans support the recent Obama decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending almost 20,000 new troops there! They have no idea of why we're there, and don't even strongly agree that it's "essential to win in Afghanistan to succeed in broader efforts against terrorism". But they're strongly behind sending troops and spending money the country doesn't have. It's breathtakingly stupid! If people figure out something as dead simple as this, how can they *possibly* do the right thing when it comes to making much more complex decisions involved in cooperatively downsizing industrial civilization? Looks like the BASE is shooting back up again. Get your genocidal war escalated in Afghanistan, stupidos.

    [Mar05'09] The number of US adults now in prison is now up to a new world record of 1 in 31 (1 in 11 for black adults). The US got rid of real industry and substituted the banking 'industry' and the prison 'industry'. The greater depression, however, may finally bring this insanity to an end.

    [Mar06'09] Geithner has refused to identify who has been paid 1/6 of a trillion in tax money over the last few months of the AIG bailout! This is outright robbery -- taking tax money from working people and putting it directly into offshore accounts of already insanely rich people in the midst of the greater depression. Super rich people 'insured themselves against the bust of Lehman' for pennies on the dollar (translated: having no investment in Lehman, they took a bet for long odds (1-2% chance that Lehman would go bust), they engineered the bust, and then they collected a payoff of $150 billion dollars on a tiny 'investment' -- *they were paid by taxpayers*! Americans will have to rise up and break something or these criminal scams aren't going to stop. This is exactly equivalent to fixing a horse race, except that the amounts are a substantial fraction of the GDP. It is like taking out fire insurance on someone else's house, arranging to have it burned down, then when the insurer goes bust, you get taxpayers to pay you instead. These people should be in jail. This is pure and simple class war, except that one side is not fighting back yet. Fight back now, or pensions, social security, and health care will be toast -- all poured into offshore compounds of a bunch of immoral creeps.

    [Mar14'09] Watching the depression unfold in the time of peak oil is sure depressing. The US is still spending hundreds of billions in Iraq. The US is moving even more troops and materiel into Afghanistan. The US is still manning 1000 overseas military bases. To fix this problem, a few dribbles of money -- a small fraction of what was wasted annihilating millions of Iraqis and Afghans -- is supposed to now be spent on railroads, public transport, alternative energy, and road maintenance -- all while the companies that are supposed to do this are going out of business. Real money -- multiple trillions of it -- is instead going to failed banks in order to rescue the dainty a$$es of gambling-addicted rich people who invested in them. With some of the same very a$$holes -- Summers and Geithner -- in charge, nothing will change. The only way to get those creeps out of there would be to have a general strike and blood in the streets -- like the way the French turned back Sarkozy last year. No chance of that in the US, because despite all their big gun talk, Americans are actually more passive than Europeans. Dmitri Orlov has it right. We don't need no steekin' energy efficient vehicles or houses because we already have them -- 25 people standing in the back of a pickup truck or 25 people living in a McMansion. Time to start sawing holes in the SUV roof and buying some more refrigerators.

    [Mar22'09] Here is a graph of the adjusted monetary base (BASE) and the (Fed) Board of Governors Total Reserves (TRARR) that is awfully suggestive. The jump in the top (blue) graph looks like it is entirely explained by the bottom graph (red).

    [Mar30'09] Here, finally, is a detailed summary by James Hamilton of what when into creating the huge discontinuous jump in BASE (which is jumping back up again this week -- see link above). I remember asking about this very graph on Econbrowser, back in November 2008. A bunch of other people must have asked, too. The crude summary is that the Fed almost doubled bank reserves, essentially by creating money from nothingness and putting it into bank vaults. But then, they also arranged to pay the banks interest on their newly created/donated reserves equal or better to what the banks could get by loaning it out (it's kewl to be a central bank). That is the main reason why the banks haven't lent it out. The conclusion of the article is that if banks *do* start lending it out, it will be explosively inflationary. It's hard to see the point of doing this in the first place if they don't lend, though. Wasn't that the whole idea?! So in the end, after reading the article -- like most of the articles at Econbrowser -- I still have this nagging 'still hungry' feeling, like I'm missing something important.

    [Apr09'09] "Nobody supports -- I mean, you can talk about a one-state solution, if you want. I think a better solution is a no-state solution. But this is pie in the sky. If you're really in favor of a one-state solution, which in fact I've been all my life -- accept a bi-national state, not one state -- you have to give a path to get from here to there. Otherwise, it's just talk. Now, the only path anyone has ever proposed is through two states as the first stage." -- Noam Chomsky. I'm in favor of one state, too. But no need for the two-state never-gonna-happen part. That's because it's *already* one state! (recognize facts on the ground!) -- except that slightly over half of the people can't vote. Let them vote.

    [Apr10'09] The peak oil crunch is now within sight, even as the tide of oil prices has gone out -- eerily just like the strange tide before a tsunami. No point in warning people. They can't listen. It's very similar to the housing bubble. Any moderately logical person could see by 2002 or 2003 that it wasn't sustainable, with prices getting so far out of whack with salaries that were staying approximately constant. Of course, it was impossible at that time to say exactly how long it would take before things crashed. It certainly went on a lot longer than I expected -- so long that I began to doubt my own common sense judgement. In the case of oil, things are much clearer. We draw it out of the ground at the rate of 1 cubic mile a year give or take a percent or two. There is less than 30 cubic miles of reasonable EROEI oil left in the ground. Who cares about oil prices? The amount of remaining EROEI-bigger-than-2-oil sure doesn't! Dropping demand by a few percent won't solve the problem: 0.98 cubic miles is about the same as 1 cubic mile. The remaining oil won't care if the silly human monkeys start another world war. Stupid monkeys. And even that wouldn't slow down the burn rate -- it would probably increase it.

    [Apr14'09] The US military uses 350,000 barrels of oil a day, 56% of that for jet fuel. That's a lot (the biggest single user in the world), but still only about 2% of total US usage, so, unfortunately, it will be able to be sustained for a long time.

    [Apr28'09] The pure sadism of the latest torture revelations is sure creepy. But just as creepy to me are the people defending it in blog comments and on NPR. A majority of Americans now support torture. I guess this is what you expect after a decade-long diet mind-control programs like 24. You are what your mind eats.

    [May20'09] Chris Whalen has a great article on derivatives here. The story is very simple. In spite of the fact that dealings in derivatives and their kin have brought the economic system of the entire world to its knees, the banks won't let them be reformed (e.g., by having derivative trades forced onto public exchanges) because that would cause banks like JPMorgan to go bankrupt, because they would not be able to charge the higher fees they can make with "over the counter" (i.e., private/secret) derivative trades. JPMorgan has more than 40% of all the derivatives help by US banks. This is what we are bailing out! Un-flipping-believable. Instead of getting ready for power down, we've got a bunch of useless-eater whinging banker dorks running the the entire human race into the ground at warp speed, trying to preserve their record 40% of all corporate profits -- for coming up with this Nobel laureate sh*t!

    [May22'09] By a number of policy measures, it's sure getting hard to distinguish Obama from Bush. Same bailout/ripoff/bankdorks as Bush with same conflicts of interest, same war policy/funding/surge as Bush, same ultra pro-Israel war-on-Iran threats as Bush, and now Obama is looking for ways to 'legalize' secret indefinite detention without public charges or trial, in order to keep Guantanamo and many other less well known gulags (Bagram) open permanently. How is this different from John Yoo or Alberto Gonzales? Obama's proposal to increase gas-mileage requirements is OK as far as it goes (35.5 mpg fleet average by 2016), but it only puts us a few frigging mpg ahead of the original 1908 Model T (it got 25-30 mpg)! And by the target date of 2016, oil production will be well onto its steep post-peak-oil downslope (look here at the frightening decline of Cantarell, formerly, the second largest producing oil field in the entire world after Ghawar in Saudi). The fact that Obama is sometimes a more inspirational and liberal-sounding public speaker and more physically attractive matters not a whit when his policy is the same as that of Bush. The fantasy land in which people live truly frightens me.

    [May31'09] The M3 reconstruction by shadowstats.com suggests that the rate of growth of M3 peaked at the beginning of 2008, before all hell broke loose later in the year, and has now returned to a 'normal' growth rate (well, since Reagan) of 7% per year. The enormous injection into bank reserves that started in Sept 2008 is visible as an upward bump in the shadowstats M3 curve. However, the curve then resumes its downward trend around Jan 2009, after just a few months. It sure looks like deflation is continuing for now. The enormously inflationary stimulus packages, which have resulted in a more than doubling of BASE bank reserves in a few months (normal growth of BASE is a few percent per year), were seemingly absorbed in just a few months. The much larger M3 measure (historically 10x larger than BASE, now still 7x larger than it) seems to have brushed off the stimulus. Note, however, that total M3 (as opposed to change in M3) is still *increasing* at 7% per year. So I suppose a better description of where we are now would be 'still heading in the direction of deflation', if you think of M3 as the broadest inflation measure. Given how quickly the intense monetary stimulus was brushed off, however, it wouldn't be surprising if we got to a flat M3 in a year (and the BASE jump doesn't include the alphabet soup of TARP, PDCF, MMIFF, CPFF, TSLFm, FHFA, AIG, TAF, SFP, which if you add all those others together adds up to another 2x the BASE increase). The velocity of money curve also plotted in the BASE Fed graph above looks like an exact mirror image of BASE and the reserves injections (TRARR), which suggests that the extra money was utterly and completely absorbed by the banks without getting out anywhere into the economy where it could cause inflation. The last time the growth of M3 flattened was from 1992 to 1995 during the 'bond vigilante' period of Clinton 1, which is illustrated in this deficit and M3 graph which I made in 2005, when M3 was still an official Fed statistic. Rumors are the bond vigilantes are back, but now in a more deflationary context than the mid 90's.

    [Jun02'09] It's time for Americans to start doing the wild thing and letting out their inner French person (by going postal, like French workers do) otherwise the richies are just going to claw back half of our pensions to support their house/car/boat/art addictions. All the people running the bailout have skin in the very game they are bailing out -- they are bailing themselves out! They should be in jail -- now -- awaiting trial, to prevent them from further bank robberies!

    [Jun03'09] Ilargi has an insightful comment on this Clusterstock graph at Automatic Earth: "In 2002, the Detroit Big 3 produced 80% of 12 million cars [produced in the US], or *9.6 million vehicles*. In 2009, they will build just over 50% of a total production of 5 million cars, or roughly *2.6 million vehicles*." I had no idea how recently US car production had fallen behind "in-sourcing"! Ilargi overstates a little by including pre-collapse and post-collapse, since if you go back to just before the collapse in car-buying in mid-2007, the US car production was 63% of a total production of 11 million cars, or still roughly 6.8 million ('only' a 30% drop from 2002). But after the recent collapse in car-buying coupled with continued losses in Big 3 share of production, Ilargi is correct that it's hard to see how the US companies can survive a catastrophic *73% reduction* in output over just 7 years with no obvious turn-around in sight. It's a shame with all the blather on the TV that the main point never gets out. The other point that doesn't get out is that reducing car production is actually a good thing! There was a great article from the new editor at London Cyclist saying, 'we should stop the crap about us not being anti-car: of *course* we're anti-car! How can you be against smoking but be pro-cigarettes?'. Reducing car production now will make things better when the world slams into the peak oil downslope in a few years. The last thing we need is to get car production back up! Finally, we need more reporting on how Americans are partly responsible for this disaster because they swallowed the advertising and mindlessly bought so many stupid giant SUVs (and voted for Bush a second time).

    [Jun23'09] This simplified but very useful oildrum post by David Murphy makes an important point (look here for more equations). Peak oil is conventionally graphed in units of oil usage (currently about 85 million barrels/day). However, a more critical number is millions of barrels/day production (usage) minus the amount of energy required to obtain that oil. The effective downslope of peak oil is going to feel steeper each additional year than a peak oil *usage* graph because of the simple fact that humans have always gone for the easiest/cheapest to extract oil first. The easiest to get oil is strongly correlated with the oil that takes the *least energy* to extract. Over time, it takes more and more energy to extract the same amount of oil energy. For oil, the current energy cost has been estimated at approx 11:1 (one unit of energy is being expended to get 11 units). This makes oil a practical energy source unlike the absolute obscenity of American ethanol production which is currently at an EROEI of around 1:1 -- that is, it returns *no* net energy to the system. But remember that the energy return on energy investment for oil used to be 100:1. In the case of the US, one could very reasonably include the military expenditures for occupying oil-rich countries in the costs of obtaining oil. It is not enough for an energy source to have a positive energy return on energy investment. As EROEI gets below approximately 3:1, another cliff comes into view. This is easiest to see close to breakeven (EROEI = 1:1). For example, for a source at 1.1:1 (one prominent estimate of US ethanol EROEI from a supporter, no less!), in order to double the energy from that source, you have to invest 10 times as much total energy. That other energy has to come from somewhere. If it were to come from other ethanol, the amount of corn that would have to be grown would spike exponentially to many times any possible world as ethanol was ramped up. Even if the energy were to come a high EROEI source, you would still need 10 times as much of it. In simple terms: (1) low EROEI sources cannot replace high EROEI sources, (2) the EROEI of all of our fossil fuels sources are simultaneously getting lower, (3) all major fossil fuel sources are past or near peak, and (4) this is a major problem for the continuation of industrial civilization. The inability of the general public, teevee, academics, and friends to see the energy elephant in the room makes me feel like I'm mentally ill. But I'm not.

    [Jun27'09] Read this to get an idea of just how hard it is to eek out a few extra miles per gallon of fossil fuel. Engineering is hard and physics doesn't respond to cash rewards. No matter how much money you offer, the engineers aren't going to be able to build you a safe airliner that travels 500 miles per hour and gets twice the gas mileage of a 737 from twenty years ago. Ever. Some of the complexities described in that article were undertaken for fuel efficiency gains in the range of 15% (around 5% from more efficient engines, 5% from aerodynamic improvements, and 5% from better management of compressed air). Some of those gains now have to be given back. We also need to data about what happens when these composite-shelled planes get hit by lightning (the lightning survivability regulations on have already been adjusted downward for them; however, mother nature and the laws of physics could care less about the regulations). We're halfway through our cubic mile of oil for this year. About 28 cubic miles left. Instead of speaking truthfully about the end of industrial civilization, congress is debating pathetically trivial 2 miles per gallon here versus 4 miles per gallon there (the current US car fleet average is barely better than a model T). Fiddling while Rome burns (the last of its oil). It's morbidly fascinating, like watching somebody smoking through their tracheotomy. Or what poor MJ did to his face. The suggestions here are sensible (try to have less of a die-off) but are not on the table. A few more bangs into peak oil will hopefully get people talking more sensibly in a few years. More battery-assisted bicycle trailers!

    [Jun28'09] Two underreported statistics about the doubling in unemployment from 7 million at the end of 2007 to 14 million now: *80%* of those newly unemployed were men (the largest gender gap since WWII), and half of newly unemployed were under 30.

    [Jul13'09] A ways back, I speculated about the instability of computer trading heading toward smaller and smaller timesteps. I guess I wasn't creative enough in imagining the pure sociopathy of the criminal financial mind. From the revelations surrounding the Aleynikov affair, it looks like trading companies have located their servers in the same building at the NYSE or NASDAQ computers to minimize latencies. This implies that trade latencies must be in the hundreds or even tens of microseconds, in "dark pools" designed to minimize visibility to the rest of the market (isn't that what capitalism is all about?). But the dark pools smell really bad: there are also claims that some of the code actually hacked ethernet switches to sniff other people's trading packets. We have to get these parasites off the host! Rome is burning.

    [Jul18'09] The ridiculous swine flu circus continues. Scary boys and girls! A general swine flu vaccination program was advertised and executed in 1976 after some recruits at an the Fort Dix army base base got it and one died, after a long forced march. After vaccinating 40 million people, at least 400 people died from side effects of the vaccine and thousands were severely injured. Though this is a very low rate (minimally, the vaccine only killed 1 out of 100,000 people vaccinated), it's wide application resulted in 50 times as many deaths from the vaccine as there were from the thing it was trying to prevent (Bayes rule). Almost 100 people a day in the US die from the *non*-swine flu. Those people don't appear in the effuent oozing out of the teevee. The planned swine flu shots contain squalene, an adjuvant designed to boost immune responses so lower doses of swine flu antigens can be used. It's OK to eat squalene (e.g., there is some in olive oil) and it's found in human joints. But it's a bad idea to inject oils like squalene into the bloodstream along with other antigens in order to trigger an immune response.

    [Jul20'09] The opening Harry Potter scene of 4 dark gray smoke-colored demons whizzing through the streets of London finally smashing a pub and leaving people lying in the street was reminiscent of remote controlled US drones raining down death in third world countries. The rest of the movie was an indifferently patched together sequence of nice looking special effects. You'd think somebody would be paying attention to the overall plan with a budget approaching that of many third world countries (like the one in which real drones explode real people). The antiwar 'movement' has been utterly and disgustingly silent under Obama -- all while he is substantially escalating wars (a record number of troops have been killed in this not-yet-over month in Afghanistan) and increasing the size of the army. How is this different than Bush?

    [Jul21'09] The state of California is initiating a 20% funding cut of its world class University system to 2.4 billion a year, while maintaining its 11 billion dollar yearly funding of its ridiculously bloated prison system, which supports a per capita prison population that is 10-20 times as large as that in the UK, Europe, Canada, Japan, etc. In the 1970's, California used to spend twice as much on its wonderful public universities as its prisons (making it possible for an average Californian to go to college without accruing an enormous debt). The prison industry suddenly began to change in 1980 with Reagan and the war on drugs, all across the country. I noted this years ago, but I didn't realize just *how* out of whack things have gotten. Californians and US-ians want more prisons and have gotten more prisons to keep their precious kiddies safe. They don't complain when the budgets of universities are cut but prisons are not. They only get mad about university salaries but not about prison industry salaries, parrotting the Newspeak poured into their weakened minds. More prisons are just what we need to solve the coming world energy crisis, right? These funding changes are slow structural things that have enormous inertia and have similar slopes across decades. Kind of like the coming inexorable decline in world oil production and soon, natural gas production. Way to go, California.

    [Jul22'09] The just-proposed state of California budget cuts 3 billion from higher education (of which the 2.4 billion in University of California funding discussed above is a part) but only cuts 1 billion from prisons. The idiocy of cutting three times as much from higher education as from prisons -- where the bloated prison budget is *already* more than twice the higher education budget -- is stunningly stupid. Cut off your brain California and put it in jail. Run the per capita prison population up to 40 times that of Europe because 20 TIMES EUROPE ISN'T ENOUGH! What absolute idiots. Why not cut all social services and reinstate debtors prisons? In 1776, 60% of the people in British prisons were debtors. Yes you can.

    [Jul28'09] Monthly national new home sales have 'recovered' -- to just less than one half of monthly foreclosure activity in California. The disconnect from reality of the mainstream media is pretty amazing. But I also read an exchange between Simon Johnson and John Talbott reprinted here about what should be done. Despite their considerable expertise, it really shocked me to see both of them talking about 'return to normal growth'. What planet are they on? The thought of 'returning to normal growth' just boggles my mind. These people are relatively smart yet they seem happy with staying on a path that will turn the entire earth into a big collection of completely deforested Haiti's filled with people eating mud sandwiches, sprinkled with walled compounds where the rich people hide. In 20 years, oil production will probably be back to 1995 levels, but with a lot more people to feed. Growth is going to stop whether we like it or not. Population will contract. Political correctness can't be eaten.

    [Aug04'09] Here is an analysis of the frightening high chance of 'rescission' (being cut off) from your US health insurance policy if you actually get really sick 'Only' 0.5% of people are cut off. But if only 1% of the people get really sick, then 50% of really sick people are being cut off, because the insurance company certainly isn't going to cut off people who are not very sick and who are paying their premiums.

    [Aug11'09] By gradually removing state and federal support for students going to college relative to when I went to college, an unbelievable amount of debt has been created -- almost 3/4 of a trillion dollars, equivalent to about 1/4 of all consumer debt not counting real estate. The situation is so dire that the draconian anti-bankruptcy laws, which are specific to student loans, haven't prevented a default rate much higher than that for subprime mortgages. No fix in sight. Just continued implementation of the policies that got us here -- continued defunding of higher education and increased funding for prisons (or this year, cutting higher education 3 times as much as prisons). In California, state spending per student has fallen by 40% (inflation adjusted) since just 1990. Even Dmitri Orlov is against going to college. Dang.

    [Aug15'09] Income inequality in the US has surpassed the previous record set just before the onset of the (previous) Depression (Emmanuel Saez PDF here. The top 1% captured 2/3 of income growth from 2002 to 2007.

    [Aug20'09] [external inaccessibility of www.cogsci.ucsd.edu over the past month and a half (!) was due to the campus net police closing outside access to the server, while looking to see if an opening had been exploited.]

    [Sep05'09] Landlord sold the flat to raise cash in the current UK property uptick. We had to move.

    [Sep13'09] "The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance." -- George Orwell, 1984. The Afghanistan war is a good example. It is part of the flow, helped along, by of all people, Bruce Cockburn who just sang Rocket Launcher for the troops while visiting his brother (who just jointed the US military). Trippy, man. Never liked the guy's voice and lyrics. 'Vibrant skin?' You suck, Bruce. Andrew Gavin Marshall's most recent article is good. It's easy for me to see certain trends -- like prisons and universities in California. There has been a virtually linear increase in prison funding and decrease in university funding in California since 1980 (as I have repeated blabbed on about). But the most important point is that it shows no sign of abating; the university cuts were 3x as deep as the prison cuts a few months ago. A few days ago, there was an email to all staff at UCSD explaining that they can't take their 'furlough' (pay cut days off) on days when they have face-to-face contact with students. If you have graduate students, that would be every day. Kewl, you can take your time off at night, when you're sleeping. I can remember universities vs. prisons because I have verbalized it and it's a blackly funny talking point. But other gradual changes, like the continued, linear development and acceptance of the police state -- tasers, crowd control devices (recently deployed at a public meeting with Susan Davis in San Diego!), databases, surveillance -- and the privatization of the same -- are harder to see because they are more amorphous and less directly visible. Half of the US troops in Iraq are contractors/mercenaries and the proportion is over half in Afghanistan -- a total of a quarter of a million people, almost half the size of the US military in Vietnam, and twice the percentage of contractors in any previous US war. But these things are linearly and inexorably changing just same -- in the wrong direction. Extrapolate these changes forward a decade and it doesn't look good, esp. when you put them in the context of similar slow unidirectional decline in the underlying curve of oil production. If unemployment continues to rise (currently actually at about 20% in the US), however, the situation could get unstable. Not now, though. The main thing Americans seem to be terrified of is guaranteed health care! Imagine, if you have a pre-existing condition, you would still be able to get insurance! Scary boys and girls! But while all this ridiculous stage-managed nonsense mechanically unfolds (superb summary prepared in record time by Matt Taibbi here), it's completely OK with Amurikans to blow monstrous wads of 'mandatorily' collected tax money for 'death-listing' poor Afghans or Palestinians by remote control halfway around the world. Maybe when unemployment reaches 30%, they'll begin to wake out of their iPod soma and glimpse the real terror on the horizon. But by then, it will be time to segue into the next war (while keeping the current two going, of course). And all at the moment of peak oil. The collective idiocy and cruelty of humans is astonishing. These days it often makes me forget the things I like about them.

    [Sep20'09] "I'm glad all those teabaggers marched on Washington last week. Because judging from the photos, it's the first exercise they've gotten in years." -- Bill Maher.

    [Sep21'09] "I have always contended that 'all significant scientific advances have been financed by a budget intended for something else' or 'all real research is bootleg'." -- kly84g on theoildrum.

    [Sep22'09] A few years back, I finally understood the basic idea of how the modern money system is supposed to work: money is created out of the void by the Federal Reserve (though banks have to pay interest on this 'vaccuum energy' money) and then the banks multiply the created money roughly by 10x because of roughly 10% fractional reserve requirements via multiple cycles of deposits and lending that only requires retaining 10% of what was deposited. Recently, Steve Keen has made the point (citing studies as old as 20 years ago) that historically, creation of money by banks *precedes* creation of 'money from the void' as well as deposits. This is an obvious possibility that I totally failed to envision, even though there is nothing in the basic scenario outlined above that requires that 'money from the void' or deposit money actually precedes money created by fractional reserves rules. Banks simply create money. And they get *paid* (interest) for this. Nice line of work.

    [Sep22'09] Alexander Cockburn just wrote a somewhat tedious column about gossip. Searching for some myself, I found that Stephen Stills auditioned to be a Monkee; and that Jimi Hendrix once opened for the Monkees around the time he was living in Peter Tork's house in Laurel Canyon (and was booed off stage). Now that's what *I* call gossip!.

    [Oct06'09] I ran across an amazing statistic about California higher education in this Guardian article: "The percentage of 19-year-olds at college in the state dropped from 43% to 30% between 1996 and 2004, one of the highest falls ever recorded for any developed world economy". That is so sad. A lot of the money that would have helped people continue to go to college went instead to prisons, which now house more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world (10-20x the per capita prisoner count in EU countries). Cut off your brain and put it in prison, California.

    [Oct09'09] The monetary BASE just jumped to a new high ( here is a FED graph of BASE and MULT, the almost perfectly inverted money multiplier/velocity indicating that the increase in BASE is having almost no effect on spending and is simply sitting in banks, generating interest for the banks that comes from the very same place that gave birth to the excess reserves -- the void). You can now see three big moves in BASE: the first was an absolutely unprecedented doubling from Sept to Nov 2008, the second was a top-up pulse in Jan/Feb/Mar 2008, and the third and current top-up pulse started in July/Aug 2009.

    [Oct16'09] The peace prez is planning this week to send 45,000 more troops to Afghanistan. F-ing unbelievable. US-ians are fine with it 'because the economy is recovering'. On days like this, I feel like I am completely losing touch with reality.

    [Oct21'09] M3 (reconstructed) has made an historic turn downward. Take a look at the second chart at the link. The downturn is completely unprecedented historically, especially in light of the massive injection of created money into the system starting in Sept 2008. The guy at the nowandfutures site (who has done us all the service of reconstructing M3) says the downturn is temporary. Perhaps so, but it truly looks like we are entering uncharted territory (cough). The biggest wild card is peak oil. Conventional crude peaked in 2005. "All liquids" -- which is a number about 1.15x as big as crude, and which includes several other things (condensates, natural gas plant liquids, tar sands) that the human monkeys began to extract when the most attractive regular crude peaked -- themselves peaked in 2008. It's almost certainly down from here on out. New, difficult territory. Off-duty physicists playing around with money equations aren't going to fix it. They should get back to real work.

    [Nov01'09] In talking to people back in the states, I heard a lot of FDR this and FDR that and what if Obama this and that. FDR presided over the beginnings of an almost perfectly exponential rise in oil production/consumption in the US that continued with hardly a single out-of-place yearly data point until the 1973 oil shocks. This powered the conversion of the US from an agrarian to an industrial civilization. Exponentially increasing low-EROEI energy is an incomparable drug rush that creates an exponential increase in everything else. With that as a background, policy and party differences pale into insignificance. Sadly, that rush is gone forever. The new regime of permanently decreasing per capita energy will equally overwhelm puny differences in policy and party and country. No party or country can publically state this reality and none will, until industrial civilization has decayed to such an extent that national parties and policies don't matter. Last month Scientific American ran yet another puff piece from Leonardo Maugeri (remember his don't-worry-be-happy 2004 article in Science?) about there being plenty of oil left. That resulted in a lot of people writing in to say: please cancel my subscription. This month, there was a piece on how water, wind, and photoelectric will neatly be able to supply to us an *increased* yearly energy budget by 2030 without the need for any fossil fuels (just in case last month's Maugeri was wrong). The article did worry a bit about not having enough minerals for that many photocells and batteries (e.g., silver), but noted that this could be solved by recycling (?!). They didn't mention mining and smelting and steel-making and how we would triple the capacity of the grid. They didn't mention the fact that recent high oil prices have caused *dis*investment in wind and solar, but no doubt, they have a reason why even higher oil prices will turn this around and spur reinvestment in the future. They didn't mention much about food. The message was, don't worry mr. consumer. We've got this one under control. Just keep on driving your 100,000 watt car, and replacing your laptop every other year. That same Scientific American issue did have an article on how to grow food -- indoors, in skyscrapers. I particularly liked the artist's touch of photocells on top of a 60 story hydroponic food tower. Those photocells would probably be big enough to power and cool the CEO's penthouse office... Just shameful. Instead of Maugeri's pablum, we have the likely reality of Mexico ceasing all exports (much of which go to the US) in 2 years, as its biggest oil fields fall off a cliff. As I have mentioned for years, their cliff was steepened by the very same improved oil extraction methods mentioned by Maugeri! Because of this, the oil production downslope may not look at all like the almost linear downslope of US production, which peaked in 1970 without the help of advanced methods (horizontal drilling, water flood). In the short term, it has the potential to eat up our current temporary surplus production capacity in a year or two. Danger Will Robinson.

    [Nov07'09] The military is having problems because a majority of recruits are too fat or can't run or can't do one push up or pull up or they used too many drugs or have police records. They need a lot of new bodies since the current equivalent-to-Vietnam-era numbers of troops and contractors in Afghanistan is NOT ENOUGH. So one hand (big ag, video games, junk food) takes away from the other hand (the computer-military-industrial complex)! This makes me think of the recently revealed snafu that came up with the just-about-to-be-released soft X-ray 'strip-search' airport scan machines (they call them milimeter scans so you don't realize you're getting X-rayed) -- the possibility that TSA ("thousands standing around") employees might be tempted to collect child p orn after scanning kids. The utter nincompoopery of all sides of both of these situations would be laughable if we weren't talking about THE END OF FRIGGIN' INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION! And I never realized that McDonalds was so anti-war, man...

    [Nov15'09] Federal data say that 25% of homeless are veterans. Social workers will tell you the true number is even higher. So now, the big girlie man in California (the steroids must have shrunk it off entirely) is getting set to make the 'hard decisions' to cut funding for homeless. Girlie man.

    [Nov24'09] It's morbidly interesting to sample some of the effluents splattering out of ClimateGate. With all the hysteria, many people don't even have the correct 'sign' about why Hans von Storch and Claire Goodess resigned in 2003. The shallowness of thinking demonstrated seems breathtaking, until you remember that language is just an overlay on a primate brain, and science is just a temporary overlay on language. The debate reminds me of a non sequitur I often heard during the 2008 oil price spike: oil companies and oil traders are making lots of money from high oil prices, so therefore, peak oil isn't true. The whole prurient email viewing episode provides a pleasant enough distraction for inarticulate population while it continues to get fleeced (today there was a trial balloon about installing Jamie Dimon as Minister of Your Money -- fascism indeed!). World oil consumption bumped up a bit over the path few months. Even if it was just from the Chinese building empty cities, or building, tearing up, and rebuilding roads, or buying unbelievable amounts of new aluminum making capacity, the uptick likely brings us frighfully close to maximum daily production numbers, and could lead once again to unpredictable explosive price increases. Predicting these eruptions is really impossible in the near term. For example, commercial real estate might crater, cratering some banks just in time to bring usage a smidgen under maximum production, saving the day (or month). But in 10 years, after 10 years of continued depletion, things are going to be *extremely* rough, even if the depression deepens considerably from now. We are now in a Wile E. Coyote moment where economic contraction (the most recent one, no doubt caused in part by bumping into production limits) can temporarily take the pressure off. Further along the inexorable downslope, that won't be possible. We will have to start to contract the whole world. Judging from the extraordinary shallowness of thinking and the ease with which opinion is manipulated, that contraction is likely to be very messy. No amount of writing is going to convince people that one barrel of oil -- currently at $76 a barrel -- is equal to one year of hard labor by a human (as explained here). Only a year of hard labor without oil will do that.

    [Nov26'09] The swine flu scare is now mostly history. As an index of the hysteria, recent investigative reports suggest that only a few percent of suspected swine flu samples sent to the CDC actually turned out to be H1N1 flu. The data further suggests that 'flu-like' symptoms are only actually some kind of flu maybe 20% of the time. If we treated all diseases this way, it would implode the medical care system.

    [Dec01'09] If we can have the death penalty for people, we need the possibility of the death penalty for corporations -- since they're legally people, too. Excellent idea from the comments in zerohedge on the Barclays Lehman shenanigans.

    [Dec03'09] What distinguishes the Obama disaster from the Bush disaster other than looks, and the fact that Obama can speak the language without sounding like a complete dolt? Sure, it's only been a year, but that was enough time for Bush to have started the disgusting war on Afghanistan in 2001 (almost 9 friggin years ago!). Economic policies continue to be designed by the same people Bush consulted (criminal bankers). Secret prisons, rendition, and total information awareness surveillance are unchanged, and still managed by Israeli companies. The wars are escalated over the line held by, uhhh, Rumsfeld?! Middle east policy and aid subsidies are unchanged. The lastest speech was filled with the same pablum of Bin Laden (long dead) and vintage Bush 9/11 garbage. Actually existing policies on energy use, car culture, and health care are unchanged. Not looking too good. Where's the alternate universe? I'm living in the same ugly one I was in last year.

    [Dec13'09] Warlord Obama (quip from Le Point) picks up his peace prize. As someone else quipped, he should have sent an unmanned drone to pick it up for him. Or maybe, he should have sent a swarm of the these -- the latest sick DARPA fantasy -- real flying insects controlled by electronics that are powered by tiny radioactive nickel sources. This is what our best minds are doing as Ghawar dies and Rome begins to burn to the ground. Truly pitiful. Meanwhile, there was an unintentionally humorous post on the OilDrum -- a site about peak oil -- on why it's too dangerous to raise chickens in your back yard! It was posted by the same woman who assured me in a comment response last year that it was too dangerous to consider riding a bike in a city. Equally pitiful. She is perfectly intelligent and has written very helpful non-technical but hard hitting summaries of peak oil. Both of these are a reflection of our yeast-in-a-barrel problem. Despite the towering internal complexity of each yeast, each individual yeast is still not intelligent enough to stop reproducing, so they all die after their last explosive division in their waste products (alcohol). Similarly, modern industrial civilization is too complex for any one person's brain -- even extremely intelligent and dedicated ones -- to understand. Many single persons would each have to understand many different scientific fields, politics, sociology, geography, engineering, and economics (notice it wasn't in the science category...). Committees of specialists won't help when our problem involves integration across all the people and cultures across the entire world. It's looking more and more like nothing is going to be able to stop us from seriously sh*tting up our barrel -- except the spherical barrel walls themselves.

    [Jan04'10] "Millimeter wave" body scanners from scumbag Michael Chertoff's conflict-of-interest company that generate nude images of every traveler are up and running at many airports. These are the closed booths that you have to walk into. The millimeter wave scanners use very high frequency microwaves (30-300 GHz). For comparison, WiFi/cellphones/bluetooth use 1-3 GHz and MRI and FM radio use 0.1 GHz. Theoretical studies have suggested that millimeter wave (terahertz) radiation can cause the formation of single stranded bubbles in DNA, but this has not yet been experimentally tested. A different body scanning technology deployed at other airports uses backscattering of soft X-rays. These scanners use much higher frequency, higher energy soft X-rays (30 million GHz). These scanners are not booths but look instead like a flat panel that you stand against. The ionizing radiation dose from a single backscatter image is relatively small (less than 1/100 the dose from a 10-hour high-altitude flight, but in the scanner case, delivered entirely to the skin); however, plans have been mooted to put these into busses, trains, and even surveillance cameras, which could easily add up to substantial radiation doses. The soft X-rays generate a more detailed body surface image than the millimeter wave scans and penetrate tissure deeply enough to image the teeth and hand bones. The entire radiation dose is delivered mainly to the skin. Currently, TSA regulations state that both these scans are optional and that "passengers who do not wish to utilize this screening receive an equal level of screening and undergo a pat-down procedure". It is not clear exactly what the first clause entails. The scans are read by a person in a hidden room, not by the TSA drones in the line. This is supposed to stop the "thousands standing around" goons from collecting (child) po rn (!?). Since the line to the scan booth often gets backed up (since it takes longer to go through than a standard metal detector), your belongings (e.g., laptop) are typically screened before you get scanned, and they may sit for a long time on the pickup conveyor belt, increasing the chance of theft. Also, you can't see your belongings while being scanned since you have to you face away from the exit conveyor belt with your hands in the air. At the moment of peak oil, instead of trying to retool industrial civilization to prevent it from collapsing, we are devising yet new expensive ways to look up people's butts, driven by complex psyops. It looks like the knicker-bomber/pasty Abdulmutallab was so incoherent that he had to be escorted to the gate by a "sharp-dressed" Indian man who asked that Abdulmutallab bypass security without a passport because he was a Sudanese refugee, according to Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell, who was sitting a few rows away from Abdulmutallab. Holland's counter terrorism agency said that Abdulmutallab did in fact have a valid Nigerian passport but did not release any video they have. Smells bad.

    [Jan10'10] Boiled down to bullet points, here are the three main reasons why the transition to renewable energy is unlikely to happen. (1) There is no possible positive spin on power down and the end of growth. It's more fun to use more energy, period. Renewable energy won't be able to support our current life style. No possible viable conventional politician *or* revolutionary can propose power down and economic contraction -- along with having less or no kids -- as a policy. None will. (2) The effects of climate change will be delayed. The really bad effects of climate change (e.g., on food) won't start killing huge numbers of people for 15 or 20 years. (3) Fossil fuel will get slowly tighter and tighter. This will prevent long term infrastructure investments from being made in time. It will get harder and harder to keep the fossil fueled machine going, but keeping things going by stopgap measures will remain easier and cheaper than retooling for a long time. When everybody finally agrees there is a problem, there won't be enough fossil fuel energy left for transition. Since I don't see (enough of) an effect of this knowledge on my very own behavior now, when it could make a difference, I don't expect to see it in anybody else's behavior.

    [Jan31'10] As part of Obama's 'spending freeze', he proposed a massive increase in military spending, which includes a $5 billion increase in spending on nuclear weapons the same week the Senate passed a bill containing unilateral sanctions to punish foreign companies that export gasoline to Iran or help it develop refining facilities -- because of its nuclear reactor program. When you just read the news without the pictures, it makes you feel like you've taken drugs. Sometimes, I feel like nuclear weapons really are being proposed as the solution to peak oil. At David Michael Green writes, this was an ugly week for humanity.

    [Feb01'10] Some good energy news for a change! Wind capacity in the US increased by a large amount in 2009, led by Texas, partly the result of stimulus spending.

    [Mar05'10] BASE is going vertical again.

    [Mar13'10] Probably the best way to describe what banks have done is an economic coup d'etat. The result will be to raise regressive taxes at the low end of the income scale (after they were previously lowered at the high end of the scale), and then at the same time, gut pensions and social services (as promoted by Mish et al.). The result will be incredible econonmic pressure on the low end, the young end, the old end. It's not hard to see that eventually, this could lead to a right-wing political coup to complete the transition to fascism (banks + corporations + military). Even in these absolutely desperate times, the military budget continues to grow. Another 10 years of that, and the US will most of the way there.

    [Mar23'10] Several people have pointed with alarm to this statement in Bernanke's testimony on Feb 10: "The Federal Reserve believes it is possible that, ultimately, its operating framework will allow the elimination of minimum reserve requirements, which impose costs and distortions on the banking system." (at end of this document). One sensible explanation of what went wrong over the past 10 years was that leverage was too high, which roughly corresponds to minimum reserve requirements being too low. The idea that there should be *no* minimum reserve requirement means that instead of banks multiplying money injected into them by the Fed by 10x (=1/10% fractional reserves requirement), they could multiply it by 1/0% = infinity! It's seems truly hallicinatory to me to have the head of the Fed describing minimum reserves as "distortions", followed by no comments from worthless hordes of finance commentators. Perhaps this is because deposits that are components of M2 and M3 but *not* M1 (such as non-individual savings accounts and term deposits) have no 10%-ish reserves requirements -- and because M2 and M3 are much bigger than M1. Still, this seems like a substantial change in policy. Here is one commentary on it that concludes that reserves are already a fiction in the US and already officially not required in several 6 OECD countries -- so this 'change' would in fact only be officially recognizing what already exists. Sure is a strange world down the economic rabbit hole! Perusing these charts from the Fed really makes it seem like the economy is still falling off a cliff. The sharp turns are all correlated with huge (and continuing) injection into the BASE money supply by the Fed. Nothings seems to be resolved.

    [Mar24'10] Jesse's Cafe Americain makes the point that the monetary base also expanded rapidly during the Depression. However, what distinguishes the current increase is its amazing rapidity, visible here by comparing graphs of the monetary base (AMBNS) across two equivalently long time periods: from 1925-1955 and from 1980-2010. Those two graphs are crudely superimposed here using an image program. There is about a factor of 40 difference in the y-axis scale because of inflation. After removing that, the recent expansion of BASE can be seen to be 3-4 times faster than during the depression; and it is still in progress. Jesse goes on to call for reduced income disparities and a return to growth. I think the first one is great idea, though difficult to implement without pitchforks and torches. I think the second one is impossible in the context of increasingly limited energy supplies (mostly fossil fuels).

    [Mar25'10] Complete mind control was prominently exhibited in the recent 'health care' debate, which involved sums of money that are trivial in comparison to the never-discussed military budget. The problem could begin to be solved if everybody just memorized the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion. It's just not that hard.

    [Apr06'10] The top 6 American banks have assets equal to 63% of US GDP. The body politic needs some serious de-worming. Note that this is not different/worse than Europe. Deutsche Bank assests are 84% of German GDP and RBS/Barclays/HSBC are 337% of UK GDP (according to zerohedge).

    [Apr13'10] "The US government bailout and stimulus package to respond to the financial crisis added up to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90% of the nation's home mortgages, [which are ] calculated at $10.5 trillion by the Federal Reserve. Yet home foreclosure rate continued to climb because only distressed financial institutions were bailed out, but not distressed homeowners." -- Henry C.K. Liu >. The next big target for the financial vultures will be pensions (with the full support of commentators like Mish and even Ilargi). Apparently, only extrememly rich people deserve them. Boomers will lose them and younger people won't even be promised them. The concept of retirement will go away. People will work until they die. This is class war carried out under the cover of fomenting intergenerational war between two non-rich groups. As Ruth Sunderland says: "Debate about gap between public and private pensions is a sideshow. The real apartheid is between top earners and everyone else".

    [Apr19'10] This weekend, Obama went golfing with the CEO of UBS, a big contributor to Obama. A few weeks ago, UBS recently paid out an almost $1 billion fine to the US treasury to settle an investigation of UBS helping wealthy Americans hide their income in secret offshore accounts. See above. The US savings rate seems to be going down again. It this surprising given that banks are paying less than 0.1% interest while raking in 4% on loans? At current US bank rates, a modest $20,000 yearly payout would require a principal of $40 million dollars. It's good for banks: the financial 'industry' is now wildly profitable again, despite most banks being functionally insolvent. The financial 'industry' (what a joke -- see how 'industrial' you bozos are when there is no one to make you a new disk drive) is now is now approaching half of the total US economy. Money for nothing (and for guys who are mostly tone deaf).

    [Apr20'10] The vampire squid makes money precisely because they *don't* operate in an open market, but in private, non-public markets where they can fool people more easily. They are the exact opposite of open market capitalists; their 'over the counter' trades are 'under the counter' trades. And when they lose money, they get government welfare. They don't need it or deserve it. We definitely don't need them. We've got some serious problems maintaining industrial civilization through the coming energy/water/grain/fish/soil/fertilizer plus continuing population growth crunch, and we have got to get these imbecilic parasites off our backs. They're not going to leave voluntarily. The weird lawsuit against just Fabulous Fab for a relatively minor offense (in the greater scheme of things), seems like it might be a convenient auto-da-fe to sop up some of the building pressure in the defrauded and soon to be depensioned populace. It seems highly unlikely it will have any lasting effect on the parasites. Look what happend with Enron: after *their* 'public hanging', things literally got a hundred times worse/more criminal!

    [Apr23'10] Didja see what just happened in this Fed graph of total commercial bank credit? It looks like Sept 2008 again! The plot also includes total consumer credit (which is less than 1/3 as big as commercial bank credit, and which didn't get any helpful injections this time either). Here is a closeup (2 years of data) of the same data on total bank credit, now plotted along with the BASE money supply, which shows the extreme abruptness of the change. I can't particularly correlate the huge jump in bank credit with anything in the news. Almost half a trillion dollars (AKA 460 billion dollars) in a few weeks is a really big move -- that's almost as big as a full year of spending by the US department of 'defense'. What's up?

    [Apr23'10] A longer term picture of cash+bank reserves (BASE) and total commercial bank credit graph from the last post is here, plotted on the same y-axis. What could account for a 1-week half-a-trillion increase in bank credit in the last week of March 2010? It has to be a central bank operation. But what? Preparation for an Iran war doesn't seem more likely than at any other time over the past few years. Perhaps, there has been some advance knowledge of yet-to-be-released damning evidence in the so far just a limited-hang-out/auto-da-fe by the SEC? That too, seems unlikely given the dominance of the financial 'industry' in the government -- Summers, Geithner, campaign donors, golf buddies, 6 big banks with assets equal to 60% of US GDP, etc, etc -- and the power of the panopticon press. However, I tend to be absolutely horrible at political prediction (I'm only good at mechanical things like the 2008 oil peak, which I predicted correctly in 2003). I only noticed a few (other? :-} ) wackos commenting on the credit spike, suggesting that big banks might be ready to expose some new huge losses, or that the US financial elite rats are finally getting ready to desert the sinking ship (seem unlikely to me at this point). The only thing that really correlates with this in the news are the problems in Greece, but, sheesh, that seems like too much for just Greece (400 billion euros).

    [May03'10] It's worth trying to state what is going on with banks in as clear language as possible. Currently, banks take out huge loans from the Fed, which creates money out of the void in return for interest. The Fed opened this 'discount window' to investment banks only in March 2008, when Lehman failed. The current interest rate the banks have to pay to the Fed's 'discount window' is at a record low, at around 0.75%. Then they take these 'excess reserves' (defined as reserves above the mimimum 10%-ish rate required by law) and re-deposit them into the Fed as 'Treasuries'. This explains why bank reserves (BASE) have more than doubled since Sept 2008, which is completely explained by 'excess reserves' (EXCRESNS). The Fed then decided, for the first time in history, to pay interest on excess bank reserves (the same Fed that generated the money out of nothing in the first place). The interest the banks get on this 'deposit' is 3.5%. Good 'work' if you can get it, eh? The banks could also lend you money to buy a house at 4-5% interest while paying less than 1% interest on their borrowing, but that would be more risky. So they are reducing their lending to such an extent that government-guaranteed loans through Fannie and Freddie now account for 95% of lending. This utter insanity passes as brilliance, to be rewarded with record bonuses. If people knew what was going on in simple corn pone terms, they would probably vote in a Hitler right now to clean up the mess. It's gotten to the point where it almost seems better not to tell them -- like the way I now feel about peak oil.

    [May09'10] The Deepwater horizon disaster will evoke calls to stop deepwater drilling in much the same way that Chernobyl put people off nuclear power, as Dmitri Orlov points out. Unfortunately, now that we are past peak oil, much of the remaining second half of oil is in deepwater places. Unlike Orlov, I doubt the bans will hold for long. Despite their outrage, the spill will not induce people to conserve one little bit. Only temporary oil price spikes can do that. But they will respond with more consumption as soon as they abate. The bans will be overturned soon enough, and people will get the rest of the oil out. Then it will be too late to conserve.

    [May16'10] Actions speak louder than words. Here we are, a year an a half after the Obama election and *all* the US troops are still in Iraq. The latest postponed withdrawal is supposed to be this August. Go ahead, believe in that. The Afghanistan war is considerably *bigger* than it was under Bush, and Obama is doing smirking Jack-the-Ripper/Bush imitations about slaughtering wedding party guests. And then there are his huge spending increases on nuclear weapons, far past what Bush had previously ordered. And the same Bush-installed criminals (Geithner, Summers) are currently in power, bailing out their filthy fraud friends. Just as in the UK, the differences between the parties are merely Orwellian. I hear many people shedding crocodile tears about the Gulf oil spill. It's bad, certainly. But those people have no intentions of getting rid of their cars, or of even driving a little less. They won't stop flying. I'm guilty myself -- I have no car, but I certainly still fly, which is approximately equivalent to driving the same distance in a car. So stop your sobbing, humans (which I suppose includes me). The *only* thing that will stop you/me is a fossil fuel energy shortage that will lead to a food shortage. Exactly the same as with other animals. It won't happen for a while yet (10-15 years) since the 'peak' of peak oil is quite flat. But every day gets more and more schizophenic, juxtaposing energy facts and 'normal' everyday banter. It's actually 3-way 'schizo' because in addition to energy reality, and iPad/TV reality, there is financial terr'ist reality. They dropped the market by 1000 points in 5 minutes to scare non-numerate congressworms into voting the next day against breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks, using high frequency trading (now 70% of all trades!). Then across the pond, they did the same thing to Greece with CDS's to scare the EU into bailing out their own (the same) super-richies' bad bets by making low income people pay for them. These two stunts have set up (two more!) transfers of insane amounts of wealth to already super-rich people, and positioned the rubes for additional future stripping of pensions and jobs and assumption of rich people's risk -- all with the acquiescence of the rubes, and in the US, even support! The other 99% of us can only see echoes of this (e.g. the vertical half a trillion dollar one week jumps in total bank credit here). The super-rich slime hold all the levers and are cashing out before the peak oil sh*t really hits the fan. This economic shock and awe campaign gives me the same feeling as in the 6 month lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion -- the leisureliness, the lack of embarrassment, the inevitability.

    [May29'10] Straight from the horses mouth (ass): "I would recommend you panic" -- Hugh Hendry, hedge fund worm, speaking on the BBC. In the previous depression, the US turned left and Europe turned right. So far, things look they just might be reversed this time.

    [May31'10] BP is in somewhat of a pickle after the 'top kill' failed (injecting mud and 'junk' to try to slow the leak. The next plan will be to try to saw off the bent riser and attach a tube over it to collect the leaking oil. They could try to cap the well by installing another blow out preventer above the partially shut one, but there are several serious problems here. The topmost part of the casing (bore liner steel pipe) of this well is 16 inches in diameter. Given the large resevoir pressure of 13,000 psi at the bottom of the well (which BP unloaded by withdrawing the heavy mud and replacing it with sea water, which was the proximal cause of the blowout), which is still in the range of 9,000 psi at the level of the blow out preventor, even if they were successful in completely shutting it off the leak, the increased pressure might actually rupture the 16 inch casing which has a rupture pressure under 10,000 psi, leading to a completely unrestrained leak much worse than the current one. If the latest plan to capture the leaking oil fails, capping the well will probably have to wait until the relief wells are finished in a month or two. From reports of people who survived the disaster, this is looking more and more like a Chernobyl- or a Challenger-style disaster -- caused in both cases by non-engineering management overriding engineers' best guesses. In the case of Chernobyl, lifting out the moderator rods past the physicists' never-go-higher-than-here marks in order to perform a 'safety' test (indeed!), and in the case of the Challenger, blasting off probably to have a teacher in space for Reagan's state of the union speech, even though the engineer who designed the solid fuel booster (Boisjoly) refused to sign the blast off order because he knew it was too cold for the O-rings to properly seal off the hot gasses from escaping during the initial ignition. If history is a guide, no one will even remember what the real cause of the disasters were -- management failure rather than technological failure. And the management won't be properly punished so this doesn't happen again after a few years (in the case of the Challenger disaster, the guy who correctly refused to sign lost his job and had to leave the industry because the higher management types were more powerful than the truth).

    [Jun06'10] I hadn't been practicing the guitar for while. After having a few glasses of wine, I became inexplicably enraged at rhythm changes. So I sat at my desk last night and perhaps inadvisedly recorded this version of Sonny Rollins' Oleo, but in A instead of Bb, with rock drum loops turned up fast to crudely simulate jazz drumming, dominant 7th's and minor 3rd's, and the Garage Band "Texas Blues" patch to complement a slightly drunken timing. It's called A-glio> (olio e aglio, get it?).

    [Jun13'10] The official Gulf of Mexico spill rate used to be 5,000 barrels/day. However, the BP ship is now collecting 15,000 barrels/day through a very leaky top hat on the cut-off riser. Together with the possibility that the bore liner is ruptured below the sea bottom and leaking there, too, it looks like the often-reviled initial scientific estimates of around 50,000 barrels a day (1 barrel every 2 seconds) is closer to the truth.

    [Jun16'10] Now it's official that the leaking oil well flow rate is much higher than previously reported -- currently about 1 barrel every 2 seconds (roughly 1 million gallons a day), according to scientists, BP, and Heading Out at the oildrum :-} . The flow rate has probably increased, probably the result of abrasive particle erosion of the partially closed blow-out preventer and perhaps leaks to the outside of the well casing and perhaps, because the higher pressures and flow during the failed 'top kill' attempt (pumping heavy mud into the well through a port *underneath* the blow-out protector to try to build up a heavy-mud column inside the bore hole to counteract the oil and gas pressure). Now 1 barrel every 2 seconds sounds like a lot of oil, and it is -- but compare it to US daily oil *usage* of about *450* barrels every 2 seconds (roughly 1 *billion* gallons a day) -- that is, about about 1,000 times as much per day as the spill. World oil usage is almost 2,000 barrels every 2 seconds. I certainly agree that BP sux, but so do all of the rest of us. You can't make an omelette (i.e., an industrial society) without breaking eggs. *Of course* there were some inadvisable BP shortcuts in this particular case to save money and increase their profits by increasing the risk of damaging other people's stuff. But even when everything is done correctly, mistakes can still happen. This is especially the case as the easier-to-get oil fields are exhausted. It will be even harder and even more risky from now on, until we get to the point where the energy required to reasonably safely get the oil is greater than the energy returned by the produced oil. This unfortunate catastrophe is part and parcel of peak oil, not the merely despicable old news of corporate greed. The right lesson has not yet been learned. Here in London, none of the stupid car drivers that I glare at at every intersection accelerate even slightly less luxuriously than they did at the beginning of the year (and even if they did, it wouldn't help much). I'm so sick of hearing the words 'addicted to oil'. We're not 'addicted to oil'. That's like saying that a person has an addiction to blood. Oil the is current life blood of industrial civilization. Without it, industrial civilization will quickly die out. Work on blood replacements is waaaay behind, despite serious blood loss...

    [Jun22'10] My response to Robert Jensen query about intellectual and emotional reactions to collapse here.

    [Jul02'10] There is a worrying discussion of the possible effects of the oil spill on the money economy as a result of BP's huge derivatives positions by Gordon T. Long here. In the course of the late development of industrial society, scientists and engineers have figured out how to deal with complex problems, and they have figured out what level of corner-cutting can safely be tolerated. Sometimes these very accurate estimates get overriden by management to save money. Usually, management gets away with it because most well-designed systems have layers of fail-safes. Occasionally, the management overrides are disastrous (Challenger explosion, Chernobyl meltdown, Deepwater Horizon blowout). In the case of financial complexity, not only do I not trust the managers, but I also have *absolutely* no faith in the skills of or respect for the "money engineers" themselves. This is looking more and more like trench warfare, where conservative British historians praised the British army for proudly maintaining discipline as soldiers pointlessly marched out of trenches into withering fire and certain death. Embarrassing lack of style, you humans.

    [Jul04'10] The $30 billion the Congress didn't want to spend on extending unemployment benefits -- supposedly because it would increase the national debt -- went a few days later to extend the longer-than-WWII war in Afghanistan that Obama was supposedly elected to end. Pitchfork time Americans! What more direct illustration could there be that this stupid, bloody, criminal, pointless, counterproductive war is directly bankrupting you? -- indeed the *very* people who are fighting it?!?

    [Jul05'10] Clear summary of the main points on the blowout from the oildrum comments:
    ROCKMAN: BP actually ran a wireline pressure gauge (an MDT) before they ran csg. It measured about 11,900 psi [pounds per square inch] in the reservoir. This is equivalent to a 12.6 ppg [pounds per gallon] mud weight. They drilled it with around 14 ppg mud. And if you didn't catch it earlier there's an easy way to covert pressure to MW: pressure (psi) = MW (ppg) * 0.052 * mud column height (feet).
    fdoleza: So they drilled it way over-balanced, then they circulated the mud out before they had a cement bond log and knew they had a good set of plugs? What was the guy on? LSD?
    ROCKMAN: At this point that's what it looks like. Maybe when the official facts come out we may draw a different conclusion. Even more difficult to understand is that the real time data monitoring system appears to document there were clear signs of the well kicking almost an hour before the explosion. They either didn't notice or didn't believe what they were seeing. Everyone in the oil patch I've discussed it with all find it equally unbelievable. Maybe we've got it wrong but that's exactly what it looks like right now.

    [Jul13'10] The Deepwater horizon spill (at 35 to 60 thousand barrels a day for 72 days) is now probably the world's worst oil spill, surpassing the Ixtoc 1979 spill, at least 10 times worse than the Exxon Valdez spill. At best, the new capping stack will close off the flow. If that doesn't hold or begins to cause further damage to the well, the first relief well could penetrate the bore and stop the spill in a month. The first or second relief well often fails, however, and there is a chance the leak will continue for another 3 months or even longer. As Dahr Jamail reports from the scene, hell has already come to south Louisiana.

    [Jul17'10] BP appears to have temporarily capped the well by installing a new blow-out preventer stack on top of the 26" dia bore liner, and has closed it temporarily for a test, stopping the oil leaking into the Gulf for the first time. The pressure (about 2 tons per square inch at the ocean floor well head after subtracting out water pressure at that depth), however, did not build up to quite as high as expected (about 20% less than expected), which could indicate that some oil is still escaping through an alternate channel. BP is doing seismic imaging now, presumably to look for subsurface fractures around the borehole. But very good news so far.

    [Jul28'10] The main function of the wiki leaks (given several weeks in advance to the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel by the ostensibly antiwar Assange, who supposedly "enjoys crushing bastards", take that, you bastards) so far seems to be to motivating an *enlarged* war against Pakistan and -- of all things -- the resurrection of Bin Laden! (who probably died of kidney disease in Dec 2001). Today, two days after the official leak release, the House congressional worms just tossed another $60 billion at the Afghan war today by a 308-114 vote, described as a major win for Obama. The mind boggles at such pukedom. The same pack of worms voted down a call for US troops to withdraw from Pakistan by 38-372. Economic crisis whatever. At least real worms are good for the soil. At this moment in history, most Americans don't care about dead non-American civilians. The Iraqi/Afghanistan holocaust (well over 1 million killed) doesn't even register with them, so piecemeal text revelations of this wrongdoing won't move them. They won't pay attention to the rest of the world until the American empire begins to overtly collapse, and that's probably still two decades away. Bizarrely, in an interview, without prompting, Assange defended the official government theory of 9/11 (planes brought down the two towers and fire imploded the third tower, WTC7). Why this at this time? To go with the 'latest intelligence' on the whereabouts of the long-dead bin Laden?! Assange is maybe legit. But that would make him and even better conduit of info+disinfo.

    [Jul30'10] Gordon Duff makes the excellent point that there was a strange absence of anything in the wiki leaks on the Afghan drug trade -- a major source of money for covert operations dating back to Vietnam and before. The restablishment of the drug trade was one of the first great 'achievements' of the US invasion of Afghanistan. With respect to Assange as witting or unwitting, Gordon Duff says: "I hate it when people are duped. I would rather he were paid or being blackmailed. I always want the useless to be rewarded in this life because, just in case there is another one after this, they know what they can expect there."

    [Aug01'10] The capped BP/Macondo/Gulf-of-Mexico well is holding for now. They are trying to decide whether to make another attempt at a 'top kill' (pump in some heavy mud, let it sink down, let out some pressure, repeat) or to wait for the relief wells to arrive (relief wells usu. take several attempts before they manage to get close enough to the hole). The reason for being careful about the 'top kill' is that the current shut-in pressure is equivalent to the burst rating of the 16-inch casing near the top of the well but actually higher than the burst rating of the 22-inch casing at the very top of the well (i.e., the well is probably currently shut in as a result of the 22-inch casing holding back more pressure that it is rated for). Hopefully, the relief well will arrive soon...

    [Aug04'10] 'Top kill' described above seems to have worked without blowing up the largest casing. The big pressure differential should now be gone. [edit Aug11: the pressure differential is less, clearly better than before] Whew.

    [Aug11'10] Tens of *trillions* (AKA thousands of billions) of out-of-the-void money is given to banks who then redeposit it in the Fed to 'earn' interest, but no money for extending unemployment, paying for food stamps, or investing in infrastructure? This is class war, pure and simple. I read on many blogs average people, who are getting absolutely reamed by this policy *defending* it! If average people don't wise up and start fighting back, it's just going to be more of the same. The plan is to slowly attack salaries, pensions, infrastructure maintenance, parks, and so on, little by little, each year. At the same time, tax rates for rich people and rich corporations will continue to be whittled away (they already pay almost no tax compared to 20 or 30 years ago via off shore scams). And for what? To preserve the ill-gotten assets of a tiny fraction of super-rich people whose money 'works' for them? So they can construct compounds on Caribbean islands protected by private security forces? Because they came up with the great idea of outsourcing everything to Chinese Foxconn slave labor factories where people literally drop dead in their 30's from overwork making iPhones? Then pile on top of all this usual 3000-year-old crap, declining energy supplies and a bunch of nincompoops wanting to bomb Iran. The complete lack of common sense boggles the mind and makes it hard to get anything done. And money doesn't do work of the kind you can get from fossil fuels. Ever. You off-duty physicists who knew better should be ashamed.

    [Aug13'10] The blown-out BP well is currently being held at 4200 pounds per square inch (2 tons per square inch), possibly by applying extra pressure from pumps (the ambient ambient pressure of sea water at the wellhead is about 2300 pounds per square inch) or perhaps from mud still in the 5000 foot pipe to the surface. In either case, that is not exactly what one would desribe as 'static' (meaning in equilibrium). Until they bleed off that pressure and see what happens (e.g., see if oil comes out), it not clear at this time how 'plugged' the well actually is. Hopefully things will be clearer next week. BP may be trying to wriggle out of finishing the relief well. The current estimate of the spill is about 5 million barrels -- a record amount of oil spilled, but sadly, only about 1/4 of a day of US usage.

    [Aug14'10] A negative pressure test -- i.e. applying pressure less than 2300 pounds per square inch ambient water pressure -- did not result in any obvious leaks. Good so far -- but given uncertainty due to previous sloppily monitored cement jobs, not a slam dunk until the relief well injects cement from the bottom.

    [Aug15'10] Gordon Long has a reasonable diagnosis of the what happened over the last ten years here. And I'm not complaining about his idea of bailing out college students :-} instead of utterly worthless gambler/parasites like AIG and Goldman. He points out that funding more students and teaching positions to stem the tide of the rest of the world overtaking the US in research would cost no more than a rounding error for the unbelievably gigantic disgusting TARP bailout. And it's simple common sense that the US should cut military spending for the US's vile overseas occupations and operations in 130 other countries when there are 40 million Americans on food stamps. But I think he doesn't realize that the situation is about to take *another* unexpected turn as energy starts to get scarce. All the sudden changes he described that were related to the internet are going to be partially undermined by the *energy* cost of producing actual things (what Gordon says is not important) jumping up. Where things are made *will* suddenly begin to matter again, a whole lot more than it used to. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Obummer recently said about Iraq and Afghanistan: "[We must] make sure that we've got a civilian expeditionary force that when we go out into some village somewhere.... let's make sure that we are giving them the support that they need in order for us to be successful on our mission". I wonder where they would train for the bashing down doors and terrorizing families in the middle of the night part of their 'mission'? Maybe in fake Iraqi villages set up by erstwhile movie producers in San Diego? Civilian expeditionary force, eh? Maybe it would be a good idea to watch out for the domestic civilian expeditionary pitchfork-and-torches force...

    [Aug31'10] It seems that the US housing bubble (and the even bigger UK and French housing bubbles) may take a very long time to disinflate (heh). Fannie and Freddie -- originally purposed to make housing affordable -- are now being used to *prop up* house prices at levels that are becoming more and more unaffordable! On the other hand, if housing prices drop further toward affordable levels, it could put a majority of mortgage holders underwater, further reducing housing related spending. If interest rates stay near zero to prevent even further housing losses, pensions are further impacted, continuing the contraction. The only way that housing prices can be propped up would be to increase wages. But with unemployment high, that won't happen. Because nobody wants to rock (blow up) the boat, it seems likely that things will drift down slowly for a long time, Japan 1990's style (without the benefit of a robust manufacturing base, but with a less unfavorable demographic distribution).

    [Sep12'10] "The real kill team, of course, is in the White House, under the leadership of a Democratic president who, it's clear by now, is covertly serving out George W. Bush's third term in office." -- Christopher Ketcham On Sept 11, 2010, Obama announced yet another one year extension of a State of National Emergency, first begun by George Bush on Sept 14, 2001. There are now 120,000 troops in Afghanistan, the most ever.

    [Sep18'10] The relief well has finally intersected the bottom of the blown-out and now sealed-from-the-top Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, four and a half months after the blowout, about the amount of time it usually takes. The well can now be cemented in from the bottom to seal it for good. They still have to be careful since the approximately 12,000 pounds per square inch pressure of the well down there is currently only being held in place by the column of heavy drilling mud (the relief well would flow at 50,000 barrels a day if this heavy mud wasn't there). It won't be over until the cement is pumped down and cures [update: successfully sealed -- now we just need 2 or 3 decades for the Gulf to recover from the spill].

    [Sep28'10] "Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. Its you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO. And you are losing..." -- Barry Ritholtz

    . [Oct12'10] Military manufacturing in the US has more than doubled since 2000 while the rest of the manufacturing sector has continued to shrink (graph here). The military now makes 8% of all durable goods in the US (as opposed to 3% in 2000). At peak oil, instead of investing in electrified rail and preparing for lower energy return on energy investment, the US is expanding its military. Ironically, or perhaps ominously, the military is the only organization taking peak oil seriously. Civilian organizations are all officially and unofficially ignoring it as it happens right in front of their eyes. In just 5 years -- minus a manufactured event or another war, or both -- it is going to be impossible for anyone to ignore peak oil. The Fed can not print oil.

    [Oct24'10] Two views of community organizing from Billy Wimsatt and Dmitri Orlov. I like Billy's vision much better (and his father was my PhD advisor!) but I'm having to work to convince myself that Dmitri is wrong.

    [Oct24'10] 70% of stock trades are held for an average of 11 seconds. This means that the daily 'market' consists almost entirely of computer programs, not people. The remaining humans are exiting this 'market'.

    [Oct27'10] "Because of the connection of energy to problem solving, we will not stop using fossil fuels until we are forced to". -- Joseph Tainter, Barcelona 2010.

    [Nov01'10] The TSA only-job-left-in-America guys will now feel your testicles if you skip the d*ck-measuring X-ray machine -- because of a ... package?! (I order all my toner cartidge packages from Yemen, don't you?). Touch my package, duuude. The military guys sure have got a sick fascination with genitals, sexual humiliation, and torture. A little worse each year. After another 5 or 10 fake events, we'll be flying in hospital gowns.

    [Nov03'10] The idiotic Democrats have mostly lost to the strikingly more idiotic Republicans. Sad to see good guy Russ Feingold go, but it was great thing to see Meg Whitman pour $140 million of her ill gotten gains down the toilet over the past 6 months in her losing governor bid in California. I'm confident she will feel the loss -- of the money -- very acutely. California rocks. Wisconson sucks.

    [Nov04'10] Easy come easy go. The USGS just reduced its estimate of the undrilled reserves in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, NPRA (which is just west of the much-disputed Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR) from 10 billion barrels to less than 1 billion barrels, which might not even be enough to make extracting it net energy positive (there is a larger amount of natural gas there than oil, and the natural gas is probably worth going after). The usual press drones can never bring themselves to mention energy return on energy investment, but rather say 'not currently economically viable'. But the fact of the matter is that oil prices have no effect on whether or not the deposit is net energy positive, and therefore, an energy source as opposed to a sink.

    [Nov05'10] Scary numbers here on the current costs of drilling for natural gas in the US. It looks like the current average money return on money investment is running negative (!). Of course, the costs for drilling a well is up front, and so you would have to average over the length of production time to get a better estimate of total money in vs. total money out. But given that gas wells deplete very quickly and are depleting more and more quickly (now down to just a few years), these are truly scary graphs to me. Currently, natural gas costs 1/2 as much as oil on an equal energy content basis. Given the predicament indicated by the rate of drilling for gas relative to the rate of production of gas, its currently low price points to a staggering mismatch between an insanely short-look-ahead financial system and the production cliff we are about fall over in the next decade. Natural gas is critical for heating, cooking, for managing short term loads on the electric grid, and for extracting oil from tar sands. Maybe people would understand better if you mentioned that TV and the internet will be constantly interrupted or that the battery on the iPad doesn't last as long when it's cold...

    [Nov25'10] A majority of US-ians think that going through the body scanner will stop them from touching your penis or vulva. Wrong! Merely wearing a panty liner or tampon is enough to get felt up. God help you if you've had a urostomy. It was dismal watching the brainless Stasi-like only-job-left-in-town TSA drones in action recently. The lastest idiocy (observed in LAX in Nov) was for them all to limply yell in unison to simultaneously shut down all the lines for a few minutes as a 'practice run'. For what? A mass groping? This is bascially Abu Ghraib lite -- sexual humiliation as a form of population mind control. TSA is a dead weight on airlines, which are about to suffer additional calamities as oil demand bumps up against max output next year, temporarily driving oil prices higher until the economy is crashes again. Maybe the drones will then be assigned to fondle each other, to keep their chops in shape, just in case a passenger shows up...

    [Nov29'10] As usual with anything that hits the news and gets blared around the world, there are multiple threads behind the recent negative stories about the TSA. One angle I hadn't thought about concerns the fact that individual airports can opt out of having the TSA there. This doesn't mean that you won't get fondled. But it could instead be done by a private contractor (maybe already the case if the TSA contracts out their workers). If I had to decide between (1) lightly X-raying my peepee, (2) lightly microwaving it, (3) paying a $11,000 fine, (4) having it fondled by a TSA drone, and (5) having it fondled by a private contractor, I think I would choose number 4. The energy of the X-rays used in the backscatter machines is comparable to those used in a standard mammogram or dental X-ray (mammogram=20keV vs. TSA=30keV). This is just the energy of the individual photons; for a complete comparison, you also have to know how many photons are used (I don't know that comparison -- the TSA claims the flux is lower). The scanners work differently than dental X-rays or mammograms in that a narrow intense beam is scanned rapidly over the body. The fact that airport screeners may not even be allowed to wear radiation badges is not a good sign that their intention is pure.

    [Dec07'10] The release of the secret Fed documents only forced by a lawsuit revealed that the $700 billion given out at the end of 2008 was just chicken feed. The Fed gave out $12 trillion (17 times the size of the 'official bailout', which was 'debated' and passed despite the fact that most people opposed it) in virtually zero-interest-rate loans to the very people whose fraud crashed the system. Those people were able to use this money to buy things that normal people could not (such as 'bank accounts' that had a decent rate of interest), because normal people would have to pay a minumum of 5% on a *much* smaller loan. Complete criminals. This allowed them to pay themselves huge bonuses as a reward for bankrupting small people. Class war, plain and simple. These criminals will continue to strip underwater properties from regular people and steal their pensions until people strike back. The people won't do that until things get a lot worse. And by then, on the downslope of peak oil, people will be susceptible to a Hitler/Mussolini type. Just great...

    [Dec11'10] Obama's current approval rating is at 45%. For context, Bush started off in 2001 at just 55%, shot up instantly to 87% after 9/11, drifted linearly down back to 55% by April 2003, then shot up to 75% with the invasion of Iraq, then drifted back down to 45% (Obama's current), when he was reelected (whatever) in 2005, then eventually drifted down to 25% by the end of his second term in Dec 2009. Looks like O'Bomber won't get reelected unless he starts another war or receives the gift that keeps on giving -- another 9/11.

    [Dec12'10] The graphs of M3 at shadowstats show that the actions of the Fed have finally flattened the strongly negative (deflationary) trend in M3 that began in June 2009. Previous to this, M3, the most general measure of total money, had grown pretty much continuously on a year by year basis since the Depression. M3 growth did almost go flat for about 5 years between 1990 and 1995, but then continued upward strongly after that. M3 began to flatten again about 6 months the Sept 2008 crisis, then jumped back up sharply with the stimulus, coincident with the specatular more-than-doubling of BASE. The recent unprecendented downturn in M3 only started in June 2009 and flattened to zero over the past 6 months.

    [Dec24'10] An amazing xmas present from the Congressonal worms. An almost $1 trillion tax cut, mostly for super rich people, and paid for by a transfer mostly from social security! I would call it class war, but our side is not fighting back. So it's more like class massacre.

    [Dec28'10] This graph prepared by David Lewis here, showing the history of R&D (public and private combined) for defense, health, and energy says it all. We currently spend about $80+ billion for defense R&D, about $27 billion for health R&D, and less than $2 billion on energy R&D. Right at the moment of peak oil. As David Lewis puts it: "I suppose the US could still choose to have other priorities, but I guess what I'm seeing here is something like the Fall of Rome. Imagine you were poring over statistics as the Huns closed in and noticed the budget for coping with Huns was about as sizable as the climate science and energy R&D budgets are here compared to the more important things the Roman Senate were putting their money into". I don't think he fully realizes the gravity and nearness of peak fossil fuel energy; but he has his price ratios exactly correct: renewable energy will never be cheaper than fossil fuel.

    [Jan23'11] Here is a 8-month-old tidbit I just came across. In a clever marketing trick, a photograph of a beautiful nude model from PhotoAlto, a stock photo agency (mirrored here) was photoshopped (contrast reversed, changed to gray scale, fake gun image added) by a German magazine and then spread widely through the internet (e.g., 'right' here, 'conspiracy' here, 'metro' here, etc). By contrast, the bottom image here is what a real back-scatter X-ray image looks like (notice that the bones inside the legs are visible, meaning that some X-rays penetrated that deep). Kewl use of sex for mind control (not the real back-scatter image...).

    [Jan30'11] Here (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4) is a thought-provoking series of articles arguing that the 'wars for oil' are actually wars for state-less oil *companies*. The Afghan route for Caspian oil will supply India and China, not the US (cf. 80's Alaska pipeline oil going to Japan, not the US). Rich people think differently than you and me.

    [Feb16'11] The level of denial in mainstream media reports on the (mild!) wikileak about peak oil makes me chuckle (in horror), but also feel a bit schizophrenic (my Feb-2011-updated peak oil talk slides are here -- 6M PDF). It's like the Monty Python "it's just a flesh wound" skit. But geology doesn't give a hoot about the clueless palaver churned out in Time magazine. The lifeblood of industrial civilization is starting to drain away -- at 1000 barrels a second, 80 million barrels a day, one cubic mile per year. Good luck breaking an 'addiction' to our blood supply! There is at best 15 years of gradually decreasing supply followed by 15 years of rapidly decreasing supply, followed by god knows what. I often read in the oildrum or 'sensible capitalist' sites about how renewable energy is a waste because it's more expensive than fossil fuel. Of *course* it's more expensive! It will probably *always* be more expensive! What do you expect when it's made out super convenient, super high energy density, always instantly available, use-it-once-and-it's-gone-forever fossil fuels? Renewable energy is not like that. It doesn't run out if you can manage to maintain your machines, but it's intermittent and expensive (=energy requiring!) to store. Does this mean we shouldn't do it? Of course not! Does this mean we shouldn't conserve? Of course not! We should madly construct expensive, intermittent non-fossil fuel power and electric bikes/carts/trucks to store that energy *and* we should conserve, too. But right now, there is no sign of panic. To parrot what one of the hedge fund a$$holes said last summer, "I would recommend you panic." Like Mubarak, the oil supply will cause mass demonstrations. But unlike Mubarak, the oil supply will pay absolutely no attention to them. No matter how big they are. As the Big Squeeze sets in toward the end of the next decade, it seems likely that our maneuverability as a society is going to be reduced -- right when we really need it to flexible and adaptive. At least the (forced) convervation part will happen. We need a better word for a rupture between your consciousness and the consciousness of everybody else, caused by most everybody else except you being crazy: schizo-all-the-reset-of-you-are-nuts-ia... :-}

    [Feb20'11] Over the past 2 months, another 1/5 of a trillion dollars was added, presumably from the Fed, to US bank reserves, after a year of relative quiet. I presume this must (part of) QE2. A longer term view shows that this action, begun in Sept 2008, remains utterly unprecendented, and strangely without effect. It also looks like have been 3, not 2 bouts of money injection. From the money multiplier plotted on the same graphs, it's clear that the money didn't go anywhere -- rather, reports suggest it was lent back to the Fed, who then turned around and paid interest to the banks on the money they just created, presumably out of yet more created money. Without clear information on 'over the counter' (i.e., secret, under the counter) trades of these banks, one can only presume that this money is an insurance payment to bail out bad derivative bets that banks haven't yet declared as losses. If that's not the case, then show us the money. After crashing the economy, these banking intestinal worms are now trying convince everybody that no one deserves a pension (except themselves), and that all pensions should be retroactively reduced to the lowest common denominator. The might Wurlitzer media is dutifully re-broadcasting this to 'left' and 'right'. We should go after *their* 'pensions'! As Matt Taibbi says, we need to put one of these guys into a real jail for a year. What they're doing is a *lot* worse than stealing your car or breaking into your house and stealing things. They're stealing the the whole town.

    [Feb21'11] Jame Clarage, a physicist in Texas, did a simple calculation of how much energy one google search costs. I've been searching for a long time, since Altavista. Along the way, especially toward the beginning, I would often get a little twinge when I searched THE ENTIRE WORLD to find the phone number of the guy in the office a few doors down (but I would do it anyway). It turns out that that twinge was justified. The simple calculation, which might be off by a factor of 2 or 3 (but it hardly matters) is: 10 million Google searches per hour divided by the estimated energy to power Google's server farm for one hour (estimate of 1 million servers from Gartner multiplied by 1 kilowatt per server per hour). This comes out to 0.1 kilowatt-hour per search. Yow. That's a one hundred watt light bulb on for a full hour -- for *one* search. I might do several hundred searches in a day (20 kilowatt hours). For context, the average Briton uses about 37 kilowatt hours a day for heating their poorly constructed homes (estimate from David MacKay's 2008 book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air -- but note that the average US-ian uses 2x as many kilowatts per day as an average Briton: 250 vs. 125 kWh/day). The average American currently does 1.5 searches a day. One could imagine that this will increase. A few years back, someone estimated that a Second Life avatar uses more energy than a real life Brazilian. We are at a very particular moment in time. As the energy supply becomes more and more constricted, search will get more expensive. But still, I value search highly: I'd rather do 400 searches (40 kWh/day) than use a car for a day (the average British car user uses 40 kWh/day). But maybe I'll start writing down more telephone numbers. [update Sep'11: another number for google searches/hour is 40 million/hour]

    [Feb23'11] American worker logic: because rich bankers made fraudulent bad bets, we should take away teacher's pensions and fire them (Rhode Island is sending all of their teacher pink slips). The richies are having trouble not laughing at how easy it is to take candy from a baby while they plan their tropical dream homes and furnish their yachts.

    [Feb25'11] Imagine if the 10 trillion (minimum!) dollars poured into banks to (temporarily!) fix the failed bets and outright fraud of utterly useless bankers, the money poured into the always-growing poor-people-extermination military, and the money (and research grants!) poured into the pitiful homeland security up-your-*ss boondoggle had instead been spent on alternative energy and alternative-energy-ready grid improvements. Then we might have had a fighting chance to not flame out a few decades from now. The most maddening thing about this whole thing is to watch large groups of exquisitely organized human minds helplessly and hopelessly flailing about, doing the utterly, obviously wrong thing -- right at the most critical moment in all of human and cultural evolution, and all in slow motion. It's absolutely tragically maddening.

    [Mar10'11] Car sales in America are picking up. Americans are buying SUVs and pick-ups. With gas surging to $3.50, they are spending an extra $1000 a year on gas. 40% of American corn is being turned into ethanol (accounting for about 10% of of the fuel burnt in cars, so all-ethanol would require 400% of the total US corn crop -- see my comments above on corn ethanol, a few years back). Cantarell, the huge Mexican oil field that powered American SUVs is cratering, now down to 1/4 of what it was just a few years ago. In New York, where half the people don't even have cars, the people with cars are absolutely outraged by bike lanes -- even non-existent ones. I just don't know what to say.

    [Apr05'11] This analysis in the Daily Bell makes some good points, but ignores the fact of its mere popularity, which means that people not only hate Rebecca Black, but they hate themselves for being drawn to watch it (80 million of them). This irritating video has pretty good production values for a 13-year-old because it was produced (for just $2K) by small company using now widely available software. So perhaps people are not only hating themselves but hating the fact that musical production has become cheaper and more democratic. Wrong target! This is similar to lower middle class people being against taxing the rich, even while the share of the super rich eclipses the levels of 1929 and shows no sign of stopping its increase.

    [Apr13'11] In a recent poll, 61% of Americans saw Obama as more liberal than they were. They also don't want high speed rail. Given that Obama is indistinguishable from Bush in most important areas (military spending and maintaining/starting new wars, bowing to big banks and the super rich, strengthening the surveillance state), it's hard to guess what they have in mind. A fourth war? Immediate removal of existing rail tracks? A Guantanamo in every state? Bringing the TSA into school to feel-up and X-ray kindergartners on their way home? Doubling the 'defense' budget? End Medicare and Social Security now instead of just cutting them back? Bailing out *the cousins* of the banker's trophy wives? Sheesh. I would say something about just desserts, but Americans seem to like theirs. I can't imagine that this disconnect from reality can persist much longer, but I have been wrong (many times) before. I will try not to fall into a fashionable "sullen dispair", as John Michael Greer has just warned against :-} (he certainly nailed me on that one...)

    [May06'11] Maybe Elvis was still alive and was killed. I doubt he was one of the persons killed in the raid, but I can't be sure. No believable real evidence has been publicly presented and the body/bodies are supposedly at the bottom of the ocean and the living (if any, whoever they are) are being tortured in some secret location. The official story has already changed (female 'human shield'/not human shield, armed/unarmed, watching live/not watching live feed, etc etc). Three crudely faked death photos, one published at many major newspaper websites, were quickly outed (why? something more than simply cash for photos? if the internet can figure this out in an hour, couldn't major newspapers do the same?). The Mighty Wurlitzer plays on. Maybe the long series of apparently faked videos and recordings were finally starting to make people laugh, and the chip had to be finally cashed. Of course, faked videos aren't proof of his prior death. Maybe things will be clearer in a few months, but I doubt it. Remember the first Gulf War incubator hoax, the Jessica Lynch hoax, the Pat Tillman hoax. Or remember the entire premiss of the second Iraq war, with a million plus killed and trillions lost. It took years before those lies were finally unraveled (the incubators was a complete concoction, Jessica Lynch was treated well by Iraqis before they had to flee a hospital under American attack, and Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire, and last but not least, the Iraq WMDs were fakes and Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11). In any case, killing Elvis has provided a temporary circus-like diversion in the US from the staggering 'recovery' -- and watching the super rich pillaging pensions and laughing on their way to their banks.

    [May12'11] Still hard to tell if it really was Elvis, or if I can believe that helicopter-crashing commandos perfectly ran their 99.99% DNA match to a half-sister (99.99% not!!) on ruggedized equipment in record time before dumping the body in 12 hours. Of course, just because that's very unlikely, and just because the latest videos they 'found' is mostly likely faked doesn't mean it *wasn't* him they killed; but it certainly isn't evidence in favor. And today, introducing: The Son of Bin Laden! Is this a joke? (Nigel Tufnel voice). Whoever it was that was actually killed, the Emmanuel Goldstein psychological operation has resulted in a major terror booster shot of 9-11 nonsense (which Elvis probably had nothing to do with) and many new minutes of hate. My sister's flight was delayed because an Imam had to be taken off and re-searched, then even after that, he was ultimately prevented from flying by the pilot. Meanwhile The TSA goons are protecting us from terror diapers; and there are plans afoot to Xray or feel up your crotch just to get on a train. Why not just post a goon on every street corner? After all, the US has exported all its real jobs. Pitiful, US-ians.

    [May12'11] Ignitable drinking water, courtesy of fracking for shale gas or coal bed methane, courtesy of peak fossil fuel forcing humans to go after harder-to-get reserves. The quasi-religious belief in 'progress' in the face of obvious limits -- often exhibited by scientists who should know better since they try to find out how the world is, not how they want it to be -- is disappointing.

    [May18'11] "[Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy] was my boss. He knows all about peak oil, but he can't talk about it. If the government announced that peak oil was threatening our economy, Wall Street would crash. He just can't say anything about it." -- David Fridley, scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. There was an "we've got this under control" kind of article by Phil Hart in the oildrum yesterday, pointing out that peak oil has so far been less precipitous than first expected; we have been on an 'undulating plateau' for 5 years since regular growth stopped around 2005. The argument is that this will allow us all to react appropriately as the slow deline that never ends begins in earnest a decade from now. In my opinion (and that of several well-informed commenters) this neglects five key points (that I have endlessly repeated above). First, the plateau has had the effect -- via the constriction of growth -- of *reducing* our attempts to mitigate the problem. We are doing virtually nothing now given the size of the problem for industrial civilization (see Steven Chu above). As conditions get tighter, our maneuverability is likely to be *further reduced* rather than stimulated. Second, the flatness of the plateau is partly a reflection of better secondary production techniques and horizontal drilling, both of which tend to reduce current output decline but at the cost of increasing *depletion* rates. This results in a sharper falloff when it finally comes (e.g., Cantarell down to a 1/4 of its output in a few years, North Sea 10% per year decline rates; the imminent death of northern Ghawar will be a tremendous shock). The very fact of the current extended plateau probably implies there will be a sharper dropoff than we saw with the classic symmetrical decline in 1970's Texas. Third, the recent slight increase in all "all liquids" looks less impressive when you account for the fact that it includes a greater and greater percentage of non-crude, much of which which has substantially a lower energy density per barrel; condensates and natural gas plant liquids (pentane, butane, and propane) are still misleadingly counted as full barrels (here is a more sensible graph of all liquids by Rune Likvern with everything converted to crude oil equivalents). Also, "all liquids" includes things like ethanol whose production generates approximately zero net energy (EROEI ~= 1); American corn ethanol shouldn't be added to the curve at all. Fourth, this analysis pays no attention to increasing *internal* demands of exporting countries (Jeffrey Brown [westexas] Export Land model). Finally, it ignores the evidence that there will be massively increased competition for exports between *importing* countries in the near future (China and India would consume the *entire* exports of world oil and coal *by themselves* in 15 years if they were to continue growing at the same rate they have over the past decade). The author of the post works for an oil company. It will be "happy days" for oil companies, at least! But I am worried about what my 5 points imply for the rest of us. I couldn't have said it better than Ben Bernanke (!) said last week: "the FED cannot create more oil".

    [May26'11] An energy drought is virtually certain in a 'long term' view (15-20 years). With oil, for example, each year another cubic mile of it goes irreversibly into the air as CO2 and water vapor. There are about 25-30 decent cubic miles of oil left (and that's including some that hasn't been found yet). That basic picture hasn't changed in decades (the peak in world oil discovery was in the 1960's -- *45* years ago). But in the short term, many unexpected things could happen. For example, looking at current trends, China is set to consume all world oil *and* coal exports in 15 years -- *if* they continued expanding at the rates of the last decade. I think this is extrememly unlikely to happen. Further bumps up against maximum production will cause price fluctuations in things made from, transported by, and that use oil, and this will cause people to buy less stuff, both in the west and in China. Eventually, reduced demand will lead to China tapering off their increasing demand for new energy imports from its torrid pace of the last decade. This will remove (a small amount of!) the pressure on limited energy exports. This will keep us on an undulating energy plateau over the next 5 or 10 years (which says nothing about what financial chaos might accompany those undulations!). So in 8 or 10 years, the "we've got this energy thing under control, at least in the west" crowd (see Phil Hart above) will say that they were right all along -- right around 2020 when the hammer blows of peak all-energy first begin to fall in earnest. By 2030, when it's too late, everyone will realize something should have been done sooner. Like right now -- in 2011. But, as has become blindingly obvious to me over the past 5 years, it is absolutely impossible to imagine, even assuming the most globally enlightened players, that any significant steps in a safer direction (e.g., massive worldwide war-footing investment in electric rail, electric grid, neighborhood retrofitting, manufacturing lots batteries and small battery vehicles, wind, solar, solar heating, massive gasoline taxes, reclaiming farmland from under concrete, reorganizing food production to use less fossil fuel, stopping all the 'Monsanto' chemical company nonsense) could ever be undertaken (or even be discussed!) before outright physical shortages of energy and soon after, food, force contraction of industry, commerce, and then population. Contraction in industry, commerce, and population will never be a politically viable campaign platform for dictators, democrats, or revolutionaries (despite what the archdruid recently said about the possibility of 'use less' as a fashion statement). The reason for this is simply that using less energy is less fun than using more. The perfectly religious hope that "scientists will think of something" will never go away until the scientists fail. They are very likely to fail when industrial civilization runs low on easy energy -- mostly deposited in our 'account' in three bursts 90, 140, and 300 million years ago -- around 2030. However, the small possibility that the scientists won't fail is enough to prevent any attempts to prepare for the towering difficulties we will all face if they most likely do. So, play good music, enjoy eating, find out new things, and be creative while it lasts. The collapse will take quite a while.

    [May30'11] 9-11 booga-booga is finally beginning to wear off (witness Texas' recent threat to ban the TSA, less than one month after the 'kill Elvis' show). If that starts to spread, serious medicine might eventually be required. Sadly, all that would be required to give average people a booster shot of terror for the new decade would be a big explosion in a major city. Or an attack on the tower formerly known as Sears (incidentally currently owned in part by the same investment group that owned the WTC's). There has already been a constant stream of preparatory stories (e.g., the drill a few months back in Portland) in the mainstream media/circus.

    [Jun16'11] By analogy with looking for difficult oil in deep water off the edge of the continental shelf, I read today here from Canadian geologist David Hughes that one of the best targets for fracking are the (formerly!) impermeable seals that previously allowed conventional gas to build up underneath them (makes sense). Talk about burning the furniture to stay warm...

    [Jun19'11] "If I was pressed to answer I would argue that the new paradigm is perhaps something similar to the 'we are no longer afraid' (strength in social networked numbers) paradigm of the young people in the Middle East but this time without any evident political content." -- Michael Gurstein, commenting on the much self-video'd 20,000 person riot in Vancouver after the defeat of Canucks in the Stanley Cup.

    [Jun26'11] The US currently has a total of 300,000 (1/3 of a million) people in Iraq and Afghanistan (which is smaller than Texas), divided equally between uniformed personnel and contractors (similarly consisting of mercenaries, cooks, medics, etc). At the height of the Vietnam war, there were 500,000 troops in Vietnam. These latest wars have now gone on for a full decade, show no signs of winding down, have wrecked both countries, restored the opium trade, killed over a million people, and are filthy sores on the rotting body politic of the US and UK.

    [Jul08'11] The Congress worms pass a bigger than ever 'defense' budget and then cancel the successor to the space telescope.

    [Jul19'11] An abridged list of Rupert Murdoch's media holdings from Good magazine:
    TV: Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox News Channel, Fox Kids Channel, Fox Business Network, Fox Classics, Fox Sports Net, FX, the National Geographic Channel, The Golf Channel, TV Guide Channel
    Radio: Fox Sports Radio Network
    Books: HarperCollins (which publishes JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Lemony Snicket, JG Ballard, and Neil Gaiman)
    Magazines: TV Guide, The Weekly Standard, Maximum Golf, Barron's Magazine
    Newspapers: The New York Post, Wall Street Journal, The Times (UK), The Sun (UK), The Australian (AU), The Herald Sun (AU), The Advertiser (AU)
    Websites: Foxsports.com, Hulu (part ownership), Scout.com, The Daily
    Film studios: 20th Century Fox (Avatar, The Simpsons, Star Wars, X-Men, Die Hard, Night at the Museum), Fox Searchlight (Slumdog Millionaire, Juno, 127 Hours, Black Swan, Little Miss Sunshine)
    Sports (part ownership): Los Angeles Lakers, Colorado Rockies, Australia and New Zealand's National Rugby League
    Time for some creative destruction.

    [Aug06'11] Here is a Fed graph of BASE (bank reserves) and WSHOMCB (mortgage-backed securities held outright by the FED) -- just two of the hard to remember things you hardly ever hear about on teevee that massively increased soon after the Sept 2008 chaos began, and which have remained just as distended since then. BASE more than doubled to over a trillion dollars, while WSHOMCB increased from absolute zero to the same size as the (doubled) BASE. As Richard Heinberg has written recently, we have to get control of the ridiculously volatile financial system before it *really* messes things up. Peak oil is a b*tch, but it's relatively slow. We have been on a peak 'oil' plateau (where 'oil' is defined in terms of equivalent energy units of crude, lease condensates, natural gas plant liquids, and biofuels) since at least 2006. As total 'oil' begins to fall over the next 5 years, it will fall slowly. If the financial system has an epileptic fit for a mere plateau, it needs to be redesigned, so saner heads can get to work rearranging things as total available energy -- the primary basis for economic growth -- slowly decreases. Unfortunately, there is virtually no trace of discussion of this on teevee, CSPAN, or state or city government. They don't dare mention the elephant in the room. And ironically, as the grinding stasis/contraction continues, there will be even less incentive to bring the topic up. It seems that we are all collectively intent on flying into the wall at full speed. I suppose it's just human nature. But to paraphrase Guy McPherson, mother nature has a bigger bat.

    [Aug14'11] For something completely different, I recently installed Fedora 15 on a machine. The Gnome 3.0 interface is dumbed down, irritating, no easier to use, doesn't look any better, and is more graphics resource intensive (what's not to like?), and crashes several-year-old graphics cards. It even enraged Linus himself. The idea of making your computer into a passive tablet is depressing. I don't want to stroke the screen when I'm programming. If the goal was to make a more useable interface, there are perfectly good examples out there. It amazes me that the Linux desktop could be in such a desperate state after so long. It's not rocket science. What a waste of programmer resources.

    [Aug15'11] Basic budget numbers from 2010 (shown in a nice simple graphic here) are *never* mentioned in proper context on the teevee. Total spending was $3.8 trillion, which includes defense, discretionary, social security, medicare, medicaid, other, interest on debt. Total receipts were $2.6 trillion (mostly individual income taxes, and social security and payroll taxes, with corporate taxes only accounting for 11% of receipts) for a deficit of $1.3 trillion. Total individual income tax brought in $1.1 trillion. Total 'defense' spending was $0.9 trillion. In simple terms, total defense spending is currently approximately equal to all individual income tax revenue. And total defense spending is approximately equal to the entire deficit. Basic numbers, people. As the late Chalmers Johnson said, this is the decline of the Roman empire. If this isn't fixed (and there is absolutely no sign of any change in defense spending), the US is going down. One unfortunate difference from the Roman empire is that the Romans didn't have nukes. Instead of the idiotic campaign circus, why not simply have people vote for how much they want to pay in taxes, how big of a deficit they want, and how much to spend for 'defense', social security, medicare, medicaid, and 'other' -- all in trillions. Simple, real things. Everybody has to shut up and come up with 10 real numbers that add up. That would be a real vote about real things. Addition.

    [Aug18'11] For the first time, the amount of corn used to make ethanol in the US -- an idiotic, approximately *zero* net energy process (same amount of fossil fuel used to make it and distill it as is gotten back from burning it in cars) -- has eclipsed the amount of corn fed to cows. This grew up from almost nothing to over 50% of all US corn in less than a decade. This really shows the utter bankruptcy of modern thinking with regard to cars. Needless to say, this can't go on for much longer. It isn't much different here in the UK/EU. While out on the streets cycling while idiots in cars honk and throw their weight around, I wish I had a megaphone attached to the back of my bike that would randomly bellow out things like "50% of car trips in London are less than 2 miles", or "I'm just as late for dinner as you", "cyclists will inherit what's left of the earth", or "you, pig, are piloting a 100,000 watt vehicle while mine is 100 watts", or "I paid for this road, too" or "your engine sucks compared to the American ones". Well, maybe I wouldn't say the last one for fear of my life, tho it's certainly true of the damn black taxi engines, which account for 20% of London's toxic particulates. The taxis are wonderfully designed (much better than American taxis) except for the absolutely awful horrible disgusting engines. Even tho UK/EU-ians only use 50% of the total energy per capita that Americans and Canadians do, they're not really any different than US-ians. It's just because they already filled up all the space combined with the fact that they used up most of their fossil fuel resources (until the North Sea, but that is now rapidly depleting). They would have done exactly the same thing as Americans did if they had enough fuel and space, despite their most sincere protestations about how much better than Americans they are. On the other hand, they *are* positioned a little better now, precisely because they weren't able to destroy their pre-car cities as thoroughly (tho sometimes, the 'pre-car' bit is a bit hard to make out here...) :-}

    [Aug23'11] The utter contradiction of (1) resuming economic growth and house price increases (making extra things to put in newly purchased houses) together with (2) austerity and lowering wages (that would be for people who buy most of the houses and extra things) and (3) flat energy supplies (that would be the energy that makes the extra things) would be hilarious if it wasn't so blackly dire. The economic system and human's desire to reproduce are running up against limits that historically they haven't dealt well with. Stopping growth in cell phones and big screen teevees is one thing. Stopping growth in food -- which currently requires a lot of fossil fuel since it is now made by a small fraction of the population -- without stopping growth in people is what I worry about. Plus, I *liked* the whole retirement concept! It seems to have gone out the window for everybody but the very rich. Instead of any sane discussion of obvious realities, the US govt/Obama admin just blew $1 billion over the past few months bombing Libya. Precious money that could have been spent on practical alternative energy research and electrified rail so that the US wouldn't be idiotically pouring *over* 50% of all its corn into its stupid car gas tanks.

    [Aug29'11] For many years, because AI/computer-vision/robotics/google were crude compared to animal and human biological-brain-based models, I pooh-poohed them in an academic way. I pooh-poohed the breathless Hollywood terminators and unrealistically super-powered super-intelligent robots. I utterly, completely missed the forest for the trees. Now, 70-80% of stock market trading is done by computers with algorithms designed by physicists. The trading is happening too quickly for humans to follow, using non-human-style trading patterns that battle each other where 10 *microseconds* can win the day. Human traders and human writers do follow the longer time scale *results* of this trading, trying to make sense of it, and no doubt half the time confabulate reasons for why a particular thing occurred, long after the fact. I used to point out how face recognition never worked well in unconstrained environments. But who cares about that? There is a camera on every PC pointing out from the screen that each person looks at. And why even bother with that when people post better pics. Google doesn't really understand meaning? It will never have to. Simple co-occurence and page rank have re-formed the student mind. When the first unmanned or remote controlled bombers manufactured by General Atomics in San Diego were sent up, I used to make fun of them because they would sometimes crash, or be too dependent on their human video death game controllers. Now, both semi-autonomous unmanned and simple remote-controlled flying machines are killing people, many people, every single day, and are beginning to be re-patriated. Because of the internet, some people now get their news outside of the 'mighty Wurlitzer' of the mainstream media. But the internet has been filled to the brim with disinfo, some generated by people in new 'public service' jobs, an some generated and distributed by machine. When tasers -- remarketed electric shock torture from the 1960's CIA -- came on the market, I described them above merely as politically correct guns for SUV-driving suburbians. But now police are tasing a person to death *every week* in the US. Just think how many people they are tasing that didn't die. England just reported its first police taser death last week (poodle!). And the police in the US aren't shooting any less people. There are already combo prototypes of unmanned aerial drones that can tase you from the sky. Eventually, surveillance cameras or TSA metal detector check points will have tasers in them. The recent war in Libya (it didn't even come up in the vile US Congress!) was a brilliant example of putting all this together. It was amazing to see the raw power of information control not just in the US/UK/EU but in, say, Saudi media. The money and gold of the regime were seized electronically without protest. The literal handful (maybe 5!) non-mainstream reporters on the ground in Libya were silenced by death threats conveyed through the 'reporters' from CNN/CIA. Gaddafi's army was burnt to a crisp by high tech night bombs to pave the way for the al-Qaeda rabble, led by a literal al-Qaeda guy from Paki who had been tortured by the CIA, then imprisoned by Gaddafi only to be let out by Gaddafi's son. Libya, previously with the highest standard of living in Africa, above Saudi and Russia (!) was turned overnight into a smoldering improverished, no-electric power, no-water, no-hospital wasteland run by NATO-installed al-Qaeda. Compare this to alternate reality most people got off the internet/teevee.
    -----------------------------------------------
    I admit this all looks bad. However, it also depends on fossil fuel. Fossil oil is currently on its final plateau and coal and natural gas are getting there soon. We are close to the peak net energy plateau. Since it is a plateau before the drop begins in earnest, the current orgy of building military killing machines and police human suppession machines will likely crescendo over the next 10 to 20 years, and will continue to be repatriated from brown-people-land back to the homelands. But it seems unlikely to me that 'terminator world' can survive in that form past the beginning of the collapse of industrial civilization, which for the past decade I have been expecting to begin around 2030. High tech machines have specialized parts like high quality infrared cameras that are manufactured in secret. But they also rely on parts manufactured for consumer products by consumer-dependent corporations. Turning the whole population to manufacturing tanks when they used to be making cars in WWII was one thing. It was a time of perfect exponential increase in fossil fuel energy. Turning the whole population to manufacturing terminators and crowd control machines seems less practical as the grid starts to fail, and long distance transportation begins to break down, and the debt based money system malfunctions in a time of economic/energy contraction. I suppose this is the final stage of peak oil awareness -- the embrace.

    [Sep12'11] Solyndra, a silicon valley green-tech thin film solar startup compary that had raised more than $1 billion in venture capital and secured another $0.5 billion in federal loan guarantees has just declared bankruptcy. Part of the reason was uncertainty about government incentive prorgrams. Thus, right at peak oil, it's still cheaper to 'burn the furniture' of remaining harder-and-harder-to-get fossil fuels than it is to build and use renewable energy. As the price of fossil fuels increases (or stays the same while people's purchasing power drops), this is unlikely to change, unfortunately. The main reason is simple: renewable energy systems are made using fossil fuel. Renewable energy systems will always be more expensive than fossil fuel until there is no fossil fuel left. Then it won't be possible to make them any more. The reason that Solyndra failed was that the small solar energy market was swamped with lower-priced coal-made Chinese conventional solar cells (from Suntech and Yingli, made with a more 'business-like' approach to environmental damage). The Chinese cells are essentially 50 year old designs, as opposed to the hi-tech thin film cells from Solyndra (using rare earths from China) that were supposed to be so cheap they could be sprayed onto roofs. The article about it in Forbes completely misses the take-home point. It shows that the Chinese can turn coal into solar cells for cheaper (much lower labor costs, no pesky constraints on pollution) than California can turn coal and natural gas more cleanly into thin film cells. Crucially, it doesn't show that either process could work when the coal and natural gas are gone -- whether clean *or* dirty. Rock on humans. For the record, I'm *strongly* in favor of subsidising solar heat concentration and solar electric while we still can, even though fossil fuel will always be cheaper.

    [Sep21'11] Solyndra has a bit of dirty laundry. It looks like some of the people running it realized they could game the system. Compared to the utter disaster of ethanol (using *over* 50% of the US corn crop together with congressional subsidies to generate an essentially *zero* net energy product (about 1 energy unit of fossil fuel is turned into about 1 energy unit of ethanol), Solyndra was at least making solar cells that turn energy positive for every year after 5 or 8 years. But the fact that solar electric was regarded by sociopathic money parasites as a possible host is profoundly depressing. I wish those parasites would just get some horrible disease so normal people could live.

    [Oct05'11] Steve from Virginia is wordy, but I like his main points. As energy prices go up, initially from getting close to peak energy, they tend to cause economic contraction. This results in energy prices temporarily falling. This in turn results in fossil fuel energy companies no longer going after expensive (i.e., lower energy return on energy investment) reserves; but it also results in renewable energy companies going broke. Eventually energy prices spike again. But that soon causes economic contraction and a repeat of the cycle. Thus, business cycle time delays interact poorly with the later development of industrial civilization. Conventional economists usually expect that energy price increases will spur innovation and renewable energy and more exotic non-renewable energy. Instead, the price *crashes* are selectively decimating the very companies that are supposed to grow and save the day because they are smaller and closer to the edge than fossil fuel companeis. I didn't see this dynamic coming when I first started to think about peak oil 10 years ago. The result will probably be fossil fuel severe shortages at a time where there is still plenty of positive EROEI fossil fuel left in the ground. I suppose that's a silver lining of sorts.

    [Oct16'11] Student debt has now eclipsed credit card debt and is headed to $1 trillion dollars (the average cumulative student debt at a for-profit college is almost $30K). From 1990 to 2000, earnings of young college graduates and college costs were both going up. Since then, earnings have gone flat or dropped slightly, but costs have continued linearly up. If 1991 was 1.0, young college graduate earnings are only up to 1.1x but costs are up to 1.55x. Obviously, this can't go on forever. It is looking more and more like the housing bubble. It took a while for that one to pop; even after household incomes went flat, prices continued to gallop up for 6 years (and house prices still remain bizarrely inflated relative to salaries in many places). Then there is the effect of college debt on new/future housing debt -- it would seem to be negative, or deflationary. But despite all the talk of deflation and debt destruction, the on-the-ground feeling is that the actual prices for things you actually need (rent, food, furnishings) are increasing while incomes are decreasing. It feels a lot like 70's stagflation, but with near-zero interest rates, so savers/pensioners are hit, too. In the long term, I can't see how the coming debt destruction could be inflationary, but my previous predictions in this area have not been accurate (London rents are continuing to inflate). As a teacher, I'm not looking forward to what this will eventually imply for college education. Things seem to be spinning around in non-productive directions. Take "article spinning" -- a computer based method of "elegant variation" to take existing articles, rewrite them with synonyms so that google doesn't recognize them as semantically equivalent (since google doesn't need/do semantics) then spray them all over the web and have them link to your website, to run up your google page position (this web page, ridiculously :-} got a hit from thebestspinner.com). Or the bizarre copper carry trade in China, where reports suggest that over the past 3 months, virtually all of the copper imported into China was used as a financing instrument (!) The idea is, get a low interest loan to buy copper using dollars, defer payment on the loan for 6 months, stockpile the copper, use it as collateral for a yuan loan, yuan appreciates against the dollar, make a profit. Now copper price has crashed more than 30% causing a problem for these huge inventories (several times as much copper as is used in the entire US in a year). Or the story I previously pointed to about Lenovo (Thinkpad computer manufacturer) making more than half of its profits in *real estate speculation*... World gone wild.

    [Oct18'11] The comical but "very real, very real, very real" (Diane Feinstein, Peter King) alcoholic car-salesman former-khebab vendor plot seems laughable; and in the UK, Liam Fox was outed as a Mossad mole. But there are also reports of a large-scale US military exercise in the middle east today. Probably just the usual shadow boxing/disinfo. But the kill Elvis show has long worn off, small crowds of villagers with pitchforks are collecting here and there in American cities, son of COINTELPRO adbusters and color revolution shills are out among them in force, there is the unsightly spectacle of an African American president bombing black Africans, creating a callosal humanitarian disaster in order to 'save civilians', and not even 'succeeding', robot assassins killing 100 people every few days, oil prices staying high (so far) unlike in 2008, and a frigging election/sewer/circus coming up! Who knows?

    [Oct26'11] Steve Jobs told Obama that Obama would be a one-term president because he failed to eliminate the teachers unions (!), and because there is no 11 month school year and classes until 6 PM, and because Steve couldn't manufacture his fondle phones as cheaply in the US as he could in China -- all this while Steve was piling up one of the largest hoards of US personal and corporate cash, and being a lot more stingy with it than his nemesis, billg. The problem is that US-ers and UK-ers and EU-ers (well, and me, typing on a old Apple laptop) agree with him. They wouldn't be willing to pay more for fondle phones (or even just buy new models less often!), and so suicide nets and slave wages it is. And damn those teachers. But perhaps Steve is now working word problems in hell, forever (I know, bad taste).

    [Oct26'11] The US withdrawal from Iraq seems to have come down to the refusal of the Iraqi government to give US troops immunity from prosecution for any heinous crimes they may have committed or have yet to commit. Whether they actually leave on time is another question. But what about payback? After almost 10 years, a holocaust of Iraqis (1-2 million killed, millions more wounded and poisoned, Fallujah a horrifying depleted uranium wasteland), over $1 trillion US tax dollars spent, Iraqi money and gold and artifacts looted, a few thousand Americans killed and more wounded, the public witch-hunt basis for the war (weapons, 9-11 association) completely and utterly debunked years ago, and the country of Iraq completely trashed, the US now says it will leave, paying no reparations, while retaining oil contracts! When the US is eventually laid low, the world will remember them/us like they remember the Nazis -- good tech, but intrinsically bad people who stood by and let the militarized state massacre millions of other humans they considered to be genetically inferior both inside and outside of their country. When the power of the US wanes, the rest of the world may very allow for the US what happened to the Germans at the end of WW2 -- cities firebombed and several million Germans casually starved to death in post-war concentration camps.

    January 24, 2012 (earlier: scroll back)
    [Nov20'11] The US police storm trooper/dystopian sci-fi thing creeps me out. The EU/UK has their own version. I always hope that people here or people there will rise above being 'good Germans'. But, unfortunately, I think there was nothing special about Germans. What they did was quintessentially human -- it's the human way. Most all human chimps have their own hidden master race thing going on under the covers. The economic contraction (US-ians actually used 5% less oil than in 2007) plus a doubling (US) or tripling (UK) of college tuition has driven some mostly younger people to begin questioning the status quo (update: the Berkeley tuition is planned to increase from 11K to 21K in one year). But not close to a majority. If the overall social situation showed even the slightest hint of really getting out of hand, I think one well-placed false flag could instantly drag everybody back into line for several years (e.g., a small dirty nuke in a big city). The sad thing is that I don't even think one will be needed. A string of Joe Pa's will do just fine! -- and there is virtually an unlimited supply of those in the wings. The relatively big Libya operation hardly even made the news. There will be many 'good humans' when energy descent starts to really bite in 15 years. Well, OK, it was a wrong-side-of-the-bed/glass-half-empty kind of day... :-/ Tomorrow's another day.

    [Nov27'11] I watched Back to the Future for the first time since I saw it when it came out in 1985. It was complete with Spielbergian 'Libyan' terrorists (played by Jeff O'Haco and Richard L. Duran) driving a VW microbus that somehow had no trouble keeping up with the DeLorean. The doctor took a big jump into the future -- to around now. That future was a time of flying cars, capes, and desktop fusion. Flying cars, like fusion, are the future -- and they always will be. It made me gloomy the whole next day.

    [Dec28'11] Ron Paul's antiwar position on foreign affairs and anti-police-state and anti-bank-bailouts position on domestic affairs is better than Obama's. He is the *only* antiwar candidate! Other aspects of his domestic plans (e.g., his return-to-feudalism austerity plan, the demonization of the EPA, gutting Social Security and Medicare, reducing regulation on financial criminals even more than its current almost non-existent state) are worse than Obama's. He is similar to Obama in being utterly clueless about the implications of peak oil (he thinks high prices will cause the market to email mother earth to create more low energy-return-on-energy investment oil). With respect to the EPA, PissedOffAmerican said in a comment, "I'll take smog over a nuclear winter". But in any case, it makes *very little difference* to actual policy who is elected to be the president of the US.

    [Jan04'12] Statins damage muscles because they (are designed to) inhibit the mevalonate pathway and ubiquinone (coenzyme Q10). This produces muscle cramps, myalgias, and sometimes myopathy and rhabdomyolysis as 'side effects'. The most potent statin (cerivastatin) had to be withdrawn from the market in 2001 because of the risk of rhabdomyolysis (pathalogical digestion of skeletal muscle) was ten times higher (at 1 per 1000) than with other statins. In this context, it is worth pointing out that the heart is the most important muscle in the body...

    [Jan17'12] "It is my professional opinion that the production of excess energy has been demonstrated when the results of the last 20+ years of experimentation are evaluated. There has been a lot of work done in the past 20+ years. When considered in aggregate I believe excess power has been demonstrated. I did not say, reliable, useful, commercially viable, or controllable. If any of those other terms were applicable I would have used them instead. If anything, it is the lack of a single clear demonstration of reliable, useful, and controllable production of excess power that has held LENR research back." -- Joe Zawodny on cold fusion on his blog.

    [Jan24'12] Sure Steve Jobs was a money slut who wanted to break the teachers unions so he could turn the US into a giant Foxconn with suicide nets, slave workers *and* slave engineers, powered by coal extracted even faster and more dirtily than the US currently does (as long as the opaque clouds of coal smoke didn't reach Steve's mansion). But an equally as great problem with 'Steve Jobs' are all the people who slavishly, repeatedly buy the smooth surfaced devices that are killing live music and conversation. Now, Steve's AI, Siri (originally the soldier's assistant), can be lazily asked with voice commands to text a 'friend' to say you will be late to a meeting. It's natural you are too lazy to take the effort to text, otherwise you would have been on time. Or Siri can find you the nearest sushi restaurant, which you will hardly be able to taste because you will be stroking the large smooth-surfaced pill during dinner. Stop buying! Start practicing an instrument instead of learning to type on a large pill!!

