Survival

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It
knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or
it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it
will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether
you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes
up, you better start running." --African proverb

I'm an equal opportunity basher

Nice dog

Motivation


Grabbed from PicFreak

Small men casting long shadows

The control over the price of oil is in now in
the hands of global guerrillas -- the open
source, system disrupting, transnational crime
fueled, sons of global fragmentation covered by
this author. These actors can now, at will,
curtail the supply of oil through low tech
attacks on facilities in Iraq, Nigeria, central
Asia, and India. The amount of oil effectively
under their control exceeds five million barrels
a day, more than Saudi Arabia's two million
barrels a day of swing production.

Means and Motives

It's important to note that this capacity to
disrupt production is substantially different
than any terrorist threat we have faced in the
past. With terrorism, the potential of damage has
always been from single large attack on a major
facility or node (extremely difficult to
accomplish and relatively easy to recover from).
Today's threat is based on sustainable disruption
-- ongoing, easy, low-tech attacks that are
nearly impossible to defend against (everything
from pipeline destruction to employee kidnapping).

Massive decentralization coming if this keeps up.

There are a host of other reasons for it also.

Read it all.

The Political "Mind"

Scientific study of the political mind, that ever
present oxymoron, in action:

The study points to a total lack of reason in
political decision-making.

And it's not the exclusive domain of pols. The lack
of reason in the treatment of others is found in
anyone who deals with others like they're pieces of
furniture.

They're everywhere, growing like weeds in a garden.

I don't understand why some people need "studies"
to confirm what's obvious to any rational observer
but here it is.

Expect simple denial from the irrational observers.

That's the nature of power.

How to Make an Instant Dark Age

The ultimate end of power...

US digital ambition

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends
that the United States should seek the ability to
"provide maximum control of the entire
electromagnetic spectrum".

US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy
the full spectrum of globally emerging
communications systems, sensors, and weapons
systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".

Consider that for a moment.

The US military seeks the capability to knock
out every telephone, every networked computer,
every radar system on the planet.

Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-
aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?

The fact that the "Information Operations
Roadmap" is approved by the Secretary of Defense
suggests that these plans are taken very
seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

And that the scale and grandeur of the digital
revolution is matched only by the US military's
ambitions for it.

Edit:

This report is little different than the original,
but here's a link that should work.

Why not herd?

This url soon to go under the "Powerful Links"
section here...

To learn effectively, it is necessary to become
conscious of the reality feedbacks in which we
are involved and to think reflectively upon the
changing maelstrom or flux of which we are
‘part’. If we respond blindly to our instincts or
to culturally conditioned ‘rules’, we remain the
slaves of those memes. Our social outcomes will
be the result of the mass actions of many
individuals responding blindly. Humans advance in
direct proportion to the degree that they become
conscious decision-makers. Up until that point,
humans are the slaves to blind forces...

Fear and arrogance are the great mind-killers.
Fortunately, humans have a natural curiosity and
an inclination to act optimally in what they
perceive as their own best interests. It is the
place of wisdom to harness these natural
propensities to improving the lot of humans in
this strange land. Crushing exploration, or
forcing sullen conformity to more blind rules,
will not advance our situation.

As we learn, we must understand that ‘the’ rules
are changing all the time.

Without changing rules we remain tied to
repeating patterns, while our population ever
grows to the point of eventual breakdown.

Read.

Plenty of new info debunking "peak oil"

Fort Worth, Texas, is built on top the Barnett
Shale natural gas field, a field so vast that the
U.S. Geological Service estimates it contains
some 26 trillion cubic feet of yet-to-be-
discovered natural gas. Estimates are that as
much as 160 billion cubic feet of natural gas are
in place per square mile in the Barnett Shale
formation. The Barnett Shale field is the largest
gas-producing field in Texas, covering some 15
counties in the northern part of the state. The
core area comprises about 120,000 net acres that
stretch north from Fort Worth to the western
outskirts of Denton.
...
Commented Jerome Corsi, Ph.D., co-author of
"Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity
and the Politics of Oil": "With the field only
discovered in 1981, the Barnett Shale natural gas
resources were not known when Shell Oil geologist
M. King Hubbert started worrying about 'peak
production.' With natural gas resources this
abundant, we can be reasonably assured there
remains a large quantity of natural gas to be
extracted at home, right on the continental U.S.
That abundance should be apparent even to those
who want to maintain the doctrinaire position
that the Barnett Shale natural gas is organic in
nature."

