[Jan25,'00] 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. [update: see Nick Turse's 2013 book on this]. 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 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

[quotes from 2000/2001 -- chronological blog entries from 2002 onward begin a few pages down]

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 second 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.

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

############################################################################
Chronological "Life in the US" Blog Entries -- 2002 until present
############################################################################

[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 750 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.

[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!" (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 basically 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 Alzheimer's 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 reservoir 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 basically 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 kilowatt-hours 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 themselves 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, and 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.
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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.

[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 (pathological 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 (update: mr. pimple just dumped a billion 4 days later). Facebook makes me sad to be a human. Industrial civilization slams into peak oil, and this is the response? Peak oil will be fixed by social media? and by giving Bono 1.5 billion more dollars and 20 billion to mr. pimple?

[May23'12] The 'end of the university' has been predicted many times, and I mostly ignored these predictions because they didn't seem to be happening at all. For example, about 10 years ago, Don Norman, the founding head of the UCSD cogsci dept moved to a company in Chicago that was going to 'replace the university' in 5 years with high-cost but high-quality online business school courses. After 5 years, the company was not doing well, and Don went back to a standard academic position at first-tier Northwestern. However, the recent huge increases in tuition (in both the US and UK) paid for by clearly unsustainable increases in student debt, something will soon have to give. As top level universities have begun to put high quality content online for free, it will begin to put much more pressure on mid-tier universities -- much more than so far generated by low-end online courses have (U Arizona, etc). This article outlines some of the main points. This progression reminds me of the inexorable increase in the prison industrial complex that accompanied/led to the stunning 4-fold growth in per capita US prisoners from 1980 to now, a percentage of the population in jail that now dwarfs all other countries in the world. It would take a truly concerted push back to stop inexorable progress toward the dystopian future described in cryptogon's comment here. All the pundits who are so quick to bash professors and 'old methods' of teaching humans forget that the old methods got us to where we are now. As anyone who has taught and done research at a university for the last 25 years will tell you, the increase in the costs of college has not appeared in their salaries or working conditions, which haven't changed. What *has* increased at virtually all universities is the percentage of the university budget devoted to administration, with many places now well over half admin staff. The planned de-skilling inherent in having low paid drones play videos of good lecturers is essentially a continuation of that trend at the expense of actual teachers. The combination of fascism (militaristic corporatism) with artificial intelligence is particularly toxic. In this context, I begin to see bright side of peak energy :-} -- fascist AI won't work as well without the grid.

[May27'12] Here is an update on the peak oil 'elephant in the room'. While the mainstream media like the NYT are publishing idiotic articles like this containing utterly hallucinatory sentences such as: "Industry experts and national security officials view the Alaskan Arctic as the last great domestic oil prospect, one that over time could bring the country a giant step closer to cutting its dependence on foreign oil", the reality is that people in the US are simply using less oil. They are using less oil by driving a lot less, because they can no longer afford it. This is an unprecendented, historic change that you can easily view on the internet, yet which can never be mentioned in the fantasy land of the official media. The shocking graphs above show that we have entered a completely new regime of contraction that utterly differs from the previous two and a half decades of business as usual. The hallucinatory media's response is that "peak oil is dead" -- right at the moment that peak oil is beginning to bite big time! For sure, the US is on its way to cutting dependence of foreign oil. It will get there by using half as much oil as it does now in a wrenching transition that has just begun, and it will have to continue contracting its oil use after that as domestic supplies continue their decline. Now-mostly-depleted Alaskan oil provided a small bump on the relentless downslope of lower-48-state production in the 90's, achieving a plateau for a few years, but never getting close to the 1970 lower-48-fueled domestic peak. Arctic oil is likely to be similar, slightly flattening the domestic production downslope when it possibly (!) comes on line in 5 or 10 years. This will be during a time that China and India will be competing with the US for remaining world exports. Those remaining world exports are themselves decreasing each year as internal demand of exporting countries increases. An example is Egypt, which used to be an oil exporter, but which began importing last year (around the time of the uprisings). The peak in oil discoveries was in the 1960's. We have now burnt through much of that inheritance. Hope the scientists (as opposed to clueless journalists) come up with something soon... (who, me?) :-0

[June21'12] The correctional population has now reached 5% of the labor force in the US (Fig 17 in Bichler and Nitzan, 2012, PDF here). From 1920 to 1980 the correctional population was flat at about 1% of the labor force. The previous runup in the income share of the top 10% of the population in the roaring twenties occurred without an increase in imprisonment. But the recent 1980-to-now runup of the income share of the top 10% from 33% back to 50% almost perfectly matches the 1980-to-now increase in work force imprisonment of 1% to 5%. Bichler and Nitzan suggest that we may be reaching an asymptote of the pigmen, with further increases in their hoard risking torches and pitchforks; and the rate of increase of imprisonment rate has flattened (hit by the Great Recession!). There is probably still some room to squeeze the bottom 90% or 99% even further (look at Greece, where 70% want to leave). But Bichler and Nitzan are right that there *is* tipping point past which things will go all Robespierre.

[June24'12] A hybrid Bermuda grass Tifton 85 (made by cross-species fertilization so that it is sterile so that it doesn't reproduce so that it has to be bought from a supplier -- GMO: the early days) designed to feed cattle that had been growing for 15 years on a ranch outside Austin. It responded to a drought by producing cyanide gas killing a small herd of cattle. Drought induced prussic acid poisoning of livestock has occurred before. Another example of production of cynanide compounds by plants to keep animals from eating them comes from Madagascar, where there is a bamboo whose young shoots contain cyanide to prevent eating. In turn, the Golden Bamboo Lemur has evolved resistance to this cyanide and eats what would be a lethal dose (for other lemurs) of these bamboo shoots every day.

[July2'12] I saw Prometheus, which was visually spectacular, but irritatingly crappy and nonsensical in its plot, dialogue, and character behavior. The giant (outsourced!) army of animators (the movie cost 1/8 of a billion dollars to make) was expertly marshalled, with one epic struggle reminding me of Laocoon and his Sons. But, incongruously, the story -- written and controlled by much more highly paid insiders -- was disjointed and stupid. Perhaps these Alzheimer-y quotes from Ridley Scott himself provide some insight: "There's no real link [with the original 'Alien'] except it explains I think who may have had these capabilities, which are dreadful weapons way beyond anything we could possibly conceive, bacteriological drums of shit that you can drop on a planet and the planet... Do you know anything about bacteria? If you take a teaspoon and drop it in the biggest reservoir in London, which also scares the shit out of me, and amazes me that there are not huge guards around it... That's the way to do it. You don't do 9/11, you just get a teaspoon of bacteria, drop it in, and eight days later the water is clean and then suddenly on the eighth day the water goes dense and cloudy, but by then it's been sent to every home and several million people have drunk it, you've got bubonic. It's that simple." Not content to leave it at that, Ridley continues: "That's how scary it is, so these evolutions of these guys who have watched developing DNA, it's like 'How can DNA change that quickly, sitting in front of me on a table...' That's because your mind doesn't allow you to accept that that may be feasible, that's the deal. In the same way that we have been here three billion years, we know we've been... The Gulf of Mexico they believe is a huge asteroid. That was an impact zone, you know that? Yeah, for that big a thing to actually hit our globe, it would have had to adjust the spin, the axis. That probably created the first massive cataclysmic thing which took away all of the dinosaurs, so that after that you're left with water, that's why the Grand Canyon was a sea and it is now a dry valley." (quote from here). Ouch. Hearing people praise this tripe reminds me of when reporters would reverently transcribe Reagan's word salad when he was off his teleprompter. In the case of Prometheus, all delivered to you by Newtonian-mechanics-stimulated skeletons clothed with texture-mapped NURBS computed on giant arrays of linux servers. Just think of how terrified Ridley would be if he actually knew what was in dirt...

[July23'12] The prolific-to-the-very-end Alexander Cockburn died at 71. Half the wikipedia entry about him is headlined 'anti-semitism'... Whatever. His unique radical -- as well as humorous -- voice will be sorely missed (even if he did doubt global warming and peak oil :-} ). Meanwhile in Colorado, it comes out that many people in the theater where the shooting occurred thought it was a "promotional special effects" event. Talk about a culture of violence!

[Aug01'12] I'm liking a Toyoki Koga electron that emits Bo Lehnert needle radiation photons. I suppose that's not the kind of research that gets Russian oligarchs depositing 3 mil into 'physicists' bank accounts...

[Aug07'12] I love the internet. We have a small DeLonghi DEM10 dehumidifier (small flat, no clothes dryer, in damp rainy London). After 2 and a half years it failed; the compressor would momentarily spin up but not stay on. After a quick google, I found someone who had diagnosed the problem as a failed 1 uF 275V capacitor on a small printed circuit board under a plastic cover inside the machine, a weak point in the design. I unsoldered the original capacitor, soldered in a new one (cost about 50p), and the dehumidier is back up. The dehumidifier wasn't expensive (about 120 pounds) so I could easiy imagine someone just tossing it into a skip (dumpster), where the 99.99% working stuff (case, cord, sensors, circuit boards, fan, compressor, copper refrigeration circuit, refrigerant) would end up in a land fill. That's why we need to keep the internet up :-}

[Aug13,'12]
Imprelis
Reading about the DuPont Imprelis disaster today, I am struck by how difficult it can be to continue to make progress at the same speed, a point made repeatedly by Joseph Tainter. Imprelis (aminocyclopyrachlor) marketed by DuPont beginning Oct 2010, is an artificial auxin (auxin a natural plant hormone), used like many other artificial auxins as a broad-leaf weed killer. Well known examples are 2,4-D (1950's-to-now home weed killer) and 2,4,5-T (agent orange). Weeds exposed to these chemicals overgrow and die while grasses are less affected. Aminocyclopyrachlor is less human-toxic, and more stable and more water soluble than 2,4-D. The result of this combination of three apparently 'good', carefully-engineered-on-purpose properties was that it began killing mature trees (esp. evergreens) as it was washed into their roots a year and more after it was applied to lawns. It was broken down even slower inside killed trees making compost made from the trees plant-o-toxic for years. It has been taken off the market and lawsuits are underway. Now I have no problem with lawsuits and I think people should be protected from dangerous chemicals. But at the same time, from a broader perspective, this is a case of people wanting something that only possible in the fantasy land of advertisements. And look at where Imprelis was being applied -- to large mostly pointless lawns on inaccessible 'green space' in between car-filled roads on land where nobody ever sets foot (and on gigantic, perfect, never-used lawns on rich-people and imitation-rich-people estates). Imprelis does just what it was engineered to do -- kill dandelions in grass effectively, for a long time, while being 'non-toxic'. The sequence of events brings to mind the rise and fall of copycat statins (e.g., cerivastatin) that were engineered to be better and more specific than the first statins. They were so much better at being statins (inhibiting the mevalonate pathway) that they resulted in muscles (such as the heart!?) being pathologically digested (one of the many other downstream effects, alongside changing blood lipids) and had to be taken off the market. Or Celebrex, Vioxx et al. -- cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitors that were engineered to be more specific than older drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen (which inhibit both COX-1 and COX-2). The COX-2 inhibitors upset your stomach less, allowing higher doses, which eventually resulted in perhaps 100,000 early heart attacks and strokes in the US, and the 10x more potent Vioxx being taken off the market, again, because cyclooxygenase is involved in more than just inflammation. The stomach upset from old drugs turned out to be a feature, not a bug (not that the old drugs like acetaminophen are that great -- acetaminophen is responsible for almost half of all US liver transplants, interacting esp. poorly with relatively small amount of alcohol, with a *very* non-linear dose-response liver damage curve). With a system of patents that rewards single blockbuster chemicals that are designed to be applied to one point in a complex meshwork of chemical reactions in animals and plants, I suppose we could expect no other outcome. But it's equally important to realize that there really isn't a better alternative (to the patent system or to the one-drug clinical trial system). Even an enlightened approach -- e.g., using chemical combinations -- would break down from an impossible combinatorial explosion at clinical trial time, long before getting anywhere vaguely close to the number of chemicals in natural 'drugs', AKA food. We are running tremendously hard to stay in the same place. Suing DuPont is not going to fix our problems. It would be better to just let the weeds grow (or pull them out by hand), or get rid of the useless never-used-by-humans-or-animals 'green space' altogether! It would be better/cheaper for people to lose weight and exercise more (or at all) so that there was less heart disease and arthritis pain. This can't happen when we live in fantasy land. DuPont makes money because people buy the stuff. We need personal responsibility in addition to effective regulations.

[Aug17'12] I admit to a certain morbid fascination at seeing nervous richies suspiciously eyeing each other in a prisoner's dilemma-like way as they try to cash out their dropping FacePlant shares (though Facebook tanking is bad for CA, which is a shame). Then there is the crabbed issue of richies upset about helicopter noise from other richies doing the Hamptons to New York commute by helicopter. Being a boomer, I suppose I should instead listen to the CDC (center for disease cash) which suggests that *every* boomer sign up for a hep C test so that, if positive, they can go on a $100K half-a-year course of pegylated interferon (immune system stimulator) plus ribavirin (interferes with RNA metabolism) plus telaprevir or boceprevir (viral protease inhibitors) and hope that their viral load goes down before the immune stimulation casues autoimmune problems like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, retinal detachment, or lung inflammation/pneumonia. Eeek a mouse (not!). One standard quickie hep C test is advertised as 98% accurate. Accept that that unreasonable claim is true, and say 2% percent of boomers (mostly former needle users) have hep C. By rough Bayes, the quickie test would result in half of the positive boomer diagnoses being false positive. More expensive tests work better (98% correct :-} ). So perhaps all 100 million of us should get expensive hep C tests? (e.g., a $500 PCR test, tho even those can be false negative if virus titer is low at test time). That would come out to $50 billion for one test each, plus $300 billion to treat the positives. A fine proposal, but it should only be made in the context of getting rid of something else of comparable size. How about the F-35 program?

[Aug26'12] For every dollar that California spends on public transit, it spends ten dollars on automobile-related investments. This will change! Time to fix the grid instead! More electric rail!

[Sep07'12] The courts won't touch a single criminal banker [update: 3 UBS execs *were* convicted today for fraud!] but instead go after the guy who made the "hopium" poster because he lied about basing it on a copyrighted AP photo! Now that's much worse than copping a few trillion in tax dollars here and there, right?

[Sep10'12] People often decry the Fed 'printing money'. It is true that the Fed has been given the right to create money out of the void and then lend it to big banks who pay interest for this created money back to the Fed (which is itself a collection of privately-owned banks). The Fed disposes of this created money back into the void when the principal is paid pack. But the more significant source of money-creation *by far* are the banks themselves (the ones that get the ex nihilo money). Fractional reserve banking (e.g., a 10% reserve requirement) means that banks can create 10 times as much money as is deposited into them (over time, with multiple cycles of deposit and loan, each time only retaining 10% of the deposit). This bank-created (not Fed-created) money is what the banks mostly charge interest on. Since banks typically pay 1/4 as much interest out on deposits as they demand in interest on loans, this is another factor of 4. So for an injection of $1000 (on which they pay, say, 1% interest), they can create $10,000, and then charge 4% interest on it. The bottom line is that a bank pays $10 interest a year for the priviledge of charging $400 in interest per year. Not bad 'work' when you can get it. Now reduce reserve requirements further and you're talking big money for nothing. This is a preposterous amount of money to pay for a trivial accounting system that is now all run on cheap web servers and database backends. Flexible money creation should be run as a public utility, *not* a private for-profit business. [Sep24 update: excellent video here (go to equations in second half) from Steve Keen on how this absolutely fundamental mechanism responsible for the creation of the majority of money is concealed/omitted from standard economic models. Economists are truly emperors with no clothes!]

[Sep20'12] Reading Dmitri Orlov, I came across this recent NYT article showing an amazing increase in US arms sales (now 80% of world total exports of arms!). The graph is cropped in my browser not look shocking until you click the link here, and even there, it seems cropped a little so it doesn't match the text! (graph looks like $56 billion, text says $66 billion). The Obama administration has thus more than doubled the export of arms compared to the last 4 years of the Bush admin. Major US exports are Hollywood movies about terminators -- and actual terminators.

[Oct04'12] Carl Zimmer, now at Discover, has his undies bunched here about the circumstances surrounding the publication of the French GMO-is-dangerous study and complains that the study (which cost at least $1M) didn't test enough animals (it didn't). Fine. But he studiously avoids commenting on the fact that there have been virtually *no other* independent long-term feeding studies -- well, aside from the Big One currently being performed on humans, hopefully not [yet] with the spermicidal corn announced by San Diego's Epicyte way back in Sept 2001 (inserting human anti-sperm antibody genes into corn is just like traditional breeding methods, right?). Carl makes a comparison between anti-GMO people and global warming deniers. Some days, I grow tired of yuppies dumping on climate change deniers. Not that I am a denier -- I *am* a yuppie after all. I fully expect an absolutely awful humanity-unfriendly climate sh*t storm in the second half of this century as CO2 reaches 500 ppm, right around the time the useable (net energy positive) hydrocarbons really start to run low. But it hardly matters whether one is worried about, or believes in, climate change. The myriad daily consuming/living decisions that drive CO2 increase made by the people in the two different groups are NOT THAT DIFFERENT! I would venture to guess that lower income climate deniers (many in the bottom half of the US that makes less than 45K a year) probably generate *less* CO2 than the more stylishly dressed, higher income climate worriers on their 'eco'-tours to pretty places. As Mary Logan writes here, climate change is a euphemism for growth. Attempts to grow, or at least not shrink, will continue the rigidly linear CO2 increase, no matter how 'worried about climate' Carl is, until net energy positive hydrocarbons are rare. It's the urge to grow -- consuming in the ever-decreasing energy return on energy investment fossil fuels in the process -- that has powered the linear upslope. Our current growth pause didn't even make a tiny dent. Feeding spermicidal GMO corn secretly to poor people won't stop it. Then it will be Mother Nature at bat.

[Nov16'12] Quite the spate of articles these last few weeks about the US becoming a top world oil producer and an exporter! Back in the real physical world, global crude oil production has been on a plateau since 2005 (the slight "all liquids" increase has come from scraping the bottom of the barrel (yup) with zero-net-energy ethanol, etc). And American fracked gas and tight oil producers -- the more expensive 'new' oil that is supposed to save us -- are right now going out of business left and right because the current cost of producing this more expensive oil and natural gas is too close to the current price for them (~$90/barrel and ~$4/MMBtu). The downside overshoot in gas price is particularly striking at less than 1/3 the price of the energy-equivalent amount of oil. So there must be another explanation for the new burst of deceptive articles. Today, Steve Ludlum suggests that the problem is the same one the business press had before the stock market crash of 1929. They they knew the stock market bubble couldn't continue but were afraid to say so for fear of triggering a crash. In this case, if people knew what the real propects for next few decades were, they might get real mad. So don't mention the war. I mentioned it once or twice, but I think I got away with it. But seriously, I think people really *can* smell what's up, unconsciously, without numbers. They are just trying -- like me -- to keep their head down and carry on. If you have a job, this will work OK for the next decade.

[Nov25'12] I recently read an article by Andrew McKillop, previously a sensible peak oil guy for a decade, who has now suddenly changed his tune here. I pointed out that the reduction in US driving visible in Department of Transportation data has not been mostly due to efficiency gains or voluntary conservation but rather the result of the inability to pay for fuel (cf. the inability to pay for food visible in the doubling of the number of people on foodstamps over the same time period). One particular omission from the new McKillop world view is the slow but relentless reduction of available exports as a result of increasing internal demand in exporting countries visible since 2006 (Jeffrey Brown Export Land Model) and increasing by the year. Again, this isn't a cliff, but it is a long term trend *very* unlikely to reverse with world population growth, and unlikely to be fixed by a 3 year US fracking boom, much less phantom zero-net-energy ethanol 'gains' added to 'all liquids'. My guess (in 2003) was that peak crude oil (not incl NGL like butane and propane) would be 2008. There was a peak in 2005 at 74 million barrels a day, then a dip, then back to 74 in 2008, then another dip, then back to 74 in 2010, then another dip, and then slightly higher to 75 million barrels a day in 2012 (now in the latest dip) (recent data here). Calling the exact position of a peak on a bumpy plateau is a little like cognitive neuroimaging (depends on how much smoothing you do :-} ). But knowing that we are on the bumpy plateau is not difficult to do *at all*. Remember that ten years ago, the official energy agency projections -- now shown to be ridiculously incorrect -- were that we would be at 100 million barrels per day now. The peak in oil discoveries was in the 1960's. Fracking will be a small uptick on the downslope of the world discoveries curve. I am *sure* that Andrew McKillop knows this, too, which is why I find his new tack peculiar. I'm not unhappy that people are driving less. That's a good thing! But I am a lot more worried than Andrew McKillop about whether civil society will be able to withstand another 20 relentless years of deprivation-induced driving reduction and food price increases as world population continues to increase. Maybe he thinks that since nothing blew up so far, this may be the new business as usual. Even though I disagree, I sincerely hope he's right!

[Nov27'12] Gregor Macdonald wrote a good article about energy that discusses the (forced) move away from oil from a US perspective. One important point is that this is a move toward coal. The US has outsourced its manufacturing to China where coal use has seen a staggering increase (another decade of Chinese coal increase like the last decade would have China importing most of the world's exportable coal). As gasoline-powered drivers are driven off the road (good riddance!) coal use will strongly increase in the US to support the electrical grid, which itself is badly in need of an upgrade. One thinks of the internet and its devices as forward looking, but powering them and manufacturing them has led to the largest increase in coal use in human history. There has been a lot of talk of trying to do something about this but absolutely zero action. And as Macdonald points out, it's easy for Europe to bray about reducing carbon use when all their goodies are being manufactured in China. Even though hurricane Sandy and weird weather themselves are *not* the best evidence of global warming, they have begun to convince people in the US that global warming is real, despite the best efforts of Frank Luntz, Fox, and endless stoopid anti-science blogs (Luntz has now reinvented himself to sell global warming!). But all the already-convinced yuppie global warmers fondling their smart phones and typing on their laptops (I put myself in this category, tho no smartphone) are the very damn ones using the extra coal! Probably there could be no real movement in coal use (i.e., no reduction in its staggering upward trend) until a real once-in-a-millenium storm scrapes a major coastal city all the way down to mud. We know from the geological record that storms *much* larger than Sandy or Katrina occasionally occur. Without such a freak event, however -- which has a low probability of occurring in the next 20 years! -- it will most likely be full coal ahead, until the EROEI gets lower and the price rises, choking demand as is occurring now with oil. In all likelihood, this means that nothing substantive in the linear CO2 upramp will happen for another 15 years absolute minimum (33 gigatons of CO2, which equals 9 gigatons of carbon will be added each year).

[Jan09'13] Food stamp usage (run in most states by JP Morgan!) jumped up late in 2012. Almost 1 out of 6 Americans (about 48 million) are now on food stamps -- an all time record. A lot of these people are employed. Thank god the housing bubble is being reinflated, right?

[Jan15'13] The horrible air today in Beijing (roughly 20x above the US federal air quality standard for small particles) was as bad as the air in a room where somebody smoked several cigarettes or as bad (in terms of small particles) as the air gets in a car where someone smoked one cigarette. Eeeeew! Breathing the bad Beijing air is about equivalent to smoking 2 cigarettes a day. That doesn't seem like much, but the cardiovascular risks from inflammation caused by small particles in air pollution and cigarettes ramp up quickly at low doses and actually flatten out at higher exposures. Lung cancer risk, by contrast is more linear with cigarette dose, perhaps because it simply deposits more carcinogens. You have to be a little touched to smoke in Beijing (or London for that matter).

[Jan25'13] Apologies to my brain for wasting precious time uselessly oogling and googling... On Dec 14, in addition to airing footage of the actual Sandy Hook shooting site, CNN Anderson Cooper also aired footage [group of police running at beginning and around 1 min] of an "active shooter drill" taking place some afternoon at St. Rose of Lima Pre School here, near Sandy Hook elementary, but clearly implied by context that it was Sandy Hook elementary. During the shooting itself, another active shooter drill was taking place about 35 min away in Carmel, Putnam County. This has odd similarities to the multiple aircraft drills known to be associated with 9-11 (Vigilant etc) and the subway bombing drill apparently simultaneous with 7-7 (Peter Power). You could argue that the pre-school footage was a harmless fake; after all, CNN didn't say outright that the running policemen were at the event (tho it did run the clip twice in the report). And "active shooter" drills are now getting as common as the old air raid drills I did in grade school in the 60's, where we would all hide under our desks to protect ourselves against nukes :-} . Similarly, the report (last line here) that the armed "camo pants" man running away from the school that police officers chased down and handcuffed in the nearby woods was an off-duty tactical squad (SWAT) police officer from another town is also weird (if it is true). Why was he armed? Why was he at the school during the shooting? Wasn't he originally reported to be related to one of the kids in the school? If he was SWAT, why was he running away? Isn't this CNN newsworthy?! Again, clearly suspicious, but not a smoking gun (though worrisome to imagine armed off duty camoflage SWAT guys as normal people to have around grade schools). Then there was this bizarre "just read the card" warm up to a press conference by a father who has just lost his daughter in the shooting, but looking for all the world like an actor getting into character. Again, maybe instead the effect of stress or camera shyness or savvy. However, given that these anomalies surround a major country-wide emotional Hunger Game-like passion play (Suzanne Collins even lives in Newtown), they don't reinforce trust in MSM reporting and suggest that one should maintain a studied uncertainty about what actually happened (aside from the fact that a lot of children were killed). There is enough uncertainty about this event even in the general public's mind that a week ago, CNN aired a piece on "Sandy Hook conspiracy nuts", brazenly opening with the same running policemen drill from St. Rose Pre School! Uncertainty isn't conspiracy. Scientists are uncertain all the time. After all, if we weren't uncertain about how things actually are, why would we bother to do experiments at all? (P.S. I favor less guns).

[Jan26'13] The cost of producing newly-found oil is currently around $90/barrel, approximately equal to the current price of oil. Oil in the good old days only cost $5 or $10/barrel to produce. Oil at $90 has resulted in historic drop-offs in driving in the US and EU. When oil went up to $160/barrel in 2008, the world economy crashed. There is essentially zero chance that even newer (deeper, tighter, colder) oil will cost less than $90/barrel. Delicate point in time. We are getting ever closer to the point in time where people can't afford the price that is the minimum required to produce new oil (a half a million barrel plus horizontal frack well costs $10 million to drill versus $1 million for an old style vertical well). In the past, expensive-to-produce oil was inaccurately referred to as "previously uneconomic oil". We used most of that up. We are getting closer to only being able to find "forever uneconomic oil" -- that is, oil that has an energy return on energy invested less than one. In economic terms, this works out to oil that is too costly for industrial civilization to afford. We are not right up against the wall yet, though; massive quantities of natural gas are currently being flared at tight oil wells in the US because the crashed price of natural gas (from the previous boom in natural gas fracking) has made it 'uneconomical' to recover it -- it is burned off on-site, looking from space like a new network of cities. All part of the 'wisdom' of the markets.

[Jan31'13] A full one quarter of jobs in the US now pay less than $23K, the federal poverty line for a family of four. This is moving strongly away from the Henry Ford idea that people should make enough money to buy the outputs of the companies they work for. At $23K a year, it is hard to imagine buying and maintaining a car, house, flat screen, or renting an apartment. Occupy indeed.

[Feb12'13] The tight oil fracking business looks like it could be headed to the same self-inflicted crash the natural gas frackers experienced last year. Previously, I had thought that Chris Cook's idea (Mar 2012) that oil price would crash in 2013 was wrong, partly because he phrased it in terms of oil market manipulation and seemed to not pay enough attention to simple depletion, progression from crude to natural gas liquids, etc. I was thinking of it in my simplified 10-year-moving-average way as: (1) oil production costs always increase because good (high EROEI) oil is drilled first, (2) this results in oil price increases, (3) increasing prices eventually result in economic constriction, (4) oil prices then come down because people can't afford it, and finally (5) producers of the expensive oil (the only kind available) go out of business when the price gets below their production costs. If *this* is what Chris Cook meant by financial manipulation (I had trouble fully understanding what he wrote), then I generally agree now :-} (tho I think it is very unlikely prices will plummet as far as they did in 2008).

[Feb20'13] The Fed is on the move again, strongly increasing the BASE in its first major move since Dec 2010. The price of oil is plotted on the same chart as a reference. Maybe the Fed was worried about the 'dreadful' February sales at Walmart? What a better way to fix this than to give *banks* more money! Or perhaps the Fed is trying to keep the mini housing bubble going that has started in CA and other real estate (a lot of all cash buyers, esp. including banks, who can now rent out foreclosures instead of, well, foreclosing). In 2001, it seemed completely impossible to me that the real estate bubble could continue to inflate given how far it had already come by then. But then it proceeded to double in size over the following 6 years! (which is why any short-term economic suggestions I make should be completely ignored, like this post I suppose...). Right now, it seems impossible to me that the current mini bubble could continue to inflate given the average person's financial position, a median income of 50K, 50 million people on food stamps, current savings rate down to almost zero again (like 2006), ballooning college loan debt, with 50% of 40-year-olds underwater on their loans (esp. on condos that have suffered the largest proportional price drops), and with bad employment numbers. But this new bubble probably has little to do with average people. Instead, the privately owned Fed (such refreshingly clear thinking and writing in John Hotson's 1996! article here) is inserting huge wads of near-zero-interest-rate cash into banks to fund institutional investors (e.g., other banks) buying rentals which have a better return (e.g., 6% gross, 3% or more after costs depending on how slummy they are) with the intent to keep them for just a few years. This is class war but one of the classes isn't fighting back (yet!). Of course, making sure a small number of rich people get richer as the housing bubble reinflates is *so* much more important than preparing for the Great Energy Transition. I have probably underplayed the international currency war dynamics, however, since Japan, UK, and EU central banks are just now doing the same thing. So perhaps the growing US mini bubble is just collateral damage in the bigger scheme of things. The blinkered madness of it all still infuriates me (even as I participate in it every day...).

[Mar01'13] Bradley Manning is a brave, admirable man -- "I leaked documents to show the true costs of war". The guy who snitched on him is a lame, cowardly traitor to humanity, Adrian Lamo -- what a pathetic excuse for a human! Another pathetic sight this week was Kathryn Riefenstahl, or whatever her name is, and her CIApic starring a fierce female torturing people to reveal the hiding location of an already-dead guy probably long buried. All this while the US inches closer to direct military involvement in Syria. By his actions, Obama has turned out hardly different than Bush. Gay marriage is great and all that, but when it comes to bankers, overseas wars and assassinations, greater-then-the-rest-of-the-world-combined 'defense' spending, the war on drugz, mideast policy, and an ever-growing police state in the decaying homeland, where's the beef? (or should I say donkey? et tu, Ikea meatballs?!).

[Mar09'13] A fine piece (of ...) recently played in the execrable NYT showing that drone pilots slaughtering people halfway around the world by remote control are getting PTSD -- AKA guilt -- poor things. How about, DON'T DO THAT! I don't imagine in the fullness of time that academic apparatchiks fawningly studying the video-screen'd imperial legions will be viewed kindly, either. Here we are in the 12th year our Afghan dirty war, launched on false pretenses, with almost half of those years surged and droned by Obama (different than Bush, how?). A human, moral, not to mention, budget catastrophe, getting worse by the month, allowed by Americans who can't be bothered to stop it, along with the other half who, preposterously, think it's still a good idea to hire people to kill the children of people they don't know, halfway around the world, even after the already-dead man who didn't do it was killed again...

[Mar20'13] The disastrous destruction of Iraq escalated 10 years ago and continues to this day. There have been a lot of articles about how we were lied to. B.S.! Anybody with half a brain *knew* they were lies in 2002, *before* the war started. Here is what I said about it publicly 10 years ago. With one or two million dead, trillions of dollars wasted, and a country sent back to the dark ages (100 killed by bombings today alone), a giant crime was perpetrated against people who had nothing to do with 9/11. The crime was a thousand times worse than 9/11. It *was* in large part about oil. All this as the US prepares to make its overt intervention in Syria more overt. On this day, I wonder whether the good things the human mind has come up with outweigh the bad.

[Apr04'13] The Fed has continued to inject massive amounts of money BASE (~M1, red line) and the big banks have taken it all and immediately put it back into the Fed (WRESBAL, blue line) to collect interest from the Fed at a higher rate than the rate that that loan from the Fed charges. This is the third major injection of free money into banks (the first was Sept 2008, then Jan 2011, and now Jan 2013. This suggests that banks came under huge new hidden stresses in Jan 2013 (around the time that Walmart reported sales were dropping off a cliff). This is what peak oil looks like -- limits to growth. Too bad the media shills declaring peak oil 'dead' -- even with oil between $90 and $100 for a year -- can't be retrospectively fired from 10 years into the future when it will be obvious to everybody they were wrong. Pay no attention to the money changers. They can create money; but simply storing larger numbers in the bank's database doesn't create net energy.

[Apr04'13] The recent squib about the Brain Activity Map (BAM) Science (et al. Yuste) reminds me a bit of the cornucopian shills in the energy business. Just because we really *want* cheap convenient renewable energy doesn't mean it's possible. For example, it would be great for MRI if there existed high temperature superconductors that are (1) strong, and (2) maintain superconductivity with high currents. After decades of looking for one, none has been found. They *might* exist, but they are not guaranteed to exist simply because *we* need them. It's an empirical question. Similarly, the various contraints -- in fossil fuel energy replacements *and* large scale neuron recordings are well enough known -- and not likely to change radically next year just because we humans would really like it to be. I have had a long-standing interest in analogies between symbol use in cells, language, and computers, and I recently happened across this report about creating logic gates out of genetic material. But it also got turned into this absolutely nightmarish fantasy by a non-biological tech writer for Extreme Tech: "Moving forward, though, the potential for real biological computers is immense. We are essentially talking about fully-functional computers that can sense their surroundings, and then manipulate their host cells into doing just about anything. Biological computers might be used as an early-warning system for disease, or simply as a diagnostic tool (has the patient consumed excess amounts of sugar, even after the doctor told them not to?) Biological computers could tell their host cells to stop producing insulin, to pump out more adrenaline, to reproduce some healthy cells to combat disease, or to stop reproducing if cancer is detected. Biological computers will probably obviate the use of many pharmaceutical drugs." Suuuuuure. I can just see the software update message: 'I'm sorry, but we discovered a small bug in the DNA program we installed into your pancreas which causes the pancreas to explode, so we suggest you immediately eat/install this software update virus package; should your pancreas have already exploded, we suggest your relatives incinerate your remains to avoid infecting the rest of the family'. Monkey wrenching around with gene networks that have taken billions of year to evolve is child's play. What could possibly go wrong? -- especially when corporate profits are at stake.

[Apr12,'13] I was really blown away by this list of recently failed solar companies assembled by Eric Wesoff. For years, I have highlighted the problem that since renewable energy devices are almost entirely made using non-renewable energy, one would expect *upward* pressure on their cost as fossil fuel becomes more scarce and more expensive. So solar companies failing during times of economic stress partly brought on by increasing fossil fuel prices didn't surprise me. Rather, it was the sheer scale of the recent failures (hundreds!), and the breathtaking rapidity of both the entry and the demise of these firms (how many are left?!). It was really the vitality plus destructiveness of capitalism that shocked and amazed me, once again. Of course, some of the carcasses will be scooped up by those remaining. But others will simply be junked. And, of course, some of them probably deserved to be junked. But in the greater scheme of things (think 10 years :-} ), it seems bizarrely wasteful to bankrupt 200 solar companies -- including the largest, in China, that was supposedly responsible for bankrupting the others -- in the space of hardly more than a year, right at friggin' peak oil! Why not move forward in a less manic way? Or what if the US had spent the trillions it spent destroying Iraq on renewable energy? If one could count on renewable energy being a good bet for vulture capitalists 10 years from now, no prob: then we just have to wait for the great harpies to rip back into town. But renewable energy may remain a risky boom/bust bet quite a way down the fossil fuel depletion curve -- that is, it will be cheaper to eke out energy from lower and lower EROEI fossil fuels for some time yet. My biggest worry is that the vitality of capitalism itself is based on high EROEI fossil fuels, which fuel rapid growth and big profits, and that right when we *really need* its creative destruction, capitalism will have a limp d*** because profits will be too low. That because I think it's not really "capitalism", but rather "first-half-of-fossil-fuel-ism", based on one-time exponential growth of energy from fossil fuels. None of this is to imply in a backhanded Ozzie Zehner-like way that we *shouldn't* develop renewable energy. Of course we should, full blast, now, while there is still plenty of fossil fuel left. It will take several decades to figure out and adapt to what really works at the generation *and* usage ends. Barely enough time. I'm still hoping.

[Apr30,'13] I shouldn't have wasted any time reading about Boston, but... a Boston suburb was basically put under martial law, or at least a dress rehearsal for it. The sheer symbolism of it all! William Rivers Pitt fumed last week that Dunkin Donuts stayed open and everybody in Boston was cheering. This presumably make it OK for warrantless SWAT teams in armoured personnel carriers to flush whole neighborboods of people out of their houses in a police-state/Iraq style at machine-gun point. Regardless of how much of Boston was affected, the important point it that is was portrayed on teevee as martial law -- and glorified as such. And it did nothing to find the injured guy in the boat! Instead, somebody spotted blood drips on his boat, and then the police came and shot it full of holes for half an hour somehow mostly missing the unarmed suspect until the FBI -- who it turns out had already been following the brothers for several years, and had them on an airline watch list (they flew anyway?) -- arrived to stop them. And the campus police officer that was killed earlier was probably shot by another policmen, not the fleeing suspects. This level of security theater couldn't have happened in (this part of) Boston 10 years ago. Looking at all that military kit, it makes more sense now why homeland 'security' has tragically become bigger than the New Deal. But the New Deal happened near the beginning of an almost perfect exponential increase in oil. Not going to happen this time. This graph of a typical tight oil well (Bakken) is our best shot now -- more than a 50% decline in the first year -- a true 'Red Queen' situation. Instead, in the context of tight budgets, it looks like the bloated, useless homeland 'security' bidness is now going to become even a little bit bigger, preposterously devouring an even larger share of the dwindling funds that should be being allocated instead to transitioning off fossil fuels -- or, for that matter, to plant maintenance that would have prevented the Waco explosion, which killed 5 times as many people as the Boston explosion. I suppose there is some slight chance that this dire prospect could be turned around. My hopium supply is low today.

[May04,'13] US housing is 'recovering' (higher prices are better?) with prices up almost 10% in a year. At first, this seems mysterious given high unemployment, record low labor force participation (back to 1978!), lower wages, the difficulty of getting loans, college kids moving back home with no job and big debt (the people who are supposed to enter the housing market), and with housing ownership at an 18 year low (!). The key to understanding this is withheld inventory. There are 7.5 million housing units held off the market mostly by banks, who very recently, have had rules changed so they can be landlords. Also, investors have gone after rentals driven by below-inflation interest rates. About 1 million houses are sold per year. There are still 3 times as many homes in delinquency or foreclosure (3 million) than usual. It is in banks' interests, *not* average people's interest for the bubble to reinflate. It is hard to see how this could go on for another year, but I have always underestimated the money changers (as well as their ability to hoodwink the average person into thinking that paying a higher price for a basic necessity is actually a good thing).

[May09,'13] Go Elizabeth Warren! [introducing her new bill in the Senate] "Some people say that we can’t afford to help our kids through school by keeping student loan interest rates low," said Senator Warren. "But right now, as I speak, the federal government offers far lower interest rates on loans, every single day–they just don’t do it for everyone. Right now, a big bank can get a loan through the Federal Reserve discount window at a rate of about 0.75%. But this summer a student who is trying to get a loan to go to college will pay almost 7%. In other words, the federal government is going to charge students interest rates that are nine times higher than the rates for the biggest banks–the same banks that destroyed millions of jobs and nearly broke this economy. That isn’t right. And that is why I’m introducing legislation today to give students the same deal that we give to the big banks."
"Big banks get a great deal when they borrow money from the Fed," Senator Warren continued. "In effect, the American taxpayer is investing in those banks. We should make the same kind of investment in our young people who are trying to get an education. Lend them the money and make them to pay it back, but give our kids a break on the interest they pay. Let’s Bank on Students... Unlike the big banks, students don’t have armies of lobbyists and lawyers. They have only their voices. And they call on us to do what is right."

[May23,'13] The stock price of Myriad Genetics rose to a 52-week high after Angelina Jolie's announcement.

[Jun04,'13] Good article by Steve Ludlum here. It repeats what he has said in the past many times but it bears repeating. Here are the main points. First, oil price, though high enough to cause economic problems, is dangerously close to or even under the cost of current production. We are very close to a situation where oil is too expensive to afford but to too cheap to produce. That situation will result in declining oil supplies and further economic contraction. The second main point is that poorer countries are actually willing to pay more for their initial barrels of oil than richer countries are willing to pay for their excess barrels of oil because those initial barrels are more valuable to poorer countries than the excess barrels are to richer countries. This means consumption in richer countries will continue to go down. The third point is that eventually, poorer countries economies will suffer from the lack of the ability of richer countries to buy their expensive exports. This puts additional pressure on exports-driven purchase of oil, even in poorer countries. Injecting massive amounts of money into insolvent banks won't fix these fundamentally deflationary pressures. Instead, the mass injections are mainly have the effect of making very rich people even more rich. No easy fix, especially nobody dares talk about this in an adult manner in public.

[Jul04,'13] The oildrum announced yesterday that it is shutting down and turning into an archive after an 8 year run -- right when the real work begins. I guess nobody is interested in the real work! I suppose the expressed intention of the oildrum to avoid finance and policy does make it less relevant at a time where the worldwide flattening of oil production is easy to see elsewhere. I will certainly miss the excellent technical articles on energy production. Still, I am somewhat amazed looking at at this this Google graph (HT Southern Limits) of the searches for fracking, peak oil, shale oil (and the oildrum), that worldwide interest is apparently dropping, right as we begin to enter the critical phase. Maybe it's because people subconsciously know what's happening as they subconsciously detect that they are driving slightly less miles each year (which is occurring simultaneously in the US, EU, China, and India). But back in the 'real' world, car production is growing 3 times faster than global oil supplies. As Steve Ludlum would say, this is truly a worldwide waste-based economy. Now the recently constructed empty cities can be decorated with cars with empty gas tanks! Matt Mushalik is right on the money: "What to do: re-tool car industry to manufacture non-automotive products. CNG buses, rail cars and components for the renewable energy should be on the top of the list. What not to do: Build more road tunnels, motorways, highways and new airports." We (US/EU/China/India) are still mostly doing the second.

[Jul05,'13] "I am an optimist, and so I believe that some of us will persist as small bands and tribes of semi-aquatic, nomadic humanoids. What's more, I find this perspective quite inspiring —- far more so than the perspective of breeding many more generations of office plankton whose job is to convert natural resources into smoke and garbage while popping pills to try to stay sane." -- Dmitri Orlov.

[Jul07,'13] According to Tad Patzek (blog here), the total land area now used just for agrofuel crop fields (maize, sugar cane, oil palm), not including access roads, storage, transport, docks, etc, exceeds the area of the Indian subcontinent. These biofuel monocrops occupy land that previously contained zero-net-energy producing earth-life-supporting temperate and tropical forests and savannas. Insane humans have turned these forests and savannas into temporarily net energy producing 'sustainable' 'energy' farms by rapidly using up fast depleting fossil fuels, fossil water, soils, and phosphates from other places -- in order to put the output of these fields into their 100,000 watt machines AKA cars, so they can drive back and forth every day to their important jobs for just a few more years (a bicycle is a 100 watt device). This is almost twice the area currently being used for wheat and rice cultivation. Complete and utter insanity. Why don't humans ride a 100 watt bicycle to work instead of driving a 100,000 watt car to the gym to pedal a stationary bike like a drugged hamster on a wheel, so they could avoid horrendously damaging the earth their offspring will inherit? Oh, that would be because they don't trust their fellow car drivers not to kill them for getting in the way and slightly slowing them down on their mad dash to work (or the gym). It's perfectly logical. We'll party on for maybe another 2 decades tops (I include myself). We can't help ourselves. Then mother nature will be up to bat. She can't help herself either. She's big into thermodynamics, can't be bribed, doesn't care if you ride a bicycle, and she has a really big bat.

[Jul11,'13] It's critical to keep our eyes on the Bank-gate and Stasi-gate and Energy-gate balls and not get distracted by sex- and race-baiting -- two divide and conquer strategies as old as the hills, because they work so well. Probably impossible to implement in practice, tho, given our language super-charged monkey brains. A related problem -- too many people -- is probably intractable for similar reasons. With evidence visible everywhere of there being already too many people for the earth to support (energy, freshwater, soils, metals, oceans, climate change), the world added 82 million people in 2012 for a total of 7.2 billion ( www.worldwatch.org ). This is the highest annual increment since 1994, forcing upward revision of population projections made only 10 years ago. The mind boggles imagining the additional increment in resource extraction of fossil fuels, freshwater, soil, metals, and oceans required -- *in one year* -- to equip more than another whole UK worth of new people with not just food and water, but also houses, sewers, electronic devices, electrical power, roads, cars, places of work, not to mention ridiculous things like fitness gyms and artificial nails salons (all the 'demographic transition' things that slow population growth). In addition, life expectancy is going up. The rate of increase in population is still slowing, but current projections have now been moved up to 9.6 billion people in 2050. The mind boggles but the mind can't do anything practical about it; the current rate of approach to collapse is still too slow. Mother nature will be left with a dirty job at mid-century.

[Jul14,'13] Above, I stated I wasn't too worried about methane. This was because even though it is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, it is cleared out of the atmosphere much more quickly than CO2 (methane atmospheric lifetime is 10 years, since there is a lot of oxygen around to oxidize it to CO2, see Gavin Schmidt). Maybe I'm a little more worried now. A really big 'burp' of it would be a problem. Recent reports of a rapid increase in melting-caused methane bubble chimneys causing persisting holes in the ice cover of frozen lake (some vents are even flammable!) are disturbing. The amount of methane released *so far* is still small in its effect compared to the effect of burning one cubic mile of oil a year plus burning approx. equal amounts of coal and methane -- or even compared to the amount of methane released by growing rice (anaerobic decay in rice paddies generates a lot of methane). In another 3 decades, CO2-induced warming will mostly likely have made us *warmer* than the warmest recent interglacial. Though that warmest interglacial didn't result in catastrophic methane release, being warmer than it, we will then be in truly uncharted territory. If the recent rapid increases in methane release start to increase more rapidly each year, the positive feedback might lead to a large transient methane release in the next few decades (most of this would come from anaerobic decay of thawing subarctic permafrost). This would temporarily (i.e., for 5 or 10 years until it was oxidized) put the world into a what-CO2-will-do-to-us-in-80-years-from-now state. This might have the salutary effect of raising consciousness more than a slow increase in temperature would. But unlike methane, the human-added CO2 will stick around for thousands of years.

[Jul17,'13] It's morbidly fascinating to watch the construction of a massive totalitarian surveillance state, in plain sight, eyes wide shut. The recent revelations were old news to many people given previous whistle blowers like Binney, Mark Klein, and many before them. I remember reading about the NSA and the NRO (now folded in) in Ramparts in 1970 (blackbird spy planes, signals intelligence, analog phone recording). Many of the new things revealed are 'merely' system upgrades made possible by faster CPUs/GPUs and larger hard disks, and by the fact that people now willing carry around video-capable personal surveillance devices. The secret FISA court is also an 'upgrade' -- a parallel, secret, unconstitutional Supreme Court that somehow always manages to agree to the military and government's requests, but gives the patina of 'legality' -- in secret! The steady drumbeat of movies and media and ever-increasing and strong majority poll approval by what used to be called the 'left' is going further to making the all encompassing surveillance state a fait accompli. Like the increase in prison population, the ever-increasing militarization of daily life and daily SWAT teams encroach slowly but surely (see Radley Balko), until people find it unremarkable to have storm troopers everywhere, picking off an unfortunate so-and-so here and there, while the rest of the sheep nervously mind their own business -- just we have seen in so many dystopian movies over the years. As the totalitarian security state takes shape, it gains momentum from the sheer number of people it employs -- in the military, TSA ("thousands standing around"), private companies, and universities, which are getting more interrelated and harder to tell apart. Back then, those movies would give us a frisson. Now it is merely an uncomfortable fact of life ("don't mention the war or the mini drone will tazer your @ss, stoopid!"). The only positive thing I can think of is that a perfect panopticon is extremely energy and resource intensive; for example, the new $2 billion Utah spy center will use 2 million gallons of water a day just for cooling. I'm hoping that as energy and resources becomes scarcer (e.g., rare earths for magnets hard disk actuators), that it will slow our relentless approach past a comfy, pornified Brave New World to a full-on 1984. It looks like the economic (really energy-plateau-induced) contraction of the past 5 years has finally managed to flatten the linear increase in prison construction and prison population in the US. Starting from a per capita imprisoned number that was flat from 1920 to 1980, the US had more than quadrupuled its per capita imprisoned by 2007 (the US now has more per capita people imprisoned than any major civilization in history). Perhaps energy starvation will be able to do the same for our metastasizing panopticon, though that would be cold comfort: after all, the US prison population hasn't gone down even a little after it flattened. A sad commentary: hoping that at some time in the future things will -- at best -- stop getting worse because of energy strangulation. Sheesh.

[Jul19,'13] The 'revolutionary' Honda Fit is *so* back to the future. It has a 1.5 liter, 117 horsepower engine (i.e. 87,000 watts [1 hp = 745 watts]). Accelerating that 'underpowered' car is like turning on almost *one thousand* 100-watt light bulbs. It's very similar to a 1979 Honda Civic (but with a slightly larger, but more efficient engine). Future historians will laugh at how preposterous it was for most people in the US to view a 100,000 watt vehicle as 'impossibly underpowered', yet for them to fret about unplugging their unconnected cell phone chargers that draw a fraction of a watt. On the positive side, a light-bodied, well-designed 20,000 watt device would leisurely be able to get up to 50 miles per hour and carry 4 people -- and would be less lethal to cyclists and pedestrians. And what about a battery-assisted bicycle? Those run handily on 250 watts. In other 'news', Microsoft dropped 10% today (no, I'm not sorry, can I have some more, please?). The loss in 'value' was $25 billion. The idea that the idea of Microsoft could be worth $25 billion less in the space of a few hours makes me laugh at the human monkeys running our ridiculous economic system as it careens toward its deadly 2030-2050 encounter with mother nature.

[Jul21,'13] After having just read about NHS automaton 'nurses' in the UK yelling at family members not to give any water to a dying relative on the "Liverpool Care Pathway", I wasn't surprised to see that Law Enforcement Today found it worthwhile to run an article suggesting that militarized police (they even have bayonets now) not shoot the family dog (while shooting the family?). Actually, one story illustrated police shooting a small dog who struggled injured on its back before being dispatched by several more shots, all while it was trying to protect its homeless owner, who was having an epileptic seizure. People are seriously losing their common sense, not to mention their sense of humor. I suppose the bayonets are for cases where a drug raid unexpectely turns into trench warfare. It's a shame we human monkeys have nukes. Somebody could get hurt.

[Jul23,'13] I love Chris Hedges' recent commentaries but I'm afraid I agree with Jb's comment at Economic Undertow's Monday Mayhem: "The truth is, the masses aren’t going to 'rise up' until they believe they have nothing left to lose. They must be more terrified of telling their children that there's nothing to eat (let alone go to college) than they are of getting hit in the face with a tear gas canister. When they do rise up, they will seek to restore what they lost: cheap fuel and food; look at Egypt!". That is not going to happen in the US for at least 15 years, probably sometime after the entire world reaches peak net energy roughly around 2025 or so. We're there for oil but not yet for all energy. So, carry on with the shorter showers for now. In China, growth in electrical consumption (which is strongly correlated with economic growth) has flattened to almost to zero growth (N.B.: that means they are still using *half* of all the world's coal to generate electricity to make stuff for the rest of the world). Electrical consumption growth had briefly gone negative at the height of the 2008 crash, but over the past years has been back up to 10 to 15% increases per year. This has resulted in incredible pressure on their water supply (for extracting, washing and processing coal). But despite all the breathless Zerohedge-y blather about Chinese growth flattening immediately, now, blah (the derivative of a noisy function is *so* noisy!), it's means little in the overall (multi-year-smoothed) approach to world peak energy, which is the one to be really worried about. China has plans to add the equivalent of two India's worth of electrical generating capacity in 7 years. They probably won't get all the way there, but they will try, turning more and more land into desert on the way. The increase in Chinese coal use starting around 2000 is what has made world per capita energy consumption go up again after having flattened out for 20 years from 1979 to 2000. Overall growth in energy use will mostly likely increase for at least another decade. The richest 200 people in the world -- who have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion people, are still desperate to skim off yet more for their bug out plans, and they will keep the pedal to the metal until the car is completely off the cliff. *Then* people will finally panic and revolt -- when it is too late to effectively change course.

[Jul27,'13] "The US promises it won't torture Snowden". What an amazing statement on so many levels! What on earth does this mean? That by default, you get tortured? But the US has already defined "enhanced interrogation" (with Cheney watching) as "not torture". So by default, you get worse than "enhanced interrogation"? (as in shipped to Egypt in an unmarked CIA jet). And who is the statement directed to? Not even the American people could believe it! Somehow this make the Obama administration better than the Bush administration? Sheesh. [Jul28,'13] Almost all the members of the SEAL team that 'killed bin Laden' were wiped out a few months later in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. The relatives have motivated an investigation, with the bizarre subtext that the military purposely allowed the Taliban to shoot down the helicopter because the US military was somehow more sympathetic to the Taliban than to their own special operations people and allowed the Taliban to get revenge for Obomber 'killing bin Laden'. Paul Craig Roberts has a different, more plausible scenario here (originally presented in 2011). It's partly based on a 2011 interview with a neighbor that was put online soon after the attack; the neighbor reported that 3 helicopters had arrived at the beginning of the raid, speaking Pashto to warn people away, then 2 left, and one exploded, killing all on board (the guy interviewed said he saw many body parts, and the downed helicopter was well documented). Here is the 2011 translation (video link now dead). The general idea is that perhaps no SEALs were involved at all. The evidence is pretty flimsy, but then so is the evidence for the official story (buried at sea?, internet-outed photoshop jobs given to senators?, Hollywood movies by Kathryn Riefenstahl?).

[Aug01,'13] Catherine Austin Fitts has interesting recent interviews about a new economy (e.g., she mentions Dallas) in the US being created out of the ruins of the old economy that combines new US tight oil, new fabrication (esp. for military hardware), and industrial US farming. She says the coming bail-ins will be mainly in offshore banks in an effort to repatriate offshore capital to prevent Detroit-like collapses from spreading, and that there will be a continuing bull market in equities as bonds go down (hard to see stocks continuing up, like Chris Cook on oil crashing in 2012, which turned out to be wrong -- but who knows). With the druid, she expects a very slow motion collapse. But as a person who is fundamentally a money manager and makes income from selling investment videos, she has a very short term focus. Fracked wells that decline by more than 50% in one year and have no long tails as stripper wells seem like a poor power source for a "breakaway civilization" to me! She generally puts too much emphasis on money dynamics and she seems to understand very little about the geology of fossil fuels or that fossil fuel energy is the original force of creation, or about energy return on energy invested, or much about the dire eventual results of all our CO2 exhaust (20 years into the future for a money manager might as well be infinity). She thinks we will mine the moon (a litmus test indicating utter lack of understanding of physics and net energy). But she *is* right on target with respect to the upcoming teardown in ridiculously impractical after-the-fact health care for people poisoned by industrial food and lifestyle (though I don't see how the "breakaway civilization" industrial food is supposed to fix that!) (and she should probably take her own health care advice to heart!)

[Aug08,'13] Bradley Manning's statement is so much more worth reading than the millions of lines of video crap written daily for the teevee or the higher end crap published in the NYT. It is all a way of gradually and subconsciously moulding people's minds into thinking that post-Constitution America is 'normal', that it's 'normal' for domestic police departments to have weaponized drones staring down from above ready to call in SWAT teams with tanks -- "step *away* from the bambi!" [13 armed agents to hood and kill a fawn]), or to have every personal message, image, and location vaccumed up by a bunch of creepy, leering J Edgars, or to have the TSA patting you down on the way to the grocery store or movie theater. It's not normal, and it would be a really bad idea to passively let it get worse each year. Could end up in a really bad place in another decade or two. But the light at the end of the tunnel :-} is that we will run low on energy (I'm hoping!) before we will ever be able to get all the way to Elysium.

[Aug25,'13] Saw Elysium. It was OK. Not nearly as good as District 9, but that was expected, given the requisite Hollywood-i-Sony-i-fication. The writing was a little uneven. It was good to see latino good guys for once! (slum scenes filmed in slums surrounding Mexico City). But of course, the silliest thing, as usual, was energy. There was seemingly still huge amounts of unspecified energy available for mining, and hi-tech manufacturing, flying cars, flat screens, hyper biotech, chip fabs, not to mention food for the masses, and rocket engines capable of instantly accelerating and decelerating heavy payloads up to 17,000 miles per hour (AKA orbit) and back to zero to land, to keep the space station supplied with air, water, marble, etc. So... what was their problem, exactly? The basic energy contradictions are analogous to the Matrix's measly 100-watt humans supposedly having their energy 'harvested'. To keep a human alive, you have to put in more energy than you get out. Basic thermodynamics of life. But ignoring that, let's suppose you *could* get 50 watts net per human. That couldn't possibly power billions of multi megawatt machines. Like Elysium, the math doesn't work. There will be a lot less usable energy in the future than that.

[Sep08,'13] Obama is pushing for attacking Syria with 1/6 of the US population on food stamps. There are 350 total million Americans. Out of that, the "civilian noninstitutional population" -- that is 16 years or older, not in jail, mental hospitals, the military, and old folks homes -- is 245 million. There are 11 million officially classified as "unemployed". But there are also a record 90 million people 16 years and older *not* in the labor force (retirees, younger people not looking for a job). That make 101 million people over 16 not working. This, number which has been going up as baby boomers retire and are not replaced by equivalent numbers of college age people taking jobs (they're back at home without a job but with a loan to pay), is approaching the number of people in the labor force. Probably better not to waste money killing Syrians halfway around the globe and spend it instead at home, Obama.

[Sep09,'13] Scott Creighton had a great post on Common Core here. This one sentence says it all: "With defense and security expenditures slowing, corporations are looking to profit from new cloud-based software used to collect and mine information from student records to create individualized education programs designed by third-party companies." What an utterly depressing, inhuman, Brave New World picture! "When the Great Spirit Died" indeed. As a teacher, this makes me want to puke.

[Oct02,'13] "The state, in its internal projections, has a vision of the future that is as dystopian as mine" -- Chris Hedges. Chris has does have the somber outlook of a preacher's son. But look on the bright side! The unprecendented peak and decline of vehicle miles driven (somebody from Forbes or the Economist forgot to tell drivers in the US/UK/EU that 'peak oil is dead') means that we have probably passed 'peak Walmart'.

[Oct08,'13] On the 12th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, with the government closed because of debt problems, there are *twice* as many troops in Afghanistan as there were when Obama became president, and the US is spending $10 million *per hour* there (no, that spending didn't close down). There is only one party -- the war party.

[Oct12,'13] "In the theatre of the absurd we know less about what Glenn [Greenwald] has than what we know about the NSA. maybe, we need the NSA to hack Glenn, and leak what he has." -- Trish at the Rancid Honey Trap (update: Greeewald is now starting his own media outlet with the help of a 'friendly' billionaire).

[Oct26,'13] I've written about the irony of the shale gas producers all piling into fracking at the same time thus putting themselves out of business by crashing natural gas prices to below the cost of production of fracked gas. I initially chalked this up to short term business as usual; and the first guys in *did* make money. But I overlooked the insidious role of banking documented by Deborah Rogers in this PDF. The rapid moves into fracking required a lot of new debt. This provided a new opportunity to banks. By analogy with mortgage backed securities, the banking 'industry' went ahead and created 'complex' (i.e., obfuscated) 'products' like 'volumetric production payments' and then by analogy with the 'innovations' surrounding subprime house loans, bundled leases on unproved gas fracking fields and sold them to pension funds (genius). This was fine until natural gas prices started to crash, at which point the investment banks (e.g., Barclays) forced continued natural gas overproduction to get their short term loans repaid, further crashing gas prices and putting many of the fracking companies out of business (did I mention pension funds?), ironically right as we hit peak natural gas. I suppose stricter banking laws might have damped out some of this idiocy/criminality and resulted in less money being skimmed off by the sociopathic richies. And perhaps this might have resulted in more fossil fuel having been invested in producing renewable energy devices, which are less profitable in part because they have a high up front cast, but are much more sane from the point of view of salvaging industrial civilization during the coming fossil fuel energy downslope. A fine idea -- to bell the cat! But no mouse has the power to do it. As we get closer to zero net energy for fossil fuels, which is expressed in economic terms at the point where the cost of producing fossil fuel is not high enough to make any profit at all, but too high for non-rich people to afford, we start to enter a long period of declining production. We have now passed the wealth inequalities of 1929, largely due to short term sociopathic banker scams. The sociopathy is now completely public. One recent example is Carlos Icahn's suggestion that Apple borrow money to buy its own stock (Apple has $150 billion in cash reserves, with $100 billion of that in offshore banks to avoid tax). This would increase the value of the stock far beyond the borrowing costs. All this, while lawyers haggle over how much the designer of the late Steve Jobs' just-finished never-used utterly ridiculous $140 million superyacht should be paid. Despite gigantic bank crimes, there has been no trace of an attempt to reign them in or to reinstate any of the common sense banking laws from 30 years ago. The sociopathic richies operate these 6-month-look-ahead slash and burn schemes, but then expect to keep their filthy lucre forever, while being able to continually do things like cut pensions and health care without consequences (see, e.g., the recent announcement in Detroit that pensions will be cut to less than 1/6 of their original promised -- and paid -- for size). As long as this expectation is fulfilled, they won't stop their pillage and plunder. The increased pressure from the energy downslope *will* eventually change this, and regular people will finally turn away from their cellphones in rage. The richies won't stop themselves until their heads rot on pikes on a bridge.

[Nov25,'13] [Nov25'13] My father, Charles Sereno, died suddenly and unexpectedly in his home a few days ago. He was a good man who was the prime force in setting up my world view and I will miss him terribly.

[Dec06,'13] I'm listening to Phony Toady Iraq-war Blair on the hotel teevee droning on about how great Nelson Mandela was. What a steaming pile. The MSM says how great Mandela was, 40 years after the fact, while it pours sewage out of its mouth about the Mandela's of today. CNN's viewership went into the toilet this year, dropping by almost half (!). Couldn't happen to a better set of Orwells. It truly makes me feel like I am entering a parallel reality when I listen to the 'news' 'feed' for a few hours (I don't have cable at home). You have to be schizophrenic to be sane.

[Dec15,'13] Here is an interesting old film, from an the BORAX experiments by Argonne national labs in Idaho. The film shows an experiment on BORAX-I, which took place in 1954. A small nuclear reactor core was purposely exploded by a critical event (caused by withdrawing 4 of the 5 control rods, then ejecting the last one with a spring; the site became a superfund cleanup site). Something similar likely happened in this video of the more recent and much larger explosion at unit 3 at Fukushima, which had some features of a criticality as opposed to a hydrogen explosion (which may have occurred in unit 1). It seems very likely that many radioactive uranium and plutonium containing control rods from the in-operation core were ejected and aerosolized at unit 3. Once again, I admit I initially underestimated the severity of the disaster at Fukushima.

[Dec18,'13] Steve Ludlum just wrote another interesting -- but in parts overly florid and confusing -- post here . The main point, however, is very good: it is impossible to fix an economic contraction caused by *energy constraints* by fiddling with the money system (QE, interest rates, etc, etc.). Specifically, the problem is that energy return on energy investment (EROEI) is getting lower and lower. This is expressed as higher energy costs, but also, demand destruction. Fiddling with money has virtually no effect on average EROEI. EROEI depends primarily on geology. The 'new advances' in fracking didn't change EROEI of fracked deposits. It was always crappy. The reason those deposits are being mined now is simply desperation -- people are willing to pay 10x as much for them as they were 20 years ago. If oil prices drop even a little through additional demand destruction (austerity), the frackers are toast. Similarly, the EROEI of tar sands dregs is at best 3 (from a supporter!), which compares unfavorably with Texas oil at an EROEI of 50 or 100 from the golden years in the mid 20th century. Although is it possible to implement negative interest rates (paying to keep your money in the bank), EROEI of less than 1.0 is an absolutely hard limit for an energy *source*. Bottom of the barrel tar sands at EROEI=3 are uncomfortably close to 1.0. Now perhaps physicists can come up with an idea to improve EROEI. But changing the interest rate or paying physicists more is very unlikely to change the overall form of the Maxwell equations, or the equations that describe how a heat engine works, or how much energy it takes to crush rocks to a given size. The main mistake of average people but also scientists is to assume that the huge amount of growth that occurred in the late 20th century was due to people coming up with bright ideas. People *did* came up with bright ideas. But most of the growth was only possible because we found a bunch of high EROEI energy deposits created 100 million or more years ago. That's just as much responsible for the bright ideas as the other way around. We have now mostly used up these high EROEI deposits. Pure ideas (or pure money fiddling) in the absence of high EROEI energy deposits cannot make new growth, period. And given the current precarious situation of the biosphere, that's probably a good thing.

[Dec29,'13] I'm getting a worried feeling that something is coming seriously unglued in the money business. The latest scam -- the Fixed-Rate Reverse Repo facility -- proposed in June and now implemented, somehow spit out $100 billion dollars in a single day, a few days ago. The housing boom is now driven by cash buyers; 60% of single-family homes are now bought with cash -- except that it's not really cash, but effectively near-zero-interest Fed loans to private equity firms, hedge funds, and big banks, who just recently got approved to be landlords. I can imagine banks will make responsive landlords. Sort like the circus with finding out who 'bought' your home loan (I find the whole idea of 'buying' a home loan odious). I have greater difficulty understanding the abstract financial gobbledygook about 'collateral', 'liquidity', and 'marginable risk-on positions' than the Dirac equation for the electron. It sure seems like some kind of same-old, roaring twenties Ponzi scam of the kind typically executed right before falling off a cliff. However given my previous ability at predicting short term outcomes (much *worse* than random), this probably means more good times are on the way (for the next few months!). But I'm much less likely wrong on the long term, average-for-a-whole-decade picture: energy depletion means growth can't go on. The money people don't look that far ahead and don't seem to realize that things have fundamentally and irrevocably changed from the previous 200 years of same-old boom and bust. The previous 200 years of boom and bust rode a continuous expansion of energy starting with coal, then coal+oil, then coal+oil+methane, then coal+oil+methane+nuclear. In a little over a decade, all all 4 will be in decline, all at the same time, across the entire world.

[Jan06,'14]
Reverse Repos
I tried to force myself to understand the financial gobbledygook surrounding the "fixed rate reverse repo facility", since $0.5 *trillion* dollars did this over the past 4 days. For scale, a trillion is about how much the US spends on all aspects of 'defense' each year, and about how much US income tax is collected per year. So this was a cash deposit equivalent to 1/2 of a year's US tax proceeds, deposited into the Fed in four days. The 'people' who can do this are about 90 mutual funds, 18 special banks, and the Fed's 21 primary dealers. Here is the best I could do (I think it's like a pawn shop). A "reverse repo" (for a bank) is where the Fed 'lends out' securities (e.g., treasury bonds, but could also be things like mortgage-baked 'securities' that the Fed bought) in return for a cash deposit from the bank. The bank holds them for a short time (a day, a few weeks), then returns them to the Fed and the bank is paid interest (GCFRTSY:IND, now at 0.03 percent). This is (intentionally!) hard to understand because why call what the Fed is doing 'lending' securities?! when the Fed is actually paying interest on this so-called 'loan' (N.B.: using money generated out of the void). A better way to describe this is that the banks are lending cash to the Fed! I suppose lending securities is like 'lending' your guitar to the pawn shop in return for cash -- but a normal person would only call that 'lending' with an ironic tone. In this weird case, the pawn shop is the big bank and the Fed is the poor person getting the temporary money. The reverse repo is similar to the Fed paying interest on banks' 'excess reserves', which began in 2008, *after* the worst part of the crisis had cleared. The tripling of the BASE money supply since 2008 was virtually all due to increases in banks' 'excess reserves' now deposited with the Fed (Fed graphs here). As far as I can tell, all this extra money originally got lent into existence by the Fed itself! According to Investopedia, the repo 'mechanism' is usually "used to raise short-term capital" So the Fed needs cash?? Seems unlikely. It seems like yet another way to recapitalize bankrupt banks. But why such a ridiculous amount in 4 days? Maybe just some end of the year accounting trick; but this 'facility' didn't exist last year. Why is there suddenly extra 'cash' around? Bloomberg says the Fed will be using reverse repos to "neutralize cash in the banking system" and as a way to begin to undo all of the "easing" (for banks, not people!) they have done. But it's hard for me to see how this could possibly work since it seems exactly the same as paying interest on 'excess reserves' -- that is, it looks like yet *more* easing! Also, since banks are essentially bankrupt, they hardly need to have a bunch of real cash withdrawn from them. And no real person I know is cash-heavy. Like Henry Ford said, if people actually knew how the banking system worked, there would be a revolution tomorrow. It is true that these amounts, while large, are small compared the flows in derivatives or the flows in currency markets ($4 trillion/day). As usual, there is not even a tiny mention of perhaps the single largest cause of the ongoing crisis, the declining energy return on energy investment (EROEI) which powers the physical (i.e., real) economy. Making rich sociopaths even richer won't fix that, but that's exactly the plan: in 2013, the amount of money set aside by 8 wall street banks for bonuses ($90 billion) was more than the total cost of food stamps for 50 million people ($75 billion) (numbers from Jim Quinn). In the past, I have underestimated how long things can go on (e.g., I thought the previous housing bubble was impossibly inflated in 2001 but it went until 2006), so I imagine things will continue 'up' for another year or two. It's also important to keep in mind that, compared to the mere $1 trillion a year collected in US taxes, the bond market is currently at $90 trillion (up from only $10 trillion in 1990), currency market bets/hedges around $250 trillion, and derivative bets around $450 trillion. It seems hard to imagine how these numbers will be re-synced with the real, productive, fossil-fuel-driven economy, esp. as it begins to flatten and contract.

[Jan19,'14] It's hard to see how this FED graph of the BASE money supply and student loans could somehow 'unwind' gracefully. I am getting exactly the same feeling I had around 2004-5 (impossible growth rates can't last forever). Which means it will probably continue for the next few years :-} I guess my 2004 prediction that peak oil would probably arrive around 2008 was correct after all. 'All liquids' have continued slightly up; but since the energy density of non-crude oil liquids is less than crude oil (and since some liquids like ethanol are double counted since they are close to zero net energy), I think in retrospect, we will see that the long net energy downslope actually did begin a few years ago.

[Jan20,'14] Here is a short piece occasioned by the death of my father written for Naked Capitalism (where he used to comment). Though not really fitting their gamut, I was pleased to see that Susan hosted an article there from Gail Tverberg's site about energy there a few days ago :-}

[Jan31,'14] [Jan31'14] Food stamps are 1% of the US Federal budget; the military is more than half. That's why the Republican and Democratic congress worms and Obama decided they needed to *cut food stamps* ($8 billion) to 'balance the budget'. There is only one party -- the war party.

[Feb05,'14]
The Internet
The internet is primarily a way of doing the same things that we were doing before, but using different technology that can be more easily monitored, reported, and archived. I often worry about not having the internet for search (when I am coding, when I am looking up a scientific information, etc). But I did my PhD without the internet and learned a lot in the process. And I was still able to search. It just took a little longer, but probably because of that, I put in a little more emotional energy into trying to remember things. But that has served me well (e.g., when I'm doing a google search...). Yesterday, the Teilhardian internet was abuzz about the Super Bowl. We had super bowls back then, too. But now, we could *immediately* download video of people in the winning city going outside and lighting stuff on fire (these were the college students); and we immediately found out that the losers dejectedly went online and masturbated, and that an overenthusiastic fan in New York bit off part of his brother's ear during a superbowl party. This doesn't surprise me, or suggest that humanity is going downhill. Law codes dating back 4000 years already had fines for biting off ears; and the Code of Hammurabi had four laws on the topic of someone who had "smitten the privates" of someone else, with fines and punishments depending on the relative rank of the smiter and the smitten (one of the punishments was cutting off an ear). It's the same humanity it always was, and certainly the same as it was when I was in college. But I just hate being constantly reminded of it :-}

[Feb19,'14] The banker 'suicide' count is getting weirdly high (one was a nail gun suicide?! is this a joke?). The sensible shoes explanation is that there is trouble on the way, either for the world, or for bankers because of pending investigations not yet public, and that a bunch of them freaked. Though complete speculation, it is not completely out of the question that this is some kind of coup warning to the richie bankers to reign in some of their most egregious banker games, from the people that worry about controlling a large population that could become increasingly restless during a long hot summer.

[Mar14,'14] The US national debt has almost doubled since the economic crisis of 2008 (about $10 trillion to about $17.5 trillion). For reference, the BASE money supply (similar to M1) in that same time went from about $1 trillion to $4 trillion (the extra $3 trillion is the 'excess reserves' cash that the Fed created that is deposited back in the Fed where it makes more interest than was paid to withdraw it from the Fed -- a ridiculous scheme to literally give money to bankrupt banks so that the bankers can keep paying themselves bonuses for their catastrophic failures). Another reference is that the combined derivatives exposure of JPM, Citibank, BoA, and Goldman Sachs has risen above $200 trillion, which is based on total assets of about $5 trillion (over 40:1 levering, what could go wrong?). In the case of Goldman Sachs, their derivatives position is even more extreme -- over 400 times their total assets. Despite the Fed's economic stress indicators saying that nothing is stressed, we have certainly not had an economic recovery since 2008 in the usual sense of the word. One straighforward measure is traffic volume; its perfectly linear 2% a year increase from the early 80's suddenly flat-lined in 2008, and then stayed that way to the present. Sure Blackstone made out like gangbusters buying foreclosures to rent, and the student debt 'business' is thriving, but most people have not recovered at all. I find it difficult to believe that the distractions of the the Ukraine/PussyRiot/disabled-gay-athlete psyops have completely taken people's minds off their evaporating pensions. Peak energy in the form of ever decreasing energy return on energy investment slowly creeps along, too slow to knock people in the head. Instead, we see market oscillations (e.g., iron ore crashing because of Chinese steel slowdown, copper crashing because China temporarily stopped buying it to put in warehouses to use as collateral) that give irrelevant/misleading signals about the slower but much more insidious decline in usable energy (and useable everything else). I still feel the need to write about it from time to time. But I have taken the words of Robert Maynard Hutchins to heart; he was supposed to have said: "Whevever I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until the feeling goes away". My version is: "Whenever I get the urge to warn people about peak energy, I ride my bicycle until the feeling goes away". Not looking forward to this summer. Perhaps these new taser drones, now hilariously being breathlessly marketed to the very ask-your-doctor sheeple they are intended to be used on (!) will keep them in line. At this rate, everyone is going to need a tinfoil jacket. The number of prescriptions for ADHD drugs has almost doubled among adults, just in the past 4 years. Perhaps another few doublings of these slow-release cocaine prescriptions -- so that half of the population is taking it -- and people truly won't care.

[Mar16,'14] When someone robs $7000 from a bank, this is what the State does. For crimes the other way around, bankers simply get larger bonuses. There have been *no* prosecutions of bankers for their subprime and other 'toxic waste' (self-described!) crimes (contrast this with the S&L scandal of the 80's, where many people were prosecuted). The ever growing police state now functions to defend banks. This is the very definition of fascism.

[Mar21,'14] In a striking parallel to fracked natural gas and fracked oil, coal prices are going down, even as coal miners are continually driven to dirtier, as well as lower energy-return-on-energy-investment, coal. The reason is demand destruction. Peak net energy will never be perceived for what it is. Instead, as net energy goes down, the price often goes down, too! Peak oil is dead, long live peak oil.

[Mar30,'14] The CDC now reports that 1 in 68 eight-year-olds have some kind of autism, up 30% from just 2012 (when it was 1 in 88). I'm sure the problem is genetic, right? Time for more DNA testing to find out if you will come down with autism soon 'because of your genes'...

[Apr01,'14] Giant 'reverse repo' event (see above) again today. The magnitude was equivalent the last big one, exactly 3 months ago on Dec 30. Up from almost nothing in 2013, the average daily rate of 'reverse repos' (the Fed 'pawning' its assets to big banks so it can give those banks even more free money -- as interest on the securitised 'loan' the big bank is making to the Fed) in 2014 is now almost 1/10 a billion a day. That could add up to big money shortly! That suggests big banks have gotten back into really big trouble during the 'recovery'. It's all talk. Elephant talk. Serious misanthro.

[Apr02,'14] Interesting reading on statins. They directly block one enzyme, which is part of a pathway of enzymatic reactions (mevalonate pathway) that leads to cholesterol. Since cholesterol is found in all cell membranes, and since neurons have extensive and elaborately folded cell membranes, this is probably the pathway to some of the brain side effects and neuropathy (e.g., see Beatrice Golomb review here). Among other downstream effects are blocking coenzyme Q10 and the production of dolichols and heme-A, which are probably the pathways involved in the occasional catastrophic side effects like irreversible muscle wasting (rhabdomyolysis), pancreatic cell damage (diabetes), and mitochondrial DNA damage. The effect on cholesterol -- the original target -- is probably *not* the mechanism for the positive effect with heart patients. Rather, the mechanism may be the blocking effect on a cell nuclear DNA transcription control mechanism (NF-kappaB -- nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B-cells), which is a part of immune system pathways activated by cellular stress and which is involved in blocking cancerous growth (when statins block NF-kappaB, they therefore reduce immune-system-caused inflammation). Quite a tangled web for a Sally Field to describe in 30 seconds on the teevee to the "ask your doctor" people! And these effects vary greatly from person to person (that means, you will have to "ask your doctor" when you hobble back to the office, if you can remember where it is...). One should probably avoid statins if one is able -- how's that for peecee advice :-} . For, example, recent studies have shown increased diabetes and stroke when statins are given to people without heart disease. Looking ahead (and assuming the power stays on) where does this lead? Should everybody have all their DNA sequenced to find out how they would respond to tens of thousands of different 'therapeutic' drugs so that they can then go on a regimen of ten or a hundred thousand drugs, each carefully blocking some of the worst side effects of all the others, all 'improving' your wonderful life? At that rate, everyone might as well get married to their doctors since that will be the only person they ever talk to. Thankfully, the power probably won't stay on long enough to see this. And besides, we are all *already* taking one hundred thousand different chemicals/drugs a day, every day, AKA food. Ya think, maybe people should just eat better, instead?

[Apr16,'14]
Life's Work
I was feeling low last week. Doomerish stuff doesn't usually get to me. People often say that old age is not for sissies, implicitly referring to physical infirmity. But the mental part is worse. Once at a large scientific meeting, I remarked to an attendee near my age that "each year, I get more misanthropic, but more accepting" -- a classical vice. I suppose last week was nothing more than an occasional objective glimpse of reality, which most of the time one tries to keep partially hidden for sanity's sake. Probably the most poignant realization is that my life's goal of always trying to learn more and find out more just for sake of understanding more things about the world did *not* turn out to be a good thing. Instead, there is a predictable way in which new human knowledge gets applied. Five thousand years ago, early metallugists figured out how to make bronze from tin and copper, and this almost immediately got used for better weapons, rapidly rearranging and enslaving new groups of people. Last century, advances in understanding atomic physics were quickly -- within the same two decade-long time window relevant for bronze -- harnessed for enormously better weapons. Closer to my home, in the case of psychology and brain science, better understanding of biological vision, audition, touch, movement, and emotion in combination with computers helped boost the field of machine learning, which has resulted in the first installment of a new terrible plague of 'smart' weapons, better mind control, computerized 'trading', better industrial robots, and the beginnings of computer-based medical triage, bedside drug monitoring, and smart pills. There is no sign that these trends will abate in the near future, even as resource depletion (reflected indirectly in the inability of people to pay) begins to visibly constrain things like the growth in the number of miles driven. Despite the fact that industrial robots use a lot more energy *per unit item produced* than humans operating machine tools on an assembly line, the now-global optimization method of capitalism for short term profit makes it inevitable that humans will continue to be displaced by more energy-intensive industrial robots, further reducing available jobs (which after being outsourced to lower-wage countries weren't very good ones anyway...), and reducing the ability of people everywhere to pay for the very things made by these industrial robots. Obviously, this is *eventually* a self-limiting process. But I think it will continue right up to the effective cliff in the net energy curve where massive increases in energy use only result in tiny net energy increments (near net energy zero). We're not there yet, despite being past peak crude oil. As it get more expensive to produce good food, instead we will get more profit-friendly genetically modified 'plants', cultured Google-burger 'pain free meat', and 'food' manufacturing. More people will have large amounts of fat surgically removed, maybe even by machine. The polarizing trend of rich people getting even richer will continue and they will of course be able to afford much better tasting non-manufactured organic food, will keep themselves thin, and will live as long as they can soon inside havens surrounded by land-based and aerial machine-controlled weapons and surveillance devices. Though there is not nearly enough energy to get to Elysium or the Matrix, everybody will work together full speed to do their absolute best to go directly there for the next 15 years. The truly depressing thing is that the eventual ignominious unravelling in the later part of this century is exactly the predictable result of my original life's goal of finding out more about how the world works. Bummer. But I'm doing better this week :-}

[Apr21,'14] To follow up on the previous post, I was wondering if there might be some very rough way of estimating how long we might expect the replacement of humans by machines, referred to above, to go on. As many people have pointed out, a human can only generate about 100 watts of power continuously. Integrated over an entire year of hard work, that only amounts to about 200 kilowatt-hours of energy. That's about as much energy as we currently get out of just one 42 gallon barrel of oil, after refining it down to 20 gallons of gasoline and burning the gasoline in a 25%-efficient gasoline engine. Thus, my aphorism one barrel of oil equals one year of hard physical work. Currently, oil is around $100/barrel (it was about $60/barrel when I wrote the 2005 article at the link almost 10 years ago). But the cheapest human slave still costs more than that. For example, the official minimum wage in Bangladesh is $220/year, which is near the low end for poor countries. The minimum wage is around $500/year in many African countries. This suggests that oil still has to double in price relative to the cheapest humans to turn the sights of the fascist capitalists away from industrial robots and firmly back to human slave labor. A wild card is the rate of oil depletion. But the top of the peak oil curve looks like it will be quite flat, as many (myself included) have been expecting. This will probably have the effect of keeping business as usual going without major interruption for at least another 10 or 15 years. So my guess is that we are looking at at least 10 or 15 more years jobs losses to automation. The price of oil can't go much higher than it is now without crashing the world economy (again). Instead, the gap will probably be closed by the wages of the poorest continuing downward, as they are now doing even in southern Europe, which isn't nearly as poor as Bangladesh. Eventually, declining energy return on energy investment will put a definitive end to this and people will return to cutting down trees for a while. Ten years ago, my initial guess was that the effects of declining EROEI of all fuels would really begin to kick in in a big way around 2030. Still seems about right today.

[Apr24,'14] The US nearly emptied its stored natural gas supply during this last cold winter. They weren't quite as bad as Britain the previous winter, when then UK came within a day or two of having to begin shutting down the gas grid across the country. But the idea that the US is going to overnight turn into a gas exporter to the EU is laughable. The EU will have to buy gas from Russia (around 60% of its energy supply) and Russia currently needs to sell gas to the EU. With the US pulling a reverse Cuban missile crisis on the EU/Russian border, things could get out of kilter. Maybe this is in the US's interest; it certainly isn't in the interest of the (f'ed) EU! C'mon EU-ians, get off your backs! Yesterday, the US sent a few hundred US troops to Poland. Is this a joke? (Nigel Tufnel accent) It seems utterly irrelevant in military terms. Sending cash and a few hundred snipers/advisors to stir the pot is one thing. Actually fighting against Russia is entirely different. Fighting Russia wouldn't be like the cowardly turkey shoots in Iraq or Afghanistan (not to mention that both those wars were essentially lost, and both required hundreds of thousands of troops). Russia is fully capable of shooting back with modern weapons. The US military knows that (tho sometimes I wonder if the Nulands and the Powers and the James Jeffrey types really understand this). This makes it highly unlikely there will ever be Ukraine no-fly zones. The sustained level of Matrix unreality in the US and UK/EU media is pretty amazing to me. What I really don't know is what in the heads of most people watching it.

[Apr29,'14] About 20% of the worlds PC's use Windows XP. Today Microsoft announced it will not fix a critical Internet-Explorer-bug-spread rootkit in XP discovered over the weekend. This is why Bill Gates is about to become a hundred billionaire. There is a clear conflict of interest here because this bug actually increases Microsoft's revenue by forcing users to upgrade against their will. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft discreetly paying a 'contractor'. Some government lawyers need to step in. Classic anti-trust situation. Where are they? [Update: On May 1, Microsoft wisely relented on their threat to not fix the showstopper bug in 20% of the world's peecees]. Meanwhile in Ukraine, a sniper shot the mayor of Kharkiv in the back while he was swimming (the mayor was previously on a Swiss government sanctions list for supporting Russians, but then turned his support to Kiev). He was flown to Haifa for treatment. In the same town, a bunch of neonazi football hooligans with about a 10:1 count advantage beat up a peaceful pro-Russian demonstration in the middle of town. Stupid humans and their stupid master race ideas -- one of the 'great' things that language has added to the animal brain. I suppose this was the plan the whole time, in what Pepe Escobar sarcastically calls the $5 billion dollar "Khaganate of Nulands".

[May15,'14] According to OECD stats, the working age population is about 67% of total US population (about 320 million). The 'unemployment rate' is supposedly 6% (about 10 million). But there are about 90 million people of working age who are 'not in the labor force'. This means that 46% of the working age population is currently unemployed in the US. 15 years ago that number was about 39%. The UK is similar, and moving in a similar direction. With all the scare talk about the death of retirement, it looks like retirement is becoming the new norm :-} I need to retire before the party's over!

[May20,'14] Gordon Duff catapults 9-11 disinfo today. Not that this is surprising given the stupidity of many of the things he mixes in with real info at his site. But this seems to me to be a sure sign he must be being paid to do this.

[May29,'14] This is a telling graph: it shows vehicle miles traveled (something I have been yammering on about endlessly...) together with the civilian labor force. Obviously, the civilian labor force did not suddenly go flat for lack of people (the US population curve is a linearly increasing straight line at this scale). But perhaps it goes some way to explaining the less-driving graph. People in aggregate haven't been able to afford to pay for gas during the 'recovery', which was not only jobless, but which even flatlined the number of *potential* job seekers (i.e., the official unemployment numbers are a pedantic diversion). This is all beginning to look like a truly new and dire economic regime. Welcome to Greece. Today, the US economy/GDP was reported to have contracted, which was described by FTN Financial as "rare for expansions" (you don't say?) -- so naturally, the stock market hit a new high. Among the biggest buyers of stocks lately have been the companies themselves. This increases their share price. Yes, it is truly a perpetual motion machine. Peak oil is dead; long live peak oil.

[Jun03,'14] The recent suggestion that the incompetent US government should resign and be taken over by Google, looked at objectively, is an almost pure example of fascist corporatism, Mussolini-style. Look at the content, not the fashionable, preposterously overpriced, city-of-Glassholes from whence it came (the Italian fascists were stylish dressers, too). Similarly, in the larger context of the decline of empire, the fact that the US now has to rely on mechanical drones, 'barbarian hordes', and other pirates (al-Qaeda jihadis hired via Saudi against Syria, Kievian neonazis hired via jewish oligarchs against Novorossiia) to fight its wars instead of genuine imperial storm troopers points to the beginning of the true decline of the US imperium. The US has plenty of aircraft carriers; but relatively inexpensive water surface skimming missiles have rendered them somewhat vulnerable against any but the poorest of the poor, good mainly for fighting aliens in Hollywood movies (latest Gojira). After wasting somewhere between $1 and $2 trillion dollars invading and making a shambles of Iraq and Afghanistan and killing between 1 and 2 million people there (that would be $1,000,000 spent to kill each human), the US is in no condition to invade another country right now -- certainly not one that can shoot back. Few US-ians publicly opposed those utterly disastrous policies; I did, but I had no follow through. And after the larger demos in the UK, everybody went home -- and then reelected the same guys who did it. Meanwhile, back at the energy ranch, California's supposed new powerhouse of fracked oil reserves was just downgraded by 96% (!). Geologists decided that the Monterey formation actually contains only 4% of the original estimate of 14 gigabarrels (without drilling any new holes?). For scale, yearly US usage is currently 7 gigabarrels. The new estimate of reserves is 0.5 gigabarrels -- about one month of US usage. Oh well. For the past 4 years, the oil frackers have been spending 1.5X as much money drilling for oil as they get in return for it each year. This is explained as 'worth it' because of all the new 'reserves' that have been make accessible. They have been able to do this through finance/debt (shale debt has more than doubled in the last 4 years). Nothing to see here. Keep driving. I'm sure the rapidly depleting (as in one year) fracked wells will somehow refill just when we need them to, in order to allow the drillers to pay off those subprime loans a few years from now. Don't you know peak oil is dead? Good thing, too, since mother nature doesn't do debt; when net energy goes below zero, there is no overdraft protection.

[Jun10,'14] Things look uber-bubbly to me. For example the cab reservation program/company Uber just got an $18 billion dollar valuation. Looking on the bright side, it could start to kill off the toxic black cabs here in London. I actually like the cab drivers and the interior design of the black cabs, but I absolutely detest their primitive, often poorly maintained, filthy diesel engines, which measurably shorten Londoners' lives by causing artery disease from sub PM2.5 particles, plus emitting scads of NO2. They probably account for a full 1/4 of the toxic pollution in London (London NO2 is *twice* as bad as Beijing). Oh yeah, back on topic: $18 *billion* dollars for some Uber software? It's probably fine software and a fine idea, but that's getting close to the amount the US spends on all biomedical research per year! When it looks to me like it's absolutely impossible that the bubbles (IPO, stock, house, bond) could go on inflating, it probably means there is still a year or two to go. I'm absolutely sure about the 5-10 year arc of gradually declining net energy (total available energy). And you can't make stuff, eat, etc without energy. But I'm *total* shite on the 1-2 year horizon where financial anti-gravity machines rule (e.g., companies now using zero interest rate loans to borrow money to buy their own stock, which increases its price -- what Carl Icahn was telling apple to do 6 months ago). Household confidence is improving, and people are starting to use their credit cards again. Don't worry, the anti-gravity generator never fails (but our fridge just did).

[Jun16,'14] Every time I see one of these videos (from Boston Dynamics now bought by Google), I find myself thinking about how you could bring one of these things down. First, take away its fossil fuel :-} . But I'm thinking some kind of rope snare would work too. I am so over stupid human tricks. More and more I see my whole life of trying to figure out how the brain works as a terrible mistake. If we every *did* figure out the brain well enough to make something like it, it would be a huge catastrophe. Luckily, I am almost certain there isn't enough fossil fuel left to get there.

[Jun29,'14] Americans' approval rating for Congress is at 7% and Obama's approval rating is down to 41%, gradually approaching Bush's lowest numbers of around 25% (Bush was still around 41% in 2006 with 2 years to go). Americans' approval of the military stands at 74%, the highest of any major group asked about. The ingredients for fascism are pretty clear. They need to ask a more direct poll question: "Would you approve of the military taking over the government/Congress? to see how close we actually are. Currently, 79% of Americans are "satisfied" with their current "level of freedom", down from 91% in 2006, so perhaps there is beginning to me some pushback. Not much, tho. Tho Chomsky and Pinker are now all big on how the US is not like central America, stuff like this suggests that if you're not an MIT professor, the US *has* become quite a bit like central america. Another war would do wonders for Obama. Here is an annotation of Bush's poll numbers that I did in 2007 showing the huge boosts due to 9/11 plus Afghanistan, then the second Iraq invasion, and then the capture of Saddam. It is true that the May 2011 killing of 'bin Laden' didn't help Obama, perhaps because people didn't believe it, or maybe because they had already begun to forget who the long dead Osama was supposed to be. But an important point is that it doesn't really matter if Obama's numbers are almost down to 40%. Congress is at 7% and doesn't seem to cause problems for them ("the presidency" is at 29%). People don't look very restless. If people started to actually get somewhat restless, a few extra SWAT raids or flash Boston-style demonstration martial law security theatre rollouts would probably do the trick. US police depts *already* do 200 SWAT raids *a day* (mostly for drugs, which they *don't* find a majority of the time). And if serious unrest developed and stubbornly refused to go away, a small nuke in a small part of a large city is always an effective last resort. As I've pointed out above, a small device would do less damage than most people think, esp. if it was detonated in a basement. Easily survivable by most people in a large city, and another 'attack on America' would be instantly effective in galvanizing the entire country around the government and military and taking focus off the richies. A richie here and there claim to be worried about pitchforks, but I think we are still a long way from persistent unrest. Further down the line, it's not hard to imagine a domestic, race-based 'color revolution', incited by the same tactics used in Ukraine: snipers shooting at both sides.

[Jul01,'14] Biggest ever 'reverse repo' event (see above) in the middle of June (chart here). The magnitude was the biggest ever. These events are coming at exact quarterly intervals (first was the middle of Sept 2013) and getting bigger each time, and the average rate in between the spikes is going up exponentially. A 'reverse repo' is where the Fed 'pawns' its assets (jewelry) to big banks (the pawn shop!), who give the Fed 'spending money' (the Fed needs money?). On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. But this could help the banks in two ways. The Fed could give those banks even more free money -- as interest on the securitised 'loan' the big bank is making to the Fed in return for the Fed's 'jewelry'. But the banks could also use the 'jewelry' as collateral for other loans, so they could show bank regulators that they are in good shape with the temporarily borrowed money collateralized by the Fed 'jewelry'. Then they get back the money they lent out, and give the 'jewelry' back to the Fed to get their loan-to-the-Fed back. I read a gobbledegook explanation by commentator ShorTed that this was all normal, which seemed to focus on the advantage to the banks of the higher rate of interest that the Fed pays. To me, it suggests that big banks remain in deep trouble, else why would this whole thing just have been invented only 9 months ago, and now be on an exponentially increasing curve? Regular people also remain in deep doodoo. Since 2007, the number of people in the US on disability has *doubled*. Exponential sh*t like both of these things can go on for a while. Then it must always stop, usu. suddenly.

[Jul06,'14] Now that we are past peak crude oil, we may be coming up on peak petrodollar. Oh-oh. After peak petrodollar, it will be harder and harder to simply create dollars electronically, which doesn't cost very much, and get people in other parts of the world to send actual stuff (e.g., the computers whose programs create the money) in return. The dollar probably won't go down without a fight, though.

[Jul12,'14] [Jul12,'14] In early July, Zerohedge, following Seeking Alpha, reported on CYNK, a social media plan-for-a-company with no earnings, no assets, no product, no website, one employee, and spending of a paltry $1.5 million (on what?). Then on July 9-10, this vague idea-for-a-social-media-company was bid up to over $5 billion dollars in market capitalization. On July 11, trading in CYNK was suspended for 2 weeks (because it probably doesn't exist). My favorite comment on the CYNK run-up was from i_call_you_my_base -- "Dot com bubble and housing bubble at the same time now. Neither worked on their own, so it's probably wise to try both simultaneously". Meanwhile, a giant increase in bank lending, which started in January 2014, has mainly consisted of companies borrowing money at low interest to buy their own stock, pay dividends, and acquire other companies; corporate debt vs. corporate cash is at the highest level it has been at in 15 years (zerohedge plotted it upside down...). As Wolf Richter points out, none of those things has any actual productive effect. This is what peak oil looks like. As ridiculous as it is, this kind of churning will nevertheless go on for a while, since total energy input (mostly from more coal) to the world economy hasn't started declining. It is still nominally going slightly up; but that doesn't account for continually dropping energy return on energy investment, an increasing percentage of less-energy-dense shorter chain hydrocarbons in an 'oil' barrel, and the utter insanity of zero-net-energy corn ethanol (double counting). Of course, in theory, it would be better to prepare for the inevitable downslope in total available energy and productivity in a more rational way, but I am becoming more and more accepting of the likelihood that a more rational approach will never be able to emerge. Here is Rune Likvern's estimate of net cash flows for tight oil well in the Bakken formation of North Dakota, one of the most successful oil fracking operations in the world. They are currently $14 billion in debt! That's the cost of about 150 million barrels of oil. The North Dakota tight oil operation is currently producing 0.8 million barrels/day, up from 0.3 million barrels/day in 2011 and almost nothing in 2007 before the price of oil spiked (2013 US consumption was 19 million barrels/day). Output is expected to reach 1.0 million barrels/day this year, which should make it possible for them to begin paying off some of the debt this year. But keep in mind that fracked wells deplete very rapidly (60% in one year). This is what the future of industrial civilization is based on: a tight oil "retirement party" (Art Berman). Rune Likvern has an excellent analysis of the relation between peak oil and banking here. Central banks have 'printed money' (reduced interest rates, QE) in part to mitigate the effects of high-priced oil (translation: low net energy oil -- the only kind left) flowing through the world economic system; oil is now $3 trillion/year out of a world GDP of $70 trillion/year. But this hasn't helped people buy gasoline. The number of miles driven has been going down since 2008. Instead it has created asset bubbles in housing and stocks (e.g., see above). Bank-created money can still buy oil for now. But banks can't print oil. In the long run, printing money will have no effect on integral of the oil depletion curve because that sum is controlled by net energy, not stupid bank tricks; when the net energy of an oil deposit is below zero, no amount of money printing will turn that into an energy source -- it is a 'reserve' that will never be tapped. The expansion of debt relative to the real, energy-dependent economy is happening at a rate never before seen in human history. Party on. There is still some time before the SHTF.

[Aug15,'14] Danger Will Robinson: oil (and other energy) prices are dropping. Oil has dropped to its lowest price in about a year and has been on a slow downtrend since 2011 (after returning to trend after the huge 2008 spike and dip). Lower prices might seem like a good thing, but if this continues, it will decrease effective 'reserves' by making some of them (e.g., most fracked/tight oil) too expensive to drill. Eventually, even the (permanently!) reduced demand will run into supply leading to another price spike and another permanent downward increment in demand. This is what peak oil looks like: a sawtooth, not permanently high oil prices.

[Aug19,'14] Police have a job that is *less* dangerous than fishermen, roofers, iron workers, garbagemen, electrical line workers, and farmers, and equivalently dangerous to the jobs of taxi drivers, landscapers and grounds workers, and maintenance and repair workers. As many police die crashing their cars as die from miscreants. We need to stop militarizing the police even more than they already are. But given all that, the Ferguson circus is a psyop. Police have always been this way (sociopathic storm troopers), esp. in the black community. Google Fred Hampton 1969. The psyop idea is to sell the idea of this being normal to the rest of us (libruls), similar to the 'show lockdown' that occurred in Boston after the Boston marathon event. A domestic 'strategy of tension'. It would be absolutely trivial for the police to plant a live fire infiltrator to kill a policemen 'from the protestors', Kiev-style, in order to justify a major crackdown, and after wall-to-wall MSM sewer pics of black people breaking windows and stealing teevees. Here are the actual looters; these guys could really use some Chicago-style 1960's police action on them. Police are simply vicious collaborators -- as in the WWII meaning of the word. Update Aug21: here they are, first lying in a press conference, then shown in a cell phone video executing another black man in cold blood.

[Aug20,'14] Today, Wolf Richter wrote that retail sales have been flat for about 6 months because consumers are pinched. Given that the Fed reported that about *half* of Americans *can't* come up with just $400 cash for an emergency without a taking out a loan or selling something, this didn't seem surprising. But looking at the general upward trend in spending, it prompted me to look up a longer term chart from the Fed (this includes retail sales and food sales -- food sales are approx equiv to retail sales excluding food). For the life of me, I just don't understand how retail and food sales could have returned to their normal yearly growth rates after the 2008 shock (20% drop). By this measure, there has certainly been a recovery since 2008. But where did the money come from? Are people's salaries up over 20% from 2008? Mine certainly isn't and I don't imagine most other people's are either. There must be a lot more debt somewhere...

[Sep01,'14] Today, Russia announced a new gas pipeline to China. As usual, as I re-read my previous posts above trying to predict what might happen with respect to future oil and gas imports, I was unable to see the future. I *was* clued in that China couldn't go on increasing its imports at its 2001-2011 rates for very long without soaking up all available word exports in another decade or so (see my 2011 peak oil presentation (PDF)). But I said nothing about *Russia* and China. Now, thanks to EU support for the US in creating the stinking mess in the Khaganate of Nuland, it looks like Europe (EU/UK) has agreed to voluntarily donate their portion of Russian exports to China! How white of them! That should make it easier for China to absorb all available world exports. Fantastic work by Cameron and the European Council. Who needs old-school fossil fuel anyway? (well, we do cook with it at our house, and it runs a lot of the generators that power my MRI magnet center, but whatever...). After all, peak oil and peak gas are dead. The fact that the bitumen and tight oil companies responsible for the oil Renaissance (retirement party) have all gone into massive debt since 2012 probably doesn't mean anything. The fact that gas exploration requires a lot of oil isn't relevant either. Central banks will find a way to print oil to help out gas exploration. Pay no attention to energy return on energy investment. Instead, pay attention to the Burmese beauty queen who absconded with her $200,000 tiara (and $10K from pageant committee who wanted her to get breast implants). May Myat rocks!.

[Sep07,'14] Car miles driven have begun to slightly creep up. Here is a long term graph (with BASE bank reserves to show the start of the second depression). It's hard to see the uptick there, but if you zoom in to a 5-years-only graph, you can see that we have almost gotten back to 2011. Note that this is still almost 3% below the 2007-2008 peak. And it looks nothing like the relentless linear 2-3% yearly increase that occurred every year from 1970 to 2007. The recent uptick is probably the result of a 'glut' of oil from the fracking boom of the past several years. Amazingly (I shouldn't be amazed, I know), SUV sales have even turned up (to almost one-third of vehicle sales). So is peak oil dead? Certainly not, even in the US! The all-time peak of oil production in the US remains 1970. This was all from regular (non-tight) oil in the continental US. The peak in 1970 was correctly predicted by Hubbert in the late 1950's. Then the US found Alaskan oil in the 1980's, which resulted in a small upward bump on the US oil production downslope. Then deep offshore oil was exploited (remember the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?), which resulted in another uptick on the overall downslope, starting in the late 1990's. Finally, starting in 2011, tight oil resulted in the largest uptick on the overall downslope, starting in 2011, a spike reaching up almost half the way back to the 1970 peak. But despite all the hoopla, the US hasn't gotten close to the 1970 peak; and it still imports half of its oil. And the tight oil 'bonanza' is hardly that; all the tight oil companies are still in debt (see above)! And tight oil wells often deplete 60% (or 80%!) in a single year, so compared to old style oil wells, tight oil is truly 'running as fast as you can to stay in the same place'. Oh well. I suppose there is no point in trying to promote 'reality-based' thinking. In the end, it seems to be almost irrelevant to behavior, until it's too late. Then it *does* affect behavior -- quite strongly :-/

[Sep26,'14] "The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress." -- Gary Webb

[Oct01,'14] LA police have killed one person a week for the past 14 years. This doesn't include people killed by police in jails and mental institutions. Last year, killings by LA cops accounted for 7% of all homicides (PDF here). While the number of killings by civilians has dropped by more than half since 2000, the number of killings by police has remained flat.

[Oct08,'14] "If you have burst out some new ideas in your specialized or interested field, welcome to submit your great papers to the corresponding Journals or Special Issues" -- science spam email. Makes me feel like I haven't been "bursting out" enough lately.

[Oct10,'14] Mr. President peace prize is now bombing Afghanistan at the fastest rate in two years. Both parties (Pussy Riot losers and Inflatable John McCain losers) are the war party. There is no effective difference. The Pussy Riot losers are actually worse because they silence the pitiful remains of the left. Oil prices have continued to drop. This doesn't indicate there isn't a peak oil problem. It *does* indicate that a lot of frackers are about to go out of business. The withdrawal of investment currently going on will only be felt in supply about a year or two down the line. But everything is going to be all right for a year, so don't worry be happy :-}.

[Oct20,'14] Oil has continued to fall under the careful ministrations of the financial sociopaths. If some 2008-like event happens, oil could fall further, like it did in 2008 -- from demand destruction. That would have catastrophic effects on non-conventional oil (perhaps this was the Saudi plan -- but a year of $60 oil would be a disaster for Saudi). This is what peak oil looks like half the time; the other half of the time there will be nasty spikes, like early 2008. Dropping drone bombs on pickup trucks and bombing Syrian refineries won't fix this. I'm getting a listless feeling that I must be crazy since nobody else seems to see things this way. Reading IgnorantGuru perked me up a bit. "It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is ‘the’ single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I’m their largest customer." -- General Nikolas Justice (2008, see also "Debian is pwnd by the NSA").

