Author: Gaianne

This Monday, Matt Simmons is reported dead in this article in the Bangor Maine Daily News. Best known for his accurately predictive book on the decline of Saudi oil production, “Twilight in the Desert,” more recently Matt Simmons had been speaking out about evidence that the oil blow-out of BP’s Macondo well (the “Deepwater Horizon”–actually the name of the drilling rig) was larger with more damage to the well itself, and with more extensive plumes, than generally acknowledged.  

 (Thanks, Kevin, of Cryptogon, for catching this.)  

The initial report was that Matt Simmons died of a heart attack, but already that story has been discarded.  Given that it was a drowning, and given the context of Simmons speaking out against BP statements and lies (that is, some of BP’s statements, going right back to the start of the blow-out, are already known to be lies), and given that other people have already been threatened into silence by BP, the probability percentage that this is NOT murder drops into the single digits.  

[Update Th 17 June 2010: at Migeru’s suggestion, I have reformatted this for clarity. No text has been changed–Gaianne]

Dougr in a comment on The Oil Drum says:  

OK let’s get real about the GOM oil flow. There doesn’t really seem to be much info on TOD that furthers more complete understanding of what’s really happening in the GOM.

As you have probably seen and maybe feel yourselves, there are several things that do not appear to make sense regarding the actions of attack against the well. Don’t feel bad, there is much that doesn’t make sense even to professionals unless you take into account some important variables that we are not being told about. There seems to me to be a reluctance to face what cannot be termed anything less than grim circumstances in my opinion. There certainly is a reluctance to inform us regular people and all we have really gotten is a few dots here and there…

That is:  

there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us.

dougr continues  

First of all…set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc….forget that, it won’t be happening..it’s done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.

So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?…there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It’s really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do…you will see the “sense” behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:

The well bore structure is compromised “Down hole”.

That is something which is a “Worst nightmare” conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have “said” a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place…

TOP KILL – FAILS:

This was probably our best and only chance to kill this well from the top down. This “kill mud” is a tried and true method of killing wells and usually has a very good chance of success. The depth of this well presented some logistical challenges, but it really should not of presented any functional obstructions. The pumping capacity was there and it would have worked, should have worked, but it didn’t.

It didn’t work, but it did create evidence of what is really happening. First of all the method used in this particular top kill made no sense, did not follow the standard operating procedure used to kill many other wells and in fact for the most part was completely contrary to the procedure which would have given it any real chance of working.

When a well is “Killed” using this method heavy drill fluid “Mud” is pumped at high volume and pressure into a leaking well. The leaks are “behind” the point of access where the mud is fired in, in this case the “choke and Kill lines” which are at the very bottom of the BOP (Blow Out Preventer) The heavy fluid gathers in the “behind” portion of the leaking well assembly, while some will leak out, it very quickly overtakes the flow of oil and only the heavier mud will leak out. Once that “solid” flow of mud is established at the leak “behind” the well, the mud pumps increase pressure and begin to overtake the pressure of the oil deposit. The mud is established in a solid column that is driven downward by the now stronger pumps. The heavy mud will create a solid column that is so heavy that the oil deposit can no longer push it up, shut off the pumps…the well is killed…it can no longer flow.

Usually this will happen fairly quickly, in fact for it to work at all…it must happen quickly. There is no “trickle some mud in” because that is not how a top kill works. The flowing oil will just flush out the trickle and a solid column will never be established. Yet what we were told was “It will take days to know whether it

worked”….”Top kill might take 48 hours to complete”…the only way it could take days is if BP intended to do some “test fires” to test integrity of the entire system. The actual “kill” can only take hours by nature because it must happen fairly rapidly. It also increases strain on the “behind” portion and in this instance we all know that what remained was fragile at best.

Early that afternoon we saw a massive flow burst out of the riser “plume” area. This was the first test fire of high pressure mud injection. Later on same day we saw a greatly increased flow out of the kink leaks, this was mostly mud at that time as the kill mud is tanish color due to the high amount of Barite which is added to it to weight it and Barite is a white powder.

We later learned the pumping was shut down at midnight, we weren’t told about that until almost 16 hours later, but by then…I’m sure BP had learned the worst. The mud they were pumping in was not only leaking out the “behind” leaks…it was leaking out of someplace forward…and since they were not even near being able to pump mud into the deposit itself, because the well would be dead long before…and the oil was still coming up, there could only be one conclusion…the wells casings were ruptured and it was leaking “down hole”

They tried the “Junk shot”…the “bridging materials” which also failed and likely made things worse in regards to the ruptured well casings.

“Despite successfully pumping a total of over 30,000 barrels of heavy mud, in three attempts at rates of up to

80 barrels a minute, and deploying a wide range of different bridging materials, the operation did not overcome the flow from the well.”

http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=2012968&contentId=7062487

80 Barrels per minute is over 200,000 gallons per hour, over 115,000 barrels per day…did we seen an increase over and above what was already leaking out of 115k bpd?….we did not…it would have been a massive increase in order of multiples and this did not happen.

“The whole purpose is to get the kill mud down,” said Wells. “We’ll have 50,000 barrels of mud on hand to kill this well. It’s far more than necessary, but we always like to have backup.”

Try finding THAT quote around…it’s been scrubbed…here’s a cached copy of a quote…

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WDj-HORTmIoJ:www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/busin

ess/deepwaterhorizon/7006870.html+%E2%809CThe+whole+purpose+is+to+get+the+kill+mud+down,%E2%80%9D+sa

id+Wells.+%E2%80%9CWe’ll+have+50,000+barrels+of+mud+on+hand+to+kill+this+well.+It’s+far+more+than+ne

cessary,+but+we+always+like+to+have+backup.%E2%80%9D&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

“The “top kill” effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, had pumped enough drilling fluid to block oil and gas spewing from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well was very low, he said, but persisting.”

“Allen said one ship that was pumping fluid into the well had run out of the fluid, or “mud,” and that a second ship was on the way. He said he was encouraged by the progress.”

http://www.houmatoday.com/article/20100527/ARTICLES/100529348

Later we found out that Allen had no idea what was really going on and had been “Unavailable all day”

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/05/27/interview_with_coas...

So what we had was BP running out of 50,000 barrels of mud in a very short period of time. An amount far and above what they deemed necessary to kill the well. Shutting down pumping 16 hours before telling anyone, including the president. We were never really given a clear reason why “Top Kill” failed, just that it couldn’t overcome the well.

There is only one article anywhere that says anything else about it at this time of writing…and it’s a relatively obscure article from the wall street journal “online” citing an unnamed source.