The excuse to go busting somebody's ass elsewhere
on the planet to secure Amurika's energy supply
is getting weaker by the hour.

Doesn't look like many are bringing this up.

Read.

...and what's more...

NASA scientists are about to publish conclusive
studies showing abundant methane of a non-
biologic nature is found on Saturn's giant moon
Titan, a finding that validates a new book's
contention that oil is not a fossil fuel.

Looks like the idea is locked up.

Yet, could it be both fossil and non-fossil?

Full article.

Power

"Power is insatiable, will always use itself to
seize more power, and can never willingly
surrender any portion of itself and still exist
as power...until it eats itself." --jomama

Interview with Kurtzweil

The future is exponential, not linear, and yet
virtually all government models used to track
future trends are linear. They actually work
quite well for one year, two years, maybe three,
since linear projection is a very good
approximation of an exponential one for a short
period of time -- but it's a terrible one for a
long period of time. They radically diverge,
because exponential growth ultimately becomes
explosive. And that is the nature of
technological evolution.

Interesting guy. Got his shit together.
Recognizes patterns well.

A little too positive for some visitors here.

I expect he's also right in most things...if the
center holds.

But as things get more exponential, the center is
is irrelevant and forgotten.

Was it ever there? Did it ever exist?

Full interview.

Stupid is hot...the new fad

Looks like there are even formal courses in it...

There’s this thing called the National
Assessment of Adult Literacy, which just came out
and said that Americans not only can’t read but
are vigorously getting worse. Here it is, from
the Washington ever-loving Post, December 25 in
the Year of Our Decline 2005:

“Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in
2003 could be classified as ‘proficient’ in
prose—reading and understanding information in
short texts—down 10 percentage points since 1992.
Of college graduates, only 31 percent were
classified as proficient—compared with 40 percent
in 1992.”

That’s college graduates, brethren and sistern!
They can’t read simple stuff. “See Spot run. Run,
Spot….” What you think them other scoundrels
can’t do that ain’t graduates? Halleluja, dearly
beloved, idiots are us. Am us, I mean.

What do you suppose will be the results of that?

You're looking at the beginning...moving fast.

Full article.

--This has been another Zombie Alert brought to you by jomama.

How to Establish a Government...or Capitalizing on Stupidity.

So, make sure to create illusions of good and
evil and groups having conflicting interests. And
direct people’s attention from the fact that you
are seeking power. Call it their final
liberation—it does not have to change anything,
except for making you the ruler.

But not to worry.

Soon another election will be held so that the
folks who feel like their interests have not been
served get to add another batch of idiots to the
pile.

Zombies everywhere.

Sheeit.

Read.

--This has been another Zombie Alert brought to you by jomama.

Petroleum origin myth busted

Such scientific facts, and the general knowledge
of same, not withstanding, every textbook
published in the English language purportedly
dealing with the subject of petroleum geology,
including the ones cited above, continues to
repeat the old discredited claims that the
presence of (abiotic) porphyrins in natural
petroleum provide evidence for its origin from
biological matter.15-17 Such assertions, thirty
years after having been demonstrated
scientifically insupportable, must be
acknowledged to be intellectual fraud, pure and
simple.

Question is, is there a motive or was it just
plain stupidity.

I'll bet on the latter.

More related myth trashing to follow.

Read.

Cutting thru the bullshit

This dude's got it all right.

What's seen and what's not seen...