[Oct21,'14] Over the weekend, I talked to some academics about energy depletion. As I've commonly found, they hadn't thought much about it, and just assumed that 'somebody will come up with something'. I didn't do a very good job of explaining myself because I didn't explicitly mention the main point, which is that energy return on energy investment is going down, and rapidly getting closer to the dangerous cliff under 5:1 where the *proportion* of total extracted energy that is lost in the process of energy *extraction* begins to rapidly increase (toward infinity at energy return 1 for energy investment 1). I think this is the *most* critical single point to explain. Corn ethanol at 1.1:1 vs. deep water oil at, say, 8:1 is a good example. Imagine there are 10 available units of energy. In the deepwater oil case, we consume 10 units to obtain 70 net units. With corn ethanol, we consume the 10 units to obtain 1 net unit. In the second case, most of our available energy of 10 units went to energy extraction. It's obviously impossible to run our current industrial society on corn ethanol. It would require locating and using 10x as much energy as we are currently using! If there truly was that much energy just 'lying around' (there isn't), who in their right mind would waste it making corn ethanol when it could just be spent directly! Of course, to a business mind, this is all way too conservative and impossibly too far into the future (10-20 years). For example, Twitter -- with a market capitalization about $25 billion, with finally a small positive revenue for a few quarters this year, mostly from advertising -- could suddenly get a few more users and then its market capitalization might double overnight. Worrying about things like the energy supply are *so* last century. But there are still some sensible engineers who keep the lights on for the Twitter servers, the smart phone factories, the wireless hubs and cell towers, and the twitter-er's battery chargers. The Fukushima disaster has turned the attention of the engineers in a number of countries toward coal (e.g., Germany, Japan, US). Since coal is subject to the very same energy return on energy investment constraints as other forms of energy, it will now deplete even faster (China currently uses half of the coal in the world and is set to consume all world exports in another decade or so at its current growth rate; China made 1.5 times as much cement in 2011-2013 as the US made in the entire twentieth century -- mostly using coal). As coal depletes, nuclear energy will have to come back to keep the lights on. And it won't be cold fusion; you can't boil much water if the fusion is truly cold. Now back to my regularly scheduled matrix, don't worry, be happy...

[Nov01,'14] In response to the leaked 'Bibi is a chickenshit' comment, first the twin towers 'cartoon' and now a reference to the 'grassy knoll' (!). "Are you threatening me?" -- Beavis corn-holio voice. Looks like a little blackmail after a long and troubled marriage. They must have some serious deep state goods! All silly posturing, however, when there are more important things to attend to :-} . Back in 2003, I expected peak oil in 2008, and that it would be a gradual flat top. That was in fact, approximately the peak of *conventional* crude oil (there was a previous peak in 2005 but the 2008 crude oil peak was just a tiny bit higher. But the resulting oil price spike got the oil people to rapidly pile all their drilling rigs from fracked natural gas (the previous craze because of an earlier natural gas price spike) into fracked oil in 2009-2012, and US oil production from the Bakken and Eagle Ford (those two formations account for almost 2/3 of all tight oil) spiked up as a result. These wells deplete spectacularly rapidly (70% in one year) putting drillers in a serious 'Red Queen' situation. However, over the past year, demand destruction from people not being able to afford oil, plus tight oil production increases, have slightly outpaced depletion of conventional oil, which has resulted in a small but dangerous (for the frackers) fall in oil prices. Since so much slack has been taken up by non-crude-oil (smaller chain lease condensates, even smaller chain natural gas plant liquids, tight oil, tar sands, biodiesel, and finally the towering stupidity of ethanol), 'total liquids' has continued to creep up, which has surprised me. I seriously underestimated how quickly the frackers could gear up for natural gas (fast enough to crash the price in just a few years), and then so rapidly switch to oil (it's staggering to see the google plots of new wells). The latest new trick being introduced -- which involves an old, energy expensive trick that was used to put off the Cantarell peak for a few years a decade ago -- involves CO2 flooding: N.B.: the new trick is to combine (energy) expensive CO2 flooding with (energy) expensive fracking. Of course, the total liquids *volume* increase doesn't factor in energy return on energy investment (which means more other kinds of energy have gradually been converted into 'total liquids' leaving less total net energy available, and which is reflected in higher production costs), and 'total liquids' don't even have the same energy density (all the replacements are less energy dense). But the total *volume* hasn't yet definitively dropped. Redefined 'peak oil', meaning maximum end user 'total every kind of liquid', is still a few years away (around 2016 vs. my initial guess of peak oil in 2008). I wish it was further away. You'd never guess we were this close to such a major sea change, what with markets shooting crazily up, because... Japan decided to 'print' more money?! And indices of consumer sentiment are going up to almost pre-2008 levels (probably a sure sign that there will be a crash next year). In any case, it's hard to predict the future. Perhaps, when the 'total liquids' peak comes, it will finally convince people to adopt smaller electric vehicles and electric bicycles, and all hell won't break loose (though peak total liquids will not be good for less developed places). It has been a good sign that US vehicle miles driven topped off and went down a little without all hell breaking loose. Here's hoping I have underestimated human resilience. Who *wouldn't* want to be able to retire for a few years without dealing with Mad Max?

[Nov03,'14] Euan Mearns has an excellent post here with graphs and detailed definitions relevant to my previous post above. Euan says in comments that the same guys who piled into fracking gas, then turned on a dime to pile into fracking oil won't be that sensitive to lower prices. I hope so. One problem is that if there is another 2008-like crash, it could easily be accompanied by a more serious oil price crash (than the current $78/barrel). Even if this was relatively short lived, I think it would really scare the banker rats away from the drillers for a year and cut into production a few years down the line (on wells that deplete 70% in one year). Demand destruction is real: the inflation-adjusted median income in the US has dropped 6% since 2007 (that would be after the 'recovery'). But even with demand destruction, the yearly oil drain is still a big yearly oil drain (at the rate of 1000 barrels a *second*). The likely result of a drilling investment hiccup will be a huge price spike 1-2 years after the drillers withdraw. The very short look-ahead of our economic system isn't very well adapted to bumping up against hard limits. The problem is that with liquid fuels so central to modern industrial civilization, see-saw over-corrections can reverberate well beyond oil markets. You know something's gone seriously awry when Alan Greenspan is advising people to buy gold -- probably just dementia getting to him :-}

[Nov08,'14] Only 13% of voters aged 18-29 voted in the midterm elections (the overall turnout was 38%), the lowest in 72 years. These are some of the people with huge student loans living at home unable to rent (much less buy a house) who see little end-user difference between red and blue or Obama and Bush. Some of this is explained by the fact that young people vote less and by the fact that midterm elections virtually always go against the party in power. But there is also a lot of pent-up frustration. Could go either way (Mussolini or Robespierre). The election of a bunch of Republican nasties by old people isn't a good indicator of which way the wind blows. Now back to our daily oil minute :-} . As we approach peak net energy of all types, it's worth keeping in mind this graph of world GDP vs. world energy use. GDP is directly proportional to energy input, which is very likely to flatten within a decade. Note that the energy input listed is not all net energy (e.g., it includes corn ethanol, which essentially contributes zero net energy). But most of the graph represents net energy. It suggests to me that the idea of the dematerialization of the economy is utter nonsense. The economy consists of flows of real energy (AKA goods and services, mostly made using fossil fuels) being traded (i.e., transported, mostly using mostly fossil fuels) under the control of symbolic device accounting systems like paper money, debt, gold, etc. (mostly running on computers constructed and powered by fossil fuel). Energy is the only true 'currency'. Just because it's possible to temporarily mess up the symbolic devices used for trading energy doesn't mean that the symbolic devices aren't always based on energy flows. When the energy flows lessen after peak net energy, messing around with symbolic devices (or gold!) won't create more energy flows. For reference, China oil energy consumption is up to 11 million barrels per day. This will probably continue upward for the next 10 years (for reference, current world crude oil use is 76 million barrels/day, and total liquids use is 90 million barrels/day, and China GDP growth is at 7% per year). Low oil prices are unlikely to be a 'problem' in two years.

[Nov30,'14] Despite continuing yearly decreases in violent crime in the US (the peak in violent crime was in the 1970's at the end of the Vietnam war), and yearly decreases in the number of police killed in the line of duty, police forces are becoming increasing militarized and police killings of citizens are increasing again (in recent years, police have killed about 1000 people a year, while about 40 police have been killed a year). I say 'again' because police killings were also high at during the 1970's. For example, in 1971 the police killed 93 people in New York City, while in 2011, police killed 102 people in all of California (the state with the most police killings because it is so populous -- note that there are a lot more people in California than New York city). Since the vast majority of police officers never fire their guns in the line of duty, the new police state is being implemented by a relatively small number of rogue sociopaths (see for example, Albuquerque, New Mexico) operating with banana republic-like impunity in the context of increasingly militarized SWAT teams inappropriately called up for jobs that don't require them. Like other inexorable yearly changes (e.g., yearly increases in per capita imprisoned in the US now at world record levels despite yearly decreases in the US violent crime rate), this yearly increase needs to be reversed by top down adminstrative decsions to weed out the sociopaths and demilitarize local police to avoid having things blow up from a bottom-up revolt.

[Dec04,'14] There was an insightful comment by Sam Taylor on Euan Mearns' blog about the economic dynamics of horizontal drilling and fracking (LTO means "light tight oil"). Since the wells come on line quickly and then deplete very quickly, this technology has increased the chance of large oil price and equipment investment oscillations, right at a time when they are least helpful (peak oil). Euan Mearns' graph here of oil prices (blue) compared to the number of oil and gas drilling rigs (from the US) is a truly stunning demonstration of the 'creative destructive' power of capitalism. The transition from natural gas to tight oil (when the natural gas frackers crashed themselves, fortuitously just as oil prices recovered) is striking. The increased volatility will be great pickings for hit-and-run parasitic financialized blood-sucking operations (e.g., subprime tight oil fracking leases; 16% [or 18%] of the $1.3 trillion junk-bond market is now in energy, up from 4% just 10 years ago). But the parasitic operations don't generate energy. And that is hardly the best way to prepare for transitioning industrial civilization off of fossil fuels. We don't need creative destruction in the circulatory system of industrial civilization. We need more smoothing! The financial press lives in a very different, non-physical, non-smoothed world from the people who actually get coal and oil to make their computers, and then generate perfectly smooth power to run them so their trivial bloviations can be perfectly transmitted. From an excellent Feb 2014 presentation by Steve Kopits: from 1998 to 2005, $1.5 trillion was spent to add almost 9 million barrels/day of oil production (world then around 75 million barrels/day). But from 2005 to 2013, $4 trillion was spent on new oil prospects (finding, drilling) to add just 4 million barrels/day -- that is, each new barrel this decade cost 6x as much to get as last decade (mainly because it took more energy to get it!). Most of this new oil went to more Chinese driving, since, starting around 2007, the yearly increase in car miles driven in the US/UK/EU suddenly flattened and began to slowly declne. Another $3.5 trillion (equivalent to the yearly GDP of Germany) was spent to fix up legacy fields with the result that legacy fields produced 1 million barrels/day *less* -- their production would have been a lot worse without that investment. It is interesting that Steve Kopits mentions that Chinese demand for oil had already begun flattening early in 2014, which is one of the things that must have helped to cause the recent oil price crash. Instead of always writing about 1-2 month random fluctuations (like the oil price crash), the financial press should be required to also regularly write about basic, averaged-over-5-to-10-years numbers. Despite peak oil being 'dead', capital expenditures *per barrel* have been rising at 11% per year since 2000. If the world economy avoids a massive crash, the recent price oil crash will not last very long. If there *is* a massive crash, it will probably be triggered by the bankruptcy of oil exploration and production companies. We need more smoothing!

[Dec07,'14] The biggest turnaround since 2008 (8% drop in one month) is just now visible in this graph of the US BASE money supply (which suddenly inflated by a factor of 4 since 2008 as banks 'deposited' money in the Fed to collect small but safe interest). Increases in BASE in the past 7 years have correlated very closely with the Fed's various 'quantitative easing' programs. The accompanying student loan graph (which disturbingly has exactly the same shape as BASE, tho y-axis scale is 1/6 that of BASE) is not as up-to-date and doesn't show a downturn yet. Could just be another glitch down (like the past 5-6 glitches in BASE) which is about to be 'fixed' by another huge injection of digital cash. Things will be clear in another 2-3 months. The things that makes me feel most insane is that nobody 'official' seems vaguely aware of the fact that economic growth and growth in energy use are essentially the same thing, and that growth in energy use is getting harder and harder to sustain. In November, there was 40% drop in oil and gas well permits responding to the oil price crash. This is looking more and more like deflation.

[Dec09,'14] [Dec09,'14] Global currency markets trade over $5.3 trillion a day. For scale, the gross domestic product of the entire US is about $17 trillion dollars *per year*. What could possibly go wrong as the dollar strengthens and dollar shorts need to be covered?

[Dec13,'14] I read Wolf Richter sometimes. Check out how huffy he gets here with 'Dave', who suggested that he actually do something useful (clean out a clogged street drain he observed) as opposed to just getting online and blathering on about things (uhh... like I'm doing here). Maybe it's also living in the home of hi-tech in San Fransicso. But what is 'hi-tech' really? Take the amazing story of Amazon (headquarters actually in Seattle). It has been in business for two decades. Its revenues and stock prices have gone continuously up. It profits have remained at approximately zero for all of the last decade. But what does Amazon actually do? It buys and runs huge banks of servers -- manufactured using coal and then powered mostly with coal. It then gets small manufactured objects, many frantically picked off of their warehouse shelves by human slaves, whipped by battery powered 15 to 20 second computer-voice countdowns. Finally, it uses those servers to arrange shipping of small manufactured objects to people sitting at home -- mostly by using yet more fossil fuel: oil. So this is how the economy is de-materialized -- by using more fossil fuel (IT now uses more than 10% of all power generated worldwide). I'm sure this will continue to work 'well' as long as there is plenty of fossil fuel around. Maybe that's what the Amazon CEO's were thinking this month when they cashed out 20% of their shares...

[Dec23,'14] Reading this four part series (1, 2, 3, 4) on the Mexican food export boom together with this article back-to-back and projecting a short distance into the future will unsettle your stomach. From the second article: "Another turning point came in 2013 when Monsanto, one of the largest suppliers of herbicides (e.g., glyphosate, now found in substantial [10x US drinking water limit, 1000x EU drinking water limit] concentration in breast milk of American mothers) and genetically modified seeds, bought San Francisco-based weather data and insurance startup Climate Corporation, which was started by ex-Google employees, for $930 million. 'That was an aha moment,' said Rob Trice, a 14-year venture capitalist in Menlo Park who founded the Mixing Bowl, a hub of ag-tech thinkers and entrepreneurs. 'Here was one of the largest ag companies buying an IT company in Silicon Valley.'" Rentiers gobbling up cropland, farmed by slave labor in hi-tech greenhouses, with the slaves sleeping on cardboard and forced to buy overpriced food at the company store -- a new idea?! Glassholes indeed.

[Jan11,'15] Info-filled interview with Art Berman here. For example, the best tight oil shales are 2% oil. They're expensive (=energy intensive) to produce because they are mostly rock, instead of being essentially an oil soaked sponge like much of Ghawar the Great. Oil prices continues to sell at half-price because of a 'glut' of oil that is probably around 1% (!) of still-slightly-increasing world demand (=usage). This suggests that the money system supporting industrial civilization is badly broken.
[Jan19,'15] The rapid contraction in the hi-EROEI oil business (tight/fracked oil) has continued as oil prices stay low. If oil prices remain low for another 6 months, this could cause real damage to US economy, since (1) about a third of the good-paying jobs created over the past 3-4 years have been in fossil fuel energy, (2) a quarter of high-interest junk bonds are energy-related, and (3) a lot fracking debt will not be able to be repaid. The precipitous decline in long term interest rates visible in this 1-year Fed plot of 10-year and 30-year interest rates is pretty scary. The situation seems so delicate now that even a very moderate increase in interest rates in the direction of historical norms would cause havoc in the gigantic global bond market ($100 trillion -- *triple* what it was in just 2000, perhaps a full quarter of that from heaping bank bailouts onto the public balance sheet). None of this is even on most people's radar; US consumer sentiment just hit a new 'post'-recession record toward the positive. It's impossible to guess how likely another financial blow up is. The world situation is volatile, and there is a growing post-9/11-like sentiment in 'western' countries. The last time that particular evil in the hearts of men and women welled up, two big new wars were started (both still running, millions of Muslims killed in them, many Muslim cities with many neighborhoods reduced to rubble). A war in an oil country could end the current 1-2% oil 'glut' in the face of the world burning a thousand barrels a second. The latest western target, Yemen, has a reasonable amount of oil left, but its production has dropped below 1/4 million barrels a day lately, so a US/UK/EU attack on Yemen probably wouldn't cut off much oil. In any case, the longer view is that there are still at least 15 years left of a thousand barrels a second (or at least 800 barrels a second :-} ) before the SHTF big time. There are still at least 15 years calm before the storm (my definition of "calm" includes things like bond market blowup and another oil price spike).

[Jan22,'15] Sometimes you just have to give credit where credit is due. Several studies by a group at the Canandian Centre for Disease Control showed that in one bad flu season, there was an *increased* risk of getting the flu in people who had gotten multiple flu shots. This was even replicated experimentally in ferrets (PDF here). The masterful popular press report of this by the Monty Python-esque Canadian Broadcasting Corporation described this as 'blunted protection' and fretted that it "muddies public health messages". And now, how to defend yourself... with a bannana. One possible explanation is that you get a flu shot, some antibodies are made that prevent you from getting the seasonal flu; but they are not as protective against the serious pandemic flu as actually getting the mild seasonal flu. But explanation suggested by direct tests in ferrets is that the circulating antibodies generated by the flu vaccine actually promote infection by a different (the virologists say "heterologous" which is the opposite of "homologous") virus.

[Jan25,'15] The gossip is that the Fed has ended quantitative easing (AKA giving criminal bankers large amounts of money for free), and that this is why the dollar is going up. However, a look the FED graph of the BASE money supply and the record of excess reserves of depository institutions, which explains almost 100% of the variance in the BASE, you can see that an additional $400 billion (almost half a trillion dollars, a full 10% of current total BASE, or approx. *half* of what the total BASE used to be until 2008 [less than 1 trillion]) showed up in BASE in the space of *one month* from December to January. Doesn't sound lke QE has stopped yet. Still might.

[Feb06,'15] Interestng an article on the difficulties of hacking hi-tech proprietary farm "tractor operating systems" here. It made me think of the scenes in Interstellar where all their dusty laptops just seemed to work and it was no problem hacking their farm equipment. The article points to closed source as the problem, and maybe that is part of it. But there is also the problem of the towering complexity of the tech building blocks and the lower level software in the first place. There is some opportunity for Blade-Runner-y fixes; but they rely on a reliable source of all the hi tech chip goodness -- and Ridley Scott didn't show us any of the places where they were using up all their remaining clean water for chip fabs... Anyway, the laptop that I'm typing on is on the last legs of its video card (sadly, the class action lawsuit over 20-40K video card failures against Apple just got thrown out a few weeks ago because the two guys couldn't prove Apple knew). The source of the problem is intriguing. It arose out of trying to do the environmentally friendly thing and remove the lead from solder. But non- or lower-lead solder melts at a higher temp. This made the temperature window smaller between the temp to melt the solder and the temp at which plastic and other circuit board parts begin to melt (so Apple almost certainly knew; but they relied on the fact that many people just buy a new computer and toss the toweringly complex 2 year old one in the trash). The surface mount chips have a few hundred contacts on the flat bottom surface of the chip that get tiny sticky solder balls inserted, heated to center them, then the chip precisely placed on the board by a robot before being put in the oven (and maybe being X-ray-ed after to see if everything worked). So I found a Blade-Runner-y south London shop where they can "re-ball" your video card chip with the real, good-stuff, lead solder :-} That sounds more like Interstellar. But it relies completely on having a bunch of chip fabs and board makers turning out the many-layer motherboards and having access to the lower level drivers that the 2011 chips run. A simple example is that there is no software way to make a 2011 Mac boot off the still-working integrated graphics chip -- if you exclude as 'software' putting the computer under a blanket so that it the firmware does an overheat shutdown, which will cause the firmware to skip using discrete graphics card for just the next boot... Right now, it seems unlikely that local 'maker' shops will ever be able to make the raw tech parts (chips, multilayer fully populated surface mount circuit boards) from scratch. It's a basic Turing-like problem: a maker shop that can make a maker shop. Probably takes more than a village (and a whole lotta water...).

[Mar05,'15] You know we're getting close to the end of the bubble when things like this happen: on teevee, they suggest that you should take out a 7-year auto loan to buy stocks... [update: Mar 11th: Feb 2015 set a new record for companies buying their own stock -- at the rate of $5 billion/day]

[Mar16,'15] Oil just went slightly under $43. The financial lunatics who make idiotic graphs connecting the extreme(ly insignificant -- to the long term picture!) minima and maxima are all a-titter about 'support breached'. But saner commentators like Rune Likvern have suggested agree that low prices might last for a little longer than many were expecting, esp. if interest rates rise even a small amount. In fact, they they just have. This is because this will make servicing debt more difficult and taking out more debt more expensive -- the things that are required not only to 'make' oil (CAPEX for tight oil), but also to buy it (car loans, so other income can be used to by gas for the car). So in brief, there might be more demand destruction for quite a while. The question is whether demand destruction can keep up with depletion without causing a huge crash. On the positive side, total miles driven in the US topped out in 2007 and has been more or less flat for 4-5 years (well, until the recent oil price reduction beginning at the end of last year :-} ). Nothing *really* bad happened even though many people I talked to about driving less before this said it was *totally* impossible (and it is true that it mostly wasn't 'less', as 'the same'). Presumably, all we would have to do is have a small continuous downward slope in demand to match depletion. That would probably work well for the next 10 years, I'm hoping. But keep the bigger picture in mind! The world uses roughly 1000 barrels of oil a second, and the fluctations from year to year are a percent or two. This steadily depletes remaining harder to get resources; we wouldn't be steaming 1 unit of oil out of 20 units of tar sand if there was a lot of good stuff left. As population grows (more than one entire UK per year) and the third world industrializes, even with US/UK/EU demand destruction, it is complete fantasy not to expect serious shortages and serious price spikes (and dips) after 15 more years of 1000 barrels a second. In fact, the next spike is very probably due to happen in early 2016.

[Mar26,'15] The fact that E.M. Forster could almost exactly predict the internet 'mass for shut-ins' reality of Baylandia 106 years ago in "The Machine Stops" suggests a certain unpleasant determinism to human affairs. I always used to say that the science fiction guys were wrong because flying cars never appeared. But now I think I may have been too hasty. There is probably enough net energy left over the next 15 years for some glasshole to market a few flying car/drones to some other glassholes, and hopefully enough extra energy beyond that for a quadracopter fan controller virus writer to play his own bit part in the song that remains the same. Reading medium and theverge makes me think that peak oil is attractive. However, I know it's time to get back on my anti-misanthropy pills. In truth, there is *nothing* about running out of oil (and water and food) while adding more than a full UK of people (two California's) to the world every year that is in the slightest bit attractive, esp. considering what humans are capable of.

[Apr19,'15] From this FED graph of BASE (base money supply, which provides a convenient marker of the economic disruption of 2008) and US vehicle miles traveled, it looks like recent low oil prices may have had a strong effect on driving. Oil prices dropped in the middle of 2014, and vehicle miles have shot up finally surpassing the previous unprecedented peak, which occurred at the beginning of 2008. 2015 will probably turn out to be the year of peak 'all liquids', which is crude oil + condensate + natural gas liquids, + light tight oil + tarsands + biodiesel + [cough] ethanol. This suggests that oil price will probably spike back up in 2016. Confirmation comes from the fact that Blackstone, which recently became largest US landlord by buying distressed properties during the US real estate downturn is now stockpiling cash to buy ... distressed oil and gas companies. As Nomi Prins said, it takes a pillage. [Update Apr22: Art Berman wrote an excellent article here. One graph from that article (this one) says it all: our current 'massive glut' of oil is an oversupply of production relative to consumption of ... *less than 2%*.

[Apr28,'15] Steve Ludlum makes a good point about price signals during the recent drop in oil prices (he's quite wordy as usual! -- I know, I should talk). The recent drop in oil usage in early 2014 -- which led to a drop in oil prices in later 2014 -- was probably induced by forced reduction in usage (e.g., in China, in Greece, in the bottom 80% of the US because people could no longer afford oil). Though the forced part made people unhappy, using less is absolutely the right thing to do -- the only thing to do -- if you take a twenty-year perspective on the use of a critical finite resource in a finite world. But then this slight overall reduction in usage resulted in a temporary and relatively tiny 'glut' -- hardly more than 1% of total usage. The immediate result of this tiny amount of excess production was a sudden halving of oil price. But then this *immediately* resulted in people turning around and starting to use more. This looks like a pattern that is going to occur repeatedly. The problem is that it occurs slowly enough that people seem to somehow forget the last time it happened. How else to explain why someone would rationally by an SUV right at peak oil? (so perhaps I've been wrong! maybe we need *less* smoothing -- perhaps even more insane capitalist destruction that wreaks havoc *every* year!) But seriously, the low price of oil coupled with another bout of quantitative easing (or no interest rate increases) *is* likely to lead to a bit of a 'boom' over the next 6-12 months. Though tight oil people have virtually stopped drilling, and have fired a bunch of people, there are still plenty of already-drilled but not yet 'completed' wells, and lots of debts to repay. This will keep oil prices low for a while even in the absence of drilling. This will help airlines and food prices and perhaps even real estate. But in about a year, we will probably get back to a 2007-2008 like oil spike. China and India are not growing oil use as fast as before, but they are still growing, and this growth will more than use up savings from places where per capita oil use is dropping like Greece (in dark gray). When oil price spikes again, we will likely get another 2008-like financial event (stock market crash, and another oil price crash). But this probably won't happen until 2016 or early 2017. So happy motoring (and enjoy the US strategy of tension) until then!

[May08,'15] Oncology doctors typically make almost 2/3 of their income from reselling cancer drugs to patients (to their insurance companies and Medicare) at a mark-up -- the "buy and bill" reimbursement scheme, which is not available to doctors in most other fields. Last year, one-tenth of a *trillion* dollars was spent on cancer drugs. There is an obvious conflict-of-interest here that promotes prescribing the newest most expensive drugs, regardless of relative efficacy. You know it's bad when you find muckraking articles about the practice in... Forbes! As with many other aspects of medical care, success is increasingly measured 'quantitatively' by determining whether the size of the tumor or tumor markers have changed, regardless of whether these measurements actually correspond to a better or longer life for the patient. I know, I know, I live in a glass house (a university), where costs over the last decade have ballooned to such an extent that a student loan bubble comparable in size to the previous housing bubble has been created. In fact, university costs have increased even faster than the medical care costs I just complained above. I do wonder (probably like many medical doctors wonder) where all the extra that money has gone, because my work and pay is not very different from what it was 20 years ago, before the huge run up in university costs. It seems unlikely that this can end well for universities when the next crash comes.

[May21,'15] San Diego just proposed a plan to spend over $1 billion dollars, including a quarter of a billion dollars directly from tax receipts (city of San Diego and San Diego county), and a 1/6 of a billion in construction bonds to build a new football stadium. It's true that they already have one, which was first opened less than 10 years ago. And you'd think at this late date in the game of keeping industrial civilization online that this particular *beeellion* dollars might be better spent in San Diego on water, energy, light rail, bicycle lanes (one of the best places in the world to cycle). On the bright side, I suppose having the San Diego Chargers around could help when San Diego has to go mano e mano with Los Angelenos over water, a few years down the line (San Diego imports more than 80% of its water).

[May22,'15] Basic average numbers to remember for solar electric. Power hitting the atmosphere is 1366 watts/m^2. Practically available average power considering atmospheric losses, oblique, diurnal and weather variation *before* conversion to electricity is about 190 watts/m^2. Power available after conversion including defects, soiling, and inverter and spacing losses is about 15 watts/m^2 (=1.4 watts/sq ft). For scale, a standard sized car is a 100,000 watt device (135 horsepower) at maximum output, and can cruise smoothly at highway speeds on about 20,000 watts. Therefore, to directly power a car crusing at 60-70 mph (no storage), you need the average output of 14,000 sq feet of solar cells -- an array 120 feet by 120 feet, which is 1/4 the area of an American football field. At current prices, such an array (at volume discount) would cost over $300,000. For strong acceleration (like they do here in London trying to pass me on my bicycle on their way to a red light), you need a million-dollar full football field's worth of solar cells. That's why people are going to eventually be driving smaller, lighter cars at lower speeds, and accelerating less -- which is excellent news for cyclists!

[May25,'15] A sage quote from a well-written article by the archdruid: "The second thing that can be said for certain about the coming era of impact is that it’s not the end of the world. Apocalyptic fantasies are common and popular in eras of pretense, and for good reason; fixating on the supposed imminence of the Second Coming, human extinction, or what have you, is a great way to distract yourself from the real crisis that’s breathing down your neck. If the real crisis in question is partly or wholly a result of your own actions, while the apocalyptic fantasy can be blamed on someone or something else, that adds a further attraction to the fantasy."

[May29,'15] "In my view, the overriding concern should be the probable endpoint of this technological trajectory. The capabilities of autonomous weapons will be limited more by the laws of physics — for example, by constraints on range, speed and payload —- than by any deficiencies in the AI systems that control them. For instance, as flying robots become smaller, their manoeuvrability increases and their ability to be targeted decreases. They have a shorter range, yet they must be large enough to carry a lethal payload — perhaps a one-gram shaped charge to puncture the human cranium. Despite the limits imposed by physics, one can expect platforms deployed in the millions, the agility and lethality of which will leave humans utterly defenceless. This is not a desirable future." -- Stuart Russell, comment in Nature on lethal autonomous weapon systems entitled "Take a stand on AI weapons". We are increasingly going to be in a race between Terminator-world (imagine this thing, eventually armed with tazers and bullets) and the depletion of fossil fuels. As Stuart Russell says: "Doing nothing is a vote in favour of continued development and deployment". Unfortunately, there is probably enough fossil fuel left to be able to begin to deploy crude versions of small autonomous weaponized drones, first on low-market-value humans (e.g., in Yemen or Ukraine), and then, eventually, in the US and UK homeland.

[May31,'15] The scientific peer review seems to be getting more and more broken. There used to be a few reviews, then the editor would usually make an editorial decision (the original point of an editor); and the editor usually even read the paper! Now, there are many cycles of review at every journal, and when there is a conflict, instead of the editor reading the paper and making a decision, the robot emailers seek out yet another reviewer. Then the whole thing starts again after rejection and sending elsewhere. A tremendous waste of resources! The disempowerment of editors was in part an attempt to be more transparent and objective; but the unintended consequence was a massive increase in the 'incarceration' of scientific papers. In a strange analogy with the prison system, mandatory sentencing guidelines in the US were supposed to make things more fair. The (probably not unintended) result was to vastly increase the rate of privatized imprisonment -- by 400% -- in a country that already had one of the highest rates of imprisonment (more blacks in jail than there used to slaves). Maybe it's just because I'm old and I've just read one too many "let's play scientist pretend dress up" style review. Or maybe it really is the beginning of a Tainter-esque collapse from being unable to continually service ever greater amounts of complexity.

[Jun29,'15] While people fret over unplugging their cell phone chargers, they studiously ignore the big picture -- the single decision that most affects one's carbon footprint, by far, is the decision to have a kid. Kids in the US/UK/EU are 5-10x more carbon intensive than kids elsewhere. But restrictions on having kids cannot be discussed in polite company. This means that a few decades down the line, 'not enough food' will impolitely join the conversation. 'Not enough food' does not care about political correctness, cannot be bargained with, never turns on its cell phone, and always works. This looks bad. But just because it looks bad doesn't mean there is any easy way to fix it. If everybody suddenly stopped having kids (they are already reducing), we would end up with just old people. Even in that completely unreasonable scenario, there is probably not enough 'stuff' (energy, minerals, soil, freshwater) to support an aging population long enough to reduce it by natural attrition. So 9 billion here we come, and after that probably some unnatural attrition.

[Jul20,'15] "I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you. .... I’m going to shield you from public and congressional anger. .... My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." -- President Obama, to top executives of bailed-out financial firms in a secret/leaked meeting at the White House on May 20, 2009. [Aug06,'15] Dmitri Orlov posted an insightful comment on the Druid's log today about the difference between the USSR before collapse and the US today. In the case of the USSR, there was a rich public sector for oligarchs to plunder. This is less the case in the US because a lot of the plundering has already been done. But this has a silver lining. Dmitri says: "In the USSR certain members of the political class were rather eager to get the collapse show on the road because there was something in it for them, while in the USA at the moment these same sorts of people don't see much of a bright post-collapse future for themselves, and so will do all they can to run out the clock". May we carry on in style. Dave Cohen recently commented on Jim Hansen's warning and Jim Hansen's suggestions; I agree with his analysis. I have no problem with Hansen's warnings. I completely believe them! (even if Hansen has used the overly optimistic EIA reserves numbers). The problem is the suggestion to cut out the use of fossil fuels. It's a good idea in theory :-} If we were to actually cut out a meaningful amount -- say half -- of world fossil fuel use, there would immediately result catastrophic food shortages, mass migrations enormously bigger than Calais, and a permanent world-wide depression. Such an energy input cut would instantly stop 'renewable energy' growth in its tracks since virtually all renewable energy devices, not to mention the infrastructure to connect their electrical output to personal devices, not to mention the devices themselves, not to mention the roads over which the devices are delivered to houses, are all essentially made out of fossil fuels (many roads *are* fossil fuels). It's a good idea in theory. So once again, may we carry on in style. There has been not even the slightest hint of a reduction in the extremely regular Mauna Loa linear upward slope in CO2 -- and I don't expect one until the massive worldwide depression starts. Some countries *have* topped out. For example, the US has. The fundamental reason why overall fossil fuel use has flattened and gone down (mainly as a result of using less coal to generate electricity used by industry to make things) is the semi-permanent post-2008 recession. Secondarily it is due to the final bit of outsourcing of fossil-fuel-using manufacturing from the US to other places. As the energy return on (mostly fossil fuel) energy investment continues down, it is likely that less fossil-fuel-driven action/production/growth/making-stuff will happen without any legislation at all. I think it is going to be difficult enough dealing with that kind of enforced conservation and shrinkage, so that any plans for explicit voluntary reduction in fossil fuel use will probably not happen, ever. All the discussion by right wing 'drill baby drill' blowhards and left wing 'renewables' blowhards is just noise -- they're both voting with the kilowatt-hours they use, which except for a very small fraction at the extreme fringes isn't very different, regardless of what they say. In 15 years, there will be less kilowatt-hours to go around. It won't have anything to do with what either side said, or with money games, or the Fed. It will simply reflect declining energy return on energy investment.

[Aug10,'15] Some recent news from the helium shortage front here and here and here [2014] to update what I wrote back in 2005. In 2013, helium prices spiked as the US threatened to shut down the Federal Helium Reserve (which currently still holds almost 1/3 of total world helium). But then the US backed off, saying they will wait until 2021 to shut it down, and will continue to sell previously collected US-tax-subsidized helium (it cost about $1.5 billion to collect in the first place) way below current extraction cost, encouraging over-use and discouraging conservation/recycling. Another transient and misleading price relief is that Qatar started producing more helium (now second only to the US). And helium has benefitted from the general price drops in 'commodities'. I'm sure there will no problem for a few more years, AKA 'the forseeable future'. A 6 month look ahead has always worked in the past so why change now? Tim Worstall at Forbes, from the Adam Smith Institute in London, assures us we've got so much helium, there's no reason to even bother recycling it; he also thinks peak oil is nonsense, and that we'll get oil from other planets if necessary (does he realize that one of the largest single one-time blow-offs of helium was launching the Saturn V rockets? Oh I forgot, we'll get helium-3 from the moon. Suuure.). Probably a lot of good info will be available at the Nov 2015 World Helium conference, but the registration was a bit stiff at $1300... 21% of world helium is used for MRI. 8% is used on party balloons. Burning through all our helium *is* strangely like 19th century logging. Dance monkeys dance.

[Aug12b,'15] Some of the yahoos over at zerohedge should read Gail Tverberg's latest: How economic growth fails. A key quote: "When civilizations collapsed in the past, a major cause was diminishing returns leading to declining wages for non-elite workers", which led to them buying less stuff, which led to diminishing returns. Seems like every other article over there these days is about how a minimum wage will kill companies, without the most basic realization that lower wages mean that people buy less stuff, which would be what companies make. That's Henry Ford 101. Continuing upward weath transfer won't help (each rich person can only buy so many carz). Then for home-school college, the zerohedge guys could be introduced to the concept that world energy consumption and GDP almost perfectly track each other (graph from her article), with world energy consumption the leading indicator. Kilowatts bat next-to-last (of course, it's mother nature that bats last -- guy macpherson). To end upbeat, the US installed a whole lot of new wind power in 2014 (take that, Euan Mearns).

[Aug12,'15] Zerohedge points up this muckraking letter to the editor by a retired geologist living in Silverton, Colorado more or less predicted there would be some kind of mine overflow disaster, but then zerohedge conveniently neglected to provide the crucial backstory helpfully added by Paveway IV in the zerohedge comments. The Sunnyside mining company decided to stop treating toxic drainage from one of their abandoned in 1991 silver mines and plugged up the mine with concrete. This caused the toxic water in the mine to back up to a higher altitude mine. When the EPA plugged *that* one, the tall head of toxic water (because sulfide metal deposits turn water into sulphuric acid which dissolves heavy metals) finally broke free after some minor digging, sending a toxic bolus of orange water into the Animas river. Don't forget that we need silver for, among other things, making photoelectric cells. I suppose this is small news compared to the astonishing spectacle of Fox Nooz' Roger Ailes apologizing to Donald Trump; or the fact that *hedge funds* are buying California farmland to (get somebody to) plant pistachio and almond groves, which demand massive amounts of water from the rapidly depleting aquifers (2000 foot deep wells vs. the old 200 foot deep wells), because those crops are 10x as profitable as what was growing there before. What could possibly go wrong?

[Aug13,'15]
iPhone-i-fication
The parallel dumb-phone-ification and model-year-ification of Mac OS X 10 and Windows 10 *and* Linux is depressing. Both expert and non-expert computer users rely on an enormous non-verbal, non-conscious base of visuomotor arm, hand, and finger actions. The enormity of the state space only originally became obvious to me when I first started to do serious user interface programming in the early 90's. When I watched people try to use my programs and immediately get to parts of the state space I hadn't sealed off (because I had never gone there myself, since I unconsciously knew what the goal was), I realized just how complex the tree of possible actions that I had already non-verbally learned was.
     Initially, competing software companies used this 'inertia of the basal ganglia' to seal in market share; the startup cost to learning a new pile of key and interface widget action bindings was enough to seal in a buyer (my 60-year-old brain has had real trouble adapting to Inkscape after having used certain vector graphics-related key combinations since Illustrator 3 :-} ). To some extent, the dumb-phone-ification of desktop and laptop systems is an example of this -- utterly misdirected since I don't ever want to touch the screen when I am programming or writing (using a mouse is bad enough! imagine the chronic shoulder problems that constantly touching a desktop screen would cause!).
     But as processor speeds have flattened out and computer applications have been built out, there is less real need for change. What great new features can be introduced into an email reader or a web browser or a word processing program or a vector graphics program? MacWrite and MacDraw had already roughed out many of the the main features of the last two kinds of applications more than 30 years ago in the mid-80's! Now that incremental improvements in these main applications have essentially been finished, instead what we are witnessing is regression (e.g., in Mac OS X, useful features present in Pages '09 were removed in more recent versions to make it more dumb-phone-like, forcing many users into downgrading, which luckily was still possible).
     Loss of useful function is bad enough. But a more insidious development is ever more pervasive model-year-like changes. One small irritating example from recent versions of Mac OS X is what happens when you grab a group of files to move them. As you are click-dragging, the files rearrange themselves into an evenly spaced cluster. This disturbing uncaused-by-the-user movement of something you are metaphorically holding visually draws attention away from the intended target of the click-drag, not to mention wasting programmer time, adding unnecessary software complexity, and wasting CPU cycles. The files are supposed to be inert, not struggling prey items.
     Can you learn to ignore this and get back to as efficient as you already were? Sure, to some extent. But despite considerably more CPU power and memory (four 3GHz cores w/16G RAM), the practical responsiveness of the interface is *worse* in a number of cases than a 1990 model NeXT workstation with a 25Mhz single-core processor with 16M of RAM (that's roughly 500x the available CPU cycles and 1000x the RAM). A small example, you say. But multiply that by innumerable similar idiocies and you've got some real energy wastage.
     Many other model-year-ification changes involve needless rearrangement of interface elements (e.g., new location of buttons, or new message formatting in emailers). And finally, instead of fixing existing subsystems, new parallel, unfinished, subsystems are rapidly introduced, and then partially fixed up as they fail (are debugged) in the hands of users.
     This sure looks like we are on the way to a Tainter-esque collapse from having to maintain too much needless complexity. That won't happen next year. But I'm not looking forward to another 20 years of additional complexification, not to mention penetration of software into devices. By then, as energy constriction becomes more apparent, and the energy cost of all this stoopid stuff becomes more apparent (0.1 kWh per google search equals a human pedaling a bike for an hour), perhaps people will regain some common sense. Or maybe not.

[Aug17,'15] As we watch the spectacle of the race between economic contraction and energy depletion (contraction is winning this month with respect to oil, which is now experiencing an oversupply 'glut' that has gotten up to a staggering... 3%), it is easy to forgot just how much energy *did* get used (the 97%). In the case of crude oil, about 85 million barrels a day, for the world, last year (which is roughly where we have been for the last 10 years plus or minus a few percent). Since one barrel of oil is about equivalent to a year of labor by one human slave laborer (my calculation here, focusing on the half-a-barrel of gasoline that comes out of a barrel of oil), that means every day this year, humans effectively got the equivalent of a *year's* worth of labor out of 85 million slaves -- per day. On a yearly basis, just for oil, that's like having more than 30 billion full-time slaves -- 4.4 full-time slaves per every human on the planet, including the poorest. In the US, with higher per capita oil consumption, each person had the equivalent of 26 slaves, just from oil. Since oil is 44% of the fossil fuel used in the US, each person in the US effectively had 60 full-time human-equivalent fossil fuel slaves, if you include oil, natural gas, and coal. These effective slaves were used to pump water, grow food, light homes, make roads and things, transport things, and of course, get fossil fuel energy for next year. Energy slaves can be used for many things that real human slaves can't do, like pushing a 2-ton car down the freeway at 60 miles per hour (that takes the equivalent of about two hundred 100-watt human slaves). Look out and see the world as it is. It seems highly unlikely that we will be getting this much effective slave labor from fossil fuels in 30 years, and given current growth rates in renewable energy, highly unlikely that increases in renewable energy will have made up for the loss of fossil fuels. Renewable wind and solar energy goes to almost zero almost every day, and are seaonal, so they require dispatchable fossil fuel backup generating capability (nuclear reactors can't be turned on and off this fast) that can bear the full grid load. It takes 900 tons of material to build 1 windmill. Even if you are not as much of a skeptic as energyskeptic, that's a *lot* of stuff to make, move around, install, service, and replace. Virtually all of that making and moving and servicing is currently done using fossil fuel. It's amazing to me that people can't bring themselves to even mention this elephant in the room. Fossil fuel depletion is likely to hit us hard before (fossil-fuel-caused) climate change does (and before windmills are made, erected, and serviced using mostly windmill-generated power). I suppose a silver lining is that less energy will make it harder for humans to make artificially intelligent weapons. As in the case of too many humans, the idea that laws would be able to stop intelligent weapon use is fantasy -- either by 'terr'ist scary drug lords', like the article above ridiculously blathers on about, or by the military and the police and corporations, which it carefully whitewashes. Only less energy and less food can do that, not laws. For over a hundred years, the military on the move has consisted mostly of fossil fuel by weight. A 42 gallon barrel of oil makes 19.5 gallons of gasoline and 4 gallons of jet fuel (kerosine) (among other things). At peak thrust, an F-15 jet burns 25 gallons of jet fuel per minute (that minute of fuel required 6 barrels of oil to make). A B-52 burns 3000 gallons of fuel an hour (that hour of fuel required 750 barrels of oil to make). 'Force projection' is almost exclusively 'fossil fuel projection'. The Germans lost WWII largely because they ran out of fuel at the end. The elephant in the room is that fuel for the whole world is going to get tight in 15 years, and seriously depleted in 30. The next hundred years will be utterly different than the previous hundred.

[Aug25,'15] The money people got themselves into a tight spot yesterday, but the HFT's probably did well on the snapback. In the past decade, companies have spent almost $7 trillion buying their own stock. This is called 'investment'. Perhaps this is finally winding down. The remaining oil deposits could care less about these machinations. A little over 1000 gigabarrels of usefully net-energy-positive oil is left ('usefully' means at least 2 net units for an investment of 1 unit, or EROEI=3). This remaining total is very roughly equivalent to how much we have used so far (second goes faster). We will get that remaining stuff out and burn it all. At our current burn rate, this would get used up in only 15 years (by 2030). However, we should be able to spread this out over at least 25-30 years by conservation, including 'conservation by other means' (i.e., not being able to afford it). 'Conservation by other means' of oil *hasn't* happened yet in the US in this economic cycle. The plunge in oil prices that started in 2014, probably initiated in China, has seen a large increase in miles driven in the US (Fed graphs of oil price and US miles driven here). It is true that some of this might reflects getting priced out on rent and having to drive further to work. But to see an unambiguous example of 'conservation by other means', look back on that same pair of graphs to 2008-2009. In 2009, oil price had plunged after the 2008 spike, but driving continued to decrease. That was because people couldn't afford to buy the cheaper gasoline in 2009. The price was the same as it is today. By mid-late 2016, the US may again be conserving, involuntarily.

[Sep01,'15] If oil stays low for another few months, it could cause great difficulty for banks involved in oil price hedging. It is highly ironic that *low* oil prices, virtually at the moment of peak oil, is what might might blow up the economic system this particular time, delivering another public bail outs for bankers. As Michael Hudson says, the banks were bailed out, resulting in all the gains since 2008 going to the 1%, but the 'debt tumor' was left in place. Now they are coming for everybody's pension. We need an anti-banker war in the US, not a race war. We need banker's heads on pikes on the Tower bridge. People, keep your eye on the ball!

[Sep05,'15] Sebastian Thrun, the pioneer of Google’s autonomous cars "wants to teach people how to face the future" in the Economist. Reading things like this, creates a quick chain of thought in my head. First, I think back to how he got his start in neural nets, originally inspired, ironically, by trying to make pale imitations of biological networks. Then, I fast-forward to one of the Google exec's TED talks about how the killer app for self driving cars will be better transportation for blind people, 'which is so much better than having to use public transportation because it's all run by a friendly giant corporation'. Then I think, 'but if we only had more energy and time, couldn't things eventually work out in a different, more humane way?'. Then, 'what if there actually *were* enough energy to let these maniacs get to where they are trying to go, and *then* we ran low?'. Then I think, 'there isn't enough energy left, and this makes me happy and sad at the same time'.

[Sep13,'15] Came across this accurate 9-month-old article about the complexification and decline of Mac OS X. Tainter-esque, sadly. When older stuff works better in a virtual machine better than the new stuff in native, not a good sign...

[Sep16,'15] There are more than 1 billion internal combustion engine cars in the world (had a few words with some of their fine pilots on my wet cycle ride home tonight). After years of development, and despite the probable arrival of peak all liquids this year (peak crude oil [45 API gravity and lower] already happened in 2005-2006), there are less than 1/1000 that many electric cars today. I'd say "better late than never" but we probably have only 10-15 years to ramp up real quick (double the size of the grid, mine more lithium than has ever been mined in history, etc) to avoid "never". "Never" is what happens when net energy decline makes people desperately try to keep existing things working rather than spending a lot of money (=energy) investing in designing and making new things. In 10-15 years, the US managed to improve its manufacturing methods when confronted with better designed and manufactured Japanese cars. There is a lot of current motivation. Here is a chart from Rune Likvern showing the exstimated debt position of tight oil companies in the Bakken, North Dakota (the Bakken accounts for a little over 1% of total world oil production/usage). I remember writing about an earlier version of his chart in late 2013 when everybody was insanely bullish on tight oil, pointing out that tight oil companies were seriously in the hole and would need years to reach break even. As you can see from the chart, the tight oil companies have instead gone deeper into debt since their previous 2013 low point (even I didn't think it would be this bad -- I assumed they would at least get back to zero). So many things still remain possible as we burn through our usual 90+ million barrels of oil on this fine day. But every day, some possibilities contract.

[Sep28,'15] Just saw the new Everest movie, which brought back memories of reading a paperback as a teenager in the 1960's about a climb of Annapurna. Perhaps a false memory but I seem to remember a scene where several roped-together people fell off one side of a ridge so the other guys jumped off the opposite edge, saving everybody. By 1996 (events in the movie), it was getting pretty crowded on Everest. But that was nothing compared to now. This graph from the Everest wikipedia article of the number of people reaching the summit is a straightforward exponential. On 23 May 2010, an insane 169 people reached the summit of Everest -- in one day. What is it about exponential that you humans don't understand?! [Update: nobody got to Everest this season because it was so stormy!]

[Oct06,'15] Well, this FED graph of reverse repos (with BASE/narrow money supply as a reference) sure looks like something went haywire starting in 2014 and got worse in September (really big spike on the right). As I described it above, 'reverse repos' are where the poor Fed "pawns" its assets (jewelry) to big banks (the pawn shop!), who give the Fed 'spending money' (the Fed needs money?). This allows the Fed to give those banks even more free money -- as interest on the securitised 'loan' the big bank is making to the Fed in return for the Fed's 'jewelry' (to guarantee the big banks that the Fed will pay them back, hah!). But the banks can also use the Fed's 'jewelry' as collateral for other loans, so they could show bank regulators that they are not bankrupt, even tho they basically are. The spike every 3 months and the big Jan 1 spikes suggests this has to do with quarterly and annual reports. Some of this could be the beginnings of fallout from the subprime fracking crash finally hitting the fan. Or some hidden (deceptively called "over the counter") derivatve bets gone bad. The y-axis scales are a bit confusing. The 'reverse repos' are smaller than BASE, but are now approaching a full 15% of BASE (the reverse repos are now up to $0.65 trillion dollars). BASE, the 'narrow money supply', which used to consist mainly of cash and short term deposits, now consists (since 2007-2008) mostly of 'excess reserves' that the Fed is paying banks void-generated interest on (they are 'excess' because the money got there from the Fed, but then there was nobody to give out a loan to, so the banks instead 'loaned' the Fed-generated money back to the Fed, in return for Fed-generated interest -- very similar to the reverse repos). Did I mention that the misleadingly named "Fed" is actually a collection of private banks? If a few more people knew how all this actually worked, they might not be ripping off just the suits. On the positive side, these spikes can probably continue for another couple of years without anything blowing up.

[Oct28,'15] I watched a bunch of US teevee this week after a several year break. It was an interesting experience. For the first few days, I had a jarring feeling of having been transported into an utterly alternate reality, like I had gone to an alien planet. The comprehensive side-effects warnings in the incessant drug adds played like weird SNL parody to me. But after a week of nightly pummelling, the repeated commercial jingles got more familiar and pleasant-sounding and the peculiar repeated 'news' and 'sports' events somehow began to appear slightly more real and the side-effects warnings less comical. I think the critical factor over the next difficult 15 years will be just how long the video and internet feeds can be kept up and running smoothly indicating everything is 'OK'. Keeping the reality distortion field up will be critical to stability; as much as I might make fun of teevee, instability is not enjoyable (the median income of a worker in the US is only $30K, which makes it hard to cover rent, food, transportation, and electronic feed). But it seems somewhat unlikely to me that the feed can last without major glitches beyond 15 or so more years of sustained energy depletion. The current oil 'glut' is a tiny 1-2% oversupply, which means that 98-99% of the oil got sustainedly burned as usual, and as is obvious from the smoothly monotonically increasing Mauna Loa CO2 graph. The 'giant' 'traffic jam' of oil tankers in Texas is a mere day's worth of oil usage. Art Berman had a good article on oil prices here. The strong anticorrelation between the US dollar value and Brent prices in his Fig. 5 is something I only noticed about 4 years ago while fiddling around with Fed graphs. This suggests that when oil prices spike back up probably in 2016 (Art Berman thinks they will stay low for longer), the strong (petro) dollar winds will die down. As I have often said, the world economy needs more smoothing, not less! As Art Berman comments on his own article (comment #10) this kind of 'smoothing' seems to be happening. A good thing. I am always trying to think of 'synergies' :-} I went to a battery and bulb store to try to find a slide projector bulb (of course they didn't have any), but found instead zillions of cart batteries for old people, fat people, disabled people, old+fat+disabled people). There were still endless streams of 2-3 ton cars whizzing back and forth across the gigantic no-walking landscape of suburban Illinois. But one can hope that in 15 years, the battery store will have grown and there will be more battery operated bicycles and covered carts for younger people :-}

[Nov02,'15] There is an excellent up-to-date presentation of Jevons paradox by Tim Garret here. The main points are, increased efficiency empirically results in an *accelerating* output of CO2 (N.B.: the world considered as a whole: reduced per capita US energy use merely reflects outsourcing of energy-intensive parts of the world economy to China). In order to stabilize CO2 emissions despite efficiency gains, decarbonization must occur as quickly as energy consumption grows. Today, this would require roughly the equivalent of one new nuclear plant worth of non-carbon energy (about 1 gigawatt) *per day*. This seems unlikely to occur. The other way to stabilize CO2 emissions is collapse. Bummer.

[Nov19,'15] Between just 2009 and 2015, the sum of buybacks (companies buying their own stock) and dividends (payments to shareholders) as percentage of companies' net income has gone from about 60% to almost 120% (as in, companies spent more on buying their own stock than their net income, probably meaning they had to borrow money to buy their own stock). The result is companies are being hollowed out (80,000 jobs cut at HP) in order to pay rich people even more. This looks like the end stage of an overly greedy parasite of the kind that Darwinian evolution routinely eliminates (evolution selects for sustainable parasites :-} ). Unfortunately, the unit of selection these days is the whole world.

[Dec01,'15] US light tight oil guys (frackers) went into debt with the expectation that oil would stay above $80. Instead of digging out of debt as production has ramped up, $40 oil has resulted in debt for them *increasing*. This size of problem is at least comparable and probably bigger than the subprime bubble ($1 trillion in subprime and Alt-A loans) that set off the last economic rupture in 2008. Things are still levitating along, Wile E. Coyote style. Given the typical 6-month lookahead, it seems unlikely that the system will be able to withstand $40 oil for another year without a catastrophe. So here's hoping oil prices go back up before that. People talk big about the big bad oil companies (they *are* big and bad -- and the biggest ones will make it through no prob); but then people drive, and eat food and use stuff -- all requiring a lot of oil. On the topic of the demand side of supply and demand, I have wondered to what extent hedge funds and other money manipulation 'services' might be affecting oil prices. Here is an article citing some of the main numbers. About $5 billion a day in oil actually bought for use (85-90 million barrels a day), which is about $1.3 trillion a year. There is about $0.3 trillion in commodity trading assets that could be used for oil price speculation. This suggests that commodity traders could affect prices in the short term (e.g., could account for 10% of demand on one particular day in a market where the current average 'glut' is only 1-2%). However, just based on assets, it is difficult to see how they could consistently push prices in one or the other direction over the medium term (6 months) given the size of the market for actually-used oil. The function of the hedge funds seems to be exactly the opposite of what they are advertised to do -- that is, they wildly magnify market swings so that a 1% mismatch in supply and demand results in a 50% price swing. But since a lot of derivative bets involve much larger than usual leverage, the author's conclusion is less certain. Here is a clear explanation of fractional reserves and the extension to essentially zero reserves for derivatives written by a gold bug (but so what).

[Dec02,'15] Since I saw the recent Everest, I read this account of how the computer graphics for it was done. Every scene on the mountain was shot in front of a green screen in a studio in the UK. Each single final video frame (48 per sec in 3D) of the mountain scenes then took 8 to 16 hours to render (i.e., 200 to 400 years of CPU time if the film was done on one computer). The best comment was the first by AndyS: "Excellent write up. It brings to mind the sketch from That Mitchell & Webb Sound about Doctor Who: Not really worth it all, is it?"

[Dec03,'15] These days, the world appears to be just one big 'training exercise': "The call first came in at 10:59 a.m. of multiple shots fired from the area of 1365 S. Waterman Ave. The Police Department’s SWAT team was training nearby and was suited, ‘ready to roll’ and responded rapidly, Lt. Richard Lawhead said.' -- KTLA report, Dec 2. At this rate, if you see a 'training exercise', I'd go the other way...

[Dec04,'15] The Matrix 'reality distortion' field has achieved a new level with 100 'reporters' overseen by 'Anderson Cooper' ransacking 'muslim items' and 'evidence' at the 'crime scene'. Clearly, this is what the market will now bear (tho I stand amazed). A majority of the US public supports drone bombings. At this rate, how long will it be until there are real life and death gladiator games in the homeland, just like old times? While studying the brain, I have overrated human intelligence. Ed Hutchins was right. Most things we attribute to individual cognitive intelligence are actually due to 'situated cognition', which relies on the arrangement of things in the environment, external to the cognitive agent, like the teevee sewer and 'shoot-and-cry' mind-training moovies for liberals. That's a seriously dangerous environment, will robinson.

[Dec09,'15] John Titus' has a good youtube presentation here on the Fed's policies starting in 2008. Since 2008, I have blathered on endlessly about the unprecedented increase in the BASE money supply, which was entirely due to an increase in excess reserves, which in turn was largely caused by the Fed paying interest on excess reserves deposited back with the Fed (now 90% of reserves!), because it was such an obvious 'new bad thing'. But because of all the jargon -- esp. with regard to the variously named bailout components -- I still had trouble distilling this down to the main points. The critical point is that there is a virtual mirror image of the increase in excess reserves in the equal and opposite drop in *net* lending (deposits versus reserves). That is, loans that would have been made to people and businesses have instead been made back to the Fed. This is obviously hugely deflationary for the real world (withdraws money from the real world). The most criminal part of this wealth transfer is that the main component of the 'assets' bought by the Fed from banks were worthless, fraudulent mortgage backed securities. It is difficult to see how these full-price purchases by the Fed will ever be 'unwound'. So, the bottom line summary in seven easy parts is: (1) large banks behaved completely criminally, generating fraudulent mortgage back securities, (2) this lead to a crash in the price of these 'toxic assets' in late 2007 because the criminal banks became suspicious of each other, (3) the Fed rescued the big banks by buying these worthless securities at full price, (4) banks then *also* began to get paid interest for excess reserves in 2008, which consisted mostly of the money they got from selling these worthless securities to the Fed, (5) a horrible side effect of this, virtually identical to what happened in the Great Depression, was that lending to the real economy was throttled (in the 1930's, it was from regulators *requiring* larger reserves, as opposed to this time, where money was simply printed and handed to the banks!), (6) the banks used their earnings to pay themselves record bonuses for a job 'well done', and finally (7) nobody went to jail. Since 2002, I had long expected that there would be trouble at peak oil. Peak *crude* oil occurred in 2006 or 2008. Peak 'all liquids' crude + condensate + natural gas liquids + tar sands + fracking + biodiesel + ethanol) is probably now (2015). But I *certainly* had not even the vaguest inkling of the level of accompanying moral decay possible. But the moral decay of the upper classes eventually filters down. Bummer. I guess this is really nothing new if you look at the first stunning graph by Pavlina Tcherneva in this 2014 article describing income trends. [Dec12,'15] David Stockman (yup) says here that along with the tiny increase in the Fed funds interest rate (currently around 0.12%, presumably going up to 0.25% on Dec 16), the Fed will also increase the rate of interest which the Fed pays on big bank excess reserves (it currently pays 0.25% on $2.5 trillion in excess reserves deposited with the Fed). Stockman also suggests that reverse repos (see above -- the Fed 'pawning' it assets to big banks) will be increased (this is merely another way of giving money to big banks). It amazes me how long these kinds of incredible, criminal hacks can continue without causing a complete breakdown! The idea is that if the Fed *doesn't* increase interest on excess reserves deposited with the Fed -- so that it is higher than the interest on that same money that the Fed created at the moment the loan was made to the the big banks -- then the big banks would have to make more risky loans (i.e., to real people and businesses). They wouldn't want to do that. Imagine if the news assholes actually reported things like this, in plain English. The man on the street would have a tough time believing it.

[Dec15,'15] A new study of about 150,000 births has reported that there is a 20% increased chance of autism (autism spectrum disorders) if a pregnant mother is depressed. However, if a pregnant mother takes antidepressants (SSRI's) during the second and third trimester, there is an *additional* 87% increased chance of autism. First, do no harm. This certainly suggests that it would be a good idea to treat maternal depression with something other than SSRI's.

[Dec24,'15] As expected, the Fed 'raised interest rates' on Dec 16. What the 'news' tells you is that the Fed raised the overnight interest rate charged to big banks (though most people won't understand the meaning of that). But there are two main things the 'news' will never mention, which are much more important. First, most big banks don't need to borrow (and therefore use the new raised Fed funds interest rate) because they have massive, historically unprecedented excess reserves. Second, the Fed also raised two other key interest rates to keep them both higher than the raised Fed funds rate -- the rate of interest paid on the huge, historically unprecendented excess reserves, which are deposited with the Fed (new policy inaugurated in 2008), and the rate of interest paid on reverse repos (this is when the Fed 'pawns' its assests to big banks in return for a big-bank loan to the Fed (!), which is basically a parallel method of paying interest to big banks; it is mainly used for quarterly reports to show that big banks aren't insolvent because they have 'pawned' Fed assets on their books). For interest on excess reserves, the Fed therefore just increased the payments to big banks from $6.5 to $13 billion a year. The Fed basically levied a new $40 per head per year tax on Americans on Dec 16, with the proceeds to be paid entirely to big banks. The new policy merely transfers yet more money from the bottom 90% to the top 0.1% and does nothing to stimulate lending to regular people and businesses.

[Dec28,'15] Zerohedge has nice article showing what the Fed-driven, buy-your-own-stock-on-credit 'markets' have become -- a complete cheating sham/scam. The pics shows high speed communications lasers previously used in US defense applications, here adapted for high frequency trading. This basically allows better front-running. The high speed traders -- which now often make up a majority of the 'market' (!) -- make many trades per *millisecond*, taking advantage of tiny price differences caused by ever-so-slightly slower trading programs. Allowing this is utterly preposterous. An easy way to fix it would be to introduce a small temporal jitter into each trade (e.g., when a trade is made, the time at which it is executed could be randomly jittered by up to a second in order to give traders with less-than-military-grade laser communications an even chance). Note that the laser systems are replacing private microwave link systems (on the same microwave tower), themselves only installed a year or two ago, to beat high speed optical ethernet cables. The idea that paying for military-grade communications lasers in order to front-run other 'people' (actually, mostly other high speed computer trading systems) is somehow 'market capitalism' is laughable. This is simply front-running, something that has always been defined as cheating. This is not even a casino. This is how firms can manage to impossibly win every market day, siphoning off money from the rest of the world that actually makes things and provides services. Companies raising the value of their own stock by using borrowed money for stock buybacks is mere parasitism. I wish I could like humans more. As Cognitive Dissonance has said, 'at least I'm still saying "I wish"' :-} These kind of 'traders' won't stop 'trading' until the fires in Rome reach their power supplies (which tyler has helpfully photographed :-0 ).

[Dec31,'15] A nice demonstration of the unique properties of fossil fuel is the recent cancellation of the Darpa 'bigdog' project. The kickable 4-legged pack robot was finally detached from its electrical power supply walking on treadmills in the lab. The handlers managed to get it to run around parking lots and lumber through grassy fields carrying a load. The catch, however, audible in the first outside videos, was that they had to use fossil fuel and an internal combustion enging in order to get reasonable energy density untethered. A Prius NiMH battery has only 1/45 the energy density of gasoline. Lithium batteries are better (perhaps 1/30 the energy density of gasoline), but still a far cry from the energy density of a tank of gas. The untethered pack 'dog' driven by a 2-cycle chainsaw engine just makes waaay too much noise. The multi-megawatt robots endlessly animated in sci-fi videos are also waaaay too quiet in operation. They should actually sound like real military hardware. A jet fighter can put out over 30 megawatts when it accelerates (cf. a 747, which continuously puts out 65 megawatts at cruising altitude). The only thing a battery for a theoretical jet fighter would be good for would be as a weight to drop, a la Monty Python...

[Jan08,'16] The black-holing of Ian Murdock's death is sure creepy. Not a peep about it in some places I would expect!

[Jan11,'16] Microsoft now makes more money from Android (via a $15 license fee for each Android device from software patents) than it does from Windows. Fondle slabs forever!

[Jan20,'16] Sometimes the utter absurdity of modern life pops into focus. In this case, in the form of leaked environmental impact statements (!) (PDF1 and PDF2) from Navy Seals who want to use 68 often-scenic sites in Washington state to practice 'combat swimming', simulated attacks with simulated weapons on buildings, and beach landings in National Forests with the beautiful Olympic mountains in the background. The military -- carefully respecting their environmental impact, while running war games in some of the most beautiful parts of the homeland -- utterly absurd. Remind me not to hike up there any more. I wouldn't want to stumble upon some 'insertion'.

[Feb04,'16] Banks sending out notices of reduced deposit insurance protection and laws that explain that your deposits are actually loans to banks that might not be repaid is a bit spooky. But amazingly with the incredible tension surrounding ridiculously low oil prices, nothing seems to have outright snapped yet. It is true that the stock market has not really started to drop in earnest, and is likely to do so in the next year. But may the halcyon days continue for a while longer :-} I'm still counting on bail-ins not arriving in the US/EU for another 5 or 10 years. The 1-2% oil 'glut' will subside in 2016 and price will snap back up when there is an equally tiny undersupply of 1-2%. But, the daily oil (daily all liquids) will still be 80-90 million barrels a day for another 5-10 years, and hopefully there won't be massive debt defaults for another 5-10 years. As Dave Cohen just wrote, "We're near the end of an unhappy exponential curve". But look on the bright side of life: we're not yet on the dire downslope yet! Meanwhile, back in the alternate reality, I was amazed to find out how high the average Americans' television viewing remains (almost 5 hours per day); Brit's are similar (almost 4 hours per day). The reality distortion field is still up! People are paying attention to the preposterous 'election'/circus (and here in the UK, too). In the US, the average percentage usage of human waking hours breaks down as: 23% work, 18% TV (1/5 of waking hours), 8% eating/drinking, 5% shopping, and 4% housework. However, young people definitely watch less traditional TV. Over the past 5 years, 18-24 year olds have dropped their traditional TV viewing from just over 3 hours a day to just over 2 hours a day; however, they made it up to their 5 hours a day screen quota with their portable devices. Not for nothing that Rupert Murdoch bought a 5% ($70 million) stake in Vice in 2013. Heh.

[Feb05,'16] There is a useful analysis of the current costs of battery grid storage here (or as easier to read PDF) by a not disinterested party (a lawyer for large energy companies -- mostly fossil fuel :-} ). The conclusion is that electric battery storage is currently more expensive (translated: uses more energy than digging coal). Duh, of course it does! That means that total energy usage will have to go down as we run out of coal. We are already down to digging up pretty crappy coal, just like with oil -- but despite that, it's still cheaper *net energy wise* than renewables plus battery storage. What the article misses is that we should nevertheless install renewables plus batteries (and pumped hydro and compressed air and flywheels) anyway, and plan to get by using less energy and less reliable energy. It makes me laugh when lawyers and business people argue against physics and geology. Of *course* renewable plus battery is more expensive now, and forever, you dufus! Of *course* we will eventually run low on even crappy coal and it will eventually get more energy-expensive (reach lower net energy) than solar/wind/batteries/pumped hydro! Just what is it about "finite earth" that you guys don't get?

[Feb06,'16] "The ultimate cost of protecting the privileges of the few at the expense of the many is the dissolution of the social order that enabled the rule of the privileged few." -- Charles Hugh Smith.

[Feb14,'16] I had a great time giving a DNA and language talk on Friday (main points covered in recent Phil Trans Roy Soc PDF here), then we had a very nice not-too-expensive French meal with 5 slow small courses on Saturday, then our flat heating system broke, so things are very cozy now! My worried glances toward 2030 remain, but the big bottleneck is still a ways off :-} I think of a comment I made here once years ago, something like, no dictator *or* revolutionary will ever have powerdown as their stated platform -- and that will be true all the way down the downslope of power. I suppose I should have included myself in there. "Less than enthusiastic" by Paul Heft kinda nails it, unfortunately, for us overfed overlords, looking uncomfortably forward.

[Mar17,'16] Drugs are now 12% of total wholesale sales in the US. Not surprising, judging from a few days of watching US teevee. Also today, Google is looking to sell Boston Dynamics after getting some blowback from the public creeped out by the Boston Dynamics videos (Google after all is an advertising company and is best positioned to measure the public), together supposedly with Google's estimation that there was no obvious thing that Boston Dynamics could make that would make money for Google 5 years from now (similar considerations -- creep factor [slaves running around picking packages driven by verbal countdowns], no profits -- don't seem to have stopped Amazon!). Google is afraid the sheeple will associate the 'not-cute' Boston Dynamics robots and their new 'cute' self-driving carz.

[Mar28,'16] "People who are between 20 and 35, basically they're surrounded by a soup of algorithms telling them everything from where to get Korean barbecue to who to date. That's a very subtle form of shifting control. It's sort of soft fascism in a way, all watched over by these machines of loving grace" -- John Markoff. It's so much better when your control is "subtle", and your fascism "soft". Currently, the number of people who expect an energy shortage in the next five years has hit an all time low -- 30% down from 60% just a few years ago. The number of people that think that the energy situation in the US is very serious is similarly at a record low: 28% (versus almost 50% in the 1980's). Guess information about energy (see for example, Tad Patzek's recent article here) -- the very thing that powers all the 'machines of loving grace' -- isn't being effectively delivered by those very same machines when they dispense directions to the Korean barbecue (information about energy is definitely not 'cute'). Amazing given the geological 'facts on the ground' and the relative ease of finding out about them via the internet.

[Apr07,'16] Bankers have a way with words. Here's one (embedded Bloomberg video) whose parasitic vulture business is buying the carcasses of crashed companies on the cheap at the end of a credit cycle, describing why oil compaines haven't quite yet run out cash (and hence aren't yet an appealing meal to him): "When will they run out of cash? when their hedges burn off". Unlike the public mentioned in the last post, he fully expects the 'hedges to burn off' in the not too distant future.

[Apr08,'16] John Weber has calculated that it takes about 600 barrels of oil -- equivalent to about 1000 MW-hours of energy -- just to make the steel reinforced concrete base of a 2.5 megawatt wind turbine. Such a turbine can generate approximately 4,000 megawatt hours of energy per year. This looks pretty good so far (the base costs only 1/4 of a year of the future power output of the turbine). After adding in energy to make the rest of the device, energy to make energy storage (e.g., pumped hydro -- so the turbine can be a drop in replacement for storable fossil fuel), energy for service, the net energy return is reduced, but still looks handily net positive. There is no place on earth yet where renewable-based energy systems actually feedback a substantial portion of the power into the industrial systems (mining, cement, steel, transport, manufacturing, maintenance) that are capable of creating them. I hope it's possible. The best way to find out would be to try to set something up like this on a small scale, after the fashion of the failed Biosphere II experiments from the early 1990's. It would be expensive and would look like a boondoggle (like Biosphere). However, I think it could provide highly valuable real world experience with trying to do this before we have no choice.

[Apr09,'16] Highly cool successful retrieval of the Falcon first stage (landed itself back onto an ocean barge). I say this even though I think manned space exploration is an utter waste of money -- this is exactly what robots should be used for! not the military!

[Apr12,'16] Greg had a great comment on an Albert Bates post, "Too big to scale" (the comment was here at a repost of the Bates article at doomstead diner): "All civilisations reach the pinnacle of their stupidity before collapsing. It's a very long list but The Cloud is it for me. The analogy I like goes something like this. I'll cut your legs off but give you a nice new motorised wheel chair and you will never have to walk again. All this for a small monthly fee. Can't you see all the advantages over legs? What's wrong with you. No legs is the way to go. PS if you don't pay us our monthly fee your wheelchair will stop working."

[Apr15,'16] The Fed, a privately-owned institution despite the misleading name, wrote this to JPMorgan Chase, holder of $2 trillion in assets and $50 trillion in derivatives (N.B.: entire US GDP is $18 trillion): We have identified a deficiency in your wind-down plan which if not properly addressed could "pose serious adverse effects to the financial stability of the United States." Wind-down plans are what banks would do if they failed (they haven't already?!). It's a bad sign when the pigmen start losing trust in each other. It's rather amazing that they trust each other at all.

[Apr22,'16] Overall economics numbers update: gross world product about $75 trillion, value of all land/property/goods about $225 trillion, notional value derivatives about $800-1000 trillion. There is the idea that the notional value of derivatives is irrelevant because losers will pay winners, cancelling them out. Given basic world numbers, it is obvious that this won't be possible. What has happened is equivalent to 50 people taking out a mortgage for the full value of the same house.

[Apr30,'16] [Apr30'16] The next big helium event will probably occur when the US revisits the idea of stopping the sell-off of their strategic helium reserve (established 1925) at below market prices. This policy since 2005 has had the effect of depressing helium prices and helium exploration. The last time the US threatened to stop this, there was an outright helium shortage (e.g., the Queen Square MEG machine was shut down for a few months in 2014). When this happens again in 2019, there will probably be another price spike and more shortages, perhaps longer lived this time. Back in 2014, several MRI manufacturers (e.g., Siemens) temporarily cancelled their 7T programs. But these have been reinstated in the interim (businesses must operate on a 1-2 year look-ahead). The *best* 'helium' wells contain 0.3-1% helium (the rest is methane and other short chain hyrdocarbons). Fracked gas wells contain virtually no helium since the caps of those shale formations are not tight enough to hold it in (which should not be confused with the fact that the formations themselves are too tight to allow the larger methane and oil to flow out freely without fracking -- helium is really small and diffuses into space when it escapes into the atmosphere). The 2019 helium price spike and possible shortage will likely increase helium exploration in a manner similar to the 2008 spike in oil prices precipitated fracking. That may result in a temporary helium renaissance around 2021-22. For example, there are useful concentrations of helium in gas wells in Qatar and eastern Siberia, similar to the great original helium finds in Texas and Oklahoma. However, helium is roughly on the same depletion curve as natural gas, and so I expect it will begin its permanent downslope after the Great Helium Bubble of 2020, probably starting around 2025.

[May04,'16] From an article by Mike Rosenberg: in the US, from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics on jobs in the media, in 2000, there were 66K news reporters and 129K public relations people. 15 years later, in 2015, there were 46K news reporters and 218K public relations people. That is, we went from 2 PR people per reporter to almost 5 PR people per reporter in just 15 years. Can you say singularity? This is a general phenomenon well beyond the 'nooz'. In one of the academic departments I work at, there was an absolutely soul destroying presentation from a PR person (an 'impact officer') who had recently been hired by the university. I felt sorry for the person, who was a former academic. They didn't say anything horrible; just that we should spend more time on PR and a little less on research. The administrative/teaching staff ratio at universities in the US/EU/UK has gradually but inexorably increased over the past 30 years, with administration now above half everywhere and showing no sign of reducing its suicidal host-destroying growth. Another recent example was the launch of Sea Hero Quest this week, an online video game funded by an 11M euro grant to 'help dementia research'. 0.2M pounds of the 11M euro grant went to a researcher to support a post-doc for several years to study demented and non-demented brains at the centre here; 0.15M pounds from that same grant went to a famous youtuber for his one-hour appearance at the launch event in London this week. It's getting harder to strip off the soylent beer goggles.

[May05,'16] It is amusing to see polls reporting that 20% of republicans will vote for Hillary rather than Trump. Don't get distracted by the circus: there would be very little effective difference between Trump and Hillary. Just as there was very little difference between Bush and Obama (wars, bankers, corporations, trade, policestate/Guantanamo, middle east policy, Russia). The only practical difference Obama made was that he silenced even the meek little peeps made by the 'left' against his virtually Bush-identical policies.

[May11,'16] The market capitalization of FaceBook is $0.3 trillion dollars which is equivalent to 2% of the entire US GDP of $17 trillion dollars. The business model is advertising and intelligence-gathering. Perhaps the second aspect explains why its valuation has remained so ridiculously high given that it does not seem to be making a lot of money from advertising. It's remarkable to think that the information in the giant database of a latter day Stasi has all been voluntarily uploaded.

[May16,'16] Here is a good 3-page PDF summarizing recent trends in car sales. Sales of hybrids peaked in 2013. This was probably not caused by increased sales of plug-ins. Rather, people have gone back to buying heavier, larger-engine cars because of lower gas prices (the main reasons the Prius is efficient are simply (1) small engine, (2) thin tires, (3) light weight, and (4) aerodynamic design -- the four main things that determine miles per gallon). Almost half a century after "Limits to Growth", right at peak all liquids, people as a group have decided to use more oil by buying heavier cars with larger engines. On days like this, I agree with Dave Cohen, as opposed to Chomsky, or my late father. It's not the system, but what people do. Despite high flown words about women and children emitted by a higher level symbol-using system that has been layered on top of the original DNA-and-protein symbol-using system (PDF), people are still fundamentally animals (that's not an insult). Like animals, they won't be able to do the globally right thing until their food supply starts to run low, and it's not low yet, and won't be for another 15 years.

[May20,'16] Just read the sequence of titles of these articles from the last two years of the 'mighty Wurlitzer' on Theranos. Toward the end, watch as the rats expertly depart the sinking ship that they *just finished building*. Language is great, but some days I prefer animals that don't have it :-Q

[May26,'16] In the course of setting and using up an iOS system for someone else, I am even more strongly struck by how infantilizating the touch devices are than I was struck even 5 years ago! Compared to using a real computer where I can see the file system and selection/manipulation is cleanly separated from linguistic input, it feels like a padded-cell panopticon. To see people helplessly stroking the mental walls of their little portable prisons as they 'experience' a dinner 'together' is amazing, and more amazing for being unnoticed. I have actually *tried* to make myself want one! But so far, I just can't like it ("I can't like it" was a friend's kid's response to being told she should eat her broccoli). The iPhone is currently 65% of Apple's revenue. This is how one actually votes. The trumpillory votes don't matter; what you buy, does.

[May29,'16] Americans luv carz just as much as the British :-} Britons turn into angry Top Gear monkeys when they get into a car. All the proper, studious avoidance of gaze when one runs into a neighbor on the street goes out the window as they morph into rude, honking, speeding monsters (well, I suppose this is a cyclist talking). But back to the Americans. Here is a interactive StLouis FED graph of car loans and car miles. Car miles hit an unprecendented speed bump in 2008 when gasoline prices went up and then the recession hit. But starting in 2010, there was the beginning of a sudden upward trend in car-related debt, which went from $0.7 trillion to over $1 trillion in just 6 years (the only thing growing faster was student loans, which doubled for the same time period to $1.25 trillion). When gasoline prices dropped in 2014, there was an immediate increase in the slope of car miles. Apparently, nothing can match feeling of a 100,000 watt device. Divided by, I don't know, say 120 million people in the US, that's $2500 in extra car debt for each driver. That's 5% of median salary. This is how people have voted. The same thing has happened in the EU where SUVs have outsold other passenger vehicles in 2015 for the first time. I can appreciate RE's latest epic rant here; but I really do think people *could* have voted differently with respect to carz! Right at peak oil, dammit! Giving most of us monkeys cars will turn out not to have been a good idea.

[May30,'16] Sometimes, it's important to step back and assess long term trends. Since 1960, spending on health care has gone up 5x as much as GDP, and a stunning 50x as much as wages. Part of this increase is explained by the fact that today, 33% of Americans are obese, while back in 1960, about 12% were obese (extremely obese went from 1% to 6% over the same time period). The average American is 24 pounds heavier than in 1960. Note that percentage of overweight, as opposed to obese Americans has remained *flat* from 1960 until now at about 33%. On the bright side, increase in obesity seem to be flattening, and health care spending has slightly tapered its rate of growth. The massive increase in obesity was probably a combination of mistaken health advice to stop eating fat, which partly motivated a sugar intake increase, coupled with 'weaponized' 'food' products, more driving, more desk, and more cell phone. It is easier to gain weight than to lose weight. Not good. So, I think we are going to need an even bigger health care. Of course, determining how overweight one is hardly requires 'health' care or a cholesterol test. But whatever. Health care *spending* will probably continue increasing -- for about 10-15 years. After that, it is going to have to shrink.

[May31,'16]
Health Care Induction
     Continuing on the topic of health care, as friends and relations begin to get cancer, I often spend a few days doing binge reading on PubMed. It always takes a couple of hours to readjust to the jargon in the abstracts. I am always hopeful that there will be some new drug that is less toxic that only lightly 'taps' (damages) DNA just enough that apoptosis is triggered in the abnormal cells -- but without causing too much damage elsewhere. Many chemotherapy agents stimulate normal cells to excrete tumor promoting factors (!), enable metastasis, and have long been know to be themselves carcinogenic.
     But the small average differences between regimens with adult metastatic cancer is disheartening (e.g, often just a few percent increase in 5 year survival). The amount of progress over the past 50 years of the war on cancer is not encouraging. Most of the studies don't have a pure no-treatment 'observation' arm, which is the only way to measure how much chemotherapy actually helped over not doing it. At best there is: 'we gave both groups A', 'then we gave just one group B and observed both'. The differences between the different regimens measured in quality of life (QoL) are small or non-existent, and average survivorship curves that show just a few additional months of life are not encouraging.
     In considering 'progress', you have to take into consideration that early diagnosis can contribute to curing things that wouldn't have required curing at all, which can inflate the 'cure' percentage, or it can catch things that do require 'curing' later, but that eventually kill on the same schedule. Then toss in the fact that oncologists are the only doctors that are allowed to re-sell drugs to their patients at a mark-up (not allowed in many other countries), which can provide half of their salary. This ridiculous US rule creates an obvious pernicious incentive -- conscious or unconscious -- to prescribe the latest, most expensive, just-patentably-different drugs over off-patent, or non-patented drugs (or better food!).
     The internet is filled with instructions on what *not* to eat, because food will 'interfere with chemotherapy'. The chemotherapy drugs are quite various. For example there are the classic metabolic poisons (e.g., methotrexate interfering with folate metabolism), or something/anything that damages genetic material (e.g., nucleoside analogues, chemicals that interfere with microtubule assembly/disassembly involved in cell division, inhibitors of helicases (DNA untangling/twisting/unwtisting enzymes) that snap DNA, chemicals that target various growth factors or inhibit vascularization). Many are extremely carcinogenic and have to be handled in a hood. The pharmaceutical industry spends more on promotion (about 1/4 of sales revenue) than on research (about 1/7 of sales) (note this is overall, not just cancer drugs; cost of doing bidness, I know). The drugs are often injected directly into the heart with a David Lynch-like 'heart plug' (no 'heart plugs' in the original Dune!) because they are so toxic. Given that some cancer is due to environmental poisons (AKA 'genetic predisposition'), some current chemotherapy reminds me of old quack ideas of homeopathy. You could also move closer to a toxic waste dump...
     Then, there is the unlikelihood that a single (or two) drugs targeted at a specific node in a meshwork of metabolic interactions could ever work, despite this being the only viable business model. And to be fair, there would be a combinatorial explosion in trying to test different combinations of 50 or 100 drugs -- there aren't enough people on Earth to objectively test all the combinations on real people. And even then, it wouldn't even get vaguely close to the huge number of natural compounds we routinely injest in natural food (natural chemotherapy!) not to mention the large number of new compounds we injest that have been created by industrial society (those would be the source of a number of cancers).
     Of course, you're probably thinking, well, what would *you* do if you had/got metastatic cancer? It is clear that from the moment one is inducted into the oncology treatment system, there is basically only one way out. It's quite a bit like that other 'induction' (for a man of my age, 61) -- getting drafted, or enlisting. Once you are in, trained, suited up, and on the battlefield, set against some other hapless teenaged men in similar suits, your autonomy is long lost; the end comes at the very beginning, the moment of induction. From then on, it's just you and your tumour markers to the end. When you are so down and out that the last dose of chemotherapy has a chance of killing you outright, then finally you can try your 'alternative' therapies, when they have no chance of helping, and morphine. There are no quality of life studies comparing induction to refusal because who would fund that?
     So you are on your own. Bummer. If I do get metastatic cancer, however, we'll see if I still talk such big talk when my own life is on the line.

[Jun03,'16] I used to be proud to be an academic. Now, with student debt on a steeper tear than Chinese coal use, according to the BBC, a quarter of a million predominantly female UK students have turned to 'soft' prostitution to pay their tuition in the 'modern hooker economy'. Older wealthier men browse for them in online human shopping apps. I would never in a million years have predicted that this is what the university system would come to when I entered the university as a freshman undergraduate at a state university in 1973. Students (e.g., me) were poor back then, too, but because of stronger state support for universities, it was possible to make enough money during the summer, and with odd crap jobs (night guard) during the school year to scrape by and pay for both tuition and room and board. It's not even vaguely possible to do this now, at the same school I went to. I'm sure there were a few female students who turned to prostitution back then, too, and some older men who paid them. But it wasn't anything like 1/4 of the female students (if the current estimates are to be believed). This is starting to really look like the decline of the Roman empire -- which, incidentally, I read about back then, in The Satyricon by Petronius. I remember the scene where a slave's job under the old rich master's bed was to bounce the bed up and down to help the older master have sex with a prostitute. It was interesting and all, but I didn't want to live it. Societal declines seem to have some common features.

[Jun05,'16] The unemployment numbers recently came out at a ridiculous 4.7%. The utterly depraved statisticians who came up with this number did so by *not counting* 95 million adults, almost 1/3 of all people living in the US -- which they classify as "people not in the work force". This number has almost doubled since 1990. This suggests that real unemployment is closer to 20-30% (they also artifically do not count child rearing as a component of work).

[Jun16,'16] It looks like allowing 'nooz' teams to rummage around at the crime scene in order to 'discover evidence' (cf. San Bernardino) is the new Standard Operating Procedure for Gladio2 ISIS TM terr'ist events! The perp shops at Disney Springs on the day, his wife and friends say he's gay, he's a regular at the nightclub, he pretends to be NYPD, he's been interviewed twice by the FBI, filmed by hidden camera for a documentary on the BP oil spill (bad actor!), he actually *was* an actor (imdb now scrubbed; the 'crying mom' on the green screen is also an actor), he works for G4S (=Wackenhut) security, and his father is an Afghan C-Eye-Eh asset who hangs out at the State Deparment and meets with Dana Rohrbacher? Okie-dokie! Though the FBI says it has no evidence for any contact with ISIS, Maddow's whole program on ISIS booga booga means it *must* be ISIS TM (not NYPD :-} )! Would those be the same ISIS TM supported by the CI A to overthrow Assad? Sorry, I meant to say, the same ISIS that we can only *stop* by overthrowing Assad? The same ISIS TM we're trying to bomb, but that only the Russians can find? And when the Russians do find them, we ask them to please stop? It's a complete Orwellian circus! In contrast to earlier events, this time, we have nothing but words, virtually no video (well there were laughing crisis actors carrying 'injured' 20 feet back *toward* the scene of the crime). One video suggested to be beginning of the attack sound more like a recording of multiple police shooters storming the building (which probably caused deaths) -- or there were multiple shooters. Very hard to figure out what actually happened. There is hardly any public evidence in favor of the official story and it is unlikely any evidence will be presented over the next few weeks, and then the story will simply fade. None of the odd things I listed above count as evidence of what actually happened. There could be crisis actors at a real crisis. Meanwhile, all the people that the US droned to death this week (on average, mostly bystanders) didn't even make the news at all.

[Jun25,'16] Google/Boston Dynamics/DARPA has *finally* figured out that they need "cute", which means, don't show 'Spot', the cute walking drone, handling a gun. These things are still a ways from full deployment in the homeland, but they are merely walking drones (here is a gallery from 3 years ago); they *will* be armed. From the video at the first link, you can see that the Boston Dynamics walkers finally have a working vestibulo-ocular system. The main thing the videos should make people think about is how to defend themselves against these things. They move a lot slower than flying drones, and their battery-constrained range isn't that great. And like flying drones, their weakest link may be their uplinks.

[Jul09,'16] Dang, I hate when 'reality' (supposed drone bomb end to Maidan Dallas) confirms my paranoid fantasies (previous). W.r.t. Dallas, the original police and citizen reports of multiple rooftop snipers are now cleansed, and the 'lone gunman' has supposedly been blown up by Robocop (!). We are at war with East Asia, to be danced/marched by Beyonce.

[Jul11,'16] What is wrong with this headline: "Unexpected deaths put promising immunotherapy on hold". Well, at least the "on hold" part is promising :-} Meanwhile, the deaths of policemen are on track to be at a *record low*, after continuously declining to about half of what they were at their peak in 1974. There are a lot of occupations that are more dangerous than policing (e.g., logging, fishing, piloting, roofing, garbage, mining, truck driving, farming, power line installers, construction workers). You wouldn't get this idea from watching the noooz.

[Aug24,'16] Settling in after our big move. As my former advisor, John Allman would say, "two moves equals one fire" :-} Back in the USSA, I just read that Americans' spending on ADHD drugs (i.e., slow-release cocaine) went from $7 billion to $13 billion from just 2010 to 2015. Good work when you can get it, eh? Thank god god has provided drugs to fix all of our terrible 'genetic' problems.

[Aug29,'16] I wasted some time distracting myself thinking about unintended consequences of human monkeys in self-driving cars (maybe it's because I just went to the zoo). Several people have pointed out that this will probably be hard on car manufacturers since it could substantially increase the percentage of time that any vehicle could be used (currently, cars spend 97% of their time turned off because most are individually owned). However, it wouldn't decrease traffic much because less cars would simply be used more often. Initially, self-driving cars would likely be more respectful of pedestrians and cyclists than human-monkey-driven cars. But pedestrians and cyclists will soon figure this out, and the unintended consequence of self-driving cars is that cycling and walking are likely to become much more strongly policed. I can already imagine a hi-tech fix for this: robotic cyclist tire puncturers to put the fear of self-driving cars back into cyclists. I agree with Dave Cohen; this is best that our "best minds" can come up with??

[Aug31,'16] The continuing low price of oil creeps me out. This is not because I like oil companies. The current price of new oil is so much higher than current oil prices that companies have bailed on new exploration while simultaneously going backrupt because they can't pay their loans for previous expensive-oil investments. This is all happening in the background, so far off of people's radar that they look at you like a kook when you try to talk about it. When told, many people will cheer this without realizing that they are cutting off their nose (just-in-time diesel trucking delivery of just about everything they use and eat) to spite their face. If the diesel trucks stopped running, the miniscule fraction of electric delivery trucks would do absolutely nothing to prevent store shelves from being cleared in a few days, Venezuela-style (see Alice Friedemann's book on trucks). The problem is, it is difficult to have an adult discussion of these topics. Another example is grid-connected rooftop solar. Even at relatively low levels of grid penetration (5-10%), grid-connected solar can destabilize a smaller grid (e.g., like on the Hawaiian islands). Of course, non-grid-connected solar cells used to charge electric car batteries or a house battery don't have this problem. Neither would just locally using electricity when the solar cells are generating it (turn off the lights/internet/tv at night, take a nap when it's cloudy). But those things are a lot more expensive or inconvenient than getting a large subsidy for an expensive grid-connected solar system. The adult part of the discussion comes as follows: are you willing to pay more and be inconvenienced, in order to do the right thing? For example, are you willing to pay more for stuff made by companies that don't rely on the grid? I think the general answer is a simple "no". It's true a small fraction of people have set up off-grid houses and would pay more for the same stuff or use less stuff. But read most of the comments here by the proud monkeys, many of whom say Cheney-style that there is no way in hell they are *not* going to use energy whenever they want to. The changes to the grid (e.g., an enormous amount of additional storage) that would be required to make a much higher penetration of grid-connected-solar practical would be expensive, too. People as a group will instead effectively mortgage their kids' future, and will not in general complain about the yearly mountain of military spending (which could instead be used to do some of these expensive but critical upgrades). To be clear, I don't claim to be a better-than-average monkey myself. I would complain if my electricity bill doubled or quadrupled (tho I wouldn't complain if military spending was reduced :-} ). I suppose I'm just a more-nervous-than-average monkey. I'm still hoping that people's positions might slowly change. Though looking into the eyes of the peevish pilots of some of the 100,000 watt 4,000 pound steel cans beside me as I cycle 6 miles into work usually makes me fearful rather than hopeful, perhaps their kids will have a different attitude, and maybe there will eventually be huge numbers of electric trucks. On the positive side, people's opinion of what is absolutely critical for life can, and has, changed a lot from generation to generation.

[Sep02,'16] Following up on the previous post, although I agree that intermittent renewable energy is not a great fit for the current grid, requiring expensive grid upgrades etc etc etc, I tire of reading people like Gail Tverberg constantly dissing renewable energy without discussing practical approaches to the real issue, which is that we will be forced to use a lot less energy and the need to begin practicing doing this. We won't use as much electricity at night. It will be a good thing! Every day, watching single, often overweight people, accelerating their 4000 pound steel cans past me as I cycle up to the red light -- where I meet them again -- using my 150 watt body output, I feel the same frustration (expressed here in my letter to the editor of the San Diego Reader, after they published a stoopid front-page anti-biking screed). What an incredible waste of 100,000 watts of power! I remember a couple of years ago making a comment to Gail Tverberg about, 'why not try cycling?', and she assured me that it was completely impossible in Atlanta where she lives (she's only 3-4 years older than me). Well, I'm sure if she lived in San Diego, she would consider it completely impossible here, too. This excellent comment on Gail's most recent data-filled article on grid problems is more my speed :-} Of course, I realize that wind turbines and solar electric are part of the fossil fuel economy, and won't be able to be made and installed the same way as they are now, when fossil fuels are much more scarce and when their EROEI is a lot lower. But complaining about renewable energy having low EROEI or subsidies won't fix every more scarce fossil fuels and ever lower EROEI of bottom-of-the-barrel fossil fuels!! What about fossil fuel and car-related subsidies?! (giant roads with no provision for bicycles -- how much would it cost to put in separated cycle lanes on new highways?). *That's* what everybody should be talking about on "Our Finite World" and "Energy Matters"! The main blog posts on those two sites sound like they have been written by spoiled -- but extremely well educated -- children. We still have some time before things really start to fall apart! I'm disappointed that some of the most literate writers can't conceive of even tiny forward looking steps to slightly cushion the inevitable blow.

[Sep12,'16] Queen Hillary's stumble has all the 'conservative' sites a twitter about the failing health of one of the pretenders to the throne, though they conveniently ignore the fact that King Reagan was an Alzheimer's basket case for his entire second term. One possibility recently suggested by a Trump partisan is that she has Parkinson's and is taking L-dopa, which helps with the loss of dopaminergic inputs from the degenerating subtantia nigra, but with well known 'overshoot' side effects, not only in the motor system, but also in the limbic striatum (e.g., increased impulsive behaviors). There is little direct evidence for this; she could easily be having occasional small seizures instead, or transient ischemic attacks (TIA's), or early vascular (Lewy body) dementia, or maybe the stumble *was* due to pneumonia. But assume for the moment that she is taking levedopa to help her basal ganglia. Would this make her any worse than the usual sociopaths in office? Probaby not! She was already a horrible neocon: you can't blame the (hypothetical) drugs for that (N.B.: criticism of Hillary does not equal support for Trump). Meanwhile, the 'left' is doing its best to ignore their emperor's obvious clothing defects. But the saddest thing about this maddening, ridiculously neverending spectacle, is that who gets elected DOES NOT MATTER at all! As I've said many times above, the fact that a man with full blown Alzheimer's could 'run the country', shows that a God-like, all-powerful president is an utter illusion. The 'election' is a morality-play-like diversion that has very little to do with actually executed domestic and foreign policy. Without visual and voice recognition, Obama and Bush were essentially indistinguishable from both a domestic and foreign policy perspective. The king/queen show is strictly window dressing for the proles and yups. Back in the day, there used to be child kings and queens. JonBenet Ramsay for Queen!

[Sep14,'16] Naked Capitalism recently had a Jerri-Lynn Scofield piece on the downsides of 'fast fashion' (e.g., H&M) -- people throw out clothes more often, and cotton is energy- and water-intensive to produce, and difficult to dispose of (she is a former derivatives trader now working mostly in India and writing about the textiles trade). This is the zillionth example of how improvements in technology (e.g., faster computer-aided design chains) invariably *increase* rather than decrease resource usage. Of course, it would be a good idea to simply be a little less 'fast' and throw out one's clothes less often (that doesn't require any new technology!); that is just like cycling intead of driving sometimes, or having more than one person in a car. But the little nag in the back of my head knows: even if you could get people to do this particular 'right thing' by overcoming the advertising mind control (wear your same damn clothes for an extra few months!), it would only put off nonrenewable energy/soil/water/metal/mineral/species depletion a little bit. To change the current disastrous trajectory of humans on earth would require new thinking that is orders of magnitude more adventurous than this. Today, the little nag in my head once again says that there won't be any course correction until humans can't get enough food. OK, now I have to go home and get my dinner... I will cycle home (in my H&M trousers), even though rationally, I know cycling will make no practical difference. It will make me feel better.

[Sep22,'16] In April 2016, Joe Brewer wrote a piece in Medium (which I just found via Dave Cohen) entitled "The pain you feel is capitalism dying". The Brewer article is marked, with unintentional humor, as a "5 min read" :-} This shows that basic geology/energy facts are finally percolating into the brain of a "change strategist working on behalf of humanity, and also a complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, and evangelist for the field of culture design" (who got a masters in atmospheric sciences). After a brief moment of reality (5 min?), the piece ends firmly back in the Matrix: "Yet the prospects for getting through this struggle are nothing less than a thriving planetary civilization that is inclusive and nourishing for all people while at the same time remaining in harmony with our home planet of Earth". The pain *I* feel now -- if you can even call it "pain" at all -- is knowing that the pain I feel now has not even reached 1 on the 1-to-10 "pain of capitalism dying" scale. I agree with Dave Cohen: so far, capitalism is still expanding, *not* dying -- it's the biosphere and the oceans (and Ghawar) that are dying. Me and the writers at Medium are doing just fine now, and will continue to do so -- as will capitalism -- for at least the next decade. I think around 2030, the pain will begin to get a lot more widespread. There are plenty of places already in serious pain -- e.g., those currently enduring the mostly-US-engineered disaster in Syria. The guys writing for Medium, and me and the others reading it are not experiencing real pain.

[Sep27,'16] *Of course* the cage match was nearly a tie! (I didn't watch it, and the viewing audience was smaller than the Super Bowl but larger than Monday night football). Well OK, perhaps Hillary came out slightly on top, if you use the dollar/peso exchange rate as an index, or online bookie odds (tho the online bookies all missed Brexit). I think that whichever freak gets elected, it won't make any practical difference for policy toward the things that actually count (criminal bankers, blood-soaked Salvador-option operations in Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Somalia (and Turkey!), US military spending, support for Egypt/Saudi/Izzy dictatorships, taxes on the rich and corporations, trade agreements that allow capital to freely search the world for rock bottom labor prices in countries with no regulations, energy/transportation policy, water/soil/fish/energy/resources rundown, creeping domestic police-state). It's possible that the electorate may Trump themselves in the foot, Brexit-style. But it's strictly entertainment, folks! The real voting occurs when you decide where to drive, what to buy, what to eat, and what to do on the internet each day. The few *single bits* of information that one injects into the world via elections are almost completely irrelevant compared to that firehose of information/decisions that a modern person emits -- and which immediately effect policy -- each and every day.

[Sep28,'16] Soon, Americans can 'sue the Saudis for 9/11' (sic), which makes political silly-season sense, but not any scientific sense. I wonder if this will prompt other countries to sue the US for things *it* didn't even do? It would be bad enough if they sued the US for things that it actually *did* -- just to take one of many examples, killing a million or so Iraqis on the basis of known lies. Obama just described the possible problem of the new bill as "It has to do with me not wanting a situation in which we're suddenly exposed to liabilities for all the work that we're doing all around the world". Ah yes, "all the work". Slaughtering 1 million humans *is* quite a bit of work (that one wasn't started by Obama, but he kept it going, while starting up new deadly 'work' all around the area in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen). Expensive, too. Do you think this is also "God's work", like what Goldman Sachs does?

[Sep30,'16] Today, like many other days, I find myself involuntarily 'filled with disgustion' (from an old Frank De Lima routine) as the human monkeys muscle their ridiculous 6000 pound single-driver SUV's around me on my bike up to the red light. But my involuntary scorn is truly unfounded. With respect to limits to growth, cycling is like unplugging one's cell phone charger. Won't make the slightest difference. I live in (rent) a standalone house, occasionally use our car, occasionally fly, and generally live a modern life. I am no less stoopid than the lady monkeys mindlessly accelerating their fifth-of-a-megawatt steel can SUVs. I cycle because it makes me feel better physically and keeps my limbic system balanced (because I temporarily experience being a prey item twice a day), and because it helps me suppress the cognitive dissonances that daily nag at my mind.

[Oct05,'16] "We’re going to be living in a different kind of country if people can be arrested for asking questions at a library." -- R. Crosby Kemper, director of Kansas City library system, commenting on our creeping police state. I suppose the questioner got off easy, given that police trainers are now creepily explaining to US police in training that the sex they have after they have killed another human being will be the best sex of their lives (from the "Do not resist" documentary). Some perk, eh? I guess telling them that more Viet Nam vets committed suicide than were killed in the war after they killed other humans is not as good an advertisement as 'better sex'. Despite its muckracking tone, the point of the Washington Post article may be merely to intimidate the public (further) and make the public realize that police really *are* that creepily dangerous, and that they essentially view the bottom 2/3 of the public as gooks or hajis (derogatory meaning) or Palestinians -- i.e., not completely human untermenschen.

[Oct11,'16] There are now $1 trillion (or $1.4 trillion, depending on how you count) dollars in student loans, which shot up from $0.1 trillion in just 2008 (just 8 years ago). That's a stunning slope of about $0.1 trillion dollars a year. This debt incurs a huge interest charge (4-7%). This means that the bankers and the government who have rented this money -- which was created out of thin air at virtually zero cost when the loan was made (see this PDF from the Bank of England which straightforwardly explains how this is done) -- are raking in almost a tenth of a trillion dollars a year from this. And they expect to be able to skim off this income for decades. These loans are typically non-bankruptcy loans that will unleash harpy swarms to go after the parents' assets when the students can't pay. This is an utterly unsustainable situation. There is no way that the loan and college 'industries' can continue to increase student debt at $0.1 trillion a year (10% per year!!) *and* expect that students will ever be able to pay the loan-shark money rent (remember, the Fed overnight rate is 0.4%) into the bulging pockets of the bankers. Wages aren't growing at all per year. Jobs aren't growing at all per year (except bartenders and Uber drivers). There are 93 million people of working age that aren't even in the workforce -- that is a larger number than the 74 million boomers or the 75 million millenials (N.B.: last two groups overlap with first). This isn't the way the universities used to work when I started. It was more affordable. There was more government support. Universities ran leaner operations. They had less administrative staff. Less (mostly female) students had to turn to prostitution. I am ashamed of what they have turned into. The money system (and the university system) should be reformed before the whole thing blows up. Unfortunately, the chance of significant monetary reform occurring in the near future seems small since this kind of 'growf' can probably go on for another decade (the interest payments are less than $0.1 trillion a year and US GDP is $18 trillion a year). It's just not at all on anybody's radar as they oogle the monkey crotch clown talk. Guess I should enjoy the best of the Weimar while I still can. The world crony 'capitalist' system is like a large, powerful toddler with no parents to rein it in, gorging itself while there is still stuff left in the earth's kitchen. We're all at fault -- *we* are the giant toddler.

[Oct12,'16] Randy Newman's latest embarrassing effort tries to fix the amazing fact that -- even in the face of a blizzard of anti-Russia propaganda from the yellow press -- Putin is more popular with *Americans* than either Hillary or Trump. Good luck with that!

[Oct18,'16] A presstitute talking dirty. This is how the shadow government gets cowardly journalists to strong-arm real journalists. The new McCarthyism is desperate to get people to look away from the "dirty talk" reality of the real government behind the curtain that you get a tiny glimpse of in those various emails. But the mighty Wurlitzer is pretty mighty, and (bookie) odds show that it has been able to refocus attention back onto the monkey crotch clown talk (but away from WJC's crotch, nuclear war, etc) and onto 'Russian vote tampering', which will send war-mistress neocon- and banker-friendly Hillary into the White House (N.B.: seems unlikely Trump would have ended up different in those respects -- at best, he suggested that we shouldn't antagonize Russia; but on Libya, when it counted in 2011, he said "I would take the oil —- and stop this baby stuff. I’m only interested in Libya if we take the oil."). This year's circus beats all previous! For example, see Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism who has a long article that essentially says that Hillary's 3 speeches to Goldman Sachs -- for which they paid her $675,000 -- are irrelevant, 'because they are boring'. He says "What can Goldman Sachs possibly have thought they were paying for?" Stunningly, Lambert pretends not to know. The sad thing about this spectacle is that probably no one even bothered talking dirty to Lambert. Any Trumped-up cracker could tell him: $675,000 is *not* boring, stoopid! (35% of all Americans have debt in collections), and *obviously* it wasn't for the speeches, dumbass! Their site is frigging "Naked Capitalism"! And it's even Naked Capitalism's fund raising week -- trying to raise (a boring) $21,000.

