Saturday, September 18, 2010

The Peak Of The Oil Wars - 3

In this series we have been focusing on the foreign policy considerations, as well as other aspects, of the peak oil reality.

In one previous post on this subject matter, The Peak Of The Oil Wars - 2, we noted how strange it would be if Iraq became the number one producer of oil in the world, as expected by Lloyd's of London and others.

That eventuality was especially interesting when considered while looking back at the anti-war left research and subsequent assertions that the Iraq war was actually preplanned as an oil war.

That is, beginning from Vice President Dick Cheney's secret meetings with oil barons, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars never were wars based on the foreign policy considerations publicly stated by the U.S. government.

Instead, these were wars based upon imperialistic notions to militarily control the basic oil supplies in the middle east that were in the gun sights of oil barons.

We have also taken a look at Afghanistan in the context of that imperialistic struggle to control oil, which we see as civilization's drug of choice.

War is only one aspect of the future for world civilization as oil production reaches the peak, then begins to diminish as a viable source of energy because such hydrocarbons simply will no longer be available.

So we focus in this post on some of the other eventualities moving toward us rapidly in the wake of the years following "peak oil".

I found a white paper concerning the entire issue, from beginning to end so to speak, which has some monumental statements in it:
The rise of modern western civilization is not merely a product of human ingenuity and free-market principles ... The industrial revolution, and all the things it brought, is little more than a tale of mankind's taming of the dark flames of fossil fuels.
(Coal & Oil: The Dark Monarchs, page 40, PDF, emphasis added). This led to the old "military industrial complex" which alarmed some American leaders, but never-the-less it became the essence of civilization as we know it anyway.

The future of civilization as we know it, then, likewise does not turn on the mastery of machines of technology alone, which will die out or run out of gas too as the hydrocarbon remains of ancient life forms becomes unobtainium.

Instead, the future turns on the ability to convert machines so they will be able to use renewable energy (the replacements for oil, coal, and other derivative fuels we call hydrocarbons).

This reality can be grasped by recalling the behavior of addicts who are cut off from their drug, then extrapolating that singular behavior into the group behavior of civilization as we know it (an oil addict):
The present dominance and dependence on coal and oil along with natural gas will also make the issue of resource depletion strongly connected to energy security. Globalization has been fuelled by cheap and abundant energy, traded as a commodity in a free market. Increasing conflict over scarce energy would undermine the very foundations of the world-wide social, economic, and political normalization processes that have been observed over the past few centuries. It is not surprising that concern has been expressed regarding potential energy shortages, insecurity of supply and price volatility by various researchers, agencies and organizations. The Lloyd's insurance market and the highly regarded Royal Institute of International Affairs (often better known as Chatham House) recently said that business is underestimating the catastrophic consequences of declining oil supply ... An industry taskforce on peak oil and energy security, consisting of six UK companies, also concluded that peak oil was an urgent, clear, and present challenge ... The US military also foresee a massive oil crunch is inevitable without massive expansion of production and refining capacity ... By 2012 ... surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in oil output could reach nearly 10 Mb/d.
(ibid, page 87, emphasis added). Civilization became a military industrial complex at first, but it morphed from there.

Dredd Blog readers know that this blog replaced the older term military industrial complex with a more modern descriptive term "military oil media complex", or MOMCOM.

Dredd Blog sees that imperialistic oil addiction is taking over policy as America's industries are "shipped overseas".

Dredd Blog sees that the media became a business of keeping the public deceived about the realities around them, as it morphed away from real news information into consumer entertainment providers.

In short, civilization has been sold a bill of goods which ended up being a bill of bads so addictive that there seems to be no way out, what with the current state of ineptness in government.

Even if we found a new source of oil with the "drill baby drill" ideology of those who are criminally insane, civilization as we know it would still be destroyed, because global warming will have the same effects that peak oil will have.

The only way out is to master one of the renewable energy solutions we have been aware of for these many years.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Friday, September 17, 2010

All Justice Is Local - 2

We have been following the impeachment "trial" of a federal judge from the New Orleans area.

The trial of a judge who was raised and educated in the land of Oilah Akhbar, who as a state judge, did what he saw his peers doing under the law of that time ('84-'94) in the parish he still calls home.

The House is prosecuting him for things done as a state judge during those years, things which for the most part are still considered ethical, even after massive changes to the ethics law there in 2009.

Those who are trying to defrock him deride him for eating with the gentry, even while they send billions in "cash & money" to Karzai in Afghanistan, a corrupt murdering thief, who will turn on them in a New York minute, to become their militant enemy.

It seems a perfect fit for the sayings "majoring in the minors" or "making a mountain out of a mole hill":
Billions of dollars are being secreted out of Kabul to help well-connected Afghans buy luxury villas in Dubai. Amid concerns that the money could be the result of corruption, American politicians have temporarily cut off aid to the Afghan government.
(Der Spiegel). At the same time the "defense" appropriation bill, where billions of taxpayer dollars are spend on corrupt crooks around the globe, a judge who lost his home during Katrina and his wife shortly after that, is being prosecuted because a large health care corporation wants it that way.

We have elevated voodoo economics and voodoo justice to new levels.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

The Keystone Complex To The Rescue - 4

The governor of the State of Pennsylvania was aghast when he realized that his administration had authorized a contract with a private firm to spy on Americans.

Anyone who protested in the streets or with words (like Dredd Blog) was put on a terrorist list in that state.

It became the State of Transylvania which had been overrun by the Keystone Complex:
An embarrassed Gov. Ed Rendell apologized Tuesday to groups whose peaceful protests or events, from an animal rights demonstration to a gay and lesbian festival, were the subject of regular anti-terrorism bulletins being distributed by his homeland security director.