“WASHINGTON–BP PLC has concluded that its “top-kill” attempt last week to seal its broken well in the Gulf of

Mexico may have failed due to a malfunctioning disk inside the well about 1,000 feet below the ocean floor.

The disk, part of the subsea safety infrastructure, may have ruptured during the surge of oil and gas up the well on April 20 that led to the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, BP officials said. The rig sank two days later, triggering a leak that has since become the worst in U.S. history.

The broken disk may have prevented the heavy drilling mud injected into the well last week from getting far enough down the well to overcome the pressure from the escaping oil and gas, people familiar with BP’s findings said. They said much of the drilling mud may also have escaped from the well into the rock formation outside the wellbore.

As a result, BP wasn’t able to get sufficient pressure to keep the oil and gas at bay. If they had been able to build up sufficient pressure, the company had hoped to pump in cement and seal off the well. The effort was deemed a failure on Saturday.

BP started the top-kill effort Wednesday afternoon, shooting heavy drilling fluids into the broken valve known as a blowout preventer. The mud was driven by a 30,000 horsepower pump installed on a ship at the surface. But it was clear from the start that a lot of the “kill mud” was leaking out instead of going down into the well.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870487560457528013357716426...

There are some inconsistencies with this article.

There are no “Disks” or “Subsea safety structure” 1,000 feet below the sea floor, all that is there is well bore. There is nothing that can allow the mud or oil to “escape” into the rock formation outside the well bore except the well, because it is the only thing there.

All the actions and few tid bits of information all lead to one inescapable conclusion. The well pipes below the sea floor are broken and leaking. Now you have some real data of how BP’s actions are evidence of that, as well as some murky statement from “BP officials” confirming the same.

I took some time to go into a bit of detail concerning the failure of Top Kill because this was a significant event. To those of us outside the real inside loop, yet still fairly knowledgeable, it was a major confirmation of what many feared. That the system below the sea floor has serious failures of varying magnitude in the complicated chain, and it is breaking down and it will continue to.

What does this mean?

It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot…the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?…the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?…it doesn’t leak so bad, you close the nozzle?…it leaks real bad,

same dynamics. It is why they sawed the riser off…or tried to anyway…but they clipped it off, to relieve pressure on the leaks “down hole”. I’m sure there was a bit of panic time after they crimp/pinched off the large riser pipe and the Diamond wire saw got stuck and failed…because that crimp diverted pressure and flow to the rupture down below.

Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed…..and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it, which they have done, they just neglected to tell us why, gee thanks.

A down hole leak is dangerous and damaging for several reasons.

There will be erosion throughout the entire beat up, beat on and beat down remainder of the “system” including that inaccessible leak. The same erosion I spoke about in the first post is still present and has never stopped, cannot be stopped, is impossible to stop and will always be present in and acting on anything that is left which has crude oil “Product” rushing through it. There are abrasives still present, swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it’s way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?…no one really knows….However now?…there are other problems that a down hole leak will and must produce that will compound this already bad situation.

This down hole leak will undermine the foundation of the seabed in and around the well area. It also weakens the only thing holding up the massive Blow Out Preventer’s immense bulk of 450 tons. In fact?…we are beginning to the results of the well’s total integrity beginning to fail due to the undermining being caused by the leaking well bore.

The first layer of the sea floor in the gulf is mostly lose material of sand and silt. It doesn’t hold up anything and isn’t meant to, what holds the entire subsea system of the Bop in place is the well itself. The very large steel connectors of the initial well head “spud” stabbed in to the sea floor. The Bop literally sits on top of the pipe and never touches the sea bed, it wouldn’t do anything in way of support if it did. After several tens of feet the seabed does begin to support the well connection laterally (side to side) you couldn’t put a 450 ton piece of machinery on top of a 100′ tall pipe “in the air” and subject it to the side loads caused by the ocean currents and expect it not to bend over…unless that pipe was very much larger than the machine itself, which you all can see it is not. The well’s piping in comparison is actually very much smaller than the Blow Out Preventer and strong as it may be, it relies on some support from the seabed to function and not literally fall over…and it is now showing signs of doing just that….falling over.

If you have been watching the live feed cams you may have noticed that some of the ROVs are using an inclinometer…and inclinometer is an instrument that measures “Incline” or tilt. The BOP is not supposed to be tilting…and after the riser clip off operation it has begun to…

This is not the only problem that occurs due to erosion of the outer area of the well casings. The way a well casing assembly functions it that it is an assembly of different sized “tubes” that decrease in size as they go down. These tubes have a connection to each other that is not unlike a click or snap together locking action. After a certain length is assembled they are cemented around the ouside to the earth that the more rough drill hole is bored through in the well making process. A very well put together and simply explained process of “How to drill a deep water oil well” is available here:

http://www.treesfullofmoney.com/?p=1610

The well bore casings rely on the support that is created by the cementing phase of well construction. Just like if you have many hands holding a pipe up you could put some weight on the top and the many hands could hold the pipe and the weight on top easily…but if there were no hands gripping and holding the pipe?…all the weight must be held up by the pipe alone. The series of connections between the sections of casings are not designed to hold up the immense weight of the BOP without all the “hands” that the cementing provides and they will eventually buckle and fail when stressed beyond their design limits.

These are clear and present dangers to the battered subsea safety structure (bop and lmrp) which is the only loose cork on this well we have left. The immediate (first 1,000 feet) of well structure that remains is now also undoubtedly compromised. However…..as bad as that is?…it is far from the only possible problems with this very problematic well. There were ongoing troubles with the entire process during the drilling of this well. There were also many comprises made by BP IMO which may have resulted in an overall weakened structure of the entire well system all the way to the bottom plug which is over 12,000 feet deep. Problems with the cementing procedure which was done by Haliburton and was deemed as “was against our best practices.” by a Haliburton employee on April 1st weeks before the well blew out. There is much more and I won’t go into detail right now concerning the lower end of the well and the troubles encountered during the whole creation of this well and earlier “Well control” situations that were revieled in various internal BP e-mails. I will add several links to those documents and quotes from them below and for now, address the issues concerning the upper portion of the well and the region of the sea floor.

What is likely to happen now?

Well…none of what is likely to happen is good, in fact…it’s about as bad as it gets. I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system is accelerating and attacking more key structural areas of the well, the blow out preventer and surrounding strata holding it all up and together. This is evidenced by the tilt of the blow out preventer and the erosion which has exposed the well head connection. What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don’t, they are inviting disaster that much sooner.