[Oct24,'16]
Older and Wiser I
     Out on a hike the other weekend, I began thinking about power down, the predicament the world is in, and whether it could have been avoided.
     So I did a quick review of my own life decisions. I was fully aware of limits to growth back in the early 1970's. Back then, in high school, I read about flywheel energy storage in Environment magazine, and the two-blade one-megawatt Grandpa Knob wind turbine, which was already running in 1941. I then studied geology in college, among many other things, including history and evolutionary biology. But I didn't learn much about petroleum geology, partly because I thought of oil companies as big and bad (they were/are). I also avoided studying economics and money. Both of these decisions were strategic mistakes (not because I want more money).
     In the 80's and 90's, I studied the visual system, got a job and tenure, and during that process more or less suppressed thoughts about limits to growth, despite an overriding unconscious dread that would sometimes bubble to the surface when I would write a small poem. Though I had the background to do it, I didn't do any research into limits to oil in the 80's and 90's. I didn't finally fully develop my initial 1970 awareness of oil limits until the buildup to the Iraq war in 2002, motivated by its oil angle. During this whole time, I would drive 12 miles one-way to work (well, at least it was in a small Honda). I would cycle on the weekends, but only for non-work-related exercise, and would rarely cycle into work (along a beautiful route, which I kicked myself later for not using more often, after I moved to London in 2007, where I cycled daily on crowded streets for almost a decade through the drizzly polluted air). It wasn't until 2004 that I finally stopped driving and started taking a shuttle into campus (cycling a few miles to the shuttle stop, which fixed my knees, blood pressure, and made me thinner).
     It's pretty clear that to have generated a different outcome today, we would have had to begun majorly re-engineering and re-planning just about everything about industrial civilization starting roughly around 1970. This is about the time that a fully modern appreciation of our basic predicament had became apparent, including energy, climate, soil, and the impossibility of continuous growth. But looking at my own intellectual history, I see that despite what I regard as all my optimal advantages -- generally cushy life, extreme left upbringing, early realization of the problem, no distraction of having to raise a family (despite my efforts in that direction), a very wide background in many scientific fields, and specific interest in the big picture (e.g., DNA and language) -- the *biggest* picture *still* didn't fully sink in to my conscious mind until about 2002, when I was already 47 years old.
     Now, I find myself making snide remarks about young people expecting to find 20 megawatt Iron Man 'power packs' growing on trees. Maybe I would never have stooped that low. But, in essence, I failed. I shouldn't expect other people to have done better.
     Probably nothing could have stopped the additional half a century of car-centric suburban build-out that occurred after 1970, which will probably be energetically impossible to undo, and which will likely come back to haunt us in another decade or two. Only a small percentage of people now have a comprehensive understanding of the interlocking problems of finite energy and freshwater/soil/food, how the money system works, how human populations with available resources grow just like animal populations, and finally, the imminent end of growth. Few are consciously aware of the severe gravity of our current situation, the result of growth taking off a few years before I was born. And I didn't even mention climate change, which won't hit hard until later this century, after the initial impact of limits to growth from declining net energy.
     On the positive side, it seems likely that even after the limits to growth really begin to bite in another decade, most people will remain unaware, and will simply do their best to make their way forward.

[Oct28,'16] Here is some utterly nonsensical blather from the recent Paris Agreement on climate change: "Accelerating, encouraging and enabling innovation is critical for an effective, long-term global response to climate change". This goes along with the pious talk about "internalizing externalities". What complete rubbish! It's pitifully obvious that the *only thing* that could possibly make a difference to our predicament would be: less people using less stuff and eating less meat. What is happening is exactly the opposite: more people, each using more stuff, each eating more meat (raising meat animals uses 20-30x as much water and energy per pound as eating the vegetables directly). Nobody can/will ever campaign on the platform of using less. And innovation, for example, to make vehicles more efficient simply results in people using them moar, cancelling the efficiency gain and then some. By far the most likely path forward will be to try to maintain worldwide business as usual for as long as possible. This means more people, using more stuff, eating more meat. However, since earth resources are finite, less people using less stuff eating less meat will eventually happen, by hook or by crook. Clive L. Spash here calls it 'the Paris agreement to ignore reality'. 70% of world wildlife was eliminated between 1970 and now, during worldwide business as usual. Worldwide business as usual will very probably continue for another decade plus. Trumpillory won't make much difference -- it's a silly, indulgent distraction (what's next? "Putin controls the FBI"?) from thinking deeply about the real problems. Thinking about what happens after business as usual breaks down (after about 2030), I always involuntarily channel Gary Larson's cartoon of a giant roach taking a shower -- when the drain plugs. The giant roach says: "I hate to think of what's down there" :-}

[Oct30,'16] From various short-term indicators of the kind the business press spends virtually all its time writing about (e.g., bonds yields, general cyclical trends, record increase in mergers, bubble property markets starting to top), it has been suggested that the next downturn is due soon, maybe around the beginning of 2018. Let's say that's right (I have no idea, but doesn't seem unreasonable to me -- I was expecting problems sooner, as usual). However, since oil use and oil production just have just now roughly come back into alignment, this suggests that there could be a substantial oil price spike in 2017. But if another 2008-like credit problem comes down the pike almost immediately after this, the spike wouldn't last as long as the pre-2008 spike or even as long as the smaller intermediate recovery after the post-2008 lows. Then we might be back to an 'oil glut' again for a few years (2019-2020). Not what I would have predicted even 2 years ago! Predicting the future is hard! If electric cars get a lot more popular than they are now, they could shave another one percent off of oil demand. That would be enough for another 'glut' even with more than 98% of people still using oil-powered carz (not to mention 100% of them getting their food via oil-powered trucks and ships). What a wacky way to run industrial civilization! When the inevitable serious downslope hits -- as a result of using 10 barrels while finding 1 barrel every year -- this will result in less-prepared people facing a steeper downslope. Gail Tverberg thinks that prices will only go down. Her reasoning, roughly, is that when oil prices are high, people begin to not be able to afford it. Then she looks at recent measures to fix the economic crisis. In general, they result in transferring more money (e.g., via poor people having to rent more money [debt] in order to be able to keep buying things) to rich people, and making it even harder for the bottom 99% to afford stuff, in order to continue growth. She suggests that declining EROEI is not as important as affordability and she expects oil prices to remain below levels that will fund new developments. In her favor, oil prices *have* remained lower for the last two years than a lot of people (myself included) expected. Two things that seem at odds with her view are the steady increase in vehicle miles driven that started right around the recent low oil prices (people do seem to abe able to afford more gasoline) and fact that low prices were driven by a tiny glut that would seem to be able to get used up quickly once the collapse in new drilling starts to percolate through the system in the face of the 98.5% of production that *does* get used every year. We will know by late 2017. At this point, I still expect higher oil prices.

[Oct31,'16] The long-standing mismatch this 2013 paper between both annual and cumulative curves of PhDs awarded and faculty positions created (which has persisted relatively unchanged from 1982 until near the present is pretty shocking. PhDs have continuously been created at roughly *7* times the rate of new faculty positions. The article suggests instead of preparing PhD students for faculty positions, they should instead be farmed out more quickly as initially unpaid or low-paid workers for "resource-constrained" companies, who are mostly interested in "better understanding customers, regulations and funding strategies". Such a different world than the one I entered as a beginning PhD student in 1978! It makes sense to have a slightly greater supply of PhD's (some people may bail, some may fail), but a ratio of 7:1 is clearly way too high -- and much higher than it was when I started.

[Nov01,'16] The relevance of the recent data dumps surrounding the activity formerly known as 'the election' is not so much their content, which mixes a few sordid bits amongst banal blather, but rather the demystification aspect. This is similar to Watergate, which itself was extremely unremarkable. After all, Nixon's successful efforts to kill half a million people in Vietnam and surrounding countries were unbelievably more horrible than his trivial Watergate caper. In the present case, seeing how sausage is actually made shouldn't truly be any kind of revelation for a normal adult, since they see the same thing that happening in their everyday jobs. But seeing that bland and occasionally tawdry talk that underpins reality (monkey crotch clown talk, accepting Saudi money to help fund jihadis for C-eye-eh purposes) in the context of the usual main sewer media idealizations has the potential to make some people think more analytically and objectively about things than they otherwise would have. It normalizes and validates the true conspiracies of real life. Finally, it's good to remember that whichever pathetic contraption gets elected after this 2-year-long emmerdement, the real-world (non-teevee, non-soundbite-window-decoration) outcome will not end up being very different! (remember 'peace-prize' Obamabush, remember Brexit).

[Nov08,'16] I hadn't seen these particular videos before (but a lot of other people obviously have!). This Boston Dynamics video is from way back in 2012 showing SandFlea, the jumping robot. It is followed by the creepier-looking RHex tough-terrain robot, and then the completely creepy RiSE, which can crawl up vertical walls and tree trunks. Only missing is the sex robot that does a strip tease followed by driving a metal stake through your heart. There is a certain inevitability to technological/military development. Science fiction writers got there almost a century ago. It's pretty clear that these things won't be good news for most humans. But like human population growth, the development, military deployment, and 'peacetime' deployment of robot technology won't be substantially impeded until the humans run low on energy. There is still a rather large amount of useable energy left. There are probably already small, armed flying robots currently undergoing testing that could easily kill an unsuspecting human. I can't imagine that a even a 'suspecting' human would be able to survive the onslaught of 10 or 20 such robots. We clearly need some laws to slow down the crazies before the world goes full retard. Go, lawyers! (that's a new one for me).
     Update 9 PM CA time: It looks like Brexit #2 is almost official (9 PM CA time). My city friends are appalled (once again) as they feel the angry glare of the people in the flyover states that receive transfer payments from the cities/coasts. On the positive side, it's important to remember that the US election is an enormous psychological operation that is mostly orthogonal to the actual operation of the government.

[Nov09,'16] As there was after the Brexit vote when we still lived in London, there is mournful feeling in the city air here after the election of President Di@k, esp. among so-called 'leftists'. I admit to schadenfreude seeing Charlie Rose commenting on the election, unable to conceal his pain and disgust. This is the same Charlie Rose who once cheerled Hillary's and Robert Ford's Libya-to-Syria 'Salavador option' -- that has utterly destroyed the lives of millions of people in Syria, after the destruction of the lives of millions of people in Libya, another Hillary project. Charlie cheerled when it counted, in 2012 and 2013, when he was catapulting the chemical weapons hoax propaganda. In 2013, Charlie Rose asked Assad about the faked chemical weapons attack "Do you have some remorse for those bodies, those people that is said to be up to at least a thousand or perhaps 1,400 who were in Eastern Ghouta who died". For shame, Charlie, for this 'incubator babies' stunt. A few years later, he gets Trump to 'admit' that Trump agrees with the 'new' Obama that the US weapons are 'now' going to the 'wrong people'. Wrong people my ass; that was the (publicly stated!) plan from the beginning! There is also a mournful feeling in the UK/EU, which was much more lopsidedly in favor of Clinton. That is a sight to behold, given that loose cannon Trump says he is anti-NATO and wants to cooperate with Russia, which would be the best thing that could happen to the UK/EU -- to get the US out of meddling, compromising EU natural gas supplies, messing up EU contracts/business with sanctions, arranging the Nuland 'fuck the EU' Ukrainian coup, creating a blizzard of refugees, installing US-controlled missile batteries in Romania and Poland (compare if Russia installed missiles in Mexico and Canada), and generally economically and politically sabotaging their so-called 'allies'/lapdogs. I would be surprised if any of that actually happens, tho. Aside from the pain of occasionally having to hear the voice and see the face of President D**k, I still think it is unlikely that Trumpillory will make much difference in the end. When Trump begins appointing people, in a few months, we will soon find out (as we did with Obama, when he immediately re-appointed Bush's bankers) if there will be any change at all in the course of the ship of deep state, after the effects of this working class let-off-some-steam FU wears off. The business cycle is the business cycle, and there probably would have been a crash in 2018 no matter what. The pentagon and the c-eye-eh and enn-es-ay will still be bombing, fomenting, and surveilling. Google and Uber will be googling and ubering billions of things just like they were before. Automation will continue to worm its way uninvited into all walks of life (DDOS attacks from 'smart' lightbulbs). Couples will still pitifully both look down at and caress their iPhones and have their second-to-second thoughts controlled by social media programs, all while they are having an 'intimate' dinner out 'together'. The Terminator-i-zation of society will continue. The amount of remaining oil and coal and fresh water and lithium has not changed. The world will continue to burn 1000 barrels of oil per *second* for the time being. The civilian labor force participation rate peaked in the 90's and has been in decline since then. There is no way that outsourcing can practically be undone. It took almost three full decades to achieve, it would take decades to reverse, it would require overthrowing multinational corporations that care nothing for people in individual countries, and it would require dropping US wages to 25% of what they are now. So, just relieve the video and audio pain (and indigestion) by just not using the teevee/video/audio! Just read instead :-}

[Nov10,'16] It took exactly one day to see that probably not too much will change. The proposals for Trump's cabinet are the exact same corrupt bankers and neocons and Iraq war architects and defense contractors we've had under Bush and Obama! Bring on the snark! It's unfortunate that most flyover guys won't even know what a neocon is :-Q The election was pure theatre -- two *years* of hate, when Orwell could only imagine two minutes! Hopey Changey is now on the US's other foot. Sorry zerohedge shut-ins, your swamp has already been refilled (well, it was too much work so they ended up deciding not to drain). Barely an hour of getting to watch Hillary's supporters cry and then you get smacked upside the head with Giuliani, fatty Christie, the Bolton thing, and some Goldman back bencher! I feel your pain. But at least torture will be brought back (though I somehow missed when they took it away?). OK, must rein in the snark, because there I just did exactly what I'm about to criticise people for doing (but it felt good). Scott Creighton has a great piece here: "You are at war with the wrong enemy and that is by design". Here are some critical graphs that people should be talking about instead: the civilian labor force participation rate, which has basically been on a downslope since about 1996, and the employment-to-population ratio, which has only made up 1/4 of the unprecedented-in-almost-a-century spike downward in 2008-2009. More robots won't fix this. More consumer debt won't fix this (it's at record levels, incl $1+ trillion college loan debt). Both of these graphs could be set up for another big fall around 2018 (look at the spacing of the previous gray/recession zones). Outsourcing and worldwide wage arbitrage begun in earnest in the 80's and 90's caused this slow decline. Even more secret free trade agreements won't fix this. Obama didn't fix this (how could he have?). Hillary wouldn't have fixed this. Skate-boarding on the 101 freeway against mein trumpf won't fix this. Trump won't/can't fix this! People ought to suppress their inner primate and start talking about the real stuff (energy, food, fish, population, fresh water, climate chaos their kids will have to face) before things go full monkey retard! Though I am dubious about Paul Craig Roberts' idea that Trump will have a positive effect on foreign policy or banking or somehow be a challenge to the deep state, I did have to laugh at the title of his most recent article: "Progressives find 'white trash' more threatening than nuclear war". More my speed is Linh Dinh's quick summary here.

[Nov11,'16] "The latest neocon/liberal-hawk scheme is for the U.S. population to risk nuclear war to protect corrupt politicians in Ukraine and Al Qaeda terrorists in east Aleppo, two rather dubious reasons to end life on the planet." -- Robert Parry. The washington post C-eye-eh outlet reports that one day after the election, Obama is supposedly cleaning Nusra house because Hillary is gone. The election of preznit Di@k ends up having a positive effect on the lives of people in other countries?! But, given that Trump has a neocon VP, now just appointed head of his transition team, has just talked up that neocon cockroach Bolton (outed in 2005 by the late Larry Flynt!), and still has to deal with the somewhat autonomous pentagon/intelligence agencies, it is premature to think that this indicates that the necons crazies are being reined in. It's just one small report amongst the usual daily blizzard of disinfo, which includes 'reporting' on what Trump is planning. I am remembering back to the inauguration of Obama in 2008 when the Izzy's phosphorus-bombed Gaza and we got to watch Obama sit obediently silent. The most likely reality today is that, as Linh Dinh just wrote, Trump is simply an Obama for a different demographic. As John Steppling just said, "the big mistake of liberals was to think Trump was bringing fascism, without realizing fascism was already here". Here is a cartoon (upper right) from a local Mexican paper (PDF) for an international view :-} Now that Soros-funded Pussy Riot has finally weighed in, it's an official US color revolution!

[Nov13,'16]
Trump climate hoax
     Trump says he thinks climate change is a hoax and he supposedly wants to ditch the Paris Climate Accord (we'll see what actually happens). Any high school science educated person can easily verify that climate change is not a hoax (doesn't explain Euan Mearns). And many 'leftists' are therefore righteously upset about 'how dare he?'. Michael Mann says "A Trump presidency might be game over for the climate. It might make it impossible to stabilize planetary warming below dangerous levels."
     The problem is that, unfortunately, the Paris Climate Accord is itself a complete hoax, along with all the previous accords. All the accords haven't made even the tiniest of dents in the *rate of increase* in CO2 emissions. They are nothing more than window dressing. In fact, partly driven by slightly higher average temperatures, which drives up the rate of bacterial metabolism, the *rate of increase* of CO2 has actually *gone up*! Making outsourced solar panels in China using low quality coal (i.e., which generates a lot more CO2), and then shipping them halfway around the world to decorate yuppie roofs using bunker oil (the dirty diesel that powers outsourcing, and worldwide 'free trade') is not green, and actually generates almost as much CO2 as directly burning higher quality fossil fuel more expertly, locally, even when you factor in the energy you get back from these grid-tied panels. Remember, the panels don't obviate fossil fuel since there have to be fossil fuel peaker plants (N.B.: which use fuel less efficiently than base load plants) that can *fully* drive the grid when it is dark and not windy. The panels reduce the amount of fossil fuel needed at the plants, but use more fossil fuel elsewhere (incl for grid upgrades when the panel input gets substantial). Just because the CO2 was excreted in China doesn't mean it doesn't count.
     It's not clear to me that denying climate change is morally worse than accepting climage change and then doing nothing about it -- such as climate-change-accepting 'leftists' who continue to partake of modern industrial civilization. Though I think of myself as especially enlightened (who doesn't? :-} ) and ultra-extreme-left, I have no illusions about my carbon footprint -- it's a lot bigger (as in 10-20x bigger) than somebody living in a rural village in India. I am partaking of the fruits of industrial civilization, even though I cycle to work, try not to fly too much, and have been eating less meat lately. If Hillary had been elected, all the 'leftists' wouldn't have complained, and would have gone on generating exactly as much CO2 as they will with Trump as preznit. Whether or not there is a Paris Climate Accord will have little effect on how much CO2 we all generate.
     An example of something that *does* affect how much CO2 we generate is gasoline prices; lower gasoline prices over the past year and a half have immediately stimulated Americans to buy bigger-engine cars and drive them more miles per year (it wasn't just Trump supporters). Because increases in efficiency have been completely used up by increasing the size of 'cars', current fuel economy is *the same* as the fuel economy of a 100-year-old Model T (about 25 miles/gallon). It *is* true that climate change deniers are more stoopid than those who accept the obvious reality of climate change. But for better or worse, that doesn't necessarily make them more morally culpable. Knowing about climate change and effectively doing nothing is pretty bad, too.
     Now if everybody in the US dropped everything and installed full roof panels, didn't tie them to the grid, bought a small plug-in electric car (or better, a small electric cart), got a job closer to home, didn't ever go on long road trips, bought a bunch of large batteries to power their refrigerator after dark, and stopped flying and eating meat, then perhaps that *fossil fuel energy* investment (all those 'renewable' things are directly made from fossil fuel!), would eventually reach break even in the CO2 department, maybe a decade or two down the line -- and then the yearly increase in CO2 could begin to slightly slow a decade from now. CO2 levels would still be increasing, however, esp. as other countries continue to modernize, even in a so-called 'green' way.
     However, it seems unlikely that the average American, who has a median income of $50K, could even vaguely *afford* to do something like this now (much less *want* to do it, since it would be a downgrade, after spending a lot of money they didn't have); it seems unlikely they will want to do it a decade from now, Paris accord or no Paris accord. And that doesn't include the 95 million Americans of working age who are 'not in the work force'. Rural villagers in India are not going to be able to afford to do this either. They are going to try to save up to buy their first car.
     Talking down Trump, as satisfying as it might be, is just a way of avoiding talking about inconvenient reality, which is that there is no 'drop in', non-fossil-fuel, non-CO2-emitting replacement energy source to feed, water, power, and make concrete for the 7 billion people currently on the planet and the two California's of new people being added every year. Talking down Trump serves the same function as when the right pretends that there are no energy supply or climate problems -- neither address the elephant in the room. As Gavin Schmidt said, "planetary warming doesn't care about the election".

[Nov17,'16] The four biggest long term problems we need to face are: (1) the net energy supply for building/powering/maintaining/feeding/watering industrial civilization is flattening and will begin to decline in one to two decades, (2) the world economic/money system is not designed for steady state, much less contraction, and is likely to become (substantially more) unstable in one to two decades as debt increases and asymptoting interest rates reach the bumpy plateau of zero, (3) climate change 'baked-in' by increasing levels of long-lived CO2 will begin to hit hard in three to four decades, (4) population is still increasing at the rate of more than one entire UK every year, probably for at least three more decades (i.e., *40* more UK's worth of people, houses, roads, cars, food, water, concrete in three decades, and the continued destruction of the animals/plants/soil/water that that entails). The 'right' ignores 1, 2, and 3, and obliquely acknowledges 4 with anti-immigrant-ism. The 'left' ignores 1, 2, and 4, and thinks 3 will hit first (I still think that 1 and 2, ignored by most official 'left' and 'right' people, will hit hard before 3). It would be worth having adult discussions about 1 to 4 rather than the utter nonsense that fills the air these days. On days like this, I am beginning to doubt that these problems -- the *four* obvious elephants in the room -- will *ever* be publicly acknowledged! Instead, people on both sides can't get enough of the stupid, irrelevant, "it's over, man" election -- with record low turnout, in which the winner got less votes than last time's loser, in which voters strongly disliked both candidates, and which was won by the tiniest of *statistically insignificant* margins! (anybody claiming to be able to have been able to have correctly predicted such a close outcome, esp. considering the non-linearities inherent in the stupid electoral college, is an idiot). The deep state banking/corporate/military apparatus running the government hasn't changed! The election is not our main problem! This worried rant describing how the left needs to reach out to the flyovers, just linked to by the archdruid as insightful, doesn't even *mention* any of these four, giant staring-us-in-the-face problems! Prostrating the whining left to a bunch of crackers won't fix any of the problems! Producing iPhones domestically by dropping US wages to Chinese levels? Keeping wages the same and tripling the cost of an iPhone? Both seem unlikely. Energy-intensive computer-based automation, AKA 'progress' is not going to fix the problems -- it's going to get kicked in the @ss by number 1! (I think the archdruid would agree on this point).

[Nov20,'16] As I expected, Trump's actual appointments so far are 'full swamp': Michael Flynn (WJC Haiti guy, Bush/Obama Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria war and Salavador Option guy), Jeff Sessions, Mike Pompeo (Monsanto, oil industry shill, anti-Iran), Steve Bannon (Goldman Sachs, neocon, propagandist with David Horowitz), VP Pence (neocon). The Times of Israel reports that Trump is is getting advice from Kissinger, the original creature from the black lagoon! Despite all the distracting noise from so-called 'left' and so-called 'right', not much will change. Not better or worse than Obama -- the same, which is depressing. A positive change so far seems to be less baiting of nuclear-armed Russia and somewhat less support for ISIS/al-qaeda in Syria (but note the recent scrambling Swiss F-18 fighter jets around Russian presidential plane). For a deeper assessment, see this excellent comment that somehow leaked through the PC filter at naked capitalism.

[Nov21,'16] I got asked my opinion about a web re-report of the recent 'discovery' of 20 gigabarrels of oil in north Texas. I sent back my usual, grumpy-old-guy caveats. I said, it's unclear how much of that oil is actually decently net energy positive until they actually start drilling/fracking. These articles never put things into proper context (US-ians use 7 gigabarrels a year, this 'giant' find -- assuming the ridiculous hype is true -- is not even a full 3-year supply. And what about the 8 gigabarrels 'found' in Brazil in 2007 that was supposed to turn Brazil into a powerhouse oil exporter? Instead, in 2015, the Brazil oil company bonds were marked down to junk; the initial annoucement was mostly hype. I noted, we are currently burning 1000 barrels a second but only discovering about 130 barrels a second, and that this reminded me of the sorry spectacle of acquifers being pumped down at 5-10 times their replenishment rate (US/Ogallala, India, China, etc). But still, it is very hard to suppress the religious feeling that tech will soon discover Iron Man power packs filled with Lost-In-Space 'deutronium', because progress *must* happen, because we really *need* it to happen. Even I feel this.
     Then -- while continuing avoiding work :-} -- I skimmed chapter 1 and chapter 2 of old-guy Daniel Kripke's ebook on the (non)effectiveness of sleeping pills. These are mostly benzodiazepine or shorter acting/cleared drugs with similar target effects (zolpidem). In the second link/chapter, even though measurements (and family member reports) showed that the sleeping pills were actually making things worse for the person than the placebo, the users thought the drugs were helping more than the placebo. The scenario is utterly typical for intervention in a complex feedback system -- if you strongly jack up one node (GABA-A receptor channels), you will have an immediate 'good' effect (you will get sleepy). But before long (in just a week or two of steady intake), the multiple neurobiological feedback systems will 'fix' this destablization, and the long-term sleepiness effect will soon be mostly cancelled. But now, the person will find they can no longer sleep without the pills. Maybe OK to take very occasionally, but a catastrophe when used regularly. Among other things, regular intake significantly increases your chance of death (by 4x!), and causes depression.
     My first reaction in thinking about the history of this was, people must have started out trying to do the right thing, that is, start with alcohol, which affects the GABA-A receptor, make barbiturates that do the same thing, then engineer a shorter-acting version of the same thing, then finally, discover that it doesn't really work, the way that drinking enough alcohol before bed to make you sleepy every night doesn't work in the long run. But in thinking through *why* people think the pills work even when, objectively, they don't, it seems obvious that the drug developers knew this would be the case, from the very beginning. By analogy with alcohol -- some short-term effects will remain, even when one is drinking too much on a regular basis, and second, it will be hard to stop, even though it is impairing daytime 'life performance'. These features, of course, make a fanstastic long-term business case for selling these drugs, which are now taken by perhaps 10% of the US population!
     But how is this related to the north Texas 'discovery'? In going back to the cornucopian view of energy (high tech fracking will save the day), it's really just another version of thinking that hi tech fast kinetics GABA-A channel drugs will save the day; and like that other case, a little common sense and knowledge of the human experience and history says say otherwise. In the sleeping pill case, all the humans involved -- drug companies, doctors, patients, family members -- collaborated to generate this bad outcome. I sound like a grumpy old man. Actually, I'm just a former young man who is now somewhat grumpy to find out that the distilled, seemingly simple, common sense knowledge of other older humans (e.g., don't overrun your resources, calm yourself down before going to sleep, be suspicious of too-good-to-be-true tech) was right after all.

[Nov27,'16] Trump just hired Betsy DeVos, the 5-billionaire sister of Erik Prince (Blackwater/Xie/etc) who married into the Amway fortune, to run the dept of 'education'. Tastes pretty swampy, trumpettes. Mike Whitney has a good summary of Trump's almost instantaneous jump 'back into' the swamp here, which assumes Trump ever left it. The 'make rich people great' plan basically boils down to: (1) tax cuts for rich people (this will be called a 'middle class' tax cut), and (2) tax cuts for large corporations (this will be called 'building infrastructure' and repatriating 'offshore' cash plans). Giving (even more) money to rich people and multinational corporations will not help with the basic reason growth will never be able to shoot back up, which is declining world net energy. I suppose the richies are not worried about pitchforks manned by trumpettes because the trumpettes loved it the last time they got sheared by trickle down under Reagan (they even fondly reminisce about it!). Stunningly, American's (esp. republican's) economic confidence has risen to a record high. However, we are in a very different situation than with Reagan's first term. Giant tax cuts and giant deficit increases are not a sure thing in an environment of rising interest rates (bond losses) and record debt (tho there is still a way to go to get to Japan/EU/UK/China debt levels). I don't think that Obamacare, such as it is (a sop to insurance companies copied from Romney vs. a single payer system like Medicare) can even itself be gutted -- the insurance companies will complain. The fascist fun fest will run for another one to two decades through one or two more business cycles; but eventually, it will come to an unhappy end when net energy starts to severely plummet around 2030 and worldwide contraction begins in earnest *and* climate change starts to bite. I don't think it will be the end of the world -- just the official recognition of the beginning of a more difficult, contentious, warmer, but above all, a much lower-energy world.

[Nov29,'16] The Stein recount thing was just weird, condemned by the Green Party itself. Though at first a little Arab-Spring-y, it quickly became obvious that it was hopeless from the beginning, given the basic numbers. Why bother in the first place? To destroy the greens? (they were hardly a threat!). Maybe just raising money? (more raised for the recount than for her entire election 'bid'). Today it was also announced that Goldman Sachs will likely remain in the driver's seat (new Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin). The first comment at zerohedge was, "I wonder how many Trump supporters will now admit to buyer's remorse". Meet the new swampboss -- same as the old swampboss. The post-Trump bond interest rate spike (up 0.5%, a 20% increase) seems to have stablized over the past two weeks, for whatever reason.

[Dec04,'16] Grope and change. Yet more of the swamp has been drained -- oops, right into the white house. Trickle down will work this time for sure, Trump snowflakes -- plus you'll get a Trump world wide wrestling muppet-shearing thank-you tour, at which you can cheer wildly! William Engdahl suggests here that the trumpen horse is a scheme to sabotage the Russia-China alliance by seeming to ally with the weaker (Russia) to isolate the stronger (China), and to start a new big war on Iran (Flynn and Ledeen). The recent call to Taiwan by Trump made after Engdahl's article was written does fit into this picture. The Saker hopes Engdahl is wrong, pointing out that attacking Iran and befriending Russia would be incompatible.

[Dec07,'16] The part of the stock market that is going crazily up (the so-called Trump rally, which isn't really that) are financial stocks and energy stocks. What an insane detachment from reality as I usually think of it! The parasitical financial sector has helped increase debt to record levels, while the energy sector is at peak oil, with 1 barrel found for 7 used this year, and tight oil drillers still deep in debt trying to pay it off by selling into a glutted market. A common sense assessment suggests that these stock valuations -- and the accompanying 11-year high in consumer confidence -- are not rational. My common sense suggests they could fall back to earth suddenly. But these things always have a habit of floating in mid-air like Wile E. Coyote for much longer than you ever expect them to! The market and consumer confidence are definitely not rocket science -- where gravity is never suspended.

[Dec08,'16] Panicky Dallas police withdrew almost half of the liquid assets from their pension fund as lump sum payments ($0.5 billion withdrawn, leaving only $0.73 billion liquid assets) over the past several months. The lump sum withdrawals were suspended today to avoid the fund becoming insolvent. Clearly, this is Putin's fault. But seriously, this is the fault of bailing out banks by running interest rates to zero, which is rapidly bankrupting pension funds. The simple result is that huge amounts of money have been and will continue to be transferred to the idle rich unless there is real push back. You can't push back using a$$book.

[Dec12,'16] After updating the vote counts, it looks like Clinton won the popular vote by a full 2% (2.5 million votes), and will likely have gotten as many votes (66 million) as Obama did for his second term (N.B.: several million less than Obama got in his first term). A 2% margin is pretty statistically significant, contrary to what I said a few weeks ago. The archaic electoral college system is certainly stoopid. But this doesn't change the fact that the elections remain almost completely irrelevant distractions. The Trump snowflakes have been quiet about the farcical cabinet nominations of same-old billionaires, Goldmanites, and generals, which reads like an article from The Onion. I feel their pain. Yesterday, the cesspool of nominations was joined by the Bolton-perv-swamp-thing (eeeeeww!). Bait and switch -- 'hope and change' for a different demographic. As with Obama and the left, the Trump snowflakes will keep their lips respectfully zipped about him, by design, enraged only at Democrats, even after having watched their man instantaneously backtrack on the faux populism that they just voted for a few weeks before. The nutso "Russian hacking" conspiracy theory based on no evidence amazes me. The Democrat's problem was *not* Russia; their lousy right-wing candidate was! The Democrats appear to be committing hara kiri, right when they could be powerfully rallying their forces! I suppose this could be some kind of neocon/CIA vs. FBI/NSA/military 'deep state' dispute as some have suggested, tho the behind-the-scenes guys aren't usually so unruly, and the Trumpen horse hardly seems capable of the feats of strength that would be required by faction 2.

[Dec15,'16] The Fed has "raised interest rates" a tiny bit in what almost looks like a response to the bond market crash (=bond/mortgage interest rate increase). This could be partly the result of Chinese selling Treasuries to stop the yuan from falling further; but that started happening before the current jump up, which is closely correlated with the election result. Despite endlessly writing about it, I still have difficulty fully understanding the mechanics of what is actually being done by the Fed. My vague understanding was that the Fed interest rate was defined for money generated out of the void for overnight loans to a small set of the largest banks in the world, which then pay interest to the Fed. But this Fed text seems to describe a different method where the Fed undertakes "open market operations as necessary to maintain the federal funds rate in a target range of 0.5 to 0.75 percent, including overnight reverse repurchase operations (ON RRPs) at an offering rate of 0.50 percent". The sentences after that are hard for me to understand. The overnight reverse repurchase operations (reverse repos) are where the *Fed* gets a loan from a large bank by the Fed "pawning" some its assets (the misnamed 'Fed' itself being a privately owned central bank) to large banks (the Fed needs cash?!), so that the large banks can get interest payments *from* the Fed. I tried to describe/understand what is actually happening here as a method of banks being able to show that they had assets (the 'guitars and jewels' the Fed temporarily gave them). I suppose the reverse repo business is the logical reverse of the banks taking out a loan from the Fed and therefore can also serve as as control lever. This is described in the Wall Street Journal as different from the old mechanism where "the Fed controlled the fed-funds rate by buying or selling U.S. Treasuries, adding or draining the total amount of reserves in the banking system." The reason for the 'new mechanism' is said to be that huge excess reserves (see the gigantic increase in the BASE money supply coincident with the same-scale giant increase in Federal Reserve Bank assets graphed here that began in 2008) have made it "harder to control the fed-funds rate the old way". The gigantic amount of excess reserves are not being loaned out to people; rather they have all been deposited back with the Fed, which then pays big banks interest on them (!) -- which I think is a separate source of big bank income from the reverse repo 'mechanism'. I still don't quite have a solid intuitive grip on these most basic and central money mechanisms, or how regulating the amount of from-the-void money given to banks necessarily controls the interest rate!

[Dec16,'16] I have hardly listened to US National Public Radio for the past two decades. Listening again today was a jarring experience of an alternate reality fully as weird as the experience I get when I very occasionally watch a block of regular US teevee. The unquestioned background assumptions behind a discussion on how 'facebook needs to help us mark fake news, or sort it off the bottom of the list' made my jaw drop -- namely, that many people actually get their 'news' via facebook, and that facebook is considered a good source of one's mental hygiene (I know you're thinking, 'where have you been, dude?'). Then it was onto saving the children of Aleppo, dealing with Russian hacking, and looking forward to blizzards of drones delivering amazon packages (including intercontinental, whatever). When it comes to roughly understanding the technology of how these NPR reports are written and delivered and transmitted, or understanding roughly how a person's car and the hundreds of computers and programs in it efficiently carries them along the road, there is only one reality. But what was so disturbing to me was the contrast between my rough understanding of the true reality of 'the children of Aleppo' or 'Russian hacking' or 'Amazon package drones', and the alternate nonsense mental pictures transmitted via real radio waves into the real car. It's weird that people living in an alternate reality nevertheless participate in a system that constructs real things that respect real world constraints. Imagine that food was grown using methods analogous to those of NPR 'news'. We'd all quickly starve. May the real diesel trucks that keep the just-in-time shelves stocked every 3 days continue to run in the real, non-NPR world!

[Dec29,'16] I have often heard from the supposed US 'left' that Putin, together with the evil oil companies are conspiring to prevent cheap renewable energy from replacing fossil fuels. These are people that heat and air-condition their homes with fossil fuel, fly in airplanes powered by kerosine, drive to work using gasoline (except for the less than 1% who have electric cars, and anyway, those guys' batteries are charged using coal or natural gas if they charge at night), eat food grown using fertilizer made from fossil fuel (methane reformation), then planted/watered/harvested and shipped and trucked to stores with fossil fuel, and who use devices (e.g., cell phones, rooftop solar) made in China from coal, shipped to them in container ships using bunker fuel to a port, then offloaded onto diesel trains and trucks, and then finally onto gasoline trucks, and who surf the internet 24/7 using servers powered entirely by coal, methane, and nuclear after dark. Let's do a quick sanity check on trucks. About 67% of freight tonnage in the US goes on trucks covering about 0.4 trillion miles per year. Recently, an electric truck that can carry a full 60,000 pound cargo container has been investigated for use at the Long Beach port. It goes up to 10 mph and has a 30-60 mile range, which is sufficient for local purposes. By contrast, a long distance truck typically carries 1,500 to 2,500 pounds of diesel fuel. Lithium batteries are at best 1/25 the energy density of 25%-efficient diesel. This means that a drop-in long-distance lithium truck battery pack will weigh nearly 1/2 to 3/4 the entire gross weight of the truck, which in the US is 80,000 pounds. Obviously, this would reduce the payload. This is not to denigrate shorter range electric delivery vehicles, which are certainly part of the future -- but a future that must look different than the present. These physical considerations have very little to do with Putin or evil oil companies (I'm not saying oil companies *aren't* evil). Solar electric and wind are not drop in replacements for our current on-demand, just-in-time way of life. Electing a different person can't change basic physical considerations. It's fine to 'blame Trump'; but to a large extent, this seems to me to merely be a way of avoiding talking frankly about (or even mentioning!) the wrenching changes about to overtake industrial civilization as net energy begins to decline over the next two decades. [Update: Dec 31: excellent presentation on the big picture with a positive ending by Chris Martenson here.]

[Dec31,'16] Looking at other instances where ethnic tensions have recently been exploited by the US neocons and their NATO lapdogs to draw and quarter societies (e.g., former Serbian republic, Iraq Sunni/Shia, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen), it is disconcerting to say the least to see similar strains being played up in the US itself (by both 'right' *and* 'left'!). Violent human primate ethnic identity politics is a dangerous, powerful, and ever-charged battery for social change. It's best to look behind the curtain at who is trying to draw upon this putrid reserve of violent human primate potential energy, which once in full bloom, is exceedingly difficult to bottle back up. For a positive finish, here is an uplifting talk by Douglas Rushkoff. He doesn't mention energy; but, it made me feel briefly happier about being a human :-}

[Jan15,'17] Amazon's Echo/Alexa is a high quality listening and semantic interpretation device -- a post-Orwellian intelligent bug -- that people can voluntarily install in their own homes. There is still a bit of a 'creep factor' when a news item appears on these devices (e.g., recent story about a court case trying to get access to the Amazon Echo recordings). But unfortunately, the 'creep factor' is declining. Modern teevees not only listen but also often stream video of you off to corporations, and instead of being creeped out, people instead make fun of sensible people who put tape over the cameras! (it's harder to find the microphones). As the internet of things begins to penetrate everybody's extrapersonal space even more completely, there will be trash cans and refrigerators with video -- all networked. *Other* people's cell phones are already beginning to recognize *your* face. The refrigerator or garbage can will be able to tell one of your networked light bulbs to turn itself on so they can see better. All of this is supposedly to 'help' you, for example, because you are so stoopid/mentally disabled that you are no longer competent to manage your own refrigerator, since there are so many other more important things to do than paying attention to what you eat (/snark). Of course, the internet of things is actually a way of helping large corporations make more money, so that the 8 men who own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world http://planetfreewill.com/2017/01/16/8-richest-men-have-as-much-wealth-as-poorest-half-of-the-world-davos-elites-address-populism/ can increase their ridiculous piggy share (about $0.4 trillion) even moar (not to mention the Roths child family, who somehow didn't even make that list despite owning maybe 5 times as much wealth (~$2 trillion, about as much wealth as the bottom *three-quarters* of all living humans!). Clearly, the most sensible thing to do would simply be to avoid installing and using these infernal surveillance devices. It's ridiculous to think that you need to have your 'refrigerator', AKA artificial intelligence programs at a few gigantic corporations, keeping track of your diet. The giant corporations *don't* have your body's best interest in mind! The weaponized food they created is a good part of the reason that 70% of Americans are overweight, with some teenagers needing transplants for their fatty livers, which look like they came out of a ne'er-do-well alcoholic kid of a billionaire. No doubt, we will soon be treated to 'news' stories of how the smart garbage can called in the SWAT team to stop a burgler, oh, and by the way, be sure not to change your hair style before throwing out your garbage... Just keep that shite out of your house! Don't become reliant on those devices!

[Jan18,'17] I listened to National Public Radio again for a half an hour (pussyhats, Rick Perry stumbling through his scripts, what small business owners and insurance companies think of the utterly undefined replacement for Obama/Romney care, how a rainy month impacts California's water conservation rules, can't get rid of the DOE, oops, because it actually mainly does nuclear weapons and nuclear waste cleanup, how Steve Mnuchin foreclosed on an 80 year old couple's house then sold his company share for nearly $1 billion dollars, why Guantanamo has to stay open because "we are still at war", an advertisement from a company to assist you with your international finance needs, Will and Grace is back). The alternate reality that the NPR stream was designed to conjure in my head barely held together, like bad Halloween make-up. I don't know what the FecesBook alternate reality stream smells like these days; probably a different feel for different demographic. Surely pussyhats and cosplay, but maybe less Steve Mnuchin? I wasn't motivated to say anything out loud so a cacophony of angry inner speech merely bounced around in my head. I then read a story on the internet about how a minor cold snap in Charlotte, North Carolina (some ice and snow 11 days ago) caused people to rush to Walmart and completely empty the just-in-time shelves, which didn't set my mind at peace, but made me think about the function of opiates for the masses. Let NPR sing, and let another day of productive work begin! It is difficult to look out upon the world as it actually is these days without feeling schizophrenic. But the fake news disinfo blizzard from NPR is just water off the oily duck's back of my mind's eye :-}

[Jan22,'17] [Jan22,'17] The turnout in the anti-Trump womens' marches was huge :-}. Just as the 'left' was blind to the fact that Obama was *the same as Bush* (same banker criminals, extend existing wars, add even more wars, with direct Syria attack (as opposed to just hiring al-Qaeda) only blocked by the British lapdogs (!), more assassinations/drones, more surveillance, a 'health insurance' plan from Romney), the 'right' will be blind to the "government Sachs" of Trump -- and moreover, they will just shut up, just like the 'left' did for 8 years of Obamabush. Even now, I hear that the good Obama was prevented from doing all the good things he wanted to do. The 'right' will similarly 'reserve judgement' for Trump's whole term (if he doesn't quit), and then afterward, just like the 'left' did. Republicans now control the house, senate, and preznit. There could easily be some kind of economic contraction toward the end of 2017 or early 2018, precipitated by tiny interest rate normalization, or an EU bank/derivative blow-up, more EU uncertainty if Dutch/French populists are elected, or a moderate oil price spike if the 0.5% oil 'glut' gets a little close to 0.0%, or Saudi getting color-revolutioned, or all of the above. The deplorables are going to get tarred with it big time, even though they did nothing to cause it. Nobody will mention criminal bankers and how most money is created by banks, not the Fed.

[Jan22b,'17] Trump, introducing Mike Pompeo (Trump CIA head nominee) at the CIA on Jan 21: "Now I said it for economic reasons, but if you think about it, Mike, if we kept the oil, you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place, so we should have kept the oil. But, OK, *maybe we’ll have another chance*". This is a little like listening to an Alzheimer's patient when the frontal control and filtering system starts to break down. Yee-haw. In the immortal words of Frank Zappa, "Politics is the entertainment branch of industry".

[Jan23,'17] The fiercely polarized, almost 50:50, partition of the US between the working class -- some of whom regard Trump as the last 'great white hope' -- and the usually better-educated, sometimes better-paid people who voted for Hillary, many while holding their noses -- must have the deep state laughing their @sses off at this latest successful divide-and-conquer. The problem is truly not rayciss, low-paid Trump crackers or politically correct Hillary snowflakes (some of whom are equally low-paid -- e.g., bartenders with college degress). The problem is that both Hillary and Trump supporters are not able to see that the real problem is the final, forceful merging of government, global corporations, and global banks in utterly unfettered world dominance, in order to finish the strip mining of the entire earth for the benefit of a few ultra-super-rich men. Both 'left' and 'right' seem to be stumbling toward fascism in unison! (e.g., McCarthyite anti-Russia rhetoric on the left, block traffic and you will die Indiana bill on the right). The Trump supporters cheer when a $3.7 billionaire with roughly 20,000 times as much wealth as the median wealth of a 60-75 year old American (maybe 50,000 times as much as the wealth of a median Trump supporter) tells them they have been cheated, and that he is going to do something about it, because he wears a baseball cap, so that make him 'one of them'. We have exceeded 1929-style wealth disparity, except that now we have used up all the easy energy that was still there, ready to begin to be exploited in 1929 -- and we now have 7 billion people to feed instead of 2 billion. The Roths childs' family fortune is now equivalent to the combined wealth of the bottom 75% of all humans (5.25 billion people). There is still a supply of reasonably net-energy-positive energy to continue running that global strip-mining operation for the next decade or so. When net energy starts to drop more catastrophically in about 15 years, the ultra-super-rich will do their best to hide in their armoured compounds from the occasional roving starving band. Maybe a few, more visible, less ultra-super-rich richies will get Mussolini'd. Our problem isn't *just* sociopathic ultra-super-richies at the pinnacle of the global banking/capitalist/extraction system. Our problem is them (and esp. their money system that is designed to *not* work right in the steady state or contracting state), plus a finite and rapidly dwindling supply of net-energy-positive energy, plus Trump crackers *and* Hillary snowflakes that don't realize the imminent severity of the net energy situation. The net energy problem can't be easily fixed by more low-EROEI coal *or* by more intermittent wind and solar power. As the world's population ages and slows its increase, it will gradually begin to temper its currently ever-growing use of nominal (N.B.: not net!) energy, which will help cushion the blow; but this, too, will eventually be overtaken by depletion. It's ironic to consider that soccer moms in their SUVs, using the grid, and buying stuff on Amazon delivered by diesel emit as much CO2 as Trump crackers in their 4x4's, using the grid, and getting stuff on Amazon delivered by diesel. In fact, because soccer moms and other upper middle class people who typically worry more about climate change can also afford to fly more, they actually use and need *even more* fossil fuel than the rayciss Trump crackers! On the hopeful side, no matter what catastrophe happens, the people that survive without being exposed to the worst abuses will bounce back and be happy with less. It doesn't matter if you win the lottery or lose a leg -- or your gasoline. A few months after the event, generalized happiness returns back to what it was before the positive *or* negative event. Contra Dave Cohen, this is a feature, not a bug, which is going to come in handy in the not too distant future.

[Jan26,'17] Sure is depressing reading right *and* left bloggers digging in for extended trench warfare, both somehow completely ignoring the net energy and wealth-distribution elephants in the room. The level of discourse amongst the primates on left and right has gone from the toilet into the sewer. Feeling melancholy in the autumn of my life. But Science's best tips for safe cycling cheered me up :-} So maybe it's still my late summer.

[Jan29,'17] Trump bans immigration to the US from 7 countries, 5 of which the US/Obama has been actively bombing -- a list pretty much straight out of the neocon PNAC. The new Trump order doesn't even name the countries but simply refers to the list from Obama administration orders. Saudi and Izzy are OK (oh, right, *we* didn't bomb *them* ...). Whatever. And lookee here at these pig/human chimeras so we can charge your insurance $350,000 for a replacement liver grown in a dystopian Blade Runner freakshow lab so you don't have to change your bad eating and drinking habits. Remember, all of this is divide-and-conquer nonsense! Keep your eye on the ball. The 'ball' in never in the 'news'. For example, the wall is in the news (despite the fact that it's already there!), but the potholes I have to carefully skirt in my twice-daily cycle commute -- while still watching the angry car-people -- are not (I got a flat yesterday when my brain's avoid-5000-pound-cars module overrode the avoid-deep-potholes module). Government Sachs is not in the news. How banks create most of our money out of the void and decide who gets it is not in the news. Declining net energy is not in the news. The fact that China is no longer building an entire US interstate highway system every 3 years (they finished building two, starting in 2011) is not in the news. The fact that since 2009 (after the recovery from 2008), global GDP has grown around 3% per year, but global debt has grown around 6% per year, is not in the news. The fact that what we are headed into is not just another turn in the credit cycle is not in the news. Keep your eye on the ball. Remember that on his first day in office, Obama signed an executive order closing Guantanamo prison, which is, uhh, still open. And look at the social wreckage of the former Yugoslavia (brought to you by the previous Clinton). Bad idea to head in that direction (still a ways to go, though). One week at a time.

[Feb05,'17] The tiny world oil 'glut' (now probably less than 1%) is often suggested to be the main thing that is keeping oil prices lower than many people had been expecting -- in particular, the people who took out big loans to drill light tight fracked oil wells, and who are now still deep in debt even after substantially increasing US oil production. But there is another indirect factor, which is that it gradually takes more and more energy to produce a barrel of oil as we scrape the bottom of the barrel, so a nominal produced barrel has effectively used up some of the other barrels in 'total world liquids'. Because of this, though total liquids production has slightly increased, the final amount of useable energy has increased less, or maybe even declined. Since total economic activity is very closely related to total energy used, most of which is fossil fuel, having less net energy could be part of the reason that growth seems to be slowing down (to just under 3% per year), though this is difficult to measure directly, since it can be affected by exchange rates. However -- with full knowledge that passenger car driving is only one use for oil -- looking specifically in the US at passenger car miles, you can see that US car miles are still on a tear, increasing at a somewhat more rapid pace then the three decades before the 2008 crisis, when they actually dropped for the first time. Total miles are up, but so is population, so it turns out we are only back to about 2003 after population adjustment. But nevertheless, partly as a result of low prices due to the oil 'glut', losses in the part of the economy and world that are extracting the lower-net-energy oil are not being paid for by the drivers who are driving more, and in less fuel efficient cars. The low oil prices have certainly gone on for longer than I was expecting. Can oil prices continue down, even as oil net energy continues to fall, and as more people drive more? Maybe for a little while; but over the 'long haul' (here meaning a few years) this seems highly unlikely to me. In 2004, I guessed that peak oil would happen in 2008. If 'oil' is measured as 'all liquids' -- which mixes stuff with greatly varying net energy yields (e.g., ethanol, which has zero net energy) -- I was wrong: total liquids (crude oil + condensates/pentane + NGLs/propane + biofuels) have increased almost 10% since 2008 (88 => 98 million barrels/day), though standard density crude (vs. light tight oil from fracked wells, which has to be mixed with heavy oil from, for example, tar sands, before being sent to refineries) did in fact peak in 2008. But looking at the surprisingly slow recovery of growth since 2008 and the continuing deformations of the money system, I am beginning to wonder whether 2008 was 'effective net energy peak oil' after all. One can easily imagine that in an effort to make up for declining net energy, a large amount of additional oil energy could have been expended to extract oil/liquids, just in order to tread water, which would look like a big increase in extracted energy. After 2008, China poured *two* entire US-20th-century's worth of concrete, using coal, and then suddenly stopped, perhaps mostly due to having 'finished' their infrastructure. Since other factors than reserves (like sudden Chinese policy turns) can rapidly change energy usage, it is hard to know how close we are to peak net all-energy. Hopefully still a ways to go! Finally, another factor not previously mentioned above is simple demographics; the aging population, both in the US and soon also in China, will use less energy, everything else held constant. It is difficult to factor everything into the mix and figure out what is causing what.

[Feb06,'17] Trump's threat to 'defund' California is humorous since California sends more money to the federal government than it gets back; the federal government distributes the extra it keeps to the Trump states, who by contrast with California get more money back than they pay in taxes. California also produced one quarter of the country's food. But it's a great sound bite for the Trumpanzees :-} . However, when it comes to water, California gets a lot more water from surrounding states than it sends back to them, so seceding would be suicidal on that count.

[Feb07,'17] Mrs. Billionaire-Blackwater-Amway just got confirmed for 'education' secretary courtesy of an historic tie-breaking vote by the neocon vice-president Pence. She plans to use privatization to make American education just as great as American prisons (the US has the largest per capita prison population in the world). Come to think of it, why not just combine the rump remains of the public schools for the 90% and prisons into one big happy private business, the department of EduPrisoCation? It would make school safer (booga booga Sandy Hook, scary boys and girls!) and it would be quicker to deal with misbehaving students, no? I will likely be retired before getting to experience the fruits of her 'labor' at the college level. For better or worse, the rate of change will be slow.

[Feb08,'17] Where were the 'leftists' that are now agog at banning Muslims when Obama was *bombing* Muslims (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen), which is what generated many of the refugees spreading across the EU? Bombing Muslims is worse than banning them. The previous two sentences do not imply support for Trump. I don't pretend to know for sure what Trump, and the generals he has appointed, and Kissinger, and the 5 Goldmans, and the CIA, and AIPAC, etc are actually doing, given the fantastic clouds of disinformation being thrown up each day. But I do know that the 'left'/'right' debate is almost entirely a side-show. It's comical watching sites on both the 'left' and the 'right' suddenly forgetting what they were for/against a few weeks ago. For all practical purposes, we seem to be in Bush's 5th term, AKA Obama's 3rd term (e.g., bombing bridges in Raqqa in Syria in support of greater Kurdistan).

[Feb11,'17] Police in the US now (data from 2014) seize more assets ($4.5 billion/year) than burglars do ($3.9 billion/year). Over the last decade, this has turned into a major funding source for police departments. This has strong echoes of historical events accompanying decline of many different historical empires. But it doesn't seem like we are declining yet; there are self-driving cars and robot factories about to put everybody out of work! I was just reading in the execrable Wired on how Trump can't fix the loss of industry because most jobs will be replaced by robots. There wasn't a peep about energy in the article. As long as low-cost, high-net-energy energy is available, robotization will continue. Changing over to robots currently often requires more energy than using humans because robots are more energy intensive to make and to run. This would suggest that robotization could reverse quickly if energy suddenly gets harder to get and/or more expensive (cf. the way frackers suddenly started fracking, and then just as suddenly stopped -- creative destruction, man). For now, the robots are up and coming. And certainly, the coming energy scarcity is likely to be a local pheonomen in the future, so robotization could continue even after it is too energy intensive to use in some energy-scarce part of the world. Still, I will be very surprised if robotization is still rapidly increasing 15 years from now.

[Feb13,'17] I read lots of downer stuff and I see lots of foul comments from trolls and 'regular people' every day :-/ . Perhaps because the Oroville dam problem is closer to home (I drink water from it during the summer), reading some of the comment sewage in the upper right "Live chat" feed here [update: now a stale link] temporarily spooked me. But only temporarily: don't you guys know that they voted for Trump in Oroville? :-/ As long as unlucky humans aren't being dismembered right in the living room, messing up the carpet, unfortunately, most humans are willing to give blanket approval to human dismemberment -- somewhere else, where other people have to clean it up. It's pretty clear that a hypothetical privatized infrastructure program wouldn't have touched what should have been fixed in the Oroville emergency spillway 10 years ago (more concrete on the hillside below the emergency spillway), because it wouldn't have been profitable then or now. The problem was that when a relatively small amount of water went over the emergency spillway (for the first time ever, in an effort to spare the damaged main concrete spillway), the emergency spillway immediately began to get undermined, increasing the chance of a break in *it* (N.B.: as opposed to a breach in the main dam). From pics posted on the web, it looks like the *main* spillway channel has been eroded some distance up from the initial breach, almost up to the level where the high tension power lines cross. However, this happened a few days ago, and the damage line has not moved up at all over the past few days of continuous large releases (through the main spillway). The current higher failure point is where the main spillway began to get much steeper, probably as a result of it passing over softer, more erodable rock past that point (which probably explains why the breach in the spillway occurred below this point in the first place). However, we still have a long, nail-biting way to go (early June) until the inflows to the lake peak, with little chance to repair the main spillway. The main *dam* remains undamaged. If it were to fail, the result would be truly apocalyptic. Thankfully, that still looks very unlikely (at this point in time!) :-}

[Feb15,'17] A wrinkle in the 'main spillway' problem referred to above from an Oroville press briefing today (watched here). *Inside* the reservoir (under water), there is a channel leading to the main spillway release gate that is reaching its erosion design limits, which will require some slowdown in the amount of water being released in the near future (current release rate is 100K CFS, which is over 400 tons of water per *second*). Luckily, the resevoir level is now low enough to absorb the next storm without overflow. The broken outside end of the main spillway is still holding up very well. Best of luck to these guys!

[Feb18,'17] Amazon/Bezos delivers your books and music and packages and tchotchkes, stores your music and pictures, listens and interprets and centrally stores what you say in your home (if you have Alexa), has your credit card info, owns the Washington Post where much of your news originates, and has a half a billion dollar contract with the CIA. What could possibly go wrong? In return, Amazon has made your life *so* much more convenient -- imagine how much time you used to waste back in the day having to (gasp) store your own music and (gasp) manually play selections from it, and (gasp) manually open a photo album. Amazon/Bezos is only here to help you free up your precious time so you can be more creative! Riight.

[Feb21,'17] Reverse Engineer has a good summary article on the blame game for the current predicament industrial civilization finds itself in. It prompted only two comments, one from Blair T. Longley. Predictably rambling and long-winded, Blair ended up reserving the most blame for scientists. They have created orders of magnitude more power from advances in mathematics, physics, and engineering, but failed to develop similarly sophisticated and powerful advances in politics and economics and an understanding of societal dynamics. I agree in spirit, esp. with respect to classical economics :-} . But I think Blair underestimates how difficult it is to deeply and scientifically understand the dynamics of large populations of language-capable brains powered by fossil fuel, developing and learning and manufacturing and scheming. Waaay harder than apes, even though many features of human emotional mechanics are not that different from non-human apes. Language is a second, higher-level life-form, souped up with the ability to generate code from meaning (instead of having to wait for mutations in code), and now super-powered by an internet infused with the beginnings of AI injecting a toxic brain-modifying slurry into the already pretty foul-tasting mix. Though I agree that the simple frauds injected into everybody's brains -- for example, about how money works -- *are* frauds, they are nevertheless subtle enough to make it difficult for most academics interested in physics and mathematics and biology and neuroscience to understand. I always tried to read very widely, especially when I was younger, but I didn't really gain even a basic understanding of money creation and debt until I was almost 50 (partly my fault because I had ignored economics as unworthy of serious attention...). And that is the absolutely utterly dead-simple part! Developing a theory of how we might have slowed or re-engineered this runaway train before it got to the current desperate state is many orders of magnitude more complex. Quantum mechanics is absolutely trivial by comparison -- electrons and protons are all exactly alike, they don't learn, and they only constitute a few moving parts :-} [Update: good Michael Hudson interview here -- an excellent uplifting post, though failing to mention the additional difficulty of declining net energy].

[Feb27,'17] I think they got the category for the Al-Qaeda White Helmets Riefenstahl Oscar wrong -- 'special effects' instead of 'documentary'?

[Mar01,'17] The Trump speech continues the tradition of 'reality teevee', which translated, means complete and utter detachment from reality. Complete blue pill. The bad thing about getting old is having to repeatedly see that this same-old shite always 'just works'. Remember the trifling silly fake reports that when broadcast through the fetid NYT megaphone of Judith Miller convinced 90% of Americans that Iraq had a bomb that led to the deaths of at least half a million Iraqis and the permanent contamination of Iraq with a third of a million rounds of depleted uranium? Saddam didn't have chemical weapons but we did. And before that, remember the fake story of 'unplugging baby incubators' tearfully performed in Con-gress that launched the previous attack on Iraq? Ralph Nader had some worthwhile comments on RealNews. The agencies that the Trumpanzees want to kill (education, worker and environment protection) are just a few percent, total, of the size of the ridiculously bloated military budget, which Trump supposedly wants to increase; in fact, the proposed military budget increment itself would be bigger than the budgets of those other agencies put together. Won't happen. But imagine what better uses the fantastically bloated current military budget could be put to! Not that the hysterical McCarthyite 'left' pushing the fake Russian hacking story is better! Despite their supposed opposition based on ridiculously superficial differences such as bathroom signs, *both* parties are rightwing/corporate/ultra-rich/fascist. Another thing Ralph Nader mentioned is that large corporations have now spent $2.5 trillion buying back their own stock. This wasteful parasitic enrichment of already ultra-rich stockholders merely sucks the remaining life out of the shell of a formerly innovative and productive businesses, and reflects a pitiful and utter failure of intellectual vision in the challenging time of peak energy. This sure looks like catabolic collapse -- consumption of the tissue of one's own body on the way down. Tomorrow is another day and I'm sure I will be feeling less red-pill-y then. Today, after watching just a few seconds of the Trump speech, I am basically thinking what Geoffrey Chia says you shouldn't say in public.

[Mar03,'17] This comment from Reverse Engineer (on why military growth might *not* restart after a societal power down) made me smile :-} -- "I disagree. We went 60,000 years without being dickheads, I don’t think it is hard wired at all. I think we just got a flawed Op system that needs replacement. It’s like Windows 7, just worse." It reminded me of my late father.

[Mar08,'17] According to a report from Americans for Financial Reform (pdf), during the past election cycle, the financial sector donated over $2 billion to federal candidates and parties, which works out to $3.7 million per member of Con-gress. The surprise biggest spender was the National Association of Realtors ($120 million!) handily exceeding Soros ($25 million) and Goldman Sachs ($12 million). In between were a bunch of hedge funds (and Bloomberg L.P.). And this was only what had to be reported. The real totals could be twice that.

[Mar12,'17] Four brief points about the recent information leaks about C-eye-eh hacking software.
     (1) The C-eye-eh/Stasi effort was almost entirely parallel to the NSA/Stasi effort, except run by an organization that has a big, mafia-like 'wet works' division, not to mention its own drone fleet for actually killing people abroad (and sometimes at home).
     (2) These guys had a casual approach to letting this technology back out into the underground hacker community (which is where they got some of it from!). This makes sense when one compares their related actions with respect to arms and drug trafficking.
     (3) Perhaps most disturbing, was the almost completely blase/whatever reaction of 'everyday' people to the news that the C-eye-eh had hacked teevee software in (e.g., in Samsung teevees) to make it appear that the teevee was off, even though it was actually on and transmitting information through the teevee's microphone (newer ones have cameras too) back through the user's internet to the C-eye-eh. Now we have 1984-like data streams going to Thought Police at *two competing* secret organizations!
     The subdued response is probably because people are already *voluntarily* installing similar things (e.g., Alexa) in their homes that transmit everything back to the (e.g., Amazon) mothership to be interpreted, are bored by the Samsung fine print about how it sends audio back to Samsung, and are accustomed to voluntarily uploading pictures of their breakfast, genitalia, etc to the cloud. It is true that @ssbook, Snapshite, Amazon, and Samsung don't (yet) have 'wet works' divisions, for when you resign (ref to The Prisoner :-} ). But who knows where your teevee feed has gotten to by now, given point number 2?
     And remember, although Amazon is not officially part of the security state, it got a $0.6 billion contract in 2013 from the C-eye-eh for cloud services. That's the virtual dictionary definition of fascism -- the coming together of big industry and authoritarian government. Several of the leaked hacks have false flag options to make it appear as if they come from Russia or China instead of Langley, which clearly proves that 'Putin is a thug who sabotaged our election'. Yeah, and we are at war with East Asia, too.
     Self-declared 'Democrats' now like the C-eye-eh slightly more than 'Republicans' do for the first time in a number of years. At supposedly 'left' university, I get politically correct 'teacher training' that explains how I should watch my tongue and not say anything bad about the military because 10% of the school is somehow in the military. And there are weekly 'active shooter' presentations, despite the fact that per capita shooting deaths in the US have plummetted since the end of the Vietnam war. Sorry, I deviated a bit off-topic from number 3.
     Finally, (4): why now? I have previously suspected that one function of the stream of recent leaks has been to scare people and habituate them into thinking there is nothing they can do, similar to nightclub shootings, etc. But the latest leaks will be hard for people to distinguish from Snowden, since many probably don't even clearly distinguish the NSA and the C-eye-eh. Perhaps there *is* something to the idea that these recent leaks represent internecine warfare in the shadow government. It is increasingly important to keep one's head screwed on tight in this topsy-turvy world.

[Mar13,'17]
Grid storage
     The possibility of fast progress in the deployment of grid battery storage is a positive development. Mostly talk so far. In two years, there will be more concrete data to look at about how 'large' (but see next) grid battery storage systems actually perform. It is critical to keep basic 'order of magnitude' scales in mind when talking about grid storage. This is virtually always omitted in breathless press reports because it involves (gasp) *more than one number* -- that is, you actually have to compare *two* different numbers :-} .
     The total daily world electric power usage in 2012 was about 54,000 GWh. Tesla has said that 34 GWh of world battery electric storage was produced in 2013. At that rate of battery production, it would take 1600 years of battery production to make enough batteries to store one complete day's worth of total world electric power usage. Or put another way, total battery production in 2013 equalled slightly less than *one minute* of world grid storage.
     There are a very large number of half-days when wind+sun generate almost nothing (calm+night), and many weeks when wind+sun power output is low, so *one full day* of storage is not an overly ambitious goal. Tesla's (not yet done) Gigafactory was originally advertised to be able to produce 35 GWh of batteries per year (including batteries for cars), but 2016 *projections* for Tesla and Panasonic are for yearly production of 100 GWh of batteries. At that higher projected production rate, the time required to make enough batteries to store one day of current world electric power usage would be reduced from 1600 years to 550 years. However, remember that this doesn't count replacement batteries, since batteries wear out in 5-10 years.
     From these basic order-of-magnitude considerations, it is clear that we still are a very long way from a solar/wind/battery drop-in replacement grid. It's also important to remember that the amount of energy used by internal combustion engines is roughly equivalent to the amount of energy used by the grid -- that is, to replace all cars and trucks with plugins, you'd have to double the size of the current grid. This puts us back to about 1000 years to make the one-day-of-storage grid batteries. And this is not counting any of the new batteries needed for the electric cars and trucks themselves.
     I am *not* trying to disparage 'renewable' energy (N.B.: it's not truly renewable until it has actually been made out of its own output, rather than from coal, oil, and methane), *or* trying to ignore the fact that we will be able to count on hydro, biofuels, remaining fossil fuels, nuclear, etc, *or* trying to insist that the world of the future must be exactly the same on-demand, just-in-time world we have now, *or* trying to claim that we won't be able to replace lithium-ion grid batteries with hot liquid sodium/sulfur batteries, and so on. But it is important to memorize basic, real numbers, rather than to just unconsciously snort and parrot the feel-good hype/nonsense (Elon Musk's advertizing stunt about Australia).
     My soundbite: "One full year's production of batteries from Tesla's GigaFactory will hold *one min* of world grid energy storage".

[Mar14,'17] The stunning increase in complexity of hardware and software systems has made it virtually impossible for a normal intelligent human (with *lots* of time to waste!) to be able to understand the entire system hierarchy from low level hardware to the top layers of virtualized software. Encryption is utterly useless if there is a chink in a different layer or a weakness before or after things have been encrypted. For example, Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) in current vPro systems, building upon its introduction in Sandy Bridge, allows remote access to peecee disks and other hardware for 'management and security tasks' when an OS is down, or the peecee power is 'off', and when the internet and boot disk are disconnected and the RAM is out via 3G wireless built into the chip (for Anti Theft 3.0, seriously, we're just trying to help you wipe your disk when the bad guys steal it). Why bother with encryption? I doubt anything could go wrong with the AMT scheme (snark). To paraphrase Robert Maynard Hutchins, 'When I feel the need to upgrade, I lie down until the feeling goes away' (the original was 'exercise' :-} )

[Mar17,'17] The new 'Trump' budget proposal (this name explains nothing about the people who actually prepared it) increases the half a trillion dollar US 'defense' budget by more than $50 billion (10%). The cuts would be paid for by cuts in other more useful agencies -- e.g., a $6 billion (20%) cut in the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Just think, instead of spending $3 million in chump change to take out a Walmart toy drone with a Patriot missile (a US military stunt this week), the military will be able to afford to use a nuke next time :-/ . The proposed *increase* in the US department of war is more than Russia's *total* spending on its own war department. The preposterous proposed increase prompted a complaint from, of all places, Fortune magazine. The response from the 'left' on the military increase has been muted, perhaps because 'Putin sabotaged our election' (except that despite all the hysteria, no evidence has been presented for this). There is no real leftwing left in the US or the EU/UK! Now would be the time to get into the streets -- when the military hardware that gets used later is actually being planned, not when they are already transporting it (usu. with the approval of both the right and the pseudo 'left') to the next theater of war. This is waaay more important than protesting the stoopid 'Muslim travel ban'. If the US military hadn't killed millions of Muslims in other countries and funded 'Salvador option' Muslim death squads over the past few decades under Bush *and* Obama, there wouldn't have been a 'Muslim problem' in the first place ('b' reports here on who we killed today). The US military bombing and occupying other countries, and the presence of over 700 US military bases in other people's countries across the world is the real problem. Of course, the proposed Trump budget won't go through as is. It is merely a red meat banner meant to pacify the Trump base ('hope and change' for a different demographic -- Linh Dinh). But the current more-than-half-a-trillion a year current cash burn by the ridiculously bloated US war department *will* continue, just like military funding continued after the Roman empire had already begun to decline (and this doesn't even include the 'black budgets' of the C-eye-eh, etc!). I suppose the chaff from this 'budget debate' will help keep people's eyes off of the bigger problem (incl both the eyes of the right and pseudo-left), which is the impending wind-down of global industrial civilization as an increasing population runs into hard limits in net energy, fertilizer, food, water, minerals, soil, fish, and so on. But the wind-down won't get into high gear this election cycle, so *who cares*? Instead let's continue to blow all our spare change -- which won't last forever -- on the military. For shame -- and shame on the half of Americans who actually support *increasing* this stoopid, already insanely monumental waste of money and energy, and a source of endless human suffering.

[Mar19,'17] California has had to spend a fifth of a billion dollars just to do emergency patches to the Oroville main spillway, which was opened again on Friday as the lake levels started to go back up. We need to immediately stop wasting so much money on the mostly offensive component of the so-called 'defense' department and divert the money into more productive pursuits like refurbishing our water supply.

[Mar21,'17] A single bitcoin transaction, including 'mining' costs, currently uses at least 30 kWh (a per-transaction estimate for 2017 here is even higher: 100 kWh). Let's stick with 30 kWh. Translated into my favorite energy unit, the 'cyclist-hour' (one cyclist-hour is about 0.1 kWh), one bitcoin transaction is equivalent to cycling for 300 hours straight (50 days of 6-hour-a-day cycling). Isn't the 'non-physical' internet great?! For comparison, a single credit card transaction costs less than 0.01 kWh, so less than 10 minutes of cycling. This whole picture reminds me of the human monkeys who peevishly accelerate their 6000 pound quarter-of-a-megawatt steel chariots past me on my bike, up to the red light where I meet them 10-15 seconds later, JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN. We are doing bitcoin because we can -- for now. In theory, the system is supposed to adjust the cost of mining to the processing power currently available, and many people are throwing processing power into bitcoin 'mining' currently. It remains to be seen how gracefully bitcoin will be able to contract when the energy that powers the miners themselves itself gets a lot more expensive to mine.

[Mar23,'17] At about $1.3 trillion, the US student loan bubble has now grown to the same size as the US subprime loan bubble, which blew up in 2008. The default rate is similar to the peak subprime default rate (over 10%). Two differences are that most of these are government loans, and there is no collateral involved. In the UK in early 2017, the government announced a plan to sell some student loans to the private sector. I haven't heard of anything like that in the US so far. Looking at this strikingly steep and linear increase, which took off immediately after the subprime bubble crashed, it is hard to imagine it can continue for a long time. But then, I said the same thing 5 years ago! If the current increase ($0.15 trillion/year) is maintained, in another 5 years, it will reach $2 trillion, an amount utterly unimaginable just a decade ago, when student debt was 'merely' $0.1 trillion. I don't see any way that this could be 'unwound' gracefully, but then I'm not very creative when it comes to banking. I imagine their will be US rentiers wanting to 'buy the loans' (just saying 'buying a loan' kinda makes me retch) since loans essentially generate free money without having to fix any toilets, as long as the poor students or their parents continue to pay. This is an awful transformation of the university system I first entered in the 1970's.

[Mar24,'17] Two excellent remarks from the web today. First, from Cryptogon: "It’s a sh*t sandwich all around in the general purpose computing world. It’s a very serious worry, because I see the least capable computer users (most computer users, in other words) fully embracing swipetard devices and operating systems, which are mainly intended to serve as tamper proof vending machines and surveillance platforms". And then from Scott Creighton: "The Trumpster’s glorious generals are currently bombing the crap out of civilians in Mosul and invading Syria via Raqqa and the whole of the American public is only concerned about how to keep poor people from getting healthcare or how many fabricated ties Rachel Maddow can produce between Trump and Russia. Orwellian? Fascist? Just plain sad and pathetic? You decide". Finally, I can hear the calls for self-driving carz to save us from Abu/Trevor/Khalid/Adrian what's his name/face/asset. Nothing that even moar VR can't fix, first seen here, in an arty third-person view (Veljko Popovic), and then here, in righteous first-person view (Keiichi Matsuda).

[Mar26,'17] There is some clear demand destruction visible starting in 2016 in this Fed graph of total US vehicle miles travelled and gasoline prices (reduced slope at right edge of graph, blue line). The reduced-gasoline-price stimulus to car miles that began in 2014 (red line) has rather suddenly moderated at the beginning of 2016. The rate of increase (0.6% per year) is now lower than US population growth (0.7% per year). We are still not back to the unprecedented absolute drop in car miles that occurred in 2008 and 2009, or back to the bumpy plateau in car miles that lasted from from 2009 until 2014. There is still a small (less than 1%) oil 'glut'. However, the internal usage of oil-exporting countries is ever increasing, and China is still rapidly increasing its imports (~10%/year, see mazamascience PDF here), and is still a long way below US per capita usage. Even if all of these trends moderate, it still seems likely to me that we are experiencing the calm before the net energy storm that will hit in a few years when everyone finally realizes we are in the second, more difficult half of the age of oil, and when Ghawar finally dies. There is already a crisis of midlife white Americans increasingly dying, not just from alcoholism and opiates from from all causes, at a higher rate than poorer blacks, reversing the situation 15 years ago. The situation in the US is beginning to look like what happened (esp. to men) in Russia in the 1990's, and this will likely to be exacerbated during the reign of Trump -- our very own Yeltsin -- who will release our own oligarchs from what few constraints they still have. After 5 or 10 more years of 'oligarchs gone wild', and 5 or 10 more years of oil depletion, Americans will be longing for a Putin to clean house. Let's hope we get a Putin rather than a somebody-else-tler.

[Apr02,'17]
Older and Wiser II
Visiting relatives, I was again stunned peeking into the alternate universe that is American teevee, which I see about once a year. I expected the drug ads, but was surprised to see that Harvoni was all over the place now. There was nothing for Sovaldi, its 'bargain basement' competitor -- only $60,000 per year for Sovaldi versus $100,000 per year for Harvoni. I suppose the idea is to bankrupt the public dime (at the rate of a million public dimes per treatment) of the VA (homeless vets with hep C) until the payment system crashes, then call it a day. Given 3.2 million people with hep C, it would take a mere $320 billion dollars to treat them each for a year with Harvoni (for scale, that's 10x the size of the entire current NIH budget).
     Then I saw hours of the inane 'blame Russia for everything', wall-to-wall on the 'newz', then as R2D2 on Rachel Maddow, then as 'comedy' on Colbert. There was a lack of any trace of concrete content in support of this idea, and the whole shtick was instead about personalities. But even more impressive was the stunning tone-deafness of the supposed 'left' to their their carbon-copy of 1950's-style, McCarthyite red-baiting. And of course, not a peep about the massive Pentagon escalation in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, currently underway.
     I drove through hopelessly spread-out, unwalkable subdivisions liberally dotted with vast tracts of unusable 'green space' surrounding work places, all built on the best farmland on the whole planet. On the way back, I watched "Superstore" on the plane, a 'workplace comedy'. Most of the cast was obese to morbidly obese. It wasn't a comedy but rather a tragedy of average people with no options in a state of clinical depression somewhat controlled by drugs, food, and the toilet 'humor' of continuous humiliation of other people stuck in the same situation. It brought to mind factory chickens being fed Prozac, Benedryl, and caffeine to make them passively alert so they gain weight faster.
     Ten years ago, I would have more strongly felt the urge to think about how all these things could possibly be fixed or at least ameliorated before the status quo becomes completely impossible to maintain. For example, the majority of western 'health care' -- ignoring the huge administrative overhead and plain parasitism of US-style 'insurance' -- consists of insanely expensive, hi-tech, one-factor attempted patches to people's bad eating habits and thinking habits that aren't really capable of undoing the effects of a life of bad food or thought. My former self would have thought, Why not drop everything and improve diets (both food and cognitive)? Why not outlaw weaponized food?
     In my academic work, I have argued that cellular symbol machines and human linguistic machines are deeply analogous (PDF here). Before coming up with that idea, it had taken me years of study in college to completely come to terms with the amazing and harsh realities of the growth of complexity during mere Darwinian evolution. Human language-based cultural evolution is orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution because of the presence of 'reverse translation' at the linguistic level. The ability to turn symbol strings back into code for direct transmission is critically absent from the cellular-level system that founded Darwinian evolution, and this gives cognitive evolution an even wilder character than Darwinian evolution.
     But only now (!), after almost 4 more decades of study have I finally consciously come to terms with the same amazing and harsh realities of *cognitive* evolution and *cognitive* growth. As a fresh assistant professor, I used to marvel at the fact that the irritating gnat that I just squashed had about 14,000 genes packed into it (versus only maybe 19,000 genes to make a human). But biology doesn't care. It makes stunningly complex organisms by the trillions and then they carelessly eat and squash and overgrow each other, may the best grower win. The dynamic of growth *no matter what* drives an evolutionary system until it runs into hard limits. Growth -- biological or cognitive -- simply can't be stopped when there is still free energy (in the chemical sense) for the taking lying about.
     I used to complain about how people would carelessly buy an iPhone -- containing multiple chips with a billion parts in each one, put together with the complex, refined outputs of 200 other supplier companies, each using materials gathered from around the globe -- and then carelessly discard the thing just 2 years later. But now I finally see, this is *just like* biology! (go ahead, marvel at my naivete). Biology carelessly discards a lot of gnats, and a gnat is *a lot* more complex and miniaturized and energy-efficient than an iPhone -- and it can even reproduce (many of) itself(s) without factories, and all its parts can be recycled and re-used.
     The partial introspection we experience inside our human brains is at best only a very minor restraint to growth. Even when we can clearly see the end of growth just a decade away, we *still* can't make ourselves do anything to cushion the blow. We can't even slightly slow down in our frantic approach toward the geological brick wall. Only 'geology' (energy/soil/water depletion) has the power to stop biology and language. Unfortunately for us, geology lacks empathy. My undergraduate major was geology, the queen of the sciences :-}

[Apr12,'17] Wolf Richter has a good article here on Tesla. Tesla currently has a market capitalization of about $50 billion. Since its creation in 2008, it has lost money every year, for a total loss of almost $3 billion. It continues to exist because of investors and government subsidies sinking money into it (emphasis sink). For comparison, GM also has a market capitalization of about $50 billion. Since 2008, it has made almost $50 billion. Despite Tesla's wonderful 'disrupt-i-ness', this looks like an exceptionally poor starting point for weathering the next recession. Of course, perhaps its business of buying lithium batteries and solar cells manufactured by Panasonic and packaging them will take off in the next few years, right in the middle of a recession. Theoretically possible.

[Apr17,'17] Sometimes it's just crushingly depressing to watch the mass action of the (American) human primate brain. The Pentagon's stupid war show stunts (the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump didn’t know about the MOAB use until it had been dropped) have resulted in a 17% drop in Americans who think he will "keep his promises", but at the same time, a 10% *increase* in his "favorability" (assuming *this* isn't itself disinfo). This reminds me of my observations of human primate behavior in my daily cycle-communte to and from work. The human primates driving their 200,000 watt SUVs look at me with a combination of pity, disdain, and irritation at my seeming over-pious-ness. I know and respect this. Most of them believe in global warming and the need for healthy physical activity levels, but cannot consciously see how their extremely inefficient daily commute and their subsequent occasional drive to the exercise place directly relates to global warming as well as their woefully inadequate activity levels. They 'need' such a large vehicle so they can more safely ferry their family about. This is partly to protect their offspring from having to walk amongst the other SUV drivers, who kill 1.5 times as many pedestrians per vehicle mile as regular cars do. They feel safer looking down on the other more reasonably-sized cars despite the fact that their increased height increases the tendency to roll over in sudden course corrections (increased height is also why they are more likely to kill pedestrians). If I slow them down by even 500 milliseconds, they are likely to muscle their huge metal can around my 100 watt bicycle to rush up to the red light to show me that even though they are angry, they have magnanimously restrained themselves from crushing me. If I don't wear a helmet, they will mentally tut-tut how 'dangerous' I am being despite the fact that a 12 ounce styrofoam shell would do nothing to protect me against an impact of their 6000 pound SUV. On less well travelled roads, I have to constantly check behind me to prepare for evasive action in case someone careens into the bike lane while texting. The whole experience, somewhat paradoxically, tends to refresh me, perhaps because of the life and death aspect, and after I make it safely to work or back home, I tend to quickly forget it. I suppose I find Trump's 'war boost' more depressing because in that case we are talking about actually blowing up large numbers of people as opposed to carz merely "showing me who's boss".

[Apr21,'17] For something completely different, I just got a Boss RC-30 looper and was messing around jamming over 12/8,11/8 time. This is 'leave one beat out' every second measure, like the time in John McLaughlin's Dance of the Maya (listen to Billy Cobham when he comes in at 0:55). I accidentally left the record mode on, and so unintentionally recorded two lead tracks, which sounded kind of cool, and major/minor-y, and 1970's, so I concatenated it 4x, turned the reverb waaaay up, and saved it here, for a trip down memory lane :-} (RIP Alan Holdsworth :-{ )

[Apr23,'17] In June 2016, business owners in San Diego helped city planners publish an in-depth study of how to fix a central stretch of El Cajon boulevard to make it more walkable and bikeable and less dangerous (I commute on this stretch every day). The study found that the only cycling 'tolerance demographic' likely to use the entire stretch of this road in its current condition was the 'strong and fearless' (woohoo), which corresponds to less than 1% of the population. One of the main options proposed by the study was to add bicycle lanes (the ones with curbs greatly reduce chance of cyclist death) because the study also found that street parking there was underused. In Jan 2017, this minor change was blocked (unfortunately, I didn't find out about the public meeting until now) because it might impede parking. That would be the street parking that the study had found was underused. Also, homeowners thought it would 'kill children' because traffic would be diverted to side streets where wannabe rich person houses are -- despite the fact that the study found that no traffic diversion would be created (since cars already just race up to red lights). So it looks like the only change will be a painted bicycle lane on half of the length of the route, and only on one side of the street. Go ahead, drive to the 'climate action march' or the 'support science march', because of not being 'strong and fearless' enough to make a change that would *actually matter*. Then drive to the doctor to figure out what to do about pre-diabetic fatty liver disease, in a city that probably has one of the most year-round bicycle-friendly climates in the entire country, just a few years before the world oil situation blows up for good. Sheesh.

[Apr25,'17] In a demonstration of how seemingly harmless technological 'conveniences' can backfire, a new longitudinal Framingham Heart Study of almost 3000 participants showed that after correcting for age, sex, education (for analysis of dementia), caloric intake, diet quality, physical activity, and smoking, that drinking one artificially sweetened beverage per day resulting in a *tripling* of the 10-year risks of both stroke *and* Alzheimer's dementia (PDF here) (drinking sugar-containing beverages had no such effect). This risk was probably overestimated since there was a correlation between people with diabetes and people drinking diet sodas, and since diabetes/metabolic syndrome is associated with Alzheimer's, which could be the brain expression of metabolic syndrome -- the inability to 'take out the garbage'. Note that there is some independent evidence that artificial sweeteners actually *cause* diabetes (as opposed to diabetics simply adopting artificial sweeteners after getting diabetes) -- by altering gut flora. The toxic beverage manufacturers immediately responded that their drinks are "safe for consumption" and that other factors are important such as "genetics". So either, drink up and hobble in to get your genes sent through an expensive DNA sequencer so that your very own 'personalized medical program' can be constructed to help bankrupt the already tottering edifice of American 'health care', *or* just stop drinking that sh!t and improve your diet...

[Apr26,'17] Reading the intertubes today really drove home the point that I'm truly living in an alternate reality from many people. I'm really not happy about that.
     First, I kinda burped reading the sentence in an article in The Verge on raising sheep embryos outside of the uterus by Rachel Becker: "It’s appealing to imagine a world where artificial wombs grow babies, eliminating the health risk of pregnancy." This was an improvisatory flourish by the author since according to the Childrens' Hospital of Philadelphia guys, the ostensible point of the 'external womb fetal lamb ziplock bag' study was to eventually put human preterm infants into the bags to avoid preterm damage (rather than to 'helpfully' completely eliminate the chores of pregnancy). What made me flinch was the offhand presentation of a dystopian nightmare as 'appealing' -- and somehow relevant to the world I live in, where 70% of Americans are overweight or obese and are literally running the 'health care' system into the ground, having their insurance pay for expensive drugs and expensive surgeries in a ridiculous and toxic (and hopeless) attempt to fix a lifetime of bad eating and exercise habits, and where as many Americans die from opiate overdoses as from guns or carz, and in a world where there are already waaaay too many people for existing supplies of energy, freshwater, soil, fish, etc. You think maybe the overdosers have also soured on the 'appealing future' of raising human babies in ziplock bags plumbed into desperate unemployed 'support moms'? Offhand comments like this jar me into a realization that I live in an alternate mental reality. Perhaps I need to ask my doctor for a drug to fix this (but that would require going to the doctor :-} ).
     Another example of my disconnect from reality is the Morning Consult POLITICO poll today. First was the poll itself. One question was, 'Which of the following issues are important enough to prompt a government shutdown?'. The positively hallucinogenic choices were: (1) increased military and homeland security (i.e., 'yes' means, shut down government if military spending not increased enough), (2) continue cost-sharing insurance payments, (3) continue benefits for retired coal miners (huh?), (4) increased deportation, (5) decreased domestic program funding (i.e., 'yes' means, shut down government if domestic spending not decreased enough), (6) planned parenthood, (7) sanctuary cities, (8) border wall. The winner (at 47% yes to 39% no) was, yes, shut down government if defense and homeland security spending is not increased enough. The weird concoction of words in the questions hardly self-assembled into coherent meanings in my brain, and the answers were unsettlingly Weimar-ish.
     Then there was a disgusting, grovelling post by Susan Webber (Naked Capitalism) explaining to enlightened fascists (oh sorry, I mean 'leftists') why "it is naive and self defeating to demand that a progressive or bona fide leftist candidate oppose war as a major platform position".
     And, finally, remember that since those SF food delivery robots are going to have to be armed to protect them from poor homeless people, be sure to ask your personal surveillance system, sorry, I meant your new Amazon 'hands-free camera and style assistant' for tips on how not to look homeless (that is, while it's not busy trying to imitate your voice).
     As Richard Heinberg recently wrote: "In many of my writings I try my best to avoid morbid fascination and focus on practical usefulness. But every so often it’s helpful to step back and take it all in. It’s quite a show."

[May05,'17] Interesting graphs here from Jeffrey Snider on the temporally distinct peaks in derivatives (JPM=2008, BofA=2010, Goldman+Citi=2014) by the main derivatives guys. I didn't realize derivatives were down -- though "down" is a relative term when current notional value derivatives total for the big 4 is about $170 trillion, "down" from over $200 trillion (where global GDP is a mere $75 trillion).

[May10,'17] Google's panicky decision a few months ago to start denying ad revenue to any even vaguely controversial non-junk-music videos on youtube (driven by demands of large advertisers) will have a dampening effect on non-mainstream information availability. The main effect here, however, might be mainly to put a dent in video production values. I am quite happy to abide low budget production values if the information is good (and anyway, I usually prefer to read, because it's faster). A more dangerous change would be stronger censoring of web searches that would turn google completely into @ssbook. It's probably on the way, which will require people to know more about what they are looking for, or drive people back to samizdat-style bulletin boards. However, even that could be imperiled by direct interception of packets on the wires of the intertubes. But then there is always amateur packet net! The continuous progression of 'just a little easier' can go backwards. One advantage of 'just a little harder' is that cost of individual messages is higher, which (in my dreams) might have the result of reducing the amount of repetition, disinfo, and plain noise. One can dream.

[May15,'17] Elon Musk's new Boring Company is starting to bore a tunnel under LA from LAX to Westwood. The demos and mock drawings show a sled with a tray to hold a single automobile. This is utterly preposterous as a subway replacement. Imagine the traffic jam at the entrance, much less the exit, where cars having been transported at 160 mph would have to rapidly emerge one after the other, if this was scaled up even to the throughput of the blue line. However, this is surely not being designed for everyday people. It makes sense only as part of an 'Elysium strategy' to allow rich people -- the same ones who will buy a 'Tuscan' solar roof for their vacation home -- to bypass clogged freeways, like an automotive version of a personal Lear jet. Perhaps the outlet at the airport end will go directly to valet parking for the rich person's security line bypass. The US is slowly but surely morphing into the long established arrangement seen in large third world cities -- a walled rich city center surrounded by a thick ring of favelas, and no middle class (Elysium itself was shot in the slums surrounding Mexico city). Disappointingly, this is the same dystopian future envisioned long ago in books, then in movies. As their decline continues, most Americans (who of course haven't the slightest idea of where North Korea is on a map), will ignore their changing reality and instead will fret over the latest Trumpfart or the Russian Phantom Menace, brought to you by the monolithic DemoRepubloFascist party.

[May17,'17] From time to time, I read a bunch of abstracts on clinical trials. Sometimes they are merely observational. The best ones do a direct, randomized intervention (tho in cancer studies, there is rarely the critical 'no treatment' arm). They generally show small effects. Upon reading the latest tranche of the zillions of conflicting and often marginal scientific results on treatments for heart and artery disease, stroke, dementia, diabetes, arthritis, and cancer, I am often left with the feeling, 'if we only just had a really big study'. There is, in fact, one really, really, really, big 'study' that is usually not mentioned in scientific and esp. pharmaceutical contexts. *Half* of the world's population (3-4 billion people) essentially eat a vegan diet (little or no meat and diary). It's not a scientific, randomized study. But it *is* an intervention, big time. The results are that these people just don't get heart disease, stroke, dementia, diabetes, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, and cancer with anywhere near the same rates as people in richer countries with richer diets. For example, even those with the APOE4 allele don't get Alzheimer's (much lower rate than in the US) if they eat a mostly plant-based diet. This is hardly a revelation. We already knew the truth in Europe, hundreds of years ago. The diseases of Americans and other rich countries are simply the diseases of the idle European aristocracy. It's completely obvious that we could get rid of the majority of 'health care', which is really sick care and bad-diet care, if people simply ate a diet that was mostly plant-based, and walked and used their bicycles every day. It's also pretty obvious that we haven't been able to fix the results of a bad diet and lack of exercise with daily drugs and an occasional drive to the exercise place. US adult obesity rates continue to rise, with almost 38% of adults in 2014 obese (CDC data; this doesn't include overweight people, who together with obese people make up 71% of the US population). Obesity is partly a function of social class (black > hispanic > white > asian). Lower class people are more likely to eat 'weaponized food' for a variety of reasons. On the positive side, US youth obesity rates have been almost flat over the past decade, though at this rate of change, industrial civilization will collapse before obesity rates are impacted. Maybe US obesity is, in part, a class-based, unconscious physical expression of peoples' fear of what comes next.

[May20,'17] I just read an Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's puff piece on a glossy white paper (original PDF can be downloaded from here) on how self-driving electric vehicles will rapidly overtake internal combustion engine cars. The original study was by Tony Seba at Stanford, the owner of the "Seba Technology Disruption Framework TM", who bills himself as a professional 'disruptionist'/rethinker. Stories about the Arbib and Seba 'study' have been widely catapulted across the web. I paged through the original report. Ambrose managed to exaggerate the already exaggerated white paper. He started with his title, "All fossil-fuel vehicles will vanish in 8 years in twin ‘death spiral’ for big oil and big autos" (the report, and later in Ambrose's article says 'most gone by 2030'). Here is a collection of other predictions. Crude oil will fall to $25 a barrel, bankrupting all oil companies and many car companies. Electric cars have near-zero marginal fuel cost (presumably, the special kilowatt-hours used by electric cars will somehow be less costly to generate than regular garden variety kilowatt hours that the rest of us use). The electric vehicles will run for 1 million miles with almost no repairs (the report said half a million). They will be constructed out of adamantium (actually, he didn't say that...). Grid usage will have to increase by 18%, but no grid expansion will be necessary because everything will charge at night (night energy source not specified -- it must be the special "zero marginal cost" energy). All internal combustion cars, trucks, trains, and ships will be gone by 2030. Cities, then suburbs will ban human drivers (he didn't say anything about whether this means we can finally get some bike lanes). Car dealers will disappear by 2024. China and India will do it, too. This will all happen because electric is so much cheaper.
     I suppose fantasies like this are more pleasant than the Planet of Slums reality that is beginning to remake cities across the US in the image of big cities in the third world. In the past, I have linked to Ambrose's financial articles, but this has made me more wary of his other stuff. It's not that I'm against reducing the number of cars, or that I don't expect 'disruption' from some self-driving cars and trucks, or that I prefer dealing with human-driven cars on my bike. It's just that Seba's whole fantasy of how this plays out seems highly unlikely. Uber is supposed to upend the world when it supposedly succeeds in killing all the taxi services thengoing driverless and firing all its drivers. But currently, Uber is losing roughly a billion dollars a *quarter* in order to undercut regular taxis, and they're not dead yet. And though it's dangerous to linearly extrapolate past trends into the future when exponential things can (occasionally) happen, it's important to remember that currently, in the US, there are about half a million electric cars out of a total of about 250 million cars -- that is, 0.2% of US cars are electric. After recent large increases, new residental solar installations are now actually falling year-on-year. I am dubious that flat or already-declining available net energy will support very many more bouts of energy-intensive 'disruption'. In any case, we'll know in just 8 years :-}

[May22,'17]
How to eat right before you get too old to care
     Motivation. Seeing the terrible decline of some older people we know, Claudia and I have changed our diets to whole foods plant-based. I am humbled by *how long* it has taken me to really get wise on diet, esp. when a lot of the basic info has been out there for decades! Claudia has helped me a lot in this. She was initially motivated to google around after suffering several terrible bouts of food poisoning in London, when she came across "Happy Healthy Vegans", then Neil Barnard, John McDougall, T. Colin Campbell, Michael Greger, and so on. Though I had almost gotten to the same place in the early 80's in graduate school, subsequently, I was unconsciously misled by the constant spew of industry-funded disinfo and FUD (always follow the money), tho with flickers of understanding here and there.
     But this is my final answer. Given my broad education and general willingness to look behind received opinion, I have to say that I'm seriously embarrassed at how long it has taken me to see straight on this most fundamental part of life (what's a blog/diary without some first-class embarrassment :-} ). I don't want to get dementia. I don't want to 'replace' my knees. I don't want my skeleton to fall apart. I don't want to take statins. I don't want to take the latest toxic anti-Alzheimer's drug. I don't want to get colon or prostate cancer and then get infused with toxic chemotherapy until I die. Finally, by the time I might need that stuff a few decades from now, it seems likely that the current ridiculously bloated 'health care' system will have started to fall apart. I'm not counting on that 'sick care' system -- which is actually mostly 'bad diet' care -- even being around a few decades from now. We don't have kids, so I need to (finally) do the right thing now.
     The Largest 'Clinical Trial' Ever. From time to time, I binge-read a bunch of pubmed abstracts on clinical trials. Sometimes they are merely observational. The best ones do a direct, randomized intervention (though in cancer studies, there is rarely the critical 'no treatment' arm). They generally show small effects. Upon reading the latest tranche of the zillions of conflicting, directly or indirectly industry-supported and often marginal scientific results on treatments for heart and artery disease, stroke, dementia, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, and cancer, I am often left with the feeling, 'if we only just had a really big study'.
     There is, in fact, one really, really, really, big 'study' that is very rarely mentioned in scientific and esp. pharmaceutical and surgical contexts. Half of the world's population (3-4 billion people) essentially eat a whole foods plant-based (vegan) diet with little, or no, meat and dairy. It's not a scientific, randomized study. But it *is* an intervention, big time.
     The results of the 'big study' are that old people there simply don't get heart disease, stroke, dementia, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, erectile dysfunction, and cancer with anywhere near the same rates as people in richer countries with richer diets -- as in 1/10 or even 1/100 the rates for age-matched groups. One striking example: even those with two copies of APOE4 allele in third world countries (e.g., Nigeria) rarely get Alzheimer's. In the US that gives you 5-20x the incidence of Alzheimer's (because it's 'genetic', woohoo). As the poor world adopts more calorie-, meat-, and dairy-dense western diets (or people from there come to the US/EU), their stool volume goes down to one third of that of mostly-plant-based eaters, and they rapidly acquire western diseases of middle and old age.
     All this should hardly be a revelation. We already knew the truth in Europe, hundreds of years ago. The diseases of Americans, Europeans, and other rich countries are simply the diseases of the idle, over-meat-and-dairy-fed old European aristocracy (gout!). Or the idle over-fed Thai artistocracy. Or the the idle over-fed Egyptian pharoahs (mummies had atherosclerosis and gallstones). Or take a comparative anatomical look at the human gut -- from its length, you can see it was designed to process mostly vegetables and fruits and grains. Or take a comparative look at human molars -- they have thicker enamel and shallower cusps than other already bascially vegan apes in order to grind even more grains and starchy roots. 'Paleo' is merely the latest industry-supported disinfo/FUD campaign to try to obscure those long-known facts. More evolutionary details are here. Embarrassingly, I already knew all this in 1979 (I was 24, taking courses in paleoanthropology and comparative primate anatomy).
     The basic truths about human protein requirements and the fact that improved diet can actually *reverse* diet-induced diseases -- even after they are well along -- was rediscovered experimentally by modern medical doctors in the first half of the twentieth century (Dr. Russell Henry Chittenden b. 1856, Dr. William Cumming Rose, b. 1887, Dr. Walter Kempner b. 1903, Dr. Lester M. Morrison b. 1908; Dr. Denis Burkitt b. 1911, inventor Nathan Pritikin b. 1915). But subsequently, these critical observations have been completely and criminally expunged from modern medical education. With the rise of molecular biology, and the pharmaceutical/cancer/surgical/medical-device industries in the second half of the twentieth century, diet has become almost completely detached from health in the mind of the public but also, especially, in the minds of doctors, who literally get no training at all in nutrition. In fact, attention to diet is actively smeared as unscientific and 'un-medical'. I never even came across most of these names until recently (I knew of Burkitt's lymphoma but had no idea of his more critical work on diet!). Michael Greger's Dec 2015 "How Not To Die" is an excellent, humorous, comprehensive, and extensively documented compendium (see also his videos at https://nutritionfacts.org/, which made it to PropOrNot -- Russian Red kale, dontcha know?). Or see this fine, politically incorrect, 2010 video from Dr. John McDougall, which effectively covers all the main points (or see his excellent 2012 "The Starch Solution") -- then read the utterly flaccid wikipedia FUD on him (*so* weakling the shill wikipedia editors had to timorously repeat the same FUD sentence twice!). Or see "The China Study" (2nd ed., 2016) by T. Colin Campbell. Or see this amazing 1982 interview with then 67-year-old Nathan Pritikin.
     It's completely obvious that we could get rid of the majority of western 'health care', which is really sick-care and bad-diet-care, if people simply went back to eating a diet that was mostly plant-based, and walked and used their bicycles to get around on shorter trips. It's also stunningly obvious that we haven't been able to fix the ever worsening results of a bad diet and lack of exercise with drugs and surgery and DNA testing, *or* by driving to the exercise place! US adult obesity rates continue to rise, with almost 38% (2 of 5) adults obese in 2014 (CDC data). This doesn't include "overweight" people, who together with "obese" people make up 71% of the US population! In the US, obesity is partly a function of social class (black > hispanic > white > asian). Lower class people in the US are more likely to eat 'weaponized food' for a variety of reasons. They no longer eat like 'real' poor people do (like the old people in rural China whose average cholesterol never goes above 130). The obesity epidemic isn't 'genetic'. DNA testing and 'personalized medicine' isn't going to fix it. And this diet-driven health disaster is now rapidly and catastrophically spreading to the rest of the world.
     The Main Problem. The main problem with the US (western) diet is simply that people eat too much meat and diary -- food that is too calorie-dense (=fat-dense), and too protein-dense, that contains no fiber, and that contains carcinogenic raw and cooked animal proteins and cancer-promoting growth factors. A second related problem is people eat too much refined plant-based oil (free oil) and refined sugar (chips/crisps are basically just spiced, plant-oil-and-sugar delivery devices), and refined flour. It doesn't help much to add bare fiber to a too-rich diet. The fiber has to be intimately associated with and stuck to the nutrients and fats and sugar as it is in whole food. To take an example from the second problem, there is nothing wrong with fructose if you extract it slowly from a fiber-filled cup of cherries or oranges or bananas (fructose is not a 'poison'!). But it can be unhealthy if you routinely drink large purified amounts of it in the form of Coke *or* in the form of a glass of manufactured fruit 'juice'. Remember how much orange juice you get when you squeeze one orange (which mechanically separates and removes much of the fiber, which is the job of your stomach and intestine). Thus, there are *two* bad things about a full glass of manufactured orange 'juice': (1) it contains the sugar from waaaay more oranges than any normal person can eat in one sitting in the form of actual oranges, and (2) the fructose isn't embedded in any fiber. It's no better than Coke. The exact same argument applies to olive oil versus olives (one tablespoon, 15 ml of free oil, equals the still-attached-oil in 40 small ripe black olives). But why focus on diet in the first place? The simple bottom line is: basic scientific evidence has shown that diet is *much* more powerful than genetics, drugs, and even exercise, in determining your long-term healthy survival.
     Dairy. Americans/UK-ians/EU-ians eat waaay too much cheese and dairy, which in addition to containing no fiber, also contains a lot of saturated fats. The amount of cheese that Americans and Europeans now eat is staggering, and has continuously and massively increased toward the end of the 20th century as a result of business and advertising practices. In the US in 1900, people ate 3 pounds of cheese a *year*. That was not very different from Europe at the time, since many people had recently come from there. Now Americans eat 45-50 pounds of cheese a year (some European countries now eat even more, and have world-record levels of colon cancer and Type 1 childhood diabetes to match). Cheese is just highly concentrated cow's milk. Cow breast milk (before concentration into cheese!) is designed to cause a baby cow to put on nearly 1,000 pounds of weight in a year. It has 3x the protein content of human breast milk. It contains natural estrogenic hormones from the constantly pregnant industrial milk cows, which is probably why dairy is associated with breast cancer. It contains IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor one) as well as other peptides that stimulate increased production of IGF-1 by the human liver. Peptide breakdown products of milk casein protein (casomorphins) cause histamine release, i.e., inflammation. Casomorphins also slightly hit opiate receptors to keep you -- as a baby cow -- addicted to cow breast milk. Cow's milk given to early-weaned humans of certain genetic backgrounds probably causes most Type 1 (childhood) diabetes. 100% of Type 1 diabetic children have antibodies to milk proteins (probably having gotten into the circulation, and then exposed to the immune system, via leaky gut), while 0% of non-Type-1-diabetic children have them; and Type 1 diabetes is extremely strongly correlated with dairy intake by country. Finally, cheese has about 2000 calories per pound. Cheese is super-milk. Milk also has lactose (milk sugar), but that's *not* the main problem.
     This doesn't even consider the hormones and antibiotics added to make the industrial calves grow faster. That's strictly business. The reason they give antibiotics continuously to cows and other food animals is that they put on weight 10% faster than when given the same amount of non-antibiotic-laced food (perhaps the antibiotics mow down some of the intestinal bacteria, thereby leaving more food energy for weight gain). The dairy industry is a hugely powerful lobby. Just look at the article out this month about how it's OK to eat as much cheese as you want. This meta-analysis arrived at this preposterous dairy-industry-funded conclusion, then parrotted by the Guardian and the NYT, and then the whole web, by omitting any study from their meta-analysis that included people with heart and artery disease -- i.e., the very people damaged by too much milk and cheese. Or look at the Enron Texas billionaire-funded 'Nutrition Coalition', which is trying to 'reform' dietary guidelines (by lobbying Congress) to recommend that people eat *even more* butter, meat, and cheese. Or see 'Authority Nutrition' or 'Nutrition Impact LLC' -- other industry shill groups.
     Meat. In the case of meat, a similar massive increase in the amount eaten has occurred. In poorer parts of Europe, this has happened quite recently. For example, in southern Europe, rates of diabetes have shot through the roof (even including type I, auto-immune diabetes). To take an example, in Crete, they now have nearly the highest rates of the more common, acquired, type II diabetes in all of Europe. Just 50 years ago, they used to eat meat just a few times a year for holidays and had no diabetes. Now they eat it (and cheese) every day. In China, after eating a western diet for just a decade and a half, diabetes and obesity rates have ballooned almost up to American 'standards'. In the UK, Alzheimer's has just overtaken heart disease to become the leading cause of death. Alzheimer's is strongly correlated with metabolic syndrome (obesity, diabetes, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, heart and artery disease, unbalanced blood lipids, erectile dysfunction). In Africa, colon cancer did *not* increase as poor Africans reduced fiber and ate more junk food, probably because they haven't yet been able to afford to increase meat and dairy consumption very much. In the case of osteoporosis, high-protein diets from high meat and dairy intake cause the kidneys to excrete calcium (as a result of acid load from the body having to perform excess proteolysis); drinking cow breast milk and eating a high-animal-protein diet as a human child, teenager, and adult literally rots your bones.
     Then there is how humans now raise industrial chickens. They are fed antibiotics, growth promoters, Prozac, Benedryl, and caffeine, and then the tissue is injected with brine to make it absorb water, so a given amount of meat weighs more. This is again all 'strictly business'. The antibiotics and growth promoters make the chickens gain weight faster when given the same amount of food. The rapidly grown (9 weeks when it used to take 6 months!) salty chickens we eat now are essentially obese; the meat has 10x the fat of chickens a century ago (20% fat vs. 2% fat -- 3x as many calories now coming from fat as from protein, more percent calories coming from fat than with ice cream!). The psychoactive drugs (and keeping the lights on 20 hours a day) makes the chickens alert, passive, continuous feeding machines, in spite of their dire living conditions. This has some disturbing analogies to modern humans.
     Oils. You often hear the 'olive oil is good'. It is somewhat better than eating a similar amount of: (1) toxic trans fat (hydrogenated vegetable oil [40% trans] used in processed foods, but also naturally in butter [3% trans], beef [2% trans]), or (2) saturated fat (in chicken, beef, cheese, butter), or (3) other purified plant seed oils (corn/cottonseed/sunflower/safflower/canola oil, also mostly for processed foods). But olive oil, like all the other oils, contains 4000 calories per pound. It's the most energy dense thing you can possibly eat. It doesn't fill you up at all because the volume is so small. It impedes normal artery dilation function just as much as other oils do. It also doesn't taste like much! (just eat a teaspoon by itself). Do an experiment halving the amount of olive oil in a dish and see if you can really *taste* the difference. The biggest effect is on the texture of the food; most of the flavor in a meal comes from other things in food (mostly from plants). The simple rule is that you shouldn't eat too many calories in fat; trans fats and animal saturated fats are worse, but too much olive oil will lead to the same problems. Here is a pdf transcript of an enlightening, somewhat confrontational interview of Neil Barnard, by 'fat-positive', media- and publisher-friendly, Mark Hyman; Neil Barnard has all the goods. The 'Mediterranean diet' only became extremely olive-oil-heavy in the late 20th century; this has resulted in some of the highest rates of childhood obesity in the entire world (Greece and Italy). Instead of 30%, 40% (or more!) total calories from fat, it's best to get 10% total calories from fat. Given how calorie-dense it is, this translates simply to 'eat a lot less fat/oil'. Reducing oil reduces arterial inflammation.
     Alcohol. Large studies have found a "J-shaped" curve, meaning a little seems to be slightly better than none, but any larger amounts are quite a bit worse than none. It looks like the "J" goes above into the worse-than-none region above 1 drink per day (damn!). There may also be hormonal effects (hops contain phytoestrogens that hit estrogen receptor alpha). which may be another reason (besides the alcohol itself) why alcohol consumption is associated with breast cancer in women. So, as with cheese and meat and oil, it's critical to keep the right dose -- a small one. Finally, the cardioprotective effect of alcohol only applies to people who don't exercise, who eat too much meat and dairy, not enough vegetables, and/or who smoke. Luckily, at low doses, it doesn't obviously *hurt* the hearts of people that already have healthy diets and physical habits.
     Exercise. Another problem is that people think that they are fat and unhealthy because they don't exercise. Exercise certainly helps with muscle and joint pain, and general skeletal maintenance, and circulatory fitness (but note, massively too much exercise is also bad -- ultramarathon runners eating a too-high-protein diet actually get atherosclerosis!).
     The main misunderstanding here is that the *great majority* of the food calories you eat every day are used up maintaining intermediary cellular metabolism (heating yourself, taking out the cellular 'garbage', making ATP to power tens of thousands of different energy-requiring chemical reactions). The average human exhales about 2 pounds (~1 kg) of CO2 every day. The carbon in that CO2 excreted by each cell comes entirely from food. This means that in order to maintain a heavier weight, you have to eat more calories, *every day*. You burn almost as many calories sleeping as during waking hours. To keep a reduced weight, you have to continuously eat less calories, forever.
     Take an average overweight or obese person. They will often have been eating as much as 1.5 times as many calories, say 1000 extra calories, as they should have been, just to maintain their extra weight. This extra weight then has to be carried around by a skeleton and joints not designed for that much weight (not too mention simultaneously under osteoporotic assault as a result of having to create too much acid to metabolize too much protein).
     How much exercise would this person have to do to fix this without changing their every-day eating pattern? Well, if that person ran *seven* fast (8-minute) miles a day, every day, including weekends, that would fix it right there. That is completely impractical, esp. if obese. There is another effect that people often fasten onto -- that regular *extreme* exercise *slightly* increases metabolic rate. But that effect only breaks out of the noise with people that are training for marathons or the Tour de France -- for example, people cycling 30 miles a day, or running 10+ really fast miles a day. Even then, the 'increased metabolism' calories are a small fraction of the calories burned by a couch potato just sitting there maintaining intermediary metabolism in all of their enlarged and more numerous cells. The only way to permanently lose weight is to continuously and forever eat less calories per day, period. This is actually not hard at all to do if you eat a less calorie-dense, whole foods plant-based diet.
     Cancer. One of the principal defining features of abnormal cancer cells is that they continue to divide and crawl around, ignoring 'social' cues from the surrounding cells that cause a normal cell to stop dividing and stay put. When the tumor mass(es) grow to a large size, you die. But this only occurs with the last few doublings. Unlike yeast, which can double in 1-2 hours, the doubling time for tumor cells is usually much slower (2-3 months, or longer). Starting with one abnormal cell and assuming no cell death and a 3-month doubling time means you would only end up with 16 abnormal cells after a year, and a million abnormal cells after 5 years, which is still an invisible, undetectably small mass. At that rate it would take almost 8 years to get up to a billion cells, a detectable 1-2 cm tumor. However, if the doubling time is slowed down to 6 months (by the immune system killing some abnormal cells, by some abnormal cells killing themselves via apoptosis, or by a reduction in tumor promotion), then it would take 15 years to grow to a detectable size, or if doubling is slowed to a year, then 30 years to become detectable. Because tumor growth is an exponential process, relatively small modifications of the growth rate have a huge potential to change lifetime outcome, for example, death at 90, from some other cause with an encapsulated 2 cm tumor vs. death at 50, overrun with large metastasized tumors. Diet has an enormous potential to affect tumor growth throughout life, via anti-cancer compounds in plants, by reduction in inflammation, by avoiding consuming tumor-promoting proteins and factors in meat and dairy, and by avoiding obesity which storehouses fat-soluble carcinogens. Diet is natural chemotherapy.
     Recommendations. For breakfast, for example, you could eat oatmeal with some fruit and a some ground flax seed. Don't put dairy milk or dairy yogurt on it; use nut milk, or nut or coconut yogurt, or soy milk (the ~10 grams a day of soy protein that the Japanese eat, about equivalent to a cup of soy milk -- is associated with *lower* rates of breast and prostate cancer). Oatmeal helps with blood lipids. It has a lot of fiber. It fills you up and keeps you satisfied longer. Many people have lost a lot of weight by changing *nothing* but eating oatmeal for breakfast.
     Try to eat as many vegetables and fruits and grains as possible. Anything in the direction of less meat and cheese, and more whole-food plant-based and starchy food helps. Eating a high-animal-protein diet is about as carcinogenic as smoking, esp. if the diet includes a lot of processed and grilled meat (beef/pork/chicken/lamb/fish/sausage). Learn to make flavorful spicy foods without meat and diary and using less oil. Remember that fat and meat actually don't have very strong flavors all by themselves. Most of the flavor in a dish comes from plants, not meat. Just don't drink soft drinks and manufactured 'juice' at all. Go for carbonated water or squeeze a fresh orange or cut up a mango (tastes better, more satisfying!).
     Try to avoid eating any processed 'weaponized food'. These foods are painstakingly designed to make you eat more than you should by avoiding triggering satiation. This includes fast food and pizza, but generally most highly processed food/junk. American pizza -- now metastasizing worldwide -- has morphed into an insane ultra-mega-cheese-and-meat-and-oil delivery system. Italian pizza (as found in Italy) does have cheese, but much less of it, on a much thinner crust -- and the original Italian pizza probably didn't even have cheese at all! The American version has quintupled the cheese content. American pizza every few days is one of the reasons why teenagers (esp. lower income) are now getting fatty livers and fatty, insulin-resistant diabetic muscles; their teen-aged livers look like those of aged alcoholics. Insulin resistance is mainly due to deposits of intramuscular fat, *not* sugar intake. The intestine immediately transports fat that is eaten into the bloodstream from where it then immediately gets deposited into fat stores. By contrast, turning carbohydrates into fat is actually a much more energy-intensive process, despite the idiotic anti-carb disinfo that is gospel to most overweight people.
     If a diet change can be maintained for even a few weeks, your palate *does* change, remarkably quickly. You begin to find less calorie-dense, less oily foods just as satisfying mouth-feel-wise in just a few weeks. You don't have to give up any spices or taste. In fact, food tastes 'brighter'. Most of the flavor in meat dishes comes from plants. Plus, you get to eat a lot more, making it much easier to get full. Most people losing weight on a whole foods plant-based diet say that they have to make no conscious effort to restrict their food intake at all, aside from eating mostly plants and avoiding processed food and added oil.
     Finally, if you eat an every-day high-calorie high-fat diet, the intensity of the experience of calories and fat becomes lost to you, requiring an ultra-high-calorie-and-fat preparation -- say, a duck confit burger topped with a slice of fried foie gras, and a side of the original 'french fries', double-fried in duck fat to increase the fat content, followed by a cheese course and a chocolat fondant -- to rise out of the everyday background in order to achieve bliss (yes, I have eaten that, with a lot of wine :-} ). Eating less-calorie-dense food most of the time restores the bliss of an occasional high fat treat (and that bliss can be achieved without the foie gras, which anyway contains amyloid plaque precursors from the stressed, force-fed duck's fatty liver disease; remember that Mad Cow was contracted by eating meat). Also, you taste your food much better without having to use so much alcohol to wash the fat off of your tongue after every bite (esp. salt and sweet).
     If you go completely plant-based in the modern world, the *only* supplement you need is B12. That's because people eating plant-based real-poor-people diets used to get it from eating small amounts of bacteria in dirt on vegetables (you only need to eat micrograms since proper blood levels are in picograms). Since B12 gets into meat via the same pathway (eating bacteria) and given high-antibiotic conditions in concentrated animal feeding operations, meat eaters are often deficient in B12.
     Last, but not least, meat and dairy account for between 20% (UN estimate) to 50% (World Bank estimate) of human greenhouse gas emissions, partly a function of whether you include methane (methane has a shorter atmospheric life than CO2, but is a lot more potent). This includes pumping water, fossil fuel driven deforestation, making fertilizer, growing animal food (5-20x as much food production required compared to eating the plants directly), methane (animal farts and open pit manure decomposition from 20 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cattle, and 1 billion pigs and sheep pooping in miserable conditions, at any one time). After having removed most shallower-living, easier-to-get fish from the world's oceans, humans are now literally scraping the bottoms of the deep oceans with huge trawls to decimate stocks of 100-year old (human-mercury-laden) deep-sea fish. It's an utter joke to eat chicken and fish and beef and pork every day and 'be against human-caused climate change' or to be for 'sustainability'. Eating 'local', or 'wild-caught', or 'grass-fed' meat and fish doesn't help in the slightest. Reducing or eliminating eating chicken and beef and pork and dairy and fish is a *lot* more important than sobbing about Trump and the Paris accords.