    [Feb07'12] The tragicomedy of errors in energy continues. As we stand at the beginning of the peak oil downslope, the boom in *natural gas* drilling from 2004 to 2009 has resulted in a temporary glut of natural gas. This has reduced US natural gas imports. US natural gas imports began in 1990, and reached 1/5 of US gas usage by 2003, but now are down to 1/7 of US natural gas). But it has also caused natural gas prices to crash below the costs of current production. That resulted in 2009 in natural gas producers *halving* the number of active drilling rigs in the space of a few months. The low cost of natural gas has also put pressure on renewable energy companies and plans (why invest in wind now when natural gas is so cheap?). Of course any idiot can see that this low price will only last a few years. Fracked natural gas wells deplete in less than 2 years (much faster than oil wells and faster than non-fracked wells) and the towering daily usage of natural gas isn't going anywhere (60 billion cubic feet per day in the US). When storage and the current crop of frac wells are depleted, there will be a horrible price spike, re-invigorating investment in in the latest expensive production methods. The price spike (natural gas use is just about evenly divided into industrial, electric power, and residental+commercial uses), will then motivate people to think about renewable power for a year or two. I used to think this was a stupid way to raise a kid or run industrial civilization (6-month year look-ahead, no planning for even the mid-term future), and that it could be fixed. I still think it's stupid; but now I see it can't/won't be fixed. As a world society, we have made the choice not to fear greed. The only long-term planning these days is for war with "North Garnet". That should fix things real good. World stupid bowl. Big mistake, once again, since we should have started retooling in the 1970's when the problem first came to light. Instead, we will barrel blindly on, toward a dreadful mid-century catastrophe.

    [Feb13'12] "They were irrational statements that made the deputy be concerned for the safety of the children," Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Orange County sheriff's department said, describing why this unarmed black religious Camp Pendleton marine nursing student was shot to death in front of his daughters by 4 white armed cops while he on an early morning prayer walk with them. This wasn't news. Your news would be Whitney Houston (who had an amazing voice). In other non-news, the FAA has gotten the go-ahead from the House and Senate (75% of the Senate!) to purchase 30,000 aerial drones for domestic surveillance/torture use. They will initially be armed with shotgun tasers (US police already kill 2 people per week with tasers and torture a much large number of people per week with tasers without killing them). I liked the old "Prisoner" teevee series, but I didn't want to live in it! (except for Port Meirion). What's next? Domestic drones with robocop cannons and missiles like the ones in Afghanistan? "Oh sorry, you looked like you were endangering your kid so we accidentally took out your house and wife and other kid. Please accept our apology and get some counseling."

    [Feb14'12] My best guess peak oil estimate from around the time of my Iraq antiwar speech in 2003 until recently was 2008. Now I am beginning to wonder whether this was actually an overestimate! The first clue (snark alert) was a sympathetic 2012 articles on peak oil just published in Science and Nature. Journals like Science and Nature would never touch a politically hot topic like this until it is completely safe (i.e., irrelevant). When it could have counted for more in 2004, they were publishing prominent main articles by oil businessmen like Leonardo Maugeri (see above), saying there was no need to worry about peak oil.
    But the real clue to me (snark off) were these two shocking graphs: (1) the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) graph of total gasoline retail deliveries (which includes ethanol), and (2) the US Department of Transportation graph of total traffic volume (both *not* zero based [update Apr05: the retail sales graph is now changed to zero based]). The first graph shows that the US has been on a long gasoline consumption plateau from about 1988 to 2007 (with two dips around 1995 and 2005). The middle of this plateau was 1998! Things changed suddenly in 2007, when consumption began to decisively fall. The fall was approximately linear until the unprecedented discontinuous drop of the last two months. Note that there have been gradual improvements in miles-per-gallon since 1995, all during the plateau. But the savings from those improvements were completely cancelled by people doing more driving in cars with more powerful engines (Jevons' paradox -- increases in energy efficiency lead to the same or greater energy use). Jevons is starkly visible in the second graph, which shows the linear increase in total traffic volume from 1996 until 2007. The continuous upslope in driving ate up every last bit of engineering efficiency gain over the past 20 years. What began to happen in 2007 in the US is new and different than anything in the past 20 years -- closer to the real, forced overall energy usage drop that happened in the late seventies during the pre-peak-oil Arab oil embargo. Gasoline deliveries have gone from around 60M gals/day for a full 20 years from 1985-2005, to 45M gals/day in 2010 (a 25% drop in 3 years), to only a freaky 30M gals/day in the last 2 months (a 50% drop in 5 years! -- but the last 2 months are undoubtedly an outlier). Another couple of years of this and we're talking Greece. Greece imports 100% of its oil, and has been hard hit over the past 5 years by the tripling of oil price -- the major reason, completely ignored by the MSM, for its recent increased debt problems. Standard economists will say, oh, it's just a flesh wound (in the US); the usage is down because of the temporary credit crunch, and that is about to go away. In reality, peak oil happens when people can't afford to pay the increased price of mining the harder-to-get, lower return on energy investment energy reserves that remain. Oil price doesn't have to spike at peak oil. It will probably drop some. It frightens me to see people, here in the Unemployed Kingdom, still accelerating their metal crates as if to kill me (which frightens me, too :-} ), while the world is suddenly and catastrophically changing around them. I suppose the rapidly depleting North Sea, which still provides the great majority of domestic UK oil will keep Greece at bay here for another 5 or 10 years (North Sea depletion is running at 5-10% per year). The deepest problem is that this is a slow motion disaster, which is what makes it so insidious and hard to respond to. The world won't end this year or next.

    [Feb28'12] This remarkable chart from Asymptotes of Power by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, shows that the increase in the US incarceration rate -- which has reached the absolutely stunning number of 5% of the US workforce -- exactly parallels the beginning-in-1980 increase-to-1929-levels of income disparity. The argument of the paper is that the elite are worried that the increase in violence against the general population required for them to keep (or to keep increasing) their ill-gotten gains may be too large for the general/world population to accept. Despite Occupy, Arab spring, and the UK/EU riots, a general uprising still looks distant.

    [Feb29'12] A great and hopeful article about energy and society from UCSD physicist Tom Murphy here. Go Tom!

    [Mar10'12] As Rome burns (along with the yearly world cubic mile of oil, of course), this is what the parasitic money classes are doing. Paper oil. Enron ownership games with oil on its way to port. Shame. But what about all the other people who have kept this damaging parasitic rule-bending cheating legal? It looks like oil *is* set to drop sharply in the next few months (tho highly unlikely to get down to $35 like last time). These criminals should be sentenced to actually make something real, say, an iPod, after being woken from their dormintory bed. Shame, you worthless humans. All these tricks exploit tiny variations in oil usage, oil fear, and oil production, which despite the upcoming swoon in price, is still right up again the limits. The little money-making wiggles are utterly meaningless in the greater scheme of things and should be damped, not encouraged. In any sane world, we would, as Chris Cook says, stop this nonsense and try to begin practical planning 10 or 20 years ahead, like you would if you had a kid (oh, I forgot, all these people do have kids...). Instead of that, you have barf heads like Alan Kohler voming on the teevee about how there is no oil problem. And a bunch of internet weenies who see oil price manipulation as evidence against peak oil. Unfortunately, as I've said many times, both are true; in fact, peak oil is absolutely the *best* opportunity for oil money gamers! Go here to see Matt Mushalik blow the supposed 'graph guy' out of the water with a bunch of real data. But Matt will never get good air time. On days like this, the chance of any substantive change looks so remote that I descend to rooting for Brave New World vs. 1984 and recording indulgent Miles jam tracks that make me think of 1970...

    [Mar19'12] Apple has $100 billion in cash -- 1/10 of a trillion dollars, equal to 1/30 of the total US budget. Much of this pile is for effective marketing of anti-social media devices...

    [Mar23'12] Tom Murphy gave a very sensible interview to OilPrice here. The questions of the interviewer (the editor of OilPrice) reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of science that is widespread, even among scientists; it amounts to a religious faith in never ending progress that will arrive just in time to improve human existence and allow us to continue our unprecedented increase. Science is about finding out how the world is, independent of how we would like it to be. Of course, human scientists do this through experiments that they fervently hope will work. But if their experiments don't work, then eventually, that hope must be extinguished or moved on to a different experiment. Engineers try to make new practical things that might be more efficient than existing things. But like scientists, even though an engineer may fervently want to make something, and there is a lot of money to be made if it could be made, some things just can't be made. High-temperature superconductors capable of carrying high currents would make MRI cheaper and some company a lot of money. Those facts alone says nothing about whether they are a physical possibility. Atomic physics could care less about the hope of engineers for progress in high temperature superconductivity *or* economic demand (e.g., prompted by running out of helium from methane wells). As energy depletion begins to bite by the end of this decade, there will begin to be less and less *energy* for scientific and engineering exploration. I agree with Tom. We should do something now. Mother nature will soon be coming to bat -- twice. First on energy, then on climate. She's not religious and she has a really big bat.

    [Mar28'12] My physics education was quite spotty, so I was surprised to learn here that the average amount of power produced by fusion in the sun is only one tenth of a milliwatt per kilogram of sun. A human body generates thousands of times that much power per kilogram. A car engine is a million times more power-dense than the sun. The (long) planned fusion reactors would be more than a billion times denser. So tokamak fusion is really not exactly like power from the sun. Since we haven't yet reached break-even (as much power out as we put in) for even 1 second after 50 years of trying, I don't think we should count on fusion working. We should invest more in other proven technologies like wind, solar electric, and solar heating. Just because they currently cost more than fossil fuel is a not a good reason to avoiding investing in them. At least they do produce energy, unlike fusion. They will likely *always* cost more than fossil fuel, since they are made out of fossil fuel -- that is, right until fossil fuel gets rare. If we are not already making our energy machines using non-fossil fuel power when the fossil fuel gets rare, then industrial game over.

    [Mar29'12] From a Tainter-esque perspective, consider the long lamented 37-page Glass-Steagall Act and the recently passed 2319-page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that was supposed to fix the problems caused by repealing Glass-Steagall. I hate to see what will get passed to fix Dodd-Frank...

    [May03'12] Busy lately. Here is a charming passage from the recently released 2010 Army "Internment and Resettlement Operations" manual available as a PDF here: "2-40. The I/R [internment/resettlement] tasks performed in support of civil support operations are similar to those during combat operations, but the techniques and procedures are modified based on the special OE [operational environment] associated with operating within U.S. territory and according to the categories of individuals (primarily DCs [dislocated civilians]) to be housed in I/R [internment/resettlement] facilities." It's nice that U.S. territory is a "special operational environment" but I'm feeling uncomfortable about the possiblility of becoming 'dislocated'. But on the positive side you can get brownie points if you are one of the "detainees and DCs [dislocated civilians] willing to assist with product development, such as taping audio surrender appeals" or "detainees and DCs [dislocated civilians] willing to participate in PSYOP product testing." (p. 284). Personally, I wouldn't go for taping surrender appeals since my singing voice was never good, but perhaps I could be one of the other useful "detainess and DCs [dislocated civilians] with special skills who can assist with I/R [internment/resettlement] facility operations. Such skills include language; construction; engineering; and training in medicine, education, and entertainment." Yeah. Don't intern me bro, I can play Giant Steps on the guitar for the internees! That'll soften them up. Gentlemen: your fellow frogs are writing these instructions for slowly boiling naked frogs.

    [May19'12] Facebook went on sale today for almost 1/10 of a trillion dollars, to be paid to a bunch of parasites hiding out on treasure island. Facebook is basically a private sub-internet that offers nothing you can't already do on the non-private internet with a *very* moderate study of web design. Its profits are miniscule by comparison to a tenth of a trillion dollars. The sucker IPO generated money roughly equivalent to 5% of the entire yearly federal budget. The price had to be propped up to keep it falling way below the opening price by Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter, late in the day. Watch the furbo parasites dump now that they've pumped. Facebook makes me sad to be a human. Industrial civilization slams into peak oil, and this is the response?




    Blown up election by Linh Dinh
    [FB: omputer vs. computer] by zerohedge
    If cops can't taze a pregnant woman, the terrorists will win by William N. Grigg
    The great facebook con by Henry Shivley
    The inequality speech that TED won't show you by Jim Tankersley
    Idiocy as WMD by Linh Dinh
    Cornucopians in space by Gregor Macdonald
    My neighbors use too much energy by Tom Murphy
    How many people died for you eight-hour day? by Surly
    Make love, then war by Linh Dinh
    The middle class hasn't disappeared. it's just sliding toward the bottom by Paul Buchheit
    Liberals and their situational ethics by Lawrence Davidson
    Five reasons why the very rich have NOT earned their money by Paul Buchheit
    Know thy enemy by Linh Dinh
    U.S. filmaker repeatedly detained at border by Glenn Greenwald
    How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses by Naomi Wolf
    Scott Henderson trio in Tokyo! [tuned down to Eb] youtube
    The eagle and the lion by John Michael Greer
    A modest health care proposal by Dmitri Orlov
    [3% of boys in Utah are autistic] by Brian Moench
    Why baseload power is doomed [and good riddance!] by Chris Nelder
    [gang killing by paramilitary police run amok: breathing while black] by Michael Powell
    Trained for success, bred to be eaten by Dmitri Orlov
    Of God, peak oil and turkeys... by Steve Ludlum
    Drunk soldiers have fun by murdering Afghan people [it's not terrorism when we do it -- it's an 'isolated incident'] by b
    [copper thieves in Chicago -- burning the furniture] by Ameet Sachdev
    Roger Boisjoly dies by Ralph Vartabedian
    Stratfor overview wikileaks [by intelligence infighting? -- update: no, the FBI!]
    The straw at the bottom of the cliff by Dmitri Orlov
    Manipulating reality; hurting democracy by Lawrence Davidson
    [coming to a drone near you] by Jeff Hecht
    Kurt Haskell's statement by Kurt Haskell
    Killing to pop music by Linh Dinh
    [US peak oil in one graph -- gasoline deliveries] EIA
    Why is gasoline consumption tanking? by Charles Hugh Smith
    The cancer in Occupy by Chris Hedges
    After the gold rush [shale gas] by Art E. Berman
    Bilderberg steering committee member is Ron Paul's biggest campaign donor by Noah Rothman
    Unadjusted consumer credit soars by most since peak of credit bubble, Aug07 Tyler Durden
    More on Ron Paul by Paul Craig Roberts
    [big pharma and the CDC vs. the breasts of the third world] CDC
    [cost for one F-35: 1/6 of a *billion* dollars] Russia Today
    Last days, last words by John Rember
    Bilderberg steering committee member is Ron Paul's biggest campaign donor by Noah Rothman
    Unadjusted consumer credit soars by most since peak of credit bubble, Aug07 Tyler Durden
    More on Ron Paul by Paul Craig Roberts
    [big pharma and the CDC vs. the breasts of the third world] CDC
    [cost for one F-35: 1/6 of a *billion* dollars] Russia Today
    Last days, last words by John Rember
    [you can buy a cheap whore congress-worm for 5K!] by Lena Groeger
    Personal choices in uncertain time by John Day
    Why to we ignore the civilians killed in American wars? by John Tirman
    Nordic whoring by David Macaray
    Fallujah remembered by a US marine by Ross Caputi
    war is a crime by David Swanson
    [predator drones come to the homeland] by
    Each star marks a US military base, but just so we're clear: Iran is threatening us; we're not threatening them by earth_first
    America is back on Colbert report
    A million gardens by Stan Goff
    Meet the reptiles by Mark Ames
    Comfortably numb by James Quinn
    In case you were wondering why we keep bailing out wall street... by Henry Blodget
    ['our thing' in Libya] by Franklin Lamb
    The first steps in reforming the US financial and tax system by Michael Hudson
    Mother nature reveals her energy descent action plan (humor) by Tim Murray
    Here's the army ranger the Oakland police attacked [ruptured spleen, internal bleeding] washington's blog
    Same sex wedding news [one story all the time] Conan
    Hunting witches in the 'war on terror' by Mary Beaudoin
    Suburbia death watch by Steve Ludlum
    [2-tour Iraq war veteran protestor's skull fractured by Oakland police head shot] by Linette Lopez and Robert Johnson
    A recipe for success Cryptogon
    Stranded resources by Tom Murphy
    "My wife and Guy are fearless ... I wish I could say the same about myself" by Mike Sliwa
    Message to the occupy wall street movement by Pilar
    Is it a "colored revolution"? by Michel Chossudovsky
    Deomonstrators confront Mayor Bloomberg at Manhattan restaurant dailybail
    Architectural myopia: designing for industry, not people by Michael Mehaffy and Nikos A Salingaros
    [more 'incubators' debunked] CNN
    DARPA's ghost in Apple's machine cryptogon
    Don't be a PV efficency snob by Tom Murphy
    [surveillance goes both ways -- let's keep it that way!] dailybail
    [Brezinski interview] MSNBC
    The colossal deceit known as the underwear bomber case by Lori Holt
    The triumph of capitalism: jobless nations by John Kozy
    Cowards and presstitutes by Paul Craig Roberts
    Microsoft's desperation to catch Apple in the crackpad race to the land of dumb and dumber Cryptogon
    What Solyndra's bankruptcy means for silicon valley solar startups by Todd Woody
    A huge housing bargain -- but not for you by Roger Arnold
    The FBI vs. antiwar.com by Justin Raimondo
    U.S. has nearly doubled air attacks on Libya in past 12 days by Larry Shaughnessy
    The twilight of meaning by John Michael Greer
    Solving the mystery of WTC7 Architects and Engineers
    [WTF Canadians?] by CBC News Canada
    Tax the super-rish or riots will rage in 2012 by Paul Farrell
    Police say they can detain photogrphers if their photogrphas have 'no apparent esthetic value' by Mike Masnick
    Renewable energy zealots must understand 'net energy' by Megan Quinn Bachman
    [tasers kill 1 person a week in US] Amnesty 2008
    Obama is implementing plans for war throughout the Middle East created 10 years ago by the neocons by Washington's Blog
    A nation-sized battery by Tom Murphy
    A very secret agent by Chris Cook
    10 of today's hottest jobs: proof that America is doomed cryptogon
    100 MPG on gasoline: could we really? by Tom Murphy
    Inside story on the missing tapes by Susan Lindauer
    Why do the police have tanks? [enemy combatants in your own home] by Rania Khalek
    Captured zeta leader: we've purchased weapons from the US government itself by Maria Andrade
    [we said it *was* about oil in 2003...] AFP
    The president, the media, and oil supply by Roger Blanchard
    [TSA searches grandma's Depends] by Lauren Sage Reinlie
    [go Texas!] by Jim Forsyth
    Why I am part of U.S. boat to Gaza by Jane Hirschmann
    Gaza and American 'security' by Ray McGovern
    Sermon to the sharks by Dmitri Orlov
    2010 oil story: drawing down the inventories by Gregora Macdonald
    Weiner's progressive defenders blind themselved to the rightwing views that may now ensure his survival by Scott McConnell
    Productive vs unproductive: manufacturing vs. financialization [great summary of main points] by Charles Hugh Smith
    Rise of the second-string psychopaths by David B. Schwartz
    Congressional research service confirms big banks borrowed cash for next to Nothing, then lent it back to the federal government at much higher rates Washington's blog
    [creeping police state] SWAT tactics are killing us by William Heuisler
    [creeping police state] [home burned down by CS-gas-cannister-shooting police robot directed by heat-sensors and GPS tracking detecting someone inside -- but he got away (!)] by Michael Owens
    [creeping police state] another day with the blue shirts in Phoenix rynomaz111
    [creeping police state] What were you guys thinking? Why did you kill him? by William Norman Grigg
    [creeping police state] [2 burly DC cops slam a drunk *parapelegic* man face down onto the pavement] incognitamundi
    He shows the president who's boss [US Congress poses as the Syrian parliament] by Justin Raimondo
    The sexual underground of bankers by Danny Schechter
    Engineers request permission to speak freely regarding world trade building 7 Washington's blog
    Does a CIA "asset" own the bin laden compound? by Joe Wolverton II
    Housing in North America: peak oil's primary victim by Gregor Macdonald
    [PDF] Still no rigorous hard data for saftey of X-Ray airport passenger scanners by J.W. Sedat et al.
    Bin Laden's death won't end war on terror until Americans understand the threat was always us by Susan Lindauer
    A deception too far by Michael Rivero
    China: the new Bin Laden by Paul Craig Roberts
    The agendas behind he Bin Laden news event by Paul Craig Roberts
    TSA feels up Miss America youtube
    10 doomsday trends America can't survive by Paul B. Farrell
    Ikea's third world outsourcing adventure -- in the US by Andrew Leonard
    Ten years on the road, part one by Michael Yates
    Here's the setup for the con of the decade by Charles Hugh Smith
    [hedge fund manager/filth John Paulson earned $5 billion 2010 -- $13 million/day -- and paid only 15% tax -- for doing what?] the Daily Bail
    Eyeballing John Rizzo by John Young
    [Gerald blowing off some steam :-} ] by Gerald Celente
    Super-rich CEOs are killing your retirement by Paul B. Farrell
    Will we be able to maintain and replace our energy and transporation infrastructure in a post-peak oil world? by Jeffrey J. Brown
    The psychopathology of pop hatred the Daily Bell
    "They have the money and we need to get it back" by Henry Blodget
    New Civil War erupts led by super-rich, GOP by Paul B. Farrell
    "We can be grateful..." by Larry Kudlow, scumbag
    Wikileaks, Appelbaum, Lamo, Project Vigilant Anon posted by Alan Taylor
    Four time bombs by Paul B. Farrell
    [full-power full-body medical X-ray airport scanners/cancer-inducers on the way] by Matt Johnston
    A national myth: our rich retirees by Susan Jacoby
    Driving mad by Linh Dinh
    [no-eat list] by Christopher Elliot
    Government back doors by Nate Anderson
    Don't let Wisconson divide us ... conservatives and liberal AGREE about the important things Washington's blog
    Growing army defections reported in Libya by Jason Ditz
    Iraq is no more by David Swanson
    The real reason Bernanke funnels trillions into wall street banks by Graham Summers
    [71 year old Ray McGovern roughed/cut up by Hillary's thugs, while standing silently at her preposterous talk about 'free speech in Egypt'!] youtube
    Brooking's "Which path to Persia?" by Tony Cartalucci
    No one curious what CIA is working on at the moment in Egypt? by Jay Janson
    Hard lessons from the HuffPost sale by Robert Parry
    A walk on the dark side by Mark H. Gaffney
    [credit where credit due: 9 freshmen Tea partiers defeat Obomber-supported Patriot Act re-authorization!] by Jason Ditz
    Can we do that here? by Johann Hari
    The status quo unravels by Steve Ludlum
    The US and Europe aren't "the right markets": does big oil have resources to carry out your plan? by Nicholas C. Arguimbau
    An immodest proposal by E.R. Bills
    How a giant weapons maker became the new Big Brother by William Hartung
    Forbes' rich list of nonsense by Michael Tobis and Scott Mandia
    [households vs. corporations] Contrary Investory
    We're off the rails Malcolm Gladwell video on income inequality
    De facto decriminalization of elite financial fraud by William Black
    [leaving Las Vegas] by Sartre
    De-leveraging with a twist by Steve Keen
    'Travelers feel a little safer' seeing rape victim dragged across airport by Polpolice [creeping Stasi state] by Jason Ditz
    Review of Susan Lindauer's Extreme Prejudice by Michael Collins
    Lawless police state by Linh Dinh
    A tale of two websites by Kanomi Blake
    Extreme inequality helped cause both the Great Depression and the current economic crisis Washington's Blog
    Journalists are all Julian Assange by Robert Parry
    Banana republic finance by David Stockman (yup)
    Why is Brian Whitaker lying about Israel and cablegate? by b
    The naked emperor hails sex by surprise by Pepe Escobar
    [Muslims report FBI terrorist... to the FBI] by Jerry Markon
    Is Wikileaks a front for the CIA or Mossad? by Richard Spencer, Telegraph
    Enabling bullies by Linh Dinh
    Keiser interviews Stoneleigh (2nd half) Max Keiser
    TSA Gestapo empire by Paul Craig Roberts
    Banks' self-dealing super-charged financial crisis [42 million Americans on food stamps and these criminals walk free] Pro Publica
    10 ideas to starve the Wall Street Beast by Pam Martens
    [decide not to fly because you won't let them touch your penis, and they sue you?!] insert title here
    What you don't know about torture CAN hurt you George Washington blog
    Plutacracy now by Ashvin Pandurangi
    The Bankster's last meal by Glen Ford
    [Mark Penn says Obama needs a, uhh, false flag] youtube
    The world's greatest ever scramble for resources by Nigel H. Maund
    The rally to restore vanity by Mark Ames (+ comment by WE)
    Scary new wage data by David Cay Johnston
    Interview with Mark Basile on thermite by Richard Gage for ae91truth
    Financial warfare and the failure of US military leadership by Damon Vrabel
    Tea bagger's slave mentality interview with Mark Ames
    [Bankrupt US/UK condemn leaks documenting their invading terrorist style] Wikilieaks
    Mulligan mortgages -- the banks' only way out by Gonzalo Lira
    Lender Processing Services' DOCX document fabrication price sheet
    The mortgage fraud scandal is the biggest in human history by L. Randall Wray
    Hacking the low tech future thenextwavefutures
    Why do we celebrate Columbus Day? by Eric Kasum
    The broken banking system by Ann Pettifor
    Wrong turn by Chris Floyd
    America's China bashing: a compendium of junk economics by Michael Hudson
    "A girl about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death.... I think that one of the positions took her out" by Chris McGreal
    Humanity's defining moment -- join us Mish by Damon Vrabel
    The iPhone economy by Dave Cohen
    The Zapruder film of 9/11 by Daniel Sunjata
    [3 billion a year in US tax receipts for "purification"] CBC News, Canada, 2006
    The anniversary of 9/11 Washington's Blog
    The guns of August by Chalmers Johnson
    Why Iran's Jews are better off than Gaza's Palestinians by Mike Whitney
    Miserable pursuits by Dmitri Orlov
    Heaving into view by Steve Ludlum
    From Marx to Goldman Sachs by Michael Hudson
    Space and non-space by Nathan Lewis (Oct09)
    Commodity ETFs [exchange traded funds]: toxic, deadly, evil by Paul B. Farrell
    What a real train system looks like by Nathan Lewis (Dec09)
    The problem with bicycles [interesting article, tho I am still pro-bike] by Nathan Lewis
    Coping with vomitoxin in wheat [sensible advice: wash and eat] by Gene Logsdon
    Project vigilant is a fraud by A to Cryptome
    Hollow men of economics by Gregor MacDonald
    Hell approaches for us all, but only for an extended period by Michael David White
    Like we all didn't know by Gordon Duff
    Natural selection, finance, and extinction by Charles Hugh Smith
    Terror's self-licking ice cream cone by Ray McGovern
    Facebook: no "Palestinian" pages by Jillian York
    The one economic chart you should permanently burn into your memory Economic Collapse Blog
    The middle class is being systematically wiped out by Michael Snyder
    The IMF is coming for your social security by Dean Baker
    The case of the missing chart by Steve Ludlum
    Con of the decade part 1 by Charles Hugh Smith
    What will you do if growth is over? by Nate Hagens
    Banksters are coming for your retirement next by Eric Blair
    Exclusive footage of deepwater horizon ground zero by Steve Roest
    Left leaning despisers of the 9/11 truth movement: do you really believe in miracles? by David Ray Griffin
    The military-industrial complex's wins by Melvin A. Goodman
    Financial coup d'etat Jesse's Cafe Americain
    Response to Stoneleigh's talk by Rob Hopkins and Peter Lipman
    Rethinking Iran-contra by Robert Parry
    Sultans of swap: BP potentially more devastating than Lehman by Gordon T. Long
    Where have all the peaceniks gone? by Cindy Sheehan
    [it takes a village -- 10 police officers -- to taze a 86-year-old bedridden woman] by Tim Hull
    ["Thousand Standing Around" American growth industry: harrassing amputees] by Jill McNeal
    What is fascism? by Damon Vvrabel
    The CIA/Likud sinking of Jimmy Carter by Robert Parry
    Obama's Truman-MacArthur moment by Ray McGovern
    General Stanley McTerror by Maximilian Forte
    The greatest threat to the western way of life if the western way of life itself by John Kozy
    Why, really, was the USS Liberty attacked? by Alan Hart
    Checkmate by Dmitri Orlov
    [wedding-party slaughterer collapses in Senate hearing] YouTube
    Wikileaks founder has Garan massacre video by Philip Shenon
    SEC: government destroyed documents regarding pre-9/11 put options Washington's blog
    Oil consumption around the world by Barry Ritholtz
    [HFT is a scam] Zero Hedge
    Act of desperation? by Gordon Duff
    The next 9/11 by Maidhc O Cathail
    Obama goes with Neocon flow on Iran by Robert Parry
    Treat Palestinians like Jews by Robert Scheer
    The US is defending not just its closest ally in Israeli raid, but also approach to war by EmptyWheel
    What is good medicine? by Michael Horowitz
    The really creepy people behind the libertarian-inspired billionaire sea castles by Mark Ames
    Cooper Union student loses an eye in West Bank protest by John Del Signore
    DKos booking school Fishgrease
    Slouching toward despotism by Keith Hazelton
    The intractability of the built environment by Gregor Macdonald
    [Dalio thinks he's a hyena] by Mark Ames
    Despite knowing it had a damaged blowout preventer, BP still cut corners by removing the single more important safety measure [mud] by Washington's blog
    Democracy's death spiral from Greece to the United States by Dave DeGraw
    1000 point slide compels investigation of wall street casino scam by SmartKnowledgeU
    Warning shots: how many do you need? by Guy McPherson
    Confessions of a Wall St nihilist by Mark Ames
    Is general-purpose personal computing doomed? by Neolander
    MPEG-LA -- towards a read-only culture by Eugenia Loli-Queru
    Extend and pretend III by Gordon Long
    Computerized front running [by useless Wall Street parasites] by Ellen Brown
    Pentagon looks to revive [has revived: see recent launch/test] Nazi space-bomber plan by Lewis Page
    Defense spending is much greater than you think [~30% total federal budget] by Robert Higgs
    But why now? by Mike Whitney
    Who would *not* want transparency? Washington's blog
    $33 billion dollar tax refund by David DeGraw
    A miracle in the Marcellus shale? by Dave Cohen
    Farmville by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz
    Manufacturing a Minsky melt-up by Gordon T. Long
    The sultans of swap -- act III -- the getaway by Gordon T. Long
    Sex and drugs and savings plans by Adrian Ash
    Strategic defaults increase consumer spending by Ed Harrison
    This is war by Karen Kwiatkowski
    It can't possibly be that easy by Stuart Staniford
    What is the minumim EROI that a sustainable society must have? Part 3 by David Murphy
    [US DOE admits peak oil -- only reported in France] by Richard Heinberg
    Fear and loathing in Ohio by Asher Miller
    Stop feeding the tapeworms [plus good comment] Washington's Blog
    Good-bye by Paul Craig Roberts
    Most important chart of the century by Nathan Martin
    The health care Hindenburg has landed by Chris Hedges
    Toyota hybrid horror hoax by Michael Fumento
    How much excess profit does corporate America really need? by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
    The Pentagon's runaway budget by Carl Conetta
    TV makes you deader by Linda Carroll
    Round midnight by Joe Bageant
    The future where soda cans have screens by Cryptogon
    Industry's parting gifts by Dmitri Orlov
    FBI wants records kept of web sited visited *Yawn* by Cryptogon
    How secret becomes special by Stan Goff
    Digital doomsday by Tom Simonite and Michael Le Page
    Depletion of key resources: facts at your fingertips by Peter Goodchild
    The sharp dressed man was a government agent by Lori Haskell
    Washington's militarized takeover of Haiti by Stephen Lendman
    [even far right Gold bugs are worried about wealth concentration] by Stewart Dougherty
    Court rules that mass surveillance of Americans is immune from judicial review EFF
    The battle for the American soul if over and Jay Leno won by Joe Bageant
    Spring food crisis may trigger economic collapse by Michael Hampton (a little hysterical, but 2009 was worst harvest in decades)
    2009: the year of the great vampire squid by Catherine Austin Fitts
    Conspiracy or cock up by Michael Collins
    The meaning of Copenhagen by Richard Heinberg
    The unknown war by Steve Ludlum
    House-breaking the corporations by John Michael Greer
    [personal US Air Force assassination drones] by David Hambling
    Avatar -- biggest antiwar film of all time by Gilad Atzmon
    Evidence mounts by Gordon Duff
    The underwear bomber by Joe Quinn
    Immodest proposals by John Michael Greer
    The bomb at the heart of the system by John Michael Greer
    No coherent opposition by Steve Ludlum
    Questions in thwarted US plane bombing by Barry Grey
    Thin blue whine by William Norman Grigg
    Are the CRU data "suspect"? by Kevin Wood and Eric Steig
    Was volatility in the price of oil a cause of the 2008 financial crisis? by Theramus
    [IRS audits mom for not making enough money] Danny Westneat
    US economic recovery in the era of inelastic oil by Stuart Staniford
    The economic crisis and what must be done by Richard C. Cook
    A gesture from the invisible hand by John Michael Greer
    Cuba orders extreme measures to cut energy use by Marc Frank
    Hillary's dope deal by Jeff Huber
    Almost $300 billion in housing aid (and only $60 billion of it for renters) by Justin Fox
    "Restless va gina syndrome": big pharma's newest fake disease by Terry J. Allen
    What is Obama's big gamble? by Steve Ludlum
    The case for deflation interview with Stoneleigh
    Afghanistan a success -- time to come home! by Karen Kwiatkowski
    Message from the gyre by Chris Jordan
    Strange bright banners by John Michael Greer
    Protesters shout down Ehud Olmert at [University of] Chicago by Clare Murphy
    Why the US is not Japan and [why] this is not good news by mybudget360
    What's wrong with this picture? Absolutely everything by Nomi Prins
    Dangerous unintented consequences by Martin Weiss
    Osama bin Laden: dead or alive? by David Ray Griffin
    Don't call 911 by Jamie Ross
    US income inequality [is] frightening [enlightened richies] by Bruce Judson
    Fed buys more than 100% of mortgages issued in 2009 by Chris Martenson
    [thank god it's 'retina-safe' -- but is it carbon-neutral?] by Paul Marks
    Study prompts provinces [Canada] to rethink flu plan by Patrick White
    Grinning robots by Charlie Brooker
    Heroic police electro-torture, humiliate double amputee by William Grigg
    [SPR conspiracies] by Rob Kirby (sept 11)
    [in post peak oil year 1: bicycling to school violates policy] by Andrew J. Bernstein
    Interview with Steve Keen [2nd half part2] [and part3] Max Keiser
    Swine flu 2: The Revenge by Kent Sepkowitz
    Credit is not created out of excess reserves washingtons blog
    [giving money to debtors works better than to creditors] by Steve Keen
    Daydreams of destruction by John Michael Greer
    [nanny state violent mental] by Christie Blatchford
    Sick and wrong by Matt Taibbi
    Hunger insurance by Dmitri Orlov
    A terrible ambivalence by John Michael Greer
    After Obama by David Michael Green
    The coming consequences of banking fraud by J.S. Kim
    The great American affordability scheme by Ilargi
    Bush's third term by David Swanson
    Who won the ideology wars? by David Michael Green
    The widening gap by Emily Spence
    [coming soon to a 'crowd control' situation near you] by Paul Marks
    A great new bull market? by Henry Blodget
    This blog [survival acres] is closed Survival Acres
    Buckle the heck up! (data-filled, w/key Fed acronyms) Economic Edge
    [disgusting excuse-for-a-human tasers mouthy mom and then manufactures speeding charge (thrown out) when manufactured cell phone charge falls through on Jan 31 end-of-month ticket quota day + 800 comments] by John O'Brien
    DNA evidence can be fabricated Press TV
    Cash-for-clunkers boost Japanese car sales by Bernard Simon
    If US health care's so good, why do other people live longer? by Carrie Peyton Dahlberg
    Stephen Hawking both British and not dead by Cade Metz
    Medicare for all by Ian Welsh
    ['real men' need child prostitutes] by David Edwards and Muriel Kane
    Temporary recession or the end of growth? by Richard Heinberg
    The best Goldman apology yet by Matt Taibbi
    Close encounters with the Pentagon by Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford
    How I learned to stop worrying and love Goldman Sachs by Max Keiser
    Does America 2009 = Argentina 2001? by Eric Janzen (inflationista)
    Sustainable blather by Scott McGuire
    The bailout was based on a big fat lie by John Carney
    [real warfare destroys your mind] Dave Philipps
    You tax dollars at work by John Cook
    [anything the police do is justified] AP
    [go Marcy Kaptur!] Congress: Hank Paulson BAC-Merrill testimony
    [Abu Ghraib comes home] by Tesa Culli
    The makings of a police state, part 1 by Sibel Edmonds
    The save the Republic, tax the rich by Robert Parry
    New, hard evidence of continuing debt collapse by Martin Weiss
    Max Keiser interviewing Michael Hudson interview by Max Keiser
    Max Keiser on Goldman Sachs interview with Max Keiser
    [why you *really* don't want cloud computing] by David Pogue
    Legal immunity set for swine flu vaccine makers by Mike Stobbe
    Why the NSA-Titter rumor is dumb by Cryptogon
    Toward a solution to the debt crisis in California by Ellen Brown
    Cruise missile 2008 by John M.
    Professor Pileni's resignation as editor-in-chief of the Open Chemical Physics Journal by Niels Harrit
    If it isn't Sarah, it'll be somebody like Sarah by David Seaton
    'Unscientific America' -- a review by Michael Mann
    Forget shorter showers by Derrick Jensen
    Largest ground combat operation since the Vietnam war [same policy as Bush] by Rick Rozoff
    What the jumps in the U.S. 'savings' rate really means buy Michael Hudson
    Does sodomy keep us safe? by Alan Uthman
    [even slightly better gas mileage is very hard] by John Ostrower
    Touring empire's ruins by Greg Grandin
    The Net Hubbert curve: what does it mean? by David Murphy
    Definancialisation, deglobalisation, relocalisation by Dimitri Orlov
    ACLU-obtained slightly less redacted secret tribunal hearing of a mastermind and 'a computer hard drive' PDF!
    What's next for the US economy, or what's left of it? by Bob O'Brien
    Elmer Fudd nation by Mark Ames
    Readying Americans for dangerous, mandatory vaccinations by Steve Lendman
    [RF and optical chips for targetting bombs] Antifascist
    [manly-man brawny cop takes down 72-year-old great grandmother with taser] by David Edwards
    Migrating from necessity by J.D. Rosendahl
    From a failed growth economy to a steady-state economy by Herman Daly
    Dark pools by Eric deCarbonnel
    Illness, medical bills linked to nearly 2/3 of [US] bankruptcies Eurekalert
    [Obama war funding indistinguishable from Bush's -- promises it won't happen again, blah, blah] by Jason Ditz
    Grand theft auto by Greg Palast
    Place your wagers Contrary Investor
    [loathsome bankers trying to claw back charity grants in order to pay obscene bonuses for ...screwing us?] by Parul Tharp
    [gold 'exports' and the US trade gap] by Rob Kirby
    Time to get rude -- time to get French! by David Macaray
    [US in bed again with guy who boils people to supply our Afghanistan 'boyz'] by Deirdre Tynan
    Early retirement claims increase dramatically by Mike Dorning
    The NAFTA flu by John Ross
    Interview with Dr. Harrit gulli.com
    Implications of the Ayres Warr model by Ian Schindler
    Yet another bogus [stoner!] terror plot by Robert Dreyfuss
    Loan reset threat looms til 2012 by Mathew Padilla
    Obama unveils his inner Cheney by b
    [Obama keeping/legitimizing secret detention without trial] by Sheryl Gay Stolberg
    Global margin call by J.D. Rosendahl
    Torture by James Keye
    Real food is not advertised Michael Pollan interview
    Kabuki on the Potomac by Chris Whalen
    [CNN ringing the tocsin!?] by William D. Cohan
    Hersh details JSOC killings by Jason Ditz
    Jesus of suburbia by Jim Quinn
    The nature of the current financial crisis by Richard C. Cook
    Adventures in post-oil paradise by Peter Goodchild
    Greatest heist in monetary history Naomi Klein interview
    Osama bin lowrider by Chuck Burr
    Is google making us stupid? by Nicholas Carr
    Let there be light [Solaren] Cryptogon
    The peak oil crisis: priorities by Tom Whipple
    Game theory exposes PPIP as fraudulent by James Keller
    The myth of systemic collapse by James Keller
    Burning our bridges to the XXI Century by Dmitri Orlov
    Banks as bidders and sellers; financial nostalgia by Mike
    Bill Moyers interview with William K. Black PBS
    Explosives found in World Trade Center Dust [non-technical review of paper below] by Jim Hoffman
    paper Active thermitic material discovered in dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center catastrophe by Niels H. Harrit et al., 2009, Chemical Physics
    War pigs -- cost of a global empire by Jim Quinn
    [finally, an informative summary about BASE from econbrowser!] by James Hamilton
    I am a banker. SOme of us did not f*ck up by Jerome a Paris
    What a mess! by David Chapman
    Smearing Tristan Anderson by Jami Tarn
    All about gnomes by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    The next ten years by Chuck Burr
    [almost water self-sufficient in 10 years in Tuscon] by Brad Lancaster
    The hijacking of the fourteenth amendment (4 page pdf) by Doug Hammerstrom, 2002
    Busted while reporting in Alexandria by Wayne Madsen
    Obedience to authority in America by Mike Whitney
    Slow growth and deflation by Gary Shilling
    Green, as in money by Gar Lipow
    Breaking the taboo on Israel's spying efforts on the United States by Christopher Ketcham + comments
    Freeman speaks out on his exit by Chas Freeman
    Fed refuses to release identity of credit default swap counterparties [the recipient of loot from taxpayers] George Washington
    Median home price in Detroit is $7,500 by Joe Weisenthal
    Generational theft? by billmon
    The language of looting by Michael Hudson
    The oligarch's escape plane by Michael Hudson
    Social collapse best practices by Dmitri Orlov
    A fraud bigger than Madoff by Patrick Cockburn
    The economists who missed the housing bubble are coming after your social security by Dean Baker
    The Israeli smashing of Gaza and International silence by Ann Wright
    A commodity called misery by Joe Bageant
    Space crash called "catastrophic" by Vladimir Isachenkov
    Obama's awful financial recovery play by Michael Hudson
    The insolvency of the Fed by Philipp Bagus and Markus H. Schiml
    Bond market calls Fed's bluff by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
    How taxpayer finance fantasy wars by Chalmers Johnson
    [things not going well for Obama's planned Afghanistan surge] by b
    Warm reception to Antarctic warming story Real Climate
    Oil rises, oil falls [good, except ignore silly climate link] by Jim Puplava
    [scroll to 23 minutes in] 32 min Paul Kanjorski CSPAN interview
    Astonishing incongruities by Paul Craig Roberts
    Bernanke: game over? by Karl Denninger
    Super baaadddd by Bill Bonner
    Tasers cause dramatic rise [6-fold] of in-custody sudden deaths by Elizabeth Fernandez
    TARP part deux? by Karl Denninger
    What, wasn't Ahmad Chalabi available? by Chris Floyd
    Perestroika 2.0 Beta by Dmitri Orlov
    This land is your land [incl. last verse!] Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger
    State of Antarctic: red or blue? RealClimate
    To stabilize global banks, first tame [i.e. close down new] credit default swaps by Chris Whalen
    Lightning, earthquakes and hurricanes by Jim Willie
    Bernard Madoff, the Mafia, and naked short selling by Mark Mitchell
    Al Qaeda doesn't exist -- part I, part II, and part III corbett report
    Gaza invasion powered by US [$1 billion US taxpayer money spent sending fuel] by Robert Bryce
    That bastion on American socialism by Dmitri Orlov
    Homes for the holidays Contrary Investor
    The wall street Ponzi scheme called fractional reserve banking by Ellen Brown
    Dancing on a precipice by Jesse
    Debt balance markers by Russ Winter
    [ugly panicked richies] by Michael Shnayerson
    Higher wages or bubblenomics by Mike Whitney
    [bank scum tell taxpayer bailout-ers to f*ck off -- we should have said that to them before giving them money] AP
    An aerial tour by WOW
    A ost desperate move by the Fed by Rodrigue Tremblay
    [Goldman Sach bailout-receiving criminals pay 1% tax -- arrest them!] by John Byrne
    [M3 back to yearly growth rate when official M3 discontinued -- 8%/year] Shadowstats
    Senate to middle class: drop dead by Michael Moore
    A Ponzi scheme that is bigger than Bernard Madoff's by Mark Mitchell
    The end of leverage by Charles Hugh Smith
    Suburbs, cites, and sustainability by Lakis Polycarpou
    The dark alliance by Gary Webb, 1996
    We all failed Gary Webb by Robert Parry
    Total defeat for US in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn
    Deflation has become inevitable by London Banker
    [sometimes they are just pigs] CBS
    KopBuster investigators bait Odessa police to illegally raid house by Stephen C. Webster
    The radicalization of an American prisoner by George Peter Jr.
    The soldiers revolt by Joel Geier
    Drawing the future from the past by Channapha Khamvongsa
    "A bailout will weaken the automakers!" [cartoon] by Jesse
    Obama-cola by Jennifer Matsui
    The American car industry: a riposte to the knockers by Eamonn Fingleton
    Saving the Big 3 for you and me... by Michael Moore
    CNN cuts entire science, tech team [who needs it] by Curtis Brainerd
    [a good sign: they're a little scared of us!] by Johnnie L. Roberts
    Cloud computing part 4: the rise and fall by Railton Frith
    The wages of irrational greed by Jesse
    Learning to lead by Dahr Jamail
    Max Keiser comments on Obama economic team [video interview]
    Thou shalt not crucify labor on this cross of paper money by Antal E. Fekete
    Open the books by Ralph Nader
    Hope in common by David Graeber
    Behind the Citigroup "nationalization" by F. William Engdahl
    Citibank thanks America for filling its begging bowl with a royal one finger salute by New York Crank
    Crisis? what crisis? by Dave Fryett
    Senate hearing on US auto bailout signals new attack on workers by Jerry White
    A tsunami of hope or terror? by Alan Kohler
    [Mac OS X is morphing into Vista!] by Dan Frommer
    Back to the bad old days by London Banker
    Let the trials begin! by Douglas Valentine
    Flat earth Friedman's wealth is vanishing by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    Project for no American Century by George Washington
    Who are the architects of economic collapse? by Michel Chossudovsky
    Obama's change leaves by the back door by Tom Eley
    [cops unknowingly pepper spray their own agents provaceteurs -- tee hee] by Nick Cargo
    [these guys just don't learn] by Saijel Kishan
    Yes we can (have a depression) by Karl Denninger
    KPFA interview [Oct8-15] with Michael Hudson [mp3] by Bonnie Faulkner
    The strange case of falling international reserves by Hugo Salinas Price
    Wikipedia trying to delete article on Rahm Emanuel's father Wikipedia
    Obama faced with security problem at outset of transition process by Wayne Madsen
    The last recession by Jerry Silberman
    Organized crimes by Carlton Meyer
    [looks suspiciously 'helicopter'-like to me] St. Louis Fed
    More from the front lines of the financial crisis by Stephen Lendman
    The Bush-Obama-McCain Administration by Morton Skorodin
    The election-industrial complex by Walter Smolarek
    The elections and the responsibility of the intellectual to speak truth to power by James Petras
    Wall Street Monsters and Meat (you) by Jim Willie
    Why I'm voting for Obama by Douglas Valentine
    [yikes -- goldies talking deflation] by Brad Wessels
    "One brigade of soldiers cannot establish martial law" by Timothy Gatto
    What a real financial collapse looks like (English subtitled video, Argentina)
    Columbus day StJohnBeachGuide.com
    Rescue for the few, debt slavery for the many by Michael Hudson
    Genesis plan now known workable by Karl Denninger
    FEMA sources confirm coming martial law [likely disinfo] Wayne Madsen via Palestinian Pundit
    Taser creates new crowd control system [all part of 'helping' people in the homeland] by Matt Davis
    The weekly report by Mick Phoenix
    Cop tries choking to get evidence that doesn't exist Classically Liberal
    Saving fat cats is stupid by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    Gap risk by Steve from Virginia
    The bailout in plain English by Joe Bageant
    Not one dime! by Mike Whitney
    Financial coup d'etat by Catherine Austin Fitts (3/6)
    The natives are restless jesse
    We have the money -- if only we didn't waste it on the defense budget by Chalmers Johnson
    [mother (and baby!) tasered for not handing over baby to social workers] by Gerry Bellett
    Fed pumps additional $630 billion into financial system [not the bailout!] by Scott Lanman and Craig Torres
    [the complete elimination of capital markets] by Roger K
    [useful description of what interbank lending actually is] by Steve from Virginia
    How McCain blew it by Alexander Cockburn
    Bailout blues by Richard Heinberg
    Cutting the bull by Juan Carlos Arroyo Calderon
    Stop the bailout! Save America! by Karl Denninger
    Trouble in banktopia by Mike Whitney
    Tar pit operation at work by Russ Winter
    The Sphinx and the Hijinks by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    Buy my sh*tpile, Henry BMSPH
    Shantyland by Ilargi
    Adieu, stage 1 collapse! by Dmitri Orlov
    Now is the time to resist Wall Street's shock doctrine by Naomi Klein
    The Bush Administration's banking rescue plan by Rodrigue Tremblay
    Paulson plan to may benefit mostly Goldman, Morgan by Jody Shenn
    [the US army -- now 'helping' people at home] by Gina Cavallaro
    It's the derivatives, stupid! by Ellen Brown
    Lehman's bankruptcy and the hidden $138 billion bailout of JP Morgan by Rob Kirby
    You just bought a country by Ilargi and Stoneleigh
    Screwed by Mick Phoenix
    Can bailout capitalism [sic] work? Seeking Alpha [sic]
    [stupid war pundits and armchair sniper moms at Wired] by Gary Brecher
    Western capitalist civilization? by Richard C. Cook
    Let's not forget the good times Postman Patel
    Will McCain-Palin lies hurt them? by Robert Parry
    The dress rehearsal is over by Richard Heinberg
    The great decline by Glen Ford
    Was America attacked by Muslims on 9/11? by David Ray Griffin
    Storm troopers at the RNC by Ray McGovern
    What does Sarah Palin mean for the left? by Eric Patton
    A tactical suggestion for future demonstrations by Eric Patton
    How the Chicago boys wrecked the economy interview with Michael Hudson
    [this will lead to sabotage] by Stephen Baker
    Before ReCreate68 there was Jerry Rubin by rodneykingman
    My Palestinian wife by Charley Reese
    On Iraq, Biden is worse than McCain by Robert Dreyfuss
    [detention camp set up at DNC] CBS
    X11 is dead, long live X11 David Taht
    The tempo of change by John Michael Greer
    What's so heroic about being shot down while bombing innocent civilians? by Liliana Segura
    Twilight of the psychopaths by Kevin Barrett
    Organized crime nation by Dave Eriqat
    [how to make a police state] by Emily Feder
    [TSA employee repurposes delicate flight control sensors as ladder during overnight 'security' check] by Joseph Rhee, Brian Ross, and Eric Longabardi
    Private property and wealth by James Keye
    The great consumer crash of 2009 [excellent data-filled article] by James Quinn
    [reverse this: $8 billion to be seized for California universities] by Michael Rothfeld
    'Major discovery' from MIT unpractical, and ignores present advances in solar baseload by Joseph Romm
    Most corporations in US pay no federal income taxes by Jennifer C. Kerr
    Countdown to $200 oil -- oil at $115! by jerome a paris
    Information clearing house publisher threatened by Mike Whitney
    [tasered handcuffed schizophrenic man was killed by subsequent police beating] by David Edwards and Muriel Kane
    Local scientist splits water, saves world, get on TV by JoulesBurn
    Why McCain may well win by Robert Parry
    How much worse can "It" get? by Steve Keen
    Peak oil parenting by Annie the Nanny
    Sami El Haj, Al Jazeera journalist, tells his story [see esp. US torture doctors] by Silvia Cattori
    Was 9/11 an inside job? [Lockerbie comment weird] by Mark Gaffney
    Pimco's McCulley and sustainable home ownership by Karl Denninger
    [Canadian 'defense' minister defends his overseas storm trooper baby killers] by Graham Thomson
    The military-industrial complex by Chalmers Johnson
    [money cockroaches scamper out of banks to buy your farms and grain elevators] george washington
    Saudi prisons to replace Guantanamo by Press TV (Iran)
    US has bigger problems than the war on terror by Rudy Wittshirk
    A supersonic detonation [not a fuel tank explosion] caused the crash of TWA flight 800 NTSB Watch
    Status report Richard C. Cook
    Multiple birds -- one silver BB by Alan Drake
    Nuke-armed paranoids by Gordon Prather
    US defends laptop searches at the border by Alexandra Marks
    Peak toil peak oil blues
    Want some torture with your peanuts? [sounds like an old Star Trek episode] by P. Jeffrey Black and Jeffery Denning
    Not for your benefit by Mick Phoenix
    The designated suspects by Peter Dale Scott
    Running the numbers by Chris Jordan
    Bringing Ireland to Baghdad by Gary Brecher
    End game by Mick Phoenix
    We are entering a two economy society interview with Michael Hudson
    The shadow knows Ilargi comments on Alisair Barr piece
    Stop nukes by bombing oil wells, neocons suggest by Raed Rafel
    SWAT run amok by Vincent Hodgkiss
    Bomb Iran? What's to stop us? by Ray McGovern
    Most Americans are afraid to feel outrage by Joe Bageant
    Gnomic sexual desires fuel inflation fules by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    Wired magazine's incoherent truths by raypierre
    [Madsen on Apr 29 Carnaby killing] by Wayne Madsen
    Democrats back down [keeping their perfect record] by Richard Cowan
    Saving science by John Michael Greer [even the Druids like science!]
    State of emergency: the final 6 months by Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg
    The de facto nationalization of the housing bust the economic populist
    A new kind of wage slave by Betty Brink
    The hidden battle for the world's food system Raj Patel
    Researchers fail to reveal full [$1.6 million each!] drug pay by Gardiner Harris and Benedict Carey
    Has Obama moved right on Israel? RealNews video by Aijaz Ahmad
    What if it's just us? by David Ker Thomson
    Traffic! Weather! Sports! Collapse by Dmitri Orlov
    Life without airplanes LoTech Magazine
    Rich dude suggests pensions get 0% interest by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    The nearly unfathomable depths of pentagon corruption by Bob Chapman
    [our mass graves contain over 1 million souls] by Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail
    An immemorial day for the progressive media by cat's dream
    Was 9-11 a cover for a coup d'etat? by Ed Encho
    What is the earth worth? by ilargi
    Food stamps and the un-adjusted economy by Hellasious
    The last roundup by Christopher Ketcham
    List of 'suicides' by whistle blowers by Ichingcarpenter
    [crap microsoft replacement for unix servers strands 800 planes for 3 hours without radio contact after it shuts itself down] by Matthew Broersma
    Military or market-driven empire building: 1950-2008 by James Petras
    [socialism for the super-rich] by Reggie Middleton
    The Pentagon strangles our economy by Chalmers Johnson
    The Bear Stearns buy-out... 100% fraud by John Olagues
    Deflation in a fiat regime? by Mike Shedlock
    Shadow exchanges for the shadow financial system: dark pool jesse
    Fourteen points of agreement [pdf!] S.E. Jones et al., 2008
    [the similarity to recently instated British practice is remarkable] by Ellen Nakashima and Spencer Hsu
    [kinda harsh, coming from a Canadian!] by Peter K. Vickers
    The specialization trap by John Michael Greer
    The coming war with Iran: it's about the oil, stupid by Joe Lauria
    [against hyperinflationary depression] by jesse
    The slow burn by Catherine Austin Fitts
    Want to save the economy? by Mike Whitney
    [growing wealth disparity] by Henry C.K. Liu
    Credit default swaps by Ellen Brown
    [state farm commercial explaining how to avoid the humiliation of cycling] Streetsblog
    Carlyle Group's plan to take over the banking system by Robert Wegner
    Off the reservation? by Karl Denninger
    The Collapse Party platform by Dmitri Orlov
    [major miscalc] by Gareth Porter
    Meet me in Guantanomo (music) Hinrichsen Music 2008
    The failure of neoliberalism by Phillip Blond (Jan 08)
    Marine mom's eyewitness account of Winter Soldier by Elaine Brower
    The Red menace by Iain MacWhiter
    Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan try to palm off the derivatives beast onto the US public by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    The insanity of Bear Stearns/JPM continues by Karl Denninger (lifelong Republican, voted for Bush twice)
    The Fed's bailout: whose money is it? by Richard C. Cook
    Iran: danger and opportunity by William R. Polk
    The Spanish Inquisition SOTT
    How Americans have been misled about WWII by Robert Higgs
    [Sunday night: yet new Fed method of printing money] by Lee Adler
    Ploughing through the filth by Chris Floyd
    Bear Stearns; the smoking gun(s) by Jesse
    [this will be coming to intersections back in the homeland before long] blacklisted news
    Positive feedback loops by Genesis
    Spitzer's real scandal [from Sept 2007] by Sander Hicks
    Our roller coaster ride to hell by Tim Gatto
    MTV Holocaust commercials [dual use!: social engineering + lobby] Cryptogon
    Banks face systemic margin call by Walden Siew
    The next agriculture? by John Michael Greer
    [the year of the rat] by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    How Hollywood learned to stop worrying and love the (ticking) time bomb by Scott Horton
    Why are we allowing unbridled greed to destroy our childrens' future? by Gary J. Aguirre
    Will the American Empire end before it ends the world? by Paul Craig Roberts
    The brotherhood of torturers by Karen Greenberg
    Fire and rain: the consequences of changing climate on rainfall, wildfire, and agriculture by 'Doug Fir'
    x-rated story by Eric H. May
    Testy tuesday by Genesis
    The terrorists still at ground zero, 7 World Trade Center by Alexander Cockburn
    Bonds that untie by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    FIRE economy" OK, but... by Genesis
    Fed eunuchs reveal true selves in technicolor by Lee Adler
    Respect Vietnamese patriots by Jay Janson
    [the election plan] by Paul Joseph Watson
    Waterboarding for God, with decency and compassion by Ray McGovern
    [that's more like it! -- boot 'em out of town] by Darsha Philips
    History of seigniorage wealth by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    Bush bust by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    Does the Brownshirt Party have aces up its sleeve? by Paul Craig Roberts
    Tasers are a replacement for talking, not guns by Robyn Doolittle
    Primaries by John Chuckman
    "I did not have se x with that war" by E.R. Bills
    Stimulus plan is a scam to benefit the rich by Sean Olender
    Four more American drug planes seized [the CIA's granting agency...] my Danieal Hopsicker
    Back up the rabbit hole by John Michael Greer
    Trillion dollar secret by John Riley
    Judge won't let homeowners buy loans [only richies always win, by law] AP
    Global finance and the insanity defense by Pam Martens
    Disowned by the ownership society by Naomi Klein
    Microsoft panics, overpays for Yahoo by Mike Shedlock
    Where did all our deposits go? by Mike Whitney
    Which is worse: regulation or de-regulation? by Paul Craig Roberts
    [US has killed a minimum of one million Iraqis, excluding Kerbala and Anbar] Reuters
    US War Crimes in Indochina in the 1960's by Ralph Schoenman
    [John Paulson pockets $4 billion -- $1300 from every American -- for betting in 2006 that US subprime would fall -- it takes a genius, eh?] by Gregory Zuckerman
    [what the US still manufactures] by Raquel Dillion
    ["I apologize..."] by the Chimp Who Can Drive
    The US is being scuttled by Herb Ruhs
    Mind the ruins by Dimitry Orlov
    Florida sees heroes paid by Postman Patel
    Review of "Bad Samaritans" by Ha-Joon Chang by Chalmers Johnson
    [traveling while British] BBC
    How to sink America by Chalmers Johnson
    How Wall street blew itself up by Pam Martens
    [perfect for your next antiwar march!] by Adam Frucci
    [flying while Portuguese -- dang, I'm part Portuguese!] Public Citizen
    [Judge Karen decides Guantanamo detainees are not human beings] Presscue Wire Services
    Is Bush losing his grip on the military by Chris Gelken
    Why the US wants the collapse of Pakistan by John Berlin
    Money supply trends are deflationary by Mike Shedlock
    The future that wasn't: part 2 by John Michael Greer
    Sibel Edmonds speaks to UK Sunday Times by Brad Friedman
    Sibel Edmonds case by Lukery
    Imperialist propaganda by Chalmers Johnson
    Good guys in black hoods by Douglas Valentine
    Atrocity-linked US officials advising Democratic, GOP presidential frontrunners Amy Goodman interview with Allan Nairn and Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
    New rule for high profile papers by Gavin Schmidt
    The phantom terrorists of the war on terror by Daan de Wit
    A solar grand plan by Ken Zweibel, James Mason, and Vasilis Fthenakis
    Things that "can't" happen by Mike Shedlock
    [possible solution to current indium shortage] DailyTech
    US troops head to Pakistan by William Arkin (day before Bhutto assassination)
    The third rail of world politics by Kurt Cobb
    Housing -- simple as that by Christopher Martenson
    Lost [keeping the homeland safe] by Erla Lillendahl
    Gold and mortgage failure avalanche by Jim Willie
    Reconciling fascism with reality by Pervez Dastoor
    Tragicomic mulatto by Emily Raboteau
    Are Americans really "better than that?" by Ray McGovern
    Daycare paid for with the blood of Iraqi children by Thomas Riggins
    Gary Webb's enduring legacy by Robert Parry
    Recurring patterns in America's deep event [pdf] by Peter Dale Scott
    Our own holocaust denial by Mark Weisbrot
    How to be a better slave and avoid being Tased by Marcus Salek
    [All our oil problems solved by Brasil find -- not] by Luis de Sousa
    The poor. The struggling. The hedge fund managers by Bill Scher
    Hi-tech torture by Rosemary Jackowski
    Thanksgiving what really happened by Ryan Dawson
    China's e-waste nightmare worsening AP
    [more children are dying in Iraq now than under sanctions] by Hind al-Safar
    [why the US should leave immediately] Independent IE
    [higher percentage of subprime in red states] NYT
    Virtues of a disorganized resistance
    Plan B? by Richard C. Cook
    A sick graph by Dan Hahn
    [police taser man in a diabetic coma] Dothan Eagle
    The American empire is falling with the dollar by Paul Craig Roberts
    Bankruptcy law backfires on banks by Robert Wallach
    Welcome to year 27 of the Reagan revolution by Mike Whitney
    Energizer "D" battery exposed by Mike Adams
    Flashback by William Schroder
    A world without the rich by Michael Blim
    Go ahead on -- start WWIII by Gordon Prather
    [taking action, here not there] by Philip Weiss
    Criminal accessories Zbignew Zingh
    [the road to Iran] by Felicity Arbuthnot
    Torture then and now by Fred Morris
    [why coerced confessions used to be disallowed] by Steve Bergstein
    Why California burns Joseph Cannon
    The connection between food supply and energy by Glenn Morton
    The future of urban war Nick Turse in atimes
    Airstrike kills civilians in Iraq, Pentagon denies everything by Winter Patriot
    Taking out the SIV garbage by John Mauldin
    The Fed, the discount rate, and the stock market by Tim W. Wood
    Housing flameout by Mike Whitney
    The Prince by Jeffrey Feldman
    Super SIVs by Mike Shedlock
    New! Master-liquidity enabler conduit by Alan Hall
    Canadian gas -- decline sets it by Libelle
    A bill that will allocate (classified) dollars over the next (classified) years to fight flesh-eating (classified) Rep. John Haller
    Why? (is GreyZone a doomer) by Grey Zone
    [RealClimate vs. Murdock/WSJ] David at RealClimate
    How fast can we change? by Robert Rapier
    [comcast blocked email containing www.afterdowningstreet.org -- on to samizdat!] by David Swanson
    "I'm an old man. Good luck to all of you." by Zeke
    Zero emissions needed to avert dangerous warming by Catherine Brahic
    [Comment on StoneLeigh's roundup: banks and video games: sub-prime => credit cards] by Matt Kennel
    [big banks collude to 'fix' the market] by Carrick Mollenkamp, Ian McDonald, and and Deborah Solomon
    [new permission to fly rule proposed] by Wendy M. Grossman
    Melting ice cap triggering earthquakes by Paul Brown
    Finance roundup Stoneleigh, TheOildrum Canada
    [business week explaining how free markets are the problem] by David Bogoslaw
    The Portland plan [hopefully disinfo] by Cpt. Eric H. May
    Martial law [note: his 'ideal solution' is a military coup!] by Lech Biegalski (original "Solidarity" member, Poland)
    Science teacher's brush with police ends in heart attack by John Marzulli
    Who want's to bomb Iran? Democrats by Jon Wiener
    [if the Repugs can do it, so can the Demoworms -- if they wanted to] Project Filibuster
    [poodles trip over each other to line up for the next genocide] by Tim Shipman
    Toward an ecotechnic society by John Michael Greer
    What can the commodity market tell us about peak oil? by Shunyata
    So who's afraid of the Israel lobby? by Ray McGovern
    Why not impeachment? by Robert Parry
    Ramblings of an old geezer davebygolly comment on Jerome a Paris article
    Simulating the quant bloodbath by John Carney
    Inflation and the Federal Reserve by Richard C. Cook
    The depravity of empire by Arthur Silber
    The US Senate votes to partition Iraq. Softly. [how you like the democracy we brung you?] by Reidar Visser
    CIA jet used for "rendering" suspects crashes with four tones of cocaine on board
    'A coup has occurred' by Daniel Ellsberg
    To grandmother's house we go: peak oil is here by Glenn Morton
    The latest betrayal by Senate Democrats by John Walsh
    What WWIII may look like by Philiph Giraldi
    'Hitler' does New York by Pepe Escobar
    Veteran right-libertarian writer murdered [2006] by San Diego police [see incl. 2001 Kreca article] by Todd Brendan Fahey (right-wing libertarian)
    Analysts watch, wince as Mexico's oil supply dwindles by David Adams
    Lebanese musician Khalife jerked Around by venue by Pitchfork
    Fire alarm by Chris Floyd
    George W. Bush's thug nation by Robert Parry
    Death Machine Fiction Plane
    Monetary doves at the point of a gun by Jim Willie
    America's hegemonic status slipping away by Paul Craig Roberts
    Why the US is really in Iraq by Larry Everest
    Corn ethanol and its unintended consequences for California by Juliette Anthony
    Cold turkey for financial addiction by James Cumes, John Craig, James Cumes
    More Americans support Iraq occupation and mass murder by Kurt Nimmo
    9/11 explains the impotence of the antiwar movement by Paul Craig Roberts
    The second sighting by Mick P
    Bipartisan consensus pushes for Iran attack by Larry Chin
    ACC orders commandwide standdown Friday by Bruce Rolfsen
    [US-allowed] Government death squads ravaging Baghdad by Dahr Jamail
    Why Bush can get away with attacking Iran by Jean Bricmont
    [just the main points] VictorInOxford
    "Is it really true?" seismobob AKA Glenn Morton
    The bases are loaded [over 100 Iraq bases are being consolidated to 6 megabases] video
    [as read on DisinfoKos] Maccabee
    [the NSA's temporary power problems] by Lewis Page
    Technophilia, virtual communities, and the world of ends by Dave Pollard
    Bush executive order: Criminializing the antiwar movement [it exists?!] by Michel Choosudovsky
    What drives quality of life for seniors? Driving by G. Miller, G. Harris, I. Ferguson
    A wake-up call by Paul Craig Roberts
    Who to we [the US] owe and how much? by Mike Hewitt
    Absurd terrorism theories invade the homeland by Kurt Nimmo
    Proof bin Laden tape is 5-year-old, re-released footage by Paul Joseph Watson
    Impeach now by Paul Craig Roberts
    [video interview with David Strahan] by George Galloway
    The real casus belli: peak oil by David Strahan
    Iraq on my mind bz Dahr Jamail
    Has Santorum let the cat out of the bag? by Mac McKinney
    The obscenity by Stan Goff
    Killing 10,000 Iraqis every month by Michael Schwartz
    [some Brazilian ethanol produced by slaves] by Vivian Sequera
    A letter from Joe Bageant by Cid Yama
    The Fed's role in the Bear Stearns meltdown by Mike Whitney
    [use less energy, but more mercury] by Mike Adams
    [huge cache of non-Muslim explosives luckily 'not enough for act of terrorism'] Winter Patriot
    The American culture bomb Cryptogon
    Levitate the Pentagon by Pepe Escobar
    US ruling makes server RAM a 'document' [do judges have to pass high school?] by Greg Sandoval
    [prison sentences in the US] AFP
    Negroponte behind Samarra blast Press TV (Iran)
    When the grid dies by Gavin Schmidt
    [training people to be drones] by Bill Adler
    A depopulation explosion? by John Michael Greer
    Responsibility by Ken Benderman
    US signals permanent stay in Iraq by Howard LaFranchi
    Voices from the American Gulag by Chris Floyd
    DePaul denies Finkelstein tenure by Maudlyne Ihejirika and Dave Newbart
    Cops planted pot on 92-year old woman they killed in botched drug raid by Rhonda Cook
    Bush's palace by Scott Horton
    [democrat cowards cave to Bush] CNN
    Helmets attract cars [slightly: 12% closer] to cyclists by Nikhil Swaminathan
    Leave Inside Iraq
    Commander's veto sank threatening Gulf buildup by Gareth Porter
    Collateral genocide by Mike Ferner
    The moral obligation to lose the war by Robert Shetterly
    Where is the US Nimitz? by Michael Klare
    The nature of the beast [coming to a 7-11 near you] interview with "Nero"
    Unique [scroll to last heading at bottom] by Doug Noland
    Atrocity gods by Ashley Howes
    An open letter to Uri Avnery, Noam Chomsky, and Jimmy Carter by Roger Tucker
    Levin gives Cheney reason to smirk by Ray McGovern
    Where are the lifeboat communities? by John Michael Greer
    When leading fund mgr talks, do people listen by econotech
    [annual increase of M3(b) is over 10%] nowandfutures.com
    Cycles of sustainability by John Michael Greer
    [criticize the fuhrer, get on the no-fly list] by Michael Roston
    Iran: the threat of a nuclear war by Leonid Ivashov
    The general behind the curtain by Xymphora
    US military set to retain high ground in space by Railton Frith (free reg. required)
    War, energy, banks, and the US dollar by Jim Willie
    Fingers of instability, part III [so naive on energy!] by Ty Andros
    Innovation in hard times? by Stuart Staniford
    High-fivers and art student spies by Christopher Ketcham
    The Iraq that George built by Rec
    Right to know by James Rothenberg
    [dual-use Tivo -- the commenters all love it] by Sharon Weinberger
    Review of Nemesis by Stephen Lendeman
    Review of EIA oil data for 2006 by Phil Hart
    [Obama's new look] by Ali Abunimah
    Too much blood by Matt Taibbi
    The failure of reason by John Michael Greer
    Two theories by William Rice
    Americans have lost their country by Paul Craig Roberts
    Mr. Porter -- looking back, not in anger, but in error by Postman Patel
    Zero degrees of US dollar separation by Jim Willie
    Cheney OK after Afghan blast by Alisa Tang
    Aerosols: the last frontier by Juliane Fry
    Will America face the truth? by Mark H. Gaffney
    Guttmann responds to Microsoft's response by Peter Guttmann
    Congress' liability in a nuclear strike on Iran by Jorge Hirsch
    Warmonger Pipes testifying to Congress by Daniel Levy
    3,000 students shut down highway in Santa Barbara by VoteHarder
    Killers in the classroom by June Scorza Terpstra
    [Geo 'catapaults the poisoned well'] by George Monbiot
    The 'pod people' and the plane that crashed into the Pentagon by Michael Rivero
    The Anglo-American dirty war in Iraq by Chris Floyd
    If it ain't Islamic, it ain't terrorism by winter patriot
    The fixer by Ken Auletta
    [Irvine cop] by R. Scott Moxley
    US homework outsourced by Jason Szep
    To peak oil, or not to peak oil by David Chapman
    Natural gas -- a tale of two markets by Nate Hagens
    Why the Gulf countries continue to embrace the doomed dollar by Eckart Woertz
    Crude crash is no conundrum by Deepcaster
    The Bushes and the truth about Iran by Robert Parry
    Challenge article on foundations by Bob Feldman
    War signals? by David Lindorff
    The center cannot hold by Juan Santos
    The end of the "summer of diplomacy": assessing US military options on Iran (pdf) by Sam Gardiner, USAF Colonel (ret.)
    Pentagon moves to second-stage planning for Iran strike option by Larisa Alexandrovna [disinfo watch?]
    Coffee, tea, or T A T P by Garrison Keillor (but I like the Chile Peppers)
    The C I A's pain project Feb 17 interview with Alfred McCoy
    Close associate of Atta surfaces in south Pacific by Daniel Hopsicker
    Hotel minibar keys open Diebold voting machines by lambert
    77% in U.S. unable to learn a lesson by Scott Horton
    War is horrible, but... by Robert Higgs
    Falling prices may spell relief for consumers? by Paul Krasiel
    Hyping Jack No. 2 by Tom Whipple
    The day America changed, except me by David E.X.N. Nghiem
    [geologic details of the 'Jack' find] by Byron King
    [thankfully, the UK is keeping the world safe from cellists] by Mark Rice-Oxley
    9/11's dark window to the future by Robert Parry
    Everyone loves a parade! by Rob Kirby
    Train wreck of the week by Bob Chapman
    [coming to a demonstration near you?!] AP
    Is American democracy too feeble to deal with 9/11? by Paul Craig Roberts
    Most embarrassinng piece of propaganda ever? by Hsing Lee
    The sixteen acre ditch by Billmon
    The hole in the city's heart by Deborah Sontag
    Where was Osama on Sept 11, 2001? by Michel Chossudovsky
    EXTRA -- oil discovery saves civiliation! by Jeff Vail
    BYU places professor on paid leave by Tad Walch
    Experiments to test the "orange glow" hypothesis [Aug31'06] by Steven E. Jones
    Clarification of the huge Chevron Gulf oil discovery by Randy Kirk
    Diary of the Mexican earthquake by John Ross
    [NIST responds, WTC7 report due in 2007] NIST
    The US peace movement and Hezbollah by James Brooks
    Northern Great Plains falls into Dust Bowl conditions rawstory
    [more debunking of ethanol smokescreen that won't die -- from an ethanol guy] by Robert Rapier
    Will your neighbors have your back? by shelter from the storm
    The battle of Oaxaca by Nancy Davies
    Those opposed to nuclear annihilation are appeasers by Glenn Greenwald
    Republican guest suggests implementing 'universal service' [trial balloon] by Marie Therese
    The real green revolution by Adam Fenderson
    [et tu, counterpunch?!] by Maher Osseiran
    Neocons are covering their asse(t)s by shelter from the storm
    Interview with Chris Cook, originator of the Iranian oil bourse by Chris Vernon
    Bush appears more confused than usual (see middle: earpiece?) by bush unplugged
    Robert Hirsch scares me out of my wits by Rob Hopkins
    Pipelines to nine-11 by Rudo de Ruijter
    [Hollywood is against terr'ism -- whew, I feel safer already] by SMH
    Dead man coming by Matt Taibbi
    Ehren Watada [a lot braver than the chickenhawks] by Dahr Jamail
    [creeping police state] by Jonathan Karp and Laura Meckler
    The de-Zionization of the American mind by Jean Bricmont
    War against life and liberty based on lies by Scott Horton
    Israel asks US to shop rockets with wide blast [disgusting NYT euphemism for real human shredders] by David S. Cloud
    What a f***ing crock [some funny comments] by KilgoreTrout
    The fragility of microprocessors by Alice Friedemann
    The ideology of late imperial America by Jennifer Loewenstein
    Bush wants wider war by Robert Parry
    Identity politics by billmon
    Co caine one bust lifts veil on global narcotics cartel by Daniel Hopsicker
    Scott Henderson interview (guitar player) wgg
    By all means, let's be honest, Mr. Paulson by Chris Sanders
    Sleeping with the enemy by Joe Quinn
    The Hiroshima myth by John V. Denson
    Israeli bombing backed by US by not UK/European voters by Tom Baldwin
    Israel and the US losing on 3 fronts by Patrick Seale
    Plague of plastic chokes the seas by Kenneth R. Weiss
    A net energy parable: why is ERoEI important? by Nate Hagens
    The triumph of 'crackpot realism' by Alexander Cockburn
    [now that we are losing the war, the Dems finally utter a few peeps -- what cowards for not opposing it earlier] Raw Story
    A tank of gas, a world of trouble by Paul Salopek (MSM Peak Oil -- good!)
    Comments on Steven Johnes article Scholars for 9 1 1 truth
    [Rainwater peak oil prophet a co cane import agent?!] by Daniel Hopsicker
    Police spies chosen to lead war protest by Demian Bulwa
    Cassini-Huygens: lakes on Titan ESA/ISA/NASA
    Too late for empire by Jonathan Schell and Tom Engelhardt
    Making money by feeding confusion over global warming by Clayton Sandell and Bill Blakemore
    Warming triggers 'dead zone' by Jeff Barnard
    Iran: the next war by James Bamford
    US rushes bombs to Israel by David Cloud and Helene Cooper
    'Why don't you want the fighting to stop?' Rawstory
    A war by any other name by Sami Moubayed
    Attention deficit Americans are being misled to war by Paul Craig Roberts
    Treatment of US suspects at home mirrors that of terror suspects in military custody by Larisa Alexandrovna
    Why coal-rich US is seeing record imports by Mark Clayton
    [thiomersal safe if you live in a third-world country] by C.J. Clements and and P.B. McIntyre
    Keeping the streets of Iraq safe by Jean
    Round-tripping by Rob Kirby
    Hadji girl by Robert C. Koehler
    The reality beneath the flag-waving Paul Craig Roberts
    Last stand by Seymour Hersh
    People-centered peak oil investment tips by Alan Wartes
    Imagine for a moment it was you by qrswave
    America's immenent nuclear relapse by Jorge Hirsch
    Haditha, My Lai, and the media by Sarah Weber
    The high price of American gullibility by Paul Craig Roberts
    Torture school by Mark Benjamin
    Military resistance, a brief history by Zoltan Grossman
    Review of Andre Viljoen (2006) book on growing food in cities by Rob Hopkins
    "CNN, the most trusted name in aaaaaaaaahhhhh!!! the Jon Stewart show
    FAA stalls release of DC9 records by Daniel Hopsicker
    Air conditioning by Stan Cox
    [*excellent* ethanol article in Car and Driver!?] by Patrick Bedard
    [oildrum comment on article below mentioning unscalable need for gallium] by PaulS
    Major step for [US] solar power by Paul Rogers
    Killing Iraqi children by Jacob Hornberger
    [American gulag] by Avery Walker
    [why can't we get more good news?] by Greg Mitchell
    Drug warriors push eye-eating fungus Jeremy Bigwood
    [scary 'exercise' on Jun 19] by William Arkin
    The economics of oofle dust by Chris Shaw
    Countless My Lai massacres in Iraq by Dahr Jamail
    Amid the respectables in the heartland by Robert Higgs
    The alt fuels distraction by Dave Roberts
    Why does the N S A engage in mass surveillance of Americans when it's statistically impossible for such spying to detect terrorists? by Floyd Rudmin
    Stem cell caution by Richard Hayes
    Want this?
    Renewable energy: what are the limits? by Ted Trainer (Sep'03 -- reposted w/live link)
    [positive news about fusion] by Kurt Kleiner
    Gas supplies continue to be negotiated by Heading Out
    The mad hatter's war party by Chris Saunders
    How massacres become the norm by Dahr Jamail
    The lobby and beyond by Michael Neumann
    How reliable are those USDA ethanol studies? by Robert Rapier
    The war drums are getting louder by Stephen Lendman
    Stephen Walt responds [nothing to see here, move along] by Steve Clemons
    Expose on Jewish role in US policy is disowned by Richard Beeston
    Electrification of transportation as a response to peaking of world oil production by Alan S. Drake
    US corporate profits surge to 40-year high by Rex Nutting
    Will the US nuke Iran? [Real video inside this link] by Jorge Hirsch
    [other drones already up there] Cnet
    [domestic drones planned: will they be armed with missiles?] by Declan McCullagh
    [wmv video: Moussaoui wore a 'stun belt' for new testimony] MSNBC
    Willy Loman goes to war by Mark Ames
    Smoke and monetary policy by Jeff Vail
    Energy by Michael Schaefer
    [comment on peak college enrollment at theoildrum] by westexas
    Why there's no strategy to end this war by Alexander Cockburn
    The aging effects of war by Mike Woolley
    'Base' US intentions by Jim Lobe
    Harvard backs away by Alex Safia
    Whatever happened to congress? interview with Chalmers Johnson
    The end game by Steve Saville
    Food, sustainablilty, and the environmentalists by Tom Philpott
    The Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy [pdf] by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
    Too hot for New York by Philip Weiss
    The farcical end of the American dream by Robert Fisk
    Where do we get such men? by Werther
    Iraq vets by S. Brian Willson
    The Bush doctrine of nuclear preemption by Greg Moses
    [Time describes operation swarmer as photo-op] by Brian Bennett and Al Jallam
    [supporting war means supporting baby-killing] by Amer Amery
    Largest US airstrike since invasion underway AP
    Is another 9/11 in the works? by Paul Craig Roberts
    Mexico's ability to export oil [92% of Mexico's exports go to US] by Khebab
    Nuclear bunker buster bombs against Iran: this way lies madness by Stephen M. Osborn
    US on human rights: laugh yourself to death by Jim Lobe
    General Pace to troops by Jorge Hirsch
    See Dick loot by Dahr Jamail
    Is the Iran oil bourse the casus belli? by F. William Engdahl
    Life in a grass house by Kyle
    Net energy by William Stanton
    The plunge protection team intervention risk indicator by Robert McHugh
    LA South Central farm receives 3-day eviction notice by Michael Ruppert
    CENTCOM engages bloggeres by Capt. Steve Alvarez, USA
    'Torture boy' signals more spying by Robert Parry
    Shining light into the abyss by Charles Sullivan
    42% of taxes in FY05 went to current and past military activities by FCNL
    [US quietly orders $38 million more in DU shells -- $77 million total in last 2 months] by John Byrne
    Surely Americans will not put up with this censorship by Katharine Viner
    [very interesting history of "town gas"] by Heading Out
    Senator Feinstein's war profiteering by Joshua Frank
    The night before the bobing: two eyewitnesses by Baghdad Dweller
    My name is Randy by Ian Demsky
    US reign of terror in Iraq by Simon Assaf
    The problem with mercury by Peter Montague
    Paying the Iraq bill by Joseph Stiglitz
    This presentation may be too graphic by Mary Pitt
    Halliburton affiliate tabbed to build immigration jails by Mason Stockstill
    COUNTER-INTELPRO : the Black Panther coloring book WhatReallyHappened
    The Muslims are coming (again) Lenin's Tomb
    Program trading, 1999 to 2006: 19% to 56% by Jesse
    Bush SotU address: Iran is a go by Ben Frank
    What 3 degrees of global warming really means by Peter Barrett
    [2 times the risk for 10 times the profit] ConsumerAffairs.com
    Hansen in the NYT RealClimate.org
    Debate on climate shifts to issue of irreparable change by Juliet Eilperin
    The fallback position Patriot Boy
    Polls show many Americans are sumply dumber than Bush by Paul Craig Roberts (Reagan's Asst Secy Treasury)
    Public health in a post-petroleum world by G. Daniel Bednarz
    57% back hit on Iran [the USian brain is a giant propaganda sponge] by Greg Miller
    The nuclear threat at the end of the age of petroleum by Zbignew Zingh
    'We must all be prepared to torture' by Fred Branfman
    The life and death of an Iraq veteran who could take no more by Andrew Buncombe
    Is our time up? by Pat Murphy
    Warriors and wusses by Joel Stein (who'd have thunk?!)
    Harry Belafonte smacks Wolf Blitzer (2.7M mp3) CNN
    Just how dumb to they think we are? by Paul Craig Roberts
    LOL -- Bin Laden tape plugs book against his jihad in Afghan-Soviet war by Wayne Madsen
    Hillary outflanks Dubya on Iran -- on the right by Robert Dreyfuss
    On the origins of dark matter by Brad Setser
    America's dark materials [standard numbers are meaningless] the Economist
    Pharisee nation by John Dear
    Black gold and the US dollar hegemony by Douglas Gnazzo (gold bug, but a great collection of stats)
    Hedge funds finance 80% of trade deficit by Ashraf Laidi
    Cloudy with a chance of chaos by Eugene Linden
    [Ledeen wrote for forged-Niger-docs mag] by Larisa Alexandrovna
    History points to higher rates! [opposite prediction from below] by Puru Saxena
    Has the Fed already overshot? by Mike Shedlock
    [it's starting, just like Iraq] by Carol Giacomo
    Countdown to energy war by Jim Willie
    Why indeed did the WTC buildings collapse? (draft 4.4 -- pics of slag) by Steven E. Jones
    Snake oil, carnies, and four flat tires by Rob Kirby
    Gag reflex by Chris Floyd
    AMERICAblog just bought General Wesley Clark's cell phone records for $89.95 by John Aravosis
    Climate shock -- book review of Thin Ice by Kelpie Wilson
    [Mogambo Guru discovers peak oil -- but misleading on money creation: M3 virtually linear at 0.6 trillion/year since 1995] by Richard Daughty
    The middle class on the precipice by Elizabeth Warren
    Torture tactics by Barbara Wolff
    Stuff and nonsense by Gordon Prather
    Day one -- the war with Iran by Douglas Herman
    Is this the miscreats exit in OSTK? by Bob O'Brien
    The Fed's money armament is underway by Robert McHugh
    My Lai massacre hero dies at 62 BBC
    End this evasion on permanent military bases in Iraq by Gary Hart
    J Edgar Hoover with supercomputers by Ray McGovern
    [failed attempt to plant WMDs] by Larisa Alexandrovna
    East Asia under the midday sun by Steven Lachance
    Abramoff and Al-Arian by Juan Cole
    9-11 -- the gift that keeps on giving bulldog
    The Delay-Abramoff money trail by R. Jeffrey Smith
    Proud to be an American by PatriotBoy
    Saving the net by Doc Searls
    'Mrs. Anthrax' released -- no charges [and no MSM comment] by Robert Scheer
    The end of exurbia and high noon in the desert [2 great articles] by Dmitri Podborits
    Countermeasures for US citizens by John Stanton
    What's the fed up to with the money supply? by Robert McHugh
    Why indeed did the WTC buildings collapse? (draft 3.1) by Steven E. Jones
    Why was there molten steel under ground zero? by George Washington
    Nuclear deployment for an attack on Iran by Jorge Hirsch
    The grand illusion by Rob Kirby
    Smile, the Fed hates you by Stirling Newberry
    Dead man tells no tales by James Bovard
    [even richies have the jitters] by Oliver Ryan
    Congress expects up to $1B wartime request [kewl title typo: it's $100B...] by Liz Sidoti
    Making payola pay Paul Porter interview
    Philly peace protest turns violent by Jay Lassiter
    [watch out, Good Americans] by Genevieve Roberts
    Destroying the village in order to save it by revcom.us
    Greenland, or why you might care about ice physics by Stuart Staniford
    American hunger by Julian Edney
    Bushlandia in black and white by John Ross
    All the news that's fit to buy by Alexander Cockburn
    Timing the credit event by Mike Shedlock
    Eyewitness: I never heard the word 'bomb' by Siobhan Morrissey
    Giving up on New Orleans by Mike Tidwell
    GOP memo touts new terror attack as way to reverse party's decline by Doug Thompson
    What's up Doc? by Rob Kirby
    Jimmy Massey, Ron Harris and ambush journalism by Stan Goff
    Wag the Damascus? by William Arkin
    Italian TV broadcasts report of US us of chemical weapons on civilians DKos
    Gulf damage worse then reported? by David Forest
    On message by Lewis H. Lapham
    Minimal behavioral adaptation to oil shocks by Stuart Staniford
    Why oil intensity changed in the US economy by Stuart Staniford
    The costs of war by Stewart Nussbaumer
    Woman countersues RIAA for fraud and deceptive business practices by Ryan Paul
    The heat death of American dreams by Ed Merta
    Doctor's diary heals wounds by David McNeill
    The nature of anti-Americanism is changing by Raymond K. Kent
    The police state is closer than you think by Paul Craig Roberts
    Report: euthanizing right-wing pundits would solve global warming Eyewitness Muse
    Bicycle sales boom in US amid rising gas prices AFP
    Why are Democrats so dumb? by Xymphora
    Miller on a scooter by Xymphora
    US insists no plans to invade Venezuela by Christopher Toothaker
    Captain Courageous by Chris Floyd
    Houston: we have a problem Brushtail
    Rumours of deaths greatly exaggerated by Brian Thevenot and Gordon Russell
    More dissent, more censorship by Dahr Jamail
    Confessions of a hit man by Charlie Reese (self-described 'conservative' that sounds radically left to me)
    Torture, morality, and the antiwar movement by Rahul Mahajan
    Entire 101st airborne division [20,000] deploying to Iraq NewChannel5 Nashville
    Blackwater down by Jeremy Scahill
    'You can't wash your hands when they're covered in blood' by Hart Viges
    [heh, billmon's heart of darkness] by Billmon
    US army plans to bulk-buy anthrax by David Hambling
    House republican study committee document by John Byrne
    Anti-computer style explained by Tim Crabbe
    Was Pentagon tracking Atta just days before 9.11 attack? by Daniel Hopsicker
    [the last time methane hydrates melted] Astrobiology Magazine
    Tons of British aid donated to help Hurricane Katrina victims to be BURNED by Americans by Ryan Parry
    Chavez: US plans to invade Venezuela AP
    America has fallen to a Jacobin coup by Paul Craig Roberts
    Sausage -- looted or not -- puts elderly church leader in prison by Kevin McGill and John Solomon
    Overview of photovoltaic solar cells by James Fraser
    Oil: geologists vs. economists by Marshall Auerbach
    As bodies recovered, reporters are told 'no photos, no stories' Cecilia Vega
    The H A A R P Race by Chris Sanders
    [history of planetary experiments, reposted] by Rosalie Bertell
    New Orleans unmasks apartheid, America style by Jason Miller
    Apartheid America and the right of return by Xymphora
    A god with whom I am not familiar by Tim Wise
    [you are on your own] by Parmedics Larry Bradsahw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky
    How we survived the flood by Charmaine Neville
    I just got back from a FEMA detainment camp by Valhall
    The vicious downward cycle of the American economy by Paul Craig Roberts (former Reagan asst treasury secy)
    Do you know what it means to lose New Orleans? by Anne Rice
    [Funeral director deployed to hurricane region told to expect up to 40,000 bodies] by Clint Confehr
    Captain Cracker, failing earnestly by monkeygrinder
    Interest rates are headed higher in the long term by Bud Conrad, Jun29
    Interest rates are low because of extreme credit expansion by Bud Conrad, Jul19
    Everything has gone according to plan posted by China at Lenin's Tomb
    Ethnic cleansing in the USA by Xymphora
    Starving the beast in the kingdom of fear by Big Gav
    Paul Allen's other yacht by Paul Rogat Loeb
    The butterfly effect by Stan Goff
    Nature is politics by Alexander Cockburn
    [armed cutting in line for richies -- scroll to middle] by Mary Foster
    It reminds me of Baghdad in the worst of times by Julian Borger
    You bet your life by Michael Ruppert
    The real news interview with Bigfoot
    Lake George by Will Bunch, Attytood
    New Orleans and the death of the common good by Chris Floyd
    Evil? yes; spineless? no by John Walsh
    Bush: war was to stop terrorists from getting oil [you the terr'ist] by Jennifer Loven
    Deepwater basins will save us (common misconceptions III) by Bubba
    Eyeballing Katrina damage 01 by Cryptome
    Bush-Cheney heading for nuclear rendevous at Desert One by Webster Griffin Tarpley
    The problem of excessive inequality by Xymphora
    [SWAT teams trash drum and bass parties in Utah and the Czech Republic (?!)] Admin
    The moral hazard myth by Malcolm Gladwell
    [notes from one of the soldiers we 'support'] by J.D. Engelhardt
    Peak oil debunked by Matt Savinar
    Body part porn and war, part 1 by Helena Cobban
    The American economy is destroying itself by Paul Craig Roberts
    Psyop in Utah by Charlene Fassa
    Containing the antiwar movement by Stan Goff (see Buchanan below)
    The Democrats dilemma by Pat Buchanan (see Goff above)
    All US military leave has been cancelled by Bob Chapman
    Abu Ghraib, satanists, and spoon-benders by Edward Spannaus
    Utah ravers treated like terrorists by Apollo
    The soldier's revolt in Vietnam by Martin Smith
    PV shortage by Robert McLeod
    [peak oil hits the NYT] by Peter Maass (reg required)
    There is such a thing as too late by Ray McGovern
    Tot's name to stay on no-fly list by Michael McAuliff
    Space weapons by Giuseppe Anzera
    [because of 9-11, it's OK to to kill Iraqi kids, as told to the WSJ by a West Point ethics professor] by Greg Jaffe
    Intelligent falling the Onion
    The plot thickens by Al Martin
    Drink-soaked Trotskyite popinjay slimes antiwar mom by Justin Raimondo
    Able danger intel exposed "protected" her-oin trafficking by Daniel Hopsicker
    "I did not haff outercourse with that woman..." by Joseph Cannon
    Bring the troops home now, or face mutiny mparent7777
    Sacrifice? count me out by Ted Rall
    Why the corporate rich oppose environmentalism by Michael Parenti
    [No-fly babies...] by Leslie Miller
    Get ready for a wider war by Paul Craig Roberts
    The stakes are too high Deliso interview with Sibel Edmonds
    Army intel unit exposes massive FBI 9.11 cover-up by Daniel Hopsicker
    Basic choices and constraints on long-term energy supplies by Paul B. Weisz[excellent intro, from July 2004]
    Bartlett on EMP June 9, 2005 [go Roscoe]
    Would you? by Douglas Herman
    [Google puts Cindy Sheehan's criticism of Bush's Iraq war behind 'adult' shield] by Cindy Sheehan
    Bigger than AIPAC by Robert Dreyfuss
    Watching the economy crumble by Paul Craig Roberts
    US reportedly planning to boost troop levels to 160,000 in Iraq Wire reports
    Peak oil vs. Y2K by Paul Lymath
    What have we done? by Dahr Jamail
    MTV ad Censored after having been shown only once MTV
    67-year-old grandmother tasered for honking her horn gets probation AP
    Jim Kunstler's despair by Andrew Nimelman
    [you know it's getting bad when Walrat starts to jump ship...] Reuters
    Hitler's shadow and the coming storm by John Chuckman
    Cheney's plan: nuke Iran by Justin Raimondo
    Welcome to Plan B by Jan Lundberg
    Don't you dare call it treason by Alexander Cockburn
    Producing ethanol and biodiesel from corn and other crops is not worth the energy www.physorg.com
    The spirit of Nazism by Robert Koehler
    Democrats more hawkish than Bush by John Walsh
    Plame retaliation by Xymphora
    To hell with Judith Miller by Stan Goff
    Turd Blossom's stink bomb takes out dazed neoliberals by Larry Chin
    [plan to build the Just Desserts Cafe] Freestar Media (anti-gov)
    [Puplava expects inflation] by Jim Puplava
    Victory and recruitment by Michael Neumann
    Exponential Enrons ahead by Kelpie Wilson
    Just say Noruba by Arianna Huffington
    "Secret" air base for Iraq war started prior to 9-11 by Duke1676
    Contract that spawned Guantanamo prisons awarded to Halliburton during Cheney's tenure as CEO by John Byrne
    The Fed's at it again -- what do they fear? by Robert McHugh
    [where motherboards come from] hexus.net
    The Green Republic: a country inside a country by Riverbend
    The Downing Street memo by Xymphora
    Lie of the century by Michael Rivero
    Thomas Friedman's imaginary world by Alexander Cockburn
    You gotta ask me nicely, Danny Banality of Evil
    [first they came for the mouthy black women with expired licenses, but I wasn't a black woman...] Plam Beach Post
    Former CIA director calls for Iraq withdrawal [wake up, you Democrat worms]
    Property gone wild by Michael Neumann
    Monkey business by Matt Taibbi
    [US soldier feels bad about routinely rounding up Iraqi kids to use as human shields] by Mitchell E. Potts
    Not free, not fair [I can barely understand this stuff] by John Embry and Andrew Hepburn, Aug'04
    [the US currently has 106 military bases in Iraq] by Tom Engelhardt
    Gitmo detainees say they were sold by Michelle Faul
    What else would you do with a dick in your face? by Rudepundit
    Greenspan's inflation-wedgie by Alex Wallenwein
    Fine peak oil article from Fishing Facts, 1976 -- embarrasses today's WSJ/LA/NYTimes/Newspeak by George Pazik
    Bentagon vs. Newsweak by Ted Lang
    Do the people of Iraq have a right to resist occupation? by Jack Smith
    A conversation with denial UNplanner
    Pirates reprise by Rob Kirby
    Not a pretty picture by Sidney Schanberg
    [George Galloway knocks pipsqueak Coleman out of the park -- Scots rock!] by George Galloway
    How they forged the case against Galloway by Simon Assaf and Charlie Kimber
    John Bolton's plane scare by Xymphora
    Join the 14 percent club! by Alexander Cockburn
    America's right to know by Ralph Nader
    Naomi's courage by Michael Neumann
    An ethical blank check by Richard Drayton
    Rant of the day by YD
    Off the charts if Americans knew
    It won't stop another war by Joshua Frank
    Al Franken is a big fat phony by John Walsh
    Chewing raw grubs with the "Nutcracker Man" by Joe Bageant
    [Tiger Force military judge does Abu Ghraib] by Newt
    On a road to nowhere by UNplanner
    NYT minimizes Palestinian deaths by Alison Weir
    Oil supply tsunami alert by Kjell Aleklett
    [like a roach, he checked in but he didn't check out] by John Byrne
    Blinded by the light by Guest at ThisIsRumorControl
    An economic 9-11? by Michael Rivero
    Saving Saudi Arabia by Xymphora
    Congressman Roscoe Bartlett votes no on energy bill global public media
    Come on in -- the quicksand's fine the Feral Mettalugist
    Emails 'pose threat to IQ' by Martin Wainwright
    [the art of subduing a woman in a diabetic coma] by Jason Kravarik
    The most important thing you don't know about "Peak Oil" by Steve Lagavulin(cool name)
    Abiotic oil from Jon Clarke
    Cheap labor and high commodity prices by Xymphora
    Draft by Black Commentator
    About Rachel Corrie by Arthur Silber
    Wartime psyop by Fintan Dunne
    Let's drink to the slobbering classes by Joe Bageant
    What did April say? by Malcolm Lagauche
    The invisible hand by Robert Bell
    On messengers and shooting by Athenae
    Fingerprints of a con job by Xymphora
    The united vegetative states of America by Anwaar Hussain
    Domino effect and interdependencies by Norman Church
    American Thermidor by Stirling Newberry
    Torture Inc. -- America's brutal prisons by Deborah Davies
    Even Stephen Roach has it wrong by Peter Schiff
    A Trojan jackass for the anti-war movement by Stan Goff
    The Pentagon's secret stash by Matt Welch
    Scott Ritter interview [interesting, but weak on geology] by Larisa Alexandrovna
    "You've been sand-bagged, boy" by Nick Welsh
    [it's 'non-lethal' -- the 100+ admitted deaths were 'accidental', man] by Malcolm Lagauche
    [outsourcing war] by James C. McKinley
    The cavernous divide by Scott Klinger
    Feeding tubes for the third world by David Swanson
    If Jesus returns, Karl Rove will kill him by Harvey Wasserman
    Aramco projects: a closer look [it's happening] by Greg Croft
    New undeclared arms race by Michel Chossudovsky
    The long fingers of petroleum by oilman2
    Secret plans for Iraq's oil by Greg Palast
    How do you shoot babies? a warning from Auschwitz by David Edwards
    [fine oil presentation from conservative congressman Roscoe Bartlett] US Congressional Rec
    US used chemical weapons in Fallujah assault by Doug Lorimer
    Bionic US troops go back to war [maybe reporters could get bionic brains, too, when theirs fail] by Sarah Baxter
    George, the axe, and the cherry tree by Feral Metallurgist
    Mother responds to William Rivers Pitt by Cindy Sheehan
    The long road down by John Michael Greer (farmer, druid!)
    [even SAIC believes in peak oil now...] NETL/SAIC pdf (1.2M)
    [torture] by
    How to track a PC anywhere it connects to the Net by Renai LeMay
    Arnold vs. the nurses by Alexander Cockburn
    The oil factor in Bush's 'war on tyranny' by F. William Enghdahl
    [a dual-use dystopia] by David Hambling
    It sounds crazy, but... by Ray McGovern
    14 characteristics Bushflash.com
    Oil outlook 2005 by Matt Simmons
    The meaning of "Calm" -- relativity, LA Times style by Alison Weir
    [body shrink-wrapper for homeland security] ABC
    Uncle Bucky and the rocket-fueled breasts by Bob Harris
    I support the occupation of Iraq, but I don't support our troops the Onion (satire, guys)
    Letter from an oil exploration insider by Anonymous
    Imperial entropy by Kirkpatrick Sale
    Philadelphia Inquirer slanders embattled Prof. Gil-White by Jared Israel
    Poor, white, and pissed by Joe Bageant
    Did Bruce Eberle get Gannon top White House access? by John Byrne
    Sex lies and Jeff Gannon by Justin Raimondo
    Lessons from Cuba by Pat Murphy
    Remarks in Hudson, Jan 8, 2005 by James Kunstler
    The American Turkish Council by John Stanton
    There are no journalists by Sidney Blumenthal
    California's shrinking salad bowl by Deborah Rich
    A man called Jeff by John Aravosis
    [send CNN a copy of 'Propaganda for Dummies'] bradblog
    [maybe tbrnews was right!] rawstory
    Third warmest year in a row PhysOrg.com
    200 years of American interventions (flash) adbusters
    Hiroshima, mon amour by John Chuckman
    The eight percent war by Manuel Garcia
    Lynne Stewart convicted of collusion with CIA-created terrorists by Kurt Nimmo
    It's kind of muddled by Xymphora
    Phoney phreedom by Xymphora
    If there is no picture, did it happen? by William Marvel
    What caused the Permian extinction? by Megan Fellman
    [use of lynx web browser considered terrorism!] Cory Doctorow
    We've been taken over by a cult by Seymour Hersh
    Sounds like terror by Jeff Wells
    Two little girls on the road by newt
    The white room by H.D.S. Greenway
    No. 1? by Michael Ventura
    OPEC and Bush 2's new economy rhetoric by Andrew McKillop
    Reply to Gilbert Achcar by Alex Callinicos
    We are living in a giant airport by William Blum
    The anti-war movement and the Iraqi resistance by Sharon Smith
    What's new in production by Robert E. Snyder
    [US Press: Taliban destroys statues => bad; US bulldozes Babylon => whatever] by Ghali Hassan
    ["just the deaths fit to print"... by Dave Lindorff
    [soon, you'll need a permit to fart, since methane is a greenhouse gas] washingtonvotes
    [the war comes back home, just like it did in Vietnam] by Ernesto Cienfuegos
    Getting the people behind it by Xymphora
    [peak oil reaches Forbes...] by Dan Ackman
    Investigate violations of law by Jim McDermott, M.D., and Richard Rapport, M.D.
    A mean and unholy ditch by Joe Bageant
    Part 2: the center of the doughnut by Andre Gunder Frank
    [new uses for doctors] by Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks
    US eyes greater military clout in Asia following tsunami disaster AFP
    On lasermania by Doug Ritter
    Part 1: Why the emperor has no clothes by Andre Gunder Frank
    Where are the images? by Bruce Jackson
    [life in prison without the possibility of a *trial* -- wake up kiddies!] Reuters
    A government 'op' that went wrong by Jeff Wells
    Torture jet by Dana Priest
    Forget torture: it's the sex that matters by Paul Craig Roberts
    Urban vs. rural sustainability by Toby Hemenway
    Blood, oil, and Gary Webb's death rigorousintuition.blogspot.com
    Market edges close to breaking points by George Littell
    The cost of war (for the invaders) Memory Hole
    [The LA times can't bring themselves to say 'torture' even when the Iraqi dies] by Richard A. Serrano
    Israelis compare pullout plan to Holocaust by Josef Federman
    Houston, we have a problem by Rahul Mahajan
    [eye to eye with our glorious invasion] cryptome
    David Cobb and Medea Benjamin: losers of the left by f500k
    Gary Webb -- do what he did by Al Giordano
    Getting in touch with your inner terrorist by Michael Neumann
    The material basis of accumulation by Stan Goff
    White House-linked clandestine operation paid for "vote switching" software by Wayne Madsen [disinfo watch]
    Icarus over Iraq by Tom Engelhardt
    Running out of bubbles to blow by Jay Taylor (gold looney)
    Hope you capsize and get eaten by sharks by Glorious Revolutionary Federation of Fortune 500 Killers
    [how our hard-won understanding of the visual system is put to 'good' use...] by Noah Schachtman
    Renewable energy: what are the limits? by Ted Trainer
    Interview with an antiwar veteran by Derek Seidman
    And on the other hand... a felafel? by Alexander Cockburn
    Why I hate thanksgiving by Mitchel Cohen and Peter Linebaugh
    Face the music: time to oppose our troop's actions by Joshua Frank
    The energy challenge 2004 -- petroleum by Murray Duffin
    The energy challenge 2004 -- solar by Murray Duffin
    The priviledge of running free deficits by Stan Goff
    Private Boston-based jet used to transport US prisoners for outsourced electric torture from Sunday Times
    US$ health warning! Will devalution help energy transition? by Andrew McKillop
    The last gasp of U.S. hegemony by Kevin Rafferty (a former managing editor for the World Bank)
    Reality check by Adam Porter
    [dollar vs. euro, from a goldie] by Alex Wallenwein
    Torture and cinema by Stan Goff
    Varieties of cluster bombs www.againstbombing.com
    Interview with Iraq veteran Jimmy Massey by Jeff Riedel
    New democrat outreach program by Commandante Camembert
    We're all Israelis now by Mark LeVine
    Don't say we didn't warn you by Alexander Cockburn
    Why they won by Thomas Frank
    A patriot falls eXile.ru
    Can't we all just get along? by Ben Tripp
    Two causes by Xymphora
    Damn politics, let's dance by Pepe Escobar
    Energy transition and final energy crisis by Andrew McKillop
    Real men don't let other men bomb civilians by Rosemarie Jackowski
    Osama's endorsement by John Chuckman
    Bin Laden continues to earn his pay by Xymphora
    Kerrycrats and the war by Alexander Cockburn
    Voice of the white house tbrnews
    Bush quietly signs corporate tax-cut bill AP
    Wealth of a white nation by the Black Commentator
    Money, money, money by Stan Goff
    You can't blame Nader for this by Alexander Cockburn
    America's perfect storm by Jeff Berg (from Canada)
    The US Invasion of Iraq by Stephen Zunes
    A courtroom speech by Rosemarie Jackowski
    [wmv video: Jon Stewart on Crossfire: total spectrum dominance!] Crossfire
    Views of the most important international energy agencies by W. Zittel, J. Schindler
    Our future BforB
    Empire of insanity by Greg Bates
    Not there (QT video) by Operation Truth
    Face to face with the American C I A by Merle L. Pribbenow
    Who took Ahimsa exactly? by Indymedia
    Free Judith Miller! by Xymphora
    Hawk vs. hawk by Bob Dreyfuss
    Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons program by Keay Davidson
    2007 explained by Powerless New Zealand
    ['enduring bases' -- see upper right: why we're in Iraq] by John Pike
    [what a WSJ reporter thinks but can't write -- at least in the WSJ!] by Greg Mitchell
    The end of the age of oil by David Goodstein
    Embedded in a media fantasy by William Bowles
    Toilets vs. life as we know it by Joe and Margaret Anderson
    Draft plans tbrnews
    Lucy Ramirez by Xymphora
    Why Americans back the war by James Carrol
    [finally, an sorta antiwar speech from Kerry -- but still Iraqicization and 'coalition' fantasies] by John Kerry
    Thoughts on the oil bubble by Alex Wilson
    Eclipsed by William Greider
    Fight back! by Wayne Madsen
    [wave height is now 42 feet (!) at Gulf Buoy 4204] Buoy 42040
    Peak oil -- a perfect storm (and comments) by Dr Strangelove
    Wake up and smell the jungle rot by Stan Goff
    [T*** flower is sure good at what he does] by Xymphora
    Reality is off the table by Alexander Cockburn
    Running out the clock by Noam Schreiber
    Barbarians past the gates by Richard Alan Leach
    Quit f***ing around by Becky Burgwin
    Chechnya gripped by Stalinist terror, or where do suicide bombers come from by Alice Berenfeld
    Federal deficit reality by Walter Williams
    What the world should know by Douglas Valentine
    Media miss story of biggest pay cut in history by David Swanson
    The stench of doom by Alexander Cockburn
    Guantanamo on the Hudson nypress
    Why does Wall Street continue to look down on renewable energy? by Rana Foroohar
    Huge anti-Bush march by Grant McCool
    Alliances and the American election by Gabriel Kolko
    [Transmeta's antiwar guest house]
    An ordinary view of extra-ordinary times by Wanda Fish
    Play it backward by John L. Hess
    Oil boom and doom by Scott Patterson
    The trouble with electing Caesar by John Chuckman
    US to halt [non-superconducting] nuclear fusion project [helium-dependent continues] New Scientist
    Kerry on Iraq by Xymphora
    Kerry's "Energy Plan" by Stan Goff
    [GM plants increase profits, not productivity] by F. William Engdahl
    Voice of the white house tbr news
    Collape due in 2005? by F. William Engdahl
    What The 9/11 Commission Report Ignores: The CIA-Al Qaeda Connection WSWS editorial
    What would you do? by Steven Soldz
    Empire building is nasty work by Richard Erlich
    DHS's NICC Calls Cryptome Cryptome
    Terrorism and the election by Wayne Madsen
    Backstabbers! by Mark Ames
    The impenetrable wall by Xymphora
    Nine more reasons the party's over by Richard Heinberg
    Ten steps to a sustainable energy future by Rudolf Rechsteiner (Swiss MP -- compare to our 'representatives')
    Beware the liberal war on terror by Dave Stratman
    Marlon Brando by Dave Zirin
    Not far enough by Joseph Cannon
    Jurassic park, pseudo-events and prisons by Stan Goff
    Let's accelerate and stay ahead of oil's peak by Michael Bendzela
    1000 days of continuous cover-up by Daniel Hopsicker
    Shoveling coal for Satan by Matt Taibbi (go Matt!)
    Activists visit Iraq by Samara Kalk Derby
    Understanding the US war state (2003) by John McMurtry
    [mein kampf from a spook] by Kevin Drum
    Thrill is gone Vincent Suetos, Kellog-Brown Root employee
    Update to timeline by Paul Thompson
    NMCC ops director asked for substitute on 9-10 Tom Flocco
    The only choice is the war party by Kurt Nimmo
    [time to 'pull' Bush?] by Julian Coman
    Spite the vote by Mark Ames
    Tripod II and FEMA -- lack of response explained by Michael Ruppert
    Reagan's passing by Juan Cole
    [bile for the bilious] by Jim Kunstler
    Anything that flies on anything that moves by Chris Floyd
    [com vs. org] 911 review
    [Pentagon evidence review] Richard Stanley and Jerry Russell
    Supporting our troops by Steven T. Banko, former troop
    The WTC impacts by Eric Salter
    Anti-war movement -- part 1 by Sherman Skolnick
    TiVO-lution by Matt Tiabbi
    [return of the road warrior] by Douglas Herman
    Rapid climate change Physics Today
    What's the question? by William Blum
    The end of oil and the end of America by Robert Freeman
    The oil we eat by Richard Manning
    Luckily for us by Stan Cox
    And now for something really dangerous by Tom Engelhardt
    Microsoft launches damage control after code leaks by Galit Yemini
    Reading the consumer mind by Douglas Rushkoff
    How privatization sterilizes culture Michael Hudson interview by Standard Schaefer
    "Anybody But Bush": The big abdication by Patrick Donavan
    Druggie Bushie Xymphora
    The house shows its hand by Chris Sanders
    SOTUS Bush
    [Cheney's approval rating is 20%] by Jim Lobe
    [politically correct storm-troopers] ABC
    [you know it's serious when the greed+money guys say it] Fortune
    The defense budget is bigger than you think by Robert Higgs
    Lunacy by Dom Stasi
    Food poisoning as background noise by Richard Manning
    Whitey on the moon by Gil Scott-Heron
    [luckily, we've long been interested in 'solar energy'] by Rosalie Bertell, Gray nun (go Rosalie!)
    [paths to growth in 2003] by Nick Beams
    The digital imprimatur by John Walker
    [Spook poets] by Jeet Heer
    FAQ regarding "Where is the money?" www.whereisthemoney.org
    Where is the collateral? by Chris Sanders
    This is not America by Michelle Goldberg
    Microsoft running on microsoft again by Ashlee Vance
    American people "snuff" another bunch of kids by Bill Morgan
    Vietnam -- how the soldiers stopped the war Traveling soldier
    The king of dirt by Wayne Madsen
    Merchants of pain by Jim Lobe
    The cross of iron by Conn Hallinan
    Unions are the answer by Standard Schaeffer
    They're coming by Jan Lundberg
    Wag the turkey by Wayne Madsen
    Why I hate Thanksgiving by Mitchel Cohen
    The Miami Model by Jeremy Scahill
    Walmart is not a business: it is an economic disease by Richard Freeman and Arthur Ticknor
    Into the dungeon by Sarah Shields
    Men and porn the Guardian
    Chipping away at your privacy by Howard Wolinsky
    Hold on to your humanity by Stan Goff (first-rate)
    [Outsourcing torture] by Olivia Ward
    They can take you away and tell no one by Elaine Cassel
    What they did to me (an employee at mathworks) by Maher Arar
    Mini nukes for terrorist cities by Paul Craig Roberts
    Now that the group-sex shoe is on the right-wing foot by Patsy Baye
    [I don't want my tax dollars supporting people like this, and I certainly don't look forward to meeting them on the street...] by Gregg Zoroya
    Reversing reality by Sarah Weir
    Rush the junkie the exile
    Tough minded liberal by Mark Hand
    Circus maximus by Chris Lloyd
    The emperor has no clothes by Robert Byrd
    [Chumps] yuricareport
    RFID zeitgeist by Howard Rheingold
    [Right vs. ultra-right] by Xymphora
    All the president's votes by Andrew Gumbel
    The day of the locust by Mike Davis
    Welcome to Arnold, King for a day by Alexander Cockburn
    The democrats messed up; Arnold had help by Stuart Nusbaumer
    America needs thorazine! exile.ru
    Just answer the question by Doug Newman
    Arnold unplugged -- Hasta la vista to $9 billion by Greg Palast
    Raise taxes or cut military spending Carlton Meyer, Magazine of Future Warfare
    Arnold after dark Counterpunch
    [Food fight] by Mike Allen and Dana Priest
    Lying about sex is an impeachable offence; lying the nation into war apparently is not by Eric Margolis
    How the dominance of Microsoft's products poses a risk to security by Dan Geer
    [The 'terminator' gene for songs] by Charles Haddad
    The RIAA nails a 12-year-old girl by Ashlee Vance
    'Trusted Computing' FAQ [AKA Palladium, AKA making the Chinese pay for software, AKA welcome to their machine] by Ross Anderson
    Functionally insane Americans by David McGowan
    Controlling the news by Walter Storch
    The Bush admin's desperation is showing by Bev Conover
    US tech industry staff decimated [literally] in offshore stampede by Drew Cullen
    The Times scoops that melted by Jack Shafer
    Growing prison population (with decreasing crime) growing problem for states by Curt Anderson
    American feudalism pushhamburger.com
    National news picking up by Renee Downing
    Hope through anarchy by John Stanton
    The soldiers of ward 57 by Anne Hull and Tamara Jones
    The founders and the fedayeen by Mary Beth Norton
    Can the real reason for war be this crass? by Mano Singham
    Hydrogen cars are not a good idea UC Berkeley
    The coming financial reality (II) S. Schaefer interview w/M. Hudson
    Financing the War, Financing the World (I) S. Schaefer interview w/M. Hudson
    Friday, July 11, 2003 by Xymphora
    The death of Jim Hatfield by David Cogswell
    Snowball effect on a soggy economy by Dan Monkerud
    Are we the new Nazis? by Douglas Herman
    When the Phoenix comes home to roost by Douglas Valentine
    Software bullet is sought by Andrew Ross Sorkin
    San Francisco paper fires antiwar [technology!] reporter Marge Holland
    Sugar water apple censors Miles Davis by Andrew Orlowski
    US back in nuclear bomb making business LA Times
    Poor Sean Hannity by Charley Reese
    Today show goes dark on Tim Robbins [cool move guys!] by Steve Rosenbaum
    Washington needs to stop being fiscally irresponsible by John Crudele
    I was only asking by Michael Wolff
    [This list will be harder to fix than your credit record] EPIC
    The world after Iraq by Robert L. Hutchings
    The self-healing, self-hopping mine by Ashlee Vance
    [Producer fired for German/American analogy] zap2it
    New Yorkers most affected by 9-11 least likely to support war Dan Mihalopoulos
    [Plunge protection team] by Martin Crutsinger
    Police injure protesters and onlookers by Martha Mendoza
    Dealing with change by Philip Abelson
    [California school crisis seen from the UK] by Andrew Gumbel
    "Lots of tanks, but no air conditioning" by Margaret Atwood
    SF police play catch-up by Joe Garofoli and Jim Herron Zamora
    Deficit hits $193 billion in 5 months by Jeannine Aversa
    Surveillance nation by Dan Farmer and Charles C. Mann
    In the grip of a permanent war economy by Seymour Melman
    Marine life by Allen Gunderson
    [Install solar panels raises your taxes] by John Woolfolk
    What about three-strikes-and-you're-out for corporate criminals? by Lee Drutman
    Self loathing on the high court the Black Commentator
    Clear Channel: Songs that shouldn't be played by newspeakdictionary
    Niche market by Jon Margolis
    Prison nation by Paul Street
    Bi-directional Total Poindexter Awareness by Andrew Orlowski
    US Deficit 97 billion in first 4 months by Jeannine Aversa
    A nation divided by Robert Fisk
    Tens of Bush supporters take to the streets Betty Bowers
    Microsoft's secret plot
    Rich people and their level of greed by Molly Ivins
    Aesop's fables Comstock
    Cut his mic! on O'Reilly
    A world without water (June 2002) by Ginger Adams Otis
    The hidden holocaust by Michael Parenti
    The space shuttle must be stopped by Greg Easterbrook
    That's entertainment by James Davis
    The Space Age Born Of The Cold War Is Over by Bruce Moomaw
    Why do mean-spirited shows lure Americans? by Bruce Kluger
    Equal opportunity death merchant by John Stanton
    The electrocuting water cannon (and you thought demonstrating was for sissies) by George Smith
    Largest [yearly] loss in US history ($0.1 trillion) by SafeMoneyReport
    [Microsoft does not apply its own patches to its own buggy software] by John Leyden
    [The technology formerly known as Palladium...] by John Lettice
    Kahlo's missing withered leg by Marta Russell
    Gold to be re-monetized by James Sinclair
    Stop Palladium now by nyfairuse
    Belly of the bear by Richard Russell
    Supremes back Disney and pigopolists vs. science and culture by Andrew Orlowski
    RFID tags by Decaln McCullagh
    Blame yourself by Michael Neumann
    Reverse garbage pull by Chris Lydgate and Nick Budnick
    CIA interrogation/torture manual 1963
    I'll take forward command post any day... by Pierre Tristam
    The super-rich by Michael Parenti
    Banking bunkum by Henry C K Liu
    Is this really happening? by Mahbubul Karin (Sohel)
    You have no right to remain silent by Joanne Mariner
    [A brand is as 'good' as a religion] by Leander Kahney
    Polls show Arabs and Jews agree by Josh Ruebner and Rania Awwad
    Shoot citizens, ask questions, then get a lawyer (maybe) by Charles Sheehan-Miles
    Antiwar Sierra club threatened with disbandment by Sierra club by Miguel Bustillo
    [Get the male child, or else his relatives] by Justin Huggler
    Night of the living dead by John Chuckman
    The unbearable whiteness of being (Republican) by Ruy Teixeira
    Interview with a draft resister by Chris
    Talk radio by Thom Hartmann
    Spank the donkey by Steve Perry
    Pod Pelosi by Arianna Huffington
    [The watch list: and you thought mistakes on your credit record were a pain...]
    He's baaaaack! by Tommy Denton
    It's the empire, stupid by anti-empire
    Improved performance by Bob Feldman
    Airline blacklists for leftists by salon
    Of TCPA, Palladium and Werner von Braun by John Lettice
    The invisible hand made visible by Doug Saunders
    The natural history of the rich by Richard Conniff
    [Theater of the absurd: environmental impact statement for laser weapons flown on Boeing 747's] Missile Defense Agency
    Capitalism might work if we had a spare planet or two by Stan Cox
    A year of the 'War on Terror' by Alexander Cockburn
    Now that's class warfare by Molly Ivins
    PBS purge by Thomas Greene
    The Powell trap by Norman Solomon
    The price of life by Andrew Chang
    Our boys on ship by Roland Watson and Glen Owen
    A stuckist net by Andrew Orlowski
    The collapse of the inverse pyramids by Adam Barth
    What is your post-Palladium future? by Andrew Orlowski
    Memo to the right wing: it's class warfare out there by Molly Ivins
    Show us the money! by TheDailyEnron
    Patio Man and the Sprawl People by
    Economists in denial by Mark Weisbrot
    Can Jeff Gerth save the white house? by Alexander Cockburn
    [Stasi-land!] by Ellen Sorokin
    [No expects the Spanish Inquisition] by Ritt Goldstein
    3d graphics world shaken by patent claims by Matthew Broersma
    The corporate ethics red herring by Matt Vidal
    Too much in the hands of too few by Carol Goar
    Microsoft stakes IP claims on OpenGL by Andrew Orlowski
    Palladium summary by Seth Schoen
    Let me through, I'm a proctologist by Tom Shields
    Leaving our children behind by Heather Wokusch
    Verispy Supercomm 2002
    What the flag means to me by S. Brian Willson
    The crooks in the white house by Alexander Cockburn
    Cracks in the facade of civic religion by Joseph Stromberg
    [non-war-related rich people more important] Wake up signals by Paul Craig Roberts
    [war machine more important] Eagle has crash landed by Immanuel Wallerstein
    MS security patch EULA gives Billg admin privileges on your box by Thomas C. Greene
    Economic inequality in US by Huck Gutman
    Corporate pyramid scheme by Bob Hiler
    In defense of Martha by Leslie Savan
    [Apple execs stock dumps] by May Wong
    IE(eeeeeee) by Rob Flickenger
    Palladium trust machine by Thomas C. Greene
    Vietnam and Kerrey by AP
    Northwest diary by Alexander Cockburn
    Study blames 18,000 [yearly] deaths in USA on lack of insurance by Steve Sternberg
    Neither Enron nor deregulation by Robert C. Hinkley
    'Metal Storm' [our scientists and tax dollars at work]
    A tale of two massacres by David Edwards
    Log cabin to white house? Not any more by Will Hutton
    Bush aides met plotter before Chavez coup by Rupert Cornwell
    Silicon valley's spy game by Jeffrey Rosen
    The flawed calculus of torture by Jef Raskin (the Mac!)
    All cell phones to get GPS! by Chris Kanaracus
    Dear loathsome trade hacks by Don Henley
    Empire abroad, prisons at home by Paul Street
    Identity card delusions by Simson Garfinkel
    The nightmare of Word by Rob Landley
    New windows "filesystem" by James Treleaven
    American International Group (AIG) the Economist
    A year of living dangerously by Thomas Croft
    Anti-americanism blamed on college teachers by Ellen Sorokin
    Unmanageable bloaot by Stephen Roach
    U.S. Works Up Plan for Using Nuclear Arms by Paul Richter
    Nothing personal by Bruce Headlam
    [Death of OpenGL?!] by Andrew Orlowski
    Sign 'em up! by Bowen Smith
    Enron Contributions to Current Members of House of (may take a minute to load...)
    Testimony of Frank Partnoy US Senate
    Brosnahan for the defense by Larry Chin
    It wasn't a shortage, it was a shakedown by FTCR
    Debt collection, not reconstruction real priority of Afghan 'reconstruction' by Yoichi Shimatsu
    Enron may spark the revolt of the professionals James Galbraith
    Lying on Top by Dean Baker
    Memo To Washington: We Can Handle The Truth by Arianna Huffington
    Giving that fish a running start by Peter Kinder
    Hurts so good by John Balzar
    There are more Enrons out there by William Greider
    Crony Capitalism, USA by Paul Krugman
    Bush gets Layed by Pratap Chatterjee
    We can put an end to Word attachments by Richard Stallman
    American Torture Prisons by Julian Borger
    It's the economy, and it's going to be stupid by Mark Weisbrot
    Justice, Texas style by Molly Ivins
    Public Money, Private Code by Jeffrey Benner
    Discrediting Linux by Thomas C. Greene
    Microsoft Pyramid Update by Bill Parrish (Nov 28)
    Microsoft Pyramid Update by Bill Parrish (Nov 28)
    Now who's the rogue state? FAS link
    The Bankers' Vision is Limited by Mary Midgley
    We Must Refuse to be Enemies by Penny Rosenwasser
    When Persuasion Doesn't Work, Use Force... by George Monbiot
    Manhattan's Milosevic by James Ridgeway
    Gore Vidal and Timothy McVeigh (!) by Fiachra Gibbons
    [On the Attack on the USS Liberty 34 years ago] by James Bamford
    How Dare We? by Michael Coren, Edmonton Sun
    Hiroshima Mon Amour by Justin Raimondo, www.antiwar.com
    Less (and more closed) ERs now than at the beginning of the boom by Peter Gosselin
    Powell and My Lai Reuters
    Clear Channel (yeah right) by Eric Boehlert
    In Hunt for Scandal, The Media Ignore Sanctions by Drew Hamre
    Bush's Poor Understanding of the World by Charley Reese (former GW supporter)
    Do Our Souls Sleep Too Well? by Nathan Johnson
    America's War Crimes by Conn Hallinan
    New Genetics' Drain on Public Health by Robert Pollack
    Why the Latest Decision was not Favorable to Microsoft by R. Bork and K. Starr (!)
    US Greenhouse Gas Emissions Way Up, Rest of the World Down by Elizabeth Shogren
    The Biggest Women's Issue by Marie Cocco
    Who's the Victim Here? by John R. MacArthur
    MS masters NC mind-set by Nicholas Petreley
    Security Geek Developing WinXP Raw Socket Exploit by Thomas C. Greene
    Microsoft Before the Earthquake by Eben Moglen
    Learn About War by James Glaser
    Things You Can't Say In America by Alexander Cockburn
    File Downloader Spying by Steve Gibson
    Orwell Was Right by Dennis E. Powell
    The Price of Occupation by Anthony Lewis
    Nuns in Jail by David Rossie
    Microsoft Exec: Open Source is a Cancer (heh!) by Sun Times, Chicago
    Kerrey to Thanh Phong Villagers: Shit Happens! by Matt Taibbi
    The Rights of Government to... by John Balzar
    Drill, Grill, and Chill by Maureen Dowd
    Reality Check by Ted Rall
    "I'd rather listen to Newton than to (Microsoft's anti-Open-Source) Mundie. He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up the room less." --Linux Torvalds, SiliconValley.com