Rendell said that the information was useless to law enforcement agencies and that distributing it was tantamount to trampling on constitutional rights.

...

Rendell said he ordered an end to the $125,000 contract with the Philadelphia-based organization, the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, that supplied the information, but said he was not firing his homeland security director, James Powers.
(Governor Rendell Axes Contract). The dubious Keystone Complex member, the meme-complex now known as the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, an Israeli crowd, seem to have the mindset of a bunch of undersexed horny old busy-bodies who can't get enough of those fear mongah sugah crissspssss.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post is here.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Democrats Pay How Much For War? - 3

In this series Dredd Blog has been asking "how many seats will the democrats loose" due to their indiscriminate continuation of military spending for the hideous and unpopular wars.

The thrust of Dredd Blog's criticism of the democratic party was that they did not follow up on campaign promises which turned the bushies out of office, but instead the democrats turned into bushie lites (The Circle W Cowboys) instead.

Here are some sample posts that deal with this point: Democrats Pay How Much For War - 2, The Rise of the Machine Intolerance, and What Was Rejected.

Following yesterday's primaries, we now have indications that for the first time since the not-so-great Depression the republican primaries pulled more voters to the voting booth than the democratic primaries did:
For the first time since the 1930s, participation in Republican primaries exceeds participation in Democratic primaries ...
(NY Times). Obviously the democrats, led by President Obama with his W compass, have not read the tea leaves properly for the past two years, choosing instead to forget the left and move to the right under the dubious political reasoning that the neoCons would reward them for so doing.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

All Justice Is Local

The impeachment of Federal Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. in the House of Representatives, by a unanimous vote in March of this year, now goes to trial in the U.S. Senate.

Most of the case turns on what Porteous did as a state judge, not as a federal judge.

As a state judge he would send administrative cases to cronies who would kick back about half of the income from those cases.

That stopped when he became a federal judge, however, he presided over a case in which about 13 federal judges had already recused themselves.

While that case was still pending, before the final judgment, Judge Porteus was given some $2,000 by one of the plaintiff's lawyers.

Judge Porteus eventually ruled in the plaintiff's favor to the tune of a $15,000,000 dollar judgment.

A massive FBI investigation ("Operation Wrinkled Robe") uncovered judicial misbehaviour, but the grand jury did not indict Judge Porteus, thus there was no criminal charge, trial, or verdict against him.

Thus, this case is the first time or one of the only times a federal judge has been impeached without a prior criminal conviction.

The defense is based in part upon a theory that corruption exists everywhere, some places worse than others, but that is a local matter akin to state's rights.

In other words, they are arguing that since all the judges in Jefferson Parish, specifically the city of Gretna, are corrupt in some degree, you can't finger just one of them because that constitutes discriminatory selective prosecution.

They go on to say that since he is retiring next year anyway, and since there was no criminal charge or trial in a federal district court, that there is no ample federal record or reason upon which to base an impeachment.

The trial will get into some of the statistical evidence of corruption in various states, and should be interesting.

UPDATE 9/15: The testimony is beginning to convince me that Professor Turley, the judge's lead counsel, expressed the heart of this case when he mentioned that a large health care corporation located in Louisiana entered into a written contract with a New Orleans law firm to get the judge thrown off a case against them.

This judge had a reputation for being for the common folk instead of the big corporations, therefore he was a target.

The judge ran into some financial problems during the several-year time-frame of the case, which eventually led to a bankruptcy filing.

After the trial was over and the decision was pending for over a year, the judge borrowed / was given some money by one of his friends, who happened to be a lawyer in the case on the side of the plaintiffs.

That was picked up by the FBI operatives and somehow the health care corporation got wind of it, then instigated the current congressional impeachment.

This post is part of the (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) Dredd Blog System series "All _______ Is local"; here are some sample posts:

All Weather Is Local

All Security Is Local

All Ocean Experience Is Local

All Ecological Disasters Are Local

Monday, September 13, 2010

Open Thread



Your turn again ...




The BP propaganda that "microbes ate the oil" is not supported scientifically according to a microbiologist ...
Dredd Blog has generated several posts concerning the feverish cover-up of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe:

A Watchdog Group has now sued via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to get to the bottom of it.

Dredd Blog had the true story all along.

Another one bites the dust - refinery explosion kills ...
Another sign of the degeneration of the courts into political ideology instead of the law is covered in an article about Supreme Court Law Clerks ...
When Zbigniew Brzezinski returned from China last month to land in DC, he said it was like travelling from the 21st Century backwards in time ... their infrastructure spending is local while we rebuild countries we just destroyed, but by comparison spend little at home for Americans ... Arianna Huffington has a book out called Third World America ...
Massive deforestation contributes to global warming and climate change
Oil companies may lose entitlement tax advantages
Scientist wants testing of Gulf Shrimp for safety
Boehner or Boner, somebody is going to hurt somebody at the battle of the bulge
Now they are bailing out Afghan Banks but carping about helping unemployed Americans

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Honest People Shine In This Darkness - 2

True researchers, true scientists, and true Americans have shown up to rise to the top of the news again.

Some of our scientist friends are getting to the bottom of it by finding one of the Deepwater Horizon plumes which was said to have evaporated into the atmosphere.

The reality is that these marine biologists have found the once-mobile plume now laying down on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

They find it probable that other plumes have done likewise, but that yet other plumes are still travelling in the currents, like a submarine the size of Manhattan Island, under the surface of the gulf waters.

In previous posts Dredd Blog attempted to remind readers that the government and BP were doing a significant amount of play pretend by implying that the Gulf was now cleaned up.

The most horrible of damage to the environment will go on for years, as BP spends millions on propaganda campaigns to generate a false impression that they are good for the environment.

They also pump millions into campaigns to deceive the public into believing that green house gases will not lead to the demise of civilization as we know it.