[May29,'17] The brash boldness of criminal banks is increasing. Look at this this Fed graph plotting excess reserves and then interest paid on excess reserves. Excess reserves are money originally created out of the void by the Fed, then held by large banks beyond their reserves requirements. *Interest paid on excess reserves* is the amazing concept of re-depositing the created-from-the-void money with the Fed, who then pays the banks interest for doing this (!). This is an utterly risk-free way for banks to 'make money' (quite literally). You can see that in 2017, the Fed has suddenly started rapidly ticking up the interest rate it pays large banks on the 'excess reserves' (about 1/3 of this interest is paid to foreign banks). From 2009 to 2016, the rate was 0.25, then then 0.50% in 2016, then 0.75% and 1.0% in 2017. The Fed has carefully set this rate to stay higher than the tiny increases in effective Federal Funds rate, which can be seen in comparison in these graphs. Put this in the context of the 96 million Americans currently not in the workforce out of a working age population of 205 million people (graphs here). That means almost *half* of working age people in America are not employed. And we are creating money to give to large US and foreign banks who can then deposit it back with the Fed to collect interest. Normally, I would now say something like 'if more people knew how this worked...'. But the sad reality is, if more people knew, the more likely outcome would be *more* votes for bankers and rather than pitchforks for bankers. Maybe the way to get them raise their pitchforks would be to take away the 'smart' phones.

[Jun05,'17] It's blackly humorous to watch the 'left' and the 'right' reacting to the proposed Trump withdrawal from the Paris climate accords. Numbskulls on the 'right' are doing their stupid anti-science jigs, @assbooking and commenting and slobbering to each other using technology they don't understand that was created by, uhhh, the same kind of scientists and engineers that figured out climate change. But the appalled 'left' (and most EU-ians) are just as bad. They act as if the Paris accords have had even the tiniest measurable restraining effect on the collective rush of the insane monkey posse known as humanity toward the hard limits of a finite earth. The Paris accords are not a 'first step' -- they have done *absolutely nothing* to the utterly linear increase in world CO2 output. It is arguably better to tear them up, because they have served merely as a smokescreen and a way to salve consciences by saying 'we are doing our best', when in reality, we are doing *nothing at all*. The only way to fix the problem would be for everybody to immediately begin to use less stuff, eat less meat and dairy (meat and dairy account for between 20% [UN] to 50% [World Bank] of human greenhouse gas emissions!), reduce hospital visits through improved diet, take less pharmaceutical drugs, drive less, fly less, bicycle to work and the food store, live in smaller houses, buy less crap, and esp. have less kids (the other half of greenhouse gas emission increases). We all know *not one* of those things are negotiable for the great majority of either the 'right' *or* 'left'. A pox on all the dancing *and* the sobbing.

[Jun09,'17] The market capitalization of Tesla now equals that of GM, the largest US car manufacturer. For now, let's ignore the fact that Tesla has lost $2-3 billion a year over the past few years while GM is making roughly $6 billion a year. Instead, let's compare market capitalization per car sold in 2016. That would be $5,000 per car sold for GM (or $6,600 for Ford) versus $800,000 per car sold for Tesla. Thus, Tesla's market capitalization per car sold is roughly 160x that of GM. Of course, this doesn't do justice to how much more 'disruption' Tesla is capable of than GM, and how much this 'disruption' costs. For example, a pension fund investment in Tesla has great potential to 'disrupt' some old people a few years down the line. Another potential example is cobalt. One of the critical components of 'lithium' batteries is cobalt. Battery manufacture currently uses about half of all world's cobalt production. The price of cobalt doubled in late 2016 from $12/pound to $25/pound. About 1% of cars are electric, and a tiny fraction of 1% of homes have lithium-cobalt (e.g., Power Wall) electric storage. The money rentiers are slobbering over the money changing prospects of a mere 10% increase in cobalt production in 2017 (123,000 tons/year to 136,000 tons/year). Just imagine the 'disruption' we can look forward to when everybody gets an electric car and an electric home, and cobalt production expands by 50x or 100x (5,000% or 10,000%). Higher prices will no doubt cause a hundred times as much easily accessible cobalt to be found -- because we humans need and deserve it. Disrupt me harder. This doesn't mean I oppose electric carz! (or better, electric bicycles) or think that there won't be some more progress in battery technology (e.g., see update below). It's just that it's also important to consider physical reality of our current overshoot when reading puff pieces like this recent one from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (that I already complained about above) to counteract the global reality distortion field. I know, deep in my heart, that there is probably no way to soften the eventual blow that will arrive around 2030. But every new day, really just like the cornucopians, I imagine that anything is possible! [Update: Jun13: here is some late 2016 progress on the battery front :-} the new Renault/Nissan Zoe battery developed by LG has 41 kWh (200+ miles) usable (75% more energy than the original battery which was 23 kWh), but weighs only a little more at 670 pounds (old battery was 640 pounds) and fits in same space. Given that electric cars are considerably less complex than ICE cars, their price could eventually reach parity with ICE cars -- less complexity cancelling out greater expense of the large battery.]

[Jun15,'17] A large number of retail stores are close to, or in, bankruptcy and are closing many stores. This is often attributed to online sales. But online sales only accounted for 8% of total retail sales in 2016. Of course, online sales are continuing to grow (Amazon accounted for about 1/4 of total growth in retail sales last year), but this also includes online sales by the companies that are going bankrupt. Put together with the recent rise in car inventories and recent pauses in the preposterous increases in high-end real estate, the overall picture suggests we are getting close to another recession -- a slight contraction of the economy, which will cause a slight increment in the small glut of oil, which will cause a large oil price crash, which will come at exactly the wrong time for light tight oil companies, who have increased debt-funded capital expenditure over the past year. Huge increases in 'subprime' light tight oil debt coming due in 2018 could turn out to be a nucleus for instability in world banking system in 2018-2019. However, I had expected 'subprime' light tight oil debt to have caused a problem long before this. So hopefully things will continue to limp along without another 2008-like crash. The 2008 crash resulted in a permanent decrement in retail sales unlike previous recessions. Here is a 25-year Fed graph of 'retail sales' (blue), the related 'new orders for consumer goods' (red), and the BASE money supply (green). The red and blue lines never returned to their long-term trend lines. Compare 2008 to the almost invisible effect of the 2001 dot-com bubble crash. The BASE money supply graph (green) shows the huge spike in bank 'excess reserves' that began in 2008, and that conveniently illustrates the three main bouts of quantitative easing (2008, 2010, 2012), AKA 'give more money to already super-rich people'. The Fed has indicated that they are about to start 'unwinding' the three QE's. This is not yet visible in the green line. Though I think super-rich people are unavoidably, intrinsically, irremediably evil, personally, I would prefer limping along to Greek-style austerity any day. But I'm just one insignificant non-rich passenger on our runaway train...

[Jun19,'17] Amazon buys brick-and-mortar Whole Foods with the intent to fire a bunch of people, create a more automated zombified buying experience, crapify, and reduce prices to compete with Walmart. An example of the automation is a 30 May 2017 Amazon patent on a system to block attempts to use your 'smart' phone to comparison shop when you are in their store using their wifi. Forget about the so-called election. The real voting comes when you buy stuff through Amazon. That vote for Amazon is a vote for a cashless, police-state panopticon. They won't need to shoot too many attempted shoplifters because they will recognize you, pre-crime style, before you even walk through the front door. Avoid voter's remorse just a few years down the line! Avoid amazon! It's *not* inevitable.

[Jun24,'17]
Sauve qui peut
     It is difficult to talk about diet because of its powerful social, personal, political, and business overtones. The advantages of a plant-based diet are obvious from the scientific perspectives of hominid evolutionary history, interventional dietary studies, and climate change. Humans have a digestive tract evolved mostly for vegetables and fruits and grains when compared to other animals, they have molars specifically evolved to grind seeds when compared to other apes, and they live a long time, which gives chronic problems caused by eating a too-high-protein, too-high-fat diet a lot of time to build up. Eating a meat-heavy diet (chicken/beef/pork/dairy/fish) is a major initiator of human cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, erectile dysfunction, and retinal damage. Plant-based diets have been known experimentally to actually *reverse* the progress of many of these diseases for more than a half a century. And finally, we now know that eating meat accounts for perhaps as much as 50% of human-caused climate change when you include the methane, repurposing land (it's meat that cuts down the rain forests), pumping water, growing animal food, etc.
     But the social, political, and business overlays on diet combine to almost completely drown out the basic facts. Returning to a mostly plant-based diet looks like a social move down the 'ladder of development', esp. for people who have just clambered up. It is a return to the diet of the truly poor. It looks like a sign of deprivation and failure, for both rich *and* poor. It turns its back on meat-centered high European food culture. There is even an unpatriotic tinge to bankrupting large industries and throwing people out of work (big meat, big dairy, big hospitals, big pharma, big medical devices, big insurance). For example, if everybody were to eat less meat, they would require a lot less surgery and less drugs and less MRI's and less doctor visits and less in-home care and less cars and less battery-operated carts.
     The hidden social aspects of discussing plant-based diets has some analogy to what I imagine the well-to-do car drivers are thinking as we interact on my daily bicycle commute. When not (respectfully) resentful at my occupying even a small amount of road space, or at my slowing down their righteous commute by a second or two, I imagine that they also extend empathetic pity toward me, seeing my graying hair, and thinking that for some reason, I might not be able to afford a car, like the other poor people that they see on bicycles. I probably get the most heat from genuinely economically poor drivers, esp. before I was wearing my helmet, because they were only one step up the pecking order; or if seeing my helmet, they realize that I am not poor, they also assume that I am cycling for political (or selfish) reasons, and then resent my 'slumming'.
     But I'm not cycling mainly to save the planet. The planet doesn't need saving and will do just fine after humans will have mostly exhausted the easily accessible energy -- stored in several hot periods in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic hundreds of millions of years ago -- over the next few decades. The humans population will then begin to go down. Sure it might take 10,000 or 50,000 years to re-populate, re-vegetate, and 're-plankton-ate' the planet, but the planet has a lot time on its hands.
     Getting back to diet, eating mostly plant-based, like cycling, is mostly about saving myself. Old, obese, heavy-meat-eating humans come to have bodies resembling that of the dead killer whale that recently got tangled in fishing lines near the coast of Britain, and that had a stunning one part per *thousand* PCB's in its fat. And killer whale physiology has adapted to being a top predator, unlike humans. Humans have been able to turn themselves into top predators not by adapting their bodies, but by using language, the second coming of a symbol-using system (PDF) built on top of lower level DNA-and-protein system that initiated Darwinian evolution. This has all occurred within an instant of Darwinian evolutionary time, so the re-evolution of human physiology, gastrointestinal tract, teeth, gut, and so on, hasn't even started ('Paleo' is a complete crock); and there is not nearly enough energy (the 100+ million year old coal/oil/methane will have been mostly consumed within the space of 100 years) for it to ever get off the ground.
     Finally, the bad effects of having a mostly vegetarian physiology, but eating too much meat and fish and dairy, are exacerbated by highly efficient methods of industrial meat production, where waste animal fats are incorporated into animal feed, which is then fed in all directions (chicken fat to beef, beef fat to chicken, fish fat to chicken, etc). The result is to concentrate man-made fat-soluble toxins and metals in animal fat, which are then immediately deposited in human belly fat, like the trans fats that end up there when humans eat too much trans fats (including the trans fat that naturally occurs in beef, pork, lamb, and chicken). Even plant production isn't immune -- for example, metals-containing chicken feces ends up being used as rice fertilizer.
     But the bottom line is that eating mostly plant-based doesn't have to be seen mainly as social or moral commentary. It's also a rational and individually selfish response to knowing the facts of the interplay between Darwinian evolution, biochemistry, and the optimization method known as capitalism. Sauve qui peut.

[Jun28,'17] Much as with the toxic interaction between capitalism/business and human diet referred to in my diet rants above, the interaction between capitalism and 'noooz' is equally toxic:

Anonymous/undercover Project Veritas guy:

"Why is CNN constantly like, Russia this, Russia that?"

John Bonifield, CNN supervising producer for the CNN Medical Unit:

"Because it's ratings. Our ratings are incredible right now."

Bonifield later reports on 'what he is up against' (meaning what Bonifield's supervisor is up against from the CEO of CNN, Jeff Zucker):

"Good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we're done with it. Let's get back to Russia."

On the Russia reporting, John Bonifield says:

"Could be bullsh*t. I mean, it's mostly bullsh*t right now. Like, we don't have any big giant proof... I don't know, if you were finding something, we would know about it. The way these leaks happen, they'd leak it. It'd leak. If it was something really good, it would leak."

On Trump, John Bonifield simply says:

"Trump is good for [our] business right now".

Project Veritas is run by conservative James O’Keefe. Here is a pathetic attempt (one of many) to smear the *real information* in the video, no doubt illegally and surreptitously obtained (like virtually all domestic C-eye-eh surveillance) by an anonymous person. The Heavy.com piece uses fear, uncertainty, doubt, and character assassination. Doesn't work for me, and I'm as left and anti-Trump as they come. But I think the Mighty Wurlizter will eventually win this one, because of the even more dismally short attention span of people these days. For example, last night, Russiagate merrily continued to gush out of CNN, with an hour-long evening show containing such gems as 'Russians are genetically programmed' to be shifty spys, and to want to undermine US freedoms. What a creepy re-run of McCarthy-ism, but also European/American 'master race' propaganda (e.g., see US WWI recruiting poster here). The Mighty Wurlitzer used this across Europe and the US to whip up, and drag along, the (always!) generally antiwar populace in England, France, Germany, and Russia into both WWI and WWII. The 'genetic master race' bullsh*t, whether coming from Germans, US-ians, or Israelis -- is utterly poisonous chimpanzee politics. It doesn't directly use science. It doesn't even really use language. Rather, it's about creating masterful flows of subconsciously perceived chimpanzee politics images and chimpanzee politics soundtracks and chimpanzee politics voice timbres. Of course, creating and blasting these finely crafted products out to the insouciant populace, requires an incomprehensibly complex machinery created by physicists, mathematicians, engineers, writers, directors, editors. Almost unbelievable coordination and distributed intellectual power is required to deliver and present the CNN product about the supposed 'genetics' of Russians on the airport flat screens where I saw it -- along with my fellow travelers, the majority of whom were overweight or morbidly obese. For better or worse, this is truly the pinnacle of language-driven human cultural and business evolution -- both CNN, but also the current the state of the American body. In the near future, I'm hoping that complexity (and girth!) will begin to decline!

[Jul03,'17]
Good sh*t
The interaction between bioscience, entrepreneurship, and the seven deadly sins (pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth) is always fertile ground for black humor. Over the past 5 years, there has been a surge of interest in the 'gut microbiome'. Initially disregarded because it was so complex, not to mention constantly under scorched-earth attack by 'life saving' antibiotics, molecular biologists have more recently began to start cataloging its diversity in unprecedented detail, finally realizing that it is literally a critical part of the body. It is highly responsive to what we eat. Since the poor people of the world -- who live on a few dollars a day and so can only afford to eat a whole foods plant-based diet -- have massively lower incidences of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, macular degeneration, breast/prostate/colon/pancreatic cancer, rheumatoid and regular arthritis, asthma, multiple sclerosis, Krohn's disease, gout, kidney stones, gall bladder problems, and erectile dysfunction as they get old, some biotech guys have come up with the idea of gathering sh*t from these poorest of the poor people, purifying out the wholesome bacteria in it, and then reselling it to obese, diseased, bad-diet westerners as a hi-tech pill. There's always IPO gold in the 'tropics'. Of course, an oral pill would probably be pretty useless, because it has to pass through the acid bath in the stomach, one function of which is to kill bacteria. So perhaps suppositories or enemas. I'm sure there would be a market for a hi-tech battery-operated cell-phone-app-controlled 'tele gut microbiome rejuvenator pump'. And if vampire Peter Thiel is already injecting himself with young people's blood, just think, he might need some of their sh*t, too! Of course, the back door approach won't work very well either. The problem is one of the deadly sins, gluttony -- which is usually pronounced 'meat-o-ny'. Eating a high-protein, high-fat, animal-based diet results in the wrong kind of food down there for the poor people's whole foods plant-based intestinal bacteria. But the hope of being a daily glutton, but then fixing it with a pill, is an eternal human desire, so the minor fact that it won't actually work won't stop it. Probably not too long before Therash*t, Stronz-onos, MetaboT$rd, Merde-oni, and iShite, are butting, uh..., heads.

[Jul11,'17] A biotech stock analyst (from 2003, quoted in the NYT, dredged up by Chris Hedges: "We sometimes joke that when you’re doing a clinical trial, there are two possible disasters. The first disaster is if you kill people. The second disaster is if you cure them. ... The truly good drugs are the ones you can use chronically for a long, long time". The frank admission of evil, though disgusting, is somehow less mentally disturbing to me than somebody like Willem Post, a retired engineer who posts on a Maine NIMBY anti-wind-power site (and on Euan Mearns site). It is difficult to put a finger precisely on the source of my unease. Willem Post is excellent on the subject of the true carbon costs of electric cars or on the basic physics and engineering background to energy efficient houses -- and why better insulation is just as, or even more, important than making more 'renewable' electric generation. I generally agree with him that by not considering the whole system (e.g., including natural gas peaker plants) that green techno-cornucopians are badly overestimating the so-far quite incremental effects of 'renewables'. Then there is overall growth. For example, the average 2004-2014 global growth rate in energy usage was 2% per year. This was barely covered by renewables, which grew at 2.8% of total energy per year. And note that that this doesn't consider increased energy costs of spot generation as intermittent solar and wind are daily compensated by larger and larger ramp-up/ramp-downs causing more wear and tear on natural gas peaker plants. One problem is that he is geologically naive -- he expects that "we have time to prepare, as we have about 100 to 150 years of fossil fuels left over". In that view, there is plenty enough energy left to slowly (potentially!) build lots of high-quality EU-style Passivhaus's. This is probably why he is so against wind turbines marring the beautiful ridges near libertarian rich people's edge-of-the-forest houses in Maine. This is similar to general US tax proceeds being paid as subsidies to rich people buying Tesla 'Tuscan' solar panel roofs for their mountain vacation home (not to mention subsidizing Elon himself). Something about Willem Post's whole package of off-the-grid retreats for 'euro' rich people really rubs me the wrong way. I know he talks about the need for subsidies for poorer Maine-ers for house insulation. But I know he also must know this will never happen. He seems not to realize how close we are to a net energy precipice, or if he does, he doesn't let on. Of course, he *has* to know that the harvesting low-energy-density solar and wind resources inevitably requires larger geographic footprints. And, of course, he knows that energy storage can have a similarly large footprint -- the energy in a gallon of gasoline is equivalent to lifting 3500 gallons of water (13 tons of water) one kilometer into the air. Perhaps, the real source of my unease is that deep in my heart, I know we are all basically acting the same as him -- just to varying degrees, each mostly proportional to how rich we are. The stock analyst, letting it all hang out, was somehow more refreshing.

[Jul13,'17] Sometimes, I come across something that fundamentally upends my understanding of large scale money. Here in an example, which shows a graph of the 'percentage of global bond market returns explained by central bank asset changes'. After a spike during the Financial Crisis, it was down 1% or less. Then, there was a short spike to over 30% at the end of 2010, but quickly back to under 1%. Then, a fatter spike in June 2013, and then an even fatter one starting in 2014 going up to 20%, but only going down to 10%. Finally, starting in 2016, a sustained increase, now reaching over 50% (!). The bond market (worth $200 trillion) is much bigger than the stock market (worth $70 trillion), and has proportionately more daily trading. The article quotes BofA saying "Central banks have become the bond market". These Fed graphs of reverse repos (another weird big bank support mechanism where the Fed 'pawns' its assets for an interest-bearing loan from big banks to the Fed, because the Fed needs money, haha), and Fed total cash balance are strongly correlated with the 'Fed percent of the bond market' graph. Similarly, the huge linear increase in the balance sheet of the Bank of Japan took off at a similar time (near the end of 2013). And the last, biggest jump in excess reserves held at the Fed happened around the same time. Another eye-opener today for me was this article, showing that 40% of the Fed's interest on excess reserves held at the Fed is paid to foreign banks. These graphs suggest that beginning around 2014, worldwide central bank disturbances of similar magnitude to those observed during the Financial Crisis have occurred, yet without huge, easily visible consequences. I am amazed that nothing has blown up! I feel like passenger on Titanic, hearing some loud noises coming from down below, but not knowing what they really imply. The loud noises include: (1) possible reduction in bank excess reserves causing (more!) asset inflation in the real economy, (2) effects of change in interest paid by Fed (US taxpayers!) on excess reserves (which are 40% foreign!), (3) effects of unwinding the $4.4 trillion QE Fed balance sheet, (4) effects of Fed interest rate increases, (5) effects on the bond market (now 50% Fed?!). I still don't really have a completely firm basic-level understanding of how all this self-referential stuff actually works. However, it seems clear we are now exploring a new part of the parameter space, right as we sail over peak net energy.

[Jul18,'17] Following up on last week's 'why hasn't this already blown up', take a look at this graph (from Credit Suisse via zerohedge) of who has bought stock since 2009. It shows that companies buying their own stock accounts for *all* cumulative buying of stock since 2009! I knew it was big but not that big. Stock buybacks benefit only the scum bosses, and mostly disregard performance. Filthy rich parasites are hollowing out the entire world for themselves. Walter Scheidel, using historical examples, argues that the only thing that has *ever* reversed this trend is mass violence and/or catastrophe. Sociopathic rich people have always thought the same way. This article on the collapse of a private equity fund investing in energy, shows that the richies were fully expecting oil to spike in the near future (like I expected!). What caused the oil price collapse was a tiny glut from the combined effect of (1) frackers having to sell into a soft market to pay interest on their still-unpaid loans, and (2) the world's proles not having enough money to drive and buy even moar. Neither reflects well on humans.

[Jul26,'17] Toyota announced they are working on a solid state lithium battery that supposedly can "charge in a few minutes". This brought out the usual 'Iron man power pack' magical thinking in many of the commenters (well, at least those that weren't whining in the most unmanly fashion about the frigging 'styling' visible in the publicity photo...). Let's do the math. A service station pump can put 10 gallons of gasoline into your tank in two minutes. Internal combustion engines are about 25% efficient, so given that you get about 8 kWh (kilowatt-hours = energy) out of the 33 kWh in each gallon of gasoline, you are loading about 82 usable kWh in two minutes. To put that much energy into a half a ton electric car battery in two minutes would require an electrical power supply capable of putting out 2500 kW (kilowatts = power) over those 2 minutes, as in 2.5 megawatts -- enough power for 2000 average homes. In reality, the power used goes down during charging, so to get an average power of 2.5 megawatts, you would need more like 5 megawatts of power at the beginning, and then even a little more given less-than-100% efficiency. The idea that consumers are going to be hooking up high voltage 5 megawatt cables to their beautifully styled carz to draw off a burst of power equivalent to that used by 4000 households -- and that the battery is somehow going to absorb all that energy without being damaged or having its recharging life reduced is complete fantasy (here is what a 2 megawatt cable actually looks like -- this is a ship-to-shore cable). 20 cars charging at the same time would require the entire output of the largest existing wind turbine running in high wind. Of course, this kind of fantasy is the only way that the wonderful resource extraction system known as capitalism can advertise these fine advances in battery chemistry to the average human primate who is otherwise busy fussing about the blue trim. In reality, if you spread out the charge over 15-20 minutes, don't fully charge the battery, and put up with some battery life loss, it becomes more practical and safe to put in another 150-200 miles worth of range into an electric car. But it will still require almost a megawatt of additional electrical power per car to come from somewhere (and it will reduce battery life). The Toyota Prius is extremely efficient -- it's the car equivalent of a diesel locomotive. Driven gingerly for a year, it actually got an average mileage (measured by how much gasoline we put into it) of 65 miles per gallon including city plus highway. But, recently Toyota inexplicably sunk a huge, now abandoned, effort into hydrogen fuel cell cars. Perhaps their new magic battery won't turn out like that. But possibly it will -- it might be 'the battery pack of the future, and it always will be'. I know, I just need to get over it and 'eat my own dog food'. Male mandrills have ridiculous red and blue 'trim', too, on their faces and testicles, driven by Darwinian evolution. Language-driven human evolution just works in the same way. And besides, all this talk about carz is a little off base, at least this year in the US, because the American primates are bankrupting the car manufacturers by buying less carz, and instead buying even more and bigger SUV's, pickups, crossovers, and vans using near-zero percent interest loans, partly because gas is still cheap. I can just imagine the meetings between the empirical scientists and engineers at Toyota, who have to respect physics and engineering constraints, and the Toyota advertising guys, who have to respect how most human primates seem to 'think' these days ('the advertising guys just said what??!').

[Jul27,'17] I just read this account of how script kiddies can hijack an 'internet-of-things', automatic carwash, of all things, and make the mechanical arm hit the vehicle, continuously spray the occupants, and bring the exit door down repeatedly on the vehicle trying to make its escape. Of course, the system was run by a stoopid insecure Windoze CE machine, and 'who does that today?'. But peeling back the layers, this is a little parable for the downfall of humanity. First, why wash the friggin carz so much in the first place?! The reason is that the fat guys with man-breasts and heart disease that roar by me on my bicycle every day wouldn't think of going out in public without the 'makeup' picture purrfect on their hyper manly turbo charged pickup truck. But it's too inconvenient to wash their metal can by hand, so aspie engineering humans have made big machines to help. But then it was too inconvenient to even have one person watching over the automatic car wash machine by hand, so Windoze CE and some outsourced computer programmers to the rescue. But I'm sure the security on the intelligent refrigerator that will have a landing port for amazon soylent food delivery drone system will be *much* more secure and will never chase you around the house trying to drop a jar of soy pickle things on your head, or mistakenly call in the swat team when somebody yells, or lock the fridge door because the latest delivery of soylent overdrew your account - because it won't run on Windoze CE. Right.

[Jul28,'17] Total government plus personal debt in 1980 was slightly less that median household income (this excludes corporate debt, data from here). Now, total debt is closing in on 6x median household income, which comes out to 7.3x as much debt relative to income as in 1980. Debt is 'money that has been rented'. In the case of renting a house, somebody has to make the house before it can be rented. This actually uses up a lot of energy and materials and labor, and the house must be maintained. In the case of renting money to buy a house (a mortgage), banks simply generate debt/money out of the void by updating some digits in a database at the moment of creation of the loan. Then, they get to charge monthly rent on this 'thing' that they have 'made' for 30 years, on threat of taking the house, for virtually no expense in energy or materials or labor or maintenance. Interest rates are currently low, which makes the 'more than 7x as much debt' somewhat less onerous. For example, in the 1980's, interest rates on a 30 mortgage averaged about 12% versus about 4% now, which means that that interest rates are 1/3 of what they were, but there is 7x as much debt instead of just 3x as much debt. The banker parasites have thus roughly doubled their share relative to the rest of us. We need to get them off our backs. We should take a cue from the banks themselves - they have completely lost trust in each other. On 27 July 2017, the head of Britain's Financial Conduct Authority said that Libor, the London Interbank Offered Rate, will be phased out by the end of 2021. The reason? Ignore the chaff in the article just linked. The real reason is that large criminal banks now trust each other *so little* that unsecured interbank lending has essentially dried up to nothing (though they are fine with unsecured lending to regular people - e.g., credit cards). Here is a Fed graph showing interbank loans, plotted along with the BASE money supply. I always put the BASE in because it is easy to see when things went haywire from 2008 on, when it went vertical (for comparison, see the tiny blips in BASE for Y2K and 9-11). We ignore big bank shenanigans at great risk to ourselves and the real world. From this Fed graph of 10-year-minus-1-year interest rates (and 5-year interest rates for reference), it looks like short term interest rates go below long term rates (blue line) pretty reliably about 6 months before a recession. Since long term rates are going down relative to short term, but are still 1% above short term, it looks like perhaps another year (amazingly) until all hell breaks loose again. However, as is obvious from the graph, when change comes, it can be very rapid.

[Aug04,'17] The recent Seymour Hersh phone call with Ed Butowsky, recorded and leaked by Butowsky is entertaining -- well worth a 6-minute listen. No mention of Seth Rich's surprising morning demise after Rich apparently made it through the first night in the hospital in reasonable shape, so maybe that was disinfo and it really was a robbery. But, perhaps even more likely, this leak is to fix that other leak, and disencumber the DNC. Hersh is certainly not above catapulting disinfo/decoys -- look at his ridiculous 're-broadcast' of the 'bin Laden' killing in Pakistan ("he was already dead, Jim"). It didn't sound like Hersh was planning for this to be leaked (e.g., Brennan comment), but who knows; the mainstream media treated it like radioactive debris and completely ignored it. But standing back a little from the fray, the whole so-called 'war between the deep-state and Trump' is deeply suspect (pace PCR, but also Hersh!). The utter continuity of government in the transition from Obama to Trump, including bankers, neocons, the Pentagon, and 'defense' contractors, intelligence agencies, Amazon, Google, and so on supports my assessment before the election -- Trump vs. Hillary was a *complete* side-show. It's all about keeping the non-super-rich public -- right and left -- off-balance while injecting new memes, like the new cold war, into their distracted, misdirected, drugged brains, while managing unprecedented looting by the super-rich in the run-up to powerdown. One could argue that this is better than having to deal with a bunch of *un*distracted, really angry human primates who don't really know how the find the people they really want to string up.

[Aug06,'17]
An evolutionary approach to diet
     The other great apes, like all monkeys, are all basically whole-food, plant-based eaters (leaves, roots, seeds, fruits, nuts, plus a few insects). Some packs of chimps do get 1-2% of their yearly calories from eating an occasional baby monkey or baby duiker, but if there are no baby monkeys or miniature antelopes around, a chimp pack won't eat any meat at all. Bonobos appear to be exclusively whole food plant-based.
     When we look at how humans have *changed* relative to our closest relatives (bonobos and chimps, then gorillas, then orangs), the ancestors of modern humans have very clearly thickened the enamel on our cheek teeth, flattened out the cusps, and shrunk the canines so they don't stick up relative to the other teeth. Those tooth changes -- as well as humans having an 2-3 times as many copies of the gene for salivary amylase as chimps have (for breaking down starch) -- are clearly adaptations for adding more grains and seeds and starchy roots (and even bark!) to vegetable, fruit, and nut eating. This has been confirmed by analyzing what has been found in the tartar between the teeth of early hominids. These changes may even be related to the need to support a larger brain (starch is the primary direct energy source for the body and brain). These changes occurred long before the origin of agriculture.
     Our guts are not very different from chimpanzees. Compared to chimpanzees, we have a relatively longer small intestine (human small intestines are more similar in length to that of orangs and gibbons), and a relatively shorter large intestine, and a somewhat smaller overall size of the gastrointestinal tract. But it's important not to lose sight of the big picture -- the human gut remains most similar to that of an herbivore as opposed to a classical omnivore like a bear, much less that of a carnivore. A good summary by Rob Dunn can be found here.
     Human cooking of some kind has probably been around for at least a third of a million years, which is enough time for it to have begun to have had a small effect on our physiology. Humans typically cook meat to firm it up, which makes it less disgusting to us than when it's raw (the form preferred by carnivores), and perhaps not incidentally, more like edible plants. The relatively longer small intestine may suggest that humans are adapted to slightly more digestible carbohydrate food than with other apes, and the shorter large intestine is perhaps the result of having to deal with somewhat less uncooked plant fiber. However, keeping perspective, our gut looks nothing remotely like that of an animal that eats meat at every meal. To take one example, the pH of our stomach is not anywhere near as acidic as that of a carnivore (high stomach acid helps break down high-protein food and kills more bacteria). If you feed an herbivore like a rabbit a high cholesterol diet (the standard 'rabbit model of human atherosclerosis'), the rabbit immediately gets artery disease, just like a human (77% of the young male hearts of Korean war casualties showed signs of atherosclerosis). If you feed an omnivore like a dog a high cholesterol diet, it just laughs it off. Some (but not other) Neantherthals may have eaten a lot of meat; but perhaps, this is one reason why they lost!
     Once we got language and domesticated animals, however, all bets were off, and we could eat absolutely anything we fancied and go where no monkeys had gone before (e.g., the arctic). The important thing to keep in mind here is that is it highly unlikely that there has been anywhere near enough time since the origin of modern language (long after the origin of cooking) to have made even the slightest dent in *evolutionarily* changing our dentition, our guts, our basic physiology, or what chemicals our digestive systems expect to get as daily input. Just because we *can* eat a lot of meat doesn't mean we are designed to do so; and hominin cooking may have been mainly used to make *vegetables* more digestible.
     Evolution is slow, but remarkably opportunistic. It seems likely that primate evolution has basically arranged for us to critically depend on a dietary intake of an amazingly complex array of nutrients and antioxidants from plants, fruits, and grains, all accompanied by a lot of fiber (some of it cooked), which is then fermented in the colon. There is evidence that normal appetite control depends on signals deriving from short chain fatty acids that result from fermentation of plant fiber. To take one of thousands of examples, we don't make vitamin C (like carnivores do) because we expect to get it from eating plants. Most of these thousands and thousands of nutrients and chemicals, as well as fiber in plants are completely absent in meat and dairy. Eating meat also immediately changes gut flora (e.g., feeding meat for just one week to a long-term whole food plant-based eater).
     Trying to distill this panoply of healthy, expected plant chemicals into a pill won't work because: (1) there are *so* many chemicals, most not yet characterized or annointed 'vitamins', (2) pharmaceutical companies can only test and patent one chemical at a time, and (3) eating large amounts of single chemicals outside of their normal whole-food context often leads to disaster. For example, higher *serum levels* of vitamin E's are associated with reduced cancer and reduced heart failure risk. But when long-term supplementation with one of the vitamin E's was tested -- a very different thing than getting all the vitamin E's in the context of real food -- it turned out to be associated with a *higher* risk of heart failure. The human gastrointestinal tract is happy when it has to work to extract frutose from actual fruit; it is not happy to get a concentrated aqueous solution of already-purified fructose poured into it. Finally, if you were to take your hypothetical daily 'super combo plant goodness pill', but then go on eating meat and dairy every day, you would end up with all the wrong bacteria feeding on the animal protein breakdown products in your large intestine (a lot of the same bacteria that make rotten meat smell different than rotten vegetables). Of course, we could try to 'fix' this by also daily feeding ourselves special antibiotics (as is done with industrial farm herbivores when they are fed ground-up animal protein), and maybe by using special hi-tech probiotic suppositories. But that dystopian diarrheic nightmare is certain to be a losing plan as net energy declines over the next few decades.
     Our 'expected diet' is analogous to the way the visual system relies on the fact that there will always be an 'expected world of objects' out there that it can use to drive the normal development of the higher-level visual system. Genes are involved in setting up the basic architecture of cortical visual areas; but those areas won't work right without a complex visual 'diet' of years of real world input, which the genes utterly rely upon to generate the final product in a healthy working visual brain. Take the real world of moving visual objects and environments away, as when you raise an animal in the dark, and the visual system completely fails to develop properly (and, in fact, ends up permanently broken).
     Humans *can* survive while eating meat and dairy every day. But doing so will reliably bring on the 'diseases of the rich'. The arteries of 5,000 year old mummies -- the rich of their day -- were clogged with atherosclerotic plaque; the mummies also had gallstones. The diseases of the rich (many of which are interrelated) include heart disease, atherosclerosis, strokes, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, vascular dementia, Alzheimer's dementia, macular degeneration, cataracts, hearing loss, gall bladder problems, kidney stones, kidney disease, erectile dysfunction, breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, and autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, and so on. These now-expected diseases of middle age and old age were virtually unknown in middle-aged and older people in rural Africa or rural China 30 years ago. These diseases are now beginning to appear in our children (e.g., type 2 diabetes can longer be called 'adult onset'). That's a high price to pay, not only for the individual, but for society, which must then support a ridiculously bloated 'sick care' system that hopelessly tries to repair these self-inflicted wounds with more and more expensive biotech. More than three-quarters of US 'health care' is spent on this. The eye, ear, and brain diseases are especially frightful to me. But biotech is losing the war: the percentage of life lived disabled in the US is slowly but surely increasing.
     The bottom line is, eat a whole foods plant-based diet, and your whole foods plant-based primate body will thank you. And it may help you to avoid being inducted into the 'sick care' system, which is usually a life sentence.

[Aug15,'17] One good way to deal with destablizing 'strategy of tension' psyops is to ignore them. Granted, it's not easy, given the daily blasts of the mighty Wurlitzer. One way to regain perspective is to focus on simple numbers from elsewhere, say Chicago, that suddenly are not making the 'nooz' today. And black humor helps: the US (including the supposed 'left') is happy to support right-wing fascist religious fanatics overseas (e.g., ISIS/DAESH/whatever, not to mention the literal historical Nazi Bandera-ites in Kiev), so why all the sobbing when a few turn up on the home turf? And I mean the real ones, not the laughable assets. And remember Mussolini -- what the mob first gives, it can end up stringing up. Inequality of gains like this don't go on forever. Unfortunately, the first stop is likely to be more nazis. Rising inequality is the *real* problem, *not* Trumpillory. Divisive identity politics is a classic diversion. Gotta keep your eye on the ball.

[Aug20'17]
Would you like a vaccine with that?
     Being rather out of touch, I only recently looked into the leghemoglobin story (Impossible Burger). In order to make a high-tech 'vegetarian' hamburger that looks red, leaks red juice when grilled, and really tastes like beef, silicon valley entrepreneurs raised a quarter of a billion dollars from Google, Bill Gates and others, to insert a gene normally expressed in the inedible roots of soybean plants (the leghemoglobin gene, 'leg' for 'legume') into yeast to make the yeast generate large amount of leghemoglobin when fermented. Adding this to isolated wheat protein, coconut oil, and isolated potato protein results in a manufactured substance that looks and grills and tastes a lot like a beef hamburger. This is all marketed as 'the future of protein', to help stop the warming of the globes, yadda, yadda.
     You might wonder why this literally causes steam to shoot out of my ears. Let's ignore for the moment that eating a too-high-protein diet is the very thing associated with all the diseases that people get when they transition from eating a whole foods plant-based diet to a standard meat-and-dairy-heavy western diet, AKA the diet of only ultra-rich people before the beginning of the twentieth century.
     One of the additional things that is unhealthy about eating a lot of meat could be eating the heme iron that is in the meat proteins. Eating heme iron (as opposed to eating iron from plants) seems to be associated with heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. One possible mechanism is that heme iron can help to oxidise cholesterol. For example, there is an 27% increase in coronary heart disease risk for every additional 1 mg/day of heme iron consumed daily. There are similar magnitude increased risks of diabetes, stroke, and cancer for that same heme iron intake increment.
     Then there is the question of whether it's safe to eat a lot of leghemoglobin (people don't normally eat soybean roots), not to mention that this leghemoglobin has been synthesized in a new species/cytoplasmic context. A set of documents (PDF here) released by the FDA, only after forced by an FOIA request describe some of issues in more detail.
     A cautionary tale is tryptophan (an essential amino acid). Tryptophan was originally extracted from bacteria that naturally generate it. But after more than 1500 cases of permanent neurological damage and 37 deaths, a number of trace impurities in batches of tryptophan manufactured by Showa Denko in genetically modified bacteria were identified as co-occurring with the neurological damage cases. Very unfortunately, the contaminants were never fully characterized. Virtually all tryptophan was banned in 1990 (among other things, it competed with antidepressants).
     The contaminated batches were from the 4th version of the Showa Denko manufacturing process that involved inserting 5 additional copies of the native bacterial gene for producting L-tryptophan into the same bacterium. Somehow, the abnormally large amount of tryptophan generated by the engineered bacteria led to the generation of much higher amounts of the toxic trace chemicals. Exactly what effect large amounts of leghemoglobin have in the context of the hundreds of thousands of other chemicals in a normal yeast cell remains to discovered, probably about 5 years from now, with the help of lawyers. The only good thing I can think of to say is that perhaps this is preferable to Sergey Brin's even more Blade-Runner-y dystopic in vitro tissue-culture 'Google-meat'.
     But looked at from a broader perspective, the whole plan of trying to generate high-tech ersatz meat is just so hopelessly misdirected. But it is also such a damnably predictable response of the economic system that is rapidly destroying the carrying capacity of the only planet we have, under the captain-ship of the robber barons of the twenty-first century such as Brin and Gates. Most non-ultra-rich people before the twentieth century were perfectly happy, not to mention much healthier, *not* eating such large amounts of meat and dairy every day. By eating unreasonably large amounts of high-protein, high-fat meat and dairy and fish, along with other other manufactured high-plant-oil weaponized food, we have created an epidemic of staggeringly unhealthy people serviced by a staggeringly profitable medical-pharmaceutical-food industrial complex. What *should* be the the two most important measures -- average health and health care costs -- are obviously continuing to go in the wrong direction. And this is catching. Not only do people who come here from places where they had healthier diets quickly get our diseases when they adopt our diet; but the ones that stayed behind are all racing to change their healthier diets to be more like ours.
     Trying to fix this by adding another yet more powerful weaponized food to the arsenal is *so* decline-of-the-Roman-empire-like! It's not politically correct to tell people they should just eat a lot more fruits and vegetables and grains, and a lot less meat and dairy and fish to improve their health, and help mitigate overshoot. There is a strong analogy to electric carz. Rather than daring to suggest that people should just walk and cycle more and drive less, we guiltwash them into ersatz (electric) carz, which have no chance of fixing the underlying energy/overshoot problem, or reducing energy usage. Reading the stunningly clueless comments in and on the many puff pieces written to support the Impossible Burger roll-out over the last year (I refuse to link them) makes me realize that this can't/won't be stopped. In fact, it's probably just a matter of time, given Gates' involvement, until: "Would you like a vaccine with that?".

[Sep05'17]
Whole foods plant-based diet works as advertised
     The whole foods plant-based diet sure works as advertised! 16 years ago, my cholesterol numbers were considered relatively 'good' for my age, at least by American standards:

    age=46, tot=177, HDL=52, LDL=115

But by 10 years ago, they had crept up to 'average American', which is definitely *not* good (see esp. 'bad' LDL):

    age=52, tot=206, HDL=51, LDL=140

After just 3 months of a whole foods plant-based diet, my numbers are considerably *better* than they were 16 years ago, and probably back to where they were when I was in my thirties:

    age=62, tot=152, HDL=58, LDL=83

I don't know what my cholesterol numbers were 5 years ago, after 5 years of a meat-heavy EU/UK diet, but they were probably worse than my last previous test 10 years ago (my weight stayed constant within a few percent the whole time). This effect (a 40% drop in LDL from 10 years ago) *exceeds* the average effect of a large chronic dose of a statin (never took them). And in contrast to statins, the diet 'side effects' were all great (joint pain gone, sinus congestion gone, constipation gone, clearer headed, sweet breath even before brushing). Food is better (and cheaper and better tasting) medicine, indeed!
     There are exactly 5 main bullet points on diet. First, the standard American diet has *way too much* protein (as in 2-3x too much) -- chicken and fish and beef and pork and dairy (or ersatz isolated plant protein replacements) are too protein-dense. Metabolizing too much protein dissolves your bones, causes inflammation, and promotes cancer (esp. grilled animal protein).
     Second, eating too much animal and plant fat (including olive oil) and animal cholesterol causes yet more inflammation and damages blood circulation, which damages your entire body and brain, and stores carcinogens. Carbohydrates don't cause diabetes; too much fat does (intramuscular fat blunts insulin sensitivity).
     Third, meat (fish/chicken/beef/pork) and esp. dairy contain growth factors like IGF-1, and independently stimulate the liver to produce more endogenous IGF-1. This promotes cancer growth. Cancer cells reproduce slowly. Slowing down their exponential growth helps a lot in the long run.
     Fourth, plants contain a huge array of health-promoting chemicals and fiber that are not found at all in meat, fish, and dairy, and which *are expected* by our standard vegetarian anthropoid primate digestive system. For example, primates don't synthesize vitamin C like carnivores do, because our digestive system expects to get it from eating plants. Thousands and thousands of other plant-synthesized chemicals are also expected.
     Fifth, hi-tech pharma drugs, but also dangerously concentrated single-factor supplements, including those extracted from plants, cannot fix the results of a bad diet. They can actually make things worse. Cholesterol doesn't 'normally' increase with age; old plant-eating humans have the same cholesterol that they had as kids (130).
     Dead simple, really. Eat more whole foods and starches including plants/fruits/grains, eat less fish/chicken/beef/pork/dairy/oil, and avoid pharma and supplements! The constant fog of confusion surrounding diet is a criminally deadly, corporate-run smoke screen over simple truths that have been known for hundreds (really thousands) of years.

[Sep12'17] The human mind is a shallow processor that is easily led astray by non sequitur arguments when they are prefaced with valid observations as a setup! I include my own mind here (see below). For example, when I talk to people about oil depletion, I often get back something about 'depletion whatever is all a plot of the evil oil companies'. Well, *of course* they are evil, and *of course* they plot behind closed doors, just like any large corporation (e.g., Google). But it is a complete fallacy to say that because oil companies are evil tricksters that oil depletion is false, or worse, that oil depletion will be no problem. The evil plots of oil companies can't affect how much net-energy-positive oil is left in world geological reserves for future human draw-down; evil plots can't refill high net-energy resevoirs. Profit-seeking behavior can't rewrite the laws of physics so it will be easier to replace diesel and kerosine for long distance flying and shipping and for construction and growing food. We are on the cusp of a permanent, severe liquid fuels depletion problem, with no drop-in replacement lined up. World all-liquids 'oil supply' looks like it is peaking now (2016-2017); 'crude oil' itself peaked 5 or 10 years ago, depending on exactly what you consider to be bona fide 'crude oil'.
     Similarly, with health concerns like high cholesterol or high blood pressure, it's pretty obvious that big pharma stands to gain from strict cholesterol and blood pressure targets. But this is *no argument at all* that strict cholesterol and blood pressure targets are wrong! Both of these are correct: big pharma is bad, and high cholesterol is bad. But they are unrelated. Pharma is a very poor way to try to 'fix' high cholesterol and high blood pressure, which are both 'side effects' of a bad diet. High cholesterol and high blood pressure are clear signs that the body's normal homeostatic mechanisms are being driven to their limits trying to manage the diet-induced damage. Improving diet is the only way to actually remove the underlying problem. However, I can't say that I have always been able to avoid falling for this rhetorical trick. For example, 5 years ago, I thought that the move to lower the suggested targets for cholesterol *was* simply a plot to sell more statins. And the lowering *did* result in pharma selling even larger barge-loads of statins to people with bad blood. But finding out that total cholesterol in old people in rural China never goes up (and averages about 130!) finally drove the point home to me that the standard US cholesterol guidelines are actually *too lax*! The ridiculous profits of big pharma, or the fact that big pharma has engineered misleading clinical trials, doesn't make high blood cholesterol a good sign.

[Sep27'17] Thankfully, I don't have to watch the football freak show on the teevee. The whole National Anthem charade was only instituted in 2009. Yet another in a long line of red flags to wave in front of a working class bull while banker oligarchs sink their lances deeper into his neck muscles. 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. But their real problem is football etiquette. Sure. The best one could hope for is that this expertly executed bit of wedge politics ends up in a small backfire, slightly negatively impacting football watching, which in my dreams could be positive development if the fans redirect even a tiny bit of long overdue attention to the 10 bloody lances hanging down their backs. Funny comment in response to zerohedge's obediently generated clickbait (no link, b*chez): "What next? ALL viewers must stand too?".

[Oct03'17] Another Maidan-like slash Sandy-Hook-like American Gladio psyop kicks into high gear (and stocks bump, natch [written before the bump stock nonsense]). Americans and Ukrainians are made of the same stuff and will respond to the same bait. Hopefully, the result won't turn as bad as in Ukraine. Here is a video (via Scott Creighton) from a taxi driver sitting at the porch of the Mandalay Bay hotel that unequivocally and repeatedly records the sound of at least two completely different sources of automatic sniper gunfire, strongly suggesting that the official story of the 64-year-old lone gunman on the 32nd floor firing from about 1200 feet away (about 1/4 mile) is wrong/incomplete. The two sources are audible in the first few min; you can hear echoes from the closer shooter, but then a much more distant shooter that is not preceded by close-up shooting sounds. Then, as the taxi driver leaves the Mandalay Bay, around 5:02 in the video, she videos what could be muzzle flashes coming out of the Mandalay Bay hotel closer to the ground floor. There are other videos from different viewpoints [0:27] that show similar flashes around the same place (not too far above ground floor, with correlated shooting sounds). The sound correlations, being visible from different angles, and intermittency is suggestive; but reflections from an aerial source, or a strobe light in a room are also possible. And it could all be part of the usual disinfo storm in order to poison the well on the clear audio evidence of multiple shooters. I have no idea of what actually happened, and it's unlikely that the full truth will ever come out, after having been mixed in with a daily firehose of disinfo garbage. Almost 600 people killed and wounded in less than 5 mins seems too high for one shooter at such a long distance -- that's a whole 'standard Chicago month' of killings in just 5 min. But I won't find the official story convincing until they find his passport (sorry). By analogy with the 9-11 show, I imagine it won't be too long before Chertoff x-ray machines and crotch pat downs are de rigeur before getting a hotel room. Be real scared, so we can make you real saaafe. Let's all 'come together' because we might eventually need machines and crotch fondling in restaurants, too. Lookee here (at least 20 times) at this heart-wrenching hyuuman interest story! Pay no attention to Chicago, there is no human interest there (or Baltimore, with twice the homicide rate of Chicago).
     [Update Oct5]: this horrific pic confirms the high death toll; also, Paddock's plane may have been bought by a defense contractor, Volant Associates, in 2013.
     [Update Oct8]: multiple independent videos now available with more than one shooter clearly on their soundtracks.
     [Update Oct9]: the main-sewer media drops this like a hot potato to throw stomach-band-snapping fat Harvey Weinstein under the bus in all his pussy-grabbing physical repulsiveness as an ultimate distraction! (not that Harvey 'the pig' doesn't deserve to go under the bus, or better, spend some time in a pillory; it's just that there are so many other equally deserving slime bags in Holly-pedo-wood). Perhaps the daily smear with Harvey was because anomalies were detected that were causing public indigestion, in spite of the disinfo firehose.
     [Update Oct11]: Classic disinfo strategy: real victims suffered horrible wounds, but crisis actor fake gunshot (or actual victims with minor concrete/bullet fragment wounds) with better 'optics' are interviewed to get the 'uplifting' story 'straight'. Just because there probably were crisis actors hired does not imply that people were not shot.
     [Update Oct12]: The SkyVue towers (abandoned ferris wheel construction project visible across from the stage -- look left from this google maps view of the stage) are one of several possible location of the acoustically closer shooter(s). No muzzle flashes are visible from occasional video of the towers from concert floor videos; however, for an automatic rifle with a suppressor (muzzle extension) installed, you have to be within a few degrees of the direct line of fire to see the muzzle flash at all. Here is a detailed timeline.
     [Update Oct13]: all iphones/laptops/recording-devices confiscated from concert workers at the Route 91 festival by the FBI were returned to their owners wiped clean. This is known as felony destruction of evidence -- but critical to keep dis-disinfo out of the public domain. You are just a worker bee with no rights to your own information, even without having committed any crime. What's next? All witnesses must get ECT? ... for their mental health, of course. Reminds me of a scene in the original 1987 Robocop: "Madame, you have suffered an emotional shock. I will notify a rape crisis center". Also today, Kymberley Suchomel, 28, a witness who mentioned multiple shooters in a viral facebook post was found dead in her home, presumably having 'died in her sleep from epilepsy' after her husband left for his early morning job. This follows the death a week ago (Oct 4) of another key witness, John Beilman, who 'killed himself and his daughter' after being questioned by the FBI the previous day about a charger found in Paddock's room that is used to charge batteries for military communication devices (Beilman had previously worked at Ultralife Corporation in Newark). Yet another key witness, Jesus Campos, the 'security guard' shot in the leg, has left the building, just before his meet-the-press. Also today, in addition to rearranging the timeline once again, which should help to make it more lawsuit-proof, Sheriff Lombardo told us today that a visual inspection of the geriatric GSW'd brain during a coroner’s autopsy found no abnormalities, but that they are awaiting microscopic examination (what, no fMRI?). And finally, someone broke into Lee Harvey Paddock's home in Reno 'before the police got there'. Americans will believe anything, so it's not important to sweat the fine details.
     [Update Oct17]: A 24-7 diet of Fat Harvey has dampened outrage at the randomly changing, obviously incorrect official Las Vegas story. Now I just hear echoes of echoes of disinfo, which effectively defuses the situation. Daniel Hopsicker (and reddit) say there were two Volant's and the one who bought Paddock's plane is John W. Rogers, an oncologist. Incendiary rounds seem to have been shot at the nearby jet fuel tanks (but it's difficult to ignite jet fuel this way). The 21st century version of the might Wurlitzer is sure impressive. Or as a ZH commentator said" "Squirrel! It's what's for dinner".
     [Update Oct18]: the 'security guard' with the untreated GSW reappears looking like he gained a bunch of weight after his 'Oct 10' awards ceremony, to give a weird, pre-recorded, handler-touching-him, managed, softball interview on... Ellen?! Well, she is involved with the slot machine business. See, we made you think you took drugs even though you didn't (but it would have been even better if he did some vaudeville dancing with his cane...)
     [Update Oct22]: A good example of 'poisoning the well': Neon Nettle 'alt' media (which I linked above) reports that Chad Nishimura, a valet who parked Steven Paddock's car didn't remember Paddock bringing in 'crazy bags' (i.e., a lot of stuff). This was true. Then they report that Chad Nishimura was killed in a 'botched robbery'. Here is the report of the Oct 16 event quoted by Neon Nettle. That report doesn't, however, mention the name of the victim, pending notification of relatives. But a commenter at Neon Nettle outed them by reporting that the person killed at the church was 'Hector lemurs-Flores', confirmed by this report, which identified the victim as Hector Antonio Lemus-Flores. The reason this is bad is that it contaminates and disables the real information from and about Chad Nishimura. Classic well-poisoning, Neon Disinfo. Doesn't mean that there isn't occasionally some real information not available elsewhere there. That's exactly the point: mix real information with crap. See also 'Jim Stone'.
     [Update Oct26]: Jesus Campos, the 'security guard' 'wounded' by a high caliber bullet, who is apparently not licensed as a security guard by the state of Nevada only returned to the US from Baja Mexico through San Ysidro one week after the shooting, driving his rental car for hours with a 'wounded' leg ("anything to declare sir? Good luck with that wounded leg"). It's not clear when he left, which was probably not that difficult to do when you are a material witness to the largest mass shooting in US history, and besides he had to go to Mexico to avoid Obamacare, and they have better 'reverse liposuction' there, man. And lookee here, 'investigators' have found that Lee Harvey Paddock scarily 'searched the internet' for SWAT tactics (even though his laptop disk drive was missing -- note to self, be sure to remove disk drive before starting a 'killing spree'). And look, Paddock's brother is into child porn! Like I said, no need to sweat the details of the script, sorry, I mean the 'careful investigation' of the largest mass shooting in US history. Americans are easy.
     But seriously, the fact remains that many public videos taken from many different positions clearly contain audio evidence of multiple shooters (automatic gunfire bursts with different volumes, overlapping bursts that are not echoes, different muzzle-report/bullet-strike timings). Here is but one of many examples. There are also many witnesses who claim there were multiple shooters. Two of these witnesses have already died after surviving the event unharmed (Danny Contreras and Kymberley Suchomel). I don't know what the real story is. Could be No Country for Old Men for all I know (e.g., the Mexican lady warning 'all you people are going to die'). But those videos prove conclusively that the official story from Wolf Blaster (before the main sewer media dropped the story) is simply wrong.
     [Update Oct30]: Good article by Scott Creighton on the "no real victims" well-poisoning disinfo.
     [Update Nov02]: More possibly suspicious Las Vegas survivor deaths over the past few days summarized here. The couple's Mercedes inexplicably 'exploded' when they hit the gate of their gated community. Also, Jason Aldean's lawyer just had a 'seizure in his sleep' (like Kymberley Suchomel) and died.
     [Update Nov06]: Air traffic control audio reporting "active shooters on the runway" (go to 2:00). These could also be a security response, not other shooters].
     [Update Nov10]: Many conspiracy theories this week about an attempted assassination involving Saudis in Las Vegas on the night of the shootings, and more on shooting from helicopters, insert/remove by helicopter, or all three, smooshed together with, natch, ISIS. If the flashes observed by the Mandalay Bay taxi driver in the unbroken lower-floor hotel windows during the shootings (correlated with shooting sounds) were reflections, they would have had to have come from a source in the sky, given observed angles. Several helicopter videos posted a month ago clearly show flashes in regular sets of four (4 front, then 4 back) that look like standard helicopter running lights, not shooting. Since then, all the 're-mixes' have made this hard to assess (perhaps the point). It's also quite possible that those running lights are the elevated source of some of the reflected flashes.
     As far as Saudi, we know that several things are true (recent summaries from different viewpoints here (Henderson), here (Madsen) and here (Meysann)): (1) Mohammed "YemenFamine/QatarSanctions/ISIS-supporter" bin Salman is now in control after the Nov 4 Saudi coup, which occurred just after the silly 'robot citizen' show, and just a few days after Kushner left Saudi, (2) Prince Al Waleed, worth around $25 billion (one of the 5 or 10 richest men in the world), with some ownership at the Mandalay, is now not free to go (incidentally, he was the one who offered money, which was refused, to Giuliani on 9-11; he also has major stakes in many American hi-tech companies, e.g., he is one of Twitter's largest shareholders), (3) Prince Mansour bin Muqrin Al Saud was killed on Nov 5 in a Saudi helicopter crash, (4) the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, resigned while under house arrest in Saudi where he still is, and (5) an armed posse walked through the Tropicana, possibly during the Oct 1 shooting. From the grainy video they could be escorting the 'white t-shirt guy'..., but behind the posse (?), and the stretcher (?), and then the t-shirt guy peels off at the end (?). It's highly unlikely that this was Mohammed bin Salman, and there is no independent evidence he was there. Having these 'reports' seeded with ISIS (and Thomas Wictor joining in!, and featured on Rense) also suggests this is just the usual spray of disinfo to contaminate real info.
     Finally, I just came across this video taken by Holly Wilson Leslie on Oct 1 at 10:55 PM (25 min after shooting stopped), of a running helicopter in extremely tight quarters, at the north side of the Harley Davidson Store adjacent to the Airfield 5191 S. Las Vegas Blvd, with some unidentified SWAT-like armed men fiddling with some kit lying in the street. Hard to know what to make of it. Since then, it has been re-uploaded by flat-earthers (yup). A high degree of uncertainty remains, and unfortunately, the amount of chaff increases by the day. To end on an up note, it's nice imagine that one day, our own Clown Princes, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Buffett - who now have more wealth than the bottom 1/2 of the country - may have *their* wealth seized while they are imprisoned in a luxury hotel.
     [Update Nov14]: A few weeks ago, somebody noticed what look like three people dressed in black running back and forth on top of a platform or trailers behind a fence while shots are still being fired off and on, in a video that had previously been posted to youtube a month previously (Oct 7). One figure even looks like he is carrying a gun. This link will start the original video at 4:54, right where the most obvious figure appears. Before starting it, first slow it down with Settings -> Speed -> 0.25 so that you you can make out the black figure, in spite of the shaky camera. A left arrow while video is running will back it up 1-2 secs. Here is a copy of that video frame-by-frame so you can see that there seem to be 3 people in black running around up there. That elevated platform is on the left side of the killing field (looking at the stage), about halfway back. Many people were killed on the right side of the stage. Looks suspicious, but not definitive.
     [Update Nov22]: Just now came across the fact that the ear lobes of the 'woozy' Paddock and the 'leaked' photo of the dead guy in the hotel room are different; the living Paddock's ear lobes are attached, while dead guy's are pendulous. This was recognized on the internet at least as early as Oct 4 (!). The Las Vegas police confirmed that the grisly photo was in fact a photo of the 'suicide'. Compare the ear lobes of live (1, 2, 3), and dead grisly). Clearly different guys. It wouldn't be the first time 'death mask' photos were faked (see e.g., fake bin Laden 'death' photos shown to US senators).
     [Update Nov30]: A girl says "There's glass falling from Mandalay Bay" after the last two shots of the night at 3:30 in this video (posted Oct 2). This may be a re-telling of an earlier event.
     [Update Dec03]: Here is a summary of the current anomalous state of affairs: the worst mass shooting ever in the US disappears from the news with nothing explained.
     [Update Dec23]: Just read the month-old comments from "Geoff Jones" on this video suggesting the figures in black moving along the top of the 1-2 story stucture were bartenders at a private function, therefore dressed in black, maybe carrying brooms not guns as they were escaping. Another commenter said, they only looked black because they were backlit by the stage lights that were turned on the crowd. Yet another commenter way down in the list pointed to a similar structure with similar (vague) figures on it on the opposite side of the arena starting at 1:17 in this video. Two semicircular structures on either side of the concert floor are visible from 10 floors above Paddock's room during the shooting in this videohere. No strong conclusion possible since the videos are lo-res/shaky. In any case, the story remains out of sight, probably for good. Different ear lobes on live vs. dead Paddock still unexplained. Many witnesses reporting multiple shooters and audio evidence of multiple shooters still unexplained.
     [Update Feb10]: The Clark County Coronorer's office released an autopsy of a "Stephen Paddock" with the wrong height (3" too short; the real Paddock was/is 6'-4" tall). This discrepancy is consistent with the difference in ear lobes between Paddock (attached) phots and the leaked 'dead guy' pics (pendulous). As expected, the whole 'investigation' has dropped completely off the radar. There is no need for any investigation of the biggest mass shooting in US history!
     [Update Feb27]: Just came across a long series of videos by someone who claims (mostly believably) to be an animator. The latest is here on the view out the Mandalay window. Other curious ones comment on the absolutely bizarre store-security-video here and Mr. Casual here. The fact that the videos are all still up probably comes from the 'no victims' disinfo in them. By contrast, Scott Creighton, who debunked the 'no victims' disinfo, just got his third strike and his youtube channel has been purged -- for debunking the 'no victims' disinfo!
     [Update May03]: An odd just-released body cam video of police entering Paddock's room, with him apparently dead on the floor (pixellated), records one person saying "We do not have a broken window" (0:39) and then about 15 sec later, a person saying "Standby, we've got curtains open on a window that's not broken" (0:55)". Windows not broken yet? (they were clearly broken the next day). A different room? No smoke from 1500 rounds? And here is another video from somewhere under the bleachers that contains two overlapping independent machine gun sounds (immed. after 4:00 and 5:00). The closer cracks could be bullet impacts from the softer muzzle reports, tho on casual Audacity inspection, the timings don't seem consistent with one source.

[Oct30'17] Quite the scandal fest this week: Trump/Manafort vs. Spacey vs. Hillary/Bill/UraniumOne vs. HillaryFusionGPSFakeDirtyDossier vs. Weinstein! It would be hard enough to keep this all straight without the usual main sewer media subterfuge. For example, with Manafort, there is now a "Conspiracy against the United States" as blared by the Mighty Wurlitzer. This, despite the fact that the FBI Manafort charges do not cover any activities related to the presidential campaign and relate to things he might have done in 2006: the charges are about Manafort using millions of dollars of laundered money from Ukraine for home improvement. Also lost in the shuffle is the fact that Manafort also worked for the Clintons for years. Talk about 'conspiracy theory', you C-eye-eh, guys. Unfortunately, the glaring anomalies of Gladio Las Vegas (see above) have now been effectively buried by all the noise.

[Nov03'17] The 'news cycle' is out of control! So much ISIS-schmei-sis, it has yanked Weinstein right out of view, much less the Las Vegas mess. Las Vegas probably has the largest number of surveillance cameras anywhere in the US, but not a single relevant surveillance video has come to light. Must have all malfunctioned (like 7/7).
     Meanwhile, the FED has finally actually started to dump some of the junk it has been holding since the last financial crisis (by not 'renewing' it). You have to zoom into the last year here, but then you can see the sudden drop. Looks like the first real shoe to drop.
     And Tesla just lost 2/3 of a billion dollars this *quarter*. But carz are so old school - let's go to Mars instead! The Mars fantasies made the Tesla car stock go up, so what's not to like? We can't even *slightly* slow our approach on the Earth to the brick wall of peak world net energy (and food and water and soil), while continuously burning 150 tons of oil per *second*, but we're going to somehow spend billions of dollars to rocket a few tons of water, MRE's, and other kit and to Mars — a windy, extremely cold, almost airless, ultraviolet-blasted, virtually waterless desert, with a toxic soil containing 1% perchlorates, because... *that* will save our sorry @sses? What a ridiculous, preposterous, embarrassingly puerile fantasy! The real problems are all here! We are hitting peak net energy in plain sight. The 'jobs' report tells us that 'unemployment' is down to a new cycle record low of 4.1%. But the labor participation rate (62.7%) is back to 4 decade lows, and almost 1 million people exited the labor force in October, pushing the total number of people 'not in the labor force' to a record 95 million people. Here are Fed graphs of the civilian labor force participation rate (red) and employment-population ratio (blue), which show we have not 'recovered'.
     I was talking to a television producer last week who tried to argue that from a utilitarian point of view, people such as Weinstein might be valuable to humanity on sum because of all the 'goodness' and 'pleasure' they brought to people while they were doing their day jobs (i.e., when he wasn't molesting young women and masturbating in front of them into potted plants). Yeah, like that Weinstein POS 'masterpiece' Resevoir Dogs — one of the few movies I've ever actually walked out of. Also, what about the PTSD I have from the image of Harvey The Pig, a real-life Mr. Creosote, having to be hauled out of Naomi Campbell's birthday party by ambulance when his gastric band began to impede his breathing after he ate too much at the buffett? [Update: or the fact that he hired ex-Mossad agents from London Black Cube to harrass/honeypot the girls he molested?] And I admit to unhealthy schadenfreude at the thought of a bunch of Hollywood molester/pedos running scared for the past two weeks. I only wish some real big-money people who frequent Little St James Island and Nickelodeon will 'awake to black flack' from the crossfire, and have to be 'washed out of their ball turrets with a hose' (Randall Jarrell).

[Nov08'17] Here is a fine comment by "Long FB" at Wolfstreet: "Three college roommates [trans.: dumba$$es] come up with an idea to take crotch shots that disappear six seconds after their girlfriends look at them. Three years later Wall Street values this idea at $30 billion dollars. This market cap is higher than companies like American Airlines, Humana, Allstate, CSX, Deere & Co, Southwest Airlines, Marriott, etc. See any problems here?". The older I get, the more I see the impending disaster of humanity, which for the past 15 years I have been expecting to start around 2030, as being mostly traceable to one simple, universal *individual human* error -- which is continually enthusiastically adopting devices/strategies that make everyday tasks just a *little* bit easier, but that come with unforseen and ultimately truly terrible costs and externalities. With Snap, was it previously *really* that difficult to just show your girlfriend your pee-pee face to face? Sure, it is 'easier' to use Snap for this purpose, sitting at your desk, or lying alone in bed with your cell phone, without ever having to leave home. But looked at from a longer perspective, the societal mass action that results from trillions of similar, seemingly minor 'decisions of convenience' has always had the potential to head off the system in a seriously wrong direction. These universal human failings weren't a problem in a small Neolithic village. But (temporarily!) empowered by incomprehensibly massive amounts of fossil fuel energy (=geographically-localized failures of the biosphere to recycle nutrients), our gigantic lumbering world-encircling human system is now literally destroying the planet because of them - our soil, minerals, food, water, all other animals even including insects - in a way that seriously threatens our very existence. All inexorably propelled by the lust for small increments in 'personal convenience'. Here is an excellent article by Andre Staltz, presenting some not-yet-fully realized bad outcomes of this unconscious mass action with respect to the comparatively smaller issue of the internet. The only way this could be changed would be for each *individual* person to 'fight the machine', many times per day. Is this possible? Not bloody likely, I'm afraid. The only thing that will stop it is net energy rundown, followed by food rundown.

[Nov24'17]
Studied blindness
     Reading research into depression, well, just depresses me :-{. One blindingly obvious reason people are depressed and uncooperative is because they are 50+ years old, post heart- and gallbladder-surgery, overweight, high blood pressured, diabetic, with feet that are already tingling from impaired circulation that also slows their thinking, maybe already getting around in a battery cart, taking piles of pills from plastic bins multiple times every day, and stuck in front of the teevee. That would depress anyone. Most of those depression-inducing physical states are transparently related to diet (too much meat and dairy protein, too much fat from meat and from purified plant oils). The most crushing evidence for this is that as our 'standard western diet' rapidly spreads around the world, it rapidly brings with it a world of pain and misery and heart disease and diabetes and dementia and osteoporosis and cancer that simply *wasn't* there before. Trying to treat the resulting 'depression' and improve 'mental health', and making new depression-fighting apps, without mentioning the diet elephant in the room seems the height of folly. Yet, it's nearly impossible to get funding for simple dietary interventions or better presentations of these simple, self-evident dietary facts.
     I suppose everyone should have the 'right' to eat in such a way that makes their lower extremities turn gangrenous and their brain get choked off from its circulation as a result of diabetes and artery disease (you don't have to be fat for this to occur if you eat the wrong things). They have the right to ignore the long-known facts that true 'paleo' humans, well *before* agriculture had been invented, had evolved molars to grind *more* grain compared to the already fruit-and-nut-and-leaf eating apes that are our closest cousins (Loren Cordain, the fat exercise dude promoting the paleo/Atkins diet, when he should know better, is a dork). But this implies a right to burden the 'sick care' system to the breaking point. With all the 'left' discussion of the need for health insurance, there is a terrible lack of discussion there of the personal responsibility for eating a healthy diet. Publicly-paid health insurance is a wonderful thing that I, being card-carrying left, whole-heartedly support. But roughly 3/4 of medical care in the US tries to vainly to 'fix' the results of bad diet with pharma and surgery. This simply doesn't work very well, despite being spectacularly expensive, wasteful, and the source of a dizzying spectrum of 'side effects' (they're actually the 'main effects'). The majority of the diseases that people go to the hospital for are completely avoidable and not 'genetic' at all. Trump didn't cause this. Just because there are a bunch of stoopid, anti-science, overweight, right-wing meat-eaters who want to get "big government's hands off their Medicare", while they, too, are getting sick, *doesn't* relieve the need for more personal responsibility on the left with respect to diet. The studied blindness to obvious inconvenient truths reminds me of blindness to our energy predicament. It's worth noting that for all my snarky pseudo-outrage here, only a year ago, I was almost as 'studied blind' to the critical importance of diet.
     Turning briefly to energy, in bitcoin-la-la-land, bitcoin 'mining' consumed almost 30 TWh of energy this year, more than 1/800 of all the electricity consumed in the *entire* world, more electricity than is used by almost 160 countries (e.g., Ireland). This planned idiocy (since how hard it is to 'mine' is controlled by a simple parameter that is adjusted to keep the rate of successful 'mining' constant) is one of the main things that is keeping the bitcoin bubble inflated. The rate of increase in bitcoin electricity consumption is currently exponential; it increased 30% last *month*, but the price of bitcoin went up 40% last month, so all that terrible waste of energy was 'worth it'. This is about as logical as poisoning oneself with diet, then investing in high tech medicine to try to patch up the damage afterward, without changing one's diet at all. Obviously the current growth of bitcoin 'mining' can't continue, since at this growth rate, it is set to consume *all* of the world's electricity by just 2020; so bitcoin price will soon have to asymptote. But do we really have to wait until the lights start flickering? [Update Dec12: the bitcoin bubble has now surpassed the previous all-time record 'tulip mania']
     I would like to think that we should be able to apply the almost magical power of our language-based brain operating system, the 'second coming of life' (see pdf), to diet and energy so that we could help ourselves to aim our world system in a better direction, for example, by stopping investing exponentially more energy each month in utterly pointless bitcoin 'mining'. But as we leap over one rubicon after another, ignoring the growing signals in plain sight that our biosphere is literally collapsing, I'm beginning to wonder whether our mad dash over the cliff can even be slowed.

[Nov29'17] The latest update to MacOS, High Sierra, shipped with several stunning, face-palm bugs. One allows a user to login as root by simply entering user "root" and no password into a pop-up panel asking to verify priviledges before doing something invasive. I half wonder whether this was actually a plot to scare people away from a real operating system (unix) into the padded-room touchy-feely 'playpen' of iOS. But seriously, it's probably simply the result of galloping increases in complexity and the needless and vile creation of parallel ways of doing the same thing. Much of this is 'make work' - like adding fins onto carz - that doesn't improve the underlying functionality in any way, but merely provides a reason to 'upgrade' to the latest 'model year'. In the case of software, the really bad thing is that complexity in increased, which in turn requires increased resources to maintain it (or not, as the case above illustrates!). In the popular press (and in IT departments around the world), there is constant braying 'upgrade immediately else you will die'. How about just "don't upgrade"? It is very easy to fall prey to the notion that an older operating system is contaminated, decrepit, and gray-haired, and just about to fall to pieces compared to the latest sleek new 'tail-fin' version. This is just advertising nonsense sneakily talking to your primate limbic system. The reality is that an older patched system has a lot of beauty of its own, and the benefit of *less code*. I'm sure that the software for self-driving carz won't have any problems like this. Several other 'advantages' of this latest OS is that it uses a new file system, APFS, which is not, and will never be, supported by any previous apple OS (including the one in use last month, not-high Sierra). The new file system has catastrophically slow performance on spining hard disks, including Apple's own Fusion Drives. Those spinning drives would be where all the 'stuff' people access with their phondle phones is actually stored in the great cloud. The reason for this bad performance is that APFS causes spectacular fragmentation of files because of 'copy on write'. This so-called 'advance' (a 30-year-old idea) offers absolutely nothing positive to somebody who actually programs computers or manipulates large amounts of data, and instead causes a set of expensive headaches (e.g., an APFS-formatted USB stick or hard disk can't be read by last month's Mac OS 10.12, Sierra). Expensive second-party software will be eventually be released and debugged to mount this new filesystem read-only. Sadly, we are getting closer to the end of the road. That's the bad thing about 'growf': you *must* always have it, even when you don't *need* it.

[Dec06'17] I feel for the more contemplative Trumpflakes with the latest revelations of Izzygate (oh sorry, I meant Russiagate) and now, Jerusalem!! There *were* the $35 million pre-election plus $5 million post-election inauguration donations from Sheldon Adelson to tend to. Squirrel!! It's what's for dinner! This hardly means I support the stunningly mindless idiocy of the 'democrat' Russiagate-ers either [Update Dec08: new fake-Russiagate-news-self-debunking record -- 3 hours]. In fact, there is something blackly 'refreshing' about the Trump/Kushner Jerusalem ploy, whether the result of idiocy or art; 'sensible people' are more outraged more by this latest Trumpfart than they are by the miserable daily apartheid 'facts on the ground' in the 'two-state' charade *and* the $5 billion that flows out of the US treasury every year to support the existing 'facts', and to continue to build new 'facts'. The thing that makes 'sensible people' so incensed is that all the attention to this latest Trumpfart could actually cause average people to become more aware of the real problem, which is that the US is constantly paying for more 'facts'. So, one-state it is! The two possibilities are, officially recognize the existing apartheid/open-air-prison within the one state, where half the population officially can't vote, or transfer the 6 million Palestinians somewhere, many for the second time, out of their homes and off of their land. The one-person-one-vote option will never be on the table, since that would require elevating the Palestinian untermenschen to 'real people', and we can't have that in the 'only democracy in the Mideast'. I fear that in the end, this will probably turn out to be just 'Squirrel!' -- with things returning to their grindingly miserable status quo before too long. It all makes me feel like an expat in my home country. So I'll write about cycling instead :-}
     When I talk to people who only drive carz (I drive a car once a week, but cycle every day), if the topic of cycling comes up and they don't know I cycle, they will go off on some tirade about all cyclists go through red lights (most don't, actually), how they all cycle dangerously (most don't), yadda yadda. As someone cycling every day, I do the same thing, but in reverse. Though most carz are courteous or at least not overtly aggressive, I mainly remember the actions of a small number of car a$$hats. And so when people ask me about carz, I might tell them that all carz are a$$hats, even though the great majority aren't. In reality, most of my commutes are uneventful. Yesterday, however, I was waiting peacefully at a light with a giant-tire 4x4 to my left rear. I had just stopped at an asian market and so I had a plastic bag of produce (lemon grass and galanga and canned jackfruit) tied to my backpack. It seems to be the case that extra anti-cyclist aggression is somehow triggered by the sight of someone actually successfully operating part of their life by bicycle (or maybe it was just the lemon grass sticking up). I wasn't blocking him/her in any way (I couldn't see through the windshield reflection). When the light changed, the driver floored their quarter of a megawatt engine up to full power, rushing close by me in a cloud of diesel exhaust (up to the next red light, natch). I got off onto the sidewalk and walked for a bit so as not to meet that person at the red light, while contemplating why efficiently carrying my shopping was so enraging, and of course, once I was back on the road, I made extra efforts to peer through the windshield reflections of other trucks to try to discern the intentions of their pilots. But I wasn't really worried. Having been cycling for decades, I'm used to it. Gunning the motor was no different than when a dominant male macaque very briefly mounts (symbolically copulates with) a non-dominant male in a social situation. This rarely results in bloodshed. As a cyclist, my overriding goal is to avoid bloodshed (my own!); mere symbols can't hurt me.

[Dec15'17] I know the internet is an echo chamber, but I couldn't help myself... The humor-impaired San Francisco chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals hired a robot (at $6/hour, cheaper than a human) to patrol the sidewalks to keep the homeless humans away because of so many "needles and tents and bikes" (the machine was identical to one I saw this summer, patrolling a food-court/mall in Boston). I was pleased to hear that the homeless humans responded to their Christmas present by smearing its cameras with barbecue sauce and possibly excrement, and then someone, appropriately, put a hood over it. But that all worked only because this first generation device wasn't armed. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to last. Before long, more nightmarish devices could easily be armed with tasers, then rubber bullets, then real bullets. Amazon delivery robots and drones will need to be armed to prevent theft. The whole world will turn into "armed response". Before long, we are probably going to need tripwires, slingshots with gooey opaque projectiles, and small firecrackers that make sticky dust clouds. Else, in the poignant words of "penrose" at information clearing house, it will only be:

     Go gentle, America, into that good night
     Tweet, tweet against the dying of the light

[Dec20'17] After hearing a story on NPR (driving to a store to replace my bicycle communting backpack), I realize I don't really have cause to complain about cars. It was an interview with a Iraq war veteran who took a job in the police in Baltimore, then recently resigned in disgust. One of his 'training' experiences was riding with his partner, who stopped and yelled at a young man who had been riding a bike on the sidewalk. Incidentally, in California, it's legal to ride on the sidewalk as long as you yield to pedestrians, and as long as your city doesn't prohibit it; I never do it, however, because at my overall average speed of 17 mph, which includes all stop signs/light, I'm going way too fast for the sidewalk. Anyway back to the 'community outreach' story. After the person got into the street, the 'officer' gunned his car into him, knocking him off, crushing his bike, which he then threw over a fence. Thankfully, I haven't come close to facing anything like that, and I hope I never do.

[Dec23'17] "Mass casualty drill 'same time, same place' as Amtrak derailment. Just another random coinky-dinky, I'm sure. Scheisse! Then later this week, the weird resignation of Eric Schmidt, which occurred, probably coincidentally, immediately after Trump's latest executive order on seizing the stateside property of people involved in 'human rights abuse'. Schmidt is one of the richest people in the world, with a small army of young blonde Instagram admirers, who last week controlled one of the most powerful corporations in the world. Three other executive resignations after the order, also probably coinky-dinky, include include Gary Jacob (Synergy), Suresh Nair (Giga-tronics), and John Schnatter (Papa John).

[Dec29'17] You have to zoom in to the end of this graph of BASE and of US securities held by the Fed to see the beginnings of the unwind (just $12 billion of $2 trillion added since 2008 removed). The same thing is happening in the EU as orchestrated by the global cartel of bankers, which operates independently from, and above the 'governments' of individual countries. As this continues in 2018, it could eventually pop this latest insane bubble. The ultra rich have already prepared for this, and use outrageous techniques not available to plebes. Hard to say exactly when the 'pop' will happen (now, or 1.5 years from now). But since it's always hard to catch a falling knife, for the cautious (and not-ultra-rich), it's safer not to try.

[Jan03'18] The recently revealed "Meltdown" and "Spectre" hardware 'bugs' in Intel and ARM processors are a good example of the costs of complexity. Both 'bugs' (not really bugs since the hardware works as intended) involve a tricky counter-intuitive speed-up mechanism called "speculative execution" and "out-of-order execution". I remember when this was widely introduced in Intel processors in the late 1990's as processor speeds began to hit the wall (around 3 GHz) that they remain at today. For example, the code in both branches past a branch point can be executed in parallel before the processor knows which one will be needed. When it finds out, then it uses the correct result and discards the irrelevant one. To oversimplify (summary here, and gory details for meltdown PDF here and spectre and PDF here), the problem is that since these parallel execution speed-up mechanisms are going on 'below' the 'bottom level' of the assembly language that higher level software gets compiled into, the *software* can't easily check as to whether the memory location being accessed should be allowed to be accessed. By gaming this hardware mechanism, one process can examine data in another process, which could even be another virtual machine running on the same hardware (Docker, etc). Software fixes for this are already rolled out or in progress, and it remains to be seen how much of slowdown they will cause. Unfortunately, people running older kernels will never get a fix.
     One can easily imagine problems analogous to 'meltdown' and 'spectre' arising in the 'internet of things', as the complexity of technology is increased, further optimized, and more intimately networked.
     Similar hard physical/electronic limits to the late 1990's processor speed ceiling are now happening with spinning hard drives (that would be the 'old' tech where all your 'modern' cloud data lives). The cost per gigabyte has and flattened. For example, an 8T drive costs about twice as much as a 4T drive, which contrasts with what was happening up until recently, where larger drives became cheaper per gigabyte than smaller drives, soon after their introduction. Major upticks in density were magnetoresistive read heads, "giant magnetoresistance" heads, tunneling magnetoresistance heads (with microsopic heating coils), and perpendicular magnetic recording (vs. in-plane). We haven't hit the wall but we are getting closer.
     Unfortunately, there is no real cure for the increased costs of complexity. If one can afford the cost, no problem. But eventually, the cost to support continually adding complexity will be too high. And remember that 'cost' all boils down ultimately to 'energy'. That is, it will require *too much energy* to increase complexity and maintain it. And our total (net) energy supply is flattening, and may actually begin to decrease a decade or so from now. At that point, things can only get simpler. Although it is hard to imagine anybody doing this voluntarily (including myself), the only real adaptive strategy is to reduce complexity (e.g., additional increases in computing speed) before one is forced to do so under duress.

[Jan05'18] Today, I sadly lost my Ironman Triathalon wristwatch when it fell off my wrist during my daily cycle commute because the holes for the spring-loaded pins that hold the wrist band on finally wore out. I bought the watch in 1986, and wore it every day since, so it lasted for 31 years of continuous use. Being a bit of an aspie, I successfully replaced the CR2032 battery maybe 8 times, cleaning out and re-seating the waterproof O-ring each time. I dunked it underwater in the bath and shower and while swimming maybe 10,000 times and it remained waterproof and unfogged until the end. I replaced the wrist band multiple times. When I went online to get a new watch, I found a confusing gaggle of a thousand different functionally equivalent models, many with different bands, many non-replaceable, and with slightly different functions and shapes, none of which were more compelling or practically useful than the six main functions of my original 1986 model (time, date, day, stopwatch, countdown timer, alarm) that I used every day. Reading online reviews, I found that people who still wear watches expect to replace them every year or two along with their cell phones. When I reflect on why I took care of my watch, it is clear that it would have made little difference to the world if most other people did the same thing as I did with their own watches (and some surely did). Instead, I realize that I did it merely to calm my troubled mind.

[Jan08'18] US coal production has continued to drop, now down about 35% from what it was during its US peak in 2007 (it was already almost flat by 2000, see MazamaScience PDF graph here).
     This, perhaps not coincidentally, marked the peak in total US energy consumption. That means we are now back to what US coal usage was around 1980. It's worth making a comparison to English coal production, which peaked around 1914, more or less coincident with the peak of the British empire. Most people looking at the US curve assume that the falloff must be because coal is 'dirty', coal is expensive, that other cheaper things are replacing it, and that it would be no problem to increase US coal production again if we ever wanted to. Sure it's dirty; see for example, the coal-induced London killer fog of Dec 1952 (visibility 3 feet), which killed over 10,000 people. And certainly, some of the functions of coal are being replaced by natural gas and to a lesser extent wind and solar. For example, one reason for using less coal is that it is harder to ramp a coal plant rapidly up and down to compensate for daily variations in wind and solar, which have recently been added to the grid; we are not using less coal because it's dirty or more expensive, but because it doesn't work as well for dispatchable power (peak demand occurs every day when people return from work, just as the sun and wind go down or off). The more easily dispatchable methane is a bit cleaner; but methane is a CO2-generating fossil fuel like coal that just happens to be temporarily cheap as a result of the *methane* fracking binge that crashed natural gas prices, just prior to the current tight oil fracking binge that has crashed the price of oil, leaving fracking companies deep in debt up to this minute. Like coal, there is a limited supply of high net energy methane.
     After WWI, English coal production continued down until today. By the time Margaret Thatcher got around to breaking the UK coal miner's strike of 1984, UK coal production was already all the way back down to levels not seen in England since the first half of the 19th century. By analogy, it's unwise to assume that we will be able to rapidly ramp up high net energy US coal production when we may be desperate to do so, say 15 years from now. The most important reason for the rise and fall of English coal was simply the fact that high net energy coal in England ran out. It seems quite possible that this is also the reason for the peak in US coal in 2007, and the even more recent peak in China coal in 2015 -- see MazamaScience PDF graph here). Because China uses so much coal (e.g., somewhat ironically, to make our 'green renewable energy' devices and iPhones), China's coal peak was main reason total *world* coal production to also peaked in 2015 (see MazamaScience PDF graph here).
     Though these leisurely peaks are visible in plain sight, the final world peak in coal is still conventionally thought to be a long ways off. And since conventional wisdom incorrectly puts energy demand, not energy supply, in the drivers seat, it makes people think that stupid money tricks (e.g., mortgage-backed securities, the Bank of Japan buying insane amount of Japanese securities starting in 2013, Tesla's tiny 2000-car-battery grid battery), which are capable of causing short term gyrations, are capable of doing truly magical things -- like creating new supplies of high net energy fuel for our taking.
     Actually, I find 'coal forever' and 'peak coal' equally horrifying :-{ . 'Coal forever' would be (already is) a climate disaster (CO2, mercury). But since world energy use and world GDP are extremely highly correlated because energy drives growth, peak coal slash peak energy probably means peak world GDP, which is something our current money system is seriously not adapted to dealing with (and me too...).

[Jan13'18] Controlled, randomized feeding studies and large scale correlational studies of diet and disease suggest that the low carb, high protein, high fat diets people 'instinctively' follow these days are probably responsible for a majority of American (and increasingly Chinese and Indian) health problems like atherosclerosis, diabetes, strokes, osteoporosis, arthritis, Alzheimer's, breast/prostate/colon cancer, autoimmune diseases. The relevant scientific evidence has been around since the 1950's (Burkitt, Kempner, Pritikin). The simple fix is to eat a lower protein, lower fat, and higher carb diet (less meat/dairy/oil, more plants).
     You might think that people who have skills in seeing through disinformation would be able to see through the fog of disinformation with respect to diet. But look at the pathetic case of RE at Doomstead Diner. He is an insightful, articulate and raunchily funny commentator. Yet his personal health is a shambles. Though he is the same age as me, his circulatory/skeletal/immune systems have fallen into such disrepair that he can no longer walk a block unassisted by a battery cart and has recently been shopping for gravestones. He attributes the problems to having fractured a cervical vertebra from a gymnastics coaching injury; but he doesn't consider what might have weakened his bones making them more susceptible to fracture in the first place (e.g., osteoporosis induced by a too-high protein diet). He is a heavy smoker (another assault on bone remodeling/repair). Recently, without reading any studies of diet and health, he decided that the way to improve the rapidly failing health of what he calls his 'meat package' would be to eat more raw meat!. His unnecessary physical decline is painful and pitiful to watch, and yet seemingly impossible to arrest. The architecture of the collapse of his health is a striking and unintended analogy to the collapse of industrial civilization that he has written about with insight and humor.

[Jan23'18]
Just because it goes on longer than you expect doesn't mean 'forever'
     I waste too much time reading about money, but I don't get any wiser. In fact, I think it has made me more stupid. Ever since the 2008 crash, which roughly corresponded to peak crude oil (not condensates, not natural gas plant liquids, not tar sands, not fracked tight oil, not biodiesel, not corn ethanol), I have been stupidly amazed that the result wasn't a bigger crash and a long retrenchment, but instead an *even bigger* and *even longer* bubble than just about any previous bubble.
     I have watched as companies with price-to-earnings ratios above 200 (where the 'normal' price-to-earnings ratio is something like 20), burn through gigantic piles of cash, year after year, seemingly with no bad effects. These would be companies like Uber/Yelp/Amazon/Netflix/Twitter/Tesla, Schlumberger/Pioneeer/Halliburton (oil), and IQVIA/Vertex/Ligand (pharma), many of which represent the 'new' economy, 'new' fracking, 'new' not-cable teevee, 'new' fix your bad diet with pharma. You can look at the numbers for yourself here.
     When I first heard about companies borrowing money to buy their own stock, I thought it indicated we were near the end of the bubble. I was totally wrong. Then I read that this self-buying accounts for most stock buying, and that perhaps 2/3 of profits go into stock buybacks. Clearly *that* couldn't go on. But it has! For several years! Despite central banks saying that were going to unwind their unprecendented purchasing of assets after the 2008 crash, they have barely begun; the tiny 'unwinding' dip in the red line in this FED graph is virtually invisible without zooming in to the last few months.
     The contagious madness has led to the spectacle of central banks and sovereign wealth funds (Saudi, Norway) starting to make long term investments in the stock market, sometimes even by taking out loans (getting deeper into debt).
     Finally, there is oil. Here is an excellent interview with Art Berman on the finance of fracking. There is a strong analogy between tight oil fracking and Netflix or Amazon; fracking is another example of 'anti-creative' destruction made possible by near-zero interest rates (compare, a metastatic Amazon destroying brick-and-mortar, despite being less energy efficient and still essentially unprofitable). Shockingly, the fracking companies had negative cash flow even when oil was at an economy-crashing $100 a barrel. Not surprisingly, they have remained cash-flow-negative with $50 oil. Part of the reason they are still in operation is that the oil field service companies have been forced to reduce their prices (those would be some of the companies mentioned above with stratospheric price-to-earnings ratios...).
     The production dynamics of fracked oil is insanely short-sighted. Fracking and horizontal drilling result in an up-front burst in oil production followed by super-rapid depletion, when compared to conventional vertical wells. These sudden bursts of production are part of the explanation for the small (1-2%) but highly destructive oil glut that has helped crash oil prices. Primary production in fracked tight oil wells depletes very rapidly (60% depleted in a year). And despite having already sold off the fruits of these production bursts, frackers are *still* all in the red!
     Finally, fracked wells are not compatible with pump jacks. Those are the nodding 'donkey head' oil lifters that produce small amounts of oil for many years from conventional wells, after the gas pressure driving much more voluminous primary production has dropped too low to push up the oil. Pump jacks don't work on fracked wells because rock porosity is way too low for significant oil to seep into the bore to be lifted, and because the lifter valves don't work well in horizontal holes. This is a second factor that increases the rate of fracked oil depletion.
     Thus, the fracking companies really do look like Tesla and Uber - temporarily burning through massive amounts of investor cash without making any money, all while destroying existing profitable operations. It fits John Michael Greer's description of 'catabolic collapse' to a tee; metabolizing your own muscles for energy, while burning the furniture for good measure.
     Clearly, all of this nonsense can't go on forever, but it certainly goes on much longer than any rational person would ever expect! I am completely certain the current bubble can't continue for another 10 years. But, I suppose it's possible that the animal spirits will power us 'upward' for another whole year (!). I can literally see the increase in animal spirits every day in the ever increasing size of the 'cars' (Tundra/Armada/F-150/Silverado) and their ever-bigger tires clattering over the torn-up pavement alongside my bicycle.
     I certainly don't want a crash (or a bicycle crash :-} ). I just wish there could be more overall sanity and caution as we sail over peak net energy, metals, fertilizer, water, soil, fish, etc., with an ever growing population and with interest rates finally starting to rise. We are now using 6 barrels of oil for every one we find. The only way that 'all liquids' oil production has been able to continue slightly upward is because of super-rapidly depleting 'frack cocaine'. But, since the previous 2008 shock was partly caused by the oil price spike due to peak crude oil, when peak fracked/other oil arrives, the cliff is likely to be sharper. An economy-crashing oil price spike won't help the 'alternative energy economy'; it will sink their boats, too, since all of their operations utterly depend on oil. The increase in 'all liquids' that I called 'slight' above was comparable to the total increase in energy from 'renewables'! Similarly, when the stock market starts to decisively go down, buybacks could stop suddenly, which given their size, could create strong positive feedback (in a negative direction).
     Though consumer confidence is now at record levels (usu. a bad sign, incidentally), there are some other sane people out there who are thinking the same way, and explicitly discussing civilized methods for using less energy and how we might try to engineer a graceful contraction. It's utterly useless to focus on Trumpfarts; our problems are much bigger and much more difficult to solve. Hordes of irony-blind richies taking their private jets to Davos to discuss the 'threat of climate change' isn't going to help. There is no essential difference between the approach of the two 'different' parties to the real big problems. Talking about Trump is a just a way of ignoring talking about the real problems of an economic system designed only for growth and a brain operating system designed only for 'moar' that together have brought us to the threshold of catastrophically overrunning a finite earth.