Abstract: the proposed Iranian Oil Bourse will
accelerate the fall of the American Empire.
...
Bush's Shock-and-Awe in Iraq was not about
Saddam's nuclear capabilities, about defending
human rights, about spreading democracy, or even
about seizing oil fields; it was about defending
the dollar, ergo the American Empire. It was
about setting an example that anyone who demanded
payment in currencies other than U.S. Dollars
would be likewise punished.

Gonna be a shitpot full o' gummint-produced paper
changing hands.

Brought to you from The Planet of the Strange.

Highly recommended read.

Getting what you like

"Take care to get what you like, or you will be
forced to like what you get."
-- George Bernard Shaw

Lipidleggin'

Butter.

I can name a man's poison at fifty paces. I take
one look at this guy as he walks in and say to
myself, "Butter."

He steps carefully, like there's something
sticky on the soles of his shoes. Maybe there is,
but I figure he moves like that because he's on
unfamiliar ground. Never seen his face before and
I know just about everybody around.

Fiction?

So far.

Full story.

Via Sunnimaravillosa

The Rise and Decline of the State - the book

Van Creveld covers economic, cultural, social,
and military matters with impressive erudition.
As once Amazon reviewer wrote: "Every once in a
while you come across a book that goes beyond
being interesting or thought-provoking, but is a
veritable five lane intellectual super-highway.
Martin van Creveld's The Rise and Decline of the
State is such a book."

Haven't read it but it looks like a good companion
piece to The Sovereign Individual, by Davidson and
Rees-Moog which I have read and highly recommend.

Can you see how the first leads naturally to the
second premise?

Read the whole review.

Doug Casey's predictions for 2006

Doug's economic predictions are always worth
a look. He has a fine track record.

The big X factor, as always, remains the
government. Frankly, I never expect anything good
from government. And here I refer to the
institution itself. How can you, considering that
its main products are wars, pogroms,
prosecutions, persecutions, taxation, regulation,
inflation, and assorted idiocy. These aren’t just
accidental characteristics; the actual essence of
government is coercion, and coercion is not a
good thing. Worse, the people drawn to “service”
of the State aren’t the "best and brightest", as
their propagandists put out, but the worst and
dullest; they’re people who believe in organized
coercion. Who else could even consider working
for such an organization? That’s why "throwing
the bums out" is a pointless exercise in self-
delusion.

Full article.

xMax sparks low power wireless revolution

A little-known start-up has demonstrated
wireless broadband 1000 times more efficient than
WiMax – and claims the technique could also make
wireless LANs that will run for years on watch
batteries.

Full article.

What the smart money is doing

Decisions by the world's two wealthiest men to
bet on a further weakening of the U.S. dollar,
coupled with China's lack of confidence in
American currency should grab the attention of
every working person, says Craig Smith, CEO of
Swiss America Trading .

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is following the
example of Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren
Buffett, who made a pretax gain of $412 million
in the fourth quarter of 2004 by buying foreign
currencies.

Citing widening U.S. trade and budget deficits
and a federal debt of $7.62 trillion, Gates said
in a TV interview at the World Economic Forum in
Switzerland last weekend he expects the dollar to
extend its three-year decline.

"I'm short the dollar," Gates said, according to
Bloomberg News. "The ol' dollar, it's gonna go
down."

...

"When I saw this quote, literally I had to catch
my breath," Smith said. "This is a clear-cut
signal that the people who know money are running
-- they are not walking -- in my opinion, they
are running from the dollar."

Now I'm sure I'm gonna get a lotta pissing and
moaning in the comments section about how the
rich get all the breaks and blaming them for all
the trouble you see.

Give it up. It's a tired ol' tune, pumped into so
many empty heads by the propaganda masters
to keep as many as possible distracted from the real
reason the money is running:

The Great Political Shell Game driving down its
value from the beginning as soon as it became
delinked from gold. Pols don't take kindly to
limits on their power for long and that's
originally what gold did.