    Politial Prisoners in the US--29 Years in Solitary Confinement for a Crime Not Committed by Seth Sandronsky
    Torvalds Responds to Microsoft Open Source Attack by Linux Torvalds
    Shocked Over Kerrey? It's How We Fought the War by Alexander Cockburn
    Republican Arsenic and Democratic Arsenic--Cut the Crap on Nader by Michael Moore
    A New Nuclear Bomb for 'Non-Russian' Targets by Walter Pincus
    Orwell, Collateral Damage, and Timothy McVeigh by Hussein Ibish
    Real Violence and Timothy McVeigh by Alexander Cockburn
    Return to Madness by Harvey Wasserman
    [Objective C not Java on Mac OS X] by Aaron Hillegass
    China Is Not an Enemy and Shouldn't Be Provoked by William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune
    Flip the Script by Tony Karon
    [Why The Mojave Wind Farms are Turned Off During an Energy Crisis] by Mark Riley
    The Coming War in Who Wll Control Software Development by FreeDevelopers.net
    GNUstep, the open source OpenStep by Goerges Tarbouriech
    How much is enough? by Amitai Etizioni
    [From the horses mouth] by CNET
    IBM withdraws CPRM for hard drives proposal by Andrew Orlowski
    CPRM, Round 2by Andrew Orlowski
    Sub's fatal move staged for civilians, US admitsby Michael Millett
    Pry Loose the Cold, Hard Fingers of the Market's 'Invisible Hand'By Frederick H. Borsch
    Cruel and unusual punishment in Florida --Counterpunch
    Class Warfare is Over: The Richest Won by Mark Shields
    Don't Deny the Brutality of History by Robert Jensen
    Understanding the Deregulation Boondoggle by Hauter and Slocum
    What's Wrong with Content Protection by John Gilmore
    Conservatives and Liberals by David Morris
    Shrub by Harvey Wasserman
    Power demand last 6 months less than last year (=gouging) by Public Citizen
    Bork Him by Mark Weisbrot
    Clinton's Economic Legacy by Mark Weisbrot
    Everything you ever wanted to know about CPRM by Andrew Orlowski
    Dying of Consumption by George Monbiot
    Where Were You When They Copy Protected Hard Disks, Daddy? by Andrew Orlowski
    Barbarians of our Own Dark Ages by Michael Stowell
    [Interesting facts about satellites] by Richard Sale
    Bipartisanship Spells Trouble by Mark Weisbrot
    Fixing the The Legitimacy Gap by Norman Solomon
    Bursting Greenspan's Bubble by Mark Weisbrot
    Wild Globalization by John Gray, the Guardian of London
    Justice Bill by Dennis Roddy
    The Best of All Possible Worlds by Cockburn and St Clair
    People Can Make A Difference, Even In America by Mark Steel
    Will Gore Throw the Election to Bush? by Robert McChesney
    (Linus' kernel was 3% and Stallman's code was almost 30% of the original GNU/Linux) by Judy Steed
    Nader Again Singled Out For Exclusion From Presidential Debate Premises by www.commondreams.org
    Inside the Death House by Bob Herbert
    Oil and the Economy by stratfor
    Withering Democracy by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
    Disgrace of the New York Times by Alexander Cockburn
    A Not So Academic Oversight by Mokhiber/Weissman
    As Clinton Spoke Words Of Hope, The Riot Police Swung Into Action by Doug Saunders
    Nixon 'Wrecked Early Peace In Vietnam' (just before 1% win over Humphrey) by Martin Kettle
    Subculture Is At Root Of Police Brutality And Bias Cases by Christopher Cooper
    Supreme Anxiety by Counterpunch
    This Is A War Of All Worlds by George Monbiot (Manchester Guardian)
    A Perfect Day for a Gorilla Suit by Mark Taibbi
    The Camus Guy by Mark Ames
    The rise and fall of the .com economy by Christopher Hird
    Preying for the Artists by Spider Robinson
    That Was No War, It Was Homicide - And Still Iraqis Die by John Pilger
    The Gulf War Brought Out the Worst in Us by Robert Jensen
    Why Diallo Had To Die by Manning Marable
    The Jackboot State by CounterPunch
    Anarchy Can't Save A World Controlled By Filthy Lucre fine rant by Muriel Gray
    Growing Anti-Capitalism Not Going Away by Sunday Herald UK
    Israel Redirects Hellfire Missiles 'After US Advice' by Robert Fisk
    Hunting Mexican Migrants for Sport by Jan McGirk (UK!)
    The Real Microsoft Killer: Open File Format by John Diedrichs
    Vietnam: A Retrospective excellent article by Antony C. Black
    The Death Penalty for MS by Rob Bos
    Free, anonymous information on the anarchists' Net by John Borland, see also FreeNet
    The Devil's Chair (torture in the US) by Anne-Marie Cusac
    We're #1--in prison population by David Ho
    The Fed Is Overlooking the Inflationary Effect of CEO Compensation by John C. Gamboa and Mary Ann Mitchell
    'New' and 'Left' Are Not Oxymoronic by Alexander Cockburn
    The IMF and the World Bank--interview w/Michel Chossudovsky by Jared Israel
    Indy Media DC Coverage by Indy Media
    Digital Diploma Mills, Part 4 by David F. Noble
    25 Years After End Of Vietnam War: by Bob Buzzanco
    Gnutella et al. from the LA Times
    Epidermal Marketing by inc.com
    What do you want to do? by ftrain.com
    Suicide Note by ftrain.com
    Life and Libertarians: Beyond Left and Right by Alexander Cockburn
    Business Brooks no Interference by Will Hutton
    The Thin White Line: Will White Americans Stand Against Police Brutality? by Farai Chideya
    Our Increasing Willingness To Let The Rich Take More And More From The Poor by Richard Rorty (the philosopher)
    Global Warming: Melting of Earth's Ice Cover Reaches New High by Lisa Mastny
    The Target is Russia by Theodore A. Postol
    As Robert Cringely might have put it by A.J. Mayo
    Return of the Hacker
    Medical Rebels by Katherine Finkelstein
    "In another instance, when the hospitalization of a psychotic patient was denied, a psychiatrist told the reviewer, 'I'm going to put her in an ambulance and send her over to you.' Claim approved."
    Who Invited the Pirates? by J.S. Kelly
    New Film Challenges Us to Talk Honestly About War by Norman Solomon
    What do you do when the money leaves? by Molly Ivins
    When Only Giants Run the Media by Robert McChesney
    Seattle Diary--It's a Gas, Gas, Gas! by Jeffrey St. Clair
    How the Internet ruined San Francisco by Paulina Borsook
    Microsoft and 3D Graphics: A Case Study in Suppressing Innovation and Competition by Alan Akin
    2 million inmates, with no solution in sight by Dave Zweifel
    Boycott Amazon.com by Richard Stallman
    [One major way in which amazon.com is taking over the market for books is by offering a site (here is an honest explanation from a left publication, the Nation) a percentage of the sale--as much as 5%--for every book sold that was referred through that site. This strategy, common with internet business, is expensive, and Amazon is still not profitable; however, it is worth it to the venture capitalists who fund Amazon because of the possibility of coming close to taking over an entire market. It's also obviously not a strategy available to the 'independent bookseller']
    New Film Challenges Us to Talk Honestly About War by Norman Solomon
    What do you do when the money leaves? by Molly Ivins
    When Only Giants Run the Media by Robert McChesney
    Seattle Diary--It's a Gas, Gas, Gas! by Jeffrey St. Clair
    How the Internet ruined San Francisco by Paulina Borsook
    Microsoft and 3D Graphics: A Case Study in Suppressing Innovation and Competition by Alan Akin
    Why bother? by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
    Can feminism survive class polarization? by Barbara Ehrenreich
    The Post-Microsoft Era posted by Jon Katz
    [Total Defeat for Microsoft (!)] by Dan Gilmor
    Columbus Day, 1999 by Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly
    Panic Attack #1 by Clifford Smith
    A Winning Issue that Nobody Wants to Run On by Mark Weisbrot
    Extreme US Child Poverty Rises By More Than 400,000 In One Year by Commondreams newswire
    EBay Pulls Human Kidney From Internet Auction (bids at $5.7 million) by David Lazarus

    Life in the rest of the world

    100,000 civilians have been killed or had limbs torn off by land mines since the end of the US invasion of South Vietnam.

    "It happened during a critical situation for South Korea. We should not judge these incidents through the standards of peacetime"
    -- a retired South Korean admiral commenting on the summary execution of 2000 civilians suspected of having Communist sympathies.
    Once again, war crimes turn out to be just the bad things that were done by the other guys.

    Half (3 billion) of the people on this planet live on less than 2 dollars a day.

    The Arctic ice cap is shrinking by 24,000 sq km every year as global temperatures warm. It is now on average five feet thick compared with nine feet just 30 years ago. In other words, Arctic sea ice lost about 40 per cent of its volume in less than 30 years. Summary here.

    "I had been instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults."
    --Denis Halliday, who resigned last year as co-ordinator of humanitarian relief aid to Iraq after a 34 year career with the UN.
    "How long should the civilian population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?"
    --Hans von Sponeck, Halliday's successor, who resigned this year
    (from John Pilger here)

    The number of killings per week in Kosovo in the year before the US/NATO intervention was about 30, approximately equally divided between Serbs and Albanians. The number of killings per week in Kosovo in the 4 months after the war has remained virtually unchanged at about 30 per week. Now, however, the victims are mostly Serb.

    The US and Britain have given and sold huge amounts of military hardware before and after ($1 billion) the genocide in East Timor in 1975 when over 200,000 people--one-quarter to one-third of the population at the time--were killed by the Indonesian military--something that really did warrant the label 'genocide' (in contrast to what ostensibly prompted the NATO to bomb Yugoslavia). But even this pales before the results of a US engineered coup against the Sukarno government in 1965 when almost 1 million Indonesians (communists, suspected communists, and ethnic Chinese) were slaughtered by the army and militias ("one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century" according to the C I A, who was partly responsible for triggering it). But back to the present, the adminitration finally cut off military aid, which almost immediately caused Indonesia to accept a peacekeeping force. It has been suggested we should cut off economic aid, and maybe even impose sanctions as well. Sanctions have been a horrible failure in Iraq (see below). In contrast to the situation in Iraq, however, a cutoff in economic aid to Indonesia (much less sanctions) has been strongly opposed by multinational corporations, who would stand to lose big ("When I think of Indonesia--a country on the equator with 180 million people, a median age of 18, and a Muslim ban on alcohol--I feel like I know what heaven looks like," --the president of of Coca-Cola in 1992). Therein, is another powerful lever.

    When asked about Iraqi children starving and dying as a result of the US embargo of food and medicine, US Secretary of State Madelaine Albright said, "It's a hard decision, but we think the price ... is worth it." Since the Secretary of State made that statement, about half a million Iraqi's, mostly children, have died. What has been accomplished that makes the sanctions 'worth it?' --Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney Fourth Congressional District, Georgia (after a visit to Iraq) (it is estimated that the 1,000,000 people have died since 1991 as a result of the sanctions; this truly warrants the name genocide)

    " The companion volume to Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village turns out to be It Takes an Air Force... --CounterPunch

    It is a little acknowledged fact that Serbia minus Kosovo is now much more of a multi-ethnic state than Kosovo, which has been ethnically cleansed of 250,000 Serbs, Roma, and other non-Albanians under the 'watchful eye' of KFOR.

    "International attempts to bring peace to Kosovo have been confounded by a wave of violence by ethnic Albanians seeking revenge against Serbs for the 18-month crackdown that left 10,000 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced before NATO intervened. Most of the more than 200,000 Kosovo Serbs have fled since NATO troops replaced Serb forces in the province." (API)
    ---
    Here is an acknowledgement of the current situation; but it is marred by the typical newspeak/propaganda that fills the supposedly liberal press. The estimated 10,000 killings and hundreds of thousands of displacings occurred after NATO intervened, not before. Furthermore, recent estimates suggest that even the 10,000 number is perhaps 5 times the real number. The estimate of the number of deaths (Albanian and Serb combined) in the 18 months before the NATO intervention is 2000--about equivalent to the number of civilians killed by NATO.

    The US has dropped almost as many bombs on Iraq in *2000* as it dropped during its entire war on Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, humans that are 'unpeople', like the Iraqis, rate even less of a mention in the news when they are blown limb from limb in their houses, fields, schools, and churches. Even Scott Ritter (!) of all people, has complained, for his own reasons.

    Since you're, like, the President and stuff, can you, like, set a country on fire, . . . and then, fly over in a helicopter and say, "I am the President of the most powerful nation on earth. You must bow down before me"? Uh-huh-huh, uh-huh-huh, uh-huh-huh, uh-huh-huh . . .
    --Butt-Head, in Beavis and Butt-Head

    Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Serbia together spend just over $10 billion on the military, less than U.S. allies such as Israel and Taiwan. The US spends almost $300 billion on defense each year.

    Almost 2,000 people, a large majority Palestinians, including many children have been killed, and about 20,000 injured in the occupied territories and in Israel. The only viable rule is: every person's life should be deemed about as valuable as any other--a Palestinian life is worth the same as an Israeli life. Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon engineered by Sharon in 1982 killed about 17,500 civilians--a much larger number of civilians than were killed by the only side that the media feels comfortable calling terrorist. Relative numbers count (see above on the USA's much more horrific terrorist war on Vietnam). The need for the moderate majority to express themselves is desparately greater than ever before. Instead, the US has increased the more than $2 billion a year in military aid it gives to one side--and enforces the notion that whatever Israel does is acceptable and justifiable and whatever Palestinians do is wrong.

    "Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but 2000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we came here and stole their country. Why should they accept that?"
    --David Ben-Gurion, 1956, from the memoirs of Nahum Goldman

    "We will never forgive the Arabs for forcing our soldiers to kill them." --Golda Meir

    Keeping things in perspective: NASDAQ losses for last year (2 trillion dollars) were roughly forty times the size of the entire Russian state budget.

    "In terms of the health impacts on the general population in and near the war zone, the effects of the use of DU munitions pale in comparison with the other direct and indirect effects of war."
    --Steve Fetter and Frank von Hippel Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

    An American lawyer we met a few days later just outside Nazareth commented: "It's like Mississippi 1930 over here. Apartheid. I had no idea it was like this before I came." --from Sean Gonsalves in the Cape Cod Times

    The Americans are getting to be like these boring couples who take their holiday in the same place every year. The Pentagon's official statement should have read: "We looked at the brochures and thought of bombing somewhere new like Paraguay or Latvia. But then we thought, 'we always enjoy bombing Iraq, so what's the point of taking a chance?' We know the way, we can bomb the same hotel we bomb every year, we can just relax." --Mark Steel from the Independent, UK

    There are estimated to be 27 million slaves in the world today, more than at any time in human history.

    [-------- chronological "Life Overseas" blog entries follow ---------]

    [Sep12'01] From the Saudi Arabia? It would be a shame to nuke all that oil. Trained to fly in Florida? Perhaps too harsh to bomb Miami Beach (close enough, whatever) for harboring terrorists. Just checked out of an apartment in San Diego? But I live a few miles away! There are many calls to squash the ant that so savagely bit our mighty Pentagon and trade spires. The problem is there are many ants. And you can't threaten to kill them because they are ready to die (the present culprits are mostly all dead already). So I guess the only thing left to squash are dark-faced men and women and children living in poor, dusty cities, and their not-very-good sewer and water systems--it's hard to bomb them back to the stone age because they're already there. And we'll no doubt increase spending on missile defense. Neither will work, but most of our proud Roman citizens need 10 heads for an American head. Guess the forgotten 3 million Southeast Asian civilian heads weren't enough.

    [Sep13'01] War is merely terrorism on a much larger scale (see above).

    [Sep14'01] A majority of those surveyed by the New York Times said the United States should retaliate "even if it means many thousands of innocent civilians may be killed." (my initial guess was that about 100,000 would be considered OK). We already have a word for this: terrorism.

    [Sep14'01] O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
    --from "The War Prayer" by Mark Twain
    Written during America's crackdown on the Philippines (1899-1902) which killed 4,600 Americans and almost 300,000 Filipinos, and not published until well after his death (full text here.

    For better or worse we now have a more personal view of what the receiving end of a 'video-game' war looks like.

    [Sep15'01] The destruction of the trade center towers has not reduced the value of the life of dark-faced humans any more than the 3 million civilians we killed in Southeast Asia reduced the value of American life. Should major cities in the US be bombed for harboring Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara? No.

    The Iraqi declaration about the deaths of 5,000 Americans ("Regardless of human feelings on what happened yesterday, America is reaping thorns sown by its rulers in the world") will likely, in the fullness of time, be eclipsed by Madeleine Albright's declaration that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children "is a price worth paying".

    We should take our example not from our military and political leaders shouting "retaliate" and "war" but from the doctors and nurses and medical students and firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing, not vengeance but compassion. --Howard Zinn

    It is crucial to argue for peace now, as the mechanisms of war are brought into high gear. There is no moral point in holding off protests out of respect for the current victims. There is no better time to stop the creation of more similarly innocent victims. Kudos to Madonna

    Since both sides tread the path to war under the banner of holiness, the holy might make some effort to bar the way. --Simon Jenkins, There are 285 million people in North America, 140 million people in Pakistan, 27 million people in Afghanistan, 6 million people in Israel, (and 1,300 million people in China).

    Americans are finally waking to the uncomfortable fact of how a large part of the world views us--as a rich, attractive, self-interested, Roman empire--now greviously wounded and gearing up its biggest-in-the-world Darth Vader military to drop endless tons of anti-personnel bombs on civilians in one of the poorest countries in the world. We will come off looking like the civilians working on the Death Star. The Afghans on the street shaking their fist at us will lose this one, bigtime. They didn't do it, and bombing them won't help our cause, except to make some Americans feel good (cf. another widely-publicized celebration).

    Instead of 20 more billion for war (undoubtedly just the first cash injection), and bailing out airline executives (as a reward for firing 25% of their work force!) how about giving some of that money to the victim's families? The 40 billion would have come out to almost 7 million per family.

    The Clear Channel radio network (which is the largest owner of radio stations in the US) issued a list of songs that shouldn't be played, which included things like "Morning Has Broken", "Peace Train", "War (what is it good for)", John Lennon's "Imagine", and any song by "Rage Against the Machine".

    The very bases where bin Laden's legendary Qaeda network is centered were built with covert C I A funding hardly more than 15 years ago. The US is just as much a party to 'harboring terrorism' as the hapless Afghans living under the Taliban. No one, however, suggests we carry out a surgical strike on the C I A for its partial responsibility. And no one even suggests firing the people who thought it was a good idea at the time. Instead we hear that we shouldn't restrain the C I A from 'fighting dirty'. Well, they did 'fight dirty'. They gave about 3 billion (tax) dollars to the anti-Soviet freedom fighters and helped them build the training camps we're now bombing. That seems to have been a big part of the problem.

    "While the huge support in opinion polls for military action indicates a collective amnesia of our moral tradition, the hypocrisy it exposes in the west's claim to moral superiority is not lost on the Muslim world. Violence is a powerful form of communication, as Mohamed Atta and his colleagues understood: we all knew from their choice of targets what they were saying about US economic and military domination. So what will be the message of the US-led coalition, made up of the most powerful nations on earth, in attacking one of the poorest, a country of ruins, refugees, a legacy of a cold-war playground?" --Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, UK

    How come no discussion about how 'the market' failed to deliver adequate airport security because it outsourced it to minimum wage, no-benefits, fast-food-restaurant-like companies with huge turnover?

    Millions of starving civilians, now with about 100 infected with an Ebola-like virus, held off by armed guards at the Afghanistan border, waiting to be killed--looks bad, is bad, guys.

    "In interviews, opposition leaders stress their determination to join the battle against terrorism, though those speaking English usually pronounce the word as 'tourism'. 'I have been fighting against tourism in Afghanistan for 24 years,' one commander told us stoutly." --Patrick Cockburn, from northern Afghanistan

    George W Bush founded the Arbusto Energy oil company in Texas in the 1970's. Salem Bin Laden (brother of Osama) may have invested money in it then (Salem died in a light plane crash in 1983).

    A recent poll indicates that 63 percent of Americans believe that strikes on Afghanistan will increase the threat of terrorist attacks. But most still want them anyway. Working at reducing wealth disparities, ending economic sanctions against Iraq, and getting out of Saudi Arabia is much more likely to reduce terrorism than killing our former bin Laden allies. Only a small group of ultra lefties support those three (anti-war libertarians support the last two).

    "Personally I don't think and have never thought that we should discontinue support of Israel. I am very critical of [US] policy towards Israel but that's in part because I think it's very harmful to the people of Israel... What we should do, I think, is join what has been a very broad international consensus for about 25 years now, which calls for a two state settlement on the internationally recognized borders (that means pre-June 1967) in recognizing the rights and guaranteeing the security of all states in the region including Israel and a Palestinian state. --Noam Chomsky.

    Just as in the case of Israeli and Palestinians lives, an Iraqi life (about 6,000 lost per month due to sanctions) is worth the same as an American life.

    Debka.com reports that the US, with the approval of Russia has moved tactical nuclear weapons to several bases along the border of Afghanistan.

    What cowardly pablum our newswriters regurgitate every time we bomb someone! What's all this about 'softening' targets when you really mean 'amputating limbs' and 'crushing people to death in falling buildings'. And not even one tiny peep on the incredible irony that the most catastrophic failure ever of government intelligence has resulted in a threefold (!) increase in the confidence of the public in the same federal government. It's hard to recall that before Sept 11, the rhetoric was all about dropping taxes (esp. capital gains taxes) further in order to starve the worthless state into submission. I suppose it's all somehow related to the ability to believe simultaneously in cell phones and creationism.

    "U.S urges bin Laden to form nation it can attack" -- the Onion.

    "The Russians killed at least five times as many Chechens in the days of the conquest of Grozny, hailed by Clinton, as died in the World Trade Center, and here we have Bush arm in arm with his soul-bro, Putin. --Cockburn and St Clair.

    The UN's World Food Progam says that just to supply sufficient food for 400,000 people in northern Afghanistan would require about 1,800 Hercules cargo flights a month--a rate far in excess of the *military* missions now being flown, and ten thousand times more than packages of "beans and tomato vinaigrette," (English-only menu) we so kindly dropped on mine fields earlier this week--the highest altitude food drop in history. Current UN estimates are that 7.5 million people need food aid in Afghanistan.

    "None of the Anglo-American onslaughts since 1991 can match the cruel absurdity of this week's bombing of one of the poorest and most ruined countries in the world by the planet's richest and most powerful state assisted as ever by its British satrap" --Seumas Milne.

    "Why it is that all of these people hate us. It's not because of freedom. It's not because Britney Spears has a belly button or because we export hamburgers. They hate us because of things they see us doing to their part of the world that they definitely do not like." --Edward Peck, former US Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan's terrorism task force recently on CNN Crossfire.

    "You keep talking also about collective punishment and killing innocent people to force governments to change their policies; you call this terrorism when someone would kill innocent people or civilians in order to force the government to change its policies. Well, when you were the first one who invented this terrorism.... And now you have invented new ways to kill innocent people. You have so-called economic embargo which kills nobody other than children and elderly people.... You are the ones who invented terrorism and using it every day. You are butchers, liars, and hypocrites." --excerpt from the statement that Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, one of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, made to the federal judge at his sentencing hearing.

    Expressing critical thought is considered to be favoring the terrorists. That is what I consider extremely dangerous. -- Vaclav Havel The peace movement *doesn't* need to change its message. We're up against the *same old*. Don't cave. The US/British bombing war on Afghanistan is wrong, will kill and starve people who had absolutely nothing to do with the horrendous WTC attacks (and many of whom are already starving), and it won't work, at least for its stated aims of stopping more of the same. It may have other, additional uses related to the control of new oil supplies or to a new alliance with Russia against China. The acknowledgement that the war is unlikely to properly sate American blood lust has the hawks deparately caterwauling for an assault on Iraq. Hooray for the brave and sensible anti-war women (Barbara Kingsolver, Arundhati Roy, Mary Riddell, Barbara Lee)--much better than wimpy male cavers like Lance Dickie, Marc Cooper, and Chris Hitchens.

    Every day over 20,000 people in the world starve to death according to the UN.

    "Office of Homeland Security"? Isn't that what the Department of *Defense* was supposed to be??

    The Chinese are working overtime to manufacture enough flags for all of our new found patriots.

    "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." --US diplomat to Ahmed Rashid several years ago.

    "The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." --John Flynn, 1944.

    "The International Coalition Against Terror is a largely cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same league". --Arundhati Roy

    CNN and company have switched from 'all-Condit, all the time' to 'all-anthrax, all the time,' -- Ibish and Abunimah, LA Times

    "Wealth has never yet sacrificed itself on the altar of patriotism" -- Bob LaFollette. 80 percent of the benefits in the recent 100 billion dollar Republican anti-terrorism bill will go the top 2 percent of households and only 2% to unemployed workers.

    A good part of modern war consists of pilots in high tech, high altitude planes dropping high tech, often anti-personnel weapons on undefended civilian targets like power stations, water treatment plants, food warehouses, and simple homes in poor countries. As the Afghan hospital system collapses, terribly wounded civilians have been forced to flee to Pakistan. Truly disgusting, guys. Not a good plan for the future either. Do we really want to end up in a day where every sewage treatment plant has to have its own Patriot air defense system? Bombing civilians is wrong, period. Apologizing and calling it collateral damage doesn't make it right.

    "Attention, noble Afghan people," starts the message broadcast in both Pashto and Dari. "As you know, the coalition countries have been air dropping daily humanitarian rations for you. The food ration is enclosed in yellow plastic bags. They come in the shape of rectangular or long squares. The food inside the bags is halal and very nutritional. In areas away from where food has been dropped, cluster bombs will also be dropped. The colour of these bombs is also yellow. All bombs will explode when they hit the ground, but in some special circumstances some of the bombs will not explode." --US radio message broadcast in Afghanistan
    -----------------
    What a bizarre world we live in where even the slaughter of civilians can be conducted in a politically correct way. It really turned out like '1984' after all.

    "280 people would have to die of anthrax to equal the risk of driving 50 miles [once] in a car (about one in a million)." --Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel

    "The U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble--the airport, the power plants, their water facilities [we're already doing that] and the roads." As far as the civilian population [27 million] of Afghanistan, [Bill] O'Reilly [in Time] said, "If they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period."
    -----------------
    I knew Americans were 'more equal' than other kinds of people but that's some serious 'more equal'! (about 1 to 5,000).

    Various nightmare scenarios now come to mind (e.g., Russian ground troops hit by nuclear bomb dropped by Pakistani military faction).

    "Terrorism is the use of force or the threat of force against civilian populations to achieve political objectives." --Edward Herman. By this sensible definition, the war in Afghanistan is terrorism. For example, Admiral Michael Boyce, Chief of the British Defense Staff, said "The squeeze [the bombing campaign] will carry on until the people of the country themselves recognize that this is going to go on until they get the leadership changed." Compare the lefty Herman's definition to the one in the recently passed bill:
    -----------------
    (d) the term "terrorism" means an activity that: (i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and (ii) appears to be intended: (A) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (B) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (C) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking. -----------------
    It's the same! That's one thing you gotta love about the politically-correct US. Even in white heat of war hysteria and revenge, it still can't bring itself to tell it like it is: '"Terrorism" is when someones tries to intimidate or coerce the civilian populations or governments in the US, Europe, or Israel by violent means.'

    "Bush has told advisors," writes Judy Keen in a USA Today puff piece, "that he believes confronting the enemy is a chance for him and his fellow baby boomers to refocus their lives and prove they have the same kind of valor and commitment their fathers showed in WWII." ... Refocus your life, bomb a village. Maybe we should bring back the draft--for 50-somethings sorry they missed out on Vietnam. --Katha Pollitt

    "As long as the U.S. keeps killing civilians, it will not differ from the organizations it is fighting against--the only difference is that the U.S. apologizes." --Ismet Berkan, editor of Radikal.

    "The revolutionaries took over the embassy so rapidly that the C.I.A. station was not able to effectively destroy all of its documents, and the Iranians were later able to piece together shredded agency reports." --James Risen, commenting on how that earlier loss will help with information recovery from the secret C I A site that was destroyed next to the WTC. Not surprisingly, Risen forgot to mention that one of the documents the Iranians were able to piece together was a C I A manual on how to torture women. Makes me a bit nervous with the talk these days about the FBI re-considering the use of domestic torture for added 'homeland security'.

    Afghanistan is four times the size of South Vietnam, 60 times the size of Kosovo.

    The US bombing initially increased the Taliban's support inside Afghanistan. Instead of being seen as fundamentalist crazies who nevertheless rescued the region from total post-Soviet chaos and slaughter, they are now also heroes--brothers and fathers and uncles--who stand up with extreme bravery--and with significant cost in life, limb, and skin--to the fire and shrapnel of the world's biggest bombing machine. However patriotic one might be here, it is hard to get that worked up. As Bill Maher says, the Americans who press the buttons that dispense the flames from on high don't seem that brave; and brave Americans that may have already lost limbs (a foot) on the ground are hidden away to avoid having the American public turn against the war.

    In one year (1996), 9,390 people were killed with handguns in the United States. Yet no one suggests that we should be considering torture in gun-related homicide cases. For comparison, in the same year, two people were killed with handguns in New Zealand 1996, 13 in Australia, 15 in Japan, 30 in Britain.

    The US is now dropping bombs (the "Daisy Cutter", also used in Viet Nam) that use six times the amount of ammonium nitrate explosive that Timothy McVeigh used in the bomb that blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. The planes that drop them have to fly over 6,000 feet to avoid the shockwave.

    "How do you wage war against an entire country to get one man? We were all sorry to see the loss of so many American lives on September 11. But why do Americans seem to think that their lives are more valuable than lives outside their borders? This is what makes people so angry at the U.S." --Siphiwe Moerane, South African graphics designer.

    "Mr Powell US Secretary of State has said that the evidence against bin Laden and al-Qaeda would not stand up in court. If it won't stand up in court, how the hell can it justify bombing?" --Dennis Halliday, former assistant sec'y general of the UN.

    Walter Isaascon, chairman of CNN, decided that his reporters were focussing "too much on the casualties and hardship in Afghanistan," and ordered CNN reporters "to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it's in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States." This argument is absolutely indistinguishable from the one terrorists use.

    Know your enemy. A 1997 UNICEF survey of 300 children in Kabul revealed that 40% had lost a parent, 2/3rds of them had seen [real] dead bodies or parts of bodies, and 90% believed they would die during the conflict. There are 50,000 armed men in Afghanistan and 25,000,000 people. That's 500-to-1.

    "Why of course the people don't want war. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." --Hermann Goering at Nuremburg

    "Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others" --Emma Goldman.

    The bombing was wrong. It should be stopped now, too. Left (and right) warnings about starvation were valid (and may yet help to avoid it). The life expectancy of Afghans is 40. The Northern Alliance are every bit as horrible as the Taliban. Supporting vicious people with guns because they happen to agree with our present goals didn't work last time. It is unlikely to work this time. It greatly increased the number of people killed in a country far from our home. The Taliban and the Northern Alliance make up a miniscule percentage of the population of Afghanistan (0.2%). Estimates are that about 5,000 skinny, dark-faced humans have so far (Nov 16) been killed in Afghanistan by the US war. Unfortunately, this is probably far from enough for American's 'new patriots' (cf. 100,000 or so people killed in the first Iraq war). Killing a lot more people is unlikely, however, to be a good long term strategy.

    "My concern about this order [Presidential decree establishing secret military trials], not having reviewed every detail, is that it kind of undercuts the efforts we've been making as a nation to distinguish ourselves from regimes like the Taliban. It sort of suggests that when the going gets tough, we don't really believe in our ideals either." --Professor Jonathan Entin, Case Western Reserve

    Soon after Sept 11, Defense (sic) Secretary Rumsfeld said "Victory [over terrorism] is persuading the American people and the rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that's going to be over in a month or a year or even five years." Cool victory, man.

    The German 'Greens' have traded peace for power. Time to change the party name, guys!

    [Nov25'01] The US Air Force helped the Northern Alliance this Sunday (11/25) kill most of the 500 or so Taliban POWs trapped inside the stone walls of a fort by dropping bombs on them (30 air strikes) while British and Northern Alliance troops were shooting at them from the parapets. Pretty brave, huh? Even the Taliban rarely did stuff that brave. As the Red Cross started collecting the body parts Wednesday, the Northern Alliance fighters went around cutting the black cloths they had used to tie the prisoners' elbows behind their backs (and in some cases, their big toes together so they couldn't run). Also see latest Robert Fisk for only Western report from behind the lines. but this is relatively benign in the context of recent history--between 1992 and 1996, the Northern Alliance killed 50,000 people in Kabul.

    [Nov26'01] The lives of soldiers, both theirs and ours, are worth *the same* as the lives of civilians, theirs and ours. Poor Afghan civilians are just as innocent and valuable as New Yorker civilians. We will not be at peace with the world until those equations are actually respected. The violation of those equations goes much further in explaining 'why do they hate us' than Britney Spears and McDonalds do.

    [Nov27'01] The problem with the current US war on terror is that it emphasizes the already obvious truth that people with Kalashnikovs, tanks, and trenches--however fanatical and brave they may be--are no match for a giant, high-tech airforce/navy/satellite/electronic military machine (costing thousands of times as much as the tanks and Kalashnikovs), in combination with princely economic bribes (billion dollar debt cancellation). Now, more than ever, it is obvious that the only true deterrent to American power is a portable nuclear bomb. Though difficult to make, many already exist, and more are likely to be made in the coming decades. Our permanent 'Warfare State' should focus more of its attention on that problem than on boondoggle missile defense toys.

    [Nov28'01] Today, a proposal was floated to try captured Taliban in military tribunals on Guam. There was an objection from Guam that it might hurt their tourist industry. So, another proposal would be to have the secret tribunals--capable of handing out the death penalty--take place instead on US Navy ships at sea. However, the Northern Alliance has slaughtered most of the likely prisoners/suspects (perhaps 2,000), with tacit US (and Iranian) approval.

    Enron workers lost their retirement plans as the company went bankrupt since the plans were locked up in Enron stock that was frozen by Enron executives after they sold off their own shares (AKA class war--this after the Chairman, Kenneth Lay took in $140 million in 2000). The problem, amazingly, was that the ongoing price gouging (unfavorable long term contracts for California negotiated at the height of the crisis by the Gov) was not enough to keep the company afloat after last Spring's gorgings on 100-times-the-going-rate price spikes...

    It's easy to forget that our repulsive Attorney General was beaten -- as an incumbent, no less -- by a dead man (Mel Carnahan), despite $60,000 in contributions from Enron in Missouri before being elevated by Bush.

    Over last weekend 30 Israeli civilians were killed by suicide bombers and hundreds were injured. This was accurately reported and condemned in the world's media as a terrible atrocity. Over the same weekend 200 to 300 Afghan civilians were killed and hundreds more injured by US bombs in an atrocity that was 10 times worse in terms of the number of humans butchered. The Afghan civilian deaths were almost completely suppressed by US media. Humans screamed there, too, but those screams mostly disappeared forever into the cold night air -- not confirmed, not seen on TV.

    "President Bush's Fascist Tribunals"--the title of an article on the website of the John Birch Society (!).

    Over 200 teachers in Middletown, New Jersey were jailed after going on strike protesting large increases in health insurance payments (large for teachers--the cost was $600/year more) for 5 days against a court order (?!).

    [Dec06'01] Bush gives me the willies , too.

    Unnamed Taleban sources say that the US bombing of Kandahar over the past two months has killed 10,000 people, mostly Taleban fighters. In my book, 10,000 US civilians are worth about the same as 10,000 US servicemen, which are worth about the same as these 10,000 Taleban, whatever bad things they did while they were alive. Like the 100,000 or so people killed in the Iraq war, these slaughtered people are invisble. This kind of invisibility is not a good plan for the future of our shared world, especially since it was our tax money that went a long way to creating the Taliban in the first place, and people in countries outside the US know that.

    "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how I hate all this, how despicable and ignorable war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." -- Albert Einstein

    Conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, 76, in Basel to conduct for a music festival, was dragged sleeping out of his hotel bed by Swiss police because he had been put on a national list of terrorist suspects for a comment he made in the 1960's that opera houses should be blown up. After being held for 3 hours with his passport confiscated, he was released. Better safe than sorry with those dang foreigners...

    The US is currently bombing a starving country with the highest precentage of disabled persons in the world (land mines, cluster bomblets, unexploded bombs, war) and a life expectancy under 40. A report by Marc W. Herold, University of New Hampshire Economics professor finds that using conservative estimates, about 3,700 civilians--people who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11--have been killed in Afghanistan by U.S. bombs. This is more people than were killed in Kosovo in the year before we bombed. It's also on top of the deaths of perhaps Afghan 10,000 fighters--the huge majority also with no connection to 9/11. The number of innocent Afghans driven from their homes by the US bombing is over half a million--as many as were driven out of Kosovo by Milosevic when the US bombed there. Hundreds of Afghans are dying of starvation and freezing to death every day in horrible refugee camps. OK to stop carnage now, guys? Anything I can think of to stamp out genocidal thought in our proud land...

    Bush is just the biggest warlord.

    An Afghan woman living in the caves hear where the Buddha statues were destroyed (after being driven there last year by the Taliban) uses tabasco sauce from a food drop to treat a lingering gunshot wound in her foot.

    "When I was crossing the border, I saw Iranian artillery point toward Afghanistan. When I entered Afghanistan, I saw artillery pointing to Iran. On the Afghan side of the border I heard that the region's military commander had called the Iranian consul and told him that their homes were made of clay, so what did the Iranian guns aim to target? He had said, "the worst that you can do is bombard our houses and when it rains we will take the wet mud and build our homes anew. Don't you find it a pity if our guns destroy your beautiful homes? You can't make glass and iron and ceramics with rain. Why don't you come and build the road to Herat for us?" --Mohsen Makhmalbaf, director of the Iranian film, "Kandahar"

    Enron+Shrub sure seems a lot worse than Whitewater+Hillary but hardly a minuscule bleat out of our prostrate press!

    After killing almost 4,000 Afghan civilians without even noticing (but, probably, not Bin Laden) in the course our remote-control attack on one of the poorest countries in the world, our brave leaders have been looking for another place to attack. Already-destroyed Iraq, with 100,000 civilians killed the last time we dropped more than an all-sides-of-WWII's worth of bombs on their Texas-sized country, and filled with thousands of dying and deformed kids, has been enthusiatically suggested as next in line. But there has been reluctance because that would require perhaps one hundred thousand troops ('only' 20,000 US troops have been moved to Kuwait et al. so far). So the current plan seems to be Somalia, which doesn't even have a central government. The amazingly cowardliness of it all defies belief! Here we are, with our satellite-controlled-full-spectrum-dominance-Death-Star $300-billion-a-year military -- and we are afraid to attack any but the absolutely poorest, least technologically advanced small countries, safely halfway around the world. Americans sure look attractive to the rest of the people living on our fine planet because we are so rich. But it's a kind of disgusting attractiveness as they see us respond to the call to express our 'patriotism' and 'bravery' by buying more of the stuff that most people in the world can't afford.

    Can it really be a year since we didn't elect George W. Bush president? Time sure flies when youre going straight to hell. --Barry Crimmins

    When "influential" people in America and other countries were asked whether America's "scientific and technological innovation" was a major source of the worldwide popularity of Americans, Americans dismissed it (32% said it was "a major reason") in comparison to 63% of Europeans and 86% of Middle Easterners who cited it as a major reason. A majority of Americans thought we were liked because "the U.S. does a lot of good around the world", not high on the lists of non-Americans.

    The U.S. is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don't care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose. And we don't like that. Because Afghans are now being made to suffer for these Arab fanatics, but we all know who brought these Arabs to Afghanistan in the 1980s, armed them and gave them a base. It was the Americans and the C I A. And the Americans who did this all got medals and good careers, while all these years Afghans suffered from these Arabs and their allies. Now, when America is attacked, instead of punishing the Americans who did this, it punishes the Afghans. --Abdul Haq, anti-Taliban Afghan executed by the Taliban early in the Amerian war.

    Wasn't the goal of our Afghan war to get/kill the perps? -- as opposed to slaughtering 4,000 civilians and toppling the Taliban so Afghans can safely listen to American rock music in public? Two short months later, it looks like the US in only pretending to try to capture/kill bin Laden. Our government (and Saudi) may very well rather have him around as another permanent Saddam, useful for justifying weekly bombings of people in poor countries.

    In 'liberated' Jalalabad soldier-bandits steal sacks of food-aid food, transport it to hotels, and feed it at highly inflated prices to deep-pocket western 'reporters'. Ah, the joys of the 'free' market (i.e., under boundary conditions set by US government policy). Meanwhile, life is truly grim out in the sticks--tho completely invisible in the US. A much bigger story in the US press was that euthanized pet carcasses have sometimes been boiled down for use in pet food--despite the fact that this represents a miniscule fraction of the farm animals that are boiled down for human consumption.

    "U.S. President George Bush's crusade against terrorism is going splendidly -- except for a few minor hiccups, such as that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida remain elusive, the Russians have reoccupied half of Afghanistan, perhaps thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S. bombs and India is now threatening war against Pakistan." --Eric Margolis

    [Jan10'02] "Now we are British, we are American. You bomb from the air and we will find your terrorists for you. Then we take control of Somalia like the Northern Alliance." -- [UK Telegraph] one of our new friends in next-stop-Somalia.

    The real-life 'hero' on which Black Hawk Down main character mainly based is in jail for child molestation and rape, disowned by his wife.

    Most major news organizations abided by an order Jan. 11 from Pentagon officials not to transmit images of masked and chained prisoners in Afghanistan shot the previous day. "The Geneva Convention prohibits humiliating, debasing photos," said Rear Adm. Craig Quigley. "We need to be cautious in case there is a legal action somewhere downstream."

    The US military has decided to stop 'chasing shadows', having slaughtered about 4,000 Afghan civilians in the process. However, the bombing hasn't stopped, and is killing civilians almost every day--accidentally, of course. I wonder what wonderful Newspeak description of these new killings we'll get next month. I also hope nobody gets the urge to 'chase shadows' again in a large American city.

    US troops massacred an large number of civilians (estimates range from 500 to 5,000) in Somalia at the time of Black Hawk Down. I guess child-molester special-forces white-guys (see above) massacring crowds of black women and children didn't work out as a movie pitch.

    "We've found there is a lot of strategic space between a low-intensity war waged with Pakistan and the nuclear threshold. Therefore, we are utilizing military options without worrying about the nuclear threshold." On the other hand, if that turns out to be a miscalculation and Pakistan initiates the use of nuclear weapons, then India would respond "and Pakistan would cease to exist." --Indian diplomat as told to Seymour Hersh. More and more, other countries are thinking just like we have for decades! Great.

    "If Clinton 'choked on a pretzel' while watching a football game alone, passed out and later flaunted a vivid facial bruise, they'd say that he was getting a blowjob from one of his girlfriends, got hit by Hillary with a lamp and then bombed Afghanistan to distract public attention. With George no one even asks how you can black out from eating a pretzel, or if the choking caused brain damage. How would they know?" -- Alexander Cockburn.

    US and its allies bravely stormed a Kandahar hospital, killing 6 skinny, injured, armed al-Qaida patients that had been left behind by retreating Taliban troops. Meanwhile, NPR ignored that report and instead devoted a loving 10 minute segment to the death, from old age, of a lion in a god-forsaken Afghan zoo, cruelly injured a decade ago by a venegeful Taliban whose brother was killed by the lion.

    The Pentagon's budget will be increased $48 billion dollars in 2003 to $380 billion dollars. The increase alone is one and a half times the entire defense budget of Britain or France. 'Defense' spending in the US now exceeds the 15 next-largest miliary budgets combined. We're proud of having kicked ass in one of the poorest, most hungry, most poorly defended countries in the world. The "axis of evil" countries--Iran, Iraq and North Korea--have a combined military budget of just $12 billion (that's a 30-to-1 ratio of military spending, us to them). D'ya think we can be victorious again? They're slightly better fed (but still hungry).

    [Feb01'02] If we insist on dropping tens of millions of these disgusting things on other countries, it's just a matter of time before someone, someday, succeeds in returning the favor.

    The 'tall man' hinted at being bin Laden turned out to be a metal scavenger--somebody so poor he was going places where bombs had been dropped to pick up the scrap metal to sell (for about $5). He and his two friends were blown apart and set on fire by a Hellfire missile fired from a remotely operated drone costing millions of dollars. Blade Runner time is here today for the worthless people that live outside our fine empire.

    Let Iraq live. Now is the time to stop the preparations for invading Iraq, which, according to Debka, will occur in a month or two.

    [Feb15'02] Milosevic is on trial for war crimes. But can he beat this? (from Esquire, 1963, by R.H.S. Crossman, posted on the right-wing FreeRepublic.com and followed by flames).

    British 'peacekeepers' with night-vision goggles shot a woman in labor in Kabul in 'self defense' and killed one of her relatives as they tried to drive her to the hospital. This gets an 'understanding' write-up (tragic error, etc). That script wouldn't get an understanding write-up for even a *dog* mother in America. But it's only an Afghan mother -- worth less than an American dog. Naturally, the British soldier won't have to face charges in Afghanistan (he was evacuated back to Britain to avoid this). Naturally. All those who cheer the kiddies with machine guns in our airports ought to watch out what they ask for.

    Danny Pearl's death was unjust and horrible. So, equally, were the deaths of several thousand Afghan civilians.

    "The only place where you and I disagree ... is with regard to the bombing," Nixon said. "You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care." --Richard Nixon talking to Henry Kissinger on the Nixon tapes. Between 2 and 3 million civilians were killed when the US invaded and bombed South Vietnam and surrounding countries. Saddam never came vaguely close.

    "C. The lessons of Balata were thoroughly assimilated before the [March 2002] Tulkarm operation. There, the Golani contingents sewed up the refugee camp by a diversionary tactic: they feigned an attack on neighboring Nour Shams camp, driving the terrorist heavyweights to escape into the next-door Tulkarm camp, where they were quickly surrounded. This time, the Israeli commander cut the camp off from water, electricity and food supplies and kept ambulances out. Ambulances trying to force their way into the camp were shot [two ambulance workers killed], even those on the way to evacuate genuine casualties. On the third day, the Palestinian resistance collapsed. Among the 1000 men who surrendered were some 200 top commanders and senior terror activists." [3.5 million Palestinians live in the occupied territories; the next day, there was another lethal suicide bomb] -- debka.com

    A few years back we were supposed to get a global village, a global free-trade zone. Now, it looks more like a global free-fire zone.

    The British tabloid Daily Mirror reported the announcement of Blair's forthcoming visit to Bush's Texas ranch under the headline "Howdy Poodle."

    House owners will now get 48-hour notice before demolition of their homes (Ha'aretz). Shades of the new Afghanistan: stonings will now use smaller rocks -- and your dead body only gets hung up for a half and hour instead of a whole day. Great.

    I believe that Americans are basically decent people. If they understood that Iraq is not made up of 22 million Saddam Husseins but made up of 22 million people -- of families, of children, of elderly parents, families with dreams and hopes and expectations for their children and themselves -- they would be horrified to realize that the current killing of innocent Iraqi civilians by the U.S. Air Force, or what happened in the Gulf War, is being done in their name. --Dennis Halliday

    100,000 people were killed directly by warfare in 1999. 60 percent of those were in Africa, home to only 10% of the world's population.

    Suicide bombers and American soldiers are a lot alike. Both give their bodies to Old Men of the State. Both kill civilians. The differences are: (1) American troops have better equipment, (2) they have better odds of survival, and, most importantly, (3) they kill a *lot* more civilians (e.g., Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia). In the recent troubles in Israel, the IDF has killed 5 times as many civilians as the suicide bomber have. Numbers count.

    "If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus casbah, and if this job is given to an (Israeli) officer to carry out without casualties on both sides, he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even -- shocking though this might appear -- to analyse how the German army operated in the Warsaw ghetto." -- an Israeli officer quoted in Ma'ariv.

    [Mar30'02] The message coming from Bush and Powell on 3/30/02 is that when Israeli civilians are killed, it is terrorism, but when Palestinian civilians are killed (3 times as many), it is understandable, and not terrorism. Almost every other country in the world (e.g., Europe, China, Russia, Japan) sees these two kinds of killings as similarly evil. The fact that the international 'human' shields in the occupied territories work shows that by definition, Palestinians are less than human. On 4/1/02, 5 international human shields were hospitalized for light injuries from shrapnel from gunfire at their feet, but they were not shot at directly.

    [Apr03'02] In a virtual replay of the public's self-contradictory assessment of the slaughter in Afghanistan, a large percentage of the US population sympathizes with Israel and not the Palestinians, supports Israel's invasion of the West Bank, and then concludes that the recent Israeli attacks will lead to more suicide bombings.

    [Apr04'02] One can only imagine what would be on the 'Nixon tapes' of contemporary internal White House discussions about how a 'lousy few thousand people' killed in the Mideast is getting in the way of our fine summer plans to slaughter 10,000 (or 100,000) Iraqis. Saddam sends money and hundreds of Palestinian civilians give up their lives, with the effect that tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians are spared for a few months. The cold calculus of modern human life.

    [Apr05'02] The IDF tossed stun grenades into a group reporters and cameramen and then fired rubber bullets at their cars as they left to scare off the last remaining group of Western TV reporters (NBC and CNN) leaving only international 'human shields' on cell phones to report things like the crushing of 4 ambulances by tanks today.

    [Apr07'02] 45% of the Jewish population of Israel now supports "transfer" -- that is, ethnically cleansing 3 million Arabs from their homes (such as they are, some for a second time) in the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza. See (conservative) Derek Copold on why this wouldn't be a strategically sensible thing to do. Now imagine a similar article in a mainstream American paper explaining with a straight face to Americans why, morality aside, ethnically cleansing 3 millions Jews from their homes in Israel would in fact be a poor policy choice from a strictly military point of view, despite the fact that a substantial portion of the Arab population supports it.

    [Apr09'02] When the assault began at 1am, rockets and flares could be seen streaking through the darkness into the buildings and open spaces of this dreary, rundown camp. As dawn came, the barrage stopped and loudspeaker announcements in Arabic told men among the camp)s 6,000 inhabitants: "Put your hands up and give up. Save your women and children." -- Stephen Farrell, Nablus

    [Apr12'02] Observers estimate that 30% of the Jenin refugee camp, previously home to 15,000 Palestinians, more than half under 18, has been destroyed by Israeli bombing and demolition with bulldozers. The demolition and the burying of bodies in mass graves is still going on today despite an order of Israel's High Court not to remove the bodies. The refugees living in the Jenin camp were first "transferred" (ethnically cleansed) from the coastal region of Haifa in 1948, to make room for the influx of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The official story is that tens of thousands fled their homes because they wanted to.

    [Apr12'02] During 1991-2000, Saudi Arabia purchased $33.5 billion in US arms and other military services, exceeding those of Israel ($18.8 billion), Egypt ($12.7 billion), Kuwait ($5.5 billion), United Arab Emirates ($1.4 billion), and Bahrain ($1.1 billion), according to the General Accounting Office--small potatoes, of course, compared to the US, which just decreed a one-year, $44 billion dollar increase in its 'defense' budget.

    [Apr12'02] Bethlehem University's new Millennium Hall, opened in 2000, costing $2 million, of which $1.2 million was provided by USAID's ASHA program (American Schools and Hospitals Abroad), was destroyed by four TOW missiles, each costing $180,000, provided in aid to the IDF the US Government. --Amnesty International

    [Apr14'02] Natan Sharansky, Israel's minister of housing, recently (Apr12) suggested that the Israeli Defense Forces' attack on Jenin was more restrained than the US campaign in Afghanistan. It will be difficult to ever count how many died in Jenin since the occupying IDF (30,000 soldiers) has kept the press and ambulances out of the killing fields. There were 15,000 people in the refugee camp (outside the city of Jenin) before the invasion -- 47% of them children and old people according to the previous census. The IDF is currently deciding which of the dead bodies rotting in the streets were 'gunmen' and is burying them -- no doubt, along with dead 'gun-children', 'gun-women', and 'gun-old-people' -- in local mass graves or sending them to burial grounds in Haifa or the Jordan valley (the traditional place to bury dead terrorists in unmarked graves). A wide swath of buildings in the center of the camp were demolished by bulldozers. These mass removals and burials were approved today by an Israeli High Court ruling, on the condition that they were required for the 'safety' of the Palestinians. Sadly, Sharansky's equation has an element of truth to it; the wrongs he speaks of are similar. The lives of Afghani villagers (an estimated 3-4,000 killed almost exclusively by high-altitude US bombing, also in numbers that will never be known) are worth about the same as the almost worthless (by US standards) lives of Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp, snuffed out under buildings collapsed by bulldozers to make room for tanks, by (US made) Hellfire missiles fired into civilian buildings, or more slowly in the streets, under the watchful eye of Israeli snipers charged with keeping ambulances and relatives at bay until enough blood had flowed out. But Sharansky is wrong to imply that killing low-market-value humans using a smaller ratio of airpower to troops makes it better than what the US did to 3-4,000 civilians in Afghanistan. Both are just as much an example of terrorism as suicide bombings. The low-market-value humans out there are watching and remembering, even if many 'Good Americans' aren't.

    The wolf and the lamb are drinking out of a stream together. The wolf tells the lamb, "You are spoiling my water." The lamb says, "But the water is flowing the other way." The wolf says, "It doesn't matter. I'm going to eat you anyway." -- Turkish proverb.

    [Apr15'02] Muntaha Seraya suffered a miscarriage after being beaten by Israeli troops when 15 of them invaded her home. Mrs Seraya's husband, Ali Abu, was forced to serve the troops as a human shield, being frogmarched through the ruined streets, while soldiers rested their M-16 rifles on his shoulder and fired. "They were taking me from one house to another," Mr Seraya, 42, said. While he was outside one home, an Israeli sniper's bullet shattered his left leg. "They started shouting [at the sniper], `Why have you done this?' While they were shouting, they left me bleeding and went away," he said. He spent the next five days trapped inside the refugee camp before being carried to the hospital on a ladder. -- by David Blair, from the UK Telegraph, reporting on the trials and tribulations of low-market-value humans in Jenin

    [Apr16'02] Several recently-raised proposals present reasonable chances for Israeli-Palestinian and an Israeli-Arab peace, based on the principle of land for peace. Israel now needs a leader who will grasp these ideas and lead the majority of its people to recognize that the path to the realization of the founding fathers' vision lies in a withdrawal to the 1967 borders. As far as can be determined, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not the person to take on this historic role. -- Ha'aretz editorial

    [Apr16'02] "It [the Jenin refugee camp] is totally destroyed, it looks like an earthquake has hit it... We have expert people here who have been in war zones and earthquakes and they say they have never seen anything like it. It is horrifying beyond belief... It is totally unacceptable that the government of Israel for 11 days did not allow search and rescue teams to come." -- Terje Roed-Larsen, UN, on the first visits allowed to the camp with the Red Cross.

    Jacques Chirac -- 19.67%
    Jean-Marie Le Pen -- 17.02% (later: 16.9%)
    Lionel Jospin -- 17.01% (later: 16.1%)

    [Apr25'02] 60,000 US servicemen died in Vietnam. 60,000 of those who returned subsequently committed suicide. Social workers estimate as many as 90% of the Palestinian children in occupied territories like Gaza suffer from post traumatic stress disorders--from seeing other children shot in the head while throwing stones at tanks, neighbors houses bulldozed after accented announcements on a megaphone, F16's screaming overhead at night, observing the daily humiliation and abuse of their parents, and so on. Conditions like these lead humans inexorably to a lot of 'give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death'.

    [Apr27'02] The IDF denies using "human shields" during their West Bank invasions. The proper term for marching handcuffed civilians through the streets at gunpoint in front of an invading army, is, apparently, "guides", according to Captain Jacob Dallal. See how that works in reverse. 'During an invasion of Haifa, Palestinian policemen marched handcuffed Israeli civilian "guides" at gunpoint in front of Palestinian armoured personnel carriers and tanks'.

    [Apr27'02] "People [In Gaza] are certainly preparing for the worst. The banks report massive withdrawals. Human rights groups are duplicating their files. Everyone knows what happened to the computerised archives of the Palestinian ministries in Ramallah and Nablus and Jenin; they were stolen by the Israeli soldiers because, in the imperishable words of one Israeli officer: 'Documents have a very important value.'" -- Robert Fisk

    [Apr27'02] "Let them eat broadband instead..." -- Mark Almond

    [May11'02] This week, almost 500 people were killed in southern Sudan by Ugandan rebels. People in Sudan have such a low value in our fine world market that a half-an-Intifada's worth of people in one week is not even news.

    [May27'02] "Well, we could afford to lose, oh, 25 million, but could they?" -- anonymous Indian official commenting on the prospects of a nuclear war with Pakistan.

    500 people (the world's billionaires) have as much money as the bottom *half* of all of humanity. That's a hell of a lot more obscene that the uncovered breast of a statue.

    [Jun08'02] Hopefully, there won't be a nuclear war in asia. The problem, is that if there is one, despite millions of people dying, life on the planet will go on. Some weapons won't work, some will have more local effects than the man on the street expected, and the fallout will be relatively localized. Then people will think it's not so bad after all.

    [Jun08'02] The oddness of life. In Afghanistan, anesthesia is rarely used even for things like human limb amputations. In the US, ketamine (the anesthetic of the third world, when they can get it) is not even approved for animal surgery.

    [Jun15'02] Looks like the attack on Iraq is on again (more troops in Kuwait, surveillance drones crashing in Iran, Powell threatening to resign).

    [Jun26'02] Back from vacation, and things seem crazier than ever! At least global warming hasn't changed much. Even the direst predictions of the hundred year outlook on global warming (e.g., sea level increase of 30 feet) are actually relatively 'moderate' when you compare them to the complete history of climate on the Earth (e.g., 200 foot sea level increases, glaciers covering half of Illinois, inland seas covering most of the continental US, 70% of species extinguished by meteorite hits and giant lava flows). Which is not to say that the 'moderate' change on the way won't be painful (flooding all of southern Florida, wrecking many rich people's seaside homes, mass starvation when all of Indonesia catches fire from a permanent el Nino, etc). Reasoning in a similar way, every once in a while, there's a doozy of a storm. These are the events that account for much of what you see in the geological record--thousands of years of slow sediment deposition, and then, bam, it all gets gathered up and plastered into a huge pile one really bad day. Has nothing to do with global warming--more like bad climatic luck. Right now, I'm half hoping that we (the US, but, naturally, not the part where I live :-} ) gets one of those once-in-a-thousand or once-in-ten-thousand year storms. It probably *won't*, in reality, be attributable to global warming. But there is no way you will convince US citizens of that. They will think the bill has finally come due. That's a good thing, because if the rest of the world ever gets around to using as much stuff (energy, meat, fish, sulfuric acid, gasoline, computers, paper, drugs) per person as we do, non-moderate, meteorite-like things will happen, and probably very quickly (each American requires 30 acres of land for overall life support, each European, about 15 acres, and each Burundian, about 1 acre). The onset and offset of glaciation is now thought to have sometimes occurred in the space of a few years. That's so short it's almost within the purview of a business plan!

    [Jun30'02] Polls that we are no longer thought to be winning the war on 'terr-ism' may be the final straw pushes a desparate election-frazzled administration to start an unprovoked war on Iraq. It will be a dangerous one, but not only for the unlucky, starved targets of our fine war machine (and its "leather-toughened marines"--Boot/Kudlow). For example, Sharon could decide to begin a mass 'transfer' of Palestinians or a war on Syria under its cover.

    [Jul02'02] The most recent (of four!) Afghanistan wedding bombings turns out to probably have been an attack that included AC-130 Spectre gunships. It shows that we're better than Saddam since he kills his own people. At least we just kill other people's low-market-value people. These air strikes seem to have been called in by people on the ground. Imagine the possibilities at home!:
    "An air strike on targets in a San Diego suburb went wrong when bad ground intel from a jealous neighbor about a canyon cave complex resulted in AC-130 gunships strafing a backyard barbecue, slaughtering 50 guests as they fled into the night. The guests had set off some fireworks, stupidly forgetting that they were at war; such mistakes are inevitable, etc, etc. Unfortunately, most of the people killed were actually Bush supporters".
    The horror of the world's most powerful, most high-tech-ever military strafing wedding parties in the world's poorest country halfway across the globe is an obscenity that I fear will be a sad footnote in a future history of the decline and fall of the American empire.

    [Jul05'02] A record number of American citizens with large net worths (over $100 million) have become expatriates in the past 6 months. What do these nervous rats know that you and I don't?

    [Jul07'02] The sad thing about the completely justified opposition to the coming war on Iraq is that it stems mainly from the fact that it might be slightly difficult, as opposed to the fact that it's utterly wrong and immoral, not based on a credible threat to the US, and a cover for grabbing control of the world's oil assets. Nobody (man-on-the-street) opposed the war on Afghanistan because it was like the war on Panama or Grenada--the most powerful/rich/technological against the least-powerful/completely-unable-to-defend-themselves, and in this case, halfway across the world even. The soft support for the Iraq war stems from the fact that starved, embargoed Iraq is less of a complete steam-roller-able pushover--though it is hardly likely that Iraq could withstand an assault from a US force assembled over the next 6 months for more than a few weeks. America the Brave only unanimously supports ripping flesh with shrapnel and burning skin of low-market-value humans when the targets have *absolutely* no power--military, economic, or even the 'power' of possible bad side-effects of their own annihilation--to fight back. Death star indeed.

    [Jul09'02] The monthly casualty rate in Kashmir and Columbia is greater than in Palestine, but it is much smaller news. For example, about 3,500 people are killed each year in Columbia in Columbia's 'civil war' (where the US provides 1 billion a year to one side). Such is the genius of the invisible hand of the market.

    [Jul13'02] Turkish gov't crisis may (slightly) delay Iraq attack. Who could have predicted that? Unfortunately, looks like Iraq invasion may happen anyway. The US appears to have abandoned trying to use Saudi bases and instead plans to attack from Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan (and Turkey).

    [Jul13'02] The US has recently used a lot of depleted uranium. It is very heavy, and when added to a shell, the shell penetrates armor better. It vaporizes on explosion. It is mostly uranium-238, but also contains variable amounts of other nastier stuff:
    Iraq/Kuwait (1991) -- about 500 tons
    Bosnia (1994-5) -- about 3 tons
    Kosovo (1999) -- about 10 tons
    Afghanistan (2001) -- about 750 tons

    "In the Middle East, you have to speak the language that is understood -- the language of force. Israel has to do what the British did in Dresden, what the Americans did in Tora Bora, or what NATO did in Sarejevo. Why doesn't the Army drop leaflets over the Palestinian territories, saying, 'We're going to start bombing in three hours,' and whoever wants to can escape?" -- Michael Kliener, rightist Knesset member

    [Jul27'02] In the occupied territories, 1/5 of children under 5 are suffering from severe malnutrition (compared to 1/40 in 2000). Almost half of Palestinian children suffer from anemia.

    [Aug01'02] Two million extremely-low-market-value humans have been killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo/Rwanda war of the past 4 years. And that, unbelievably, doesn't count the million or so killed in the original Rwanda genocide. Hardly a peep from major papers, compared to what they say about what happens in the Middle East.

    [Aug03'02] US purchases of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserves have accounted for 50% of the total increase in demand for oil around the world this year.

    [Aug06'02] 2,000 people have died since 1995 in attempts to cross the US/Mexico border since the improved border fence and guards were instituted. Kinda like the Berlin Wall, but more deadly.

    [Aug08'02] The US poodle press is so disgusting! Isn't there even a single slightly brave mainstream writer out there that can bear to say what they all know -- that 'taking out Saddam' instead really means the high-tech slaughter of 100,000 defenseless people, and that doing it is an act of pure evil? Though it was never reported in the national press, at least that many Iraqi humans were burnt to a crisp and buried alive by B-52 carpet bombing in the last America war on Iraq while hiding hopelessly in their desert bunkers. The numbers are so inaccurate, it is possible that 200,000 were killed. 200,000 humans, that is. Was it worse that Saddam was supposed to have killed 1/20 that many 'of his own people'? (note that the US denied the original report, which came out during the Iraq/Iran war, where we supported Iraq.) I don't see the difference. A lot more 'of his own people' died horrible deaths at the hands of Americans. There is no such thing as a war against a president. War is only against people.

    [Aug08'02] The IMF agreed to lend Brazil $30 billion yesterday after giving Uruguay an emergency $1.5 billion cash advance last weekend as most of South America fell into a financial panic.

    [Aug08'02] "The White House residence has private phone lines. This is so seven layers of government employees don't screen W's calls from his closest relatives and friends. What if Bush isn't available when the phone rings. Does he leave an answering machine message -- 'Thank you for calling. I can't come to the phone right now. But, if you'll leave your name, phone number, and what corporate crime you've been charged with, I'll get right back to you.' " -- Walt Brasch

    [Aug10'02] "As long as the occupation continues, resistance in one form or another is bound to go on. -- Jonathan Steele. Since the 1967 war, Israeli bulldozers have demolished over 9,000 Palestinian homes. The Israeli high court recently handed down a Kafkesque decision that says that family members and neighbors of evildoers don't have to be given even 1 minute's warning before bulldozers demolish their house at night. Nice to be living in the 'only democracy in the mideast', huh?. Rather like 'democracy' in ancient Greece -- a great system for the 10% of the population that could vote.

    [Aug12'02] "If left to its own, Israel will have no choice but to fall back on a riskier defense which will endanger itself and the world at large... To enable Israel to abstain from dependence on nuclear arms calls for $2 to $3 billion per year in U.S. aid." -- Amos Rubin, 1987, economic adviser to Yitshak Shamir [Aug17'02] The 'Democrats' are spineless as usual! Instead we see strong anti-war text and speeches from Dick Armey, Brent Scowcroft, and Henry Kissinger (!). Isn't *that* enough to shame you 'Democratic' worms into even a little tentative bleat against the war machine? Instead, we have the ungainly spectacle of 'Democratic' slugs begging Sharon to meet with them, too, when he goes on the campaign trail for Jeb Bush (!). The 'Democrats' are so spineless because they are afraid the war might go 'well' -- that is, kill only 20 US 'boys' in accidents while roasting, burying-alive, dismembering, and filling with shrapnel a few hundred thousand Iraqi humans. You worms. [Aug19'02] Newsweek finally picks up the story on how, under the watchful eye of our 'boys', the Northern Alliance slowly suffocated 1000 Taliban prisoners to death inside sealed shipping containers sitting in the desert sun and then dumped the bodies into a mass grave. That's a third as many people as died in the towers. Humans like us. In the major radio and TV US news outlets, however, this story was ignored in favor of a constantly replayed videotape that suggested that Al-Qaida killed 3 dogs. It is worse to poison 3 dogs than to slowly suffocate 1000 humans to death inside sealed shipping containers, as long as the humans are Taliban. No one took video inside those hot, dark, oxygen-less shipping containers. So, it's all about market value.

    [Aug21'02] The Pope should go to Baghdad right after the start of the war. Make yourself useful, man!

    [Aug29'02] We *must* have the draft back! There are plenty of casual warmongers. Let them put their own flesh on the line; the warmonger count always goes down when there is the real possibility that a high-speed blade of shrapnel might pierce their skull or anus. We need a simple lottery with absolutely no exceptions (unless you want to leave the country). Just like at the end of the war on Vietnam. Everybody's so down on warmonger/draft-dodger politicians because they are always saying one thing and doing another. Don't be that way! Voting is cheap; if you really want a war, then vote with your damn body.

    [Aug29'02] 39% of the 1.6 million people in Botswana are currently infected with HIV.

    [Aug30'02] USAID reported that 1 in 5 Palestinian children now suffer from chronic malnutrition (AKA starvation), primarily a result of the Israeli military siege -- a level equivalent to what is seen in the parts of the world populated by truly low-market-value humans (e.g., Nigeria, Chad). This is worse than what is currently seen in Somalia and Bangladesh.

    [Sep01'02] There are 33 million cubic km of ice in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, enough to raise global sea level by about 200 feet. This ice is in dynamic equilibrium, since in only one year, an amount of snow falls there that is equivalent to 1/4 of an inch of worldwide sea level rise. Recent research suggests that conditions at both the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps are changing rapidly.

    [Sep12'02] Bush 'has absolutely no quarrel with the Iraqi people'. That's why he's now in the process of ordering the deaths of 100,000 of them (or some other number of 'no interest'). Same cowardly little man who never got close to a real war himself.

    [Sep14'02] George Bush at Harken Energy and Dick Cheney at Halliburton were *much* worse than Martha Stewart. Don't let them get away!

    [Sep20'02] A senior US defense official suggested that, "America wants Iraqi's to participate in their own liberation". How nice! (else shrapnel rips your flesh). The US could also help them 'liberate' some of their extra oil reserves.

    [Sep20'02] [Oil-pig US to the world] "They [France and Russia] should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we'll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American [oil] companies work closely with them. If they throw in their lot with Saddam, it will be difficult to the point of impossible to persuade the new Iraqi [huh?] government to work with them." -- James Woolsey, former CIA director

    [Sep20'02] In Germany, anti-war rocks! A rare note of cheer in these depressing days of the new millenium.

    [Sep20'02] I am so sick and tired of pious pontificating about 'savage' mustard gas weapons (sold to Iraq by GW's daddy for their war against Iran). What's so 'unsavage' about a cruise missile, a cluster bomb, or a good old fashioned gravity-operated 500 pound bomb? They're all exactly as savage! Those things killed just as many civilians in Afghanistan as were killed in the trade towers. And the people over there that that didn't die didn't get anesthetics while their shredded limbs were being amputated.

    [Sep21'02] The translation of "calm" or a "lull in violence in the mideast" in the US press means 'only Palestinians are being killed.'

    [Sep21'02] The US gears up its $1-billion-dollar-a-day military and propagandas up its lobotomized populace to 'take on' the only kind of 'foe' it is unafraid enough to attack -- an essentially defenseless, backward country with no air defenses containing millions of non-white humans that can be safely killed by the tens of thousands from 7 miles up with no high-market-value humans shedding a tear. The only reason we are going to invade is because Saddam probably *doesn't* have WMDs. Cowards. Rot in hell, etc. Today, the only straight talk comes from Robert Byrd (!)

    [Sep24'02] The coming Iraq war, AKA, killing 50,000 - 100,000 Iraqi humans, and a few American humans, unfortunately, is unlikely to wreck our economy. It will probably 'only' cost about $50 billion. Not cheap, but workable. That's the problem. And no doubt we will be able to recoup some of the loss by taking over (AKA stealing) Iraqi oil assets. This will, however, take some time. Hopefully enough time for the anesthetized populace to stir enough to dump out the Bush-child.

    [Sep30'02] Crude oil, at end 2001, reserves and production: 
    ---------------------------------------------------------
Saudi Arabia  261.8 billion   8.8 million/day
Iraq          112.5           2.4
UAE            97.8           2.4
Kuwait         96.5           2.1
Iran           89.7           3.7
Venezuela      77.7           3.4
Russia         48.6           7.1
US             30.4           7.7
Libya          29.5           1.4
Mexico         26.9           3.6
---------------------------------------------------------

    [this is when I really became aware of peak oil again -- after the 70's]
    [Sep30'02] The usual Newspeak. First, it was 35 pounds of weapons-grade uranium on its way to Iraq (natch) from Turkey. Two days later, it was 5 *ounces* of weapons-grade uranium on its way to Iraq. Today, it's not even uranium but lead, and zirconium. Whatever.

    [Oct01'02] American non-terrorism in action: Ari Fleischer: Iraqi people must kill Saddam or we will kill 50,000 or 100,000 Iraqi people, for their own good, of course.

    [Oct02'02] "If we went shopping every time the Americans threatened us, we would always be at the market," said Taha Mahmud Fatah, 39, a jeweler in the northern city of Mosul.

    [Oct07'02] "Now that your 401(K) statements have been turned into 201(K) statements and if you want your 201(K) statements to become 101(K) statements, vote for Republicans in the upcoming election." -- Al Martin

    [Oct15'02] US planes bombed Iraq for the 50th time this year -- this all 'before' the war.

    [Oct18'02] The utter bizarreness of the modern world. All this tough press trash talk about terrorism, 'not letting them win', blah, blah. Then we have a few explosions in the Philipines and Indonesia, and the annoucement by North Korea that they are working on a few WMD's. A small number people were killed by the explosions (at least by the standards of how many people starve to death every day, or how many people die of wars in Africa every day)--and these were non-Americans killed in non-American countries! Suck it up press guys and Paula Zahn's! Get back to the 'news for parrots' ("An airliner went down today at Heathrow--no parrots were killed" -- Monty Python). Anyway, a few people get killed, and the other axis of evil lets out a few peeps (we can't invade North Korea because Seoul would be destroyed in the process), and then our behemoth Death Star Rumsfeld military appears to suddenly lurch backward, the stock market shoots up a thousand points on the non-reported news of no war for now. Sheesh.

    [Oct19'02] Today, senators were warned that there might be Al-Qaeda snipers on golf courses. Such are the sacrifices we must all make in order to secure what's left of the planet's oil for our fine and moral Empire.

    [Oct26'02] "Those activists who in the past have gone into Palestine, or gone into Iraq and said 'Bomb us, we're here, we're white people and we're here' -- those are fantastic people," -- Arundhati Roy

    [Oct26'02] "If they turn on their radars we're going to blow up their goddamn missiles. They know we own their country. We own their airspace. ... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need." -- General William Looney, the head of the perpetual U.S.-U.K. Iraq bombing operation, several years ago

    [Oct29'02] "I see linkages between someone who is willing to murder his own people. I hold Saddam Hussein to account and we are going to do that." -- Bush's language organ

    [Nov11'02] Ralph Nader didn't make the Democrats lose this time. It's the Democrats, stupid.

    [Nov11'02] Nuclear is back in fashion. US policy now openly talks about first use. Out a few years ago, in this year. Such short times in the greater scheme of things. Nuclear fission bombs *are* hard to make, and fusion bombs even more so. But not so hard; India and Pakistan made their own. So it's just a matter of time before more countries get them. It might take another three or four decades -- right about the time when oil starts to get really scarce. The left often talks as if nuclear bombs will end the world. In fact, a small fission bomb isn't that damaging. We already saw what they do in crowded cities in Japan. Bad, yes, but consider that the number of people killed was 'only' comparable to the number of Iraqi's the US killed during the first Iraq war, and who cared about those Iraqi's one bit? Once a fission bomb gets used against non-white people, we will sort of count the dead, and move on to bigger and better things. The most un-talked-about potential use of nuclear weapons that has my first world ass worried is not a suit case bomb in an American city, but instead someone blowing one up in the upper atmosphere over the US. This wouldn't kill anyone outright, but it would destroy an awful lot of electronics, iPod's, SUV ignitions, PowerPoint presentations, etc. This would require some kind of missile. It wouldn't have to be very accurate, but it would have to be long range. These are the things we should worry about -- something that could immediately change our fine way of life even before the oil runs out!

    [Nov16'02] Oil facts (in barrels, reserves numbers stable for decades):
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    -- total oil used since 1850 -- 900 billion
    -- total world reserves remaining -- 970 billion
    -- percent oil currently in use discovered before 1973 -- 70%
    -- time left, current world usage rate (29 billion/year) -- 33 years
    -- time left, US uses only oil still left in US fields -- 3 years
    -- time left, US steals and uses all of Iraq's oil by itself -- 15 years
    -- time left, whole world uses oil at US's current rate -- 6 years (!)
    -- peak US oil production -- 1970
    -- peak world oil production -- expected 2004-2007
    -- percent US oil used in food production (no pack/refrig/truck/cook) -- 25%
    -- physical human work equivalent of energy used to generate US diet for 1 person, 1 day -- 3 weeks
    -- oil in US strategic reserves (0.66 billion) -- 1 month US usage
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    figures from www.eni.it
    World consumption increases more than 2% per year; the US uses about 25% of the total oil used per year but has only 5% of its population; everyone has a car; there are no practical replacements in sight after many years of thought by smart people, etc., etc. When oil gets expensive, we will make hydrogen (energy storage, not energy source) for fuel cells, using, uhh, what's left of the coal to electrolyze water. Whatever, boys.

    [Nov21'02] Only 13% of Americans between the age of 18 and 24 -- the age of the people who actually do the killing -- could even find Iraq on a map. Sounds, bad, but the number only went to 30% when asked to find New Jersey, so I see why GPS is a, uh, no-brainer.

    [Nov23'02] The US spent $13 billion bombing rural Afghanistan and, so far, about $10 million (that's less than 1/1000 as much) fixing it up. The low-market-value humans of the world have dutifully taken note of the carrot/stick ratio. If I was them, I'd start making some sticks.

    [Dec03'02] America is the dominant military power because we spend such an incredible fortune every year on the military. Yet despite all our flesh-shredding gizmos, we have recently only attacked weakened, starving countries that are completely unable to defend themselves (e.g., Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq). When an empire can only break the skulls of weaklings, it makes it look weak itself. I hate to think of the uses to which all out killing toys will be put when the oil *really* starts running out a few decades from now (see above).

    [Dec06'02] "You are a very privileged group of people at Stanford. You are not going to go to the war. You are not going to fight in Iraq. The people who are going to have their families go to Iraq are -- truck drivers; they are guys who work on the railroad trains; they are people who are bellhops in hotels. But you don't talk to them -- it seems to me that to try and have an open discussion about the [policies] of the Middle East and Iraq, you need to consider talking to the people who will be most intimately involved in such a tragedy of an Iraqi military campaign." -- Robert Fisk on what academics at Stanford can do.

    [Dec10'02] The strongest anti-war statement today comes from Jerry Springer.

    [Dec12'02] "To us [in Canada], it's mind-boggling [that the US complains about arms sales]". The U.S. sells the world's largest volume of weapons to more countries than anybody else, they have 1.5 million troops stationed around the world, they spend more than $500 billion a year on the military budget... they just fought a war against Afghanistan and they are ready to bomb Iraq. I guess it's not the kind of irony you laugh at." -- Richard Sanders, Ottawa co-ordinator of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade

    [Dec26'02] One good thing about running out of oil is that it's impossible to make solar- or wind-powered tanks and fighter jets. China's economy grew at an 8% rate this year. If they continue to refine their taste for SUV's, perhaps things will all work out for the best after all.

    [Dec26'02] I'm tired of these peecee polls! We see that most Americans enthusiasm for war with Iraq goes down if even a few hundred Americans might be killed (though there were a scary 15% or so that supported the war even with limitless US casualties -- I guess that means that it would be OK to kill the non-Americans in the world twice). It's good to know about the casualty averse ones, but why do they always leave out the questions that weigh killing 100,000 Iraqi troops vs. 1,000,000 Iraqi troops vs. all the people in Iraqi vs. all the people in Iraq and Syria vs. all the non-Israelis in the mideast? How else are we going to get a good estimate of the market value of different kinds of humans in the discerning eye of our Good Americans?

    [Dec26'02] "Dick Cheney Before Cheney Dicks You" -- protest sign

    [Dec27'02] Dubya down! Approve -- 55%, Disapprove -- 37% (latest CNN poll, unreported, natch). Start the war, quick, so Good Americans will like him better again.

    [Dec27'02] Today, the US/UK retaliated against Iraq for shooting down an unmanned drone flying over their territory with several bombing runs, which Baghdad claimed killed three civilians and injured 16 others, and destroyed a mosque. If stuff like this pisses me off, you can imagine what the other non-American oil-consuming (75% of total world consumption), fish-eating, steel-using, water-drinking billions think of it. Are Americans stupid?

    [Dec30'02] The US announces it can fight two wars at once with its volunteer army. The wars in question are against Iraq, struggling after a decade of sanctions, where bombed sewer plants have led to raw sewage in the street and in the home, and where we are anyway already bombing every day, and North Korea, a different kind of basket case that might actually have one or two nukes. This looks weak guys! We should be able to fight *ten* countries like that with one hand tied behind our back given how much we spend compared to the rest of the world. The rest of the world would be more impressed if we said we could fight two countries with modern air defenses, a couple of hundred nukes, and a well-fed populace. Beware the Roman empire with no clothes -- the bully who can only beat up the weaklings.

    2003 ##########################################################

    [Jan09'03] During the last Iraq war, US and UK warplanes carried out 890 strikes against electrical power plants and oil installations. I hope someday, somebody doesn't return the favor.

    [Jan15'03] A recent poll says that 50% of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for the World Trade Center attacks. 65% say that bin Laden and Iraq are allied and planning new terrorist acts. Almost 50% say that some or that most of the September 11 terrorists were Iraqi citizens. This is why I gradually get more and more misanthropic.

    [Jan15'03] The US won't think of messing with the borders of Iraq after it invades; but killing 125,000 people and injuring 125,000 more in the process (assuming, charitably, that it's no worse than last time) won't make the news, or matter in any way to the US. Destroying a border is more costly on the world's stage than burning, dismembering, and disemboweling close to a quarter of a million humans. Humans sure suck when they're ordering somebody else's execution. Remember that.

    [Jan19'03] "Some of [the chickenhawks] keenest for war in the Bush administration -- including Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, senior officials Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle -- never served in Vietnam... (Bush avoided Vietnam by joining the National Guard, and then failing to show up for guard duty for months at a time). But with the massive U.S. assault about to be unleashed on enfeebled Iraq, the Pentagon may have finally found a way to wage a war so safe (for U.S. soldiers) that even a young George Bush wouldn't have been scared to participate." -- Linda McQuaig

    [Jan22'03] Playing for keeps: "Everyone we spoke to said they would not use the 34 shelters provided for civilians in Baghdad because of the 1991 bombing of Al-Amarya shelter when 408 out of 422 women and children in the shelter were burned to death. -- Robert Rodvick in Baghdad

    [Jan23'03] This week the all-powerful US pentagon managed to spam all the Iraqi ISP's off the net. How courageous our military is in denying Iraqi's their email!

    [Jan23'03] "How did our oil get under their sand?" -- peace march sign

    [Jan23'03] Bush's approval is down the the level of Clinton during Monica-time. Tee-hee. But you never get to enjoy seeing the cockroaches on their backs for long enough: they're undoubtedly cooking up some 'incubator babies' as we speak.

    [Jan25,03] Donald H. Rumsfart responded to a plea from archeaologists to consider protecting archaelological sites in Iraq by asking for their locations to be sent to military planners. Incinerating people with bad coordinates is collateral damage, but bombing archaelogical sites (most of the good stuff long ago plundered by the Brits and others, and more recently by looters selling to the West) might be a 'war crime' according to the Boston Globe. The system can't be fixed.

    [Jan25,03] Will the war start sooner now that public support (and the stock market and the dollar) are plummeting? Maybe next Tues? The US is planning to launch $1 to $2 billion dollars worth of cruise missiles into Iraq. This is what you call an attack requiring surgery. Too bad one can only imagine Rumsfart soiling his shorts, tied down to a chair in an emergency hospital with doctors amputating limbs and pulling skull fragments out of brains while the bombs go off in other wings.

    [Jan25'03] Military spending in 2003:
    --------------------------------------------
    United States: $343 billion
    Our allies combined: $205 billion
    Russia: $60 billion
    China: $42 billion
    Rogue states (not incl. the US): $14 billion.
    --------------------------------------------

    [Jan27'03] Today, the only 'democracy' in the Mideast gets ready for an election by sealing millions of people in their homes under military occupation (they can't vote anyway).

    [Feb01'03] The tragic failure of a 22-year-old space shuttle possibly due to a too-rapid atmospheric re-entry (possibly indirectly due to greatly reduced spending on maintenance in recent years at NASA) will cause Bush's ratings to go up. It will also serve as a full-time distraction from war preparations.

    [Feb03'03] "The intent is to break the will of the species. Iraq is merely a convenient stage, Saddam Hussein an extremely unfortunate prop." -- the Black Commentator

    [Feb10'03] The Christian Science monitor today had an amazing, Orwellian editorial about how Germany and France delivered a "slap in the face" to Turkey for its 'democratic' (!) action of having a closed parlimentary decision to support the US war on Iraq, despite more than 90% of its population being against this very action. Truly, today, war is peace. Sheesh.

    [Feb11'03] Thank god we're only planning to slaughter human shields. For a moment, I thought they might be people like me. Actually, their slaughter will be somebody else's fault anyway. Actually, the fact that we are brave enough to slaughter human shields shows our fortitude, intelligence, and strength as an American people. We may even demonstrate the extreme bravery required to use a nuclear weapon, something mere human shields will be powerless to stop. Like us, the Iraqi human shields have a use for duct tape -- in their case to avoid their windows shattering when they are hit by bloody chunks (of other human shields).

    [Feb15'03] My speech at the Feb15 downtown San Diego anti-war demonstration here

    [Feb19'03] The village idiot's poll numbers plummet to almost 50-50. Probably something to do with the 'irrelevant' protests over the weekend (the largest anti-war demonstrations in human history).

    [Feb22'03] The execrable Barry McCaffrey predicts: "If we decide to employ force, in 21 days it'll be all over. They're not going to believe what we do to them." Why not try Viagra instead, Barry? It's easier on the women and children.

    [Feb23'03] Pope should go to Baghdad as a high-value human shield!

    [Feb27'03] "Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches [i.e., nukes]" -- Ariel Sharon

    [Feb27'03] "That was the most expensive No vote you ever cast." -- senior American diplomat to the Yemeni ambassador minutes after Yemen voted against the first Iraq war resolution in 1990. Three days later, a $70 million aid program to one of the world's poorest countries was ended, resulting in problems with the World Bank, IMF, and the expulsion of almost a million Yemeni workers from Saudi Arabia (from John Pilger). A few days ago, even our supine press was not able to suppress derisive laughter at Ari Fleischer's mock shock at a question about bribes for votes, which led to his exit. Sometimes it's the little things in life that you appreciate the most.

    [Feb27'03] If the war goes 'well' (i.e., 'only' slaughters 100,000 Iraqi's, with lower class American soldiers from San Diego and elsewhere only dying in accidents while pushing computer buttons) the Bush popularity ratings -- from Good Americans, most of whom won't see even one picture of a disembowled kid -- will soar. Can't be repeated enough: Humans sure suck when they're approving the execution of someone else's kids.

    [Mar01'03] Current world oil use: 1 billion barrels every 12 days. Total world reserves: still about 900 billion.

    [Mar01'03] Helen Caldicott has the same idea! about a truly high-value human shield that you can't prosecute either.

    [Mar03'03] Turkey rocks! The parliament vote was split, but it just barely ended reflecting the will of the population -- 90% are opposed to helping the US in its war on Iraq -- and even in the face of a cool $6 billion dollar US cash bribe. Probably can't stick.

    [Mar03'03] Conservative anti-war columnist Charley Reese (see below) says that once the war starts, he will no longer write anti-war columns. What tripe! Why does the start of a wrong war make it right? By this logic, threats to exterminate the Jews should be argued against, but once the extermination starts, it's time to 'support the troops'. I don't see it; if the war is wrong, starting it doesn't change anything. If Vietnam is a model, it's particularly important to protest against the war after it has already started! The 'support the troops' argument was used back then in spades. It unduly prolonged that evil, sickening war.

    [Mar05,03] Key money facts
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    -- World gross domestic product -- 43 trillion
    -- US gross domestic product -- 10 trillion
    -- California gross domestic product -- 1.4 trillion
    -- US total federal debt -- 40-45 trillion
    -- US federal budget -- 2 trillion
    -- US 2004 budget deficit (w/o Iraq & black budgets) -- 0.4 trillion
    -- US national debt -- 6.7 trillion
    -- US consumer debt -- 1.7 trillion
    -- US residential debt -- 6.8 trillion
    -- US current account (trade) deficit -- 0.5 trillion
    -- foreign ownership of US financial assests -- 8 trillion
    -- daily world currency transactions -- 1.5 trillion (80-90% speculative)
    -- dollars in circulation -- 3.0 trillion
    -- dollar-denominated world trade -- 2/3
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [Mar09'03] 42 percent of our populace believes that Saddam was personally responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center (Times/CBS News survey). Interestingly, this is actually a deduction from the 6 month-long stream of propaganda from our 'news' organizations, very few of which have explicitly presented evidence for this or even explicitly made this connection in the nightly delivery of sewage. Of course, 40% is about the same percentage of us who don't believe in evolution. We're not troglodytes in every scientific field, however, since we do believe in cell phones (and by implication, quantum mechanics, theory of electronic circuits, Maxwell's equations, and so on).

    [Mar09'03] One reasonable estimate for the cost of the upcoming attack on Iraq is about $1000 per US person. That's $2000 that me and my wife will be paying this month to have teenagers from Camp Pendleton slaughter Iraqi kids.

    [Mar10'03] Today, the 'Democrats' are *so* cowardly about opposing the war, several have considered suspending public campaigning because the only people that show up to see these cockroaches are those demanding to know why they're all groveling before Bush as the world hurtles toward the cliff.

    [Mar11'03] Over 10% of our troops in the Gulf defending our rights whatever are non-citizens.

    [Mar12,03] The current 'yes' votes are from Britain, whose people are overwhelming against 'yes', and from 3 poor African countries whose aid and loans we have threatened if they don't say 'yes' (who cares what *their* populations think). Forget the crocodile tears, you say: we're rich, we've got the scary tech, so just deal with it. But we've also got a scary number of targets in our rich homeland, and by occupying the oil fields that essentially oil-less countries like Europe, India, China, Japan, and Korea depend on, we're also messing with other rich people that can afford to have and sell their own scary techs (and dollars). One day, when the thankless hordes come to pick over the debris of our empire, they'll return the favor, and not cry either.

    [Mar12'03] "We cannot allow Saddam Hussein to continue disarming" -- Freudian slip by Tony Blair.

    [Mar12'03] "They come from above, from the air, and will kill us and destroy us. I can explain to you that we fear this every day and every night." -- Shelma, 5, Iraq

    [Mar13'03] "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography. -- Ambrose Bierce

    [Mar14'03] I still marvel every day that 'good Americans' can think that killing large number of civilians from the air by ripping apart their bodies with remote-controlled bombs (carefully cleared of politically incorrect graffiti) is somehow more moral than breaking into their houses and slashing their throats or machine gunning the parents in front of their children (then killing the children, too). More altitude does not make bombing the slightest bit more moral than up-close and personal slaughter like that at My Lai. Height does not make right. Don't be a 'good American'. Polls show our 'Good Americans' just want to 'get it over with' (and also that almost 50% don't even know who Chirac is). A remote-controlled 'get it over with' massacre of children (45% of Iraqis are children) is not like house cleaning. It's more like Kerrey having to call a second young SEAL to come over and help slash the throat of an old unarmed Vietnamese man when, after Kerrey stabbed him in the kidneys and twisted the knife, the old man refused to stop trying to resist. It involves the slightly sweetish smell of warm blood and the roasted smell of barbecued human flesh.

    [Mar17'03] Two days ago, a brave American woman trying to stop a third house demolition in Gaza from taking place was run over, back and forth, by a bulldozer, crushing her legs and skull. Her friends dug her mashed body out of the dirt but she died soon after. There are photos of her standing up to the giant bulldozer with a megaphone just before her death, like the Chinese man who rather more successfully stopped the line of tanks a decade ago. Why is my tax money supporting these atrocities? She was braver and more of a hero to me than the Universal Soldiers who will soon be suspending their personal moral judgement and following orders to press computerized terror launch buttons that send flesh shredding weapons on their way to a city of 40% children. *She* was an American, too.

    [Mar18'03] "How bad do you have to suck to lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein?" -- Bill Maher

    [Mar19'03] You don't have to be a hard core leftie (like me) to see many reasons why this idiot's war -- against the wishes of the entire world -- is foolhardy. The main reason is that the US relies on a certain detente with the rest of the world in order to maintain its position at the top of the world. This requires that the rest of the people in the world, largely voluntarily, do the following: (1) finance huge trade deficits with the US, (2) invest massively in the US economy, (3) buy stuff from other people with dollars, (4) provide low cost labor overseas to manufacture the things our corporations make money on, (5) let us use 4 times as much oil as everybody else, (6) send the smartest people in their country to study, teach, and work in corporations here. The idiots in command think they can force the world to continue doing these things and more using overwhelming military might; the main point is to to shock and awe the *world* this month. The problem with this plan, mentioned before, is that the attack on Iraq makes us look an awful lot like a paper tiger. Sure, we will once again vaporize hundreds of thousands of pitiful sitting-duck Iraqi soldiers; and the Bahgdadis who dread going to sleep because of the monsters that come at night, will finally get to 'get it over with' and pick through rubble for the scorched body parts of their loved ones. But the world can also see how long this setup took. Months and months of shipping people and boats and planes and tanks and desert command centers over there -- and it's not even done yet. We spend $400 billion/year on our military; Iraq spends $1 billion/year. It's probably going to end up costing something like 1/4 of the federal budget to pay for our little splatterfest and occupation. And the world can see how pathetic this target is -- an essentially defenseless, starved country, bombed daily (50,000 sorties *since* our last slaughter there), and with information-gathering inspectors shoved up every crevice until just Monday, making sure defenses are down. Try to imagine carrying out a similar inspection, humiliation, and then all-out attack on the major population centers of virtually any other country that is involved in numbers 1-6 above. Sure we could 'do' Somalia, but who cares if Somalia buys their oil in euros or withdraws their investments in US banks? A full 14% of the population of one of our 'supporters', Spain, views the US favorably. You can imagine what the numbers are like in the rest of the world where they don't support us. Time for us Americans to shake off CNN-muzak and *think* through this on our own before that's not allowed anymore. Stop pretending to be asleep. These guys are ruining *your* country.

    [Mar23,03] An equivalent amount of money to the total budget shortfall facing states and cities around the country is being spent on the idiotic, morally decrepit war on Iraq. It's worth repeating: these guys are ruining our country. They ought to go to Iraq themselves and fight their own damn war instead of getting low income San Diegans to risk their lives doing it. Don't fight a rich person's war. The rich should love it or leave it.

    [Mar24,03] Shock and awe in Basra (man retrieving his injured daughter).

    [Mar27,03] The US says it is sending 130,000 more troops to Iraq today after the completely outgunned Iraqis bravely fought back against overwhelming odds. Perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 Iraqi soldiers (AKA people) have been killed so far, along with about 400 Iraqi civilians, and maybe 200 British and American troops (many in accidents). All are equally valuable humans in my book. Meanwhile, the world secretly cheers on David under their breath against our Goliath, though they know David will fall eventually. Soon we will be hearing that the failure to win Iraq in two days was all the fault of lily-livered peaceniks like me who stopped the US from fully carrying out a Hiroshima-style shock and awe. Been there, done that -- in Vietnam. Total crap. We killed 2-3 million civilians in South East Asia. That was well beyond Hiroshima-style shock and awe. We *still* lost. The only way we could have won there was to have killed most of the 10 million people living in the countryside in South Vietnam (the remainder of the population -- about 5 million -- were already refugees, mostly in the cities, and hence already 'pacified'). Guess we weren't man enough to do that. We got tired out after a mere half-a-Holocaust when two were needed. It's ironic that the pro-war refrain of the time was 'we can't leave Vietnam because we have to finish the job we started'. Lily-livered liars.

    [Mar27,03] The early stages of this war seem strangely incompentently handled. What's really going on? Preparing US opinion for Dresden-style bombing to 'soften up' civilians in Basra, then Baghdad? Some other disinfo plan if our troops get 'softened up' themselves? Bush being setup? I don't know.

    [Mar27'03] Evidence that the even non-stop propaganda is not completely effective: an interviewed sixth-grader says: "Bush is going to get us all killed".

    [Mar28'03] "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop." -- Mario Savio, 1964, Berkeley.

    [Mar30'03] "I know our hawks avoided serving in Vietnam, but didnt they, like, read about it?" -- Maureen Dowd

    [Mar31'03] The US has exhausted half of its stock of cruise missiles, is now shooting up cars of women and children, bombing farms, shooting the 'chick that was in the way', and is not close to winning the war against a weak enemy. The world -- for the most part quietly -- takes note of the spectacle.

    [Apr02'03] Web portals report more searches for "al-Jazeera" than for "sex" after the Qatar news service was knocked off the web this week. Guess CNN wasn't enough to satisfy the soul.

    [Apr03'03] Other forms of pneumonia (non-SARS) kill more than 40,000 North Americans yearly (over 100 per day). Diarrhea kills 2,200,000 people worldwide every year (over 6,000 per day!); malaria at least 1,100,000 people/year, sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) about 40,000 people/year. SARS has killed about 50 people over several months (death rate of 3% vs. more than 30% for the Spanish flu). Could all the noise about SARS (which hasn't killed anybody in the US yet, despite a number of infections) has to do with our latest bout of 'two months of hate'? Could RibovirinTM stop it? heh. There is talk of SARS gumming up the global economy. I guess the 6,000 people that died today from diarrhea and the 9,000 that died from tuberculosis must be on some other globe.

    [Apr03'03] "I don't think about it as human life" -- an American high-altitude bomber-boy talking about his human targets (i.e., 'it'). I think we all know people who think like this: they flew planes into towers full of people; they didn't think of 'it' as 'human life'.

    [Apr04'03] Eyewitnesses at UMass said that a recruiter told adjunct professor Tony Van Der Meer and a student that they should be shot in the head for their antiwar views. Luckily, not official US policy (yet).

    [Apr05'03] In an LA Times poll today showing broad support for the Iraq war and substantial support for invading Iran next, the proud American populace (half of whom believe the 9-11 hijackers were from Iraq) also thinks that the UN, not the US, should take charge of the reconstruction effort. The disconnect with reality is stupifying. As the US is busily making sure Europe and Russia are locked out of 'reconstruction' contracts (so that they all go to Cheney's croney-capitalism buddies), TV-addled brains of 'good Americans' are afraid of having to pay for cleaning up the bloodstains and would rather have the UN mop up the body parts and fix the water pipes. They ask these poll questions wrong. How about "Do you support US companies taking over the Iraqi oil fields or do you think the UN should rebuild Iraq?" Then you'd get the correct answer.

    [Apr05'03] Just now, the US dropped a bomb about 300 feet from the Palestine hotel where virtually all the Western reported are staying. Must have been another 'stray' like the cruise missile that went to the Kuwait shopping mall. You never know about these things. Cruise missiles are so hard to track on radar (not!) that Turkey immediately said we can't fire any more over their territory; and we didn't know it was off course (probably because it was on course...). One thing we can be sure about, however, was that bombing of the Palestine hotel was 'not the result of hostile fire', but was in fact an accident. I'll drink to that.

    [Apr06'03] "Can you help get my arms back? Do you think the doctors can get me another pair of hands?" Ali asked. "If I don't get a pair of hands I will commit suicide," he said with tears spilling down his cheeks -- Ali Ismaeel Abbas, 12, from Baghdad's Kindi hospital. He was fast asleep when a missile obliterated his home killing his father, pregnant mother, and brother, burning his chest, and ripping off his arms (Reuters).

    [Apr06'03] We (the world) are currently burning more than 4 barrels of oil for every new barrel discovered. Demand is increasing every year, especially in the 'non-US' parts of the world. It is obvious to scientists that the world is heading rapidly toward an energy/raw-materials train wreck. Peak oil will be here in just a few years. Aldous Huxley said "facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored". Go US-ians! Maybe you can beat this rap if you don't worry, be happy, and keep watching Aaron Brown explain to you how the noose is tightening around 15 years of oil (if we took all for ourselves).

    [Apr06'03] The shock and awe gallery brought to you by the internet because the monopoly press censors itself.

    [Apr08'03] The slaughter continues. The US bombs Al-Jazeera (after cyber-attacking its English website and pressuring ISP's to sabotage it), and then a US tank across the street even fires a tank shell at the hotel where NPR (National Pentagon Radio) is (of course, not at the floor where the Americans are). The country holds its tongue, hoping that Total Poindexter Awareness won't notice them. Economic numbers look truly scary. The stock market rallies anyway, then falls. US-ians watch CNN and fiddle.

    [Apr08'03] Today, Iraqwar.ru's intelligence source(s) signed off. So I was listening to AM news radio business hour. No real economic news in these uncharted waters, but they were instead touting a company that makes gas masks for pets. World gone wild.

    [Apr08'03] "Even if the numbers were higher [than the low numbers reported by the US], does it make any difference? I think the US casualties are small -- and this is no wonder. They don't get into real fights. The "ground forces" just do the work of a dog in a hunt: their only job is it to find the prey and the "air force finshes the job". The only way to resist the cowardly tactics of the US is a proper air defence. Neither Iraq (2003), Afghanistan (2001/2002) or Yugosloavia (1999) had that ability. Maybe North Korea will be a different story. And they also have the bomb and missiles that can reach the US troops. -- anonymous post on Iraqwar.ru

    [Apr09'03] Now that our operation is going 'well', we just have to get the oil without France or Germany or Russia or India or China noticing. The outcome was not unexpected given that we spend $400 billion/year and they spend $1 billion/year and have been subject to 10 years of sanctions. No American will see or pay attention when 100,000 Iraqis perish in the aftermath as happened in Gulf War I, because the most important thing is that, for $75 billion, we have taken down the Saddam statues. Don't mention the oil. The rest of the world will pay attention, however, and may attempt to take down some of our statues. Prepare for Operation Continuous War (Syria, etc.). Can you think of a better way to spend our pensions?

