status quo

STATUS QUO


If it weren’t so tragic it would be friggin hilarious. Okay, it is still funny in a morbid type of way. Today, all you hear on the news is about Arnold “I’ll Be Back” Swarchenegger and his love child. No one seems to give two craps that the Japanese nuke reactor has actually melted down. Melt. Down. Words that sent our very own commie queen Fonda staring in The China Syndrome. Words that had us pretty worried about Chernobyl. Words today that send a yawn down our spines. The media is complacent, the government is lying ( trust us, there are only a few thousand gallons of oil leaking from the oil rig so far, oh, right, and don’t forget that the chemicals used to “disappear” the oil to the bottom are perfectly safe to eat in your gumbo ) and the revelations from the Internet generate as much interest as the state of someone else’s grandmothers bowels. Either we simply don’t care, feeling that our SUV air conditioning will filter out nuclear fallout, or we have bigger worries such as India and Pakistan nuking each other and REALLY putting some crap up into the atmosphere.

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Pakistan and India had a bit of a rumble over this weekend. Those two! Always fighting over some glacier a few miles above sea level. Not that this isn’t important, if those mountains hold the majority of each countries water. Or, one of those countries water. If I’m not reading too much into things, India will soon dry up and wither away from drought, so they might be taking renewed interest in this issue. Or, Pakistan is looking at all of its little Muslim leader buddies elsewhere in the middle east and thinking, hmmm, we might want to start a war to keep OUR population in line. Why wait for civil unrest when you can head it off early, and gain a bit of important real estate from those troublesome Dot Heads while you’re at it? I’m not predicting anything, just wondering if perhaps this time there wouldn’t be a more important reason to actually fight a nice little war ( written on Tuesday lunch just in case we see a few mushroom clouds between now and when this is posted ).

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http://energybulletin.net/stories/2011-05-17/looking-rear-view-mirror

There is a nifty refutation of panic and doom. Look, he says, all is not so bad as even I, your intrepid author have led you to believe. I am reminded of William Engdahl who wrote A Century Of War ( again out of print with used copies being insanely priced ), a wonderful account of the powers that be, puppet masters behind the scenes controlling petroleum and banking. I love that author, and almost all of his books are super. And yet, for whatever reason although my guess is he was tired of writing about oil and wanted to focus on the many and varied conspiracies and all the focus on oil was ruining his A game, recently came out on the side of abiotic oil. You know, the theory that oil is mineral in original rather than organic. Which could very well be true, but as an intrepid probationary Minion First Class pointed out, it doesn’t matter if the flow rate is less than our usage. It isn’t necessarily selling out as it seems to be resolving to avoid conflict from now on. Why, that would be like me saying Yuppies were swell folks, or that I loved ex wife #2, that I wanted the federal government to take all my money or I wanted to marry a new wife that would rip my testicles off my body just as I finally grew them back. How does one stop fighting the good fight? Anyway, I think that the above feel-groovy article misses a few points such as water injection fields always plummet drastically in outpoint after a certain time. The worst could be just ahead of us. But make up your own damn mind. It isn’t like you listen to me anyway.

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http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay11/suspended-animation5-11.html

Old Smith put a pretty good article out. It is almost as if he truly wants to pick up the doomer stick, yet is still afraid of being burned by fire. Hey, this guy knows his economics. If his analysis doesn’t work for you, might as well go back to Forbes cheerleading ( the standard “can-do spirit will defeat resource depletion any old day” ). Basically, he states that we’ve never been borrowing so much money as we are now since WWII. If you turn back to your history books, you discover that for a few short years of debt, we in effect took over the entire free world economy and then squeezed it dry of all wealth. That was a hell of an investment. Today, we spend just as much merely to keep the status quo. Which is, let me remind you, keeping from plunging into the abyss. We are getting a really crappy deal. Alas, our economy simply isn’t what it used to be. Back then, we went from 25% unemployment to zero. We had the lions share of the worlds petroleum and ore. We were building a naval ship every few days, a fighter plane every few minutes. So, we actually had resources to back up that borrowing. Today, we can’t even build a barbed wire fence on our southern border. Back then, our borrowing was quickly paid back with global looting. Today, we try to loot Iraq and a few insurgents blow up all the oil infrastructure. We are digging ourselves into a hole, whereas before we were just investing.

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This is the classic example of more effort going into a system for far less effect. The complexity of our society is such that not only is there no going back, dialing down such as going to local agriculture again, but we can’t stop from sliding backwards no matter how fast we run. But don’t worry, our Can-Do spirit will save the day somehow.

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