Eventually even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the BOP will collapse the well. If and when you begin to see oil and gas coming up around the well area from under the BOP? or the area around the well head connection and casing sinking more and more rapidly? …it won’t be too long after that the entire system fails. BP must be aware of this, they are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our Gov’t must be well aware too, they just are not telling us.

All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit…after that, it goes into the realm of “the worst things you can think of” The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out…as I said…all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn’t any “cap dome” or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?….is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.

It’s a race now…a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it’s last gasp in a horrific crescendo.

We are not even 2 months into it, barely half way by even optimistic estimates. The damage done by the leaked oil now is virtually immeasurable already and it will not get better, it can only get worse. No matter how much they can collect, there will still be thousands and thousands of gallons leaking out every minute, every hour of every day. We have 2 months left before the relief wells are even near in position and set up to take a kill shot and that is being optimistic as I said.

Over the next 2 months the mechanical situation also cannot improve, it can only get worse, getting better is an impossibility. While they may make some gains on collecting the leaked oil, the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who can “get there first”…us or the well.

We can only hope the race against that eventuality is one we can win, but my assessment I am sad to say is that we will not.

The system will collapse or fail substantially before we reach the finish line ahead of the well and the worst is yet to come.

Sorry to bring you that news, I know it is grim, but that is the way I see it….I sincerely hope I am wrong.

We need to prepare for the possibility of this blow out sending more oil into the gulf per week then what we already have now, because that is what a collapse of the system will cause. All the collection efforts that have captured oil will be erased in short order. The magnitude of this disaster will increase exponentially by the time we can do anything to halt it and our odds of actually even being able to halt it will go down.

The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our life times if the worst or even near worst happens…

We are seeing the puny forces of man vs the awesome forces of nature.

We are going to need some luck and a lot of effort to win…

and if nature decides we ought to lose, we will….

Reference materials:

On April 1, a job log written by a Halliburton employee, Marvin Volek, warns that BP’s use of cement “was

against our best practices.”

An April 18 internal Halliburton memorandum indicates that Halliburton again warned BP about its practices,

this time saying that a “severe” gas flow problem would occur if the casings were not centered more carefully.

Around that same time, a BP document shows, company officials chose a type of casing with a greater risk of

collapsing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/06rig.html?pagewanted=1&sq=at_issue...

Mark Hafle, the BP drilling engineer who wrote plans for well casings and cement seals on the Deepwater

Horizon’s well, testified that the well had lost thousands of barrels of mud at the bottom. But he said models

run onshore showed alterations to the cement program would resolve the issues, and when asked if a cement

failure allowed the well to “flow” gas and oil, he wouldn’t capitulate.

Hafle said he made several changes to casing designs in the last few days before the well blew, including the

addition of the two casing liners that weren’t part of the original well design because of problems where the

earthen sides of the well were “ballooning.” He also worked with Halliburton engineers to design a plan for

sealing the well casings with cement.

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/hearings_bp_ce...

graphic of fail

http://media.nola.com/news_impact/other/oil-cause-050710.pdf

Casing joint

http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/files/OGL00001.gif

Casing

http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/files/OGL00003.gif

Kill may take until Christmas

http://preview.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-02/bp-gulf-of-mexico-oil-leak-...

BP Used Riskier Method to Seal Well Before Blast

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/us/27rig.html

BP memo test results

http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20100512/Internal.BP.Email.Reg...

Investigation results

The information from BP identifies several new warning signs of problems. According to BP there were three flow

indicators from the well before the explosion.

http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100525/Memo.BP.Internal.Inve...

BP, what we know

http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100512/BP-What.We.Know.pdf

What could have happened

1. value=”1″>Before or during the cement job, an influx of hydrocarbon enters the wellbore.
2. value=”2″>Influx is circulated during cement job to wellhead and BOP.
3. value=”3″>9-7/8″ casing hanger packoff set and positively tested to 6500 psi.
4. value=”4″>After 16.5 hours waiting on cement, a negative test performed on wellbore below BOP.

(~ 1400 psi differential pressure on 9-7/8″ casing hanger packoff and ~ 2350 psi on

double valve float collar)

5. Packoff leaks allowing hydrocarbon to enter wellbore below BOP. 1400 psi shut in

pressure observed on drill pipe (no flow or pressure observed on kill line)

6. Hydrocarbon below BOP is unknowingly circulated to surface while finishing displacing

the riser.

7. As hydrocarbon rises to surface, gas break out of solution further reduces hydrostatic

pressure in well. Well begin to flow, BOPs and Emergency Disconnect System (EDS)

activated but failed.

8. Packoff continues to leak allowing further influx from bottom.

Confidential

http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100512/BP-What.Could.Have.Ha...

T/A daily log 4-20

http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100512/TRO-Daily.Drilling.Re...

Cement plug 12,150 ft SCMT logging tool

SCMT (Slim Cement Mapping Tool)

Schlumberger Partial CBL done.

http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100530/BP-HZN-CEC018441.pdf

Schlum CBL tools

http://www.slb.com/~/media/Files/production/product_sheets/well_integrit...

Major concerns, well control, bop test.

http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100530/BP-HZN-CEC018375.pdf

Energy & commerce links to docs.

http://energycommerce.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=articl...

well head on sea floor

http://nca-group.com/bilder//Trolla/A.%20GVI%20of%20Trolla%20prior%20to%20WHP002%20(2).jpg

Well head on deck of ship

http://nca-group.com/bilder//Trolla/DSC_0189.JPG

BP’s youtube propoganda page, a lot of rarely seen vids here….FWIW

http://www.youtube.com/user/DeepwaterHorizonJIC

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1097505/pg1

    I used to cover the energy business (oil, gas and alternative) here in Texas, and the few experts in the oil field — including geologists, chemists, etc. — able or willing to even speak of this BP event told me early on that it is likely the entire reserve will bleed out. Unfortunately none of them could say with any certainty just how much oil is in the reserve in question because, for one thing, the oil industry and secrecy have always been synonymous. According to BP data from about five years ago, there are four separate reservoirs containing a total of 2.5 billion barrels (barrels not gallons). One of the reservoirs has 1.5 billion barrels. I saw an earlier post here quoting an Anadarko Petroleum report which set the total amount at 2.3 billion barrels. One New York Times article put it at 2 billion barrels.

    If the BP data correctly or honestly identified four separate reservoirs then a bleed-out might gush less than 2 to 2.5 billion barrels unless the walls — as it were — fracture or partially collapse. I am hearing the same dark rumors which suggest fracturing and a complete bleed-out are already underway. Rumors also suggest a massive collapse of the Gulf floor itself is in the making. They are just rumors but it is time for geologists or related experts to end their deafening silence and speak to these possibilities.