    [Apr11'03] In a city where our bombing has killed and injured tens of thousands of people, the hospital system has virtually collapsed. Patients whose limbs were amputated with aspirin anesthesia were abandoned in their blood-soaked beds while virtually all (32) of the hospitals were looted. The reaction of the US and British governments has been to attack the news channels for reporting this. Why doesn't the scumbag Rumsfeld just order a few air strikes on the non-compliant newspapers and stations? That would teach them for not continuously re-playing the staged pulldown of the statue by an American tank (in front of the Palestine hotel, with all the streets blocked off around by tanks and a handful of expatriate Iraqi's flown in by the Pentagon to cheer). After all, they only re-played that tape about 250 times. At least now that the hospitals have been abandoned, we won't have to studiously avoid looking at pictures available in the foreign press of screaming kids with their arms ripped off because they'll just die of gas gangrene in somebody's house. I guess this is what the press means about 'ending decades of misery'. One wonders if a nuclear bomb would be more humane.

    [Apr12'03] I think the chaos in Badgdad, though heavily filtered by TV -- especially the fact that there are virtually no operating hospitals in the entire city, all the patients now gone or rotting in no-longer-working freezers -- is subconsciously giving Americans the willies. The reason is, despite all the racist talk about 'softening' the enemy's skin and bones with showers of fire and shrapnel, Americans -- particularly poorer Americans -- *do* realize that Iraqis are basically standard issue humans, very similar to themselves. And Americans subconsciously know that if put in a similar situation, they would probably act in a similar way. Though the war is not supposed to officially be about oil, Americans also subconsciously know that it is about oil -- after all, the oil fields are the only secure places in the entire country. Americans know, like a bird feeling the unspeakable urge to migrate, that this can only be the case because we are running out rather quickly. The world after peak oil will be less and less pretty. Though Americans might not be able to quote oil reserves numbers, or know exactly how much oil power can be replaced by wind or nuclear power (not nearly enough, not nearly quickly enough), or how world trade and food production (e.g., fertilizer production), will be impacted by less and less oil, they know in their still unbroken bones that their future might have something in common with Iraqis who today smashed 5000 year old vases and trampled into dust the first written records of humans on this planet.

    [Apr14'03] Embedding: the early years -- "No radioactivity in the ruins of Hiroshima." -- New York Times headline, one month after a fission bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

    [Apr15'03] On tax day, it's hard to stomach the shear audacity of the criminals that run our country. First, they use tax money to create the largest military in the world -- we spend more on the military than all the rest of the world combined, including the downpayment of $80 billion in tax money we just made to start this war. Second, we invade a tiny defenseless country that has been starved by sanctions, bombed daily by us, and inspected for weapons for more than 10 years, killing 10,000 or so people immediately, cutting off their water and the electricity, and setting up the deaths of another 50,000 or 100,000 in the aftermath, like last time. Third, we secure all their oil wells, but allow crowds to loot virtually every hospital, each one containing scores of horribly wounded civilians, and every government building, and then encourage them to loot billions of dollars worth of artifacts from the museum that holds the first records of human civilization (which will be sold for a pittance to the underworld of stolen-art dealers, who will then resell them at a huge markup to Western collectors and museums). Fourth, we decree that Iraq shall cancel billions in debt to France, Germany, and Russia because they didn't help us in our military plunder. Fifth, we install only US companies to rebuild Iraq -- an Iraq now in even more desperate straits with dysentery and diarrhea (thousands of times more daily deaths than SARS, worldwide) running amok -- so that these companies can gulp down billions of additional US tax dollars as well as billions of dollars worth of oil revenue extracted from Iraqi oil wells (who needs Sumerian statues when you have McDonalds?). Anybody who can read can draw the same conclusions -- except of course, the so-called 'liberal' press. They were all there for the statue downing and *not one* of them had the balls to show us the long shot of the deserted square surrounded by US tanks with a few hundred shipped-in extras performing for their cameras. Instead, they talk only about how 'well' the war went. *Of course* it went well! How could it not have have, given that we spent $400 billion a year and they spent $1 billion? As they used to say in the old days, the entire commercial world press is in bed with the fascist insect.

    [Apr30'03] So, how are we all liking our very own occupied territories? They've only cost us $80 billion for the first six months -- about the total amount of the deficits in all the 50 (now 51, I guess) states in the US.

    [May01'03] General Garner warns the Iraqis that 'there shall be no out-of-the-country influences' -- not including, I suppose, the scumbag himself.

    [May13'03] The over-the-counter derivative trade has grown to nearly $200 trillion per year (for comparison, the US federal budget is under 1 trillion per year and the US Gross domestic product is 10 trillion). This is an enormous amount of speculative, predictive (as opposed to productive!) money sloshing around every day. The problem with this is not so much the amount as the possibility of unstable oscillations. If you choose a time step of integration that is too long when trying to numerically integrate an equation, your estimate of the behavior of that equation will oscillate in time, not accurately reflecting the actual behavior of the equation (in the limit of infinitely small time steps). There are practical limits to how short of an interval over which derivatives can by updated. Paradoxically, we may soon see wild oscillations because people aren't trading *fast enough*, where fast enough will soon be milliseconds -- trades that are largely out of human hands.

    [May17'03] Since 9-11, we've directly killed two to five times as many civilians as were killed during 9-11 (e.g., 1700 in Baghdad alone, not counting people indirectly killed through infrastructure damage) -- for those civilians own good, of course, and by 'accident'. I'm sure they all understand why it was necessary to turn auntie into bloody chunks with a cluster bomb. None of the surviving relatives are likely to hold a grudge, I'm sure.

    [May18'03] Funny how 'al-Qaeda' always goes where all the oil is. Saudi together with Iraq has almost 40% of the remaining oil in the world. Complete coincidence, I'm sure.

    [May19'03] "You could oversee a bombing mission overseas then break for dinner with the family" -- Boeing engineer Roy Smith on the new X-45 unmanned bomber. "Well, it's about time. I often think to myself, as my frozen dinner rotates in the microwave, 'Shouldn't I be blowing the limbs off of some goddamn foreigners?'" -- Matt Barganier

    [May23'03] Not finding Iraqi so-called weapons of mass destruction after two months of searching turns out not to be a problem; US-ians don't care that the main supposed reason we killed tens of thousands of people and spent $80 billion turns out to have been a hoax. Apparently, they're satisfied with the other hoax about Saddam supporting Osama bin Laden (and have completely forgotten about the loot and arms the C I A sent Osama during the previous decade). They're also glad about avenging the 1991 mass graves of Shias (who were encouraged to rise up then by the US, and who were then abandoned to Saddam's helicopters and artillery) by sending an equal number of civilians to mass graves, once again. US-ians also seen unfazed by the acquisition of their very own biggie-sized West Bank. Go US-ians.

    [May26'03] "I think the document is not a good one [the road map plan], but we have to choose when we battle the US, and now is not the time," -- Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (he voted for it).

    [Jun11'03] AP reports a minimum of 3,000 civilian casualties in the American war on Iraq. Only our civilians count. Theirs don't, even when the reasons we killed them are demonstrably false (Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; there were no 'WMDs' there after all). Republican pollster Frank Luntz explains it this way: "Whether or not they find weapons of mass destruction doesn't matter, because the rationale for the war changed. Americans like a good picture. And one photograph of an Iraqi child kissing a U.S. soldier is more powerful than two months of debate on the floor of Congress." The world watches and waits. Better hope our new military tech is as good as they want you to think.

    [Jun12'03] The 'roadmap' charade continues. With Palestinian civil society in ruins, more and more Israeli-only roads and settlements contructed in occupied territory every hour (using a yearly tranche of 3-4 billion in US aid directly, plus 10 billion in 'loan' guarantees, many of which are not expected to be repaid), with a US peace activist squished to death by a bulldozer without US comment (!), the Israeli government knows that it is just a matter of time before the dream of greater Israel becomes a fact on the ground. The only fly in the ointment is the need to transfer/ethnically cleanse more than 3.5 million worthless human prisoners/vermin into Jordan, because if the world ever decides ten years from now that Palestinians should actually get the right to vote, their ever increasing numbers would then probably result in a Palestinian president of greater Israel! Ethnic cleansing will go down just fine with US-ians, so long as it is done in slow motion. The US looked away when 250,000 Serbs were cleansed from Kosovo in the year after the war that was undertaken, suppposedly, to stop ethnic cleansing (which only happened after the start of the war, but whatever).

    [Jun26'03] Amnesty International can now visit any prison in Afghanistan, except, of course, for Bagram, where the US runs its 'torture-lite' facility.

    [Jun28'03] Currently, the US is spending an estimated $4 billion a month to keep the 200,000 US troops in Iraq and $1 billion a month for a similar thing in Afghanistan -- and they are likely to be in both places for years. That's $60 billion a year -- more than we currently spend on all biological research. Waste of money.

    [Jul02'03] "We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture or... kill them until we have imposed law and order on this country. We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country." -- US Iraq Viceroy Paul Bremer

    [Jul10'03] Today, a US archaeologist suggests that the US army needs to kill some looters by firing on them with machine guns from helicopters in order to stop the loss of priceless artifacts like cuneiform tablets. Low-market value humans, indeed. Be careful of what you ask for, lady -- might come home one day.

    [Jul11'03] Today, Tony Blair is advised to quit 'before it gets rally nasty'. Tee hee, mr. poodle. Also today, shrub is getting ready to send troops to Liberia to deflect growing criticism over no-WMDs-in-Iraq and the sagging the economy. I not looking forward to the eventual effects of these costs -- added to the $60 billion a year (!) currently being spent on Afghanistan and Iraq -- on the dollar, the stock market, the housing market, the budget for scientific research (natch!), and the coming energy crunch.

    [Jul16'03] What is indisputable is that the C I A new the evidence was fake early on. Everyone assumes that administration knew that it was fake, too. But perhaps the administration didn't realize how sloppily fake it was, and therefore, perhaps it was served up to them as a bait.

    [Jul24'03] Two dead brothers -- and today their shot-up pictures -- will pacify the yahoos for a week, but the $1+ billion per week drain of tax revenues will continue this week, next week, and all the rest of the weeks for the next few years. Maybe US-ians will tire of running 5 or 10 percent of their tax dollars down the toilet for the benefit of mr. dick's corporations, but probably they won't. The oil output of Iraq is still a small fraction of what it was before the war, and oil prices are as high as they were during the war (that's actually good for mr. dick). Today, our Treasury Secretary explained that killing Saddam's sons will improve our economy. I think he's got something there: I don't know about you, but the sight of bullet-riddled faces always makes me want to save less, spend more, buy a new house, and start a small business.

    [Jul29'03] Yesterday, US troops slaughtered up to 11 civilians in a botched Saddam raid in Baghdad. Imagine what you would think if a force occupying the US -- let's say France -- looking for a George Bush in hiding (not an unappealing idea!) instead incinerated your crippled Granny and her grandkids in her car, in a middle class neighborhood, by firing so many rounds into it that it caught fire, then letting her and the kids burn to death, then walking away -- all for your own good, naturally. Your pissed-ness at Frenchmen would undoubtedly extend well beyond pommes frittes.

    [Jul29'03] Iraq has the second largest reserves of oil in the world. This month, Iraq had to begin importing fuel to overcome a fuel shortage.

    President/King Bush was asked the following question: "Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al Qaeda were a key part of your justification for war. Yet, your own intelligence report, the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate], defined it as--quote 'low confidence that Saddam would give weapons to al Qaeda.' Were those links exaggerated to justify war? Or can you finally offer us some definitive evidence that Saddam was working with al Qaeda terrorists?" His response was unintelligible, had nothing remotely to do with the question, yet nobody even snickered. Here is his response: "Yes, I think, first of all, remember I just said we've been there for 90 days since the cessation of major military operations. Now, I know in our world where news comes and goes and there's this kind of instant -- instant news and you must have done this, you must do that yesterday, that there's a level of frustration by some in the media. I'm not suggesting you're frustrated. You don't look frustrated to me at all. But it's going to take time for us to gather the evidence and analyze the mounds of evidence, literally, the miles of documents that we have uncovered." Later he said "I want to remind you, he actually used his weapons program on his own people at one point in time, which was pretty tangible evidence." I'd myself would hate to be hit by a weapons program. The guy's a total dunce -- they told him to say "weapons program" instead of actual "weapons" and it comes out like this: an emperor with no brain. But the press people *have* brains. Why don't they have enough balls to even giggle a little? They could do it as a group, for safety, like they did with Ari.

    [Aug05'03] This year, the maniacs who run this country have decreed a 44% increase in military spending -- in one year. Tell that to the yahoos.

    [Aug06'03] "I wanted to get out of this kicking-in-doors-with-guns kind of thing," said Hinman, a West Point graduate who was in Panama in 1989, left the military in 1999, but was ordered back overseas and arrived in Kuwait in May.

    [Aug06'03] The Univ Calif budget was cut by almost half a billion dollars in this month. The budget for prisons was untouched. The percentage of the population in jail in the US was flat from 1920 to 1980, when it began increasing during Reagan-time. It is now 5 (!) times more per capita than the rock-steady 1920-to-1980 rate. Very stupid planning for the future, yahoos. People in jail aren't going to save your butts when the climate starts really heating up, and you run out of oil for your 'Expedition', and you run out of electricity for your air conditioners.

    [Aug07'03] "When you take a father in front of his family and put a bag over his head and put him on the ground, you have had a significant adverse effect on his dignity and respect in the eyes of his family." -- General 'the Occupier' Sanchez. Cool. Politically correct occupation. Better to civilly invite him to one of Saddam's prison, now working just like they did in the earlier days, where there are no lawyers and no one calls home, and *then* beat the crap out of him in private. Similarly, we used 'firebombs' and not 'napalm' when we were attacking Baghdad because the otherwise identical 'firebombs' have less benzene, and are therefore, more environmentally friendly as they turn your skin into wet charcoal.

    [Aug12'03] We are rapidly approaching Vietnam-like conditions in Iraq, now that every Iraqi is potentially a 'remnant of the Ba'ath party'.

    [Aug13'03] Up and up. CEO's now make 500 times what the regular workers do. Eventually, even the yahoos will get pissed. I always misunderestimate them, though; perhaps they won't complain until the ratio goes over 10,000 to one. That's still a long way off.

    [Aug15'03] "There is no real reason for us to be out here!!!!, We're protecting the oil is all, and as far as the supposed war ending, it hasn't. Not when everyday soldiers are still getting mines placed in front of convoys. Rocket propelled grenades thrown at us." -- email from US soldier in Iraq.

    [Aug25'03] "Numerous commentators have blamed the number of acres burned in recent years on increased fuels from past fire suppression, increased fuels from timber cutting, and environmentalist obstructions to fuel treatments.... But a close look at the data reveal that the main factor responsible for fires today is drought. When examined on a decade-by-decade basis, drought is responsible for 98 percent of the variation in acres burned in each decade from the 1950s through the 1990s." -- Randal O'Toole, Thoreau Institute

    [Aug26'03] Danish 'peacekeepers' mistook two unarmed Iraqi fishermen for 'Iraqi thieves' (they're all so shifty), and then shot them both to death along with one of their own troops. All this for the bargain basement price $200,000 per year, per 'peacekeeper' -- whata deal! Meanwhile, back at the crib, the US prison population continues to grow, inexorably. In a Dept of Justice study last year, one in every 37 US adults was either currently in prison or had previously been incarcerated (served a sentence, not just held pending trial). Good work guys, but still short of a true prison planet. At the current rate of growth, tho, which has shown no sign of abating since 1980, we just might be able to get there if we just don't lose our nerve! We have 5% of the world's population, but we use 25% of the world's oil -- and we imprison 25% of the world's prisoners.

    [Aug27'03] Our 2003 war on Iraq resulted in a large number of fatal civilian casualties. As a percentage of their population (23 million), these estimates range from 100,000 to half a million when taken as a percentage of our population. This doesn't count Iraqi soldiers who were killed (possibly a larger number). If you support the occupation, then go over there yourself and dodge the rocket-propelled grenades while guarding Bremmer so he can smoke Saddam's cigars in Saddam's air-conditioned palaces. But remember, it's not like Quake: when your foot gets blown off, the nerve stumps hurt for years, your game is truly over man, stay-at-home pro-war yahoos won't shed a tear when you hobble by, and amputees don't get on 'Survivor'.

    [Sep10'03] We eventually got out of Vietnam because we lost. It wasn't because we didn't try. We killed more than 3 million people. We have lost in Iraq (tho thankfully, having killed less people). We can get out now, or later. Today it looks like later. That would be a really bad move, guys. How can we get out now? -- by using ships and planes (like they used to say when we were in Vietnam)

    [Sep14'03] There is a poignant moment, when worry turns to panic. During a heavy rain, for example, you might be driving when a loud thunder clap raises the driver's anxiety level a little, but the friends and family along for the ride don't really notice. Then, you come to a fast running stream that shouldn't be there in the street, and the conversation gets a little ragged. You decide to cross, nervous, but in control. Halfway across, in a flash, things spiral instantly out of control, and the conversation turns to screams as it becomes matter-of-factly apparent that it's every man for himself. I feel like the giant Gary Larson roach in his shower looking at the plugged drain saying "I hate to think of what's down there..." The earth's ecosystems can't possibly support raising the huge number of people in the 'rest of the world' to anywhere near the living standards and per capita energy and water usage of Americans (Europeans and Japanese are not far behind, relative to the currently silent majority). This would require something like a factor of ten or twenty increase in worldwide resource consumption. Those great masses see us every day, and their demands are increasing. And the oil, gas, water, fish, wood, and soil resources are all simultaneously reaching their peak rates of extraction, after which, the direction is down. I hate to think of what's down there.

    [Sep30'03] Crony capitalism rules in Iraq. Crony capitalism is bad for Thailand and Argentina, but OK for us and vice-president Halliburton. Well maybe it's not good for us, but it's certainly good for Halliburton.

    [Oct01'03] The rest of the world to the US: you bomb it; you buy it. In translation, this means: chimp, cheney, and rumsfart bomb it, the American people buy it. However, now our proud senators are rallying to reduce the smaller amount of reconstruction aid from the $87 billion -- leaving, of course, the miliary/oil-field-occupation money intact. Thank god for congressional oversight. This, however, was shot down by the Bushies, who need every cent for oil-field-occupation and Cheney-swill.

    [Oct17'03] This week about 80 people were killed in demonstrations against the government in Bolivia. Low market value humans don't count.

    [Oct21'03] Kosovo is now the major conduit of heroin into Europe, courtesy of the US war on Serbia. Afghanistan has returned to having over half of its GNP coming from production of opium ($2.3 billion est. receipts, 3/4 of the entire world's opium supply, up from almost nothing, in one year), courtesy of the US war on Afghanistan. Maybe it's just their way of saying, thank you.

    [Oct27'03] In order to defend against what even U.S. military officers call 'freedom fighters' (!), U.S. military police have, for several months, been stationed at Baghdad police stations. Large tranches of my US tax dollars collected so that lower income San Diegans who live north, south, and east of me can risk their lives and limbs guarding our newly installed Iraqi police from other disgruntled Iraqis! It's probably something to do with the 20,000 or so low-market-value people we killed there earlier this year, and the tripling of the daily death rate reported by hospitals compared to before the war -- but we're officially not in the business of counting such insignificances. It is fair to say that Iraqi deaths were small in number when compared with the holocaust we engineered in Vietnam. The effect of the continual attacks has been to temporarily scare off all the global vampires waiting in the wings to begin feeding upon the injured but still tasty carcass. And sadly, it's hard to think of another way to keep them at bay. I know it's selfish, but since I live in San Diego, I would rather have my tax dollars spent on more fire engines.

    "It did not have to happen in this way. Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow." -- Patrick Cockburn

    [Oct30'03] Imagine how this might have been written about if it had occurred here: "Jack-booted, body-armored soldiers of the army occupying the United States fired automatic weapons on a van of Americans driving on city streets near San Francisco carrying high tech workers, slaughtering four of the unarmed occupants and seriously injuring several others. The soldiers also fired wildly into the cars of several people on their way to work. More than 20 people have been killed by the occupation army this month in San Francisco. The deaths were ironic given that the goal of the occupation army is to take over and sell off the United States high-tech industry."

    [Nov01'03] Weapons of mass destruction are a way of life for us, as demonstrated by this recent US military definition of "nuclear bonus effects" -- "desirable damage or casualties produced by the effects from friendly nuclear weapons that cannot be accurately calculated in targeting as the uncertainties involved preclude depending on them for a militarily significant result". Unfortunately, such desirable bonuses from our friendlies won't help us create any more oil, which still takes millions of years.

    [Nov03'03] "It was a mistake to discount the Iraqi resistance... If someone invaded Texas, we'd do the same thing." -- Lt. Col. Kim Keslung, orthopedic surgeon at the US Army base hospital in Baghdad.

    [Nov04'03] Oil production in Iraq is hardly over 1 million barrels a day, Since Iraqis paid low prices for gas before the war, the coalition has had to import gasoline and sell it at a loss to avoid (even more) unrest. This is being done by Cheney's chums at Halliburton (isn't that special?), who are charging American taxpayers $2.65 a gallon and selling it for less than a tenth that much. There is something amazing about using American tax money to pay an American company to sell Iraqis gasoline at a huge loss. It just goes to show that growing the economy has always been dirty work, but someone's gotta do it.

    [Nov15'03] Peak oil might be here; production of several majors actually dropped in the third quarter against rising prices and sharply increased investment in exploration. Things are getting a bit bumpy for the US in Iraq, but there is no way we're going to let loose of our chokehold on the land around that oil. The talk about a democratic Iraq is hilariously at odds with the reality that a government elected by anything vaguely resembling a popular vote would be very unlikely to be friendly to the US. So the plan this month seems to be: say we are planning to leave, try to assassinate as many local leaders as possible, and don't leave. Bush's numbers have stopped going down for the last few weeks, so 10 to 20 (US) losses per week might work for the forseeable future as long as there are no major 'jackpot' attacks. Even in that case, there could always be another domestic anthrax scare to 'bring people together', or there could be an 'event' during Bush's UK visit next week, with the same effect. And there will probably also be a story about Filipino conjoined twins being attacked by sharks while having sex through a feeding tube with Kobe Bryant. Alternatively, we could go back to a short bout of sustained bombing, which would rally the 'liberal' press around the chimp in less than an hour. It is true that a similar war plan did fail to work in the end in Vietnam, despite its execution on an insanely more horrific scale, with 2 to 3 million Vietnamese civilans slaughtered. And if the economy tanks, Bush will no doubt be tossed out. But this *is* different from Vietnam: the US will stay in Iraq for a long time, Democrat or no Democrat, because of the oil (the great Dean is behind a semi-permanent stay). As reported in the Economist: "Iraq is a capitalist's dream" (I'd sure hate to see a capitalist's nightmare).

    [Nov19'03] Pat Buchanan (yikes!) agrees with me about the probability of escalation in order to terrify Iraqis into submission, which will certainly work, since we have all the bombs and satellites and planes. The only thing that might head this off in the face of the burst of patriotism that idiotically but reliably accompanies bombing runs, is some kind of economic collapse in the US -- a run on the dollar followed by an interest rate increase, and then a collapse of the stock market and housing bubbles. I'm not looking forward to either scenario.

    [Nov25'03] "Weapons of ass destruction" -- Linda Heard, commenting on the use of donkeys as missile launchers. Meanwhile, 8,000 people (that's 3 WTC's) died of HIV/AIDS today (and every day this year). This doesn't matter because they're mostly low-market-value humans in sub-Saharan Africa.

    [Nov28'03] Iraq exported 1-2 MB/day of oil in October 2003 (accounts differ by a factor of two), which was less than was it was exporting before the war (2.5-3 MB/day). Much of this is due to pipeline sabotage in the north, which shows no signs of abating. It also means the US will likely continue to subsidize Iraqi oil to keep the price low inside Iraq (that is, to keep the gas lines there from getting even longer than they already are, in a country with the world's second largest reserves). It's all about supply and demand, you know.

    [Dec06'03] "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," -- Colonel Sassaman (in Iraq). Destroy the village to save it, whatever. The recent clampdown at the Miami FTAA meetings (which prompted a request for investigation from Amnesty International) looks like 'fear and violence', lite. Watch out, Amiricans: can get heavier if it turns out we need 'help' here, too.

    [Dec06'03] "The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from that class. The great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages will bear its burden without complaint." -- Rothschild Brothers commenting on the Federal Reserve.

    [Dec10'03] Today, 6 more Afghan babies were slaughtered in a raid (after we wiped out 9 last week). Luckily, we hear that "the US will not be deterred by civilian casualties" and that the children "were to blame for being at the target location". They were crushed to death when the bombs blew down a brick wall behind which they were hiding (AKA a building) during a bombing run in the middle of the night. Interesting choice of words. Seems like that leaves only one kind of weapon that can deter the US. I'm sure that all the non-US-ians out there that don't have them yet are trying their best to get them -- before before their children start getting slaughtered in morally justified accidents. Don't know about you, but when I was a kid, I was very careful not to play next to anything with GPS coordinates that might be bombed in the middle of the night, which explains why I have survived with all my limbs intact. Those stupid kids (and low-market-value, to boot).

    [Dec14'03] There are no Iraqi WMDs. There is no Iraq connection to 9/11. Saddam is captured. Troops home?? I don't think so, because the troops are there permanently -- for oil and military bases, not Saddam, like I said a year ago. The occupation is going according to plan. The number of troops being killed is acceptable. If Americans are fooled by a fake turkey (it made more of them think Saddam was behind 9-11!), they're little heads'll be positively knocked right off by 9 months of Saddam-is-a-WMD-TV. Unless the economy implodes in the next 6 months or Saddam dies of a heart attack and a body double can't be found in time, or another war can't be started soon enough, Bush will win. Then there will immediately be another war. Stupid US-ians -- not planning for your future.

    [Dec18'03] "9/11 is slated to become one such commodity and Bush's involvement in the conspiracy is scheduled to become a fetish of power, accompanied by the sub-conscous sense that, 'If he did allow 9/11 to happen, he did so for our own good.'" -- Michael Hoffman

    [Dec20'03] Just before the second Iraq war, the war-and-sanctions-damaged Iraqi power grid ran 20 hours per day. Now it runs about 8 hours per day. After giving reporters a tour, Ahmed Khalid Hussein checked his watch, and said "I must rush [home] to catch it and perhaps have a hot shower. The electricity is like a guest that comes and goes very quickly. We cannot miss it." -- Ahmed Khalid Hussein, chief engineer Salaam electric substation in north Baghdad.

    2004 ##########################################################

    [Jan02'04] "Soldiers in Samarra also blew up the house of Talab Saleh, who is accused of orchestrating attacks against U.S. troops, witnesses said. They said the troops arrested Saleh's wife and brother and said they would not be released until Saleh surrenders." -- MSNBC/AP. We are adopting the highly successful techniques (not!) used by the jackbooted Israeli occupation army. When you've got them by the *babies*, their hearts and minds will follow, right? (to paraphrase an old line from the Vietnam war...)

    [Jan06'04] Why can't we ever have a candidate that goes down in flames, but is a completely straight-talker. Just say, every day, "We are in Iraq (1) to establish military bases near the oil, (2) skim off tax payer money into corporations friendly to, or actually part of, the Bush adiminstration, and, (3) to use revenues from Iraqi oil to pay for this permanent military occupation. Do you, the American people support this policy? It is the policy, not only of the Bush administration, but also of all the major Democratic contenders".

    [Jan16'04] "Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another." -- Benny Morris, an Israeli historian from the Israeli 'left' (I suppose the Israeli 'right' is more 'humane' and would just 'put' millions of Arabs 'out of their misery'). Thank god for choice in the 'only democracy in the mideast' (well, if you don't count the more than 3 million who are already in a cage and who already can't vote...).

    [Jan18'04] The world used another 28 billion barrels of oil last year. The total Iraq reserves are conventionally estimated to be 112 billion (4 years, world usage). Iraq has about 12% of total world reserves (around 1000 billion barrels). The second war on Iraq along with pipeline sabotage has resulted in a substantial drop (halving) of Iraqi production; the oil-soaked ghouls who ran the war haven't yet even done a good job of grabbing the stash. This production loss was almost entirely made up for by increases in Saudi and Kuwaiti production (where 1/3 of all remaining oil is), which explains why prices didn't spike and maybe even went down relative to world currency (oil is currently around $33/barrel, more than before the war, but the US currency is down 25%). This all looks a little bleak, but they say things will all work out because of the wonders of market-driven optimization. When there is no more oil for the market to 'optimally' distribute (i.e., to give us 5 times our fair share), perhaps the market will find a way to power cars and planes, and make plastics and fertilizer out of pure greed instead of petroleum. The electric grid very nearly went down (with forced rolling blackouts) in the US Northeast during the cold snap last Friday because of competition between power plants and homes for natural gas. It wasn't news. Probably, this was less news than Michael Jackson because of the genius of the news market -- it's smarter than you and I. An often heard complaint is that lefty people have cried wolf too many times. Well, I think things have, unfortunately, turned out just like many of us back in 1970 feared they would. No major alternative energy sources have been demonstrated these 34 years later. Current world energy sources are approximately: oil=40%, coal=24%, gas=20%, nuclear=5%, with renewables still a pittance: hydro=2.3%, wind=0.07%, solar=0.006%. This is pretty much the same as 1970. The only difference is that total consumption of non-renewable energy has increased every year (*way* faster than total alternative energy sources have grown, again, no doubt, due to the genius of the market). People look at you like you're nuts when you try to bring it up. I just have one thing to say -- wolf.

    [Jan18'04] The total assets of the worlds 500 or so billionaires is now more than the assets of the poorer half of all humans (3 billion people). Sounds a lot like cancer: by breaking out from the antiquated social rules of the cellular world, cancer cells marshal resources and overcome evolutionarily less fit cells like skin cells, liver cells, and brain cells. Then, you die.

    [Jan30'04] You Brits are sure wussies. Getting rid of two heads of your own damn BBC, and the reporter, to boot, for *accurately* reporting that the war on Iraq was based on a fraud! Pusillanimous, poodle, bootlicking lickspittle toadies, etc., etc. It's embarrassing to see you 'gladly wearing holes in your tongue licking the shoes of you-know-who...', to quote your very own Monty Python...

    [Feb01'04] 1 billion per day of our tax money is draining into Iraq, and into the drooling mouths of Dickie's corporate friends. It's seems incredible that we would spend so much just to help them 'throw off their yoke', and it is. The oil endgame isn't going to be pretty (keeping the rest of world, whose energy demand grows every year, from draining the limited supply of oil), and even Dickie doesn't know exactly how it will work out. Sometimes, the ornery people have their day, like when they turned on Mussolini, when best laid plans went awry. This is one problem that can't be fixed by nuking it.

    [Feb01'04] Getting rid of Bush will not fix Peak Oil. Time for all of us to do some adult thinking.

    [Feb06'04] Bush's approval is down to 47% and Cheney is under attack. This makes for a dangerous, wag-the-dog situation, esp. after 'all ricin, all the time', seems to have fallen flat. It was too derivative. At least they could have changed the color of the powder! Don't they have any decent media guys?

    [Feb13'04] Jay Garner predicts that we should only be in Iraq for "the next few decades", but that we need to increase the size of our force there. From the horse's mouth. We're planning to be there until the oil runs out, just like a lot of us said before the war.

    [Feb14'04] "It's definitely worse now than before the war. Even at the height of sanctions, when things were miserable, it wasn't as bad as this. At least then someone was in control." -- Eman Asim, Ministry of Health official who oversees Iraq's 185 public hospitals.

    [Mar09'04] We're staying in Iraq, but public support is starting to fall, the gay marriage thing and Martha are starting to wear out and the turned-out-not-to-be-ricin dust is long forgotten. I have a certain morbid fascination trying to guess what Rove will come up with, besides daily 'links to al-Qaeda'. I would have thought they would have sprung something big sooner, but I suppose there is still a long way to go to the election, and you have to pace yourself. They should get CIA-da on the job!

    [Mar11'04] Madrid bombing today.

    [Mar18'04] Crude oil went above $38/barrel today even as the dollar improved.

    [Mar21'04] The paraplegic Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, leader of Hamas, supported by Israel against Fatah, was killed today (along with 7 other people) by a helicopter missile strike on his wheelchair. Sounds like Sharon is getting desperate. What next? Hope he doesn't pull out his 'matches'.

    [Apr11'04 -- travelling] Things not going too well in Iraq. But US-ians always go for a good revenge-slaughter of civilians for them killing our mercenaries (about 350 Iraqi civilians killed this week) and that will tide Boosh over for a bit. However, something's bound to 'wag' if this keeps up for another month. It looks to me like the resistance is winning. There are only something like 30,000 actual fighting US soldiers in Iraq; the rest are support. That's about the same as the resistance. Kerry will not help. It may even turn out like Lyndon Johnson all over again, escalating back up to half a million. I predict we will get *both* a 'wag' *and* Kerry; the 'wag' will provide the impetus to make it possible for Kerry to escalate.

    [May05'04] I *never* manage to predict correctly. The recent ruckus about the torture photos is *so* Earl Butz-y or James Watt-y, for those who are old enough to remember their demises (which were not for the bad things they did before they were dumped). The low-budget porno aspect of it lends the whole thing such a weird media momentum. I certainly think that torture is bad, but it's hardly a new policy. And it was worse to slaughter 500 civilians in Fallujah and then set snipers up to pick off family members trying to aid the dying. But because those amputations and exploding body parts (our actually-existing 'people-shredders') never make it to American video, they don't count -- at all. Sort of like the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by sanctions. Zero market value. Just got back from visiting a bunch of castles. I suppose we've made progress from the time when judges would dispense 2,000 lashes with a nail-tipped whip when 1,000 was enough to kill you. For example, a marine colonel recently explained "We don't want to rubblize the city [Falluja] [because] that will give the enemy more places to hide." But I don't think there has been enough progress to stop our vicious hominid selves from stupidly 'rubblizing' our fine planetary house.

    [May12'04] Positive for Bush: jobs up, gold down, dollar up, both presidential candidates support the occupation, Syria sanctions (today); negative for Bush: occupation still attracting too much attention, oil up (even before any shock), majority polling antiwar. I was expecting oil up, a prowar Kerry (cf. Lyndon Johnson), and Syria sanctions, but not the other five. Thank god another video beheading arrived -- and not a moment too soon, with Bush polling lower than ever -- to straighten out my fellow Americans into reaffirming that innocent Iraqi civilians (the majority of the 10,000 Iraqis in US-controlled prisons, according to the Red Cross) deserve the torture they are getting. The unfortunate Berg was wearing a US-issued orange jump suit, and was apparently just released from several weeeks in Iraqi/US police custody, but what the hey.

    [May12'04] "But I do think it was the Lariam [anti-malarial drug]. Nothing else makes sense. I think chemically, something went wrong. SF [special forces] guys compartmentalize their lives. His compartments just broke." -- Laura Howell, wife of special forces serviceman who shot himself in the head just after she brushed aside his high-powered handgun as he was about to shoot her in the mouth (she had hidden in the back yard that night, worried that he was about to kill her and the kids sleeping upstairs). Wonder why they didn't pick that up in the clinical trials? Could it be that not enough of their subjects were 'compartmentalized war workers'?

    [May13'04] In a few weeks, the dueling snuff videos should put Bush back on track as the "we're-too-soft-on-beheaders" backlash is cultivated. The bad turn for the American gulag in Iraq does not seem to have translated into any additional support for Kerry. In fact, he has actually *dropped* a few points in the past two weeks! Currently, 57% of Americans still believe in the press-concocted Osama-Saddam connection and 67% think Saddam did have WMDs or WMD programs. Kerry may actually lose if the economy stays about the same for the next 4 months. I have a bad feeling today about what will happen to the world economy just after the election, esp. because I think we are close to the first big peak-oil shock. I'm just recording my prediction, since it seems like I'm almost always wrong, in an attempt to do better next time.

    [May15'04] Today, the UK decides to begin its 'withdrawal' from Iraq by doubling its ground forces from 7,500 to 15,000. I'd hate to see what an escalation would look like!

    [May18'04] I agree with Xymphora. Amazing as it may sound, the continuing torture show seems to be helping Bush! It's sent along to us by the same pusillanimous press that couldn't utter even a tiny peep at the beginning of the war. I don't believe they are suddenly bolder and braver now. While talking about withdrawal this week, the US and the UK are actually *increasing* the number of troops in Iraq (transfers from Korea, new re-call-ups). However, this would at best be an increase of 25%. Set against this is that the entire population of 27 million Iraqis is slowly becoming united against the US. 150,000 troops is not enough to control the whole country. For comparison, the US had 500,000 troops in South Vietnam, which had a population of 15 million at the time (5 million refugees, 10 million people against us), and we were free to carpet bomb or cluster bomb or napalm or laser-guided bomb (yes we had them back then) just about anything. But the US doesn't want to control all of Iraq. The current deployment may in fact be enough to control the places with the oil ($16 billion exports this year, even with all the interruptions). 14 new US military bases are currently under construction in Iraq.

    [May19'04] The Gaza/Rafah slaughter continues under the cover of the Iraq torture show. Today, brave tank and helicopter pilots 'light up' a street demonstration with US supplied tank shells and helicopter missiles, killing 10 marchers, mostly children, and wounding scores. They were either demonstrating to protest or responding to a demand (or both) that all males ages 16 to 60 to assemble at schools for interrogation, complete with buses to take people away. Bush agrees that this was self defense (from children, presumably, since Palestinians will soon outnumber Israelis in greater Israel), and then forces a re-write of a UN resolution complaining about the demolition of hundreds of houses, sometimes with people still inside. Another day in the life and death of low market value humans. The flabbergasting result in the US is that Bush's poll support has firmed up. Good Americans, good Americans...

    [May24'04] From reading the US press, it sometimes seems like sexually humiliating prisoners is worse than killing them, and slaughtering an entire wedding party -- the bridegroom, 15 kids, the photographer, the musicians, the donkeys, etc, is OK. The odd thing about this peculiar American style -- violence OK, sex bad -- is that it dates back hundreds of years. Who could have predicted back with our founding fathers (they founded the cities, OK?) that this style would have had such a long lasting impact through thick and thin, through the invention of coal, oil, cars, and now cell phones and the internet?

    [May24'04] The latest information from Jean Laherrere suggests that natural gas production won't peak in the world until 2030 (24 years), but will peak in the US in a few years (oil production peaked in the US in 1970). However, because natural gas is much more difficult to transport than oil, this will likely result in large local price fluctuations. The current best guess for world peak oil production is now 2008. In other news, the free market has determined, amazingly, that chief executive pay was still not high enough after all the run-ups in the 90's, and it has soared 168% in the past five years. Job well done, guys!

    [May26'04] "People are accusing you of drinking Saddam Hussein's Kool-Aid." -- Paula Zahn ridiculing conservative weapons inspector Scott Ritter on CNN before the war. Unfortunately, Scott turned out to be correct. Guess you drank the Kool-Aid, Paula. But hey, your shilling for the man only cost us a quarter of a trillion dollars (and made you a bundle), at the cost of 10,000 slaughtered Iraqi civilians, perhaps 20,000 dead Iraqi soldiers, and 1,500 dead American soldiers and mercs. Paula went to my high school. If she was 3 years older, and a man, she might have been drafted for Vietnam. Probably would have been singing a different tune, then.

    [May29'04] 35% of well-head gas is lost creating and transporting LNG (liquified natural gas). Delivering LNG through our yet-to-be-constructed set of new terminals is what is planned to save us from the fact that natural gas production seems to have just peaked in the US.

    [May31'04] What's up? Seven US aircraft carriers plus their support ships going somewhere all at once (half the entire fleet -- more than half if you consider the carriers that are currently in undergoing repairs). Reports of a large money injection this month (M3 up $150 billion [=$2 trillion/year]) while talking about raising interest rates to stop inflation (?). Oil-will-never-run-out propaganda from an oil businessman (Maugeri) in Newsweek and Science (!). Iraq and Saudi looking worse and worse, while work on our 14 new military bases in Iraq continues at a hectic pace (we're sure not blowing $4 billion/month in Iraq fixing Iraqi power plants...). There is no way the US is leaving those bases behind (don't mention the oil -- I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it), yet the situtation on their street is deteriorating daily. The chance of a some kind of stunt this month seems high. Then again, maybe it's just that my lefty brain can never manage to think enough like a Rove to see that there is a little 9-11 in the Saudi bombings -- i.e., they're the kind of thing that actually run the poll numbers back up! What really runs the poll numbers down is when *nothing* happens, and people just sit there for a while with no pictures to look at.

    [Jun06'04] First there were tanks and bulldozers to prepare the way for 'withdrawal', now this week the Gaza withdrawal plan (held up by arguments between the far-right and the even-farther-right) is finally approved by removing the 'withdrawal' part of it, as a wheelchair-bound Palestinian is killed by two 'warning shots' to the head. Sometimes the Orwellian-ness of it all takes your breath away.

    [Jun07'04] Apparently, the plan with the 7 aircraft carriers and their more than 100 escort ships is to go to West Africa and scare some Africans there into giving us their future oil -- i.e., convince them that we can invade them even while right in the middle of another sloppy occupation. Still sounds suspicious, since there isn't *that* much oil in Mauritania, but whatever. And apparently, the huge jump in M3 is unconnected -- some have suggested a way to protect Fannie and Freddie when interest rates go up. Or perhaps it is to deal with the already existing fallout of the small uptick. Return on equity has been around 30% this year for F and F because they 'borrow' (i.e., create money) at near the Fed rate and then lend it back out at (much higher) market rates. Cool way to 'make' money, eh? But all good things must come to an end.

    [Jun11'04] Yesterday, several sites suggest (from newspaper reports) that all 10 available aircraft carriers are now out to sea, tho not obviously all going to the same place. Just a stronger summer pulse? Who knows. Normally, only 2 or 3 are simultaneously deployed during peacetime. 6 carriers were sent to the Gulf for Iraq 2.

    [Jun15'04] The next two obvious US moves are against Iran and Saudi, perhaps initiated by an Israeli strike against Iran or an even bigger disaster in Saudi. Perhaps all the commotion has something to do that.

    [Jun24'04] Today, US military sealed off the Iraqi city of Baquouba after apparently losing control of it. Hopefully they are not now responding with a revenge-slaughter like the one that killed 500 to 1,000 civilians in Falluja a few months back. Bush got interviewed by federal prosecutors in his 'safe house' for a full hour today (fully clothed, no dogs, nothing up his butt), and Cheney said FU to Leahy, too.

    [Jun25'04] Bush's election polling numbers (tho not approval numbers) have rebounded (even or beating Kerry now), so all the chaos of the last few weeks seems to have actually *helped* Bush, as I had predicted and feared above.

    [Jul01'04] Seven of the ten US carrier strike groups currently and unprecedentedly out to sea may be going to the coast of China in mid-July. Such a concentration has never before been deployed in peacetime (or even during our 4 previous victories over weakling countries -- Iraq1, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq2). China is not a weakling country. But they can't defend themselves against 7 US carrier strike groups (perhaps 100 ships, carrying hundreds of planes), at least now. I can't think of a better way to encourage them to get to work!

    [Jul07'04] Now it looks like North Korea may be a likely US target this summer/early-fall, which might be a better explanation for the 7-carrier deployment than (just) scaring China.

    [Jul08'04] I was listening to NPR (national propaganda radio) this morning, with Deborah Amos, reporting after just leaving Iraq. In talking about all the changes after 'sovereignty'. She managed to never once mention our occupying army (and of course NPR has never uttered a word about the 14 permanent US military bases under construction). She *did* mention that security had gotten worse each time she went back, and that what made it hard to report on all the 'good news' was the fact that is was too dangerous to go to where all the 'good' was being done (thankless bastards). NPR also reported that a barrage of almost 40 mortars into an Iraqi national guard headquarters somehow killed 4 US soldiers and wounded a score (just visiting). But now that the unelected 'Iraqi' government headed by a C I A asset has been given the right (by who?!) to impose martial law, as announced by the fine new Iraqi 'minister of justice and human rights' (cool -- I can just imagine the 'coalition' hack who was paid to come up with that PC job description), hopefully, 'democracy' can be gotten back on track. They hate us because we're free, but that hate should begin to subside once they experience freedom themselves. Meanwhile, there have been runs on the biggest banks in Russia -- I guess not important enough to make the morning Marketplace highlights.

    [Jul18'04] Blair now says not 400,000 in Iraqi mass graves, but 5,000 -- less than half the number of civilians we killed when we invaded. Gotcha, stupid people, again -- live and don't learn.

    [Jul21'04] "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind would be to kill the entire population." -- Thomas Neemeyer, head American intelligence officer 1st Brigade of 1st Infantry Division, commenting on the process of bringing 'democracy' to the Ramadi region of Iraq. Hope he doesn't get a chance to decide to bring 'democracy' to my neighborhood.

    [Jul27'04] Only 2 aircraft carriers are apparently in the Pacific now, in the Tiawan Strait, apparently not 7, as originally predicted in the Straits Times (link below). This may be different, however, from the last time we sent carriers to the China coast, because that time they didn't actually go into the Strait.

    [Jul27'04] There are 72 million people in Iran.

    [Aug07'04] Iraq is starting to look an much more like Vietnam than I predicted. The US is losing control of large portions of the country; the US-installed puppet government relies totally on coercive power of the US military; this has completely de-legitimized the puppets. Given the obvious skill displayed in pre-war propaganda, it surprises me how the occupation seems not to have been very well thought out.

    [Aug1'041] The war will end up taking the entire country down the toilet. I write this as I hear military jets taking off and landing outside my UCSD window. Kerry will flush, too.

    [Aug12'04] The last week of US operations in Iraq have killed a substantial fraction of the number of people that were killed during the supposedly-over war itself. As the slaughter in Najaf accelerated today in preparation for the Republican convention, about 200 people, many of them civilians, were killed in last 24 hours alone (500 wounded). We will, of course, 'win', since we have better equipment than the average Iraqi homeowner, who stupidly neglected to budget for anti-aircraft missiles to defend against night bombing runs (e.g., 75 dead and 148 wounded from bombing Kut last night, many women and children according to the local hospitals). We have also taken over the main Najaf hospital (against the 'rules' of war, of course, but who's in charge here, eh?) as a 'command center', in order to 'deny cover' to enemy who have 'softened up' limbs and torsos. It's absolutely disgusting, as is the lack of reporting on it here, and the lack of American street protest. However, it's also a bad move strategically for US military interests (our new military bases in their country near the oil), because there *is* detailed reporting on it over there. Americans only understand the language of force. The dialogue is beginning. We kill Mehdi army teenagers and civilians so that Americans will vote for Bush. They kill US soldiers and Iraqi collaborators so that the US and British invaders will leave Iraq (their killing has nothing to do with the election since the two candidates have indistinguishable positions on the war).

    [Aug13'04] Muqtada al-Sadr's favorability rating in Iraq was 68% in May and probabaly much higher now (he may have been injured today in the US assault on Najaf). Bush's approval rating in the US is under 50%.

    [Aug17'04] "Imagine a Muslim army about to bomb the Vatican with the help of a few Christian mercenaries while the Pope is away, recovering from an angioplasty in London and silent about the whole drama. This is roughly what is happening in Najaf, Iraq." -- Pepe Escobar. Probably you'd be upset at an assault on the Vatican even if you weren't a practicing Catholic, or even a Catholic at all.

    [Aug20'04] Such a blizzard of conflicting (dis)info coming from Iraq the past few days!

    [Aug21'04] 40 percent of all Palestinian males (including children and the elderly) have spent time in Israeli prisons. I guess that that's expected in a nation where 'the whole nation is an army' (except, of course if you're in the Palestinian half of the nation, which means you can't vote, you can be shot with a tank round without recourse, and you're basically permanently in prison). Must be bad Palestinian genes (seems like I heard that one before somewhere, though).

    [Aug22'04] The insane slaughter continues with pious debates on whether or not the US should storm a *building*. Slaughtering humans (probably half civilians, but what reporter is crazy enough to really find out) from the air with giant bullets fired from Robocop-like machine guns in AC-130's is OK/expected/not-news/whatever. When a round hits the building, by contrast, it is cause for solemn discussion by talking heads. If even a single one of those giant bullets zinged through their window, the Wolf Blitzer brigade would be sh*tting their pants. The human race is sick.

    [Aug24'04] "In short, Mr. Bush has done more to electrify the international Left and give it a sense of common purpose than anyone since Che Guevara." -- Eric Margolis.

    [Aug27'04] August 2004 Najaf summary. Moqtada Al-Sadr and his lower-class Mahdi teenagers hole up in middle-class Najaf, in and around a shrine which is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country, and the nearby 'largest-graveyard-in-the-world'. The US military (a Marines self-initiative according to one disinfo, but undoubtedly Negroponte of the central-American-blood-soaked hands) decides to 'bring em on' and goes on a fierce 3-week attack on Najaf, hours afer Sistani leaves for the UK, and also on Fallujah, Samarra, and on the Sadr city slum in Baghdad. In Najaf, this includes occupying the hospital (sometimes you just have to be creative and break the 'rules' of war), strafing and burning the center of town and the graveyard with millions of giant bullets from AC-130's, setting up snipers to keep ambulances away, and bombing the old city hotels and shops around the shrine so heavily (e.g., a 2000 pound bomb dropped on a hotel 130 yards from the shrine) that our brave commanders jovially debate whether it looks more like Stalingrad, Sarajevo, or Beirut (you get to talk dirty like this to reporters when you're on Darth Vader's side). The smell of burnt flesh, blood, and rotting, unretrieved corpses hangs over the city as the Mahdi army continues losing ground and people as the tanks roll right up to the ring of obliterated rubble surrounding the shrine. Sistani, feeling a little left out, decides to return to Najaf from England where he had gone just as the conflict was breaking out, telling his supporters to go ahead of him on his return to the city and occupy the shrine. Groups of unarmed Sistani supporters who heed the call are slaughtered (probably a hundred total) by Saddam's old Iraqi police in Najaf as the police fire into the crowds, and in nearby Hilla and Kufa and Diwaniyyah while marching to the shrine to stop the bloodshed. Iraqi police round up, kidnap, and threaten journalists for telling the wrong side of the story. Sistani, denounced as an Anglo-American agent, finally arrives in the south (not via the US-controlled Baghdad airport), and is escorted under British air cover to the shrine, finally ending the bloodshed. Perhaps 500 to 1,000 Iraqis are slaughtered in and around Najaf, a majority of them civilians, and more injured in the fighting. US casualties are minimal (around 10 killed -- a ratio of 50 or 100 to one). Finally, to commemorate the tragic slaying of an Italian journalist hostage who had been kidnapped in the fray, the Iraqi and Italian Olympic soccer teams are allowed to wear black arm bands by the Olympic committee. The 500 to 1,000 Iraqi people slaughtered don't count at all compared to one Italian, unfortunately, because of their extremely low market value, which is, in fact, less than that of the stone and mosaic walls of the shrine. Those walls were, for the most part, skillfully avoided by the US military through the use of remote-controlled, hi-tech weaponry, which 'surgically' burned, flayed, disemboweled, amputated, and beheaded the unfortunate humans living and hiding around it. The Americans then pack up and leave, yet another job well done, of 'liberating' yet another part of a supposedly already 'sovereign country' (and of building 14 permanent military bases there around all the oil), at the bargain cost of a billion of our tax dollars per week. A major aerial and ground assault by the US on Fallujah (with significant US casualties) continues, under the radar (well at least, until victory is declared there, too, ... again).

    [Aug27'04] When oil company economists publishing in Science magazine (Leonardo Maugeri a few months back) and conspiracy theorists publishing on the web (Joe Vialls yesterday) agree that Peak Oil is a sham, you just *know* it must be happening right now :-}

    [Aug31'04] "What we are witnessing now is a collision of a financial system relying on fractional reserve banking, debt-financed growth, and a fiat currency system with a planet and energy resources that are finite, limited, and running out. Infinite growth is battling with finite energ .... I have absolutely no doubt as to which side will win." -- Michael Ruppert

    [Sep01'04] The US will stay in Iraq. The main reason we are there is to build 14 military bases around the oil. Chalmers Johnson is right. This is where all the money is going (in addition to mercenaries and security to protect the base builders and the oil, and a few bombing runs in what has basically become the 'Iraqi triangle'...). This is why there is little left for reconstruction, despite spending more than $1 billion there per week. We don't need to control every city for this plan to work (though we do have to control some). There is such an iron grip over the media that this straightforward reality never even gets whispered.

    [Sep03'04] "The child had to be killed first, and then they killed the terrorist." -- Mikhail, Russian storm trooper providing a Russian translation for "we rescued the hostages". Almost 500 people were killed during this particular 'rescue' (340 dead plus 100 missing). No doubt, some grisly retaliation (the 'rescue' notwithstanding) is in the works because Putin has 'let down' the Russian people by 'only' murdering tens of thousands of Chechen children. Sometimes you just have to be tough with child-killers to get the job done right (I suppose that would mean killing 100,000 children of the child-killers because killing only 20,000 of their children didn't work, correct?).

    [Sep07'04] Today it was announced on AM news radio that more invasive physical searches will be immediately instituted at US airports because of terr'ists in Beslan, and that nobody will complain because else the terr'ists have won. Great. Now some airport goon is going to be sticking his finger up who knows where because the Russians spent a decade mercilessly slaughtering Chechens (remember Grozny). Damn Russkies. Sometimes history just comes around and bites you in the a**, literally.

    [Sep12'04] Today it was reported that a journalist doing a stand-up report was killed (screams and his blood spattering the lens) while covering the aftermath of a firefight that broke out during an American incursion into a neighborhood in Baghdad in response to 'morning mortars'. A brave American flying an attack helicopter had fired several remote control missiles at an unarmed crowd (BBC video) that had gathered around a burning US vehicle that had been hit by a bomb earlier. This is what the injured and dying civilians looked like afterward (here is the photographer) who was injured, too. The slaughter was OK (because the journalist was Palestinian and the crowd was Iraqi, of negligible market value, including the two Iraqi kids among the 13 people that were killed, along with the 61 that were injured), and it was not news here and certainly not a war crime (there's an election going on, stupid!). Besides, it turns out the US was actually trying to *help* the Iraqi crowd, which is why we are in Iraq: "Air support destroyed the Bradley fighting vehicle to prevent looting and harm to the Iraqi people" -- US military press statement. Also, they said they were responding to the crowd firing on them. Also, they said they were trying to destroy secure communication devices left in the vehicle. Now, imagine an Iraqi attack helicopter in New York (!) firing a missile at a crowd of unarmed Americans around a burning Iraqi amoured transport vehicle that had been tooling around in Manhattan -- in order to 'help' the Americans, of course -- killing a bunch of them on camera along with a Jewish reporter covering the fighting. Now *that* would make the news here, even during an election! Wolf Blitzer would tell us it was a war crime, maybe even genocide. Over 3,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since just this April in fighting between insurgents and the US military. These 3,000 people have absolutely no value compared to the 3,000 people killed in the trade towers, whose value increases every year. In another comparison, while the US press was focussing on the 1,000th US soldier death (for the entire war), it ignored the 1,000 Iraqis (civilians and Mahdi army soldiers) that were killed in Najaf that *week*. Such contrasts are all part of the infinite wisdom of the market.

    [Sep15'04] More civilians have been killed by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq than were killed in total in *all* 'terrorist events' since 1968 ("terrorist event" as defined by the US, which of course, doesn't include the 2-3 million Southeast Asian civilians killed by the US during the Vietnam war). War is simply large-scale state-sponsored terrorism using better equipment that kills more people while providing greater safety for the empire's soldiers. Here is a typical insurgent from Fallujah that survived our latest 'liberation' of that city. Here are other insurgents that didn't make it through the 'liberation' of Fallujah last April.

    [Sep23'04] A lot of times on the left, people (myself included) want to show that while a particular US policy may seem to have a positive side (getting rid of Saddam [even though we partly created him]), it actually has a lot of negatives that the right doesn't normally bother with (slaughtering huge numbers of non-American civilians). This tend to be the case for situations where the US is wielding its upper (imperial) hand. By contrast, the situation in Iraq currently is looking pretty out-of-control and unfixable; the militant right (and left!) should be scared about the status of our 'upper hand'. The only way to really permanently "remove the cancer" (a US general's description) in Fallujah and similar places in Iraq would be: (A) to drop a small nuclear bomb on it, (B) to 'Dresden' it with conventional bombs, both killing fifty or a hundred thousand people, or (C) to invade and occupy with an overwhelming force of ten or twenty thousand troops. But there is a strong unspoken force deterring the US from doing plan A or B -- a world financial backlash against the US and US currency that could seriously destabilize our country -- and plan C is unacceptable to Americans since it would result in a large number of US casualties ('large' is relative; in 2004 it means more than ten or twenty American soldiers in a week). So instead the military is currently planning to just do a 'Najaf' on Fallujah, right after the election, after 'softening' it up by bombing for the next month (this week we were bombing construction cranes and bulldozers there along with women and children). But it is not clear at this point that plan D will actually work -- as in actually slowing or stopping the insurrection. A similar approach certainly didn't work in Vietnam, where we killed *millions* of people; the current 'Najaf' plan would 'only' kill a few *thousand*. We have the largest, most expensive, most high-tech, most carrier'd, most satellite'd, most foreign-base'd, most Darth-Vader-like military in the world (we even have programs to 'own the weather') -- nobody else is remotely close. Despite all that, we haven't been able to decisively win against a disabled country that lost a war to us a decade ago, and was then economically strangled and bombed and inspected into complete defenselessness (no air force, no navy, no air defense, no WMDs) for a whole decade -- right up until the very moment of our second invasion and occupation (the inspectors fled a day or two before the blitz commenced). We haven't even been able to steal much of the oil yet (we were reduced to stealing a huge chunk of change from the oil for food program). Iraq -- with 12% of the entire world's remaining oil reserves -- has unbelievably become a net oil importer. Be afraid, US wolves: the sheep out there (and I don't mean 'al-Qaeda') are beginning to see our decayed teeth and arthritic limbs. They are currently letting us get away with building 14 military bases in Iraq around the oil. This has been the great success of the war, despite the poor security outside the bases, maybe even because of it -- if warfare breaks out between Sunni and Shi'ite and Kurd, there will be less of a resistance focus on the bases. However, the rest of the world needs that oil, too; and as things get more crunchy, we should expect less of a free pass.

    [Sep27'04] As predicted above, the US military is continuing to purposefully slaughter mainly civilians, after shutting off power and water to an entire cities, while supposedly targetting insurgents, in rebellious Iraqi towns in order to convince the *civilian population* there to knuckle under US patrols. There have so far been no protests against this (aside from Turkey's protest at the Turkmen slaughter in Tal Afar -- which effectively stopped it). As I've said many times before, war is simply terrorism, using better equipment. Our government is planning an even more vicious, wholesale bigger-than-9-11 slaughter of Iraqi civilians right after the election. Protest it today.

    [Sep30'04 -- commentary submitted to NPR Morning Edition] "On Wednesday's Morning Edition (Sept 29, 2004), there was a report about the unrest in Iraq, a country we invaded and now occupy on the false premises that Iraq had WMDs and that Iraq was somehow tied to 9-11. Through Eric Westerfeld, we heard from General Myers that the US is planning to subdue Fallujah, again. The first time we tried this in April, 2004, we killed around 1000 civilians, only stopping after the rest of the world responded with outrage to the carnage. The general now explains how we will have to do it again, but this time more forcefully. Bombing civilians in order to stop them from supporting the insurgency is terrorism, plain and simple. This NPR report calmly described the new plans for killing as many civilians as were killed in 9-11. Why is the free market value of Iraqi civilians so much less than the market value of American civilians or American troops? Why does NPR collude in supporting this valuation? I think history will not look kindly upon 'good Americans' and media outlets such as yourselves that helped to shape them." -- Martin Sereno.

    [Oct02'04] Today, 1/4 of Iraqis depend on rations for food. The war-supporting right and left might think this means we can still win! Just cut off their power, water, *and* food, and their hearts and minds will surely follow, to paraphrase Chuck Colson, who said "when you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow". But Chuck turned out to be wrong.

    [Oct04'04] "Most Israelis recoil at the thought of giving Palestinians equal rights, understandably fearing that a possible Palestinian majority will treat Jews the way Jews have treated Palestinians." -- Michael Tarazi.

    [Oct05'04] A majority (41/70) of the dead people brought to Samarra hospital after US 'precision' strikes last weekend were women and children. Stop the terror, US-ians. Stop slaughtering women and children in the name of 'bringing democracy' to them (actually, it turns out that Samarra and Fallujah don't get to vote anyway in the first election because they don't support the right guys, and it's for their own good). Stop killing for peace. Stop killing for the American election.

    [Oct06'04] From the horse's mouth: "I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child's existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I've killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian women is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do." -- Ariel Sharon, 1956 interview with General Ouze Merham (current prime minister of the 'only democracy in the Mideast'). Bush should be a man, too, and take proper credit for burning children.

    [Oct17'04] Hard to tell what's actually going on in Iraq -- whether the situation is just difficult for the US, or nearer to serious problems, as some have suggested. The only information comes from reporters parrotting military strategy press releases/propaganda to American newspapers while cooped up in dirty hotel rooms in Baghdad (because it's completely impossible for Americans and Brits to go outside, which suggests that the situation has, in fact, continued to deteriorate), a stray phone call to the BBC from inside Fallujah (enduring a major US assault over the weekend, surrounded by a US military cordon cutting off food and water supplies, with the hospitals inside out of medical supplies), and resistance websites translated from Arabic filled with impossibly high numbers of successful attacks, but also some video documentation. The US, of course, has the air power to completely obliterate whole cities; but it can't easily use it without the possibility of risk to its navy fleets, which are hard to completely defend against missiles that fly just a few feet above the water. A pre-election Osiraq-like attack on Iran by Israel with US carrier basing has been rumored, but that seems unlikely to me, given the already tenuous Iraq ground situation.

    [Oct18'04] Ghawar is dying. All of Saudi may peak by the end of this year. The whole rest of the world outside of OPEC and the former-Soviet-Union has already peaked. We will have to drill as fast as we can just to maintain a reasonable downslope on the decline that never ends. Looking back, historians of the future (your kids) will find it unbelievable that there were hardly more than a few offhand words about oil in the hallucinatory 2004 'campaign season'.

    [Oct28'04] A recent Lancet household survey (pdf here) of Iraqi households (excluding those in Fallujah, since there were so many deaths there) conservatively estimates that 100,000 people were killed by coalition forces (mostly by our Air Force) during and after the second US war on Iraq. Most of these 100,000 dead people were women and children. This is perhaps a 75-to-1 ratio of civilians to US troop deaths, which is not surprising, because -- despite all the crocodile tears about not giving our storm troopers enough body armor -- civilians have *much* worse 'equipment' (houses, cars, clothing made out of cotton). I wonder how US-ians would like it if a gang of Iraqi trailer trash screaming "Go, go, go" in Arabic broke down their front doors in the middle of the night 'by mistake' (because they got the name wrong because they don't speak English, or because of a jealous neighbor), and then the troops trashed the place, terrified the kids, and ripped off their stereos and jewelry, all in the process of 'helping' those US-ians to be more 'democratic'. Aside from the fact that we're catching up to, and may have surpassed Saddam in killing (we're *waaay* past Milosevic), this shows that our supposed 'precision strikes' were in fact just like all the other the civilian slaughters that have characterized war in the 20th century. I don't think we will be leaving Iraq any time soon with either Bush or Kerry. We will continue to slaughter civilians up until the bitter end several years from now. I think a major component of our plan in Iraq and parts of the former Soviet Union is to prevent China and Russia, and to a lesser extent Europe and Japan from buying/using a lot of Mideast oil. Needless to say, this is a very dangerous plan which will eventually fail when the rest of the world finally retaliates economically, and possibly militarily. Stupid for US-ians not to discuss this more openly. We are supporting this slaughter with our silence and our taxes. It's immoral to be a 'good American' and collude with war criminals. The civilian slaughter in our war on Iraq is a *much* bigger crime than 9-11 -- by a factor of 20!

    [Nov03'04] 20% of the world's population has access to running water. As things wind down, we may end up more like the other 80%.

    [Nov05'04] According to our pitiful, pusillanimous press, our brave storm troopers are "itching" to slaughter whatever of the 300,000 Iraqi humans who weren't willing or able or allowed to evacuate the killing field of Fallujah. First, it's not true (they're not itching), second our 'boys' are about to commit war crimes and they know it (that's why they're not 'itching'), third, I wish the turds who write this offal would go over there and do a little storm-trooping of their own to help out in this great crusade (they'd probably vomit all over themselves). Scum.

    [Nov07'04] A note from one of our former 'boys' to Rahul Mahajan, in response to his blog entries on Fallujah (maybe I spoke too generally above -- I guess *this* guy *would* be "itching" if he were still in the service): "However, having killed my own number of ragheads and my strong support of genocide of the Arab race and Muslim religion, stands. These are a people who have no business living. None of them. Women, children, old men and any other filthy pig f***er. We should systematically eliminate them all." I think this reflects the thinking of a substantial chunk of US-ians: genocide is a dirty job, but someone has to do it to keep the US-ian herrenvolk safe. Because of my moral values, I don't support the Iraq war, and I don't support our troops.

    [Nov07'04] The invasion of Fallujah begins by the US forces taking over the main hospital. Now that's some ballsy strategy. It shows the bravery of our body armour'd leathernecks, given that we could have more safely bombed the thing to rubble from the air like we did with the other Fallujah hospital yesterday. I bet those doctors and injured patients must have put up a fierce fight, eh?

    [Nov09'04] The 'liberal' media coverage of the destruction of Fallujah is just hallucinatory. We demolished two hospitals with bombs (the second today, killing 20 medics) and stormed a third hospital (stormed a hospital?!), handcuffing the doctors because it was the "center of propaganda". We bombed the power plant, cut off the water supply, sealed the entrances and exits of the city, and shelled and bombed and strafed (with depleted uranium bullets) the city center for a month in an effort "to prevent civilian casualties" and "to reclaim Fallujah for its citizens", causing 200,000 of them to flee (males were not allowed to get out, since they are defined by the US military as "not civilians"). We are demolishing Fallujah (including 20 of its 40 mosques) with Christian crosses hanging from our tank barrels (two different photos distributed by the media) and cluster (anti-personnel) bomblets and phosphorous bombs in order "to allow elections to take place there", though any Fallujans that survive and/or come back to dig out of the rubble and get limbs blown off by unexploded cluster bomblets might not get to vote if they are too "restive". Our puppet Allawi, known in Baghdad as "Saddam without a moustache", declares martial law across Iraq for 60 days in order to -- what else -- "make elections possible". Never mention the fact that no WMDs were found and no 9-11 connections were found -- the supposed reasons for our war. Never mention that the war (mostly the bombing) caused 100,000 excess deaths of mostly civilians (when compared to the last year under Saddam; this is a much larger number than the number that sent Milosevic to the Hague). How can you 'liberal' media news writers sleep at night? You *know* of the shooter). This (shocking view of Ali Ismayal's injured left arm before amputation) is also terrorism (Ali's right arm was amputated, too), the result of the US bombing his house in Iraq on March 30, 2003, killing all 15 of his relatives in the house) during the invasion of Iraq in April (report on civilian casualties from initial invasion here ). Just because we used a remote-controlled bomb and the pilot got safely away instead of using an up-close-and-personal blowtorch doesn't make it not terrorism. The American people approve this because they don't see it, because the media collaborate by being too afraid to show anything but sanitized video games. The Lancet study suggests that there have been 100,000 other people dead like Ali's relatives and even more wounded like Ali, since we invaded, when compared to Iraq under Saddam the previous year. We're doing this to real humans, including our "boys" (they're not boys; Ali is a boy). We don't belong in Iraq. We should get out now.

    [Nov26'04] "Coalition forces dropped ordnance during Operation Iraqi Freedom on legitimate targets. Your family was in an area that was being legitimately targeted and therefore regrettably harmed." This is the note that you get if you were one of the 75% of Iraqis that were turned down for minor compensation after the US slaughtered one or more of your family members. I wonder how red-state US-ians would respond to a note like that from an occupying army, of say, Chinese (written in Chinese and English)?

    [Nov29'04] In Israel, the most disturbing revelation in from a series of recent army misdeeds was footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin at a checkpoint. Why? Because it disgraced the memory of the Holocaust. I don't see what the Occupation has to do with the Holocaust. The Palestinians didn't do the Holocaust. That forced-violin-playing disgrace turned out to be more disturbing to Israelis than the reports of a soldier empyting his automatic weapon into the prone, dead body of a Palestinian schoolgirl. And in that case, the empyting of an ammunition clip into the already dead girl was found more disturbing than the shots that actually felled her as she ran in terror and the shots that killed her as she lay there injured unable to crawl away. What a weird backwards outrage scale! People sure get themselves tied in knots explaining away bad things while trying to feel morally and racially superior.

    [Dec01'04] The grisly destruction of Fallujah seems to have 'worked' strategically for the US since there was much less of outcry than after the first time. US-ians don't seem to care about a record number of US soldier deaths (and could care less about thousands of low-value human deaths). We created quarter of a million refugees in a few weeks, but, as with Vietnam, half-starved refugees on the run are more controllable than people living in their hometowns (we created almost 5 million refugees in South Vietnam before finally losing the war). It also solves the problem about Fallujah voting the wrong way -- now there's nobody home, so no prob, or they get to go back to Concentration Camp Fallujah and vote, if they dare venture out onto street. There is a lot of press noise about the country breaking up and Sunni/Shi'ite rivalry, which is music to the metallic ears of US military planners. On the other hand, amazingly, with all the firepower, we still don't completely control Fallujah -- though we've be able to courageously stop the Red Crescent from entering, and probably used some kind of napalm, which is mixture of polystyrene and jet fuel that sticks as it burns (well, you see, it was an 'improved' napalm [sticks better?], not even called 'napalm', so not outlawed), showing a degree of desperation. The situation on many major Iraqi roads seems to be getting worse, and the Pentagon just announced it is increasing the deployment by 12,000 troops (mainly by keeping people there longer -- again, the American people won't mind somebody else's kids getting shot up, and they're probably a foreigner anyway, or the fact that this is more total troops than were used during the invasion), suggesting that the military may be getting worried about their supply lines, which are quite long. From this perspective, the situation seems less favorable for the US.

    [Dec03'04] "So far the plan is for most of the city's 250,000 residents to return in stages and first only a few thousand will be let in. They'll be fingerprinted, given a retina scan and then an ID card, which will only allow them to travel around their homes or to nearby aid centers which are now being built. The Marines will be authorized to use deadly force against those breaking the rules" -- reporter to Tom Brokaw yesterday on plans for welcoming Fallujans back to the ruins of their town (what, no tattoos?). I'm not a black helicopter kind of guy, but even if you're one of those US-ians who wouldn't object to nuking all non-US-ians (I wonder what the real percentage is, done in proper Kinsey style...), this test-run for a police state oughta give you the creeps. Damn if things aren't turning out just like writers warned with 1984, Brave New World, Robocop, and Blade Runner.

    [Dec06'04] Here are poll numbers on Arab opinion of America, before and after the Iraq invasion/occupation (from the Sep04 Defense Science Board Task Force "they-don't-hate-our-freedoms-they-hate-our-policies" report, pdf here ), from a Zogby poll, taken on April, 2002 and then again on June, 2004:
    -----------------------------------------------
    Morocco .... 61% => 81% unfavorable
    Saudi ......... 87% => 94%
    Jordan ....... 61% => 78%
    Lebanon ... 70% => 69%
    UAE ......... 87% => 73%
    Egypt ........ 76% => 98% (!)
    -----------------------------------------------

    [Dec07'04] This is a map from btselem.org, the Israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories, of the Bantustans (red and orange patches) -- that our supine press calls the 'incipient Palestinian state' for 'thankless' Palestinians who rejected this 'generous' offer. Many of the red spots well inside the green line are now enclosed by 30 foot high concrete walls (detailed wall map here (1.7M) ). This is a map that virtually no Americans have ever seen because it (and the giant prison walls) *never* ever get shown on our teevee or pictured or explained in our papers. The latest part of this apartheid plan is to make rat tunnels between the dark red parts because Palestinians aren't allowed anywhere near the network of Israeli-only surface roads that cover their 'incipient state'. The so-called 'state' is a bascially a large number of prison camps separated by wide swaths of military-defended territory around the roads, crossable by Palestinians only through humiliating check points. Cool democracy, where the half of the population inside the concrete prison camp walls doesn't get to vote. And we US-ian taxpayers get *all this* for a few billion per year in grants and another few billion a year in interest free loans. Furthermore, no one else in the world seems to be paying any attention to this (are they?).

    [Dec10'04] To 'prevent health risks' to civilians returning to Fallujah, the US military is delaying their return (to a retina-scanned, let's-see-some-ID-or-you're-shot, forced-work-gangs, rubblized strategic hamlet paradise), so they won't get rabies from the dogs that have been eating at thousands of unburied corpses on the street and in collapsed buildings. How thoughtful and humanitarian we are! Merry Christmas! Probably, the rest of the world is not paying attention to this, is not worried about us stealing their oil (since we don't currently get much oil from the Mideast, but they do), and therefore will continue to invest the majority of their savings in our currency forever. Yeah.

    [Dec14'04] The US transports 25,000 tons of cargo (dominated by fuel and water) around Iraq every day (a standard 18-wheel US truck has a gross weight of 40 tons). This week the military announced that it was increasing the amount carried by planes per day from 100 tons to 450 tons per day, with possible plans to increase this to 1,600 tons a day (AP). Also, heavy bombing of the destroyed and 'pacified' Fallujah has resumed. One can only hope that nuclear 'pacification' will not be required. War is peace. We destroyed the village to save it. Serious deja vu.

    [Dec16'04] Serious fighting continues in Fallujah under an almost complete and creepy US news blackout. It is a sign of US weakness.

    [Dec19'04] If the US barely controls any territory outside of our military bases in Iraq, one wonders how well we could do if some other non-disabled oil-purchasing country decided they didn't like us being so close to 'their' oil. Of course we could nuke them, and they could nuke us, in fine Easter Island style.

    [Dec22'04] Given the Dec21 rocket attack or suicide bombing or whatever in Mosul, it looks like the US doesn't even control the territory inside their bases very well. The US doesn't have enough troops to destroy Mosul (2 million) in the way it destroyed Fallujah (300,000). Our utterly supine press, however, is already beating its chest explaining how we are being 'manly', and 'cordoning off' this and 'sealing' that. Before long, we'll pull out our people-shredders and start to 'soften up' the non-people. But how is that going to prevent the mechanism of this latest attack? The fact is that the US is so hated now, they can't trust any Iraqi, yet they require many to work for them inside every base. We can't 'seal off' the entire country into some kind of Orwellian retinal-scanned gulag (as much as Wolfowitz might like to) with only 150,000 troops in a country of 27 million. I suppose the US war planners are hoping that they can get an Iraqi civil war started soon, before things get really ugly (for us). Support inside the US for the war is lower than ever and Bush is back near his lowest approval ratings, which happened around the time of Fallujah I. A glance at the stunning, frequently-updated "Approval" polls graph at pollkatz suggests that we may be getting perilously close to 'needing' another 'pick-me-up'. The three previous biggies were 9-11, invade Iraq, and capture Saddam. Amazingly, almost everything else that happened since 2000 had only tiny effects on the Bush approval graph, which for the most part goes down linearly between 'pick-me-ups'. The fact that the Iraq war 'ended' in June with 'Iraqi sovereignty' did result in a never-before-seen slight positive linear trend, but most of the wind was taken out of that by the debates. It looks like Bush was only saved at the last second by the new 'bin Laden' tape, but the effects of that seem to have already worn off.

    [Dec30'04] The dead Osama promotes the mythical all powerful one-legged Zarqawi in yet another faked tape, Bush 'responds', and nobody laughs. Things are starting to look positively Third-Reich-y around here! I'm not looking forward to what will happen when the first *real* oil shock comes in 2-3 years. But as I watch my own non-adaptive behavior, my mind is drawn to a scene from the Eiger Sanction, which was a silly 1975 Clint Eastwood movie, but with great climbing shots from the real Eiger. Things are going downhill for the climbing party that Clint has joined. They are hauling up one climber disabled with a head injury bundled up like a mummy, and there is an approaching storm -- and Clint asks, "Do you think we'll make it?" The accented response comes, "No, but we will carry on with style".

    [Jan2'05] As part of its 'Gaza withdrawal plan' and under the cover of all the tsunami disaster porn, Israel today sent 50 tanks and armored vehicles into Gaza. Eleven Palestinians have been killed in Israeli operations of the past 5 days, so in our racist media, this qualifies a 'lull in the violence' as 'the withdrawal continues'. War is peace.

    [Jan3'05] The Iraq war is a huge festering mistake. Antiwar types like myself are sad that it turned out so much like we feared. The pro-war guys were wrong. We should get some points for foresight. We should rub it in their face like they rub it in ours. It's costing us almost 1/5 of a billion dollars every day. We're slaughtering mostly civilians. We will likely eventually lose, but not for want of trying or spending. We tried really hard to win in Vietnam. We lost. Iraq may be similar.

    [Jan4'05] Doctors entering Fallujah for the first time and searching 1/3 of the neighborhoods have so far discovered 700 women, children, and elderly men under the rubble of their destroyed houses, including infants that starved to death after their mothers were killed. I think the technical word for this is "collateral baby-killing". This doesn't count the dead buried in mass graves by US military (~400) and in gardens by Fallujans, or dead bodies under rubble in the other 2/3 of the neighborhoods. One doctor said "It is the most depressing situation I have ever been in since the war started". The US military, of course, allows no pictures. This particular disaster porn is off limits, so that US-ians will continue to 'support our tsunami', and the 'boys' that implement it. The Good Americans will later whine, "we didn't know it was happening". That excuse didn't fly the last time, however.

    [Jan7'05] "The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house!" -- recently released Iraqi detainee from Abu Ghraib commenting on the current state of Iraqi infrastructure (Dahr Jamail interview). Proabably, it's not a good strategy to alienate the entire rest of the world; it makes more and more people out there dream of bringing electricity to Americans' nether regions.

    [Jan11'05] "It is clear that by completely destroying this Sunni city, with the help of a mostly Shia National Guard, the US military has fanned the seeds of a civil war that is definitely coming. If there are elections now and the Shia win, that war is certain. The people I spoke to had no plans to vote. No one I met in those five days had a ballot paper." -- Ali Fadhil, Iraqi doctor, on visit to Fallujah on Dec 27, from Jan 11 BBC documentary. This probably wasn't the original US plan, but it seems in retrospect that it was adopted as an element of policy around the time of Fallujah I. It looks a little desperate to me, given the possibility that things could spiral out of control, and since many Shi'a (e.g., Sadrists) are as anti-American/anti-occupation as Sunnis.

    [Jan13'05] In Iraq, the candidates' faces are not only *not* shown on teevee, but a good number of them are anonymous. They should start that up here! It would make our election farce so much more enjoyable. They could officially mention that thing about 'pockets' not voting, too.

    [Jan15'05] The US "government news agencies" never say things like: "Negotiations will not be possible until the prime minister Sharon reins in the Israeli gunmen" (like the snipers that injure and kill Palestinian civilians every week), or that "Israeli militants killed several more civilians today" (which they just did today). Israeli gunmen have killed 4 times as many civilians as Palestinian gunmen have. However, when you are in the army that is sanctioned by our fine "national new agency", then those 'other' civilians don't count (because they are untermenschen) and killing the untermenschen is morally justified to defend the only 'democracy' in the Mideast. The fact that half of the population of Eretz Israel is imprisoned in a check-pointed, tank-shelled, house-demolished, helicopter-missiled, Israeli-only-roaded, snipered, walled-in gulag doesn't count. War is peace.

    [Jan15'05] The Ghawar oil field in Saudi, discovered in 1948, is the world's largest oilfield. 3400 wells have been drilled into it. It produces 5 million barrels a day (Saudi total production is 10 million, US total production is 7 million, world usage is 82 million barrels, all per day). Ghawar is almost empty, and is ready to decline rapidly when the sea water (pumped in below the oil to keep the pressure up) hits the last of the pipes still producing oil (most holes are currently used for injecting sea water). These days a big find of oil is 500 million barrels. That is one week of world usage, so we need one of these big finds every week. The current find rate is proprietary business info, even though it forms the bedrock that supports the continuation of industrial society. Current guesses are that we are finding 1/4 as much as we are using. Who cares, whatever, yee-hay, let the scientists and engineers figure it out.

    [Jan17'05] The US has done something on the order of half a trillion dollars in damage to Iraq. None of this will be paid back. Look at Fallujah. Absolutely nothing has been fixed. Sporadic fighting there never ended. Nobody went back to their ruined houses with no electricity, and streets filled with body parts and sewage. Fallujah will remain a wasteland for decades. The US may be forced to withdraw from Iraq if the resistance maintains its current pace and the US is unable to foment a civil war, or if the maniacs in the Pentagon decide to attack Iran or Syria. The problem in coordinating the change of attention from Iraq to Iran. There will have to be some gap so that the silly putty minds of the US people can be molded around the idea (barring some kind of 9-11 event, which could stamp them into a new shape in a few days). We will leave the place an utter shambles, just like we did in Vietnam. We will probably reinstitute sanctions on Iraq, like we did in Vietnam. This is how the nation that uses the most resources behaves as the world inches up to the peak extraction of the Earth's resources. Ugh.

    [Jan18'05] Election observers have been dispatched to oversee the Iraqi election. Most will do so from Jordan. As Xymphora says, they must have some pretty good binoculars! Since the majority of the candidates are anonymous, the vote checking from Jordan will be even more difficult, but these guys are sharp. Putty-for-brains Americans aren't laughing at this. What is wrong with you people?

    [Jan18'05] The US war on Iraq has actually had the effect of conserving Iraqi oil resources while running down those of the rest of the world such as Canada and Mexico, and even Saudi. The effect of running down the 'friendly' suppliers was amplified by the sanctions we also imposed on Iran and Libya. It possible that this was part of the original plan (along with the establishment of military bases in Iraq). Iraq would be a *real* strategic reserve -- 15 years of current US usage if we hog it all by ourselves -- not the piddly 1 month US usage in the US reserve that is currently called "strategic". However, if the US does eventually have to evacuate, this plan may backfire (for the US).

    [Jan20'05] The US military has taken over the largest hospital (7 stories) in Mosul for use as a 'military headquarters' (bottom paragraph in this aljazeera report ) after driving out all the patients and staff. Must all be part of "getting the vote out" (of town). Are we planning to flatten Mosul? (the destruction of Fallujah started with the occupation of their hospital). Also today, a poll showed that putty-for-brains Americans slightly opposed an attack on Iran by 47% to 42%. An unbelievable 42% *supported* it, even in light of the ongoing Iraq disaster. And anyway, as Seymour Hersh has leaked, action against Iran has already started. The slightly-negative-on-attacking-Iran numbers are similar to Bush's approval ratings 4 months before the election. It will be easily fixed with another 'bin Laden' tape or two, without the need for any kind of big event. I'm really not looking forward to seeing what the putty-brains get molded into when the peak in oil and gas production starts to bite in a few years.

    [Jan21'05] I think the average teevee-brain American is going to process the Jan 30 Iraqi 'vote' -- where not only the ballots are secret, but so are the voting locations and candidate's names (!) -- as a great success. Since US reporters virtually never even leave their hotel rooms in Baghdad unless embedded, the US military in conjuction with the monopoly press will have complete spin control. What is the sound of bombs going off in Iraq when the US isn't listening? Can't hear them, la-la-la.

    [Jan27'05] "Isn't there some 'idiots guide to being a good Vichy government'?" -- Riverbend, describing a TV interview in which Iraq's current president's confusion about the possible arrest of Chalabi.

    [Jan30'05] The election proceeded like the statue-toppling -- a wild success (except for the C-130-toppling), with the vote counts for anonymous candidates verified by out-of-the-country observers (remote viewing, I think), and the turnout was more than 100%. Today, Bill Gates shorted the dollar at Davos. Just because it seems totally insane for the US to attack Iran doesn't mean Bush et al. won't do it. The administration is telegraphing its moves just like it did with Iraq. An Iraq attack seemed equally implausible right after Afghanistan. The congress won't stop him. However, this time, I don't see how they can do it without a draft, because while Afghanistan didn't use up many soldiers' tours and lives, Iraq has. However, to drag along the stoopid US-ians, 42% of which amazingly already support an Iran attack (too bad we can't ship all their butts over there to help out), we'll probably only need a few new low budget terror videos. That, plus a few months of oldtime Goebbels, and the putty-for-brains US-ians will be on board, and the bombing can begin. It's more dangerous than Iraq because Iran has not already been bombed for a decade and has some modern anti-ship missiles. Also, it will be an attack on a country that sells oil to our economic rivals, who might be motivated to provide the Iranians with some halfway decent air defense tech. Sometimes, it's enough to make you want to see US-ians hoist on their own petard -- and Iran is going to be a pretty big petard (that's Elizabethan for IED). The rats of the intelligensia (I suppose that category includes me) haven't yet started to desert the sinking US ship, but they're starting to sniff the salt air. The only 'attraction' of the US is more and more its military -- shades of the decline of the Roman empire. link

    [Feb02'05] The US is a bit bogged down in Iraq. If things continue their downhill slide for another 6 months, there may not be enough troops to effectively attack Iran, even if a majority of the American people can be made to think that the Iranians need to be bombed by then. Convincing Americans that a *draft* is needed (sending *their* kids over there) is harder than merely convincing them to send over poor volunteers and immigrants looking for green cards. Only another direct attack on America would make a draft acceptable. The US ships in the Persian gulf are a possible target. One scenario is that Iran will first be provoked, perhaps by an Israeli attack. Iran will respond, not by attacking Israel, but by attacking US ships in the Gulf. This will then provide the needed momemtum to restart a US draft followed by a US invasion of Iran and then maybe Syria. The January Seymour Hersh leaks and the Cheney mumbles about delivering bunker busters to Israel and what they might do with them are, unfortunately, generally consistent with this idea. link

    [Feb09'05] The Gulf War I story about Iraqi troops popping the Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators was broadcast around the world by the "mighty Wurlizter" of the free press. It turned out to be a complete fabrication, orchestrated to whip the publics' little minds into shape behind the war. The recent horror stories from the Fallujah hospital, about US troops pulling doctors out of surgery, beating them up, and leaving their patients to die on the operating table, are available only on the internet (from virtually the only unembedded US reporter left in Iraq). Unfortunately, they are probably true. The stated reason for the US attacking and occupying the hospital was "to stop using the hospital as a propaganda weapon". I guess you can't play the "mighty Wurlitzer" without killing a few low market value humans.

    [Feb11'05] The number of children suffering from acute malnutrition (AKA starvation) in Iraq (7.7%) has now risen above the percentage in Burundi and Haiti. We have spent an amazing $1 billion dollars a day for the past two years to bring this about -- a child malnutrition rate even worse than what our 10 years of sanctions caused. Iraq is currently exporting about 1.5 million barrels a day of oil. With oil at around $50 dollars a barrel, if we could steal all of the Iraqi oil proceeds (as opposed to just a few billion here and there), the 1.5 million barrels a day would still only amount to 8% of what we are spending daily to build and defend our 14 permanent Halliburton military bases in Iraq. The fact that there is no sign that the US is planning to leave anytime soon suggests to me that the cabal that planned and currently executes this criminal occupation knows something we don't. If Iraq got it's production back up to 3.5 million barrels a day, and oil went up to $300 dollars a barrel, and we stole the entire proceeds, we would break even (not counting low-value human costs, since those don't exist for economists). The oil pipeline sabotage would appear at first glance to make our occupation less profitable. However, since there is virtually no excess capacity in world oil production now, attacks drive the price of oil up. From this perspective, oil pipeline sabotage may actually be *favored* by the US, since it increases oil revenues for the same amount pumped, and it conserves our putative future 'strategic reserves' (when we will be 'forced' to use Iraqi oil instead of just selling it). All this is a little over the heads of 'Good Americans', who can't be bothered to even learn the difference between million, billion, and trillion (e.g., the largest pension fund in the nation, CalPERS, for California Public Employees, holds only $180 billion in total -- *less* than the amount we've spent in 2 years for this stupid, brutal war). Some Americans are a little worried about how things are going, but they generally think we should 'stay the course'. People voted to stay the course in Hitler's Germany, too. Wrong course, man. link [Feb28'05] Last year, the international price of coal doubled as China expanded its energy use rapidly in 2004. Not to worry, though, since 'there is 200 years of coal left', right? That was a statement made early in the 20th century using the rate of usage back then. You only use 10% of your brain, too. The idea of endless coal supplies is total bull. The peak in coal is at best only a few decades beyond the peak in oil (which is virtually certain to occur in this decade). And even that much sooner date for peak coal is probably not bleak enough; it assumes (1) there will be no peak in oil and gas, and (2) China and India will immediately cease and desist in their plan to modernize. They are far from modern now, if you define modern as using a US-sized daily gulp of energy. In 2002, according to the US Dept of Energy, China used 9% of the energy we used per capita, and India used an amazing 3% per capita of what we used.

    [Mar03'05] Check out the graphs on slide 15 of the Pemex Outlook PDF (link below) from the Cantarell oil field. It is currently the second largest world producer at 2 million barrels/day (=0.7 billion barrels/year), where global usage is about 82 million barrels/day. More than 2% of the world's daily oil gulp comes from here. According to Pemex, Cantarell has about 8 billion barrels left in reserves (world usage is around 29 billion barrels/year). Pemex says it will peak in 2005 (that is, several years sooner than previously expected).

    [Mar05'05] It looks like the US attack on the car of just-released Giuliana Sgrena may have been intentional. Interestingly, Berlusconi knew Calipari, the intelligence agent negotiator who was killed in the hail of US gunfire, and probably approved a large ransom to get her back. Calipari had also negotiated for the successful release of the two Simonas, and his wife/widow apparently works for Berlusconi. Two other agents and Giuliana survived, and said that the car was not traveling fast, had already passed several Baghdad airport checkpoints, and was attacked by a patrol, not a checkpoint, in contrast to the bullcrap presented on CNN et al. La Repubblica also reports that US soldiers initially prevented first aid by preventing anyone from coming near the car. There were so many bullets all over the car seat that Giuliana collected handfuls of them. She may some interesting tales to tell since she was reporting on survivors of the siege of Fallujah just before she was kidnapped. Thankfully, she also survived her stay in an American controlled hospital in Baghdad (there was internet speculation that she might not). On her return to Italy, she said: "They said they [her kidnappers] were committed to releasing me, but that I had to be careful 'because there are Americans who don't want you to go back'." This hopefully will damage Berlusconi and/or force him to pull some Italians back from Iraq if the domestic uproar isn't squelched. She's probably being interrogated in her hospital bed in Rome right now. I hope she makes it through and talks. Go Giuliana!

    [Mar07'05] Two days later, I now agree with Kurt Nimmo's analysis. The US attack on Sgrena's car was almost certainly intentional, but was probably not designed to necessarily kill everybody inside. A passenger car is no match for an armoured vehicle firing high caliber bullets. They could easily have made sure that everyone in the car died if they had wanted to. Even though the Italians were on a cell phone to Rome, no one could have possibly found out what actually happened if they had killed everybody, given that everyone knows that much of the Baghdad airport road is not really under US control. Instead, the attack was another instance of the intimidation of independent journalists -- like the US missile killing of the Al Jazeera correspondent at the beginning of the war. It looks like it's working. This leaves Dahr Jamail, who must be running more scared than usual.

    [Mar09'05] Estimates of the recent pro-Syrian protests range from 500,000 to 1.5 million. The anti-Syrian protests drew 70,000 people. There are 3.8 million people in Lebanon. "The anti-Syrian protests were not a signal that the Lebanese wanted to be like American-occupied Iraq. They were a signal that the Druze, Maronites and a section of the Sunnis had agreed to try to push Syria out. It was the US who had invited Syria into Lebanon in 1976." -- Juan Cole.

    [Mar10'05] Things are looking might-y peak-y these days, if you know what I mean. All righty then. Rome didn't fall in a day, however, so it's time to plan ahead. Think locally, act locally.

    [Mar15'05] Well, looks like the Italian threats against Sgrena to 'watch what she says' have worked and she changed her story ("I never said that they wanted to kill me"). Her stories about how the troops said "sh*t" when they saw that they had shot Calipari (instead of her?), and about how her supposedly fundamentalist kidnappers turned out to be fans of Italian soccer and how they shook her woman's hand didn't quite compute either, but, whatever. At least now, according to the White House, we can be sure that Italy's decision today to withdraw their troops this September had nothing to do with Calipari/Sgrena and was due, actually, to the immense amount of *progress* made to date. Today, there was a poll of US-ians about Iraq. Two years after the start of the occupation, 56% of them still think that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the start of the war, and 60% still think that Iraq had something to do with al-C-I-A-dah. Probably all of them think bin Laden is still alive. At this rate, most of them would believe that small primates fly out of my butt if Paula Zahn said so...

    [Mar20'05] The value of an Iraqi civilian is about $2,500. This is about two days pay for a US or British 'security contractor' and two *years* of wages for an average Iraqi civil servant. $2,500 is what a security company will pay to surviving family members if a foreign journalist tracks them down after a routine mistaken slaughter of a civilian pedestrian or driver in Iraq (see "Shoot first, pay later" below). The genius of the market has determined that Iraqis are low-market-value humans. Watch it, US-ians. The genius of the market may eventually decide *you* need to be re-valued.

    [Mar29'05] China may be planning to buy a lot of oil with dollars. They have about 0.6 trillion dollars, which is equivalent to 11 billion barrels of oil at today's prices. China's yearly usage is around 2 billion barrels a year (our usage is 20 billion barrels a year). This is an good move for them. It's a way of getting rid of dollars that doesn't (immediately) hurt the dollar. The end result is that China holds less dollars, which have been losing value, while at the same time, getting oil, which is increasing in value. Advantage China. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the California pension fund CALPERS is dumping its real estate investments.

    [Mar29'05] As a result of reading (too much), I feel like I understand the situation in Iraq moderately well. The US mission in Iraq hasn't been perfect from the administration's viewpoint, but one main goal has been achieved. We've established 12 or 14 permanent military bases around their oil, we're threatening other oil-rich countries in the area (Iran so it won't try to denominate oil in Euros, Saudi so it won't pull dollar investments out of the US for better return), and we've lost only a small number of troops -- only the number of people that die every single week in car accidents, and since there they're all low-income, low-political-value Americans of the kind that used to get welfare, they don't matter in the Rove scheme of things. Read Riverbend to hear about how Iraqis are now intermittently inundated with American-produced teevee (the electricity supply is still half of what it was before the war, when Iraq was under world sanctions). Despite the low domestic ratings for the war, Rove knows that as oil prices creep ever upward, people unconsciously and uncomfortably know that Iraq is about oil and the land around it, and so they won't be able to turn against it with the same vengeance as they did in Vietnam, and he might eventually even be able to shove a draft down their throats. But even with a basic understanding of the situation, there are always things that surprise -- like the UK announcing that they are withdrawing thousands of troops from Iraq so that they can go to Afghanistan to look for He's-dead-Jim bin Laden. Who could have predicted this? Most people don't even know where Afghanistan is anymore. Well, maybe it's because the Brits are better at geography. What's going on in Afghanistan? Did bin Laden send Zarqawi a new wooden leg from beyond?

    [Apr18,05] It is hard to dispell a growing feeling of unreality. Yesterday, Marla Ruzicka, founder of Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict was killed on the Baghdad airport road. US media says it was a suicide bomb, parrotting the only 'reporters' on the scene, who came in US armored vehicles, like the one that defended the airport against Sgrena and Calipari. Meanwhile, at the 150 Shi'ite hostage drama in Madain, Iraq government officials first reported that Iraqi troops called off their attack after encountering fierce resistance (Sunday), and then reported that the whole thing was a hoax (Monday). And as the market begins to tank, gold and oil move down, too, and the dollar moves up. These last two somehow happen while oil demand keeps shooting up, as Ghawar and Cantarell peak, and as the trade deficit lurches up. It's hallucinogenic. The oil move may paradoxically make businesses cautious to invest in exploration for fear of the 80's and 90's all over again, and there are already warnings of this in the financial press. The shortness of business lookahead never ceases to amaze. Sam Koritz at antiwar.com responded to my backtalk on his latest oil piece (getting me another 50 hits on oil05.pdf thanks for the link!), but was unmoved by my review of geology and physics, concluding that oil is not running out now (I agree), and anyway, the market will fix things when it eventually does (I don't agree). Here is my response to his response:
    -------------------------------------------------------------------
    Apr 17, 2005
    Hi Sam

    Oh well, I guess all the graphs failed to instill a healthy fear of geology and physics.

    I'm not opposed to money. The point is that I can imagine two situations, both of which have money -- high industrial civilization of the last century powered by fossil fuels (oil/coal/gas), and low post-industrial civilization with lots of unused concrete surfaces. I once heard Jim Kunstler ridiculing the idea of an oh-so-green caller who envisioned "making San Francisco bloom" by getting rid of the streets and planting more flowers and food. Imagine digging up the streets by hand in an environmentally correct way. A chain gang made out of the entire San Francisco population would hardly put a tiny dent in its pavement supply. No, we'd have to start now, while fossil-fueled backhoes and dump trucks still run.

    Now you would make fun of those people, too, but in a different way. You are relying on us, the scientists, "to come up with something -- scientists always do". "Don't worry, be happy". Maybe we will, maybe we won't. Scientists try to find out how things actually are. We can't change the laws of nature or the amount of oil down there, or the maximum speed at which you can pump it out of small-diameter 4 mile deep boreholes, or the amount of energy it takes to drill those holes.

    It's misleading to think of geology, physics, and engineering as free one-dimensional variables. Imagine a group of economists in an airtight room. They might think that if they just breathe harder, they will increase demand, which will lead to air supply innovation. Or they just might suffocate. I'm worried we are going to suffocate ourselves. After Malthus, we more than quadrupled the population, mainly using fossil fuels. We're in uncharted territory.

    You omitted the part of my note about the prospects for fusion, which is not looking much more practical than it was 20 years ago, and which currently also relies on a limited supply of fossil helium for superconducting magnetic containment fields. Helium comes out of certain oil and gas wells. Keeping a hot-as-the-sun plasma confined for long periods of time ('long' as in, more than one second) is currently a major problem, as is feeding new hydrogen in and bleeding off the various exhaust products. Scientists *might* figure out how to do this better using mathematical models and test fusion reactors. Or, it might turn out not to be practical, period, ever. The market can ask for more stable plasmas. It can't guarantee them. And it can't guarantee some other handy energy supply if RF-heated plasmas are never sufficiently stabilized.

    My point is, our current market mechanics don't look far enough into the future. Up until last year, the market decided to disinvest in renewables and sell off the US strategic helium reserves. Sitting near the fossil fuel halfway point, this is just insane from a survival of industrial civilization point of view, or even a survival of the US point of view. But from a business point of view, it's completely logical. Who can afford to run a solar business into the ground when the price of oil is so low?

    So, given the current junta, we'll just have to wait until they go high enough. This will happen soon enough since oil fields number one (Ghawar, 5%) and number two (Cantarell, 2%) are both right at the tipping point. I'll feel better when someone sets up a solar-cell-powered solar-cell-manufacturing plant, if such a thing is even possible.
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    [Apr04'05] The one-day drop yesterday in the Japanese stock market (about 4%) was a loss bigger than the entire economy of Singapore. This sounds suspiciously like quantum mechanics, where the consciousness of the observer causes the collapse of the wave packet. "I can't like it" (to quote a little girl's comment on eating bitter greens).

    [Apr21'05] Yesterday, Chomsky discovered peak oil (finally!). Then he says, "There's a sense in which it's advantageous if the oil peak is earlier. The reason why is it will compel the world, primarily the U.S. here, to move toward something like sustainable energy." Sure, yeah, right. And what "sustainable energy" source does Noam have in mind? He doesn't say. That's about as informative as Bush saying we are going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Wind and solar now weigh in at about *0.07* percent of oil + coal + gas (that's 1/1400). If we increased the amount of wind and solar power *140-fold*, truly sustainable energy production would reach 10% of the current fossil fuel total. I doubt whether sustainable energy will even get to 10% of our current total. What Chomsky should have said was that this will eventually put the tank and aircraft carrier guys out of business (tho unfortunately, not the nuclear missile guys), since the deployed US military is 70% fuel by weight. But Noam should be more circumspect about what he wishes on the rest of us.

    [May02'05] [May02'05] Well, thank god, the price of oil dropped a few dollars as the biggest surplus in more than a year has built up. That means everything will be OK and industrial civilization won't be ending in 30 years amidst the conflagrations of worldwide resource wars. For a while there, I was worried that the 1960's peak in oil discovery was relevant to something or other, but thankfully, it's back to our regularly scheduled programming. For example, the Moonie Post says that the US is going to withdraw from Iraq, now that we've won (again), and they're reconstructed and democratic (it wasn't about oil, forget about those 14 permanent military bases); and we won't attack Iran for its nukes or its undemocratic government (or its oil, whatever), either. The Economist shows this week how we're not running out of oil, and anyway, scientists will come up with something when we do, since that's their job (what is the job of economists again?). I wish these things were true. It's times like this, helplessly watching the gears turn (better viewed with the internet), that I suppose I agree with Chomsky. Let's just run the oil down as fast as possible. Don't bother planning for renewable energy, just careen right off the cliff (think of it as a way of stimulating innovation for 'soft-landing solutions'). Then after a short bit of tumbling and innovation, land hard, in a giant pile of death and destruction (creative, of course) -- a worldwide compost heap. Something sweet smelling will probably eventually grow up again. No regrets, except, maybe, as Joe Bageant wrote, from the cockroaches watching the whole thing: "What a shame, because at the height of their culture these guys made a damned good peanut butter sandwich." link

    [May04'05] The estimated amount of coal left EIA (Energy Information Administration) is be 1080 gigatons (~1 teraton), which is probably on the high side. US reserves are estimated at 270 gigatons. World usage is estimated at 5.26 gigatons/year. Assuming no yearly increase, and that all the remaining coal has an EROEI (energy return on energy investment) ratio bigger than 1.0 (otherwise, it's not an energy *source*), coal would last 200 years. Assuming a simple 1% yearly increase, coal would last about 100 years. The rate of increase is likely to be even faster as population grows, oil and gas deplete, and conversion of coal to gas and liquids increases (note that these both involve about a 50% energy loss compared to burning the coal directly). A 2% yearly increase works out to 75 years. Gregson Vaux from Carnegie Mellon University estimates that coal will peak (be half consumed) in 2035 when increased usage from synfuel conversion is included. This is near the predicted world natural gas peak of 2030 (Jean LaHerrere).

    [May05'05] Mafkarat al-Islam reports that American troops sealed all entrances to the city of al-Hadithah Thursday, dropped pamphlets from helicopters threatening that the 'grace period' was over, ordered all people to hand over weapons, and cut off the water supply, electricity, and telephones. It's good to know that our $2.8 billion a week in tax money is going to the good cause of spreading democracy, and, what do you call it?, nation building.

    [May08'05] Today on page 3 of the Sunday print LA Times, in an article by Rania Abouzeid (article here but pic only in print version), there is a picture of supporters of returning Lebanese Maronite Christian Gen. Michel Aoun, fronted by what must be the exact same photogenic, V-for-victory-hand-sign young woman who was centered on the cover of the Economist a few months ago (except now she has a more modest head scarf and is standing, as opposed to riding around on a guy's neck with a girls-gone-wild look and a Betty Boop tee-shirt). Must be just chance that she ended up again as the face of the 'new hope we have brought to this troubled region'. You've come a long way, baby. Yeah. Now, let's get that Iran or Syria attack going. Draft, anyone? For an excellent summary of the origins of the 'Cedar revolution' media campaign, see A "Cedar Revolution" I by David Peterson.

    [May12'05] The US bombed the hospital in al-Qaim during the recent fighting there as families still in town tried to flee the fighting. The hospital director said 8 people inside were killed. These must have been part of the 100 'insurgents' the US said they killed in this operation. It looks like the US may be getting ready to demolish the city in a fashion similar to what was done to Fallujah, which remains in ruins -- although there are very few truly unembedded news reports. This is what our $2.5 billion a week in tax money is paying for: a new Guernica every month or so. At this rate, it probably would have been cheaper to just buy the country. Our weekly blood and guts bill is roughly 5 times the weekly gross oil procedes of Iraq ($50/barrel x 7 days/week x 1.5 million barrels/day = $0.5 billion/week) (though who has any idea of where that money or the oil for that matter is now going).

    [May15'05] Our friend, Karimov (who boils people to death -- see Human Rights Watch link below) ordered his police to open fire on a crowd in Andijan, killing an estimated 600 people, according to human rights campaigner Saidzhakhon Zainabitdinov. The police piled up hundreds of bodies in a school, a third of which were women, and thousands fled to the closed border with Kyrgyzstan. But it's OK for Karimov 'massacre his own people', and he doesn't have to immediately submit to 'free elections', and these massacred civilians don't count (in contrast the valuable ones in Beslan), because he's our friend (he supported the invasion of Iraq), and the dead women and children have the wrong religion, and we give him a third of a billion dollars every year in aid, and, uhhhh, there might just happen to be some oil and gas he's sitting on that we need.

    [May29'05] Italian state TV reports that Zainabitdinov (dissenter mentioned in previous note) was arrested in Tashkent a few days ago.

    [Jun07'05] There was an interesting quote from an email today to Dahr Jamail from someone working at Camp Anaconda, near Balad: "Hearts and minds are secondary, far behind the issue of petroleum products, as the US continues to compete for resources around the world". Of course it was about oil. The US (Halliburton, etc) has built and currently occupies 106 military bases in Iraq. I wouldn't be surprised if 'low cost' Iraqi oil is now being shipped directly to the US.

    [Jun20'05] The war on Iran is already on, as Scott Ritter writes today in Aljazeerah. In the recent Iraq war, preparations and actual execution (greatly increased bombing, in an attempt to get Saddam to respond) began almost 9 months before the 'official' start of the war in March 2003. This was apparent to any person with even a moderate understanding of 20th century history and access to the internet. The din of the worm-like 'press' and 'congress' in late 2002, simultaneously lulled and scared the average Good American, exactly at the point that all the preparations, troop movements, and military hardware positionings were taking place. We are in a very similar position now. If you can write, write to anybody moderate in the government to tell them to have a little spine and be a little less cowardly than they were the last time they laid down in late 2002. The time to demonstrate -- and esp. to slow the crucial flow of new recruits -- is now, as the US prepares bases in Azerbaijan to stage our next invasion and the securing of the straits of Hormuz, and our special operations forces help coordinate terror bombings by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq (MEK). The antiwar left and right (e.g., Hersh and Ritter) have been putting out warnings for 6 months. Now is the time to act, before it's too late (like it was when the big demonstrations happened last time!). That is the real point of the Downing Street memos: we have to think ahead -- like they do. Don't be distracted by Iraq, as awful as it is, while the next move is being made.

    [Jul07'05] It will be interesting to see what the London attacks, the 'new new Pearl harbor', get used for by the US and the UK media. Some possibilities that come to mind are: preparing the public for the upcoming wars on Iran and Syria, delaying the plan, announced July 4, to withdraw British troops from Iraq, taking the focus off of G8 global warming talks (which were brought to a quick halt today), reducing the 80% of the British public opposed to a new biometric ID, helping the public to forget the Downing Street memos, Rove, Afghanistan, etc. ("it's a floor wax *and* a dessert topping!") The attacks have a strong resemblance to Madrid train attacks. In that case, however, the Spanish public turned on the government when it tried to take advantage of them in the election, and a subtantial portion concluded it was a false flag operation. The London event was first officially and elaborately described as a power surge in the Tube electrical system. Then there was an initial AP report (citing senior Israeli officials) that Netanyahu was warned by the British before the first blast and therefore didn't attend a economic conference located over one of the bombed subway stops, where he was to speak. This has now been denied by Scotland Yard, and several reports now say Netanyahu was only warned after the first blast. Stratfor cites unconfirmed intelligence community rumors that it was actually Israel who warned the UK several days before, and that this will come out as a failure of Blair to "take action" (but what action? invading Iran? installing even more security cameras? [every Londoner is already on video many times a day], locking down London every time Israel says so?). Oil shot *down* $4 because for a few hours, presumably because the geniuses of the market had decided that this would decrease oil demand. However, they quickly changed their minds, and oil is now back up over $60. Without implying any lack of emphathy for Londoners (I've been on those very tube stops many times and I love London and its people) by Iraq standards, this was a relatively small event. Many recent days of routine US bombing in Iraq have killed this many civilians and nobody here has complained. If a relatively small event like this can cause an outbreak of self-love in the oil markets, imagine what a real oil-relevant event (like a problem at a major port or a large hurricane) would do. That will be the time to remind your friends that it's only the 'genius of the market' (i.e., computer trading programs) doing their magic at $200/barrel. In other bizarre news, Chevron just set up a website called Willyoujoinus.com talking about peak oil. I'm involuntarily forced to recall an old skit from Second City TV with John Candy as Johnny LaRue: "Won't you join me?" he says as we share in his relaxation in his Discount Deprive-O-Rama isolation tanks, soon with a cigarette, and then with a gaggle of Gerbil Girls. "Won't you join us?" -- as we quickly burn through the second half of the fossil fuel heritage that made industrial civilization possible and supported the quintupling of world population. Won't you check out Willy Joinus?

    [Jul09'05] Well, the recent 'booster shot' seems to be working well. So far, it has been attributed to al-CIA-dah, definitely the Iraqi insurgency, definitely *not* the Iraqi insurgency, Syria (of course), the Palestinians (!), homegrown east Asian terr'ists (which must explain their bad Koran translations), but not so far, Iran. In a strange parallel to 9-11 and the simultaneous NORAD simulated hijacking that morning, BBC 5 reported on the evening of the 7th that "we [Peter Power speaking for Visor Consultants] were actually running an exercise [at 9:30 AM] for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning" (toward the end of this clip ). Just a coinkydink, I'm sure. You can't make this stuff up! All righty, then. Fox News says the terror attacks "work to our advantage" (Brian Kilmeade, commenting on how this will get our stupid gaze off of the G8 global warming talks). They also finally got Greta Van Susteren out of Aruba. And of course, the attacks are a reason for us to start world war III (it's not already on?). A floor wax and a dessert topping, indeed!

    [Jul10'05] The three train blasts turn out to have gone off within less than 50 sec of each other, an hour before the bus blast, so the window for a warning after the first blast but before the second (as described in USA Today, so no foreknowledge demonstrated) is about 30 seconds (and about an hour before the rest of London was warned). Today, in London, Netanyahu, the apparent recipient of that amazingly prompt warning, now warns the West it must halt Iran nuclear plans. Well, duh, we *knew* the real problem has always been IranSyriaHezbollahAlQuedaMuslimsAndGypsies! And today, the LA Times has an endless article by Brownstein et al. explaining how the bombings are good for Bush, while the DailyKos deletes all previous posts discussing false flag attacks and bans their email addresses from further posts. Keep your Democratic eyes on those shifty darkies, dammit! since all the public evidence we currently have -- so far, one email already shows that 'they' did it, and that Zarqawi (!) was involved, too, and besides, the UK govt has never lied before about dirty deeds of the darkies in order to start a war. Yeah.

    [Jul11'05] Just read the article/talk by Mae-Wan Ho below on sustainable food production. I liked the content, cheerfully presented (however Lamarkian, quantum coherent, and self-organizing she may be; at least she's not a creationist).

    [Jul12'05] Fintan Dunne (below) argues against Alex Jones' ideas about the sinister-ness of Peter Power accidentally scheduling simultaneous terror drills (linked above), suggesting instead that Peter Power merely took advantage of the situation to advertise his PR business. Sometimes, I feel I have a genetic indisposition to thinking like a businessman. Maybe this is part of the explanation for what remains an odd coincidence, as well as an opportunity for confusion ("I'm actually just part of the drill, not a real terrorist"). There have also been reports of closed off tube stations more than an hour before the attack though they have not been correlated with Peter Power.

    [Jul13'05] The London bombers have now been supposedly identified as traveling together in surveillance camera videos. Two of the bomber suspects were even kind enough to leave their IDs at more than one site . Initially, this made me think of a particular passport that passed all the way through one of the WTC's, the fireball, etc. It turns out, the reason the Londoners did this was to make sure that we knew who did the dastardly deed. Besides, now that we have a grainy picture of a dark-skinned guy with a backpack to add to the the email (from Texas?), what more evidence do you need?

    [Jul15'05] The supposed military grade explosives have now suddenly and without explanation been downgraded to shoe-bomber explosives (!). It must have been hard to find evidence of high grade explosives after the police blew up the bombers houses using them (seems like the most sensible thing to do to preserve the trace chemical evidence at the scene of a crime, don't you think?)

    [Jul17'05] Somebody has been playing the "mighty Wurlitzer" real good lately. The latest story in the LA Times is that the explosive was actually a mixture of C 4 *and* the shoe-bomber explosive (and a dessert topping, too). The Downing Street memos and other lies that tricked Americans and Brits into spending roughly $300 billion in tax dollars to slaughter 130,000 non-Westerners are now backpage. You can already begin to see the uptick in Bush's poll numbers . Now just because they told a $300-billion-dollar 1/8-of-a-million dead lie doesn't necessary mean that Muslim patsies were set up, or perhaps even completely innocent people hired as actors and then given live bombs in the simultaneously scheduled 'terror exercise'. But the well-documented real conspiracy revealed in the Downing street memos by the same people certainly demands that we take these alternative explanations seriously. And don't forget that 6 or 8 of the supposed 9/11 hijackers later turned up alive (this was explained as the result of identity theft, yet it somehow never impugned the official story, and the names were never updated). Seeing the "mighty Wurlitzer" in action can sure make a person into a misanthrope, and constantly fighting the water torture of media 'reality' is mentally tiring and leaves a stain.