[Jan25'18] Here is a short practical description of the new Tesla semi truck in comparison with a standard diesel truck. First, it has a 500 mile range, which is one-third that of the range of an easier-to-refuel diesel truck. Second, the electric truck battery alone costs $180,000, which is more than the cost of that entire diesel truck with the longer range. Third, the electric truck is projected to have 20% lower operating costs than a diesel truck (finally, good!). Fourth, the 900-1000 kWh battery weighs in at 17,600 pounds, which compares to the 1,700 pounds of diesel fuel in a diesel truck that gives it triple the range of the electric truck. The weight of an empty truck without an engine is about 15,000 pounds (same for electric and diesel). The weight of an electric truck engine is less than that of a diesel truck engine, but a diesel engine only weighs about 3,000 pounds. Since the maximum gross weight of a truck in the US is 80,000 pounds, the 500-mile electric truck can carry about 45,000 pounds payload versus over 60,000 pounds payload for a long distance diesel truck with triple the range. There are currently about 2 million trucks in operation in the US. About 180,000 new semi trucks are purchased per year. Given that the up-front cost is substantially greater for an electric truck with a smaller range, and that is considerably more difficult to 'refuel', the incentive for a shipping company to replace the new purchase of a diesel truck with a new purchase of an electric truck will not be strong given only a (projected) 20% reduction in operating expenses. From these basic numbers, it seems clear that despite all the hype, electric trucks are unlikely to replace more than a small fraction of the existing diesel fleet over the next decade. [Update Feb07: ZH commenter snark on less than expected TSLA quarterly cash-burn of 'just' $0.3 billion, but greater than expected new 2017 long-term debt of $3.7 billion (total long-term debt, $9.5 billion): "Watch live on Youtube as SpaceX launches a pallet-load of TSLA investors' cash into space!"]

[Feb17'18] Language is a symbolic-representational operating system for the ape brain — AKA the 'second coming of life' (Sereno, 2014). Unfortunately, language can only ride around on top its ape brain chassis, which can make for a particularly explosive combination. To see this, read this interview with Selco, who made it through the human-language-engineered catastrophe in Bosnia. Identity politics, which is essentially chimpanzee politics, is an always-available reservoir of enormous violent power than can easily be activated and subverted by our new linguistic brain operating system. It's bad enough to wallow in identity politics, either left or right, when resources are plentiful. But when the going gets tough, identity politics has the potential to blow all our heads clean off. As Selco said: "Nothing that I saw or read before could have prepared me for the level of violence and blindness to it, for the lives of kids, elders, civilians, and the innocent". We must learn to avoid identity politics at all costs.

[Mar10'18]
Aneuploidy
     A majority of neoplastic 'transformed' cancer cells are aneuploid ("not euploid") -- that is, they have additional or missing members of the normal (euploid = "true-ploid") complement of chromosome pairs, and/or have chromosome fragments. There is tremendous variation in the pattern of aneuploidy within one tumor type, and across different tumor types. With all the molecular biology reading I used to do, not to mention history of science, I was kind of stunned to notice that I had forgotten this basic fact, originally pointed out by Theodor Boveri in the late 19th century. This is called "chromosomal instability". As cells continue to divide, different cells rapidly acquire different abnormal patterns because the cellular machinery for condensing, duplicating, and lining up the chromosomes in preparation for the very physical act of cell division is disrupted. This disruption can be passed down to the daughter cells.
     The result is that cancer cells essentially split into millions of different pseudo 'species' (Rasnick, Duesberg) within your body. Many naturally occurring species have differences in the number of pairs of chromosomes -- e.g., humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, but apes have 24 pairs, macaque monkeys have 21 pairs, capuchin monkeys have 27 pairs and so on. In the case of aneuploidy, there are much larger number of possible asymmetrical chromosome configurations by additions, subtractions, and chromosome parts.
     With extreme deviations from normal number of gene copies (e.g., some genes completely missing), cells will typically die, kill themselves, or be killed by the immune system. With smaller deviations from normal, however, the new 'species' may be adapted to the abnormal conditions of a tumor (reduced oxygen levels) or the presence of chemotherapy agents. The fact that chemotherapy agents are so diverse in their function and 'effective' across many different tumor types is a clue that cancer is not 'a few bad genes'. Chemotherapy agents include a dizzying array of things that damage or kill cells such as classic metabolic poisions (methotrexate disrupting folate metabolism), agents that damage DNA (by methylation, by nucleotide impersonation, by blocking DNA unwinding enzymes so DNA breaks, etc), inhibitors of vascularization (avastin), agents to block receptors that protect cells from being killed by the immune system, DNA-damaging radiation (the point of it), and so on.
     Though it could easily hurt a cell living in a well adjusted cell community to have an extra copy of a particular metabolic enzyme, an extra copy might come in handy with a lot of methotrexate around. Or, an extra copy of a DNA-unwinding enzyme (a topoisomerase) might be handy to partly overcome irinotecan blocking its action; this constrasts with the bad effects of an extra copy of topoisomerase I when there is no irinotecan there. Or more simply, an extra copy of a gene could help if genotoxic chemo or radiation got to the other copies.
     The emphasis on single-gene mutations as a source of cancer is probably seriously overblown and maybe even not the main explanation of cancer. The problem is, there are a large number of things that induce cancer. A number of them don't even cause mutations (e.g., asbestos, chronic acid reflux). One could imagine intracellular asbestos strands (or graphene fragments, for that matter) wreaking havoc with the physical machinery of the mitotic spindle, leading to aneuploidy. But the show must go on for 'genetically personalized' medicine and $100K per year 'blockbuster/breakthrough/game-changer' drugs-of-the-month that typically improve survival by a pitiful 5% on average over no treatment at all. You'd never get that idea from looking on teevee where actors portray the one-of-a-hundred people that actually do experience a miracle cure. The insanely expensive war on cancer has essentially failed. Cancer rates are staying the same or going up. Esophageal cancer is up 600% over the last 30 years -- that ain't genetic. Once you stop counting 'cancers that we cured' that really didn't need to be cured (e.g., in situ ductal 'carcinoma'), there has been very little major progress over the last 50 years.
     So what to do? Reduce esophageal-cancer-causing acid reflux and therefore esophageal cancer, for example, by eating less protein (mainly meat and cheese)? Stop smoking to reduce lung cancer? Sensible, perhaps, but people will never go for it. Besides, unorthodox thinking like that has the potential to collapse the economy, man. Instead, we can look forward to a bright future where people will be able to eat lots of meat and cheese, and then take 'genetically personalized' potions to fix all the problems that this causes. For example, you could mix a proton-pump inhibitor for the acid reflux with an osteoclast inhibitor to fix the bone-dissolving effects of the proton-pump inhibitor, then add a few additional things to to block stomach bleeding and occasional phossy jaw caused by the osteoclast inhibitor. Presto, problem solved!
     Given that thousands of 'personalized' reagents will be required in time-varying dosages, this mixture could conveniently be dispensed from a mouthpiece on your internet-of-things refrigerator-slash-biotech-fabricator, which could also test for tumor markers while you were sucking on it. Eventually each kid will need their own personalized refrigerator/synthesizer/tester. Now, don't share your mouthpieces, children, be sure to practice safe mouthpiece...

[Mar11'18]
Alternate reality
     I grew up in the 60's. During the end of the US invasion of Vietnam in 1972, I got a draft lottery number, which was low enough to be called. Thankfully, the war ended just in time for me not to have to make a life changing decision about how to respond (at the time, college deferments had been discontinued). Back then, I often felt that I had a different world view from maybe 2/3 of of the US population, which was divided on the Vietnam war, not to mention, on the topic of what a healthy diet consisted of. But it didn't feel schizophrenic to me -- just that people had different opinions. I attributed this, in an aspie way, to the other guys simply not knowing the facts. For example, as a teenager with a vivid physical and biological imagination, I knew approximately how many 750 pound general purpose bomb craters there were in Vietnam (roughly 20 million). I knew a lot about the physics and biology of shrapnel interacting with biological tissue. I knew about My Lai back in the day when real reporters showed real pictures of what real war actually looks like. And I remember my father's story of taking bleeding dying relatives to the hospital in the back of a car after they were hit by flack from a stray anti-aircraft shell when he was 11, growing up in Honolulu, during the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
     Over the years, after many failed attempts, I got wiser and realized that it was not really possible to change most peoples' minds with facts. But when I contrast how I felt back then with how I feel now, today I have a greater sense of schizophrenia. Many days, I feel like I am truly living in an alternate reality -- from the academics I interact with at work, from the people in the cars I interact with on the road in my twice-daily cycle commute, and from most of what I read on the internet.
     It's not that information about reality isn't available on the internet. For example, as the shrieking about the Russiagate nothingburger (a Russian troll farm spent $100,000 dollars! We must nuke them to stop this meddling!) begins to subside on both sides, I think of related facts I have come across, which are still available in the regular media if you go picking around. Here is a 2016 report from Forbes (!) on the failure of Elon Musk to successfully lobby congress to ban the use of Russian rocket engines in lifting national-security satellites into orbit. Elon Musk, who made his fortune with Paypal, who only has an undergraduate physics degree, and who pays his engineers sh$t, lost. The reason was reality, visible even to the congressworms from both sides -- his rocket engines simply weren't nearly as good or cheap or reliable as the RD-180 Russian rocket engines that the US military still buys from Russia.
     To restate that, the US military continued and still continues to launch *all* of its surveillance/killer/space-weapons satellites *using Russian rocket engines*! That's reality/facts as far as I'm concerned. When I contrast this with the Russiagate nonsense I hear my colleagues mouthing, Pyootin-this and Pyootin-puppet-that, I feel like I am in an alternate reality from both 'right' *and* 'left'. Don't you lefters and righters all remember the Nuland 'f$ck the EU' 'color revolution' shoot-at-both-sides coup that installed Nazis in Kiev right on the Russian border? Imagine if the Russians tried something like that in Tijuana? I'm sure it's not my mind going soft, since I think it's actually working better after I improved circulation to it by eating more plants :-}.
     So, for some examples, let's look at some articles from Russia Today :-} Here is a good article that accurate transcribes quotes arising from the recent Google/military drone kerfuffle that excellently demonstrate alternate realities. For example: "Some Google employees were outraged that the company would share its technology with the military". Those people are in a different reality than me. They are working for a company that was birthed by the military industrial complex. Google *is* the military intelligence complex!
     OK, but have you no care for the US drone pilots that are 'stressed' and 'demoralized' (more quotes in the RT article)? We must help our citizens avoid PTSD by offloading the stressful job of killing real people by remote control to AI drones now!
     And don't you care about saving money and about our national debt? RT quotes the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) writes: "Downward economic forces will continue to constrain Military Department budgets for the foreseeable future. Achieving affordable and cost-effective technical solutions is imperative in this fiscally constrained environment". That 'downward pressure' resulted this year in such a large increase in the US military budget (supported by both parties) that the increase alone was more than the *entire* Russian military budget. Scheisse, I'd hate to see what 'sustained' or 'rising' US military funding would look like...
     In a related RT article, former CEO Eric Schmidt, then tells us, don't worry, 'killer AI' is still 1 to 2 decades away, and anyway it will be controlled by humans: the AI takes care of the details of the wet work and the humans have more of a supervisory role so they don't get PTSD. Win-win situation.
     Finally, the RT report finishes with another 'win' by pointing out that we shouldn't forget that Google AI is now helping to treat diabetic retinopathy in India! (which is now rapidly increasing because Indians can now afford to eat too much meat and cheese and oil, just like Americans).
     The topics and sentences of the official Frankenstein narrative faithfully reported by RT don't hang together well for me, in part because I don't marinate in them daily. I suppose that is a little schizophrenic of me. That's OK. It's important to retain an empirical, logical, and sensible approach even if other people don't. If you *don't* feel pretty schizophrenic these days, it just means that your brain operating system is not working right :-} [Mar27'18] It's worthwhile putting US gun deaths, bad as they are, into the perspective of all causes of death (540,000 per year). There are about 30,000 gun-related deaths per year. These break down into 65% by suicide (20,000), 15% by police (4,500), 3% from accidental discharge (1000), and finally, 17% (5000) from criminal/gang/drug/mentally-ill/mass-shooting activity. One-quarter of all gun crime deaths happen in Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, and Washington D.C. That leaves about 4,000 gun-related violent deaths for the whole rest of the US (1,000 per year in California). Though tragic, non-suicide/non-police gun violence deaths (5,000) are a tiny fraction of yearly heart disease deaths (700,000), cancer deaths (600,000), medical error deaths (200,000), lower respiratory disease deaths (150,000), accident deaths (150,000, incl. 40,000 car accident deaths and 30,000 drug overdose deaths), stroke deaths (140,000), Alzheimer's deaths (110,000), diabetes deaths (80,000), kidney disease deaths (50,000), deaths from infections (40,000), and liver disease deaths (40,000). Violent gun crime accounts for about 1% of annual deaths (2015), a much higher precentage than in European countries, but still a very minor cause of death in the greater scheme of, well, death. Everybody must die; but we would like to minimize premature death. The overwhelming majority of premature deaths (heart disease, cancer, lower respiratory, stroke, Alzheimer's, diabetes) in the US are caused by bad diet, not the guns of criminals. [Apr26'18] Nothing hightlights the incredibly short look-ahead required of capitalist businesses more than this report that Ford will stop selling nearly all North American cars to refocus only on trucks and SUVs, in order to increase its profitability over its currently flat 8%. It also plans to incorporate hybrid drive trains into these oversize vehicles. I see many spotlessly gleaming Ford F-150's, 'Explorers' (not!), and 'Escapes' (not!) roaring by me during my daily bicycle commutes, more often than not piloted by diminuitive women, some even wearing hajibs. This move by Ford makes incredible short term business sense since the profit margin on trucks and SUVs is higher than on the things we used to call 'cars'; and, because of relatively low gas prices, people are buying larger and larger vehicles. A side effect is that accident deaths and pedestrian and cyclist deaths are ticking up, because the larger vehicles tend to roll over more easily and hit pedestrians and cyclists higher (more lethally). Of course, from even a slightly sane, wider view, this move -- by both consumers and corporations -- is a move in a ridiculously short-sighted, wrong direction. The temporary 1% 'glut' of oil is a transitory thing, spurred on by the US frackers, who remain deep in debt from selling fracked oil, and who are selling subprime fracking leases to avoid going even deeper into debt, bizarrely emulating Tesla/Netflix/Uber to gain market share without ever actually making money. Ten years from now, people will say about Ford and their stoopid consumers, 'what were they thinking?'. I say, Ford was thinking *like they always have to* (6 months ahead), and consumers were thinking 6 months ahead, too. In some respects, I think this particular mess is more the fault of the stoopid consumers.
     Speaking of projections into the future, here is a sensible quote from Catherine Austin Fitts on pensions: "If we can print money to give $20 trillion [plus] to the banks, and, [if we can] let $21 trillion go missing from the federal government, [then] why is it a problem to print $5 trillion to fund the pension funds?" (article here).

[May01'18] Here are two excellent quotes from Michael Hudson from a recent interview:
     "You asked what is the fight about? The fight is whether the state will be taken over, essentially to be an extension of Wall Street if you do not have government planning. Every economy is planned. Ever since the Neolithic (era), you’ve had to have (a form of) planning. If you don’t have a public authority doing the planning, then the financial authority becomes the planners. So globalism is in the financial interest –- Wall Street and the City of London, doing the planning, not governments. They will do the planning in their own interest. So neoliberalism is the fight of finance to subdue society at large, and to make the bankers and creditors today in the position that the landlords were under feudalism."
     "92% of corporate revenue in the last five years has gone either into stock buy-backs or higher dividend payouts. That means only 8% has gone into new investment to expand production or employ more labor. So the financial business plan is one of asset stripping and shrinkage, not growth. Nobody in the 19th century imagined that industrial capitalism would evolve along these self-destructive lines. They all believed that the most technologically efficient system would win out in a kind of Darwinian or Spencerian struggle of the fittest. But instead, you’ve had a covert, parasitic financial counter-revolution. The rentier class -– land rent, monopoly rent, and high finance -– have fought back and created a fallacious vocabulary whose objective is to deceive the population into thinking that giving more money to the wealthy 1% will trickle down to the 99%, instead of seeing this 1% income as extractive, not productive."

[May18'18] Reading this recent post by Mary Fricker, it never ceases to amaze me how rapidly large changes in the basic 'plumbing' of the banking system can occur. In this case, as a result of the 2007 financial crisis, banks were 'forced' to became 'safer', supposedly curtailing some of the practices that resulted in the last crash.
     But almost immediately, non-reported, non-bank lending and borrowing -- N.B.: between *banks* and non-banks -- ballooned. For example, non-bank mortgage originations went from 20% of mortgages to 50% of mortgages in just a few years. Also, by performing 'off balance sheet' funding operations using collateral, transactions can be done in private, concealing growing risk. Though strange to the average person, the basic operation of 'borrowing' money -- that is, *creating* money from the void at the moment of the loan -- is actually straightforward to understand. But by 'multiplying the loaves and fishes' -- differentiating this basic process into many different, unreported, intertwined versions -- it has become nearly impossible for the average person to keep up. Sure looks like the crescendo leading up to the next dump of this 'toxic waste' onto the proles. Seems like we are somewhere around 2006.
     Of course, I had been expecting this to all come unglued 3 years ago (see above), and that it would be motivated by oil shortages, possibly caused by deep-in-debt frackers finally not being able to make their interest payments. Instead, we maintained a tiny 'glut' of oil (oil is only now starting to creep up in price), and frackers have somehow managed to stay in business despite always having been deep in debt, and having burned through 1/5 of a trillion dollars over the past 5 years (Steve St. Angelo video). Consumers, meanwhile, also using 'creative' financing, have bought increasingly larger 'cars' -- so much so that I have been forced to begin wearing a left ear plug because I am starting to go deaf in that ear from the increased traffic/tire noise. And despite historically low (below 5%) 30-year mortgage rates for the past 8 years, personal interest payments have crept up to a new record that exceeds the peak just before the last housing bust.
     This latest mutation in money games won't fix the peak energy problem, and it's not something that a Renaissance gold merchant from 16th century Florence wouldn't instantly recognize. And it certainly won't stop the next crash, or the next upward transfer of wealth. Would it have been better to have faced our impending problems more openly? Probably. But, keeping the main outlines of the ever more complex big picture (energy, food, science, engineering, war, banking, geopolitics) in mind all at once is nearly impossible.

[May21'18] The fact that the new CIA director, Gina Haspel, is a woman does nothing to obscure the fact that she's the latest torturer-in-chief. Here is an excellent piece by Caitlin Johnstone on how the mask is slipping, with all the details. But I agree with Ron Paul: Haspel is not the problem -- the CIA is the problem.

Recent US: Jul 06, 2018 (earlier: scroll back)

Life in the rest of the world

[bits from 2000/2001 -- chronological blog entries from 2002 onward begin a few pages down]

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 "World News" Blog Entries -- 2001 until present
############################################################################
[Sep12,'01] From 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
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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."
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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:
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(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 to 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." -- Roths child 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 basically 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:
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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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link

[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 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

[Jan,25'06] 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 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 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 reservoirs 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 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 reservoirs 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 a neocon
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 get repaid 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' convey death threats to real reporters
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]
Libya aftermath
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 sodomy 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 (if Europe and before) 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...

[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]
Predictions for the new year
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 disable 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 the 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 even language-equipped apes. After resource limits on population have begun to bite, they 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.

[May28'12] The Iraq war is now supposedly 'over'. There are now about 40K regular US soldies and 40K military contractors on 15 military bases there. That is, 80,000 troops.

[Jun18'12] A decade ago, GM and Ford spun off their component-making companies. Through the 'genius' of financial engineering, they were filled with debt until they went bankrupt, and were then sold to China. This has also occurred even in Germany. China new vehicle sales went up 54% in 2009, 33% in 2010, but only 2.5% in 2011. There are 5 million cars now in Beijing, a city of 25 million people.

[Jul04'12] Monbiot embarrassingly channels Maugeri this week. This simple chart by Ron Patterson (Darwinian) showing OECD oil (crude+condensate) production+imports (=usage) from publicly available EIA data carries so much more weight than a thousand weekly columns. It says that the game is (half) over -- peak oil effectively happened to the OECD in 2006; China and India are now increasing their usage mostly at the expense of the OECD, in what has been a zero-sum game since 2006. But this doesn't mean that there isn't enough oil+coal+methane left to really mess up the climate (about half left). Monbiot is right on that point. Now it *is* true that the IPCC guys have stubbornly stuck to using off-by-a-factor-of-at-least-2 overly optimistic (from an energy standpoint) remaining hydrocarbon reserves estimates. But as humans get more and more desperate, they are *not* going to stop reproducing (have you?), and they will burn every last scrap of accessible net energy positive fossil fuel. I can't currently see anything powerful enough to even slightly budge our progess up the linear CO2 ramp (the worldwide recession didn't even make a tiny dent!) *except* simple depletion of net energy positive fossil fuels. The CO2 ramp will most likely continue upward, reaching about ~500 ppm CO2 by 2050 (cf. glacial CO2 was ~200 ppm, pre-industrial/interglacial was ~280 ppm, current is ~400). 500 ppm is more than *twice* the glacial/no-glacial difference added on top of no-glacial. That CO2 will take thousands of years to get absorbed by the oceans (where it is already dissolving the shells of coral and plankton) and absorbed by land plants. But peak oil/energy is going to hit us first, and much harder initially than climate change will. Things are likely to be pretty chaotic on account of energy constriction alone by 2030. Then, in 2050, when our maneuverability has been greatly reduced because of massive energy depletion, and as the skies begin to clear (like they did during 9/11), climate change will really begin to bite. As the song goes, "Walk the plank with our eyes wide open". I really wish I could see another way forward.

[Aug01'12] Orwell-world continues as US/Nato journalists in Syria are now openly embedded with al-Qaeda! However, it is taking longer for the US/Nato to make a wasteland of Syria than it took them in Libya because Syria has a moderate ability to shoot back. Leon Panetta yesterday stooped to threatening Bashar Al Assad's family: "If you want to be able to protect yourself and your family, you'd better get the hell out now". Everyone kowtows to the huge US/Nato military machine, but when you look at results, it basically lost in Afghanistan and Iraq against very weak opponents, and at huge cost (in money in the west and without yet obtaining originally desired sweeetheart pipeline and oil contracts, and in a holocaust of lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq). Meanwhile, peak oil is happening all around us, just as the denials get more and more shrill. OECD oil usage peaked in 2007 and has since dropped by almost 20%. Then beginning in 2011, China oil usage peaked (EIA nuumbers plotted by Ron Patterson). The linear extrapolation from 2000-2010 data, where China and India would have taken all world oil and coal exports by 2025 is now decisively broken. The relentless burning of one cubic oil of mile per year now has us steaming oil out of slightly tarry sands. How long til we're 'burning the furniture' by tearing up old asphalt for oil (which has about the same oil content as tar sands)? Fairy tale economists will insist it's just a flesh wound, and that oil consumption is down because of the worldwide recession. This completely ignores the reality that, vampire squids aside, it takes energy to make things. As the energy requirements for getting energy to put into the economy increase, less things will get made. Here in London, the city is quiet and deserted in the middle of the O-limp-ics! There are only 1/3 the usual number of foreign tourists (100K vs. 300K) visiting this summer; some downtown businesses are having their worst summer in 50 years. Putting anti-aircraft missile batteries on top of apartment buildings probably didn't help. As the Druid notes, if this stage is denial, then next is anger. Not looking forward to that next stage. Forget I ever said anything about peak oil. I had nothing to do with it!

[Aug07'12] It's hard to like the big picture. The US has still only slightly unwound the huge private debt bubble (e.g., relative to GDP). In fact, private debt relative to GDP has not yet even dropped below the US 1932 peak! (Steve Keen graph from Steve Ludlum's site). The last time such a huge debt bubble got unwound in the 1930's, there were very hard times, made worse by bad climate conditions. But then there was WWII and a huge growth spurt that rode on an almost perfect exponential rise in energy and especially oil usage. It is blindingly obvious from a physical/geological perspective that things can never be fixed by an exponential rise in energy usage again (not saying they can't be fixed, just not that way). That truly sucks. I like to focus on basic/gross/overall/big-average/slowly-changing kinds of numbers on debt, energy, and climate. Not a peep of this appears in any public discussion of policy, lamented today here by Ugo Bardi -- while he was driving home ;-} That truly sucks, too. Everybody is hoping reality will just go away. Last month, I watched a full week of teevee, which I do once a year. I truly felt like I had been transported to a parallel universe. I couldn't believe the sheer number of SUV/car commmercials -- in the midst of an historic reversal in 3 decades of increases in driving, with China beginning to outbid the US for oil, and the US turning almost half its entire corn crop into ethanol (an EROEI ~1 process that basically turns natural gas and coal into ethanol with no energy gain) to provide what is still only a small fraction of the fuel for idiot packs of cars. 10 years ago, when I first became aware that peak oil was going to happen in a few years, I was not surprised or bothered that normal people thought I was a kook. But I never imagined then that when peak oil *actually happened*, it would lead to *more* car commercials even as half the corn went into gas tanks! I suppose I'm stunned to realize that even people with money think that more oil can be advertised into existence. If only it *were* possible 'print' oil! As mentioned many times above, the problem is that capitalism is hitting the fan in slow mo -- not fast enough to rouse us sleepwalkers, poor or rich. Rather than even the smallest peep about current realities (e.g., planning to deal with more regular, more severe drought conditions), we instead have the spectacle of Obama doing a Reagan by arming the FSA (cf. 'Afghan freedom fighters') in Syria/Eastasia. Many of the US-supported people now killing Syrians are the very same Iraqi Sunnis who were very recently blowing up US and UK military vehicles in Iraq with roadside bombs. And the Cameron UK poodle just started yipping, too. The spectacle of the underdogs slaughtering each other at the bidding of their overlords depressingly reminds me of death squads and El Salvador 1980. The chances for blowback from this operation are very high. For now, the US is safe from this sort of thing happening in the homeland. But rabid Christian right types are not that different conceptually from jihadis; and this could be a problem down the line. And as Dmitri Orlov has just pointed out, the drought this northern summer has just put a big world food squeeze into the pipe for early next year. The food price oscillations will be amplified by the money parasites, who will see this as a great 'opportunity'.

[Aug14'12] Gordon Duff is often a disinfo-y kook, but he recently made a valid point about the skirmishes in Syria. It would seem that if the US or UK (or many other military hardware-supplying countries) wanted to, they could relatively easily arrange to supply the Syrian contras with modern (i.e., less than 45-year-old!) anti-tank/helicopter/jet weapons, which would suddenly change the equation. So the whole thing so far has largely served as extended bloody GWOT theater for teevee watchers, rather than an actual overthrow of the Syrian government. Reports of the capture of 40 Turkish soldiers inside Syria suggest desperation and incompetence in the face of unwillingness on the part of NATO and the US to overtly attack, or provide critical hardware (yet, no doubt, while requesting that Turkey act -- perhaps most recently via the Obomber phone call to Erdogan during which Obama was photographed holding a baseball bat). Today, ludicrously, Killery complains about the very kind of sectarian turmoil she directly helped to create! But now that the insurgency seems to be failing, the US and its poodles could begin have some real weapons sent to it (the kind Gordon Duff mentions; the kind that probably shot down the Turkish reconaissance F-4). That would be very destabilizing for the whole region (e.g., Saudi). More likely is to dribble weapons into the crazies whose latest exploits include bravely throwing postal workers to their death out of tall buildings.

[Aug18'12] Here is an interview with Jorgen Randers which pretty closely reflects my expectations for the future, I suppose because I'm getting to be an oldie, too. I am less sanguine than him about the implications of overall fossil fuel energy depletion on the stability of industrial society by 2050, but generally agree (cf. the Druid) that collapse happens slower than some people expect -- which will make society's likely continual inability to act even more poignantly tragic. His advice is, don't take your kids out to the forest; get them used to virtual reality (actually, Jorgen, not a problem -- but you're forgiven for being 67...). His 'practical' advice is: have less kids (esp. rich countries), reduce fossil fuel use, give renewables to the third world for free, set up stronger international organizations. Only number two will happen, but because of running into maximum production rate constraints, not by choice.

[Aug21'12] The German-British-poodle-led Syrian 'rebel' operation (using imported Libyans among others) currently seems to be failing badly. So now it's all Pussy Riot, all the time (I'm against the prison time; but they could have been sentenced to music school...). Obama's seemingly crazy statements about chemical weapons could perhaps be referring to the very ones that the US arranged for their 'rebels' to get. NATO was able to turn Libya into a wasteland in a few months by bombing in combination with funding militias on the ground. The expensive military toys work well in a "turkey shoot" against civilian cars, but they are more difficult to use against targets that have a moderate ability to shoot back (Syria, Iran). Paid mercenaries (incl Libyans, Chechens, Uzbek, Pakistanis, Senegalese, Algerians) on the ground alone won't work. Another point is that there is less oil in Syria than Libya (tho they have a lot of methane). Balancing Pussy Riot is seeing Todd Akin furiously back-pedaling on his auto-abortion comment as the richie rats abandon his foundering ship.

[Aug21'12] My initial guess about Fukushima turning out to be smaller than Chernobyl (to be fair, made before reactor #3 exploded) was wrong. The Fukushima disaster has now released several times more radioacive cesium-137.

[Sep04'12] The downsizing of the US/Israel war games and Dempsey's statement yesterday are positive signs that the US military is digging in its heels a bit against a foolhardy attack on Iran. Not a good sign, I suppose, when the military is our brightest hope; and they have been tricked into wars before. I have gotten the impression that people think that if Obama is reelected, he may be freer to reign in suicidal Israeli plans to attack Iran. I think that the Israeli counterparts of the US army will likely be able to stop such an attack, even if the Republican uglies get elected. Instead, a reelection might free Obama to attack Syria. Despite all the idiotic self-defeating viciousness on display from the other party, I don't think the failure to reelect Obama would result in major policy changes. There are certain constraints on the budget. 10 more trillion will get to the criminal bankers, no matter which party wins. And there is the need prevent the general public from starving via social services in order to avoid revolution that will also be respected by both sides (the drought and continued high oil prices will raise the price of food). Not that they aren't taking precautions -- after all it was under Obama that homeland 'security' purchased half a billion hollow point bullets this year (the kind that are 'illegal' to use in war because they cause such horrific injuries). These are for use on the *domestic* population, sorry, I meant terr'ists. That's a little over one hollow point bullet per each American man, woman, and child. Lotta terr'ists among 'em, I guess.

[Sep07'12] The fact that the Republican uglies haven't jumped on the US military slap-down of Netanyahu, which legitimizes it, emphasizes the fact that the supposed Repub/Dem differences are all theater and no substance. There is only one party: the corporate/banker republicrats. As Glen Ford says, Obama has turned out to be the "more effective evil" as opposed to the lesser evil. This does *not* mean there is no threat of a false flag to start a war; false flags have often been carried out by very localized parts of governments or intelligence agencies.

[Sep25'12] Some professional humanitarian organizations now have to wait at least 6 hours before trying to help injured people, some with limbs torn off who have survived US drone attacks (a majority of those killed in the attacks are civilians). because of the new US strategy to re-bomb first responders. Civilians in US-military-occupied countries have gotten justifiably paranoid and have serious trouble sleeping. Meanwhile, back in the homeland the dept of US homeland 'security' is just getting started with 60 domestic drone bases, so far, somewhat distant from population centers. But this is likely just the beginning, paralleling the decade long trend of militarization of police departments (well, at least in cities that can still afford them -- cf. Camden, NJ). Not looking forward to karmic "double tap" operations in the homeland -- run by out-of-shape previously unemployed college students gamers/terminators. Sad that this is what 'artifical intelligence' turned out to be, though I suppose in this context, I'm also glad that real good old-fashioned AI never did work...

[Oct08'12] The shifting of bank losses -- including outright criminally fraudulent things like mortgages on non-existent homes -- onto the public continues with QE3 in the US and with similar operations in the UK/EU. The end result is a devaluation of public purchasing power and public pensions. A third of all home sales in the US in August during the 'housing recovery' were all-cash, suggesting that record low mortgage rates are not the explanation of the uptick. This is similar to London property market where a *majority* of home sales are cash. Since the average London yuppie can't afford to pay one million pounds *cash* for a two bedroom flat, this is consistent with a substantial part of the market serving as a money laundering operation. This operation continues because it is just slightly too abstract to explain to the general public. So we end up with outright theft -- conducted in broad daylight. When I was in college, I made the mistake of not learning anything about the basic facts of money creation. I didn't really begin to understand how things actually worked until I was almost 50 (!). This is critical basic information like algebra or history that everybody should learn in school.

[Nov19'12] Quick thinking British drivers have run down both their Olympic cyclist medalist yesterday and then his coach in a separate incident. Own goal, British car dudez! Probably not worth it trying to warn the car people about peak oil/energy -- it'll just make them even more dangerous...

[Nov19'12] The new war on the Gaza ghetto (if the Goliath vs. David bombing of urban neighborhoods and media centers with US-made F16's and naval shells is properly labeled a 'war') is just like the last one -- right at the election transition -- and mostly funded by the $3-4 billion of US taxes and military equipment the US delivers to Israel every year. It is against Hamas, itself partly an Israeli creation (read about it here in the Wall Street Journal!). After killing another one or two thousand Palestinians (last time, 1400 Palestinians killed vs. 13 Israeli deaths -- which the Israelis pornographically call "mowing the lawn"), the lust for mutilated Palestinian human bodies will subside after the votes are delivered in the upcoming election. This is an absolutely disatrous policy -- esp. for Israel. The only way to stop this, and the endless ethnic cleansing accompanying provocative new land-grabs/bulldozing/settlements, is to cut off the military funding. But the chance of that happening is very small since the US and UK seem determined to support this suicidal (for Israel!) policy. The problems of energy descent, avoiding the collapse of industrial civilization, and re-making our monetary system to deal with contraction are much more critical than maintaining the current short sighted strategy of continuous tension in the Mideast. But I can't see anything to change the current trajectory (certainly not Obama! -- compare the current 'facts on the ground' and his statements to the utterly clueless happy talk just a few weeks ago that Obama must win so he can reign in Israel). Israel is on a course to destroy itself (Kissinger's comment!), and the US and the UK have spent the last 5 years preparing to take advantage of the eventual new situation via funding Egypt, Saudi, Qatar, al-Queda, and the Muslim brotherhood (currently behind the attack on Syria, and now destabilizing Jordan).

[Nov19'12] The Greek economy contracted at 7% in the third quarter. 5 more years of that sort of austerity and there won't be a Greek economy at all! Hopefully then, things would begin to pick up...

[Nov20'12] The recent purge of generals on utterly laughable grounds (booting out professional killers for chat room sex or "abusive management styles"? sheesh!) suggests that there are other more substantial reasons. Some have focussed on the involvement of Cantor. Others suggest a payback/purge for what was possibly a Benghazi 'October surprise' or a purge to prevent an attack on Iran (cf. recent US talks with Iran). Benghazi served as a CIA torture center and one of the major conduits of arms and intelligence for the destabilization of Syria by US/UK/French supported muslim fundamentalists, which is the 'new look' of US north African and mideast policy. Perhaps the Cantor angle actually does fit in to the other two if the 'new look' in fact reflects US positioning for a post-Israel mideast (Cantor trying to monkey wrench it). I doubt a big shooting war on Iran is part of the 'new look'. Complicated, deadly chess game! I really wish all this mental and physical effort could be focussed instead on planning for power-down and food and water shortages. But I suppose you could make the same complaint about brain research...

[Nov23'12] I am very glad to see the truce sooner than I had expected and the death toll much lower than I expected. Over $1 billion was spent to do $1 billion in damage and kill 160 human beings. How about taking that $2 billion out of the US' yearly tithe?

[Nov30'12] The recent vote suggests that the US, Britain, and Canada support the one-state solution. The next decision will have to be: continue apartheid, 'help out' with 'transfer', or do the right thing and implement one-person-one-vote.

[Dec24'12] Sometimes the layers of BS are so thick it makes you feel dizzy. The CIA complains here that torture wasn't as important as it was depicted in Kathryn Bigelow's latest Hollywood-supported putrid puff job where 'feminist' 'heros' torture witches to death during the hunt for bin Laden (remember when her vile Hurt Locker got the award and the much better Avatar didn't?) (what's next? 'feminist' baby killers?). Given that bin Laden probably didn't do 9-11, that he was probably already dead when they crashed a helicopter 'hunting him down', and that the CIA has *always* been a torture center, a torture training center, and a torture out-sourcer, and given that the CIA was certainly consulted during the making of the film, and that the film plays a critical role in the long line of CIA-supported Hollywood productions (cf. 24) designed to brainwash the public into seeing torture as normal, well, whatever, man!

[Jan19'13] 'Occupy Heathrow' again as hapless passengers camp amongst the yobs in response to... a few inches of snow on one day! It was a display of stunning incompetence with a landscape gardener helping (and failing) to clear a runway. It's not country-wide British incompetence. Gatwick, which experienced the same weather, by contrast had no problems because they invested in snow and ice clearing equipment. Heathrow invested less than the salary of one CEO in snow equipment (half a million pounds according to one report). Unless privatized Heathrow is directly punished by the government or by passengers, this will happen again. Some have framed this as a CEO gamble -- now lost -- that it wouldn't snow. But one commenter, Jose Hartley commenting in 2010 at the Economist, suggested that BAA might actually profit from the chaos because they make more money from retailers in the terminals than from landing charges. Genius bidness strategy: trap hungry people in the airport without their luggage, then charge them...

[Jan20'13] In the UK, we have the highest per capita surveillance camera count outside of a prison -- it's Patrick McGhoohan's Prisoner all the time. By contrast, here is how they are treating surveillance cams in Germany :-} .

[Jan21,'13]
What The Edge is worried about
I skimmed all the approx. 160 short pieces on the Edge on things we should be worried about in 2013 here. It is a useful catalog of human hopes, desires, and fears. Stuff on physics, drugs, neuroimaging, our digital tatoos.
     To my mind, some of the most critical mid-term (20-30 year) worries facing us (the ones we should be preparing for *now*) hardly make an appearance. Things like: (1) already drained acquifers facing ever more intense droughts affecting food production (and fracking), (2) declining soil quality (lack of phosphorus, carbon), (3) ever dwindling energy return on energy investment for the fossil fuel and uranium lifeblood of industrial civilization, (4) rapidly depleting elements that can't be synthesized (e.g., helium, lithium, copper, vanadium, gallium, indium, palladium, silver, neodymium) yet that are supposed to be our best hope to save our sorry butts (solar cells, wind turbines, batteries, wall-to-wall touch screens, efficient electric transport, the internet), (5) spreading electrical grid problems (what we are supposed to plug our butt-saving devices into), (6) major ocean problems (big fish all gone, acidification from CO2, severe shallow water damage from heat and fertilizers), (7) still-increasing world population (more than one new UK every year) with 3 million people a week moving to cities (one new Seattle every week) where they are being outfitted with cars and disposable paraphernalia that are 5x or 10x as energy intensive as the stuff they left behind (pop. numbers from geographer Laurence C. Smith's piece).
     So what if there are a few too many old people? or that tech is making us a bit more stoopid? or that there are not enough scientific heros? or that the supercollider merely 'verified' the florid hyperabstract theories that everybody already thought were 'true' anyway but at such a huge expense that the next project will have to be smaller (4 pieces on that)? It staggers me that so few (2 or 3) of these smart people pointed to the obvious overshoot elephant sleeping in our room. As I have said many times, the problem is that the critical horizon is just a bit too far away to be strongly motivating. The elephant is now barely stirring, which is leading fast collapse doomers to retire because slow collapse 'is not exciting enough'. Good riddance. Because it is not currently exciting is *exactly* why I am so worried!

[Jan25'13] An important graph of world GDP here . With virtually no fanfare from the yammering hordes of business/economics/politics commentators, world de-growth is happening, strongly supporting the idea that effective peak oil *was* in fact around 2008, much as I had long suspected (and feared). Though many people are worse off now than they were in 2008 (and a tiny population of very rich people are even more ridiculously rich), nothing *super* bad has happened so far, which is good news. As mentioned above, contractions partly due to fossil fuel becoming more expensive (roughly the result of its EROEI becoming lower) take an especially heavy toll on exactly the things that are supposed to replace it. For example, in 2012, Komax Solar reported a 90% reduction in orders, while orders for solar photovoltaic production equipment spending (for crystalline and thin-film cells) fell by three-quarters (yikes! I hate to be right) (Solarbuzz report). Solar production spending for 2013 is forecast to fall back to $2 billion -- levels last seen in 2006. In China, solar and wind companies are now facing extraordinary overcapacity. Cannabalizing renewables right as the first peak oil shocks filter through the economy is the first stage. I'm hoping we can get past that. My guess is that renewables will always be more expensive than fossil fuel (because they are partly made out of fossil fuel), but I'm hoping that *eventually* I will be wrong. But even if I'm right, it's *still* worth it investing in them now and rearranging to grid to deal with them now. It will only be harder, and probably even more expensive to do this 20 years from now! Besides, stuff like this is just cool!

[Feb11,'13]
China, coal, climate, food
China's linearly increasing coal consumption has now reached a level (3.8 Gt/year) almost equivalent to coal consumption of all of the rest of the world *combined* (4.3 Gt/year), despite only having 20% of the world's population. China has used 1/3 to 1/2 of all its coal (about 60 Gt used, with 30 Gt used in the last decade) and has been steadily increasing its imports, linearly heading toward importing all available world exports in 15 years. Stuart Staniford recently shed crocodile tears over this, but made no comment on the fact that a lot of the stuff he bought was made with that very coal. Though I think that the situation is absolutely, utterly unsustainable for geological, soil-o-logical, aquifer-o-logical, and most importantly, simple food supply reasons, I can't condemn China in good faith unless I am willing to walk the walk and not use any stuff manufactured there. I use stuff manufactured (and mined) there every day.
     For the past month, China has sure been looking Blade Runner-y (but New Delhi is just as bad). Shades of filthy London in the times of "The Big Smoke" (the 1952 bad air days killed almost as many people as the Blitz).
     Despite these massive increases in coal usage, there is not nearly enough coal to bring the world up to US or UK/EU per capita energy use. But people everywhere are going to try, and I don't blame them any more than people in the US/EU. I think that the roughly half of the EROEI-positive world coal that remains (the not-as-good half) will all be burned -- perhaps in a slightly less sooty way, but releasing all of its CO2 (which, since it's the not-as-good half, will result in less usable energy than we got from the first half), and this will happen much more quickly than the burning of the first half. That, plus oil and plus methane burning, will raise CO2 levels to twice pre-industrial levels -- which is equivalent to twice the difference between glaciers and no-glaciers CO2 -- added onto no-glaciers CO2.
     In 20 years, it will be hotter. This will make it harder to grow enough food. Since 2001-2002, when I first started consciously worrying about peak oil and its potential to affect the food supply, food prices have doubled. Global grain stocks have crept down to their lowest levels in decades (still a respectable 70 days). However, because there is still a little slack in the system, and because the inexorable global heating is quite gradual, it will probably take another 15 years or so before outright shortages appear (when we reach truly just-in-time food AKA 'peak food'). It is likely that the food supply will be the thing that limits and then reverses the growth of human population, but only starting around 2030.
     So, no prob, keep your head down, nothing to see here, real change won't fly, business as usual, keep driving, move along. Even though I think I can see the main outlines of the road ahead pretty clearly by concentrating on ten-year trends of world-average numbers and ignoring the blinkered yammering business press, zerohedge, etc., I am basically taking the same head-in-the-sand approach as Stuart Staniford since I truly don't have a brighter idea. Time to go back into school on my bike, through the light snow.

[Feb12,'13]
Romanian donkey meat
The English are not known for their cuisine -- or for doing much cooking at all. A few years ago, Whole Foods (simple English name) in London almost went out of business because they didn't have any aisles of prepared 'ready meals' for the British (sic) kitchen, and the CEO had to abjectly apologize and make 'good' for this specialized market.
     So the English took it in stride when recently, the The Daily Mail blared that ready meals marked as containing beef contained up to 100% horsemeat instead. But the Independent easily trumped that with a report that the horsemeat was actually donkey (Romanian donkey, so be specific, banned along with horses from Romanian roads by a new Romanian law).
     To top it off, those donkey ready meals were imported into England from France (who got the meat from Romania via Cyprus). Quel dommage! That's *gotta* hurt! (learn how to cook, dammit). And besides, horse and donkey meat is not clearly worse than (mad) cow, since they probably weren't being fed ground up sheep spines. OK, gratuitous prose violence in this post on my part...

[Mar03,'13]
NHS deems starving to death in hospital 'unacceptable'
After a report that 1165 patients in NHS hospitals starved to death over the past 4 years, the Department of Health responded by saying that the figure was 'unacceptable' and that unannounced inspections will increase. I'm sure the inmates will appreciate inspections. Austin would have classified this as an indirect speech act, meaning roughly, 'avoid going into the hospital'. The story of the poor sot (in his twenties) who was dying of dehydration and who called the police twice in desperation, but still ended up dying of thirst comes to mind. I realize ballooning health care costs are a problem but some of this seems like a stunning lack of common sense, not cost control (or Liverpool care).

[Mar19'13] The bizarre EU confiscation of a percentage of everybody's bank account in Cyprus to 'fix' Russian money laundering in Cyprus banks seems unfair to say the least. Half the depositors *weren't* Russian, and all the Russian depositors weren't money launderers; why not prosecute money laundering rather than confiscating cash from everybody? (and no money laundering happens in London, right?). The money ($3 billion) will be handed to senior secured creditors, shareholders, and depositors from outside of Cyprus (AKA "EU/IMF") in return for the $13 billion loan. This looks incredibly bad. But it is worth noting that it is actually not obviously more unfair than less visible public bailouts of banks in the US and UK. For example, in the US, large banks take out loans from the Fed at low interest. Then they deposit them back in the Fed which pays the higher interest. This truly is printing money for banks. Banks then in turn rent foreclosures instead of putting them back on the market, or buy rentals, which inflates housing prices (and rents). The effect is similar in the end to direct confiscation of bank accounts. The more direct approach, however, seems to have backfired a bit at this point.

[Mar21'13] The UK just announced a program to prop up the housing market (it needs propping up?) by subsidizing subprime borrowers, including interest-free home equity loans (so people will only need 10K up front to get a loan to build a 200K house) along with loan guarantees for banks so that they can lend to these more risky customers, who likely won't be able to pay it back. The plan is to stimulate a giant increase in personal debt. Personal dept in the UK already stands at 100% of GDP, which is *twice* the size of the government debt. This policy is explicitly designed to ignite a similar contagion to the one that previously inflated the US housing bubble, in order to help rescue underwater banks (which are in that situation because of the previous bubble!). Given current conditions, this seems ridiculously risky. The UK already has the largest government-plus-personal debt to GDP ratio (vs. EU, US, Japan). But this plan will surely 'work' -- debt, prices, and risk will increase in the (very) near term. Rent and house prices will go back up for while. It looks absolutely horrible for 6 or 10 years down the line (retire? retiring is so old school...), which will also be 6 or 10 years down the fossil fuel decline curve, but I suppose no one can think that far ahead any more. If this was an increase in debt that was trying to prepare for the loss of fossil fuels, it would be risky but admirable. This just looks outrageously stupid/greedy. Meanwhile, the collapse of the solar industry continues, with the recent Suntech backruptcy. [update Apr04: Nanosolar, a hi-tech CIGS thin-film solar company is on the verge of bankruptcy after burning a half a billion in venture capital]. This follows the pattern of alternative energy companies failing in the face of continuous high fossil fuel costs. The US solar company Solyndra went bankrupt just over a year ago. The prudent course of action for maintaining industrial civiliation would be to subsidize or nationalize companies like this rather than letting them collapse (a much better government investment then trying to get house prices to go even higher!). Because alternative energy devices are literally made out of non-renewable fossil fuels, alternative energy is likely to remain sensitive to fossil fuel prices and may remain more expensive than the fossil fuel it is supposed to replace for a long time, or forever. The market is so short term, it doesn't understand (or rather can't pay attention to) this very basic boundary condition. This may be our downfall.

[Mar27'13] A new comprehensive (178-page, graph-filled) publication from the Energy Watch Group, including comparisons to their previous predictions PDF here.

[Apr09'13] [updated/revised after reading this highly informative post from David P.]. The banks in Cyprus failed because *German and French banks* made big bets on Greece that failed when Greek debt was restructured last summer, and which didn't blow up until now because they were obscured by over-the-counter (i.e., under the counter, non-public) derivatives, the hiddenness of which allowed big German and French banks to get their high-interest term deposits out first. Then, after all the banker's profits were safe, the EU (that would be Germany, France, etc) could take large chunks of average people's and average businesses' bank accounts to 'fix' the gutted Cyprus banks. (except, of course, not before helping laggardly not-in-the-know richies withdraw their money at the last second, a few days before the hammer came down). Cyprus is small. But each new step is a test as to what non-rich people will accept. Eventually, the non-rich will get angry and ask for banker neck-cuts or cut some banker neck themselves. I never in the world thought I would end up thinking that David Stockman of all people (Mr. g*d@mn Trickle Down!) was one of the more sensible voices in the media. What Henry Ford said about money and banks remains true: if people really understood how they worked, there would be a revolution the next day. The whole system relies on the good graces of average people.

[Apr10'13] There is 'outrage' over CNN running a picture of Margaret Thatcher chumming around with Jimmy Savile during a 'tribute' to her :-} Whatever. Where's the outrage over the stench rising from the BBC for their *decades-long* coverup of the Savile monster? They didn't even make an attempt to discreetly ease him out. Just revolting. Several energy commentators on Thatcher have also noted that there has been no commentary on the fact that Thatcher rode the wave of UK North Sea oil -- now rapidly declining -- which helped her short sighted project of gutting/offshoring UK industry.

[Apr29,'13]
'Leftists', drones, and Syria
'Leftists' are all against drones (incidentally, I consider myself far left, and don't like drones). But most don't see them for what they really are -- a relatively inexpensive tool of empire for propping up our useful mafia thugs in 3rd world marches -- easier to use and cheaper than 'freedom fighters'. They are strictly for places that can't shoot back (the homeland?!). The slow moving drones are relatively easy to shoot down with modern (post-1990) short-range anti-aircraft missiles. There is a good reason that there are no drones being used to help the 'Syrian freedom fighters' who are currently trying to destroy Syria. Our (US/UK/France) Salafist/Wahabi/jihadi 'al-Qaeda' universal soldier contras and torture-ers are mostly not Syrian but rather from Libya, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Chechnya, and are being fed many tons of low cost weapons delivered from Libya and other places via air bases in Turkey, Jordan, Saudi, Qatar, and Bahrain. The reason no drones are being used there is because the Syrians can still shoot back.
     Hearing politically-correct supposed 'leftists' in the US and UK supporting their governments' destruction of Syria for 'humanitarian concerns' from the comfort of their posh homes in the country makes me puke (a recent list here). Tony Cartalucci has a useful summary of the 'rebels'here.
     Though the politics of Syria are complex, perhaps these people need to watch some of the on-the-street videos over at SyrPer, or look at the pictures here to get a better idea of what they are actually blithely and stupidly supporting. The US/UK/EU are backing the Sunnis against the Shia -- the very same Sunni's who were blowing up US/UK occupation soldiers in Iraq (see also: Osama and, uhh, some Chechens that were recently in the news).
     The idea is to exploit and escalate local ethnic/religious conflicts try to bring another country back to the stone ages, to live alongside the US/UK/EU's previous glorious successes Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Sickening. In contrast to those previous catastrophes, however, Syria (and Iran) can shoot back.
     Doesn't mean they can/will win; but it won't be as easy as shooting fleeing passenger cars in the middle of the desert. The moles in the US/UK/EU governments are truly playing with fire this time as they lamely trot out their same-old fake 'chemical weapons' nonsense (why would the Syrian army mess with chemical weapons when it has tanks and MIGs?). The blowback of direct involvement would be fierce (attack on Israel, interacting with a Russian fleet). [update: a mea culpa from the Angry Arab!]

[May03'13] Morris Berman quote from a recent talk he gave aboutJapan: "A rising tide lifts all yachts". He is so academic sounding! (I suppose I have no grounds to complain...). His Japan thesis is fine as far as it goes. But I was shocked at out naive Berman seemed about energy. Japan is *far* from sustainable, importing virtually all its fossil fuel, which powers its exports (e.g., cars), which pays for the fossil fuel. This system won't work as other people buy less cars. It's fine that Japan has replanted its forests. Too bad the Indonesian forests were destroyed and imported as fuel to make up for it.

[May14'13] Stephen Hawking acted out of conviction, despite Cambridge's lame attempt to save its face by reporting his decision as due to health reasons. Hasbara (et tu Raimondo?) says: Hawking shouldn't complain because the chip he uses to talk was partly designed in Israel. Go ahead: snatch his chip! Like white phosphorus, that won't "photograph well". This may turn out to be a turning point against Israeli exceptionalism. The latest ploy is that it's all Chomsky's fault (!). Now I would agree that 5 decades of dire transformational grammar *was* Chomsky's fault... Speaking of not photographing well, one of our contras haplessly allahu akbar'ing his way across Syria took a video of himself eating the heart and liver of a dead Syrian government soldier. Despite support from the US, UK, Israeli bombs, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi, along with pro-war 'leftists' like Tariq Ali and Ilan Pappe and Bernardine Dohrn (!), the freedom fighters have been losing badly to the (mostly Sunni!) Syrian army defending their own country from this ragtag bands of foreign Al Qaeda mercenaries. Such 'great successes' must be why Cameron just pledged to double support for these idiots in 2014 because of all the 'progress' made (and because he has so much of our extra money lying around). After he met with Putin, Cameron said "they were good talks and I am looking forward to now taking them up with President Obama and seeing if we can turn this proposal for a peace process and a peace conference into something that can make a real difference" (glowingly reported on here in the 'leftist' Guardian). A "peace process", eh? Like that other one? Maybe he forgot that it was the *Syrian goverment* that agreed to a *Russian* offer for negotiations after his 'rebels' categorically refused it? Or was it because part of the Russian fleet has docked in Syria and agreed to finally provide Syria with anti-aircraft defenses again American and Israeli O'bombers? All good for cynical misdirected US/UK policy? Scheisse. What a plonker! (I'm in England now, after all). Obomber responded that the “work to establish the use of chemical weapon in Syria” will continue. I suppose this makes sense since Carla del Ponte at the UN reported that it was actually our contras that used the chemical weapons in Syria. So now they get another shot. The disconnect between the official/mainstream/'alternative' story and reality makes you feel a little more schizo every day. Check out this puff piece that looks like it was written by the state department on a new dawn in Afghanistan on supposedly 'alternative' zerohedge.

[May22'13] On a public teevee, I saw an MSM shill casually walking down the middle of a street 'battle scene' intercut with a 'fierce' (but, of course, attractive, woman -- how peecee!) unconvincingly manning a machine gun. I instantly knew what it was without sound or captions (later confirmed on the hotel room teevee as an MSM embed with our 'Syrian' 'rebel' proxies). The saddest thing was that none of the blue pills in the room laughed at the preposterous sham.

[May25'13] The foreign 'Syrian' contras supported by UK terrorists are losing bad... oh, lookee here, UK people at this bloody knife!

[Jun03'13] Foreign 'Syrian' contras were trying to import a load of sarin into Syria from Turkey but got caught by the Turks (whose government is supporting the contras against the wishes of a large majority of the Turkish population. No trace of this from the MSM sewer media of course. This from Edward Dark was a depressing read for the utter and disastrous naivete of it all. Given PNAC, what could he have possibly expected would happen? The sheer power of the worldwide matrix is stunning. Meanwhile back in the real world, births continue at about 130 million per year and deaths continue at about 50 million per year. So, say we wanted to reduce world population by 2 billion to take a little stress off of our energy/water/food/soil/fish/CO2/etc situation -- how long would it take? Keeping the current rate of deaths constant, reducing world population by 2 billion people would require *no births* at all for 40 years. You're probably thinking, that's not practical, and I would agree. So I guess we'll just have to settle for Monsanto/Astra-Zeneca giving us royalty free licences for the Vitamin A enhanced "Golden rice" scam that has about 3% as much beta carotene as cilantro. But luckily, there's Golden Rice II, with half as much vitamin A as cilantro. It hasn't been tested on animals yet, but I'm sure the 72 hungry children it was tested on liked it because it was as effective as spinach. Whew, I was getting worried there for a minute that the world death rate might really start to go up in a few decades when the energy/water/food/soil/fish/CO2 thing really hits the fan. And keep using your re-usable grocery bags, dammit!

[Jun16'13] Now that the Syrian government -- whose support has risen dramatically during the war to include a strong majority of Syrians -- has mostly successfully beat back the motley crew of US/UK/EU/Saudi/Qatar-supported al-Qaeda mercenaries/proxies, the US/UK/EU are contemplating a disastrous direct attack on Syria to Iraq-ize it and make its population pay for their 'wrong choice' of supporting Assad (it's only democracy when we do it), using a stupid old already-used already-discredited last month (!) 'chemical weapons'/'Tonkin' sham/scam. PNAC all the way (see Wesley Clark talking in 2007 about the the long-planned destruction of Syria as just one of a group of countries here). What another human catastrophe this would be if the US/UK goes on a rampage bombing its usual infrastructure targets (bridges, power plants, water purification, hospitals, teevee, internet). However, it is unlikely to be as easy as Iraq or Serbia. As usual, the so-called 'libruls' will begrudgingly support it, now having turned in favor of the surveillance state 65/35 (versus almost the opposite under Bush). For shame. The US attack on Fallujah left a toxic legacy worse than Hiroshima. Syrians are likely in for something similar for their 'wrong choice'. I wonder if the Russians will roll over once again. This one is awfully close and they have to see the writing on the wall, but they are in a very weak position and they probably haven't delivered enough air defenses to be effective against the US terminator military -- by far the largest and most expensive in the world. There may also be a 'Monica distraction' element here; things rarely happen for only one reason. The Druid suggested yesterday in a comment in his blog that outside agitators from other countries might be trying to foment a 'color' revolution in the US, and that the US security apparatus would be in a position to beat it back. An intriguing concept, which I hadn't really thought of before. Seems highly unlikely in the next few years. Perhaps not so inconceivable after another decade of austerity, though, or if long term (mortgage) interest rates tick up even a tiny bit.

[Jul04'13] The Egyptian military coup and the reinstatement of Mubarak's generals and thugs, complete with tanks in the street, is described as a triumph of 'democracy' (!) by the 'left', despite the fact that the military overthrew the guy who won the election (by a minority of eligible voters -- but that's just like in the US). Hard to figure out exactly what is happening given all the media miasma, and given that the US supports all sides, as needed. Among the contradictions, in addition to suporting the Egyptian army ($1.3 billion this year, second only to Israel), the US supported the Muslim Brotherhood and helped install Morsi, who in turn supported the US-supported jihadis in Syria, which is what created much of the rage against Morsi on the Egyptian streets (compare Erdogan's weaking position in Turkey for the same reason). To make things more contradictory, the Salafi parties *supported* the coup, and just today, so did the Syrian army! But it seems unlikely that a US-supported Egyptian military junta will change Egyptian policy on Syria, and it won't have to make any annoucements (like Morsi had to) about what it decides to do; it has taken over most of the local opposition media and arrested journalists. Given that the beginning of troubles in Egypt (popular resistance to the Mubarak dictatorship) basically coincided with the end of oil export revenue (mazamascience pdf here), this bodes poorly for the future stability of other oil exporting countries (well, at least those that have not yet been destablized by a US attack). Two thirds of Egypt's oil is gone; the situation will likely only worsen from here on out, as internal demand is further crushed each year, creating more instability. Some commentators have suggested that the coup is a setback for the US since Egypt wasn't on the PNAC list of countries to destabilize/destroy. Maybe, but plans have to be updated; that document is now quite old. In any case, the US is only a decade away from entering the same oil situation that Egypt arrived at last year.

[Jul07'13] Pretty good analysis of Egypt here, though it goes too easy on Morsi, and fails to see that a good part of the reason "The MB was unable to make a dysfunctional neoliberal economy work" was because of peak oil in Egypt. There isn't much difference between socialism and neoliberalism with regards to energy requirements; neither (will) work very well under an unrelenting and ever-worsening energy drought -- though I prefer the flatter distribution of (energy-derived!) wealth that typifies the first. In any case, US-installed Mubarak thugs now reinstalled will remove all traces of Morsi's moderately anti-neoliberal moves.

[Jul09'13] Looks like Egypt 'got its Pinochet' after all as soldiers shot systematically into a crowd killing 50 people and wounding over 400. This has resulted in the Salafist parties withdrawing their support for the coup. The new pharaoh, Adly Mansour, appointed by General al-Sissi will retain the $1.5 billion/year in (military) aid sent by the US. And I'm sure that when it's not shooting them, the junta will denigrate women less than the Muslim Brotherhood. This reminds me of arguments during the US elections. [Update Jul10] NBC reports that "Egypt’s new defense minister warned on Tuesday that it would not allow any group to interfere with the interim government’s road map toward the restoration of democracy." Dictators don't do irony, I suppose. But to put this in perspective, I don't really know what's actually happening in Egypt, a country of 85 million people (incidentally, the number of people that were added to world population this year). I just think the US should stop sending $5+ billion/year to Israel and Egypt, and allow them to figure it out on their own. Where does the 'aid' go? Well in 2013, the other country ordered a lot more jet fuel than it usually does, which may correlate with the recently observed drop in US refinery output of gas/petrol supplies to motorists in favor of jet fuel (kerosene, most energy dense liquid fossil fuel, more energy dense than gasoline) this month. This possibly sounds like preparation for an offensive war. More than half of the weight of a modern military on the move is liquid fossil fuel. US tax dollars at work.

[Jul17'13] Another bicyclist was slaughtered on the road in London this week (51 year old man). This was unusual because most cyclists killed in London are women. The reason, described in a suppressed report by Transport for London, is that women respectfully stay closer to the edge of the lane and follow traffic rules -- exactly what the bicycle-hating car drivers say they should do. Their reward is slaughter. Lorry/truck drivers don't see (don't look for) them and then turn right over them squishing them (this is what happened to the man this week). Men are more likely to go out into the lane, and to jump the red lights, thus avoiding death. That is why the report was suppressed -- because it didn't fit the politically correct message that everything is OK if you obey traffic rules and wear a helmet. In the Netherlands, where they have strict liability laws favoring pedestrians and cyclists, nobody wears helments, and far far fewer cyclists are killed. In Britain, at least, the 'war on motorists' is a complete myth: over the last decade, total motoring costs (purchase, maintenance, petrol/gas, taxes, insurance) have *fallen* 8% while rail fares have increased 17% and bus fares 24%. In fact, motoring costs have risen slower than the cost of living over the past 20 years. Tax those suckers! If they are get to destroy their earth for their grandchildren and everybody after by aimless driving back and forth, they should at least pay a little extra.

[Jul19,'13]
Neural dust
I work on the brain. In the past, I have often lusted after some method of recording from a very large number of neurons at the same time in order to visualize neural activity as it circulates around the several hundred maps in the brain. This is now possible with optogenetics using very small, very young, almost transparent animals -- like zebra fish larvae. But the Holy Grail is to do this with a mouse or a primate. Now, I think I am finally beginning to get cold feet.
     Would it really be a good thing to try to design some kind of nanodevice dust that could be implanted, or worse, implant itself into the brain? To be sure, there is nothing remotely like this now (either implantable or self-implanting). And I think it is extremely unlikely that anything like this will be constructed in the next decade. Graphene, for example, might be highly cytotoxic (here is an SEM picture of a graphene flake slicing into a cell). Breathing graphene dust (very strong fragments of 2D sheets) may be like breathing asbestos or worse. It's an empirical question yet to be answered. Right now, 'nanobots' are primarly a shopworn sci-fi fantasy, like flying cars, that is being recycled just now because scientists want to attach themselves to scarcer and scarcer funding, such as the the US and EU brain projects that have just been announced with this as their explicit goal.
     But it might not be that impractical to make a set of very moderately numerous small devices that could find their way into the brain. To get there, it could in via arterial circulation (big diameter to small), and would probably have to be coated with biocompatible molecules or perhaps be embedded into biological vectors. I just don't feel comfortable with the general feel of corporate 'neural dust', and given the cost of designing and manufacturing it, there is no other kind. I highly doubt having it made will be in my best interest of understanding how the brain works. Consider rabies, a naturally occurring neurotropic virus. Once it gets into your nervous system, it self-replicates until the whole brain is overcome.
     Do we really want some kind of artificial, instrumented super-rabies from, say, Monsanto crudding up brains in what's left of the biosphere? Probably not. This is turning vaguely Manhattan project-y. Just imagine the applications -- e.g., a pre-crime sensor in orbitofrontal cortex that could report when you are about to do something bad. Again, I want to stress that we are a *very* long ways away from being able to do anything even vaguely like that, despite the breathless, clueless, contentless bloggers. But scientists are creative, and sometimes they make very rapid unpredicted progress toward their goals. Maybe it's not such a laudable goal after all. Given the tighter and tighter coupling between academic science and commerce, it would be foolhardy to ignore applications beyond 'figuring out how the brain works'.

[Jul28'13] Over 300 people have been killed in Egypt since the military coup. Many of these have been poor people (who generally support the MB) killed by military snipers firing down into crowds from rooftops. The best the BBC can manage is "It is not clear whether they were killed when security forces tried to clear the area". Nothing like their reporting of the 'heroic' western-supported sarin-gas-using foreign-to-Syria mercenaries fighting alongside embedded BBC reporters in Syria. BBC's report of the assassination of Abdelsalam al-Mismari in the post-Gaddafi chaos that the UK itself arranged, is similarly bland and intentionally misleading: "Abdelsalam al-Mismari dies" and "Benghazi has seen a number of violent incidents since the fall of Gaddafi".

[Aug09'13] The situation at Fukushima has recently worsened as engineers attempted to solidify ground to contain radioactive water leaking out of the melted reactors. The result was that ground water that is percolating through the mess is being partly contained, and is rising in level, and threatening to overflow hastily constructed temporary waste water storage tanks. It is simultaneously escaping out into the underlying aquifer from below the plant, probably through damaged, never stabilized, never entered, flooded tunnels containing hundreds of tons of highly radioactive water, either directly into the sea, or possibly *under* the sea floor, to reappear as seeps elsewhere in the ocean. Finally, by changing the dynamics of the underground aquifer with the underground hardened earth barrier, there is the risk that the buildings -- particularly unit 4, which holds a gigantic amount of spent fuel -- will begin to tilt or topple. Building 4 has already sunk 30 inches since the quake. This is seriously tragic. When this first happened (before unit 3 exploded), I had clearly underestimated how badly this disaster would turn out. It is now *much* worse than Chernobyl. The total tonnage of radioactive waste at the site is much bigger than Chernobyl. The total release is bigger. Many parts of the site are still no go zones. But since the Pacific ocean is so huge, the absolute level by the time it gets across the ocean is still very small and barring some additional catastrophe, currently probably not as dangerous for the west coast of the Americas as was the early 1960's fallout from atmospheric atomic bomb testing, which did cause a wave of cancers in California beginning in the 1980's. But it's a *way* different story for people living near the source, with radioactive coastal sand blowing back up to 1 km inland. Bioaccumulation, however, is a different matter than water concentration, and there have been few public tests (the few released suggested cesium is already up in tuna). This gives us an unfortunate preview of what may happen to many other reactors currently sited near the ocean (unlike Chernobyl). The academic sites that had good information in the early stages of the disaster (e.g., Dave Lochbaum) have been strangely silent about Fukushima lately; instead we just have the spectacle of nervous Tepco officials making public statements that they have lost control of the leak situation, that they are worried that building 4 might topple (that's the one with the largest number of spent fuel rods by far), and are putting down an asphalt layer over to try to stabilize the soil, or perhaps installing refrigeration coils to freeze it in place (!?).

[Aug18'13] Shame on the supposed 'lefties' supporting the 'not-coup' in Egypt with the death toll over 500 (that's the junta's estimate! the real death toll is probably over 1,000). This is one of the largest police-killing-demonstrators event in a long time. Unlike Tiananmen square, if you stand unarmed in front of an Egytian tank, the Egyptian military shoots (see also here as armoured vehicles mow down a crowd of unarmed people throwing rocks). The likely nomination of Robert Ford as US ambassador to Egypt suggests what is coming (or has already come). He had great 'success' implementing what was called the "Salvador option" (after the US sponsored death squad hell in 1980's El Salvador) in Iraq. Ford and Negroponte arranged this after the savage aerial bombing wasn't enough to completely tear apart the country. Then more recently they did this in Syria (Ford is currently ambassador to Syria). Iraq is still apart. Syria has fought back against the US/UK/Saudi terrorism successfully so far (but at a huge cost -- 100,000 dead, rubble piles everywhere). The situation is complex given that Morsi had expressed support for the US/UK/Saudi/Qatar-supported foreign mercenaries/al-Qaeda attacking Syria. But the big picture is that this chaos actually supports -- and is supported by -- US and Israeli policy in the region, which is, basically, to create chaos (compare Libya today versus 2 years ago). The US military aid to Egypt still rolls in and is highly unlikely to stop. As mentioned above, part of the impetus for what has happened in Egypt was the transition of Egypt to having to import oil combined with a rapidly growing population. I suppose some of my deep middle class unease comes from projecting into the future, and into other currently richer countries. The coup was supported by some 'leftists' in Egypt, too. The people currently being killed are mostly poor and religious. This kind of 'whose side are you on' class war threatens to arrive in other countries, too, when the big energy crunch hits in 15 years. Chris Hedges here and Pepe Escobar here are right on the money. But none of the commentators even mention energy, the driving force behind high food prices, which is one of the main driving forces behind the uprisings. How will we ever deal with effects of peak oil on food and society without speaking its name? I fear the answer is that it won't *ever* get mentioned -- all the way down. [Update: Here, finally, is a mainstream-y article on this topic.]

[Aug20'13] Brits say they like Americans (that means they dislike them), but then they act as servile American poodles, detaining Greenwald's partner for 9 hours under anti-terrorism laws (Greenwald says the Mafia had rules against this) and then having GCHQ officials visit the Guardian to oversee the destruction hard drives containing information from or about Snowden (kinda reminds me of the story of the US Economic Development Administration destroying printers, keyboards, and mice in an attempt to deal with a malware infection...). Both actions are mere intimidation and unlikely to be effective (esp. destroying disks that are merely copies, why bother?). British papers today then meekly avoided mentioning this in their headlines (the disk destruction was hived off into the Guardian's "comment is free" blog area). Old Blighty's looking limp today. For an interestingly different take on this, see Scott Creighton. I agree with Scott that the whole disk destruction story did have a weird stage-y look to it.

[Aug22'13] "The people who call for boycott of the Winter games in Russia had no objection to holding the Olympic games in London, which implies that, in their eyes, taking anti-gay measures is a serious crime, whereas wars in Afghanistan and Iraq [killing over a million people] are mere peccadillos." -- Jean Bricmont.

[Aug23'13] How many times can they replay this chemical weapons of 'mass destruction' 'incubator babies' crap?!? Can't this B.S. actually work again?!? (after already 2 failed tries *this time*!). Why would the Syrian army possibly bother with chemical weapons when they have tanks and planes? The whole fake Iraq chemical weapons incubator babies thing was hardly more than 10 frigging years ago, now completely outed even in the MSM sewer. But people's brain are even worse now not to laugh at 3 times in a row this time. I suppose they can't remember that far back, because the internet is all about this momemnt and anything older than a month is not relevant and not kewl. In other news, the MSM finally has begun reporting on the worsening situation at Fukushima.

[Aug25'13] The human scum who direct covert British and US military strategy truly have sick minds. As Tony Cartalucci says: Did the West gas thousands to rescue failed Syrian war?. If a US/UK attack on Syria actually went off (still highly unlikely in my opinion, at this point), Russia and China would be unlikely to be able do anything to stop it. To stop it domestically, there would literally have to be a revolution in the US and UK; and there hasn't even been a peep from any of the Good Americans on the street. People in the US are mostly against an attack on Syria, but won't actively oppose one. The good Germans in the UK are similarly passive, as the the BBC lickspittles and Hague mouth the American line. And by the time any vocal resistance from a substantial fraction of the populations arose, it would be way too late (like Iraq 2003). The domestic resistance to this is instead coming from the military (!) -- in the US, from people like Martin Dempsey. The local people in the middle east actually falling for the divide-and-rule strategies, and then doing the dirty, filthy, bloody work of implementing them (compare El Salvador) are equally at fault, esp. since in many instances (e.g., Iraq before the US attacks) the people there were previously living in mixed, non-sectarian neighborhoods and marriages. This is *exactly* what the western sickos and Israel were so keen to destroy. Sh*t like this goes a long way toward cancelling out the beautiful things that humans have done. Still, for now, I'm pretty sure this is just a psyop bluff, esp. because Syria has decent air defenses, and because in the last 50 years, the powerful but cowardly US/UK militaries have rarely attacked a country that can actually fight back.

[Aug27'13] Two days later, and the US/Israel/Saudi/alQaeda coalition crazies look, well, crazier than I thought even two days ago. I suppose that's the whole idea of psyops -- looking crazy. Syria certainly couldn't hold off a sustained US attack for very long, but it could do a lot more damage fighting back than Iraq did. It is hard to express in words the level of disgust I have for the people in charge, Obama granting "absolute immunity" to his predecessor war criminals, Obama channeling Cheney, Kerry's Colin Powell moment, the MSM-Goebbels-NYT-'news', mercenary-embedded doctors without borders but with a specific political agenda, so-called leftist pwogwessive humanitarian bombers supporting the foreign Syrian mercenaries who won't object when Obama does a full-on Cheney, UK poodles, French poodles, and finally J6P Americans and Brits who seem to gladly swallow this B.S. whole. But I'm *still* hoping this is just psyops, or something more limited, like Clinton bombing a "chemical weapons laboratory" in Sudan which turned out to be the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory on 20 Aug 1998 (this was right after he explained what a blow job "is" on 17 Aug). For the Obomber regime, it will distract people from the Stasi NSA, the criminal banker mafia, their cratering jobs and salaries, and the effects of the supposedly dead peak oil problem... (for another example of peak oil being dead, see Portugal, where road traffic dropped 50% in 2012 and then 68% more (!) in Q1 2013 -- fracked oil that costs even more than the current world price to extract will fix this, right?). In the case of Good Americans not stopping their government from attacking Iraq on false premises, every year, history will more clearly say that the blood of the millions that were bombed and poisoned is forever on their hands. Good Americans and Brits are now ready to (remotely, oh so cleanly) dip their hands into the gore once more. Being fooled by the yellow journalism of one's mainstream media is not an excuse (try that with Germans -- that they were fooled by the Nazi's false flag Reichstag fire blamed on the communists and reported that way by the mainstream media of the time *isn't* a good excuse). People in the powerful attacking countries are the only ones with the power to stop this. Use your damn language-enabled minds! The three big Iraq lies (yellow cake/nukes, chemical weapons, involvement with 9/11) were obvious lies in 2003 to anyone with half a brain. It's equally obvious now!

[Aug27'13] The propaganda is being catapulted, but it hasn't taken effect yet; an attack on Syria is currently less popular with US-ians than Congress or a colonoscopy, or for that matter, the King of England during the Revolutionary war. There is the danger that sterner medicine -- e.g., a false flag sinking of a not-too-big American ship -- will be needed. Can't imagine where idea came from... (the 4 American not-too-big ships are in virtually the same place as that particular American listening ship from yesteryear was when it was hit by a false flag attack). But probably another week of the puke Blitzer mighty wurlizter will work as it always has in the past. Then it's just dialing in coordinates of radio stations, power plants, barracks, airports, bridges, hospitals, and government buildings by our brave 'warriors', because it's so much less morally depraved to blow children's heads off by remote control than it is to poison them by false flag attacks (oh, I forgot, we do both). It *is* possible that that Syria itself may sink an American ship with a Russian anti-ship missile. That would have the same effect as a false-flag sinking. One can imagine various in-between let-it-happen scenarios as well. On days like these, I look forward to humanity finally running out of fossil fuel.

[Aug28'13] Russia and China walked out of the Security Council meeting on attacking Syria. According to Eyptian teevee, Egypt will close the Suez Canal to ships including US and poodle UK warships (but they can easily launch missiles from the Mediterranean, and this might have been pre-agreed). The Blair thing crawled out of his hole to support the Cameron and Hague things. The latest polls show that the attack on Syria is only supported by 9% of the public in the US and 9% of the public in the UK. The attack is said to be based on secret Israeli intelligence (I watched zio lite Steve Clemons mouthing this on Rachel Maddow). Obama is a pathetic man.

[Aug29'13] It is not clear how a less-than-all-out attack on Syria is a plausible US military strategy for a direct attack (this is different from spending billions arming the proxy foreign mercenaries and liver-eaters, who have now mostly been defeated). But a direct all out attack leads toward dangerous scenarios. There seems to be some slightly more than average discord between Dempsey and Hagel on one hand and the Ziocon crazies on the other, which makes the situation more complex. The crazies' momentum seems to have slowed a bit and the propaganda war has gone a little limp. But I have no real idea what happens next. The mobilization of armies throughout the region makes things even more unstable and unpredictable. Looking back at similar situations in history, this just the kind of situation where a false flag "new Pearl Harbor" can have dramatic effects. Hopefully, we'll get through the next month without (another) one. [Aug29'13] Update: Cameron just barely lost a Syria vote in the Commons by 13 votes, 285 to 272 (only 9 lousy 'Liberal' MP's voted against -- less than defecting Convervatives!). Excellent result! The Cameron and Hague poodles are slapped! (they are absolutely fuming, calling everybody c*nts). If I said anything bad about the house of Commons, I take it back. This leaves only theFrench surrender poodle, sniffing around! This is one case where having a nominal conservative in power in the UK probably turned out to be an advantage, since a generally pro-war Labour person like Ed Miliband could rally his troops to vote no against Conservatives. A similar analysis applied to the US means having a nominal Democrat in power could turn out to be a disadvantage. But it's still hard to say what will happen. The UK had already sent fighter jets and UK sappers are already rumored to be on the ground in Syria. And the UK government could go ahead anyway (like Nixon bombing Cambodia), after further 'revelations'.

[Aug30'13] Looking up today, as a result of the British vote! (see Galloway speech here). Time to have a vote in the US Congress! Those embarrassing slugs can't even get a majority to agree a vote is necessary, in order to start a friggin' war -- and the letter demanding a vote came mainly from Republicans. The embarrassing 'representatives' of California, Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein both support a war (why don't you suit up and help out, girls, since only about 10-20% of the US public supports your sicko war plan? you could call Samantha Power and Susan Rice to help, too -- when they get back from vacation; and take McCain with you). The state of deep-state-controlled press world wide (including e.g., Aljazeera, which catapulted the new 'incubator babies' stories with the best of them, or Amy Goodman, who catapulted Razan Zaitouneh 7 times) is truly pathetic! Today this positively whiny article in the BBC about the Commons vote says, Britain will be embarrassed by having the French poodle there beside the US but not themselves (gag me with a spoon). This is after the BBC ran wall to wall propaganda on BBC teevee last night -- not a single antiwar interview; maybe they could change their name to BBFOX. I hate paying for them via my teevee license, esp. since I don't watch it or read the beeb these days except to ridicule it. Still a dangerous time. If a US or UK destroyer gets sunk by Syria or Israel, this could turn around quick. Finally, there is also always the tiny chance of an outed false-flag ship-sinking; that could backfire spectacularly. I hope we are moving back to 'just a psyop' -- 'When chemical weapons attack!'. That the Russians have sent armed ships into the Mediterranean with high quality military radar suggests that they were/are possibly expecting or trying to slow down an actual attack. For a laugh, see William Banzai's Hollandaise twerk (the whole collection is here). :-}

[Aug31'13] Polls suggest that the French people -- like the British and American and Turkish people -- oppose a war on Syria by more than 2:1, in contrast to President Hollande's faux left 'humanitarian' bombing tag-along-with-the-Americans plan. This is a remarkable world-wide unanimous antiwar sentiment prior to a war. The war is utterly at odds with US interests (good discussion with Pepe Escobar here). The only explanation for the continued yelping calls for war from the Kerry thing and Obama and the MSNBCBSBBC yellow press is that they are almost completely driven by powerful lobbies, including Saudi, that are at odds, literally with the opinion of virtually the entire world. The UN weapons inspectors have been booted out by the US after only a few days (a real investigation would have taken a minimum of a month). Back in his first term, Obama could have argued that he had to watch out for the funding of his reelection. Now, when he is supposed to be more of an independent agent, he looks pathetically driven to try to find a way blow something up, kill a few people, and damage the Syrian air force and air defenses -- all for the benefit of another country -- somehow without starting a catastrophic worldwide firestorm. It's painful to watch this weak man, preposterously given a peace prize, surrounded by incompetent chickenhawks, unable to face off the lobbies, unable to manfully announce that he is calling this off. And c'mon you US Congress-slugs! The UK just showed you how it's done! You can, too! [Update: the global backlash seems to sunk in: Obama just called for a vote before going forward. This is very good!]

[Sep01'13] Now, we will be forced to watch the disgusting spectacle of the Congress worms trying to out-zionize each other (blech). Still, there is the possibility that a combination of: (1) party politics (Republican uglies against the President, plus just enough Democrats with backbones who can see through the false flags and bombing for peace crap), (2) military people advising them about military reality, (3) seeing that over half of the UK Commons MPs were able to overcome ziopressure (and saudipressure), and (4) reason (whatever little they have :-} ), will win the day! Rather than wasting those billions toadying up to the ziocons who want to degrade Syria's air defenses and risking blowing up the world, how about spend it instead on US college education? For example, for $12.5 billion, all 2- and 4-year colleges and universities in the US could make tuition free (calculation here). Money much better spent! For comparison, the false-flag initiated (second!) Iraq catastrophe cost, at an absolute bare minimum, $1 trillion dollars (i.e., 1,000 billion dollars). The money spent destroying Iraq could instead have paid for 80 years of free public tuition in the US.

[Sep03'13] Two missiles were launched in the eastern Mediterranean this morning (6:15 GMT), which were detected soon after launch by Russian radar or Russian satellites. They were travelling from the central Mediterranean to the east. Initially it was not clear what kind of missiles were fired. One suggestion referred to the report here, which describes missiles that mimic Scuds and Iranian Shahab missiles (to serve as targets for air defense missiles). After initial denials, a few hours later, the missiles were in fact reported to be Israeli missiles, and then that the test was 'US-backed'. Initially, I thought it could even have been a wag the dog attempt ('US destroyer hit by Iranian missile' or 'Syria sinks US vessel after mistakenly detecting missile attack'). They were probably merely attempting to test/localize the radar responses of Syrian air defenses. On the subject of an impending attack, none of the major corporate media effluent sources have questioned the extremely weak evidence that the probable al Qaeda false flag was actually the Syrian government using chemical weapons, utterly at odds with its own interest. The polls suggest only a small fraction of US-ians support an attack. But the mighty Wurlitzer still has a week or two to grind on. And a successful false flag sinking *would* be a slam dunk for the pliable minds of the people. What a stunning and idiotic distraction this is from real problems the world faces keeping industrial civilization viable...

[Sep04'13] Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh calls 'false flag' while Nancy Pelosi explains the necessity of Bronco Bama's upcoming war on Syria to her 5 year old grandson (the grandson was against it!). World gone wild! Is *this* what the Teilhardian global nervous system super organism looks like from the inside? Unfortunately, the Congress worms will be voting right around the anniversary of 9-11. Obama is probably planning to attack on 9-11 (look at how he managed the killing of the already dead guy in 2011). If there was ever a time to stand up and be counted in the US, this is it. Syria can't stop the attack. Americans can. We have to stop Obama, Kerry, Pelosi, Boxer, Feinstein, not to mention McCain, Peter T. King, Robert Menendez, Bob Corker, etc, etc, etc. Kerry just revealed in Senate committee that the Saudis and Qataris will pay for the war (Prince Bandar, the guy who bought the chemical weapons for the Syrian jihadis, the same guy who ran the mujahedeen against the Russians decades ago in Afghanistan). Kerry is hiring out the US army to Saudi for al Qaeda and for international companies to build gas pipelines. The US Senate committee just approved the attack resolution. Russia just redirected several more destroyers and troop transport ships to the Mediterranean today. Exactly how *not* to deal with peak fossil fuels.

[Sep05'13] To really be against the against the attack on Syria, one has to also be against one of the main driving forces for it -- the western domination of fossil fuel resources. Sure the Israel lobby is lobbying all out (even as the NYT scrubs mentioning it) to get the US degrade Syrian air defenses so Israel can more safely bomb with impunity, like they can safely shoot Palestinians in a barrel; and they certainly control a majority of mainstream media outlets and re-election purses. But it's critical to also pay attention to the fossil fuel angle (e.g., gas pipelines). As Greg Muttitt has written facile and inaccurate dismissals of the oil angle in Iraq war (e.g., see Greg Palast) are just that. The bottom line is that US and UK oil and gas resources are depleting and Europe hardly has any at all. As a whole, the world is using 5 or 6 barrels of oil for every barrel found. But the US-ians, UK-ians, and EU-ians all drive and fly like there is no tomorrow. To really be against the (additional!) catastrophic destruction planned for the humans in Syria, you also have to be against fossil fuel business as usual, which means you will be against everyday life as usual. That's a taller order because it's about one's own hide. Each local action (e.g., a trip in a car to the gym -- is a daily cluster of votes for a particular course of action halfway around the world that is going to destroy many human lives.

[Sep06'13] Today, Putin says Russia would help Syria respond to a military intervention by the US, which immediately caused a swoon in world markets. Here is a useful summary of possible attack and response scenarios (note that none of them feature Russian intervention or even help). This is a much more dangerous gambit than bombing Libya or the second bombing of Iraq. Truly world-destabilizing consequences are possible. The US public is massively opposed to attacking Syria and has saturated the congress worms' offices with letters, calls, and emails 100 to 1 against it. As incredible as it may seem to Obama's supporters (but many of us warned you), Obama has turned out no better than Bush. He just looks physically different. Instead of standing up to neocons/AIPAC/bankers in his second term because he doesn't have to worry about reelection and theoretically has more freedom to do the right thing, Obama has instead stood up to American and world public opinion, in order to more closely follow neocon/AIPAC/banker guidelines. He is just a figurehead. At the G20, he will be visiting gay activists in St. Petersburg (what, not Pussy Riot?!) -- on the way to setting the world on fire. He looks like an amateur in comparison to Putin. What's so great about humans? On days like this, I like animals better.

[Sep07'13] In France, public opinion is against the attack on Syria. The war is supported only by Hollande, the 'Socialists', the 'Greens' (hah!), Le Monde, and Liberation (hah!). The right and the left are against it (via Mina on Moon of Alabama, who says, "what a picture!"). Anyway, back to the basis for why fossil fuels attract so much unsavory attention. A detailed book recently published by Pedro Prieto and Charles Hall has analyzed the energy return on energy investment (EROI) of a large, real world, renewable resource: the recently installed solar photovoltaic system in Spain that currently provides about 2.5% of Spain's power. Their conclusion is that this installation will soon be net energy positive (good!), but that the EROI calculated over a 25 year period -- when a full accounting of the energy used (roads, washing, maintenance, network stabilization) is done -- is only 2.5 (that is, 2.5 units of energy generated for 1.0 units of energy input, or in other words, only 1.5 net units given an investment of 1.0 unit). This is much lower than conventional EROI estimates for solar PV of around 8. Prieto and Hall have been criticized for including too many boundary inputs and using 1.5 euro spent to stand for 1 kWh consumed rather than directly estimating energy inputs. But there is no question that the EROI of solar PV is less than present day crude oil, coal, or methane. In any case, the energy used to create the Spanish solar PV installation was virtually completely supplied by fossil fuels (crude oil, coal, methane). No photovoltaic 'breeding' systems have yet been contemplated, so photovoltaic is currently completely dependent on fossil fuel business as usual. That business is now starting to get less 'usual'. The constriction in EU energy supply as a result of growth in China and India in combination with a relatively flat world supply has essentially crashed renewables; the collapse of many solar manufacturers that I mentioned several times above was caused by the withdrawal of state subsidies in the past few years (e.g., the Chinese firm Suntech, was selling 40% of its output to Spain). There is a major worry is that a low real world EROI is not enough to keep industrial civilization going in its current form, since so far, we have kept it going with fossil fuels with EROI's in the 10-50 range (Hall estimates the minimum EROI for business as usual is over 10). To return to a positive note, the EROI of wind is better. Clearly, there is no other way forward than using *much* less energy per capita *and* building *a lot* more renewables, including solar PV and wind (Germany now gets 7% of its power from wind, 6% from biomas, and 5% from solar, up from almost nothing just 15 years ago!). Lowering population growth wouldn't hurt either. Coming back briefly to the politics surrounding the latest war plans, one thing I haven't seen mentioned with respect to the UK decision to stay out is that last winter, the UK came within a day of the electrical and heating grid doing down for lack of methane during an extended cold snap (I'm from Chicago, it wasn't *that* cold in the UK). Since Russia supplies methane to EU countries, and given that UK oil and methane is well past its peak, this may have played a small role in a decision probably mostly made on the basis of monkey (party) politics.

[Sep09'13] As Paul Craig Roberts points out in Why are Obama and Kerry so desperate to stat a new war?, Assad has better support at home than Obama does. We must ask, why there is such a push from someone who opposed the Iraq war, which is now generally agreed to have been an disaster for both Iraq and the US, and why is the media so at odds with public opinion? The latest ridiculous thing I read was that 'left' Hollywood-ers were worried about being seen as racist if they opposed Obama's war plans, and wouldn't get work if they did. Well, maybe they wouldn't get work. But the racist thing is a crock. I am still hopefully thinking the same way as "Anonymous", who commented today at the vineyard of the saker: "Not too many thought WWI would turn into what it did. And it's not like the situation isn't Byzantine. I doubt it would go to WWIII, but it is an existential fight for many of the players, and there isn't much time to react to missiles. My bet is the US backs down. Not enough support, and the opponents are able to fight back."
[Update!!] The Kerry 'give up your chemical weapons' offer/gaffe has now been accepted by Syria and Russia! This increases the difficulty of attacking, just as AIPAC was set to go into high gear. But it probably also raises efforts to set off another false flags. Two possibilities are: (1) the sinking of a US destroyer attributed to Syria, Iran, or Hezbollah and, (2) a chemical weapons attack on Israel (e.g., by the US/UK/Saudi supported rebels).

[Sep10'13] As the 'unbelievably small' minded Kerry idiotically back-pedaled ('it was just rhetorical about him giving up the chemical weapons') and while WWIII-er's Susan Rice and Samantha Power tried to look fiercely Wolfowitz-ian, Obama may have overruled them. There remains some danger this week of (another!) false flag chemical weapons attack, this time on Israel by US/Saudi/Turkey/Israel supported rebels. A report of 'Jews gassed by Hitler Assad' coming on or around the anniversary of 9/11 could immediately restart the faltering US/Israeli Syrian war effort. Here is a report on RT from Israel explicitly discussing this option (!). I rate this as unlikely. It's worth keeping in mind that a large number of wars in human history have been started with a false flag; it's the classic way to galvanize the population to do something they are fundamentally against. However, the internet has made it possible to defuse false flags more quickly. For example, the wide distribution of chemical weapons attack videos allowed Syrian parents to recognize their kidnapped children amongst the chemical weapons victims, and then feed back this information to the web. There may even be an investigation of how those people -- probably hostages -- were poisoned. It also allows striking back against the mainstream media (BBCFOXCNNBC "news") by publicizing the effects of the chemical weapons use by the 'good guys'. For example, here is what white phosphorus did to a child in Gaza a few years ago. That is the kind of picture the mainstream media censors as being too 'sensitive' to publicize, *right* at the moment they (and Kerry and Rice and Powers and Boxer and Angry Grampa) are screaming for a hundred times as many bloody stumps and a hundred times more burnt flesh. No more. Well, at least this time, hopefully!! *Not at all* what I was expecting to happen just two days ago! If this plays out without an attack as I am fervently hoping, it's important to remember the main things that stopped it: the UK parliament, US and world opinion against the war, and finally and just as critical, the ability of the Syria (and Iran and Hezbollah) to strike back partly as a result of Russian and China not backing off, but instead placing intelligence gathering ships right next to Syria. Mutual deterrence through credible defense ("every state has the right to independence") is good, not bad. That's what makes this situation different from Serbia, Iraq, and Syria, where the US first requested disarmament, then blitzkrieged afterward, killing (hanging and sodomizing) the leaders in the second two cases, in a perfect recapitulation of heads on a pike on the London bridge from days of yore. Chimpanzees with grenades.

[Sep14'13] Good so far! There was a suggestion two days ago that the two west-to-east missiles launched across the Mediterranean toward Damascus on 3 Sept came from a NATO base in Spain -- not Israel, who initially denied any knowledge -- and were shot down by the Russians. Probably disinfo. Good article from Pepe Escobar here: while the doddering US/UK/Saudi/Israel lunatics are hiring liver-eating mercenary jihadis (who are now threatening to attack the US for not bombing Syria!) and threatening remote control demolition of power plants and hospital buildings halfway around the world with Tomahawks on the basis of Saudi false flags, China adopts a more productive tack. Meanwhile, the Russians, motivated by reckless, 'own goal' US/UK/Saudi/Israel actions, are now moving major hardware into the eastern Mediterranean in order to actually deliver the goods (modern defensive weapons for Syria).

[Sep16'13] With the attack on Syria derailed (for a while at least), and Summers withdrawn, it's a good day! (even the world's markets agree!)

[Sep22'13] The Syrian war drums are still beating in the background. Russia has continued to increase its military presence in the Eastern Mediterranean (now up to around 11 warships). Looking at the ebb and flow of past propganda campaigns, it would seem to be difficult to start a war immediately. Another poison gas false flag is not immediately practical and the priest and children (!) beheadings by our 'freedom fighter' death squads have slightly fogged the official story, which now has had to regress in the US to saying that our 'moderate opposition' is being killed by the 'real bad guys'. Would those be the bad guys be financed by Saudi, France, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, the UK then? No: the answer is they are funded by 'twitter donations'! What an amazing crock! Looking back, even after the mother of all, it still took months of wall-to-wall prepared-from-the-beginning propaganda to start the war on Afghanistan in 2001. So I remain hopeful that the US/UK/French publics are somewhat immune from false flags and pretty strongly antiwar for now. A really big one would be needed, and that could go wrong.

[Oct02'13] "Iran is now building ICBMs that the US says could reach this city [New York] in three or four years," -- Benjamin Netanyahu. Those are some mighty slow @ss ICBM's! :-} Maybe it's time to start dismantling the other big chemical and biological weapons cache in the mideast, not to mention the huge stockpile of actually existing nuclear weapons...

[Oct06'13] A pseudonymous article a few days ago suggested potential GPS jamming was in large part responsible for the deferred US attack on Syria. Probably just part of the picture, but combined with Russian antiship missiles keeping US ships at a distance, this seems like a more believable reason for the back down than that "the American people were agin' it". If the US had blown up stuff on the teevee, the US peeple would have gone along with it just fine. There were an order of magnitude more Americans watching twerking than watching Syria. And now they're drooling watching the congress worms' standing applause for the manly SWAT team that executed an unarmed woman after they supposedly pulled her baby out of her car (out of the baby seat? -- baby now 'safe in protective custody'). It's all about the children.

[Oct07'13] Good work by Craig Murray who has caught the BBC faking the sound track of a 'Syrian chemical weapons' interview here. The beeb will probably scrub the embarrassing fakes soon, but they have already been saved.

[Oct13'13] I recently scanned the 2000 page draft IPCC report (pdf one click from here). Well, I *downloaded* the whole thing, but actually only scanned the 50 page summary :-} . Climate modelers tend to be cornucopians with respect to energy. Previously, they directly based future expected carbon inputs on EIA future production and reserves estimates, despite the fact that the EIA's future production estimates (esp for oil) have had to be revised downward every year for the past 15 years. This year, the IPCC finally put in a "representative concentration pathway" (RCP) with a forcing number that is closer to reality. Their forcing numbers for the four different main scenarios are 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5 W m^-2 (Figure TS.19, page TS-115). The real amount of positive net energy fossil fuel left by reasonable (non-EIA) estimates corresponds to a forcing of 2.5 to 3.5 (i.e., we will use about 1-1.5x as much additional carbon as we have already used since the nineteenth century). Net energy will never be publicly mentioned as the crisis unfolds. But finance is pretty good at estimating it. Energy exploration and extraction is currently falling off as energy prices get close to the equilibrium point where newly extracted energy is too expensive for people and the economy to afford, but too cheap for energy companies to get bank credit and make a short-tern profit extracting it. This 'demand destruction' by price has resulted in an historic flattening of driving miles in US/EU/UK since 2008. This will soon be coming to China and India (they can withstand a higher price because they waste less, but they too have their price/net-energy limits, and are rapidly increasing their rate of waste). The end result will be that most of the EIA 'reserves' will get left in the ground because they are too close to zero net energy -- and hence aren't really reserves after all. The IPCC calls the lowest-carbon RCP 2.6 pathway the "strong mitigation scenario". I find this ironic, since I don't think there will be even the slightest trace of voluntary mitigation. Instead, there will be a mad dash to extract every last drop of net energy positive fossil fuel. But it is true that the effects of energy starvation on industrial civilization by 2030 will be characterized as 'strong mitigation'. And it will unfortunately all be accompanied by progressive climate heating, ice-free Arctic summers, smaller glaciers, acidic oceans, freaky weather, not too mention freshwater, soil, mineral, fish, and food shortages. But to end on the bright side, from the latest models, it looks like we might keep the warming we are baking into the next millenium to about 2 deg C!

[Oct15'13] A good summary of London's view of cyclists can be found in the court decision that "nobody is to blame" in the case of a woman cyclist who died when a lorry/truck turned left over her, crushing her. The lorry/truck driver had failed to signal (against the highway code) and was talking on a mobile/cellphone (also against the highway code). Until the law is changed in favor of cyclists (and pedestrians), the carnage will go on. For me, I stay the hell away from lorries/trucks, jumping up onto the pavement/sidewalk (which is illegal for a bike here) if necessary to avoid ever getting close to them. It's not uncommon to see the tyres/tires of a lorry/truck ride up over the curb around a corner (not illegal) so I get close to the buildings. The lorry/truck drivers would look more carefully before turning if the law was made even moderately more rational. For American readers, they will be surprised to find out that the British are actually *more* car-crazy than the Americans, despite the fact that some of their cities are still walkable/bike-able and gas/petrol is heavily taxed. I chalk it up precisely to the fact that gas/petrol is more expensive, so they feel more god-like wasting it, pointlessly overaccelerating up and down the street to the next red light. It all has a bit of a 1950's or 1960's feel to an American. A lot of other Europeans were like this. In the Netherlands, they made a conscious decision to change all this in the 1980's, and fixed their bike lanes and accident liability laws (it's *always* the motorist's fault). They should do the same here! (more than 30 damn years later!).

[Nov14'13] Five cyclists were slaughtered on London roads in the last 9 days (a lot more than Londoners killed by islamic terrorists). The mayor says the problem is that cyclists are jumping red lights. The irony is that those light-jumping guys (and they usually *are* guys) are *exactly* the ones who *don't* get killed! Less than 2% of cyclist deaths are due to jumping lights, whereas about 2/3 of cyclist deaths are due to mistakes by cars and trucks/lorries crushing cyclists dutifully off to the side, who have *not* jumped the light. The only way forward is to make it the motor vehicle's fault -- always. That makes cars slow down. And some space needs to be taken away from motor vehicles. The overall through speed of the traffic won't change, but there will be less cyclist and less pedestrian deaths (there were about 70 pedestrians killed in London last year, which is always 4-5x the number of cyclist deaths), and it would save fossil fuel. It is utterly pointless to waste fuel massively accelerating a multi-ton metal vehicle with a 100,000 watt engine just to pull up more rapidly to a red light. The Netherlands made these changes a full 30 years ago. Not rocket science, really. However, I think the British are so car-insane (read the red-faced anti-bike comments at the Guardian), that they won't allow this to happen until peak oil takes them out. The car crazies actually think that saving 20 seconds in a car journey is worth killing 30 humans per year. They think that if a bicycle is going faster than a car stopped in traffic that the cyclist deserves to be killed. Logic will not change their minds.

[Nov29'13] In the US, data release for last quarter show that banks earned $118 billion in interest while paying out only $13 billion to depositors. The interest income is mainly from the Fed, which is paying banks interest on the excess reserves banks have deposited back at the Fed, incredibly, mostly money originally created out of the void by the Fed itself. The Fed (bankers) are making bankrupt bankers (including some of themselves!) rich by keeping bank's overall income the same as it was before the crash, while the banks have constricted depositors' earnings by 90%. Basically, the Fed is giving banks almost half a trillion dollars a year as the banks stiff savers. How much more reverse-Robin-Hood can you get?!

[Dec02'13] Peak crude oil -- the original peak oil -- began around 2005. World crude oil production has remained approximately flat since then. If you toss less energy-dense "lease condensates" (pentane) in, production has gone up slightly, but way below the average yearly rate of increase from the end of the 70's Arab oil embargo until 2005. The oil fracking propaganda is interesting. People I talk to in UK/EU (incl. academics) casually assume that the US has become 'energy independent'. This is a stunning propaganda coup considering that the US consumes about 19 million barrels a day and imports almost 10 million barrels of that. There was a small uptick in domestic production but not anything even remotely approaching self-sufficiency. Of course, the US could cut its consumption in half and become self-sufficient, but I don't think that is what these people had in mind; many think the US is self-sufficient now! The whole fracking industry is on a tightrope, highly vulnerable to small drops in the price of oil; $80/barrel would wipe many of them out, and this may soon be on the way. Rig count is already declining and the 'subprime' oil field leases bundled by Barclays with ones like the Bakken are turning out to be, well, subprime, and oil companies are selling them off. Since 2005, greater and greater amounts of "natural gas plant liquids" (butane, propane), and "other liquids" (grab bag of ethanol, biodiesel, tar sand oil) have been added to "all liquids", which has continued to go up slightly (as Stuart Staniford is forever pointing out). Most of these liquids have considerably less energy density than crude oil (ethanol, butane), but are still measured using uncorrected raw volume. Some of them yield essentially zero net energy; US ethanol production merely converts coal and methane energy to ethanol with essentially no gain in energy and so is not an energy source at all (it thus gets double-counted). So what has happened? Essentially, just what I expected. People in the US/UK/EU finally began driving a little less. Contra Cheney, the American lifestyle *was* negotiable! This is why the US domestic oil production increase looked proportionally a little bigger. And as the world has been forced to go after the dregs of liquid fuel (all the dregs have lower EROEI than classic crude: deepwater oil, tight fracked oil, propane, ethanol, tar sand oil, arctic oil), there has been a turn toward coal and methane, which have not yet peaked. Most striking of course is China, which in the last 10 years has rapidly ramped up to consuming as much coal as the whole rest of the world combined, while making electronic toys for the rest of the world. And they have the air to prove it. 'Renewables' have continued to increase. But wind and solar are *not* drop-in replacements for coal and gas. In fact, they currently rely heavily on coal, nuclear, and gas. Europe (well, Germany) where solar and wind are farthest along, is experiencing problems with grid-tied renewables. The peaker plants required to keep the power on when the wind goes off are having trouble because solar and wind are regularly taking some of their best paying hours, making them uneconomic, despite their critical function to renewable electric energy. See Euan Mearns here for an accurate description of the problem together with remarkably and disappointingly/depressingly short-sighted anti-green climate-denialist rage. We need to quickly think outside of the box to redesign the grid and redesign transportation and redesign incentives for peaker plants and build more pumped storage, and use local batteries (e.g., electric car) for distributed storage, etc, etc before the excess energy to make these huge changes runs out. *Of course* they will be more expensive than just reflexively grabbing for the fossil fuel dregs. I am not very optimistic that creative changes can be made quickly enough. Rather, at least in the UK -- in contrast to Germany -- there will be a big turn toward nuclear to keep business as usual in operation as long as practical. This won't help wind (nuclear plants make very poor peaker plants -- they prefer to stay on all the time at the same level). This will eventually leave the grandkids living in a really messed up world -- like Detroit, but with a bunch of leaking, derelict nukes. Crap towns indeed! Sometimes anti-boomer rhetoric rings true. I prefer David MacKay (slagged off in Euan's comments). At least David is trying to do something good instead of merely plotting his tropical exit strategy (also see comments). What a let down, Euan.