    All oilmen lie about everything. The stories one hears about the extent to which they will protect themselves are all understatements. BP employees are already taking The Fifth before grand juries, and attorneys are laying a path for company executives to make a run for it.  

–dougr  

The US will be affected by this, obviously.  For example, we can now expect the Gulf of Mexico to become uninhabitable.  Nobody has given any thought to evacuating the tens of millions of people who live along the Gulf Coast, and nobody will.  They will have to get themselves out, or die.  They haven’t thought about this yet, but in a few months they will, of necessity.  

The immediate threat will be the volatile portion of the crude oil, which is approximately called gasoline or petrol, and which causes illness followed by death when inhaled for long periods.  The looming threat arises when the Gulf shifts from aerobic life to anaerobic life, and begins producing hydrogen sulfide.  At that point, if we get that far, we will be immitating in the Gulf region the conditions of the Permian extinction.  

But in fact the whole world is going to be affected.  For one thing, the oil is going to contaminate parts of the North Atlantic, and there will be no containment of the disaster:  It will just wander at random.  

Also, the consequences will impinge on both the world economy and world politics.  

–Thanks to James Howard Kundstler, scroll down to “The Daily Grunt”

–Gaianne

This item seems to have slipped by, but I think it is important.  I thought it would develop, so I didn’t write about it, but instead it sort of finished–for the moment.  But I think it will bubble up again, and soon.  Whence my belated alert.  

Musharraf, America’s puppet in Pakistan, has made some bad choices lately, first ignoring and firing Pakistan’s highest judge–roughly equivalent, I suppose, to a Supreme Court Justice, and now engaging in a shoot-out assault (actually a massacre) on a mosque in the capital city.  

The details of the shoot-out, over several days, are collected at the Agonist.  
Going back a few months, the Bush Administration had been pressuring Musharraf to join the war against Afghanistan, by attacking Afghanis within his own country with main force.  The realities of tribes and national boundaries being what they are, this would have been impossible to do without firing upon his own countrymen, since they are in fact intermingled.  National control of the border areas is sort of a polite fiction, anyway.  Mostly they are under the control of local tribal leaders.  

The Bush regime has pre-empted his reluctance by attacking the tribes using American force.  Of course the US military has no more idea of who is Taliban or who is Al Qaeada in Pakistan than they do who is an insurgent in Iraq.  Many villagers–plainly Pakistani civilians–have been killed in American air-to-ground missile and bomb attacks.  This has led, during the ensuing weeks, to a rapid decline in Musharraf’s popularity:  The open act was his fight with, and dismissing of, the high judge.  He is now widely regarded as an American stooge, not to mention murderer and traitor.  

In addition, Musharraf’s government never had good legal standing.  He has gotten away with rule by force, but by firing the judge he has lost most of the little legitimacy he had, and with elections scheduled, there is worse to come.  His government will soon be openly, officially, illegal.  

Both the legal (secular) and religous segments of society now oppose him, with street demonstrations by the one and acts of armed rebellion by the other.  

It seems to be just starting.  

Musharraf is responding with the American weapons of his own army.  It is a desperate move.  It looks like the beginning of the end.  

I add, with somewhat bitter amusement, that it was all needless.  By waging a pointless and hopeless pursuit of “terrorists” into Pakistan, the US created itself this instability, with no possibility of positive outcome–in that the Afghani war is itself a hopeless and fruitless venture.  

Musharraf will almost surely be replaced by an Islamic government which is openly hostile to the US.  The hostility is not theoretical, nor even theological, but earned, through real American acts of murder.  

How soon?  We shall see.  

It may even be that the US will have to call off its attack on Iran–there may be more pressing problems.  

The US thinks so too.  A third aircraft-carrier group has been added to the theater of operations, on top of the putative Iran strike-force.  What it can do to help, though, is a bit problematic.  

The strategic position of the US is poor, and getting worse.  Doing nothing at all would have left us better off than what we have achieved with great expense and effort.  

All of this looks like it is leading to wider war, and that would likely mean nuclear war.  Perhaps there is a reason that Republican sex scandals are breaking out (being allowed to break out) now.  The scandals certainly look to impede the American war initiative–maybe there is somebody who does not want to go into this fight with Bush wielding the button.  

Even:  The time may be nearing when the Bush regime can be removed.  

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was left shaken but unhurt on Thursday on his first visit to Baghdad after a Katyusha rocket landed just meters from a building where he was giving a news conference.

Moments after telling journalists he might boost the United Nations’ presence in Iraq because of improved security, a thunderous blast sent shockwaves through the conference venue, startling Ban and sending him ducking for cover behind a podium.

 

More

Security guards grabbed hold of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki who was standing next to Ban at the time and was dusted by small bits of debris that fell from the ceiling.

Without commenting on the explosion, which sent a large column of smoke into the air, Ban recovered his composure and took one further question before leaving the conference room.

Interior Minister Jawad Bolani played down the incident afterwards, telling Reuters: “This was not a security breach. Things like this happen in Baghdad once or twice a week.”

A Reuters reporter at the scene said the rocket landed on a small building about 50 meters from the news conference venue, a guesthouse in the prime minister’s compound. The Interior Ministry said it landed in a field outside the compound.

Earlier, Ban praised Maliki’s “strong leadership” and said: “As we see the improved situation on the ground, I am considering to increase the presence of the United Nations.”

Well, this was on my Yahoo browswer, which at this point, is the only way to get to my e-mail.  (Here is the link, I hope.)

Sorry about the schadenfreude, but it has annoyed me from the beginning that the UN would chose such a blatant US stooge to be Secretary General, and it is just too funny to watch him take a near miss while spouting Bush’s talking points.  

No worry:  They will get him out of there safely. 😉

Promoted by Steven D.

I wasn’t going to write this, but then I saw skippybkroo’s post on the spike in housing foreclosures languishing at the bottom of the diary list, and realized that he had caught the Scoop of the Week.  

It may not have been obvious:  This week has seen several interesting and portentious events.  But the import of his diary is this:  Our economy has entered the black hole of no return.  We have crossed the event horizon.  

His diary did not quite spell it out, and one might have missed it.  But this week I have been following the stories posted on The Housing Bubble, and change is in the air.  Go ahead and read.  Construction has stopped on major condo projects all over the country.  Unsold units abound.  Sold but UNOCCUPIED units abound.  Suddenly we are seeing what appear to be TORCHINGS of construction projects with no attempt to make it look accidental.  The smell of panic is as thick as the smoke.
Single family houses are not doing much better–except that there have been no spectacular torchings.  New developments increasingly feature empty houses.  The market has gone into a coma, with sales simply failing to happen, starting roughly last summer.  There are no buyers.  Prices have frozen up, and are beginning to drop.  