    [Jul18'05] Several commentators have noted that the Iraq war going poorly seems to have slowed down the march toward an attack on Iran, which had been predicted to occur in June 2005 by both Hersh and Ritter in January 2005. Though there has been some anti-Iran propaganda, it has not yet approached the level of anti-Iraq propaganda in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war. The recent London bombing was not a big enough event to give Bush or Blair very much of an uptick. A nuclear event of some kind in an American city, however, *would* be big enough to give the administration room to maneuver. Regardless of who did it, it could be attributed to Iran, which could then be attacked with nuclear weapons after a 3-5 month propaganda blitz against the American public. This would likely cause additional uprisings across the middle east, skyrocketing oil prices, leading possibly to a US occupation of the Saudi oil fields. An alternate possibility that has been suggested is that an unprovoked air strike on Iran by the US or Israel leads to a successful Iranian attack on a US aircraft carrier leading to an all out war on Iran. I sure hope both of these don't happen. I'd rather be scanning.

    [Jul23'05] Ah yes, the capital crime of "running away while Brazilian" -- that is, from armed men chasing you (probably special ops guys not in uniform, who according to witness Lee Ruston did not say anything to Menezes before executing him with 5 shots [update: 7 in head + 1 in the spine] from a silencer pistol to the base of his skull). The Israeli-trained UK antiterrorist police "regret" the fact that he had nothing to do with any crime. That should teach him to go to the skin lightening place next time. As Xymphora says, wouldn't it be easier to just withdraw from Iraq rather than having secret Israeli-trained death squads running around London slaughtering dark-skinned people because they are wearing Levi jeans jackets? Also today, one of the supposed 7/7 suicide bombers gives an interview on Pakistani TV (but that doesn't impugn the official story at all). The "strategy of tension" continues.

    [Jul25'05] According to Debka, Rice forced Abbas to relocate from Ramallah to Gaza during the Gaza pullout. I wonder if this has something to do with the "Warning from Israel" below? A US attempt to moderate a post-pullout Israeli attack on Gaza?

    [Aug01'05] The US is currently spending roughly $440 billion/year on oil (365 days * 20 million barrels/day * $60/barrel, with over half of that imported). We are spending roughly $120 billion/year on the Iraq occupation and over $500 billion a year on our military (50% of the world's military spending). Iraq (or somebody) is making only roughly about $33 billion/year on oil (365 days * 1.5 million barrels/day * $60/barrel). One would therefore have to say that as a war for oil, Iraq has not been going well. As I mentioned a while back, the price of oil would have to quadruple (or double along with a doubling of Iraqi production) in order to make our blood-for-oil war a break-even game -- and that's assuming we stole all of their oil, which is probably not practical, even now that Chalabi (!) is the Iraqi oil minister. It must be granted that the war to transfer US tax proceeds to Halliburton has been going better. Could $200 oil be here sooner than we think? I still think it's a few years off. It seems quite possible that there will be some kind of recession in the next year, and that this could actually lead to a temporary stabilization or even drop oil prices (for a year or two). The sheep will be temporarily lulled, investment in renewables will resume its drop of the previous 5 years, and then, bam, around 2008, the reduced demand will run into the slowly lowering and virtually immoveable ceiling of all-out world oil production and up will go the prices. So I guess that makes me 'bearish' on oil for now (though it seems so profane to talk about the elixir of the technological gods this way...).

    [Aug08'05] "All the great fields, ironically too, were discovered by eyesight, as opposed to seismic." -- Matt Simmons. If Matt Simmons is correct that the standard 260 Gb remaining reserves estimate for Saudi Arabia is grossly inflated (e.g., by even a factor of 5!), then Iraq may actually have the largest remaining reserves in the world, in part because Iraqi production has been impeded by three wars (Iran, US1, US2) and a decade of sanctions. There was a post on Mobjectivist today on a similar theme, except that the idea was that Iraq might have 400 Gb of reserves instead of its currently stated 112 Gb and that Saudi still has 260 Gb. The Simmons scenario, by contrast, is that Saudi has something like 112 Gb and 112 Gb is probably a generous estimate for what is left in Iraq (e.g., Kirkuk is long past peak). In both scenarios, the wars on Iraq were about oil. But in Simmons version, the end of oil is much, much closer. Simmons sits on the board of Kerr-McGee, which just sold it's North Sea oil assets to a Danish company. His solution is to immediately institute a massive offshore drilling program along with massive alternative energy and energy conservation programs. Well, at least the first one is likely to happen...

    [Aug17'05] Apparently, somebody close to the Menezes investigation leaked the fact that there *was* a video record (unreleased), Menezes *didn't* jump the barrier and paid instead with a rail pass, he *didn't* run until a brief spurt to catch the train, he *wasn't* wearing a bulky jacket, he *wasn't* carrying a package, he was shot after sitting, *not* tripping, a surveillance officer who arrived in the train before Menezes grabbed him and shoved him back into his seat but was himself then wrestled to the ground by the armed assassination team who killed Menezes, and the assassination team also put a gun to the head of the train driver. [Aug21'05] Menezes updates. The leaker mentioned above was promptly suspended, increasing the credibility of the leak. The star witness Mark Whitby, who provided the 'incubator babies' propaganda fed to the teevee, has now recanted/changed his story. The guy with the thick coat was probably a surveillance guy; the guy who leaped the barrier was one of the assassin squad guys; the guy that Whitby thought was Menezes cowering like a cornered animal may have been another surveillance officer who was tackled and surprised by the shooting of the assassination squad. Too late man -- as Bush says, you've already "catapaulted the propaganda".

    [Aug26'05] The widespread lack of very basic understanding about energy is frightening. Lately, as people have been getting a little spooked about oil prices, I read babble on the net that, well, we'll just make more nuclear (fission) reactors and convert to electric cars. That's fine, but that's a *lot* of extra electrical generation. The amount of energy used to power transportation is several times as much as what is used to power our electric grid. Imagine tripling or quadrupling electrical generation along with the capacity of the electrical grid that delivers it. OK, so say we plan to mostly charge cars and trucks at night. Then we would only have to double the capacity of the grid. But the battery operated trucks won't go very far before needing to wait until night for a charge since the best Prius batteries have *1/45* the effective energy density of gasoline; a long-haul electric truck would be mostly battery and hardly any payload (which is why no one has seriously proposed long-distance battery-operated trucking). OK, then just some cars, and no trucks. At that rate, we would be lucky if we covered the *increase* in car traffic, esp. if you include China and India. Another thing I read is, we'll just make gasoline from coal. Making gasoline from coal loses about 50% of the energy in the coal (vs. burning it directly). Also, coal emits more greenhouse gases than oil for a given energy output. Thus, big time synfuel generation would probably double the world's greenhouse gas and mercury output. I fully expect that's what we will do. Yeehaaaaa. Real lemmings don't actually jump over cliffs. It takes a civilization not willing to negotiate its lifestyle to do that.

    [Aug29'05] More journalists have been killed in Iraq (66) than in 20 years of the Vietnam war. The Iraq war has also been almost completely censored compared to Vietnam. There are only 2 or 3 independent US journalists in Iraq. Given that we're only spending a little over $100 billion a year there, that's probably enough to get an independent assessment of how things our going, right?

    [Sep02'05] Many have suggested that Katrina may have delayed an attack on Iran. However, the US does not have complete control over the timing of an attack. The response to the Katrina disaster is so incompentent and pathetic, it almost seems premeditated. Here is an interview ( mp3 ) with Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans (a lifelong Republican and Bush campaign contributor), recorded this afternooon. However, it is hard to see, even with all the yahoos red-faced about black looters, how Bush can escape damage from this. That's a dangerous thing for us all.

    [Sep05'05] The NSA is constructing a parallel secure internet for authorized "warfighters, business, and intelligence users" (kewl trio). This means if there is some kind of event, the regular internet can be shut down or greatly restricted, no doubt, in order "to protect us", without shutting down the military or selected parts of the economy. Probably it's time to dust off those old modems and pre-internet bulletin board software. Rather than phone over internet, it may someday be back to internet over phone or internet over shortwave. The lesson of Katrina is clear: we are on our own.

    [Sep09'05] After massive destruction of oil rigs, pipelines, and refineries, the genius of the market has driven oil prices *down*, naturally, because refineries (oil users) have being taken off line, oil reserves have been accessed, and oil donations made or promised. Thus, there is a very temporary 'oversupply' (well, relative to what there was before the storm). The market is *so* short-sighted, that both it, and oil futures, are not yet affected by the withdrawal of several percent of US usage for what I would think of as the "near future". The Gulf of Mexico disaster was large, but still only on the order of the depletion from many of the largest existing fields (e.g., North Sea oil depleting from 10 to 20% *per year*). I'm not looking forward to the roller coaster that Mr. Genius will put us through when the real peak begins to bite in a few years. In between, it is possible that oil prices may even crash for half a year, which would be enough to lead oil companies to temporarily suspend new exploration, and alternative energy companies to go out of business. When we are talking about a resource that is at the very center of modern global industrial civilization for the last century, and which is so obviously limited, I fail to see why wild short term speculation could possibly help us adapt to new energy sources, which even the completely flat-earth economists agree we will have to do. In the present case, no sane person thinks that hurricane Katrina has somehow increased world oil reserves. I get pissed being whipsawed by a bunch of worthless oil traders who know nothing about geology, oil, energy, making stuff, and so on. And then, when these friggin idiots make a bad call, like the LTCM guys and the Russian ruble, they get their asses bailed out. Why not execute them instead? If they need more than a $1 billion dollar bailout, I say, lethal injection. A billion dollars could have helped save a lot of people. These are the guys that would be setting up a market for Titanic life boats instead of making sure that none of the boats capsized as the ship sunk. Get 'em off my lifeboat.

    [Sep17'05] The US military has set up an Orwellian police state in the 'pacified' parts of Iraq that it controls, such as the 'demonstration cities' of Fallujah and Tal Afar. This includes retinal scans, finger prints, and photographs for every inhabitant, arrests of most men to interrogate them and further database them, a complete encirclement by barbed wire with entry at checkpoints only by retinal scan, and extensive detention without oversight of anyone deemed 'suspicious' in prison camps outside the city. This goes far beyond anything Saddam Hussein attempted. Ay-rab-hating yahoos cheer it on, but they should be wary, because such a thing could by re-imported -- esp. if there is some pressing 'continuity of government' need for it because of a stunt in an American city. It might even be implemented by mercenaries from private security companies. Down the line, there may end up being battles between these guys and the local police, the two major armed groups.

    [Sep18'05] The *real* reason we're having problems in Iraq is that simple genocide (think Carthage) is now considered off-color. I suppose this is why Chomsky is always saying that we are more civilized than we used to be. With all the military power and toys we have, we're bogged down in a battle with people using 30 year old RPG's and artillery shells. We could easily annihilate all 27 million people in the country 50 times over, but we have to be 'nice' (that is, starve, poison, torture, fleschette, and kill only a million of them). But don't let these difficulties fool you into thinking we will be going anywhere soon. We are sitting on a minimum of $7 trillion dollars worth of their oil (112 billion barrels times $60/barrel). In this light, it looks like a good deal to have to invest 'only' $0.1 trillion dollars a year to stay there -- esp. since it is likely the price is eventually going to go *much* higher. The only fly in the ointment is if the Iraqis don't fall for the permanent low-level civil war thing and instead unite against us. Then we would have a more difficult choice between oil and all-out genocide. Several prominent Iraqi figures have come out with statements that they think the mythical Zarqawi is long dead, suggesting that some Iraqis have sniffed out the permanent civil war plan, and have seen that it is not in their collective interest. Also, as the world oil shortage starts to bite in the next few years, it is less likely that the rest of the world will stand by passively while we do our dog-in-the-manger act. They might make a few covert efforts to sabotage us. Damn, all I wanted to do was figure out how the primate brain has been slightly rewired for language. For better or worse, there is probably not enough oil to figure out how the brain works. Maybe that's a good thing. I'm not sure I want to have a bunch of biologically intelligent military surveillance devices buzzing around my house some day (and thankfully, these things aren't practical yet).

    [Sep19'05] Today, Michael Rivero at WhatReallyHappened comments: "If I were Bush I would be watching my rear end closely. Right now the Neocons are probably figuring that if an Iranian (nudge nudge wink wink) were to assassinate Dubya, then Cheney could step into the Oval Office, the lies that started the wars would be buried with Dubya, and all mention of them dismissed as 'defaming the dead', while your kids get marched into Iran." Things continue to deteriorate in Iraq, where, in the generally more placid south, Basra police arrested two British undercover agents in Arab headdresses (and curly black hair wigs!) after the agents killed two Iraqi policemen in what may have been an interrupted false flag attack; non-US media outlets (Xinhua, Turkey, initial BBC) reported that the British agents who were arrested were driving a car packed with explosives. When two British armoured personnel carriers arrived to free the British prisoners, an angry crowd surrounded them and set the APC's on fire; two or more Iraqi civilians were killed in that clash. Finally, at night, a half a dozen British tanks came, knocked down the walls of the jail, and a commando team freed the British agents (and, in the process, 150 Iraqi prisoners) (some accounts have the order of these two events reversed). The London defense ministry says that the pair was in fact released by negotiation (using tanks, presumably) and that the pair was in fact looking for the 'real' terrorists. This explanation probably played better in London than Basra. The UK has now withdrawn earlier hints about troop reductions and now plans on troop increases. And finally, Cindy Sheehan gets collared by the police for speaking for a few minutes with a microphone in New York, but not Texas. New Yorkers less kewl than Texans.

    [Sep20'05] Predictable mainstream propaganda/spin today on Basra events above: it's Iran's fault! Juan Cole today has a more 'nuanced' view that adds info about a previous arrest of several aides of Moqtada al-Sadr, and he translates, but then doesn't comment on al-Sadr's claim (echoing reports in many non-US presses, including an initial BBC report) that the undercover Brits' car was packed with explosives and that they were carrying remote control detonators -- suggesting that they may have been involved in false flag operations. Webster Tarpley ("Iran war clouds" below) suggests that Katrina has not dented the progress toward an attack on Iran and that air strikes would likely come on nights without a moon (as in previous wars on Iraq), which will occur near the first of October, November, and December. There would have to be some kind of event a few weeks before that to galvanize public support for expanding the war. The expansion of UK troop strength, the Pentagon's recent consideration of extended tours together with troop strength increases, and the continuing Iran/Syria propaganda are consistent with this. I hope he's wrong.

    [Sep21'05] "A typical UK family of four would, each year, emit 4.2 tonnes of CO2 from their house, 4.4 tonnes from their car, and 8 tonnes from the production, processing, packaging and distribution of the food they eat." -- from Eating Oil ( pdf summary ), Dec 2001. Numbers in the US are similar. Modern 'civilized' humans 'eat' more oil than they use in their SUV's. I never liked SUV's, but I sure would miss eating. Meanwhile, a new $100 billion dollar plan (" Apollo on steroid "), was announced last week to explore and colonize the moon as a stepping stone to going to Mars. I'm getting this uncomfortable decline-of-the-Roman-empire feeling.

    [Sep22'05] The ozone hole has gotten back up to a near-record size again and it is no longer clear whether it has actually begun to shrink. The great majority of CFC's come from nuclear fuel enrichment (they are used to cool equipment such as fans as well as the hot uranium hexa_fluoride gas). Although improved piping would help, the upcoming massive increase in nuclear fuel production (to offset fossil fuel depletion) may offset improvements in controlling CFC leaks. Other bad climate news suggests that the Europe heat wave of 2003 led to a sharp *increase* in CO2 (because CO2-using forests and crops were stopped in their tracks by the heat); the increased CO2 will then lead to further warming. Another positive feedback situation -- this one for Arctic warming was also reported: decreased albedo from increased Arctic melting is leading to increased Arctic heat absorption, which is leading to further melting. It looks to me that these scientific observations will have absolutely no effect on government and business policy for the forseeable future. For example, a Republican budget study leaked today suggests that Katrina costs (probably part the result of global warming) will be absorbed by eliminating things such as Amtrak funding ($2.5 billion), which increases CO2 output, since rail transport is at least 5 times as efficient as cars, busses, and trucks. And although there has been some increased awareness of climate with the recent hurricanes, people watching teevee will forget it all when Rita drops off the story rotation. As a character in a sci-fi novel by Kim Stanley Robinson says it's "easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit". Examples of non-adaptive mass human behavior from previous collapses is not encouraging. And it is not clear to me that even if you could have given the Mayans all web browsers, cell phones, and iPods, that things would have turned out differently. Humans are like roaches -- some survived. And some people will certainly survive this century as well.

    [Oct01'05] There were fuel price riots in Indonesia today when the government announced that it was beginning to withdraw some of its $7.4 billion dollar subsidy of gasoline, which costs about 95 cents a gallon in Indonesia. It has often been suggested that as fossil fuel shortages begin to bite, more developed countries, which have further to fall, will be hit harder than less developed, less fuel-intensive countries, which use less than 1/10 as much fuel per capita as we do. But I think that this scenario may only come to pass later in the game. The reason the governments of many lesser developed countries subsidize fuel costs is because wages are so low that no one would be able to afford gasoline otherwise. For example, gasoline costs maybe 10 cents a gallon in Iraq (after our second war on Iraq, refined gasoline is all imported by Halliburton et al., into a country with the second largest reserves of oil in the world -- perhaps 12% of what remains in the entire world). As the dollar-denominated world price of oil continues to increase, people in the US will just pay more and (finally!) begin to buy somewhat smaller cars. Europeans have been getting by with gasoline prices are at least 3 times ours. In poorer countries, by contrast, wages are much lower, which has led US corporations to outsource just about anything that requires paying people to do things. But with those low wages, those same people will have increasing difficulty paying for fuel as the price of oil increases and as poor-country governments transfer some of those costs. In Eritrea, for example, the increasing price of gasoline has silenced the streets of the capital overnight. This is likely to become more widespread in the short term (the next decade). People in poor countries paying for fuel denominated in first-world currency (dollars) using poor-country wages will simply be priced out of driving. This will halt development there and lead to a backslide in countries lacking significant oil reserves. Even those with oil such as Indonesia (a member of OPEC) -- but that have just begun to import oil -- are having problems. The "longer distance to fall" scenarios may only hit the rich countries later in the game (two or three decades). Poor countries will likely become more aware and resentful of the inequities of a situation where oil can be transported anywhere and sold at the same high North American dollar price, but people are penned into countries where global corporations can take advantage of wage arbitrage.

    [Nov03'05] Interesting numbers yesterday from an oil insider who contacted Prof. Goose at the theoildrum.com. He/she reports huge increases in the cost of "jackup rigs" between 2004 and the start of 2006. These costs have approximately tripled (e.g., for a rig appropriate for a depth of 300 feet, the prices have gone from $35,000/day to $130,000/day). Much of this increase is due to the increased cost of steel (including steel pipe), and drilling 'mud' (montmorillonite clay). The tripling of costs for this key part of exploration has essentially canceled the tripling of oil prices with the result that there is no increased incentive for oil companies to drill for new (or already prospected) oil, despite the tripling of oil prices over the last two years. Some of this oil rig price increase is due to the greatly increased demand due to massive repairs required after the hurricanes, which has resulted in shortages. But a more ominous source is that the rapidly increasing cost of energy (e.g., oil and gas) has increased the cost of steel and drilling mud because *steel-making and mining* are energy-intensive. Cornucopian economists often write as if oil and other energy price increases occur in an abstract vaccuum, reliably increasing incentives, and soon after, supply. Instead, I see a dangerous game of chicken as energy prices increase the costs of exploration and 'production' of energy in parallel with increases in the price of energy -- a positive feedback situation. Since low-energy-cost energy is gotten first, the energy costs of getting energy have historically increased, even as energy 'production' has gotten more energy-efficient. This clearly points to a time where the *energy* costs of getting energy will exceed the energy returned. We are certainly not there yet. But in the run up to that point, it is likely that as fossil fuel energy costs increase, there will not only be positive feedback on fossil fuel prices, but also upward pressure on renewable energy prices, since production of both non-renewable and renewable energy is dependent on dwindling fossil fuel. It is an empirical question whether it is possible to produce enough renewable energy production devices to power industrial civilization using only renewable energy. Current back-of-the-envelope calculations say yes, but it remains to be demonstrated in the real world. Fifty years ago, everybody assumed fusion would be up and running now. It isn't. Given uncertainty about all this, you would think that it would be prudent to begin to increase wind and solar beyond their current 0.07% of our daily energy gulp (1 part wind/solar to 1400 parts oil/gas/coal). However, changing capitalism even a tiny bit is currently so abhorrent to our media-numbed populace and to our proud captains of industry that even a tiny government move in this direction would be instantly shouted down. Since business is not massively investing in renewable energy of its own accord, it must therefore not be needed. Praise the market God. The market God is great. This situation will only change if there is a series of massive energy shocks. It is looking like this winter may turn out to be very cold for northern Europe and possibly the Northeast (Atlantic Ocean temps are lower than usual, maybe as a result of disturbed ocean-circulation-based equator-to-North-Atlantic heat transfer -- maybe a result of Arctic melting). Perhaps this will open a tiny crack of light and make people begin to question the infinite wisdom of the market God. Hopefully, they won't (yet) start scrambling like rats (and I have great respect for rats as well as people!).

    [Nov07'05] The troop buildup in Iraq combined with the cutting of all diplomatic contacts with Syria sure looks like the US is planning an attack in the next few months. There are currently 160,000 troops in Iraq, the most ever, and major military operations are ongoing along the Syrian border. The most powerful military in the world will once again attack a small country without substantial defenses, mainly from the air. The rest of the world will bide its time and take notes. Clinton attacked Yugoslavia right in the middle of Monica. Bush is in a similarly difficult spot. Not a peep on campus. Not a peep from the Democrats. No need even for fake WMD's. Where is the embarrassment? Disgusting.

    [Nov11'05] The Jordan bomb story has been quite fluid. Supposedly, it was a suicide bomber, but there were reports that there was a bomb in the ceiling, and then some of bombers were arrested (presumably not the suicide ones!). Yesterday, Yoav Stern reported in Ha'aretz that Israelis got an early warning to evacuate before the bombs went off, but then the story was changed today to say that they *didn't* in fact get an early warning. Then later today, former IDF Amos Guiora quoted in the LA Times said that the Israeli pre-bomb evacuation was due to a specific security threat. Also, a Palestinian spy chief was killed in the blast. Twenty scary-boys-and-girls Jordan reports in the slithering mainstream media play against a mention here and there of TortureGate (and no mention at all of the Fallujah atrocities) with the clear implication that not enough people have been tortured. A leaked GOP memo suggests that a new terror attack would reverse the party's decline. Well, yeah, we know that.

    [Nov21'05] The near future looks dangerous. A US attack on Syria or Iran seems more and more likely. History never repeats exactly. As Jorge Hirsch argues below, in this case, our unprovoked attack could come first, and our bogus justification second -- that is, we had to use nukes on Iran because after we used them, Iran threatened to attack our troops in Iraq, thus justifying our first (and second) strike. Since over half the country believes in creationism, processing this nonsensical out-of-order sequence is just another no-brainer (yes, they have no brains). Don't forget how the public effortlessly swallowed a series of different justifications for the Iraq war (WMDs, 9-11, Saddam, their 'constitution', heh). Meanwhile, the first major natural gas shortage -- as opposed to a mere price spike -- may occur this winter in the UK if it has as cold a winter as is currently being predicted. This may require a partial shutdown of UK industry to keep home heating and electricity on. The problem isn't that we're running out of gas (yet), but merely that there may be a few months where supply can't keep up with consumption (I refuse to say 'demand'), causing gas pipeline pressure to drop, and some pipelines to be temporarily shut. Two factors make gas production more volatile than oil production -- (1) gas wells deplete much faster than oil wells (production usually drops after a few years), which requires constant new drilling, and so the enduser is more exposed to the 'noisy' process of exploration (some wells fail to hit gas), and (2) gas is harder to transport long distances than oil, which makes it harder for local supply variation to be damped out. Great. Real great. Until now, we have had to endure the spectacle of stupid Good Americans and Good Britons going along with an horrific unprovoked attack on a poor, starved, defenseless country halfway around the globe, without even acknowledging one of the principal motiviations for the attack -- the large remaining oil and gas reserves in Iraq, Saudi, and Iran. An actual shortage in gas may regrow the American appetite for slaughter, now temporarily dulled by a relatively small number of Western casualties (and the inconvenient fact that we're losing). If Americans and Britons can be whipped up into a frenzy with a few speeches and cheesy powerpoint slides about a fake weapons programs, I fear what their little minds will conclude when they get their first sniff of a real threat to their lifestyle. Even though I've said previously that an energy shock might be a good thing to jar people into realizing the seriousness of the problem, I've changed my mind! Now I'm hoping for a real mild winter, which will allow antiwar sentiment to continue to grow.

    [Nov21'05] "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." -- Principle IV of the Nuremberg Tribunal.

    [Nov27'05] Over 2 trillion dollars trades in the currency markets each day. That's like 3 or 4 thousand times as much as the Iraq war costs per day. You don't want to get these guys upset because they could buy your state and the states of both your parents overnight if necessary.

    [Nov29'05] The El Salvador option for Iraq, calmly announced publicly more than a year ago by Negroponte, an expert in Central American death squads from the 1980's, is now in full swing. Allawi, the US-handpicked candidate in the upcoming elections said this week that things are as bad or worse than they were under Saddam. As in El Salvador, it's time to drill holes in people's heads, tear out their tongues, randomly shoot up civilian cars for profit, terror, and fun, etc etc, all for democracy. Things have gotten so bad, they had to 'suicide' the military ethicist, Westhusing, who had ethical problems with the operations of the for-profit mercenaries. Christian Miller (Christian, eh?) in the LA Times reported Sunday without comment that Westhusing's 'suicide' just happened to be 'observed' by two USIS contractors (I had to search on the internet to find out that USIS stands for US Investigations Service), one of whom reported that he had picked up the 'suicide' gun and put it on the bed, 'so no one would get hurt'. Suuure, Christian. With all the talk about 'phased withdrawal', you would almost think that the US was going to start withdrawing. I don't think there is the slightest chance of cutting and running from all that oil. The air war against the Sunnis will be escalated and the US will retreat to their bases around the oil patches and the pipeline (e.g., the currently unused one to Israel). And as conservative Scott Ritter eloquently says, it is all of our faults. Democrats, Republicans, rednecks, and soccer moms -- all of the American people -- approved of this war then, and today agree to allow it to continue, death squads and drilling holes in people's heads included (besides, it is Iraqis doing it to each other, so not our fault -- just like El Salvador). It will continue for years, even without another synthetic terror event. We may even be able to expand the war to Syria or Iran through the US first use of nuclear weapons. The US first use of nuclear weapons will be approved by both the rednecks as well as the soccer moms as crucial to the defense of our 'boys'.

    [Dec12'05] As industrial civilization of the 21st century continues to operate for the next three to five decades -- even assuming growth reaches a plateau sometime soon -- its greatly increased extractive power (compared to its early years) will eventually strip most of the fossil fuel, metals, soil, water, fish, and eventually vegetation of our planet down to a barren condition worse than what was previously required to support much smaller Paleolithic populations. But at that point, there will be many more people living on the planet than there were in the Paleolithic. As the late astronomer Fred Hoyle was fond of saying, high industrial civilization is a one-shot affair: it gets only one chance on any one planet. If after stripping most of the fossil fuels, metals, rare earths, soil minerals, and water resources out of the crust of the planet, we have not yet managed to create a system capable of *sustainable* high tech in the next three to five decades, we will likely begin to regress back to sustainable lower tech, using scavenged metal, building materials, and tools from our all-time high point. We are getting closer to that high point -- for example, in food production. In 1700, 7% of the world's land was being used for agriculture. in 2000, 40% of land was being used for growing crops or grazing cattle. We can't get much higher than that, since much of the remaining 60% of land is too cold, too dry, or under houses, stores, factories, and streets. The only remaining 'unused' arable land is in Africa and South America (e.g., Amazon forest). And the existing land and soil is gradually being degraded (e.g., washed or blown away, demineralized, salinified, acidified). It may not be possible for high industrial human civilization to rise up again once we have depleted the planet in this fashion. For example, once the fossil fuel currently necessary for large scale steel smelting and building construction is gone by the end of this century, it may not be possible to resume large scale metal smelting and concrete pouring. Steel was previously made by first making charcoal from wood and then using human and animal-powered bellows to get the charcoal to burn hot enough. It's not practical to make enough steel for a standard modern steel and concrete building that way (even given that the trees that were cut down largely for this purpose by the 19th century have to some extent started to grow back in the Europe and the US). That's why people used to save nails (e.g., by burning the wood into which they had been nailed). The final outcome of our current two century experiment remains to be determined in the next critical 30 to 50 years of our history, since we will use in that time the same quantity of resources (coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, copper, water, soil) as were used in the first 200 years of industrial civilization. So far, the only true energy resource replacement has been wood by coal. After that, we have not replaced anything but merely *added* oil to coal, and then *added* natural gas and fission to coal+oil. If history is a guide, upcoming global resource limitations are likely to make the next 50 years an extremely turbulent time. I'm certainly not looking forward to resource limitations and hope we can find a high-tech-plus-conservation pathway forward before things begin to get really tight (and hot and dry). link

    [Dec28'05] In talking to people and reading on the internet, it seems that many breezily dismiss the idea that the Cheney et al. might use mini-nukes on Iran in the near term (e.g., Xymphora). I'm more convinced by Jorge Hirsch's arguments (e.g., here), which are based on public documents describing renewed development of small nuclear weapons by the US military as well as official US war policy revisions on their use. I am less sure than him that there will be an *immediate* response by Iran and the rest of the world, esp. if the use of mini-nukes is covert and casualties are low. This may result in the US 'getting away with it' for a year or two. The radioactive fallout from a small penetrating warhead may be quite small (most of the human radiation damage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from the almost instantaneous airburst itself, not from the fallout), and might be masked by the effects of bombing nuclear reactors. I agree that eventially, our 'successful' use of our mini-nuke 'deterrent' will destablize US/Russia/China and possibly US/Europe relations. And this will set the stage for a larger nuclear conflagration. Unfortunately, I think the backlash will take years to develop, making it more likely to coincide with the first serious fossil fuel resource limitations, which will likely be a strongly destabilizing influence on world politics. The level of denial about resource limitations prevents official media reports (e.g., BBC report on "huge" oil find in Brazil) from *ever* mentioning world or US usage numbers so that 99.9% of their readers can put things in perspective. Thus, the current estimates of the total size of the new Brazil find (0.7 Gb, not all of which can be expected to be recovered over the life of the field) are *never* compared to yearly world usage (~30 Gb) or yearly US usage (~7.5 Gb). The reason is, assuming that the whole 0.7 Gb in Brazil was recovered, it would then be apparent that this new find only amounts to 8.5 days of current world usage. This is "huge"; but, our yearly gulp of oil is way *more* huge... link

    [Jan03'06] Yesterday, the BEEB says that Germany warned Russia that its recent dispute with Ukraine over natural gas deliveries (which affected EU gas delivery passing through the Ukraine) could "hurt [Russia's] long-term credibility as an energy supplier". Yeah right. This was followed by pious statements about why it was wrong for Russia to demand Orange Revolution free-market Ukraine to pay free-market prices ($230 per thousand cubic meters) for Russian gas (it was paying $50 per thousand cubic meters). But rather than hurting Russia's credibilty I think the dispute massively *reinforced* its credibility as a long-term energy supplier. Jerome a Paris has breathless details about the complexities of bribes and corruption involved in the transport of Russian and Turkmenistan gas through the Ukraine, but with a studied disregard for the outright shortages that are soon likely to occur. I think I would have some respect for the source that heats and powers my home. The Russian slowdown (which the Ukraine passed on to Europe) precariously dropped pressure in eastern EU pipelines for a few days. Meanwhile, natural gas production from the west end of Europe (the North Sea) has been declining as rapidly as North Sea oil (oil production is going down 10% per year -- ouch, I mean, brrrrrr...). Warn away, EU guys.

    [Jan06'06] Newspeak from Al-Jazeera: "The shootout ... began after the peacekeepers opened fire on the fugitive [Serb Dragomir Abazovic -- killing him]. Rada Abazovic [his wife], 46, died from the loss of blood after being shot in the stomach". Their 12 year old son was also shot. Hmmm. Getting killed and having your wife shot in the stomach in your home when *peacekeepers* open fire? Sounds like a new horrible reality show: 'When peacekeepers attack'. Meanwhile, here at home, the San Diego Union tribune reported yesterday that the brand new aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan along with a flotilla of cruisers and destroyers set off on a mission to somewhere (they won't say) for six months, but the implication was somewhere in the Mideast. The writer actually said that the carrier was so new that it still had that "new carrier smell". Sounds ominously like our latest death star could be heading off to kill yet more dark skinned low market value people who are sitting on 'our' oil. link

    [Jan07'06] "Prime Minister Sharon's sudden absence leaves no major leaders in the nation's political center" -- Rafael D. Frankel. Sheesh. It's hard to imagine what the right must look like -- and how far things have fallen -- when *Sharon* is the "center". This reminds me of the days when Yeltsin was "left" as opposed to his "rightist" opponents. I suppose since Sharon only killed about 20,000 civilians when he invaded south Lebanon in 1978 and since we have killed about 100,000 civilians in Iraq that he must also be "left" of Bush...

    [Jan17'06] The on and off again war-on-Iran propaganda now seems to be on a sustained upslope (see CNN, Reuters, the Senate, etc). When was the last time anybody mentioned North Korea or bin Laden? Although, it might just be some kind of huge military 'exercise', the new aircraft carrier Reagan left San Diego harbor last week, and there have been scattered reports that every available ship/troop/etc is on the road to somewhere, probably the mideast. The antiwar movement (sometimes it seems like all 15 of us...) is silent, or squabbling (i.e., the 9 from UFPJ vs. the 6 from ANSWER) -- exactly at this strategic turning point. But the generic nightly CNN/Fox scary-boys-and-girls pings won't be enough on their own to allow a launch. There will have to be some kind of opinion-focusing yellowcake or aluminum tubes 'discovery', or an actual terror stunt in the US. If there is a stunt, it wouldn't have to be nearly as big as 9-11 because people are now primed. Something like the British tube bombs would be plenty. People will be even more on edge if the discovery/event is preceded by some mini economic shock like a sudden, temporary fall of the dollar, or rumors of an upcoming GM bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the latest year-by-year CO2 increase from Mauna Loa seems to have taken a huge jump in the last several years -- to almost twice the 1970-2000 average yearly increment. This may reflect some positive feedback processes starting to kick in. For example, global warming melts permafrost, decreasing albedo, which increases sunlight energy absorption, which then leads to more warming-inducing CO2 release as formerly frozen ground starts to biodecay. Also, it has recently been discovered that plants release methane -- a greenhouse gas that is an order of magnitude more effective than CO2. The increases in global temperature and CO2 increase plant growth in some areas, which increases methane, which increases heating, and so on (at least methane seems have a short half-life -- around a decade -- in the atmosphere, much shorter than that of CO2). But don't bother about that people, it's just a little fever -- look over here instead, we've got some cool Muslim ugga-bugga... link

    [Jan19'06] Did I predict that one, or what :-} As if on cue, Osama sends us another tape from beyond the grave. Despite all my links to warnings about a possible nuking of Iran, I was secretly hoping that I was just being a typical liberal doomsayer, and that everything would work out, and that it wouldn't actually happen. But day after day, seeing the propaganda gears clogging along -- a little Condi here, a little Europe there, CNN all day every day, and now an Osama tape -- it makes me scratch my head and think, they really might just do it. I had the same reaction to the early buildup to the Iraq war. In early the spring of 2002, when it first started to hit the airwaves, I felt: this is crazy, telegraphing their aims so soon -- they couldn't possibly actually invade Iraq because the obvious eventual outcome would be a giant way-too-big-to-police 'occupied territories' and this would be known in advance even by the most incompetent military planner (e.g., myself). But the gears ground on and on until the Iraq invasion was inevitable and unstoppable. The same thing is seems to be happening again. It was pretty clear to me this summer that the public and the materiel did not seem well enough prepared (despite the early Hersh and Ritter warnings). But now conditions sure looks a lot like July or August 2002 -- when I first got the dull realization that the second Iraq war was unstoppable (see above). The worst part is, even though I have criticized the antiwar movement for squabbling and not being proactive enough, I really don't have the *faintest* idea of what can be done to stop this next one. I try to visualize a gigantic demonstration too large to ignore, or a broad work stoppage too large to ignore -- but I can't. All I can see is McCain, Hillary, Feinstein, and Lieberman lining up behind the chimp -- again. Their pre-election jokeying has them all trying to outflank Bush on the right. I'm not sure what that means (nuking illegals??). And this is before anything has even happened. link

    [Jan25'06] In Iraq, US military fuel use has doubled to about 20 gallons of fuel per US soldier per day -- that is about one barrel of oil's worth of light fuel per soldier per day. Since the 20 gallons of gasoline that can be extracted from one barrel of oil is approximately equal to one year of very hard labor by a human (see calculation here), one positive aspect of peak oil is that it will eventually be much harder to occupy other countries halfway around the globe when one has to do it 'by hand'. I think that's a good thing. The latest data show that 2005 was the warmest year ever recorded with modern instruments, and likely the warmest in 10,000 years. The next warmest years on record were 1998 (an El Nino year), 2002, 2003, and 2004 (not like there's a pattern there or anything). 2005 was *not* an El Nino year (which are warmer than average). On our current track, by 2100, we may experience our warmest year in 1 million years. It would probably a bad idea to shoot for the warmest year in 300 million years. That year probably occurred during the Permian extinction, when life on Earth was almost wiped out (95% of all species lost). Unfortunately, those temperatures are within the reach of current climate models.

    [Feb05'06] The report that Kuwait only has about 50 Gb of oil reserves instead of about 100 Gb doesn't seem to have made a splash (and of course, it was retracted/disinfo'd the next day). That's a 5% reduction in the entire world's remaining reserves (total of about 1000 Gb remaining, according to sane estimates). Almost two years of current world usage disappeared overnight! This reduction is an order of magnitude bigger than the largest oil field discovered in the last decade. The reserves estimates of many mideast countries were doubled in the 1980's during the oil price crash. Perhaps other mideast countries will now be 'undoubled', too. Even undoubled, though, the majority of the remaining oil is in the mideast. The sickeningly mechanical anti-Muslim anti-Iran propaganda grinds along, and now a majority of glassy-eyed US-ians have swallowed it. They don't particularly like the Iraq war, but have done nothing to stop it, or its $100 billion/year drain on their tax dollars. And after a few short months of propaganda -- even before the cartoon (which functioned to get Europe in line with the US) -- 57% are ready to support another war on top of the ongoing Iraq war! It's stupefying. The operation to build permanent bases around all the Fertile Crescent oil after destroying and destabilizing the civilizations of its current owners is straightforwardly visible to anyone who looks. Given the relatively small amount of total oil left at our current world burn rate, though, you'd think the European poodles would by now have developed a little more healthy self-preserving fear of the US, given that EU-ians use almost 5 times as much oil as they produce. Nevertheless, it seems they have decided to go along, once again. And Russia and China, too. The big difference between Europe and Russia is that the Russians still have a lot of oil left. Russian production plummetted (was almost halved) in the 1990's after their crash, but has since come back up (though it is expected that they will soon peak for real without getting all the way back up to their highest numbers late in the 1980's). But their current production is huge -- comparable to Saudi and the US (US, Saudi, and Russia are the top 3 producers, in that order) -- and their consumption is only 1/8 that of the US; they are producing 3 times as much oil as they use while we are producing less than 1/2 as much oil as we use. And the Russian reserves are much larger than ours (we peaked in 1970). Perhaps the Russians think they can thus afford to let the US-ians horde/occupy the mideast oil because they are hoping that the continued guerrilla war in our huge occupied territory might sap the strength of the our empire. On the other hand, the Chinese -- who have also acquiesced to the US on Iran -- have a lot more to lose. They are producing slightly less oil than they use (which is about 1/4 as much as we use, despite their much larger population). They make up the difference by buying some of their imports from Iran. Bombing Iran would cut them off and it would force them to turn to their other suppliers. Chinese oil production has already peaked, and since 1996, their imports have been steadily increasing; thus, the effects of this could be seriously destabilizing a few years down the line. Perhaps China feels now that they can't rock the boat because of dollar and trade relations with the US. People have argued that the US can't attack Iran because it's better defended, has investment relations with Russia and China, and because commodity market insiders would have bid up oil over $100 by now if it was actually going to happen. I don't find any of those reasons completely convincing, given (1) who is currently in charge, (2) the changes in US policy on the first use of mini-nukes that were publically announced last year, and (3) the guaranteed 95% approval ratings for an attack on Iran if there were to be (another) synthetic terror event. link

    [Feb18'06] I admit that an attack on Iran now seem illogical, even if it was just an attempt to seize their oil fields (which all reside in a small southwestern strip of Iran -- continuous with the oil patch in Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi). But I have to temper these rational thoughts with an equally objective analysis of recent history. Before Iraq, my feeling was that an invasion would surely work (no Iraqi air defenses, no Iraqi WMDs, and a weakened, starved country sanctioned and bombed for a decade), but the prospect of a giant 'occupied territories' seemed daunting. I was right on the first point, but *wrong* on the second! Occupying Iraq has been difficult; but it has actually 'worked'! The number of US deaths is small, and the construction of giant permanent military bases is continuing at full speed. Those bases will be impregnable, even if the rest of the country falls completely apart. Having chaos in the streets, little electricity, and a ten-tupling of formerly subsidized oil prices will have very little effect on the giant base/fortresses; in fact, it will probably make them less of an issue because people are desperately busy dealing with daily gasoline and house raids (see Riverbend's recent report). Despite the 2K US casualties, by far the most likely outcome of a tour in Iraq is still to come home in one piece (perhaps 1 million soliders have rotated through Iraq). Well at least physically -- your mind does get permanently screwed up when you slaughter and torture other humans, and walk around streets where everyone hates you and many are trying to kill you. But despite the mental toll, I would *not* say that the military in Iraq is 'broken'; the great majority of it -- and the great majority of its hi-tech equipment -- is working just fine. An attack on Iran is quite plausible, as disastrous as the *eventual* outcome might be. I think the lunatics in charge are actively planning to do it, and might actually carry out those plans. 80% of the proles *already* think Iran is planning to nuke us (bless their little pea brains) -- and that's *before* the next Reichstag fire. After it, you'll be lucky to find a few percent against an attack (when public opposition might end you up in detention if the other 98% hears you). The proles will then approve escalation to a nuclear strike on Iran in order to 'defend' our troops from an Iranian counter-attack prompted by a US/Israeli first strike. They will quickly forget the little problem of who bombed first. But the rest of the world may not allow the use of nuclear weapons on a non-nuclear state to pass again. If we turn into a pariah state, it will be our fault.

    [Feb23'06] Who benefits from the Samarra shrine bombing? Over there, it will temporarily take Iraqi focus off of US occupation troops. Back here, it will help whip up yet more anti-Arab sentiment, and this will help sell a possible attack on Iran (US-ians don't know the difference between Arabs and Persians). Ayatollah Khameni in Iran urged said there were plots "to force the Shia to attack the mosques and other properties respected by the Sunni. Any measure to contribute to that direction is helping the enemies of Islam and is forbidden by sharia." He blamed the intelligence services of the US and Israel for being behind the bombs in Samarra. By contrast, Bahraini Shiite Islamic societies blamed the Takfeereah, the 'Excommunicators'. The Dubai port management stunt can be seen in a similar light with respect to domestic opinion. It was approved by a brand new intelligence agency CARC, overseen by John "Death-Squad" Negroponte. Noam Chomsky has a point when he says that the US has actually been getting a more civilized in the last 50 years. For example, compare our Iraq slaughter, even at 1/4 of a million people, to our Vietnam slaughter, at 3-4 million people (Vietnam is one holocaust that it is OK to deny, since most people don't even remember we did it...). I am worried that all this progress is about to be reversed as energy gets tight. And compared to a day in Africa, Iraq is a sideshow -- there are one 9-11's worth of casualties *every day* in Eastern Congo.

    [Feb26'06] Some commentators (e.g., Rahul Mahajan, Xymphora) think the US is just bluffing on Iran. Hopefully, they are correct.

    [Mar02'06] Robert Fisk in an interview here questions where all the funding and organization of death squads comes from. He, too, thinks the US cannot attack Iran now. As I said last week, I hope that's right.

    [Mar05'06] "Iraq, as you and me once knew it, is lost. What's left of it, I don't want." -- AnaRki13 to an Iraqi friend. Scientists, engineers, doctors, architects, writers, poets, and educated people are getting out of Iraq as fast as they can, especially if they are Sunni. By contrast, the number of educated people that have left the US so far has amounted to only a trickle. Hopefully, there will not come a time when it will no longer be safe to stay and try to change things. This depends on the reaction of the American people. If people lose their fear of the government and begin to ignore its constant braying to be afraid, 'Torture Boy' Gonzales and the rest will be history; if people go along, Gonzales will have an army of collaborators/torturers ready to electrify anyone who sticks out. It's our choice: "Your silence will not protect you!" -- Audre Lorde.

    [Mar08'06] Our newest aircraft carrier, the Ronald Reagan has been deployed to the Persian Gulf (I noted above when it left San Diego, destination unknown at the time), upgraded Vietnam era AC-130 gunships are returning to 'Iraq' (last time they were there was for the Fallujah2 massacre), a NATO general has suggested they could help with air strikes against Iran, George Ure reports in the March 8 urbansuvival.com that there is a broad shortage of many types of ammunition because the military has recently been buying so much of it. This is consistent with an upcoming attack on Iran, but perhaps not yet definitive. The military equipment and bullets could be headed for yet more bloodshed in Iraq. Hopefully, the fact that an attack on Iran looks *much* more destabilizing than the attack on Iraq looked back in early 2003 just before it was carried out will sway the saner elements of the current loonies in control. However, Cheney is now polling lower than OJ, and Bush is at his lowest ever (below 40%), so things are getting pretty desperate. This is disturbingly parallel to the time that Nixon -- near his lowest approval ratings -- bombed Cambodia toward the desperate end of the Vietnam war, killing hundreds of thousands of additional humans. Also, remember that Clinton bombed Serbia right the in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal.

    [Mar10'06] Dubai and the UAE -- the most subservient-to-the-US country in the area -- would be a major staging ground for a US take-over of the Staits of Hormuz during possibly nuclear warhead bombing raids on Iran. Could the utterly flaccid Democrat wussies not know this, and have temporarily unintentionally slowed down an Iran attack by offending one of our strategic 'partners' with cheap anti-Arab rhetoric? Or perhaps, this was actually an antiwar move? It's hard for me to think that the second one is true, given that all the major Democrats (e.g., the execrable Hillary) have been trying to out-hawk Dubya. I think they are so weak and cowardly, the only thing they feel safe doing is cheap race baiting. Just today, Dubai has 'officially withdrawn' from the ports deal. I think it's more likely what is actually happening is that the richies (here and there) will just find a way to 're-brand' the deal, with maybe some concessions by the US to calm UAE tempers (e.g., to avoid having UAE withdraw billions in Boeing and military purchases) and to keep good military staging relations, and the proles will be none the wiser (though of course hating Arabs a little more).

    [Mar20'06] The lapdog press has been ever so slightly exercised over an incident where US soldiers stormed into a home nearby after someone killed a US soldier with a roadside bomb and shot 4 women, 5 babies, and some men in the head (15 people total kiled), and then blew up their house and cars and killed the farm animals. War crime? Sure! Good support-our-troops moms dislike such up-close-and personal badness where male US teengers shoot defenseless women and children in the head in their own home and then burn it down in the process of invading those people's country halfway around the globe. But is this atrocity really worse than some other male teenager dropping computer-controlled flesh-tearing anti-personnel weapons on houses in the village next door and 'accidentally' killing babies there without seeing who he killed and maimed? Or how about killing other male Iraqi teenagers, who are 'obviously' less morally upstanding than babies of either sex? (because they are terrorists by definition). I find the idea of 'war crimes' absolutely ludicrous. There is no 'legal' way to fight a war. 'Support our troops' means support baby-killers, period. War includes baby-killing. Killing babies for oil. You can't build military bases around their oil without killing quite a few babies. Right now, the price of oil is not that bad (still only about 70% of the 1970's oil embargo peak), and so soccer moms and other Good Americans would rather not have our teenagers killing babies 'up-close-and-personal' like this for oil (or revenge). But I bet they would publically change their tune if oil went to $200 a barrel -- though of course, even then, they would *only* be in favor of up-close-and-personal baby-killing if it was done 'legally'...

    [Mar25'06] In thinking about a possible attack on Iran, I go back to the buildup for the two previous attacks on Iraq. In both cases, the pre-war buildup was leisurely and obvious as materiel and people were shipped overseas. In the second war on Iraq, most of this stuff was being shipped to huge mideast bases that were being upgraded outside of the ones we were evacuating in Saudi Arabia. For the past 2 years, the US has been building huge permanent bases in Iraq (see Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire). Given just this fact, it seems quite possible that an attack on Iran might come this year -- despite all the bad that might come of it and the shear idiocy of it. It was obvious before the Iraq war to me and many other people that there would be problems with us having a huge 'occupied territories'. But the problems have not stopped the giant airbase building. Aside from enormous street demonstrations of the kind that would actually stop a subtantial amount of our daily work, it is hard to see what popular action could possibly stop this. It would have to stop the base building. This is a slow, expensive, continuous construction of the outposts of empire. And these bases are hardly mentioned, even by the left. Also, perhaps 60% of the US population already, stupefyingly supports an attack on Iran. Not a reason not to try to stop it, though.

    [Mar28'06] Ruppert now says since the Iranian oil bourse has been postponed that the war on Iran is off because the dollar is now safe. Ridiculous. I don't think the Iranian oil bourse was that big a thing, so it being postponed doesn't seem like that big of a thing either. And the dollar sure doesn't look that safe to me when I see the richies getting nervous (they're not nervous about the Iranian bourse). Finally, the admin is in a pretty desperate place with the polls. They could do something (more) rash.

    [Apr01'06] Jorge Hirsch has another well-documented article suggesting that a war on Iran is imminent.

    [Apr04'06] Boy, it sure was depressing to read the child-like exchanges over at the oildrum, even including Stuart Staniford, who initiated the thread by posting a link to the Sean Rayment article in the Telegraph that I linked below (which could be a real leak or just disinfo). The ethnocentricity of it all! (to use a word that now sounds quaint). And this from people who have put ethnocentricity and ethnic identity aside in their study of science. The child-like lack of emphathy demonstrated by many of the posters is frightening. The bad thing about the internet is that it allows one to pick and choose and find things to one's taste, without having to grope through a newspaper that shades everything a certain way, looking for occasional rays of light that accidentally got through the editorial filter. But in using the internet, one can forget what other horrible incommensurable beliefs reside together with sophistication. It reminds me of 18th century British literary sophistication in the context of people living over open septic tanks in their basements -- and then their beliefs at the time that it was best to close the windows tight at night to avoid 'night miasmas'. The result was that many suffocated from hydrogen sulfide produced by the anaerobic bacterial breakdown of their own sh*t downstairs. The horror of it all. I'm trying to figuring out how the brain works while Cheney is plotting to nuke Iran, or make a better surveillance and attack drone, if we ever did really figure out how the brain works.

    [Apr11'06] What a disinfo/leakfest! It's pretty hard to tell what's happening. Here are several scenarios: (1) conservative high-level military people leak (again) to Hersh to try to slow/stop nuking of Iran, (2) the Hersh leaks are actually just disinfo to scare Iran, (3) the administration crazies are planning to bomb Iranian sites and cities with conventional bombs (Serbia-style, like Clinton did during Monica), (4) the leaks are a test release to introduce the idea of nuking Iran to the American sheep, (5) the crazies actually plan to use bunker-busting nuclear bombs on Iran, with the expectation that this might cause an attack on US troop concentrations in Iraq, which would then provide the rationale for the US to drop a nuclear bomb on several major Iranian cities 'to quickly end the war' we just started, Hiroshima-style, (6) the US decides to start withdrawing from Iraq and the permanent military bases it is currently constructing. These options are not mutually exclusive. The fact that oil is drifing upward suggests that the genius-of-the-market rats are starting to sniff rising seawater. I think (6) is the most unlikely, despite being the best option for a peaceful future (and one supported by a majority of the population of the US, UK, and Europe). On the positive side, Tradesports contacts on bombing Iran have dropped to about 25 cents on the dollar, and the motley collection of Rahul Mahajan, Xymphora, Michael Ruppert and 'use-Neem-because-all-left-blogs-are-CIA' Fintan Dunne agree that the US cannot bomb Iran because it is too tied down in Iraq. Okie-dokey.

    [Apr16'06] I made some updates to my Peak Oil presentation.

    [Apr19'06] Oil just went above $74 this afternoon. Meanwhile, the stranded headline in Forbes today reads: "Oil prices ease in Asian trade but still near 71 USD". No doubt, the headline tomorrow will be "Oil eases again but still near $74". At this rate, oil could 'ease' its way all to way to $100. :-{

    [Apr30'06] The 20 million barrels a day of oil used in the US is now worth $1.44 billion dollars a day (incidentally, about the same as the amount of dollars created every day for the last decade according according to M3). Sure, I found the almost half-a-billion-dollar going away present given to this pig of a human quite excessive, but that was only 1/3 of a day of US oil usage. It's going to take a long time for people to realize that, sadly, boiling some of the fat off of these pigs -- as satisfying as that might be -- won't save us from oil depletion. It is surprising to see how resistant people are on both the left and the right to the simple fact that oil-plus-natural-gas is going to peak in a just few years no matter how many new wells are drilled. There was a similar resistance to understanding geological reality in the US just before oil peaked in the lower 48 in 1970. A massive drilling program put in place after that did not arrest the decline; and neither did the discovery of Alaskan oil. It took a full decade before US oil people believed Hubbert; and even then, he never got his due for correctly predicting the peak before it happened. The prices are high now in large part because world demand is finally bumping up against absolute production constraints. Time to begin negotiating our lifestyle. Drive less -- much less -- in one smaller car. People, however, won't be able to understand or believe what's actually happening. Instead they will get extra mad at politicians and corporations and Mr. Pig, who will be forced to spend even more money on advertising. All part of the genius of the market. So, what the hey, don't mention the peak oil -- it's all just a conspiracy theory. Don't try to set up incentives for alternative energy since it would only distort the genius of the market, which runs on trying to access and create subconscious urges to buy. And don't you know, the way you *feel* about oil and your SUV is more important than stupid little things like daily wellhead production rates...

    [May01'06] "Everything is tending to catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up, and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like this?" -- Winston Churchill to his wife at the beginning of World War I. Just to be clear, I would *much* prefer a world where there was more oil *and* we had developed a way to use it without putting much CO2 into the atmosphere.

    [May02'06] Riverbend suggests that the US can't attack Iran because of the 150,000 US troops/hostages in an Iraq essentially now controlled by Iran. She has a point. But there is a fly in this ointment. It is not completely out of the question that the lunatics in charge here actually conceive of the threat of US hostages as *part of the plan*. It would galvanize the US sheep and allow a more standard Vietnam-like scorched-earth response, or even the use of small nuclear weapons on cities in Iraq and Iran -- anything to save our 'boys'. It's a sad day for the US when the people most in a position to stop such a thing are generals.

    [May14'06] The Iran propaganda has been continuous, but it doesn't seem to be growing, giving me the feeling of a holding pattern. Rawstory did have a somewhat ominous report about carrier movements to the Persian gulf. The Bush admin seems a little weakened. But this story by William Thomas, who also does chem trails it should be noted, nevertheless gave me the creeps. It certainly wouldn't take much of an 'incident' to drag US-ians and somewhat reluctant generals into a war.

    [May18'06] Ethanol only accounts for *1/10* of Brazil's energy liquids (ref). Brazil is energy self-sufficient not because of ethanol but because it increased domestic oil and gas liquids production. 40% of the energy in ethanol (generated by any process) is lost in the distilling process alone (you don't want to put water into your gas tank). After adding the energy costs of planting, watering, fertilizing, harvesting, crushing, fermenting, and straining, not much net energy is left -- maybe 1/5 of the total energy invested at best -- but only if you consider brewers grains (fermentation leftovers) as part of the energy output. Ethanol is almost a total subsidy scam. Not to mention that global grain stocks are at their lowest level in 30 years (which probably explains why Brazilian farmers are now turning away from ethanol to food sugar because the price of food has gone up faster). Global grain consumption (which increases steadily) has overtaken production overtaken production (which is a little more choppy) with the balance coming from grain stocks, which are falling. So oil it still is. Westexas on theoildrum.com thinks that the Saudis only have 80 Gb left, not the 260 Gb they said they have had (unchanged) since the oil price crash in the early 80's (when they suddenly doubled their 'reserves'). The world uses about 30 Gb a year. The conventional oil remaining is usually stated to be about 1000 Gb. However, Kuwait recently said they had only 50 Gb, not 100 Gb left. If Westexas is right, then the current world conventional total is more like 770 Gb. Other OPEC countries also inflated their reserves the same time the Saudis did. So the real conventional oil reserves are probably something more like 650 Gb. That's about 21 years at the current rate. So we're in the regular oil until 2027. Economists are warning of a 'bubble' in the oil and other commodity markets. I guess this would be like the housing bubble, except that when the bubble pops, yours and everybody else's house disappears so completely that even the bankers can't find them...

    [May23'06] The latest disinfo tape from the probably-dead-in-Dec-2001 bin Laden is kewl. By attacking the Moussaoui verdict, it tries to add street cred to the original fatty, nose-too-short 2001 admission-of-guilt tape. Previous to that fake, the real OBL, looking weak in his last tape, said he had nothing to do with 9/11. The current tape, of course, adds another 'admission of guilt'. A fine piece of work, whoever did it. Since he's almost certainly dead, Jim, this cheap-to-produce Orwellian nonsense could go on for decades. I have no idea why Robert Fisk acts like he's still alive.

    [May24'06] What's with Palast's bizarro, clueless oil article?! It's 'not even wrong'! I saw him talk live in SD a few years back and he did creep me out a little, even then.

    [Jul03'06] Now that the occupation of Gaza is 'over', our creepy 'ally' bombs a Gaza power station (supplying 65% of Gaza's power) built by an American company because of one kidnapped soldier using weapons paid for by American taxpayers. A $50 million repair of the power station will now be paid for by the same American taxpayers that paid for the weapons used to destroy it. But it's OK to bomb civilian power stations in collective punishment and storm hospitals (after all, the US does it) to force the release of a single occupation soldier because the Palestinians are just untermenschen and 'cockroaches' (haven't I heard this all somewhere before?) and they hate our 'freedoms' (which seem to be expressed to them mainly using F-16's). So far, no major 'terror' stunts aside from the low budget 'bin Laden' tape productions; and the attack on Iran has not yet happened, perhaps because of internal resistance in the military (certainly there has been no resistance from US-ians). Perhaps the cheapo tapes will be enough to keep the feeble US-ian mind distracted enough for the Republicans to keep control during the midterm elections (what cheap drunks!). But unfortunately, an election win can't be counted on to forestall an eventual attack on Iran after that (but maybe it would allow some people to sell their houses first :-} ).

    [Jul13'06] Despite no intellectual surprise, I am still emotionally surprised to see not even a trace of US press comment about the 'normality' and 'morality' of bombing airports, bridges, power plants (plural), television stations, public buildings, major highways, and families in Lebanon in response to a capture of several soldiers. Of course, we do it in Iraq, and it's 'OK' and 'unremarkable' there. About the only people that seem to be paying attention here (and in the UK) are the damn oil traders. Sheesh, even Fox News got shot at! It's darkly hilarious to see the hunkered down Fox News idiots stammering out their groveling apologies to the Israelis who were shooting at them for reporting from the war zone: "it's difficult to ascertain who fired that shot", "OK, it's difficult to tell who's firing at us", "If it was Israeli gunfire it's difficult for us to say", just after explaining that the area was under Israeli control, and that Israel had "cut Gaza in half" and that their tanks were just down the street and their drones overhead. Then after the reporters got safely away, clearly terrified by the prospect of being hit by a missile from one of the drones overhead, they then explained that their clearly marked press vehicle and talking head video setup was fired on because was that "there is some concern on the Israeli side that our camera was a weapon". Weapon indeed. Finally, don't miss the priceless closing exchange between the 3 boobs back in the studio where the guy on the right says "But I just don't understand -- this is press, that's the color, that's international". The hair guy then explains "Bad guys shoot at *anything*". Then the 'I just don't understand' guy says, "But it's Israel". Luckily, Israel is not bad by definition.

    [Jul13'06] Here is quote from Martin van Creveld, professor of military at Hebrew University in Jerusalem: "We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: 'Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.' I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under." (reported by David Hirst in the Observer Sep 21, 2003)

    [Jul14'06] The current (noon) Google News headline typo says it all: "Lebanon steps up bombardment of Lebanon". The airport was bombed again for several hours, rendering it unusable. Power station fuel supplies, bridges, and main roads have also been bombed for a second day, and there is a complete naval blockade with a report of Israeli casualties on a navy warship as a result of an attack by a drone carrying a small bomb. About 70 people have been killed in Lebanon, mostly civilians, including entire families who had nothing to do with the capture of a several soldiers by Hezbollah in a border skirmish. Of course, killing families in Lebanon to affect policy is not terrorism because these are just untermenschen families. Similarly, deliberately shelling a beach several months back in Gaza, killing picnicing families cannot, of course, be considered "an act of war" (after attempts to blame it on Hamas failed), because again those were untermenschen families. Hezbollah denied carrying out the Haifa rocket attacks, but not the others further north.

    [Jul15'06] The Israeli military now says the ship was hit by an Iranian-made missile with the fingerprint of Iran, not a homemade drone. This will be used to argue for a US attack on Iran. By analogy, I imagine some people might have begun to think about where the Israeli munitions and attack jets are made, and even about the fingerprints of us American taxpayers on the missiles that killed at least 19 untermenschen fleeing the fighting in today in a van, and another 3 when the bridge over the Litani river was bombed (MSNBC report here). The last major aerial assault by Israel on Lebanon in 1982 resulted in approximately 20,000 Lebanese civilian casualties -- a total far greater than all officially annointed terrorist attacks. On a humorous note, Putin's response to Bush's suggestion that Russia develop a free press and free religion "like Iraq", was "We certainly would not want to have same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, quite honestly."

    [Jul16'06] Robert Fisk's information-filled article from the Independent suggests that the Israeli's were surprised by the Hizbollah responses. Today, it was reported that 8 Canadians on vacation [update: revised to 7] were killed by an Israeli airstrike. What would Americans think if Canada responded by bombing homes, bridges, and airports in Seattle because people in Seattle made the munitions and then also contributed their tax dollars to help purchase the stuff that killed the Canadians? In current newspeak (e.g., the disgusting groveling on National Propaganda Radio), the definition of a 'terrorist' is somebody without an air force. You're in deep shit if you don't have an air force. Wayne Madsen claims that the Israelis have used chemical munitions (gas) and depleted uranium in southern Lebanon, and that hundreds of thousands of people have fled. It is expected that the next wave of aerial attacks will take out telecommunication (phones, cell phones, television, internet).

    [Jul18'06] Bolton explained yesterday in no uncertain terms that killing civilians with F-16's (about 220 civilians killed in Lebanon so far plus 12 soldiers, none of them Hezbollah) is not terrorism, by definition. It's not immoral to kill civilians (even Canadian ones!), as long as you use an F-16 (and as long as the Canadians have Arabic-sounding names). So, would this mean, for example, that if Lebanon bombed Virginia and killed a bunch of civilians, it wouldn't be terrorism if the Lebanese used F-16's, but rather just a "tragic and unfortunate consequence" of Lebanon putting pressure on the White house? Besides, the stupid Virginians probably didn't carefully read the leaflets that were dropped on them telling them how to flee and they took the wrong escape route and got turkey-shooted, dummies. However, unlike non-Arabic Canadians, today's Arabic untermenschen have no right to self-defense, period. This is the transparently racist message uniformly plastered across the media found from NPR to Fox to the BBC. The internet, however, still seems to be up in Lebanon (nice design, eh?). I'm afraid I agree with Paul Craig Roberts who thinks we are being set up for a wider war in the mideast. Americans are too anesthetized to see what is coming to get them big time. The only positive spin I can come up with is that Americans are too out of it to realize that oil (and gasoline) prices are going up because we are getting close to peak oil production; instead they will think it is because of the mideast, and so perhaps they will be slightly less bloodthirsty than usual. Perhaps this will blunt the expected poll bump-up the Republicans will get from this latest disaster. It remains stunning to me to see that having 25,000 Americans trapped in Lebanon waiting for a cruise ship (!) to take them away from US-paid-for Israeli shrapnel somehow implies to Americans back at home that Republicans are doing a 'better job'! Than what?

    [Jul19'06] About 6,000 civilians were killed in Iraq this *month*. Relative to population, that's like a full all-the-US-soldiers-that-died-in-Vietnam's worth of people -- in one damn month. Completely out of the news. This is what we have achieved -- all for a mere third of a trillion US tax dollars. What an obscenity. Meanwhile 9 US military warships are being sent to Lebanon to escort a cruise ship (hopefully not a false flag setup). The US and UK MSMs continue to yawn as half a million people have been ethnically cleansed from their homes in Lebanon. The earnest BBC interviewers try to get carloads of fleeing families to condemn Hezbollah as the cars careen around craters in bombed out intersections. It seems quite unlikely that Israel will be able to defeat Hezbollah without killing half a million people, and that would be a little too holocaust-y, at least at this stage of the game. So instead, the only thing they can do is 'just' wreck their entire society while trying to kill 'only' a thousand people. The problem is it doesn't look very manly to bomb bridges, airports, power plants, TV stations, passenger cars, and, uhhh milk factories. Milk factories? How positively swashbuckling. I can see the generals in their control room setting up the target list. US-ians don't see these images, but the rest of the world does. And so far, Lebanon has not shown any sign of collapsing into civil war again. If it manages to hang together under all the bombs, more and more people may begin to think, "Hath not Arabs eyes? Hath not an Arab hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" (Shakespeare via Yasmin Alibhai-Brown)

    [Jul19'06] Condi says a cease-fire at this point would be "pointless"; after all, we're only talking about Arab untermenschen getting squished and burnt alive. And it's "pointless" to worry about that, since they are low market-value humans.

    [Jul25'06] The death toll is up to about 400 Lebanese (they can't be 'innocent civilians' because all Arab civilians are suspect by definition -- for the MSM, effectively there is no such thing as an Arab civilian). Lebanese ambulances are attacked with missiles (a direct hit in the middle of the red cross painted on the roof), a UN observer post/bunker is shelled and then hit with a missile, killing 4 unarmed people (after 15 or 20 near misses) and then the rescuers are strafed [Jul26 update: an apology is brazenly demanded from the UN victims], the US rushes depleted uranium bumber busters and a third of billion dollars in aviation fuel to Israel (courtesy of the US taxpayer), the poodle refuses to utter even a tiny peep against the slaughter because somebody has got him firmly by his naughty bits ("do that smiley sh*t for the camera, Tony"). Now I am beginning to really worry that the maniacs may be reinstating their plans to bomb Iran (with the British meekly in tow, once again). The optimal time from their point of view would be just before the Fall elections. A glance over at pollkatz shows that the June'06 Zarqawi uptick is starting to wear off. Without another stunt, Bush could be below 30% by November. That would probably lose them the election.

    [Jul26'06] The invasion of southern Lebanon is at the moment going somewhat poorly for the Israelis as Hezbollah fights back effectively (despite massive destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 people from southern Lebanon), prompting the feelers put out today in the US MSM for the possibility that the US will send 10,000 to 30,000 troops there. However, the matchless US military has become somewhat bogged down in our own occupied territories of Iraq and Afghanistan -- both extremely weak military opponents that were massively outgunned, but possessing a small core of determined resourceful people and a hostile population. Now of course, we could stop using 'precision' weapons (though I don't think of anti-personnel cluster bombs and phosphorus bombs as 'precision', but whatever) and just go for outright terror bombing designed to kill a half a million civilians Dresden- or Tokyo-style, or even use our nuclear weapons on cities. *That* is why everybody else wants nuclear weapons. They will be the only true deterrent to a wounded US empire. It is strange to think that Afghanistan and Iraq -- a starved, defenseless, endlessly bombed mess without any halfway decent electronic weapons, air defenses, or air force -- could bring the world's most-powerful-ever military to this point.

    [Jul27'06] The Europeans cower before US power. Given that people armed with nothing more than rifles and old artillery shells have the US military occupiers afraid to drive to the airport, shouldn't you EU guys be showing a little more backbone? After all, you *do* have decent electronic weapons, air defenses, air forces, an economy equal to the US, and nukes. How much would it cost the EU for the it to be a little less cowardly?

    [Jul27'06] Jonathan Schell argues that it's too late for a US empire because the US military can't really win even against extremely weak opponents like Iraq and Afghanistan. The basic argument is that even with all our high tech, people can fight back against a US invasion and occupation with simple weapons. This is true. However, this argument assumes that the US (or Israel) won't resort to nukes to reestablish 'cred' in the future. As Jorge Hirsch has documented, there have been many public moves in this direction in the last few years. Such a move seems insane now, but the US is not really up against the ropes yet. I could easily imagine the US sheeple getting behind such a move in the context of oil at several hundred dollars a barrel and a permanently flaky electrical grid. All it would take would be a second 'new Pearl harbor'. A US attack on a defenseless non-nuclear state makes about as much sense for stabilizing the electrical grid as the Iraq war did -- which was started under the cover of a pack of lies, now unmasked -- but it doesn't matter: the US war in Iraq will go on to the tune of a $100 billion dollars a year for the foreseeable future. And contra Jonathan Schell, the US is still there in Iraq, next to all the oil. The US hasn't lost yet because nobody else has displaced the US.

    [Jul27'06] The heavy losses suffered by the IDF prompted a heavy attack on Lebanon today, which included bombing runs against communications masts in northern Beirut and attacks on three trucks after AP makes the magnification of the 'after' aerial photo on the right with the damage smaller than the 'before' photo on the left...). I don't want my tax dollars paying for this sh*t (but unfortunately, a slight majority of Americans are currently OK with it).

    [Aug07'06] The Lebanese death toll is up to 1000, over 90% civilians, with many more uncounted bodies still under the rubble. The Israeli death toll is 75, with the majority made up of invading soldiers. Lebanon's infrastructure is devastated. A full quarter of the entire population has been displaced. Why all the the media bull crap about pinpoint accurate strikes? Call a spade a spade: accurate air strikes have *mainly* killed civilians, terrorized them out of their homes, and destroyed civilian infrastructure (airports, roads, shops, factories, apartment buildings, mosques, churches), period. The air strikes have had relatively little effect on Hezbollah so far, and the Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon seems to have temporarily stalled. Because of this, Israel has threatened to exterminate even more civilians and destroy even more infrastructure. War is merely terrorism on a larger scale using more powerful, more expensive killing equipment. The mechanical Orwellian nonsense belching out of the MSM sewer every day would be laughable if a majority of stupid Americans didn't believe it. The latest Harris poll shows that 50% of Americans now believe Iraq had 'WMDs' before the US invasion of Iraq, up, unbelievably, from 36% last year. US-ians seem to be ejecting their brains, tunicate-style.

    [Aug08'06] The US 'got away' with Vietnam. We killed 2-3 million civilians during the invasion of South Vietnam halfway around the world. We did a half a holocaust, and then withdrew, imposed several decade's of trading sanctions, and paid no reparations for blasting, poisoning, and scraping the vegetation from 10% their landscape (using phalanxes of giant D-9 bulldozers). There are no Vietnamese holocaust memorials, and most people here have forgotten about it (well except for the 70,000 or so US soldiers from that war that have committed suicide afterward -- more than the total number of US soldiers killed during the invasion). We are now doing the same thing on a somewhat smaller scale in Iraq. Things will have to get a lot worse before the US military abandons the 14 permanent bases it is building in Iraq, so we will still be there for a while. The final US-caused Iraqi death toll is likely to be half a million plus maybe half a million from the previous sanctions and war for a total of about 1 million people. So this is a form of progress I suppose (as Chomsky is fond of saying), however slight. But, these slaughters are likely to come back to haunt us. The rest of the world may eventually rise up in revolt against our cowardly attacks on small, weak states, even if a desperate oil-starved US ends up nuking one of those smaller non-nuke-possessing countries. There are other non-US countries that the US wouldn't dare attack because those countries have enough of these weapons to form a credible deterrent. It seems harsh to talk this way, but that is the way that the sociopaths (a small minority of all humans) who run countries and their major corporations think. Until we normal humans run them out of their nests, nothing will change.

    [Aug10'06] Red alert, whatever. The *real* alert, as we all know from "The Prisoner", is *Orange* Alert -- someone is trying to escape from "The Village" and must be stopped. Virtually every previous 'terror alert' both here and in the UK has been scripted, a mistake (including a mistaken shooting and a mistaken execution in the tube by undercover London cops), a completely fake/phony, or an entrapment. Time to keep a clear mind for when the next serious stunt happens (for those who still have a mind in operating condition). I watched a few minutes of Blitzer. The discussion of lethal combinations of innocuous household substances reminded me of Richard Pryor's comedy routine where he explains how his face got burnt (from free-basing) "You see, what actually happened was, I was going into the kitchen to get some cookies and milk, and I ended up mixing together 2% milk and whole milk, and the whole thing blew up in my face". I think it's high time that they started taking stool samples from every traveler, don't you? Who knows what explosive gases there might be in there? "Alert stewardesses wrestled three agitated men to the ground after they attempted to simultaneously light farts generated by drinking baby formula in a plot to bring down the plane". But the CNN one about accidentally detonating things with your cell phone... *that* might be useful in my classes.

    [Aug12'06] "I am no military expert, but I can state this: Israel's campaign against Hizbullah has been an abysmal failure, while Israel's campaign against Lebanese civilians has been a great success. Supporters of Israel should be very proud." -- As'ad Abukhalil of Angry Arab News Angry Arab News Service. The facts on the ground *are* remarkable. Israeli weapons are expensive and accurate (with US fingerprints on them) and have killed over 1,000 people, 90% of whom were civilians. Hezbollah's weapons are more primitive and less accurate but they have killed 75 people, most of whom were invading Israeli solders. Yesterday, Israeli jets boldly attacked some transformers in Tyre, shutting off power to the entire town. They also asked the US for an emergency delivery of anti-personnel cluster bombs. Unlike Saddam's imaginary people shredders, these are the real thing. Our taxes paid for them. They are going to be used to kill mostly civilians. How long will the rest of world put up with Israelis massacring civilians who can't shoot back by remote control in retaliation for the killing of their invading soldiers? For example, the IDF occupied Marjayoun (a largely Christian town) yesterday, ordered its inhabitants to flee, and then had several of their remote control drones fire rockets at the fleeing civilian convoy of 300 cars, killing 7, including a red cross worker who was trying to help people injured by the first missle, and injuring many, all after this ethnic cleansing was negotiated by UNFIL. I think somebody could at least have complained about unsportman-like conduct.

    [Aug15'06] In a few weeks, using mostly American-made and donated weapons, the failed Israeli invasion of Lebanon did at least 3 billion dollars worth of immediate damage to Lebanon's civilian infrastructure and caused an Exxon-Valdez-sized oil spill on Lebanon's beaches when a power plant fuel depot was bombed. 3 billion dollars is about how much of our tax money is given to Israel every year. How about just this year, we give that 3 billion to Lebanon instead, to fix the damage Israel caused? I'd feel much better about paying for new houses, new bridges, and beach cleanups then having my tax dollars go toward yet more people-shredding anti-personnel weapons. Of course this won't happen. Instead, the neocon insects are planning to do the same thing to Iran (Hersh article) It's really not in our interests, people. We should be investing in alternative energy rather than a marriage of convenience between the stealing of Arab oil and unquestioning support for Israeli aggression. There is not that much time left.

    [Aug15'06] The phony liquid-bombers-who-would-sacrifice-their-own-babies circus has started to unravel. Some of the suspects didn't even have passports. Postman Patel says, they "make the Miami 7 look like professionals". Those were the 7 guys who were going to initiate a "full ground war" against the US a few months ago.

    [Aug17'06] JonBenet rises from the grave once again to become a bigger story today than Lebanon, the fact that a whole 9-11's worth of Iraqis were killed this month in Iraq (but it's getting better, I know), the ongoing chaos in Afghanistan (bombing policemen), the anti-NSA wiretap decision.

    [Aug19'06] Olmert today 'suspends withdrawal plan'. Since the continued acquisition of West bank Palestinian territory has never stopped, is this really 'news'? (given that support for the occupation is one big reason why 'they hate us', it should be). Also today, the Israelis kidnapped Nasser Eddin Al Shaer, the deputy Palestinian prime minister. Presumably, this kidnapping would be just cause for Palestinian air force (if it existed) to do $1.5 billion dollars in damage to the infrastructure of Israel and kill 500 Israeli civilians (what Israel did to Lebanon -- divided by 2 since there was only one kidnapping today -- though there were 60 since June 25). In an equally important development, the confession of the JonBenet killer was also 'suspended' today after a sucessful run as 'Aruba of the week'. Calling all third-world conjoined twins.

    [Aug23'06] The UN now estimates that Israel did $15 billion dollars worth of damage to Lebanon's civilian infrastructure, destroying 35,000 homes and businesses and a quarter of the country's bridges. That's about 5 years worth of American tax donations to Israel, not counting the guaranteed loans that are never paid back. Any sane person looking at the facts on the ground would have to say that Lebanon is the one 'fighting for its life', having barely repelled an invasion by a much better armed adversary. All that US-funded mayhem and destruction did not make the US (or Israel) safer, period. The media has fallen silent.

    [Aug25'06] Iraqi's were asked in April 2006 to give three reasons for why the US invaded their country. 76% said is was "to control Iraqi oil"; 41% said it was "to build military bases"; 32% said it was "to help Israel"; 2% said "to bring democracy to Iraq". 92% of Iraqis want the US out, up from 74% two years ago. Great to see democracy in action. Probably, we are just waiting for it to become completely unanimous, sort of like a jury... beyond a shadow of a doubt, etc. Meanwhile, 10,000 Iraqis have been killed in Baghdad in the last 4 months. That's a full 9-11 every month.

    [Sep05'06] Filling up that Ford Extinction SUV with corn ethanol would use enough grain to feed a person for a substantial part of a year. We are getting close to peak grain. Danger! Will Robinson...

    [Sep15'06] Ehud Olmert's response to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee's questions about the failure of the attack on Lebanon was "What did you think, that there would be a war and nothing would happen to our soldiers? The claim that we lost is unfounded. Half of Lebanon is destroyed; is that a loss?" The failed invasion of Lebanon killed mostly civilians, destroyed many billions of dollars of civilian infrastructure, and in the last 72 hours of the war, Israel dropped one million American-made antipersonnel bomblets on civilian areas (approximately one half of which did not explode making them into half a million land mines). This states in no uncertain terms that non-US non-European non-Israeli people are untermenschen who can be killed and their infrastructure destroyed and contaminated without political cost. We know from previous experience that this kind of 'Master race' talk is mentally unhealthy.

    [Sep21'06] Torture in Iraq is now much worse than under Saddam. Also, a full 9-11's worth of humans (3,300) are now being killed every *month* in Iraq. To fund these two atrocities, we have funnelled roughly 15 NIH budget's worth of our tax money (almost half a trillion dollars) into Iraq and the slavering maws of well-connected defense contractors. Absolutely disgusting -- and I am paying for it.

    [Sep23'06] I have great difficulty understanding the large scale world economic picture. For example, how can a firm lose $6 billion dollars over a few days, and then have Citadel and JP Morgan (giant bank) "[take] over Amaranth's energy positions" on Sept 19 (4 days ago), making huge profits in the process? What on earth does this mean? Apparently, it was all about failed bets on an expected seasonal change in the price of natural gas (that's rocket science?). Often-talked-about US imports from the world represent only 4% of total world economic activity. The US GDP (11 trillion), however, is almost 1/4 that of the world (44 trillion). I have read that perhaps 85% of world's money is in dollars, which is what makes the dollar the world's reserve currency. But dollars are being created by the Fed (and the banks it loans to) at a substantial rate (e.g., M3 went from 4.5 trillion to 10 trillion from 1996 to 2006 -- graph here), which may not be tolerated forever by the world. The world sent us actual things in return for those created dollars; in fact the growth of our current account deficit looks like a mirror image of M3! Of course, other countries inflate their own currencies using similar methods, so perhaps everything 'cancels out' to some degree. But the M3/cumulative-current-account-deficit situation sure doesn't seem stable in the long term.

    [Oct01'06] Sometimes, it's worth reviewing the four main intertwined problems threatening the long-term survival of industrial civilization. Three involve rapid (in the context of a century), non-equilibrium, non-sustainable resource rundowns -- in energy, water, metals, -- and the fourth -- global heating -- is due to the first.
          First, oil will peak in a few years (or might have already) followed by gas, coal, and uranium later this century. There is currently no practical replacement for our towering daily fossil energy diet (1000 barrels a second in the case of oil). No one has come vaguely close to concretely suggesting what a truly self-sustaining energy supply system for industrial civilization would look like a hundred years from now. This would be, for example, a windmill production plant entirely built and powered by other windmills -- including the energy needed for steel recycling, electronics, copper, installation, maintenance, decommissioning -- but that also generates enough additional energy for us to use for other things. In theory, this should be possible; if not perhaps we can make do with a lot less energy.
         Second, fresh water is being run down at many times its natural replenishment rate across the entire world (e.g., the US midwest Ogallala aquifer; Indian aquifers; Californian and Chinese rivers). Also, mountain snowmelt and glaciers that supply fresh water to many of the world's major rivers (e.g., in the Himalayas) are undergoing major modification (less snow, earlier melting, complete loss of some glaciers).
         Third, industrial society relies crucially on will almost certainly have serious effects on critical infrastructure, especially since they will all be getting worse simultaneously. For example, the oil peak (tillage, harvesting), natural gas peak (fertilizer), water problems (irrigation), and climate change (growing season) will likely negatively impact food production. We will begin ramming up against the stops of a finite earth within my lifetime. I hope we can rise to the occasion.

    [Oct23'06] Expat on the oildrum makes an interesting point that ethanol is being added to 'all liquids' production numbers. However, it takes a substantial amount of fossil fuel to make ethanol. Even the most rosy of estimates for corn ethanol suggest that it takes 3 units of fossil fuel to make 4 units of ethanol (Kammen et al. Science article). However, even though this process results in a total excess usable energy of 1 unit, both the input and output are being counted, so we get 7 additional units of 'production'. What a joke (on us).

    [Oct23'06] Iran. Dreyfuss reports the US has its hands full in Iraq and needs the support of the Iranian Shi'ites death squads there, and so therefore doubts the US will attack Iran. Ellsberg calls for leakers because he thinks an attack is imminent. Debka reports that the two carriers and third strike group arrived Oct 21 (two days ago), (others predicted this two weeks ago). I'm guessing there will not be an attack yet because the strike force doesn't seem big enough to me. I think there is a small chance that an underpowered attack leading to the sinking of a US ship could be the motivator for a bigger possibly nuclear war. But I had already suggested such a thing publically in 2004, and it hasn't happened yet. A starved defenseless country has fought us -- with our military budget equal to a full 50% that of the entire world -- to a standstill. The aftermath of an attack on a country like Iran with working defenses will be harder. In this light, I can't see how the US could avoid using nukes if the crazies in our government do decide to attack.

    [Oct28'06] US carriers seem to be leaving the Persian Gulf so it looks like there will be no attack before the election at least. Good news for now.

    [Oct29'06] Gwynne Dyer notes that grain reserves have been declining since 1999 (116 days reserves in 1999 have declined to a predicted low of 57 days of reserves at the end of this year). This may be due in part to droughts due to global warming. If this continues for another 7 years, chaotic price fluctuations in basic grains are likely to occur. The good news is that our crapulous ways in the form of high meat consumption have a built-in buffer, since it is much more efficient to eat the grains directly than to feed them to cattle. Another buffer is the use of arable land for biofuels. Although eating less meat is good for your health, eating only one kind of vegetable is very bad for your health. As Jared Diamond and others have pointed out, the origin of agriculture and densely populated cities -- and the mono vegetable crop food intake that made both possible -- resulted in a large increase in malnutrition, and a marked decrease in stature (compared to pre-existing hunter-gathers), only finally overcome in the 20th century.

    [Oct31'06] There are hopeful demonstrations of how to integrate wind and solar into the existing power grid. The main difficulty with wind and solar is to engineer rapid ramping ability into non-wind non-solar sources so the intermittancy can be smoothed out (nuclear is not good for this purpose), and (2) pumped hydro storage, which to some extent relieves the need for (1). Sweden, Germany, and Australia are doing it already. In other news, the 'guarding the oil installations' exercise planned for Oct 31 in the Persian gulf doesn't look like an attack force. It could be bait for a 2nd new Pearl Harbor, but I think that is unlikely. Perhaps just an election publicity stunt with no hostilities. But after the election, all bets are off. An attack then, esp. if the Repugs lose one or both chambers seems quite possible. Michael Klare thinks the US would have attacked Iran this summer if the Israeli attack on Lebanon had not failed, and now thinks it will take place in Spring 2007.

    [Nov02'06] It's good that our fine 21st century satellite reconaissance technology is being used on US-ian and Brazilian farmers to keep them from planting saved seeds without paying tribute to the GM seed companies. Of course, since GM seeds and GM genes have gotten into all different kinds of equipment and jumped fields and even species, it's a little hard to tell whether you thought the seeds you planted were actually yours unless you sequence the DNA in them (in your barn?), and then maybe also lie down in the fMRI lie detector to determine if your intentions were bad. What amazing idiocy and nincompoopery on the cusp of world grain reserves reaching their lowest levels in 30 years! Some days, I almost feel like us humans deserve the world they are preparing for ourselves. Meanwhile with little fanfare, Ghawar (Saudi Arabia), Canterell (Mexico), Burgan (Kuwait), and Daqing (China) -- the only 4 oil fields in the world ("super giant") that produce over 1 million barrels/day -- all now appear to be in decline (the only uncertainty is from Ghawar, the biggest, due to lack of public knowledge of water cut). It's peak party! Actually, peak cargo cult (there's a magazine called Cargo, tho I think it's been having problems lately). Some people know -- like the person yesterday who searched for "peak oil civilization bubble", and got my peak oil presentation. I'm not happy about all of this in the slightest. I have a lot of gadgets myself (though I did get rid of my car) and I am not looking forward to the party being over. But I am more worried about the hangover that will follow. Thankfully, peak oil, gas, and coal put a limit on how much CO2 we can add -- about 2-3 times as much as we have already added. Unfortunately, major measures to stop adding CO2 will not likely be put in place any time soon because it is not "politically acceptable". And peak oil and gas will only speed the dash toward coal, which has an even worse CO2/energy ratio. There are likely to be (additional) energy wars. I am pretty sure those 2 to 3 additional difference-between-glaciation-and-non-glaciation pulses of CO2 will be added (on top of the one such pulse we've already added) -- all on top of a non-glaciation level of CO2. Perhaps 'carbon-trading' (privatizing the atmosphere) will drag out the total time over which the pulses are added by a decade or two, while impoverishing the global south even more. But the atmosphere could care less about political acceptability. So there will be a lot more heating by the middle of the century. We will have to deal with heating, power down, and water and food shortages, all at the same time. Eeeeeew. Peak hangover, man.

    [Nov04'06] The US aircraft carrier Eisenhower has gone back to the Persian gulf gone back. What up? Meanwhile in Gaza, 540 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in the 14 months since Israel 'pulled out'. This is more dead than at the height of the intifada. Entire towns (Beit Hanoun) have had all males between the ages of 16 and 45 carted off in truck convoys to unknown locations by the IDF (why does this sound familiar?). Gaza is a humanitarian time bomb.

    [Nov06'06] Oil production in the UK this summer was down 12% compared to last summer. Cantarell (Yucatan, Mexico), the second biggest producing oil field in the world has shown similar more-than-10%-year-on-year declines. This is is what depletion looks like, in the time of horizontal bottle brush well completions that massively increase the permeable surface area that can be accessed by a single surface well hole. Matt Simmons' recent talks have suggested that there simply aren't enough drilling rigs to offset declines like these, given the fact that new oil discoveries peaked in the 1960's, and have been decreasing since then, now running at maybe 1 barrel discovered for every 4-6 used. An issue for the elections or for business plans? Of course not! What kind of inefficient state-controlled anti-business big-government steal-your-tax-dollars freaks do you think we are? Freakanomics indeed. The studied disregard reminds me of Phony Tony's preposterous crocodile tears about Saddam's death penalty while spending huge wads of tax money to deal out the death penalty for the crime of being an Iraqi (more than half a million death sentences there), a Palestinian, an Afghan, etc.

    [Nov09'06] I remember my horror in 1980 at the realization that the the torture/death squads in El Salvador were manned by El Salvadoreans. Sure, they were trained by the CIA and our fine faculty of the School of the Americas. But they were locals -- e.g., the ones that burst into the church to shoot archbishop Romero. Humans have more powerful thought capabilities and mechanisms of coordination than other animals. Under intense pressure, this extra power can magnify their viciousness. For the last two years, I have gotten the same tragic feeling about Iraq as I had about El Salvador. Sure, Saddam executed at least 146 people without trial after a failed assassination plot (the crime was called 'genocide', and he has been sentenced to death for it); but compare that to the half a million people executed by Bush filth and Phony Tony ('I can't believe it's not genocide'). Bush and Blair implemented most of those executions using other Iraqis (like Saddam). Saddam kept the Shi'ite Inquisition in check; women could drive and go to college; one-third of all marriages in Iraq are between Sunni and Shi'a! The people drilling holes in Iraqi's heads and putting out their eyes before summarily executing them and dumping them in the street because of their religion are other Iraqis. Sure, the death squads were engineered by that same blood-smeared cockroach that engineered death squads in El Salvador, Negroponte. But the people doing most of the dirty work are Iraqis killing other -- Iraqis that used to be neighbors and wives. The lesson for us here in our protected shell is to remember that human brains operate on the same principles everywhere. The level of stress here is currently *waaaay* lower than in Baghdad or Gaza. But the level of stress is likely to greatly escalate a few decades from now when we go over the top of peak energy (oil + gas + coal + nuclear), which will likely lead to peak food in a time of rising temperatures. There is a surprisingly short step between the neighbor who supports the war on terror to the neighbor with the electric drill (OK, maybe it will have to be a hand drill by then...).

    [Nov13'06] Everybody treats the 'commission' as if it were the Delphic oracle instead of a bunch of greedy rich old white noblemen. The idea that the 'commission' will convince Bush to 'abandon the dream of democracy' and 'tackle the security crisis' so the troops can be brought home is completely nonsensical. The troops never even vaguely had anything to do with 'democracy' and everything to do with controlling the roughly 12% of the world's remaining oil resources in Iraq and the second roughly 10% next door in Iran (which is near the 25% left in Saudi and the 18% in the assorted kingdoms, all a stone's throw from our permanent Iraqi military bases). Of course, the 'commission' knows this. We are not going to walk away from all that oil voluntarily, now that the peak has basically arrived. I wonder what kind of charade are we going to see in the next year. It should be entertaining.

    [Nov22'06] Daniel "oil-will-be-$38-a-barrel-by-Nov-05" Yergin's CERA once again tells us -- in a report entitled "Why the peak oil theory falls down" available for only $1000 -- that there is no problem with oil supplies. CERA is "a leading advisor to international energy companies, governments, financial institutions, and technology providers". Whew, I had been getting more and more worried about the future of industrial civilization after reading the free crap available at theoildrum.com. Probably, the $1000 report also explains why Yergin was so off in his prediction (his prediction was free, so I suppose that shows you that you do have to pay him to get the good info). Both the US and the UK still have some oil left (the US currently produces almost 40% of what it uses and UK just started importing a little oil after the 1999 North Sea peak). Commie pinko anti-business types like me think we should 'just say no' to flagrant oil consumption. CERA says: 'just use'. The fact that the idiotic CERA had to respond to free info like theoildrum.com shows that the free info is having some effect! Last year, I wrote something for theoildrum showing that the gasoline made out of a barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of a year of hard human labor. I think another useful way to stress how much finite fossil fuels help us would be to label applicances in human energy equivalents instead of just kilowatt-hours. For example, the average American refrigerator uses about 4 kilowatt-hours a day. A fit human can put out about 3/4 of a kilowatt-hour per day (that's assuming the human puts out about half the average power of a racing Tour de France cyclist for 6 continuous hours a day). So, that means that a typical refrigerator is a 5-'human-day' device -- that is, every day it uses the energy equivalent of 5 human slaves pedaling hard for a day.

    [Dec07'06] 100,000 people are fleeing Iraq every month. That's a rate of 5% of the total population per year running for their lives. This *is* looking more an more like Vietnam. During that massacre, there were 15 million people in South Vietnam (today there are 60 million). By the end of the war, 5 million people -- one-third of the population of the South had been made into refugees by the bombing, defoliation, and simple scraping the landscape down to the dirt with arrays of huge bulldozers (over 10% of the entire surface area of South Vietnam was defoliated to 'deny the enemy cover'). To get up to Vietnam holocaust proportions, we still have 3 years to go. Seems like the Iraqi puppet government hasn't been hiring out enough "it's getting better" news stories to improve the perception of the Iraqi brand in Iraq...

    [Dec19'06] My guess before the election that the Democrats would not offer even the slightest resistance to continuing the Iraq oil-war/occupation has so far, unfortunately, proved accurate. I see no evidence that the US intends to ever leave the oil behind. The only way this will happen is if the Iraqis drive the US and UK out by cutting their supply lines from Kuwait. I don't think this will happen for at least a year or two.

    [Dec22'06] I have mixed feelings about the Haditha prosecutions. Sure, it's bad to break into a house at night in the course of an occupation of a foreign land for the purpose of raping a teenager you spotted in previous public humiliations, and then shoot her and the family in the head and set everything on fire. But I don't see *any* difference in badness between that and pushing buttons to launch remote control weapons of human mutilation and burning by remote control from the safety of an aircraft or long-range artillery installation. If the burned and flayed folks were Americans, would Americans distinguish the two? At least the up-close-and-personal storm troopers saw their victims.

    [Dec28'06] It really bugs me when I read in the financial press about fossil fuel and gold both as "commodities". They couldn't be more different! It is true they both come out of the ground. So what? If all the gold suddenly disappeared, maybe some bankers and gold bugs would be mad, but human society could go on. On the other hand, if all the oil, gas, and coal disappeared, life as we know it would come to a crashing end. Fossil fuels are not "commodities" -- they are the only thing that distinguishes us from humans in the Bronze Age. Those guys already had gold, but there were a lot fewer of them...

    [Dec30'06] Bush's war on Iraq has killed half a million Iraqis -- hundreds of times as many as Saddam was executed for (to be fair, Saddam's total is similar to Bush's total if you include the American-supported Iran-Iraq war back from the '80s). Saddam was right on Iraq's WMDs; Bush lied. 90% of Iraqis say they were better off before the US invasion (that would be under the late Saddam). The way things are currently going, it is not out of the question that in his old age, Bush might be viewed and pursued as a doddering decrepit cockroach like Pinochet. Though a great majority of Americans supported Bush's war on Iraq, they could easily change their mind if things turn (even more) sour for the fortunes of the US. When the Italians finally turned on Mussolini in 1945, they shot him and his mistress, and then hung them both upside down on meat hooks in Piazzale Loreto in Milan. We are not there yet. Here is Fredrick Barton, co-director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies post-conflict reconstruction project commenting that rather than jobs programs or micro-loans, what the Iraqis really need to do get their country working again is "to push the Iraqi government to produce a wealth-sharing agreement on oil". Un-frigging-believable, Fredrick! To fix Iraq, Iraqis need to tell their government to give away their oil revenues to rich foreigners?! Who needs jobs? Let them eat kindness to robber barons. Oil and military bases near oil are the reasons that the US government is paying absolutely no attention to the election results. As I have said many times, the US won't leave Iraq's oil behind unless it is forced out militarily. Of course, if things get really bad, the US could decide to use real WMDs as a last resort if their supply lines from Kuwait gets cut. I'm against the death penalty, but I would be happy one day to see Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz in the same cell with one hole-in-the-floor toilet.

    [Jan19'07] The recent departure of a second aircraft carrier battle group for the Persian gulf along with anti-missile missiles was disconcerting. And the seizing of Iranian hostages. Jim Puplava suggests that the recent strange behavior of oil prices is because oil was attacked as a prelude to an attack on Iran. An article by Sam Gardiner says we can tell when the war on Iran is on when US air force tankers are moved to Bulgaria (I wondered how one watches out for such things, so I googled But a third US aircraft carrier may be on the way (Newsweek). Also, there was a report that a *French* aircraft carrier is headed for the Gulf. I have no idea what's really going on.

    [Mar05'07] In a creepy replay of the lead-up to the Iraq war, archaeologists are once again wringing their hands over the prospect of archeaological sites being damaged by bombs. What about the frigging people, man? As one Iranian wrote, don't bomb us, "especially since, hey, there's people down here". Sure it was ugly seeing American teenagers driving bulldozers over the remains of ancient civilizations in Iraq to make way for the fast food restaurant on one of our fine new Roman legion outposts, but it is waaay worse that our actions their have killed almost a million humans.

    [Mar21'07] Thankfully, new moon seems to have passed without an attack. An attack would be disastrous for the dollar. Hopefully, this warning from 10 days ago was overly pessimistic, and the report today that Russia has exited the Iran nuke site doesn't indicate an impending attack, or is just disinfo.

    [Mar24'07] The British sailor provocation UN visa denial business is worrying but nothing bigger so far. I just have a bad feeling about all that US/UK military hardware floating around in the Gulf. It really is a provocation. Its 'sitting-duckness' sets it up as yet-another-new-Pearl-Harbor. Internet rumors say Apr6. Here's hoping nothing happens.

    [Mar31'07] Well, the British sailor thing is still being worked in the most strangely incompetent way (after magically just having happened to have the capturees interviewed hours before their capture by not one but two news sources -- BBC-TV and the Independent). The imminent arrival of a *third* US carrier in the Gulf (the Nimitz) along with the French carrier that just arrived is, uhhh, not a good sign. Four giant aircraft carriers and hundreds of their support ships all in a tight space. Wait, I see! -- this is a plan to get the anti-ship missiles confused, right? What utter imbeciles humans are. We are running out of energy so we spend $1 billion a day holocausting Iraq to keep our giant military bases around their oil, but then we spend less than $1 billion *a year* on alternate energy. We are rapidly running out of not only energy (it looks like Ghawar, the largest oilfield in the world, may finally be on the way down), but also soil, fish, and water, but people are continuing to reproduce like deer. Historians of the future will say that we got what we deserved.

    [Apr03'07] Moved to London.

    [Apr07'07] Thankfully, nothing happened on Apr6, perhaps because of the unexpected release of the UK soldiers. Ghawar is finally getting some serious discussion on theoildrum here and here (I have had one of those Ghawar plots in my oil presentation for several years now, courtesy of Glenn Morton's reference to a society for petroleum geology paper). On a completely different note, on Wed, some students lay down in front of Karl Rove's car and it was kicked by a small angry mob (his car is coming from the lower right on the cellphone video). Probably shook up the fat one a bit...

    [Apr10'07] "These death squads arrived after (former U.S. ambassador John) Negroponte arrived." -- 68-year-old Abdul Abdulla, a refugee who fled Baghdad several months ago.

    [Apr29'07] A glance at Bush's approval poll numbers shows that they have stabilized around 33%. This is the low number that they arrived at after Katrina. At first (last year) I thought that such low numbers might require some kind of stunt to bring them up, but it is clear that this is a solid floor of core supporters that will never go away. Unfortunately, Bush and Cheney can operate just fine in this condition, since things have been this low for a whole year. Sure a few people are being thrown overboard, but the war policy, the encroaching police state policy, and the pauperization of working people policy are in full force -- not deflected one little bit. For example, we are spending more than ever on the war, and the Democrats are the ones who upped the spending. Lefties say they are happy to see the wheels finally starting to come off, but I don't really see that at all (yet) in terms of actually executed policy. Despite the fact that Bush is despised by a majority of people in the US (not to mention the world) none of those people are willing to (or can) do anything about it, from janitors to scientists. The war continues to suck down 120+ billion tax dollars a year and has killed nearly one million people. Most US-ians just don't care or even know. There are 3 or 4 aircraft carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf right now. It's not much different here in the UK (although UK-ians pay less of their taxes into the war and will get a good deal as the US's poodle -- assuming the US can hang onto the oil spoils). The other day, in the mobile (cell phone) store here in the UK, the twentysomething clerk asked my wife where she was from. She said the US. He then asked "that's part of the EU, right?" She said, well, there was this dispute between the US and Britain a while back, and after that, no. It's depressing to think it, but Bush (and Blair) don't even need another 9-11 (or 7-7).

    [May08'07] Here (doomer alert) is a mathematically simple discussion of population and possible earth carrying capacities. Obviously there is a problem if the true continuously sustainable, carrying capacity of the Earth is only 1-1.5 billion humans (the historical average until the discovery of oil in the 1900's), and if we assume that net birth rate declines slowly (0.015% per year) from its current growth rate of 1.15% per year to reach 0.0% per year (=replacement) by 2080. Perhaps the most unintentionally depressing comment down in the list was one by the author, who ran additional simulations assuming larger target populations (2 billion, 3 billion, 6.4 billion [current]). He noted there was hardly any difference in the peak excess deaths required to get to 1 billion, 2 billion, or 3 billion, which suggests that an overshoot correction could itself easily overshoot (as it commonly does in animal populations, where post-crash population often ends at a number lower than the steady state carrying capacity). But worst of all, to merely keep the population *the same as it is now* in the long term, the peak excess death rate would have to reach about 73 million per year (before tapering off). This is approximately equivalent to having the great calamities of the 20th century -- World War I, World War II, Stalin, Mao, the Russian and Chinese civil wars, and the 1918 Spanish flu (which was bigger than all the rest put together) -- all happen at the same time. To merely keep the current population constant at 6.4 billion. As one of the commentators wrote, this really bummed me out. What could be waiting for us might be a lot worse than a thermonuclear war. On the positive side, however, if we get rid of virtually all gasoline (and ethanol) cars and really focussed our remaining fossil fuel reserves on making fertilizer and compost and growing food, and massively increased the number of farmers and increased bicycle manufacturing and transportation (a natural form of birth control :-} ) -- something like what Cuba did after the Soviet Union collapsed, which cut off Cuba's oil supply -- perhaps we can do this in a more orderly fashion. There is always a bright side. And look at India -- most Indians live on 1/20 the per capita energy that we do in the West (only part of this is due to needing less heating). So hopefully the true long-term carrying capacity of the earth is closer to the current population number of 6.4 billion people as opposed to the pre-twentieth century historical average of about 1.5 billion people. In any case, we'll have a pretty good idea of what the real carrying capacity is as fossil fuels begin to decline in just a few decades. Given the size of this bet, some precaution is probably a good idea.

    [May19'07] When 'New' Labor came to power there were a small number of CCTV cameras in Britain. Now there are 5 million for a population of about 60 million. Britain has been turned into 'the Village' of 'The Prisoner' (for those old enough to remember the BBC series). The average Londoner is picked up on 300 CCTV cameras *a day*. Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, right? Just don't walk funny or the "suspicious gait recognition" software might report you, and don't loiter or you get Barry Manilow or near-ultrasonic screeching only audible to dogs and young people, or both. Ouch. The UK seems to have the same fear of predatory teenagers they do in the US, despite the fact that older people including boomers are responsible for the majority of crime.

    [Jun04'07] Emissions from burning fossil fuels are now increasing at about 3 percent per year versus 1 percent per year during the 1990's. Wind power is increasing, too, esp. in northern Europe (now well ahead of the US, the leader in the 1980's). Unfortunately, it is not even close to keeping up with growth. As summarized by Pedro from Madrid, in *one year* (2004-2005), global electricity usage grew by an amount that was *4 times* total installed wind power *to date*. And as with oil, the best wind sites are being used first. After going down for many years, the price of wind power installations is starting to increase, likely the result of increased fossil fuel prices, which are involved at every stage in the construction of a wind turbine -- from obtaining and refining raw materials, manufacturing, delivery, and maintenance. Pedro says: current wind turbines are non-renewable systems for capturing renewable energy. Our only sensible plan is to reduce consumption, quickly, now. However, it looks like this is not going to happen until we bang our collective heads into the wall a decade from now. Pity.

    [Jun18'07] Here is a nice graph from Euan Mearns of world energy consumption. Notice that the contributions from renewables (except for hydro) are too small to see and are not even vaguely close to covering yearly increases. I feel uncomfortable watching the slow motion car wreck of industrial civilization and not really being able to do anything about it. Here on the other hand is a report of from the (US) Midwest Renewable Energy Association Fair. Nate Hagens from Canada sums it up like this: "I got the sense the average person at MREA were in Custer [Wisconsin] because living partially/wholly off the grid is a lifestyle choice and wanted to learn about the latest gadgets, meet with friends and learn more about the alt-energy tribe. I did not get the sense, either this year or last, that a majority of consumers attended because they see the peak-oil-writing on the wall and are trying to get ahead of the curve on energy independence." It is simply idiotic from a 30 year perspective that industrial societies are not frantically investing in renewable energy and frantically finding ways to use less energy (e.g., more electrified rail transport) and punishing energy neutral tax money laundering schemes like the ethanol boondoggle. Look at what has happened in the last few years. The North Sea unexpectedly peaked (1999). Mexico unexpectedly peaked (2004). Saudi unexpectedly peaked (2005). Kuwait announced (2006) they have half as much oil left as they previously said they had; the 'error' (which was corrected by simply going back to the 1980's reserves numbers before they had been artificially doubled during the price collapse in the mid-1980's) amounted to 5% of total remaining world reserves (assuming that all the other inflated mideast totals are true, which they aren't)! Exporting countries (e.g., China, Mexico, Saudi, Nigeria) have rapidly growing populations and energy appetites (though nothing to match our own). There is nothing idiotic about looking calmly several decades into the future. Parents often do this when they have kids. Why should the future of industrial society be immune from such a commensense approach? Kids take a long time to grow up, too. Peak fossil fuel energy (oil+gas+coal) is likely to hit around 2030, which is when kids born in the next few years would get to college. Why can't one talk about all this to 'normal' people without them thinking you are some kind of kook? Why don't these people care about industrial society?

    [Jun24'07] Here is a pretty good show on peak oil from Irish teevee. Bush's numbers have clearly broken to a new low record. But the US Congress' approval rating is actually even lower than Bush's! Numbers almost this low have been sustained for almost 2 years and have not really impeded any of the polices of the Bush administration (or the cowardly Congress). Several years ago, I predicted that some kind of stunt would be required if the numbers went so low. I was wrong. Nothing is needed. US-ians seem completely anesthetized. I also had thought there would be a more sustained barrage of anti-Iran propaganda than there has been so far. It's there, but it's not at the same level as before the Iraq war (but it has been going on longer). 3 or 4 aircraft carriers are in or around the Persian Gulf now at all times. The state of oil production is not looking good (the main motivation in my opinion for the continuing US occupation of Iraq and for attacking Iran). There was a tiny blurb in Bloomberg that Mexico's oil output (one of the main exporters to the US) fell 6.6% over the last year. This will be a huge and likely ever-growing hit to the Mexican (and US) economies. It seems like a recipe for major instability just across the US's border. Yet there was virtually no comment in the media. The only place in the mainstream media you can hear sensible things about the implications of peak oil for the continuity of industrial society is on friggin' Art Bell, the late-night ghosts and UFO radio looney (interview with Matt Savinar last night -- mp3 here). It reminds me of the time years ago a teevee show contacted me about an interview after an article mentioning my research came out in a popular science magazine; the 4 parts of the program were: UFOs, poltergeists, earth mysteries, and secrets of the brain (that was me). Perhaps we need a new angle -- say if we pointed out that if industrial society fell apart, we would no longer be able to hear about Paris Hilton. I grant that on the face of it, an attack on Iran now seems more implausible now than ever. However, I didn't think Bush could continue operating with a 25% approval rate. He can. And an attack on Iran could still happen.

    [Jul01'07] There is a certain irony here given the content of my previous note, just one week ago :-} "You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade." (from Larry C. Johnson). The latest episode of "Beavis and Butthead blow up London" (from Thomas C. Greene) seems to be playing bigger in America than in the UK, tho it won't hurt the inauguration of Gordon Brown, who looks set to continue the policies of Bush/Blair, judging from his appointments. These policies include making us all more 'secure' by matter-of-factly helping to continue the holocaust of Iraqis (the US- and UK-caused death toll is nearing a million), and continuing to snuggle up to the more powerful Americans building permanent military outposts near the oil. The only way policy will change is if people actually demand it. They aren't demanding anything at all (well, except maybe an iPhone). The 'dual use' UK/US terror strategy worked before with the inane liquids screening in US and UK airports, which began in Aug 2006 after another Beavis and Butthead plot in the UK. That one got Americans wondering whether they should watch whether they were wearing padded bras -- to keep America safe. The internet is great, because of how easy it is to look up stuff. But as other people have said, unfortunately, it is also a denial-of-service attack on the human mind. Having an internet doesn't replace human memory or knowledge; the internet is worse than useless if you don't know anything and can't remember anything. As Thomas C. Greene says, "Why is [the Piccadilly stunt] such big news? Because clowns have got to be passed off as terrorists. Because a vast industry depends on terrorists, real and imagined, to justify its existence." Time sure passes when you're (not) having fun: the US and the UK have now been in Iraq about as long as they were in WWII. The two stunts (London and Glasgow) will keep the proles from thinking about the daily atrocities carried out in their name (and using their money). One prediction I can confidently predict is that Bush's (and Brown's) poll numbers will go up a little.

    [Jul08'07] Some days, I have to rally against the misanthropic vices of the onset of old age. The speed of thinking and the speed of recall for particular facts (of which older people know more than ever) is somewhat slowed, but at the same time, the recognition of patterns of deception in daily life (e.g., Reichstag fire, Operation Gladio, IRA bombs, al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 80's, Beavis and Butthead blow up London, Kamal Jalil Uthman is killed -- twice) is better. This can lead to indulgent wallowing. Maybe nothing can be done. However, that is no reason to dislike individual actors. The human mind (the neural basis for the difference between chimps and humans) originated in small bands of hominins. It had nothing to do with agriculture, hierarchical societies, temples, or TV. It was not designed to make them or to live with them. A similar thing could be said about the DNA and protein system inside individual cells. That system -- which has persisted as the fundamental control system for multicellular organisms -- was not made for the purpose of constructing multicelullar animals, the brain, and consciousness, even though it eventually got used for that purpose. It seems likely to me that some pruning of the human species will be upon us in a few decades. It will follow inumerable episodes of pruning that happened in the past. In biological evolution, extinction events have often been followed by a renaissance of speciation after the effects of the event dissipated (fish, dinosaurs, mammals). Given how rapidly we have run down our easy energy and rare element resources, we may be in for a longer hangover than usual, at least with respect to high industrial civilization (when geologists say 'long' they mean *really* long). Given that the origin of the human mind was a one-of-kind-event, it is possible that high industrial civilization may also be a one-of-a-kind event. There are many one-of-a-kind events in the history of life. Except for birds, there aren't any dinosaurs any more and there never will be. It seems regrettable that our time in the sun is not being savored for what it is, and for what it might never be again. But I suppose that even that is really neither bad nor good. Animals don't savor the exquisite complexity of their own brains. Instead they they just eat each other -- or plants, which are similarly complex -- so that they can break down the consumed macromolecular chains into small pieces in order to generate generic energy-supplying ATP.

    [Jul18'07] "The ecological footprint of a city such as London is twice the surface area of the UK. If everybody worldwide lived like London you would need three planets. If you lived like a New Yorker we would need five planets. We only have one planet." -- Herbert Girardet. This is all the more remarkable when you realize that London and New York have the *lowest* per capita energy use (a major part of the ecological footprint) of any city in the UK and the US by a good measure. Per capita energy use of many UK and US cities is 10 times greater than London and New York. Go here for stats on per capita energy use in the States.

    [Jul19'07] I just read a piece quoting nincompoop business man on why, despite the fact that there is currently a worldwide shortage of silicon (because of the demand for solar electric power), it would nevertheless be a bad idea to invest in solar power now. I won't justify it with a link. The rationale is that too many people will jump in, and then the market for solar power will temporarily tank. This dufus suggests we should wait for 10 years before investing in solar power. Sounds good to me. Why tire oneself needlessly by pulling the parachute rip cord now? Wouldn't it make more sense to wait to pull it until we *really* need it? -- say, at 15 feet off the ground? None of this means I think solar power will save the day for our current lifestyle. In fact, as fossil fuel energy costs go up as fossil fuels get scarcer, it is likely that the cost of solar power will initially go up, too, since solar power devices are currently exclusively made, literally, out of fossil fuel. Maybe improved manufacturing methods will help. Waiting for 10 years to even start to try is utter madness -- but good business. What's good for business will be disastrous for the continuation of industrial civilization and the large number of people it has generated. Imagine if this dufus' mother had used the same lame one-year-lookahead logic when raising him (well then maybe we wouldn't have had to read this drivel); and by his own stupid logic, his mother should have sent him a huge bill for wiping his a**.