[Dec19'13] Today a old dude in a van tried to brush back my wife as she walked across a London street coming within inches of hitting her. He accelerated and then turned aggressively toward her -- in his rush to reach the back of a traffic jam about 50 meters further down the street. The rage of people in their multi-ton 100,000-watt steel-plated boxes is palpable, idiotic, and deadly. I experience it twice a day on my bicycle, to and from work. About 100 pedestrians and 20 cyclists are killed a year by these idiots so I do my best to stay our of their way and bite my tongue when they car-valierly threaten me. But their reign is coming to an end. North sea oil is rapidly depleting, and fracking has suddenly become all the rage here, too. The lastest plan is to put 60 fracking rigs into the middle of the South Downs National Park near where rich people live. Car drivers are of course against this (because they like to drive to it for an weekend outing and don't want their water supply messed up), though of course they don't connect it with their own car use. At present decline rates, North Sea production will be roughly zero in 5 years, so the UK will become like the Greece, having to import all of its oil. If the price of oil slips even a little below $90 (oh, say, because the countries can't afford it because the oil import bill is going up?), the fracking guys will abandon the mess they have made (if they even get to drilling) in a flash. Oil price may go down, but it will be less affordable. Unfortunately, that will make the drivers even more aggressive toward pedestrians and cyclists. If you walk or cycle, keep this in mind. Every day I manage to get home or to school without getting killed, I get a bit of a rush (it's probably keeping my limbic system properly calibrated :-} ).

[Dec23'13] As the UN silently withdraws its faked chemical weapons claim ('nobody' did it), it's pretty clear now to most people that the foreign jihad in Syria is starting to collapse, and that there never was an indigenous Syrian revolution. There was no 'civil war'; it's just a bunch of Saudi and Turkey funded jihadis and prisoners, most from outside of Syria, terrorizing Syrians. The NYT megaphonies won't recant, tho. If they were real journalists, they would publish a retraction. If all the 'leftists' who supported it were real leftists, they would say they were wrong (they won't). They're too busy ignoring an equally disastrous aftermath of what they supported in Libya.

[Dec27'13] What happened to Tony Cartalucci? Is this actually the same guy writing now as 6 months ago?! Some months back, he said he was leaving his blog and some other people would take it over, which they appeared to do, but then he started signing articles there again without an explanation about how he somehow changed sides overnight. Truly bizarre. Makes me think of Lizzie Phelan.

[Jan21'14] In the latest 'news', the laptop bombers in the 'left' Guardian are on the war path again, catapulting the Syrian propaganda (they could hire 'Tony Cartalucci', whoever he/they is, for Thailand reporting!). And Mr. Death Squad just went all ballistic on ... his latest set of death squads. Same stupid human tricks. For something more sedate and historical, consider Alan Turing. I had read Turing's classic paper on reaction diffusion equations and development in a course given by Jack Cowan in 1978. Back then, I didn't know anything else about Turing other than 'Turing machines'. Then a decade later, I found out about how he had been put on estrogen as a 'treatment' for being homosexual, started developing breasts, and then committed suicide. I didn't read about it in detail and assumed it was from getting depressed about the side effects. 6 months ago, there was a BBC article suggesting it wasn't suicide, but an accident, and that Turing was cheerful, not suicidal in his last days before death from cyanide. Finally last month, on the occasion of his royal pardon, it was speculated that given Turing's knowledge, his possible revenge motive given the way he was treated after his amazing war service, and his blackmail-ability because of being gay, that Turing might have been covertly assassinated as a security risk. Though the idea is plausible, there is currently no evidence for it. It would have been one of the most stunning British own-goals imaginable, snuffing out one of their best minds in the name of 'homeland security'. The way in which British 'homeland security' was subsequently invoked to keep computer science research secret resulted in the permanent loss of their commanding world lead in computer science.

[Feb25'14] The US says 'forget' the EU because the US paid $5 billion for their moderate 'color revolutionaries' in western Ukraine under cover of the Olympics and the EU just talked. But now it looks like the Nazi (literally) Right Sector has taken over in western Ukraine (all the wealth and industry is in the east) and booted the US-promoted moderates out. Seems like a dangerous and somewhat unexpected outcome, dangerously close to Russia. It would be like Russia funding the breakup of Mexico, then its proxies losing control to indigenous, well-armed neo-nazi ultra-nationalists intent on taking back California. The future of Ukraine looks bleak, with old 20th century hatreds rekindled and blazing. Incidentally, they import 100% of their oil. Stupid human tricks indeed.

[Feb28'14] There are reports that a Turkish plane turned around from a planned landing in Simferopol airport in Crimea, and rumors that it contained weapons for Crimean Tartars. This may explain why military got to the airport first, to protect key Crimean facilities. Given the thick disinfo flying around in situations like this, however, it's important to maintain a skeptical stance.

[Mar01'14] Mark Ames (now at pando.com, funded by silicon valley venture capitalists; pando got Ames when they recently bought NSFWCORP) claims that eight-billionaire Pierre Omidyar (the guy who now more or less owns the Snowden documents) together with USAID/CIA were the main funders behind the Ukrainian coup. Greenwald, Scahill, and Taibbi (formerly with Ames at eXile) now all work for the new online new service funded by Omidyar. Greenwald and his defenders have risen up to say it's just a flesh wound, that Omidyar's views (meaning pocketbook?!) don't matter, and that this is all a disinfo plot to undermine Greenwald (and Snowden), all while artfully managing to say exactly nothing about the crisis itself. This Ames article is on target (tho this article of his a few days before, was not very good). It is looking now like there may have been some kind of attack that the Russian military responded to in Crimea (as opposed to getting there first, as suggested above). Vineyardsaker points out that such an attack (if it occurred) would hardly have been in the interests of the moderate side of the Ukrainian nationalists (these would be the ones funded by Omidyar) who want to repeal the uselessly provocative law agsinst the Russian language passed by armed Right Sector goons in the new parliament, and want to negotiate with Russia (loans, gas, etc). So perhaps it came from other disposable death squad groups indirectly funded via Turkey, USAID, and/or the CIA, similar to the jihadis in Syria. Trying to take over mostly Russian Crimea seems completely impractical, so I suppose the goal is just generalized destabilization of the social fabric in the spirit of 'never let a good crisis go to waste'. My gorge rises with misanthropy.

[Mar02'14] The Russians lost more than 25 million people in WWII fighting the fascists, one of the greatest disasters in all of human history (rivaled only by the even larger post-Columbus holocaust in America). It is very unlikely they will permit Nazi remnants (one here holding a "discussion" with the Ukrainian Attorney General in Kiev) to govern the whole country. And it will be difficult for the Orange-men to attack Russia when their navy and army are joining the other side. The rhetoric from the US and UK mainstream media sewer at this particular mmoment in history seems more hallucinatory than usual. One can only hope that some rendering defects in the Matrix are beginning to briefly flash into view. Maybe I'm missing the bigger picture and the mighty Wurlitzer is still intact. Time will tell.

[Mar03'14] One issue pushing Russia's hand is that disaffected actors in a disintegrating western Ukraine could sabotage gas pipelines to the EU This would not be in either Russia's or the EU's interests. For concreteness, a truck from Kiev carrying explosives equivalent to 400 kilos of TNT was stopped in Crimea today. It was amazing to watch a few tidbits of the mainstream sewer today 'explaining' the continuing circus/disaster. Two billionaire oligarchs were 'democratically' appointed as governors in eastern Ukraine in order to save Ukraine's sovereignty and show that there is no anti-semitism. Upon arriving in Donetsk, a screaming crowd (democratically) forced one appointee to leave. There was a fake story of a supposed surrender ultimatum from Russia blared by Reuters and widely rebroadcast (from CNN to zerohedge). In the meantime, two-thirds of a million people (a lot) have recently fled Ukraine to Russia. These must be people afraid of 'democracy' (or maybe the impending arrival of John Kerry's hairdo in Kiev). CNN weighed in to wonder whether the tension in Crimea might be a danger to the Ukrainian Human Barbie. And Craig Murray, wasup?! I no longer worry about energy issues -- I think humans have access to waaaay too much electricity and gasoline...

[Mar04'14] The prime mover in the western Ukraine takeover may have been the Gladio-like snipers of unknown origin that shot at both the protestors *and* the police on the 20th Feb (this is what caused the majority of deaths). This masterful application of small amounts of well-timed force created a much larger outcome. Whether these 'gains' can be consolidated, is, however, still quite unclear. Iraq and Libya were turned into hellholes (today the Libyan parliament moved into a hotel after 2 MP's were shot). Syria was almost destroyed, but has successfully fought back. It now seems likely that prompt action from Russia blocked the eastern half of the putsch. In the west, Chevron lost no time, signing a fracking deal already *yesterday* with 'free' Ukraine 'government' (the ground for the deal had been set up a few months back). Fracking seems like the perfect thing to do underneath 'the breadbasket of Europe', doesn't it? I don't listen to US teevee but the little snippets I see on the web are getting more bizarre than they used to be. But then so was Abby Martin's clueless video on RT today! Not surprising was seeing Glenn Greenback rising from First Look Productions to bravely support Abby's lack of clue, comparing Russia's bloodless blocking action in eastern Ukraine to the second shock and awe US invasion of Iraq. Ya think, Glenn? Omidyar funding the orange-ies still irrelevant? We *are* in the Matrix.

[Mar05'14] Intercepted (and now verified by him) quote from the Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet: "It's really disturbing to know that the new coalition don't want to investigate what exactly happened. So there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovich but it was somebody from the new coalition". When Catherine Ashton ignored his comments, he changed the topic. Gladio lives. This real story has been buried by the Liz Wahl and Abby Martin carnival. Knowing about the progress of their careers is less important than what they were (supposed to be) reporting on.

[Mar12'14] The US says "Russia will pay" if the Crimeans vote to join Russia. According to Obama, this is because referendums on secession are illegal unelss they are endorsed by the democratically elected government of the country they are trying to break away from. It's hardly clear that the US-financed ($5 billion investment according to Victoria "I think Yats is the guy" Nuland) unelected/installed/puppet/oligarch/club-wielding 'government' in western Ukraine is 'democratically elected'.

[Mar14'14] The US supported Banderite regime in western Ukraine, an odd-couple coalition of neo-nazis and jewish billionaire oligarchs, has no real navy or air force, but it probably does have access to a lot of operational artillery pieces, which could be used to wreak havoc in Crimea. If the Banderites start lobbing shells into Crimea and killing (more) people, the Russians will respond (but remember that the range of artillery is only 10+ miles). Given the breakdown of civil society and increasingly unstable mob rule unleashed in western Ukraine, anything is possible. Merkel's support of the Nuland-the-EU US-ians was a weak move, a serious failure! Left opponent Gregor Gysi's comments were good. I can't imagine that Americans are paying much attention to Kerry's botox blatherings.

[Mar15'14] The unearthly (literally) linear increase in China-everything (coal, steel, concrete, water, debt, exports) seems to suddenly be flat-lining -- rather like the sudden flat-lining in 2008 of the linear increase in car miles driven in the US. The China effect is likely to propagate through the world economic system in unpredictable ways. It was clear a few years back (see above) that this linear increase in China-everything couldn't go on 'indefinitely' (which translated into economics-speak means for more than a decade), since as I pointed out endlessly above, another decade of that increase would have had China consuming all world exported resources. Going back to the US-ians suddenly flatlining their driving, though people are not real happy, nothing major blew up so far, so perhaps the same will happen with the whole world. The ability of the world economic system to absorb such sudden shocks amazes me. Here's hoping it continues to do so!

[Mar16'14] This broadly written Mar 6 executive order by Barak Obama threatens to confiscate property and money of anyone that is "directly or indirectly complicit in" undermining democratic processes in Ukraine (Nuland's guys with baseball bats in Parliament don't count?), or "threatening the territorial integrity of Ukraine" (does my irony count?). The executive order ends by saying that it doesn't apply to the US government. I suppose that was to absolve them for payments to the snipers and the guys with the baseball bats. This order might be a strong motivation for Russia to draw down deposits in western institutions (e.g., treasuries) as quickly as possible. Obama's poll number are down to 41%, which is only 5% above George Bush's lowest poll numbers in his last year in office (~36%). This shows that some Obama-ites are finally red-pilling their way past the pointless Republican/Democrat show, and are realizing that Obama finally *did* turn out to be not that much different than Bush.

[Mar16'14] Clear presentations from Ben Dyson on the basics of money. It's about what I finally slowly learned 10 years ago. I got to it through finally understanding how the 'money multiplier' actually creates most of the money in the economy. That was hard enough for an average person (me) to understand. But the critical second step was to realize that in practice, the creation of money when a new loan is made actually happens *before* the money-to-be-multiplied is deposited in the bank, either by customers, or, more importantly, by the central bank (as explained by the Bank of England itself!). That is, it is *regular banks* that do most of the 'printing of money'. *Then* they get a loan from the central bank (money printed by the central bank) to increase their 'reserves', *after* creating money to loan out. Since private commercial banks proactively create money, they (as opposed to the Fed) can therefore strongly influence what that money is used for. This is often *not* in the interests of non-bankers. Almost half of the money banks have created in recent years has been used to inflate house prices much faster than salaries. Inflating house prices is not good for people, people! Inflating house prices won't help with peak energy! Inflating house prices basically help commercial banks make more money, period!

[Mar16'14] After all the preposterous bloviating in the US/UK/EU press (as well as bilge in 'alternative' zerohedge!), the Crimean vote is in, with over 95% support (85% turnout, better than any US presidential election for the entire last century) for joining Russia, and US/Kerry have backed down for now [update Mar19: even the Tartars voted to join Russia!]. The Financial Times just ran the most unbelievably ridiculous headline about the vote: "Crimea poll leaves Moscow isolated". You have to give the English credit for the brazenness of their tabloid skills (but why they didn't get Madonna to weigh in?). Now it merely remains for the western Ukrainians to sit back and enjoy the benefits of western freedom (e.g., being able to audition for X-factor), all while slumbering in the gentle embrace of the IMF, a few caring oligarchs (these would be good oligarchs, like US-ian oligarchs), and some Bandera-ites. And don't forget western Ukrainians now have the right to gay paralympic pride parades with music by Pussy Riot (subject to the approval of the skin heads with the baseball bats). The John McCain thing must be running in circles. At this moment, the heads of the US/UK/EU look pretty stoopid as they explain to their subjects how the anti-democratic Crimeans must be punished for, uh, all voting in an orderly ways.

[Mar18'14] I agree with Pepe Escobar: Obama *is* better than Bush -- because he lost two wars before they even started, as opposed to Bush who lost two wars *after* starting them :-} Now, I wonder how the EU will react if the Right Sector Yarosh carries through on his threat to "deprive our enemy of its source of income" by bombing the pipelines carrying Russian gas to EU. Own goal comes to mind.

[Mar19'14] Gladio/Maidan-like snipers may have killed one member of the military of both sides in eastern Ukraine. But this time, one of the snipers was caught. A different (good!) smell in the wind today.

[Mar21'14] A full 60% of the Ukrainian military has accepted Russian passports (Dmitri Orlov). This suggests the Ukrainian military is unlikely to start a war with Russia, and that the military does not support the US-supported nazi thugs who commandeered public buildings and kidnapped people using baseball bats. The breathtaking level of incompetence and hallucination in Washington and the EU seems worse than before (e.g., Power vs. Churkin at the UN, Merkel again today). They (including hyper-politically-correct Germany with holocaust denial laws!) seem to be bent on keeping the neo-nazi thugs in power as long as possible in western Ukraine, which looks like a seriously short-sighted, not to mention seriously losing strategy -- from a completely impartial point of view, regardless of which side you think is 'right'!

[Mar22'14] Russia's debt relative to the size of its economy is only about *1/10* that of the US. So naturally, western credit agencies have lowered Russia's rating again. This will make it harder for Russia to get credit from western banks. That's a brilliant plan -- in fact, one that Putin has been trying to implement himself for years. And don't forget that the US also plans to beat the Russians by out-oiling and out-gassing them. After all, the Russians are behind and have hardly bothered fracking yet because they are not depleted enough. There is the small fly in the ointment of stopping US frackers from going bankrupt by, I don't know, raising oil prices? (for the gipper). Last time that happened, people started buying less oil and gas, and prices dropped. But wouldn't increasing the oil supply drop prices even more? Whatever. The power of the dollar stems in part from the fact that oil is priced in dollars. When the US was exporting oil, that made more sense. Now the US imports almost 1/2 of the oil it uses. However, I can't imagine it would take very long for the US to turn into a powerhouse exporter again, which would be good, given that Russia and China are negotiating new oil and gas deals in rubles and yuan (worth $1 trillion dollars equivalent). And probably the Russians will still continue to let the US transport military supplies to US troops via Russia for the endless US war against East Asia wedding parties in Afghanistan. Blue-pill me harder (I am having a snark fit).

[Mar23'14] Abby Martin publicly wising up about the Brzezinski/Soros/neocon-fomented looting of Ukraine (before completely losing her street cred!).

[Mar25'14] Manilio Dinucci wrote an interesting big-picture piece about why the apparent US failure in Ukraine may actually be a success with respect to 'progress' in alienating the EU from Russia and in advancing anti-missile defenses and attack missiles even closer to the Russian border. If this is the real strategic reason, then it suggests that the military crazies really are increasing their planning for a nuclear war against Russia (again). It's all about scaring the stupid people: fear of nuclear annihilation overseas, fear of the totalitarian police state at home, to distract people from the things that the military knows the people should *really* be fearful of: the inexorable decline of net energy, and eventually food and water. Meanwhile, another strategic (Russian?) leak of a phone call, this time between Nestor Shufrych (probable future Ukrainian president) and Yulia Tymoshenko (oligarch, former prime minister): Shufrych: "What should we do now with the 8 million Russians that stayed in Ukraine. They are outcasts"... Tymoshenko: "They must be killed with nuclear weapons." Beavis and Butthead 'democracy' -- that was kewl. But it's all distraction/disinfo. In another month, the most egregious fascists will have been purged by the oligarchs in preparation for the main work of stripping the remaining wealth from the rump country. Stupid human ethnic/religious tricks take their eyes off the ball every time! Before long, the army will be back to its main function of protecting the blood-sucking operations of the oligarchs -- all blood-sucking done in plain sight, with no resistance from the angry and dispirited and increasingly anemeic body politic. Only years later will the population vaguely come to a realization of how they were played. Next door to Ukraine lie many 'fertile' areas for ethnic conflict (Moldova, Transnistria, Gagauzia, Belarus). I am having a worse than usual misanthropic fit today, but it will pass.

[Mar27'14] Looking back objectively at the very clear results of the recent US/UK policy in Iraq (over 1 million people killed), Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine, it is now apparent that the overriding goal seems to have been simply to destroy these countries. Extracting oil concessions, or running a profitable CIA opium trade, or getting lithium (Afghanistan) were probably distant second tier goals. Despite all my writing about oil, I now think that *even in Iraq*, the main goal was simply to wreck the country, not to try to get its oil. This suggests that largest long term US/UK goal is to wreck Russia (and China). A sad commentary on supposedly civilized humans. Given the power of language, humans have truly become the worst animal. But a very funny animal :-}

[Mar28'14] b at Moon of Alabama does a good job of reporting on how the pusillanimous main-sewer media (Washington Post, Guardian) have downplayed the revelations of Turkish military false-flag plans with respect to Syria. The Guardian is a good example. Instead of pointing out that this was high-level planning of a classic Reichstag-file-like-psyop, recorded straight from the horses mouths, early in 2014, the Guardian describes it as "discussing possible military action in Syria" (describing planning to get Syrian stringers to attack an Ottoman tomb site, the tomb of Suleyman Shah, just across the border in Syria). But from a broader perspective, there is the question whether this leak might have originated from the CIA. Here is an informative post from William Enghdahl back in Feb with some background on the strange bedfellows created as Turkey might be shifting *away* from the west, and the west trying to undermine the shift. Meanwhile in Ukraine, the looting has begun. As Paul Craig Roberts says, "the gullible dupes who participated in the orchestrated Maidan protests will rue it for the rest of their lives." In a similar 'strange bedfellows' vein, it is an interesting fact that much of the IMF loan to Ukraine will immediately go to paying Russian banks, which will help keep them solvent, and help stabilize western banks related to them.

[Apr01,'14] The cost of extracting oil is rising at 10% per year but the cost of oil is flat. That could probably go on for at least another year or two :-} By that time, the US will be an exporter, right? (not!). [Update: Jun2018: in fact, it *did go on for 4 years! But the US is still a net importer]. The worldwide level of human self-deception about energy so close to the precipice continues to stun me. Jeremy Rifkin (old fart!) thinks 3D printers will solve this problem. Computer controlled stuff like that works best -- but more importantly, can only itself be manufactured -- when the power is on. A big pigeon in the ointment is that the increased automation of manufacturing has been associated with an *increase* in power use. Digital machine tools can go faster than humans on manual machine tools, but they use more power *per unit manufactured item* (e.g., 5x as much power). I'm sure there will be no problem getting all this extra power for the neighborhood chip fab and car manufacturing plant off of neighborhood rooftop solar panels, and water for that won't be a problem either. And I can't imagine there will be any problem with the coal electric power staying on after we manufacture and plug in a bunch of 50,000 watt electric cars into the grid to replace our 90,000 watt oil-powered cars (requiring nearly a doubling of the size of the grid, a lot more copper, more coal, etc). Time to eat your RFID-enabled soma pill (just rewatched Aldous Huxley from 1958 talking about his 1931 book with Mike Wallace). E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" was written in 1909. Not rocket science, just common sense. On the positive side, the eventual demise of computer-controlled manufacturing will probably make it difficult to keep a full-on Skynet (e.g., not just soft sell taser drones) going for a long time. I think people know something is wrong, but most won't say it out loud.

[Apr12'14] Dmitry Peskov, Putin's press secretary: "Russia is the only country helping Ukraine’s economy with energy supplies that are not paid for" [the $3 billion discount on gas Russia gave Ukraine in Dec 2013], Dmitry Peskov told reporters today in Moscow, commenting on President Vladimir Putin’s letter yesterday to 18 European heads of state. "The letter is a call to immediately review this situation, which is absurd on the one hand and critical on the other". So, as a result of a US-engineered coup in Kiev, Europe will have to take over paying Ukraine's gas bill so the Kiev neonazis won't go bankrupt, oligarchs can keep on oligarching, US fracking companies can move in, and so the EU they won't get their own gas imports slowed (the EU uses imported gas for heating, and for peaker power plants that help make renewable energy useable for the grid). The delicate irony of it all. If I was an EU-ian, I wouldn't be too happy with the US-ians.

[Apr23'14] From http://uauk.wordpress.com/, a blog by a British lecturer (since 2012) in western Ukraine, who "encouraged my students to head out to Maidan in November already". But yesterday, he wrote: "This blog has gone quiet recently. I’ve plenty of ideas for updates but no time to complete them, what with seminars to give, conferences to attend, job applications to submit and so on".

[Apr24'14] Hopefully the substantial number of soldiers (5-10K) and tanks and artillery (that might have been) moved east by the coup gov't in Ukraine, and the attack on Slaviansk (5 killed) is just a bluff (for comparison, the Kiev snipers killed 21 people). The Russians have responded with a major military mobilization inside Russia. It's hard to believe the coup gov't wants to start a war with Russia when they have a coal miner's strike on their hands (against pay cuts to be used for fixing up Kiev) after just securing a large loan to pay the Russians for gas. But who knows?! Disinfo is running high, so just have to wait.

[Apr25'14] Pics from Graham Phillips iphone don't show anything that looks like much a 'war', yet (go to Syrian Perspective to see what a cell phone pics of real war look like). Hopefully it's just unenthusiastic Ukrainian army units pretending to fight to show the Right Sector putschists back in the Kiev how 'bad' they are, so they won't get themselves assassinated (the key role of commanding officers in any army, is to threaten and sometimes actually shoot the people who try to turn back -- from behind the front lines). Any war, no matter how small, is an utter human disaster that no sane human wants to be a part of. Here's hoping all the sabre rattling is just disinfo. One of the anon's at the saker made the interesting suggestion that the unenthusiastic Ukraine military is moving stuff futher east nearer to the Russian border as an excuse to the Kiev junta for why they can't spare stuff to kill Russian speakers in the middle of Ukraine. Since Russia has been in communication with the Ukrainian military, the Russians would know what was happening, and avoid overreacting. The lastest round of NYT/BBC photo fakery is so, been there, done that, guys. And I'm really getting why it's so critical that Justin Bieber apologize for visting the Yasukuni shrine. Pay no attention to China negotiating to buy some of the fossil fuel currently being sold to the EU (esp. if you are in the EU).

[Apr27'14] Well... now there are reports from RIA Novosti that there are 10K+ troops and 100+ tanks surrounding the lightly defended town of Slaviansk. The servile EU-ians (Germans) sent 'military observers' to the region. Several of them were grabbed by local people. The local people are 'separatists' in the presstitute western press; the mercenaries flown in from another country, well, those would just be 'neutral observers'. This sounds a little worse than a few days ago. But the locals are fighting back. Today, locals captured 3 high level Ukrainian special forces 'Alpha males' sent from Kiev who were attempting to kidnap the head of the local police department.

[Apr30'14] The servile French, Germans, British, Danish, and Canadians (huh?) are all deploying fighter jets near the Russian border along with the US while yelling at the Russians to pull their defenses away from their own borders *within* their own country. Probably more than 70% of Germans are opposed to this intervention, which has a good chance of undermining EU energy supplies. It's not even vaguely in the EU people's interest. What a sad commentary this is on stoopid and desperate human manipulators as they reach peak oil, just a few years from peak energy. Don't fix the problems -- just bloviate, with the danger of really blowing things up. In the US, just imagine if the several trillion dollars hadn't been totally and war-criminally wasted on destroying 10 million people's lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. That could have easily avoided the $1 trillion in new student debt, and then some. Instead, young people will be massively in debt for the next 3 decades essentially paying bankers for these past 4 wars. What unbelievable stupidity. Makes me embarrassed to be a human. Here is another 'gem' from Ukranian nationalist, Iurii Lutsenko, on Ukranian teevee "the genetic code of the Ukrainian people gives them the ability to live outside lies, whereas the genetic code of children of Gengis Khan makes them willing to live in lies and spread the patriotic syphillis" -- translation by vineyardsaker. Great set of master-race-ers the US and Germany and the UK is supporting there.

[May02'14] The locals efficiently defended Slaviansk so far and the unenthusiastic Ukranian military did not shell the town. In Odessa, by contrast, a Kiev football fan mob (just like in Kharkov) traveled to ethnically very diverse Odessa to burn down a building with pro-Russian locals inside, shooting and killing many. The BBC Matrix News reports "many pro-Russia rebels" were killed in Slaviansk (where there were almost no casualties!), and initially made no comment on 30 or 40 burned to death in the massacre in Odessa, a number of them shot as they tried to jump from the burning building. Hopey changey drone Obama read the teleprompter about more sanctions, and the Mighty Wurlizter grinds on (but now we have the internet). The Russians will sit tight for now as the Americans battle the Germans. It is informative to looks at video from the scene (e.g., from Graham W Phillips).

[May05'14] Graphic still pics here (another link here in case the first one goes down) of the Odessa massacre, taken from a video from inside the building posted on youtube by EuromaidanPR (the victorious guys whose 'friends' burnt down the building; incidentally, EuromaidanPR just put a $10K price on the head of British journalist Graham W Phillips). This sure looks like an outside-supported mercenary-run strategic terror operation, like the Maidan snipers (see above) shooting at both sides -- classic CIA death squad stuff, think 1980's El Salvador (the CIA director himself was just in Kiev a few days ago!). It is designed to leave regular local people in complete shock (that probably was the point of EuromaidanPR posting the youtube video of a woman who looked like she had been raped then her upper body set on fire in front of the elevator). Unfortunately, it also looks like a real military attack has been launched against the small eastern Ukranian town of Slaviansk. The American installed puppet fascist Right sector regime is trying to move quickly (before it collapses) to try to draw a Russian attack. Instead, Russia is filing a lawsuit with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). I have to say the degree of western media manipulation -- both 'left' and 'right' -- is truly breathtaking this time. It's just the same old destabilizing death squads -- for the 50th time -- which rely on some of the most disgusting yet inseperable and reliable parts of the human character.

[May06'14] The usual lies of our NYTimes. But lookee here: Pussy Riot's in Scotland, complaining about some Scottish dude saying something positive about Putin. Let's not be prejudiced, guys! you're off script (or we'll trash yo mamma's church, too -- and pay no attention to our CIA- and International Neonazi Fund-supported anti-Putin 'freedom fighters' choking pregnant women to death in burning buildings). I'm sure this will convince all the good people living in Odessa that they need to have *even more* Kiev neonazi hooligans visiting them from out of town -- because Putin is the real problem, why won't he send troops, damn it? Ya think?

[May09'14] Today Kiev/NATO junta tanks and armored personnel carriers dashed through Mariupol, which was setting up for a Victory Day parade, and manfully shot a few unarmed local people in the head from inside their armour (and sniper-killed a young woman on her balcony) during an 'anti-terrorist operation' (against half the population?). These pathetic operations do not seem to reflect long term planning, and they don't appear any more 'manly' than beating people to death who jumped out of a building that you set on fire. But it is also unlikely to draw Russia to invade. Instead, Russia made a rational response to the Odessa massacre 2 days ago -- suggesting immediate negotiation and postponement of the referendum (both ignored). When the Kiev junta can't afford to or refuses to pay for its gas, it *is* likely that Russia will stop pumping it to them. Pepe Escobar says, "Well, at least Washington's prayers have been answered. It took a while, but they finally found the new bogeyman: Osama Bin Putin."

[May11'14] From the Lies of our NYTimes: Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman said the United States would not recognize the results of the votes. She said the referendums "by armed separatist groups are illegal under Ukrainian law, and are an attempt to create further division and disorder" and "will violate international law and the territorial integrity of Ukraine." Nuland-installed Kiev out-of-towners driving tanks at 40 mpg through the middle of town inexpertly shooting into crowds of unarmed people apparently doesn't count as "armed" (except now, any person can see what's actually going on with the internet, you dorks). Here is video of the neonazi thugs firing live bullets into a crowd that is lined up to vote. These seriously brave 'anti-democratic' voters are considered extremely dangerous in the 'democratic' Khagante of Nuland. They clearly do want to be a part of Banderastan. Zio-lite Chomsky, supposed anarchist, sings the same song as the NYT about the illegality of the previous Crimea vote. Lookee instead here at these Nigerian girls. And look at the wonderful triumph of the bearded lady in the Eurovision song contest. Take that Putin! Go Austria! What's next, Bearded Pussy Riot? Panem et circenses. But finally, the Germans did manage to make a little whimper: der Spiegel (of all places!) re-tweets a Bild report of 400 Blackwater/Academi mercs on duty in eastern Ukraine.

[May12'14] Some good news today. The Donbass referendum came off despite the half-hearted efforts of the Kiev death squads. Jihadis/Saudi/French/Americans were booted out of Homs on busses (tho it is worrying to contemplate what Saudi/France/US plan to do with their evacuated jihadi ronin). But meanwhile, back in the human catastrophe the US and the UK created in Iraq, another 50 people were killed in one day. That's one Odessa every day in Iraq.

[May15'14] A few days ago Russia suggested that it may begin asking for rubles in return for oil and gas. Saddam suggested asking for non-dollar payments for oil over a decade ago. Iran did so about 4 years ago. Though the Russian economy is officially small compared to western economies, this is a significant event. Maybe Belgium (!) becoming the 3rd biggest 'purchaser' of US treasury holdings over the past 6 months (a fifth of a *trillion* since October) is a result of Russia preparing for the blowback from its attack on the oil-dollar. [May16'14] Vineyardsaker blog has an informative transcript of two telephone calls in the aftermath of the recent deadly racist neo-nazi attacks in Odessa and Mariupol here. Here is a quote from one of the calls between Oleg Noginskii and another person on the subject of Igor Kolomoisky, the oligarch/mafia/PrivatBank governor of Dnepropetrovsk in southeast Ukraine, nicknamed the "Jewish Banderite": "We declare that the world Jewish community, first: has nothing to do with Mr Kolomoisky, second: does not support [the actions] in Odessa, or Mariupol or any of those involved and expresses sincere sympathy. And third, says that if a Jew is involved in Nazi crimes, we will fight first him." -- Oleg Noginskii (Russian transcript here). Here are English RT interviews with Paul Vickers (his blog here), and others on the topic.

[May16'14] I have written a lot above about how China has produced a lot of cement and built a lot of roads. But FT now reports that China produced as much cement in 2011 and 2012 as the US did *in the entire 20th century*. I was in Beijing in 2012. I remarked on returning about how much new cement there was. But the true scale of what just happened is truly mind-boggling. If nothing else, it suggests that as long as there is still fossil fuel muscle left (roughly half is still left), rapid change -- for better or worse -- remains a possibility :-} . One could imagine that a graceful taper from building an entire 20th century US every two years could turn out to be a delicate operation. In any case, it is absolutely clear that the second half of net energy positive fossil fuel will all get used, which means we will get to 500 ppm CO2 (for reference, in recent glacial periods CO2 has been 200 ppm, while pre-industrial/interglacial CO2 was 280 ppm). The continual car and lorry/truck racket outside my window is virtually the same as it was when I arrived 7 years ago (two more bicylists were slaughtered this week on poorly designed London intersections) and the electricity is still on every day. The one ray of hope I have mentioned previously is that the IPCC has severely overestimated the amount of net-energy-positive fossil fuel left (by blindly accepting the IEA etc's ridiculous overestimates). So we probably won't see their worst greenhouse scenarios (600+ ppm), but rather something more like their unintentionally ironic 'strong mitigation' scenario (the IPCC RCP 2.6 pathway). That one will probably 'only' increase worldwide temps by 2 to 3 deg C. Your children will still be facing a terrible climate disaster 50 years from now, completely out of energy, and very probably low on water and food. But it won't be as bad as the worst scenarios!

[May22'14] Down in the comments (starting with comment by Petri Krohn) here, somewhat garbled by the machine translation but still understandable, you can see the classic function of 'commanding officers'. The oligarch's Privat Bank death squads (here is one of their van 'logos' ) were sent from Kiev to kill 10 to 20 truly brave Ukrainian soldiers who had arranged a non-aggression agreement with the locals and who had refused to fire on the locals. This was followed by Kiev attack helicopters firing missiles at the scene of the crime to try to sterilize it. Video already out on the internet -- too late. NATO nazi democracy is kewl according to the MSNBCBBC (they even had some preposterous explanation of why the attack helicopters were firing on their own-side vehicles). Somehow I don't think this will convince the local people, previously rather apathetic, that the Kiev junta is so much better than the previously actually elected but corrupt Viktor Yushchenko. Today, this sh*t is a all taking place a long distance from where I live. But I'm not confident it will still be far enough away 20 years from now, when the great net energy downslope starts to pick up speed.

[May26'14] Classic no-can-do London etiquette: you see an older man on the street knocked unconcious by a bus; walk by, but under no circumstances should you call emergency services. That would be getting unnecessarily involved. And don't forget to don that yellow health and safety vest before jumping off the bridge -- you might endanger the vehicles!

[May28'14] The Kiev putsch regime -- now with a newly elected jewish billionaire oligarch in charge of Right Sector neonazi death squads (note that Pravy Sector and Svoboda together only received a few percent of the vote) -- began off-and-on artillery bombardments of residential buildings and schools in Slavyansk, Donetsk, Mariupol and Lugansk City, not to mention bravely shooting at vehicles transporting the wounded (then shooting any survivors in the head), and picking off the odd old women 'terrorist' (she was hit by shrapnel from an artillery shell lobbed at a teachers college). Over 100 people were killed and wounded. Many people are trapped in these sealed-off cities (120,000 in Slavyansk, incidentally, the site of a major shale gas field, with Biden's son invested in Burisma Holdings -- you can't make this stuff up!). This is a major escalation of the war. But the neonazi's have not yet stormed those cities, or been able to convince or threaten (the families of) the Ukrainian army into doing so. As in all wars, the great majority of deaths are civilians. There has been relatively little armed resistance from the populations in these areas so far. It is unlikely Russia will get involved, since the local population does not want them involved (yet). As in Syria, it may take a while for the local people there to realize the gravity of the situation into which they have been cast. All the leftists in Syria that initially supported the US/Saudi jihadi 'Maidan' that ended up destroying their cities, beheading their neighbors, and killing 150,000 people eventually all came around to support Assad. The R2P 'leftists' outside Syria who supported the US-supported jihadis never owned up to their misjudgement (and what's with Craig Murray's continuing bizarre/pathetic position on Ukraine?!).

[May30,'14] I'm half wondering now if Poroshenko's plan was let some of the most unstable Right Sector/Svoboda maniacs get partly chewed up on purpose. Here is Pepe talking here about how the pivot has been pivoted :-} . But I wonder what he thinks about EROEI? There is clearly not enough net energy left to continue building at China's insane rate of a plug of cement equal to all the cement poured in the entire US 20th century, every two years. Perhaps it's possible to build 3 or 4 more complete US's. But at this rate, that would be only 6 or 8 years. It looks like China has already slowed massively down. I'm sure I'm somehow missing the forest for the trees given my general inability to think strategically.

[Jun02,'14] Another cyclist (52 year old experienced commuter) was slaughtered in London Monday morning at 7 AM by a skip/dumpster lorry/truck. London streets are extremely hazardous because of: (1) their confusing and inconsistent marking and variable design (here is the stoopidly-designed intersection where the cyclist was squished), (2) a set of one-way streets that does *not* increase overall flow-through speed (the average traffic speed in London is 10 mph) but instead causes uselessly increased local speed, with the only effect being that more pedestrians and cyclists are killed, and (3) a weirdly even-more-extreme-than-the-US car culture (just think of the putrid Jeremy Clarkson) where cars routinely aim for female pedestrians to brush them back. A similarly extreme car culture was brought under control in the Netherlands in the early 80's by a sea change in attitudes, a burst of separated cycle lane construction, and changes in indemnity laws. I don't hold out a lot of hope for this Anglo city, tho. There is another 8 or 10 years of good oil left in the North Sea, and by god, Old Blighty is going to use it as fast as it can (NO2 level in London are actually worse than Beijing). Instead, let's spend money sequencing the British genome to find out why British kids are getting fat, and getting fatty liver disease as kids. It must be genetic because it's become a new epidemic, right? Couldn't be because kids are aren't walking and aren't on bicycles, because of a bunch of angry Jeremy Clarksons gunning their FUV motors, spitting with car rage, are right on their @sses, could it? Nah, it's the fault of their genes I'm sure. The recent yearly increases in cycling in London since 2007 have topped out and actually started to reverse after a particularly bloody several years, and because the supposedly pro-cycle mayor has done absolutely nothing to help cycling with construction or laws (the 'Boris-bike' system was actually contracted by the previous mayor, Ken Livingston). When I'm cycling and I see a lorry/truck coming, I jump up onto the pavement (=sidewalk). That's illegal in Britain -- health and safety, don't you know?

[Jun05'14] The CIA-supported neo-nazi death squads have descended to shooting up hospitals and nurses and injured soldiers in eastern Ukraine. Classic Vietnam era revolting heart of darkness sh*t. The local people despise the Kiev neonazis, who call the eastern Russian-speaking Ukrainians 'colorado beetles' that should be burned. Ukraine is over, no matter how many more patients, women, and children the CIA/oligarch-paid mercenaries kill. There is now a leaked recording of the pilot firing the burst of unguided S-8KOM anti-tank rockets that shredded the people sitting outside in the park. Russia won't intervene, even if the junta foolishly begins carpet bombing the cities. The R2P main-sewer media is braying even more shrilly than before about how this is 'Russian aggression' (if this isn't a case of 'bombing your own people', not sure what is), and the Cameron poodle-thing just pledged to send troops to Poland to 'help', as many average 'leftist' sites embarrassedly ignore this major ongoing disaster, instead running articles about how to have better sex. But I think average people are *just* beginning to awake from the media hypnosis, as their economic conditions continually degrade. The median personal income in the US has fallen to $26,000 a year; that means that half the population in the US has a yearly salary less than that. The ratio between that salary and the cost of a car, house, or college eduation is much smaller than it was when I was a college student -- and getting worse every year.

[Jun08'14] Poroshenko just about declared war in his speech yesterday and then the Ukies began lamely firing unguided Grad missile batteries into residential areas in order to kill more civilians in what looks like a serious attempt to get the Russians to respond with an invasion that could be used to justify a NATO invasion. There could be as many as 5,000 or 10,000 Blackwater and Israeli special forces in place in Ukraine (e.g., a letter from Ukraine to Derek Chollet in the US DoD apologising for the "deaths of agents [Academi/Blackwater?] who accompanied general Kulchytsky" in the shot-down helicopter was leaked, which might be legitimate). No overt Russian response yet. Obama praised the attacks as "an incredible outpouring of democracy" (apparently bombing your own people's hospitals and rocketing employee credit union workers on their lunch break is actually 'democratic' if executed properly). Obama is an incredible charlatan and the western MSM is a stinking sewer still under amazingly comprehensive control. But the US/UK/zionist west is taking a big risk trying to take down Russian and China now. Diana Johnstone remarked that the servility of the 'old' europeans is extraordinary. It was eye opening reading "Hidden History" by Gerry Docherty and James MacGregor, in which the English and european elite spent an entire decade carefully engineering WWI -- which ironically turned out to be the beginning of their very own demise. The American 'Federal' Reserve (a private bank) was created in 1913 partially in anticipation of funding this human catastrophe. The unbelievable stupidity of it all, the way the antiwar left (and right) and average people in every european country completely caved and slavishly went along with it all was a towering disgrace to the human race. And here we are 100 years later, with the *exact same* stupid human tricks in play, opening the same old ethnic Pandora's box, everybody flying their inner master race freak flag. It's getting harder and harder for me to feel upset about power down.

[Jun11'14] Poroshenko did a Grozny on Slavyansk and then announced he will instruct his nazi army to provide an escape route to ethnically cleanse the area, along with financial incentives for western Ukrainians to settle there. I'm sure all the locals are now seeing the advantages of 'democracy'. This is probably just bluster/disinfo, since at this point Kiev has no control of routes to the east or the eastern border (so it's an 'escape' to Kiev?!). Meanwhile in Mosul and Tikrit in Iraq, ISIS al-CIA-da 'rebels' overran Iraqi army bases in scenes reminiscent of the highway of death and seized a bunch of Black Hawk helicopters and armoured vehicles, not to mention almost half a *beellion* dollars from the Mosul central bank, sending half a million locals fleeing to Kurdistan from the fighting (and expected Maliki counterattack). The fighting 'just happens' to be right around the oil fields that contain almost 1/8 of the remaining oil in the world. ISIS will take some of the equipment to Syria. What a great value for a $1-2 trillion investment of US-ian tax dollars -- the creation an out of control rogue army of jihadis abroad who are destroying two of the oldest civilizations on the planet, and at home, mine-resistant armoured vehicles for domestic police departments (Indiana). The US may now drone/bomb ISIS in Iraq while supporting them in Syria. Bush and Powell and Wolfowitz and Blair and Campbell and Straw should be dragged into war crimes court. Just think if that unbelievably large amount of money had instead been put into preparing for the ongoing and irreversible reduction in the net energy of fossil fuel -- $1-2 trillion could have bought a lot of photoelectric cells, windmills, and grid maintenance and upgrade. Probably even Euan Mearns could have gotten behind that redirection (sorry Euan).

[Jun16'14] I guess the 'west' now 'owns' the rump Banderastan Ukraine. Right at this moment the Kiev army is literally flattening the city of Kramatorsk with artillery bombardments, killing hundreds of civilians in its ongoing attempt to get Russia to respond overtly to the killing of Russian-speakers. Hardly a peep from GoogleMSNBCBSCNNBBC. The people getting killed would be the people in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that the Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk yesterday called "subhumans" who needed to be "cleaned from our land" (today they updated their site to say they were "inhumans"). Great set of nazis you guys to have 'acquired'! Very skilled at shelling apartment blocks and shooting hospital patients. I hear they will also be needing some methane in a few months, and uhh, they won't be able to pay for it. Maybe Germany can send some. Oh, I forget, they get methane from the pipeline through Banderastan. What idiocy for the EU-ians not to have outed/blocked the idiotic US/CIA/Israeli/UK coup! Cowards! Overall a disappointing disaster. The best twisted minds in the west are trying to bring down Russia (and the EU!) instead of dealing with peak net energy for industrial civilization. We really need to get these bozos out of power before they cause an even bigger disaster, not to mention one in our 'homelands'.

[Jun21'14] Russia responded to a Ukrainian artillery attack on a Russian border station by saying that this lacked the appearance of a cease fire. Russian humor.

[Jun24,'14] Above, I underestimated the Saudis, who fund ISIS/ISIL (and Turkey). It looked like they were about to take a breather, after the demotion of Bandar Bush and after experiencing heavy losses in Syria, with virtually the entire Syrian population now against the foreign mercenaries. But ISIS/ISIL have essentially taken control of a moderately large part of Iraq and Syria's oil fields. Not clear what prompted this (not only Saudi, prob. also Israel and Turkey and CIA/NATO); many of the fighters are not from Iraq, and somebody must have been paid off in Iraq to stand down let them get as far as they did (as occurred in the two previous US invasions). This looks like yet another proxy war, helped along by the fact that most Iraqis think that they were better off under Saddam than Maliki. This will help Saudi and Israel, since the greatest oil field on earth, Ghawar, is very nearly empty for practical purposes. That single oil field has supplied 6% or more of all the oil ever used by humans on the entire earth. Looks like the humans are in fine form this month. A curse on *every single* ethnic identity! They are all cultural, not genetic constructs anyway (the Palestinians are the descendents of the biblical Jews). Why can't stupid humans keep ethnicity -- based on emotions that work in a chimpanzee troop -- to food, music, dance, and language where it belongs? It is a true tragedy of the origin of language to have grafted such cognitive and eventually technological and scientific and fossil fuel power onto a hardly-better-than-chimpanzee-level social neural device that was not up to the task of wielding that power. Here is my most recent paper (PDF) on the topic of the origin of language (though I left out the part about the difficulty of controlling the new power...). In other news, Austria has just signed a 'south stream' pipeline deal with Russia. This would get Russian gas to Europe, bypassing Ukraine. However, construction of the part of the pipeline that goes through Bulgaria was blocked in January 2014 on the recommendation of the EU. But that was before the Ukraine mess exploded. With the western Ukrainians grabbing un-paid-for gas into storage before it gets to the EU, and Europe possibly looking toward a cold winter this year, the EU will likely see the light and reapprove the pipeline (in order to see the heat and the power...). Though there is tremendous hate of Russia in Bulgaria, it is likely Bulgaria will go back to their original 2013 plan if the EU flip-flops. A fly in the ointment is the possibility of a CIA-instigated Bulgarian 'Maidan' by the same-old same-old methods -- death squads, bombs, and snipers shooting at both sides. Bulgaria should look at the writing on the Ukrainian wall and simply absorb such provocations without overreacting. Who knows, anything is possible...

[Jun26,'14] "There is no evidence reports of abuse were communicated to senior managers" -- from a BBC report today, making sure that we all know that there is NO EVIDENCE that senior managers (at the hospitals or at the BBC) were ever told that Jimmy Savile (who worked for the BBC) was among other things probably having sex with corpses, while bragging about his rings made from the glass eyeballs of the dead. That makes me feel SO much better about the senior managers at the BBC, and I'm so glad I pay my $20 teevee tax this month even tho I don't watch teevee, because I know they help get the truth out to the faithful who do have one! And I'm sure 'senior manager' Thatcher wasn't told either when Jimmy came to dinner at her house (I'm working hard here suppressing further jokes about corpses) on the way to her eventually getting him knighted. I guess that mainly leaves the victims themselves at fault for not resisting the now dead Jimmy (well maybe except for the people in the morgue... oh right, no corpse jokes). Well, the BBC says it was also the fault of "leadership that lacked curiosity". I was thinking that the problem was the lack of some other body parts. In prison, child molesters are the lowest of the low and have to be protected from the rest of the inmates. At the BBC, they can be stars because there is *no evidence* the senior managers knew. Right.
     That's about as believable as the initial finding that there was no fault of 'senior manangers' at NASA and President Reagan for overriding the outright refusal of the rocket booster engineers to sign the take-off go-ahead for the Jan 1986 blast-off of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Richard Feynman had to threaten to resign the Rogers Commission panel to force them to include the real reason -- not a 'failure of communication' but rather management knowingly overriding engineering reality that was communicated in a crystal clear fashion to them. The Shuttle blew up soon after launch for exactly the reason the engineers had said, killing all aboard, because the launch was forced on a day that was way too cold, because a teacher had to be in space for Reagan's state of the union speech uplink (the pusillanimous wikipedia article doesn't mention anything about the planned Reagan uplink, which was what was forcing management to override engineering reality). The engineer who refused to sign the take off order, Roger Boisjoly, was professionally shunned afterward, fired, then rehired under Congressional order, then he resigned as a pariah. He did get some some safety awards. He died in 2012 of cancer.

[Jun27,'14] $6 billionaire Igor Kolomoisky's Privatbank publicly received 36 to 40% of the $3.2 billion in 'liquidity assistance' the IMF transferred to the National Bank of Ukraine on May 7, the first portion of $17 billion committed to Kiev by the IMF to help the stooge government survive. This was to make sure that the banks didn't collapse in Ukraine, which could have hurt the average person (it's all about helping the average person), because of the 'risk of contagion', which could lead to bank failure, which turns out to be threatened by bad loans to oil trading companies, and funnily enough these companies just happened to be owned by the bank's shareholders (they must be the people who care about women and children...). I seem to remember something about usng the money to pay Russia for natural gas, but I must have gotten confused. I'm sure the average Ukrainian is finally appreciating all the unexpected advantages of a Gladio color revolution Nazi oligarch democracy, which should last just about long enough for the criminal oligarchs to safely extract all their ill-gotten gains from their own failing banks to London and New York and then allow them to flee the smoking ruins of a former country. The idiot grins on these two Yurps seem to suggest that they think this is all a capital idea. After all, WWI and WWII worked out so well for Yurp! This combination of absurdity and criminality is hard for 'the average person' who plays by different rules in regular life to comprehend. It could make a guy angry (Minnesotan-speak). Real life is sometimes more incredible than any fictional Matrix. Who needs aircraft carriers when a bunch of cheapo Soros-style NGO's work more effectively?

[Jul01'14] Obama- and McCain-supported $1+ billionaire Poroshenko's supposed cease-fire never really occurred, but now that it has officially ended, the US-installed puppet gov't has resumed artillery bombardments (of churches, hospitals, town centers) and attempts at ethnic cleansing of eastern Ukrainian towns have increased (I think the correct term is, "killing his own people", even if he does regard them as subhuman). But the supply of convicts being sent to the front from Kiev is getting low, and the locals have been fighting back with some success. Russia is still sitting tight without overtly intervening (despite considerable domestic pressure to do so) as I expected. Perhaps as many as 100,000 Ukrainians have fled to Russia under the Kiev junta's bombing. Amazing scrub of a major conflict from the main-sewer media.

[Jul04'14] 10 days after signing the South stream pipeline deal with Russia (see pipeline above), Austria's largest bank crashes (stock) after bad debts were revealed. No other banks have bad debts, and this has absolutely nothing to do with the pipeline deal. Also the Bulgarian bank runs were completely unrelated. Honest...

[Jul09,'14] I resent the fact that my tax dollars support this and this. The bombing targets are low-market-value humans regarded as untermenschen by the hi-tech bombers, who regard themselves as a supremacist master race (based on a genetic fantasy). Humanity has had more than enough of the toxic untermenschen/ethnic-cleansing/master-race thing -- compare, Ukraine. Never ends well. Of course not one tiny peep out of the main sewer media about how all the Palestinians ended up being crammed into the Gaza concentration camp in the first place. As far the MSM is concerned, it has been that way since time began (which would be about 65 years ago). Here is Diane Sawyer shamelessly illustrating 'rockets raining down on Israel' using footage of buildings reduced to rubble by Israeli bombing of Gaza! I was disgusted but not surprised to see the Obama and the Obama administration slavishly supporting it.

[Jul13,'14] After more than 1000 bombing runs, missile launches, and 500 tank shells aimed at a densely packed concentration camp (maybe 600 tons of bombs), there almost 200 dead, mostly women, children, old people, and disabled people. This massascre is OK with the MSM because the dead and injured are only untermenschen. In fact, they call this "exemplary restraint". The rest of the world is getting pretty fed up. [Jul 19 update: the senate unamimously passes a resolution supporting the Israeli assault a few days after sending an additional half a billion of US tax dollars to Israel.]

[Jul19,'14] MH17 has provided cover for the Gaza assault (Gaza death toll up to 350, BBC ignores 15,000 demonstrators in London) as well as the failed Kiev assault on Eastern Ukraine. I watched/read a few minutes of the amazing MSM propaganda feed about MH17 etc (teevee, lies of our NY Times). Amazing discipline gentlemen, but I'm hoping less people are watching/reading/believing it than 10 years ago. But I don't know. Iraq1's 1991 "incubators" and Iraq2's 2003 "nukes" worked even though they were eventually exposed. But Assad's 2013 "chemical weapons" didn't work. Maybe the same here! The disifo is flying thickly.

[Jul21,'14] The deliberate massacre continues -- the Palestinian death toll is about 600, mostly civilians including 100 children, while the Israeli death toll is 2 civilians and 25 soldiers. What a bunch of servile spaniels the US Congress worms look like in the eyes of the world, unanimously supporting the utterly pointless and criminal apartheid state operation. This is starting to look more like the last war in Lebanon, which Israel actually lost. Don't forget the large natural gas field off the coast of Gaza. Rational people are tiring of the cheap KKK imitation and are beginning to see the reality.

[Jul22,'14] The official USian MH17 story seems to be partially disintegrating. The official story now is that the CIA relies for its intelligence on youtube and twitter (why to we have to pay so much for that??!). They don't bother with things like this. Uh-huh. I wonder if any of the confused robots watching teevee have noticed the incredible idiocy of this turn. Probably not. After the Syria debacle, this will further reduce USian street credibility. Here is discussion in the Ukrainian parliament between the Svoboda party and the Party of Regions after somebody said the other party was killing their own citizens. See I got it off youtube, just like the CIA, so it must be true :-}.

[Jul26,'14] With the massacre death toll over 1000 with almost 250 of that children, the cowardly IDF lifts the press gag order and the Israeli press admits Hamas had nothing to do with killing the three Israelis. According to Gallup, USians over 50 support Israel, but it was refreshing to read that 51% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 said Israel's attacks were unjustified (versus 24% saying they were justified). These are people who no longer get their news from the mainstream sewer and will be less surprised by the coming storm. Meanwhile, the ongoing demonization of Russia truly looks more and more like a US attack on the EU (Nuland's "f*ck to EU"). There was a hallucinatory statement today from General Dempsey about the situation. And this plan seems a little like the start of WWIII. Cameron is poodling and the EU is acting limply. The only thing that could cause a change of tack would be mass unrest, esp. in the EU. But little sign of that so far. The collapse of the Yats government doesn't seem to have had any effect on the propaganda barrage.

[Aug11,'14] Back on the grid. Things seem to have gone further downhill. It looks like we are approaching seriously dangerous unpredictable territory with reinflated stock/housing bubbles, the petrodollar/gas pipeline Ukraine war, the second Libyan catastrophe, the third Iraq catastrophe. The US/UK is provoking a firestorm in the middle of Europe. New world disorder. Bummer.

[Aug14,'14] "American colleagues at the Pentagon told me, unequivocally, that the US and the UK never would allow European-Soviet relations to develop to such a degree that they would challenge the US/UK’s political, economic or military primacy and hegemony on the European continent. Such a development will be prevented by all necessary means, if necessary by provoking a war in central Europe" -- top NATO admiral from a northern European country told to Christof Lehmann. The current plan -- a continuation of US policies in Central American since 1980 -- is to use proxy armies (here, Islamic jihadis and neo nazis). This is not likely to be a winning strategy in the long run for preserving dollar hegemony -- that is the plan where US banks print electronic dollars and people in other parts of the world give US-ians actual stuff in return.

[Aug16,'14] The lapdog UK press' non-existent 'destruction of a Russian military [sic] convoy' disinfo is outed today. Unfortunately, the disinfo already did its dirty work. Good work, UK presstitute Shaun Walker (for the Guardian) for your service to the man.

[Aug21'14] The Russian aid shipment still held up at the Russia/Ukraine border today. Also today, Scotland Yard warns us that downloading the terrorist beheading video is itself terrorism. Booga booga. ISIS is everywhere! (and they have a big supply of those orange Abu Ghraib jump suits). I'm surprised they didn't say that downloading the video would give you Ebola! Maybe the anti-download order is because the video is getting a reputation for probably being a fake. [Update: Aug26: now even the MSM admits the video is probably a fake -- though they remain sure Foley is dead. Note this means that Bill Gardner at the Telegraph who watched it must be a terr'ist... Also, over the past few weeks, Saudi has beheaded more than 20 people; no video at 6, but you can watch it on youtube without fear of GCHQ coming after you]. The multiple fake bin Laden videos, equally certified as authentic by the FBI, are a precedent. As always, one must ask, who benefits. And never mind those Gaza beheadings. Getting beheaded by bombs doesn't count as terrorism (tho I suppose downloading a video of people getting beheaded by 'morally upstanding' bombs and missiles will soon be 'terrorism' at this rate...)

[Aug24,'14] The Izzy's are back to beheading people in the Gaza concentration camp that they've been running since 1948 (8 killed today). Here is a hit on an appartment block (with a 10 minute warning) that wounded 22 people. Imagine how CNNBBC would report the reverse: "Hamas gave Israelis living in an apartment block 10 minutes to evacuate before demolishing the building with a missile, wounding 22 Israelis". In other news, Holland had announced that it will not release the full info of the flight data and voice recorders of MH17 (it hasn't released any at all). It's all to protect the women and children. Collaborators! Kiev has not released any information on the communications between the Kiev air traffic controllers and MH17 -- probably because 'women and children' and because 'Russia did it', I'm sure. Right.

[Aug28,'14] As 'b' at moon of alabama put it, the wheels seem to be coming off of neocon Victoria 'f*** the EU' Nuland's new Ukraine as the Kiev junta militias suffer large losses in their attempted invasion of eastern Ukraine. It is true that by lobbing artillery shells into the middle of eastern Ukrainian towns, the Kiev neo nazis have successfully gotten the townspeople to cower in bombed-out basements with little water. But the junta appears to be losing the war, and the conscripts (cannon fodder) seem to be getting restless (demonstrations in eastern Ukraine against conscription). Over the last few days, Merkel has (finally!) made some conciliatory statements, as reduced Russian trade following tit-for-tat sanctions has begun to bite hard (the EU *is* f***ed after all!). If Germans don't want to bail out Greeks, I find it hard to imagine they will be enthusiastic about bailing out a bunch of loser Kiev neo nazi's. But as the weather grows colder, and Ukraine's gas debt to Russia continues to go unpaid, the gas situation could deteriorate beyond mere threats, to actual withholding of EU gas passing through Ukraine ('bail us out, or else' -- the EU gets 30% of its gas from Russia and about half of that goes through Ukraine). The ridiculous and sad end result of this vicious US and UK cold-war/death-squad meddling half way around the globe (imagine Russia fomenting a 'color revolution' in Mexican southern California) is merely a destroyed Ukraine. All for nothing. This utterly stoopid US/UK policy has also forced a more rapid flight from the petrodollar; Gazprom began accepting payments for oil in rubles and yuan today. Talk about an own goal! I wonder what the British lecturer in Ukraine who initially supported Euromaidan thinks now (he hasn't said since he left). The pizza will probably get even worse... But if a casual observer like me could have guessed this outcome many months ago, it is hard to believe that German politicians couldn't have predicted it also. But they went along with the US/UK coup anyway. Why? Some kind of blackmail? Meanwhile back in the US, the latest Obomber Mr-Peace-Prize plan is to bomb *both* sides in Syria (one of them armed by the US). I truly hope that one day, that loser gets hauled into war crimes court. As many of us predicted from before he was even elected (see 2007 above), he turned out to be a complete scam -- fully as bad as Bush. There is no real difference between the parties; they are strictly for show/distraction/blue-pill-ing.

[Aug31'14] Some serious blue-pilling from the silly EU/UK politicians today! Kiev needs more cash (so they can buy more Russian tanks from Hungary?!). 10,000 EU troops are going to invade Donetsk under British lead, says the Daily Mail. The British leading the French and Germans on behalf of the neo nazis?! Really?! Look at the "best rated" comments at the bottom of that article. I'm hoping predictions of a cold winter here are wrong. And, go Dmitri!

[Sep03'14] The world didn't "stumble into WWI"; WWI was carefully planned for over a decade. People say we could now "stumble into WWIII". Again, if it happens, it won't be a stumble (but it will be a bigger fall...).

[Sep04,'14] Pepe, on the Kiev IMF bailout: "Money for nothing, [and your] tanks for free" :-} . See also the latest excellently detailed John Helmer article on how the billions-strong IMF Ukraine bailout has been/is being offshored. There is twenty times as much useful information there as in the average Guardian screed on Ukraine (plus, John is a lot funnier).

[Sep09'14] Perhaps the Nuland comment was mistranslated to EU'ians as a reflexive verb...

[Sep16,'14] While the EU weenies were busy taking their silly pills, the Obama regime has managed to get a majority of its citizens in favor of bombing Syria. This would be the same Syria that Americans were against bombing last year, when the fake chemical weapons attack story fizzled. This time, all it took was two fake beheadings. Bernays would be proud. Americans are easy lays. Given that Russia shot down the two 'test missiles' fired across the Mediterranean the last time the US/UK was planning to bomb Syria, you'd think there would be some adult discussion about this. The insanity of what is presented as 'reality' is making it difficult for me to concentrate on doing anything productive. And then there is Iraq. It's absolutely disgusting that 2/3 of the US population supports air strikes that have started once again on Iraq -- a country that the US and UK visited a literal holocaust upon; 2 to 3 million Iraqis have *already* been killed by the US and UK including half a million children. When people can't directly see the bloody results of their decisions, they are absolute filth. Bernays would truly be proud.

[Sep19,'14] The "no" vote in Scotland happened because old people (over 55) got cold feet. Even with younger people getting older, I think "yes" will win in another 5 or 10 years.

[Sep20,'14] In their latest vote, the Ukrainian people have decisively turned against the war fomented by the US/UK/EU, and against the nazi parties partially in control in Kiev. Would have been better to have come to this conclusion *before* shelling the industrial base of the country, revving up ethnic hatred between two Russian dialects, and handing what's left of the country over to oligarchs and nazis, but better late than never. [Update Sept23: Ruslana, the symbol of Maidan, publicly changes her mind after a visit to Donetsk]. Thankfully, Danish EU weenie Anders "Fog of war" Rasmussen is retiring. Good riddance. In other news, the John Kerry thing made new chemical weapons accusations against Syria. What a pathetic excuse for a hairdo that guy is! I suppose he figured that since the cheap beheading psyop videos worked this time (Cockney rhyming slang pun: "are you guys having a Turkish?" :-} ), why not try the chemical weapons canard for the nth time? Woaaa, it's a DIFFERENT CHEMICAL this time! We're seriously impressed. Meanwhile in France, the 'wildly popular' Francois Hollande thing announced that lapdog France will carry out air strikes for the US (they began bombing Sept 19), but not in Syria, because that would 'strengthen Assad'. Hollande must be trying to duplicate the wonderful success of helping the Americans turn Libya into a dreadful shambles a few years ago. Isn't the 'left' great? So much better than the 'right'. We need a machine that can project weaponized-volume laughter at these t$rds.

[Sep28,'14] The pusillanimous British MPs just voted for yet more remote control bombing of muslim humans in their latest crusade by 524 to 43. Over 500 cowardly MP's caved! Didn't they used to say "off with *their* heads" in this part of the world? Blair, Cameron, Labour, Conservative, what's the difference? For real decisions of real import (deals with Saudi), there isn't any difference at all. The US and their UK lapdogs are now bombing Syrian oil wells and Iraqi grain silos, and Samantha Power is 'responsibly protecting' the 'good jihadis' who will overthrow Assad. Remember when the US/UK hitech-bombed (carbon fiber 'electrical short-inducing' bombs) Iraqi power stations and sewer plants back in the day? We have reached a situation where in Chris Martenson's words, reality doesn't have a place at the table. That's not entirely true. The weird thing is that there are still large chunks of reality-based reasoning. For example buildings are made and they stand up for 20 or more years; airplanes (including warplanes) are made and they don't fall out of the sky. To do this, you have to deal with basic physics. There is no negotiation. Either there is enough lift or not. The hard thing to take in is that this reality-based behavior coexists with a whole other part of modern life that is *utterly* non-reality-based, such as printing more debt to 'stimulate the economy', so that aquifers can be pumped down at 10 times replenishment rate, or planning for massive economic growth and a larger population -- more than a new UK of people in the world every year -- when we have already reached world peak per capita energy use by the people that are already here, and given that it is transparently impossible to go on building another UK's worth of roads, buildings, farms, power generation, copper wires, sewers, computers, cars etc every year, forever. We have come to a point in history where it will not be cyclical. When the water and oil and fish and soil run out, you can't print water and oil and fish and soil. This time is really different. A flimsy transition town 3D printer won't be able to print those things either (e.g., it's literally made out of oil). The level of blue-pill fantasy -- across the entire political spectrum -- absolutely stuns me. And now, we are criminally bombing Syrian oil refineries, grain silos, and blowing off people's limbs and heads in random Syrian villages -- to protect our mercenaries! Disgusting!

[Oct01,'14] Obama is a war criminal. In response to protests at increased civilian deaths in its latest attacks, the Obama regime "has acknowledged that any strikes in Syria and Iraq are exempt from its standards applied to other aerial attacks". Those would be the 'standards' that have resulted in the deaths of *millions* of muslim civilians? Meanwhile, the US/UK militaries are basically bombing Syrian government infrastructure (buildings, grain silos, oil refineries). All the little American and British Eichmanns who approved this in response to some cheap faked videos will not be looked upon kindly in the fullness of time (I'm afraid that might turn out to be just a decade or two hence).

[Oct09,'14] Not much to cheer about these days. Russian oil interests in Iraq are not that different from US oil interests in Iraq. I was desperately looked around for something... then I found this one cheery report: angry Argentinians stoned Jeremy Clarkson's Porsche because of its inflammatory license plate, and he had to run/lumber away and abandon it on the road. :-} Light for my dark day!

[Nov04,'14] William Engdahl suggests here that the drop in oil prices was engineered by Kerry and Saudi in a move to destabilize Iran, Syria, and ultimately Russia. The fact that the US has been systematically bombing Syrian oil infrastructure/refineries seems mildly consistent with Engdahl's ideas. If true, it certainly sounds like a dangerous game given that we are already near the minimum oil price required to keep finance of tight oil plays in play. Throw in some additional possibly unintended demand destruction after an additional possibly unintended crash (oil prices crashed in 2008, too), and who knows what might happen in two years! This is no way to run an industrial civilization. But I'm quite sure it will continue to 'work' for another 15 years. After that, I'm (a lot) less sanguine.

[Dec13,'14] The new deals Russia has made with China (oil, gas) and now Turkey (pipeline) in response US coup in Ukraine and Russian sanctions have turned into a bit of an 'own goal' -- they probably wouldn't have happened without the attack from the west and the western sabotage of the Russian pipelines (Ukraine and 'southern' route). Meanwhile, oil prices remain 40% below where they were at the beginning of the year, which is hurting oil producing countries which includes the US. In the 'US' part of the blog, I had guessed that the current oil glut ('glut' is hardly the correct word for a 1-2% oversupply of the lifeblood of industrial civilization, but whatever) might have initially been triggered by the decline in Chinese oil demand which began early in 2014. The causal sequence since the turn of the century seems roughly something like the following. First, crude oil (i.e., high energy return on energy investment oil) flattened and then peaked in 2005 (or 2008), forcing investment in lower energy return on energy investment fuels, which resulted in higher prices, which people paid for a while. The 2008 meltdown was initiated by a failure of transfer of risk of subprime loans; banks had initially made a lot of money by offering loans to people who clearly wouldn't be able to continue paying them, but then the risk transfer system blew up. It was 'fixed' by public bailouts of banks and by reducing interest rates to zero. The recession/depression that began in 2008 saw people in the US/UK/EU driving less; but the slack was taken up by new Chinese drivers. The zero interest rates in turn impoverished conservative savers, but also conservative institutional investors like pension funds who went looking for more yield in more risky investments like junk bonds, which increasingly involved oil (I unknowingly helped this along by paying extra into my pension). Now, perhaps partly as a result of China cracking down on driving (I saw it beginning to happen already in 2012 in Beijing) along with the Chinese -- like the US/UK/EU before them -- not being able to afford to drive more, the risk part of 'junk' bonds was expressed, and banks are right now passing around the subprime fracking hot potatos. The fracking companies are still producing oil from just-fracked wells to try to pay the bills, but have instantly choked off all investment in new ones. The fascist US/EU/UK financial press chortles about all the pain experienced by oil producers like Russia and Venezuela. But if oil prices stay low for a year or two, we could easily get another 2008-like crash in some poorly lit back alley of the banking system. Not good, since the average person has not yet recovered from 2008. Since fracked wells decline so rapidly, if there is no immediate economic crash, prices should go up 'naturally' in a year or two. But that's a very long time for our short look-ahead disaster capitalism system. It is relatively easy to get oil prices to go back up immediately. For example, the US could start another war around where the oil is. Here's hoping oil prices go back up soon. Go, Chinese drivers -- now in the world's largest economy! Drive now while you still can! Ghawar is almost empty!

[Dec27,'14] For the past few weeks, I have had a more-than-usual unsettled feeling about the world economy. Given that my short-term predictive power is less than zero, this probably means now is the time to BTFD. But here goes. After a year of highly unwise US/NATO moves against Russia, Russia and China (and the rest of the world) are finally responding with rational, forward-looking, self-defensive moves, as documented by Pepe Escobar, who argues that we are seeing the beginnings of a major rearrangement of world politics and trade. Unsettling. China continues to build an entire USA's worth of coal electric generation capacity every few years and plans to continue doing this for the next decade. Unsettling because of the dizzying speed of change, not to mention peak low-EROEI coal, or CO2 (I make no moral judgement about UE/EU/UK energy use vs. Chinese energy use -- the laptop upon which I type was partly made using Chinese coal and transported to the California using Chinese bunker oil in 2011). The normally self-confident Dmitri Orlov seemed unsettled a week and half ago, writing about unloved central bankers. The indirect, somewhat lagging indicator of US's central bank policy that I often look at -- the monetary BASE seems to indicate that the Fed has stopped indirect money injections into banks in October [update Dec30: now restarted!?], despite the lack of any feeling of recovery for regular people (i.e., not including those who can buy and sell 3 million dollars houses, expensive cars, and invest in 'art'). The spread between the cost of debt (=money) in the US versus emerging markets is spiking rapidly up. But I always underestimate how high a 'wall of worry' can be climbed. Last week, the rouble, though still depressed, recovered from the plunge Dmitri was talking about, perhaps as a result of Russia's central bank spiking interest rates (or the simply the result of vulture capital sloshing around the world's financial toilet). And oil, which has dropped over 40% starting in July 2014, from the rough $100 plateau it had been on since 2011, has stopped plummetting, at least for this week. Retail and food sales (plotted on the same graph as BASE Fed graph above) have continued up (partly from increased food prices, but now well above where they were before the 2008 crash). So I'm hoping that my feeling will pass and that another 2008-like crash is not about to start. After all, the operation of the entire world is far too complex for one brain to really understand, much less properly emotionally assess. The big picture, of which I am *far* less uncertain about, is that there is still 15 years of (moderately) happy motoring and happy gridding left. Even if there is a 2008-like crash in 2016, there will be another 'recovery' after it. Germany -- the world-leading paragon of renewable energy development -- after prematurely closing down several nuclear plants, commissioned more lignite (hi CO2 output) coal-generating capacity in the past five years than its current total usable wind and solar to date, in order to keep its grid up (oh those dastardly 'coal lobbyists' -- i.e., the population that wants a non-nuke-powered grid to always be up, even though wind and solar turn off for part of every day). So I will carry on ignoring the obvious signs of almost certain disaster beginning in about 15 years (energy/climate/oceans/soil/minerals/water/food) as a result of our catastrophic end-of-days attempt to continue increasing our numbers and maintaining growth (1 million more vehicles every week after scrapping, 1.4 million new people a week after deaths, 87% of increase in primary energy in 2014 from oil, natural gas, and coal) -- and continue re-reading my quantum mechanics textbooks :-}

[Dec31,'14] Well, the drooping BASE that I was blabbering on about in the last post just jumped up big time (Fed graph here), suggesting that the Fed may have gotten back to another round of easing. If so, this would be the start of the 5th round since 2008/2009, judging by the four previous sharp upward deflections in BASE since then. The latest jump (1/4 of a trillion dollars) was the largest ever jump in the 2 week reporting cycle since the banking mess began in 2008 (for scale, from 2000 to 2008, BASE averaged about 3/4 of trillion dollars, *in total*, and the average 2 week increase across 1985-2008 was 1/40 trillion dollars). Meanwhile, the economic confidence of the average US-ian just went *up* to a new high (Gallup data here since the last recession. If you look at the price of oil in the previous Fed graph link (plotted in blue, along with BASE in red), you can see that the last time oil plummetted like this, it was followed in a few months by chaos in the banking system (not considered to be causal last time). It is worth noting that this time, other commodities such as iron ore have also almost halved in price (iron ore didn't do that in 2008) as China slows in the face of overbuilt ore supply, to levels below break-even cost for a number of iron ore producers. Last time, the banking chaos was 'fixed' by former Goldman Sach employee turned gov't advisor Hank Paulson threatening the Congress into off-loading his banker cronies' risky bets to the public, and zeroing interest rates for bankers, but not for the public (because the risk of crony bankers f***ing up is less?! -- I don't think so). Perhaps the new boost is a preemptive response to the oil price swoon. However, it is important to keep in mind that over the next few decades as the entire humanized earth rides over peak net energy of all kinds, peak soil and water, etc, it is going to be increasingly difficult to use past performance as a predictor of future results; it really *will* really be different this time. So taking a contrarian view of all of this (e.g., assuming that whatever people are smoking, it has allowed them to accurately see into the future :-} ), maybe this means: don't worry, be happy -- new year!

[Jan02,'15] I listened to and read some things by Susan Krumdieck (for example, this video), which made me feel a little less schizophrenic. I also enjoyed this very informative VICE video on how sewage is currently treated in New York :-}

[Jan11,'15] It looks like Gladio II (cf. 1980 Bologna train station) has resumed (small event in Germany today) to keep peoples' eyes off the ball. Here are some aspects of 'the ball'. Oil price remain well below the break-even price for a lot of fracked tight oil. One explanation for the low price (e.g., Ron Patterson) is that the increase in demand/usage grew just slightly slower than was expected in 2014, relative to still-slightly-increasing 'all liquids' supply (however much low EROEI stuff that may contain). This was explained in part by lower Chinese demand increases starting in 2014. But a 'glut' consisting of a 1% oversupply of something that is burned at the rate of 1000 barrels a *second* wouldn't normally justify a precipitous 50% drop in its price, so these small supply/demand variations must be being amplified by the broken/criminal/parasitic banking/derivatives/swaps 'industry' (Chris Cook). There is also the fact that quantitative easing 'eased' right around the time oil started to go down (Art Berman). In any case, oil companies are desperately trying to dump their subprime leases (e.g., undrilled leases that require oil at over $100-$120 *and* interest rates near zero for capital expenditures) in order to raise cash to keep up their debt service, and they are madly retiring drilling rigs (as in halving the number of drilling rigs in one month). A few months of this will result in the loss of 250,000 (high-paying) jobs in 8 states as frackers begin to go bankrupt (40% of the jobs created in the US since 2009 were in energy, not to mention the closer-to-home fact that pensions have invested in these fracked oil junk bonds). The bad debt here has been estimated to be as much as $2 trillion, perhaps twice the size of the real estate subprime mess that was the trigger for 2008. This is easily enough real money to blow up derivatives/hedging/insurance in a similar manner to what happened in 2008. This could lead to another mini-depression, which could suppress demand enough to keep oil low for a while. But I *do* agree with Art Berman and Ron Patterson (to use Ron's analogy) that while all the parasitic banker games can cause the water skier (oil prices) to temporarily sway left and right, the boat pulling the water skier (supply/demand) eventually calls the shots. Oil price is unlikely to stay down for very long (i.e., more than a year) when people burn the stuff at 1000 barrels/sec and when the companies that are developing the new supplies -- which deplete faster than older wells and which require more energy/money input to return the same amount of envery -- are rapidly going bankrupt. Another problem was to distract people from the fact that EU-ian's have been drifting away from supporting the US/UK (plus EU administration) anti-Russian sanctions and pro-Ukrainian-Nazi military, as the south of Europe and Ukraine continue to implode financially, and as sanctions impact German and French industry. No wonder Germany and France needed their Gladio II terror booster shots! The Charlie event was just two days after France suggested dropping Russian sanctions on 5 Jan 2014. Germany (Sigmar Gabriel, Frank-Walter Steinmeier) had said something similar over the past few weeks as well. Now all that 'foolish talk' (including recognizing Palestine) is completely out of the news and the zombified French public has staggered out into the squares for mindless 'two minutes of hate' marches to protest the French 9/11. They all conveniently forgot about France leading the charge to destroy Libya. Ukraine? where's that? [Jan13 update: now complete with a 'Saddam statue' Potemkin moment!] [Jan18 update: and a Photoshop out the immodest women (e.g., Merkel) moment.] [Jan20 update: and now Hollande's popularity skyrockets, just like Bush after the 9/11 disaster]

[Jan19,'15] A sad day today as major warfare has resumed in Ukraine with an attack by Poroshenko's nearly bankrupt US/NATO/UK/EU-supported Kiev puppet government on the Donetsk region.

[Jan23,'15] It's all about smoothing (Bob Turner was always against smoothing, but we really need some now :-} ). The current oil price swoon (more than a 50% reduction in price) is due in good part to a 'glut' of only 1-2%. In the old days, it wouldn't have been possible to pile in and out of fracking quite as quickly, from both an equipment point of view as well as a banking/finance/debt point of view. By becoming more 'agile' in some *but not all* aspects of the oil business, the free market is causing ever more precipitous declines and rises. One thing in the oil business that *is* smoothed is the output of a field. It can be drilled and fracked relatively quickly, but then the production can't be instantly shut off. Of course, a drilled well can be capped for later, but in the context of wild price fluctuations, this is hard to do when the bankers are knocking on the door. Because the oil can't be gotten out instantly, and because it's hard to store large quantities of it, and because drillers (and Saudi!) can't afford to cap wells, the price can go very far down with a trivial oversupply. The second thing that usually doesn't change rapidly is demand. We are now essentially at 'peak all liquids', running around 85 million barrels a day (different definitions of what is included in 'all'). Therefore, it's likely that there we will see several more spikes and plunges because of these relatively trivial over- and under-supplies due to different smoothing in production, banking/finance/debt versus demand. The current spikes/plunges have been caused by relatively trivial over- and undersupply. But in 15 years (2030), there will be a chronic undersupply that will be at least 20% rather than a mere 1 or 2%. That's when the real problems for industrial civilization start. The problems come of age in another 15 years after that (2045) when chronic undersupply will probably be more like 50% (or 70%) and there will be another another 1-2 billion people around using declining oil to grow food and drive around. Any vaguely rational person looking at ths situation -- which has been known in basic outline for two to three *decades* -- should be seriously alarmed.

[Jan27,'15] The pigmen seem to see things the same way I do. Here is one describing his friends: "I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway" -- former hedge fund director Robert Johnson speaking at Davos. Perhaps some of them are realizing just how close to the bottom of the barrel the world is. Take the contrast between Saudi, which has on the order of 3000 oil wells, and produces about 2,000 to 3,000 barrels per day *per well*, and the US, where there are over 500,000 wells (yes, that's 150x as many wells as in Saudi) that produce about 10 barrels per day *per well*. This is because 400,000 of those wells in the US are 'stripper' wells -- which are basically retired wells that need horse head pumps ('real' oil wells don't need pumps) -- which produce an average of less than 2 barrels a day per well. That's bottom of the barrel. When the water has swept out that last bits of the oil from the Saudi 'oil sponge' formations like Ghawar, things will likely change more rapidly than I would prefer. On the positive side, we have at least one more decade of 'happy motoring' left before the S begins to HTF.

[Jan31,'15] The Kiev Ukrainian attack on Donetsk does not seem to be going well. The Ukraine Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Viktor Muzhenko, went on teevee to say the Russian invasion was a hoax. That is, the US/EU justification for sanctions on Russia is a hoax. Meanwhile, the conscripts (cannon fodder) that the Kiev NATO junta wants to send into the grinder to try to kill their countrymen and women and children are fleeing... to the Russian side. Real war is gruesome. There are always these fake pious warnings on videos that show what it actually looks like, but no pious warnings from the politicians or the people who call for blood from their safe harbours.

[Feb08,'15] A few days ago, Steve McNamara, the head of the London Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, said that the "zealots of the cycling world" are the "ISIS of London". Kewl. I presume that means that those cyclists must now be armed with US weapons and supported by the CIA. Now *that* should change the balance of power! (I've cycled in London twice a day for 8 years). But seriously, this would all change if the rules were changed to be like they are in Germany or other places. If a cyclist hits a pedestrian, it's always the cyclist's fault; if a car hits a pedestrian or a cyclist, it's always the car's fault. It changes the balance of power without heavy weaponry. Meanwhile, net increase in global light vehicles (new minus vehicles scrapped) remains at more than one million additional vehicles per week along with almost one a half million new people this week (again births minus deaths). The US has just shut down over 1/4 of their drilling rigs in a few months (image from Ron Patteron's peakoilbarrel.com here). What could possibly go wrong?

[Feb20,'15] Another female cyclist was killed by a lorry (=truck) today at a poorly designed death trap junction in London today. This is the fourth cyclist killed in less than 2 months during which a total of 29 people were killed by motorized vehicles, most of the fatalities pedestrians (it's actually more dangerous to walk than cycle in London because for a given distance, you are exposed to angry/inattentive car drivers for a longer time). Thankfully, Scotland Yard has been motivated to reintroduce its "highway safety operation" which included ticketing cyclists for "cycling on footpaths and jumping red lights" (those would be the survivors) and drivers for "driving without insurance and not wearing a seatbelt" (to protect them when they're driving over cyclists?). That should fix the problem! Health and safety, don't you know? It's tough cycling in London in the time of peak oil. If I see a lorry/truck approaching, I often jump up on the pavement (=sidewalk). Go ahead and ticket me Scotland Yard (tho I always walk my bike on the sidewalk). The chance of me killing a pedestrian is nil and I get to live to see another day. Cyclists make up a full quarter of the morning rush hour, while freight makes up only slightly more than a quarter. Clearly, in the time of peak oil, current laws rate freight as more important than human lives. Who the terr'ist now? British car culture still essentially views cyclists as utter vermin. The attitudes of drivers here sometimes remind me of the US in the early 1960's.

[Mar02,'15] Despite getting older and somewhat wiser, I never ceased to be amazed that "it always works": the Charlie Hebdo event has now raised Francois Holland's popularity from an abysmal 8% before the event to 50% now! I would say, "whatever", except that in the current tenuous economic environment (you'd never know it from bull-to-bear indices which are at record levels), the easily duped western public is unknowingly much more dangerously close to the possibility of falling into all-out fascism -- triggered by a big economic dip and a few more 'events' -- than it has been in a long time. It will be increasingly critical now to able to de-fuse/ignore the next (and the next after that, and the next after the next) false flag events if we are to make it past peak net energy mostly in one piece. One thing to keep in mind is that if things turn really sour, our *recovery* from fascism will not be able to look forward to a perfect exponential increase in oil and natural gas usage like what happened last time in the 1950's to put things back together. People will have to get wiser (or not). It's possible! For example, the Russians have wised up: even the 'liberals' avoided blaming the Kremlin in the lastest provocation.

[Mar10,'15] The CIA-Maidan-coup/IMF/banker/Nuland/F-the-EU plan for Ukraine suffered a decisive defeat over the past month. I wonder what the sociopaths will think up next. If it's like Iraq and Libya (and all the rest), they will merely leave behind the hollowed-out, scorched, smoking wreckage of dead bodies, ruined lives and buildings, a ruined economy, inflamed ethnic hatreds, and then point their bloodstained noses and fingers elsewhere. Though it has rarely happened, I can always dream that eventually, somewhere, there will be a day of reckoning. I wonder what Paul Vickers (uauk) thinks of the situation now. He cheered at the beginning (maybe partly forced?), but fell completely silent on the topic over the past 6 months. The lethal game isn't over. Yesterday, the US began military exercises in the Black Sea.

[Mar13,'15] Zerohedge had a useful explanatory byline for "IMG approves $17.5 billion Ukraine bailout", namely, Greek pensioners are now paying the IMF, which is paying Kiev, which is paying Gazprom, which is paying Putin. Just imagine if Nuland hadn't created the vicious current reality of Nulandistan in the first place. The money could have been used so more productively, with so much less toxic ethnic hatred now permanently cooked into the stew. The western reporting on the situation is as scary as it is childish (et tu, Steve from Virginia?! -- perhaps once central always central [intel]). Russia has responded that they have working nukes and that the US shouldn't engineer coups and then parade around 10 feet from the Russian border. Hopefully, somebody will get the Strange/Breedlove's under control before something really bad happens. Hey, we've got some oceans to empty, some acquifers to contaminate, and half of the remaining harder-to-get fossil fuel to deplete -- real work to do that a useless WWIII would get in the way of!

[Mar26,'15] Russian/US war games along the Russian border continue after the recent temporary public absence of Putin. Poroshenko dismisses Kolomoiskii. But Kolomoiskii has more than $1 billion dollars, is the employer of the US vice president's son, Hunter Biden, and seems nonplussed as he raises a private army to march to Kiev. I hope Paul Craig Roberts is wrong. Eric Zuesse says: it's worrying when even Stephen Cohen is alarmed :-/ Looks like an all out invasion of Yemen (150,000 Saudi troops) has begun, after the Houthis finally managed to toss out the US supported puppet. The Mighty Wurlizter has an entirely different spin on this than it had in Ukraine, where a US supported puppet was installed by a coup. I must admit that I find it hard to imagine an effective invasion of Saudi troops. Now, beheading, that I could see (oh, I forgot, friends don't mention friends' little fetishes).

[Mar29,'15] As I read Raul Ilargi Meijer's daily summaries of the thoughts of economists and businessmen in Automatic Earth, I remain stunned at how willfully blind they can be. It's obvious that economic and business (and human biological) growth requires increased net energy. By considering the past century of growth over a long enough time window to average out the noise (e.g., 25 years), it's pretty clear that 'economic' growth, human population growth, food growth, water growth, etc, have all remained on approximately the same curve as the growth of available net energy. All those other growths obviously depend directly on energy (one barrel of oil equals one year of hard labor by a human; Americans currently access 25 barrels per capita -- 25 twenty-four-seven servants per person). If the *energy cost* of getting a given amount of net energy goes up, how could this *possibly* be ignored when considering future economic growth? Or population/food growth? Or growth in laying concrete? Yet with all our immense summed knowledge, most people still have the luxury of ignoring it. Primitive people *didn't* ignore this! After cultural memories of having run into hard limits, every person, every joe sixpack, intimately understood the relation between energy and starvation and growth and stasis. That's what infanticide is about. That, perhaps, is what Easter Island statues were for (before the islanders were mostly wiped out by European diseases and slave traders -- correcting the wrong Easter Island story I previously parroted above, in 2005, from Jared Diamond). Sometimes I have wondered whether things could have turned out differently if the caches of stored energy we found hadn't been so concentrated, so that resulting growth wasn't as rapid. But I think the problem is not just the rate of growth but also the mere continuity of it. Our supercharged-by-science industrial civilization has simply only seen growth in net energy availability and energy usage. Also, by increasing the physical connectedness of the globe, our system has been able to massively smooth out the bumps that would have been experienced by a small neolithic tribe. The world has experienced 250 hundred years of continuous growth, from a population of 0.8 billion people in 1765 to almost 10 times that many people (7.3 billion) today. The most striking spike in the rate of growth occurs between 1910 and 1960, a graph taken from this post by Javier (his climate stuff is hopelessly bad, though he is absolutely correct that a new glaciation would also be real bad). This almost exactly coincides with the exponential increase in oil usage. An important point he makes is that this happened *before* the green revolution). As total net energy has flattened over the past decade and readies its decline, many things that assume continuous growth will break (and are already breaking). For example, our current money system wasn't designed to work in the context of de-growth. But the noise on most of the Matrix-like internet sounds the same as the last year, even as energy growth flattens before everybody's eyes in plain sight! China reached peak coal in 2014! (that's sooner than even I expected :-} N.B.: world peak coal probably not until around 2025). I now think that most of internet talk will never change, all the way down, until we have 'grown' our way all the way back under one billion :-} It *is* worrisome to consider is that as energy constriction starts to reduce global commerce and connectedness (perhaps this sudden drop in manufacturers' orders is reflecting the beginning of another major contraction), it will also reduce the amount of spatial smoothing, leading to more spiky local outcomes. I hope I don't end up in the middle of a spike in 15 years; but I have no idea of how to surely avoid that!

[Apr08,'15] I just came across this interview with William Catton. I got to it from a short article on Ron Patterson's blog here. Catton wrote a prescient book in the mid 70's (finally published in 1980) on human overshoot. At the time of the interview, he was was 82 (he died in January of this year). Despite the topic, I was highly impressed at his young and cheery attitude toward life! I need to learn a thing or two from him! Collapse now and avoid the rush! (archdruid)

[Apr10,'15] According to the EIA blogged here by Brad Plumer, world carbon emission apparently went flat in 2014, while economic growth apparently continued at 3%. Keeping in mind that these numbers are often revised, some have concluded that we have finally decoupled growth from energy. I have mixed feelings about that since I think that humanity is well into a huge overshoot, and the last thing we need is more growth. If we have saved some fossil fuel that would have otherwise been wasted, that's good. But back to the numbers. This could reflect the sudden flattening of oil and coal usage by the Chinese in 2014 -- in the case of oil, probably the main cause of the (temporary) oil price swoon. This could be something like the sudden flattening of vehicle miles driven in the US that happened 8 years ago 2008. If you ask most people, I would bet they would *not* say that they felt like they experienced 3% growth in 2014. Real wages have gone down in the US and the number of people 'not in the workforce' has continued up, even as 'employment' numbers have somehow simultaneously increased. Certainly the bank accounts of some pigmen have grown, and some of that counts as 'growth'. I think the most likely reality is that the growth number was somewhat overestimated (or was biased by bulging pigmen bank accounts), and the fossil fuel use was somewhat underestimated (e.g., Beijing air didn't seem to be getting better). It won't be possible to know if we are in a new steady-state-like regime for at least a few years (at least until a flat top appears in the Mauna Loa graphs here -- which it hasn't yet -- for a few years). But as Kurt Cobb has suggested, perhaps this means that we are getting close to the end of growth, and not from want of trying to keep it going. Now if we could just stop adding 2 entire California's worth of new people to the finite Earth every year! If you look at the graphs of predicted temperature curves from the Plumer vox article, you can see the 4 IPCC scenarios: RCP-8.5, RCP-6, RCP-4.5 and RCP-2.6. Since the IPCC has used the ridiculously cornucopian cargo-cult-like remaining available fossil fuel estimates of the EIA (same guys Plumer was referencing), IPCC calls the RCP 2.6 pathway the "strong mitigation" pathway. I think that that pathway only slightly underestimates how much net energy positive fossil fuel we will manage to find and use. "Strong mitigation" will happen, even as everybody tries their hardest to not mitigate. Thus, though I think human-induced climate change is bad, I think two California's a year of additional mouths to feed/clothe/sewer/house/electrify/vehicle/iPhone together with not enough energy/food/water/soil/fish will arrive first as a much bigger problem. 3D printers won't help. Then after that hits, we will have to deal with additional, mostly bad effects of climate change. All the more reason to begin detailed, eyes-open planning for degrowth now! Just because we are heading toward collapse, there is *no* reason not to do it with grace and style :-}

[Apr17,'15] A great quote from Albert Einstein: "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 violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble 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."

[May08,'15] Most of the workers in Saudi oil fields are Yemenese. What could possibly go wrong?

[May09,'15] "If the Brits want to be governed and gutted by the same people who raised the number of foodbanks the way they have, by a factor of seven in five years, and who fabricated the pretense of a functioning economy by blowing the biggest bubble in British history in selling off London town to monopoly money printing Chinese, Russian expat oligarchs and other such impeccable and blameless world citizens, if that’s what the Brits want, then let them have it." -- from Raul Ilargi Meijer.

[May21,'15] It's nice to report good news sometime! Secretary of State, John Kerry seems to have changed tack on Ukraine: "If indeed President Poroshenko is advocating an engagement in a forceful effort at this time [an attack on Donbass or Crimea], we would strongly urge him to think twice not to engage in that kind of activity, that that would put Minsk in serious jeopardy." (toward the bottom of a May 12 press conference transcribed here). Nuland seems to have been sidelined, and Obama seems to be withdrawing support from the increasingly psychotic Nazi junta in Kiev. The US/UK coup in Ukraine seems to be grinding down, and Ukraine is heading for default. Nuland's work is done -- another country utterly trashed for the forseeable future (cf. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen) by 'democracy'. Now she's on to Macedonia.

[May24,'15] Reading this article by F. William Engdahl prompted me to look back at how I was thinking ten years ago (in 2004) after the saturation coverage at the time of the Russian assault in Beslan that killed over 300 of the hostages, including almost 200 children. I don't think I quite had it right back then. Of course, I still think the killing was horrible; but at the time, I didn't fully understand the context or the involvement of Saudi, NATO, and the US vs. Russia. Despite one's best efforts at objectivity, one can never underestimate how much one's mind can be controlled. As hard as I try, I feel I am often 5 years behind what is actually happening at the present moment. Closer to the present, two weeks ago, it appears that the Macedonain police successfully interrupted a coup attempt manned by former Kosovo Liberation Army members who were likely planning to execute a Macedonian Maidan (shooting at both sides). The Macedonian government held off this particular assault, but no doubt there are several more already in the works. It's easier to break things than to make things, so time is on the side of the psychotics. Look at the utter shambles made of Syria. And speaking of 'not getting it right', look at what the 'left' said about Syria when the when the chips were down a few years ago (Tariq Aziz etc). Few have admitted how badly they were hoodwinked.

[Jul02,'15] Uber is currently valued at $50 billion. This year Uber spent about $1 billion but it took in only about $0.5 billion ($0.5 billion loss). I know, this is all just because the company is not big enough yet :-} In other 'tech' news, digital blackmail company Yelp (threaten businessess with bad reviews if they don't advertise on your 'service' -- similar to the way Google charges to put your link higher) has fallen on hard times (not really, just 10% stock drop) after not finding a buyer.

[Jul04,'15] My first instinct on the Greek vote is to say, Go "No"! Walk like an Icelander! Here is a summary in that vein from Steve Waldman. For a different view, see William Engdahl) on "what stinks" about Varoufakis. Though Engdahl comments on execrable Greek oligarchs and Syriza's turning down of the Russian deal, he doesn't mention the role of austerity in bailing out French and German banks' subprime, or Goldman Sachs in setting up the new 'debt intruments' (most oligarchs in the world are not Greek), though he surely must know. Five months ago, Wayne Madsen noted Varoufakis' connections with Soros, and described him as a 'Soros Trojan horse'. I don't much trust my ability to understand what is going on with such a torrent of disinfo; I am often several years behind the curve. But this doesn't mean that all the actors know what they are doing either. Mistakes get made. For reference, Greece GDP is 2% of the EU. One thing to consider is that many other potential banker victims (Portugal, Spain, Italy) will be eyeing the proceedings; and together, they are a lot more than 2% of the EU. Thus, the ongoing events have potential for amplification. Just having a vote at all could alter the psychology of the situation. Engdahl is arguing that Syriza is like Obama -- something that lets off steam but doesn't change anything substantial, and in fact furthers the banker crackdown on poorer people. Maybe so. Perhaps a "No" vote will just set up an example of upcoming destruction for the other southerners to be afraid of, especially since a lot of destruction of Greece by austerity has already happened! (graph from FT's Robin Wigglesworth). I will have to wait to see what happens next since I can't guess. While Greece etc was happening, the Chinese stock market has declined 25% in a week, a loss which is equivalent to 10x the Greek GDP, and which bankrupted many a Chinese street vendor and hairdresser (80-90% of Chinese stock market is retail investors). I imagine the money guys are getting that cannibalistic feeling again.

[Jul05,'15] Examining how my expectations failed, the Greek vote was "No" but by a much larger margin than I was expecting. Then Varoufakis immediately resigns after a "No" vote (what he wanted, and on his own referendum), which I was definitely not expecting. It suggests that he will be replaced by a technocrat more willing to continue the gutting of Greece that begun way back in 2010. This *does* lean in favor of the Engdahl view of Varoufakis as an Obama-like just-let-off-steam kind of guy. It is also telling that the stock markets and currency markets were remarkably calm, which is also not what I was expecting (which is why I would be such a poor businessman). It remains to see what will happen in the shadow banking system, and there is very little public information about it, despite it manipulating sums much larger than the ones referred to on teevee (tens of trillions of euro derivatives vs. the total Greek debt of about a third of a trillion). None of my uncertainty about predicting the outcome of distracting 'noise', however, makes me any less confident of assessments of the coming 'long emergency' energy crisis -- and the guess that it will hit big before climate change does. This is similar to the 'global warming hiatus', which climate scientists regard as several-year-duration 'noise' -- patently obvious from looking at locally noisy (i.e., in the 2-5 year range) historical temperature records.

[Jul06,'15] I just read the 2012 book "The Energy of Slaves" by Andrew Nikiforuk. It is a detailed, morose, and well written book (historical first half is better), which really opened my eyes to the early history of thinking about fossil fuel resource depletion. I was already familiar :-} with the basic facts of current depletion, and the human (slave) equivalent of a barrel of oil a decade ago. In rough outline, Nikiforuk shows how fossil fuels initially substituted for human slaves, then ballooned up to the level now of more than 400 effective slaves per person in the US, transforming daily, life, housing, and work. But I *was* surprised to see how many writers there were -- at the very beginning of the exponential ramp up in energy usage around 1900 -- that almost completely understood the problem of eventual fossil fuel energy depletion! In some respects, those people were even *more* aware of it than 'enlightened' people today because they had better memories of what it was like when human slaves performed those functions, and more awareness of the contrast with how much more raw power fossil fuels afforded. In this context, Hubbert's 1956 presentation to the American Petroleum Institute was simply a restatement of what was known from the beginning of the oil age. Looking coldly at the simple math of population and energy, it's clear that the only humane way we could have avoided the sh!tstorm on the way in about 15 years would have been to have stabilized population *at the very beginning* of the energy ramp up! The problem with doing it later is that if people have a lot less kids -- N.B. they are already doing that! -- you end up with too many old people, because humans live a long time. On the other hand, a more 'balanced' reduction in population only happens with mass starvation, epidemics, or nuclear war. To merely *stabilize* the population now at 7 billion would require an increased death rate equivalent to that during WWI, the 'Spanish' flu (the biggie), Stalin, WWII, and Mao, all put together, every year, for decades. As I said above (8 years ago), discussing the very same thing, bummer. None of this is to dispute the rapid rate of improvement in computer software and technology. For example, look at Chris Urmson demonstrating Google self-driving cars. Totally amazing. None of the individual parts of the system are new (laser range finders, computer-based video object recognition and tracking, dynamics simulation, AI), but faster CPU's and better software have made it possible to actually make this all work quite well in real time. Self-driving cars -- and self-driving tanks and cop cars -- will probably be ready for the market within a decade -- just in time for the determined downslope in world oil production. I agree with Roger Dupere in the comments: "Interesting to see all the work involved in creating a driver-less car. I wonder why we don’t spend as much energy to create a society that doesn’t need as many cars. We need to rethink our cities so that fewer people would use cars, cities created with the priority on peoples instead of cars." And it's ironic to see Chris Urmson opening his talk by dissing public transportation (example of a blind guy) because it's constraining, but then going on later in the talk to describe people making decisions (drivers) as the problem -- a problem that can be fixed by taking away their ability to make decisions. Or as another commentator said: "I'm sorry Dave, I can't take you to McDonalds".

[Jul07,'15] A day later, it's pretty clear that the referendum was basically a psychological operation 'morality tale' to distract attention from the previous and continuing gutting of regular people in Greece (and Italy and Spain and Germany). It will probably get even worse from here. This will be on top of the effects of 5 years of misdirected austerity, which since 2010, has shrunk Greek GDP by 25%, raised unemployment to 25%, and raised youth unemployment to 50% -- all while the lucky Greeks that still have a job put in the longest working hours of people in any country of the EU. In 2010, just before the first Greek bailout, and before the Greek economy cratered, French banks managed to transfer their huge exposure to Greece to the German, Italian, and Spanish publics. And Goldman Sachs, who arranged the complex derivative deals in 2010 that concealed the extent of the bad loans that were to be made to Greece, profitted well from that bit of "God's work". The Greek pensioners will be effectively be paying for those executive bonuses for the next 10 years. By the time the pensioners have done all their paying, they will have had not the slightest idea of where all the money went to. Average people don't understand how banks simply create the money for a loan out of the void at the moment the loan is given, and then are given the right to charge interest for the created money. Similarly, I doubt even Greek pensioners standing in line to get 50 euros from the ATM could actually believe how their pension haircut will essentially be paying for a Goldman Sachs executive salary several years ago. As Henry Ford said: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning". Sadly, the operations on Greece look like a somewhat larger version of the economic terrorism described in detail by John Perkins' 2004 "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". Now, after an initial debt strangulation of average Greeks by bankers has resulted in an unexpectedly strong "No" from the people, it might be time for a Greek 'Maidan' (i.e., a coup; see also here). I wish I could rekindle the admiration for humans I had in my youth. But I haven't arrived at the last stage, when I don't wish!

[Jul08,'15] Two days later, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that Tsipras was not expecting the "No" vote when Syriza called for the referendum! A Trojan horse after all. Tsipras just agreed today to another round of austerity in return for a 3-year bailout, just a day after the vote to *NOT* do this clearly supports the Trojan horse assessment. No means Yes. Paul Craig Roberts has a clear suggestion of what happens next here. The EU is forced to back down a bit on looting the south (N.B.: mainly as a result of the "No" vote!) in order to avoid any Greek turn toward Russia so that the "f... the EU" US will be able to maintain pressure on Russia via NATO. Tsipras will heed (has already heeded) the implied Maidan/assassination threat and will take the deal. Since 2007, Greece has reduced its oil consumption by 1/3. This will likely continue, whether or not Greece withdraws from the Euro.

[Jul12,'15] Well, the prediction in the prev post looks utterly wrong, just a few days later! Germany and Finland seem to be setting up a Greek exit, which will probably be disastrous for the Greek 99%. This, after Tsipras proposed something to the Germans that was actually worse for Greece than what had just been turned down at the polls. It is worth remembering that Europeans fought *two* giant, catastrophic wars in the 20th century, with only 23 years between them.

[Jul13,'15] Well, yet another day-old prediction in the prev post itself looks utterly wrong :-} The new 'deal' is that the Germans will get $50 billion worth of Greek banks, Greek airports, Greek airplanes, Greek islands in return for more Greek pension cuts (already cut 50%), and salaries paid with IOU's. Those Europeans sure know how to live it up! (e.g., German and French banks whose 2010 Greek loans were bailed out by European taxpayers -- that is, most of the bailout went to banks, not the Greek people). I can't imagine other 'Europeans' will have even the slightest second thoughts about the benefits of a European monetary union (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Irish debts are roughly $1 trillion each). The $100 billion euro Greek problem debt of 2010 has been turned by austerity into a $325 billion euro Greek problem debt today ($250 billion to Troika, $75 billion to banks). Go bankers! It is hard to imagine the knicker twist that derivatives must be in, in order to push eurocrats into demanding such humiliation! What a blizzard of psyops! Each additional week of Troika strangulation of Greek banks increases the needed (bank!) bailout by $10 billion. Southern Europe is turning into Latin American disaster capitalism shock doctrine.

[Jul14,'15] 84% of the world population subsists on $20 per day ($7,300/year). One way they do that is by using *a lot* less energy per capita (e.g., 1/10 or 1/20 as much as EU/UK/US). A 'demographic transition' based on bringing that 84% up partway to the per capita energy usage of the EU/UK, the US, or Canada (top of the heap because it's also extra cold there) would require sucking out most the remaining EROEI positive fossil on the Earth fuel in less than two decades -- which is not even physically possible. So this won't happen in a decade, or even two decades, which is why the population will probably reach 9 billion before it starts going down. We are outgassing CO2 at a rate comparable to the rate at which CO2 is estimated to have outgassed from the Siberian traps, which together with outgassed sulfur (which thankfully we are *not* outgassing in a big way), caused all life on Earth to almost go extinct at the end of the Permian. Ironically, one of the mechanisms of CO2 production at the end of the Permian was probably sudden burning of buried fossil fuels due to heat from flood volcanism. This is beginning to sound more and more like the sci fi novels I read as a teenager. Bummer. But on the bright side, the CO2 outgassing at the end of the Permian lasted for 10 or 100 times longer than we could manage even if the most conucopian estimates of remaining fossil fuels were true (they aren't). Always look on the bright side of life! Also, outright worldwide energy shortages are still at least 15 years away.

[Jul14b,'15] There are now more Syrian refugees (11 million) than Palestinian refugees.