The back-story to this has two major parts.  

The first is the housing market itself.  For several years, we have seen a trend of spectacular, ever-increasing prices–your classic bubble.  It has been nation-wide, indeed world-wide.  There are housing bubbles in the United Kingdom, Australia, and parts of Spain.  In the US, southern California has been at the forefront of the rising trend, but virtually every part of the country–from Oregon to Florida and from Arizona to Massachusetts and parts in between–has seen bubble activity.  Price rises overall have risen some two to four times the base prices before the bubble began–200% to 400%.  

Where is the money coming from?  Nobody is quite sure.  Asian investors are suspected.  But that is clearly only part of it.  With the stock-market crash at the end of the 1990s it was noticed that money was moving out of the stock market and into housing.  

Also, under Bush, interest rates were depressed, and the Fed was loaning money to banks freely and cheaply, while exotic lending practices were allowed to flourish.  “Exotic” is the industry euphemism for unsound, risky, absurd, or criminal.  New kinds of mortgages were created where the borrower would not even begin to pay back the loan at a full rate for several years.  These were the ARMs and the IOs.  Cheap at first–literally free money–after a few years the loans would automatically reset and become very, very expensive.  

Why would anyone take out a mortgage like that?  Even if it looked good at first, one would soon be trapped into overwhelming mortagage payments.  Well, suppose you could buy a house at $600k and sell it in two years for $715k?  Suppose you could borrow the ENTIRE purchase price, and pay (nearly) nothing on your mortgage in the two years you held the house?  The resale would get you out from under, with the mortgage paid off, before those nasty high rates kicked in–and with a huge bundle of extra money besides.  Anyone could do this.  Mortgage companies did not even require that you be employed or have a source of income to take out the loan.  

Why would a mortgage company do this?  Up until the mid 1980s banks and mortgage companies generally held the loans they underwrote, so they were very careful to see that the loan was likely to be repaid.  By the 1990s the habit was to bundle the loans into securities instruments and sell them off to large investors.  The originators of the loans soon realized that they did not have to care if the loans were any good:  They would be bundled and sold to become Somebody Else’s Problem.  The mortgage companies were making their money by creating and selling loans–not by collecting interest and repayment on them.  

Also, as money flooded into the housing market, and prices began to be bid up, a Ponzi scheme was created–everyone involved in flipping houses would make money AS LONG AS THE PRICES CONTINUED TO RISE.  Builders built, and overbuilt.  Buyers bought, and bought again.  Houses stood empty, bought and waiting only to be resold at a higher price.  The owners never moved in, and often never expected to:  They were “investing”.  

This did result in some externalized inconvenience.  People who wanted to buy a house to live in were priced out of the market.  People who already owned their homes found their property taxes leaping up as the “value” of their neighborhood climbed with over-inflated sales.  But for “investors” large and small, this was a vast money machine–perpetual motion.  

The second part to the back-story is that since 1980 the US started off-shoring its industry, and off-shoring became a major trend in the 1990s, remaining to this day unabated.  This means that the building and furnishing of houses represents an ever-enlarging portion of our economy, to the point where it is a critical part:  Most of what the US still does is tied in some way to the building and furnishing of houses.  

These two threads came together this past summer, when buyers quit showing up to pay inflated prices.  Why the bubble chose exactly then to end is hard to say–by rights it ought to have burst at least a year earlier.  Nonethelesss, that was the top.  (Your local region may vary.)  

Without buyers, the sellers could not sell, but, not wanting to take losses, they did not lower their prices either.  The market froze–as represented by the measures of unsold inventory, and houses withdrawn from the market.  

The turn, which some have long suspected and anticipated, has now arrived.  Whether due to mortgage resets or some other reason, people are missing payments (“NOD”) and being foreclosed upon by the banks holding their mortgages.  That the foreclosure rate is the highest in eight years–for California–and rapidly climbing, is the indicator:  The huge mass of foreclosures waiting to happen, is starting to happen.  

Many people are stuck, and will go bankrupt:  They cannot afford the reset rates on their loans, but they cannot sell at a price that will pay their mortgage off.  With prices freezing, and soon declining, they are “upside down”–owing more than their houses are worth.  Most will go into foreclosure, and the banks will take back the houses to resell them for what they can.  This will drive prices down steeply.  

This is called a crash.  The last housing crash–in 1989-1990–took six years to reach its bottom.  

The complication this time is the crash is likely to take down with it every industry related to home building and furnishing, as well as the banking sector.  The automobile industry, long an important economic sector, is already in trouble and will be dragged down as well.  

Not many people will be immune.  Where did all those mortgage securities, with their unexamined but junky loans turn up?  Some are probably in your pension plan.  Large institutions of all types will be at risk.  

This is coming at a time when the US is having an increasingly difficult time financing its debt–both national and governmental.  

The house of cards is about to come down.  

With the spiking of foreclosures, we have crossed the event horizon.  Staving off the coming trouble will not be possible.  The Treasury is having to offer higher rates to sell its debt, but interest rates would have to go down to cushion the collapse.  Between these conflicting requirements, there is no longer any room to manoeurvre.  

By this summer, expect the crash to be obvious to everybody, with general panic getting underway.  

Expect it to be worse than the Great Depression.  

Plan your life accordingly.  

Housing Market

Interest Rates

US Economy

Housing Bubble

Recession

Banking

Last Wednesday, on the twelfth day of winter, I walked to the top of a local hill to watch the rising of the full Moon.  Clouds to the west caught the red light of the setted Sun, and illuminated the shrubs and stones of the hilltop in a gentle, Otherworldly glow.  The land below, city-lights and all, sank away into darkness like the depths of the ocean.  The hilltop became an island, hovering above the gloom.  Overhead, a sky borrowed from late springtime matched the faux-vernal breeze playing with my open jacket.  The Moon rose in banded veils of unbleached chiffon.  The world stopped.  

We are all in.  
Of course, when Bush announced that he was going to ignore his Daddy’s commission on Iraq, he didn’t say that.  He called it “doubling down,” which is what you do when you have a strong hand, and the odds of winning have shifted to your favor.  This phrase was deliberate mis-direction, as the odds in Iraq have been shifting steadily against the US for months, now stretching into years.  “All in” is the correct phrase, or perhaps “betting the farm,” as we stake all we have left on a dubious hand which like as not is pure trash.  