    [Aug01'07] There was an excellent, straightforward article on UK energy security on TheOilDrum by Euan Mearns. The level of denial of the basic energy facts is as frightening here in the UK as it is in the states. I regularly see single people in their 100,000 watt cars gun their motors past me on my 100 watt bike to race a couple of hundred feet up to the the next red light -- even though I'm already riding at over 20 miles/hour, thank you (twice the average speed of traffic in London). It almost makes me feel sorry for the car people (well, almost). It's not as if we are going to fall off an energy cliff next year. But it is absolutely clear that energy markets are going to get tighter and tighter from now on. To summarize, here are the 4 independent trends all going in the wrong direction and adding to each other, indicating trouble ahead: (1) production within importing countries is continuing to drop (e.g., US, China), (2) importing countries are increasing their total demand (e.g., US, China), (3) exporting countries are experiencing rapid increases in internal demand (e.g., Mexico, Iran, Venezuela), and (4) production of exporting countries is finally beginning to decrease (e.g., Mexico, Saudi). It is obvious that we have to start reducing demand, immediately, before the SHTF and (another!) war breaks out.

    [Aug01'07] Gordon Brown has said he will not delay taking troops out of Iraq in order to show unity with the US. Note that he said *absolutely nothing* about actually withdrawing any troops! 'Pave the way' for withdrawal, be 'full and frank' about your inner poodle, yadda yadda. My guess is that British troops will be staying in Iraq until they are driven out. The massive increase in the US use of air power since the beginning of this year suggests that we may a little closer to the time when the invaders are driven out than most people think.

    [Aug03'07] There was a report two days ago that there is only one US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf now. That reduces the threat level considerably if it's true. Meanwhile the pea-brained 'Democratic' 'opposition' (Obomber) says he wants to invade Pakistan, after 'ending' the war in Iraq by leaving anti-terr'ism troops there. He really needs to get out there and lead the troops into somebody else's house in the middle of the night. C'mon, let's see some, you pinhead.

    [Aug10'07] There seems to be a lot of somewhat panicky activity by banks in the last two days. The European Central Bank injected $130 billion (i.e., a whole year of the Iraq war in one day), the Fed injected $24 billion, a German bank temporarily suspended operations, a French bank has frozen subprime-invested funds, even lil' Canada injected 1.6 billion. Stock markets continued to burp (2-3% one-day moves). Commercial business credit seems to have suddenly dried up in a few weeks (e.g., loans for mergers). I have no idea what it all means or how serious it is (e.g., how does credit get 'injected' when the overnight lending rate is going *up*?), but the guy with the Russian name next door who works in the City seems to be coming home later and later...

    [Aug12'07] The world's central banks injected an unusually large amount of money ($323 billion, equivalent to about 3% of US GDP; the European central bank's injection was its biggest ever -- 1.5x the amount it injected on 9-11) into money markets on Thursday and Friday. They would seem to be worried about something. The proximate cause seems to have been people at the bottom of the housing totem pole, who took out loans on bad terms, thus making them more profitable for money managers to buy (money sharks buying the loans of loan sharks, then insured by other money sharks, and then sold to yet more money sharks). When the money guys panic, they lose all sense of reason. Oil dropped along with everything else. Too bad this 2 day drop is not because Ghawar has begun to refill itself. 'Bearishness on oil' makes about as much sense to me as 'carbon-neutral car insurance' (from a recent ad on the silly teevee) -- but sadly, it is the one-week-lookahead reality of the money guys. Oil and other fossil fuels are main physical movers behind economic growth -- they provide the force and heat that make goods and food, deliver goods and food to wharehouses, and allow people to drive to stores to buy them. It's not just a commodity but the very engine of the economy. But most importantly, the amount of net-energy-positive oil left in the ground doesn't care a bit about what people think or the market thinks, or whether they are feeling entrepenurial or panicked. Now that we are close to, at, or slighly past peak oil extraction, economic growth will begin to flatten and then contract. It is going to be interesting to see how the money guys deal with this.

    [Aug16'07] There is a tropical storm in the Caribbean headed west. It's now aimed toward Cantarell, but 5-day paths are very uncertain. Hopefully, it will turn before then. Also, it would probably have to go over a little land first to get to Cantarell, which would substantially weaken it.

    [Aug17'07] The path of Dean now looks look like it will pass north of Cantarell (which is located around 19N, 92W).

    [Aug19'07] Dean's track has been nudged slightly south but still slightly north of Cantarell (most cool mockups by Khebab here). It also looks like it might grow into a Category 5. However, passing over the Yucatan will weaken it before it gets to Campeche bay where all the oil rigs are on Tuesday. Oil prices are likely to go back up since Cantarell produces almost 2% of the world's oil.

    [Aug20'07] The latest forecasts seem to be nudging Dean closer and closer to Cantarell. Though it is very big now, it will lose a lot of power going over the Yucatan plains before it gets there. It is currently predicted to be only cat. 1 (92 mph) by the time it gets back over the water. Pemex has evacuated 1300 workers from 140 offshore rigs, so they are taking it seriously. There is a very good collection of maps here on TheOilDrum. Oil traders aren't scared at all, though they tend not to be very good at maps or math.

    [Aug22'07] The passage over land seems to have weakened Dean enough that it probably won't cause much damage to Cantarell. The oil market weenies are crowing that "they called it right". Oil prices dipped almost 2 dollars -- not because more oil was found but because a more-than-one-week shutdown of a dying super-giant oil field was avoided. Makes perfect sense, right? With currently tight credit leading to economic softness, the two-week-lookahead money skimmers could end up engineering a temporary price collapse of oil -- right at the friggin' peak, right when we really need a huge investment in non-fossil-fuel energy. Make your parasitical money while Rome burns. Disgusting. Here are a bunch of useful graphs from Stuart Staniford. I liked this comment: "Clearly, we have a situation in which financial system players have started to lose confidence in each other. The public has not lost confidence in financial institutions, but [the institutions] are losing confidence in each other. They are probably better informed than we are...". As the credit crisis unwinds, it is likely to have disastrous effects on investment in alternative energy. This cliff-like drop illustrates this loss of confidence very well (aren't the tapeworms cute when they all get afraid at the same time?). But as Staniford concludes, the money guys losing nerve and fleeing to less risky havens will not make peak oil go away. The financial crisis will eventually end, and peak oil will still be waiting for us on the other side. In fact, as Westexas comments (practically every day :-}), the rapid growth in the *internal* consumption of oil by exporting countries may hit oil *importing* countries particularly suddenly -- despite the fact that the *world* production peak is likely to be quite flat for a while (before it begins to drop in earnest). This sudden drop is likely to be the impetus for (another) oil war.

    [Aug26'07] Here I quote Evans-Pritchard quoting Randall Forsyth from Barron's quoting an anonymous hedge fund operator, because it changed my crude understanding of recent big finance a lot: "'Real money' (U.S. insurance companies, pension funds, etc.) accounts had stopped purchasing mezzanine tranches of U.S. subprime debt in late 2003 and [Wall Street] needed a mechanism that could enable them to 'mark up' these loans, package them opaquely, and EXPORT THE NEWLY PACKAGED RISK TO UNWITTING BUYERS IN ASIA AND CENTRAL EUROPE!!!! These CDOs were the only way to get rid of the riskiest tranches of subprime debt. Interestingly enough, these buyers (mainland Chinese banks, the Chinese Government, Taiwanese banks, Korean banks, German banks, French banks, U.K. banks) possess the 'excess' pools of liquidity around the globe. These pools are basically derived from two sources: 1) massive trade surpluses with the U.S. in U.S. dollars, 2) petrodollar recyclers." It certainly rationalized for me why *European* central banks had to inject (create) a lot more money than US banks last week. It also looks like the snake still has quite a bit of pig to digest.

    [Sep19'07] Rawstory news reports that Democrats have 'tricked' Republicans by agreeing to stay in Iraq for another year so that they can win the election (because Iraq will be regarded as the Republicans' fault). I don't think so. Support for the Iraq is completely bipartisan and Americans unconsciously know that. It's hard to pound it into lefty heads that Democrats == Republicans. Why can't they follow the money and the money talking? For reference, I regard myself as far left.

    [Sep20'07] I just came across for the first time, an old, simple, cool idea/device discovered long ago, and it made me feel good about human ingenuity :-} . If you take three reflecting surfaces and place them at right angles to each other (to make a corner with the reflecting surfaces on the inside), it will reflect a beam of radiation back to its source, no matter what the incident angle of the source (within one hemisphere).

    [Sep20'07] China has just become a coal-importing country (even while 5,000 coal miners per year are still dying there). China has also canceled its plans for coal-to-liquids because of a lack of coal and because they have correctly reasoned that CTL wastes huge amount of energy (that would not be lost using coal to generate electricity). Thank god there is still 200 or 1000 years of coal left, right? (wrong, there is more like 50 years of coal with useable EROEI left at *current* consumption rates, not counting more coal for growth, more coal to replace natural gas electricity, and more coal for CTL in rich countries, which are all already beginning to happen). Oh, the humanity! (Jim Carrey voice). On the positive side, the all hydrocarbons peak will put a cap on CO2 inputs to global warming (lowest IPCC scenarios).

    [Sep25'07] The French poodle is yipping. And back in the US, it seems from personal observation that the pre-war Iran propaganda is finally starting to work. Bush's numbers have drifted upwards from 30% to almost 35% approval. I'm not looking forward to early 2008. Interesting that the MSM doesn't mention that the Myanmar demonstrations were precipitated by a huge hike in fuel prices (from subsidized to near market).

    [Sep28'07] I hope these squibs from Wayne Madsen (1 week old) and Daniel Ellsberg are just disinfo (Ellsberg is not very specific). The fact that the leak about the nuke joyride (a national security breach if there ever was one) occurred one day before the Israeli attack on Syria is a little disconcerting, but correlation is not causation. People in power do screw up, both with and without malice. Remember how the attempt to plant chemical weapons in Iraq failed by an 'own goal' when the US saboteurs were accidentally bombed by the US. So it is hard to tell. The story of 6 people from Minot air force base mysteriously dying after the event is definitely noise/disinfo (several had died months before) (update: this is repeated by Tarpley).

    [Oct02'07] Seymour Hersh (increased planning, CIA shifting staff to Iran war, Iran planning to attack Europe, Latin American if they are bombed) and Debka (Russians said to suddenly depart Bushehr quoting unlinked Khorramshar news agency article I couldn't find any other reference to) say Iran war is close (early spring 2008). I don't find either of these sources very trustable given their association with their respective intellence agencies, but I am worried about government desperation around that pre-election time. The universal soldiers/goons from Blackwater or Myanmar depress me, for different reasons. Blackwater shoots up cars full of 'other' non-people that they think are not fully human. The Myanmar police shoot into crowds of their 'own' people and beat them to death. From a strictly selfish point of view, the Myanmar storm troopers worry me more, because of their analogy with my 'own' people (update: though see this video). Eventually Blackwater will come knocking, kicking down, and shooting through domestic doors (they already did in New Orleans). Also, it depresses me that the Myanmar demonstrations were about oil (provoked by a removal of subsidies for diesel, which doubled its price, in a country with large natural gas reserves and a couple of gigabarrels of oil), or as a Pakistani economist put it, it's "oil versus monks".

    [Oct08'07] Funny comment by Gavin at RealClimate reporting from a China conference through the ever-present haze and through the 'Great Firewall' :-}

    [Oct11'07] This year, there was a 27% drop in the minimum northern hemisphere sea ice coverage (2.92 million sq km) compared to the previous record minimum (2005). It has been measured quantitatively since 1979. Southern hemisphere ice on the other hand reached a new record maximum (16.2 million sq km) that was 1% larger than previous record maximum. The pictures here of the north pole are pretty disturbing. More than one-quarter of the northern sea ice at minimum size lost in *one year*. Yikes. This is well ahead of the IPCC's worst case scenarios. If this continues, there might be no northern hemisphere sea ice in the summer in just 5 years. It *is* just one year of particularly-easy-to-measure data, as opposed to harder to measure things like the internal state of the nearby Greenland glacier. However, reports from Greenland are not encouraging (much more in "The Big Melt" pdf here). Hundreds of holes (moulins) are opening up in the glacier, pouring water into a lake underneath it, lubercating its flow toward the sea, unleashing storms of small earthquakes that have never been seen before as the giant glacier unsticks itself from the rock below. Although the glacier is now moving into the ocean at a rate of about 10 miles a year, sometimes it speeds up shockingly. In one surge event, a large piece of the glacier moved 5 km in 90 mins (2 miles/hour). That's 50 miles a *day*. A fews weeks of that, and you got a real problem, uhhh, Houston...

    [Oct12'07] The placement of this article by Jim Holt says to me that the US/UK oil+bases grab in Iraq is finally ready to be presented to the rabble. Mr. and Mrs. Rabble will be all ears, now that oil (in dollars, at least) has hit another all time high.

    [Oct23'07] Labour decides that a goal of 20% renewable energy by 2020 is "too expensive" and will ask Merkel to agree to a more reasonable target. Somehow, I don't think the mechanical depletion of oil and gas resevoirs is going to respond to "reason". Amazing and pitiful lack of vision, guys.

    [Oct28'07] The horrific conditions imposed upon Gaza are continuing with hardly a peep from the Western press. Ethnic cleansing and the collective punishment of a million people is apparently OK if it is done to certain ethnicities that have lower market value. Meanwhile here in the UK, Gordon Brown begins withdrawing Iraq troops by, uhhh, sending more troops to Iraq. Way to go. He must be finding his inner poodle. This is awfully similar to when US 'Democrats' earlier this year *increased* the size of the Iraq war appropriation that Bush asked for, of course, to help end the war. It worked, right? If the Democrats really wanted to stop the war, they could do so immediately by threatening and then carrying through on a filibuster on any of the war funding bills. They only need 41 solid votes. They are cowardly worms. Their cowardice has killed over a million people.

    [Nov07'07] "Why Respect think they have enough mass to split is beyond me. It's the People's Front of Judea all over again." -- Craig Murray.

    [Nov08'07] No doubt, as the world watches US-supported 'democracy' unfolding in US puppet regimes in Iraq, Pakistan, and now Georgia it must be wondering, where can we get some of that good stuff, right?

    [Nov18'07] In this report ( pdf here), Kharecha and Hansen (global warming guy) finally absorb the impact of peak oil. Previously, they had been using the bizarrely over-optimistic USGS and EIA estimates of remaining oil reserves. Despite this 'good news' (less oil to burn), it is still hard for me to see how industrial civilization can be convinced not to burn up all the rest of the oil, gas, and coal. So far, 103 ppm has been added to the pre-industrial CO2 levels of about 280 ppm for the current level of 383 ppm CO2. The addition is about equivalent to the difference between glaciation and warm periods, but added to a warm period. Hansen's models suggest we should stay below about 450 ppm (67 ppm more CO2) to be safe and to avoid positive feedbacks (e.g., decreased CO2 uptake from forest dieback, melting permafrost, and ocean floor warming, and increased heat absorption in polar regions from sea-ice-melting-caused albedo reduction). To do that we could leave some of the remaining oil and gas in the ground (there is slightly over half of the oil and gas left in the ground) as well as most of the coal there, too (there is considerably more than half of the coal left), or we could find a way to do carbon capture. Right now, there is not the slightest indication that any fossil fuel will be left unburned. Strongly deleterious effects of global warming won't be expressed for at least another 20 years, and then, mostly in poorer countries. This makes it hard to see a way that people in richer countries will give up their cars with still so much oil left. And the use of natural gas for electricity generation, heating, and fertilizer is unlikely to decrease either. And there are no carbon capture coal generating plants in operation or planned. And carbon capture uses a substantial fraction of the energy in coal, meaning that more has to be mined to get the same amount of energy. And there will be more demand for coal as natural gas declines and as coal-to-liquids ramp up as oil declines. And more of everything as population continues to slowly increase. As I have said before, I think the only way that people's minds may change would be if a high profile catastrophic event occurred that the average person would (inappropriately) relate directly to global warming -- such as a super-large tsunami-causing Greenland iceberg storm, or a super-large hurricane 10x as big as Katrina that hits a major east coast city in the US. People would interpret it as a 'sign from God' or mother nature. If on the other hand, we have business as usual, with a bad storm here and there, a bad flood or drought here and there, and a cm of sea level rise, I don't see how we can possibly stay below 450 ppm by 2050. Given current trends (yearly CO2 increases, now about 2.0 ppm/year, are increasing), it looks like we will burn up all the remaining easy-to-get oil, gas, and coal and hit 500 ppm or above -- that is, two additional 'units' of CO2, where a 'unit' is the different between glaciation and warm periods. People in 2100 are not going to like us.

    [Nov19'07] There is an interesting comment by rkshepherd from the UK in today's oildrum here supporting an analysis by Khebab (see also parallel analysis today by Stuart Staniford) which shows that the rate of finding new oil is accelerating in the context of total oil production being flat. That implies that newer fields are peaking earlier and faster. The commenter suggests this may actually be market-driven (there is premium to get oil out fast and leave with the cash even if it means slightly reducing the total production from an oil field). When capitalism has you by the oil, your hearts and minds will follow.

    [Nov21'07] Chris Vernon has an well-reasoned approach to reducing CO2 here. It is the old idea that as oil gets (permanently) tight -- which it has been for the past few years -- any local demand reductions will be snapped up by the tight market (Jevons) right up to current maximum production level, right up until it's effectively all gone. To get under current production potential and actually leave some hydrocarbons in the ground (the only practical way to avoid getting to 500 or 600 ppm CO2), the whole world would have to cooperate in reducing demand. By contrast, to reduce supply, a much more localized set of producers need to cooperate to hold back their production, and the market will allocate less total carbon. A bit like belling the cat, but perhaps easier than 'belling the whole world'. Perhaps that is what more 'enlightened' members of the junta currently controlling America and the UK were thinking when they decided to invade Iraq (as suggested above).

    [Nov21'07] 'Salvador Option' Negroponte goes to Pakistan. It's hard to imagine what digusting filth that must slosh around in that brain. A truly poisonous mind.

    [Nov25'07] On Tuesday, the Chinese (1.45 trillion dollars invested in US banks) quietly stopped their own banks from extending commercial loans to other Chinese in order to slowdown investing in advance of an expected US recession, and as Chinese and Korean short term deposit interest rates plummetted (as short term treasuries did in the US in August, which predicted the Fed cut). The US and Asian economies are becoming more interconnected as Asian consumption-to-export ratios have actually fallen. Also, on Wednesday, The European Covered Bond Council suspended interbank trading of covered bonds (whatever they are) until at least this Monday. More details and extracts at these links. Clearly, something wicked is thinking about coming this way. The suddenness of these events -- like the earlier credit scrunch over just a few days in August -- always strikes me as bizarre. Normally, this would all look deflationary (money becoming more valuable relative to things) since credit is contracting and people can't buy as many things as they could before, putting downward pressure on prices. But central banks can and do inflate while this is going on (e.g., by creating money to keep banks like Northern Wreck liquid). Money creation in the US seems to be galloping along at over 15% per year (!). And the helicopters out in Europe, too, otherwise, the dollar would have plummetted even faster. The future issue for Europe is how a US-initiated Asian decline will affect European exports. If subprime turns out to be the trigger for a worldwide recession, oil prices may even temporarily go down as consumption flattens, causing reduced investment in alternative energy. Sadly, this won't make peak oil go away -- because it's probably already happened.

    [Nov28'07] I'm tired of looking at and hearing stupid people tearing around in their stupid 100,000 watt cars, whether I'm walking, cycling, or on the bus. Oil is going up in all currencies. It will soon be 'plunging' to 100 dollars a barrel. When it 'plunges' to 200 dollars, at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that the stupid car dunces will have to pay more out of pocket to accelerate their stupid hulks manfully up to the next light. But I don't think anything will sink into their stupid heads until oil 'plunges' to 300 dollars a barrel. In terms of how much human work we get out it, the 'real' price of oil is today's dollars is about 10,000 dollars a barrel. Just remember how fast you can push one of your stupid cars around by hand (not that I'm bitter or anything :-} ).

    [Nov29'07] What a relief to have Brown in power in the UK! He has just brought us another runway to help make Heathrow even more green so the economy won't be crimped, and will stay green. People will drive their green cars to the airport, covered by carbon neutral car insurance, and their houses will be powered by green coal. With a few more years of this we ought to be able to get past all those problems the naysayers complain about like peak oil, global warming, and slowly declining water, soil, fish, and metals. Green fakirs like Lovins will cheerfully explain why we are making progress toward renewables despite the fact that the proportion of renewable energy in overall US energy consumption (mostly hydroelectric) was 6% in 1973 and was still 6% in 2004. We will then cheerfully arrive at *rapidly* declining oil, water, soil, and fish and rapidly increasing temperatures. No one's going to stop us, least of all the pusillanimous naysayers. Not until the runways have turned truly green -- as in overgrown with weeds.

    [Nov30'07] I am slowly catching up to grade-school level on economics. One thing that happened a long time ago (1994, Greenspan years) was that banks were permitted to temporarily 'sweep' deposits out of one kind of account (e.g., checking) into another (e.g., investable savings). At first I didn't realize the significance of this with respect to *reserves*. But reading Mike Shedlock on 'sweeps', it seems like this was basically a way to get around the 10% reserves requirement, which already results in banks having the power to multiply the amount of money deposited in them by 10 (by repeatedly only retaining 10% of every deposit for many cycles). The end result of sweeps is that the actual amount of money in a bank at any one time is much less than even 10% of the deposits -- perhaps more like 3%. It means that banks have the ability to multiply the amount of money injected into them (e.g., from overnight loans from other large banks, who can go to the Fed to get loans from that special kind of Fed money that is emitted out of the vaccuum) by up to a factor of 30 or so. This also explains why the constant, massive daily flow of credit between banks is so critical, because all their customers just have to slightly increase their withdrawals in concert to overwhelm the tiny reserves. When banks suddenly begin distrusting each other, the whole system can seize up. The Fed lowering its rate will not automatically translate into banks trusting each other again. Also see this article by a gold bug (Professor, Intermountain Institute of Science and Applied Mathematics in Missoula Montana!) on the difference between cash money and debt money reasserting itself.

    [Dec06'07] "Scientists are in no position to intelligently guide public policy on climate change." -- Jerry Taylor from the libertarian Cato Institute (quoted here). No, I suppose that would take the 'genius' of the market. And mr. market genius is currently taking our stupid deer herd to ruin. But who are us scientists to say? Go ahead. Make your own day, then. You earned it.

    [Dec06'07] The IEA (International Energy Agency), has long been telling us that peak oil won't happen in the forseeable future, and anyway, that we'll get up to 120 million barrels/day before it happens, and then it will only be a plateau decades from now, because there is so much more oil to find, new technology, blah, blah. Now, Aad van Bohemen from the IEA says on Dutch TV: "So the situation [demand exceeding current supply, leading to high prices] is on overall worrisome, but it is not yet time to panic" (ref). The IEA telling me it's not yet time to panic frankly makes me pretty panicky. All the new finds, new technology, new places to explore, and new production the IEA were predicting didn't materialize yet. Production has been essentially flat for the past 2-3 years. I don't think there will be another substantial uptick in production. It's time to seriously prepare for the downticks that never end instead of smoking new fantasies from the IEA.

    [Dec09'07] This short film about Ciclovia in Bogota brought a tear to my eye. As one of the commentators said: "Cyclists will inherit what's left of the earth." So did this one -- Last of Iraqis.

    [Dec10'07] Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's excellent and clearly written second chapter on hidden holocausts points out that "since 1991, the total civilian death toll in Iraq as a consequence of Anglo-American invasions, socio-economic deprivation and occupation amount to a total of 3 million." This is but one of a large number of 'hidden', but at the same time, well-documented extermination campaigns that "don't count" and don't get talked about because we did them. The death toll amounts to 10% of the population of Iraq. In the US, a like catastrophe would be 30 million Americans dying over 15 years as a result of a foreign invasion.

    [Dec10'07] Lorry drivers here in the UK are getting ready to take on... geology? They are getting ready for a reprise of their 2000 refinery blockade that shut down the country, spurring panicked Britons to horde, which cleared supermarket shelves in less than a week (where did that Blitz spirit go to?) I'm sure all the 90 and 140 million year old geological formations where most of the oil is will be frightened this time, too. Of course, oil companies are making unearned money because oil is becoming more and more scarce. And it is true that a really effective blockade of the entire world would slow down the 1 cubic mile a year oil drain rate. And it would make the remaining 25 or so years of oil last a bit longer. But unfortunately, it won't put any more oil in the bank. The problem isn't greedy oil companies (though they are quite greedy). The real problems are: (1) demand for oil is increasing, (2) there is not enough oil left (a little less than half), and (3) what's left is already being gotten out at virtually maximum speed. This is what explains why oil prices have more than doubled in recent years yet production has remained flat since the middle of 2004. Oil prices have risen in every currency. It's not an oil companies conspiracy, as much as I detest their sociopathic and ugly corporate heads. The sooner this picture is appreciated, the sooner we can get to work. Higher oil prices would actually help us get to work sooner.

    [Dec11'07] A sign at the Mildred Lake mine north of Fort McMurray brags "Since operations began in 1978, we've moved over 1.4 billion tons of overburden. This is more dirt than was moved for the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal, the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the 10 largest dams in the world, combined!". Current production is 1 million barrels/day, a small fraction of world usage rate (86 million barrels/day). Much more 'overburden' will be have to be moved just to cushion the downslope of oil, until it takes more energy to move the overburden than the energy we get out of the heated and washed tar sands. The best tar sands are nowhere close to the energy-return-on-energy-invested ratio from mideast oil fields. And the ones that are included in the constant blather I read about 'more oil than Saudi' are EROEI well under 1.0 -- i.e., they will never be extracted, even in desperation.

    [Dec16'07] What Israel has already done (and plans to do) to Gaza will come back to haunt them. Plus, it is unlikely to force Palestinians to change who they freely elected (Hamas) as opposed to the collaborationists forced on them by the Israel and the US. As the Gaza siege continues, even Americans and Britons will be more and more likely to ask, how could all of the 'good Israelis' have gone along with this without protest? (and to ask why should they continue paying for it). The NIE is a clear signal that a core group of the American elite are not ready to go along with the push to the next mideast war (I hope they manage to stop it). It should also be a signal to begin planning for the dismantling of apartheid.

    [Dec17'07] I suppose that in a twisted way, biofuels are OK. Cannabalizing farmland in order to keep SUVs fueled is utterly obscene, but at the same time, it inserts a buffer into the system so that when grains gets really tight (maybe in no more than a year or two), farmland can be released back to food production, stabilizing the system a bit. This is similar to the idea that the US squatting on less-depleted-than-average Iraqi reserves introduces a (small) peak oil buffer.

    [Dec18'07] By ramping up atmospheric CO2 from 280 ppm to 380 ppm, we have begun to warm the planet. The good news is that as fossil fuel use eventually begins to decline in the future (as oil, then gas, then coal peak), the excess CO2 will likely be rather quickly absorbed by plants and by the oceans (quickly meaning a hundred years). As the oceans have absorbed CO2, they have become more acid through the formation of carbonic acid, which makes it harder for animals (shell fish, plankton) to deposit carbonate and silica in their shells. Their acidity will increase even more before fossil fuel use reaches a peak around 2030. They will have to absorb perhaps twice again as much as they have already absorbed. The bad news is that the time course for reversing this acidity is quite long -- thousands or tens of thousands of years. This is perhaps one of the most serious 'no-turning-back points'.

    [Dec19'07] As a result of the joyous revolution we (the US and UK) have imposed on Afghanistan, life expectancy is down, literacy is down, malnutrition is up, 7% of children below the age of 5 are dying of hunger, and the country has fallen to 4th from last place in the UN global human development index, documented here -- all compared to the situation under the, uhhh, Taliban. But, hey, opium is waaay up. What a catastrophe.

    [Dec19'07] The European central bank just make a $500 billion dollar (half a trillion dollar) loan to EU banks. That's equivalent to 5% of all US banking assets. Heavy medicine. And it looks like the stimulus for some of this badness -- falling house prices -- still have quite a ways to fall to get back to historical income/housing ratios for the US. From that seriously scary graph, they would still have to go down at least 30-40%. They could overshoot if things get disorganized. A similar -- or if historical precedents hold, larger -- fall is likely in the UK. House prices in London fell 7% this month. This suggests that there is still quite a bit of pig yet to be digested by the python. With all this on the way, the Congress (approval currently 11%) just gave Bush another $70 billion to continue the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan until May or June (on top of $460 billion for the 'regular' Pentagon budget). They bravely decided not to give him his $190 billion all at once. Ooooh, what courage, you scum! Peak oil, global warming, housing bubble collapse be damned. What are these people thinking?

    [Dec26'07] Another year passes. Another cubic mile of oil goes into the air as gigatons of CO2 (plus larger amounts of CO2 from coal, and about equal amounts from methane). Tiny, minute changes to our North way of life are made (a few new windmills here, an extra 1 mile per gallon here and there) that are hundreds of times too small to have any measurable effect, even if they could be sustained for 30 years, which many can't (there is no such thing as a 100 mpg car, if you mean an enclosed vehicle with 4 rubber wheels that holds 4 people sitting upright and can go 60 mph). In any case, these tiny changes have been canceled out and reversed by people in other parts of the world increasing their per capita energy consumption up to 1/10 of ours. We are all stealing from and sobotaging the future of humanity. The collapse will begin (has begun!) in poorer Southern countries first, where a much larger portion of the daily budget (e.g., 50%) is spent on raw food. Rice, wheat, and corn prices have have been rising rapidly, but have not yet been felt much in the North because they still make up a small fraction of finished western food. The knowledge of this makes me a bit more mentally disjointed each year. It is all unfolding in extreme slow-motion, but even so, I can't really do a thing about it.

    [Dec29'07] I'm not sure what to think about the recent assassination. Bhutto certainly looked like she was being groomed in the US propaganda-press for much of the past year to be another 'color revolution', and some (Chuckman) have suggested that US plans were disrupted internally. On the other hand, just a day before her assassination, William Arkin wrote that Musharraf had agreed to more accept a much larger number of US special forces troops in the Afghan/Pakistan border region (see also Wolf Blitzer's question to Ron Paul, 'how dare you *not* invade Pakistan', a few days back), suggesting that there was no longer a pressing need for regime change (or that Musharraf was more amenable/bribable to increased US intervention than Bhutto). Most actions arise from more than one source, so probably the real story will never be known for sure.

    [Dec31'07] I saw the Dreamworks kite movie about Afghanistan. It was as good as it could be while studiously avoiding even the most fleeting or indirect reference to the elephant in the room -- an American movie about Afghanistan and the Taliban that somehow 'accidentally' fails to mention America's support for the muja he deen *before* the Soviet invasion, as a provocation to the Soviets (see Chalmers Johnson here). "The reality, kept secret until now, is completely different [i.e., than the notion that the US military aid to the proto-Taliban came *after* the Christmas Eve 1979 Soviet invasion]: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention." "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" -- Zbigniew Brzezinski (in 1998). [update: don't forget Zbig is one of Obama's main advisors]

    [Dec31'07] In this interesting analysis published by Ahmed Quraishi in Islamabad a few weeks before the Bhutto assassination [update: disinfo claim here], it is proposed that assassinating Bhutto might be a method of creating enough chaos inside Pakistan and weakening the Pakistani army enough to allow a much stronger American presence.

    [Dec31'07] From a remarkable interview (pdf here) in a remarkable place (Acres Magazine, as in farmland!) with Michael Hudson:
    ACRES U.S.A.: Why this disregard [Europe not developing internal demand] for their own internal economies?
    MICHAEL HUDSON: The only reason I can think of is that the one thing central bankers feel passionate about is class warfare. They are trained as financial planners to hate labor so much that they will give everything to America for free if it will hurt their own labor force. That anti-labor ideology is a precondition for getting a job at the central bank in today's world.

    [Jan09'08] Here is a clear article by Karl Denninger (on canada.theoildrum.com; however, ideological, emphasis, and personal differences seem to have ended any further economic posts from ilargi and stoneleigh on any of the oildrums). It emphasizes the idea that the Fed has much less control that is usually portrayed. The article -- strictly about money in all its lovely forms -- is in line with graphs showing that the Fed rate *follows* rather than leads market-determined short term interest rates. It also very clearly and concretely describes the mechanisms behind the recent expansion of credit-money and its coming contraction. It is truly remarkable to think that what may be "the worst financial scandal of all time" is starting to unravel right at the start of Peak Oil (and decline of the oceans, soil, and climate) -- so far, almost completely decoupled from it. That decoupling can't last. How the enormous forces generated by all these things will begin to interact in the next few years is *really* hard to predict. Oil may take a (temporary!) steep drop, right at the very moment of Peak Oil!

    [Jan10'08] This may explain why theoildrum 'cleaned house'.

    [Jan13'08] Here is an excellent article on global temperature trends and how they are played out in the MSM. Of course, it does contain a few paragraphs that depend on each other, so it is harder to understand than the typical FUD spewed out by the same paper that lied you into the Iraq war.

    [Jan22'08] The Fed plunge protection scheme worked today. Asian stock markets rebounded after the US down-and-up spike on Tuesday. It seems unlikely that providing cheaper loans will fix the problems of industrial society or lessen the influence of the sociopathic crony capitalists 'jamming' the rest of us, but those sickos got their fix today. They should be in jail. Their yachts, bank accounts, drive-up mansions should be seized. Instead, their in the process of getting their next fix from our pension funds. They won't stop until the villagers arrive at the gates of their estates with torches.

    [Jan23'08] 350,000 people (as in between a quarter and a half a million) rushed through holes punched in the giant metal walls surrounding the Gaza concentration camp to get food, water, and diesel from Egypt. I am embarrassed at having contributed substantial taxes to the country (the US contribution is equivalent to about $1000 for every person in that country per year) that has put the one and a half million people in Gaza in such a desperate situation. Given the absolutely ridiculous amount of tax money the US spends on 'defense' (yeah right) -- more than the entire rest of the world put together -- I suppose this is just a sideshow. But it's disgusting. As some in the Israeli press have put it, this is 'voluntary transfer'. 'Transfer' is an Israeli codeword for ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land.

    [Jan24'08] A rogue trader in France at Societe Generale SA has supposedly lost the bank 5 billion Euros over a few weeks in Janauary, betting that the markets would (continue to) rise. The resulting indigestion as these trades were 'unwound' may have made the Fed more nervous than usual. This was a rather big loss (more than 5 times bigger than Nick Leeson), but remember that there remain almost $500 *trillion* in derivatives still out there (this huge 5 billion euro loss is less than 1% of a trillion dollars. Of course, all those bets have been made by professionals (like the guys who invented options equations and blew up their own damn LTCM...), so there nothing to worry about, nothing to see, move along. Just a rogue trader, not the bank itself, of course.

    [Jan27'08] People are getting used to low freq RFID (13.5MHz), which has a very short range (think Oyster card). There is, however, a higher frequency version of RFID (900 MHz, like EU mobiles), that would be visible at 60 feet. That could potentially broadcast the contents of your purse or wallet to a whole new set of people.

    [Jan29'08] Patrick Cockburn went back to Fallujah. It's hardly changed since the US destroyed most of the city in November 2004. 20 children per day die in its barely functioning hospital. The electricity is on 1 hour a day. But now there are retinal scans for everyone! And there's a new radio station run by Sarah from psychological operations. This is the heart of darkness hell that almost 1 billion American tax dollars *per day* has brought to Iraq.

    [Jan30'08] World production of all liquids, which includes ethanol, has gone slightly above the previous mid-2006 peak. All liquids includes crude oil, which peaked in May 2005, lease condensates (pentane), natural gas plant liquids (butane, propane), and "other" (oil from tar sands, ethanol, a very small amount of biodiesel). The energy content per barrel is highest for crude oil. Corn ethanol from the US not only has just 80% of the energy content of oil per per barrel, but is barely net energy positive (EROEI ~1.2-1.3, equals net energy 0.2-0.3) to produce -- that is, almost as much energy from coal, natural gas, and oil is used to produce a barrel of ethanol as is gotten back from burning it. This utterly disastrous industry, whose recent rapid growth has been increasingly competing with world food production for water, energy, and land, is continuing to grow in the US only because of government subsidies. Tar sands on the other hand generate fuel with energy content similar to oil, but require much greater energy input (mostly from natural gas) than crude oil production (as well as huge amounts of water), though with a better EROEI than US ethanol (maybe 2.0-3.0, equals net energy 1.0-2.0). Stating peak liquids production in barrels is intentionally misleading. If stated in equivalent energy units, we are still likely past peak all-liquids. And even equivalent energy doesn't take into consideration the different net energies of the different sources. For example, increasing ethanol production increases fossil fuel use. But then the ethanol gets *added* to (the liquids part of) that extra fuel use. I just wrote 9 sentences. Unfortunately, that is 8 too many for a teevee 'news' story. So you will only get to hear the first one out of the bunghole of the Blitzer-thing. Everything is OK. We're not on the Titanic. No need to change course.

    [Feb03'08] If the hoi polloi is not thinking ahead, the military is. Here is a quote from a 2007 report from the UK Defense Ministry's Development, "Concepts and Doctrine Centre suggesting what might happen by 2035" -- "The middle classes could become a revolutionary class. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat.... Faced by these twin challenges, the world's middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest."

    [Feb03'08] Blair helped kill a million people (AKA Iraqis) based on telling lies that he knew were lies. He helped engineer an Iraqi holocaust. How is this not a Nuremburg-level war crime? He's not even a little Eichmann. He's a medium-sized one! Why not 'rendition' him? Yo Blair, time to 'fess up!

    [Feb06'08] The number of cables cut seems to indicate some kind of sabotage. One theory is that some of the cables were cut to install taps at a different second cuts of the cable, before first cut was repaired. Another is that it has to do with the second (attempted) Feb opening of the Iranian non-dollar oil bourse. Neither theory, however, had any positive evidence for it.

    [Feb06'08] Quite the masterpiece of humor from Joe Bageant LOL

    [Feb12'08] Here in the UK, Gordon Brown just decided that each family shall spend 3,000 pounds this week to bail out Northern Wreck, which is now a UK public liability of around 100 billion pounds. Another 10 or 20 bailouts like that could put a real dent in one's paycheck, eh? And the subprime thingees are just starting to blow here.

    [Feb13'08] Look at this sad graph: it shows what happened after the Kyoto Accord -- a huge jump in CO2 output (the huge uptick over the past several years). Carbon credits should fix this, right? Instead of doing anything, here in the UK and Europe, where people like to make fun of Americans, they are imitiating American's worst excesses, asking 'scientists' to determine whether it is safe to taser children and using a SWAT team to arrest a bus commuter for listening to his mp3 player. Then when it was obvious the police had f***ed up, they booked the guy for suspicion of a firearms offence and took his DNA, even though they had not the slightest evidence he had done anything but listen to his mp3 player. I think these wannabe Amurricans should just move to America, where they could actually shoot their stupid bullets into bodies more often (not enough de Menezes situations for you here?), or get their little peepees off dumping quadriplegics out of their wheelchairs, or 'doing the Guantanamo' on a woman who had (already) been assaulted. Jealous of 'real men', you Brits? Here's real man -- the mayor of Toledo, Ohio, who booted the Marines out of town. They had been scheduled for a weekend of 'urban warfare training' downtown. The bad *boys* were shipped off to Michigan to scare the old ladies there instead. Judging from the comments on the article it looks like some Ohio-ans felt like they had been shafted ('scare me harder!') and pointed to the fact that Toledo, Ohio has always been a prime target of el Queda. Brits could also benefit from previous American experience with the "do's" and "don'ts" of electric shock torture, I mean Taser use -- like this cop who masterfully tasered himself while aiming for an already-handcuffed suspect lying face down on the ground. Given that half a million people watched that video and many Americans commented favorably on it, perhaps some of them might want to switch places with British cowboys and fascists...

    [Feb15'08] Today Bush says that the London 7/7 bombs warrant torture. Well, ooookay, how about starting with Peter Power?

    [Feb27'08] The first response to calls for belt tightening must always be, tighten the belts first on the bulging guts of the rich. What's coming is (more!) class war, plain and simple. Wealth polarization has already shattered the previous 1929-1930 peak. If they take your pension and medical and flat screen then you have to take their yacht and 3rd through 7th houses. This is the tip of the iceberg. As Elaine Meinel Supkis says, "Storm the beaches of the Cayman Islands!" The banking bandits who made huge amounts of money creating the current financial mess must be forced to pay it back or go to jail.

    [Feb27'08] Cycling home in London today, the two-way car/truck vs. cyclist rage was palpable. At more than one point, I just got off and walked my bike on the pavement (=sidewalk) to show good will. It's partly due to poorly designed cycling lanes (two-direction lanes on one side of the road that make it hard for cars to see 'wrong-way' bikes) and stupid laws of unintended consequences (e.g., the left-most bus lane into which cars are not supposed to go under pain of surveillance camera tickets results in cars turning left from the middle lane, crossing traffic in the left-most lane). But this all misses the point terribly! Imagine 20x or 100x as many bicycles! Serious world-changing natural gas and oil *shortages* (who cares about price) are just years away. A full blown world energy crisis. All the data about peak oil and peak natural gas are still true, sadly. Those numbers change glacially (maybe not such a good metaphor these day?!). New discoveries are happening all the time. They aren't saving the day or even coming close to breaking even; and they will do a worse and worse job of saving the day every succeeding year. The sh*t is poised to hit the fan and people just don't care, and don't want to talk about it. Yelling at cars (or cyclists) won't fix the problem. It's so maddening, I feel like yelling -- at a car, of course :-}

    [Mar01'08] The percentage of the American population that is in prison continues its inexorable rise. This percentage was flat from the beginning of the 20th century up until 1980. Then, after that it began a linear increase that shows no sign of stopping ("they hate us for our freedom"). The percentage imprisoned has more than quintupled since 1980 and now stands at an all-time world record of just over 1% of the entire US population. Even though nominally the "world" part of my blog, I put this here as an example of how just how much momentum society has. Through thick and thin -- wars and not-wars, Democratic and Republican, boom and recession, and a several-fold drop in violent crime -- the percentage in prison has stubbornly risen, the result of the war on drugs, sentencing guidlines changes, the prison industrial complex, and the perennial success of race-baiting campaign slogans about crime. Around the same time as percent imprisoned began to rise, the effects of the mideast oil embargo were beginning to wear off. Oil prices came down, eventually bottoming a decade later. The result was a 30-year long worldwide amnesia about the fact that fossil fuels are limited. But as fuel efficiency stagnated and total fossil fuel usage shot up again, several people noted that per capita energy use did not resume its increase, but remained almost flat. A few days ago, there was an article in the theoildrum on projections of world per capita energy use. In a striking breakout, the world per capita energy use has resumed its increase over the past few years, after reaching a plateau of about 10 barrels of oil equivalent per year (per person) by the 1970's (main graph here). What has caused this recent bump, given that we are probably 2-3 years past peak crude oil? Though the article doesn't mention it, the most likely explanation for this is a combination of two distinct factors: (1) the inexorable social demand for more energy both in the US/UK/EU, but especially also in China and India, and (2) declining energy return on energy investment (EROEI). On the first point, consider the rollout of the Tata Nano, a $2500 car that will make up for its excellent 50 mpg fuel efficiency by massive sales in India and China -- that will probably dwarf that of any previous car; or the fact that China is opening a new coal electric plant every week. On the second point, consider ethanol, which has a very poor net energy (at best, an investment of 1.0 units of energy yields 1.25 return). A key thing that per capita energy *doesn't* take into account is EROEI. For a given constant per capita energy use, as EROEI of energy sources goes down, the per capita *net energy use* goes down because more energy is lost while procuring lower EROEI energy (grow energy per capita counts both the 1.25 units of ethanol as well as the 1.0 units of energy lost making it). Although previous commentators suggested that the per capita energy plateau starting in the 1970's and 1980's indicated that industrial civilization had finally run into its limits, what seems to have happened instead was that inefficiencies were being wrung out of the system on average (though certainly not in SUV gas mileage!) permitting growth to continue. The recent breakout in per capita energy use shows that we may have entered a new stage of development, where a powerful and very slowly changing social machine is demanding more energy and getting it -- but from lower and lower EROEI sources. The graphs in the oildrum article don't mention EROEI at all, except to say it was hard to measure. But just a day before in the very same forum, there was an article showing a rapid linear decline in EROEI for natural gas in Canada (over 40 in 1996 down to just under 20 in 2006). When EROEI of an energy source reaches 5, companies begin to throw in the towel because they can't make a profit (unless there are subsidies as in the case of ethanol). Euan Mearns has made an excellent illustration of the low EROEI 'cliff' here. The oildrum per capita energy use article was relatively upbeat that we might be able to wring yet more inefficiencies out of the system, while increasing renewable energy before the S really HTF ('Olduvai'). That't how I feel when I'm looking on the bright side of life. But we also have to follow the money and the military. Five years after invading, The US/UK are still occupying Iraq, where at least 12% of the world's remaining oil sits, and the US is building enormous permanent bases there at a cost of 3 trillion dollars so far -- a huge investment (3/4 trillion on the Baghdad 'embassy' alone). I think the people who planned this both knew about (1) peak oil and peak fossil fuel, and (2) how social systems actually work (and collide). They decided to take matters into their own hands and used tried-and-true propaganda methods, which worked like they always have. The populations of the US and UK, despite saying they don't like the war and continuing occupation in polls, have done absolutely nothing material to throw the criminals out. The EU has collaborated, and has not taken any significant action against the US and UK. The recent recessionary clouds on the horizon don't bode well -- people usually become more conservative, warlike, and more easily misled under economic stress. What is to stop the same propaganda methods from being successfully used again, in the US/UK/EU or in China and India? Through these glasses, I have trouble seeing the non-'Olduvai' aspects of the right side of Luis de Sousa's gross energy per capita graph.

    [Mar02'08] "The one thing I try to get across to policy makers is that there is this kind of mythical artificial intelligence, every time killer robots are mentioned people start talking about Terminator and 'Skynet' and all this stuff that's really fairytales, and if they were like that it would be better, because what you've got here is like a washing machine. This is a dumb stupid machine, and then you are going to give it the decision to kill people, it's just ridiculous." -- Noel Sharkey on the proliferation of armed robots.

    [Mar04'08] Saudi is advising nationals to leave Lebanon, just as the USS Cole (false flag target?) arrives off its coast. The world says, "We didn't know what was happening because our internet was down", "enough is not enough yet", "it's just a mistranslation". Meanwhile, the US launched a missile attack on... Somalia??

    [Mar08'08] Here in the UK, average home prices are currently at a staggering 9 times average income. By US standards (heh!), this bubble is even bigger. Mortgage approvals are now going way down (40% drop), just like in the US. The cute way the bankers say this is "risk appetite is being severely challenged" -- that is, they will need to take a huge sh** (on us) before they will feel like 'eating' some more of our loans. But no real fear (except amongst London bankers, maybe). Amazingly, nobody here expects the early 90's again, despite the fact that things look even more inflated then they were back then. A lot of bankers live in London...

    [Mar11'08] Some round numbers from here (all in trillions) put things in perspective: Curr_US_Fed_Budget=$3, US_Gov_Max_Debt=$9, US_Mut_Funds=$12, US_GDP=$15, US_Money_Supply=$15, World_GDP=$50, World_Real_Estate=$75, World_Stocks_and_Bonds=$100, BIS_2002_World_Derivatives=$100, BIS_2007_World_Derivatives=$516. The last two are real doozies. And it doesn't even include private deals between non-reporting entities. However, it's not supposed to be as scary as it looks because $512+ trillion is only the 'notional' value as opposed to $11 trillion, the "gross market value". I don't suppose this implies a leverage of 50 to 1, but something related. Less scary? It certainly looks like Fed actions are not having their intended effects. There was a big US stock uptick today from the Fed promising to inject $200 billion (the total cost of the Saving and Loan rescue -- but all in a one-day announcement!); but long term interest rates are still going up, making loans even harder to get. Let's hope the banks aren't using the emergency loans to buy gold (but shouldn't they, if they were rational?). A generally similar thing is happening in Europe: Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal -- club Med -- are getting stiffed by German pension funds. As several commentators have said, this doesn't look like a liquidity crisis that can be solved by offering more short-term loans, but rather a solvency crisis. Money/credit is being destroyed by richies' fear faster than the Fed can temporarily inject it. C'mon guys, stop wetting your panties.

    [Mar12'08] This really creeps me out (cf. David Kelly). Remind me not to go for a walk in the country!

    [Mar16'08] Iraq veterans describe their part in the war machine that has slaughtered over a million Iraqis this time around. Not quite as bad as Vietnam (2-3 million) but getting closer by the year. This is what American and Brits are running their countries down the toilet for. Most Americans and Brits could care less about the atrocities because the victims are just low-market-value humans. But even the strictly selfish economic argument doesn't move most Americans and Brits because they can't tell the difference between million, billion, and trillion. And at least in the US, the war is, unbelieveably, getting more popular. The only thing that could stop the war at this point is all out economic chaos in the US and/or the UK. But that probably won't happen for another decade and a half (unfortunately, right about when I was originally planning to retire) when peak all-energy really starts to bite. Maybe American and British men should recall what happened to German men after WWII -- several million of them were purposely starved to death by the victors. People often say things like "just because I criticized the Nazis doesn't mean I am against all Germans". But it's not true. And you can substitute many other words for "German". If Americans and UK-ers don't start to make some big changes in their governments, they are setting themselves up for the same treatment down the line, from people that will act just like they did.

    [Mar17'08] The speed with which changes in the mortgage market are taking place is breathtaking. Upticks in temporary fixed interest rates have increased mortgage demand. But this has been met with mortgage banks becoming more conservative and halving the number of mortgages available, sometime on very short notice (e.g., 10 minutes from announcement, last Friday, here in the UK). In just days, mortgages have become much more difficult to get. I think the technical term for this is 'creative destruction'. But changes this fast could lead to just plain 'destruction'. The withdrawal of credit is hitting just as we need huge new investments in alternative energy. This would be an excellent way to stimulate/resuscitate the economy (e.g., electrifying rail, a lot more public transport, solar heat concentrating power, thin-film photoelectric, wind, tooling up for much smaller cars and electric cycles, better insulation and passive house design and upgrades, zillions of additional bike lanes!). However, I think we are instead likely to see a *reduction* in appetite for new alternative energy projects and the like -- right at the most critical point -- even as fossil fuels continue to increase in price, because alternative energy will be increasing in price at almost the same rate, and because banks will be unwilling to fund risky projects. Instead of taking the lesson that they should deal less in casino risks of no long-term worth to society, they will also end up dealing less in risks like alternative energy that have a chance of saving industrial society from itself. It's ironic that saving industrial society will be a project that is considered 'too risky'. Instead, this week, the big banking sharks will concentrate their attentions on ripping to shreds their former partners in crime to obscene profit (cf. Bear Stearns offer today at $2/share; but leaving all the bonuses extracted by the rats just before their fall intact, of course). It's sad, I suppose. Industrial society is not going to collapse overnight. But it's *really* stupid to wait to fix obvious problems.

    [Mar20'08] The UK should end their part in the Iraq obscenity. Instead, the UK junta has decided to 'postpone' the previously propaganda annoucement of withdrawal. And Sarkozy has just pledged another 1200 French troops for the other ongoing obscenity in Afghanistan. Disgusting. Collaborators.

    [Mar25'08] Remember how people talked about putting Soviet weapons in safe keeping during the collapse of the Soviet Union. It seems likely that people in other parts of the world may soon begin to mummur the same thing about 'bailout nation'.

    [Mar25'08] For reference, here is a list of the primary government securities dealers, which included Bear Stearns. These are banks beginning in 1960 were granted the right to trade in US Gov securities with the New York Federal Reserve, and which through the 'open market desk' (heh), are the conduit through which the Fed injects (by those banks buying from the Fed) or withdraws (by those banks selling to the Fed) reserves/money/debt/whatever from the banking system: ----------
    BNP Paribas Securities Corp.
    Banc of America Securities LLC
    Barclays Capital Inc.
    Bear, Stearns and Co.
    Cantor Fitzgerald and Co.
    Citigroup Global Markets Inc.
    Countrywide Securities Corporation
    Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC
    Daiwa Securities America Inc.
    Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.
    Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein Securities LLC.
    Goldman, Sachs and Co.
    Greenwich Capital Markets, Inc.
    HSBC Securities (USA) Inc.
    J. P. Morgan Securities Inc.
    Lehman Brothers Inc.
    Merrill Lynch Government Securities Inc.
    Mizuho Securities USA Inc.
    Morgan Stanley and Co. Incorporated
    UBS Securities LLC.
    ----------
    Nothing to see here. Move along. Some people just have too many yachts to fail. You all are not one of them.

    [Mar30'08] The downtick in stability in Iraq is in large part the result of anti-American 'Iranians' (al-Sadr, Mahdi army) ending their cease-fire against the Americans and the pro-American 'Iranians' (al-Maliki, puppet army/government). And then there is the Sunni core of the anti-American resistance. It's blackly hilarious to see how this gets described in the American media. The media can only have one bad guy at a time. So it must be Iran fomenting unrest (Petraeus). Indeed! The permanent US Iraqi bases continue to be constructed.

    [Apr01'08] Xymphora notes that, in contrast to my rant above, there have been some acknowledgements in the US press (USA Today) of Iran helping to arrange the Iraq cease-fire. Even after bombing crowded apartment blocks in Basra in desperation, the US and the puppet army had to withdraw. Given the tight control over what appears in places like that, this does suggest a that some parties in Washington (the 'adults', like Zbig) are pushing diplomatic engagement with Iran. It's hard to overestimate the size of the disaster in Iraq and in the Gulf and in the world economy should the US and/or Israel actually attack Iran. It's not like things are real stable now. This setback for the al-Maliki puppet regime will make passing of the long delayed oil law harder.

    [Apr12'08] The May 2005 peak in world crude plus condensate production has just been barely topped. This is because of increased production of Canadian tar sands (the next to darkest gray) is now being counted in with "crude plus condensate" (despite the fact that the energy return on energy investment for the best tar sands at 5:1 is probably less than 1/4 that of 'non-mined oil'). Nevertheless, this proves that peak oil is a hoax. Also, the cold snaps experienced in some parts of the globe last winter prove that global warming is a hoax. Those two things had been worrying me, but now I realize that just by 'closing our eyes and thinking of England' we have come through with flying colors (the advice allegedly given to Victorian brides on their wedding night, which I was recently reminded of by John Michael Greer :-} ).

    [Apr12'08] The size of the local expression of the global real estate bubble is beginning to be appreciated in the UK, as it was recently in Spain (where half of all real estate agencies have just closed). But the European Central bank has been hawkish, trying to control inflation that seems mostly due to peak oil and peak food (not your daddy's inflation). There is likely to be extreme stress within the Eurozone in another half a year.

    [Apr13'08] The daily sewer papers here are actually worse than in the US. In the Daily Mail, London cops are said to be getting 'microchips'. These are actually just better GPS devices (pdf here ), not RFID chips. This is for their own 'safety', though I think governor on their stupid police car engines would help more. Alongside this story we see Posh corrupting Tom Cruise's wife, and the credit crunch cancelling a charity ball thrown by some animal trough wiper who needs his bottom boiled.... Meanwhile back in the real world, there was an accident in a Pakistan nuclear plant. It's a little creepy taken together with Bush saying that there is going to be a bigger 9/11 coming from Pakistan.

    [Apr14'08] The US State Dept's Jeff Izzo is worried about coming oil shortages. The problem he explains is that national oil companies "do the exploration and production" but that "they don't have the technological expertise". Right, you Izz-iot. How about: they're running out of a limited resource and they want to save some for themselves? Or perhaps Mr. Izzo is too embarrassed to say what he really means. Mr. Perry Fischer, editor of World Oil Magazine, is less inhibited and gives his inner master race freer rein here: "And if energy prices go through the roof, and gasoline costs $12 a gallon, that will still be OK to those of us who can afford it. Plus, it will have the highly desirable side effect of keeping the Third World in their... well, let's just say in third place. (After all, if everybody gets rich enough to buy a car, who will make my $80 tennis shoes for $1 in labor?)". How the 'free market' actually works.

    [Apr20'08] It's easy to get used to continuous crisis when one is well fed. But far off in the distance, I hear the clamour of food and fuel riots. To some extent, it comes from central banks pouring debt/money into insolvent non-central banks, who are trying to regain solvency by investing the newly created debt/money in food and fuel, driving up the prices (even more) as supplies start to get tight from peak oil. This failed attempt to bail out risky bankers and the housing market (mortgage rates are rising, even as central banks lower theirs) is starving people halfway across the globe! The main effect so far has been to fraudulently enrich the upper echelons of the banking industry, who continue to pay themselves obscene bonuses because people won't call them on it.

    [Apr25'08] The dollar is being propped up partly by the fact that the Chinese stock market has suffered spectacular losses (50% drop since October, $2.5 trillion dollar loss), which are greater than the drop in their dollar investments.

    [Apr29'08] The shutdown of the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland caused the shutdown of work on a Scottish wind farm for lack of diesel fuel, with possible permanent layoffs (redundancies). In light of this, it probably would be a good idea to set up a lot of wind farms and solar electric and solar concentrating power *before* worldwide fossil fuels shortages emerge (or until someone actually constructs a wind farm using only energy from another wind farm). Many economists would regard such look-ahead policy as interfering in the already perfect workings of the market. Fine, but then they should be first in line for the bicycle-generator-galleys ("c'mon, [crack!] even economists should be able to put out at least 150 watts")...

    [Jun06'08] I have learned to curb the misanthropic impulse I used to get when I heard the word 'carbon neutral'. I'm returning to my geological roots. Geologists are one of the few who *really* know the meaning of 'dust to dust'. Misanthropy is merely indulgent. If industrial civilization falls, it will not be a tragedy. Same thing if it doesn't rise again. All traces of it may well be gone in a million years. At scales like that, peak oil and global warming don't matter at all. On the bright side, the collapse of industrial civilization is unlikely to even start before 2030, so the party's not over yet!

    [Jun07'08] Israel (which already has hundreds of nuclear warhead/'matches') says a strike on Iran is unavoidable. Obama all but agrees. Oil hits a new record of almost $140/barrel. US unemployment takes a record jump. The Dow drops 400 points. Banks remain essentially insolvent with zero non-borrowed reserves (look here for the unprecendented nature of that borrowing). All candidates grovel in front of AIPAC despite the fact that support for a strike on Iran has fallen to only 7% of Americans. It would seem that Americans are going to need another 'injection' to stiffen their 'resolve' to continue pouring the wealth of their country down the toilet. One million Iraqis killed is not enough. The draculas want more blood. Again.

    [Jun15'08] The Saudis say they will increase oil production to a new record. I don't think they can. The oil fields where the increases are supposed to be coming from were discovered 50 years ago.

    [Jun25'08] As UK-ers are blithely accelerating up to the next speed bump (or yelling at me for riding in the street and not in the dangerous two-way-on-one-side-of-the-street cycle lane), they are likely to be hit with massive natural gas ("meethane") price increases this winter (straight from the mouth of a Norwegian). The UK went from exporting 20% of its energy to importing 20% of its energy in less than 10 years. Imported energy is now growing at 6-7% *per year*. You'd think this would be a clear and present danger (almost all energy will have to be imported in less than two decades at the current rates). But it's not on anybody's radar! Instead, lawmakers are readying idiotic ordnances to have everybody's *trees* inspected every year, to avoid the very occasional branch fall. We're making damn sure that 1 or 2 people a year are not going to get bashed by falling branches by sending half the population to tree surgery school, but no one has the time of day to discuss the fact that the energy sources for industrial civilzation are declining at 6-7% annual rates? Sheesh. I'm all for the nanny state or the banker state for that matter -- so long as they concentrate on things in order of their importance. The nannies and bankers have their priorities *seriously* screwed up. I'm also not looking forward to the response of the people who madly accelerate up to the next speed bump. Or cops, who now only get to proudly turn on their sirens ever more often to idiotically race down the street to accost a dwindling number of drunken yobs. Here is a broader look at the imminent state of emergency in energy and the budget in the UK.

    [Jul05'08] I had been doing pretty well at keeping my inner misanthropist at bay until I came across a reference to "climate ready GM seeds" here, in an article mainly about why we have to steal Iraq's oil to help them (because we've destroyed their country).

    [Jul06'08] From the latest ASPO pdf: "Britain's oil production peaked in 1999 before falling at a relatively high rate of around 7% thanks to the high efficiency and advanced technology of its offshore operations. It had produced its oil and gas at the maximum rate possible without a thought for the future, exporting its surplus at a time of low oil prices before becoming an importer at a time of soaring prices: a strategy that was hardly in the national interest, whatever the short-term gains". Paradoxically, if *less* efficient technology had been used, Britain would now be raking in extra money instead of sitting in the frightening position of scrambling to find new imports for 7% of its total usage this year, 14% next year, 21% the year after that, and so on. The irritating truth is that we are quickly heading to an economy on a war footing -- for good.

    [Jul08'08] There is a lot of talk about electric vehicles replacing oil-driven cars. I think that's generally a good idea. However, the amount of power pushing oil-driven vehicles around is several times the amount of power used in the grid. We would need to triple the capacity of the grid, which is now near a breaking point in many places because of Enron-like electricity market gaming (shipping electricity long distances to take advantage of short term differences in prices -- something the grid wasn't designed for). If we stop that sh*t, and get smaller electric cars, it would help. But it seems very unlikely to me that the capacity of the grid is ever going to be tripled (3 times as many coal plants? 60 times as many nuclear reactors? 3 times as much current carrying capacity?). Instead, we need to be thinking about tiny electric scooters and electric carts and bicycles and replacements for truck+train-to-store vans (yahoo! make the white van guys pedal!).

    [Jul15'08] The great wisdom of the market is flopping oil prices around wildly (up 3%, down 10% in an hour, back up 2%). "Oil is down the most ever" (in non-inflation corrected dollars...) -- "the oil bubble is popped!" -- "We're saved from the speculators!" That's one good thing about petroleum geology -- changes happen in a more leisurely fashion. When it comes to draining oil fields, the amount of oil left goes down more slooooowly. Of course, it's that slow speed scares the cr*p out of me. Oil 'plunging' to $135 won't save us from the geology. Ignore the silly/stupid money people and economists and listen to Phil Hart who as actually Phil Hart who as actually worked on real oil fields. If you do this for a long time, it eventually runs down.

    [Jul19'08] Though Iran has substantial oil and esp. gas deposits remaining, they are hardly infinite. Like many other exporting countries (e.g., Mexico, Indonesia) Iran is surprisingly rapidly approaching the day when domestic oil and gas demand will drop exports to zero. This depletion of exports is faster than the underlying depletion of oil wells, a point often made by Jeffrey Brown (westexas' export land model). The holocaust engineered in Iraq by the US, UK, and Israel (over 1 million dead, 4 million refugees, a permanently occupied country dismembered into 3 unstable insecure states) has had the result of reducing the drain on Iraqi oil by destroying the economy, and has removed any real oversight as to where the oil or the oil revenues are actually going to. It hasn't been a boon for Western oil companies yet, but it has had the effect of keeping more oil 'in storage'. Iraq is conventionally thought to possess perhaps 12% of the remaining world oil reserves. Since Iran currently has another 9-10% of total world oil reserves and 15% of total world gas reserves, the idea that a similar similar holocaust is being prepared for them by the same parties responsible for the one in Iraq has seemed quite plausible to me for several years. On the positive side, the slight 'detente' of the past few days seem to have suggested that the hardliners have once again met some internal resistance. I hope it holds up.

    [Jul21'08] The level of shrieking at the NYT seems to suggest that the neocons are getting desperate: "[since deterrence will not work] an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable" -- Benny Morris. Why not go ahead? The worst that could happen would be a few more countries on the 'to-nuke' list (not a problem since they have several hundred nukes) and a few more countries "turned into a nuclear wasteland". No big deal. No parrots -- or any people from the master race -- will have been harmed. The gene pool will have been cleansed. And if there were no nuclear bombs being made in Iran (cf., uh, Iraq, the IAEA, etc), nobody's going to sort through their radioactive dirt trying to prove it. It takes a genius. Plus, I'm sure the untermenschen will understand (even the genetically almost identical Palestinians [pdf here]).

    [Jul28'08] On some days when the stupid policemen and their stupid sirens are particularly bad, I look forward to peak oil, which is finally starting to cramp their 'style'. Yahoo. I look forward to the day when they have to arrest Amy Winehouse by bicycle. But that's about the only good thing I can think of about peak oil. I'm certainly not looking forward to peak oil one little bit. There is no silver lining. It won't bring people together. People won't cooperate more. As the police get more and more storm-trooper-y to keep the populace in line (in the current precarious economic situation, over a third of Britons have less than 500 pounds savings!) they will eventually have to deal with the same hazards that Iraqi police supporting the US puppet regime in Iraq deal with. It's all bad.

    [Aug02'08] Year-to-year growth in M3 (reconstructed) may have stopped growing (top graph here) Note that it's still at an awfully high level (increasing 16% per year); but now it has dropped from increasing 18% per year. M3 growth was wobbling around 6% per year in 2003 to 2006. I don't know how this relates to all the financial turmoil, since I was sort of expecting that M1 growth would be contracting (it's actually expanding), while I would have expected the opposite for M3. Is the Fed finally losing the ability to make the overall money supply expand?

    [Aug06'08] The air force has dropped a a large number of bombs in Afghanistan this July (515 bombs), which almost reaches the August 2007 record (670 bombs -- stats here). The US/UK/EU invaded Afghanistan in 2001, supposedly to catch Osama, who probably died of kidney problems in 2001. All the carnage doesn't even make the news. It's impossible to get US-ians or UK-ians worked up the loss of life and limb of low market value humans; but you can't even get them to pay attention to the loss of tax dollars used for this purpose. One wonders what kind of wake-up call would be required. Storm troopers coming to collect late mortgage payments?

    [Aug09'08] One thing that explains sustained buying by the Chinese of electronically generated US dollars is that the Chinese stock market is down 50% this year -- "The Great Leap Floorward". This means that the Chinese have been buying less machine tools from places like Germany, which will put a strong damper on further rises in the Euro. The German economy has actually contracted for a quarter. The US hasn't contracted yet, at least officially (tho there are a huge number of extra people now going to food banks). Spain's manufacturing output fell almost 10% in June. But all this beggar thy neighbor is a distraction. In the medium term (20-40 years), we *desperately need* contraction! -- contraction in energy use, water use, fish use, coal use, and of course, population. Instead, we are only beginning to think about getting ready to start to consider slightly lowering the rate of growth! And even that is considered to be unpatriotic, both in the US and India. I'm sure all the deer on a small island finishing off the last of the browse have the same patriotic feeling about growing their herd/business. As a science deer, I just hope the pro-growth deer don't come after me when the SHTF because we scientists failed to "come up with something". My best guess -- and the guess of a lot of other scientists -- is that there isn't a "something" out there that would allow us to continue current population growth and energy use growth, and growth in percentage of the population using western-style energy water and food per capita. It's not impossible that scientists and engineers will "come up with something" (plan A). But we also need plan B. This starts with scientists being more honest. The recent shameful MIT press release about a new water electrolysis electrode is *not* a good example of this. At this rate, it's snake oil, all the way down.

    [Aug10'08] The initial news coming out of Georgia/Ossetia was extremely difficult to decode (e.g., see this AP/Reuters summary that highlights the Russian counterattack but downplays the initial Georgian assault that killed the 1,500 in the article title). It appears the conflict started with major Georgian artillery and air strikes and tank assaults by their US- and Israeli-trained and supplied military on the small South Ossetia city of Tskhinvali, killing hundreds (or two thousand), leaving most buildings damaged. South Ossetia is the breakaway-from-Georgia republic, where Georgia itself previously broke away from the USSR. South Ossetia has been a de facto independent country allied with Russia since 1992. Russia responded with much larger artillery and air strikes and tanks assualts. Georgia seems to have lost the war it started, and Russia's larger counteroffensive may end up taking additional territory. Under the cover of this confusing chaos, there are reports that a huge US/UK/EU armada, almost as big as the ones before the Gulf wars I and II, is headed to Iran, perhaps to try to set up a blockade. Those reports have been disputed. I was already worried about a carrier sinking as a way to get the US public behind an Iran war in 2004 (my first public peak oil talk). Just a possible scenario. I'm still hopeful it won't happen (and that the carrier strike force reports are the usual periodic disinfo).

    [Aug18'08] Propaganda from Sky, using Tskhinvali ruins (destroyed by initial assault by the Georgians on South Ossetia that started the war) to smear Russians by pretending it was from Gori. Watching teevee can really make you stoopid. Just say no.

    [Aug19'08] Predicting the overall shape of the near term (several year) trend in house prices in the US, UK, and EU isn't rocket science. As a result of more than a hundred years of experience in the modern world, lenders have restricted loans to 2.5 to 3 times yearly earnings. This began to change, starting about 10 years ago and culminated in obvious inanities like having people pay less than even the interest for a few years in order to allow them to take out an obviously too-large loan. Now that banks have stopped doing that, prices in inflated parts of the US/UK/EU still have to drop by a lot (like another 50%) to get back into historical equilibrium with salaries. Of course, prices could be propped up by increasing people's salaries! That, however, is completely off the table. People's salaries are likely to go down! So prices surely have to continue down, too. It has been obvious to any sane person for years that this would have to happen sooner or later (I already wrote about it as "perhaps the largest bubble in human history" in 2002, above). But the most insane thing about this whole fiasco is that it happened and is will have to be unwound *before* peak oil and peak energy have really begun to really bite. Peak oil/energy constitutes a completely *independent* deflating factor to be added on top of the deflating house bubble. Bummer. I feel like that giant Gary Larson roach taking a shower when the drain plugs: "I hate to think of what's down there".

    [Aug29'08] Thank you David Miliband for inspiring the British to quickly find more oil and natural gas in their declining North Sea fields (peaked in 2000). Although it didn't work in Texas (the 10 times more wells drilled after Texas' unexpected peak in 1970 didn't stop the slow American decline which has continued to this day), and although superior British technology has not yet stopped the 6-8% per year North Sea decline rate since 2000, perhaps the problem was lack of motivation, since Russia had been selling low. This reminds me of the last time there was a natural gas line cutoff over a pipeline dispute last year. The British press scolded the Russians for 'not being reliable suppliers'. Tchya right, it's a sellers market from now on, forever. Playing lapdog to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was one thing. Perhaps Mr. Miliband should volunteer to lead the charge into Russia.

    [Aug29'08] As I was listening, irritatedly, to London emergency sirens, I was curious if there were any studies of accidents involving ambulances. I found this study (behind a paywall), claiming to be the first of its kind in the UK. The bottom line was: about 10 deaths per year from accidents involved ambulances out of a total 3000 total road deaths per year (20% of those pedestrians) for the entire UK. The ambulances sure do crash a lot, though -- 4 times a day in London alone (!) according to the less than reliable this is london. If you add deaths from road accidents involving police and fire fighters (who have higher road accident death rates than ambulance drivers), emergency-vehicle-involved road deaths are probably on the order of 1-2% of total road deaths. Still, not too bad considering some of the supremely stupid stunts I've seen them do.

    [Sep09'08] Despite the fact that the 'liquid bombers' were cleared of targetting aircraft, the 'thousands standing around' TSA and their British equivalents (DOT) have vowed to continue to keep us safe by stealing our sunscreen and bottled water. What a complete scam.

    [Sep15'08] Riverbend hasn't posted anything to her blog since one post after arriving in Syria in October 2007. Hope she is still OK/alive.

    [Sep18'08] US attacks on Pakistan seem hardly to make the news given all the banking shenanigans. Both McCain and Obama support attacks on Pakistan. This would be a considerable extension of the war on Afghanistan. Reports suggest that the US and NATO have been moving additional troops and hardware there recently. Time to take our weaponized urine to the streets before it's too late!

    [Sep23'08] The Marriot bombing may have been a US attack on Pakistan (see above). The Pakistani leader calling for the US to stop cross border raids from Afghanistan narrowly escaped.

    [Sep30'08] The beginnings of a turn in mood of the US public could be dangerous for bankers and corporations if it gets out of hand. People are just barely becoming aware of the fact that the current deleveraging plan is extract money entirely from them -- from pensions, standard of living, salaries, health care, etc. If they continue to get more and more angry, some kind of distraction will be obligatory. The US is navigating through dangerous waters right now and the effects are worldwide. Across the world, overnight interbank borrowing rates have jumped so high that central banks are the only source of (created from nothing!) cash. These bank monkeys don't trust each other at all, plus they're playing chicken with us.

    [Oct03'08] Pretty amazing picture of house prices in the US, UK, EU and Japan. The upcoming fall in the UK is likely to be *the* most spectacular in all of recorded history. Tulips don't count.

    [Oct05'08] British bankers are angry with the Irish for guaranteeing the full value of deposits of 6 Irish banks. This caused a large amount of money to be withdrawn at the end of last week from British banks and put into those Irish banks. The British were outraged, calling it a beggar-thy-neighbor tactic comparable to catapaulting plague-ridden corpses into the city. Whatever. Maybe if the British banks themselves began to trust each other more (the London interbank offered [overnight] lending rate was at a record high, indicating very low trust), regular people would, too, yer fink? Not that the Irish government could possibly pay if several banks went under (the potential size of the bailout was 24 times the size of the US bailout!). But once again, idiot bankers shooting themselves in the foot is the least of our problems. The impending permanent energy crisis will be a lot worse. I have no idea how the stupid banker tricks situation will be resolved. I am quite sure of how the energy crisis will be resolved -- by using less energy, every year, for the next 40 years (the rest of my life). The first 10 years will be OK. It's going to get more tricky after that. It's going to involve a lot of coal -- which constitutes about 2/3 of the remaining fossil fuel. 50% of all the coal so far used by humans was used after 1972. The percentage of human energy coming from coal has recently jumped in Asia and is going to increase sharply in the US/UK/EU as oil and then natural gas decline. Peak coal will occur around 2025 or 2030, long after peak oil and peak natural gas. Current political discussions in the US and UK are so far removed from reality I feel like I'm on drugs, but I'm not, so don't choke me.

    [Oct07'08] Hmmm. I wonder if people will finally draw the conclusion of how out of touch with the real world these crazy financial gyrations are. Oil dropping by 50% in the year of peak oil! The paper price of gold going down together with a shortage of the metal. I feel like I did last week with the disgusting American bailout. If you bankers bring down the financial system, we'll bring down your food system. "Hi guys, even though I do rent a flat *near* the bankers, I'm actually not one of them. T hey're over that-a-way...". I predict things will settle down (stop dropping) in a month. It's just money -- not energy (yet).

    [Oct08'08] Today, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling announced a 50 billion pound (or 500 billion pound) bailout of all the major UK banks after the share value of UK banks fell by 50% over the past two days. Brown blamed the entire problem on Americans for concealing toxic assets (that British banks eagerly invested in), even though "they both have an enormous amount of admiration for Hank Paulson". I think the Americans *are* at fault, but "gladly wearing holes in your tongue" licking the boots of that stinky troll Hank Paulson? Eeeeeewwww! The truly scary thing for me, living here in the UK, was that none of the British reporters at the press conference made even an oblique reference to facts that: (1) UK and EU banks are *more* leveraged than US banks, (2) the debt-to-earnings ratios of Britons are substantially worse than even those of Americans, and (3) the housing bubble in the UK is *twice* the size (!) of the now-deflating housing bubble in America, both measured in relative price levels and in loan-to-income ratios. One might note that those three things are often cited as causes for the problems in America. Any rational person who can click a mouse can see that there is going to be an even steeper housing price crash here in the UK than in the US, that the US crash is not done yet, and that the British crash will be delayed by 1-2 years relative to the American one. These things are not hard to predict since they change at such a leisurely pace (see graph above). C'mon, I thought the UK reporters were supposed to ask more hard-hitting questions than Americans!

    [Oct11'08] Clearly, something is still completely wacked with the US$ LIBOR: short term interest rates are wildly higher than long term interest rates for the same thing. On the cautiously positive side, this suggests that bankers think some of the problems that have led to a complete freeze in interbank lending will soon go away. Of course, these are the same people who thought it was a good idea to invent bets on things that were worth 10 or 100 times the thing itself (everything in the entire world).

    [Oct13'08] The EU and the UK have bought controlling shares in several of their banks and in the UK, the government is now planning to force the state owned banks to expand their mortgage lending to 2007 levels. The only thing left now is to find families desperate to (1) get hugely into debt (2) in a hugely overpriced housing market (3) that's declining (4) while jobs are being lost all around and (5) mortgage rates are increasing. Sheesh. Somehow I don't think there are enough families stupid enough to try this now (as there were in 2007 at the peak of the bubble). What's the next step? A British Phaedra and Fredrick? (Fannie just doesn't work in British English). It seems pretty clear that the problem is not a lack of debt, but *too much* debt -- adding yet more debt is hardly going to solve the problem! I thought the origin of the problem was supposed to be poor people having taken out mortgages they couldn't afford! British already have the worst debt-to-income ratio of any Western country (worse than Americans!). Increasing it further will help?! Meanwhile, the markets are doing their market thing. Lately, because of the fall in the pound against the euro, pharmaceutical drug wholesalers have been making a killing by buying drugs cheaply in the UK and then selling them at a profit in the EU, depleting the supply of prescription medicines in the UK. The invisible hand comes and grabs you by the heart muscle.

    [Oct15'08] One UK bank, Barclays now holds $2.4 trillion dollars in credit default swaps -- more than the entire GDP of the UK. They're probably hoping the 21 Oct payouts on CDS's for Lehman go smoothly. Royal Bank of Scotland (recently taken over by the UK gov't) holds an equivalent amount of CDS's.

    [Nov06'08] The UK needs to immediately get out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and ressurect its manufacturing, not its banks. There is an enourmous amount of stuff that has to be manufactured for renewable energy, energy efficient retrofits (e.g., windows, heat pumps), more electric rail, and electric bicycles and carts. We don't need to rescue banks to do this. Banks don't make anything. And when they fail, they just fire everybody, pay obscene bonuses to the criminals that ran them into the ground, and leave huge bills with the taxpayer. Good riddance. We need to rescue manufacturing. Quick. North Sea oil is plummetting at a rates approaching 10% per year. I'm flabbergasted to see another runway at Heathrow and new motorways on the drawing board with the wolf at the door. Wolf.

    [Nov09'08] LondonBanker unfortunately has it right: "I have a bad feeling LondonBanker that America has just elected its Tony Blair." Meanwhile in Spain, unemployment has reached 14%, and looks like it's on its way to Depression-like levels of 20-25%.

    [Nov12'08] The drop in oil prices has resulted in a 46% surge in imports by China year-on-year in September (to 4.9 million barrels/day, where world usage is about 85 million barrels/day). That's was an unusually large one month blip, but Chinese *consumption* (about 8 million barrels/day, since they are still a major oil producer) has been going up at a rate of about 5% per year. Note that because Chinese production is now decreasing, this means that Chinese *imports* are going up faster than 5% per year. The overall picture is that the remaining 30 or so cubic miles of accessible oil in the world is being drawn out at 1 cubic mile a year, give or take a few percent. Oil price swings are not going to have much of an affect on peak oil. Oil will be on the way up again next year. Here are some pics showing that oil is already being used efficiently elsewhere to carpool, and when that fails, to train pool. It looks dangerous and it is: 10 people die every day commuting on Mumbai trains.

    [Nov27'08] Watching the response to the attacks in India. Obama now has a pretext for a Pakistan attack (see Newspeak here preparing the proles). Two wars and an economic meltdown are not enough. Perhaps a third war would help? The Mumbai terror attacks killed a few foreigners (news for parrots), but the great majority killed were Indian. The number killed was equivalent to the number of people killed every few weeks riding Mumbai's overcrowded trains (see above), but those people don't even count as non-parrots.

    [Dec06'08] The wild swings in currency markets are very disturbing. There is a rumor that China is planning a major devaluation (e.g., 30%) of its currency (it did some small devaluations this week). That could provoke a race to the bottom, tariffs, and continued deflation. The lack of understanding of the dynamics (esp. mine!) of the borg that has been created scares me. Many important parts of the world can't possibly change this fast (e.g., amount of oil left, the degree to which we understand how the brain works, how much time it takes to grow a tomato). It's just a bunch of monkeys with their little minds all bunched up running for the exits all at once. The worst part of it is that it is hugely distracting from the *real* problems (like the fact that we used up half the oil and are going through the second half a lot faster than the first half -- esp. when the price drops by 2/3 virtually at the very moment of peak oil!). I just noticed that the monstruous discontinuity I pointed to a few weeks back in the BASE money supply here just went flat. Despite no blood in the streets, I'm not feeling confident about just-in-time practices and the insanely steep drop in the Baltic Dry Goods index.

    [Dec07'08] Although this particular instantiation of home-brew small battery-assisted vehicles is more dangerous than it needs to be, it obviously points in the exact direction we should all be going! Instead of seeing the possibilities, the authorities just crack down keep the steeenking diesel taxis running. Battery-assisted carts are much more energy efficient than diesel cabs. Eventually, the authorities will see the error of their ways -- probably about the time they are no longer authorities...

    [Dec09'08] It was a relief to see the BASE graph flatten (Dec06). The dogleg up must have come from the Fed buying off balance sheet crap to turn it into reserves (as opposed to my probably wrong idea that it was somehow related to cash raised by hedge fund withdrawals). The amount of US cash *was* increased by 1.7x in a month or two when the normal increase is 1.03x per year, but at least it has stopped (for now). I suppose it's a sign of how bad things have gotten that something like this looks good. Although I have seen relatively little on it, I imagine there is terrible damage being done to alternative energy by the combination of low oil prices and reduced credit -- and right at peak oil. All this from oil demand having 'crashed' -- from 1.8% annual *growth* to 1.2% annual growth. This is a classic example where a more rational approach to industrial civilization would help -- e.g., we could put a price floor under oil. Instead, everybody helplessly watches emotion-driven business cycle hack away at the branch we're all sitting on. This isn't creative destruction; this is suicidal destruction. Once down, industrial civilization may be very difficult or impossible to resuscitate -- all too placate some wrong, mean-spirited, and ultimately, short-lived idea about how people are supposed to interact.

    [Dec10'08] It is looking more and more that truly humungous amounts of money (8 trillion) dumped into banks to try to keep them in operation as credit default swaps (CDS's) and hedge funds unwind is *not enough*, not only in the US but also in the EU. Currently, there are roughly $50 trillion in CDS's. According to this article by Chris Whalen (from Dec 1), the EU is considering freezing CDS payments, which will crash the whole system, and require more nationalizations. Yet this is a perfectly reasonable strategy given that generating an amount of money almost equal to *the entire US gross product* and giving it to these criminals *was not enough* to stabilize things! Because banks are doing nothing else but trying to pay these gambling debts, they are endangering the entire world economy by virtually shutting down credit to the real economy (food, energy, housing). If this is what the free market is, it has completely failed. Call a spade a spade. CDS's utterly failed at the three things they were supposed to do! -- raise capital (eating bailouts the size of the whole GDP doesn't count!), manage risk (the gubmint is bailing them out!), discover prices (what are their prices? no one wants to look in that septic tank so their prices are basically indeterminate!). The only additional thing we need is a pile of the perps in jail -- right next to the guys already there for decades for non-violent drug offenses. Isn't bringing the economy of the entire Earth to its knees at the moment of peak oil for personal gain at least as bad a thing as selling a few kilos of weed? I'm against the death penalty. I just want to see a bunch of "big swinging d*cks" in jail. In the London paper. This year. If the average person had any idea of the gross criminality involved here, the perps would be hanging from bridges right now.

    [Dec16'08] Muntather Al Zaidi rocks: "This is the farewell kiss, you dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq". There was no American (or American reporter) brave enough to do this. Since he was arrested, they broke his arm and several ribs, knocked out a tooth, and injured one eye (inside the Green zone, natch). The US and British pigs have killed almost a million Iraqis since the 2003 invasion of a country that contains 10-15% of the world's remaining oil. This year, they are revving up the sickening, automated slaughter in Afghanistan (using robot drones to track and kill kids and everybody else at yet another wedding -- what is it with you military sickos and weddings? -- in multiple attacks) and Obama-pig is planning to transfer 30,000 troops from Iraq to Afghanistan because the occupation there is deteriorating so precipitously. Why do Anglo pigs have such a taste for blood? Stop the wars! Don't you idiots know there's a depression on? You prefer blood even to money?

    [Dec23'08] The price of oil is dangerously low. It is likely to increase chaotically next year as the world's one-cubic-mile-a-year drawdown slams up against current production cutbacks, project cancellations, exporting-country export cuts, and China resuming imports after the Olympics clean air shutdown. Among other things, Mexico -- which relies on oil for 40% of its budget, and which is a major exporter to the US -- is on a path to cease all exports within two years (causing enormous problems in both Mexico and the US) as Cantarell continues its breathtaking plunge in production. The whole sorry process of speculation driven price rise is bound to repeat itself (I can virtually see surviving hedge funds slavering over the unnaturally low oil price/buying opportunity). I doubt the insanity will stop until there is some kind of insurrection when we get to gas lines that never go away. Meanwhile, back at the oildrum, Heading Out published an embarrassingly bad global warming denial article, which brought a bunch of bugs out of the closet in the comments section. As several sensible posters remarked, if you guys (1) can't read and understand the basic climate graphs, (2) can't afford to spend a few hours scanning articles at RealClimate.org, (3) insist on cherry picking a few points out of a noisy but unambiguously smoothly rising temperature graph, (4) can't overlook the fact that it was cold this week in their back yard but at the same time, *can* overlook the fact that ski lodges the world over are rewriting their business plans as 98% of glaciers retreat, then *why* should we take your oil and coal articles seriously? Indeed, there is way too much noise there. The venerable ASPO newletters are more pithy and less whiny.

    [Dec26'08] When people look back from what I fear will be the wreckage of 2060, I think they will come to see the 1980's as the true beginning of the end industrial civilization. Starting 20 years before, in the 1960's, a substantial collection of people (Hubbert, limits to growth, environmental movement) first got access to enough good data in order to correctly undertand the main outlines of the problem of the non-sustainablity of fossil fueled industrial civilization, including water, soil and fish drawdown, and climate. But this understanding was distracted by the holocaust in Vietnam and surrounding countries engineered by the US (3-4 million killed), the post-Vietnam war recession of the 1970's, and then the stagflation, 18% interest rates, Savings and Loan scams (true pikers those S-and-L guys were by modern standards!), and oil price collapse of the 1980's. Right at a time in the late 1980's, when the richest countries probably had their last chance to retool industry, transportation, housing, farming, and cities to head off the end of industrial civilization, many of them instead rapidly sped up the pace of *de*industrialization, outsourcing, and labor arbitrage, as a result of the suicidal incentives of a toxic economic system that rewarded bets upon bets upon bets at the expense of the real economy and the real world. Now, on the cusp of peak oil and the beginnings of a great decline, the same pitifully idiotic system is blindly thrashing about, collapsing the price of oil by greatly amplifying relatively tiny short term oil supply/demand oscillations (a few percent demand reduction!), which has resulted in immediate disinvestment in energy and housing retrofits and industrial recycling. The troubles on the way as the financial system finishes unwinding over the next few years will further distract people. If things get bad enough, people will rise up -- and burn down their neighbors' houses. That won't help if it doesn't change the suicidal incentives of the current financial system. On the other hand, I hate to think of what would happen if the current financial system actually did collapse under a sustained popular revolt. Could things have been any different? When I was younger, I definitely thought so. Now, I'm not so sure. If we couldn't collectively do the right thing before, it's not clear to me that stressing the system by financial crisis combined with the beginnings of energy, food, and water constriction will get better results. The overall system is so complex that it is almost impossible for one person to even understand its outlines -- yet at the same time it relies on the combined daily purchasing and eating decisions of those very same single people. Even though I can't see a way out, I'm still hoping for the best, because the future always full of surprises. Happy dangerous new year.

    [Dec26'08] "We have very great and destructive strength which we do not wish to use. I think of the tens of thousands of children and innocents who will be in danger as a result of Hamas's actions." -- Ehud Olmert explaining why the slaughter innocents will be required when Israel invades Gaza after months of Israeli food, water, power and banking blockades.

    [Dec27'08] 60 US-supplied F16's, helicopters, and drones were used by Israel today to conduct more than 30 air strikes on police stations and prisons in tightly packed civilian neighborhoods in the Gaza ghetto. A pharmacy in Rafah and several medical centers were also bombed and destroyed, and there were 6 air strikes on the Gaza University. More than 100 tons of bombs were dropped, killing over 200 people, including women and children, and injuring 700 in what has been called the Chanukah massacre. Most of the world criticized the killings. Obama said, "no comment", which translates as "they got the green light from us (the US and the UK)". Israel is going into emergency PR mode, helped along by places like the BBC and the Huffington Post, to explain to the world why Israel dropping 100 tons of bombs from fighter jets on one of the most densely populated civilian neighborhoods on the planet that have been deprived of water and electricity for months by Israel itself is not terrorism. The subtext is that it's not terrorism because it's being done by the master race and because those being starved and killed by the hundreds are low-market-value untermenschen each of whose lives are worth at best 1/100 of the value of people from the master race (a cultural definition of race, since the victims are genetically the same as many of the people in the master race); thus 9 Israeli civilians have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza since Sept 2005 (none over the past few months), while over the same period, at least 1,400 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces in Gaza (B'Tselem). Also, the Palestinians elected the wrong guys (Hamas). That's the way this particular democracy works (kind of like the original 5th century version in Greece). Only the votes of the master race count. If you vote for the wrong party, you get starved out and bombed. The Chanukah massacre was designed in part to boost the fortunes of the 'moderate' Livni and Barak relative to far-right Netanyahu (currently ahead in the polls) in the upcoming election (sorry, the other half of the country doesn't get to vote in that one). The Israel-approved Palestinian Authority (Abbas, Fatah) is now 'ready to take' Gaza. These are the puppets the Palestinians were supposed to have voted for in the first place.

    [Dec29'08] The Gaza death toll is up to 300 untermenschen, over 1000 injured. Gazans attempting to flee through breeches in the Egyptian border wall of their concentration camp were fired upon by Egyptian border guards. It's so bad even the stinking Rattie pope had to mumble something today. The problem is that there are more Arabs than Jews in 'Greater Israel'. The only path to a majority Jewish state at this point is (finishing) ethnic cleansing ('transfer') begun in 1948, or outright extermination of Palestinians. A west bank 'Palestinian state' broken into hundreds of disconnected patches by a mesh of Jews-only roads going to Jewish settlements with apartheid checkpoints and concrete walls, plus the disconnected Gaza ghetto is not, and never was, an option. And of course, without transfer or extermination, democracy (one person, one vote) for Greater Israel is not an option either, because Israelis are afraid of what Palestinians might do after what Israelis have done to Palestinians for the past 60 years. It's remarkable how these basic facts on the ground are presented in mainstream US and UK media. A simple map of the mosaic of separated bantustans of the proposed so-called Palestinian state has never appeared in the mainstream media. Only a tiny number of Americans even know of the existence of the Jews-only roads criss-crossing the ever incipient 'Palestinian state', or how many people still save 1948 keys to what used to be their homes in current day Israel (many razed). In the mainstream make-believe world, speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi responded to the slaughter in Gaza with: "When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally." In that narrative, untermenschen, by contrast, can be attacked and slaughtered at will, the blockade/siege of the last 3 months doesn't exist, Israel's breaking of the cease fire on 5 Nov 2008 by killing 5 Hamas officials (under the radar, one day after US election) doesn't count, there is no such thing as a Palestinian civilian, their pharmacies and universities and ambulances are terrorist infrastructure, they have no right to defend themselves from attacks, they can only vote for Israeli-approved candidates, and they can't even run away when bombs rip their neighbors' flesh. This slaughter was planned 6 months ago for the upcoming election to ensure that the candidates' hands would be covered with enough Arab blood to beat Netanyahu. Absolutely disgusting.

    [Dec30'08] Air raids on Gaza continue (400+ total so far). The Israeli navy had two high speed patrol boats ram the Dignity early this morning, a Free Gaza cabin cruiser, in international waters, with Cynthia McKinney, CNN's Karl Penhaul (CNN video here, doctors, surgeons, and 3 tons of medical supplies on board. The Dignity suffered some damage, but eventually made it to Lebanon after being turned back. The fact that a CNN newsman with a satellite connection was on board probably saved the doctors and medical supplies from being burnt to a crisp as 'terrorist infrastructure'. The only way to begin to break through the silence is with high-market-value human shields (with satellite connections!). They can't be local stringers, who will get slaughtered without consequence or report. They have to be from the US or UK, and white (so Cynthia McKinney won't help, brave as she was to get on the boat).

    [Dec31'08] The estimated combined losses in commodities, stocks, bonds, and real estate has reached perhaps $60 trillion dollars. Looking back over my comments above, I noticed a comment from the halcyon days of... just this summer, WTF?! bemoaning the fact that bank losses looked like they were going to get up to $1-$2 trillion -- 10 times the size of the Savings and Loan disaster of the 1980's. $60 trillion dollars has evaporated from the world economy in less than a year. The US Fed has injected or promised to inject/create around $8 trillion dollars. The UK, EU, Japan and Chinese central banks have also done their part (maybe another $10 trillion?). Doesn't look inflationary at all so far. And aside from oil, I have a hard time seeing stocks, bonds, and real estate shooting up tens of trillions of dollars in 2009.

    [Dec31'08] Found by Keith here: the United Nations reported on Tuesday that 320 people were killed in Gaza, including 62 civilians, and around 1,400 injured. "[The 62 figure] does not include civilian casualties who are men, even though we know that there have been some civilian men killed as well," UN humanitarian affairs co-ordinator John Holmes said. Only when they were called on it, did BBC cover their cowardly racist Goebbels behinds and change "civilians" to "women and children". Imagine saying that with Jew substituted for Palestinian. But the BBC still won: the sick meaning remains the same -- Palestinians have no right to defend themselves. Here's some more civilians that do have that right. Or look at how *air raids* on Gaza university are justified as 'self-defense' (!), while an academic boycott of Israeli universities is anti-semitic. Air raids on Gaza university are anti-semitic!

    [Jan01'09] "In six days of shock-and-awe raids, IAF warplanes have carried out more than 500 sorties against Hamas targets, and helicopters have flown hundreds more combat missions, a senior Israeli military officer said on condition of anonymity in line with military regulations." -- Ha'aretz. Wow, pretty brave you anonymous 'combat' guys are, using US-made high tech jets and pilotless drones and $5 billion in US 'aid' per year to rain tons of US-made high tech bombs onto a densely packed city that lacks any trace of air defenses in the latest 'hostilities' -- and a city you've had under a water, food, medicine, and power blockade/siege for months. And I suppose this pathetic echo of the outgoing ape-like president of the US (no offense to apes) celebrating his much larger holocaust in Iraq is a loving thank-you note for all the tax dollars that many of us opposed sending to you. May you end up some day before a war crimes tribunal. That looks remote now, but it is gradually getting harder to hide behind the servile mainstream media. Great work by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has helped to dig out the real story behind the recent war porn snuff video posted by the IDF on YouTube (and now withdrawn).

    [Jan02'09] Thousands of seriously injured people including 100 with 3rd degree burns covering their bodies, possibly from tungsten or phosphorus incendiary bombs, are lying in the cold and dark in a Gaza hospital, which had all its windows blown out when the nearby mosque was bombed. News from Gaza now comes only from brave foreign doctors like this Norwegian doctor, since all foreign journalists have been banished to several miles away from the border of the Gaza ghetto so Israel can try to conduct its morally depraved election-strategy slaughter in private (i.e., only for the benefit of its electorate). The internet makes it possible for the rest of the world can see, too -- until attacks on infrastructure bring it down, too.

    [Jan03'09] Good turnout at the London demo today (~50,000). Speeches by Annie Lennox and others. Many shoes were thrown at 10 Downing Street. Why are Britons and Americans paying for this sociopathic sh*t? Don't we have a depression on? Instead of trying to fix that, we're paying for Israelis to drive tanks into a refugee camp (their brave depleted-uranium-armed storm trooper tank drivers crossed the border today under cover of no foreign reporters and phosphorus incendiary bombs). Taxes *need* to have line items on them so people have some power to cross things off and rearrange money allocation. I would be happy to pay the same taxes but divert all of my money that has gone into killing Palestinians into the rest of the economy. Israel is not the victim. Stop this insanity. Cut off their funding now.

    [Jan04'09] From Ramzy Baroud: 'A doctor from a Khan Yunis clinic in Gaza told me on the phone, "scores of the wounded are clinically dead. Others are so badly disfigured; I felt that death is of greater mercy for them than living. We had no more room at the Qarara Clinic. Body parts cluttered the hallways. People screamed in endless agony and we had not enough medicine or pain killers. So we had to choose which ones to treat and which not to. In that moment I genuinely wished I was killed in the Israeli strikes myself, but I kept running trying to do something, anything."' The US just blocked a UN call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Barack must-have-misplaced-my-cojones Obama continues to body surf as the 1 week death toll reaches over 500 dead and 3000 injured. You're sure not looking kewl, dude.

    [Jan06'09] With one side of his ugly mouth, Brown calls for a ceasefire. With the other side, he tells the Israelis, go ahead, we won't stop you. Every once in a while the behind-the-scenes maneuvers leak (see, for example, the recent online indiscretion in Rome). What a 'good German' you are, Mr. Brown! How can you sleep at night? I can guess who's got you by the naughty bits so you won't utter a peep about the obscenity of dropping incendiary phosphorus bombs and cluster bombs on 1.5 million defenseless, caged people. What a coward. But despite the continuous blizzard of pro-Israel propaganda on the teevee, the official papers, the internet, the Megaphone, the Facebook censors, more and more bits of the true story are getting through, the smell of burnt flesh is leaking through the cracks, the blood is oozing out of the floorboards. In the US, almost half the population thinks the Israeli attack is not justified! (41% vs. 44% in favor). And here is some real news that has leaked through the media blockade: an eyewitness report put up on ABC news that comes from a high-market-value white person (more believable for UK- and US-ians) doing her best to help in Rafah. Here is another mainstream piece in the Independent, that portrays Palestinians as, imagine, not subhuman! And here is yet another from CBS: "They are bombing 1.5 million people in a cage". Quite a contrast to the carefully qualified tract yesterday in the UK Times that begins with justifiying the firebombs on civilian areas as 'not illegal' -- "we'd like to be sorry, but I'm afraid we can't be, little low-market-value kid, because that was a not-illegal white hot phosphorus bomb fragment that burnt its way all the way down to your leg bone, and furthermore, it's not illegal that we've supported blocking all the pain killers and rubber gloves from getting through to your bombed clinic, and I can't hear your screams, la, la, la, here in London, because we are all very proper British collaborators". There were only 13 comments on that lousy article, no doubt because the Times' hard-working censors stripped out all comments with expressions of outrage (like mine). So the ghastly slaughter continues. An open question is whether the growing realization about what is going on will be able to put a halt to the long standing plans for the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land (note that many of the people in Gaza were already ethnically cleansed from their villages in Israel in 1948 and 1967), or their partial extermination, or both. Never again indeed. The death toll is up to 600 people killed and over 3000 injured. No end in sight. In one incident today, an Israeli tank fired anti-tank fragmentation shells into a UN school inside which civilians were hiding, instantly killing 40 of them. Cowardly mass slaughter of civilians by a terrorist/gunman sitting safely in a tank. They knew exactly what they were doing because the UN gave them the GPS coordinates of all of their schools. The Israelis are trying to exterminate as many people as they can get away with as a means toward their dream/nightmare of an ethnically pure greater Israel. They won't stop if the rest of the world doesn't object strongly. Silence is complicity.

    [Jan07'09] The brutal disproportionate terrorist attack on Gaza civilians seems to be gradually turning public opinion in the US and UK away from Israel (some have argued, because it sounds so much like the lies that motivated the Iraq war). Looking ahead, if this trend continues, I think there is an extremely serious danger of a false flag attack. The mighty Wurlitzer of the press dangled the faked Iraqi nuclear bombs and the real fact of 9-11 to get the US, and to a lesser extent the UK population behind a really large scale terrorist operation (by this standard, the Israelis are pikers) that killed more than a million Iraqis. 9-11 ran Bush's approval up above 90% before the war. The mainstream press has continued to talk about 'al Qaida' and Pakistan nukes. But I am just as worried about 'opinion makers' in Israel. Right after 9-11, Netanyahu memorably said that the attacks were very good for Israel. More recently, in April 2008 he has repeated this point in a talk at Bar Ilan university ("we are benefitting from one thing, ..."). There is no question that a small nuclear explosion in an American city attributed to Muslims would be extremely good for Israel. It's a growing danger. It could trigger a world war. That would be a really stupid move when we've got peak energy/water/soil and climate change on our plate already.

    [Jan07'09] Yonotan Shapira speaks the truth in this BBC interview: "Obama -- don't act like a slave". The impotent UK interviewer does his best to mumble out the usual spin, unintentionally providing a vivid example of the very kind of "slave" Yonotan Shapira is talking about! Meanwhile BBC Radio continues the "la, la, la, I can't hear you" treatment, screening out any callers wanting to talk about the Israeli air strikes and ground offensives in the Middle East. Good Englishmans.

    [Jan12'09] The toll from the Israeli slaughter in Gaza is now approaching 1000 dead and 5000 injured, 50% of those women and children. It's not a "battle" when only one side has all the weapons and half the casualties the one side causes are women and children. It's a cowardly slaughter of bombs and shrapnel versus skin. Bombs and shrapnel always win. Here are the results of phosphorus bombs dropped on unarmed civilizans. This brings to mind video burned into my mind as a teenager of a running napalmed Vietnamese girl (clothes burned off), except there are no movies from ground level this time because Israel carefully kept out all the "white" reporters out of Gaza. I wish there was some way I could have prevented my taxes from supporting these appalling atrocities, which are being carried out by a rogue state with a sociopathic chosen-people/master-race mental illness (an irony if there ever was one) using weapons bought and paid for mostly by US taxpayers. Even my UK teevee tax supports it, by helping fund the constant pro-Israel propaganda blizzard. As an example, the only comment the UK Times censors allowed on the article above about napalming Gazans came from some racist git, supposedly from Canada who supposedly helped to deliver this kind of terror himself. Too cowardly to sign his own name, but 'brave' enough to burn people's skin from a safe distance by remote control. Better watch out dude, maybe they have phosphorus bombs in your hell. Pro-Israel propaganda still dominates US and UK teevee and press; and in an excellent illustration of the power of the lobby, the servile US congress just stood and slavishly delivered an virtually unanimous vote blaming everything on the Palestinians, even though the US public is split almost 50-50 on the issue. But Israel is slowly but surely losing ground in the PR war in the US and UK, and not a moment too soon. The pro-Palestinian demo in London this weekend was the largest ever -- over 100,000 people came out on a below-freezing day. Or look at Jon Stewart. Or what about the Canadian postal service (!) -- they just voted to boycott Israel. Or this post on dailykos. As Yonotan Shapira says, don't be a slave, we must all act now to avoid world war before it's too late.

    [Jan14'09] Yet another 'bin Laden' message from beyond the grave to distract attention from the ongoing atrocities and to associate those of us objecting to them with the long dead nemesis/asset. This is getting so preposterous that people are beginning to laugh openly.

    [Jan18'09] Stop the killing. One state, one person, one vote is the only solution. The tables are beginning to turn on the racist Zionists. Tom Friedman and Jim Kunstler (et tu?!) calls for more Palestinian blood and more burnt skin won't help. Does Tommy *really* think that killing 6,000 Palestinians civilians instead of the 600 plus killed already would actually help Israel? And besides, they're already bombing hospitals and schools (67 schools), shooting at medics who are trying to retrieve burnt dead babies from getting eaten by dogs (21 medics killed over past 3 weeks), fire-bombing apartments and UN food supplies, and now, slaughtering a Palestinian doctor's daughters, live, on Israeli teevee. Where does this sicko bloodlust come from? I hate to think of what exactly would get Tom off. A Palestinian Dresden or Nagasaki? Killing 'just' 6,000 Palestinian civilians wouldn't be enough to solve the 'demographic problem' of the sociopathic master-race-ers (again, so ironic since the Palestinians are closely related to the biblical Hebrews, genetically speaking -- see this pdf for a review of the interwoven genetic relations of the region). The only way to do that would be to kill more than a million Palestinians. Even the groveling US Congress (100-0, 395-4 vote in favor of Israel at a time when the US public is split evenly on that question) would have trouble gagging that one down. Israel has done everything possible to make two-state solution impossible. So what's wrong with one state, one person, one vote? Remember the creep-out feeling you would get in the 80's when an academic from South Africa introduced himself? Gerald Kaufmann, MP, just gave a fineCommons speech: "My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians". George Galloway's speech was very good, too. Listen to Mearsheimer: "It [Israel] is pursuing a strategy ... that is placing its long-term future at risk". One person, one vote. Stop the killing. Talk about the methods of the lobby publically. Prosecute war crimes. Don't let Israel steal Gaza's offshore methane/gas by (a second!) terror/ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians into Egypt. Don't be a slave.

    [Jan19'09] I can sympathize with Israelis complaining about Americans telling them they shouldn't treat Palestinians like untermenshen after seeing the holocaust the Americans engineered in Iraq (starvation, followed by over 1.3 million killed) and Afghanistan. Without ignoring the fact that the American attack on Iraq was intensely lobbied for by Israel and popular there, the Americans and Britons actually did the killing. Those were numerically larger, and therefore, worse crimes, since in my book, each person has approximately the same value as another. But I'm not anti-American any more than I'm anti-semitic. Slaughtering people of *any* kind is a crime, no matter who does it, and no matter whether they use knives, artillery, remote missles from drones, or gas. At least 50 million 'other' people were slaughtered in WWII; that was a tragedy 10 times bigger than the Holocaust. But all this is just stupid fiddling while Rome burns. The peak energy/soil/water wolf is at the door of world industrial civilization. We really should be keeping our eye on the ball instead of cultivating worthless, failed racist/supremacist thought patterns. They have a bad habit of getting stuck inside people's animal+language brains, and once they get in there, it takes decades to pry them loose. They always lead to the same old sh*t. Mine is a pragmatic view! When the energy crunch really starts to bite, do we really want to see everybody flying their master race flag? Instead, how about we cooperate like scientists did when they figured out physics and biology?

    [Jan20'09] "The only question is how to dismantle this monstrous suicidal hawkish creature without turning our planet into a fireball." -- Gilad Atzmon interview. [Jan22'09] The Gaza death toll is now up to about 1400 people, almost 1000 of which were Palestinian civilians. 50,000 people lost their homes. Here is Uri Dromi, former government press adviser, explaining what Israel's problem was, soon after the start of the so-called 'war'. Even though "the timing was perfect" because "no one was there, Obama was in Hawaii, Bush was in Texas, Condoleezza Rice was away, it was a twilight zone", there remained a "hearts and minds" problem: "When you have a Palestinian kid facing an Israeli tank, how do you explain that the tank is actually David and the kid is Goliath? That is why television kills us". It's hard to believe it, but that statement wasn't ironic. Television kills, but tanks shooting at kids are an image problem. That last statement *was* ironic.

    [Jan25'09] I usu. don't like Neil Young. But I loved the sound track to Dead Man and this is pretty good. The best line (which I suppose applies to me!) is: "Keep on bloggin... 'til the power goes out" :-}

    [Feb10'09] "A week ago or so, a friend of mine, the legendary musician Robert Wyatt, helped me put it into words in the most eloquent and simple way. 'My politics', said, 'is very simple, I am just an anti-racist'. This is really what it is all about, being an 'anti-racist.'" -- Gilad Atzmon. I agree. Each person is about as valuable as any other person. There are no master races.

    [Mar01'09] When I heard that almost 2/3 of Americans support the Afghanistan 'surge' in the midst of something worse than the Depression formerly known as Great, it struck me as insanely idiotic. Here is another insane idiocy: oil companies have reduced the number of drilling rigs operating in the US by almost 40% since Septemper 2008. Virtually right at the moment of peak oil and gas. The market is an idiot, too -- which is why we're truly f*$k'd. Of course, it would be a *great* idea to reduce rig count in tandem with planning for a lower energy future! But we're not planning a lower energy future at all. Instead, the continuous 1 cubic mile per year drawdown of oil for the world (give or take a few percent here and there), along with an almost energy-equivalent drawdown of natural gas will slam into the reduced production in a year or two, after additional economic contraction and deflation. The skyrocketing price of oil will probably cause even more deflation in everything else. Why is planning ahead such a dirty word for deer-humans?

    [Mar14'09] Just back from a movie at the Barbican (got there on foot). It started with 5 car commercials (already saw them now repeatedly in the movie theaters -- the perks for one car even included 'free insurance', which no doubt is also 'carbon neutral'...). Then there were ads with pictures of wind turbines. The amateurish and irritating movie that followed was about a clueless drifter with absolutely no skills, and her dog, which she loses, finds, and then gives away. Ah! perhaps I had missed the fact that the movie was actually a parable about the fate of industrial civilization! Bring on even more clueless pictures of wind turbines!

    [Apr02'09] I don't think there were enough photographers at this 'event', do you? Craig Murray has a good summary here.

    [Apr27'09] I wish I could say I've come up with something useful to help with all the problems I have written about. But no. I suppose I'm really no different than the young lady and her dog I made fun of last month. I just passively watch the financial criminals lining their smelly pockets, just like everyone else watches. I just watch the one cubic mile per year of 100 million year old oil being burnt (most other people don't see this yet). I just watch the obscene and costly 'wars'/occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan grinding on with no publicity, reason, or end in sight, all the while expecting support for them to grow when oil rockets up again in a year or two. I watch people buying and supplying expensive artifical fertilization when there are so obviously too many people already. Then I watch the obscenity of modern emotional technology and media mind control blasting out a month of the IVF Iraqi (!) welfare octomom, who got a $1 million offer to star in a pornographic movie along and death threats to her succession of publicists. I can easily imagine the looks on the salivating Brave New World producers' faces at the moment they got their first look at her face, her name, and her story, as they quickly calculated how to send it out to the weakened helpless minds nursing on their teevees. It really is a matrix. I just feel stunned and hurt.

    [May20'09] The US used to bomb hospitals in Vietnam. It did the same in Fallujah. Now the Sri Lankan military has shelled hospitals in the "no-fire zone" in which 100,000 people are trapped against a coastline. At the same time, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, one million people have fled US remote control drones that have killed thousands of people. Back in the empire, to better prepare our current and future storm troopers, right in sunny San Diego's only (non-union, of course) teevee studio, Stu Seegall productions, has a complete Iraqi village where US military (and the San Diego County District Attorney's Office?!) can practice breaking down doors and breaking through walls of adjoining houses of non-white people to 'fight terror'. Previously Stu Seegall produced and distributed hard core porn movies among other things, but then when the movie business slowed after 9-11, Strategic Operations was born. More than 100,000 trainees have been through it. When you think about what we are currently doing as a species given the trajectory we all know we are on, given well-documented energy/mineral/fish/grain/soil/water depletion (see this 2001 article for a example of how Atlantic cod were strip-mined to virtual extinction -- they're still gone), and combined with continued, idiotic population growth, exactly in the areas that will be hardest hit by climate change (unfairly, since they were mostly not responsible for it), it gives you a bad feeling. Misanthropy. Humans are about to get what they deserve. We can't help ourselves. Literally.

    [May20'09] "From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16% of [US] corporate profits. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21% and 30%, higher than it had ever been in the post-war period. This decade, it reached 41%." -- Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF (quoted here). At that rate, we'd all be 'financial' in another few decades. Who needs fish or food when you're that 'productive'?

    [May21'09] "This idea of two states for two peoples is a stupid and childish solution to a very complex problem," -- senior members of Benjamin Netanyahu's staff. Sounds good. Then one state? Or maybe there is some other 'complex', 'adult' solution the staff members had in mind but were not at liberty to divulge?

    [May31'09] US energy use (From Matt Simmons):
     -- train car of coal every second (86,400 train cars/day)
     -- 10,000 gallons of oil every second (864 million gallons/day)
     -- 60 billion cubic feet of natural gas/day (to moon + back 25 times)
    For the world, multiply by about 4. There is a lot of talk about how oil might go up again in the next 'business cycle'. No doubt it will! But it's parochial to think that the underlying cause is some pathetic 'business cycle'. There is a much bigger cycle that underlies the chaotic oscillations we are about to experience -- the 'world industrial cycle' -- based on the rise and fall of easily available fossil fuel energy. This one probably only has one up and down cycle. Instead of feverishly preparing for this, we have mostly waited until the last second trying to keep on doing what we have been doing for the last 100 years. Right at the precipice -- in the throes of severe world overshoot with respect to energy, food, soil, freshwater, fish, and minerals -- population continues to steadily increase. Why are we doing these things? Martin van Mourik (via Michael Ruppert interview) hit the nail on the head at the 2003 ASPO meeting: "It may not be profitable to slow decline." So not only shall we not prepare, we shall instead do our very best to steepen the cliff off of which we are consciously planning to hurl ourselves. Despite all the beauty and power of our human minds that led us to this very point, and even despite our ability to clearly foresee what lies ahead, we can't seem to stop. This is essence of Greek tragedy, played out on the biggest stage there is. But ending of the play isn't written yet. Still time to change course.

    [Jul12'09] Pretty depressing watching Obama presiding over the largest military ground campaign since Vietnam (Afghanistan) and helping engineer a coup in Honduras while Gordon Brown finds his inner poodle by agreeing to send thousands of British troops to Afghanistan next month. All while both men continue to arrange secret bailouts for slimey super-rich banking criminals. The utter idiocy of paying *any* attention to 'election' diversions has never been clearer. The elections resulted in virtually no change in critical policies and numbers (criminal bank bailouts, running two wars and planning new ones, secret detention and surveillance, funding of 800 military bases across the world, taxes, energy use). It's utterly mad to think that it's just a matter of waiting. For what? For investment in alternative energy to drop even more? Change will only come from something other than elections. No time to get distracted by swine flu (British vaccine is being rushed through safety checks in a week in order to be able to vaccinate the entire population for something that has killed one person, and something that the CDC was already experimenting with creating in 2004), or the next stupid fake terror trick.