[Jul19,'15] When a private bank makes a loan (say, to Greece), it simply creates the credit-money electronically, from the void (clearly described here in this PDF, straight from the horse's mouth -- the Bank of England). Then afterwards, it may or may not have to juggle 'reserves' according to 'requirements', but these can change on a whim. For example, European banks are now levered above something like 30 to 1 (i.e., an effective 'reserve' 'requirement' of 3%). This means that a small amount of investments gone bad (say in Greece, which is 2.5% GDP of total EU) can cause bankruptcy (which literally meant breaking the banker's table where the bankers did their deals). Creating money/debt costs the bank virtually nothing (woohoo, they have to maintain an electronic money database). They are supposed to be paid for picking borrowers that are likely to pay it back, but they demand collateral (for example, your house) to ensure this. Then the borrower has to repay the loan to the bank with interest. When the principle gets paid back to the bank, the created money effectively disappears back into the void from whence it came. But the bank gets to keep the interest. Since banks don't create any extra money for the interest payments, this system requires constant expansion (getting money to pay the interest from money/debt creation elsewhere). This system obviously won't work in the steady state. If we don't take this ability -- to create money from the void and then charge interest for it -- away from private banks, energy descent will be even worse than it has to be. (N.B.: a contraction is even worse than steady state). As Steve Ludlum just said "The banks have a death grip on us and our life-support system". I'm embarrassed it took me so long to understand how this simple scam works. The issuance of our medium of exchange needs to be taken out of private hands, for the betterment of humanity. Money doesn't talk, it swears (Bob Dylan) -- as explained colorfully in No plan B by Reverse Engineer :-} The lack of understanding of the direct connection between energy and growth is breathtaking. Money doesn't cause growth -- energy does. Fixing the money system won't fix growth (we are near the end of growth); but it could make life past the end of growth a little more pleasant.

[Jul21,'15] Why is the EU failing? Here is the best overall summary I have read: a great piece by Nicole Foss at the Automatic Earth. The first problem is that keeping the EU intact would require continuing transfers between members. This is even apparent to BloombergView (in a piece by Eric Beinhocker). In the US, 28 states sent 2.3% of their GDP to the other 22 states (this is because, e.g., the average Connecticut citizen makes almost $40K a year while the average Mississipian makes just over $20K a year -- almost the difference between Germany and Greece). By contrast, the German contribution to the EU budgets was 0.2% of its GDP and Greece received 0.2% of its GDP. Northern Europeans don't realize how much money flows between US states, but more importantly, would never agree to something vaguely similar (e.g., True Finns), even if it would help them to compete against the US in the long run. The problem is, that contrary to received opinion, Europeans are simply too rayciss' for them to imagine being able to do the same thing! More racist than Americans! It is unlikely that EU integration will increase; rather, as the world energy/economy contraction continues, things are very likely to come further apart. There are likely to be additional episodes of "When German and French banks -- and Goldman Sachs -- attack". The primary underlying cause of current situation was the enormous bubble in subprime Greek credit emitted by shadow banking system of Germany and France -- not something under any direct control of the EU. There is a mind-boggling competition for rich people's money between left Greek politicians trying to collect unpaid Greek taxes and shadow banks: having the Greek government collecting taxes from deadbeat Greek shipping tycoons actually cuts into shadow bank profits -- so the banks are *against* it! This is an outright war on regular people by banks -- N.B.: including war on middle-class German citizens, who have seen their purchasing power erode! This is partly because the previous 2010 tranche of failing private shadow banking loans are already being bailed out by the publics of Germany, France, Italy, Greece. The big banks are basically pulling a 'Latin America' -- on Germans, not just Greeks! In the worse-off periphery, continuing austerity in Greece will have no positive effect. It will further degrade the local economy, is already prompting businesses to move out, and is a sure road to explicit default and Grexit. The trust between EU countries, which itself wasn't enough to allow true integration, is in the process of being irreparably damaged. What a gigantic clusterf...! (except for those with the cash to snap up a few islands).

[Jul28,'15] Overall number check-in: world GDP is $50 trillion, while nominal derivatives and swaps are now up to $1.5 quadrillion (i.e., $1500 trillion, 30 times world GDP, or $225K per person, where the average income is about $10K per year). This is 20% higher than 2008. The amount of leverage in financial markets is insane. For example, Amazon announced it made a profit for one quarter of about $90 million (0.4% of sales). This promptly resulted in its market cap jumping by $40 *billion* in one day -- that is, 500x the (unusual!) quarterly profit. The next day, the market cap went down $20 billion. Amazon is a business that pays to ship mostly very small products around in large vehicles using fossil fuel. The amount of oil left doesn't change very quickly (a little less than half left). We need *more* smoothing, not less smoothing for the end of the age of moar!

[Aug06,'15] As a result of low oil prices, vehicle miles driven has decisively headed back up in the US, in the UK, and the EU (well, not Greece). Americans drive a total of about half a light year every year. Though things like record low home ownership rates in the US suggest that people in the US are being slowly priced out of housing, they are clearly not yet being priced out of driving more (perhaps its a consequence of them being priced out of nearby housing!). Meanwhile, in the US, also as a result of these very same low oil prices (more than 50% drop), oil *production* has started to decline as a result of the 'creative destruction' of light tight oil companies. This is because the moderate increases in light tight oil fracking output combined with a sudden drop-off in oil usage by China in mid 2014, which combined with a flattening of industrial oil usage to create a small (1-1.5%) surplus in oil production. Starting in 2016, we are likely to see a tense race between declining oil production as energy return on energy investment gets evenr worse, and declining oil use as a result of economic contraction. Given that a 1% under- or over-supply of oil causes ridiculously wild oil price swings, which then causes wild fluctuations in driving, we are likely to be in for a bumpy ride over the next 5 to 10 years. And this is even before the decisive world downslope begins in earnest. The downslope is not likely to be any less bumpy.

[Aug11,'15] I'm just reading Olaf Stapledon's 1937 Star Maker now. It makes me think back once again to E.M. Forster's 1909 The Machine Stops in relation to teevee and the internet and amazon, or the English propaganda lead-up to WWI and Edward Bernays in relation to the American election and Google (an advertising company). The fact that 100 years ago, people could so clearly forsee where things were going suggests a dreary inevitability of human technological and social development. I never understood this as a young man; I would have dismissed it as mistake in understanding philosophy, history, or evolutionary biology. Even the iconic flying car -- something I used to make fun of above -- will finally happen in a fashion. True, it won't be the original idea of a 1950's rocket-powered multi-ton steel-tail-fin car (like the ones I would fly around by hand when I was a litle boy) somehow magically levitated, but rather a light, lithium-battery-powered drone helicopter. This doesn't mean that anything people (boys) think of must happen. Thought is strongly contrained by actual physics. There will be no warp drives, or human colonies on Mars. But many of our monkey dreams of 1900 have come true, powered by fossil fuels. Though cheap supplies are gone, less fruitful deposits remain to power another decade or two of the realization of monkey dreams. Then there will be the power downslope, itself also already visible to the some people 100 years ago. Amazing.

[Aug16,'15] Brian Davey has a clear description of alternate/complementary explanations for current stagnation here. The general conclusion is quite sensible: you can't have growth without growth in net energy. Over time, as net energy decreases as a proportion of total energy extracted, a large and larger proportion of gross extracted energy is lost. All the major measures of energy production (oil production, coal production, natural gas production, nuclear energy production) only cite energy produced without also trying to measure or mention how much energy was used during production -- fair enough, because this is much harder to calculate. It can be indirectly estimated in various ways, for example, using money. For example, Steve Kopits has calculated capital expenditure per barrel of oil, which was approximately flat at $5/barrel from 1985 to 2000, but then began to linearly increase at 10% per year, reaching almost $20/barrel in 2015. Capital expenditure is a very rough approximation to the critical information we want, which is *energy* expenditure -- e.g., in real, fixed, physical, barrels-of-oil units, not adjustable, printable money/debt/etc units) for each barrel of oil produced. Over time, as that number goes up, there is less net energy available for each nominal barrel of oil or ton of coal 'produced'. A lot of discussion of peak oil focusses on peak raw crude oil production (which happened 5 or 10 years ago), or on peak crude plus condensate [e.g., pentane] (which is happening now) or on peak 'all liquids' production (which will probably happen in another few years). But we could already be at peak *net energy* of 'all liquids' production, because a larger and larger amount of energy is gradually going into producing each barrel. And things like ethanol is included in 'all liquids' as a real barrel, despite providing essentially *zero* net energy (since it has to be distilled). In this context, it may not be surprising that growth has stalled. Growth requires energy. Banks can print money (every time they make a loan, by simply changing an entry in a database); but that doesn't 'print' real energy; retrieving real net energy uses up other chunks of real net energy. Per capita energy use in the US/UK/EU has only been 'uncoupled from growth' via displacing the site of energy use elsewhere (e.g., China). This is not a good argument that economic growth can occur without net energy growth. The open question is: how fast will the future downslope in *net energy* be? In 2004, I was expecting that peak oil (crude+condensate) would be around 2008. In 2008, production was 74 million barrels/day. But after a dip to 73 million barrels/day in 2009, as light tight oil fracking came online, we have gotten back up to almost 78 million barrels/day crude+condensate production, almost 5% higher than what I thought would be the peak (I was a lot more accurate than the EIA, which in 2004 predicted we would now be over 100 million barrels/day, which was off by almost 30%). I enjoy being surprised this way because it means life will be better than I was expecting :-}

[Aug21,'15] "Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French President ... would drop a racist line, to flirt with his electorate, but by bombing Libya he sent more immigrants to France than any left-winger would." -- Israel Shamir.

[Aug24,'15] Box cutter on the TGV? Yeah right. Why not use a banana (Monty Python)? Je suis C I A.

[Aug28,'15] China has been dumping treasuries -- $0.21 trillion, some via Belgium since the beginning of the year, with $0.11 trillion of that in just that last 2 weeks (N.B.: "trillion") -- because it needs money. This has had little visible effect on US bonds, so far, which probably means that the Fed has been 'monetizing' this -- that is, buying them using Fed credit/money, which comes out of the void. Perhaps indirect knowledge of the danger of this going on for a long time this explains some of the recent bout of fear and loathing in stock markets. China selling treasuries can be described as 'reverse QE'. QE (quantitative easing) is giving additional credit money to banks (created out of the void by the Fed), which is *on top of* those banks' already-granted power to create credit money from the void when they make a loan. The problem was that banks couldn't find enough people to give their created money to, and thus weren't able to stay solvent via interest payments on their created-from-the-void money, because they made so many bad loans. QE is now considered 'normal'. It has resulted in a catastrophic transfer of wealth to already-ultra-rich people. So far, the amount of US treasuries sold is not yet huge. Total outstanding treasuries are around $30 trillion, so China's selling is still under 1% of this. China's total holdings are 3% of the total. But Saudi, the biggest holder of sovereign wealth fund assets (not in the treasuries total above), has also begun selling dollars to cover domestic spending because of lowered revenue from lower oil prices. Adding together various oil exporters, there is the potential for dumping several trillion dollars of the $7 trillion in sovereign wealth funds to raise local cash (for scale, the market capitalization of Apple plus Google plus Microsoft plus Facebook plus Amazon is about $2 trillion). This could have a strong destabilizing effect (cf., a 2% oversupply of oil from fracking combined with demand destruction, halved the price of oil).

[Aug31,'15] Oil just lurched upward from $38 to $48 in two days. Who knows what caused this. I certainly don't expect oil prices to be this low in a year, but I have been wrong in the short term many times before. But I'm very sure about the long term. The long term is that energy return on energy investment for fossil fuels is inexorably going down, and that this will affect everthing made from fossil fuels, including renewable energy devices -- just because EROEI is hard to calculate doesn't mean it can be ignored in the long term! Completely off topic, I must admit a bit of schadenfreude in hearing about trophy Picassos being suddenly dumped onto the market to raise cash... [Update: a few days later, oil flops down almost as much as recent uptick. I find the ridiculously wild fluctuations (20%) in the price of such a critical, continuously used, and fungible substance, which is used worldwide, and whose worldwide reserves are well researched, and which change slowly a telling indictment of how price is determined by economic systems. Who in their right mind really thinks that the value of oil to humans could possibly change by 20% in one hour??]

[Sep05,'15] A lot of refugees in the latest psyops news are from Iraq, Libya, Syria (4 million), and Yemen. Perhaps UK and EU-ians -- right *and* 'left' -- who went along with the US-backed destruction of these countries now need to step up and take some in, eh? Or send them to the US? (which hasn't taken any!) Instead, UK and EU-ians fly their monkey flags and Cameron monkey suggests more poodle bombing. *That* should help the refugee problem, ya think?

[Sep11,'15] The UK has poodled away more than 12 million pounds staking out the Ecuadoran embassy in London. What an incredible waste of money! The British don't like Americans; but then they do what the Americans want them to do -- like bombing countries where the EU/UK refugees are coming from (maybe because they were previously bombed/destabilized/droned/CIAda'ed???). However, now that Russian cavalry is finally coming, the game may be beginning to change.

[Sep12,'15] An unnamed British general said about the possibility of Corbyn being elected, and then trying to scrap Trident: "The Army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that. You can’t put a maverick in charge of a country’s security". This rattled even a few Conservatives: right-wing Tory Daniel Hannan said "We're not Bolivia for God's sake".

[Sep25,'15] If there are any extra VW's around London, I would give anything to substitute them and their perfectly decent diesel engines for the nightmare NO2-belching people-killer atrocities they have in London black taxis. The NO2 pollution coming out of London black taxis is probably 100x the supposedly dastardly VW's. It's criminal (and truly deadly) that those filthy engines are still on the streets (but I actually like everything else about them, including the drivers, I *just* hate the engines!).

[Oct08,'15] What a difference a month makes in Syria! This particular week, it's looking like 'game over' for the US/UK/Saudi/Turkey/Is-supported mercenaries/jihadis/death-squads that have made a shambles of the country and killed a quarter of a million humans over the past few years (shame on the 'lefties' who supported these freaks after getting fooled by the fake poison gas false-flag). Russia did essentially nothing when the US/UK/EU destroyed Libya. They then initially did almost nothing in Syria. But then, in Sept 2013, as the 'bomb Syria' rhetoric suddenly escalated in the US, the Russians shot down two possibly false flag 'test' missiles travelling eastward over the Mediterranean to points unknown, and the US (and UK) congress worms suddenly backed off. And the Russians pushed back after the US/Is coup in Kiev. Now, two years later, the situation has rapidly evolved (Hizbollah/Iran/Russia action, staged 'refugee crisis'. I have no idea of what is really going on, but I don't have a good feeling about what comes next. There is a mind boggling brew of Russian and US and Israeli and Syrian jets, not to mention drones and cruise missiles, all flying in the same Syrian air space (tho maybe only 10 Russian jets total so far). And perhaps Iran and Hizbollah on the ground. And nuclear armed submarines in the water. And the US transporting a lot of military hardware to İncirlik. It's hard to imagine the neocon crazies will suddenly give up now. However, this is a rather different situation than the US 'turkey shooting' Iraqi civilians fleeing down an exposed desert road in passenger cars, or French jets strafing apartment blocks in Sirte. Now there is some modern military hardware to contend with that can accurately shoot back (incoming at Mach 2-3, 25 feet above the ground). Some have speculated that even a small incident would be one way to fix the broken price of post-peak crude oil. But since the oil price swoon was probably due in part to 'conservation by other means' (people not being able to afford oil), that is hardly a long term solution. I suppose I'm old fashioned always trying to think about long term solutions...

[Oct11,'15] The US has withdrawn its most modern but vulnerable (fast ocean skimming missiles, jamming) aircraft carrier from the Persian gulf. We are living in a dangerous time that combines changing military situations with economic stress (e.g., biggest reverse repo spike ever in Sept).

[Oct28,'15] The latest embarrassingly bad plan to try to rescue the failing US/UK/Saudi/Is-supported 'orange revolution' regime-change plan in Syria has been unveiled -- US soldiers as human shields. How the worm turns!

[Nov05,'15] Masked anti-fascist protesters in London today ended up outside the building where Jennifer Lawrence was introducing the premier of the latest rehash of the Hunger Games, in an ironic juxtaposition of Hollywood fantasy and reality.

[Nov14,'15] France has been foremost in promoting the American idea that Bashar al-Assad is the main problem in Syria. Now France is supposedly attacked by ISIS TM, created by the US to try to overthrow Assad, and the very ISIS being effectively attacked by the Russians. However, never forget the underlying psychology of the human monkey. The main effect of a (possibly a false flag) public attack is that it makes people feel insecure. It really doesn't matter much which side the attackers are portrayed to be on, or are actually on (compare 9/11 and Saddam). Insecurity makes people rally around the government, no matter what it decides to do. The 'leftist' government has just declared martial law, and will probably organize an attack on *Assad*. This works like clockwork every time, like Goebbels explained so many years ago. As with the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo, this disastrous security failure of Hollande will cause his popularity to skyrocket again (!), and we will see both 'left' and 'right' clamouring for a police state. The 'left' will be tripping over itself in an attempt to out-fascist and out-anti-immigrant the 'right'. In an interesting inversion of the original Gladio, which was used to keep communists out of power in Europe, the effect this time may be to keep Le Pen out of power. The magic bomb-proof passport (Syrian this time) has already been found (never leave home with your Kalashnikov without also bringing your passport, man...). Like 9/11, the final story has been set in stone in the first day. 'Left' vs. 'right' is irrelevant -- here is my annotation of event annotation of 'rightist' Bush's approval polls (collected by Stuart Eugene Thiel). Instead of "Dance Monkeys, Dance", it's "Scare Monkeys, Scare". The movement is worldwide. For example, in San Diego, hours-long school lockdowns have become so common (in all cases, caused by pranks or tests), that the San Diego unified school district has ordered overpriced port-a-potties (circular seats on a 5-gallon plastic bucket) for every classroom. When I was a child in school, the crime/murder rate was a lot *higher* than now, but school lockdowns with storm troopers parading around with assault rifles was something we only saw in dystopian movies. Now, kids grow up with almost full blown fascism and think it's completely normal. We are on track to a privatized global police state -- see Peter Phillips, "Twenty-First-Century Fascism" (PDF here), to go along with power down. I hope there is another way. Maybe Peter Phillips' suggestion of negotiating with the 0.001% will work.

[Nov16,'15] Twice as many people died on the Russian plane in Sinai, yet the main-sewer media doesn't scream "Je Suis Metrojet A321". And in Syria, about as many people have been killed *every day* for the past *5 years* as were just tragically killed in Paris -- as the result of policies carried out by the US, France, UK, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi etc., arming and re-purposing crazies to overthrow Assad -- after their great 'success' in Libya. But their victims are low-market-value humans that nobody in the main-sewer media cries for. They don't count as tragedies. The French are now supposedly bombing the very people they were supporting last week. Right. They probably had to be careful to avoid the US helicopters escorting the ISIL guys [Update Nov20: pic in prev link is probably a fake since the same pic has appeared elsewhere w/o the helicopter -- see e.g. here -- my bad. Here is the actual 'escorting' clip referred to in the article; the image of the helicopter is too blurry to be determinate]. I guess it's no surprise the French already hit a hospital after only a small number of sorties. And yet, once again, a 'multi-center' drill was being conducted on the very day of an attack: "Le hasard a fait, pour vous dire, c'est que le matin au SAMU de Paris, avait été organisé un exercice sur des attentats multisites. Donc on était préparés." -- Patrick Pelloux, a physician and chairman of French trade union for EMT personnel, who incidentally also happens to be a film actor. [Update Nov19: "One such exercise was held on Friday morning, the day of the latest terror attacks. In a twist of fate, the simulated emergency was a mass shooting" -- Dr. Mathieu Raux, emergency room chief at the Pitié-Salpetrière hospital in Paris. That would be the third such 'twist of fate' after NY and London.]

[Nov18,'15] France has now smote the terr'ists by bombing "a sports stadium, a museum, an equestrian centre and several administration buildings". I'm sure that will make the terr'ists think twice next time (those would be the muscular white guys shooting out of the black Mercedes?). Meanwhile, 'scientists' have created a new viris, dubbed SARS 2.0, by combining coronaviruses from mice and Chinese bats. It was designed to be more contagious for humans. This was done, of course, to 'help' us, because we can now develop vaccines for diseases that don't yet exist (oh right, now they do exist). If you give humans too much free energy, they really start flying their freak flags.

[Nov19,'15] I have only now finally appreciated the mechanism behind why antibotics are fed and injected into animals bred for human food (this accounts for the majority of antibiotic use in the world). I knew that animals grew about 10% faster on the same food input when this is done. But the mechanism is probably simply that intestinal bacteria, which can be a substantial fraction of fecal weight, are inhibited from metabolizing biomolecules in feed, allowing an animal to get fatter quicker on less food. The expenses are, of course, great. But they are postponed and transferred to other people, and so therefore injected antibiotics and antibiotics in animal feed are a 'no-brainer' (unfortunately, this is literal) for a business. The expenses are generalized antibiotic resistance, unintended human consumption of antibiotics, and disturbed animal gastrointestinal tracts. The gains are slightly less expensive meat. In our sad fascist/corporate world, the only way this can be reversed is if animal gut bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, undoing the faster weight gain. It is not enough that this practice has disabled legitimate human uses for antibiotics (blood infections, traumatic wounds, post-surgical infections). And if the experience with non-GMO and GMO crops is an indicator, even when GMO crops are less productive than cheaper non-GMO alternatives (e.g., insect resistance to introduced GMO toxins, or weed resistance to herbicides tolerated by GMO plants, or merely lower productivity of GMO organisms), they are still preferred for a while over more productive and less expensive non-GMO organisms.

[Nov20,'15] A new development in Syria in the past few days is that Russia has located and bombed 500 ISIS/ISIL's oil tanker trucks exporting stolen Syrian oil (to Israel and other places). The zerohedge article is written as if the US wasn't aware of the magnitude of these oil exports (though it does make a good point that some banks must have records of $0.4 billion in oil purchases). It is hard to believe that giant columns of tanker trucks in the desert could possibly have escaped the gaze of current US spy satellites. More likely is that the oil export operation is closely analogous to al-CIAdah black-revenue-generating heroin-trade operations in Afghanistan -- a venerable modus operandi dating back to the Vietnam war. The estimated amounts of ISIS/ISIL oil are probably not big enough to account for much of the current oil 'glut' that has crashed oil prices. The current oil 'glut' is a 1-2% oversupply; but $0.4 billion a year of stolen Syrian oil would be only something like 1/30 of 1% of our daily oil (though note that there is a parallel contraband oil export trade in Iraq). However, the majority legitimate output of devastated Iraq (exporting madly to raise cash) has moved up 1 million barrels a day over the past year -- from about 3 million barrels a day in early 2014 to 4 million barrels a day by mid-2015; this is almost 1% of world usage, and along with reduced Chinese demand and a debt-fueled fracking bubble (now popping), that production *has* contributed substantially to the oil 'glut'. In any case, interfering with al-CIAdah is a bold move by Russia. But I don't want to overestimate my understanding of the situation given the usual daily blizzard of disinfo. In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the British Ambassador: "Persian oil ... is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it's ours." The division of spoils is slightly different now, but now that king of oilfields in Saudi is finally running out, the game must change.

[Nov23,'15] The Cameron poodle is standing tall with plans to (1) bomb Syria (who isn't these days? not to mention there are *definitely* not enough Syrian refugees on the move...), (2) cut local police, and then (3) make 10,000 storm troopers available to pile into the streets and lock down the 'citizens' *after* the next terr'ist event. But with so much noise, this UK chest beating was hardly audible.

[Nov24,'15] A US-made F16 from Turkey shot down a Russian jet just inside the Syria border, probably in the 'no-fly' zone *within* Syria that Turkey recently established. This is not far from the location where Syria shot down a Turkish F-4 reconaissance plane four years ago. This may have been a retaliation for Russia bombing the ISIS/ISIL contraband oil export business last week inside Syria (the super-obvious miles of tanker trucks the US satellites somehow couldn't find), which was almost certainly traveling out of Syria through Turkey -- both the oil and the money (via Erdogan's son). But Turkey also buys a lot of oil from Russia, imports more than half its natural gas from Russia, just signed an agreement to lay a Russian supplied gas pipe in the Black Sea last week, and profits from 5 million Russian tourists every year. This latest event is only a few days after power lines into Crimea were blown up (among other things, endangering nuclear reactor cooling systems in other parts of Ukraine), is a week after the Paris event, and is a few weeks after a Russian airliner was shot down in Sinai killing everybody on board. Not the greatest news this month for world stability, but hopefully this will all blow over without immediate overt escalation, and retaliation will be indirect. Supposedly, we're all professional here and no one wants WWIII, right? That said, I think it's virtually impossible to know what's really going on now. Perhaps the main 'known unknown' is to what extent the US/NATO/Iz etc allowed, motivated, or even performed the shoot down. From the list above, it doesn't look like the shootdown will turn out to be beneficial to Turkey. This is slightly reminiscent of the mysterious 2013 'missile test' missiles fired across the Mediterranean from west to east that were shot down by the Russians a few years ago. The Russian response to this latest provocation will likely be measured. It is possible that another even bigger provocation from the US/NATO/Iz/'f*ck the EU' crazies may be on the way.

[Nov26,'15] After reading Andrew Korybko, I have expanded my perspective a bit. Though the US might have given a green light to Turkey, perhaps the situation is a little like the US giving a green light to then-ally Saddam in 1990 (April Glaspie). The partial dismemberment of Turkey (Izzy-supported Greater Kurdistan, since they already get most of their oil from there) might actually be the current plan, with Russia doing some heavy lifting, and the US more or less cutting loose their takfiri crazies in Syria. This makes sense given all the obvious easily predictable negative outcomes for Turkey resulting from a direct attack on Russia (see prev. post). The more conventional interpretation would be that the US intends to continue the Assad regime-change plan despite all the recent setbacks. But as before, I am hardly confident that I really understand what is going on. Probably the US will do both at the same time. These guys are never sated on chaos and must always have moar.

[Nov28,'15] The assassination of Tahir Elci virtually screams 'color revolution' in Turkey, supporting Korybko's interpretation of events cited in the previous post. Looks more and more like punishment from US/NATO/etc for Turkey's Black Sea Russian pipeline deal. Ignore the 'Islamist' chaff sprayed out all day by the whorespondents :-} in the main-sewer media. Recent ISIS setbacks are likely to increase the flood of retired death squad snackbars into the EU. Maybe the shoot-down order didn't even originate with Erdogan, but rather his military slash soon-to-be-junta.

[Dec04,'15] Here is an excellent lecture by Steve Keen in which he shows that government running deficits is a *parallel* mechanism of money creation to non-central banks making loans. Because of this, if the government doesn't run a deficit (money creation by the government via the central bank), in general, the level of private debt (money created by non-central banks) has to go up instead. This contrasts with the general misunderstanding (e.g., my own) that created central bank money is further magnified by non-central bank money creation. They *are* dependent, but the central bank money creation actually *reduces* the need for private money creation (private debt), and vice versa. A short history of my successive misunderstandings (I don't think I'm fully understanding this yet) is as follows: (1) banks actually have money that they lend out, (2) banks have fractional reserve requirements and generate money by relending deposits, as controlled by central bank policy, because non-central banks need to take out overnight loans to pay people who take out more money than banks have in reserves, (3) (non-central) banks simply create money at the moment of the loan (see straighforward explanation in this white paper from the Bank of England), which creates an equal sized asset for them -- but the central bank still indirectly controls this by controlling central bank interest rates, and finally (4) what Steve Keen said above: central banks (public debt) and non-central banks (private debt) are actually parallel, and push-pull. I think one crucial thing missing from the Keen picture is: (5) central banks are actually *also* private.

[Dec06,'15] Though Hollande's popularity predictably rose after the terr'ist attacks, it wasn't enough to beat Marine Le Pen's National Front party in the regional elections (she did best at 30%, versus Sarkozy's 'center' party's 26% and Hollande's 'left' party's at 22%). The utter fantasy of the 'news' with Americans, British, French, Russians, not to mention the Israelis, all bombing 'ISIS' in Syria *at the same time*, leaves my mouth agape. The Wurlitzer has never been played like this before! With this kind of proven effectiveness, perhaps Rahm could arrange for everybody's air forces to start bombing Chicago.

[Dec13,'15] Everything is back to 'normal' in France. The 'socialists' and 'convervatives' got together to route the 'right' in the runoff elections (they won by a 55% to 45% margin), after turnout surged by almost 10%. The 'socialists' won by pulling out of several races so that the 'convervatives' could win so as not to divide the 'left' (that would be 'socialist' plus 'convervative') vote.

[Dec23,'15] Renewable energy is growing. The tiny yellow component at the top of this graph is world wind-and-solar. It has increased substantially since 2000, to slightly over 2% of total energy used. Now, you can actually see the contribution it makes in the stacked bar graph ;-} , which is still utterly dominated by fossil fuel. But look at that graph! Since 2000, total energy use has been increasing at rate that is MORE THAN 10X the unprecedented rate of increase of renewable energy production during that same time period. All the renewable energy devices were manufactured, transported, installed, and serviced almost exclusively using fossil fuel energy (most US, Spanish, and German solar cells were made out of Chinese coal). I find it difficult to put a positive spin on this. As fossil fuel limits start to kick in, it seem unavoidable that by 2040, the world will be using substantially less energy (despite there being another 2 billion people added, AKA another 30 UK's worth of people, food and water, houses, sewers, roads, wiring, etc). There is a 99% correlation of world GDP and energy consumption. Fossil fuels won't stop dominating this energy consumption graph until humans have scraped out every last EROI positive bit of them. Then -- hopefully -- there will be enough energy left to make *a lot* more bicycles :-} Human's disconnect from reality is poignant to watch. Humans talk 'carbon-neutral' but then drive and fly 'carbon-proud' (I fly several times a year myself). The possible universe of our dreams probably isn't possible. I'm hoping the one that actually happens won't be as bad as I fear. Here is a more clear-eyed positive vision. The main point is, we need/have to scale back energy usage by 70-90%. This is more in line with the reality of the components of increased energy sources since 2000 -- 10% new renewable and 90% new fossil fuel. In 25 years (2040), if renewables continue to increase as they have been since 2000, they would reach 10-20% of our *current* energy usage. But in 2040, fossil fuel use will be much less -- not for lack of trying, but simply because we will have run out of the reasonably net-energy-positive reserves. Given uncertainties, that will basically amount to 'using 70-90% less energy'. On the bright side, that would still be substantially more energy per capita than stone age humans used.

[Dec30,'15] The danger of a 'color' revolution making a shambles of Turkey (via excavating a Kurdistan out of several existing countries) increases by the week. The support for this by the 'left' is a shameful replay of the beginning of the Syria disaster in 2011. In 2011, Syria was still in one piece. The 'left' fell for the 'poison gas' psyops back then. Though Russia stepping in has so far prevented a complete Libya-fication of Syria, there are now more Syrian refugees than Palestinian refugees, large areas of cities in the country have been turned into wastelands of rubble, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed, and things are incomparably worse there than they were in 2011. The 'left' was horribly wrong about Syria. A few weeks of mercenary snipers shooting at both sides in Turkey would have the potential to create a new Turkish 'Maidan' in short order. The Turkish banking system has been attacked by c-eye-a-nonymous. The last Maidan in Ukraine has resulted in turning that country into a shambles, with the current Nazi-filled coup govenment's approval rating *one-half* that of the government that was overthrown.

[Jan10,'16] The 'refugee crisis' continues to destabilize the EU (detailed article by Andrew Korybko here . As Korybko argues, it is looking more and more like a 'color'-revolution-like psychological operation where a small amount of force is expertly applied, and then expertly broadcast to incite racist hysteria (they got every German to google 'pfefferspray'), using the usual damaged goods assets (e.g., a few wahhabi 'ronin' flushed out by Russian bombing). This is the downside of language in a primate brain, something I have spent many years trying to figure out.

[Feb04,'16] The east EU 'color revolutions' continue. Look at what a great outcome there was in the former Serbian republic. Once unleashed, the vicious animal hatreds that explode out of the human primate brain are nearly impossible to put back in the can. With non-human primates, that's not a problem since they don't access to guns, bombs, and fossil fuel. Perhaps we should be thankful that there is only another 15 years easy fossil fuel.

[Feb13,'16] 'b' at Moon of Alabama compactly puts this latest development in proper perspective: "Near Azaz, the U.S. ally Turkey is currently shelling the U.S. ally YPG, which is fighting the CIA-supported FSA." The US/Turkey/Saudi/Izzy/neocon crazies are getting crazy that their chaos game is being threatened. All they have on offer is more chaos. Google nooz doesn't rate this possible start to WWIII as noosworthy. It's truly tragic comparing before and after in Syria. So-called leftists who initially supported this (e.g., Sanders) are just as much to blame as the McCain, Rubio, and Cruz things.

[Feb19,'16] I hope that 'b' at Moon of Alabama and T Meyssan (US military -- vs. CIA -- cooperating with Russia) are right, and Saker (US preparing for war with Russia in northern Syria) is wrong (yes, I know, Meyssan was a 'Pentagon missile' disinfo guy in the past). Note that Turkey has 240 F-16's, which is easily 10x the fighter jets that the Russians have in Syria. Hoping for the best (no attack on Syria by Turkey or Saudi). Yet another possibility is that the US is setting up Turkey and/or Saudi to have some of their infrastructure damaged by Russia (Saudi: oil, Turkey: set up to have a greater Kurdistan broken off to further the chaos in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria). And I was surprised by Merkel's comment about the need for a Syrian no-fly zone (translation: Syrian bombing only by the West -- she wants more refugees?). Perhaps she was just feeding the 'wurlitzer'. It is pretty amazing to sample the twin, fantasy world projected by the 'mighty Wurlitzer' (one example here) -- it's truly an utterly alternate 'reality'! But judging from the derisive comments when similar articles are broadcast from UK 'news' sites (home of the 'Syrian Observatory for Human Rights'), it's not clear that the wurlitzer is working as well as it used to do. From these many disheartening possibilities, one will emerge in the next month or two.

[Feb24,'16] A depressing juxtaposition of 'robots' and 'people'.

[Feb27,'16] Absolutely no trace of the supposed recent slowdown in total economic activity (approx. equal to total energy usage -- but see below on total net energy) in the Mauna Loa CO2 graph http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/full.html. In fact, if you zoom in on the past 5 years here, if anything, it looks like there was actually a *spurt* of CO2 growth in the second half of 2015, perhaps partly from increased driving in response to low gasoline/petrol prices (ironically, virtually at the moment of peak all-liquids). In fact, the rate of CO2 growth has increased by a factor of 1.5x (from 2 to 3 ppm per year). Looking at the rate of growth graph here, it is quite obvious that the rate of growth (derivative) of CO2 -- not just CO2 growth -- has been increasing steadily since the 1960's, from about 1 ppm increase per year then to about 3 ppm increase per year now. With respect to increased driving, at least in the US, total vehicle miles driven has recovered from the unprecedented drop that began with the 2008 recession. Over the past 2 years, it has been increasing with a steeper slope (80 million extra miles per year) than the very constant 1970 to 2008 average (50 million extra miles per year) (Fed graph here). Humans' cognitive disconnect from their basic physical reality, with all their stupid green-washing and/or stupid denial, is comic and tragic to look at. The max arctic sea ice extent will likely set a new new record low this year. Hey, lookee over here, what about that Trump-thing or that Hillary-thing? One important thing to remember is that total CO2 output does *not* measure total net (useful) energy used; in fact, as average net energy (continues to!) go down, total energy expended has to continuously go up just to keep net energy *constant*. As energy return on energy investment falls below 10 to 1, the increase in energy expended to keep net energy constant starts to go up exponentially, with the slope rapidly increasing below EROEI of 2 (i.e., 2 units returned for one invested, which results in 1 unit net energy). We're not there yet. Peak net all-energy is probably still 10 to 15 years away. Hitting peak *net* all-energy has always been my definition of world SHTF. It's pretty hard to calculate -- we won't know for sure until a few years after it has already happened.

[Mar13,'16] Japan has a stockpile of 47 tons of plutonium. Dang that's a lot. The sphere of it at the center of the Nagasaki bomb was only a few inches across. The whole thing gives me the creeps. I don't have a huge amount of faith in the people minding this stuff.

[Mar15,'16] "It is great to be here, in a free Benghazi and in free Libya." -- David Cameron in Libya, Sept 2011, a few weeks before Gaddafi was killed. The Libya of today has been turned into an awful wreck compared to those poodle days.

[Mar21,'16] The current oil surplus is about 2 million barrels/day (a little over 2%). This 'glut' and the oil price crash started in early 2014 (see recent articles byArt Berman and Rune Likvern). Where did it come from? Saudi and Russia are now producing only slightly more than they were in early 2014 (about 0.15 million barrels/day more). The US and Canada are producing almost 2 million more barrels/day and Iraq is producing 1.7 million more barrels/day. Thus the US, Canada, and Iraq have crashed oil prices, not Saudi and Russia. This will soon cause major problems since esp. in the US, the oil glut created by fracking was built almost entirely on debt. Now that prices have crashed, that debt is going bad. The going-out-of-business frackers have closed down drilling but continue to produce like mad, trying to not go bankrupt, exacerbating the problem. This is capitalism going 'full retard' with its 'blood supply' (that would be the 98% of the oil that *was* burned to move stuff and make stuff [like food] to keep the body politic alive). How is the 'surveillance capitalism' of Google going to survive without oil for the self-driving cars? What an odd spectacle to watch. I'm not presumptuous enough to think something easy could have been done to fix this. Instead, I have the same feeling about the current economic circus that I get watching an only *slightly* old/young/sick/disabled animal being brought down by a lion: the running prey is a pinnacle of biological complexity and perfection, performing at *almost* 100%, that just happened to hit one critical bad spot. The outcome of the coming of together in the next year of (1) peak all-liquids, (2) tightoil/tarsands bankruptcies, (3) economic constriction, and (4) 80 million more humans needing energy is hard to predict -- if one only looks foward 9 months. That is like trying to predict the weather next month. However, looking forward 10 years, I am sure the 'glut' will be merely a fond memory.

[Mar27,'16] The Syrian army has driven ISIS out of the ancient city of Palmyra. Among other charming things, ISIS blew up the basement of the antiquities museum. A few days before Syria cleaned out the vermin, watch this State dept worm squirming in response to a question about the prospect of this happening (video here). That would be ISIS TM, the official bogeyman C-eye-A-supported terr'ist group.

[Apr04,'16] The UK spent 1/3 billion pounds helping to bomb Libya. As a result of the bombing, Libya has been turned into a giant human catastrophe, a staging area for CIA/ISIS attacks on Syria, and one of the sources of the current EU refugee crisis. So the UK recently generously offered to give Libya 0.00005 billion pounds (50K) to fix things up. That would be a destruction-to-help ratio of 6000-to-1.

[Apr17,'16] I was very sorry to read that David MacKay just died, at the young age of 48, from recently diagnosed stomach cancer. I crossed paths with him when he was working with Ken Miller at Caltech around 1990 on an analysis of the dynamics of Hebbian learning. He burned brightly. He was a good man. Among many other things, he wrote a fine popular book "Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air". And here is one of his last posts, a plaintive note as he lay dying, sweating in bed, unable to turn the heat down, begging that the hospital install some simple functional thermostats, as opposed to expensive and unused telephone/TV devices whose flashing only served to irritate the dying cancer patients.

[Apr19,'16] "The Polish Navy is practising for a US attack on Kaliningrad by guarding the destroyers like the Donald Cook from Russian submarine interception, so we have been caught provoking the Russians right at our very border. And since we have officially taken part in the surprise NATO military manoeuvre at armed-to-the-teeth Kaliningrad, and that has visibly upset the Russians, we should demand from our American allies compensation for the status of a front-line state, just like Egypt and Israel, which collect $3 billion in aid every year." -- Stanislas Balcerac (quoted by John Helmer here).

[May09,'16] Just saw David MacKay's last interview with Mark Lynas, which was given an inflammatory title in the useless Guardian (the Lynas guy kinda creeps me out photographing himself with the trophy he awarded to the deathly ill MacKay). MacKay was right that (1) wind is intermittent, (2) so is solar, (3) solar not great in the UK in the winter, and (4) people won't want to pay more for energy. But he underestimated the current contributions in the UK of wind and solar. And he underestimated the cost of new nuclear, esp. if it includes a plan to clean up afterwards. I was also surprised that he was surprised that carbon capture doesn't exist. Carbon capture, like fusion, will almost certainly be the 'carbon capture technology of the future, and it always will be'. The reason goes back to MacKay's point number 4; it's expensive, meaning it's expensive *energy-wise*. It's not vaguely possible to take it back out of the air; there are no existing large scale demonstrations of trying to catch it immediately after burning. His perspective probably reflects actually having working with the people in the government who are trying to put out this year's fires (by having the Chinese build a nuclear power plant at Somerset). I'm not worried about the next 10-15 years. Unfortunately, rational discussion -- of the kind that MacKay liked -- of the reality of 2030 is completely off the table. I imagine it won't even be on the table as food and water shortages related to the beginning of powerdown begin to appear in 10-15 years. On the positive side, more electric vehicles (which MacKay thinks will be here) are one positive way of dealing with intermittency. The amount of power moving all those stupid people around in their 2 ton metal cans, half the time driving just 2 miles pick up stuff, is equivalent to all the power in the grid. Using intermittent power to charge local vehicle batteries is a great way to avoid using/depleting fossil fuel. In sunny places, it works well on a completely local basis. Of course, it would be even better to just get out of the metal can...

[May13,'16] The US/UK supports the ISIS liver-eaters in Palmyra; the Russians support Bach :-} The 'civilized' west (the UK lapdog) responds that this was a 'tasteless attempt to distract attention' -- perhaps, from the ISIS liver-eaters they are supporting? or from people finally realizing that the 'poison gas' scam was a psyop? Absolutely tasteless.

[May26,'16] Paul Craig Roberts says we have entered the looting stage of capitalism. But it was always this way! The *only* difference is that the looters have gotten slightly closer to tonier neighborhoods (Greece vs. Panama). In scanning the news, it is easy to get distracted by the usual daily nonsense (trumpillory, oil price farts, some coal-to-solar-cell company when t-up). The world system is creaking and groaning to adjust to a relatively moderate reduction in the availability of low energy-cost energy. Total net energy consumption is probably now just reaching no-growth. But even commentators aware of the importance of energy in economic activity and the long term arcs involved just can't seem to process the idea of 'finite' and the implications of the approaching energy EROEI cliff (the exponential increase in energy required to get a unit of net energy as EROEI heads to below 5) -- despite some of them (e.g., Euan Mearns) even writing about it and making useful diagrams about it! Dave Cohen would say, people are simply permanently trapped in Flatland, and will be, all the way down. I suppose that on this particular day, that includes me, because I remain somewhat hopeful that because the daily adaptive motions of the world mind are so far beyond the ability of any individual mind to understand (using the kinds of trivial mental models individual minds are capable of), I don't feel confident of being able to predict how things will turn out (aside from the fact we will be using less net energy in 15 years). So maybe it won't be as bad as the more logical part of my mind using mostly simple linear models says it almost certainly will be :-}

[May30,'16] Supposedly, according to data from around the world in which governments have reported how much fossil fuel they used making useful energy, the increase in fossil fuel use has flattened, with a bunch of fanfare from the green-washing machines (e.g., John Vidal in the Guardian). This is a little like asking people to weigh themselves and then tell you what they weigh. Looking at the monthly mean CO2 at Mauna Loa here, it's clear that, by contrast, there has been a menacing spike in CO2 over the first half of this year. Physics ignores monkey lies. Go, 500 ppm! Actually, the biggest factor in the spike is probably not increased human emissions, but rather the feedback from the hot El Nino year (CO2 traps heat, more heat makes more CO2 by speeding the metabolism of composting microorganisms); you can see a similar spike in the full CO2 record here in 1998, a record-breaking El Nino event and a very hot year also. But some of the general increase in slope of CO2 increase over the past decade might also reflect the continuing decline in the EROEI for fossil fuel, which would have required increasing the amount of energy used and CO2 produced in order to return even the *same* amount of net energy. I'm hoping the spike just dies down next year (as opposed to triggering some other positive feedback). But don't lookie there, lookie here at this Chinese washing machine soap ad. Get John Vidal and his Chinese-made mobile (cellphone) on it. Only by studiously avoiding looking at one's own participation in the network of fossil fuel energy use, we can pretend that everything will be all right tomorrow. Because of the low price of oil, 86% of energy sector operating profits went to interest payments in the first quarter of 2016, up from 50% in 2015. This is obviously not 'sustainable' (hah) and if it continues, will likely result in a banking catastrophe in a year or two. A lot of people I know would cheer, saying that they hope they go out of business. I hardly think of oil companies as benign; but the cheerleaders are not thinking straight about their own personal fossil fuel energy supply, which powers important things like their daily food and water.

[Jun02,'16] Richard Duncan (no, not Richard 'Olduvai' Duncan), who is a financial guy at Blackhorse Asset Management in Singapore posted a very useful presentation on China here that includes a solid series of 25-year, zero-based graphs versus the usual financial industry noise (what happened to oil price two hours ago) (N.B.: it's a lure to get you to buy a subscription). I don't agree with most of his world view, his view on credit creation, and his apparent complete ignorance of the relation between economics, growth, and energy (he would do well to read the other Richard Duncan for that), but the raw numbers he assembled are useful and amazing (I did like his idea of working toward a global minumum wage). For example, look at the graph here on Chinese cement production. China has recently had a 'crash' in cement production, which means that its towering cement production didn't increase by yet another 10% this year, but actually dropped slightly. In the three years of 2011, 2012, and 2013, China produced *more* (140% more) cement than the US did in the entire 20th century. The stunning observation is that even with this 'crash', China will end up producing in 2014, 2015, and 2016 more cement than the US did in the entire 20th century, *again*. The simple flatlining of Chinese growth in cement and steel and exports and imports has sent a deflationary ripple around the world. I gave a peak oil talk in 2011 (PDF here) pointing out that the stunning linear increase in growth in Chinese coal use and oil use that began (esp. for coal -- see my slide 52) in 2001, if it persisted, would result in China consuming all world exports of coal and oil by 2025. I had no prediction for when the increase would stop except that I knew it would absolutely have to stop before 2025. So now, it looks like it stopped, rather suddenly, in 2015, 'on its own'. However, it's important to keep in mind that Chinese fossil fuel use remains jacked up to an amazing yearly burn rate very different than the one in 2001, and *that* can't go on even at a *flat* zero-growth rate for more than a decade (AKA all twentieth century US concrete times 6), without running very hard into world coal depletion. As a human yeast cell, I can clearly see the edges of the barrel. But nothing really bad has happened, so far! Maybe it will all work out!

[Jun09,'16] NIRP, the negative interest rate policy, which includes things like paying people interest when they take out loans, and conversely charging people interest to leave money in their 'savings' accounts ran into an unexpected glitch this week when German banks begain stockpiling tons of cash (literally) to avoid the negative ECB interest rates. It's completely logical! Finally, there will actually be lots of physical cash in the banks! :-} -- so much for cashless, straight from the banker's mouths! I suppose this helps when pensioners with inadequate savings are forced to drain their accounts rather than see them whittled away. If you ignore energy, negative interest rates are the logical thing to do, to stimulate 'grof'. If you don't ignore energy, then it's obvious that having banks tax savings accounts or having them induce people who don't have the means to pay back a loan to take a loan anyway is hardly a, uhh, 'sustainable' way to get more megawatts used. China will have poured more concrete than *two* US twentieth centuries, just from 2011 to 2016. China merely going flat in 2016 has threatened the stability of the world financial system. You have to be completely insane to think that it would be a good idea to continue this kind of 'grof' indefinitely, even if we could (we can't). Of course, it's not fair, because the US got to pour their concrete first. A rational approach would be to try to distribute the coming contraction more equitably. But that topic isn't even on the table except with the absolute looney fringe. If previous historical contractions are a clue, it probably won't ever get onto the table.

[Jun16,'16] The aggressive movement of NATO missiles and troops to the Russian border is disturbing, not the least because any war gaming suggests that any border crossing by NATO would result in a big NATO loss. Imagine the US's reaction to Russia moving an equivalent amount of materiel (missiles and troops) up to the California/Mexico border, pulling some destroyers in up next to Tijuana, and then starting wargames with Mexico. This is looking more and more like yet another new pearl harbor. I wouldn't want to be living in one of the NATO poodle border countries. But the utterly irresponsible 2 minutes to midnight B.S. is frightening in a Cuban missile crisis kind of way. As long as nothing really bad happens, it could just be a way of distracting people from peak energy and peak money. But people won't stay distracted unless something really bad does happen. So it might.

[Jun18,'16] From the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, without the hot air. Global coal consumption declined 1% (it has dropped similarly for a few years now, mainly due to China). But increases in consumption of oil, oil-like products, and natural gas more than made up for this, so the total fossil fuel consumption went up. Renewables went up, too. This year, the increase in fossil fuel use was more than the increase in renewables. This was spun as renewables are saving us and replacing coal. Wind and solar did grow rapidly, but because they only account for a small component of total energy consumption (2%), their large percentage increase *relative to themselves* (solar and wind) amounted to less absolute increase then the increase in fossil fuel use. Also, the growth in annual installation of wind and solar relative to their annual growth is slowing, suggesting we are roughly 2/3 of the way to maximum growth rate in wind and solar, so using current rates and assuming some tapering in fossil fuel use, we might expect something like 7% of total power from wind and solar by 2030, right around SHTF time. Also, remember that 1 unit of solar plus wind requires 1 unit of fossil fuel load balancing capacity using the most optimistic assumptions (nuclear is not appropriate for this purpose). The reality is that we need to save us from (too many of) ourselves. Not possible without a no-spin discussion of the real numbers. Adding 80 million people (more than an entire UK) per year to the earth's population (over 1% increase per year) won't work for very much longer, esp. as total fossil fuels peak in a decade and begin to go down. However, it is very likely to continue as long as there is enough food.

[Jun25,'16] In the aftermath of the close Brexit vote (52% to 48%, with the winning Brexit side consisting of 36% of the eligible voters), Google says that Britons have been madly googling 'what is the EU?' (dunno, maybe where almost half of UK exports go to, while maybe 4% of EU exports are imported to the UK?). Reading celebratory online comments in UK papers, one does get a slightly 'brown shirt', ethnic cleansing'y feeling; but it's not like that sentiment wasn't here before. In the great depression, europe turned/voted right. It can be argued that this is why the EU was created -- a somewhat undemocratic organization to try to save people from themselves after the devastation of two wars in too quick succession that utterly toppled europe from its world leading position. Hitler and Mussolini were democratically elected, and the tabloid-whipped UK masses voluntarily marched into battle (and then uselessly up out of trenches into withering machine gun fire under the gun from their commanding officers situated behind them). The US, by contrast, turned left in the depression. Of course, this new depression could be different. Though Trump is not Hitler (he's more like Berlusconi), there is a bit of a 'brown shirt'y feel in the US, too. But back to the UK. Young people here -- many of them having taken some of biggest hits in debt, 400% increases in college fees, crap jobs, and stratospheric rent -- pretty strongly favored Remain. The mood in London (and likely in Cambridge, Oxford, Brighton, Warwick, York, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Brighton, Cardiff, Bristol, Bath, and Warick -- map here) is shocked and somber today (one suggestion was for London and Scotland to secede from the UK :-} ). Brexit defeated the left, Corbyn, the Greens, the Scots, the Irish, the young, and the universities. It was mainly a way of those disenfranchised by deindustrialization in the smaller cities and depressed suburbs -- and older people -- to give the government the Trump finger. Of course, it will probably Brexit them in the foot/@ss if extreme right conservatives or a Blairite replacement for Corbyn can marshall anti-immigrant emotion to form a new government -- "thanks for your vote, here's some more austerity and shock doctrine for you". Not to mention that the most pro-Leave parts of the country are the ones most economically integrated with the EU. Hard to guess how it will turn out a few years down the line, though -- way too many variables, with predictions ranging from positive effects on trade, the City taking a hit (loss of EU passporting), the City flourishing because of so many agreements to renegotiate, the UK dropping a bunch of worker and environment and bank protection, the air actually getting better without regulation because people can't afford their carz, or the UK ending up as a US military outpost backwater. There is amazingly little comment on net energy rundown, which to me is the elephant in the room (remember when the UK didn't used to import oil?). I won't be staying around, but I wish them the best of luck. Hope it doesn't end up dismembered like Greece.

[Jun29,'16] I am suspicious that such a big thing like Brexit could have happened 'by accident'. This is unsettlingly reminiscent of WWI. In the case of Brexit, the disgruntled impoverished deindustrialized countryside has been there since Thatcher. So have many of the immigrants. The fact that the referendum came up at all, coupled with the expert anti-immigrant whipping up by the press seems non-accidental (and not unexpected!). It's even a little color-revolution-y. At first glance, it appears that financial UK is in a poor negotiating position with the EU. But perhaps there is a neocon element to this to keep the EU in line on the neocon/NATO straight and narrow, and to weaken Steinmeier etc., and the recent small pushback against US/NATO from Bulgaria. And we have to remember the source of the wave of new immigrants -- i.e., the neocon/Hillary/Ford (death squad) destruction of Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, Syria, and now perhaps even Turkey.

[Jul16,'16] It looks like Turkey narrowly managed to put off the fate hinted at in the previous note. Robert Baer mourns on CNN that the undemocratic coup, quite obviously *not* supported by the population, 'was not professionally done'. Oh really. Now perhaps Turkey can make good on its recent suggestion, and that it will stop trying to do the same thing to Syria. Before it was clear that the coup had failed, California Democrat Brad Sheman tweeted "Military takeover in Turkey will hopefully lead to real democracy - not Erdogan authoritarianism". I wonder how that would fly in your homeland, Brad?

[Jul18,'16] A little late, guys. Their article, supposedly debunking bad neuroimaging experiments, is itself an almost perfect illustration of the kind of tabloid, overstated, click-bait that has come to plague scientific publication in the time of the internet, spurred on by the the lazy, ever-more-bloated each year, bean- and altmetrics-counting university administrations. It's kind of amazing to see the same pattern of excesses replaying themselves in the decline of this empire. Before long, we may be subjected to a new plague of 'preregistration' of hypothesis, all lovingly managed by the scientific journal 'industry'. The lack of historical perspective is disconcerting. This has the potential to substantially degrade science by turning it (even further) toward market research, advertising, and corporate cubicle drone-land. Do we really want 'science' to be done by corporations? Like the example of big pharma drug trials? Or perhaps, do we really want all science to be drug trials? Has everybody forgotten how all the publically supported research that made big pharma possible was originally done? Hint: it wasn't done by the corporations of the time. It's depressing to think that young scientists may soon grow up not have known that it was ever different. [Update Aug28: I knew it was probably a bad idea to talk to the NYT columnist about the 'debunking' article. She mangled my affiliation [now fixed] and then used only one quote, of course, taken completely out of context -- I was dissing, not supporting the 'debunking' article for virtually the whole phone call. This after I carefully explained out fMRI works in several follow-ups. Oh well.]

[Aug24,'16] Settling in after our big move. As my former advisor, John Allman would say, "two moves equals one fire" :-}

[Aug30,'16] Despite Russia's withdrawal, the Syrian army has been doing reasonably well against the US/UK proxy armies of ISIS/Al-Q. This US failure to destroy Syria increases the chances of a direct US attack on the Syrian government over the coming next year, probably more likely if Hillary is elected (Wolfowitz supports her over Trump!). The neocon/Hillary/Ford "Salvador option" death squad strategy continues. What a human catastrophe.

[Sep01,'16] Between 1970 (pop=3.7G) and 2010 (6.8G), global material extraction went from 22 billion to 70 billion tonnes. As we miniaturize, we are actually extracting *more* materials per capita (1.7x as much). That is, we are growing less, not more, sustainable, even as population continues to grow. De-materialization is a complete fantasy.

[Sep06,'16] It turns out to be surprisingly easy to impose negative interest rates on physical cash. Two dystopian ideas are to randomly invalidate random serial number bank notes, and/or to impose a tax on cash withdrawal.

[Sep17,'16] Well, unfortunately, my prediction above of a direct US attack on Syria "over the the coming year" (because the US/Izzy/UK attempt to tear apart Syria had bogged down) came true in only 2 weeks. The US (update: with the help of the UK [natch], and Austrailia and Denmark?!) just bombed a Syrian army position in Deir es-Zor with F-16's and A-10's (for survivors) killing 60 or 100 Syrian soldiers, all in *support* of an attack on the Syrian army by the ISIS head-choppers (the US didn't bomb ISIS afterward when it found out its 'mistake', but the Syrian army retook most of the territory). Though Russia convened an emergency UN security council session today in response to the bombing, and announced that "the White House is defending ISIS", Russia is probably not in a position to directly strike back. Here is Vitaly Churkin's response to the attack on Syria ('diplomat' Samantha Power walked out on the speech). But real information like this will soon be buried in avalanche of manure from the neverending 'election' freak show.

[Sep20,'16] Given the slight lull in the election freak show, the distraction to the US attack on Syria has turned instead to be the "kinder/gentler" Chelsea dumpster bombing, followed by the supposed Syrian/Russian attack on a Syrian aid convoy with the ever-so-dreaded "barrel bombs" (both links to to excellent articles by Scott Creighton). The world as broadcast by America has become a continuous string of psyops, very Matrix-like. I accidentally watched a few minutes of teevee about this while getting lunch. The disconnect between reality and the teevee is schizophrenia-inducing. Just read -- don't watch video.

[Sep21,'16] An escalation of the Syrian conflict, possibly involving direct US/Russia events is possible in the final throes of the US election silly season. It may have already begun if the reports (e.g., Ziad Fadel) of a Russian cruise missile attack on a US/UK/Izzy command and control center north of Aleppo are true. Couldn't we all just get along and do something more useful, like planning for the imminent (before 2030) energy crisis and retooling the money system so that it won't blow up in the steady state? Looks like the answer is no. If there are still historians writing 100 years from now, they will wonder how such American-empire-wide insanity could possibly have been maintained. If they don't have access to a video record, it will be hard to comprehend -- like this latest development in the internet of thingz -- a vibrator (!) that calls home to the mothership. Don't panic, it's just market research, to help make your personal devices even more useful than they already are...

[Sep22,'16] Andre Vltchek's apposite translation of the burkini ban: "You can wear any wetsuit but not a burkini. It is exactly the same thing, but the wetsuit is our own invention (and therefore it is right), while the ‘burkini’ was designed by and for ‘the others’ (therefore it is clearly wrong). Remember, only our definitions are allowed on this Planet." -- Andre Vltchek.

[Sep26,'16] From this PDF: Americans' gun ownership is quite skewed: 50% of guns are own by 3% of the population (average 18 guns per those persons). There were other surprising things: the number of guns owned per adult has doubled under Obama; but this was mainly people who already had guns buying more. I was also surprised that only 22% of the population owned a gun (6% have only a handgun, 5% have only a long gun, 11% have both). It was hardly surprising that gun ownership is more likely in rural counties, by veterans, and by conservatives. And in other news, here's hoping that tonight's cage match comes off without (another) psyop.

[Oct04,'16] The nuclear clock is ticking awfully close to midnight these days. The recent US stunts in Syria provoking Russia are quite scary in a reverse Cuban-missile-crisis way (tho few in the West remember the US-missiles-in-Turkey component of the Cuban missile crisis). Imagine the US response to the analgous case of Russian-supported Mexican jihadis trying to overthrow the Mexican government in order to re-route Mexican oil and gas pipelines away from the US. The mouthing of US propaganda on Syria and Russia by the mainstream media is just pathetic. Russian is running a nuclear disaster drill this week that involves 40 *million* people. Paul Craig Roberts thinks that the only hope is either (1) Russia and China surrender to the US, or (2) European vassal states rebel against the US. Neither of those are sure shots.

[Oct05,'16] Some commentators, upset that Americans are still following Kim Kardashian's robbery instead of a possible imminent nuclear war, have suggested that perhaps Americans will wake up if the US suffers a (even more) clear loss in Syria. The problem with this approach is that the US suffered a clear military loss in Viet Nam, over 40 years ago! Of course, the US holocausted roughly 3 million south east asians in the process, but the US *still lost*. Much more recently, the US essentially lost in Ukraine. The clear message is that one -- or ten -- losses are *not enough* to disrupt the Matrix reality distortion field! As long as there is enough free energy to keep FoxCNNABCNBBC and the intertubes matrix up, and the rest of the world scared by the huge US military, probably nothing big can change. For better or worse, we are still at least 15 or 20 years away from the beginnings of the great power down. There was a depressing article in the Guardian that at current growth rates, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. Thankfully, the article overestimated how much accessible oil is left -- a Monty Python, 'always look on the bright side of life' moment to be sure :-}

[Oct07,'16] American F-18's (upper right, upper left, lower left) reputedly painted to look like Russian SU-34 (lower left), in a photo from Christian Borys (Daily Beast), who tweeted "The U.S is painting their F/A-18's to match the paint schemes of Russian jets in Syria. Standard training, but interesting nonetheless". Could be a setup for (another) white helmets psyop/false flag -- or as advertised, merely for training US pilots to face Russian jets. The UN vote on "saving Aleppo" (i.e., saving US/UK ISIS, and maybe some US special forces/human shields there) is at 3 PM this Sat. It all looks spooky, but I still can't believe that the US military will actually overtly attack a large number of Russian military assets (even with the 10:1 ratio in military spending the US has over Russia). In the past, the US military has only done overt attacks on countries that can't shoot back -- like Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. I *hope* the real question is, what distraction can/will be pulled to save face, to get Hillary elected? On the other hand, in the unlikely event that the US *does* initiate an all-out air attack on the Syrian government, then the question will be whether Russia will back down again as it has in all the previous US-initiated disasters in the middle east (Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen). Russian statements this time seem somewhat stronger than in all those previous cases, there is more new Russian hardware installed this time, and Syria (after Ukraine) is nearly the last straw (save Iran).

[Oct08,'16] While Kirby was embarrassing himself at a press conference about fake war crimes in Aleppo, the US-supported Saudis massacred 450 people at a funeral in Sanaa in Yemen in a double-tap strike. This will barely be mentioned in the vile, servile main-sewer media.

[Oct10,'16] The US (or at least whoever was in control of the Pentagon this month) seems to have backed down a little (again) on a major escalation in the attack on Syria, which was a relief, if a temporary one. It is easy (for me!) to get obsessed with my partial understanding of particular small events like this at the expense of the ocean of other significant events -- that don't make the news anywhere -- that result from humans consuming the final energy output (after losses) of 100,000 terawatt-hours of oil, coal, methane, hydro, nuclear, and renewables every year. Terawatt-hours (power times time) are units of energy, like joules. The average *power* consumption of humans (watts = joules/sec) is currently about 12 terawatts, which is 12 thousand gigawatts, which is 12 million megawatts, which is 12 billion kilowatts, which is equivalent to the power output of 120 billion 100-watt average humans continuously pedaling bicycles as hard as they can 24/7 (Tour de France cyclists put out 200 watts average just during the time they are racing in the Tour). With that much powered activity going on, no human can possibly understand what is actually happening on any given day. It would be like asking one cell in your body what it thinks all the other cells are doing.

[Oct12,'16] Basic numbers update (to refresh my memory, some from Phoenix capital). World GDP is $73 trillion (US GDP is $18 trillion). World GDP is correlated r^2=0.99 with world energy consumption over the past 45 years. Now let's move futher away from physical reality. US public and corporate debt is $24 trillion (up by almost *2x* since 2008 crisis). Chinese public and corporate debt is $22 trillion (up by *3x* since the 2008 crisis). The world's stock markets are worth about $70 trillion and trade about $0.2 trillion a day. The bond market including corporate bonds is worth about $200 trillion (Chinese bond market is about $10 trillion) and trades about $0.7 trillion a day. Finally, last but not least, the currency market trades about $5.3 trillion *a day* (can't measure size in same way since this is using money to buy money vs. using money to buy stocks). This has much less to do with physical reality. Currently, although computer currency trading has tripled over the last 3 years, it is still only $0.2 trillion a day (~4% of total). After a few more computer currency trading triplings, however, currencies could be thrashing around full retard every day (e.g., see 6% drop in pound sterling in 2 minutes on 7 Oct 2016, just past the stroke of midnight).

[Oct18,'16] I was just googling Mark Ames yesterday to see what he might have written recently about Russia and about "can't we just drone this guy?" and found -- at this seemingly critical point in history -- virtually nothing like the early heady days of The Exile! His writing has seemed meager and lifeless after getting kicked out of Russia back to the US. In retrospect, it made me think about The Exile, which I used to avidly if a bit pruriently read, as a Pussy Riot/George-Soros/color-revolution/C-I-eh/Lena Dunham/Broad City kind of thing. Of course, it was a more conventional 'dick and whore riot' thing. Which gave it street cred. Perhaps the reason he finally got thrown out was that the Russians finally saw through the ruse (despite their appreciation of p/d riot humor). He is an excellent writer, and was amazingly productive during those years. In comparison to going back to things I had thought about science ten years ago, I find I am much less confident of my political judgements from ten years ago. For example, despite wasting time on it, I don't know exactly what to think about latest Assange kerfuffle (any more than I know what to think of the recurrent Snowden phenomenon, which also looks like some kind of limited hangout -- if he really was a problem, seems like he, too, could have been quietly assassinated years ago).

[Oct19,'16] Last week, Art Berman wrote here that world oil production has come into balance with world oil demand, eliminating the 1-2% surplus that had resulted in the crash of oil prices from over $110/barrel (in Sept 2016) to under $50/barrel (by Jan 2016). The key graph is here. Since the beginning of 2015, the 1-2% 'glut' has kept oil prices extremely low. This has encouraged people to drive more and buy vehicles with bigger engines. The low price of oil prevented fracking companies (who are mainly responsible for the 'glut') from recouping their debts. They greatly reduced drilling, and kept them selling into a soft market in order to make interest payments. It looked like it was just about to blow up the 'subprime' fracking debt, which was used to buy leases only profitable with oil at more than $100/barrel. But the sharp drop in new drilling has just now flattened. We are now at the "Now what?" point in Finding Nemo, where the fish have escaped the aquarium into the bay, but are still in their bags. If oil shoots back up enough to put the frackers back in business, it will probably cause an economic crash a year later. This will start the whole process over again. On the other hand, if oil stays low for a little longer, because oil companies continue to try to pay down their debt by selling (slightly too much) oil, the subprime oil debt could blow, which could itself cause a reduction in economic activity like what happened in 2008, prolonging the temporary production/usage balance. The 'undulating plateau' long predicted by peak oil people (like myself) could really suck. With such violent oscillations, it's virtually impossible to predict what is going to happen short term; for example, we could easily spike back up into a glut for a few more months (look at previous short term events in the curve). However, it seems pretty clear to me that by 2020 -- after an entire US's worth of people (320 million) has been added to the planet -- that it is highly unlikely that there will still be a 1-2% 'glut', even if you include another crash in there between now and then. Last year, 1 barrel of oil was discovered for every 10 used. Before too long, this will catch up with us. Americans have been buying 1 all-electric vehicle and 1 plug-in-gas vehicle for every 350 gas powered vehicles they buy each year (17 million year). That only covers 1/3 of the yearly increase in the US population.

[Oct21,'16] In China, housing has just gone crazy again, starting around the beginning of 2016. Perhaps unsurprising given my proven complete lack of business sense, this is not what I would have expected, given the flattening of insane growth rates (pouring a complete US century worth of concrete over *two* consecutive 3 year periods), and with building overhangs and impending bankruptcies in the sticks with some empty partially completed cities, falling exports, and so on. When it takes $1 million to buy an apartment in Beijing, a massive credit bubble is once again inflating.

[Oct24,'16] On one hand Julian Assange said "I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud". On the other there is the recent sequence of (1) train suicide of the wikileaks lawyer in the UK, (2) weird Pamela Anderson food delivery, (3) more recent WL-founder Macfadyen death (lung cancer? he certainly *looked* like a smoker), and (4) temporary public disappearance of Julian Assange. WL has looked honey trap-ish for long time, and perhaps this is to reestablish street cred, or as Scott Creighton suggests, maybe there is some kind of internal intelligence squabble.

[Oct30,'16] In the past, the US has lost wars (Vietnam), but without losing its threat potential. And up to about 15 years ago, the US could still park an aircraft carrier off the coast of an undefended third world country and bomb it and cruise-missile it at its leisure without any danger of shootback (Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria before 2013). Now, there are relatively cheap fast anti-ship missiles that can prevent this when launched in a swarm. Russia and China make them, and other smaller countries are beginning to buy them. Anybody with an internet connection can find out about them, but the Newspeak mainstream media pretends they don't exist as it publishes monthly anti-Putin propaganda for the past 8 years that would make the old National Enquirer blush. Now think about what would happen if the US started a war and one of the 'invincible' beat-up-on-defenseless-small-countries and turn-them-into-hellholes aircraft carriers was disabled or even sunk. The illusion would be shattered. Now think about -- Why all the push toward war with Russia? It almost looks like the neocon *goal* is to shatter the illusion of US invincibility! I suppose it would still be OK as long as the aircraft carriers are far enough away (but what convential-war use would they be then?)

[Nov08,'16] Toyota finally announced that they will be abandoning their non-selling hydrogen vehicle, and are planning an all-electric long range vehicle. Though my *short-term* business sense is nil, I was already warning (based on common sense opinion at the time!) against the hydrogen vehicle debacle in the very first version of my peak oil PDF in 2004 :-}

[Nov24,'16] The increase in national debt in the US and China over the past 8 years looks pretty scary (the US debt-to-GDP-ratio doubled during that time, while China's has probably quadrupled). Consumer debt in the US is massively increasing (esp. student and car loans). Back in 2008, I would never have imagined that debt could have smoothly linearly increased like it did without *something* blowing up (in either the US *or* China). After the election, bond interest rates suddenly jumped up by about 0.5%; but they are only getting back to levels where they were in 2015 or 2013, which is still well below where they were before 2008. I have difficulty imagining bond interest rates continuing up (i.e., bond prices going down because people are selling them), which would blow up the cost of service on homeloans/carloans/studentloans/govtdebt/corporatedebt, with widespread effects. It is not an accident that 75% of derivatives are about interest rates; and it is worth noting that people with home/car/student loans don't have derivative hedges. However, the size of the current move is not that remarkable -- so far. But who knows. Looks ominous and out-of-control, but I've felt that way for the past 10 years and nothing super bad happened (here in UK/US) then. So maybe this next year will be uneventful, too (I'm hoping!). Of course, I am incorrectly thinking about this in a goody two-shoes, patsy kind of way, rather than more realistically thinking like seriously non-goody, scheming, dirty-talking, financial 'legal criminals' do, taking advantage of made-to-order laws they help to engineer. For example, this new Trump-related plan announced by Goldman Sachs (I guess that counts as the 'government'?) 'helps' repatriate "overseas cash" (which isn't even overseas -- it's mostly dollar denominated US treasuries [=bonds]) by giving corporations a huge tax break -- so that they can more easily use the proceeds from selling these bonds to get cash to buy their own stock (as opposed to having to borrow money to buy their own stock), which will then drive their own up stock prices up even futher. What could possibly go wrong with eating your liver to feed your stomach? Why bother with farming food, which is *so* old school? The trumpettes probably wouldn't like the sound of this particular swamp (if they could understand it). But, hey, at least Trump started out saying he doesn't believe in global warming -- now that's *bound* to help with this debt problem, right? Here is Raul Ilargi Meijer summarizing Alastair Crooke on limits to growth as the real problem that everybody studiously refuses to talk sensibly about. And finally, here is a somewhat breathless alt-right scenario that see Trump taking the fall for the next economic down draft, which will self-implode and discredit the right -- N.B.: just because I linked to it hardly means I agree with all of it! (e.g., Brandon never mentions energy). However, the war on cash spreading across several countries (new max peso note is now worth only $10) does suggest that the time when the muppets get sheared is beginning to come into view (I regard myself, unfortunately, as a muppet).

[Nov25,'16] The comparisons between the effects of monetary policy in different countries (US/Japan/Germany/Spain/Greece) in this Richard Koo video was very useful to me (again, just because I linked, doesn't mean I agree with everything -- e.g., that the most important thing is to preserve globalized 'free trade', race-to-the-bottom wages, China pouring as much concrete as the US 20th century every 3 years, etc.). He argues that the way the post-bubble recessions *should* have been fixed would have been to invest in people (government borrowing money to help non-banker people) instead of banks (quantitative easing, incl buying $2.5 trillion government bonds), and not to keep interest rates so low. Near zero interest rates have created huge stock/housing bubbles, destablized pensions and social security, and have transferred enormous amounts of wealth from poorer to super rich people. Currently, US house prices have *never* been so expensive (expense defined as house prices relative to salaries); affordability is *much* worse than just before the popping of the 2008 real estate bubble. As many have noted, we are now 'off by one' -- we have low interest rates that make sense *after* bubbles have burst, but now we are in a situation where interest rates are near zero but *before* the stock and housing and bond bubbles (they caused) have burst, and where there are now also huge bank excess reserves to unwind. The 'unwind' is to absorb the selling of $2.5 trillion dollars of excess reserves bonds, which would cause a huge spike in interest rates. I note he mentions nothing about energy, which is the real basis of all the money games he talks about. Even though they are hard to understand (for me at least), we *can* change the money game rules. We can't change the energy 'rules' -- that is, how much reasonably net energy positive fossil fuel energy is left for use to use to rearrange the entire world (including agriculture, which uses more fossil-fuel-derived nitrogen than the entire pre-human biosphere), to use renewable energy, which is less abundant and less convenient, before fossil fuel is too severely depleted. Tick, tick.

[Nov31,'16] Under the stated goal of fighting counterfeiting, 86% of the paper currency was withdrawn from legal circulation in India a few weeks ago in a shock-and-awe demonetization bid. The idea seems to be to force people into using electronic payments in a country where 98% of consumer payments are in cash. Electronic payments could then be taxed automatically to overcome widespread tax cheating. Meanwhile, the comparatively small amount of new legal cash is quickly being being withdrawn to matresses for emergencies. Money currently in banks is frozen (the lines at banks are to convert the banned notes, which many are still being paid with). This is hitting the bottom 50% of the population hard (remember, 1/5 of the humans in the world are Indian) and has instantly expanded the mafia trading the banned notes, as well as expanded the police state. People who can are trying to buy (even more) gold. The policy is still widely supported for the hope that it might reduce corruption. This remains to be seen. This may be a preview of what will unfold in other countries. Given the instability in India, there may be increased danger of a war/distraction with Pakistan over the next few months.

[Dec05,'16] 'Debt', esp. government debt, is often thought of rather abstractly as a vaguely negative thing that doesn't particularly benefit anyone. In fact, 75% of financial assets, much of which are 'instruments' that collect interest on debt, are owned by just 1% of the population. So, translated, people with increasing 'debt' are actually forced into more and more medieval-like tithing to the rich lords for the priveledge of renting money -- something that takes virtually no energy to 'produce'; when a loan is made, the total assets of the bank are merely digitally incremented, thus creating the amount of money for the loan at that moment (see this PDF from the Bank of England for why it actually does work exactly this way; banks are money factories, not money warehouses). The amount of consumer and government debt increased massively under Obama and will likely increase a lot more under Trump. We are getting more and more medieval -- except without all of the holidays :-{ . Since net energy growth, which is more than 99% correlated with GDP growth is also flattening, this will eventually pauperize most of the population if the trend in increased financial parasitism continues unchanged. A completely pauperized population will usually *not* revolt (too tired, too hungry, too broke, too sick). The danger point is rather when a reasonably well-fed population (70% of US-ians are seriously overfed) suffers a unexpected set-back (cf., the French Revolution). That kind of situation could easily occur over the next decade or two, well *before* the net-energy-driven collapse begins in earnest.

[Dec13,'16] The bond market is so big that the very moderate interest rate increases over the past few weeks has corresponded to a $1.7 trillion dollar loss in the value of bonds, and an almost $3 trillion dollar loss over the past two months. This is almost equivalent to the increase in gross debt during the entire Obama administration (~$4 trillion depending on what you include). The bond market is sure big! This suggests increasing distrust of the dollar. But other currencies are distrusted even more.

[Dec18,'16]
The Gig Economy
     The Uber/Lyft/Deliveroo gig economy is in some ways a return to the very origins of capitalism from feudalism, where peasant villagers took company piecework back to their own houses, where they provided their own work space, food, transportation, tools, and medical care. There is a good video about this here: The brutality of the system is being lost on those who actually use these apps -- from the Financial Times (!). The reference to the 1992 novel, Snow Crash, shows just how depressingly predictable some aspects of the built human world are.
     But at one point, the video voice over says something about: "digitalisation, which can't be reversed". It can, and will, be reversed. The devices and infrastructure of the digital economy AKA the spam and porn delivery system, are extremely resource (water, electricity, oil) intensive to make, distribute, and maintain. An i7 CPU contains 1.4 billion transistors; it requires hundreds of washings with ultrapure water under ultraclean conditions and several months of 24/7 power without even a subsecond glitch to make one; immediate search results are delivered across internet routers from server farms that together consume more than 10% of total electrical generation, mostly from coal (probably more if supply lines were traced to their source); getting family pics off 'the cloud' uses tremendously more energy than cracking open a local physical photo album. These devices won't be around in their modern form for the long haul when net energy supply is much lower. Hi-tech batteries and i7 chips are *not* going to be made by UberFab subcontractors in their home ovens, and home contractors are not going to have ultra high-speed pick and place robots lying around to assemble them.
     I'm certainly not looking foward to less computers and internet and less net energy, because then humans will probably just go back to feudalism, with less vacuum cleaners, dirtier water, and maybe even a plague or two (the population of Europe didn't recover to pre-plague 14th century levels until the 17th century).
     But maybe they could also bring back all the holidays? :-}

[Dec19,'16] Good news for the holidays! Aleppo, a city of over 2 million people, has finally been freed from the US-supported liver-eaters -- oh sorry, I meant to say the 'moderate rebels' (as opposed to 'bad ISIS', which would be the immoderate rebels the US is somehow 'fighting' by using them to implement a 'salvador option'. There, I NPR'd it). The US policy was shamefully supported until the very end by the pitifully hornswoggled 'left' (I consider myself left). The Congress worms just voted almost unanimously this Dec 8 to send anti-aircraft missiles, to the 'moderate rebels', of course. What could go wrong? (maybe another airliner 'accidentally' downed?). There are reports that NATO personnel were captured by the Syrian army in Aleppo, and that this spurred a secret meeting of the UN security council on Friday. Those were no doubt 'undercover agents' who had to infiltrate ISIS in order to help defeat them, right? If we hear nothing more, then probably, those assets were cashed during behind the scenes negotiations.

[Dec29,'16] The top 25 holding companies with derivatives have total assets of $14 trillion dollars and total derivatives of $250 trillion dollars (from Pam and Russ Martens, here). Most of the assets and derivatives are in only 4 banks (Citi, JPM, Goldman, BoA). Despite the record positive consumer sentiment in the Gallup poll, it looks for all the world like we are not far from the situation in 2006/2007, but with even more slack squeezed out of the system. Of course, my short term business sense is nil, so this probably means everything will continue shooting skyward for a while. The 1% oil 'glut' is now down to maybe 0.5%; but if there is another 2008-like reset, there could be another downward bump on the bumpy plateau of oil prices, leading to further lack of attention to critical energy issues at the worst time possible. Even with a crash, however, it is important to remember that we *will not* go on finding 1 barrel and using 6 barrels forever ('forever' defined as 1-2 decades ;-} ). The top-selling electric car is the Nissan Leaf, with only a quarter million on the road. Total world electric vehicles are over 1 million while total world vehicles are over 1 billion so total penetration of electric vehicles is now roughly a tiny 0.1%. The uptake of electric vehicles is increasing, but has been very slow. The turnover rate for the US car fleet is 15 years. In the US, the total energy required to run carz is about equivalent to the total energy used from the electric grid. With numbers like that, it is clear that the oil demand side -- all things held constant -- is not due to change a lot over the next decade. Of course, nothing is constant; but it seems unlikely that the world's car fleet will be mostly electric for a long time.

[Dec31,'16] While the 'left' wallows in high dudgeon about Trump denying global warming, it almost completely ignores the impending net energy train wreck (global warming will be the second, somewhat later, train wreck). As I get older, I am more and more impressed how well-placed people (and science fiction writers!) were able to see certain aspects of the future so clearly. I suppose this is merely a reflection of the fact that technology can't really change many critical aspects of the nature of the human species. Here is Admiral Hyman Rickover, a very well-placed person, from a speech he gave *in 1957* (full speech here): "I think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance of energy resources for our own future. Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels. What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels: The answer is -- in the long run -- none. The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. Metals, too, are non-renewable resources threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have, to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift. Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare."

[Jan02,'17] I read an interesting revision (Gallagher, 1995 pdf here) of the relationship between financial collapse in the 14th century (Venice bankers versus Florence bankers versus the rest of the European world and the Mongol Empire) and the Black Death. Though the Black Death is often treated as deus ex machina, it was argued that this was perhaps the first, most striking case in the modern world where growth flattened, causing a crisis and then a deadly response from a banking system that is not compatible with a steady-state or a contracting economy, which created the mid-14th-century Depression to rule them all (almost half of the entire human population of the planet died off). The entire world appears to be moving toward a similar juncture in the next one or two decades.

[Jan15,'17] Another year begins. The world will burn another cubic mile of oil this year (1000 barrels/sec, 150 tons/sec). There will likely be only minor oil shortages this year, if any at all. A year of no shortages (or no demand destruction) will be much less likely 15 years from now, however, since we are currently finding only 1 barrel for every 6 burned. Rather than focus on that big picture, we (including me) will be forced to focus on the micro picture ("Will there be a 1% 'glut' this month? Will there be a 1% shortage this month"? Is my syllabus up to date this month? Did you hear the latest trumpfart?"). I think there will probably be a 0.5% oil shortage causing an oil price spike later this year (if there is no huge economic crash). And I predict my syllabus will be updated. But with respect to the picture 15 years from now, these one-year-look-ahead predictions about tiny, almost random 'gluts' and 'surpluses' (and trumpfarts) are almost completely irrelevant. But after 15 years now of thinking about this almost every day, I am finally realizing that we can all probably *only* operate this way. We will probably *never* be able to take personally expensive action to avert a catastrophe that is that far (a mere 15 years!) into the future. We will have to wait until the catastrophe is only one month or one week away to finally pull out all the stops and try to patch things up. Another discussion we should be having now -- or rather should have been having 50 years ago when limits to growth became common scientific knowledge -- is how to fix our debt based financial system, which is designed to work properly only with a permanently growing economy, which requires a growing energy supply, not a steady state economy or much less, a contracting economy. That also won't be discussed, partly because most people have no concrete idea of how money and debt actually work (there is a superb summary of how things *actually* work here). It's a weird experience to be slowly riding the glacier down to the sea, fully knowing that where we are sitting will eventually break off and crash into the sea, without ever getting up off our @sses to even walk backwards a few feet! I wish another future was possible! I really don't want to run low on energy, or live through 2008 squared! Unfortunately, geology is utterly unmoved by what we animals want; it is only moved by what we do.

[Jan16,'17] I just read Alice Friedemann's excellent, small, fact-filled book on small book on trucks and energy. Previously, I had written that trains carried more freight than trucks in the US while the reverse is true in Europe. In fact, trains in the US *do* carry more freight *measured in ton-miles* than trucks; but measured only in tons, trucks carry a lot more (trucks typically go much shorter distances). Trains use fossil fuels in a stunningly more efficient fashion (10 times more efficient!) than trucks measured in ton-miles, because of air and rolling resistance, and because just-in-time trucks are not usually full, and because they start and stop more on their shorter runs. She also set me straight on why electrifying long distance rail in the US would actually *not* be a good idea for now. Diesel locomotives already have electric motors and they actually use fossil fuel more efficiently than suspended-wire electric-only locomotives driven by centrally-generated fossil fuel grid electricity (plant and transmission losses). Electric locomotives *do* make sense for commuter rail, which accelerates faster, to faster speeds, and which carries smaller loads. Of course, in fantasy land, the new suspended wires for cross-country electric locomotives and electric trucks would be powered by zillions of tons of distributed photocells in the day, and zillions of tons of distributed batteries at night, all built up into a completely new, special-purpose, country-wide transportation grid parallel to the existing grid (because the energy used for transportation is approximately equal to the energy used for the current electric grid). Rail is now privately owned and already invests a higher percentage of its earnings in equipment and rail maintenance than do truck companies, which run on taxpayer subsidized roads (most road damage is caused by trucks). The absolutely gigantic new investment that would be required to electrify 100,000 miles of existing rail, repair and electrify 250,000 miles of abandoned rail, and electrify several million miles of roads for trucks, and then battery-i-fy them all is simply not going to happen any time soon. To begin to get an idea of what would be required, Siemens electrified a one-mile, one-lane stretch of the I-710 for electric trucks in LA for $13 million. Note that this was just for a few posts and wires; the wires were powered by the regular grid, not the fantasy distributed photocell-and-battery-arrays parallel grid which needs to be as big as the existing grid. For why the parallel fantasy grid will not happen soon if ever, see the previous post. It's a fine idea, actually! The problem is that is would massively increase the cost of transporting goods now to deal with a problem won't occur for at least a decade. Accelerating a loaded train up a hill can draw 20 megawatts (my unit of power is the 'cyclist', which is about 100 watts, so this is 200,000 cyclists of power :-} ). A standard 50 pound solar panel generates about 200 watts (=2 cyclists) of power in bright sunlight, so that means that one train would require a minimum of 100,000 standard panels assuming bright sun, no losses, no extra panels for charging batteries for the 2/3 of each day where there is no bright sunlight. In practice, many more panels would be required for one train (e.g., 4x as many would be 10,000 tons of just solar panels for one train in one region -- N.B.: that's equivalent to 170 fully-loaded 60-ton railcars of solar panels). 'Good people' will prevent such an expensive thing from ever getting off the ground until it is way too late to do the right thing.

[Jan24,'17] Susan Webber posted an article here at Naked Capitalism on the puzzle of why global productivity has slowed down. There was no mention of energy. The first comment by Dick Burkhart was, rationally, 'how can you possibly talk about economic productivity without ever mentioning energy?!' Susan Webber immediately responded that 'energy doesn't make any difference because the 2016 fall in oil prices didn't cause a productivity uptick', and that 'anyway, we may have reached peak demand'. The astounding apparent lack of understanding of how modern industrial civilization works (including esp. the internet, a major consumer of energy from fossil fuel!) demonstrated by Susan Webber, who is highly intelligent and a voracious reader, does kinda stun me. What an amazing non-sequitur! First, 'oil price doesn't matter for productivity', then 'we may have reached peak demand'! It seems distinctly possible that the reduced energy return on energy investment is *exactly* why productivity is flattening, and why we have reached peak demand! It's seems ludicrous to me discuss economics without discussing energy, which is the fundamental basis of all productivity. I suppose spending too much time with the 3-month-look-ahead people eventually rots your brain. All the cute animals featured on the Naked Capitalism page never ignore energy concerns for a second! Humans are modified animals with a population pumped up by a century-long fossil fuel binge. That population is about to go on a permanent fossil fuel diet. The other animals will think, 'aren't the humans so cute when they talk to each other about the productivity paradox using their cute human language? It's a shame that they aren't doing so well.' :-}

[Jan29,'17] Charles Hall has calculated that all the batteries currently in the world can currently store less than one minute of global electrical output. In order for renewable-energy-plus-storage to run our current grid, we would then need minimally 1000x more batteries than we currently have made in the entire world. Grid energy storage is still expensive to make. We should do some anyway, at least until the copper, silver, and lithium becomes too hard to get. Tesla is installing a large amount of battery grid storage this year in California. This should substantially increase our real-world experience with how practical it will be to drastically scale this up. Notes that adding the cost of storage to, say, solar cell electric will substantially decrease the energy return on energy investment. Hopefully, Hall and Prieto's calculation of EROEI=2.6:1 for Spanish solar is too low -- because that would leave little room for wouldn't leave much room for an EROEI bigger than 1 (one isbreak-even) after the energy cost to make the grid batteries is deducted.

[Feb02,'17] The demolition of Palestinian homes to make way for Israeli settlements reached a ten-year high in 2016. Each year, US taxpayers effectively give every Israeli a stipend of roughly $1000, which helps to make more of those 'facts on the ground'. We don't get to vote on this because both parties support it. In 2016, an unprecedented 10-year military aid package of $40 billion was announced. As with Darwinian evolution, the facts on the ground at the end of the day are all that count. What we have here is state-supported Darwinian evolution (I just gave a talk about evolution, so Darwin was in my mind). Doesn't look like any of this will change with Drumpf/Kushner. For something completely different, a friend sent me a link on 'mechanical doping', the installation of small electric motors to assist professional cyclists, who have been maniacally doping their bodies for a century. I hadn't heard about this before (crikey, there's already a wiki page on it!), but once told, I could immediately intuit the sequence of events. Since the average power output of a Tour de France cyclist is about 250 watts, and they allow things like electric shifting, even a single low tech alkaline AA battery would be enough to spit out 100 watts here and there (there is almost 4 watt-hours of energy in an alkaline AA cell, which is equivalent to 100 watts for 2.5 min). Reading this was making me feel tired and jaded by the usual stupid human monkey tricks. But then I had to laugh when I read that 'super-doper' Doctor Michele Ferrari, now permanently banned from the 'sport' during the Lance Armstrong doping investigation, had earlier visited Istvan Varjas, the bike motor guy, worried that the motors were going to cut into the good doctor's drug doping business. Not to mention that the robotics guys at JPL were appreciative, too ('dual use', man!). Finally, none of this is to say that I wouldn't *love* to have one of these babies in my crankset the next time some overweight slob in an SUV or a 4x4 roars uselessly past me. I *am* a monkey after all!

[Feb06,'17] It was shocking to come across this F William Engdahl's piece on abiotic oil. I have previously linked to his articles for what I regarded as careful geopolitical observations, but this embarrassing piece really undermined any confidence in his abilities. He says this 2017 blog post was based on his 2012 book, which I had not read. By googling, I found out that he was already promoting abiotic oil in 2007. Of course, when a writer reaches beyond their direct scientific expertise, they can always slip up. But this should be close to home for him, since he has written so much about resource wars. What a slip! His latest piece illustrates bizarre fantasies about the formation of methane, oil, and even coal (!). It is easy enough in this day and age to use the internet to read scientific papers debating abiotic oil (tho this is the first I have heard of abiotic coal!). He has utterly failed!

[Feb09,'17] For an utter fail in a different context, see the embarrassing Amnesty International "human slaughterhouse" propaganda campaign deconstructed by Scott Creighton. The unmasking of the previous 'Syria chemical weapons' scam, which prevented Obama from attacking Syria looked like the agony of Syria might be winding down. Maybe this can be unmasked, too, to stop Trump or whoever from re-escalating the war on Syria.

[Feb11,'17] Oil companies have begun to pour 'money' (i.e., yet more debt) back into oil exploration. This kind of money-pouring is based on a 6 months to 1 year lookahead. This trumps the utterly useless daily 'oh, look, oil/gas/etc price/reserves/inventory ticked up/down this Friday at 2 PM' noise/nonsense that clogs zerohedge etc. Coupled with the shrinking of the 1% 'glut' to under 1%, this means the oil companies must be expecting an oil price spike within the year.

[Feb20,'17] Jeffrey P. Snider (person, AI writing bot?!) seems to auto-generate endless numbers of similar articles per day. Recently, he has written hundreds of them on odd things happening with 'eurodollars'. I still can't fully understand what his point is (except that there is a problem/shortage/hidden-ness) with eurodollars. A 'eurodollar' is a dollar-denominated deposit in a foreign bank or a foreign branch of a US bank often used for transactions between two non-dollar currencies that is not subject to normal US regulation (not restricted to euro countries, so it should really be called an 'offshore dollar'). I remember back in the 2008 day, that some people had suggested that the main precipitating factor of 2008 was a 'eurodollar shortage'. The reduced regulation on eurodollars means, among other things, that eurodollars are not subject to Federal Reserve Bank reserve requirements. First, we need to translate 'reserve requirement' into English: it means, the amount of dollars that a bank is allowed to create from the void for the purpose of giving out 'loans', which it then afterward borrows a fraction of the created money at a lower interest rate for its 'reserves' so that the loans/created-money are 'only' 10x as much -- great 'work' if you can get it). In 2014, the Fed showed an average daily volume of eurodollars of $0.14 trillion. Though this seems 'small' relative to, say, currency market trading ($5.3 trillion/day), it seems that eurodollars are mostly used to buy actual things via overnight loans/payments, more or less like a futures contract, as opposed being mere parasitical 'money buying money' in the currency market casino. But since eurodollars are not constrained by the usual reserves requirements, this means that even moar of them can be created from the void. So, this being my mental work-in-progress, I'm still unclear how there could ever be a 'shortage' of them; all the foreign banks would have to be bankrupt at the same time not to be able to legally generate them from the void, which doesn't seem to be true yet. Given that these are all essentially policy decisions (e.g., reserves requirements), any 'eurodollar shortage' would seem to have to be engineered. However, my understanding of the network of international banks, which stand even above 'national' central banks (which are actually private, like the so-called 'Federal' Reserve) is not very deep. Plus, many of the details (e.g., stock holders in the uber banks) are essentially state secrets.

[Feb21,'17] "Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top" -- Edward Abbey

[Feb22,'17] Scott Creighton has a top notch article here on the dreadful continuation of the Phoenix Program, Iraqi chapter. Especially note the continuity in this policy from Bush, to preznit 'peace prize' (no pussy hats complained then), and now continuing in full force with Trumpf. For shame, US-ians. Some day, when the US empire has fallen and similar horrors come by here for an extended visit, people here will ask 'how could people elsewhere possibly be so deaf to our horrible experiences'? Their grandparents will be able to explain.

[Feb26,'17] Rune Likvern made a useful back-of-the-envelope calculation of 2016 EROEI of oil from Volve, a small independent oil production installation that recovered about 64 Mb (million barrels) of oil, here. For reference, daily world oil+otherliquids usage is 96 Mb, so this minor field produced almost a day's worth of world oil consumption over its 8 years of operation (now shut down). Likvern's estimates for 2016 were EROEI=15, measured leaving the oil platform. The estimate for the net energy available to the consumer was EROEI=8 (e.g., 6% of the *net* energy leaving the platform has to be used to transport the oil to the consumer). That's still a ways above the EROEI 'cliff' that starts around EROEI=2, below which, the amount of energy that has to be invested to get one unit of net energy goes up rapidly reaching infinity at EROEI=1, which is zero net energy. Note that this is (was!) a *conventional* oil field -- discovered in 1993, production started in 2008, offshore continental shelf, salt-associated, in 80 meter deep water, reservoir depth ~2900 meters, 'secondary production' water injection used immediately for pressure support w/5:1 water/oil output, in the Norwegian North Sea. It is likely that the EROEI for current drilling and mining (light tight fracked oil which has to be mixed with heavy to be refined, deep sea/continental slope oil, tar sands) is worse than this, though hopefully still above EROEI=3. The Hills group 'ETP model' suggestion that we reached EROEI=2 for oil in 2012 is almost certainly wrong. However, new discoveries, which incidentally dropped to a 50 year low in 2016 (yikes!), *are* probably getting dangerously close to the EROEI 'cliff'. Also, Rune Likvern's estimate compares the energy invested, which is high quality diesel and natural gas and helicopter fuel, with the total energy contained in the output barrels of crude oil, not all of which is useable as an energy source after refining (e.g., asphalt). Finally, these estimates don't include the energy required to construct and maintain the transportation and industrial infrastructure, which relies partly on oil, and which is in gradual decline, in the US at least. The ever-declining EROEI for all energy sources will soon lead, or may already have led, to peak net energy, the most critical peak of all for industrial civilization (which is more difficult to estimate than EROEI of an oil rig). Despite their overwhelming importance, it is virtually impossible discuss these topics rationally in 'polite conversation'. And anyway, polite conversation is being drowned out by *utterly irrelevant* Trump vs. the so-called 'left' distraction/nonsense.

[Mar03'17] Fracked oil is called *light* tight oil because it consists of much shorter aliphatic chains (heptane or less) than crude oil (mostly longer than heptane) (see also Westexas writing here). Nevertheless, everything is piled together into "all liquids", which is still creeping ever slightly upward (which even includes the essentially zero-net-energy ethanol). In order to supply a refinery, light tight oil has to be mixed with heavier oil, such as the low EROEI heavy oil washed and cooked out of tar sands. Note that this only gets the specific gravity (API) right even though it won't contain the same distribution of chain lengths as real crude oil, and is increasingly being rejected by refiners ("dumbbell crude"). Even as inventories of 'oil' in the US have gone up, the US has inexplicably been importing *more* (real?) oil. Since the bloodstream of industrial civilization consists of heavy diesel and bunker oil (ships, trains, trucks), not gasoline, or the even shorter aliphatic chains in light tight oil, we may be a little more dangerously closer to real problems with our just-in-time world than it appears on the surface. It wouldn't hurt to be cautious.

[Mar06,'17] While the Ukraine breaks up in real time this week (Donbass border/currency/coal/nationalization/deoligarchization), the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Boris Johnson, visiting the Ukronazis in Kiev, focussed on the upcoming Eurovision song contest. Go Boris. For entertainment, I then read Pepe Escobar who suggested (supposedly based on an anonymous source) that Flynn got dumped because he/Ledeen really wanted to attack Iran, which could certainly have lead to major world oil problems. Maybe.

[Mar10,'17] With hardly a peep from Trump, the US 'news', or the supposed 'left', the US has sent 2500 combat troops to Kuwait , a staging ground for entering Syria. This is probably just the first tranche. The autonomous operation of the supply line machinery of state reminds me of the (much larger) buildup to the Iraq war and strongly suggests that the US/Trump/military/whomever have not given up on partitioning/destroying Syria.

[Mar13,'17] The Mighty Wurlitzer seems to be gearing up for another US-supported coup attempt in Turkey because of Turkey's resistance to the creation of greater Kurdistan via partitioning Turkey and Syria. The Turks have seen the results of the partitions of neighboring countries close-up and are right to fear a partition of Turkey and Syria. The sudden injection of US troops into Syria -- which could additionally serve as human shields for the YPG -- could be related.

[Apr04,'17] Yet another head fake 'dictator kills his own people with chemical weapons' attack in Syria from the Disinfo Reifenstahl Helmets. Who needs long term memory when you have the internet, right? Sheesh.

[Apr06,'17] Today, CNN says: "Trump is considering military action in Syria". My brain explodes trying to relate this sentence to reality. It refers to a universe parallel to the one I'm in. Trump actually controls the Pentagon? The US/Saudi/Izzy hasn't already employed a 'salvador option' al-Qaeda/ISIS to destroy Syria for half a decade, killing nearly another half a million people? Trump 'considers' things? Because of friggin' 'chemical weapons' brought to you by the Hollywood Helmets and Nikki Haley's fake 'Colin Powell slash Samantha Power women and children moment'? 'Humanitarian bombing'? Again, again, a-f*cking-gain? (Daily Mail report on fake 2013 chemical attack pulled after lawsuit by British 'defence' contractor, Britam, so only avail on wayback). Splutter, splutter. I don't look foward to declining net energy, but now I'm now beginning to wonder if as humans start to run low on it, they will actually pull even *more* of this shite! I was naively hoping that our unwanted power-down might help to *cut* some of the crap.

[Apr06b,'17] Update: Late in the day here, at 3 AM Syria time, 50-60 cruise missiles were launched against a Syrian government airfield being used to attack ISIS in Homs, perhaps just before the new false flag 'Assad uses chemical weapons' lie began to fall apart. This may be reminiscent of when Bill Clinton bombed the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in 1998 during Monica. Or it may just be the beginning of a major escalation against Russia, which could be real trouble. I am hoping the first interpretation is right. Somebody could have Trump by the p@ssy, but he could have just grabbed his own p@ssy. Of course, the spectacle will be a big popularity boost for the SUV crowd, like when Bush bombed Afghanistan. Fake 'leftists' with the urge to cheer (as they vilely cheered for the original Syrian intervention) will have their knickers in a vicious twist, because they supposedly hate Prez P@ssy for being 'evil', they hate Russia, and because Hillary would have bombed *so* differently (she would have used 75 pink-colored cruise missiles). But I doubt they will be able to repress the urge to cheer.

[Apr07,'17] The euro poodles (May, Merkel, Hollande, Tusk) and Trudeau from Canada have now publicly weighed in in support of Trump and, and are 'catapulting' the false flag. Just like the fake US 'left' poodles (incl Bernie!). What mental weaklings! Go Bolivia! I can't imagine most actual EU-ians agree with their spineless leaders. The Russians claim that less than half of the US missiles hit the Syrian air field, the others possibly jammed, spoofed, shot down, or malfunctioned, and that few high-value targets were hit. However, given the usual disinfo storm, it's impossible to really know what actually happened. Ignoring the stomach-churning patriotic macaque-monkey displays from all concerned, which will eventually die down, this is not a US move from a position of power. Firing a bunch of expensive, slow missiles from vulnerable destroyers near Cyprus because of fear of getting US planes shot down is supposed to signal power, but it also can demonstrate weakness, esp. if many fail. Russia is not likely to abandon Tartus and will strengthen air defenses and offenses. China, embarrassed by the attack during a dinner meeting with Trump in the US, will have to respond indirectly. I'm going with interpretation one, above (like Clinton's Sudan factory bombing).

[Apr09,'17] I'm still guessing this is more 'Clinton Sudan factory bombing' than 'Cuban missile crisis'. Russia and the US are moving some military equipment around, but they always do that, and there is no credible evidence yet for major mobilizations. The US is continuing to bomb northeastern Syria (opposite end). Some have suggested that the main point of this was not to threaten Syria or Russia but to threaten China (see, e.g., US aircraft carrier group going once again to the Korean pensinsula). Big public productions like this tend to have multiple uses. The Russian 'red line' joint statement was probably disinfo, despite its wide distribution (Al Masdar News and Times of Israel, but also Reuters and the Independent). Perhaps the most ironic result has been the inability of the anti-Trump MSM to restrain itself from monkey-flag-waving, which is turning this into a major popularity boost for Trump, and which has instantly shot their own stoopid Russiagate nonsense in the foot! Who knows, perhaps Trump actually thought through that part of the sequence. If so, it's hard to imagine him thinking foward to the next week. A pox on both their houses.

[Apr10,'17] The ridiculous 'barrel bomb' canard resurfaces (Spicer presser today). This psyop continuity from the Obama regime to the current not-very-different oligarchs+bankers+generals+asshat Obama2 regime truly shows that we have reached full-on '1984'. 'Any fool' knows that when white hot iron shrapnel from a conventional bomb tears off a woman's leg or a baby's head, this is virtually doing God's work, as opposed to doing the same thing with an infernal 'barrel bomb', you terrible Assad regime person. Sheesh. War is *defined* as ripping the limbs and heads off of live humans, disemboweling them alive, and crushing them in collapsed buildings, which only sometimes kills them immediately. This isn't changed in the slightest by avoiding using the fantasy 'barrel bombs'. There hasn't been real visual reporting of what war actually looks like since the American war on Vietnam. Wouldn't want the stoopid human monkeys to actually see what they pay for every day. They might get scared, or throw up. Besides, have you no care for (our) women and children? I'm in favor of the old practice of putting heads on pikes on the bridge. Since we now have big flat screens visible in broad daylight, we could project magnified video of the heads on freeway overpasses so all the sheeple mindlessly piloting their ridiculous 200,000 watt 6,000 pound SUV's on their way to work could see all the good effects of avoiding 'barrel bombs'. There would be enough heads at one per day for almost three millenia, just from the million muslims killed by the false-pretext US/UK war/genocide on Iraq. It's no less barbaric than funding the things that ripped the heads off of the living humans in the first place. Just because we can't see them doesn't make it less obscene -- in fact, it makes it *more* obscene. What's so great about the human monkey? Physics? Chemistry? Some days, I prefer the physics- and chemistry-naive non-human monkeys. When they rip somebody's head off, they have to do it by hand.

[Apr11,'17] Still guessing this is *not* the second Cuban missile crisis. Here is Stephen Cohen, a sane voice, on CNN explicitly suggesting that it is. I'm guessing he's wrong. He helpfully and calmly manages to broadcast the Russian response, amidst the robotic braying of the hosts and Colonel Leighton ('we lied to you about Iraq, but this time is for real, man'). The contents of the Russian response were, of course, completely omitted from any other CNN 'reporting'. Yesterday, Steve Pieczenik quite forcefully argued that he believes the reports of the beginnings of a real military buildup. From the disorganized commotion visible in Washington, it's not yet clear what's up or what whoever is control in the US wants, besides Spicer's blurt "The first goal is to destablize Syria". That was the original goal! Nuclear war with Russia and North Korea is something else. I'm still guessing that Pieczenik's 'buildup' reports may themselves be catapulted disinfo; disinfo was, after all, Steve's life-long professional occupation (tho he sure looked convincingly angry/honest in the video!). And don't forget there still are many non-Dr-Strangelove types in the military. The one thing that creeps me out a bit is Putin's comment that the US Syrian attacks were planned before the poison gas psyop that was supposedly their trigger, and that more psyops are in the works. If true, it means the Russians, too, would already have been 'preparing for hot war' before this. Just in case, here is a handy nuclear firestorm map app. But probably, this will all die down in a week. It's all just the fog of not-hot-war (well, as long as you are lucky enough not to live in Iraq/Syria/Libya/Yemen/Afghanistan, where over a million people have been killed over the past decade). Finally, here is a helpful map of pipelines.