What are we proposing to throw into the pot–the cauldron–of Iraq?  Troops we do not even have.  They will in fact be selected from soldiers who have already served over-long, and long since should have been rotated out.  Modern drugs are indeed wonderful:  The fact that these men are still functioning at all is a miracle.  But as every serious doper knows, drugs have a price that will be paid.  The point is, though, that Bush himself does not expect to pay it:  As with everything else he does, payment is for others.  Americans have accepted–and submit like sheep–to a government that offends every human value.  

We give no thought to the destruction of Iraqi lives.  This is reprehensible.  Perhaps more unsettling, we also give no thought to the destruction of American lives.  The troops that we carelessly expend fare worse at our hands than Vietnam vets.  This is dishonorable.  

Four years ago, I never would have believed it.  

And yet, there is a still deeper level of dishonor.  Some have argued that murder, torture, and chaos per se is the American strategy in Iraq.  That may be.  American soldiers have been given no coherent military mission, and the well-known, inevitable result is demoralization–in all senses of the word.  What kind of people lets this happen?  What kind of people does not care?  And how does one imagine such soldiers are to be returned to civilian life?  

But maybe they won’t be.  Perhaps the Bush people have already figured this one out:  Just use the soldiers until they die.  Then replace.  Repeat.  The war, after all, is not going to end.  Ever.  

Absurdities nested in layers:  Three, four, five troop-increase scenerios talked about?  Not one would bring troop levels up to a third of what we would have needed to occupy Iraq in the first place.  To occupy Iraq now–after three years of dissipation and failure–it is not a tenth, not a fiftieth, not one one hundredth of what we would need.  

“Doubling down” was two weeks ago.  Already we have switched to “surge.”  All I can think of is New Orleans.  If there is anyone who can put the desert city of Baghdad under eighteen feet of water, Bush is the one to do it.  

If there is a strategy at all, it is indeed murder and chaos.  I think this may be a sign of desperation.  

But events keep unfolding.  In a bare two weeks since the initial rejection of the commission, mongering for a new war against Iran has intensified, with a Murdock propaganda outlet “leaking” an Israeli plan for a pre-emptive nuclear strike.  It has been only weeks since Israel all but admitted to possessing nuclear weapons–a fact long known unofficially, yet one that belies all pretenses of peaceful intentions.  How do I read this?  Desperation and more desperation.  In practical, main force, military terms Iran is no threat to Israel whatever.  But there is another agenda, and that agenda is oil, and the agenda of oil is in deep trouble.  

The new PSA agreements for the puppet Iraqi government to sign away Iraqi oil may indeed be Bush’s idea of victory, but it is hard to be sure they will count for much.  If Iraq ever attains a real government, would they still be honored?  Would European countries–who will not be beneficiaries–feel the need to honor them or pressure Iraq to honor them?  Short of a drill-bit to the head, I don’t see how any of this can be done.  

And of course, insurgents may well keep the oil from flowing, even as they are doing now.  Despite the extra troops.  

So, will the PSAs be Bush’s victory?  It all depends on what the meaning of is is.  

The Iran war has been touted for a year now.  It’s chances to be anything other than a superpower-wrecking disaster–always poor–are worse than ever.  For a year Iran has been preparing.  A year ago the Air Force seemed to believe the Iranians had no air defenses.  Whatever was true then, it is not true now:  The Russians have been supplying them.  We have no troops;  the Navy can expect to go to the bottom of the Persian Gulf; now even the Air Force will take hits.  

Not to go into the problem of repercussions.  

Desperation, or misdirection?  

I wish I knew:  On the face of it, Bush has finished the work of destroying civil liberties and legal government, and it ought to be time for the powers that be to replace him with someone who can promote a practical–that is attainable–agenda abroad.  Are things merely taking longer than we expect?  

Or.  Maybe there is no attainable agenda.  I am far from sure about this.  But the stink of desperation no longer emanates from the Bush people alone.  The media, which has just spent the last three months preparing to ship Bush out the door, is now also awash with it.  

Something has changed.  It is not just Bush, and not just the Army that is all in.  

Last year our pending economic collapse was just numbers in economic reports–numbers that mostly got re-written out of existence–and the housing market going into a coma–which is still being explained away.  This year is the year that economic collapse becomes visible to everyone, in the form of layoffs and foreclosures and currency devaluation.  And yet there is nothing new here:  We are on schedule.  

This winter, everybody has the plain evidence they need to know that the climate has–as long suspected–popped.  We have entered the time of transition.  However we intend to cope, we now know we are in for the ride.  Perhaps this was unexpected:  The powers that be are not half as reality-based as they think, nor as we like think.  

Whatever has changed, we are all in.  

I am so embedded, personally, and as a society Americans are so embedded generally, in this construct of mind, that it is almost impossible to think about it directly.  So my excuse–such as it is–in writing so obliquely is that I do not have a better approach.  

As usual, I started my internet day with a survey of news and political blogs.  The item attracting blog attention was President Bush’s rejection of (his father’s) Iraq Study Group with his own assertion that instead of drawing down the commitment he will instead add 50,000 troops.  

Why is one unsurprised?  

Most of us can see that this is a military disaster, but there are two things that are harder to see.  First, that this is a perfect embodiment of the American spirit, as taught in countless aphorisms, self-help books, and Hollywood movies.  If Bush’s pronouncements are really just prolefeed for the rubes, that is what he is appealing to.  Being delusional, it is possible he believes it himself.  

Second, these fantasies and delusions attract because the reality we have laid for ourselves is really, really hard.  Whether our desire for Iraq is democracy, an end to sectarian war, or simply to grab all that oil, there is no strategy whatever that can offer ANY of these things, let alone all of them.  

Who is willing to face that?  

And those are just the failed goals.  What about the malign consequences that are now fated to ensue?  
The Democrats are already in full denial mode, and it looks like they will again do anything Bush asks.  Even here in left blogistan we continue to pretend that there is something constructive that might be done.  We share in the delusion.  

This is familiar.  The US continued fighting the Vietnam war, with accelerating brutality, for more than a half-dozen years after it was plainly lost, all because, years after the rest of the world could see the obvious, we would not admit it to ourselves.  Nixon had a phrase:  “Peace with honor.”  But the honor was a illusion that no one else shared.  

Others could see through us like glass.  What they saw was neither flattering nor heartening.  But we could not see ourselves at all.  

So far I am only writing about the attractions of delusion.  So let’s take another step.  

On one of his early albums Bob Dylan recorded a song (from memory):  

Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town.  
Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children and his cabin broken down.  

He looked for work and money and he walked a ragged mile.  
He looked for work and money and he walked a ragged mile.  
Your children are so hungry that they don’t know how to smile.  