    [Jul27'09] This article by Chris Cook is an excellent summary of the depravity of capital leading the part of the world that actually makes things into the abyss. The only way to stop it is to understand it and set boundary conditions to prevent it. This is what the best minds are doing as Rome burns. Fiddling for dollars. Plain fiddling would be preferrable. I'm embarrassed at humans. Chris Cook's simple and practical suggestion to stop all this nonsense is to denominate money in units of energy (see here for a slide presentation). The problem is that volatility is bad for producers (because large temporary price dips cause them to draw back, even as overall time-averaged scarcity is increasing) and consumers (because they can't predict how much to set aside for energy or how much to conserve/rearchitect/etc). Only the middlemen profit from volatility. The middlemen are now are mostly operating in secret, non-public 'over-the-counter' mode, which is truly an 'under-the-counter' mode! There is nothing wrong with private transactions per se; bartering is 'under-the-counter', too. But in that case, goods that are actually being used are transferred. Millisecond parasitic transfers of oil futures are very different. Get rid of these parasites! They don't do anything useful for other humans. We don't need the stupid 'liquidity service' they 'provide' because it's *not* a service; it's merely cruds up the system, screwing up signals for people who actual produce and consume things. These guys are are collecting money for nothing.

    [Aug20'09] [external inaccessibility of www.cogsci.ucsd.edu over the past month and a half (!) was due to the campus net police closing outside access to the server, while looking to see if an opening had been exploited.]

    [Sep19'09] In contrast to the late 2007 peak in subprime resets, the peak in alt-A resets won't happen until late in 2012. As can be seen in this Fed graph, tax receipts began to collapse in late 2007, right around the subprime peak in resets (I've also plotted the spectacular Fed-driven increase in the monetary BASE on the same graph that occurred a year later). Unfortunately, the alt-A reset bubble is a lot bigger than the subprime bubble. A similar progression of riskiness and size (alt-A mortgages are larger than subprime and their resets are delayed) has happened to some extent in other countries. Now stir in the beginnings of post-peak oil. I think we're going to see a lot of pretty agitated human monkeys a few years from now (they're really unattractive when they're angry). The deflationary fallout of the alt-A peak in resets is likely to require another round of central bank money creation in 2012 and 2013. This will happen right at the moment when we're all supposed to be heavily engaged in re-architecting the world's economy/population/energy-use towards a more physics/reality-based, steady-state, renewable condition. Yeah, right. I still always get the urge to say that it didn't have to end this way. If we had only taken proactive measures in 1970, when the true scope of the problem was first clearly recognized... But looking at the nature of the recent debate in the US about health care for all monkeys, I suppose that a proactive approach was never a possibility. Probably the only thing that could have made the monkeys stand up and pay attention would have been a large-enough, but not civilization-ending, catastrophe -- like a small meteorite. Things are not changing in the right direction now, or with anything vaguely close to the speed the true direness of our predicament demands. The upcoming fallout of the alt-A reset peak will seriously sabotage attempts at re-architecting industrial civilization. But the initial downslope of peak oil will be very gradual (though stupid monkey chatter during oil price spike next year will obscure this). The steep part of the downslope won't really begin to bite until 2020. From this point in time, 2030 sure doesn't look good at all (I know I should keep my inner misanthropist off public display...).

    [Sep30'09] Interesting to read (from a comment on today's Automatic Earth column) that N.J. Berrill, a comparative and developmental biologist (Berrill and Karp is on my bookshelf) was quoting the ideas of Hubbert to the poster in Montreal in the late 1950's.

    [Oct10'09] An astounding 61% of the American public (50% of the Democrats) agree that it is "more important to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action". All while the 8-year war in Afghanistan is being escalated. Hard to know what would put Americans off of their suicidal track. Apparently 20% effective unemployment isn't enough! Perhaps they would see the light at 30% unemployment? [update: Oct10] Meanwhile, just a few hours after giving his Nobel peace prize acceptance speech, Obama met with his generals to dicuss sending 60,000 more troops Afghanistan (which is now supported by Medea Benjamin from Code Red). Obama presides over the largest war machine in the world, which costs as much as the war machines of the entire rest of the world (the US has 5% of the world's population). The disconnect from reality is so large, I'm having major difficulty concentrating.

    [Nov09'09] "And now, for something completely different". I would laugh at this Soma for weakened minds, but it mechanically does its job. In the past, I thought that human minds were precious and a terrible thing to waste, and that we should rise above unthinking animals. Now I just wait, in comedy, for the Grim Reaper to point to the salmon mousse.

    [Nov21'09] The Australian senate voted against a plan to prepare for peak oil by planning ahead for sustainable energy sources as opposed to increasing coal burning. Kewl. That'll show those oil rock formations who's boss! No doubt, it will also make the 100 year drought in Australia go away by changing the laws of physics on heat absorption. Ya think? It's the human comedy :-}

    [Nov22'09] Michael Rivero has had some worthwhile stuff ocassionally. But the barrage of nonsense he continually posts on both energy and climate (wall-to-wall 'climategate' for the past few weeks) is truly embarrassing. The bits of real info on his site are then tainted -- a classic disinfo move. Who knows, maybe he's being paid for it.

    [Jan08'10] It's been pretty cold in London (around freezing), while at the same time, the re-freeeze of Arctic sea ice is proceeding at a record slow pace (equivalent to the warmest re-freeze ever). I was raised in the Chicago suburbs, so I haven't even taken out my heavy coat. But they could sure afford to take some of the money they waste around here on surveillance cameras (incl. 20,000 video cameras *inside* people's houses!) and spend it instead on salt. Many downtown London sidewalks (pavements) are atrociously icy. No prob for me, but really terrible for old people.

    [Jan10'10] Sampling the mood of the times, I'd say we're currently straight on the path to what Gregor Macdonald called, in November 2009, coal world. I have repeatedly made the same point myself here, years ago (Nov18'04, Jan27'05, May10'05, Jul12'05, Jul30'05). That is, we continue scrabbling for dwindling standard fossil fuel resources without making serious efforts ("serious" means more than a fraction of a percent per year) in two key directions: (1) building new infrastructure for renewable energy while plentiful high-energy-density fossil fuel is still around, and (2) reducing energy consumption, because renewable energy will never be able to completely replace fossil fuel. The result of not doing this will be that energy will get tighter and tighter using current infrastructure until we are driven back to using almost all coal. We will then be so energy impoverished and stressed that there won't be any surplus left to invest in energy transition. It will be (would have been?!) extremely energy intensive to make an energy transition. Macdonald points out that the previous two previous difficult-enough energy transitions -- from wood to coal, and then from coal to oil -- were both transitions in which the new energy source was *more* energy-dense than the previous source. The hypothetical transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy goes in the opposite direction. For example, a nominal "one kilowatt" silicon rooftop photoelectric cell covers 100 sq feet (twice as much area would be required for an equivalent power thin film cell), costs $9,000 installed, and generates 3-4 kilowatt-hours of usable power per day in a sunny location, which equals about 1/10 gallon of gasoline. To put this in perspective, the average US household used (in 1999) more than *eight* times that much electricity per day. And, unlike gasoline, the solar electric energy must be used as soon as it is generated, or else it must be stored with a substantial loss. So an average American electrical budget would currently require a $100,000 photoelectric installation. And that doesn't include driving, heating, and air travel, each of which use equal or larger additional amounts of energy. A 10 kilowatt solar installation costs that much largely because *it takes a lot of energy to make it*. Finally, this difficult, not-even-started transition to renewable energy will have to take place with a *much* larger population to support than was the case with the previous two transitions. Yeast, meet barrel.

    [Feb01'10] The latest word from the growing police state is that if you refuse to be scanned in one of the naked scanners (either X-ray based or high energy microwave-based), you won't be able to fly. The American Civil Liberties Union gives a preview of what the perverted "thousands standing around" are going to be grabbing in the near future: "Passengers expect privacy underneath their clothing and should not be required to display highly personal details of their bodies such as evidence of mastectomies, colostomy appliances, penile implants, catheter tubes and the size of their breasts or genitals as a pre-requisite to boarding a plane." A bunch of mindless drones from the Tourism Suppression Agency groping mastectomies, penile implants, and colostomy bags. The next step, if we don't resist now, will be naked CCTV cameras irradiating us at every corner. We humans are pretty stoopid. Rather than dealing rationally with peak oil, we instead donate tax receipts to scumbag Michael Chertoff's company to buy zillions of naked scanners (that would have had at best a 50% chance of detecting the underwear bomber, according to their *supporters/manufacturers*!). The next step will be body orifice scanners like they have in prisons (you sit on them). Nothing will stop these creeps except mass resistance. And people have to have the mental fortitude to ignore and expose the (next!) false flag when the creeps get really desperate. The verbatim response from many people I haved talked to "well... if it makes us safer". The response to that is, "will you accept body cavity searches if 'it make us safer'" or "does any of this actually make us safer"? The answer to both those question is "no". On the other hand, if we would stop messing around with other people's countries and resources, that *would* make us safer.

    [Feb06'10] Just 5 days after my post above, and there are already articles on the internet about TSA drones using nudie scanners to grope mastectomy patients. The really sad punchline is that the gropee thought the whole thing was a good idea.

    [Feb09'10] Peak oil warnings from, uhhh, Richard Branson.

    [Feb25'10] The average wage for manufacturing jobs in China is $1/hour, 3% of what it currently is in the US (for comparison, Japanese manufacturing wages are 80% of those in the US). That $1/hour wage is just as much a problem for Japan as it is for the US. At these wages, the de-industrialization of the US and most other high-wage countries is bound to continue. It is hard to see what could reverse it in 10 years, even as the downslope of peak oil begins. During the US depression of the 30's, the US turned leftward. There is no sign at all of that this time around. And economic pressure on the lower wage tea party guys is just beginning. In thinking about how this will play out, it's important to remember that the depression hit the US most severely because the US was in a similar position to where China is now -- low wages and surplus industrial production. With wages at 3% of those in the US, China can't easily begin to absorb a lot more of its own products without taking a big hit in revenues (from either adjusting wages higher wages or prices lower), because they still have to pay for raw materials at open market prices. Perhaps that is a good thing because currently, a Chinese person only uses 1/10 as much oil per capita as a US person. If they were to escalate their usage to that of people in the US, it would require doubling current world oil production, almost certainly impossible given that we are likely past peak oil production The US came out of its depression -- well, at least after WWII -- on top of the world. What followed in the US and the rest of the world was an almost perfect exponential rise in energy use (esp. oil) that cemented its world dominance. How things will turn out this time, I can't really guess, esp. with the possibility of new war(s) somewhere thrown in there. The only thing I am sure of is that that kind of post-WWII exponential increase in energy use *cannot happen* this time. It is hard to see how intense competition over resources can be avoided. The recent collapse in world trade (yearly 10% gains in trade over the past 15 years were replaced with a 20% drop in 2009) have helped to take some of the pressure off, but even 20% less trade leaves 80% -- and that involves substantial resource drawdowns. Even with a permanent depression there will eventually be a horrible collision with the energy supply downslope. I'm just repeating myself ad nauseum.

    [Mar15'10] This could be just more of the regular disinfo (esp. given Dan Plesch source), but actual movements of materiel (if the report is correct) carry a lot of, uhhh, weight for me. It took months to very visibly ship stuff to the Persian Gulf in the build up to the 2003 Iraq invasion. To prepare for another war there, it could be less visible, since there is already bunch of stuff over there.

    [Mar16'10] Chinese steel overcapacity is now greater than total European steel output (from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard). This suggests that China is having difficulty growing out its current situation. China could be in a situation somewhat analogous to the US before the Depression. Will they then also turn left?!

    [Apr21'10] Only *6* people in Greece reported earning over a million dollars last year. They are now coming to London to cash out in the tony West end, helping to keep London the developed world's most unequal city (from Daniel Dorling). The Greece bailout should be made dependent on them taxing their rich people properly.

    [Apr25'10] Reading about Stephen Hawking's new teevee show has added a peak oil tick to my thinking about extraterrestrial life. Given the large number of galaxies out there and the fact that life is based on simple molecules that exist on asteroids and in other stars systems, it has seemed likely to me that life may have evolved many tiems. However, there were two 'origins of life' (defined as the origin of a self-maintaining code-using system) on Earth -- first life, then language (Sereno, 1991). Other life out there is therefore most likely single-celled (which is what life was on our planet for 7/8 of its 3.8 billion years of existence, or single-celled plus non-code-using multicellular (all but 0.002% of 4 billions years). Other alien life out there has no doubt been burnt out by stellar evolution. If the second coming of a coding system (coding system on top of a lower level coding system) happened on another planet, *and* it had access to enough easy energy sources to boot up an industrial civilization, then still, it might have burnt itself out -- as our own is likely to do this century -- by running out of easy energy. The brief run of our industrial civilization on Earth is even a tinier speck of galactic time than code-using intelligent life on Earth. Unless some new energy source comes up, which I think is unlikely, our current civilization simply doesn't have enough remaining energy to build enormous death-star-sized space ships capable of reaching other planets. Here is the extra peak oil tick inspired by Hawking. Imagine that another planet was endowed with 100 or a million times as much easy-to-get energy. An industrial civilization evolving there might actually be in such a position to 'leave town' after it overran its ecology, but before it overran its energy resources. Like Stephen Hawking, I think the blind acquisitiveness of code-using systems powered by a million times as much easy energy as our own would indeed be a terrible thing to behold.

    [May25'10] The new chimerical government of the UK is planning massive public sector cuts while sparing cuts to their poodle participation in the US-run Afghanistan slaughter/occupation. Shameful.

    [Jun01'10] An increasingly desperate and dangerous nuclear-armed pariah apartheid state stages a 4 AM massacre on a flotilla of unarmed aid vessels in international waters killing 19 aid workers that were carrying supplies to break the medieval-style siege on refugees in Gaza many of which had been previously ethnically cleansed from their land. The US, which provides on the order of $4 billion in aid every year, immediately unilaterally blocked a UN security council condemnation of the act, with Obama playing the same pitiful wimpstooge he played during the Gaza massacre a year and a half ago (magnifying the stooge-ness he so recently displayed in his handling of BP). The UN condemnation was supported by virtually the entire world beyond the ruling classes of US and the UK (pics). Israel is still holding over 600 people. The Egyption dictatorship, which has supported the siege, was forced to temporarily open its border with Gaza, presumably to avoid a mess on the street. As with South Africa, boycott, disinvestment, sanctions, and above all, social rejection will be the only effective options in dealing with a country that has morally collapsed (94% of Israelis approved of the 2008-2009 Gaza massacre), and is hopelessly mired in toxic racial supremacist thinking. All humans have the potential to let their own personal master race thinking get out of hand. The trick of civil society is to keep it focussed on food, music, and dance. It wouldn't hurt to have the US stop sending them arms and money to the tune of thousands of dollars per Israeli per year, but given the strength of the lobby in Congress, that is not likely to happen any time soon -- strikingly, even in the midst of an economic disaster in the US that is rapidly approaching the size of the Depression.

    [Jun04'10] Some people think that because Israel has nuclear weapons and because it appears crazy -- or tries to make itself appear so -- that it has to be appeased, else it will set one off, perhaps via a false flag. I think there is only a very small chance of that happening. For example, South Africa had nuclear weapons (via Israel), but they were weaned off their master race thing without detonating one in public (it is true that Israel has 200 while South Africa only had maybe one, bought from Israel). Yesterday it was revealed that a 'parrot' (a 19 year old American citizen) was among otherwise low-market-value humans killed by the 'Bambi commandos' -- by four bullets to the head. Unfortunately, since he is Turkish-American (his parents moved to Turkey when he was young), his market value is lower, and this has already been played up by the execrable mainstream media. Several survivors have reported that several dead bodies were thrown overboard, which may account for the discrepancy in the number of dead reported (here are the faces of the named ones). By contrast, the 81 year old woman who threw one of the commandos overboard is being held for 'attempted sexual assault'. It's impossible to make this stuff up. Or this -- an inadvertently anti-hasbara masterpiece by a managing editor of the Jerusalem Post that was so smelly it even managed to irritate The New Republic.

    [Jun05'10] In spite of the fact that real industrial production in Europe and China and India and the OECD in general has basically recovered to pre-Fall-2008 levels, strange hidden money shenanigans with overnight banking lending seems to be just starting to go insane again, like just before September 2008. I have no idea of what is really going on. I am suspicious of games played by unproductive parasites using millisecond delays to jump in and pre-bid other people, but don't know how much they are to blame (though a Tobin tax together with outlawing 'dark pools' would help starve these creeps).

    [Jun10'10] The mayor of London is calling for Americans to stop criticizing BP because it will damage British pensions (like mine). I wonder what Boris would say if an American company caused the largest oil disaster in history and ocean currents carried it to the UK shores. Somehow, I don't think the security of American pensions would be foremost in his mind. But what if a greater tragedy occurred and there were no more tuna left for sushi, Boris? (a major tuna spawning ground is in the sights of the oil plume -- it's 'only' parts per million, but that's plenty enough to do the job). Now a tragedy *that* big might actually have Boris calling for BP to fly straight and pay damages. In reality what is likely to happen is that the US government will bail out BP using American tax money. So stop your sobbing, Boris. And who's the real victim? This is beginning to sound more like Bambi commandos assaulted with cameras by peace activists using their own blood to cause them to slip. The reality is that BP executives gambled by cutting corners during drilling and completion on what was actually not an overly hard well to drill. There are many wells that are just as difficult (5% of the US's daily oil comes from offshore wells in deep water), and a number that are substantially more difficult -- deeper water, deeper hole, higher pressure. BP lost its potentially profitable gamble and should now have to pay, like ordinary people would have to (and will have to, via pensions). And don't forget, Boris, if the bottom kill relief wells run into difficulty before finally sealing the well (which they often do), the oil plume may very well reach the UK via the gulf stream. None of this excuses people getting angry at BP while not even being aware of -- much less thinking about doing anything about reducing -- their daily oil.

    [Jun16'10] It's tragic and maddening watching the UK and the US sinking fortunes into slaughtering the natives of Afghanistan and Iraq while their own economies totter along precariously close to the abyss. The head wedding-party-slaughterer, Petraeus, briefly collapsed in a Senate hearing, supposedly dehydrated. I wonder what he would have done if one of his obscene drone-borne missiles had sheared/scorched off his legs. Hopefully, the wikileaks release of one of his finer works or art will soon be smeared across the internet, despite sniveling rat-faced attention-starved snitch Adrian Lamo having betrayed the presumed leaker in support of the war machine. Truly an insane moment in history.

    [Aug04'10] This is a worrying note from a generally sensible group (also linked below). As usual, one has to be on guard that this could have been motivated by disinfo, perhaps unbeknownst to the VIPS guys. As mentioned above, it is a different situation than the impossible-to-conceal buildup to the Iraq war in late 2002 in that there is already a lot of hardware and people and supply lines in place there. Hopefully it will blow over.

    [Aug07'10] [from the oildrum] Think of a 300 mile long train with 30,000 hopper cars filled with coal. That's how much coal the US burns. Every day. China burns three times that much. Every day. Over the past decade, China tripled its coal consumption and India doubled its coal consumption. There is a higher proportion of coal left than there is of oil and natural gas left. But up against those recent increases, we'll be lucky if it's 20 years until peak coal, esp. since 10 years from now, coal will have to begin filling in for declining oil and natural gas. The writing is on the wall and on the web but most humans refuse to read it.

    [Sep22'10] Dmitri Orlov certainly got up on the wrong side of the bed a few weeks ago! -- but he does make many good points. I recently read Tainter's old and rather tedious 1988 book that focussed on the collapses of the the Roman empire, the Maya, and Chaco Canyon. The simple main point is that societies collapse to a state of lesser complexity because it becomes more and more energy-intensive to increase or even maintain complexity. Clearly, this basic idea applies directly to ever-reducing return on energy investment of oil -- one naturally goes for the easy oil first. Over time, it becomes more and more energy intensive to extract oil until the energy return on energy investment gets close to 1:1, at which time oil extraction will begin to collapse. But it also applies to something like Microsoft Word. In the beginning, it was a program that one or two people could read through, with 27,000 lines of code (I maintain three 10-20K line programs myself). The original Word worked OK, more or less. But by 1995, it had grown to 2 million line of code. By now, it's a 50 or 100 million line blood sucking monster that requires a small city to maintain it, and its functionality is not that much better for most people, despite having increased in size by a factor of 2000. Perhaps Word can double in size one last time. But trying to guess how our current supercharged much-more-highly-interconnected system will play out under similar stresses is difficult based on the analysis of previous cases. Certainly, one could imagine, as does Dmitri, that collapse could potentially be much faster than say the Roman empire. But the additional interconnectedness is not all bad. Individuals have better access to information (tho they rarely use it). But perhaps some might, when push comes to shove. Thankfully, Dmitri's next post next post was more uplifting -- in his own special way.

    [Oct02'10] There was a tedious discussion in the oildrum yesterday about a reasonable article on the reasonable "Export Land Model" of more-rapid-than-expected oil export reduction as a function of growing *internal demand* in exporting countries. This will collide in the worst possible way with the growing appetites of importers, as well as collisions between the big importers -- in particular, the US, EU, China, and India. While massive EU and US imports have been relatively flat, 'westexas' (one of the original authors of the Export Land idea) notes that China and India have increased their share of *total global exports* (from exporters with at least 100,000 barrels per day of exports) from 11% in 2005 to 17% in 2009. A simple extrapolation puts their share of total global exports at 100% in 16 years. While this clearly can't happen, it's obvious everybody's boat is likely to be rocked sooner than one might expect if one was only looking at the almost flat peak in the world oil *production* curve. That curve has been hovering around 90 million barrels a day -- depending on what you count as 'oil' e.g., sweet crude, heavy crude, lease condensates, natural gas plant liquids, oil from tar sands, ethanol, biodiesel -- for the past 3-4 years. The stunning lack of appreciation of these simple, practical, easy-to-understand numbers by other-worldly economists and short-sighted businessmen is depressing. The current basic numbers (summarized from EIA here, and worth memorizing) are as follows. On the *export* side are: Middle East: 55%, Norway/Russia/Kazakhstan: 29%, Nigeria/Angola: 6%. On the import side are EU: 36%, China/Japan/SouthKorea: 31%, US/Canada/Mexico: 28%, India: 5%. Then there are regular people, left and right, who are instead currently concentrating their powers of analysis on much more important topics like the new Richard Curtis video...

    [Oct17'10] China is creating a housing bubble that is several times the size of the one in the US. There are reports that there are 5 times as many empty apartments and houses as there are in the US. Hard to imagine that this will interact well with peak oil. Once again I feel like that giant Gary Larson roach taking a shower and discovering that the drain is plugged: "I'd *hate* to think of what's down there..."

    [Oct23'10] Superb graph here from a presentation made by Paul Mobbs to some arm of Parliament in 2009. Contains all the main points for the UK. The contrast between this reality and everyday discourse is so great that it's hard to imagine I'm living on the same planet as "everyday". It's clear there will be essentially no preparation for the downslope of peak oil. There will be no preparation for contraction. Just falling down the stairs, one stair at a time (image from a recent John Michael Greer interview).

    [Oct24'10] The revelations in the wikileaks -- whatever their limited hangout intent w.r.t. Iran -- ring depressingly true to life and are intensely reminiscent of the El Salvador death sqauds where US supported *local* mercenaries did most of the dirty work of *personally* torturing and maiming people. US-ians prefer to do most of their maiming from a safe distance whenever possible and outsource the Spanish Inquisition stuff. That doesn't make them even slightly better -- thats's just what people do when they have more money.

    [Oct31'10] Every day I watch people pointlessly accelerating for 100 meters before breaking sharply before the next red light. Every day I watch ebb and flow of the religiously maintained traffic volume. We are now just about at, or perhaps even a few years past peak oil. The oil spill that was just capped was in deep water -- hard-to-get oil with much poorer energy return on energy investment than the oil of 10 or 20 years ago. No large cache of easy-to-get oil has been discovered in decades. The world is still using 85-90 million barrels a day, one cubic mile per year. But I'm not resentful. My urge to raise the alarm is shamefully reduced. If the super-rich get all the bail outs for their gambling debts and then get to cash out now (income polarization rose to record level *since* 2008), while austerity is rammed down the throats of most of the rest of the herd, why *shouldn't* those people in cars have the right to race up to the red light? Maybe they, too, know it's probably too late.

    [Nov06'10] "The bankers defrauded each other, and as the crisis deepens, they will turn on one another like frenzied, fat, white cannibals -- just as they did in 2008." -- Glen Ford.

    [Nov11'10] The UK government, which already spends less per student than the US, is planning to double or triple college fees, all while maintaining nuclear stockpiles, aircraft carriers, and other useless things. Not a good investment in the future, but maybe those in control think there isn't any (future). Then there's the 'war effort' -- 10,000 UK troops in Afghanistan -- 10 solid year of supporting the US-run debacle/slaughter. Shameful misallocation of funds at the very moment of peak oil.

    [Nov26'10] Don't believe in peak oil? Soros has *30%* of his ill-gotten gains invested in oil (these are the people/scum who make their money 'work' (sic): they will bid up oil again, rake in profits, and crash the world economy again). Don't worry be happy. The latest Marcellus oil shale find (sic, it's gas) will save the day. And just for kicks, Soros bought 11,300 shares of OSI Systems Inc., the company that owns Rapiscan, the X-ray airport body scanners.

    [Nov30'10] Here is a particularly clear description of the main difference between money creation by deposits/loans with a reserve requirement, and money creation by securitisation, hedging, leveraging, and derivatives. In the first case, there is an exponentially decreasing, bounded multiplier; the total amount of money created by the bank after multiple deposit/lending cycles is: 1/reserves_fraction - 1. That is, $9 is eventually created from an initial $1 deposit after about 30 cycles of redeposit/relend. In the second case, instead of lending out deposit*(1-reserves_fraction) (i.e., $0.90 from a $1 deposit), the bank can effectively lend out *more* than reserves; but more importantly, it can do this *each time* a deposit comes in. Thus, there is no exponential *decay* in the amount of money created with each redeposit/relend cycle, but rather an obviously unstable exponential *growth* in the amount of money (which is how derivatives, etc got up to $2 quadrillion -- many times the size of the real economy funded by the standard reserve-based money creation system). This is grade school algebra. This 'new innovation' has turned the banking system into a absolutely standard, old-time pyramid scheme, massively enriching already-super-rich people at the expense of everybody else, to levels unseen in a century, and destablizing the financial system right at the moment of peak oil. It's so stupid and evil and ill-timed, that it's hard to believe. Nothing has been fixed and seems unlikely to be, barring some kind of insurrection. The latest outrage is having Irish pensioners bailing out EU (German, French, English) bankers who made bad bets (via the Orwell-speak 'bailout of the Irish'). But, as satisfying as it would be to see these guys hanging from the lampposts (or at least in jail!) an insurrection would not fix peak oil. On the positive side, the oil peak is a gentle one -- at first. Thank god this will give us and Lady Gaga quality time to attend to critical topics like openly gay Amurrican soldiers...

    [Dec01'10] Another 80 million people were added to the Earth last year (a number slightly more than a quarter of the population of the US, or approximately equal to the whole UK). Almost a billion have been added since 2000. Of course, it would be a good idea to think about voluntarily *reducing* population before the decline in fossil fuel begins in earnest. But there is no chance of this happening either in rich countries (where each new birth adds an energy load that is an order of magnitude greater than a birth in a poor country) or in poor countries (where more rapid population growth makes up for lower per capita energy use). The growth of easy energy is highly correlated with the growth of human population. Here is a graph of just oil and world population from my no-longer-updated peak oil presentation. Human population took off in the 19th century around the time of big increases in coal use. It rapidly accelerated about the time that oil was added to coal (after that, natural gas and then nuclear power were added to still-growing coal and oil use). The growth of easy energy probably directly drives human population growth via increases in the food supply. Humans left and right will have sophisticated and civilized debates about who should go first, about comparative patterns of development, fairness, and so on. Nothing will change. Both sides are ridiculous. The rich say, just raise the level of the poor and they will stop reproducing. That's a fine sentiment except that raising the level of the poor to the level of the west would increase the depletion rate of fossil fuels and fresh water and fertile land by a factor of 10, leading to a really fast crash. Imagine adding the infrastructure of a whole 'nuther UK, every single year (that's what China and India are trying to do, but most people there are still living far below UK 'standards', such as they are). And the west is not doing a very good job of reducing its production of gold-plated 10x-poor-people babies. The poor say, it's not fair that we should pay for a century of intemperate behavior by you rich pigs. Those who have not had babies yet say the same thing. All true, and not fair; but adding another billion people, rich and poor, will only make the denouement even more horrific. It is virtually guaranteed that there will be another billion people on the Earth by 2020 (15 more UK's). Sometime around 2030 or 2040, human population will be begin to be controlled once again by the same sure and natural method that has always worked for controlling populations of other animals -- limitations in the food supply. It won't be fair. It won't be equitable. It won't be predictable in detail. Many humans will be looking the other way. It is guaranteed to work overall.

    [Dec03'10] "As for the bulk of what has been leaked so far, especially on Iran and the movers and shakers in the Persian Gulf, it is barely disguised US/Israeli propaganda." -- Pepe Escobar in Asia Times on Wikileaks.

    [Dec17'10] David Rutledge from Caltech has made a new estimate for total world production of coal, past and future, of 680 Gt (gigatons). This is slightly lower than his previous estimate, and about the same as the estimates of Patzek and Croft (2010: 630Gt) and Mohr and Evans (2009: 700Gt). About half of total world coal has been used (310 Gt). The yearly coal burn rate is about 7 Gt. By contrast, some of the worst case IPCC scenarios use official government and energy agency estimates that total coal production, past and present, will be 5x as great (3,500 gigatons). Those estimates come from the same organizations that have steadily dropping their ridiculous overestimates of total oil for years now as oil production has flattened; they are getting closer and closer to 2000 gigabarrel total oil reality (not too long ago, their official line was that total oil was 5000 gigabarrels). I think those agencies will soon have to start doing the same thing with coal. As with coal, about half of total oil has been used. The yearly oil burn rate is about 29 gigabarrels. Since one ton of coal has about 4x the energy of one barrel of oil, the total energy in 2000 gigabarrels of oil and 680 gigatons of coal is roughly comparable. It goes without saying that nothing will stop cold starving humans from using all the useable (net energy positive) coal and oil. Also, these calculations assume that all coal and oil have equal net energy. They don't. Net energy declines as better quality, eaiser-to-get resources are depleted. What will stop coal and oil production is break-even net energy, not absolute depletion. Thus, the effective (net energy) downslope is steeper than the production downslope, and the two downslopes diverge more and more as the break-even point is approached. This isn't rocket science. You don't need a college degree to understand it. The good news is the climate probably won't get as quite awful as predicted by the standard scenarios (it will still get awful). The bad news is that coal will be 90% exhausted by 2070, when humans will be desperately scraping out the last of the barely net-energy-positive stuff. Oil and natural gas will be even more completely exhausted. Already by 2040, there will probably be another 2 billion people around (the current growth rate is about 0.5 billion people per decade). The current death rate is about 1% per year. The death rate is likely to increase a lot. From here, 2070 is not looking too good. At least I'll be dead. This is the adult world we are preparing for the kids that people are bringing into the world today. I know humans are animals, but they also have language. Just don't do it.

    [Dec21'10] There was a stunningly incompetent response to a few inches of snow at Heathrow this weekend, an amount we would have laughed off back in Chicago. Instead of moving it aside in order to keep 1500 flights a day flowing through the airport, the privatized airport management decided to save money and leave it in place until it partially melted and then froze solid. Then they tried to have their workers chisel it away the next day. BAA, the airport owner, reported pre-tax profits of 1 billion pounds this year, but they spent only 0.0005 billion (500,000 pounds) on equipment at Heathrow to deal with snow and ice. Heathrow had only 50 people working to clear the snow (vs. 150 people at Gatwick, an airport less than half the size -- i.e., *1/6* as many as Gatwick). They turned down an offer from the UK military to help. Apparently, the airport failed to follow the recommendations of the 'resilience' report after the disaster last year. This impotent response to a relatively minor disruption -- and the very fact that you have people whose jobs it is to write about 'resilence'! (as opposed, to say, grabbing a shovel) -- is not a good sign for the future when there will be real problems. Like many other people, our holiday plans were cancelled. Dang, you can never go home again, etc. The execs at BAA raking in huge bonuses for messing up everybody else's lives are faceless, for now at least [update: the slob went public with a sob story that he had to lift his snout out of the 'privatized' public trough for a few seconds to forgo his bonus this week]. In Greece, when protestors recognized one of their parliamentarians on the street, they started *stoning* him, but he got away (cf. Charles and Camilla). The richies won't stop until there are consequences for their own travel plans and private estates and Mercedes. The problem is that by the time that average people figure that out, we will be on a serious net energy downslope, and well-deserved beatings will do nothing to fix it. And the proles could easily be distratcted (again) by a big false flag terror event if they start getting out of hand. Recent booga-boogas involved FBI infiltrator talking so much nonsense in a mosque that the people there reported him... to the FBI; or in Oregon, where the FBI provided fake bombs to a barely mentally competent patsy. It would be trivial to supply one of these slow-witted sots a real bomb when simple booga-booga is not enough (cf. the real bomb in Sweden). It will have to be at least as big as Oklahoma City.

    [Dec29'10] Here is a sensible, data based prediction of near term oil import capacities by Jeffery J. Brown and Samuel Foucher. The one sentence summary is, if we assume current import and export trends for the next 5 years, rich oil-importing countries (i.e., excluding China and India) will have to reduce imports by 33% (in the case of the US, this would be 33% of 60% imported, or about 20% of total oil usage). Their point has always been that major stresses may develop even on the "bumpy plateau" here at peak oil, before world production has begin to decline in earnest. None of this justifies the US consuming as much oil as China, India, Japan, Russia, and Germany -- combined.

    [Jan17'11] This is the kind of nonsense by which money changers make money for nothing -- gaming somebody else's stock order by less than a millisecond -- a true case of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Idiocies like this, however, will be temporary. They rely on a properly functioning electrical grid supported virtually completely by electricity generated that same millisecond from fossil fuel. These activities are completely parasitical. When food starts going short, these parasites will eventually begin to be targetted and eliminated from the system.

    [Jan23'11] "A cash machine for which you need no PIN" -- a showgirl's description of Silvio Berlusconi and his Caligulan court.

    [Jan28'11] Today, the US-supported dictatorship in Egypt -- the largest recipient of US military aid ($2 billion/year) next to Israel ($3+ billion/year) -- turned off its internet, BlackBerry messaging, and SMS. Syria just followed suit. Looks like martial law is next. There are reports that Mubarak's son and wife fled to London, many a tyrant's first stop on their way to their favorite tyrant retirement community...

    [Jan29'11] Bizarre placement! Fox news (!) gave Kurt Haskell air time for his long standing claim that the 'underwear/crotch bomber' was let onto his flight *without a passport*, as a result of the intervention of a 'well-dressed man' at the ticket counter, presumably in order to provide support for the Patriot Act and airport nudie scanners pimped by former homeland 'security' chief Michael Chertoff. Go Kurt!

    [Jan29'11] In Egypt, Mubarak dismissed his government and deployed the army to the streets for the first time in 25 years after protestors overpowered police, because, as he explained on Egypt teevee: "there is no turning back from the path of reform that we chose. We seek more democracy and freedoms". As Dmitri Orlov notes, this is beginning to look like Eastern Europe in 1989, when the (other) 'evil empire' began to collapse. Mubarak dismissed his 'government' and appointed the former spy chief and head torturer as 'vice-president' (there wasn't one before). May the 'seek' for 'democracy and freedoms' continue! It looks like the demonstrators are defying the just announced 3-day curfew. Tanks are in the street in the center of large cities, for now visible live on Saturday at Al Jazeera seem to be just sitting there, in the middle of huge crowds. The police have retreated completely. Tanks always win vs. people (cf. Gaza), and for now, most Egyptians are welcoming the army and the tanks. About 100 people have been killed so far.

    [Jan30'11] Mohamed ElBaradei (formerly IAEA) is a current member of the board of trustees of the Soros-funded International Crisis Group, known for previous involvement in 'color' revolutions (most recently 'red' in Thailand). The Gaza-Egypt border was just indefinitely sealed by the Egyptian army. Al Jazeera has reported that Mubarak is planning to evacuate to Tel Aviv after Saudi said no (since they just took in the US-supported dictator just booted out of Tunisia). It is difficult to guess what happens next in this fluid situation.

    [Feb04'11] Military vehicles running over crowds of protestors in Egypt rhymes with Tiananmen Square. For now, this still seems far away in the US and the UK. I think it will still look far away after another year or two of 'austerity', despite the fact that the polarization of wealth in the US and UK has gone beyond that that preceding the Depression. The almost perfect correlation between food prices and oil prices gives me pause. Things could rapidly spiral out of control again if oil prices spike again, which they are bound to do in the next year or two. And speaking of oil, I just checked oil exports of Egypt at Energy Export Databrowser and was horrified to to discover that exactly this year, they just went down to almost nothing. There is a long way down from the US/UK to Egypt, where 45% of the population lives on $2 a day or less (in purchasing power parity terms). For comparison, 50% of people in the world live on less than $2 a day.

    [Feb07'11] The US financially supported key members of the Mubarak opposition, even as Obama-robot Hillary-robot and Blair-robot are limply mouthing support for Mubarak. Don't forget the facts on the ground: the main effect of the Egypt revolution so far has been to groom the Israel-supported head torturer, Suleiman, to replace the doddering 82 year old Mubarak. Not that I or anybody else even more justifiably paranoid than me could have fomented a different outcome. The only way to head something like this off is for *every person in an entire population* (including the army) to be well-informed, ultra-paranoid, and street active, one year before anything officially begins to happen in the mainstream propaganda/media -- a truly tall order. I got the same sinking feeling before the two Iraq wars. The government/military started systematically transporting military equipment over there for the first war many months before it started. By one month before it started, all the materiel was there, and the war was completely impossible to stop -- right at the moment when the Wolf Blitzer propaganda blaster was shifting into high gear. To stop it, one would have had to have been paranoid enough to begin public interventions *one year* before that (early 1990) -- at a time when no one was even yet thinking about Iraq. Right now, that means paranoiacally visualizing the next big thing (but where?). Last month, I wasn't thinking about Egypt at all, even though the CIA had already been thinking *and* doing there for two years. Today, the lovely Merkel has offered Mubarak asylum in Germany, but it is looking like he won't even leave the place to his head torturer. His personal fortune is "$40 to $70" billion dollars. Given that the US money spigot was less than $2 billion a year, he must have directly pocketed half of it! He also has a giant loyal court of sycophants and goons protecting him (today they got a 15% pay raise). The situation is not yet dire enough for even one of them to turn on him (not that I would be brave enough to do so). Though the price of food and fuel skyrocketed, a larger impetus for the riots in Tunisia and Egypt than twitter, people are not yet starving. But the situation is fluid. The world food sitation is now hiccupping more severely, with China just announcing that they will *9 times* their last year's imports of corn. Too bad the stoopid Americans made 1/3 of theirs into ethanol for their stoopid mini-tanks. As Bob Moriarty just wrote, peak oil means peak food means peak people.

    [Feb08'11] A classic false flag is exposed in Egypt! Egypt's interior minister Habib el-Adly arranged to have a Christian church in Alexandria bombed on New Year's Day, killing 24 people. This was first blamed on 'Gaza militants'. Then Jeffrey Fleishman in the LA Times 'reported' two weeks ago that Egypt had conclusive evidence, courtesy of el-Adly, that Al Qaeda -- virtually non-existent yet omnipresent, headed by Elvis bin dead 10 years Laden -- was also involved in the church bombing. But this time, the bastards were outed when the hired perps escaped from jail last week and tattled! Yeah. Beware the next false flag. Some paranoia is justified.

    [Feb12'11] Great to see Mubarak gone. Now let's see what the military and the CIA/Israel-supported torturer Suleiman, do. He is not more liked than Mubarak, but Egypt has an enormous secret police in addition to its regular police and its army, and it is still well supplied with US supported torture chambers. The army remains currently in control. There is not a great deal of practical difference between the army+Mubarak and the army.

    [Feb21'11] The French Revolution occurred during the Enlightenment, a time of increasing expectations, education, and communication -- and bread shortages. That's rather like a lot of the world (e.g., US/EU/Mideast/China/India) right now. The French Revolution ended up with Napoleon and huge invading armies. I suppose fossil fuel shortages will eventually put a crimp in the aircraft carriers and killer drones of our modern Napoleons (a modern western military on the move is 70% fossil fuel by weight). On the other hand, I'm not sure that a return to more traditional methods (bows shooting arrows dipped in feces to cause a 'better' infection, Waterloo, etc.) would be that much better. At least, it would take longer to move military crap around. As usual, I had absolutely no inkling above of the imminent parallel uprisings (Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Wisconsin!) that were about to occur. Well, prediction is very hard, especially about the future. At least I did mention oil shortages (but when have I not mentioned them...)

    [Feb24'11] The 'diplomat' picked up in Pakistan turns out to be C IA. The government rag NYT obediently following Obama's orders to withhold the goods they had in an effort to try to let the story blow over. There is a widely linked report (e.g., here) that Davis was plotting nu clear false flags with the Taliban. However, the text of that report originated with 'Sorcha Faal' (=David Booth), who runs a known disinfo site (doesn't mean that it doesn't sometime publish partial truths -- but it's not a trustworthy source). There are plenty enough real false flags. Remember this one? -- "The [Iraqi] official said two unknown gunmen in full Arabic dress began firing on civilians in central Basra, wounding several, including a traffic police officer." These two guys turned out to be British special forces (SAS) who had to be rescued by demolishing the prison they were being held in. In any case, we are entering some uncharted waters. Even though Libya 'only' produces 1.6 million barrels a day, if we lost that it would amount to a 2% loss of our daily oil (1000 barrels a second, 88 million barrels a day). We are at peak oil precisely because Saudi no longer has enough 'swing production' to make such a large loss invisible (it's spare production is probably not much more than 2 million extra barrels a day). And all this is occurring in the context of other exporting countries experiencing increasing internal demand in the face of declining production (e.g., Egypt's exports just went to zero this year). If Libya goes offline for a while, it will be keenly felt by the rest of the world over the next year. Oil prices will likely spike, which will then cause economies to crash, which may then precipitate yet another flight to safety (the dollar) later this year.

    [Mar13'11] In the wake of the terrible earthquake/tsunami disaster in Japan, there are many jeremiads about how dangerous nuclear power is. It *is* quite messy. But given that the quake was a gigantic 9.0, followed by a 30 foot wall of water (which probably did more damage to the reactors than the shaking), it's perhaps surprising that the result wasn't worse (though the scenario is not over yet). It's easy to say you are against nuclear power. It's easy to say you are against big oil or big coal, too. But all that whining is utterly meaningless if you're not also against plentiful always-on electricity and easy transport and enough food. There will be coal, there will be deep water oil and gas, and there will be nuclear -- at least for the next 30 years when all three have run out in a practical sense (i.e., as *sources* of energy). If you don't want big nuclear and big coal and big oil and gas, stop having kids, stop driving around and flying around, stop eating meat, and get off the internet (hey! I should follow my own advice! I'd probably get more useful work done...). Currently, in the US, solar provides 0.01% (i.e., 1/9400) of total energy used. Wind provides 0.7% (1/135) of total energy used. There will coal. There will be oil. There will be nuclear.

    [Mar14'11] Eeesh. A hydrogen (gas) explosion just occurred at a second reactor (#3), a plutonuium-containing reactor, and there was just another tsunami, as well as reports of low levels of radiation from a US aircraft carrier that passed 100 miles from the power plant. This explosion was larger than the first one. We are getting a bit closer to a Chernobyl-sized disaster (but still far away). I am sure, however, that the unquenchable thirst of the still-growing human population for energy will keep nuclear (and coal and oil and natural gas) energy on our plate until they run down. Population is currently growing at the rate of more than one entire new UK per year (80,000,000 people). Is California going to turn off the 2 gigawatts coming out of San Onofre (1 million homes)? The output of San Onofre is equivalent to the average yearly output of about 12,000 typical Danish 0.6 megawatt wind turbines set up in a windy location. It's not very windy [very large jpg!] around San Onofre, so replacing the output of San Onofre would require 50,000 or 100,000 turbines. The San Onofre plant alone is equivalent to the entire current wind turbine power output of California. But that wind output still has many complete zero-energy gaps in power of 1-2 days when it's not windy. I don't think San Onofre is going offline anytime soon. People are too short sighted to think ahead for 10 years (even for their kids) to do the right thing now. And what about all the new power plants for the extra 80,000,000 new people added to the world just this year? At California standards, with 5 people per home, those new people would need 16 new San Onofre's or about 40 reactors the size of each of the reactors in the Fukushima complex, just for their home power, just for this year. Lack of energy is a war footing. The rules will change. What is acceptable will change. Unfortunately, energy decline is a permanent war footing. And as others have commented, the number of people killed by the tsunami (probably more than 10,000) is 3 orders of magnitude larger than the number killed by the nuclear plant disaster. For that matter, there are over a million deaths *per year* from automotive accidents, which utterly dwarfs the miniscule number of deaths from nuclear energy accidents. I'd be very happy to see less cars and more wind turbines myself. I'm not against nuclear power, properly handled, but it's not a long term solution: we are running out of uranium and only one thorium core has ever been built (note that a hypothetical thorium electric plant isn't any less messy after it's been running for a few years).

    [Mar15'11] Additional bad news from Japan: a spent fuel pool caught fire (now put out) releasing radioactivity, and there was a third explosion that may have breached the water filled torus at the base of that reactor, tho not the pressure vessel itself (these events were at 2 different, additional sites to the sites of the 2 previous explosions at #1 and #3). Not close to Chernobyl in terms of radiation release (yet!), but not yet stable (i.e., below the boiling point of water). It looks like the biggest release of radioactivity so far may have come from damage and fire in the on-site pools containing spent fuel (5 times as much long-lived radioactivity there as in the core, located above and just off to the side of the core for easy unloading), not from damage to the reactor core itself. Even the large explosion at #3 which sent stuff flying high into the air may not have ruptured the containment vessel since it remained pressurized afterward. Another worry is that temperatures are rising in the spent fuel pools sitting the the buildings above the other reactors. Here's hoping for the best even though the news has gotten worse each day. Also the wind is blowing inland today. I have corium in my nightmares. It's worth reemphasizing that nuclear energy doesn't replace coal or oil or methane. It *adds* a good chunk to them. Humans are going all out to maintain business as usual, which means going all out on *all* of the 'big four' energy sources, at the same time. With growing population, I don't think this will change *at all* until each source is depleted beyond practical use. Platitudes about stopping climate change won't stop humans -- those platitudes haven't budged humans even a hair in their energy use patterns! The only thing that will stop humans from using coal, oil, methane, and uranium is running out of coal, oil, methane, and uranium, followed by running out of food. It's the obvious elephant in the room that virtually no one can talk about in the everyday happy market world of Matrix-land that each of us lives in.

    [Mar16'11] Problems with the spent and partly spent fuel overheating and boiling off water in cooling ponds continue. The amount of dangerous radioactivity in each pool is several times larger than in each core. Still not stable. The next 2 days are critical. The Chernobyl disaster was caused by non-engineer 'safety officer' apparatchiks ordering more knowledgeable plant workers to pull the moderator rods out past the "never go past this point" mark put on them by the physicists -- in order to perform a 'safety' test!!! The Chernobyl reactor core melted down *1 second* after they did this, and caught fire soon after. In the Fukushima case, a bad design of emergency power (underground generators that flooded, vulnerable overground power lines that got knocked down, all virtually at sea level on a tsunami coast) turned a manageable situation into something that is getting closer to Chernobyl each day. Very sad. In both cases, the disasters were completely preventable by scientific knowledge and common sense. Years after the Chernobyl disaster, very few people can accurately quote the real reason for it.

    [Mar18'11] The disastrous hydrogen explosions may have been caused by hydrogen vented from the overheating core escaping past an O-ring on a heavy on a cement plug (by the 70 pounds per square inch pressure lifting it and ruining the seal) just above the sealed metal reactor core (instead of being vented safely outside of the building) as explained here. News today looks somewhat more hopeful after water was added to some of the cooling ponds and power is being restored (and no more explosions have taken place...).

    [Mar28'11] Unlike the 'own goal' administrative mistakes in the first space shuttle explosion (administrator overrides solid fuel rocket booster engineer, Roger Boisjoly, who refused to sign the take-off order because it was too cold on the basis of his observation of previous partial failures), and Chernobyl ('safety officers' order the removal of moderator rods past their maximum safe withdrawal point to perform a 'safety test', which instantly causes a core meltdown), the Fukushima disaster seems to have been caused by two engineering design flaws: (1) explosions caused by pressure vessel hydrogen (and radioactive steam) venting into the building instead of being 'safely' dumped outside because of an incorrect specification of the pressure the O-ring on the concrete containment vessel inside the building could withstand (above), and (2) loss of water in the spent fuel pools through a compressed-air-operated door/gate seal in the side of the pool which failed with prolonged power outage (Dave Lochbaum's hypothesis here. Neither of these design flaws are particularly subtle. If these two explanations are verified, they are largely the fault of GE engineers and their subcontractors (in the 1970's), along with Japanese engineers who failed to correct them, and failed to provide earthquake- and tsunami-resistant backup power). Alternative or additional explanations of spent fuel pond water loss include water being splashed out of the ponds by earthquake shaking, and cracks in the pools from the earthquake and from the subsequent explosions. Of course, none of these real explanations, or the practical palliatives (transfer spent fuel from fuel ponds to dry casks like the Germans have done) that should immediately be implemented on the many current operating copies of these reactors will be calmly reported by the stupid dunces the world calls 'teevee reporters', currently engaged in 'reporting' on the latest US-run effort to bravely kill poor people and bomb power stations by remote control in countries that still have a lot of oil. Rather, we will have them motivating American to empty the supply of potassium iodide actually needed by Japanese near the stricken plant. Long live the internet, where real information was available to everybody within days of the event, without the need for any 'news teams'! Helpful, publically-minded engineers and scientists are all we need. The world would be a better place without the news teams and their painted clown-face 'reporters'. Everybody is against nukes now, but, childishly, almost no one wants to forego the power the plants put out (which among other things, help make parts for phones/computers/teevees), have fewer kids, travel less, and so on.

    [Mar30'11] From the first time I saw the larger explosion at Fukushima unit 3, I had a bad feeling about it, given how much more debris and dust were blown upward. It was immediately apparent that unlike the first explosion in unit 1 and the explosion in unit 4, both of which left most of the reactor building structures intact, likely including the spent fuel pools, this one might have damaged the concrete containment structure. Unlike the other two, there is a possibility it was initiated by molten 'corium' from a substantially melted core coming into contact with water in the suppression torus below the bottom of the containment structure, causing a steam explosion (rather than, or in addition to a hydrogen explosion). This explosion was more likely to have damaged the spent fuel ponds causing them to leak water. Quite a mess, though there is no hard information on what actually happened (and there won't be for a while). In the end, the whole thing will likely kill a smaller number of people than the tsunami/earthquake itself (27,000 killed or missing) -- and probably less than the number of people killed across the world in automobile accidents *every single day* (about 3000, with about 10,000 a day seriously injured), which is regarded as an unfortunate but acceptable daily loss of life for the convenience of driving. But the Fukushima disaster has permanently wrecked a good chunk of land (some of which still has people on it), caused ground water and sea water contamination, and will require an enormous effort (years) before it is stablized (e.g., by digging under the structure to install a concrete barrier to further ground and sea water contamination). The stabilization seems to be going slower than with Chernobyl and there is a lot more radioactive fuel at play. Dmitri Orlov (always a hopeful one :-} ) argues that we have declined as an industrial civilization below the minimum level of competence required to use and manage nuclear power. I hope he's wrong.

    [Mar31'11] The Libyan rebels -- whose leader spent the last 20 years in Langley, Virginia with no visible means of support -- have already set up their own central bank. Capital idea! Cool! Can we do that here? This comes about a year after Libya began charging US and UK oil companies additional fees to operate, which resulted in US and UK oil companies (but not Chinese oil companies) withdrawing from their Libyan oil operations in protest. As Susan Lindauer writes, this is yet another vampire war for oil.

    [Apr06'11] As a result of taking some of its older nuclear power plants offline, Germany has had to import power from its neighbors (France and the Czech republic). France, on the other hand, generates 80% of its power from nuclear power plants...

    [Apr12'11] Japan now estimates that the release of radiation from the Fukushima disaster is (so far) up to 10% of that at Chernobyl. Not as bad, but getting closer.

    [Apr13'11] I would imagine a lot of countries are concluding that Gaddafi's decision to give up his nuclear program was a mistake. The US doesn't do no-fly programs over countries with nukes.

    [Apr18'11] Saudi has not made up for the 1.3 million barrels a day cut in oil production by Libya (the cut is about 1.6% of world "all liquids" usage, graphs here). Saudi also has growing internal demand. Saudi's oil fields are 50 years old and many are producing oil with a substantial water cut (water pumped in below oil to repressurize depleted oil field), which has to be separated afterward. The 'newer' fields (most also discovered 50 years ago) have high sulfur, more viscous, more difficult-to-process oil. A significant permanent downslope of oil production now awaits industrial civilization. But unfortunately, nothing will be understood until severe shortages have been chronically experienced. An example of the absolute unreality of discourse comes from the Pacific Northwest. Because of a large snowpack this year, the hydropower resevoirs have been emptied in anticipation of large run off. Since there will be extra power, the intermittent supplies of wind power (equivalent to two large dams) is currently planned to be idled, because there will be no place to store it. This has gotten people angry for having spent money on wind power. Instead of planning for coal depletion, a sloppy wind grid, distributed battery storage of intermittent wind power, more pumped hydro, or any of a number of common sense responses to the imminent decline of industrial civilization, people are mad because they can't waste energy like they have become accustomed to doing. The only thing that could change their mind is severe, chronic shortages. This all goes for me, too. We don't have a car or kids, and we live in a small flat, but we still use a lot more energy than world per capita average. Of course, by the time that forced shortages cause rationing, it will be even more difficult to spend the extra money on renewable power, since renewable power will *always* be more expensive than coal/oil/gas "because it's made out of them, stupid" (Dr. Steve Brule voice). *Of course* it's not as good/convenient/cheap as coal/oil/gas (maybe I will leave nuclear out of that trio just now...). Never will be. And that is *exactly* why we should be going all out right now making renewable energy while there is still some fossil fuel left! Despite its momentous implications, energy rundown will too slow to knock people sufficiently upside the head to get them to actually do something practical about it (i.e., look ahead for at least 15 or 20 years). For example, right now, because of current high price for oil (which is all that matters, even if it is set to crash next year, since this is business, not logic), natural gas now looks cheap. In equivalent energy terms, at current prices, natural gas costs only 40% of what oil does. In anticipation of this demand (again with a time horizon of one year), drilling into shale gas has picked up over the last year. Shale gas wells are super-rapidly-depleting (e.g., 85% declines in one year in Chesapeake Energy Corporation's Haynesville shale) because shale gas formations are so 'tight' permeability-wise. This makes it hard for the gas to percolate through to the borehole, which often includes several miles of horizontal drilling through a 50 foot thick formation. The methods of slightly increasing permeability (fracking, 'proppants') cause small earthquakes, contaminate the water supply (e.g., causing tap water to be ignitable!), release large amounts of the super (20-100x as bad) greenhouse gas, methane (6% of total well production!), etc, etc. It doesn't matter. And the oil shale boom is still happening even when all the big money on oil is already shorting oil in anticipation of the next oil price crash. It makes perfect sense when you are looking ahead one year. So, full steam ahead -- for one year. Until the next iceberg. Until we all go down with the ship. Oh well.

    [May13'11] TEPCO has confirmed that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in (at least) reactor 1. The scale of the disaster is getting closer to Chernobyl every day. My initial guess that it wouldn't turn out to be as bad as Chernobyl may turn out to be wrong. Despite the lack of press coverage, the situation remains far from being under control. Constructing a containment building over as well as into the ground alongside the damaged reactors to contain the mess will be a substantially bigger job than it was with the single Chernobyl reactor. From a distance, the response to the disaster seems to be lackadaisical and haphazard given its seriousness -- but this is from a distance, and with spotty reporting of what is currently going on. The current understanding is that the core probably melted into a pool at the bottom of the pressure vessel within the first few hours (detailed reports here). This disaster lends credibility to those who argue that nuclear energy's energy-return-on-energy-invested is overestimated because of not having included energy costs of recovering from disasters. However, nuclear EROEI is still *much* further above 1.0 than the pointless (1 unit of energy in, 1 unit of energy out) conversion of 40% of the US corn crop into ethanol. Nuclear plants are still being constructed worldwide and few modern plants have been turned off worldwide. And as peak world energy hits around 2025 or so, it is likely that a lot more will be built (think: China, peak coal).

    [Jun02'11] Excellent articles on pedal power from Low Tech Magazine here and here. I like the calculation of how many pedalling people it would take to generate the UK electrical base load (1.2 billion people) -- that is, 20 people, each pedalling non-stop for 8 hours, every day, to power each UK person (that would be 40 people per person in the US). And this is just for electricity (about 1/8 of total energy use).

    [Jun06'11] The 'sprout' E. coli is resistant to penicillins, tetracycline, nalidixic acid, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazol, cephalosporins, amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, piperacillin-sulbactam, and piperacillin-tazobactam. No doubt this is due to scary organic vegetable farming practices (yeah right). The official story is that it has nothing to do with standard genetic engineering practices where a DNA sequence to be inserted includes an antibotic resistance gene so that the antibiotic can then be used to select organisms that took up the DNA sequence... Clearly the way to fix this is to ban organic vegetable farming (after all, all those organic vegetable farmers give their vegetables antibiotics, right?) and buy all your safe GMO food from Big Pharma. What a steaming pile of crap, so to speak :-}

    [Jun07'11] Oh, not cucumbers, not lettuce, and not tomatos? Oh, not Spanish farmers (not to worry, since they're bankrupt now)? Oh, not the organic sprouts? I'm surprised Mladic wasn't blamed. But the idea of it being unsafe to eat homegrown and fertilized vegetables has been implanted. Sales of vegetables have plummetted in Europe, despite no evidence against them. After all, you never know when an organic vegetable might contain bacteria resistant to the 8 main antibiotics that also releases a special toxin. If we could only get rid of these damn organic farmers and replace them with factory farms growing GMO crops that can be manufactured into 'food' with implanted edible RFID chips so your smart fridge can tell you when your 'food' has 'spoiled' (can it, even?) ... What utter mainstream media B.S. mind control nonsense!! The only food that is safe to eat is the kind that's *not* advertised. If sensible humans can't see that having a chemical and computer companies taking over the food business -- and their fridges! -- is a dangerous and direct assault on their bodies' health, well then, just eat up, folks.

    [Jun10'11] In addition to genes for resistance to 8 antibiotics, Helge Karch now reports that the supposedly 'organic' E. coli from Germany also contains plague genes (as in "I'm not dead yet"). We've got to take the DNA synthesizers away from those damn organic farmers before they kill us...

    [Jun12'11] The average Chinese person uses less than 1/10 the number barrels of oil per year that the average American uses (2 vs. 23). If China increased its per capita oil usage to US levels, China would consume the entire world's oil output (not just exports -- the whole output). They are trying. Just this year, the combined length of their freeways reached the combined length of the US interstate system roads; but the total number of cars in China is still less than 1/5 that of the US, and Chinese on average drive less. This situation suggests that something will have to give in the next decade -- US oil consumption, Chinese growth, or both. On the bright side, worldwide solar power is continuing to increase, currently running at about a 60% year-on-year increase over the past 4 years (almost all due to Europe and in particular Germany). Solar is still only at 1/200 (0.5%) of total electricity generation, but more solar is good news.

    [Jun14'11] Despite a lack of direct (DNA) evidence of contamination by the pathogenic, multi-antibiotic resistant, plague-gene-containing, shiga-toxin releasing E coli with both enteroaggregative and enterohemorrhagic features previously only seen in separate E coli strains (non-toxic strains of E coli constitute a substantial proportion of healthy stool), the sprouts remain accused on an epidemiological basis (i.e., several people from the same sprout farm got sick at the same time). Some 10-year-old background from Helge Karch is here. One idea is that it came from sprout seeds. Note that the initial incorrect Spanish cucumber story came from epidemiological evidence as well, which led to the discovery of shiga-toxin releasing E coli, that however turned out not to be the deadly strain. Despite the seriousness of the outbreak, the story is rapidly fading from the news, with organic foods and vegetables (unfairly) under a subconscious black cloud. This may help the adoption of GMO's in the EU, which had previously strongly resisted their introduction (see, e.g., recent wikileaks diplomatic cable releases showing US diplomats lobbying for Monsanto against French and especially Spanish resistance to GMO's, reported this January(Guardian article).

    [Jun16'11] Today at least :-} things seem to be unwinding a little faster that I would have expected. I ran across (1) the insightful comments from an old guy in Athens to Paul Mason at the end of his Greek report today, (2) undercover police in Plaza Catalunya trying to start a riot, but now, as is getting more and more common, caught on youtube, (3) the fact that 60% of Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo's profits (Lenovo is the 4th largest computer manufacturer in the world that recently acquired IBM thinkpad, etc) in 2009 came from *real estate speculation* in China (!), and finally (4) this supposedly muckracking article about bankers, including one at scitty bank (Italian pronounciation), in the New Yorker with a tone that was a combination of sycophantic (the usual) but also worried. These look like the beginnings of cracks in the shared world picture/illusion required for modern life. Ugh. Well, not that I think that bankers shouldn't take a hit... I'm sure things will be patched up again in a few days for another couple of months of business as usual. Hopefully. So we can get back to removing the last working fish from the ocean, as is our wont.

    [Jun23'11] The new IEA plan to release oil from the strategic reserves was a big surprise to me. The amount is not that great (the US component of the release is 30 million barrels, or approximately 1.5x the amount of oil the US uses in *one day*). Spread over a month, it is a little more than what the war on Libya took off the market -- that is, *per month* (mainly from the European market). Presumably it is designed to temporarily drop oil prices so that an (oil consuming!) economic recovery can happen. These are the pitiful strategies of humans in the time of peak oil -- burn off your savings so that the burn off rate of remaining savings can be increased. This is worse than burning the furniture in the fireplace -- this is burning it in the middle of the house. Talk about short-sighted! Now if this was part of a crash program for replacement energy and energy savings to avoid the collapse of industrial civilization, fine. Instead, it will get people back on the road to nowhere and boost SUV sales and crash renewable energy companies at the worst possible time. This will work for less than a year, and risks a new embargo by oil exporting countries -- and that's assuming the the reason this is being done is not that an actual critical oil shortage is about to arrive and the IEA is panicking. In a footnote to my previous post above the absurdity of the 4th largest computer company in the world making more than half of its profits from real estate speculation, China just announced cash for clunkers because car sales there have dropped. It sure looks like they've got the same just-burn-the-whole-house-down idea in mind. In not too many years, it will become pretty obvious to everyone in the US that it was a Really Bad Idea to fall for dumping 3 trillion dollars into the Iraq war obscenity/slaughter ($20 billion dollars a year just for air conditioning) instead of spending it on solar panels and expanding the electric grid. But by that time, it may be too late.

    [Jul03'11] Well, looks like the occupied territories extend quite a ways across the Mediterranean! Heavily armed Greek commandos bravely stopped an unarmed boat as a favor for another country, even after Hillary said it was OK for that country to kill people on the boat. Now that'll certainly help Greece to pay back those French and German banks, right? (so the default insurance on those loans won't have to be paid out by American banks). Greece *will* be paying the loans back by selling whatever it has that's worth something. It's not obvious they got anything for this particular grovel, so maybe they were just practicing assuming the position. Greece is stuck on the euro. If it trys to get out, go back to its own currency, and devalue it, the price of oil in its own currency would immediately triple or quadruple. Greece imports 100% of its oil, which must still be paid in dollars. Same goes for Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland.

    [Jul05'11] Though test designs have been operated decades ago, no commercial ambient air pressure molten fluoride salt thorium reactors have yet been built. These are different than molten salt *cooled* reactors (such as the solid fuel breeder reactor in Japan that currently has a stuck fuel assembly immersed in hot, can't-be-exposed-to-air, opaque liquid sodium...) and actually have the nuclear fuel dissolved in the air-safe (in the sense of not causing an explosion if exposed to air) liquid. They have much more attractive :-}, that is to say, better failure modes than pressurized water solid fuel reactors (the molten salt is at ambient air pressure, the fuel is liquid, there is less neutron exposure of heat extraction circuit, shutdown is by passive drain out), and have mainly been overlooked because it is harder to make nuclear weapon material from them. They certainly look like the next obvious stage in our race to avoid energy dought. It is critical that some actual examples be contructed and have their failure modes tested to see if the expected benefits are real and the remaining engineering obstacles can be overcome (fluorine emission after shutdown, corrosion problems with high temperature fluoride salts, stopping tritiated hydrogen fluoride production, etc). This will be difficult, since people don't want 'nuclear' (for quite reasonable reasons, like the dreadful ongoing permanent disaster of Fukushima), but they want their energy just the same. I think the near future will instead be a lot more coal and a lot more more brown clouds.

    [Jul17'11] The news doesn't usually make me smile, but "the smell of Murdoch in the morning" (William Rivers Pitt) or "Rupert Murdoch dogpaddling over the cosmic sewer" (smokingmirrors) makes me feel positively warm and fuzzy!

    [Aug09'11] Well, now it's the smell of a wharehouse of independent filmmaker's and independent record label musician's work burning (Sony/PIAS). I guess spending a third of a trillion dollars on surveillance cameras didn't work out. When rich people steal a billion here and there and crash our economic system, they generally don't make a lot of noise and main-sewer media explains that we all have to tighten our belts (except the richies). Poor people are noisier, less savvy, and happy to get away with a just a teevee or a cell phone. For about the tenth time in the past few years, I feel like Gary Larson's giant cockroach taking a shower when the drain plugs. This isn't even the beginning of the downslope of oil/energy/GDP/industrial civilization. We just hit a dang plateau and the richies are already cashing out (wealth distribution most skewed ever) and demanding martial law. "I hate to think of what's down there...". On the positive side, a lot of people took matters into their own hands and brooms at RiotCleanup.

    [Aug10'11] There have been several slightly strange things about the recent London riots. The police seem to have held back oddly, compared to, say, anti-globalization protests. In this case, there was a lot more reason to be aggressive. Certainly, the spotlight has moved off of criminal bankers and Rupert Murdoch who have in their own way, hied off with orders of magnitude more ill-gotten goods than the rioters. Who now remembers the endless, multiple criminal foreign wars that have turned a large proportion of Afghanis and Iraqis and Libya into refugees? I also noticed a larger than usual amount of like race baiting in online comments, even from BBC newscasters (Fiona Armstrong vs. Darcus Howe) and Cameron's racist facebook friends (cf. hasbara, online 'personalities' constructed by intelligence agencies). Certainly an intra-class war is an excellent thing to foment as in*ter*-class differences rocket to historical extremes. This is what happened after the late 60's riots in the US (that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King), preventing any coalition between poor whites and blacks, and fortifying a divide that has persisted for decades. Liberals and conservative both asking for martial law. Same old.

    [Aug22'11] Juan Cole certainly seems to have lost it and morphed into a neocon! The strangest things happen when you're not looking. He has been raving on in support of the immoral UK/French vampire attack on Libya for oil, as the North Sea rapidly depletes. People who read him openly wonder why he lost it [update 1 Sep: well maybe he never had it: I missed the old news on his CIA consultant gig]. The unreported attacks are the usual cowardly bombing of undefended city buildings and power plants, water lines, strafing boats and people in the streets from helicopters, beginning 3 months ago and continuing since then. NATO has carried out almost 20,000 sorties, including 7,500 bombing runs over the past few months. These are being carried out so mindless UK drivers can continue tooling uselessly around in their armored, oil-powered 4000 pound hulks, where, in London, 50% of trips in cars are less than 2 miles. The UK can't blame the US for these oldstyle colonial atrocities using newstyle high tech equipment, cowardly delivered from the safety of a high flying bomber. Maybe 1000 people killed over the past day and a half. At least 5000 injured. Hospitals overflowing. Disgusting. It's just a matter of time before they start bombing the hospitals (cf. Vietnam, Iraq). I fear one day, NATO countries will pay in kind. Imagine a powerful foreign country bombing London while simultaneously arming bands of thousands of local yobs/rebels (see Franklin Lamb, Nazemroaya1), Nazemroaya2) and then blasting an alternate reality out to the world and back into your own London teevee with the Mighty Wurlitzer. Why don't you French and British and Italians go home and fix your own countries? Stop trying to steal other people's oil! Here is a report of the european oil jackals already running back in even before the bombers have left, cancelling Gaddafi's Russian and Chinese oil contracts (the Italians killed half of the Libyan population between 1911 and 1943 suppressing resistance to their colonial rule). Not about oil, no... And it worked so well, in Iraq, right? One million people killed, civil society destroyed, daily breaths of depleted uranium. Before NATO invaded, Libya had the highest human development index, the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy in all of Africa (ahead of Saudi and Russia!). Let's check back in 10 years.

    [Aug23'11] MSM 'reporters' from CNN and others conveyed death threats to Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya and Thierry Meyssan, at last report (yesterday) trapped in the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli, when the CIA/MI6 'reporters' abandoned the building as the NATO supported rebels passed through the area, looting houses and stealing video projectors off the ceiling at the Rixon hotel. The death threats were for suggesting that the NATO air-power-and-intelligence-supported yobs/mercenaries/rebels being ushered into Tripoli included 'al-Qaeda' -- in the sense of Afghanistan redux: bin Laden slash al Qaeda started out [ended up?] as a CIA asset. Franklin Lamb (in a different hotel) says he was shot in the leg by a sniper and now reports that the 'rebels' are winning. Hope they make it! [Update: Aug24: Nazemroaya out of the Rixon now taken by rebels, Lamb reports from Tripoli Port in the Corinthia hotel] [Update: Aug25: rebels apparently holed up/controlling the Corinthia hotel, shooting *out*; Update: Sep1: Meyssan and Nazemroaya make it to Malta]. Over 1000 other people were killed today.

    [Aug26'11] Proud NATO is still delivering bombs to supposedly 'liberated' Tripoli. A lot more people have been killed in the fighting today. The US, UK, France, and Qatar still have special forces on the group supporting the Taliban-like 'al-Qaeda' rebels/yobs who keep themselves busy looting video projectors from hotels when not otherwise engaged. The handful of non-mainstream journalists (4-6) still on the ground, peeping against the mighty MSCNNBCBS Wurlizter (e.g., Theirry Meyssan here), have been completely silenced by death threats, and may have been captured or killed. The 'official' 'battle hardened' reporters, who mysteriously only take pictures of the rebels and the hospitals they have laid waste to (e.g., Alex Thompson), meanwhile rigorously censor any pictures of the US/UK/French special forces they are traveling with, which include forces from Qatar (which has oil interests in Libya) and even eastern european mercenaries. The UK/Canada!/UK/France/Italy/US should go home and fix their own damn countries! Instead NATO is today plotting an occupation/demolition/'stabilization' force so the country can be utterly destroyed and demoralized in a catastrophe similar to what the US/UK achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan, while preserving Libya's oil for the multinational vampire pirates.

    [Aug27'11] To cover up the UK/French/Canadian responsibility for the massacre in Abu Salim carried out by CIA-dah 'rebels', this disgusting report from the BBC is larded with disinfo: the rebels control Tripoli; but at the same time, the TNC are not in Tripoli because they have retreated to a "makeshift airstrip" in the western mountains (don't mention the 3 months of NATO bombing, 'I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it'); Tripoli is free (of water, and electricity because of NATO bombs), the people are celebrating, even though the streets are empty; the rebels "are continuing to secure frozen assets" but some of the money is missing because it was stolen (by who?); a stream of "foreign dignitaries" are waiting to meet the rebels (on the airstrip?) but they can't, because 'security' is bad (executing too many injured civilians in the hospital? did I mention the bombing?); but actually it's 'the regime' that may have destroyed the hospital because NATO is concerned for civilian life (that's why they did 8,000 bombing runs) -- and actually, it was 'Gaddafi's guards' who were 'raping children' (in incubators, perhaps?). How can you beeb writers live with yourself after writing lying crap like this? Libya [used to] export most of its high quality low sulfur oil (EIA 2010 numbers): it was going to Italy (28%), France (15%), China (11%), Germany (11%), Spain (10%), Greece (5%, UK (4%), US (3%), and 14% elsewhere. Go home, Canadian/UK/French/Italian oil pirates!

    [Aug31'11] The lesson of Iraq and now Libya: it's a really bad idea to give up your nuclear program. Libya looks set to be driven into a state similar to the post-2003 catastrophe of Iraq, which like Libya, was a place that had a good standard of living before the US invasion. Now, Tripoli is filled with rotting garbage, an unintended side effect of Libya 'rebels' having slaughtering anybody in Tripoli they caught with black skin, which included the foreign workers who used to pick up the garbage. Blacks left in town are in hiding -- one was with Franklin Lamb.

    [Sep04'11] Rick Rozoff's excellent site on WordPress, Stop NATO, was suspended on Sept 2 from making any new posts by WordPress with: "Warning: We have a concern about some of the content on your blog. Please click here to contact us as soon as possible to resolve the issue and re-enable posting." Of course, click here, produced no response. Dangerous anti-war, anti-military thoughts must be suppressed. Meanwhile in Libya, NATO bombing is continuing (52 bombing runs on Sept 4) -- 200 bombs a day, average, for 6 months. Go home, NATO oil vampires. [update: on Sept 4, wordpress backed down, perhaps after the negative web publicity, and the site is live again].

    [Sep12'11] Colonial NATO cowards are back to bombing Libya while British and French soldiers and their al-Qaeda shills on the ground are busy torturing blacks and Gaddafi supporters in the wasteland of cities they have 'liberated'. Of course, self-righteous NATO only slaughters people 'accidentally' because they have been used as 'human shields'. I wonder how a Londoner or Parisien would like it if their slaughtered mom or kid were labeled 'human shields' killed 'by accident' when their neighborhood was bombed from a high altitude fighter jet piloted by an African trying to oust Cameron or Sarkozy? Fix up your own houses (and your damn public transport) UK/EU and stop destroying other people's countries!

    [Sep19'11] Amy Goodman, pod person, comes out in her true colors on Democracy Now, shilling for the US/NATO Libyan invasion/bombing/oil-grab/al-Qaeda-install and, oh yes of course, popular revolution, via a report from an embedded 'reporter'. Here is some real discussion, including Lizzie Phelan back from Tripoli, holding her own, from 12 days ago: part 1 and part 2.

    [Sep20'11] Yesterday, Siemens pulled half a billion euros from an unnamed French bank and deposited it directly with the European Central Bank. Sounds a bit unravel-y.

    [Sep29'11] NATO airstrikes continue to support the bloody, shameful siege of Sirte, helping the 'rebels' shell strategic positions such as hospitals. Many black refugees fled there from Tawergha, which the rebels plan to bulldoze so no one can return. Sounds familiar. Meanwhile, back at the ranch in the UK, there is plan afoot to increase the road speed limit from 70 to 80 miles per hour. This was touted as a way to 'stimulate the economy' and 'increase efficiency'. Driving somewhere at 80 mph instead of 70 mph uses about 20% more gas to travel exactly the same distance (or almost *40%* more gas than driving there at 50 mph, which is around the optimum speed measured in miles per gallon). Slow down, and get your hands off Libya, greedy UK-ers! The economy is tanking in part because of high oil prices -- and the solution is to reduce miles-per-gallon by 20%? Talk about a waste-based economy...

    [Oct04'11] Another London woman cyclist was crushed to death by a lorry on 3 Oct, this time at the awful intersection at York Way and Pentonville Road, which has the utterly idiotic but ubiquitous pedestrian/bike-crusher railings set up on a useless sticking-out traffic island-like thing in front of the McDonalds, which creates a choke point (where the back wheels of the lorry ran over the woman's head after she was caught against the railing). The British certainly do have their head up the arse with respect to the Netherlands when it comes to bikes (not that the US is better). One example among many is the pampered black cab lobby. The black cabs transport only 0.6% of commuters in central London but account for 20% of the heart-disease-causing small carbon particle pollution as a result of their horrible-quality diesel engines coupled with a driving style that involves useless rapid acceleration and braking. I fear the situation will get worse before it gets better. As the squeeze on fossil fuel in the UK gets worse as the North Sea continues to deplete, UK drivers will get more aggressive. Also, economic contraction will tend to limit money for improving cycling conditions (construction of more separated bike lanes like in the Netherlands, where more than 90% of the people cycle at least once a week, without helmets, with the lowest death rate per cycle mile in all of Europe). Put simply, major road space has to be reallocated away from cars. Car ownership in the Netherlands in 1960 was 0.5 million cars and a lot of people cycled. In 1980 it had increased to over 4 million cars. This resulted in cycling virtually vanishing from city centers in the Netherlands. But they managed to fix this in the next decade! Cycling in many cities in the Netherlands is continuing to increase. In the UK, by 2000 there were 21 million cars. The modal share distribution of journeys in the UK in 2009 was: 2% cycling, 3% rail (including the tube!), 3% other (ferries), 7% buses, 23% walking, 63% cars. Since 1995, across the UK, cycling has been on a slow *downward* slope while car licenses have been on an upward slope (25% increase 1997 to 2009). Cycling by 11 to 17 year olds in the UK is now down to *1/3* of its level in the 1970's as kids are being driven to school, just as in the US. The absolutely preposterous *growing* reliance on cars in the UK has to -- and *will* -- be undone by peak oil, whether car drivers like it or not. It would be rational to set up policies to further deter people from driving now, to cushion them from the coming blows. But people in the UK won't have that. They demand to feel the full force of the hammer on their head. Fine. If we can all get through the comming squeeze without car drivers going on too many murderous rampages, perhaps there will be something positive to look forward to. Just think of how many useless new nanny state jobs could be created to help people get over their 'car addictions'... :-}

    [Oct10'11] NATO bombing has killed thousands of people in Sirte. This is what receiving end of NATO bombs looks like. 'Humanitarian' bombing of course. I seem to remember something about a no fly zone because Gaddaffi was killing civilians. But the servile UN is silent now. Why don't we have a NATO/Cameron/Sarkozy criminal oil vampire no-fly zone? They are the scum who are actually killing civilians and maiming children like the one in the video, with thousands of bombing runs -- *hundreds* or *thousands* of times as many as Gaddafi was accused of (25,000 sorties total to date including surveillance). NATO scum.

    [Oct25'11] NATO heavily bombed Libyan oil field infrastructure in order to make it impossible for Libyan oil production to resume without foreign 'investment'. NATO air sorties continue apace, now over 26,000 including almost *10,000* bombing runs. Libya has about 42 billion barrels of oil left compared to Iraq's 112 billion barrels, compared to about 900 billion barrels total world crude left. That means that Libya alone contains almost 5% of the total remaining oil in the world (if you believe the official story that the 30%-of-total-world-oil-remaining Saudi reserves have somehow remained constant after the last 3 deacdes of production). After the utter destruction of Sirte by bombs and remote control terminator-like robots, Gaddafi is now dead. This production was more reminiscent of a classical continental torture-execution -- complete with so_do_my and faked death photos -- than of a people-finally-rise-up-and-kill-Mussolini kind of thing. Very similar to the hanging of Saddam. The were some good things in the bad old days like smaller, more compact walkable cities, lower energy intensity; however, public state torture/disembowelment/execution wasn't one of them. Similar to Iraq, there has been massive infrastructure destruction (water, power, hospitals, buildings, roads). The savings and gold of the country have been impounded or stolen by corrupt, bankrupt US/UK/EU bankers. This will keep Libya in a desparate state for decades. As in Iraq, the position of women is quickly regressing back to the middle ages (the result of a war supported by so-called feminists, and now, girlie man, Gordon Duff?!). But like Iraq, it may be difficult to hold back the armed Libyan civilian population forever. This is a proxy war to contain reemerging Russia and China. I am somewhat amazed at the passiveness of both of them in the face of so many (oil contract!) losses. They both have the technology to interfere with US/UK/EU shooting-fish-in-a-barrel terrorist wars against defenseless third world countries; but their thought control technology is far inferior. For now, the NATO oil vampires have won. All sorts of threatening text is now being written in the usual outlets about Syria and Iran. As openly mooted, one possibility to draw the US (and the US military!) into a war would be for Israel to attack Iran unilaterally, Iran to respond by decimating a remaining rump US Iraq force, dragging the clueless population (and US military!) along. Just one of several possible scenarios. A similar effect could be achieved with a US carrier vs. a 'super-exocet' (Joe Vialls redux!). This could easily be psyops/disinfo, which has been going on with respect to Iran for a full 8 years now. But the increasingly precarious economic situation (e.g., in US, food stamp usage went from 27 to 46 million in just 3 years from 2008 to 2011) along with peak oil is bringing us closer to kind of situation that in the past has been followed by large scale wars. An attack on Iran could possibly set such a thing off.

    [Nov02'11] A drive through of the ruined and looted ghost town of Sirte after NATO and its rats got done with it. NATO does a Guernica/sodomy and Hillary laughs about it. She/Sarkozy/Cameron should watch their karma.
    [Nov08'11] "You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him *every day*" -- President Obama, ostensibly, of the United States.

    [Nov27'11] Just sitting watching. I don't know what to say. Maybe just sitting is the real problem...

    January 24, 2012 (earlier: scroll back)
    [Dec01'11] The biggest strike in the UK in decades (Nov 30) barely makes the news. It was visible in London mainly as an increase in the number of 'protect and serve' police vans scurrying through the streets with their American sirens turned up so loud the scratchy distorted sound output was ear splitting. If I'm wondering what kind of action is required to affect policy, then I'm sure other people are as well. The austerity cuts are strongly weighted by income -- if you make less money, the percentage of your cut is *more*. This is straighforward class war, couched in the language of the nanny state (the latest ridiculous example comes from Spain: street walking prostitutes will be fined for not wearing reflective safety vests...).

    [Dec28'11] "A theme that emerges...is insulation of the decision-making elite from the consequences of their actions. That is to say, in societies where the elites do not suffer from the consequences of their decisions, but can insulate themselves, the elite are more likely to pursue their short-term interests, even though that may be bad for the long-term interests of the society, including the children of the elite themselves." -- Jared Diamond, Collapse. The implications of this for our current situation is very clear: make super-rich people pay, else we all go down even harder.

    [Jan02'12] The Iran talk has escalated. And Israel just said that it has no choice but to burn more Palestinians in Gaza (it burnt 1500 last time). This could be more of the same Iran disinfo we saw over the past 9 years. But looking at the past year, the destabilization of Tunisia, the destabilization and re-junta-ification of Egypt, and the utter destruction of Libya went more 'smoothly' than I would have predicted, and so far, is closer to having achieved original the stated PNAC goals that I would have predicted. Syria is now teetering. Syria would seem to be a more difficult case than Libya because it is better armed and somewhat more strongly supported by Russia. Iran is much better armed than Libya, with missiles, air defenses, and electronic expertise. As far back as 2003 I was guessing that an attack on Iran could be used to provoke the Iranians to sink a US ship or even an aircraft carrier, which would then provide a 9-11-sized reason to (continue) attacking Iran. That never happened. It is probably still the case that US aircraft carriers have no sure defense against fast comparatively cheap water-skimming anti-ship missiles that jump up at the very end before impact, esp. if several are used at once. The interruption of world oil supplies after an attack on Iran seems too risky, even for the sociopaths in control of US/UK policy (Panetta, Clinton, Petraeus, Dempsey). Perhaps the US has recently developed some way to neutralize these kind of missiles (or plans to bomb them instead of bombing the nuclear reactors). Perhaps Iran doesn't have as many of the latest fastest Russian anti-ship missiles as some people think. And a big war would certainly distract people from the end of growth. Sadly, the end of growth doesn't mean the end of growth in CO2. The unspeakably ridiculous meeting about reducing carbon emissions was recently adjourned while the rate of CO2 increase continued utterly linearly upward. The only plan was something like: more 'carbon-neutral car insurance' brought to you by Iggy Pop. It is remarkable that the 2008 crash and subsequent depression was *barely* visible in the CO2 data ramp! It is pretty clear that we will deep-water-drill, frack, mountain-top-remove, and oil-sand our way through the rest of the earth's net-energy-positive fossil fuel. Because doing that burns fossil fuel, CO2 will continue to linearly increase, even as the net energy obtained from those harder-to-get-at deposits continuously decreases. We've added one glaciers-to-no-glaciers aliquot of CO2 to the atmosphere (on top of higher, no-glacier CO2); burning the remaining half of fossil fuel will add another one (getting us up to about 500 ppm CO2, well into the extreme danger zone). But the really bad effects of climate change are likely to be delayed for a few decades. I don't think climate change will be the first thing to stop the growth of humans. Instead, the approach to zero net energy fossil fuel leading to food shortages will probably hit first. Any moderately rational person can see that the only way to avoid an ugly crash resulting from increasing human numbers pitted against the energy downslope, the soil downslope, the fresh water downslope, the fertilizer downslope, the minerals downslope, the fish downslope, etc. is for humans to voluntarily have less kids and to voluntarily use less stuff. But I think there is basically zero chance of humans reproducing less and using less. People are animals with a powerful animal urge to reproduce and consume, acutely refined by natural selection, that can't be denied by mere language (even if language *is* something analagous to the cellular code-using system! :-} ). We are adding more than one entire UK of people to the earth every year. Think of outfitting an entire new UK with houses, cars, trains, roads, schools, electricity, food, clothing, sewers, health care -- every year). Resource downslopes in the physical world, however, *are* stronger than people. Resource limits on population will probably be followed by extreme climate disasters further limiting food and population. I wish I could see a different viable path forward to 2050! The main reason for my pessimism is that humans had pretty much already figured out what the problem was *40* years ago, when resources were less depleted and a different path could have been chosen. It wasn't.

    So what are my useless short term predictions? No bombing war on Iran (hopefully, despite the growing feeling of dread that Iraq troops and materiel are being repositioned for this purpose), just continued economic war. For the rest of the world, nothing less than fitful business as usual for another decade. Oil prices may actually decline a bit over the next few years (barring outright war) as high prices reduce demand to just under production limits, paradoxically even as we sit right on the bumpy plateau of peak oil. My longer term prediction is the same as a decade ago -- really big trouble maintaining industrial civilization by 2030, and a horrible mess by 2050. Hopefully, I'm wrong! (and not just about climate change being slightly delayed, and no war on Iran...)

    [Jan09'12] I don't know the true order or whether they are related in any way, but the announcement that Iran will no longer accept dollars for oil (supported by Russia; in retaliation for sanctions) and Panetta saying Iran isn't working on nuclear bombs on face the nation were a little surprising for me. Soon after Iraq demanded Euros for oil, it was invaded. I don't see how the US could invade Iran. The US could try to bomb Iran's hidden missile installations. However, as the war on Serbia showed (where the US almost exclusively bombed decoys instead of real tanks) it is possible to outsmart the smart bombs. In its own wargame simulations almost a decade ago, the US lost against Iran. I don't know what has changed since then. The main effect of the sanctions so far seems to be an 'own goal' -- the rise in the price of oil costs the US/EU/Japan, but increased revenues for Iran (and oil companies). The US is committing slow economic suicide by military Keynesianism (Chalmers Johnson). The US spends $1 trillion per year needed to maintain 1000 foreign military bases, fund terrorists in Iran, etc. That comes out to $10,000 per year *per US household*. The logical thing to do would be to spend that money instead on retooling industrial society to use alternative energy so that it won't start collapsing in a few decades. Instead, the response to peak oil is economic suicide.

    [Jan13'12] It's worse to kill people than urinate on them, Mr. Panetta. You are one of the people ordering the killing. On a different topic, another worrisome possibility for jump-starting the war on Iran would be a false flag attack on a US ship (cf. the USS Liberty). In that case, the actual source was detected (not Egypt). The source of an anti-ship missile or a torpedo might be easier to conceal. Most wars, perhaps, have been started by similar methods. Doesn't mean one is coming. I still think it won't happen (yet).

    [Jan15'12] The cancellation/postponement of the US joint military exercise in the middle east planned for the spring -- supposedly to have been the largest US military 'exercise' ever -- is a hopeful sign that the adults may at least temporarily be in control in the US. Although there is no overt shooting war, the recent US economic actions has resulted in an instant 40% devaluation of the Iranian currency relative to the dollar, and assassinations/provocations are continuing as the US moves men and materiel around the ring of military bases it has on Iran's borders. Of course, could also be more of the usual disinfo/feinting.

    [Feb20'12] As long as the US has a carrier in the Persian gulf, I think the US is probably *not* serious about starting a war with Iran because the US military is well aware of carrier vulnerability to surface jump-up missiles. So a real danger sign is when all the US carriers *leave* (unless they are so desperate for war that they are willing to 9-11 a whole carrier, which I continue to doubt). The various bungled/false flag attacks haven't been very convincing (Iran bombs India for buying their oil?! the ushered-onto-the-plane-without-a-passport underwear bomber?). And perhaps China can help.

    [Mar05'12] You'd think the there would be some *penalty* for the last time (second Iraq war) that the lying scum in the government and the servile press and military lied lied lied lied about weapons of mass destruction, which was only ten years ago (not to mention the massacre of over 1 million people plus trillions of dollars wasted right at peak oil...). Sheesh, if people can't see through this, how on earth can people deal with the very *real* problems on the way...

    [Mar09'12] The Unemployed Kindgom is pushing to spend 20 billion pounds on renewing its Trident nuclear weapons. This will be paid for by cuts in pensions, schools, colleges, hospitals, public transport, and renewable energy. Homelessness in the UK jumped sharply this year (up 14%, to almost 50,000 households). What on earth are British nukes for? And all this while the UK spectacularly hypocritically toadies up to USrael about Iran's nuclear power plants. It's pitiful, stupid, and disgusting.

    [Mar14'12] A UK teenager was arrested for making this relatively mild facebook post. Good to know the Orwellian UK thought police are protecting the UK from being terrorized by the writings of people who think that the UK was stupid to have gotten involved in the pointless longer-than-WWII, US-run Afghan debacle/slaughter/occupation/moneypit that now seems to be falling apart (moi?).

    [Mar27'12] Went out for a 50 mile bike ride out of London and back into London over the weekend. At one point, me and my friend got behind an especially aggressive car for safety, and then we watched as he wildly swerved, narrowly avoiding hitting a pedestrian as he strongly accelerated onto the motorway ramp. We didn't even slightly block him at any point; the simple sight of bicycles and pedestrians seemed to throw him into a rage. Wish I could have texted him the first graph from this PDF from the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It shows an absolutely stunning, almost 23% drop in indigenous UK North Sea oil production -- *in one year* (as in 4 more years of this, and we're importing almost 100%, like Greece). This was accomodated by a 11% increase in imports and 27% decrease in exports, so actual consumption hardly budged (like the car guy above whose near-deadly burst of acceleration required the full tenth of a megawatt of power many car engines can put out). Maybe Chris Cook will be wrong on oil prices this time :-/ (he thinks they are about to crash like after the 2008 peak). In the US, a spike in methane prices 2 years back resulted in the fracking gold rush. This then quickly caused methane prices to crash, with the result that the fracking companies are now all having to sell methane at a loss. Sheesh. Peak fossil fuel surreptitously sneaks by, under cover of the idiotic business cycle.

    [Apr29'12] "So this twenty-first century world of ours is shaping up right now largely as a confrontation between the U.S./NATO and the BRICS, warts and all on every side. The danger: that somewhere down the line it turns into a Full Spectrum Confrontation. Because make no mistake, unlike Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, the BRICS will actually be able to shoot back" -- Pepe Escobar.

    [May14'12] Several years later, it comes out (in the Guardian) that the scary underwear bomber that launched only-job-left-in-town pathetic TSA drones into fondling the traveling population (well so far, just people not in cars) was working for the CIA. Kinda thought that right at the beginning, given how he managed to get escorted onto the plane without a passport. Of course, the testimony about that critical bit wasn't allowed in his trial. Irrelevant detail, apparently.

    [May20'12] "Under the Taliban, women were confined to their homes. They were not allowed to work or attend school. They were poor and without rights. They had no access to clean water or medical care, and they were forced into marriages, often as children. Today, women in the vast majority of Afghanistan live in precisely the same conditions, with one notable difference: they are surrounded by war." -- Sonali Kolhatkar.