[Apr13,'17] The Trump-Bartiromo chocolate cake freak show has moved the 'official' public presentation of 'government' to a new level of farce, even beyond the execrable Brian Williams soiling his pants mouthing Leonard Cohen on 'beautiful' missiles. Reality looks like a comedy skit instead of the other way around. The wall-to-wall war whoops of the yellow press, together with the fake videos, analyzed, for example, here, which would have impressed even their English forebears of pre-WWI 1913, may work their 'magic' given another few months, tho I don't think they fool younger people. I did witness them working on a number of my fellow older academics, even one with an MD (!). On the positive side, the Tillerson visit to Russia went off OK, and there was even a meeting with Putin. Talking -- even the weird talking-past-each-other, robotic, Kerry-like utterances of Tillerson versus the logical Lavrov -- is good. As a result of Trump blowing up the Russia-US intelligence cooperation hotline, the US has had to cut down on its Syria bombing operations for fear of drawing Russian anti-aircraft fire. Eli Lake's re-blog of Cernovich on Bloomberg is probably the usual disinfo.

[Apr14,'17] The MOAB Afghanistan bomb is just another sorry re-run, analogous to the perennially popular 'chemical weapons' of 'mass destruction' canard, proving once again that there is no history. It even included a fantasy 'tunnel complex'! (scheisse, these guys have *no* imagination). Remember the elaborately illustrated and completely fake Tora Bora multilevel tunnel complex repeatedly broadcast by the 'Mighty Wurlitzer' of the NYT not to mention The Guardian? The reality turned out to be a few small mountain caves. If anything, the immense power of the internet seems to have even further eroded historical perception, except in the special case of washed up rock groups and bad, old teevee shows. The MOAB was originally called the 'Daisy Cutter' in Vietnam, where it was used to blast away the jungle to make landing strips, that is, when millions of gallons of dioxin-tainted Agent Orange and giant tree crushing bulldozers weren't doing this. The US scraped/poisoned/bombed almost 10% of the surface area of Vietnam down to dirt before it *lost* the war and left the contaminated wreckage and 2-3 million dead people behind. The US dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in the entirety of the second world war, leaving roughly 20 million bomb craters (from the 95% of the 750 pound bombs that actually exploded), and a sh*tload of buried unexploded bombs that kill to this day. Militarily pointless, the historical curiosity of the MOAB is merely another sound bite for the disgusting Brian Williams to slobber over. He won't, of course, mention that the US has *lost* the war in Afghanistan, defeated by the stunningly inferior military of the Taliban! The only US success there has been to protect and resurrect the C-eye-eh opium trade back up to its original pre-Taliban levels (before the US invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban had eliminated the C-eye-eh opium business). One can only hope that whatever continued provocation of North Korea the MIC crazies and Trump come up with this week has as *little* practical effect as the Afghanistan MOAB bomb 'tunnel complex' psyop. Already in 2004 (w.r.t. Iran), I had begun to worry about the possibility of a new-new Pearl Harbor where a US aircraft carrier gets sunk in order to firmly fix the US proles on a war footing. Anachronistic aircraft carriers are pretty much sitting ducks for a swarm of modern supersonic anti-ship missiles, and today are strangely like the obsolete battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor that were used to launch the US into WWII (the newest ones can go fast, but 65 mph is still slow relative to a missile, and the ocean is still flat). I don't think we're there yet. Trump's one-eighty into a neocon Bush/Obama war pig was pretty fast, eh?, perhaps suggesting some kind of blackmail (sex? via Kushner? assassination? Russia-gate?!). But I'm not denying I will be a little relieved to see NK clear from the Matrix news feed over the next week or two.

[Apr17,'17] Quick relief! Looks like the 'aircraft carriers to NK' and the 'failed missile test' were both probably just @ss-covering disinfo distractions. Who needs the MSM 'catapulting the propaganda' when you've got zerohedge et al., who even added *2 more carriers* to their disinfo load yesterday...

[Apr22,'17] The upcoming 5G voice and data frequencies will get into the range of millimeter wave airport strip-search body-scanning frequencies. These higher frequencies penetrate the body differently, and despite being more energetic (energy equals h nu) require more transmitters because smaller wavelengths are absorbed more easily. The possibility of a full-metal-jacket fascist full-body panopticon grows ever closer each year.

[Apr24,'17] A vimeo interview (transcription here with a putative former Dutch currency trader, Ronald Bernard (still involved in banking) succinctly describes the centrality of blackmail in maintaining the discipline of evil. He says he is still alive because he hasn't named any names. Minutes 22-27 almost sound like a confession. What he describes is a refined, modern version of practices that go back at least to Classical Greece, and probably before. Kubrick's sanitized version in Eyes Wide Open conveyed the same unmistakable feel. In two weeks, the multiple copies on youtube and reddit and 4chan already have 'poison the well' flat-Earth, UFO, and alien nonsense added. If disinfo (for now, I'm guessing it's for real), this guy would have to be an absolutely amazing actor. [Update Jun9: part 2 of the interview].

[Apr30,'17] The US killed almost 1/3 of the total North Korean *civilian* population (2-3 million people) by bombing and napalming every major North Korean city (Curtis LeMay) during the Korean war. Some of the death toll was due to starvation afterward. North Koreans are not completely insane; they have logical reasons to want nuclear weapons as a defense against the US. On Wednesday, *South* Korea had to mobilize 8,000 police officers to suppress protests against the US installation of THAAD missile defense systems there. The anesthetized, propagandized, and casually vicious US masses support the 'war effort' (including much of the 'left'). In a recent poll, at 47% to 39%, Americans wanted to shut down their government if defense and homeland security spending was not *increased* enough. The increased money for 'defense' would obviously be better spent on fixing potholes in the decaying streets that I cycle on every day :-} . But despite all the scary noises, I still think this is basically all psyop/disinfo circus nonsense (tho installing US anti-missiles at the Chinese border *is* dangerously first-strike-ey). In a saner world, the most pressing problem would be how to deal with the beginning over the next decade of an irreversible decline in net energy available to run worldwide industrial civilization together with declining fish, soil, freshwater, metals, and other critical non-energy (but energy-intensive to obtain!) resources. A good first step would be to actually talk about these problems, instead of the steady diet of warmongery from the yellow press of the MSM.

[May12,'17]
Peak Oil Update/Summary
     Starting around 2002, I first started following the oil more closely. Looking at the data available then, I soon developed an expectation that oil would peak around 2008. That year, oil price did spike up to unheard of levels, and 2008 (or 2005 or 2011) very probably marked the world peak in conventional crude oil production. However, then came additions from tar sands, fracking, deep water oil, more lease condensates (pentane), and more natural gas plant liquids, and this resulted in 'all liquids' continuing to slowly increase after 2008 until the present. Looking at this Fed graph of the monetary base money supply and total retail sales excluding food, clearly something unprecendented in previous contractions *did* happen in 2008. Perhaps this new disruption was only accidentally coincident with peak production and price peak of low-EROEI conventional crude oil. In any case, many of the people who used to write about peak oil have now gone silent with the current lower price of oil and with the current 1% oil 'glut'. Some peak oil people, such as Gail Tverberg, who was one of the principals at TheOilDrum.com, are now predicting that oil prices might go down and stay down permanently, because of demand destruction. That is, oil is expensive enough to cause people to cut back but not expensive enough for oil companies to make a profit off of newer, harder-to-get oil -- and things are likely to stay that way permanently. Another group of 'tech cornucopians' assume that the 1% of world power generated by solar and the 1% of world electric cars will rapidly increase with solar roofs, etc, and this will keep oil prices low instead by replacing oil use.
     I think Gail and the tech cornucopians are both wrong. My summary is: (1) the existing population of China and India are still way under US kWh/person, but trying very hard to get there and they have 7x as many people as there are in the US, (2) world population is still growing at 1%/year (more than one entire UK per year) and is projected to do this for 30 more years (more than 7 additional US's worth of people), (3) solar electric and electric cars are tiny (barely visible in stacked graphs) and their growth rate is almost static, and even if 'Tuscan roofs' and overpriced money-losing Tesla cars markedly increase (2x, 4x, 6x), it would still only amount to a small fraction of total energy production percentage and car percentage two decades from now. The bottom line is that there would seem to be ample opportunity to increase oil demand by 1% relative to the almost flat oil supply, and oil and natural gas are far from being replaced by solar and wind as critical power sources for industry, roads, fertilizer and food production, and transportation (esp. ships/railroads/trucks). Now, in more detail.
     First, the amount of the oil 'glut' is still tiny (less than 1%) relative to the 99%+ that got burned. Maintaining this knife edge situation permanently seems unlikely. A slightly larger glut causing even sharper price drops would have the potential to knock out more of the oil industry leading eventually to a rebound price spike, while a mere 1% increase would eliminate the glut entirely and a 2% increase could cause another spike.
     Second, oil discoveries over the past few years have dropped to new record multi-year lows (6-8 units used for 1 unit discovered). The eventual effects of using 600% as much oil every year as is being discovered that year should be compared to the effects of having a 1% glut or having some oil tankers parked in the bay.
     Third, low kWh/person countries are willing to pay a lot more for their initial increase in oil usage than richer countries are. This is because the productivity increase from very-low-oil-usage to low-oil-usage is much greater that the productivity increase from a soccer mom buying an even bigger SUV. This suggests that robust oil demand will be there for decades. China and India have more than 7x the population of the US, but together, China and India currently use less oil (17% of world total) than the US does (the leader at 20.5% of world total oil usage). Even if China and India were to use everybody else's oil in the world, they couldn't make it up to US per capita usage. Also consider that countries with high gasoline taxes are paying 2-3x as much as people do in the US. For example, gas in the UK costs $7 to $8/gallon, but people still buy a lot of it, and some even drive SUV's (the mind boggles).
     Fourth, population *increases* (as opposed to the effects of modernization of existing population in low kWh/person countries) together with low oil prices will continue to drive demand up. Population is growing by more than an entire UK per year (two entire California's per year), which isn't expected to top out until 2050 at the earliest, which would amount to 7 more US's worth of people to support and provide housing, transportation, food, and toys for. The 2008 oil price spike did cause temporary demand destruction in the US and an actual drop in car miles driven beginning in 2008, even in the face of continued US population increases. However, low prices starting in 2014 immediately caused an increase in US car miles driven, and immediately stimulated US-ians to buy larger, less fuel-efficient cars (I see them from my bicycle every day). The increase in US car miles since 2014 have brought US per capita car miles back up to approximately where they were in 2003. With coal fossil fuel, the sudden cessation of China cooking up insane amounts of concrete to build a complete US interstate freeway system every three years (they now have two) at the end of 2016 *did* cause a sudden flattening of world coal usage. But it seems that oil and methane are unlikely to experience similar sudden demand flattenings (in the absence of world war) because oil and methane provide the power for what goes over the roads and provide food and houses and toys for the car occupants (not to mention the cars themselves, 20% of which have to be replaced every year).
     Fifth, the energy return on energy investment for oil has been inexorably declining. The amount of energy used is still a small fraction of the energy returned (perhaps 10-15%), but that is enough to begin to cut into the total net energy available. Net energy -- not to mention widely varying energy/barrel for different 'liquids' -- is not considered when looking at 'all liquids' production, which consists of crude oil plus light tight oil (heptane), plus lease condensates (pentane), plus natural gas plant liquids (butane, propane), plus tar sands, plus biodiesel (slightly net energy positive), plus ethanol (no net energy!). Thus, some of of the apparent increases might actually just be 'treading water' when looked at from a net energy perspective. Of course, the people using the finished energy sources don't see any decrease in the energy available per gallon; rather the increased energy costs are absorbed by the rest of the system, which is what Gail Tverberg is fond of pointing out.
     Sixth, the cornucopian idea that solar and wind are a drop in replacement for oil, methane, coal, and nuclear is wrong (Tverberg agrees here). Solar and wind require substantial up-front investments that most people won't be able to afford. The half of the population that can't afford an unexpected $500 dollar expense are hardly going to buy a $50,000 'Tuscan' solar roof from Tesla, which will maybe break even after 20-25 years (Tesla's own calculation!); people only keep a house for 10 years on average, and wouldn't easily be able to take the roof with them. A few idle rich people will buy them (e.g., soccer moms guilty about their mammoth SUV's), and will be handsomely rewarded with a $15,000 tax break because they are 'helping the planet' (this is actually a transfer payment from the US population to Elon Musk). These would be the same people that would casually emit 2 tons of CO2 on a vacation to see what's left of the 'global warming damaged' Barrier Reef (as advertised in my UCSD retirement newsletter apparently without irony). They may also have an extra $10,000 for the house batteries and inverters to carry them through blackouts better than the proles in less tony neighborhoods. Though this may help to create a few gated/walled 'Elysiums', a la Rio, it won't measureably affect the composition of the global energy supply. Even if growth rates in solar and electric car batteries were to increase (they are actually flattening now), it would take a very long time to swap out the 99% of the gasoline cars on the road. In the US, the replacement rate for cars is about 18%. This means if almost 100% of new car purchases were electric cars, we could replace most of the cars with electric in a decade (and presumably beef up the electric grid, since the energy currently used in cars is about equivalent to the total energy used in the current electric grid). But when only 2-3% of new car purchases are electric, and buyers retain gasoline cars for longer distance travel, it would take decades before gasoline demand is greatly reduced. Even at current low car replacement rates, lithium and esp. cobalt supplies for batteries are already tight. In the case of container ships, railroads, and long distance trucks, there are no drop-in electrical replacements on the distant horizon. A lithium truck battery capable of powering a long distance truck currently weighs almost as much as a fully loaded 80,000 diesel truck, which reduces the payload of an electric truck to almost nothing. Of course, a long distance electric truck could stop to recharge every fifty or a hundred miles, but that won't be a 'growth industry'. Half of freight, however, travels less than 100 miles on trucks, where batteries might be practical. But it's important to remember that ships and trucks and trains are replaced at a much lower rate than passenger cars. There will never be even medium distance (>30 min) electric passenger planes if these even ever arrive.
     Seventh, solar and wind are currently utterly dependent on fossil fuel -- for making concrete, float glass, steel, mining silver and other minerals, diesel transport, pavement/bridge maintenance, tires, installation, service, electronics manufacturing. Supply chains are getting longer and more reticulated rather than shorter and more local. An iPhone is assembled by transporting the outputs of 200 suppliers distributed across the world using fossil fuel. There is no Biosphere (Steve Bannon!) equivalent for industrial civilization -- this would be a demonstration project showing that it is actually possible to design/mine/manufacture/transport/service some basic fragment of what is needed for industrial civiliation using only renewable power (water, wind, solar). It may or may not be possible. It's a empirical scientific question. It doesn't *have* to be possible just because we want it to be.
     Eighth, the peak in methane production -- esp. fracked methane -- is probably still a few years off. Some oil usage could in theory be replaced by methane (e.g., compressed gas busses already on the road). However, there is robust demand for methane (1) for heating (2) for electrical generation as coal and nuclear plants are retired, (3) for new natural gas peaker electric plants to buffer the intermittent effects of more solar/wind, and (4) for making fertilizer to grow food in more and more depleted soils for the expanding human population. Compressed natural gas cars are still rare, and compressed natural gas isn't practical for ships (except liquified natural gas tankers :-} ) or for trains. It could be used for some trucks. This suggests that increased methane use is not likely to strongly reduce oil demand.
     Finally, we have to consider how this interacts with the current business cycle, which looks a bit long in the tooth. Should there be a 2008-like contraction (or worse), it would result in demand destruction in the US like that observed in 2008. But the US only has 5% of the world's population. After another crash comes, there will be some recovery, and even through the year of the crash, roughly a cubic mile of oil will still be burned and forever lost (tho a small amount will laudably be used to make, deliver, and install solar cells :-} ). A crash will likely cause more contraction in the business of exotic, harder-to-get oil, further impairing supply a few years down the line. I had previously expected oil prices to already be higher by now -- I expected a spike by the end of 2015, and when that didn't happen, I expected it to happen in 2016. Oil prices went up a little, but no 2008-like spike. I still expect a spike by the end of 2017, as oil usage comes up against fast-depleting light tight oil but also slowly-depleting but mostly already-depleted conventional Saudi oil. But even if that happens, there will likely be another oil price crash soon after the spike, similar to what happened immediately after the 2008 spike.
     I have done an exceptionally poor job of making accurate short term price predictions, partly because a 'glut' of 1%, which is what I more or less regard as 'noise' from the point of view of the long term survival of industrial civilization, can completely crash prices (and that is precisely why I would have made an absolutely terrible businessman!).
     Burning a cubic mile of oil per year, however, is *not* noise. Because of that, with my geology cap on, I remain much more sure that by 2030, we will be in a new era of continuously declining net available energy -- right about the time that people across the world will supposedly be trying to increase fossil-fuel-driven investment in alternative energy beyond just Elysium soccer moms. This is likely to be a difficult time for most people on the planet. I'm still hoping it doesn't turn out like Blade Runner, Elysium, or Ghost In The Shell.

[May14,'17] A killer whale that recently died in the UK after becoming entangled in fishing lines there had body fat that consisted of 0.1% PCBs (1 part per 1000) -- a staggeringly high concentration. I've always wanted to scan the enormous brain of a killer whale. This is one area where environmental controls are worse in Europe than in the US. If I ever get a hold of one, I shall scan with care!

[May16,'17] A few days ago, the US via the Kurds made a deal with ISIS fighters (no doubt overlapping some of the people the C-eye-eh was funding) who were holding an important dam hostage in Syria. They would be allowed to leave if they didn't destroy the dam. They left, and were then bombed by the US as they were retreating through open country. Hard to say who ordered this (like with the bombing of Syrian soldiers in Deir es-Zor last year). Obviously, it sabotages future negotiations in several arenas. A double double cross. There can be no intent except to further inflame the already catastrophic situation. This is what we blow money on instead of fixing our decaying cities, parts of which now look like this.

[May24,'17] I just came across these graphs from Market Daily Briefing (mdbriefing.com) showing the Bank of Japan balance sheet (central bank assets). It is clear that something went completely haywire in 2013, when the central bank started buying "central government securities" (JBG's, Japanese government bonds), linearly increasing its holdings from the 2002-2013 average of $1.2 trillion (dollars) to a stunning $4.8 trillion currently, a quadrupling over just 4 years. Although I have read about increases in central bank purchases ("quantitative easing") by other central banks beside the Fed, this graph still amazes me. This has generated very little inflation in Japan. For this to have occurred, almost three and a half trillion dollars must have been lost to deflation over 4 years. One wonders how many more 2008-like, gross transitions in monetary behavior can occur before something seriously breaks! Here is a paper modeling how to 'unwind' the BoJ situation, which suggests that the Bank of Japan will have negative net assets for 100 years if the quantitative easing ended now (no sign of it ending). It concludes there should be a "loss sharing" agreement between the central bank and the government (that is, the central bank loses money it created from the void, regular people lose actual salary). I tried to get some feeling if "are we dangerous here?", but failed to figure out what this really means in concrete terms that I can understand. "I think we *are* dangerous", though the paper quotes the example of the Czech republic being in this situation since the 1990's, but recovering.

[May25,'17] The Manchester bombing -- for now accepting the official narrative, complete with the trademark magic bomb-proof ID card -- is an absolutely classic example of "blowback" (a word coined by the C-eye-eh itself). The family of the accused "short-tempered and gullible" bomber are Libyans involved in MI6 plots to overthrow Qaddafi back in the 1990's, and involved with the ISIS/al-Qaeda death squads that reentered Libya well before the UK/France/US overthrew Qaddafi, and then had the death squad guys kill Qaddafi with a bayonet up his rectum (what Hillary laughed about). As Libya has descended into utter chaos afterward, regular people -- but also a lot of the disgruntled death squad guys -- fled back to Europe. This is virtually the textbook definition blowback: you reap what you sow (see also summary by b at MoA). But pay no attention to that -- the 'real' problem, according to the UK, is that the US leaked the bomber's identity. If only that had been kept secret, all would be well and the UK's involvement in destroying Libya would have 'worked'. Riiight. And remember, the only places that have real 'civilian deaths' are the US/UK/EU. There are no 'true civilians' in other countries because they are not part of the US/UK/EU 'master race'. [Update May30: check out the ridiculous 'redacted photos' here. Given that there are so many perfectly competent Photoshoppers in the fashion industry, it's weirdly almost as if the amateurishness was intentional.]

[Jun15,'17] London is a city absolutely terrified of fire as a result of the Great London Fire of, uhhh, 1666. They have routine fire drills where people are flushed out of their swimming pool showers at the exercise place in only their towels onto a rainy 40 deg F street. Yet somehow, the English fear of fire often doesn't seem to penetrate into the places where it would count. I am reminded of fire several years ago in an English old folks home that trapped and killed a bunch of poor old people because the fire escape ladder was made of wood and burned up before it could be used. Or the time when the fire alarm people started a fire in a school building by drilling through the floor into, what else, the fire alarm circuitry from the floor below (personal experience). Or the recent Grenfell Tower fire, where members of the fire brigades initially told people to stay inside their flats in a poorly designed burning 27-story building, recently covered with decorative but flammable cladding, that had no sprinkler system. When the firemen went inside, they discovered horrific scenes of piles of bodies in the narrow single-file stairwell and rooms filled with unconscious people, only able to rescue a few. There are probably well over 100 dead, tho media focussed on much lower official death tolls (there were 120 flats in the building, so there were probably ~600 people in the building). The building was a poor-person council flat tower right in the middle of the richest parts of London, Kensington and Chelsea. The $11 million cosmetic external cladding job no doubt made it easier on the eyes of the nearby rich-ies. But the police are on the job -- they have arrested and already tried and imprisoned for 3 months someone who took a picture of a burned dead person who had jumped. Now *that* will no doubt make future fires proceed more smoothly. *None* of the people responsible for the decisions that led to this catastrophic fire have been arrested, nor is it likely that they ever will be. The flammable cladding (flammable plastic core with aluminum covering) was manufactured by an American firm. The version they used in London is banned in the US and the EU for use on buildings taller than 40 feet, but allowed on high-rises in the UK. The fireproof version is only a little more expensive. This shows an utter and criminal lack of simple common sense. [Update Jun28: a stunning 120 other apartment blocks in the UK are covered with the same dangerous, flammable cladding.]

[Jun19,'17] To protect ISIS -- those would be the guys the US is also supposedly 'fighting' -- the US shot down a Syrian jet that was bombing ISIS, just a few weeks after Russia took out some big C-eye-eh-and-Izzy-supported takfiris on May 28. After the Syrian jet shoot-down, Russia broke off the Syria cooperation agreement again. But it is unlikely they will shoot down an American jet. It is also unlikely that the US will try to kill any Russians. Iran, however, almost immediately launched some ballistic missiles against ISIS in Deir Ezzor in a more significant move (this is where ISIS is still squatting on some of Syria's best oil fields in the east, near Iraq). The bottom line is that Trump/Hillary = no difference at all. 'Hillary' (rather, the underlying military-industrial complex) would have done the same thing, probably even sooner. The current 'president' is merely a lightning rod for the proles -- "hope and change for a different demographic", as Linh Dinh says. If you eliminate the small, meaningless cosmetic flourishes (e.g., visas, wall, Paris accords, Cuba) the election has been almost utterly immaterial to actual policy (economic/banking, military, social, energy/climate). The main difference is merely which irrelevant @ssface you have to look at on the teevee. Just don't watch the teevee. The Pentagon is still clearly trying to partition Syria using the Kurds (in the region where Syria, Iraq, and Iran border southeastern Turkey). So far, not working that well. US-and-Izzy-supported ISIS continues to lose ground.

[Jun27,'17] It is important to keep *all* the major factors influencing the progress of human affairs -- energy, water/soil/food, population, technology, debt -- in mind at the same time (cf. club of rome). Chris Hamilton has long emphasized demographics (see recent post here). The problem in trying to predict exactly what will happen over the short term is that small differences in growth can easily cause 'gluts' or 'shortages' in the 1-2% percent range, which can cause economic havoc that obscures the long term picture. Chris puts a too much emphasis on a demographic 'ice age', the fact that the growth in population in OECD plus China plus Brazil plus Russia has now flattened to 0% per year from the almost 0.6% per year growth 'enjoyed' over the past 4 decades, and that it will go slightly negative (-0.1%) twenty years from now. However, in the case of oil, so far, continued growth China, Russia, Brazil and the 'rest of the world' (India, Africa, and others) has kept world oil consumption increasing. And *global* population growth is likely to remain above 0.5% per year for another 20-25 years. Chris thinks the rest of the world won't be able to afford to consume at closer to OECD levels: "India plus Africa and the poorest parts of the world are still growing... but alas, they simply haven't (and won't have) the income, the savings, the access to credit to ever consume at Western or even BRICS levels of consumption)". Surely, he is right that they won't/can't get there; but the real reason is that getting there would require extracting the ever-dwindling remaining fossil fuel energy resources at a rate that is physically impossibly greater than current extraction rates. Another factor is the ever-dwindling energy return on energy investment, which means that slightly more energy is lost every new year to obtain the same amount of usable net energy. There is an absolute cut-off at EROEI of 1:1 (no net energy). But the practical hard EROEI cutoff is probably closer to 10:1, because of the requirement to maintain energy extraction infrastructure (extraction, refining, transport, roads, the grid, electronics) before any of the extracted energy can be used to do other things -- like making steel for non-energy-extraction purposes, heating and cooling homes and businesses, growing and transporting food, pumping water, manufacturing things (e.g., 'renewable energy' devices :-} ), constructing buildings and roads, keeping the internet up). As we are forced to resort to less and less rich resources (fracking, tar sands, deep water, Arctic), EROEI inexorably declines. Contraction from hard/geological/physical energy constraints will eventually overtake the gentler contraction from slowing of growth/demand. Precisely predicting the future -- i.e., exactly when the curves cross -- however, is a much harder thing to do (actually, the curves can only meet, because geology and physics always wins over what the brains of humans merely *want/demand*). There is little doubt the curves will have met before 2030, when world population will very likely still be growing, and I will be 75 -- assuming I survive my twice daily cycling until then :-} . This is not rocket surgery, but pretty much exactly what limits to growth predicted in 1972. It's the biggest elephant in the room that the main-sewer media never dares to touch. Instead, yesterday, we got yet another f'ing round of fake 'chemical weapons'. Perhaps the most hallucinogenic passage in that Reuters article is: "The United States has taken a series of actions over the past three months demonstrating its willingness to carry out strikes, mostly in self-defense, against Syrian government forces". Perhaps Russia will need to bomb some Mexican police stations near the California border, "mostly in self-defense", eh? At this rate, The New York Times is going to need a whole new section devoted to "Fake Chemical Weapons Reports"! The state of the US/UK press is pretty pitiful. The London Review of Book decided not to publish Seymour Hersh's most recent, bland, investigation into 'fake chemical weapons attack #19' -- even after they paid for the investigation! It came out in Die Welt. But aren't the NYT and CNN supposed to be *against* Trump, and so would want an article exposing Trump having faked intelligence? I guess supporting the chaos-making neocon policies in Syria with the latest fake chemical weapons psyop just mentioned above trumps even Trump-bashing at NYT and CNN. Scheisse. It's worth pointing out that one of Seymour Hersh's previous pieces was a fantasy re-telling of the fake 'bin Laden hit', to try to give it more gravitas. His latest is suspect, probably disinfo to absolve our Syrian contras (Syrian bombs supposedly caused everything according to Hersh). The Matrix is real and has many layers (eyes back to your fondle device, facebook calling...).

[Jul12,'17] The so-called 'obesity paradox' (that being moderately fat increases survival when compared to being normal weight) is a typical example of an utterly useless, sound-bite crap/disinfo created by dishonest medical statisticians and then catapulted by the attention-deficit, click-bait media. It was originally proposed in 2003 for *chronic kidney disease* patients (so it must be good for you, too...), which proves that you must stay calm, and continue to eat more meat and cheese. Once you make some sensible adjustments by excluding people who smoke (they die, but are generally thinner), and excluding people who are wasting away from cancer (and kidney disease!), it's clear that any BMI above normal substantially increases chance of early death. A study published in Lancet looked at 10 million people, with 1.6 million recorded deaths, across 14 years (239 studies in 32 countries over 45 years). After excluding current or former smokers, those with chronic disease at the start, and those who died in the first 5 years (leaving 4 million people), the result was that every 5 units of BMI above 25 (a generous definition of the top end of 'normal') results in 31% increased risk of early death (before 70). There is no 'obesity paradox'.

[Jul19,'17]
How not to die cycling.
     I'm was thinking I should write a short book, 'How not to die cycling'. So here it is -- just 2 pages. I've been a regular cyclist for about 35 years and most recently, have cycled to work twice daily for the last 15 years in San Diego and London, and so I have had decades-long personal experience with 'stupid car tricks', yet have survived to tell the tale.
     Whenever I query people about cycling without letting on that I do, the first things out of their mouths are typically some combination of: (1) cyclists ride dangerously and have been known to kill people, (2) the roads aren't designed for bicycles so cyclists shouldn't use them, (3) adding proper cycle lanes could only cause traffic to get worse, (4) the small number of existing cycling lanes have already wrecked traffic, (5) cyclists are unfairly setting themselves up to be killed by drivers, which causes unnecessary anguish to the drivers, (6) cycling will get you killed, which is why they themselves would never do it, (7) killing a cyclist who is not wearing a helmet should only be a misdemeanor, (8) only poor people use bicycles, (9) all cyclists are angry vegans who ignore red lights, or (10) cyclists don't have cars and so don't pay for the roads.
     Since this is the basic mindset of the pilots of the 200,000-watt 6,000-pound steel cans speeding past my 100-watt, 165-pound flesh-covered device, the first, most important rule of safe cycling is: 'the car is *always* right'. Never argue with, yell at, or touch a car. Muttering under your breath is OK. This especially applies when they unfairly cut you off, or even seriously endanger your life. In fact, at such critical points in time, it's esp. important *not* to let social emotion and language interfere with visual field attention and expert sensorimotor performance. Even though the person in the big car may be obese, which means that I am subsidizing their bad-diet 'sick care' (I pay for it, they use it), and even though they just gunned their 200,000 watt engine in order to race past me up to a red light -- I just think, Zen-nnnnnn.
     *Do* get in front of cars at stoplights so they can see you when they start back up, esp. at the right-most edge of a protected left (if you are turning left), or at the left-most edge of a right turn lane (if you are going straight). Go partway into the crosswalk at a red light (safer for you, and unblocks cars turning right on red). This usually won't make the cars angry because they are often on their cell phones when the light is red. When they look up and see you, their anger will be less, and since they are stopped, they have a *lot* less kinetic energy.
     When going around a parked car, get out into the point in the lane where you will need to be to clear an opened door *before* you immediately come up to the parked car. Since this maneuver has the potential to enrage some drivers since you are momentarily occupying more space than they think you deserve, once you pass the parked car, immediately, sharply steer closer to the curb, which the angered chimp driver will interpret as a submissive move, and which provides some protection from an attack. Always strictly respect lights and stop signs, wear reflective strips and gloves, use bright rear flashing red lights in the daytime, and wave to attract peripheral visual attention using visual motion, esp. at cross streets. Use a rear-view mirror (mine is at the end of my left drop handlebar).
     As long as the speed limit is around 30 mph, busy multi-lane streets are actually *safer* than less-travelled 2-lane roads because people are less likely to be on their cell phones. On less traveled streets, be extra wary when a car approaches from behind, since this is where they will be looking down, using their cell phones, and swerving toward you. Never cycle along either side of a truck (hop onto the sidewalk if necessary). Never cycle on a road where the speed limit is over 40 mph (energy equals mass times velocity *squared*).
     If a car driver gets visibly angry, or angrily revs their engine, hop off onto the sidewalk and walk the other way. The driver may not even be mad at you, but beware anyway. In a local example, an SUV driver, angry that a bus wasn't going fast enough, raced around the bus to 'punish' the bus driver using the bike lane, knocking an experienced cyclist off of his bike into the path of the bus, killing him.
     If it is raining or just starting to rain, you must utterly avoid metal sewer covers or metal plates, which can be ridiculously slippery. When absolutely forced, cycle over them in a perfectly straight line. Also, remember that heavy rain can dangerously conceal/fill large potholes. Cycling in fresh snow works, as long as you remember to take turns less sharply. New snow on top of partially-melted-and-refrozen snow requires extreme caution. And in London, when making a left turn, watch out for moss, which can grow in the middle of the street :-}
     It's tempting to whiz past a stopped line of cars because, given that they are stopped, they seemingly can't do as much damage to you. This is OK coming up to a red light where there are absolutely no gaps in the car line(s). However, with two same-direction lanes, a car may have stopped short to let an opposite-direction car make a left turn, and the left-turner will be so caught up in socially bowing to the car that graciously surrendered some precious road space that the left-turner won't see you, even if you are right there, barrelling down the middle of the right lane, wildly gesticulating. Also, if you are in the middle of an open right lane, a car in the same-direction lane to your left may suddenly dart out in front of you without looking or signalling (or do that and then make a sudden right turn). So extreme caution is required whenever passing a car. Expect them *not* to signal. Expect them *not* to see you, even when they have just passed you, or you just passed them. Expect them to underestimate your speed and turn right, right into you.
     If you fall off, tuck and roll. Don't put your hand out. A cracked rib heals *a lot* faster than a frozen shoulder. It's worth imagining how you would fall off in different environments while riding. Proper falling style is critical to avoiding serious injury. Road rash heals quickly.
     Finally, never forget that cycling with cars is *always* a life and death situation, like gladiatorial combat, so don't cycle if you are emotionally distracted, or even slightly inebriated. Eat a healthy vegan diet, just like the gladiators did :-} . If you play video games, remember that cycling with cars is different. It's for keeps -- no packets of 'health' to pick up if you f**k up. So there you go! Time to get on your bike and stay alive! Don't *pretend* to be 'Terminator' by buying a pig car named 'Terminator', you girlie-men and girlie-women! Live the real thing! You'll die of old age waiting for the US to create perfect Netherlands-style bike lanes. Got to get out onto the street now!
     Your cycling cockroach, Marty

[Jul29,'17] The recent almost unanimous House (419-3) and Senate (98-2) passage of the bizarre Russian sanctions bill creeped me out. It looks like Trump will sign it, since it is completely veto-proof. It sure did spring forth fully grown from fetid neocon well! As several commentators have said, it's like one of those 'elections' with only one candidate, who then gets all the votes. Though it would seemingly mostly punish Europe, will the EU react with more than words? This is a direct attack on the EU's energy supply. It's also an attack on Boeing (?!) and Caterpillar. The US gets 50% of its titanium from Russsia, with 35% of Russian titanium being consumed by Boeing alone. Seeing the lemming-like up-take of this seriously old-school anti-Russian hysteria from such august sources (not!) as National Propaganda Radio amongst many intelligent people I know also creeps me out, big time. This is what it must have been like back in 1912 under the expert assault of the yellow British press in the lead-up to WWI. Almost a year of nightly Russia-gate has not produced *single thing* of any substance, despite the nightly shrieking on the teevee. It's seems pretty obvious the emails were an internal leak. I guess any kind of adult conversation of what humanity is actually facing is utterly off the table. Instead, the US looks like it is preparing to overthrow the Venezuelan government. Two recent US attempts to overthrow governments (Ukraine, Syria) created chaos in those countries, killed and ruined countless people's lives and buildings and streets, but have not so far actually 'worked' the way they were initially advertised to do. On the other hand, creating (even more) chaos in Venezuela *would* be a good way to get oil prices to go back up.

[Aug11,'17] 'NK will attack Guam' is still being sprayed around like cat piss. Like they say at the San Diego Zoo, 'stand back, the lion's range is at least 8 feet'. China responded that any US attack on NK will be met with Chinese force, but that China would remain neutral if NK attacked first. Seems unlikely that the US military would want attack first and fight China. While the US military is happy to 'turkey shoot' civilian cars with depleted uranium bullets from hi-tech warplanes, it would much less enthusiastic about fighting the Chinese military. Newspeak will now temporarily back away and spray us instead with a zillion stories on groping Taylor Swift. The US public supports a US attack on North Korea -- if they attack first. Since they won't, this would require another 'Gulf of Tonkin'. There is always a slim chance that a new false flag (like the original fake Gulf of Tonkin incident) could be quickly unmasked in the internet age. Well, one can always hope. The problem is that a single 9-11-like nuclear event somewhere, not necessarily involving major loss of life, is the ace in the hole that would surely 'work' on the psyches of Amerians et al., and would be more difficult to unmask. The precarious economic state of the current 'recovery' unfortunately makes something like this a distinct possibility (though still low probability).

[Aug22,'17] With Bannon out, every last facade of populism is removed, and Chump Trump has now been completely Obamified (Scott Creighton!). The more than 16-year-long Bush/Obama/Trump war continues without a blink, in a style (e.g., C-eye-eh drug trade) that is barely distinguishable from what happened in the 1960's in Vietnam or the 1980's in Central America. Talking about Chump Trump is a complete distraction from the 'continuity of Goldman Sachs government'. Talking about Chump Trump (and nonsense nazis and confederate statues and antifa) distracts our gaze from the continuity of interlocking global banking/military/corporate oligarchy actually running the show. Trump is *utterly* irrelevant.

[Aug26,'17] According to Rune Likvern, light tight oil companies in the US are paying about 6% on their debt, and remain deep in debt (1/5 of a trillion dollars since 2008), with 1/4 to 1/3 of proceeds going to debt service. (see also this excellent review by Chris Martenson). Light tight oil (AKA oil fracking) has never made a profit! All the production started since 2014 (after the oil price collapse) is very likely to produce very large financial losses in the not too distant future. Even at this late date, I still regularly experience futile urges to raise the alarm. With the geologically illiterate pseudo-left, I just hear, 'let the ebil oil companies go bankrupt' -- which would be just after that person drove into work, or got off a plane, or picked up some food, grown with fertilizer made from natural gas, delivered to the food store by diesel, in their gasoline car, over asphalt roads. From the pseudo-right, it's 'what bubble?' or 'we need more creative destruction' -- equally without clue, driving around in even larger oil-powered vehicles. Oil is merely what makes the world/food/manufacturing/shipping/internet go round. No biggie. Neither side has the vaguest inkling of the difficulties in continuing business as usual with an ever growing population as we reach the bottom of the barrel (fracking, Arctic oil, UK oil now has a 90% water cut). Both think another mile or two of Elon Musk tunnel will save the day, perhaps on Mars. Both hardly give a thought to using bottom-of-the-barrel fossil fuel to literally scrape the bottom of the deep seabed 'barrel' to decimate populations of 100-year-old, mercury-laden slimehead fish (AKA the 'orange roughy'), after wiping out the easier-to-get fish nearer the surface. Perhaps it's better that most people don't know, because then they would behave even worse. 'Sustainable' me harder.

[Sep21,'17] Intrepid 'scientists' at the Francis Crick Institute are editing genes in temporarily cultured human embryos in order to eventually "improve IVF treatments for infertile couples and also help doctors understand why so many pregnancies fail". In other work, 'scientists' managed to use CRISPR-Cas9 genetic engineering to inactivate human-cell-infecting endogenous retroviruses in pigs (PERVs, yup) in preparation for growing organs for zenotransplants (pig to human). The sheer insanity of these activities boggles my mind. We are rapidly running down the carrying capacity of the earth measured in fresh water, topsoil thickness, fossil fuel energy resources (oil, coal, natural gas), fertilizer production (completely dependent on fossil fuel natural gas), metal ores, uranium ores, rare earth ores, animal and plant species, ocean fish (including literal bottom-of-the-barrel 100-year-old fish that live in the deep ocean), as we acidify the oceans, fill them (and the remaining fish) with small plastic particles, kill off remaining coral reefs, and create giant underwater deserts just off of our coastlines from fertilzer runoff, mostly the result of industrial meat production. Every single one of these things would be helped by LESS PEOPLE (and less meat), not MORE PEOPLE. The argument that we need MORE PEOPLE to support the aging population is faulty, esp. when they are generated via expensive cell culture, or kept alive via Blade-Runner-like transplants of organs grown in genetically-engineered pigs. It's utterly obvious that adding two California's worth of new humans to the earth every year is a REALLY BAD IDEA for supplies of fresh water, food, soil, fertilizer, concrete, metals, and energy; this is hardly the way toward supporting the already existing population in an even vaguely sustainable way. It's also obvious that money would be better spent trying to eliminate the causes of the need for transplants (e.g., diabetes is the most common reason for the most common type of transplant, a kidney) rather than trying to grow human compatible organs in pigs. Yet it remains almost impossible to discuss the elephants in the room in polite company, or insert any reality into preposterous articles like the ones above. I don't claim that I don't live in a glass house myself; I have spent my life studying brain organization (though I didn't have any kids, the single most growth-promoting thing than any individual can chose to do). Probably nobody will ever be able to rationally talk about growth and population, all the way up to the crash later this century. Of course, you might be thinking, what about Trump's insane speech at the UN threatening to wipe out 25 million people? (how you like him now, Trumpflakes? South Korea wisely responded by sending $8 million of symbolic nutritional and medical aid to North Korea). As I've said from the beginning, idiot Trump is just a nonsense distraction that should be utterly ignored. I agree with Caitlin Johnstone: "Trump isn’t extremely awful because of the few ways he’s differed from other recent presidents, he’s extremely awful because of the things he’s got in common with them". The Democrat's position is actually the same as Trump's -- except that they would use more politically-correct, identity-sensitive language to describe why they were forced to wipe out people. Virtually all the Democratic worms who are defending 'your' insurance-industry-sponsored Romney-care just voted to increase military spending *even more* than the ridiculous increase Trump had asked for. Hillary said she was ready to 'totally obliterate' Iran. Trump is a sideshow! The multitude of 'everyday' decisions made by people that when combined result in unsustainable growth is the only real show in town. *That* show must go on -- until it can't, starting in earnest around 2030. I'm not above it all; despite my pseudo-outrage, I just put my head down and go to work. Seeing clearly doesn't really change anything.

[Sep29,'17] Now that C-ISIS-A is going down and Izzy is panicked, bring on the Kurds! We're only sending mountains of military hardware and troops to somebody else's countries for another couple of decades, 'to help', because we're 'good people'. Dontcha know, the white helmets poison sonic Russian football election attacks? And save the Kurds! And facebook is chipping in to help you, too!
     Once one figures how things work, the firehose of propaganda, from facebook, the C-eye-eh, google, techno cornucopians, the NYT, and on terr'ism, diet, pharma, energy, and banks just doesn't work any more. The big problem is that it takes many years to 'figure out roughly how it all works'. By then, you're old and gray, and your skin is less silken. And if somebody makes it to old age without having attained a decent grasp of most of the big picture, they probably don't have enough remaining patience (or enough remaining patent cerebral circulation for that matter), to successfully 'hit the books' and get there. Catch 22, man.

[Oct12,'17] In tier-one Chinese cities, house prices are now 50-100 times yearly income (Andy Xie). This means, roughly 100-200 years of paying 50% of your salary to pay off a loan. Put this together with flat or declining fossil fuel net energy (which powers most manufacturing, building, food and fertilizer production, transportation etc), and two more California's worth of people added to the earth every year, and I would have to say that 'it probably *is* different this time'. Not in a good way. Of course, I am still hoping that we can muddle through with out a kaboom as we sail into these new waters. The midterm elections coming up will give Americans the chance to choose between 'Goldman or ...Goldman' (Ken Barrows), so that is unlikely to result in any real change (contra Andy Xie). One aspect of fracking that I didn't catch on to in the beginning of the fracking boom was the extreme lightness of the product -- it's basically already gasoline, or even lighter. This has helped to keep gasoline prices low. But gasoline is actually not the most critical transport fuel: heavier kerosine and diesel and bunker oil are (in the early days of oil refining, gasoline was simply thrown away into rivers, which is why they sometimes used to catch fire). The thing that could easily upset the apple cart is oil depletion -- esp. true crude from which diesel is made -- overtaking ongoing usage, and eating up the miminal current 1% 'glut'. I fully expected that this would have already happened 2 years ago. Just because my prediction was off doesn't mean that the reasons for making it have gone away! The main fly in the ointment is much-more-frothy-than-oil-production financial bubbles (e.g., companies taking out record loans to buy their stock, students taking out record loans for college). Bubbles deflate faster than they inflate: fear is more powerful than greed. Hopefully, the financial/societal system can continue to function at a basic level after those bubbles pop.

[Oct19,'17] The US/Izzy attempt to use the Kurds to destabilize three countries (Iraq, Syria, and Turkey) suffered a major setback this week when the Iraqi army bloodlessly retook the Iraqi oil fields in Kirkuk, occupied since 2014 by the Kurds, and used as a huge slush fund by Barzani. This result appeared to be due to a combination of internal dissension, along with Kurds and US/Izzies overestimating the resolve of echo other to do something when the ultimatum came from Iraqi government. This is excellent news for the stabilization of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Detailed and separate summaries by Pepe Escobar and Alexander Mercouris are here. Penny and Scott Creighton have written sensibly about this for years. Once again, the so-called 'left' was completely, uh, hornswoggled.

[Oct29,'17] James Stafford of Oilprice.com has estimated that 'mining' an average bitcoin (which involves *extremely* inefficiently finding a way to represent all previous transactions) requires consuming the energy in 20 barrels of oil, which weighs roughly 3 tons. This makes 'sense' because the current price of a bitcoin is about 100 barrels of oil, which is utterly preposterous. One barrel of oil produces about 20 gallons of gasoline, which, when burned in a 25%-efficient internal combustion engine is equivalent to the physical work produced by a human slave doing one full year of hard labor. World bitcoin mining uses 40 times more energy than what is currently required to power the entire worldwide Visa network (which handles an astronomically larger number of transactions). This is what humans are wasting their precious stored fossil fuel on as we sail over peak net energy. For shame, humans.

[Nov06,'17] There has recently been a lot of discussion about 'the trouble with scientists' — they have confirmation bias, they don't publish negative results, they make new findings appear more different from existing findings than they actually are, they change their hypotheses after collecting data, blah, blah, blah. All true; and it was all true 100 years ago. The new proposed 'solution' is to have 'preregistration' of hypotheses, all managed by friendly corporations who will also archive all your data and your fetid 'pipelines' in order to 'supercharge your workflow' and help with data constipation. I remarked previously that turning everything into a pharma trial (praised in the article above as 'ahead of the game', yeah, right) and handing all your content over to a 'disinterested' corporation is probably not a good idea. But even it there really was a 'disinterested party' (there isn't), this could easily result in unintended consequences. Look at what happened with mandatory sentencing. That was supposed to result in a 'more fair' sentencing by removing supposedly biased human judicial oversight. The result has been a human catastrophe, much worse than any hypothetical result of 'bias'. An unintended consequence of this new 'fair' system, instituted starting around 1980, is that the US, virtually alone in the world, has increased the percentage of its population in jail by a factor of *five* from its 1920 to 1980 average. With 4.4% of the world's population, we now have 22% of the prisoners in the entire world, a world record incarceration rate that is approaching 1% of our entire population. One could imagine a similar unintended consequence of a large corporate preregistration bureaucracy, intended to 'help' scientists behave better — essentially, a scientific jail that would 'rehabilitate' wayward scientists. Science as we know it, with all its warts, could begin to be accidentally strangled.

[Nov11,'17]
What, no energy?
Here is a comment I recently posted in response to a report of a Vienna workshop on the "Evolution of Social Complexity". The blog post by Peter Turchin was entitled "An Agenda for Research on the Evolution (and Devolution) of Social Complexity". ================================================================
     I was somewhat stunned to not see energy supply listed as a challenge to social sustainability. Population increases (currently two California's per year) and technological evolution, including robotization and the internet, are both utterly dependent on an increasing energy supply.
     Food production and distribution currently depends mostly on our currently flattening fossil fuel energy supply. For example: (1) making nitrogen fertilizer from methane, (2) pumping water, (3) making steel for farm implements, (4) tillage, (5) seed production and planting, (6) harvesting, (7) distribution and refrigeration, (8) road construction from concrete (limestone cooked in a coal furnace) or asphalt (from crude oil) (9) road maintenence, (10) food-store construction and maintenance, (11) marketing and internet, (12) car transport to food store or truck transport to doorstep.
     Our current world energy mix is oil, coal, methane, biofuels/waste, hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar in that order. The wind and solar components are growing. But their growth is not even keeping pace with our increasing energy usage! Wind and solar growth are not actually causing a reduction in fossil fuel usage, which is still nominally slowly growing (though we may be near flattening of net energy increases from fossil fuels).
     We still burn a full cubic mile of oil per year (1000 barrels a second, which equals 150 tons a second). Currently wind and solar worldwide only account for a few percent (roughly 1% wind and 0.5% solar) of total energy usage (not 'capacity', which isn't actual usable energy). Making wind- and solar-energy-producing devices is currently utterly dependent on fossil fuel. For example: (1) making concrete by cooking limestone, (2) making steel for turbine blades, (3) mining and transporting iron ore, copper, silver (solar cells), neodymium (magnets), and many other elements, (4) installation and service cranes and vehicles, (5) silicon wafer production, (6) float glass (melting silica over a bed of molten tin to make both sides of the glass pane very flat), (7) regularly washing dust off arrays of solar cells, (8) making batteries by mining lithium, cobalt, nickel, (9) chip fabs to make all the computer tech.
     Currently, adding solar and wind is not resulting in any *capacity reduction* in fossil fuel plants since the entire grid has to be supported by dispatchable fossil fuel plants when solar and wind basically go off at night, and sometimes, during the day.
     We are currently growing (population, energy usage) with no obvious way to replace the current flattening in net energy from fossil fuels. This is about to turn into a permanent net energy reduction from fossil fuels over the next decade. Last year, we discovered 1 unit of oil (top component of world energy usage) for every 6 units we used. Obviously, that can't/won't go on for very long.
     You might say, 'good riddance to dirty fossil fuels'. Unfortunately, those would be the fossil fuels that kept up the internet, delivered all your tech doodads vis bunker fuel on container ships, then diesel or coal-electric trains, then diesel trucks. It would also include the fossil fuels that kept you fed, kept the lights and refrigerator on, kept you supplied with water. And of course, I'm sure that you plan to never fly anywhere using kerosine jet fuel.
     It would seem that by far the largest open question is whether industrial civilization can in fact be constructed, powered, and maintained solely on 'renewable' energy. It's an empirical question, perhaps best answered by trying to construct an 'Industrial Sphere' version of the hated Steve Bannon's BioSphere -- to see, emprically, whether it is actually possible to make everything you need for industrial civilization (steel, concrete, roads/trains, computer chips, solar cells, food, water, waste disposal) using entirely renewable energy.
     It might be possible. Or not. ================================================================
     The only response was that the conference wasn't about energy (yeah, but it was about complexity, which requires energy), that energy problems are still only "looming in the background" because people are "not experiencing energy problems", and that "fortunately there still are several decades left to solve these problems and I am sure there are even much better energy solutions by using magnetic force not discovered yet but it is still very good you keep on addressing the issue". Whew, no need to worry, because when the going gets tough, Dr. Who-like scientists will solve it by "reversing the polarity". You might be thinking, I shouldn't insult the human 'yeast' in their beer barrel for not knowing about the interaction between exponential growth and the finite supply of sugar in the beer barrel. But the problem is that the human 'yeast' have actually constructed their f-ing barrel, all by themselves! At least *some* of them know exactly how it works! Shouldn't we be talking to *them* at this critical point, instead of scriptwriters?

[Nov12,'17] The recent coup in Saudi has attracted worried attention from those paying a little attention to world events. The recent news in outline is that just a few days after Crown Prince Jared Kushner left Saudi (could be unrelated, of course), Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) purged and arrested/detained some extremely rich Saudis and has begun impounding their money; and Mansour bin Muqrin, son of the former intelligence service director, died in a suspicious helicopter crash. MBS has threatened Lebanon with war, forced the Lebanese prime minister to resign, and is currently holding him under house arrent in Saudi, which so far has only provoked a measured verbal response from Hezbollah. And finally, MBS has promised 'reforms' (woohoo, women will be able to drive). Previously MBS (together with US and Izzy) continued funding Bandar Bush's ISIS in an attempt to overthrow the government in Syria, motivated the Yemen war (now causing the largest famine in recent world history, an actual genocide, not like the fake one in Serbia in the 90's), and organized the blockade of Qatar. Here are 5 recent quite different takes on some of this: Henderson, Madsen, Meysann, Martenson, and Koenig. Here are some of the main 'big picture' points to weigh. First, it is now clear that Russia has, at least temporarily, blocked the Saudi/Izzy/US-supported destabilization and dissolution of Syria (tho Syria has experienced hellish destruction and loss of life). Second, the price of oil has stayed low-ish, partly the result of US fracking, and from demand whose *rate of increase* has slightly slowed. Third, there had been a marked drawdown of Saudi investments in US bonds since 2014 probably a result of their cash flow problems (see next). Fourth, growing Saudi internal demand for oil and everything else from a growing population have put great stress on the Saudi oil-revenue-derived budget. Fifth, Iran and Hezbollah have further improved their ability to defend themselves after the shocking defeat of the Izzy army in Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah in 2006. Sixth, Trump (and the UK) has continued shopping massive amounts of weapons to Saudi. Seventh, Russian and Chinese defensive weapon systems have continued to improve, reducing the ability of the US to pull a carrier into port and fire away. Eighth, Saudi is arranging an IPO for Aramco, the world's largest energy company, in 2018. Ninth, it has long been rumored that Saudi has overstated their oil reserves (they almost doubled them without explanation at one go in the late 1980's); the final watering out of Ghawar, discovered in 1950, which has supplied roughly 5% of all the oil that humans have ever burned, may be near. Finally, Saudi, but also the US, have increased the shopping of oil and weapons to Asia in the 'pivot to Asia'. Quite a lot of things to keep in mind at once, many of which seem to, or do, conflict. Some commentators have emphasized the loss of US and Izzy dominance in the mideast, esp. focussing on Syria. Others point to the Saudi coup as a way to quickly replenish US treasury investments with the impounded money. Other mention a weakening petro-dollar, or a petro yuan. Others suggest that this will just result in a small kerfuffle to motivate slightly higher oil prices. Yet others think 'Trump' is draining the Saudi swamp (The new Mr. ISIS, MBS, did also detain the original Mr. ISIS, 'Bandar Bush'). I can't claim not to be confused, and it's possible that some of the individual actors are confused themselves. But, as much as Izzy demands it, I don't think a major attack on Iran is practical or planned, which would be a big disaster.

[Nov19,'17] Talking to nominally 'left' people these days is a hallucinatory experience for me (for what it's worth, I consider myself 'extreme left'). The other day, I heard an encomium to the 'genius' of Robert Mueller (!), hoping that he will somehow discover, a frigging year later, that the John Brennan psyop known as Russiagate was 'true', and that an internal DNC leak by Seth Rich, who was subsequently killed under suspicious circumstances, had nothing to do with it. I find the idea that the election was 'hacked' utterly preposterous. As William Binney recently noted, the intelligence agencies could instantly prove (or disprove) Russian hacking with their internet-monitoring vaccuum cleaner. How can people still believe such nonsense after a year of absolutely nothing? And what about the fact that there is so much sh$t flying around during one of our so-called 'elections' that you'd need a Star Wars-sized nuclear powered sewer pipe hack to compete? Hillary didn't fail to get elected because the 'election' was 'hacked'. She didn't get elected because many people just didn't like her, and many people didn't want 'more of the same'. Russia had nothing to do with that. But more importantly, what concrete difference would it have made if we had gotten Hillary instead of Trump? The differences are completely "Squirrel!! It's what's for dinner" (or rather, today, I should say, "Elephant!!"). I always ask 'left' people, would Hillary have brought us a non-Goldman-Sachs government? Would it have brought us less tax cuts for rich people? Would she have prosecuted (even one) banker criminal? Would she have brought us less war (e.g., on Syria)? Less 'defense' spending? (the Democrats gave Trump even more than he asked for). Less threats against Iran? Would she have done something about the Saudi genocide of Yemen? Would she have reigned in the Google/Amazon/Facebook/Palantir/Narus panopticon? Would she have dropped insurance-industry-supported Romney care (oh sorry, don't know how I got that confused, I meant Obama care) for single payer? These are the real, non-'squirrel' things that count. When she had some power, Hillary helped manage the destruction of Libya, formerly the wealthiest country in Africa, and the one that had its wealth most evenly distributed. Libya has descended far after 'we came, we saw, he died (Hillary laughs)'. The unprovoked destruction of an entire country (not to mention killing its leader with a bayonet up his rectum -- what Hillary was laughing about) is a real war crime comparable to the bad things that Trump has done so far (e.g., Trump's several times as many drone strikes as Obama). I *certainly* don't like Trump either, but the reality is, as I argued before the election, Trump vs. Hillary is mostly 'Squirrel!!'. And we would probably still have had to suffer through Russiagate, anyway, with the Uranium One Clinton bribes. Trump is just hope and change for a different demographic. Of course, they won't get their hope and change either. The Trump muppets will merely be pitifully shorn by 'their' 'friendly' billionaire, who is 'one of them' because he sometimes wears a baseball cap. Important never to forget that language is riding around on top of a standard model ape brain chassis.

[Dec18,'17] Tesla's grid battery, which can store 130 MWh (it's equivalent to just 2000 electric car batteries) was tested today and managed to inject 100 MW of power into the grid for half an hour (50 MWh of energy) without event. Good so far (for a tiny drop in the energy storage bucket).

[Dec22,'17]
Paleofantasy indeed!
Just got around to reading Paleofantasies (2013) by Marlene Zuk. I picked it up because of her background in evolutionary biology. Quotes from the more daft evolutionary fantasies of 'modern paleos' were mildly amusing, though they were intermixed with scientific information in a way that I found to be weirdly awkward. In the end, I found the 'paleo' debunking incomplete and ultimately quite misleading.
     Her two main points were that it is hard to be sure of what 'paleos' were actually doing/eating etc, and that human evolution hasn't 'stopped'. One main example of the second point is that population differences in adult lactose tolerance seem to have evolved relatively rapidly and recently after the origin of the domestication of animals for dairy.
     She also addresses the 'paleo' idea, originally popularized by Jared Diamond, that the neolithic revolution was a disaster for humans as measured by stature and skeletal and dental evidence of disease. This was likely the result of suddenly increased population density (because of suddenly increased food supply) together with not-very-good sanitation, which increased transmission of human and animal-borne diseases, and lastly, the sudden restriction in the range of things eaten. She points out that this eventually went away as humans got better at cities, and that stature and disease markers recovered by about 4000 years ago.
     But I found her overall message garbled and somewhat misleading. With all her effort to make fun of non-evolution-based 'paleo' ideas, she was quite weak on basic primate evolutionary biology and physiology and anthropoid/hominid/hominin evolution. For example, one of the clearest pieces of dietary evidence in dentition is the early evolutionary increase in the thickness of enamel in cheek teeth (molars) relative to apes, the lowering of cusps, and the use of even the canines for grinding, all of which clearly point to an early change in diet toward hard-to-chew seeds and nuts and tubers - millions of years before the origin of agriculture. We still have those same kind of teeth.
     Also, a quick comparative glance at the gastrointentinal tract of daily meat-eating animals shows radically higher stomach acid than humans, which is an adaptation to a high animal protein diet, and which helps to kill dangerous bacteria. Similarly, the long, large diameter, bulbous, large intestine of humans is adapted to fermenting plant fiber, and doesn't look at all like the smoother, shorter, thicker-walled large intestine of a carnivore (or even an omnivore like a bear or raccoon) that is adapted to dealing with the putrefying bacteria that accompany regular meat eating (good summary here). She makes a big deal of the recent (10,000 years ago) dietary-driven evolutionary adaptation in European populations of post-translationally keeping the enzyme coded for by the lactase gene around into adulthood (lactase is there in all mammalian babies to help digest mother's milk, but levels normally fade in adult mammals). But that is a miniscule evolutionary change compared to what would be required to turn our vegan teeth, saliva, stomach, small intenstine, and colon into those of a real carnivore.
     Another clear human adaptation confusingly presented is the early evolution of bipedalism together with improved temperature regulation as a result of hairlessness and improved sweating (the last two are harder to date in the fossil record). Those all suggest that 'paleos' *did* in fact routinely do a lot of long distance exercise. Zuk merely casts doubt on how often modern 'primitive' humans 'run down' animal prey (it's not that common). But that hardly covers all the reasons why early humans might have routinely walked long distances, and it doesn't explain those unique human adaptations.
     Finally, the discussion of human diseases is contaminated with 'geno-fantasy'. One can hardly explain the recent rapid increase in obesity as 'genetic', or as the result of 'rapid human evolution'. Clearly, it is a result of a recent change in diet interacting poorly with essentially unchanged genes and physiology. This goes against her main, over-simplified, trade-book-y, hypothesis that 'there is no paleo'.
     Though language and cooking and fossil fuels have made it possible for us to eat whatever we want (e.g., twice-a-day grilled meat), this doesn't mean there isn't a preferred diet for humans. It was possible for small populations of Inuit to scrape out an existence (for many centuries!) on the very boundary of climates capable of being inhabited by humans, using neolithic technology, eating mostly meat. But the cost was greatly reduced life expectancy, increased heart disease, and chronic osteoporosis (and even then, they ate seaweed whenever they could get it!). Remarkably, by analogy with sickle cell anemia, they even developed a deleterious mutation (it causes high infant mortality) that blocks them from regularly going into ketosis, which would otherwise have constantly occurred on their unhealthy low-carb, high-fat diet; apparently, constant ketosis caused by an extreme high-fat/high-protein diet is evolutionarily worse than higher infant mortality (N.B.: ketosis can occur on a high carb diet during fasting, which may have different features than continuous high-fat/low-carb ketosis).
     So there *was*, in fact, a typical 'paleo' lifestyle! On the basis of our guts, teeth, body shape, and physiology, it likely involved a mostly whole foods plant-based diet, and a lot of long-distance exercise.

[Jan05,'18]
Futurism
Here's a review of Futurism's 'the remarkable breakthroughs from 2017' with a jaundiced eye.
     First, seven earth-like planets were discovered by looking at variations in the brightness of one pixel. The actual one-pixel data should be constrasted with the nonsense 'interpretive dance' computer graphics of colorful Avatar-like planets fed to the 'news'. These planets are 40 light-years from us. This wasn't properly explained. The fastest thing we have launched went about 100,000 miles per hour (that's 36,000 miles per hour from the rocket and 66,000 miles per hour from the Earth's orbital motion). The speed of light is 186,000 miles per *second*. Our fastest thing went 29 miles per second (1/6400 the speed of light). Therefore, at current top speed, it would take about a quarter of a million years to get to Trappist 1 (the red dwarf). On our current trajectory, it seems highly unlikely to me that humans will be in a position to detect the unbelievably weak signal an amazingly reliable probe would send back a quarter of a million years from now. Interesting, but not relevant to our imminent overshoot.
     Second, '5 new particles' were discovered at the LHC. The 'particles' last for on the order of one picosecond (one trillionth of a second) and were detected by examining 250 trillion collisions winnowed from a much larger number that weren't examined. The raw data consists of 5 peaks in a mass spectrum between 3000 and 3100 MeV (a proton weighs 938 MeV), rising out of the background noise. This will "shed light on how quarks bind together". Interesting, but not relevant to our imminent overshoot, or even nanotechnology, much less molecular biology.
     Third, SpaceX successfully re-launched a booster, which was considerably cheaper than the re-usable Space Shuttle. Since the Space Shuttle was originally mainly conceived of as a way to launch military satellites with an overlay of useless human tricks, this more sensible approach will result in cheaper launches for military satellites (the military went back to regular rockets some times ago). Interesting, but hopefully not relevant to our imminent overshoot.
     Fourth, there was the lamb fetus in the ziplock bag 'artificial womb'. I had already complained about this utterly pointless 'medical' research here. This was supposedly for better maintenance of preterm infants, though it was not clear where the human equivalent of the 'support lamb' that the ziplock back was plumbed into for oxygenated blood and waste disposal would come from. Ghoulish, and not interesting at all, and I seriously hope *not* relevant to our failing medical system, where 75% of the 'diseases' 'treated' are completely avoidable, since they are due to bad diet (too much meat, diary, oil, smoking, sitting), with a staggering more-than-70% of the population now overweight or obese.
     Fifth, Futurism reports on using CRISPR to edit genes in a human embryo (the first procedure using "donated clinical-quality human eggs"). This method is only applicable to in vitro fertilization (it was done without mosaicism by co-injecting a defective sperm and the repair enzyme into the oocyte). This provides a ridiculously resource-intensive way - in a world that already has too many people (as in two entire California's worth of new people added every year) - to make *even more* viable people, and would require all pregnancies to be in vitro, Brave New World style. Also ghoulish, and hopefully, won't happen.
     Sixth, the Chinese Academy of Science conducted the first 'quantum encrypted unhackable' video call. This will supposedly have implications for how "information is transmistted and secured". Interesting, but not relevant, even to the military. There is no reason to bother with trying to decrypt messages! Standard encryption with long keys is completely unbreakable once it's already 'on the wire' or 'in the air'. Virtually all surveillance and hacking is instead done at the weakest link, say, Intel VPro, where a sub-basement-level minix system running on a separate processor accesses your disk and talks to the internet even when your computer is 'off', or a keylogger gets keystrokes while you are typing your 'secret message', or by using a buffer overflow, or by an insecure out-of-order microprocessor, or by looking at semi-public metadata (where you clicked).
     Finally, seventh, CRISPR was used to edit genes in a person with a rare genetic metabolic disorder (Hunter syndrome) using a virus to insert code into liver cells using engineered zinc-finger nucleases (proteins that cut the DNA at particular code locations, so the inserted gene doesn't get pasted in randomly, possibly activating 'cancer' genes, AKA genes that are used even when you don't have cancer). Though the puff pieces describe this as a 'cure', it is not at all clear that this will work yet; and it certainly won't stop the brain damage from the syndrome because the CRISPR-enabled enzyme it won't get past the blood brain barrier either. Given that Hunter syndrome is an extremely rare X-linked (i.e., usu. in males) disease with an incidence of 1 per 160,000 and since it is not clear that this hi-tech fix works better than infusing the missing enzyme, this is essentially irrelevant for human health. Expanding this to a large number of other diseases and 'gene-defects' (oh, say, like the 'gene defects' that 'make' you get colon cancer when you eat way too much meat?) seems super-energy-intensive, dangerous, and impractical (changing your genes so your adult colon somehow becomes more like that of a bona fide carnivore without messing anything else up?). Won't happen - ever.
     All of seven of these 'advances' are energy-intensive and essentially irrelevant to the energy starvation of industrial society coming down the pike around 2030. We're in a fundamentally different situation than futurists from the late 19th and early 20th century, who envisioned a night out on the town, in a top hat, on a seatbelt-less convertible flying car with a quaint hand squeeze-horn, and underwater gondolas strapped to hapless whales. Back then, all the stored energy was still there for our taking, with only English coal nearing its peak. But even back then, many scientists and engineers were fully aware of energy depletion, and Aldous Huxley foresaw our CRISPR future in 1931. Now in 2018, the energy wolf is finally at the door.

[Jan12,'18] As the Fed has slightly raised the target Federal Funds rate above zero (now in a band from 1.25% to 1.5%), it has in parallel raised interest rates on what it pays banks for "excess reserves" deposited back with the Fed (1.5%). This absolutely preposterous dole for large banks rewards them for *not* making loans by paying them interest on a giant pile (still over $2 trillion dollars) of excess reserves that these large banks risklessly deposit back with the Fed. A portion of the money deposited has actually been generated from the void as loans from the Fed. In 2017, these outright welfare checks to banks for doing nothing amounted to $30 billion. While fascist thought control corporations pay internet trolls to debate the morality of guananteed basic income for the working poor, filthy rich bankers have just gone ahead and arranged with their criminal buddies in 'big government' (a misnomer, because the Fed is *privately* owned) to pay themselves $30 billion in 'guaranteed basic [gold-plated?] income' a year. Since the 2007 recession, 'Obama/Trump' zero interest rate policies combined with zero punishment for banker crimes has instead punished savers, destablized pensions and social security, transferred massive amounts of wealth upward with the 'everything bubble', and moved the world ever closer to the combination of fascism and feudalism accurately forseen a long time ago by Huxley and Orwell. I put Obama/Trump in scare quotes above because the Fed is not controlled by the government. Recently released Fed discussions from 2012 on monetary policy show they completely consciously created the 'everything bubble' (PDF here). It's amazingly depressing to see this looting occurring in plain sight, concealed by nothing more than cheap, weekly "Squirrels!". This week's 'squirrel' is "sh$thole countries". The so-called 'left' 'rises up' to 'defend' Haiti as if a 'principled denunciation' of a friggin' *word* could have even the tiniest practical positive effect on Haiti, while the so-called 'right' dances a little jig, both utterly oblivious to the bait and switch occurring before their eyes. It's fine for banks or the military or Republicrats to *actually turn* multiple countries into sh$tholes, but merely *calling* a country a a sh$thole is somehow unbelievably "shocking and shameful"? Right. While the faux outrage rages, here is an example of how richies steal money in plain sight: a set of waivers issued two weeks ago to pardon criminal behavior of big bank robber barons, the most recent in a long line of such pardons, described in slightly more understandable terms here [Update: OK, so I laughed at the video projection of "sh$thole" onto a Trump hotel; but it only serves to give the distraction more legs. Also, it doesn't matter whether he really said it or not, since it's an unbelievably perfect sound bite].

[Feb05,'18]
Money 'printing'
     Here is an attempt to cut through and disable the jargon surrounding the creation and control of money in as compact a manner as possible. The amount of public confusion and misdirection surrounding the creation of money and taxation and government spending is amazing, considering that the real 'money people' have known how this actually works since the Renaissance (or earlier). Here is a straight-talking PDF from the Bank of England that describes how banks create money at the moment of a loan. A excellent longer summary by Jim Kavanagh is here.
     But, first, gold. Some suggest going back to gold-backed money. But that is not far enough back! The original trick of creating money out of the void *pre-dates* modern paper money. For example 16th century goldsmiths in Florence who stored deposits of physical gold realized they only had to have a fraction of the gold deposited with them actually on hand. This is exactly equivalent to the modern right of private banks to create money out of the void: maintaining 10% gold reserves means creating 10x as many certificates (proto-money) as there is actual gold. The problem with 'gold bugs' is that if this 'gold printing' *weren't* allowed in a modern gold-based system, then the fixed gold supply would not be able to wax and wane as needed, like fiat money does. The waxing and waning is actually a critical thing to have, when it's in the right hands.
     Second, as already mentioned above, it is absolutely crucial to understand that money *is* actually created at the moment a loan is issued. Most money is actually 'printed' this way by regular banks, *not* by central banks. The key points are: (1) money can be created only by certain privately-owned entities, (2) the creation of money this way takes virtually no energy (mark a ledger, enter a figure in a database), (3) private institutions can profit from interest charged for the created-from-the-void money, (4) real energy-intensive things like houses are pledged as collateral for the loan, and these real things can be seized/stolen by the bankers if the intrinsically worthless, created-from-the-void money is not repaid, (5) the money created from the void does *not* include the money that will be needed for interest payments, so the system is inherently unstable without continuous growth, and finally (6), when a loan is paid back, the created money disappears the fact that its rate is independent of the rate of 'printing' is what provides the crucial waxing and waning of the money supply.
     Third, the economy doesn't work primarily by taxing people and using the proceeds to do things. Rather, the great majority of money that is actually used to do things is created by private banks (*not* the Fed!) in the form of loans and bonds, using the out-of-the-void method described in point two. A full 97% of money is created by banks (not the Fed) making loans; just 3% of money is created by the 'government' (not really the government since the Fed is private). Banks have increased the amount of money by over 10% per year. This is extremely profitable for them (they effortlessly create money from the void, you have to do real hard work to get paid money in order to be able to pay them their interest).
     Fourth, the proper function of progressive taxation simply to correct runaway wealth accumulation by extremely rich people, which destabilizes society, rather than to raise money for public works. There is no social security/medicare solvency problem.
     Fifth, what to do about this? The ability to create money from the void *must* be taken away from private, profit-making enterprises. Private money creation does not fundamentally differ from counterfeiting, which is already not allowed for (other!) private businesses. The ability to create loans (=money) should only be given to public, non-profit institutions (compare, the bank of North Dakota, Lincoln's greenbacks). These institutions would be in a better position to deny credit for useless, damaging, parasitical things like stock buybacks. Progressive taxation should be reinstated/reinforced to curb the excesses of extreme personal piggishness inherent to winner-take-all capitalism. We need to reinstate the high tax rates (94%) we had on super richies 70 years ago!
     Sixth, bitcoin? No. Bitcoin is a purposely amazingly inefficient way to run a distributed ledger. The 'purposely' part is that the difficulty of 'mining' (updating the ledger) is adjusted to make the rate of mining constant. This has resulted in bitcoin's estimated yearly energy consumption reaching 47 TWh at the beginning of Feb 2018. The Feb 2018 yearly rate approximates how much energy all of Singapore uses in a year. A bitcoin transaction is 100,000 times the cost of a functionally equivalent VISA transaction. This rate of energy usage is up from 38 TWh, just *one month* ago (go here for estimates of energy usage). The *one month* increase in bitcoin energy use equals how much energy Sri Lanka (population 20 million) used in one year. Bitcoin is an utterly preposterous waste of (mostly coal) energy that won't go on for much longer. Certainly, this is no way to 'fix' the money problems described above.
     Finally, we *really* need to fix those money problems *before* net energy constraints force a contraction of industrial society. When the 10% per year increase in 'money', which means 'loans', which means 'interest bearing debt' runs into net energy constraints that will impact the real, non-money, energy-requiring economy (e.g., building roads, houses, making iPhones) over the next 20 years, debt repayment will implode and banks will try to seize the energy-dense 'collateral' of the entire world. This is actually already happening because per capita net energy has flattened, but the rate of money creation has not. We have to fix the system by disbanding private banks before the real contraction starts. We will have enough real problems to deal with without bankers gumming up the works by trying to steal literally everything under the sun. The money madness of the last 10 years will be just a prelude to complete insanity if we don't start frankly discussing this. I'm still guessing that the 3 horsemen of the apocalypse will arrive in the order of: money, energy, and finally climate -- assuming that the 4th horseman, the small but growing possibility of a nuclear war (egged on by the stoopid and dangerous Russiagate hysteria), doesn't intervene. So we should fix money first!

[Feb08,'18] I sure would hate to be stuck as a human fighting the machines responsible for the huge, instantaneous vertical market moves today and yesterday, for example, a human running a pension or a sovereign wealth fund (well, I suppose I *am* stuck 'fighting the machines' since I have been paying into SS and other pension plans since the 1970's). The 'extreme fear' that is following last week's 'extreme greed' looks like it will be in town for a while. Google's News' 'Business' headlines today are a hoot: "Twitter Has Good News for Once: Its First Quarterly Profit". By contrast, near speed-of-light machines slicing 8% off the Dow in two days ($2.5 trillion in market capitalization!) doesn't appear. Must be 'fake news', eh?? Google sez: muppets must remain calm and continue buying the dips during 'shearing operations'. Tomorrow, Friday, will probably be another rough day [Update: Fri, Feb 10 wasn't so bad after all because the muppets followed their instructions and bought the dip] [Update2: From this comment at zerohedge on "short gamma" strategies (betting on the sign of the second derivative of the price of an *option*), it's pretty clear we have arrived at the 2018 equivalent of the 2007 'toxic waste' of bundled subprime loans. Sure seems like there is likely to be a big sewer stoppage sometime this year as all this cr@p tries to go down the drain at the same time. It's unfortunate that some of the 'bundled t&rds' in this sewer plug will probably include parts of my pension...].

[Feb11,'18]
'Finite' delusions
     I just unwisely wasted some of my ever dwindling remaining lifetime listening to Cory Doctorow giving an immensely irritating talk at UCSD (via youtube) at CalIT2 "Scarcity, abundance and the finite planet". What a nincompoop! He is supposed to be a science fiction writer, so therefore in theory knows something about science and technology.
     He talked about the wonderful discovery that some of the best selling items from Ikea became lighter and more tightly packed over time. One of his examples was the "Billy" bookcase. The "Billy" bookcase is a complete piece of cr@p Ikea particle-board bookcase that is not fit for the stated purpose of holding books. It works well with tchotchkes and stuffed toys. If you actually fill it with books, the pin-supported shelves will sag, especially any place where there is a little humidity. There are millions of Billy's in landfills, outgassing formaldehyde from their plastic coated particle board. I am embarrassed to say that several came from me. At the end of their short life, I easily snapped the shelves with my foot over a curb to make them fit into my garbage can. I was incredulous when Cory then used the small-percentage lightening of the "Billy" bookcase (which no doubt resulted in even more rapid sagging) as an argument for why we will be able to manufacture 6 times as many Billy bookcases for rural Indians and Chinese, so that they can all be brought up to the level of rich San Franciscans! I'm sure the ultralite, 1/6 as heavy, Billy's could easily hold some origami figures. There are two complete California's worth of new humans generated every year. He mentioned the Club of Rome. How could he possibly imagine that we can construct two complete California's worth of new Billy bookcases, not to mention houses and streets and sewers and furniture and cars and meds and iphones, every year for the forseeable future, until everything looks like San Francisco, and not turn the entire planet into a Blade Runner-like smoking ruin?
     Then, after 'solving overshoot', he complained about the 'inefficient design' of his 'just good enough' electric drill. This would be something like a variable speed 1/3 horsepower electric motor with a plastic case attached to a gearbox driving a ball-bearing chuck capable of holding hardened bits of different diameters. Actually, quite good. So maybe Cory did some coding at some point. But did he ever think concretely about what's actually in an electric drill, or even cursorily think about how an electric drill is actually made? His idea was that instead of buying a 'just good enough' electric drill, we should be able to order a much better one to be synthesized on the spot, apparently from something like a 1990's-model Star Trek replicator. It would then get used once, it would somehow record how it got used, send the information back to the replicator so that the next time, an even more perfect electric drill could be synthesized on the spot. Before resynthesis, magically, all its parts (copper, steel, plastic, ball bearings, ball bearing races, gears, chuck, rubber) could be 'recycled' in an 'energy efficient' way. What a blithering idiot! Sure, some of these parts are now manufactured by computer controlled machine tools. But those are merely automated versions of the hand mills and lathes of old, still programmed by humans so that the movements are efficient. The jump from a hand mill to a computer controlled mill is miniscule compared to the jump from a computer controlled mill to a magical Star Trek replicator that can take completed electric drills as raw material, somehow cleanly disassemble the plastic, rubber, and metals, then magically redesign them to be 'more efficient for whatever inexpert thing Cory happened to do with the drill that one afternoon', and then, unbelievably, spit out a completed new drill, not to mention instantaneously transport it to Cory's ostentatious mansion for another inexpert single use. This from a talk entitled "Scarcity, abundance and the finite planet". Somehow, Ikea selling an even more crapified Billy bookcase for the same price as the slightly better, earlier, heavier one (so the just-deceased penny-pinching fascist billionarie, Ingvar Kamprad, could collect even more loot in his bank account) is supposed to be 'evidence' that we will soon have magical energy-efficient electric drill replicators??? Rather than any concern about how much energy an electric drill replicator would use, Cory instead worried over 'privacy concerns' -- what, that everybody will know what a dufus Cory is with an electric drill?? No, it was that Google Drill will attempt to covertly convince him to do unnecessary drilling. Sheesh! Nobody called him on his whole ridiculous replicator fantasy. Instead, they asked about body hacking.
     Perhaps too much listening to utter fantasy/nonsense like this is why I see people in black clothes blithely walking across the middle of a street at night, into traffic, without looking. When I (rarely) drive, I go very slowly at night to avoid hitting the Newtonian-mechanics-impaired youth (probably Cory's video should have had a warning about how drills are *no good* for body hacking). Mechanized manufacturing is actually *more* energy intensive than old-style human-driven assembly lines. The only reason mechanized manufacturing is increasing is because there is currently, briefly, cheap enough fossil fuel energy to displace the human version. That won't last very long as declining net energy starts to bite. One might argue that we need people like Cory to spin tall tales to distract people and make them feel good. But the fact that such utter nonsense could make people feel good (and not mad, like me) just makes me sad, scared, and lonely -- and a little less angry, I suppose :-}

[Mar04,'18] I admit I'm feeling uneasy about about the Ides of March, when many new wars have been started (Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq2, Libya, Yemen). The war shrieking in the execrable NYT is more deafening and daft than usual ('North Korea' helping 'Syria' with 'poison gas', really? what, no barrel bombs?), as noted by Michael Chossudovsky and Edward Curtin. Given recent setbacks, a new US/Israeli-initiated war at this time seems strategically foolhardy, and unlikely. But, even so, I'll be happier if we make it to June without any new really bad thing happening.

[Mar10,'18]
There is only one future
     A couple weeks back, I read (HT Pete Markiewicz) an article by a younger guy who was complaining that the thrill of the grimy future of 'Minority Report' was wearing thin because of all of the drearily similar copies. Touchingly, he longed for something more like the first 'Star Trek' (!), which was originally pitched as 'Wagon Train to the stars' :-} . I bet he never saw 'Wagon Train'. I felt his pain, but I think he utterly missed the point. It isn't that people have gotten un-original. The problem is: *there is only one possible future*. It is skynet/alexa/surveillance/stasi/sexy. Aldous Huxley could already see this, 90 years ago.
     As one ages, the number of possible paths that one can take into the future inevitably shrinks. Over time, it seems more and more as if the path that was actually taken was the only one possible (well, maybe barring a few unlucky breaks). When I think back on how technology has progressed, it feels the same -- and I don't think it's just because I'm older.
     Take touch screens. They just *had* to be. Touch screens were originally developed in the 70's, but already by the 80's, they were in sporadic use. The original orange-on-black MRI scanner interfaces on GE machines from around 1990 were touch screens. They were a nightmare of completely non-standard, modal, full-page panels, often using "Cancel" to mean "Save current parameters and go to next modal screen". I particularly remember "Rx AHD Scan", an abbreviation for "prescribe ahead scan", which meant "while the current scan is running, set up the parameters for the next". I think they detected x-y by interruption of infrared beams from the screen edges. They were irritating to use and always covered with hospital bacteria suspended in primate finger oil. But they were the future. Now the whole world is an oiled touch screen.
     It was *always* going to be touch screens. Virtually all sci-fi from the 80's onward had people caressing touch screens, even though practical consumer versions weren't there yet. I unconsciously responded the to the 'modern-ness' of the sci-fi touch screens, but unlike a true businessman, I didn't consciously grasp the overwhelming importance of the stroking/grooming aspect. In fact, it is only relatively recently that neurophysiologists discovered 'stroking-tuned afferents' -- these are specific, small caliber afferents in the skin that only respond to very slow stroking/grooming motions across the skin (about 1 cm/sec). They look just like pain afferents.
     Touch/grooming interfaces may be infantilizing and mesmerizing and not very good for 'real work', esp. if it involves language or code or visual or sound design. But *nothing* could have stopped them. There was only one possible path foward, one possible future. Touch screens. Of course, this single future of touch interfaces had to be actually constructable. But capacitive touch surfaces are very old, and reasonable resolution screens were already there in the 1970's. It was just a matter of time before armies of engineers would generate the optimized indium tin oxide capacitive touch screens of today.
     This doesn't mean that everything that people 'have always wanted' will get made. Some perennially wanted things, like flying cars (flying carpets!), are intrinsically impractical, and will probably never be common because of basic physical constraints (fuel energy density, aerodynamics of car-shaped objects as heavy as a land car). A shame, considering all the youtube videos we could have looked forward to of flaming berserker 'air traffic rage' incidents :-}
     Finally, coming back to skynet/alexa/surveillance/stasi/sexy/IoT, we are obviously heading there, full speed ahead -- with touch screens, of course. If there were less people on the earth, and if a larger proportion of our high-quality, high-density energy sources remained -- ironically, all generated by localized *failures* of the biosphere to properly recycle energy -- I'm sure we would get a lot closer than we currently already are. Because that is the *only possible future*, I'm less disturbed than I used to be by the fact that the energy will run low before we can make it so. That said, having industrial civilization run low on energy will be spectacularly 'disturbing', and is certainly not something I look forward to in the slightest.

[Mar19'18] I started, obliquely, by listening to a John Helmer interview (starting just after minute 34 here) on the latest curious event in Salisbury (N.B.: just down the road from Porton Down, the infamous UK chemical and biological weapons factory and test site). This occurred just before the Russian election. Helmer points out that the Skripals made it to the Salisbury Mill pub, the Zizzi restaurant for dinner, then the park bench before falling unconscious, frothing at the mouth. He says the policeman who went to the Skripal home got sick immediately and is now in the same Salisbury hospital with the two Skripals (hospital is open for business). The policemen who visited the pub and the restaurant didn't get sick. Helmer suggests that the immediate source of the poison was in the Skripal home. It is unclear why the policeman visiting the home got sick immediately, but, by contrast, the Skripal's made it through the pub and dinner before falling ill. Helmer's guess is that a mistake by Skripal was capitalized upon by the British government to try to turn it into another 'Colin Powell vial' (the lie that helped start the 2003 war on Iraq). A Skripal mistake sounds a little implausible, but the US/UK can never get enough 'vials'.
     Chris Martenson (more trustable, a toxicology PhD!) suggests here, by contrast, that the fast action of nerve agents means that the Skripals must have gotten got exposed somewhere immediately after leaving the restaurant on the way to the park, not at home. Also, he contradicts Helmer with citations that the sick policeman first found the passed-out Skripals (vs. going to their home). He also notes that a number of other people who attended to the passed out Skripals *didn't* get sick. This suggests the policeman as a possible source or carrier if it was a nerve poison. No evidence of what happened has yet been publicly released (and none probably ever will be).
     Craig Murray reports that the first successful attempt to synthesize novichocks was by Iran in 2016, cooperating and reporting to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which added it to their database. Perhaps this can be used to attach it to Iran, though it completely undermines the UK claim that only Russia could have synthesized it. Picking a war with Russia now really wouldn't be a good idea. Hopefully it's just a way to boost the fragile May, who after the event, is now finally ahead of Corbyn.
     But Corbyn has quickly 'seen the light', or rather the polls, and is now on-board with 'keep calm, and blame the Russians'. Over the weekend, it suddenly made perfect sense that it was a genius Russian strategy to publicly execute an old man in the UK with nerve toxins, right before the Russian election, as the propaganda campaign has spread virtually worldwide via utterly supine mainstream media 'journalists'.
     For something completely different, here is a clip of a Nov 2017 UK teevee show, Strike Back, that had a novichock plot (yet, they use the word "novichock") similar to the official story of what happened, courtesy of @Syricide (go here about halfway down). Forget the military-industrial complex -- we live in the screenwriter-intelligence services complex!
     Finally, several have discussed what they ate. It's not hard at all to get food poisoning in the UK esp. in the ubiquitous chain restaurants; my wife and I had multiple experiences, some extremely severe :-{ . This explanation seems unlikely, however, given that one hour is a little fast-acting for typical salmonella, campylobacter, norovirus, or listeria food poisoning.
     The main question is whether a larger war at the US/Russian border in Syria (a la Magnier) is about to break out. There are some rumblings of US and Russia moving more equipment around than usual, and it's still March. Hopefully just the usual disinfo/chaff.
     Update Mar22: Here is Thierry Meyssan with his usual mix of intriguing and bizarre. Though he was one of the first to point out the foreign source and support for 'ISIS' in Syria, he was also responsible for the original 'no plane hit the Pentagon' disinfo. Here is yet a different take by Israel Shamir (scroll down to addendum at end of article). Here is Gregory R. Copley highlighting possible connections between Skripal and Christopher Steele, hinting that Skripal might have authored the Steele dossier. Finally, useful comments (#108 and #128) by "Old Microbiologist" containing actual information.
     Update Apr4: Porton Down scientists refuse to knuckle under to May/Johnson pressure to declare the poison Russian, and so the official story is starting to come apart, tweets are deleted, etc. But May/Johnson have won, because they only needed their shite to stick to the wall for a few weeks.
     Update Apr8: British 'authorities' bizarrely report that the Skripals two guinea pigs and a cat were locked up in the Skripal house until the guinea pigs died of dehydration and the cat was reduced to such a state that it had to be put down. Keep calm and blame Russia...
     Update May7: A good summary of the current state of the affair, which is too ridiculous for words, by Stephen McMurray.

[Apr08'18] Izzy snipers pull a Stephen Paddock last week, shooting 100 unarmed people marching out of their open air apartheid prison (the imprisoned Palestinians make up half of the population of Izzy), killing 17. Most of the presstitutes simply ignored the story. The servile 'left' press (gag) like the 'Guardian' described it as a "clash". Yeah, that would be like when South African police 'clashed' with black demonstrators; sorry, but snipers shooting unarmed people from 300 yards is not a 'clash'. Gilad Atzmon contrasts the pious pronouncements with reality (includes Corbyn, the 'anti-semite', hah). And here is the Onion. The toll of people injured by live fire bullets has now risen to to 750 untermenschen, oh sorry, I meant people.
     The real absurdity of the situation is that the people being shot are the ones who are genetically related to the biblical inhabitants of the Levant (i.e., the Palestinians), while the people doing the shooting, who booted the Palestinians out of their homes just 70 years ago, are genetically closer to Azhkenazi Khazars from the Caucasus, typically with only 0-3% Levantine ancestry (see papers by Eran Elhaik in 2013 here and 2017 here), who only converted to Judaism around the 8th century (see also papers by Paul Wexler on the Irano-Turko-Slavic origin of Yiddish). Imagine what the Guardian would have published if something analogous had occurred in Alabama (police snipers shooting into a demonstrating crowd of unarmed blacks, injuring 100 and killing 17).
     But that whole massacre has been quickly forgotten because the Bezos-Post has now is telling us again that once again, just as the US 'tries' to 'pull back' from the war on Syria (trans.: our liver-eating ISIS proxies get defeated again, which would be the ones we're supposedly 'fighting'), the Syrian government 'strategically' responds with a 'chemical attack', which is 'faithfully' reported by the 'lights, camera, action' White Helmets, pulling the U.S. reluctantly back into the war. Riiight. Good summary here at Moon of Alabama, and on-the-ground reports here from Vanessa Beeley.
     The problem is, unfortunately, you *can* fool most of the people, most of the time. I am slack-jawed at how many times the 'chemical weapons' nonsense has been effectively re-used on Americans since 'what My Lai?' Colin Powell's monstrous fake poison vial lie. The effectiveness of this nonsense on the minds of the rest of the world is less and less, with each repetition.

[Apr10'18]
The Ides of April
     War fever is increasing and the Bezos/Google/Beeb mighty Wurlitzer continues to catapult anti-Russian hysteria and 'chemical weapons' Douma psyop (now with Glen Greenwald's approval! tho he says he's against the war). Izzy attacked the T-4 Syrian air field with eight air-to-ground missiles launched from planes over Lebanoon and Russia outed them. The Saker has made a useful list of possible AngloZionist options here.
     An all-out US/Izzy attack on the US/Russian border in Syria or Iran seems unlikely, given the unpredictable outcome, and the chance of uncontained escalation. The context of this operation is very different than the Iraqi 'turkey shoot' since both Syria and Iran can now shoot back in a way that was impossible for Iraq in 2003. They have modern anti-aircraft, anti-missile missiles, and Iran probably has some fast surface-skimming cruise anti-navy cruise missiles that could damage attacking US ships (within range), forcing them to stay inconveniently far away. The military, and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff know this.
     On the other hand, the US empire is staggering a bit and strongly in need of some kind of mafia/bully action to reestablish street cred. And there is the not-very-intelligent, 69-year-old Bolton swamp-thing, made 'National Security Advisor' just a few days ago. The previous salvo of 59 cruise missiles at a semi-empty Syrian air base -- almost exactly a year ago on 7 April 2017, at a cost of a mere $100 million dollars, with a substantial number likely shot down -- could be repeated. A larger attack could probably only be launched in a week and a half from now, which is about how long it will take the US etc ships to get there. Since US-ians have probably forgotten about the previous fake chemical weapons attack that was used as a pretext for the 59 missiles last year, perhaps a similar symbolic attack will work again for them. Though the rest of the world would view it as the 'emperor with no clothes', that would be OK for now, as long as no kid pipes up to point out the obvious.
     The world energy situation is a lot more dangerous now than it looks, and perhaps some of the (sociopathic) 'adults' in room are thinking further ahead like me. When the energy going gets really tough (it's not tough yet), another extra-big 'new Pearl Harbor' may be required. One possibility is a small (false-flag) nuke in an American city. I suppose I should count my blessings that the fake chemical weapons shtick still 'works' :-/ . And perhaps the recent FBI escalation of porn-o-gate can serve as a new 'squirrel' (an absolutely classic 'wedge issue', porn-o-gate has actually *increased* Trump's approval amongst his core supporters), to keep the proles' eyes off the ball.
     Update Apr11: Reuters reports: "Russian envoy to Lebanon: Any U.S. missiles fired at Syria will be shot down". Russia Today reports: "Any US missiles fired at Syria will be shot down, *launch sites targeted* -- Russian envoy to Lebanon".
     Update Apr12: The threat of war seems to be receding (I'm hoping!), perhaps because some adult actually understood the Russian envoy's warning above. Imagine the US response if "Pyoootin" had threatened a massive bombing attack with intent toward regime change -- in Mexico. The deep state neo-cons have been temporarily beaten back, but are no doubt already planning the next 'incubator babies', to try to re-re-resuscitate the C-eye-eh/Izzy/Saudi-supported ISIS crazies defeated by Syria, Russia, and Iran. Meanwhile in Salisbury, 'comical UK' has decided that the Zizzi restaurant and the Skripal house will need to be destroyed (not just the cat and guinea pig?). And Nigel has run himself over with his car. It's worth remembering that though the Russians could do some damage to US assets in Syria, they remain seriously outgunned, and could be easily overpowered by a sustained US/Izzy attack. That could result in dangerous escalation.
     Update Apr15: Trump/whoever replayed the symbolic Sudan pharmaceutical attack and/or the 2017 Syria attack, hitting just a few targets, including a former chemical weapons company already neutralized by OPCW and currently producing cancer drugs, hence, safe to bomb. The bombing also conveniently destroyed (non-existent!) evidence of chemical weapons making, the supposed reason for the bombing, just before the OPCW inspectors were due there, in an installation in the middle of a dense city (the damage at Barzeh did not seem enough for "76" half-ton missile warheads). The Syrian defense against this symbolic attack seemed to be surprisingly successful; Syrian air defenses apparently were able to shoot down many of the incoming missiles. One suggestion was that older US missiles were used to drain some of the Syrian air defenses, but this seems like an unlikely US strategy. The suspicious thing to me is that this symbolic attack did not seem very scary (esp. considering how much just how much the US spends relative to the whole world on this cr@p); and the attack ships and planes kept a respectful distance. Through all this, the Syrian army continued to mop up the US/Izzy/Saudi-supported ISIS psychos. Perhaps, secret negotiations with the Russians dialed down the size of the US attack. Or perhaps, a larger attack was called off because of the beginnings of a Russian response (advanced Russian radars 'painting' attack ships and planes). Or perhaps larger attacks are still coming when when the rest of the flotilla arrives in a week. The Russians really have no good response options to a larger attack. Syrian Pantsir air defenses could be overwhelmed by large enough number of modern cruise missiles (though it would be hard for the US to go a lot over 1000-2000). The only Syrian/Russian defense would be to attack the missile-launching ships and jets with the most modern Russian weapons. Last week, the Russians said they would attack the source of the missiles, but they didn't, perhaps because of a gentlemen's agreement that Russians would not be targetted. However, if unprovoked, false-flag-driven US attacks escalate to real targets (e.g., Russian S-300/S-400/Yakhonts) or if the US troops recently dropped off in Syria get publicly involved, the Russians may finally be forced to respond. Their only possible response could endanger the whole planet. More likely (I hope), is that the US will just back down for now (at least until the next new Pearl Harbor).
     Update Apr17: It seems possible that many of the FUKUS missiles aimed at defended Syrian air fields (military and civilian) were downed in the air over Syria, without any Russian shots fired at their sources (ships, planes, submarine). If this report at Moon of Alabama is correct, the US military has a serious problem; this would seem to confirm the poor results of last year's (2017) test cruise missile attack on Syria. It's important to maintain a skeptical position about what exactly happened, given the usual amount of disinfo/chaff surrounding such an event. Here is a useful comment for some background on the practical problems of air defenses. Finally, it's important to remember that this was still a rather limited, symbolic US attack -- limited number of high value targets and low missile numbers compared to an all-out conventional attack. However, if the FUKUS weapons used were in fact the latest available, and if many were downed, one unintended consequence of this attack is that the mafia-like 'enforcer' image of the US empire (and the F and UK hanger-on-er components of FUKUS) has been further damaged. The newer JASSM cruise missiles attacking Barzeh almost all got through (according to the Russians), which might have been a test by the US (not a very rigorous test given that Barzeh was undefended!). What happens when all the US warships arrive in the middle east next week will be key. I'm guessing they will stand down, to respect the dawn of a new Cold War II. I am hoping we have made it through the Ides of March, mostly in one piece! The US still occupies (admittedly, very thinly) the 30% of Syria that contains most of Syria's oil, water, and gas (don't mention the war/oil, I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it).
     Update Apr19: It seems possible that the US *did* in fact only use very outmoded, easy-to-shoot-down cruise missiles (except at Barzeh), probably because the US military wanted to make sure that the attack didn't look like a direct attack on the Russians. If so, we are all in the strange position of relying on antiwar elements in the US military to promote world peace. I doubt Trump was responsible for the limitation of the attack (Trump IS the swamp). For comparison, 66% of American registered voters supported the attack, with only 23% opposing it (Apr 14 poll). Virtually all major newspapers supported the attack. The core voter-base for Trump actually opposed the attack. Tucker Carlson on Fox is a truth teller. Left is right and right is left. How utterly depressing!
     Update Apr22: What explains the virtual silence on (or grudging support for) the Syria attacks by a majority of US-ians? I came a across a recent comment, probably at saker or moon of alabama (can't remember where) that made sense to me, since I have thought the same thing myself over the years. The reason to ignore the war is that deep down, US-ians (myself included) know that their position at the top of the world food chain depends on the fact that the US spends much more on its military than any other country, and relies on implicit and explicit death threats as well as occasional death from above to keep its temporary position on the top of the heap. I doubt most people are strongly convinced by the chemical psyops, esp. since they have now been re-run so many times. However, as long as there are cars and gas and Home Depot and Amazon and iPhones and low interest rates, they can manage to suppress any conscious cognitive dissonance thoughts. The practical problem is that if cars and gas, etc, are impacted, which is likely to occur when the next downturn comes in a year or two, people may sour on the 'world policeman' (world mafia don) role, in which case, stronger medicine would be required to keep them on board. A real or false flag attack on one or more sitting duck US navy ships would instantly harden the war support from grudging to strong enough to instantly muzzle the internet opposition. This has occurred *many* times in history to galvanize support for imperial wars. I sure hope we make it through the Ides of April (and May) in one piece!
     Update Apr30: Somebody (possibly Izzy) missile'd an ammunition dump in Syria last night, setting off a huge explosion (2.6 on the Richter scale) near Hama. Here is some good material on the background to the situation from John Helmer. And here is one assessment of the propects going forward by Paveway IV. Initial reports in the alt media elicited a huge, almost instantaneous response from the hasbara trolls. And the 'Lies of our Times' has now weighed in to warn us that a retaliation is surely on the way. A critical part of every 'pearl harbor' is to first set up expectations. Damn the 'Ides of May'. But to end on a 'lighter' note, here is a suggestion from Canthama that the attack was not Izzy, but rather ground-based, and finally here is a satirical mashup pic (bring on the 'yellow cake'). The fog of disinfo from both sides remains thick -- hard to know what actually happened.
     Update May05: Now hoping we get through May and June without a large Izzy or US attack on Syria, which could precipitate a truly stoopid, major, own-goal war. Amazingly, it is possible that the World Cup in Russia on 15 July may have some effect on the timing of a possible new attack on Syria (from the time as a kid that my late father would turn American football games into a contest between good and evil, I have hated professional sports). Trump is an irrelevant puppet leader, 'bedeviled' by the ridiculous Mueller wielding only ... uh, Stormy Daniels, after almost two (!) years of Russiagate has fizzled. It's just psyop/Kabuki for the proles, which includes most of the 'left' *and* 'right' (e.g., see this pitiful article by Mike Whitney, and see this nice map that shows the two 'different' sides that are *both* being entertained by the show). The odds are still against a large war because of the possibility that a good part of the world's oil and gas supply could be interrupted if Iran is attacked. It's worth noting that this would hurt 'the world' more than it would hurt the US That's not a good thing, because it might make some of the crazies -- who don't realize how vulnerable the US military would be in a confrontation with a near peer -- more bold. Saner (military) heads realize that it would be a bad thing to (further) demonstrate that vulnerability. And oil prices are already going up as the 1% 'glut' finally gets used up.
     Update May08: Though Trump's preposterous cancelling-the-Iran-agreement speech won't convince hardcore Trumpflakes that Trump *is* the swamp, they will now be permanently conflicted/disabled, like Obama supporters trying to explain away Obama, the previous bankers-and-war preznit. I think that people are overestimating the effect of this latest 'Trump' Syria 'squirrel'/stunt/charade. The Syrian army is winning against the US/Saudi/Izzy-support ISIS etc. terrorists. However, if there is another new pearl harbor, all bets are off.
     Update May09 [4AM GMT]: So soon (in less than a day!), I may be proved wrong. Syria has fired back at an Izzy provocation for the first time in almost 4 decades, after withstanding 100 or more Izzy attacks on Syria during that time. We will see tomorrow if a larger war breaks out. There will be a desperate attempt by the Mighty Wurlitzer to get the US involved. Interesting that the first Syrian strike-back in decades happened with Nutty dining in Russia, in a weird anti-parallel with Trump 'chocolate cake' missile launch in April 2017. Sheldon Adelson is meeting with Trump in Washington tomorrow (Iran/Syria has nothing to do with it, of course).
     Update May10: Izzy declares success, which as translated by Bernhard (MoA), may mean they are temporarily pulling back from further immediate attacks on Syria. A substantial number of attacking missiles were again shot down (for example movie and still from over Damascus), and 30 Izzy jets did not enter Syrian air space, firing their missiles from 60 miles away. Here is a summary of Syrian air defenses by Wael. Syria will continue slowly but surely cleaning out the US/Saudi/Izzy-supported ISIS/jihadi/takfiri/al-Qaeda head-choppers from Syrian cities and the Syrian countryside. Here is a brave Syrian manning a Pantsir short range air defensive missile battery in Syria that had just run out of missiles, who dies trying to dash back to drive it out of the way of an incoming Israeli suicide drone. Finally, here is a report of what happened from the viewpoint of the SAA (translation of SAA FB post by Canthama).
     Update May13: Summary: the fact that Syria successfully shot back for the first time after being attacked roughly 100 times by Israel over the past few decades is highly significant.
     Update May14: Now watch as the embarrassingly supine press once again (cf. the even more deadly 2009 Operation Cast Lead and 2014 Operation Protective Edge, which both took place under Obama) gruesomely tries to justify terrorist snipers shooting unarmed demonstrators in the head (a massacre today: 58 killed, 2800 wounded), because 'Iran', because 'terror', because 'clash', because 'you made us kill you', because 'human wave attacks', because 'unfortunate propaganda attempt' (Raj Shah). How can you live with yourself, presstitutes? But average US-ians, despite the Wurlitzer, despite the hasbara trolls, are finally starting to wake up to the reality of the apartheid nightmare, where half of all the people in Israel (almost 4 million people), descendents of the 3/4 of a million people who were terrorized out of their homes in 1948, are being held without the right to vote in hellish, open air, sniper-ringed, concentration camps. My mind is bruised. I want to resign from the human race.
     Update May15: Many on-the-ground pics from the Daily Mail.

[May07'18]
     Americans still often look to Europe as more sophisticated than the US, hundreds of years later. But look at what Germany, France (with the UK's help) have done to southern Europe, esp. Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. First, they created a 'sort-of' joint currency. But go here to see how they have been careful not to make it *actually* like the US dollar, which is a real joint curency between US states; the Germans are keen to prevent what actually happens in the US from happening in the EU -- that is, where "German taxpayer's [would be] used to fund other member states". By contrast, California and New York taxpayers *actually do* fund the 'flyover' states.
     Stripped down to basics, the 'EU' (i.e., German, French banks, Goldman Sachs) gave southern Europe huge loans -- not out of generosity, but as a method of bankers making money on the interest payments. They made a lot of money from it during the 2000's boom. But when the bubble popped, instead of spreading the pain of the pop around, they extracted almost everything from the south, *halving* the standard of living of hard-working regular people in Greece.
     Is the European south corrupt? Of course! Think Greek shipping magnates bribing rich middle eastern country leaders for help attacking Libya in return for the prospect of shipping stolen Libyan oil, just prior to the war on Libya. But what the EU did in simple terms after the 2007-2008 crash was to literally take money from poor Greeks to pay rich German and French bankers. Regular Germans didn't profit; but they didn't get squeezed to pay German bankers anything like regular Greeks did. This is not any more sophisticated than the impoverishment of flyover country in the US (and don't get me started on the ridiculously meat-centered Euro diet :-} ; that's not sophisticated, or humane, or environmentally possible, either).
     Finally, this isn't to say that interstate transfer payments in the US are adequate! If California and New York actually *did* fund the flyover states properly, we might have slowed the inexorable movement toward outright fascism. This is a lesson not just for the US.

Recent World: Sep 11, 2018 (earlier: scroll back)

Recent (1999) 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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