Your grass is turning black and there’s no water in your well.  
Your grass is turning black and there’s no water in your well.  
You spent your last lone dollar on seven shotgun shells.  

There’s seven breezes blowin’ all around the cabin door.  
There’s seven breezes blowin’ all around the cabin door.  
Seven shots ring out like the ocean’s poundin’ roar.  

There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm.  
There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm.  
Somewhere in the distance, there’s seven new people born.  

In proper folk-song form, the predicament and its conclusion are laid out very concisely, with shared understanding of what it is and what will happen.  

Indeed, what MUST happen.  The last line line  

Somewhere in the distance, there’s seven new people born.

is both conclusion and reversal, undoing what has gone before–making it all right, and natural.  The sense of completion has already been hinted at a stanza earlier by the number seven (this is a point of mythology that I don’t go into here); The final line tells us that the completion is right and proper–just.  

We are not supposed to ask why.  

Before I DO ask why, I want to take up a few aspects of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine.  I should say at the outset that I did not follow the news story at the time:  I did not think the media would say much of substance.  One virtue of that is that the movie was able to take me by surprise.  

Moore starts out with the atmosphere of paranoid fear that pervades Littleton Colorado.  Through the metal cage of a front door he interviews a local suburbanite about his ready-to-fire gun collection.  This is a treat for a big bad city-dweller like myself.  Even in the ghetto nobody has front-doors like that!  

He moves on to the local economy.  Set on a desolate stretch of prairie, Littleton exists to build nuclear missiles, whose plain purpose is to commit mass murder, and if used would likely end human civilization and many larger lifeforms.  He asks, but does not answer:  What kind of people can devote their lives to this?  

Plainly, these people never think about what they are doing, ever.  Robots have deeper souls.  

Finally he gets to the school itself.  It is bizarre.  All of the kids, including the killers, are inundated with material wealth.  They seem hard-put to even make proper use of all their toys.  But the loneliness and the aimlessness are palpable.  These last are familiar to anyone who has spent time in the Midwest.  But one thing I did not expect was the utter cluelessness of the adults.  Worse than anything I remember.  Times change.  

When I was in school, bullying (when it was finally noticed) was supressed.  At Columbine scapegoating and bullying among the students is encouraged and utilized by the staff as a form of child-management.  

By this point, you have to know what is coming, even if you never read the news or heard about the movie.  

Needless to say, I had not seen the footage of the killings themselves.  That they HAD been filmed was the big surprise–but only for me.  Everyone else, Moore included, was not concerned about the cameras.  But for me, this was the turn–like in Dylan’s song:  Oh, this is the way it is SUPPOSED to happen!  Everything is JUST FINE.  

Before I explain, let me note that the killings certainly appeared to be traumatic.  The kids were upset.  Their parents were upset.  Only–and this was curious–even as new “security” measures were being devised, nobody wanted to know why the murders had occurred.  No matter how horrible people thought it was, everybody tacitly accepted that it had to be this way.  They might add new fences or more cameras.  But they would never, ever do anything that might prevent violence from happening.  

Why were the cameras the turn?  

Although it appears that our entire civilization (and not just the US) is either rooted in, or turning to embrace murder/suicide, there is something about the Midwest that brings it closer to the surface.  The country is open in a way that might suggest freedom but equally suggests desolation and exposure.  The social mood is constrained and claustrophobic in the extreme:  Everyone is into everyone’s business, but not in a nice way–the tone is hostile and invidious.  

The Midwest has a history, different from other regions.  The Texas Tower killer is probably the most famous.  It is a pattern.  

The cameras, like the telescreens in George Orwell’s 1984, are there not because the children are loved (they are not) but so that they can be spied upon secretly and hostilely, and more effectively, and so that they can EXPERIENCE being spied upon hostilely.  The cameras are there to enhance control.  The prison atmosphere is not an accident.  

(These children grow up in Solzhenitzen’s First Circle.  Only, no one tells them that.)  

The immediate effect on the subject is to induce a false personality to show to the (ever-present) camera.  This is a psychological distortion, and carries a risk:  Some children will not be able to separate their false personality from their real one, and in the process they will lose track of what is real and what is not.  The result is a gradual depersonalization.  Depending on how much stress is laid upon them, they will drift into unreality but remain functional, or they may eventually crack up.  Separating personalities carries a different risk:  It very much matters which personality is which, and the talent of keeping track is yet another layer.  If everything goes well, by separating your personalities you can cope with the hostile environment.  

Littleton is a town which chooses this distress for its children.  

From there the movie devolves into worrying about the sales of bullets at K-mart.  Very heart-warming, in a fuzzy, liberal way, and completely meaningless.  While I do agree that it is better not to leave dangerous tools and weapons lying around, that is really so not the point.  The kids had moved on from impulse and opportunity to the thinking through of plans.  It is a “whole nother level.”  

As a total aside, let me commend his portrait of the towers of Detroit.  Nothing so says fascism since the German movies of the Modernist period.  

Let me return to Hollis Brown.  So his grass is burnt black this year?  It’s South Dakota:  These things happen.  But we understand that he is on his own:  The starving kids are his problem alone–not ours–or at least we expect him to think that.  And if he had gotten REALLY ANGRY, and taken out a few of his neighbors, as well as his wife and kids, well, we expect that too.  All of it is better than making the changes that would keep it from happening.  

It is about time to ask:  Murder/suicide is an acceptable price for WHAT?  What is it buying us? And who is the “us” to whom these benefits accrue?  

At this point, I have written myself into a box:  I can see where this is going, but not how it gets there.  The essential point is this:  Our civilization has learned how to make slaves responsible for their own slavery.  This was perfected toward the end of the nineteenth century.  The downside is that they do tend to crack up.  The upside is that it is very, very efficient.  

How is it accomplished?  Bait and switch, of course.  We start with individualism and freedom.  It sounds good to those who have been brutally subjected to another’s will.  That the world actually works through a network of mutual constraints and interactions may pass unnoticed.  After all, the children in Littleton are actually growing up in an artificial, enclosed environment of hostile control.  Suppose, at the same time, we can teach them an ideology of individualism and freedom?  The switch comes when the freedom never materializes.  Meanwhile the individualism means they take it on themselves.  

Life does not get much more enclosed than that.  

Suicide begins to seem like a choice.  

From suicide to murder is very easy.  But this is only half the picture.  For the mania that is endemic to the bottom of our society seems to have possessed the top.  Indeed, it radiates from the top.  The techniques of depersonalization that are practiced on the children of Littleton were not created by sane people, and cannot be implemented by them–that is a salient feature of all these techniques.  So where did they come from?  