And no, a gold-backed, government-produced currency
isn't the answer. What they do they can undo,
obviously. They did.

Read.

Natural gas, the overlooked alternative to oil

Natural gas reserves

Total - 135,119,592,390,000 cubic feet (source)

Natural gas consumption

Total - 1,482,830,070,000 cubic feet (source)

If we continue to use natural gas at the same rate
as we use it today, the United States has about a
50-year supply of natural gas, though another 200
years of additional gas supplies could be produced
if people are willing to pay more for the gas
they use.

Compared with oil at more than US$60 a barrel,
an energy-equivalent amount of gas costs in the
region of only $20. Experts predict that gas,
which was once considered a wasteful by-product
of oil exploration, will turn into the No 1
fossil fuel. Vying for gas resources are the
world's top guzzlers of energy, the United
States, Europe, China and India.

Some stats on propane auto conversions.

Propane conversions should give the planet some
breathing room while looking for the ultimate
energy source.

The Long Emergency

What's going to happen as we start running out
of cheap gas to guzzle?

It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in
dark raptures of nonstop infotainment,
recreational shopping and compulsive motoring --
to make sense of the gathering forces that will
fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in
our technological society. Even after the
terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still
sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming
time the Long Emergency.

Running out of cheap oil will not likely be the
cause. It's just a symptom of a currency in decline
along with an empire in decline along with rot
thruout, everyone just wanting to keep the good
times rolling at everyone else's expense.

See tomorrow's post to see why oil continuing as a
mainstay is unlikely.

Read.

Via chumpfish

Justice

JUSTICE, n.
A commodity which is a more or less
adulterated condition the State sells to the
citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and
personal service. --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's
Dictionary

Another history lesson

"Last century over 170 million people were
murdered by their own governments, and your
government doesn't want you to have a gun.
Doesn't that bother you just a little?"
-- Unknown

Eddie Izzard on empires

"So in Europe, we had empires. Everyone had them
- France and Spain and Britain and Turkey! The
Ottoman Empire, full of furniture for some reason.
And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, famous for fuck
all! Yes, all they did was slowly collapse like a
flan in a cupboard." --Eddie Izzard

A fiscal hurricane

Straight from the maw of the beast...

To hear Walker, the nation's top auditor, tell
it, the United States can be likened to Rome
before the fall of the empire. Its financial
condition is "worse than advertised," he says. It
has a "broken business model." It faces deficits
in its budget, its balance of payments, its
savings — and its leadership.

"broken business model."?

Never was a business model. It's a non-profit
model, for everyone and when everyone loses they
eventually walk off the job.

Can ya blame 'em?

Will you be one of them?

...

After three decades in the business, Rivlin is
frustrated by lawmakers' inaction and blames
balanced-budget advocates for not better
articulating the problem. "There may be better
ways to talk about it," she says. "I sometimes
think, 'Where's Ross Perot when we need him?' "

Ah, The Great Blame Game then the Looking for a
Savior Game.

Empires don't work that way. Hubris and belief of
indestructibility is built in. The System thinks
it's immortal. Instead it eventually eats itself
- along with those who support it - and dies.

Like I've said before, there is no political
solution.

None.

Take a look at what a few more talking heads say.

A different look at crime

Not just wetbacks get their backs wet. When you
consider the ease with which drugs go into the
US, and get delivered to every small town, at
prices you can’t refuse, you realize that the
Warn Terr couldn’t keep the Queen Elizabeth II
from coming across the border on wheels. With a
marching band in front. Criminal enterprise is
far more efficient than government. Though
probably less criminal.

...

Organized crime is a better deal. I much prefer
the friendly neighborhood dope dealer to any
federal official. I can tell the former “no.”

I got a good guffaw outta this one. I expect you
will too.

Full rant.

Listening

"Everything has been said before, but since
nobody listens we have to keep going back and
beginning all over again." --Andre Gide