    Amnesty is cheerleading for war by Moon of Alabama
    Interview of 'Treasure Islands' Nick Shaxson Rob Hopkins
    [deepwater oil: just the facts] by Jean Laherrere
    [great US/UK success in Iraq: half the population is now hungry]
    Full spectrum confrontation world? by Pepe Escobar
    [French elections, half a million early deaths from Vioxx] by Alexander Cockburn
    Evaluating a 1981 temperature projection by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Rein Haarsma
    [dang Aldous Huxley -- designer babies for 50 year old women in a world with way too many people] by Steve Connor
    Christ was never a christian but he was tortured by occupying forces by Eileen Fleming
    Nuclear fusion [the power source of the future] by Ugo Bardi
    UK oil: plummeting production vs. media inattention by Rick Monroe
    Capitalism: a ghost story by Arundhati Roy
    [750 sq ft 3 room cave going for just $46K] by Barbara Demick
    World energy consumption since 1820 in charts by Gail the Actuary
    MMT as the austerity alternative by Michael Hudson
    ['1984' officially arrives in Old Blighty] Casuals United Blog
    China coal update by Richard Heinberg
    Trident is a colossal wate of money that will encourage further nuclear proliferation by James Bloodworth
    US state department hands terror-cult US base in Iraq by Tony Cartalucci
    Tactics and strategy at the Strait of Hormuz by Luis de Sousa
    Who was behind the Dehli bombing? by Gareth Porter
    The 'Syrian revolution' is possibly over by b
    The real story versus the cover story by Mark Gaffney
    [false flag, classic] by John Crewsdon
    China steps up to Syria China Matters
    Debt-o-nomics Part Three by Steve Ludlum
    Who is threatening whom? from Juan Cole
    A German satire on a Greek stage by Farooque Chowdhury
    Britain had to plead with US to take part in Iran flotilla by Jame Kirkup
    The Arab agenda in Syria by Pepe Escobar
    In Libya now the truth is coming out by Lizzie Phelan
    Iran turns embargo tables by Tyler Durden
    [leaked Australian gov't oil report] by Matt Mushalik
    Global energy and resources by Peter Goodchild
    Israel tamps down Iran war threats by Ray McGovern
    Sinking the petrodollar in the Persian gulf by Pepe Escobar
    Albert Einstein opposed Israel terrorism and zionism Letters to the Editor,, New York Times, 4 Dec 1948
    American-backed terrorists in Iran by Tony Cartalucci
    [keeping the master race gene pool clean...] by Dan Williams
    [better title: fifth scientist assassinated by terrorist bomb] BBC
    Horror and puppetry by Linh Dinh
    Iran in the crosshair again? by Vineyard Saker
    Much ado about methane [it's the CO2, friend] by David Archer
    Why is Britain ramping up sanctions against Iran? by Simon Jenkins
    Through a keyhole darkly by Ed Kinane
    "I didn't vote for these bastards. I voted for the other bastards" by Dmitri Orlov
    Those *peaceful* suicide bombers in Syria by b
    No secret in Finnish Patriot missile discovery by b
    Anatomy of a NATO war crime by Franklin Lamb
    [implications of UK trail of MF collapse for Eurozone, Canada] by Tyler Durden
    Years of drone flights find no Iranian nuclear weapons program by b
    The coming war with Pakistan: BBC rewrites 10 years of history and declares Pakistan the new enemy by Tony Cartalucci
    [the US/UK war on Iraq has permanently destroyed higher education in Iraq]
    The real 1% doctrine by Mark Ames
    The "Left" and Libya by Alexander Cockburn
    Washington's countdown by Tom Burghardt
    Gould-Werritty by Craig Murray
    How the devil paid by Tony Cartalucci
    The Egyptian revolution -- act II by b
    Organ gangs force poor to sell kidneys by Michael Smith, Daryna Krasnolutska and David Glovin
    Britain's dirty secret [threat to world peace, etc] by Meirion Jones
    A false flag compaign against the concept of man made global warming by Ugo Bardi
    New Libyan "PM" is a big-oil goon by Tony Cartalucci
    [UK planning to attack Iran -- wouldn't this money be better spent on fixing the crap windows???] by Nick Hopkins
    Germany and the Euro crisis b at moon of alabama
    The Greek decision by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
    [US/EU-supported Libya 'rebels' get into 6 hour gun battle using antiaircraft guns at a *hospital* trying to kill a patient] by Nick Meo
    [PDF!] [25,000-women study: higher cholesterol -> *less* heart attacks] H. Petursson et al. (2011)
    The actual war begins now by Franklin Lamb
    Centrist Islam and Mustafa Abdul-NATO by As'ad AbuKhalil
    The Gaddafi I knew by Eric Margolis
    Foreign companies fight for Libyan oil [after bombing oil infrastructure to necessitate foreign intervention] by A. Tagiyeva
    Lizzie Phelan speech on Libya, Oct 10 by Lizzie Phelan
    UN silent despite no grounds for NATO war on Libya by Frances Thomas
    Chaos computer club analyzes [German] government malware CCC
    Libya's TNC, bullet proof democracy and perpetual war by Christof Lehmann
    Isrl's window to bomb Iran by Ray McGovern
    Mass killing and humanitarian disaster in NATO siege of Sirte by Bill Van Auken
    NATO's war on libya is directed against China by F. William Engdahl
    Again and again -- securing Barge-e Matal b
    [bring earplugs! -- they work] by Kevin Koeninger
    Turkey lectures Syria on killing militants -- then kills militants by Tony Cartalucci
    Europe bank debt in lurid detail by David Malone
    [stop bombing Libya, UK-ers! -- fix your freaking Tube!] by Miranda Bryant and Dick Murray
    A brief economic explanation of Peak Oil [excellent article] by Chris Skrebowski
    Does the Euro have a future? by George Soros
    How al Qaeda men came to power in Libya by Thierry Meyssan
    How the NATO military and corporate takeover of Libya was achieved by Dan Glazebrook
    NATO's 'victory' in Libya by Tony Cartalucci
    30,000 bombs over Libya by Thomas C. Mountain
    Wordpress suspends Rick Rozoff's 'Stop NATO' new site by Rick Rozoff
    Gaddafi's Libya as demon by Diana Johnstone
    Lies, war, and empire: NATO's 'humanitarian imperialism' in Libya by Andrew Gavin Marshall
    [previous Great Leader installed by NATO now accused of trafficking Serbian organs] BBC
    Right to plunder by Pepe Escobar
    NATO's ugly face by Stephen Lendeman
    Never forgive, never forget by Stephen Lendeman
    Libya: the greatest betrayal by Tony Cartalucci
    Winter is coming by Nebojsa Malic
    The true heroes of NATO's war by Glen Ford
    WikiLeaks cables expose Washington's close ties to Gaddafi by Bill Van Auken
    Libya's forced collapse: what does it portend for Africa? by Amengeo Amengeo
    Libya war is CIA op 30 years in the making by Tony Cartalucci
    Tripoli in defiance of NATO by Tony Cartalucci
    Al-Qaeda asset is military commander of Tripoli by Pepe Escobar
    Rebels cleanse Tripoli's Abu Salim [after NATO bombardment] from Matthieu Mabin
    Updates on Libyan war collected by Rick Rozoff
    BBC shows "Green Square, Libya" from India! crashareyouready
    US, NATO plan Libyan "stabilization" by Bill Van Auken
    You don't bomb a "captured" city by Tony Cartalucci
    "The rebels now are just NATO's ground troops" interview w/young Libyan from London
    Tripoli Port notes by Franklin Lamb
    Calls for NATO occupation of Libya deafening by Tony Cartalucci
    Demolitions by Israel increase fivefold, says new UN report UN IRIN
    Fierce fighting continues in Tripoli by Bill Van Auken
    Killing the truth [death threats conveyed by MSM reporters!] RT interview with Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
    Libya: mission accomplished? moon of alabama
    Waiting for the endgame in Libya by Franklin Lamb
    The Pentagon's "Salavador option": the deployment of death squads in Iraq and Syria by Michel Chossudovsky
    The benz burners arrive [138 luxury cars torched in Berlin so far in 2011] zerohedge
    [quantitative easing transfers money from poor to rich -- looting without broken glass] by Heather Stewart
    Riots and the underclass by Alexander Cockburn
    NATO's massacre at Majer by Franklin Lamb
    Britain baffled by bersek by Farooque Chowdhury
    What is really happening in Europe? the Vineyard Saker
    London's burning by Hal Austin
    Panic on the streets of London by Laurie Penny
    The suveillance state has failed by Daniel Hamilton
    When did the American empire start to decline? by Stephen Walt
    Truth emerges about IED carnage by Kelley B. Vlahos
    Israel backers worry about muting of pro-Israel media voice by Ron Kampeas
    I love the smell of Murdoch in the morning by William Rivers Pitt
    One third of Libya turns out to support Qaddafi in world's largest march ever Mathaba
    Israel passes draft law requiring Palestinians to pay for their own home demolitions by Saed Bannoura
    Dead money by Steve Ludlum
    Freedom riding to Gaza by David Swanson
    What if the Sun went into a new Grand Minimum by Georg Feulner
    Learning from the aquacalypse by Dave Cohen
    "It's too late for that" by Paul Mason
    Betting on the PIGS by Kash Mansori
    NATO's "Alternate Universe" in Libya by Wayne Madsen
    NATO's war crimes in Libya by Susan Lindauer
    [good Michael Hudson article on Greece] by Michael Hudson
    Accusations of treason in the Greek Parliament [Greece to be sold off to German and French banks] Covering Delta
    Sarkozy and Cameron prepare to land in Libya by Manlio Dinucci
    Welcome to the violent world of Mr. Hopey Changey by John Pilger
    Why 'b' was wrong on Fukushima by Malooga (informed anti-nuke engineer)
    Wikileaks reveals US wantedd to keep Russia out of Libyan oil by Paul Jay
    Dear Coen Brothers, it's nothing personal (it's all political) by Tali Shapiro
    Pirates of the Mediterranean by William Bowles
    2020 crude oil production down around 8 mb/d [~11%] by Matt Mushalik
    Conserving the commons by Vera Brodova
    NATO warships shell Red Crescent building in Misrata Jason Ditz
    There goes the data: major cuts at EIA by Gregor MacDonald
    Financial heist of the centure: confiscating Libya's Sovereign Welth Funds by Manlio Dinucci
    1992-2011 bis repetita by Vineyard Saker
    How many cancers did Chernobyl really cause? [estimate: 53K cancers and 27K deaths] by Lisbeth Gronlund
    3-week update on Japan's nuclear crisis by David Wright
    Surreal rhetoric on Libya by Lawrence Davidson
    Wow that was fast! Libyan rebels have already established a new central bank of Libya by Michael Snyder
    Libya's blood for oil: the vampire war by Susan Lindauer
    UK 'anarchists' are part of MI5 by Kevin Boyle
    War on Libya and the control of the Mediterranean by Rick Rozoff
    Possible source of leaks at spent fuel pools at Fukushima by Dave Lochbaum
    [what idiocy! -- he's *long* dead, Jim] by Syed Saleem Shahzad
    Possible cause of reactor building explosions by Dave Lochbaum
    Attempts to refill fuel ponds by World Nuclear News
    [comment on three Fukushima explosions and spent fuel fire] by shelburn
    [comment on [smaller] Fukushima No. 1 explosion from nuclear plant engineer] by donshan
    What about a no fly zone for the Palestinians? by Gilad Atzmon
    Not guilty by Chris McGreal
    Egypt, a classic case of rapid net-export decline by Jeffrey J. Brown and Samuel Foucher
    Egypt to open Gaza border in both directions Tuesday Xinhua
    Was Davis running drone programme in Pakistan? by Chidanand Rajghatta
    Protesting Iraq by Layla Anwar
    Bahraini police surrender to protestors Press TV
    Beyond the false dawn: global crisi 2020-2022 by Charles Hugh Smith
    Bread, not twitter by Mike Small
    [protestors strike back] Staff, alMasryalYoum
    The revolution is dead. Mubarak Obama won 'Black Swan' comment on BusinessInsider [guess he didn't win :-} ]
    The Tunisian example and Britain by Christopher King
    Reagan epoch shatters in Egypt by Robert Parry
    Government document captured from Egyptian thugs by Kawther Salam
    UK/US companies help shutdown Egypt internet Democracy Now
    Prince warns S. Arabia of apocalypse Press TV
    All is not what it seems in Egyptian clashes by Tony Cartalucci
    19 private planes arrive in Dubai from Egypt Free Egypt
    Population redux by Paul Chefurka
    The Guardian's political censorship of Wikileaks by Israel Shamir
    Lauren Booth: go go go by Gilad Atzmon
    Pakistan will implode if the US does not leave Afghanistan by Imran Khan
    The Japan myth by Daniel Gros
    All British forests for sale by Johann Hari
    US plans for military escalation in Afghanistan by Barry Grey
    For C I A drone warriors, the future is death by Pepe Escobar
    Wikileaks conjures Litvinenko's ghost by Justin Raimondo
    The doctor at the heart of Kosovo's organ scandal and follow-up by Paul Lewis
    The British Army's FRR go through the looking-glass? by Nick Kollerstrom
    Vichy Britain by Neil Clark
    [why undersea cables in the news now?] Cryptogon
    German faces choice as Spain wobbles by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
    [Irish pensions bail out EU -- i.e., German, French, UK bankers] by Emmet Oliver
    The party game is over: stand and fight by John Pilger
    The largest heist in history by Greg Pytel (April 2009)
    Chalmers Johnson dies by Stephen Lendman
    Robotz, Obama and satanic mills by Steve Ludlum
    The white knight of zombieland by Steve Ludlum
    Protest works by Johann Hari
    [Who rules America?] by zerohedge
    [Google pays 2.4% tax -- a lot less than you do...] by Jesse Drucker, Bloomberg
    European maps alphadesigner
    The global banking cartel has one card left to play by David DeGraw
    A financial coup d'etat
    by Michael Hudson
    US/UK war crimes: more leukemia in Fallujah survivors than Hiroshima survivors by Bill Wilson
    Peak oil is history by Dmitri Orlov
    Will we ever learn the truth about 9/11? by Eric Margolis -- Huffington Post (deleted)
    No good men left here by Christopher Ketcham
    Warface defining human life by 2020 by Paul B. Farrell
    Israel places order for 20 F-35s -- U.S. picks up the [$3 billion dollar!] tab by Greg Grant
    Bank profits a sign of economic sickness, not health by Steve Keen
    Conflict of interest in 'superbug' report Times of India
    And now for some good news by Johann Hari
    Entrepreneurs: from the Near Eastern takeoff to the Roman collapse by Michael Hudson
    Obama warned Israel my bomb Iran Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
    Systemic fear by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan
    Ethnic identity politics are deadly by Elaine Meinel Supkis [but I don't believe that better border controls will solve the problem...]
    The Democrats are just one-half of the war party by Cindy Sheehan
    Oil spill pics washington's blog
    'The front fell off' for BP [youtube] John Clark
    The death of nations vs. the wealth of nations by Damon Vrabel
    Why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan by William Dalrymple
    Torture and truth by emptywhere on Craig Murray release
    How Goldman gambled on starvation by Johann Hari
    Sinking ship by John J. Mearsheimer (clear-headed conservative)
    Is Petraeus McChrystal's replacements or Obama's? by Paul Craig Roberts
    A pathless land by John Michael Greer
    The coming era of energy disasters by Michael Klare
    [Kevin Neish eye witness] by David Lindorff
    Why the French hate Noam Chomsky by Diana Johnstone
    Flotilla fallout by Douglas MacGregor (US Army Col. Retired)
    [more eye witnesses] by Lauren Booth
    [eyewitness report from a news producer] by Jamal Elshayyal
    Defenders of the Mavri Mamarra by Ken O'Keefe
    [bambi commandos slipping on pools of blood] by Layelle Saad and Ramadan Al Sherbini
    Of course, they were asking for it by Mark Steel
    Reflections on the future of Palestine and the Middle-East [I'm hoping this analysis is incorrect] by Vineyard Saker
    Seeing through the modus operandi -- poor Bambi commandos being lynched by Al Qaeda terrorists by Mac McKinney
    Israeli butchery at sea -- an institutional failure of a morbid society by Gilad Atzmon
    Only a one-state Palestine is possible by Christopher King
    Greeks work harder than Germans do by Mark Thoma
    EU bullied into $1T banking bonanza by Gordon Long
    Clegg throws people under the bus by Michael Collins
    [TARP for Germany] by Michael Hudson
    McAfee surpasses North Korea as cyberattack power by Dick Destiny
    Dissection those 'overpopulation' numbers: part one -- population where? by Ian Angus
    The coming famine by Julian Cribb
    The great unreasoning by Dmitri Orlov
    Global nonrenewable natural resource scarcity -- an analysis by Chris Clugston
    Will there be a false flag operation to implicate Iran? by Paul Craig Roberts
    Final destination Iran? by Rob Edwards
    Time to outlaw naked credit default swaps by Wolfgang Munchau
    French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment by Henry Samuel
    Toward a new world social order by Richard K. Moore
    Sting's defence [of his million quid gig in Tashkent] by Craig Murray
    Mythological thinking, the de-industrialisation of the West and the New World Order by Big Gav
    Goldman goes rogue -- special European audit to follow by Simon Johnson
    Chinese steel production (!) by Stuart Staniford
    Living conditions determine health [health care spending accounts for 3% of variance in life expectancy] by Rock Climber (internal medicine M.D.)
    Which will be the last nation standing? by Richard Heinberg
    Naked scanners, naked CCTV and barefaced lies by Charles Farrier
    Pakistan collapse could trigger global great depression and world war III Nadeem Walayat
    If it's that warm, how come it's so damn cold? by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, and Ken Lo
    The future of phosphorus by Steve Coll
    Trolley canal boats Low-tech magazine
    CIA killings speel defeat in Afghanistan by Douglas Valentine
    Pants bombs vs. America by George Smith
    Coal world Gregor Macdonald
    Afghan dirty war [cf. Vietnam Phoenix] escalates by Douglas Valentine
    Oil and environment: a contradiction by Peter Goodchild
    Avatar metaphor for the long war by David Swanson
    [CDS inventor/looter/banker/fraudster is behind carbon derivatives "cap and trade" scam] Washington's blog
    Af-Pak war racket by David DeGraw
    Richest 1% of Britons hold 70% of wealth (vs. 48% in US) by Edmund Conway
    The oil-economy connection by Michael Lardelli
    Why we fight by Alan McKinnon
    The CRU hack by RealClimate
    Torture flight spotted in Birmingham (UK) by Robert Booth
    How a torture protest killed a career by Craig Murray
    Spotter cards and how they work Guardian
    Deformed babies in Fallujah by H.E. Dr. Ali Abdussalam Treki
    The challenging incongruity of cheap oil by Andrew McKillop
    Resources, land use, and the collapse of civilizations by Guy McPherson
    Why was the Berlin wall built? by William Blum
    Excreted tamiflu found in rivers [where it can exert selection pressure on water bird viruses] by Janet Raloff
    The worth of the earth by Ilargi
    U.S. [poodle] NATO poised for most massive war in Afghanistan's history by Rick Rozoff
    [think Alabama, 1910] by Sheera Frenkel
    Brezinski -- "It could be a Liberty in reverse" interview with Gerald Posner (cf. C I A)
    The national interests of Iran in the Caspian Sea by Bahman Aghai Diba
    The story of my shoe by Mutadhar al-Zaidi
    The revolution of the elites by Andrew Gavin Marshall
    Megrahi was framed by John Pilger
    Backbone of complex networks of corporations: the flow of control by J.B. Glattfelder and S. Battiston
    Organ harvesting by Alison Weir
    Can the wealthy have a separate peace? by Altaira
    Zionist pioneer renounces Zionism by Helena Cobban
    Peter Ackerman by Stephen Gowans
    [go Marina! -- she's a hero on Crete] by Paul Anast
    Worst single terror attacks in history and reenactment by Norm Dixon
    Kidney theft ring by Joseph Cannon
    Wars, plagues, and Europe's rise to riches by Nico Voigtander and Hans-Joachim Voth
    The monster footprint of digital technology by Kris De Decker
    Oil: the market is the manupulation by Chris Cook
    Evolution and Revolution of the Central Banking System Global Power and Global Government: Part 1 by Andrew Gavin Marshall
    [why British bread sucks] Wikipedia
    Pay us off or we blow up the plant by John Lichfield
    Trolleybuses and trolleytrucks LowTech magazine
    [from 2004] CDC to mix avian, human flu viruses in pandemic study by Robert Roos
    [Brown finds his inner poodle] by Mark Townsend, Toby Helm, Peter Beaumont and Gaby Hinsliff
    Artwork of the children of Gaza desertpeace
    Did nano-thermite take down the WTC? interview with Niels Harrit
    Metal minerals scarcity and the elements of hope by A.M. Diederen
    Moon of Alabama closes [financial, employment, social] by Bernhard
    "Almost easy" Brookings Institution report
    What is the miminum EROI that a sustainable society must have? by Charles A. Hall, Stephen Balogh, and David J. Murphy
    'There is very little logic at work' by c
    Iran surrounded Charting Stocks
    To fight deflation, abolish cash by Leo Lewis
    Ar the Iranian protests another US orchesrated "color revolution"? by Paul Craig Roberts
    A plague of snakes by Patrick Cockburn
    What if Ahmadinejad really won? by Robert Parry
    In memory of Ed Teague, Postman Patel by Craig Murray
    Holocaust and holodomor by Nicholas Lysson
    Coming home by George Monbiot
    London's Metropolitan Police accused of waterboarding by Sean O'Neill
    [Israel attacks hothouses and farmland] by Saed Bannoura
    On overfitting by Eric Steig
    Low product by Ann Thorpe
    Red cliffs and collapse by Damien Perrotin
    [US torture ship vacationing in Mallorca] by Adrian Roberts
    [drug money only liquid investment capital -- Jan 09] by Boris Groendahl
    [Indo-Europeans behaving badly as is their wont] by Catherine Philp and Michael Evans
    [7/7 confession via torture -- cf. 9/11 commission report based on torture] by Ian Cobain
    ITER iterations by John Busby
    Living with 75 tons of depleted uranium in Gaza Palestine New Network
    [2002 'creative' survey of religion, torture, but good illustrations why it would be a really bad idea to go back there] by Michael Rivero
    Prosperity without growth by Luis Queiros
    The summer of 1381 by Dan Jones
    The wreck of modern finance by Martin Hutchinson (conservative)
    Let's salt the slug in 2010 by Charlie Skelton
    Thatcher's children by Left Luggage
    Maps of who caused climate change and who will pay for it from Ezra Klein
    [remote control drones killing civilians] Ramzy Baroud
    [shelling hospitals] by Sarath Kumara
    David Miliband presses for gag on CIA memo [new poodle] by Richard Norton-Taylor
    Odd looking photographer? by Nick Fine
    'Gaza II' unfolding in the East by Wayne Madsen
    Transport and adaptive capacity by Robin Lovelace
    The cost of wind, the price of wind, the value of wind by Jerome a Paris
    State of permanent siege by Richard Cook
    Why we forgot how to grow food by John-Paul Flintoff
    How credit default swaps create bankruptcies by b
    How bad will it get? by Steve Keen
    Scholar disputes founding myth by Morgan Strong
    Useless finance, harmful finance, and useful finance by Willem Buiter
    Geithner's dirty little secret by F William Engdahl
    Arctic meltdown by Fred Pearce, NewScientist
    Almost half of French approve of locking up bosses by Estelle Shirbon
    Corporations and media by Joe Bageant
    AIG: before credit default swaps [fraud], there was reinsurance [fraud] by Chris Whalen
    The field of "permitted" opinion narrows further by Craig Murray
    The crisis of maldistribution by Branko Milanovic
    Towards a new sustainable economy by Robert Costanza
    Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society by Ted Trainer
    Is a major war a possibility in 2009? The historical antecedents by Frederic F. Clairmont
    The unfortunate uselessness of academic economics by Willem Buiter
    Only in Kazakhstan, alas: the maximumm wage fight by Rick Salutin
    A taxpayer rip-off of surprising boldness by Willem Buiter
    Make Bono pay tax by Eamonn McCann
    Please state the nature of your emergency by Kurt Cobb
    You have moved on but the injured and burned children of Gaza have not by Juan Cole
    Asia's export economies in free fall by John Chan
    The wounds of Gaza The Lancet
    Still in ruins by Dahr Jamail
    Merchants of death: exposing corporate finaced holocaust in Africa by Keith Harmon Snow
    Bankers' excesses require retribution, not reviews of pay by Jeremy Warner
    Two-way street by Rannie Amiri
    2009 world food production by Eric de Carbonnel
    Full circle by Dahr Jamail
    The starving of Gaza [about half of agriculture industry wrecked by Israeli attack] by Eric Ruder
    Edge of the abyss [hysterical Veneroso on Japan] by Yves Smith
    Italy bans kebabs [uhhh, what about those oil workers?...] by Richard Owen
    Peter Mandelson backs new 'psople's bank' at Post Office by Toby Helm
    Davos hosts Blackstone creeps by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    [the Soros-parasite cashes in again -- time to eject these parasites from the host] by Sean Grady
    Controversial bestseller by Joshua Holland
    Sophie's choice by Barbara Lubin and Anna Baltzer
    Costly new supply route to Afghanistan by b
    Endless pain by Marc Lourdes
    Israeli troops shot and killed zoo animals [why the freaky obsession about killing things in cages? eeeew!] by Ashraf Helmi and Megan Hirons
    Villages wiped off the map by Jonathan Miller
    Saudi patience is running out Turki al-Faisal op-ed in FT
    Churchill's crimes from Indian holocaust to Palestinian genocide by Gideon Polya
    From policy intention to legal justification by b
    Lloyds TSB blocks aid to Gaza indymedia UK
    PM Gordon Brown, here is my shopping list by Gilad Atzmon
    Sacrificing Gaza to revive Israel's Labor party by Smadar Lavie
    The middle ground is eroding fast by Alastair Crooke
    Photo comparison by Norman Finkelstein
    On balance by As'ad AbuKhalil (Angry Arab)
    Ceasefire and score by b
    Zionist central heating by Postman Patel
    Busted! Maasanova
    The great hunger by Marryam Haleem
    Enough. It's time for a boycott by Naomi Klein
    Terribly bloodied, still breathing by Caoimhe Butterly
    Schrecklichkeit Joseph Cannon
    Gazans flee burning hospital [Vietnam redux] HSH/HAR
    Mask is off cannonfire
    New York Rabbi tells it like it is youtube
    [the 'non-existent' lobby continues to wag the dog] AP
    Israel threatens to shoot unarmed civilians on Mercy ship [update: it worked] freegaza
    When Israel expelled the Palestinians by Randall Kuhn
    In the name of humanity Alex Thomson interviews
    Cross-party fury of MPs at Israel by Gerri Peev
    Pure propaganda from the papers of record by Philip Giraldi
    Ehud Olmert claims to be able to order Bush around by Juan Cole
    Jon Stewart on Gaza Lenin's Tomb
    Israel is targetting medics by Eva Bartlett
    Israel losing PR war by Manjit Singh
    Gaza's burn victims by Sheera Frenkel and Michael Evans
    [Israeli ubermenschen soldiers order 110 civilians/untermenschen into house, then shell it, then try to bulldoze it with half dead people still in there] UN OCHA
    Red Cross: Israeli behavior in Gaza shocking by Jason Ditz
    Eyewitness reports from Gaza Lenin's Tomb
    Red cross reports grisly find in Gaza by Craig Whitlock
    A primer on Palestine by Mark Gaffney
    Interview with Yonotan Shapira: "Obama -- don't act like a slave!" BBC
    Israel hits [3 UN!] Gaza schools Kuwait times
    Israel attacks international media building scoop
    I am ashamed by Bob Moriarty
    40 civilians hiding in UN school in Gaza killed when Israeli tank fires shells at it by Nidal al-Mughrabi
    Why aren't more Americans dancing to Israel's tune? by Max Blumenthal
    Why not kill all Gazans? by James Bovard
    [another white person -- Canadian -- eye witness report from Gaza] by Eva Bartlett
    [eyewitness report from Rafah from a high-market-value white person] ABC
    Fallujah by the sea by Chris Floyd
    Warsaw redux by Postman Patel
    Beyond hell by Ben Lynfield
    The Orwellosphere by Chris Floyd
    Financial eugenics by the London Banker
    Three interesting emails sent to Elaine Meinel Supkis
    The crisis explained -- really by Robert Feinman
    European banking on borrowed time by Daniel Gros and Stefano Micossi
    The disinformation age II by Carlton Meyer
    "We were forced to bomb your city" by Kurt Vonnegut
    CEO murdered by mob of sacked workers by Rhys Blakely
    Messing with Zohan by Gilad Atzmon
    The real reason for the global financial crisis by Shah Gilani
    Pakistan leaders escape Marriot bomb by Isambard Wilkinson
    [horse head] by setfree68
    Palestinians [genetically, Jews!] paying price for West's holocaust guilt: Tutu AFP
    Is a US attack on Pakistan imminent? by Usman Khalid
    Propaganda by Craig Murray
    ['liquid bombers' cleared of targetting aircraft] BBC
    [one of hundreds of US/Nato lies about not slaughtering civilians outed by doctor's video] Times
    Urban surprise: more bicylists means fewer accidents LiveScience
    Full Putin interview translation [compare to McBush] CNN
    [London] ambulances in crashes 4 times per day Elizabeth Hopkirk and Fay Schlesinger
    Hypocrite Miliband and the myth of western moral superiority by Craig Murray
    The Financial Times and the "self-confessed mastermind of 9/11" by James Petras
    [the US uses Russian airspace to resupply Afghanistan] by Jeremy Page
    Another famous victory by Gordon Prather
    [KKK] the people's voice
    [a positive sign] Ha'aretz
    Don't forget Yugoslavia by John Pilger
    London house prices fall 5.3% in a month [2008 may have lowest number of sales since 1959] by Kathryn Hopkins
    Free Gaza by David Halpin
    Relevance of mainstream sustainability to energy descent by David Holmgren
    The trouble with Georgia by Dmitri Orlov
    [Georgian riot police use new crowd control weapons against crowd protesting martial law] youtube
    [Google maps erases interiors of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan Google
    South Ossetia by Gary Brecher
    Major armada prepares for Iran blockade by Sam Smith
    [if you lost on your house, you're not rich enough to get bailed out] by Mark Bridge
    Russia and China strike back by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    Militarizing the social sciences antifascist calling
    Kirkuk crisis and the coming of war by Roads To Iraq
    A record July for planes over Afghanistan by Bruce Roflsen
    UK housing bubble by Adrian Ash
    [the freaky sex/humiliation/beating thing sounds familiar] by Alison Weir
    [cf. October 1957, Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas] Palestine News Network
    [US warns Israel (Jul5'08) against second Liberty attack] Brunei news
    Attack of the global pirate bankers by James S. Henry
    [here is the video of the blindfolded demonstrator taken by the girl whose father was arrested below] AlJazeera
    IDF arrests father of [14 year old] girl who filmed International Solidarity Movement
    How reliable is DNA [i.e., few loci used in current DNA databases] in identifying suspects? by Jason Felch and Maura Dolan
    Met with silence by Khalid Amayreh
    Bike, meet the city by Mary Catherine O'Connor
    The Anglo-American imperial project by Andrew G. Marshall
    Get ready for the last oil war by Andrew McKillop
    Golden shield by Naomi Klein (sponsored trip?)
    How Britain wages war by John Pilger
    [rooting out terr'ism in the classroom] by Khalid Amayreh
    [good peak oil summary to show people] by Anawhata
    [KKK 'democracy'] Ma'an
    Cognitive dissonance in action by John Busby
    Big oil's 'secret' out of Iraq's closet by Pepe Escobar
    "He lost his balance and fell" report from Mohammed Omer
    Energy transitions past and future by Cutler Cleveland
    Dead end by Jonathan Cook
    More PR-related confusion by Gavin Schmidt
    "we have met the enemy" by SamuM
    A state of emergency by Euan Mearns
    Torture poll [what's with India?!] by
    [the recession will take money from our pockets to repair somebody else's bank reserves] by Mick Phoenix
    Why UK natural gas prices will move north of 100p/therm this winter by Rune Likvern
    The real state of Iraq by Juan Cole
    "We are all North Koreans" by John Feffer
    [KKK] by News Agencies
    Countdown to $200 oil meets Anglo Disease by Jerome a Paris
    Oil hits new high as Israel calls strike on Iran 'unavoidable' by Ashley Seager
    Bill Kristol at AIPAC: Obama and McCain "don't actually differ" on Iran by Seth Colter Walls
    All that's wrong with 'common wisdom' in one article by Jerome a Paris
    The war camp in its death throes is intent on striking Iran by Mehrnaz Shahabi
    Blair due on trial in the Hague by David Halpin
    Nasrallah opens with a knight move, next move, Bush by Franklin Lamb
    [dirt on Ineos] by ace
    Forties pipeline shutdown begins by Euan Mearns
    China down to 12 days worth of coal news.com.au
    Don't mention it lenin's tomb
    Beyond the valley of the sick bag by Henry See
    Food -- the ultimate weapon of the ruling elite by William Bowles
    [nuclear plant fish kills comparable to commercial fishing] by Robin Pagnamenta, Peter Stiff and Lewis Smith
    [Brown demands more oil from 50 year old Saudi wells -- "listen up, you rocks"] Reuters
    The KLA's death camp lenin's tomb
    No ambulance, call the radio by Mohammed Omer
    GMP counter terrorism unit hot on the trail of ...er.. terrorists Postman Patel
    ['microchipping' (=betterGPS'ing) coppers for their own safety, posh and katie, credit crunch cancels charity ball] The Daily Flail
    Over-valuated housing not limited to US by Floyd Norris
    Iran torpedoes US plans for Iraqi oil by M. K. Bhadrakumar
    No checkpoints in heaven by Ramzy Baroud
    Genocidal UK, EU, US biofuel perversion threatens billions by Gideon Polya
    Bear market rallies by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
    Peak oil is here, enjoy by Edward Tapamor
    Dead men tell no tales Postman Patel
    March 20 US declaration of economic war on Iran by John McGlynn
    Update from Iraq Roads to Iraq
    Sadr militia battle troops in four Iraqi cities [new developement] by Ammar Karim
    Worried yet? Saudis prepare for "sudden nuclear hazards" after Cheny visit by Chris Floyd
    "We live in a nightmare" by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
    Shattering a ntaional mythology by Ofri Ilani
    US-UK-Australian Iraqi holocaust and Iraqi genocide by Gideon Polya
    Biogas [better than biodiesel, bioethanol] by Big Gav
    [physicist Andris Piebalgs drives a car that burns bioethanol distilled in the third world [Brazil and US?!]] by Euan Mearns
    [breaking the 'rules' of war] by Dahr Jamail
    Teachers told to rewrite history by Richard Garner
    [see first comment by atheo] by Robert Fisk [who benefits? who pays?]
    Police provacateurs caught red handed in Quebec Brasscheck TV
    [you've got to haggle] by Larry McShane
    UK top cop who led CIA probe found dead by Rob Harris
    [as I predicted, the Brown "withdrawal" talk was a farce] by Thomas Harding
    "Arctic oil and gas will not change much the coming world peak oil and gas!" by Jean LeHerrere
    Kosovo independence: a matter of Western oil interests, not democracy by Aditya Ganapathiraju
    US Navy strike group responds to increasing Lebanon, Syria tension Janes Defence (sic) Weekly
    [Britons penalized for using less energy] by Ali Hussain and Steven Swinford
    [long before Hamas] by lenin
    China jumps off the Iran sanctions merry-go-round China Matters
    UK house prices fall in February by Nadeem Walayat
    Admiral Fallon and his empire -- crushing the ants by Chris Floyd
    Egypt leaks information Jordanian newspaper Al-Arab Al-Youm via Roads to Iraq
    Whistleblower sell Liechtenstein details by Postman Patel
    'Restraint' is deceitful by Gideon Levy
    A letter from Gaza by Mohammed Omer
    Gimmicks and education Gilad Atzmon
    Former SAS soldier [Ben Griffin] blows apart Miliband denial by Ben Griffin
    Reading the numbers by Simon Davies
    Tax evaders scurry for cover by Elaine Meinel Supkis
    Liechtenstein's shadowy informant der Spiegel staff
    [new 'bonus' route for 40% of the fruits of the Iraq war] by Amiram Cohen
    [CIA renditions plane lands in London] by Duncan Gardham
    In tatters beneath a surge of claims by Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail
    Slouching toward Petroeurostan by Pepe Escobar
    [Banker talk: your standard of living -- not mine -- will fall] by Edmund Conway
    Antarctica is cold? yeah, we knew that by Spencer Weart
    [Brits with small weewees are jealous of Amurrican fascists] by Jason Lewis
    A 9/11 every day for ten and a half years by Arthur Silber
    Gertler's bling bang by Keith Harmon Snow
    [damaged cable map] Cryptogon
    Top US lawyer and UNICEF data reveal Afghan genocide by Gideon Polya
    [street battles in Athens -- 6 Feb] Indybay
    Peter Power CV fakery julyseventh
    Nine billion little feet on the highway of the damned by Joe Bageant
    Global recoupling continues by Mike Shedlock
    Gladio -- death plan for democracy by Peter Chamberlin
    Ships did not cause internet cable damage AFP
    Towards a new 'Suez crisis' by Alan G. Jamieson
    The strangulation of Gaza by Saree Makdisi
    The naked economics professor's office by Elain Meinel Supkis
    [this is where your bank account went/will-go] by Paula Hawkins
    The war that did not make the headlines by Keith Harmon Snow
    [all liguids (includes ethanol) slightly above previous mid-2006 peak] by Rembrandt
    Derivatives boom raises risk of bankruptcy [more profit from failure] by Francesco Guerrera, Ben White and Aline van Duyn
    Return to Fallujah by Patrick Cockburn
    Gaza scenarios by Helena Cobban
    Growing up in Russia in the 1990's by Legal Alien
    Escape from Gaza or voluntary transfer? by Mike Whitney
    Stealing Gaza assembled by Marc Parent
    The day Gaza's Berlin Wall came down by Tim Butcher
    NATO uber alles by Chris Floyd
    [wet dreams of a**-licking European military sluts] by Ian Traynor
    A week of funerals Palestine Chronicle
    Our punching bag by Yigal Sarna
    Unraveling the myth of Al Qaida by Peter Chamberlin
    Uncertainty, noise and the art of model-data comparison by Gavin Schmidt and Stefan Rahmstorf
    Pyramids crumbling by William H. Gross
    Twilight of the psychopaths by Kevin Barrett
    The myth of sectarianism by Dahr Jamail
    The Tzabar and the Sabbar by Gilad Atzmon
    New nuclear reactors for the UK: is this really a good idea? [see comments, too] by David Fleming
    Waiting for Mr. Goodbar by Layla Anwar
    [draft summary of Westexas paper on net oil export] by Jeffrey Brown
    The destabilization of Pakistan by Michel Chossudovsky
    The hijacking of America's economy [pdf!] Acres magazine interview with Michael Hudson
    The plan to topple Pakistan's military? by Ahmed Quraishi (published a few weeks before the Bhutto assassination))
    The post-Bush regime: a prognosis by Richard K. Moore
    Bhutto, Bush, and Musharraf by John Chuckman
    Daddy will the lights be on at Christmas? by Euan Mearns
    Iraai oil unmetered 4 years after illegal invasion by Postman Patel
    The unholy trinity by Greg Grandin
    Welcome to Fantasy Air by Kurt Cobb
    No way back by Clive Maund
    Iraq does exist by Ghali Hassan
    Tel Aviv rocked by Saleh Al-Naami
    Growing food when the oil runs out by Peter Goodchild
    Beyond the point of no return by Ross Gelbspan
    Torture and torment in 2007 AD -- stop it by David Halpin
    The hidden holocaust 2: exporting democracy by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
    [UK lorry drivers call for action -- against, uhh, geology?] by Allegra Stratton
    Ciclovia! by Glenn
    Iran has stopped selling oil in US dollars Iranian students new agency
    "Go ahead, make my day" [update: the Chavez referendum narrowly lost] by Joaquin Bustelo
    Living the diesel shortages in China by Dave DuByne
    Iraq doesn't exist anymore interview with Nir Rosen [see Ghali Hassan above]
    Scare early for Christmas by Craig Murray
    The hidden holocaust: our civilizational crisis by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
    A plague on houses by Merryn Somerset Webb
    Recoupling rather than decoupling by Noriel Roubini
    Inside a private mercenary compound in Iraq by jpolis
    Finance roundup by ilargi
    "A generalized meltdown of financial institutions" by Mike Whitney
    A low point by Craig Murray
    Datastropher by Harry Stottle
    Iraq's laboratory of repression by Robert Parry
    Salvador option comes to Pakistan Fanonite
    Climate change -- an alternative approach by Chris Vernon
    Occupation breeds terror by Seth Freedman
    [kewl: drive from your eco-friendly condo to your eco-friendly golf course near the airport in Costa Rica on an ATV] Escapeartist
    [newer oil fields declining more quickly] oildrum comment by rkshepherd
    Can hybrids make a difference in the near future? by Chris Vernon
    US democracy applied in Georgia www.iraq-war.ru
    Shambles on the left by Craig Murray
    [Guantanamo-shire] BBC
    Big melt meet big empty by Richard Heinberg
    "The world's oil and gas resources are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the foreseeable future" 10 Downing's response to petition about peak oil
    Don't be afraid, open the door by Linh Dinh
    A conflict waiting to happen by Eric Margolis
    [UK withdraws Iraq troops by, uhhh, sending more troops] by Michael Smith
    Furl the flag by Gamal Nkrumah
    [inside Kitziot prison] by Khaled Amayreh
    "Should I wrap it in brown paper on the tube?" by Dominic Sandman
    Bloggers without borders by Riverbend
    [Guardian report on German EWG report below lacking a link to it!] by Ashley Seager
    Crude oil: the supply outlook [pdf!] Energy Watch Group, Oct 2007
    [Robocop mark 1 coming to base near you] by Noah Shacktman
    [David loses again trying to protect the farm] Middle East Online
    The Dair El Zor hoax by Justin Raimondo
    Is't the resistance, stupid by Pepe Escobar
    Peak minerals by Ugo Bardi and Marco Pagani
    [powerdown from an oil and 'other liguids' guy!] by Robert Rapier
    Deregulation: global war on labor by Henry C.K. Liu
    Powerdown revisited by Richard Heinberg
    World energy and population by Paul Chefurka
    [human resources: 1=water, 2=cement] by David Adams
    The indignity of commuting by bicycle by Bike Snob
    It's the oil by Jim Holt
    [this is what surveillance cameras get used for] by Rosalind Russell
    Rattling the cage: Shalom, Myanmar by Larry Derfner
    [craig murray's site back up here] Craig Murray
    de Menezes behaved normally before being murdered AftermathNews
    Oil from Iraq by Carlton Meyer
    The City in the crosshairs conversation with Stephen Graham
    [US/NATO fighters to Bulgaria -- better than refueling tankers there, I suppose] Novinite (Sofia)
    The UK energy white paper: an academic critique by Mike Pepler
    [now I'm really mad: UK homeland security goes after Thai cuisine] Reuters
    Can we outlive our way of life? -- review of Patzak Nov 07 by Robert Rapier
    "Lost" B-52 nuke cruise missiles were on way to Midle East for attack on Iran by Wayne Madsen
    UK set for oil land grab off Falklands by Marc Horne
    Peak oil and the Fermi paradox by Mike Byron
    How wealth creates poverty in the world by Michael Parenti
    The real story of Iraq's Bloody Sunday by Kim Sengupta
    Welcome to planet Gaza by Pepe Escobar
    [Russian oligarch removes (attempts to remove) this article by shutting down Craig Murray's UK ISP, taking Boris Johnson's website with it] by Craig Murray
    None dare call it genocide by Llewellyn H. Rockwell
    Microdrones [coming to a homeland near you] YouTube video of German UAV
    Peak oil update -- Sept 2007 by Khebab
    Extreme rich/poor divides [soon coming to a country near you...] by deputy dog
    [david, goliath] by Ali Waked
    [what's up guy?] by William Engdahl
    Bank of England doubles emergency loans available to banks by Julia Verdigier
    Personal clarification by A.M. Samsam Bakhtiari
    [northern pebble] AP London
    French-kissing the war on Iran by Pepe Escobar
    [swimming in Japan] youtube
    [five-fold increase in intensity of Iraq/Afghanistan air war this year] by Conn Hallinan
    US heads to recession by Mike Whitney
    The end of the world by William M. H. Kotke
    UK troops are sent to Iranian border by Kim Sengupta
    Britain's coming credit crisis by Kerry Capell
    Tar sands: the oil junkie's last fix, part 2 by Chris Nelder
    [a run on the shadow banking system] by Krishna Guha
    The sorrows of occupation by George and Karen Longstreth (friends and former neighbors)
    [death from above can see you playing tag?] by Amos Harel
    Bush's brain-new poodle by Pepe Escobar
    Energy grades and historic economic growth by Douglas Reynolds
    [MIFisk leads with 'no plane at the Pentagon'] by Robert Fisk
    Brace yourself for the insolvency crunch by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
    Prognosis in a credit crunch by Stuart Staniford
    So they all knew it was a bubble, now? by Jerome a Paris
    Highlight of the (not so) silly season by Pepe Escobar
    Subprime in the UK by Michael Hudson
    Global markets left reeling by David Teather, Ashley Seager and Justin McCurry
    The Auschwitz of our time by Khalid Amayreh
    Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time by Craig Murray
    Updated world oil forecasts, including Saudi Arabia by Ace
    Democratic power sharing by Kyle Schuant
    What about the 3rd world? by Kyle Schuant
    Boris in Baghdad by Felicity Arbuthnot
    Wikipedia and intelligence services by Ludwig De Braeckeleer
    Global money supply by Mike Hewitt
    UK energy security by Euan Mearns
    The failed state and you [this guy needs a job :-} ] Cryptogon
    A change of US plan for Pakistan by M. K. Bhadrakumar
    Litvinenko revisionism by Justin Raimondo
    Can ecological economists stop the mainstreamers before it's too late? by John Feeney
    Surviving the century interview with Herbert Girardet
    Who is wiping who off the map? WRH
    Russia's new oil pipe to cut supply to Central Europe by Eduard Gismatullin
    Detente in the middle east or calm before the storm? by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
    Groups denounce shooting of cameraman AP
    Nothing is as it appears in the news letter to Joe Bageant and response
    Another al Qaeda leader in Iraq killed twice by US by Steve Watson
    List of countries with reported energy shortages in the past few months by Solaris
    The twisted logic of eco-sprawl by Don Fitz
    CO2 capture and storage -- the energy costs by Rembrandt
    North sea output continues to drop despite record investment by Mark Williamson
    Electricity in Uganda by Chris Vernon
    IEA: Without Iraqi oil, we'll be in deep trouble by 2015 by Jerome a Paris
    London bomb 'not scary enough', Brown tells MI5 Daily Mash
    Glasgow's burning -- run for your lives by Larry Johnson
    Beavis and Butthead in London jihad by Thomas C. Greene
    A dream called electricity by Ali al-Fadhily
    Gaza: not just a prison, a laboratory by Naomi Klein
    Named: boycott leaders by Bernard Josephs and Nicole Hazan
    The siege of Baghdad by Glenn David Cox
    An attack on Iran via the back door? by Damien Lataan
    The thing about technology by David Pollard
    Welcome to the summer of hate by Pepe Escobar
    [UK] Public opinion on Iraq by Craig Murray
    The shape of a shadowy air war by Nick Turse
    [the Manilow Method] by Josie Appleton
    Tony Blair's shameful record on civil liberties [but the coming smoking ban rocks!] by Brendan O'Neill
    Sarkozy and the 'decline' of France: the great illusion by Jean Bricmont
    Is imperial liquidation possible for America? interview with Chalmers Johnson
    Coal's future in doubt by Richard Heinberg
    [saving the only democracy in the mideast -- from disabled childeren] by Deseart Peace
    Peak oil, carrying capacity and overshoot: Population, the elephant in the room by Paul (GliderGuider)
    Vote, vote, vote for central banking! by Adrian Ash
    July 7th as Machiavellian state terror? by David MacGregor
    The empire of the hedge funds by Richard Freeman
    A nosedive into the desert by Stuart Staniford
    [Fisk catapaulting the disinfo] by Robert Fisk
    Iraq poised to hand over control of oil fields go foreign firms [trans: US/UK armies steal Iraq's oil] by Heather Stewart
    Saudi Arabian oil declines 8% in 2006 by Stuart Staniford
    "We're not leaving" interview with Karen Kwiatkowski
    Oil and Israel by Andrea Crandall (free reg. required)
    US's Iraq oil grab is a done deal by Pepe Escobar
    [due to 'cock-up', BBC loses footage of Jane Standley reporting that WTC7 has collapsed in front of live video of an uncollapsed WTC7] by Richard Porter
    UK doubles naval presence in Persian Gulf by Damien McElroy
    What is behind Russia's delay of Iran's nuclear reactor? by Peter Symonds
    Iraqi woman stabs American soldier in her home by Imad Khadduri
    TIRANNT by Michel Chossudovsky
    Not good news by Sam Gardiner
    The new Iraq oil: leaked by Raed Jarrar
    Next stop by Philip Giraldi
    ['purification'] Neil McDonald CBC News
    How Gaza offends us all by Jennifer Lowenstein
    The Lockerbie cover up -- part 1 by Carlton Meyer
    How the world can stop Bush by Paul Craig Roberts
    The strategy of tension Daniele Ganser interview by Silvia Cattori
    [Iranian serial numbers, ooooohhh, scary boys and girls!] AP
    [Feb5 airspace violation report from the Greek press] trans. by cm
    The criminalization of US foreign policy by Michel Chossudovsky
    Frenzy in France over "Iranian threat" by Diana Johnstone
    Dr. Makdisi urges a one-state solution for Palestinians by William Hughes
    Global warming is being seriously underestimated [but methane has lattened for now, at least] by John James
    Liberal markets create an addiction to gas by Jerome Guillet
    Is there a painless way to fill the oil supply gap? by Michael R. Smith
    US victory against cult leader was massacre by Patrick Cockburn
    Palm oil [the dark side of biodiesel] by Dave Cohen
    Toughness is so manly by Jerome a Paris
    Last warming by Jonathan Leake
    Mengele in Mesapotamia by Felicity Arbuthnot
    US presidential hopefuls campaigning in Israel Arutz Sheva
    Iran must get ready to repel a nuclear attack by Leonid Ivashov
    The build-up to Iran timeline by Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
    State of the (dis)union [actually, pithy summary of Iraq factions] by Pepe Escobar
    Babylon 2 by Dmitriy Baklin
    The war on shampoo by Craig Murray
    US staying the course for big oil in Iraq by Pepe Escobar
    The absent malice by Chris Sanders
    [Bliar bleats about 'outside interference' while British troops squat in southern Iraq] BBC
    Iraq as a living hell by Dahr Jamail
    The vultures are circling by Syed Saleem Shahzad
    [Lebanon war fought with US 'emergency equipment'] by Yitzhak Benhorin
    [up to half the population of Lebanon (!) demonstrates against US-backed government] by Crispian Balmer
    [be very afraid, you stupid gits] by Matthew Moore
    [100,000 people are fleeing Iraq every month] by Matt Weaver
    Toxic avenger? by Kirill Pankratov
    Mubarak: foreign powers will be "obliged" to send forces to support Lebanon's pro-US government Al-Manar TV (Egypt)
    Polonium-210 -- fact and fiction by Gordon Prather
    Pale fire and London fog by Chris Floyd
    Eerie silence on northern Iraq by Nimri Aziz
    Polonium detected at Berezovsky's office by Sandra Laville and Tania Branigan
    [non-violently *stopping* home demolitions a 'war crime'?! -- sheesh] HRW
    The British public is being taken for a ride by Julian Evans
    Iraq nears the "Saigon moment" by Patrick Cockburn
    Saint Sasha, the toenail puller by Copy Dude
    The rise and rise of gold and oil by Jephraim P. Gundzik
    America's moment in the mideast is about to end by Mike Whitney
    Russia tips the balance by W. Joseph Stroupe
    [doing it by remote control makes it OK] by David Halpin
    Plans for redrawing the middle east by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
    Human shields deter Israel attack BBC
    Police chief -- Lockerbie evidence was faked by Marcello Mega
    [UK gov't clueless on peak oil, even after unpredicted 1999 North Sea peak] by Jonathan Leake
    Welcome to Hell by Layla Anwar
    What's next in Iraq? by Norman Livergood
    Secrets of abrupt climate shifts [model of the twenty 1470-year-cycle events *within* last ice age] by Stefan
    Asymmetric challenge to the US colossus by W. Joseph Stroupe
    MI5: Save the poodle! by Mathaba
    Why we (really) may have entered an oil production plateau by Khebab
    'We are dead people' by Rory McCarthy
    War of aggression thwarted? by Gordon Prather
    An assessment of world oil exports by Luis de Sousa
    A brutal taste of the future by Sami Abdel-Shafi
    Lynching Saddam by Carlton Meyer
    When all else fails... by Riverbend
    Of rats and sinking ships interview with pusillanimous former war cheerleaders, Sullivan and Hitchens
    Evil is as evil does by Paul Craig Roberts
    The last drop by Michael Specter
    [UK Labor party prevent Iraq debate] BBC
    Grain drain by Wayne Roberts
    Heavy lies the head of the poodle dog by Zbignew Zingh
    Is attacking Iran a viable option? by Liam Bailey
    [Iraqi death squads trained by US -- cf. El Salvador] by Kim Sengupta
    [democrats promise to continue the war if elected?!] Reuters
    'Stability first': newspeak for the rape of Iraq by Pepe Escobar
    Alarm over radioactive legacy left by attack on Lebanon [disinfo to cover 'standard' DU use?] by Robert Fisk
    War in the dark? by Wayne Madsen
    We have turned iraq into the most hellish place on Earth by Simon Jenkins
    The jackals feast goes on by Chris Floyd
    [this *is* starting to look a little Gulf-of-Tonkin-y...] by Michel Chossudovsky
    Further to your comments on Gazprom by Heading Out
    The next war by Daniel Ellsberg
    Iraqi opposition leader speaks interview by Robert Dreyfuss
    More thoughts about Gazprom by Heading Out
    Rethinking the fall of Easter Island by Terry L. Hunt
    More coal equals more CO2 by Chris Vernon
    Asian workers trafficked to build world's largest embassy by David Phinney
    The Lancet study by Riverbend
    Blunkett was astonished by the size of the antiwar movement in Feb 2003 by stopwar
    [secret prisons are a bad idea] by Moazzam Begg
    Peak oil update -- October 2006 by Khebab
    The political war by Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry
    Grain stockpiles at lower for 25 years [but we have plenty of oil] by Kevin Morrisson
    [2.5% of the Iraqi population has died as a result of the invasion and occupation] by Debora Mackenzie
    Small is useless by George Monbiot
    Hizb Allah, Party of God by Nir Rosen
    War preparations by Michel Chossudovsky
    The master plan for the world by Clive Maund (excellent main points summary)
    The economy of Gaza by Sara Roy
    Ethanol from Brazil and the USA by Milton Maciel
    Naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
    Anatomy of a massacre [shooting kids in the bed of a pickup from a helicopter] by Robert Fisk
    Why NATO cannot win the Afghan war by M. K. Bhadrakumar
    Revisionism at its worst by Malcom Lagauche
    Peak oil and the problem of infrastructure by Peter Goodchild
    Russia and China 'cooking something up' by W. Joseph Stroupe
    Damage control and Contrary to Chomsky's theories by Jeffery Blankfort
    [blowback, literally] by Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan
    Hedge, I win... fails, you lose by Bill Bonner
    A doctor's life in Baghdad by Dr. Anon
    The march to war by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
    The threat is from those who accept climate change, not those who deny it by George Monbiot
    Oil import-export model for the UK (also scroll down to Valuethinker's valuable comments) by Cry Wolf
    West bank rabbi calls for the extermination of all Palestinian males IMEMC
    All Islamic states except Iran are controlled by the US administration by Dr. Abbas Bakhtiar
    Why war with Syria is inevitable by Damian Lataan
    A Hezbollah upon all of thee! by Gary Brecher
    [attn: orange revolution in need of a new color] Reuters
    Qana by Juan Cole
    [two more 'care' packages] by AAP
    Return of the Arab street by Andy Martin (conservative Republican!)
    Bush and Blair: "Keep it up!" by Robert Fisk
    Welcome to my parlor by William Lind
    Bombs cause wounds not seen before Reuters
    The fire next time by Osamah Khalil
    Death toll could be twice the official figure by Dahr Jamail
    Operation save the high command by Charles Glass
    Lebanon bombardment map: Jul 26 lebanonupdates.blogspot.com
    The US empire makes its move to take over the middle east by John Pilger
    The meaning of the second Lebanese war by activist in Haifa
    Juhad and the Wolfowitzes of the world by Gilad Atzmon
    The war on Lebanon and the battle for oil by Michel Chossudovsky
    The spirit of resistance by Pepe Escobar
    Crossing red lines by Jonathan Cook
    Red Cross ambulances destroyed in Israeli sir strike on rescue mission by Suzanne Goldenberg
    Kidnapped in Israel or captured in Lebanon? by Joshua Frank
    Rift opens between UK and US over Israeli offensive by Marc Burleigh
    Hezbollah, Hamas, Israel by Alexander Cockburn
    Americans are being whipped innto a new war frenzy by Robert Parry
    [ethnic cleansing continues] by Juan Cole
    [dead civilians eaten by dogs -- again] Rawstory
    About those photos by Matt Barganier
    Leviathan run amok by Pepe Escobar
    Dispatch from Gaza interview by Silvia Cattori
    'Blow up my city and I'll blow up yours' by Robert Fisk
    Atrocities in the promised land by Kathleen Christison
    Where's Bush? by Geov Parrish
    German media: US prepares Iran strike by Martin Walker (UPI)
    Nuking Iran with the UN's blessing by Jorge Hirsch
    Telling it like it isn't by Robert Fisk
    Israel's war deadline by James Petras
    Game over by Robert Dreyfuss
    The ultimate quaqmire by Pepe Escobar
    The slave next door by Elisabeth Schreinemacher
    Peak copper by Roland Watson
    Elections by Riverbend
    Iraq Seymour Hersh interview
    Sell off your oil wealth and ye shall be free by James Houle
    New torture jail found in Iraq [ripping out fingernails for democracy] BBC
    Two countries, one booming, one struggling: which one followed the free-trade route? by Larry Elliott
    House of horrors by Riverbend
    A 'legal' US nuclear attack on Iran by Jorge Hirsch
    Melting the skin off children by Hunter
    War crimes, lies, and omerta by The Cat's Dream
    Movies and dreams by Riverbend
    The real reason for nuking Iran by Jorge Hirsch
    [Madonna's guru accused of extorting terminally ill cancer patient] by Eric Silver
    Syria: old whine, new bottle by William Bowles
    Peak wood by Jason Godesky
    Syria: the next Iraq by Robert Dreyfuss
    Total disconnect on Iraq realities by Allen Pizzey
    [scaring the proles] AFP Sydney
    Mouse journalism by Matthew Lewin
    The occupier's [$75 million dollar] trial by Pepe Escobar
    The insurgency: neighborhood watch by Gary Brecher
    Record low for June Arctic sea ice NASA
    The gates of hell by Jamal Mudhafar
    Matt Simmons interview Financial Sense
    If there's a hell, Harry lives there by SW
    Updating Saudi oil production planUpdating Saudi oil production plans by Heading Out
    Petrodollar warfare by William R. Clark
    [this, right after posting disinfo suggesting London surveillance videos were fake] WagNews (recategorized!)
    Iraq and Washington's 'seeds of democracy' by F. William Engdahl
    The initiation rituals of future freedom fighters Iraq Tunnel
    Do you know this man? by Baghdad Dweller
    Bombing mastermind Aswat works for M I 6 by Kurt Nimmo
    Hussain Osman and the room temperature IQ terrorists by Kurt Nimmo
    Our President's new best friend boils people alive from Human Rights Watch
    People flee al-Qaim as fighting continues IRIN news
    Is intervention in the Gulf still a profitable venture? by Ahmed Amr
    B-2 bombers, F-15E fighters in Guam, Aegis ships in Japan Korea Herald
    Global energy -- how much remains? by Peter North
    Saved by the carrots by Riverbend
    Planned US-Israeli attack on Iran by Michel Chossudovsky
    Voyage of the Beagle by Big Gav
    A moment that changed my life by Saed Bannoura
    Chalabi appointed oil minister Reuters
    Jafari's government: the house of cards by Raed Jarrar
    Dear soldier by Gideon Levy
    Fallujah -- the end of warfare by Abhay Mehta
    [winning hearts and minds] by Jay Price
    Failures of the Iraqi resistance by Rahul Mahajan
    Gas chamber for Chemical Ali? by Jude Wanniski
    Christman wish list by Riverbend
    The West has bloodied hands by Eric Margolis
    The failed US face of Fallujah by Michael Schwartz
    Southeast-asia diary by Bernard Weiner
    Evil doers, here we come by Pepe Escobar
    12 days of Christmas by James Ridgeway
    Iranian Manchurian by Bob Dreyfuss
    [why they hate us] by Robert Fisk
    Have Arabs or Muslims always hated Jews? by Juan Cole
    Increased use of air lifts by Bradley Graham
    Trouble in the world's largest oil field (see update at bottom) by Glenn Morton, straight-talking petroleum geologist, creationist, whatever
    Fuel shortage by Riverbend
    Nearly visiting Iraq by Felicity Arbuthnot
    Moqtada Sadr says he will boycott elections by Faiz Jawad
    US renews air strikes on Fallujah UPI
    Strange bedfellows by Rahul Mahajan
    Virtual nukes by Gordon Prather
    Fallujah pictures by Dahr Jamail
    The grand elector Sistani by Pepe Escobar
    Calling the Kosovo humanitarians to account by John Pilger
    "Control Room" in Dubai by Andrew Hammond
    [in-place thermal cracking will delay oil peak] by Oliver L. Campbell
    Ghetto on the Euphrates by George Paine
    Strategic hamlets, once again by Kurt Nimmo
    Interview with Patrick Cockburn by Alan Maass
    Eliminate the witnesses by Naomi Klein
    The civilians we killed by Michael Hoffman, Iraq vet
    From Guernica to Fallujah by Pepe Escobar
    Unembedded Charles Shaw interview with Dahr Jamail
    Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock by Chris McGreal
    Farwell to Fallujah by Fadhil Badrani, a former inhabitant
    Fallujah leaders were local by Hamza Hendawi, AP
    [why we shouldn't be there] by Kim Sengupta
    No one is taken in by Rana Kabbani
    Iris Chang and Juan Cole by Xymphora
    Iraq = Vietnam: misinterpreting the metaphor by William Bowles
    [our mass graves] aljazeera
    ["He's dead, Jim"] welfarestate.com
    Acute child malnutrion in Iraq double that before invasion -- worse than Haiti, Uganda by Karl Vick
    Successful raid [you can pray, but you can't hide] by Dahr Jamail
    Why Iraq will end as Vietnam did by Martin van Creveld
    The Iraq solution: coming sooner than you think by Karen Kwiatkowski
    [what you get for 200 billion dollars] by fallujah in pictures
    [even Fisk suspicious...] by Robert Fisk
    Coincidence? by William Bowles
    Red cross estimates 800 civilian casualties (1/3 of a 9-11) from Dahr Jamail
    The American people owe the German people an apology by Xymphora
    Submit or die by Jacob Hornberger
    I decided to swim ... but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river by Katarina Kratovac
    Just ask Saddam by Brandon Snider
    Pictures from inside Iraq by Raed Jarrar
    [our beheadings are better because they are done by machines] by Dahr Jamail
    Outbreak by healingiraq
    Fallujah: unpacking the press by William Bowles
    Beyond embattled city, rebels operate freely by Alissa J. Rubin and Tyler Marshall
    The sandinistas win by Xymphora
    [end the liberation] BBC
    Four solutions for Fallujah by Mark LeVine
    Legitimizing mass slaughter in Fallujah by Williamm Bowles
    A distant mirror of holy war by Norman Solomon
    A thousand Fallujahs by Pepe Escobar
    Fallujah: America's Guernica by Hector Carreon
    US massacres civilians in Fallujah by Joseph Kay
    House-to-house warfare by Ibrahim Mohamad
    Rule of Iraq assassins must end: get out Americans by Riverbend
    US air raid on Fallujah clinic kills dozens [second hospital bombing in 2 days] Xinhuanet
    Target Fallujah photos1.blogger.com
    Carnage and martial law by Dahr Jamail
    The final solution for Fallujah and Ramadi by Yamin Zakaria
    Spiralling into Iraq by Dahr Jamail
    Some terrorists by Riverbend
    Message from the people of Fallujah to Kofi Annan
    Thoughts on the eve of the razing of Fallujah by tex
    Ossama Bin Moore by R
    Mideast cauldron by Immanuel Wallerstein
    Denouncing Americanism by John Pilger
    30 children in 15 days [imagine the outrage if the the gunman had been Palestinian] B. Michael
    US prepares for major operation by Edward Harris
    Household survey sees 100,000 Iraqi deaths by Emma Ross
    [yet more: ominous mainstream strike cheerleading] by Laura King
    [more pre-election strike rumors/leaks/info/disinfo] by Wayne Madsen
    Precision strike democracy by Pepe Escobar
    Saddam Hussein may get the last laugh by Thomas Guzman
    Gaza sinks in a sea of blood by Mohammed Omer
    [rumors, analysis on possible Iran attack] tbrnews
    Fallujah and Nov 2 by Bob Dreyfuss
    No-ligarchy by Mark Ames
    Biafra remembered by Gary Brecher
    Killing children no longer a big deal by Gideon Levy
    Inside besieged Fallujah [phone call to BBC]
    [our terrorists -- I mean, our friendly imperial storm troopers] James Glanz
    [Newspeak: Gaza withdrawal continues, killing 100 people, because Palestinians won't accept generous peace offer] Reuters
    Amnesty International's double standards by Paul de Rooij
    [kewl toppling!] Reuters
    [possibly disinfo] by tbrnews
    [anti-apartheid heros without guns] by Alison Weir
    The war widens by Chris Sanders
    Energy transition and final energy crisis by Andrew McKillop
    The massacre of Mesopotamian archaeology by Joanne Farchackh
    Dying for a job in the ING by Gary Brecher
    [what is it about our freakin sicko military and weddings?! -- this is the 4th wedding slaughter!] Reuters
    The Israeli invasion of North Gaza by Jennifer Lowenstein
    [oh, dude! cool war crime] by Andrew Buncombe
    Elections will not end the fighting [Pat left out 'by the US'!] by Patrick Cockburn
    The eyes that connot see beyond Jabaliya and Samarra by Simon Tisdall
    [because victim Palestinian, US headline can never read: Israeli militants/gunmen shoot fleeing 13-year-old schoolgirl 20 times in back and head] Reuters
    Why not two peoples, one state? by Michael Tarazi
    This is a massacre, not a war by Sam Hamod
    Samarra burning by Riverbend
    The man who forsaw rising oil prices by Adam Porter
    The grand illusion by William Lind (conservative)
    Emergency declared in Gaza [200 tanks in a refugee camp of people who can't vote] aljazeera
    [what's actually happening in Samarra? -- reporters are all in Baghdad] by Juan Cole
    On the nature of disinformation by Rixon Stewart
    US bombs Fallujah aljazeera
    Najaf old city demolition after US bombing by Juan Cole
    [planning WWIII] globalsecurity
    The new US strategy by Michael Schwartz
    You've lost your alibi! by Omar Barghouti
    Why they hate us by David Lindorff
    The UN muppet has spoken by Yamin Zakaria
    A milestone in the global struggle by Walden Bello
    Crazy Mike and Indian country by Jim Lobe
    Baghdad year zero by Naomi Klein
    More Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. forces than by insurgents, data shows by Nancy A. Youssef
    How time files by Michael Neumann
    [our 'security' is more important than your little brain]
    Why Sudan? by Karen Kwiatkowski (July 2004)
    Whose atrocies are worse? by Doris Cadigan
    [results of our previous glorious project] by Payal Singhal
    If America were Iraq by Juan Cole
    Demographic oil demand and peak oil by Andrew McKillop
    Why we cannot win by Al Lorentz (soldier in Iraq)
    Incident on Haifa street by Tom Engelhardt
    [use this secure online form] C_I_A website
    Putin and US-UK terror strategy by Webster Griffin Tarpley
    Who seized Simona Torretta? by Naomi Klein and Jeremy Scahill
    The Kirkuk to Haifa pipeline by Xymphora
    [act now: they are!] by Guy Dinmore
    Fahrenheit 9/11 by Riverbend
    In Iraq's wasteland, total chaos looms by Nicolas Rothwell
    When the rabbits get a gun by William Rivers Pitt
    Military-industrial man by Chalmers Johnson
    N Korea blast by David Scofield
    Precision strikes ... on ambulances by Patrick Cockburn
    He's just sleeping, I keep telling myself (not a war crime because people killed have low market value) by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
    The littlest terrorist dies -- we're safe! by Judith Moriarty
    UN Darfur vote turns scramble for Sudan's oil by Rainer Chr. Hennig
    [throw stones, get run over, twice -- life as a low market-value human] Aljazeera
    Despair in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn
    An American in Palestine by Chris Allert
    [democracy, amurrican style: you don't get to vote if we're not finished bombing you] by Patrick McDonnell
    Selling war as peace by Marc Herrold
    Iraq and the crisis of empire by Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell
    Enough for Qalqilya Lawrence of Cyberia
    Bush wins, we invade Iran [assumes no Iranian nukes] by Gordon Prather
    Four day war [assumes Iranian nukes] by Claude Salhani (American Conservative Magazine)
    AIPAC of spies by Bob Dreyfuss
    Did the grand ayatollah collude with the US assault on Najaf? by Milan Rai
    Speech to Commonwealth Club by Michael Ruppert
    Operation Slaughter Iraqis a continuing success by Bill Kaufmann
    Plus ca change by William Bowles
    Outline by Xymphora
    Days of plunder by Zainab Bahrani
    Johnson: FBI furious at leak by Juan Cole
    AIPAC's overt and covert ops by Juan Cole
    Point of maximum danger by Webster Griffin Tarpley
    A neo-Ba'athist dressing down in Najaf by Luke Harding
    Zombies for Kerry by Alexander Cockburn
    Stanlingrad, Sarajevo, Beirut, Dresden or Najaf by Terapeut
    Empire notes by Rahul Mahajan
    Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay by Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed
    Chomsky response to Noah Cohen (long!) by Noam Chomsky
    Apologetics for injustice in Palestine by Noah Cohen
    Thousands of weeping and chanting Shiites end Najaf seige by Jean-Marc Mojon
    Sistani in Najaf by Juan Cole
    Sistani returns by Juan Cole
    Smell of burnt flesh, blood smeared on streets AFP
    A demographic problem by Linda Heard
    The fat whiner is me by Salam Pax
    Scenario by Bob Dreyfuss
    Denying atrocities by Fran Schor
    Oil's slippery slope by Pepe Escobar
    [rogue Marines doubted] by Xymphora
    Does my flak jacket make me look sexy? by Salam Pax
    A democracy of killings and bombings by Yanar Mohammed
    The torture doctors of Abu Ghraib by Mike Whitney
    Death after death, blood after blood by Luke Harding (inside Imam Ali)
    The warlords of America by John Pilger
    What do we call the enemy? by Tom Engelhardt
    Pakistan turns on itself by Syed Saleem Shahzad
    [death penalty without trial for 9 year old for throwing stones] by Ali Daraghmeh
    Iraq reconstruction's bottom line by Herbert Docena
    Iraq occupation [won't work: not enough death squads] by Robert Parry
    [117 slaughtered Palestinians = "Relative calm"] by Ali Abunimah
    Through the American looking glass by Robert Fisk
    Explosions by silentbutdeadly
    Questions and fears Riverbend
    Sharon's speech: decoded version by Uri Avnery
    Economics of the noble path by Adam Porter
    The Agricultural Crises in North Korea and Cuba, Part 2 by Dale Allen Pfeiffer
    Best-laid plans by Chris Floyd
    Shooting Samarra's schoolboys in the back by Robert Fisk
    Rumsfeld's '84 visit was to reassure Iraqis [that chemical arms use was OK] by Dana Priest
    Saddam Hussein's capture by Larry Chin
    Good news (humor) by Ahmed Nassef
    Saddam. *So* not worth it by Mark Morford
    Find yourselves another mother by Gideon Levy
    Why changing the way money works is the key to resolving peak oil challenges by Dale Allen Pfeiffer
    Saddams capture means trouble for U.S. officials by Jacob Hornberger
    The tyrant is now a prisoner by Robert Fisk
    Jessica Lynch captures Saddam by Greg Palast
    Bullet points by Chris Floyd
    Close to civil war by Firas Al-Atraqchi
    The CIA's new assassination program by Douglas Valentine
    "That was awesome" -- your tax dollars at work Information Clearing House
    [Sometimes, we really are baby-killers, again] BBC
    The empire strikes out by Scott Taylor
    Israel trains US assassination squads [Operation Assassinate] by Julian Borger
    He-manitarianism by Michael Neumann
    Iraq is no Vietnam, but it may be Poland by Aleksandar Jokic
    [They're easier because they don't shoot back] BBC
    [Helping the rose revolution along] Ros Business Consulting
    Oil, power and empire by Larry Everest
    How to fix the World Bank by Mark Scaramella
    Oil intrigue by Barry Grey and Vladimir Volkov
    Bremer of the Tigris by Jeremy Scahill
    Bottom of the barrel by George Monbiot
    The inside skinny by a combat leader
    The not-so-great game by Mark Ames
    Bush operation, clean sweep by John Stanton
    The Doomsday machine by John Chuckman
    Physical evidence versus public lies by Michael Ruppert
    Occupation corrupts absolutely by Mustapha Karkouti
    'We didn't know' will be no excuse by James Brooks
    Spengler really understands by Joe Nichols
    The motive for the invasion by Michael Doliner
    Georgia in the crunch by Mark Ames
    [Nightmare scenario: one person, one vote] by Justin Huggler
    Humping Bush's leg by Xymphora
    GW loves Michael by William Rivers Pitt
    Tommy Franks in Cigar Aficionado Newsmax
    Exit or escalate? by Pat Buchanan (former presidential speech writer and anti-immigration conservative)
    Difficult days by Riverbend
    The matrix reloaded once again by Jonathan Cook
    Something wicked this way comes by John Cory
    Why the US can't stop the ongoing conflict by Rosemary Hollis
    [solution to the demographic 'problem'] by David Landau
    Keystone Kolonialists the Nation
    Intelligence for what? by Gabriel Kolko
    Iraqi governing council by Riverbend
    Jessica Lynch criticizes US accounts of her ordeal David D Kirkpatrick
    Strike imminent? Indymedia
    [robo-soldiers for the empire] by David Wood
    Silenced witnesses by John Sweeney
    The doctrine of zero risk by Thierry Meyssan
    Copy the Americans by Robert Fisk
    [Go, Cher (!)] Atrios
    Spoilers gatecrash the Iraq spoils party by Herbert Docena
    A marine veteran's perspective by Chris White
    Who are the bombers? by Jim Lobe
    [Unarmed non-Palestinian peace activists -- the ones who count -- shot in the legs then held at gunpoint in hospital beds] Arjan El Fassed
    Get out of Gaza [but stay in the West Bank] Ha'aretz
    Happy Halloween by Ran HaCohen
    One, two, three, what are they fighting for by Robert Fisk
    Imperial indifference by William Blum
    Cry peace for the children by Judith Moriarty
    Neocons flying like a hawk by Jim Lobe
    Madrid conference by Riverbend
    [Having a good eye for things that will turn out big] by John Stanton
    Thieves like us by Chris Floyd
    The war that could destroy both armies by Henry C.K. Liu
    Chile's failed economic laboratory Michael Hudson interview by Standard Schaeffer
    [Terrorist strikes from the safety of the air] by Arnon Regular
    Beyond Bush II by Michael Ruppert
    Bush plunges US into rapid decline The Black Commentator
    Shias fight back by Patrick Cockburn
    Piss on my leg by Stan Goff
    Eating fossil fuels by Dale Allen Pfeiffer
    "I hoped that the pilot who hit our house would be burned as I am burned and my family were burned" Ali
    Hearts and minds [once again] by Gert Van Langendonck
    [Life in a concentration camp] by Kevin Toolis
    Depopulation and perception management by Keith Harmon Snow
    Iraqi resistance targets CIA by Patrick Cockburn
    Specter of Somalia by William Maclean
    UN: up to 2,000 made homeless by Rafah raid by Amos Harel
    Occupation as rape-marriage by Gary Leupp
    What the US wants from China by Manuel Garcia, Jr.
    [Afghanistan, man] by Xymphora
    If Americans knew by Alison Weir
    Another bad day at the office by Jim Lobe
    [Drugs without a name] BBC
    Dude, you got, like, totally Plamed by Matthew Barganier
    Has Bush become a threat to the ruling elite? by Saul Landau
    Oil, war, and panic by Robert Fisk (go Robert)
    Cheney's chief of staff named by Justin Raimondo
    [Karl and Bob] by William Travers Pitt
    Don't mention the oil by Robert Fisk
    To die in Iraq by Douglas O'Rourke
    Sheiks and tribes Riverbend
    Sifting through the rubble by John Judis
    Freedom of the press Riverbend
    Retired general calls Bush's war a brain fart by David Corn
    AfghaniScam by Marc Herold
    Nightmare in Iraq by Sheldon Richman
    The plutocrats run wild by Nicholas von Hoffman
    Fear as human shield faces jail (retired schoolteacher to lose home, pension) by Fergal Parkinson
    The Cheney tapes by Stan Cox
    At least 10,000 civilians gunned down since the end of the war by Robert Fisk
    Losing touch with reality by Robert Fisk
    Shock the monkey by Matt Taibbi
    [Modular, re-usable code] by Xymphora
    What good friends left behind John Pilger
    [Party down, dude] Reuters
    Bring the troops out of Iraq now by Lee Sustar
    Elvis lives by Pepe Escobar
    [Letter from a 36-year-old soldier] by Tim Predmore
    Girl power and post-war Iraq by Riverbend
    The Iraq wreck by Patrick Cockburn
    Powell in Baghdad by Robert Fisk
    It was the oil, it is like Vietnam by Stan Goff
    [Genes and culture] by Robin McKie
    A disaster foretold by Uri Avnery
    Anti-americanism: too much of a good thing? by Michael Neumann
    No hurry by Robert Fisk
    International Community Supports a Deluxe Occupation by Meron Benevisti
    Folly taken to a scale not seen since WWII by Robert Fisk
    Anna Lindh on the fact-finding mission to Jenin Reliefweb
    Hitchens as model apostate by Norman Finkelstein
    Friends, Americans, countrymen by Riverbend
    [Why we should get out (stuff that doesn't make CNN] by Peter Beaumont
    The Bush folly by Stan Goff
    The tech bubble: who benefited? Schaefer interview with Michael Hudson
    Society collapses while its leaders remain silent by Avraham Burg
    Road trip by Riverbend
    Human shields face heavy penalties by Kathleen Kenna
    Soldiering is for others by Taki
    Nocturnal visit to the parents by Salam Pax
    [out of sight, out of mind] by Bill Berkowitz
    The lonliness of Noam Chomsky by Arundhati Roy
    One-legged Vietnam vet's dream by Stuart Nusbaumer
    Vietnam II preflight check Jack McMillan
    A drug for the addict by Uri Avnery
    How does the war party get away with it? by Robert Higgs
    Will work for food by Riverbend
    Walter Reed treats 1300 by Joseph Galloway
    Death by 1000 cuts by Martin Sieff
    Iran's case by Erich Marquardt
    One of three missile suspects get bail [guess which] AP
    The US cannot leave, ever by Xymphora (go, Xymphora!)
    America's selective strong dollar policy by Henry C.K. Liu
    Experimental casinos by Standard Schaeffer
    The temperature is rising by Salam Pax
    A case for Hizbollah? by Ran HaCohen
    [it's just a flesh wound, get over it] D.S. Wayman
    US tried to plant WMDs, failed Daily Times Monitor
    [hearts and minds] by xymphora
    Former prof gets inside view of West Bank nightmare by Jim Phillips
    ER, Baghdad by Jamie Wilson
    To the victors go the spoils of war by Pratap Chatterjee and Oula Al Farawati
    Think of foreigners as human beings by Matthew Barganier
    [more news from our occupied territories -- panicked soldiers slaughter family] by Justin Huggler
    [news from our occupied territories] by Anthony Shadid
    [Better hope someone doesn't try to return the favor] by James W. Crawley
    Bitterness grows [in our occupied territories] Vivienne Walt
    August 3, 2003 Riverbend
    Meet the real WMD fabricator by Alexander Cockburn
    The war on truth by John Pilger
    US fostering sinister sort of democracy by Robert Fisk
    Our foppish self-righteousness by Shulamit Aloni
    Guerillas in the midst by James Ridgeway
    US colonel kidnaps Iraqi general's family by Eric Garris
    Another botched raid; another massacre by Robert Fisk
    Iraq and the hidden euro-dollar wars by F. William Engdahl
    Congressional report: no Iraq link to al-Qaeda by Shaun Waterman
    The confiscation of Iraqi oil Information Clearing House
    Call it really what it is: sick by Douglas Valentine
    July 24 Where is Raed?
    Poll says most Jewish settlers will leave if paid by Sharmila Devi
    [The best 'justice' money can buy (for $15 million, but hard to spend)] Reuters
    Behind the hudna scenes by Ran HaCohen
    Baroque brutality of little help by Patrick Cockburn
    The sons are dead by Robert Fisk
    Watergate and yellow cake by Xymphora
    Timeline the UK Guardian
    Cake walk by Chris Floyd
    Little Caesar's quicksand by Kathleen Greider
    Blood in the water by Michael Ruppert
    White man's burden by Greg Palast
    Elite vs elitny by Mark Ames
    Asia fills her boots by John Berthelsen
    [Bush in Senegal] by Joan Herron's Senegalese friend
    [News from the occupation] by Lee Gordon
    Interview with Wes Jackson by Robert Jensen
    The double wall before the future by Arthur Mitzman
    Apocalypse now in Baghdad by Thomas Chittum
    The coin of empire by Conn Hallinan
    The fuss about interest rates by Enrico Orlandini (another gold guy)
    Iraqi civilian death count passes 6,000 Reuters
    From a different perspective by Hans Schicht (conservative, gold guy)
    Baghdad back to stone age by Nidal al-Assadi
    Little big horn by Eric Margolis
    [Modern war -- like ancient war -- kills mostly civilians] by Ed Vulliamy
    [Former special forces soldier responds to shrub] by Stan Goff
    Beyond Bush -- Part I by Michael Ruppert
    A love supreme by Susan Block
    US suspends military aid to 50 countries Reuters
    Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt AP and LA Times
    The occupation of Iraq by Col. Dan Smith
    Occupation forces halt elections throughout Iraq by Willian Booth
    Mass graves and burned meat by Chris Floyd
    [Once more, America the invading 'victim'] by John Pilger
    The invisible by Paul Vallely
    Natural gas crisis by Dale Allen Pfeiffer
    Iraq 'Has three weeks to avoid falling into chaos' by Patrick Cockburn
    The destruction is nearing its completion by Jennifer Loewenstein
    67% of Israelis oppose strikes AP
    Organized crime by Xymphora
    Winning hearts and minds with rifle butts by Tohomas W. Chittum
    Peak oil and natural gas depletion Matthew Simmons speech transcription
    War may have killed 10,000 civilians by Simon Jeffery
    Report from occupied territory Goodman Fisk interview
    The empire expands wider and still wider by Eric Hobsbawm
    AP tallies 3,240 civilian deaths in Iraq by Niko Price
    WeaponsGate by Wayne Madsen
    How to make the world aware that the party is over Kjell Aleklett
    Get a lobotomy by Paul Dean
    'Would You Have Left Saddam in Power'? by The Whiskey Bar
    Blackmail as policy by John Chuckman
    Demand for proof of Saddam Hussein's WMD's growing the Economist
    The day of the jackals by Arundhati Roy
    Empire of nothing by Tom Engelhardt
    US hands out $1 million a day in Iraq by Pauline Jelinek
    The Yanks Scott Taylor interview with Chris Deliso
    Why Japan's nightmare is worrying the world by Bill Jamieson
    War talk by Arundhati Roy
    Congo death toll -- 2500 per day by Finbarr O'Reilly
    Journal Dear Raed
    [Special forces and special bribes] by Andrew Buncombe
    Gun gangs rule as US loses control by Ed Vulliamy
    Concealing catastrophe by David Edwards
    Empire and the capitalists by Immanuel Wallerstein
    [Astonishing uranium levels -- 400 times those of Gulf war veterans -- found in Afghan civilians] by Alex Kirby
    What rates a headline in the mideast? by Ben Granby
    [conservative republicans say it's a catastrophe, loser democrats hide under the table] by Roland Watson
    Rescuing Private Lynch, forgetting Rachel Corrie by Naomi Klein
    The occupier by Stan Goff
    The real quagmire is the aftermath by Patrick Cockburn
    Surveys point to high civilian death toll in Iraq by Christian Science Monitor
    The apartheid wall by Ran HaCohen
    Saving Private Lynch: Take 2 by Robert Scheer
    Joystick mayhem by Matt Barganier
    Iraq's children by Anna Badkhen
    The GKI genocide by Mark Ames
    Saudi Arabia: the Sarajevo of the 21st century by Michael Ruppert
    Calculated act with a political message by William Beeman
    Doctored photo from London Evening Standard the Memory Hole
    [Albania and Kosovo agree with us] Gallup poll
    90% of large fish in world's oceans gone (from Nature)
    Learning curve by Merle Borg
    [The saving private Lynch 'incubator babies' story] BBC
    The Hydra's new head Paul de Rooij
    Pax Romana vs. Pax Americana by Walden Bello
    The perfect enemy by John Kaminski
    Al-Qa'ida strikes back by Rupert Corwell, Andrew Gumbel and Khaled Al Maeena
    ["At least you have the knowledge that she died painfully"] by Antonia Zerbisias
    Bush, Bin Laden, Bechtel and Baghdad by Chris Floyd
    American plans for Iraq by Xymphora
    Because they can by Merle Borg
    [*Not* a nice place to visit, and you wouldn't want to live there, but send them $3 billion/year in tax receipts anyway] by Cris McGreal
    [Only democracy in the mideast, blah, blah] by Muthanna Al Qadi
    May Day, May Day by Matt Taibbi
    Whose gonna take away Washington's license to kill? by Stan Cox
    1948 war by Ammar Munir Nayfeh, Stanford Daily Online
    [Republican] Ritter calls for regime change by Jan Barry
    Israelis fire on parents of injured [brain dead] British peace activist by Cahal Milmo
    A civilization wrecked by M.N. Dean
    Israeli troops kill British cameraman in Gaza by Justin Huggler
    Bush's military defeat by Harvey Wasserman
    Massacre at Falluja by Xymphora
    Do unto others by Matt Taibbi
    The end of Iraq's history by Francis Fukuyama
    How to give up hope by John Dolan
    The Bushites telegraph their punches by Chris Floyd
    [I'd take a number on my hand any day to being routinely shot...] AP
    Art dealers may have 'ordered' looting Sydney Morning Herald
    Putin opposes US, Britain on sanctions by Mike Peacock
    Risks of cluster bombs itvs
    Newest U.S. colony ruled by air power by Eric Margolis
    Some are weeping; some are not by Robert Higgs
    A short history of the Bush Mafia's war in Iraq by Stan Goff
    Bush barbarians teach by example by Chris Floyd
    [You left out the price list, guys...] the Oriental Institute
    US plan to bomb North Korea by Greg Sheridan
    Iraqi anger boils over by Robert Fisk
    Iraq notebook by Paul Belden
    Day of the jackals by Ron Liddle
    [When we say get your cameras out of here, we mean it] AP
    The arsonists have to be paid by Robert Fisk
    So who really did save Private Jessica? Richard Lloyd Parry
    Marines liberating Iraqi gold by InformationClearingHouse
    How and why the How and why the US encouraged looting in Iraq by Patrick Martin
    What America says does not go by Uzma Aslam Khan
    The roots of war by Barbara Ehrenreich
    The rape of Iraq by Susan Block
    Books, priceless documents burn in sacking of Baghdad by Robert Fisk
    Americans the new Mongols by Wayne Madsen
    The destruction of Iraq is good for business by Kurt Nimmo
    Hospital chaos, but UK docs are sent home by Stephen Martin in Baghdad and Lorraine Fisher
    Some thoughts about the war by Rob
    Americans defend two untouchable ministries from the hordes of looters by Robert Fisk
    Coalition control all Iraqi oil fields by Nicole Winfield
    Background: the Democratic Republic of Congo by Paul Harris
    Popping balloons: staying a kid forever by John Brand
    Iraq liberated of culture and universities by Firas Al-Atraqchi
    Disappointed marines learn stay in Baghdad may be indefinite by Andrea Gerlin
    A civilization torn to pieces by Robert Fisk
    Lie of liberation by Mark Morford
    Frenzy over Ali, but there are 1000's like him by Kim Sengupta
    [Museum of earliest human civilizations and writing completely sacked] by Hassan Hafidh
    The self-deception of civilized war by Matthew Reimer
    A nation in chaos by Andrew Buncombe and John Lichfield
    Many civilians, US tank crew killed when US soldiers detonate arms cache Al Jazeera
    [Welcome home the Universal Soldiers and the new McVeigh's among them] by Ann Scott Tyson
    The hell that was once a hospital by Suzanne Goldenberg
    U.S. economy, oil contracts and war by C. Rammanohar Reddy
    [IDF shoots American peace activist in the head as he escorts children across the street] the Guardian
    Catastrophic situation at today Baghdad hospital: ICRC official AFP
    Damascus road by Chris Floyd
    April 11, 2003 Xymphora
    Baghdad, the day after by Robert Fisk
    Last tango in Baghdad by Jeffrey St. Clair
    [Lives so low-value the dead are not worth counting] Tyler Hicks, NYT
    April 10, 2003 Xymphora
    Statue pulldown was staged indymedia
    Final proof that war is about the failure of the human spirit by Robert Fisk
    News of the dirty war by Cynthia Cotts
    Foxa Americana by Rogel Alper
    Questioning the very essence of humanity by Paul McGeough
    We said it would be a nightmare, and yes, that's exactly what it is by Alexander Cockburn
    A day that began with shellfire by Robert Fisk
    A picture of killing by Suzanne Goldenberg
    Bombs blast homes instead of Saddam by Peter Arnett
    [All part of Operation Continuous War] BBC
    Mishaps or murder? by Robert Fisk
    The Iraqi killing fields by Pepe Escobar
    US-backed militia terrorises town by Charles Clover in Najaf
    'We shoot them down like the morons they are': US general by Lindsay Murdoch
    Baghdad slips into lawlessness as defenses crumble by Andrew Buncombe
    [Surgery under aspirin 'anesthesia'] by Cahal Milmo and Andrew Buncombe
    "I did what I had to do. I don't have a big problem with it" [old argument heard at Nuremburg, guy] Reuters
    The dogs always know by Robert Fisk
    Ramzaj discontinues operation Iraqwar.ru
    Al-Jazeera and the net by John Lettice
    April 7, continued Iraqwar.ru
    [US Bombs and tank shells hit Al Jazeera and US journalist's hotels] ITV news
    It seemed as if Baghdad would fall within hours by Robert Fisk
    Amid allied jubilation by Robert Fisk
    A prayer for Iraq rant by John Kaminski (I need to read one sometimes!)
    Wag the dog by Joe Vialls
    April 7, 2003 by Iraqwar.ru
    On the streets by Robert Fisk
    Racist war and pirate plunder The Black Commentator
    Afternoon, April 6, 2003 Iraqwar.ru
    [Civilian killings evoke merriment] by Gideon Levy
    [Surgeons forced to amputate children's limbs without anesthetic] by Charles Hanley
    Falling off Hubbert's peak by Richard Sibson
    Morning, April 6, 2003 Iraqwar.ru
    Red Cross: Iraq casualties too high too count AP
    Iraqi hospitals offer snapshot of war horrors Reuters
    The battle of Baghdad by Robert Fisk
    The minute it's made up, you'll hear about it by Mark Steel
    [Cluster bombs, once again: reap what you sow] by Henry Michaels
    [Member of Rachel Corrie's peace group shot in face with large caliber bullet by IDF] AP
    April 5, 2003 by Iraqwar.ru
    Disgustingly sanitized yisa Marshall
    Commander leading invasion of Baghdad sacked Thomas E. Ricks
    Where were the panicking crowds? by Robert Fisk
    Ministry of mendacity by Robert Fisk
    Baghdad hospitals stretched to their limits ICRC
    America faces Israel scenario by Mark Ames
    The republican guard eXile.ru
    The war that may end the age of superpower by Henry C. K. Liu
    April 4, 2003 by Iraqwar.ru
    [A twinge or two before returning to the slaughter] by Oliver Poole
    Truck delivered dismembered womena and children Red Cross
    US still awaits uprisings after paying millions for them by Peter Cheney
    April 3, 2003 by Iraqwar.ru
    Iraqi troops massacred from the air by James Conachy
    [Life under liberation in Nasiriyah] by Andrew Buncombe
    Turkey and war by Noam Chomsky
    [Slaughter-boy is worried about wifey] by Lyndsey Layton
    Reports of assault premature by Robert Fisk
    Ambivalence of war by Charley Reese (conservative, anti-war)
    Presidential quarantine by Jeremy Mayer
    Cluster bombs liberate Iraqi children (from their lives, limbs, and mothers) by Pepe Escobar
    Why the Iraqis are suspicious of their liberators by Patrick Cockburn
    What you aren't being told about Iraq by Firas Al-Atraqchi
    It was an obscenity by Robert Fisk
    The perfect storm, part 2 by Michael Ruppert
    Red cross pleads for the people of Basra AFP
    [Iraqis bravely fight US tanks with SUV's and machine guns] by Luke Baker
    Illustrated "War Prayer" whatreallyhappened
    God damn you by Alan Bisbort
    Battle for Basra by Keith B. Richburg
    Something monstrous this way comes by John Chuckman
    Massacre at Basra (w/o pics) by Reuters
    Massacre at Basra (w/pics) by the PropagandaMatrix
    The reality of war by Robert Fisk
    Let me rock you by Steve Lutz
    The First Casualty Of This War Is Common Sense by Mark Steel
    The road to perdition by Derk al-Kattabi
    Liberation by death by Judith Moriarty
    Sparing the public the horrors of war by Firas Al-Atraqchi
    Dead bodies everywhere (except on TV, of course) by Lindsay Murdoch
    Computer-controlled shrieks overhead by Robert Fisk
    A beautiful morning for a war by Sascha Matuszak
    [Slaughterfest engineer caught pocketing 3/4 of a million] by Stephen Labaton
    There's going to be by Barbara Slaughter
    See Rome by Chris Floyd
    Mothers, kids, crash kits by Cathy Breens
    The exchange rate by Ben Tripp
    Memory lane by Chris Floyd
    War Shock: Iraqi troops now eating live babies by Makup Aniol Shyte
    Predictions about the Iraq war by Chuck O'Connell
    Double feature? by Douglas Herman
    Military force won't restore lost US power by Mark Weisbrot
    Let us hope by Charley Reese (conservative, antiwar)
    China: stop the war immediately CNN
    "Thank you for liberating me from my eyes" Indymedia
    The perfect storm, part 1 by Michael Ruppert
    Veterans against the war VAIW
    Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over the Onion
    You just can't believe it unless you see it LA Times
    Tear gas and stun grenade memorial by Chris McGreal
    Idiot prince will have his war by Stan Goff
    Dear George by Michael Moore
    Black comedy by Scott Peterson
    The impending storm by John Brand
    Rachel Corrie by Peter Bohmer and Rachel Corrie
    Cockfight at Baghdad corral by Susan Block
    Women vs. bulldozer (woman loses) by Nigel Parry and Arjan El Fassed
    Life underneath by T.R.
    Is Tony Blair crazy or just plain stupid? by Eric Margolis
    ["I have no answer to that question. I am an expert on wars.] Slipchenko
    [American peace activist killed when Israeli bulldozer runs her over and then backs up] AP
    The rot at the center of the empire by Jacob Hornberger
    The war of misinformation has begun by Robert Fisk
    Millions of protestors across the world again AP
    Cage Match by Matt Taibbi
    What drives the warmongers? by Gregory Clark
    Bleak future by Mark Baker
    [Soldiers not given bullets yet so they won't accidentally shoot themselves] by Wes Allison
    The present moment by Ramzi Kysia
    Powell blamed for 'mistake' in My Lai massacre by Joe Shea
    Last orders by Chris Floyd
    If we care about Elizabeth Smart by Kurt Nimmo
    Don't support our troops: win or lose, war on Iraq is wrong by Ted Rall
    Unprecedented globalization of public opinion by Seamus Milne
    The spitting image by Jerry Lembcke
    Bombs and blood by Bob Herbert
    War and women by Patricia Hynes
    Dying times International press center
    Interview with Greg Palast by Linda L. Starr
    The US and Eurasia endgame by Richard Heinberg
    Bloodless trance by Ben Cohen
    This is war the memory hole
    The gangs of D.C. by Chris Floyd
    Pentagon threatens to kill independent reporters by Fintan Dunne
    Rebuttal to Perry Anderson by Michael Neumann
    Whose deliberate disinformation? by Ray Close
    Black flags by Uri Avnery
    [Black helicopters from hell] by Kristen Ess
    Will the real Daniel Ellsberg please stand up! by Douglas Valentine
    The special treatment of Iraq by Perry Anderson
    Sex, lies, and imperialism by J. Rex Bounds & Lisa Walsh Thomas
    Pressed conference by Thomas Knapp
    War and the economy by Lew Rockwell
    Dark corners of the world by Fidel Castro
    [cf. Alan Dershowitz] by Duncan Campbell
    The damned by Adam Engel
    The prerequisite to speaking by Steven Salaita
    On the winning side by Mickey Z
    The wall by Alfred Hambridge
    War whores by Nicholas von Hoffman
    Postcards from hell by George Smith
    The empire does what it wants interview with William Blum
    I'll believe the breakthrough when I see some evidence by Robert Fisk
    Arab impotence and misguided anger by Pepe Escobar
    Early thoughts xymphora
    Enjoy your war by Charley Reese (conservative, anti-war)
    Bu-shits xymphora
    [9-month pregnant Gaza woman crushed to death when Israeli soldiers blow up her house -- she wouldn't leave her terrorist house so it's her fault] AFP
    [They're desperate] by Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy and Peter Beaumont
    [US-picked 'democratic' successor to Saddam is 'smart' bomb defense contractor] by David Lazarus
    Deceived by the warhawks by Gordon Prather
    A plea for hysteria by Michael Neumann
    Swing blades -- Rumsfeld's loot from N Korea by Chris Floyd
    How to end the war of 1948 by Liat Weingart
    In the way by Paul McGeough
    The Hours by Bill Gross
    The war scenario by Jude Wanniski
    The blood of the advanced world by Eric Marquadt
    Hypocrisies, Double Standards and Lies by John Sugg
    [Americans worry about the wrong things] by Charley Reese
    [US empire with no clothes: only attack those you know can't defend themselves] by Rowan Scarborough
    Shock and awe democracy by Judith Moriarty
    You're not crazy by Michael Ruppert
    21st century Assyria with laptops by Mike Davis
    Israel's nuclear weapons (1999) by Warner D. Farr, LTC, U.S. Army
    The reign of terror has begun by Dr. Mohamed Elmasry
    [Tucuman: IMF, reformation, starvation] by Perla Astudillo
    Patriot II by Michael Ruppert
    Lust for empire by Jill Nelson
    Rummy and Saddam
    An American emergency by Ronnie Dugger
    Living against disaster by Ramzi Kysia
    Now the news will be censored by Robert Fisk
    Button-pressing warriors by AFP
    Ring of steel by Eric Margolis
    Pakistan, ISI, and Hersh by xymphora
    Strange dream by John Chuckman
    Noncooperation and resistance by Anis Shivani
    Chief war aim is testing state-of-the-art weapons by Vladimir Slipchenko
    Blair under investigation www.cloakanddagger.ca
    The dead zone by John Kaminski
    Resolved to ruin by Greg Palast
    Blair in more mafia links by Ian Henshall
    Protestors by Ash Pulcifer
    Of oil, the euro, and Africa by Sonja Ebron
    [Our tax dollars at work] by Anne Gwynne
    [6 billion in cash is a hard bribe to turn down] by Keith B. Richburg and Peter Slevin
    Using the "UN Process" to help organize a massacre by Ed Herman
    [The death of three low-market-value humans] by Amira Haas
    The Bush Cabal give the world the finger by Al Martin
    [New York safe, London not, eh?] by Gethin Chamberlain
    [Your polls are down, gotta start the war you scumbag] by Harris
    A weekend full of shame by Boris Kagarlitsky
    Hebron, city of terror by Ran HaCohen
    Massive pro-war rallies go un-reported by borowitz
    Out of the nuclear closet by John Simpson
    The fig leaf comes off by FTW
    58 years of shock and awe by Mickey Z
    The new Leninism by Chad Nagle
    30 million protest war worldwide -- largest demonstrations in human history the Guardian
    The demise of the nuclear bomb hoax by Imad Khadduri
    A war to save the dollar by Ira Chernus
    Ten million demonstrate on feb15 -- biggest peace protest ever AFP
    Tales to frighten children by Robert Fisk
    An orange way of life by Alexander Cockburn
    Why Bush is sunk without Europe by Will Hutton
    [Helicopter gunships and tanks, 13; shops, cars, bridges, factories, people at street level, 0] by Peter Wilson
    Does Tony have any idea? by Robert Fisk
    Lessons of history by Taki
    US buys Iraqi oil to stave off crisis by Faisal Islam and Nick Paton Walsh
    [Our] nuclear option in Iraq by William Arkin
    Daniel Ellsberg interview Metall
    Do you remember the last war? by Thomas Mountain
    The degeneration of the liberals by Anis Shivani
    This is not a movie! by Anna Lappi
    The nightmare asks by Gary C. Huested
    Israel to destroy 53 more stores in West Bank market village by AFP
    Scare him even more! (and then don't re-elect him anyway...) by Simon Tisdall
    Whose left is it anyway? by Sam Smith
    The shame of the politicians by Daniel Ellsberg
    How to shut up your critics by Robert Fisk
    Would you buy laundry soap from these guys? by Roger Peacock
    Sniping for bushonomics by Al Martin
    Work accident by Jamie Tarabay
    If we didn't have Al-Qaeda, we would have to invent it by Matthew Parris
    Go, Woody! by Woody Harrelson
    This is what was does to the side that drops the bombs--imagine what it does to the side that lost 3 million people under them by Margaret Krome
    Blowback plastic by Michael Smith
    The new wall by John Chuckman
    Media gag order on assassination plot The Age, The Guardian
    Peace is bullish, war is bearish by Jude Wanniski (conservative, anti-war)
    Clean lies, dirty wars by Patricia Axelrod
    Largest concentration camp in the world by Alan Philps
    US demans total impunity on war crimes by Bill Vann
    War is inevitable by Patrick Seale
    Weapons bigger than razor blades by John Lewallen
    Gulf war 1 by Francis Boyle, 1992
    Beating Costco by Talli Nauman
    Sucker punch by Chris Floyd
    Ethnic cleansing by starvation by Rania Awwad
    Getting used to transfer by Ali Abunimah
    Globalization fails to deliver the goods by Mark Weisbrot
    Osama is in Kunar but the US can't get him by Pepe Escobar
    The Secret Sharers by Chris Floyd
    Situation deteriorating rapidly in Afghanistan by stratfor.com
    How to silence the war drums by Ron Holland (libertarian, anti-war)
    Ecological warning signs by John Vidal
    Thanks a lot, God by Mark Ames
    Lethal (700 deaths) Madagascar flu outbreak by WHO
    New York dissent by Michael Steinberg
    From Vietnam to homeland security by Douglas Valentine
    On Eric Alterman by Alexander Cockburn
    It is not my job to provide the evidence for a war crimes trial by Robert Fisk
    The nukes Iraq never had by Gordon Prather
    Invasion politics by Dennis Jett
    Wag the puppy by Norman Solomon
    The chickenhawk database by Saigon Warrior
    Pro-Palestinian activists and the Palestinians by Michael Neumann
    [*our* mass graves] by Babak Dehghanpisheh, John Barry and Roy Gutman
    The war is already on by Marc Erikson
    Daddy, what's a war? by Charles Alverson
    The Colin 'It's-really-not-a-number-I'm-terribly-interested-in Powell' doctrine by Heather Wokusch
    [Low-value human shields] by Barbara Plett
    Reasonable deaths in a nonsense war by Helen Highwater
    Weapons of mass destruction by John Steinbach
    Blood for blood by Jennifer Lowenstein
    Summer in Iraq by Leah Wells
    Saved [biggest bailout ever doesn't make the nightly news] the Economist
    Targetting the innocent by Starhawk
    Look now, not later by Brian Foley
    Revolution and counter-revolution in Venezuela by Walden Bello
    [High-value human shields] by Jill Drier
    T minus 88 days by Tom Newton Dunn and Ben Taylor
    Human shields by Jonathan Steele
    Is the United States really after Afghanistan's resources? Not a chance by Ken Silverstein
    War, the Military and the Hunt for the "Violence Gene" by Alexander Cockburn
    Fending off the threat of peace by Norman Solomon
    Counting the dead by Marc Herrold
    Remember Hiroshima and Act Now by Bruce Gagnon
    The Intifada is dead, long live the Intifada by Gabriel Ash
    There will be no invasion of Iraq [hopefully] by John Chuckman
    [Great... frying starving people with death rays fired from robots...] Aviation Week
    Facts are the best cure by Simon Tisdall
    [resistance to Iraq war leads to the brave strategy of bombing undefended cities] by Kim Sengupta
    [effect of Iraq attack on Europe, Japan] by Ehsan Ahrari
    [per capita income of Argentina descends from $8,900 to $2,500] by Anthony Faiola
    The logic of empire [a view from our friends] by George Monbiot
    A political, not a military decision by Kevin Black
    [Killing civilians as approved policy] by Fumiko Miura
    [War on terror, yeah right] by Robert Fisk
    Iraq and the new great game by Rahul Mahajan
    [Global warming liability--when the UK freezes over] by Mike Romoth
    Zap -- you're jewish by Hirsh Goodman
    Who's menacing whom? by Robert Higgs
    Why do you want to kill us? by Jonathan Glancey
    The ethics of revenge by Yitzhak Frankenthal
    [2 million people killed in 4 years] BBC
    Hanging in the balance by Charmaine Seitz
    War for terrorism by Ran HaCohen
    Nablus defies curfew by Justin Huggler
    The arab tragedy by Pepe Escobar
    A glitch in the matrix by Gabriel Ash
    Unacceptable target by Colonel James Robert Hildreth
    Target Iraq: U.S. Plans for Major War by Larry Everest
    [The perils of electing the 'wrong' guy] by Sean Federico-O'Murchu
    Weeds and tomatoes by Cameron W. Barr
    Total control by Stephen Gowans
    [Intervening in other people's elections] by Duncan Campbell
    52 die after violence breaks out in Colombia by Marko Alvarez
    Why does John Malkovich want to kill me? (!) by Robert Fisk
    Destroyed Afghan arms belonged to ally [the fog of war...] by AFP
    EU envoy confronts Dostam over "Auschwitz" prison conditions by AFP
    Opec chief warned Chavez about coup by Greg Palast
    US hit squads by Eric Margolis
    [The mind of a terrorist, or, Martial law: let's not go there] by Scott Anderson
    Gaza assault will be bloodier than Jenin by Robert Fisk
    50,000 rally in Tel Aviv against the occupation by AFP
    US is top consumer of Iraqi oil by Middle East Economic Survey
    Ugandan rebels kill 470 by AFP
    Why I refuse to fight by David Zonsheine
    There is a solution to this filthy war by Robert Fisk
    Another suicide bomb kill 15 by AP
    It's sooner than you think by Fran Schor
    [Low market-value father handcuffed after tank mistakenly fires on his wife and children, them] by Mohammed Daraghmeh
    Priests and Palestinians by Alexander Cockburn
    Voices of sanity by Barbara Ferguson
    Palestinians shun Arafat by Alan Philps
    Armies prep for U.S. Iraq attack by worldnetdaily/debka.com
    Democracy and religious fascism by Arundati Roy
    The Palestinians must seize back their pride by Adrian Hamilton
    Dick Armey calls for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Counterpunch
    Gore Vidal interview by Gary Kamiya
    PHRUSA report
    What is a terrorist? by Jeff Cohen
    Reading the tea leaves by Justin Raimondo (conservative, antiwar)
    Bush promised to help Israel squelch UN mission to Jenin by Dina Shiloh
    On the ground by Yosef Grodzinsky
    Bleats of dissent by Michael Neumann
    Sharon's plan by Martin van Creveld
    The real aim by Uri Avnery
    Talking about terrorism by Zaid Nabulsi
    Air supremacy over Afghanistan by Marc Herold
    Who's revolting now? by Mark Almond
    Gaza prepares for invasion by Robert Fisk (in Gaza)
    Unseen daily tragedies by Suzanne Goldenberg
    The age of the human missile by Pepe Escobar
    Aerial Jenin by David Chandler
    Letter to a young muslim by Tariq Ali
    [Children taking matters into their own hands] by Ewen McAskill
    Just get out! by Gabriel Ash
    Re: Did Saddam gas the Kurds at Halabja by Jude Wanniski (supply side guy)
    [Life is hard when you're a low-market-value human] by
    The engineer by Jonathan Cook
    [Expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied territories continues this day] by Celean Jacobson
    What happened by Justin Huggler and Phil Reeves
    The case for nuclear winter by John Dolan [now *that's* pomo]
    The scandal of the Church's support for war by John Dear
    The broken home by Nir Rosen
    I, George by John Chuckman
    Operation destroy the data by Amira Hass
    Venezuelan coup plotter in Miami by David Adams
    Politics being made on the heads of people by Victoria Mares-Hershey
    Using the oil weapon by Pepe Escobar
    Oracle by Jennifer Loewenstein
    You are not nazis, that's true by Santiago Alba Rico
    ['Peacekeepers' shooting women in labor] by Laura King
    Peace movement growing in Israel by Grahan Usher
    Interview with brother of 9/11 victim by Aaron Hess
    The Arab nations are lost in a pit of desperation by Robert Fisk
    Resisting the Assassins by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
    US targets Saddam by Julian Border and Ewen MacAskill
    The real butcher of the Balkans by Jonathan Levy and Tom Easton
    Men Hit in U.S. Missile Strike Were Scavengers by Doug Struck
    Liberals back America's imperialist war by George Monbiot
    Iraq Calls Bush's Bluff on Weapons Scrutiny by Scott Ritter
    The anti-war movement grows in Israel by Neve Gordon
    Der Neue Mcfaul by Mark Ames
    Afghan Horror Unfolds by Suzanne Goldenberg
    US commandos kill innocents, CIA pays off kin--a model program? by David Corn
    [Bombing teenagers in caves and civilian homes in Tora Bora] by John Donnelly
    A country of brave people by Marinella Correggia
    Mightiest military leaves all in its wake by Rupert Cornwall
    Who is Osama bin Laden? by Lev Navrozov (and so on)
    On the Edge of the Non-Violent Demonstrations by Amira Hass
    Russian Military Intelligence: The War on Iraq Will Be Launched in September by Vladimir Georgiyev
    Refusing to fight in the wrong war by Graham Usher
    Killing Innocents: Does Anyone Out There Care? by Ed McManus
    America's Strange Political Culture of Grief and Dying by John Chuckman
    The peace process by Raja Shehadeh
    Hate of the Union by Julian Borger
    The smile of policeman Agadi by Abdel Rahman al-Ahmed
    Blowback and Daniel Pearl by Susan Block
    Tell the truth, Shimon by Gideon Levy
    Why This War Was, and Remains, Utterly Wrong by Gary Leupp
    Both saviour and victim by George Monbiot
    Let's Gloat! by exile.ru
    US, allies storm hospital
    [3,000 more 'un'-POW's] by Andrew Buncombe
    Forgotten coverage by David N. Gibbs
    Ghosts and secrets at mass killer's funeral by Robert Fisk
    Next target by Eric Margolis
    Compassion for victims by Howard Zinn
    Volcanos are televisual: war is not by Vincent Brown
    Good news by Saad Mehio
    David Horowitz Rewrites the Past by Ran HaCohen
    Justice or Revenge by Terry Waite
    The USA is not an empire... by Manuel Miles
    Congratulations, America by Robert Fisk
    Stone him (but lightly) by Alexander Cockburn
    Aid agencies step in to save 700,000 by John Fullerton
    When the body count doesn't count by Scott Macleod
    Mentally crippled by war by Andrew Morse
    Bulldozing Rafah by Gideon Levy
    [Remember Kosovo, anyone?] by Jared Israel and Rick Rozoff
    Chomsky Salon interview by Suzy Hansen
    [Press so 'sheep-y' it gets dissed by Stratfor!] by stratfor
    Mongolia and Wyoming -- A comparison by Paul Treanor
    You can't be a terrorist unless you are a Muslim or Arab by Hesham Hassaballa, Chicago physician (despite suspicious 'terrorist' name)
    Mindless and mistaken UK Guardian
    Why they believe the Big Lie by Ira Chernus
    Oh, Omar by Nancy deWolf Smith
    Day 100: another raid in the bombing war without end by Suzanne Goldenberg
    US Jittery at symbolic meetings of grieving families by Kim Sengupta
    'Leave the house now -- the bulldozers are outside' by Amira Haas
    Rule of the gun ushered in by US by Eric Slater
    The non-truth is out there by Alexander Cockburn
    Civilian deaths no cause for concern by Guy Alcorn
    American Cant by Peter Beaumont
    For NPR, Violence Is Calm if It's Violence Against Palestinians FAIR
    American's to Stay? Frontier Post
    [not as nightly-newsy as women without burqas, eh?] Tim Reid
    What has 'victory' achieved? by Harry Browne
    From Greenpeace to Greenwash by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn
    A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan by Marc Herold
    U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil by Julio Godoy
    The French Connection by James Ridgeway
    Dark tales from the ministry of truth by John Chuckman
    Muhammad's killer by Neta Golan
    Sure way to end terrorism by Mark Pickens
    Hollywood Leaves Out Most of the Blood (theirs) by Larry Chin
    Remote Afghans are slowly starving by Ravi Nessman
    50 prisoners in each cell by Carlotta Gall and Mark Landler
    Bloody Evidence of US Blunder by Rory Carroll
    US Risks Backlash with 60,000 in Ring of Bases by William Arkin
    Spare our blushes and put a sack on it by Terry Jones
    The East Asian Front of WWIII by Joseph Gerson
    [Not-too-brave things done by our 'boys'] by Stephen Farrell and Roland Watson
    Do we have to wait for a war? by Tariq Ali
    America's Empire Rules an Unbalanced World by Robert Hunter Wade
    Future Airline Security News C J Parker
    100 Refugees a Day (e.g., today) Dying of Cold and Starvation in Afghan Camp by Doug McKinlay
    Is There an Islamic Problem? by Shahid Alam
    Killing Off the Extras by Azmi Bishara
    America's Strong Dollar Policy and Argentina's Default by Marshall Auerback
    Argentina and the IMF by Mark Weisbrot
    The War In Afghanistan by Noam Chomsky
    'Precision weapons' fail to prevent mass civilian casualties by Michael Evans
    [Who's Darth Vader?] by Walden Bello
    I, sir, remain haggard of the Hindu Kush by Terry Jones
    An Average Day by Marc Herold
    [Other People in the World Like Us for Our Science!] R.C Longworth
    India, Pakistan Rattle Their Nukes by Eric Margolis
    Bushed by Barry Crimmins
    Missile Defense: the Untold Story by Bill Keller
    Kabul House by Richard Ehrlich
    The Real Story by John Pilger
    US Bombs Leave Wasteland by Paul Salopek
    [Right-wing anti-Cheney tirade] by Debbie Schlussel
    [Real-life 'hero' on which BlackHawk Down main character mainly based is in jail for child molestation and rape] by Megan Turner
    This Story No Longer Exists (indeed!)
    Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ramzi Kysia
    In Praise of Unspeakable Things by John Chuckman
    Why Doves Must Fly by Andrew Hsiao
    Catholic Groups Call Terrorism Battle Immoral by Jeffrey T. Kuhner
    From Tora Bora to Bora Bora by Jack Duggan (anti-gun-control retired executive)
    Cheney's Hiding in a Cave, Too by Dennis Roddy
    The God That Sucked by Thomas Frank
    Destroying Arafat by Graham Usher
    Selective Indignation by Tim Wise
    Power and Visibility by Dr. Tariq Rahman
    The US air strikes have now killed more Afghan civilians than the hijackers killed westerners and others by Robert Fisk
    They Were Wrong Llewellyn H. Rockwell (anti-war libertarian)
    Brain Drain by Mark Crispin Miller
    Barak, Netanyahu and Mainstream Thinking in Israel by Gershon Baskin
    [The downside of the Magic Lantern...] by Annalee Newitz
    Killing Other People's Children by Lawrence McGuire (excellent article)
    [New York Times Sentences Iraqi Civilians to Death] by Judith Miller
    Government Must Deny USA Bases to Attack Somalia by Maximillia Muninzwa
    Destroying Afghanistan to Save It
    Israeli Security Brass: Assassinations Don't Work by Amos Harel
    Technological supermen doing battle with dirty, barbaric savages by James Norton
    Civilian Casualties--Theirs and Ours by William Blum
    Where's Osama? by David Rossie
    [Gotta Stop These Sicko's!] by H. Josef Hebert
    [Jeeper Creepers!] by Emil Guillermo
    Special Report with Brit Hume by Carl Cameron, Fox News
    Are you watching a war on TV? by David McCandless & Rhodri Marsden
    Tora Bora Falls but no bin Laden by Philip Smucker
    Is the Gun Smoking? by Eric Margolis
    Getting Some Hope Back by Robert Jensen
    There is Another America by Bonnie Greer
    Capitol Hill Anthrax Matches Army's Stocks Washington Post
    Christmas Fairy Tale by Madeleine Bunting
    President Scrooge by John Isaacs
    No clue to whereabouts of 300,000 persons displaced from Tora Bora UN
    Death Squads by Phil Reeves
    Americans cover up massacre of 280 in Kandahar by Justin Huggler
    The Execution of Osama bin Laden by Dana Cook
    Just War by David Portoti
    Rumsfeld isn't telling the whole story by Dalton Camp
    Is the Pentagon aiming for a victory -- or annihilation? by Thomas E. Ricks, MSNBC
    The Nonsense Mantras of Our Times by Trojanow and Hoskote
    Gainspotting by Chris Floyd
    US Bars Surrender Deal with Bombs by Susan B. Glasser
    A Comprehensive Accounting of 3,700 Civilian Deaths A by Marc W. Herold
    Inside The Country We're Bombing by Christina Lamb
    War on a Word by Terry Jones (Monty Python)
    Anthrax Genetically Matches Strain Used by Army In 90's by Scott Shane
    What's Really Going On in Somalia by Jim Davidson (anarchist/capitalist!)
    Un-American, Fly-Shit Melody by Gilles d'Aymery (go Gilles!)
    McCain Interview with Chris Matthews HardBall, Dec 6, 2001
    The Wrong War (from a former war supporter!) by Jonathan Steele
    [Scores of Taliban Prisoners Suffocated to Death in Closed Shipping Containers] by Carlotta Gall
    Imperial Rome lives in the U.S. by Richard Gwyn
    Old Story Irrelevant and Dangerous by Ira Chernus
    America's New War: A Progress Report by Eric Margolis
    By Any Standard, This is a War Against Afghans by Sonali Kolhatkar
    My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war by Robert Fisk
    Can Anything Stop the US Killing Spree? by Justin Podur
    Wanted Dead or Alive by Ronald Herring
    [Asymmetric Warfare] by Philip Sherwell
    High-Tech Puritanism by John Chuckman (excellent article)
    Let Them Eat Teddy Bears James Ridgeway
    Robert Fisk Recovering After Narrowly Escaping Enraged Afghan Mob in Pakistan AFP
    Mullah Omar by Robert Fisk
    100 Nobel Laureates (majority of those living) Against the Polarization of Wealth Toronto Globe
    [Our Caves and Their Caves] by Willian Arkin
    [Behind the Propaganda Wall] by Andrei Sukhozhilov
    [What's In Some Caves] by Richard Lloyd
    Hampshire College Votes to Condemn War (hey hey!) Amherst, MA
    Sharon Chose the Hamas by Amira Haas, Ha'aretz
    Genocidal Thought in the Land by Scott McConnell
    Finding Anti-Terror Ground to Stand On by Robin Miller
    Suicide Bombers by Sam Bahour and Leila Bahour
    How to Rewrite History by Danny Schecter
    Bombed Kids by John Donnelly
    Keep Your Eye On the Target by Ron Paul (excellent article by Libertarian/Republican/Texan)
    The Last Colonial War by Robert Fisk
    The Day Nothing Happened by Richard Lloyd Parry
    River of Victims by Robert Fisk
    The silver lining by Alexander Cockburn
    'Frankensteinian' Policies by Salim Muwakkil
    Fascism In Defense of Freedom is a Vice by James Heddle
    Surrender Ended in Massacre by Damien McElroy
    Warlords Bring Terrors by Paul Harris
    Making Laws Worthy of a Dictatorship by Patricia Williams
    [Even Stratfor Appalled!] stratfor
    Home and Death Under a Blanket by Farnaz Fassihi
    The Afghan King and the Nazis by Tariq Ali (key article)
    Ancient Corn Stocks in Mexico Found Contaminated with GM Corn Genes by John Vidal
    US 'hero' may have triggered Mazar revolt by Rashmee Z Ahmed
    We Are the War Criminals Now by Robert Fisk
    The Hierarchy of Death by Anne Karpf
    Russia Checkmated Its New Best Friend by Eric Margolis
    Playing the Great Game Jonathan Freedland
    Blood, Tears, Terror and Tragedy Behind the Lines by Robert Fisk (only Western journalist behind lines)
    Behind the jargon about failed states and humanitarian interventions lie thousands of dead by John Pilger
    Suffer Palestine's Children by Sunil Sharma
    The World's Love-Hate Relationship with the USA by Richard Reeves
    The US Alliance with Militant Islam (Ch. 3) by Robin Blackburn
    Slaughter of 500 People Triggered by Sight of Westerner Drudge (!)
    Oil--Before and After the War on Afghanistan by Fran Shor
    Faking Democracy and Progress in Kosovo BHHRG Report on the Provincial Elections
    Chaos in Kunduz by Justin Huggler
    Look Again: Islam and Economic Development Go Together Philip Bowring
    World Opinion Opposes the Attack on Afghanistan by David Miller
    House of Saud looks close to collapse David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor
    Afghanistan Attractions Lonely Planet
    Oil's Actual Role by Richard Tanter
    Two Taliban Books by Mark Ames
    Victorious Northern Alliance Castrates then Kills Taliban Prisoner Ananova
    CIA in firm control of south Afghanistan Frontier Post, Pakistan
    Bombings kill 1,000 around Kunduz Hindustan Times
    Our friends in the North are just as treacherous and murderous by Robert Fisk
    American Crusades by C.G. Estabrook
    Carpet Bombing Kills 150 Civilians by Justin Huggler
    Tortured Logic by Charles Levendosky
    US confused where to go next by Nusrat Javeed
    The Lives of Afghanis Don't Count by Ramzy Baroud
    This Must Be the End by Andrew Murray
    US Oil Companies and the Taliban by Julio Godoy
    Neuroscientist Forced Off Plane by Julie Sullivan (hey, it's my tribe)
    Northern Alliance Crushes 520 Taleban To Death With Tanks In School The Times
    Northern Alliance Threatens to Massacre 6000 Trapped Fighters The Times
    US News Control AP
    Change in the Weather by Chris Floyd
    Flight of the Taliban Rouses Warlords by Luke Harding
    Getting to Know Our Foot Soldiers by Robert Fisk
    Don't Hand My Country to Warlords by Jawed Ludin
    Al-Jazeera Kabul Office Destroyed by US Missile by Adnan Malik
    Losing the PR Battle by David Corn
    Let's Not Go There Again by Robyn Blumner
    Our Friends from the Northern Alliance by Bija Masafer (a woman who was there)
    Seeking Opposition to the War Grover Furr
    Interview With Tariq Ali La Jornada
    What the media is churning out is trash By Masood Anwar
    The Wide World of Torture by Alexander Cockburn
    Homeland Insecurity Douglas Valentine
    Al-Qaida's Endgame Decision Support Systems, Inc.
    Next They'll Tell Us bin Laden's Learnt to Live Under Water by Mark Steel
    Hypocrisy, Hatred and the War on Terror by Robert Fisk
    Ayatollah Asscroft by Susan Block
    Where Are You? Geov Parrish
    Focus on the Real Terror -- Gun Violence Joan Ryan
    Bombing With Blindfolds On by James Carroll
    What's a few (hundred) thousand Afghans? Steve Perry
    Children and Mines (hours on a dirt road with a blown-off hand) Patrick Cockburn
    Stop the bombing, please by Farrukh Saleem
    The Top Five Lies About This War Univ Pitt Anti-War Students
    A Tough Tour of Duty in the Mideast by Simon Jenkins
    [Using Our Terror Machines on Civilians] by Andrew Gumbel, Independent
    US Bombs Are Boosting the Taliban by Abdul Haq (days before the Taliban killed him)
    Watching the Warheads Seymour M. Hersh
    FBI Eyes Torture by Alexander Cockburn
    CIA agent alleged to have met Bin Laden in July by Anthony Sampson
    Operation Enduring Avarice by Arianna Huffington
    US Bombs Kajaki Hydroelectric Dam (shades of Viet Nam) Agence France Presse
    Russia to commit quarter million combat troops Nusrat Javeed
    Unleashing the CIA? by William Blum
    Does this country have the moral authority to lead the world? by Stephen Gowans
    A Need for Honest Answers Boris Kagarlitsky
    Silent Genocide Steve Perry
    No Negotiations? Justin Podur
    Backyard Terrorism George Monbiot
    Hidden Agenda Behind War on Terror by John Pilger
    Left Tying Itself in Knots by Alexander Cockburn
    Wounded forced to flee as Afghan hospital system collapses Rory Carroll
    'The Taliban Are Not Worried About Being Bombed' by Robert Fisk
    One of the Real Reasons They Hate Us by James Glaser (Vietnam vet)
    Killing Our Own Kind by S. Leon Felkins (excellent article by retired officer)
    We Are Losing the War Against Terrorism Martin Masse
    Strategies of Annihilation: Total War in US History Joseph Stromberg
    US bombs 4 out of 5 Red Cross Food Warehouses (food for the disabled) Reuters
    Strikes Requiring Surgery by Phil Reeves
    Raid on Bethlehem Ghassan Andoni
    Hiroshima to New York N.D. Jayaprakash
    Families Blown Apart Richard Lloyd Parry
    Little comfort for tiny survivor of the bombing by Sandra Laville
    [A Civilian for a Civilian] AFP
    A Non-Western Voice Irina Malenko
    Why America Must Stop the War Now by Arundhati Roy (excellent article)
    The New War Against Terror Noam Chomsky
    Life Under Occupation by Lori Allen
    New Newspeak by Hamit Dardagan
    Cleanse the World by John Dolan
    What's So Complex About It? by Michael Albert
    This War Will Not Work by Jason Burke
    Halt Afghan Bombing by Paul Clark (Gulf War vet)
    Common sense could keep us out of perpetual war by Charley Reese (conservative, antiwar)
    This War is not a Moral Enterprise by Natasha Walter
    Avoiding a New Cold War by Mahajan and Jensen
    We Didn't Have to Do This by Stephanie Salter
    Unleashing Hell by Ramzi Kysia
    Week One: Operation Infinite Disaster by Chris Kromm
    How vulnerable are the Saudi royals? by Seymour M. Hersh
    I'm Against Terrorism. Now, If Only We Could Get Washington On Side by Stephen Gowans
    War American Style by John Pilger
    The Phoney War Will Get Real Very Soon by Patrick Cockburn
    No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak by Barbara Kingsolver
    The Most Potent Weapon in the West's Arsenal is Aid, Not Armaments by Mary Riddell (excellent article)
    Will a Few Holes in the Runway of Kandahar Airport Make a Difference? by Robert Fisk
    Stop the War, Plead Parents of NY Victim by Duncan Campbell
    On 'Immoral Pacifism' by Carl Estabrook
    Dithhhhhpatches Mark Ames
    Missing the Oil Story Nina Burleigh
    Yngwie Malmsteen, Brazil, & Osama (!) by Derek Sherinian
    Reports from the Front Alex Spillius and Imtiaz Ali Khan
    "Collateral damage" is a terroristic tool Charley Reese
    Multi-Focus or Bust by Barbara Garson
    What About the Children? by Jacob G. Hornberger
    The Bombing Begins by Chalmers Johnson
    West Is As West Does by Hani Shukrallah
    The Dumbest Weapon of War by Simon Jenkins
    West Risks Culpability for a Massive Tragedy by Dominic Nutt
    America's New Whore by Mark Ames
    Discreet Looks for Autumm by exile.ru
    Debka.com by Debka.com
    The Empire Strikes Back by Cockburn and St. Clair
    Military Might Cannot Heal Our Psyche This Time Marie Cocco
    Bombs Weaken Taliban Patrick Cockburn in Northern Afghanistan
    Bombs, Blowback, the Future Tariq Ali
    Afghanistan and China by Sascha Matuszak
    Same Old by Phillip Knightley
    Anderson Corrects Citation of Himself by UK Times by Ross Anderson
    No Regrets About the Muj Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1998
    The Pot Calling the Kettle Black Philip Agee
    The Taliban and Oil Company Pipelines, 1996 by AFP
    Which Side Are You On? Holger Jensen
    Opposition, Not Taleban, Controls Most Opium Production AP
    'Evidence' Unlikely to Cut Much Ice by Robert Fisk
    Worthy and Unworthy Victims by John Pilger
    A Century of US Military Interventions Zoltan Grossman
    The Unknown Enemy by Joe Sobran (conservative, antiwar)
    That Which Happened by Chris Floyd
    Osama Bin Laden: How the U.S. Helped Midwife a Terrorist by Ahmed Rashid (2000)
    The End of the "End of History" by Jean Bricmont
    Nato's mistakes by Eve-Ann Prentice (one of the very few Western reporters on the ground)
    The Siege of Iraq by G. Simon Harak
    Welcome to the Banana Republic by Boris Kagarlitsky
    Washington Post a "Useful Tool" for NATO? by FAIR
    Drug war politics demand the hard line and spending a billion or so by Robin Kirk
    The Putin Doctrine by stratfor.com
    Intervention, Immigration, and Internment by George Szamuely
    Schlock Therapy Revisited by Jude Wanniski (from a right wing, supply side guy!!)
    Inside U.S. Counterinsurgency: A Soldier Speaks by Stan Goff
    Putin Cleans House by stratfor.com (vs. not a peep from major US papers)
    Presidents and the Price of Pardon by stratfor.com
    How the West Killed Yeltsin by stratfor.com (vs. e.g., tripe on NPR)
    Why not call it genocide? by Hassan Nafaa (in a Cairo weekly)
    West's autistic view of Russia by Jacques Sapir
    The Year 2000 by Ignacio Ramonet
    The State of the World by Stephen Shalom
    Weep for poor Orissa by Simon Jenkins
    Collective Guilt and Collective Innocence by Diana Johnstone
    The WTO and the De-synchronization of the Global Economy by stratfor.com
    A Veteran Remembers by Howard Zinn
    Ten Years after the Fall: After the Celebration by stratfor.com
    The Red Tide Turning? by George Szamuely
    Where's the Evidence of Genocide of Kosovar Albanians? Cockburn/LA Times
    Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields? by stratfor.com
    Avoid the Lloyd by Matt Taibbi
    A Visit to a Bombed Village by Zachary Fink
    The Arab Holocaust by Raed Battah
    East Timor by Shalom, Chomsky, and Albert
    The Journal's Russia Scandal by Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames
    All the world's enemy interview: Jared Israel/Diana Johnstone
    Checkmate Nears for Yeltsin by stratfor.com
    Terror in Timor & the Interventionist Urge by Sddharth Varadarajan
    Sanctions and suffering forever? Jordan Times opinion section
    Making the news by John Pilger
    Massacres, First Half of 1999 (Columbia) at Columbia Support Network
    Britain's secret wars by Simon Jenkins
    Kosovo: KLA Country--report from Kosovo by Dan North
    US Intelligence in Columbia Stratfor
    Whose Stupid War Was This? by Peter Gowan
    A Just War? by Stephen R. Shalom
    Gangrene--Kosovo and the Collapse... excellent right-wing bile by Edward Zehr
    Moral Arrogance by Rick Salutin
    After Toxic Nightmare, Physicians recommend abortions for Serb Women by Mark Fineman
    Serb army 'unscathed by Nato' by Robert Fisk
    The treason of the intellectuals by Edward Said
    Cold War II by Barbara Erenreich
    NATO's War Medals by eXile
    Propaganda, Hypocrisy and the Torture Trade by Antonia Feitz (in RightMagazine!)
    When is slaughter of innocents not an outrage? by Vincent Browne
    It's the Russians, Stupid by www.stratfor.com
    Left Out in the Cold by Jeremy Hardy
    Spanish Pilots Admit NATO Attacked Civilian Targets by Jose Luis Morales
    The Twilight of the European Project (long) by Peter Gowan.
    A System for Post-War South-East Europe Centre for European Policy Studies, May 3.
    The Denim-and-Suede Fascists by John Dolan
    Recent humanitarian catastrophes that didn't register:
    • 100,000 dead in last two years of the Ethiopian-Eritrean war; 1,000,000 refugees
    • 780,000 Angolan refugees in recent months of fighting
    • 30,000 Kurds killed in Turkey, 1,000,000 refugees (NATO member,US weapons)
    • 25,000 killed, 1,000,000 refugees in Columbia, just given $1.3B US military aid
    • 80,000 dead in Algeria
    • 850,000 dead in Rwanda during the last five years
    • 1,500,000 million dead in Sudan during the last 15 years
    • 200,000 killed by Guatemala government while receiving US military aid
    • 200,000 E. Timorese killed (1/3 of total) by Indonesia given $1billion US
    What ostensibly precipitated the Kosovo war:
    • 2,000 killed in Kosovo, in 1.5 years before NATO bombing
      (about equivalent to the number of civilians killed by the US/NATO bombing)
    Each day of the US/NATO Kosovo offensive cost nearly as much as total US aid promised to fix Hurricane Mitch. Each day cost more than the entire Starr investigation. The bombing did not prevent ethnic cleansing and instead triggered it. It then lead to reverse ethnic cleansing. The bombing turns out to have left the Yugoslavian military almost untouched (perhaps 3% of its hardware destroyed). It's main effect, was instead, to destroy the civilian infrastructure of the former Yugoslavia. It did an estimated 100 billion dollars damage to bridges, schools and institutes (190), factories, hospitals (22), refineries, power stations, chemical plants, telephone lines, sewage and water plants, civilian airports (5), TV stations, houses, and apartment blocks in the past month. (list here)
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