Derrick Jensen writes about this.  It may be time to give him a closer look.  

Last week I left off with this:

I feel sleep seeping into my head with each happy, irrelevant conversation I have, to the point I can hardly think  

I had better stop complaining, and just accept it:  This is my life!  

Monday, at a discussion group, our topic was sustainable housing.  Don’t ask what that means–we never got there.  It was almost possible to ask where our food is going to come from; where we are going to live was too much to put on the agenda.  

Did I ever feel sleep closing in!  

The high-point (such as it was) was when I mentioned that the housing market has gone into a coma.  

“What do you mean!  You said that a year ago!”  

Too true: A year ago I had refered to Ian Welsh’s prediction of July 2005 that the housing bubble would burst, probably in the fall of 2006 or winter of ’06-’07, with serious impacts on the US economy.  

That was a year ago.  The prediction was for THIS year.  It looks to me now like Welsh is proving right, give or take a few months.  The bubble-burst has arrived, the larger economic effects have not (yet).  But how is it that what I said a year ago was remembered now, except with the meaning leached out?

This was so much like so many conversations these days.  If we are “reality-based” (unlike the Rethuglicans) how can we ignore the context in which any political policy or program has to be placed?  

James Howard Kundstler rails against peaceniks, well, the particular peacenik who sets off his ire drives not one but TWO SUVs!  That explains a lot.  The peaceniks I know myself do not bug me:  I agree with them.  (They also drive smaller cars.)  Except that, to be really for peace, you have to welcome the implications of giving up the war.  And while all of them are nice, good-hearted people,  they are pretty adamant about not thinking about that.  This does not seem to me a virtue.  

The Green(!) Party is just as bad.  I have nearly had it.  I am almost ready to take Dmitri Orlov’s advice and found a local Collapse Party.  If I had any organizing skills I would.  

If I am going to stop complaining, I had better do something else instead.  And so, I review our context, the Triple Crisis–or, as Catherine Austin Fitts calls it (you thought I was a pessimist!)–the Terminal Triangle. &nbsp

The parts:  politics, energy, biosphere (climate).  Each looks like a complete crisis, all by itself, but actually is generated by and linked to the other parts.  This is why each is thoroughly intractible.  

The political crisis is that the US is rotting out.  In a way it is all familiar.  Look at the 1890s or the 1920s:  The concentration of wealth and power, and the corruption of politics at all levels, is awfully similar.  The one period gave rise to the Progressive movement, the other to (the Great Depression and) the New Deal.  But I think the familiarity is deceptive, in that we think of the troubles of those times being overcome by changes in the system, and that this time we can change the system and overcome our troubles too.  

We can’t:  The restoring forces are not there.  The Progressive movement was able to expand beyond its spiritual base by appealing to common greed.  This was possible because, as a rising empire, wealth in the US was increasing rapidly, and sharing it out to the public at large was a realistic possibility, and the idea of doing so could become popular.  As we enter a time of material shrinking, this approach is not possible:  No one will be able to maintain their position in the economy without stealing from others.  

Of course the biggest thieves have been anticipating this and have been increasing their position for some time now.  And this brings us to the second problem:  The reason we have entered a period reminiscent of the robber-baron days is that the biggest players have figured out that the game is over.  Rather than putting wealth back into the economy to expand it or even to keep it going, they are raking off all they can in the assumption that it will all end soon.  

This has an interesting subsidiary effect:  asset bubbles.  Asset bubbles–the bidding up of asset prices beyond any reasonable value–happen for the double-sided reason that there is no longer any productive place to invest wealth (since the entire system is being run down) and that the bubbles themselves are an efficient way of cleaning out the weaker players.  They are a process of wealth concentration.  

Which brings us to the next part, the crisis of energy, which mostly means oil.  Oil is not the only form of energy, but it is the most concentrated, convenient, and portable form, and our entire civilization depends on it.  Now, the Triple Crisis is a crisis for the whole world, but for several reasons, the US is in an especially bad spot.  For example, if we compare with Europe, in Europe a preference for population density means that transportation can be organized around trains and trams that can be powered in any way that produces electricity–even windmills.  Most of the US can only be reached by automobiles, which need gasoline.  So even if new sources of energy were found–though that is a whole other problem–the US would still be stuck with a devastating oil crisis.  And this is a crisis that cannot be solved.  

Agriculture is another area where the US compares (slightly) unfavorably with Europe.  Industrial agriculture requires ten calories of oil to grow one calorie of corn.  American agriculture is almost entirely industrialized.  Its demise is already in sight.  People are going to get very hungry, and the measures (state-sponsored, local, organic horticulture) that got Cuba through its industrial collapse are unthinkable in the States.  

Interesting times!  Will people starve to death rather than rethink the unthinkable?  Certainly we will see.  

(Yes, there is Community Supported Agriculture–“CSA.”  Find out if there is any near you.)  

The fork in the timeline was 1980.  US oil production had already peaked several years earlier.  It was known that World oil production would peak in the beginning of the 21st century.  Anyone who had children, or thought about having grandchildren, had reason to know that something would have to be done to change the energy-basis of the US economy.  The US President had been assiduously promoting conservation and research into alternatives of all sorts.  But he found it rough going.  And then he lost his election.  

The survival fork was not chosen.  

The death-fork had widespread appeal.  It was comfortable:  Turn those thermostats back up!  Sell off that dinky car and get a high-power monster more suited to one’s manly prowess.  And so forth.  

The powers that be liked the death-fork too.  They may have thought it through thus:  A new political economy would be unpredictable, threatening to their control.  Look at what a near thing the hippie movement and the peace movement had been!  Sustainability”–whatever that might be–could be worse!  Whereas, if the US were to collapse into a third-world country–what harm?  We have been dominating and controling third-world countries for decades:  It is all well-known.  

Whatever the powers that be were thinking, their preference was clear.  And they had no trouble gaining adherents.  

However, once they had done so, the looting of the US infrastructure was forgone.  In a way, it is impressive how much of it there was (and is) to loot.  The S&Ls (the banking scandal of the mid 1980s) were first, and the plain sign of what was to come:  Enron, the selling off of public goods, the looting of pension plans . . . we are far from done.  Anywhere you see money lying around, in trust or in the common good, it is money waiting to be raked off the table.  The final stage will be when money itself is hyperinflated into worthlessness.  

The problem for progressives these days is that we talk as if the political economy can be restored, and made more just.  It can’t.  It can’t be restored, so it cannot be made just.  All politics is now rear-guard, a form of damage limitation.  I don’t mean it is useless–limiting damage is important!  

But positive change can not be made this way.  

But to return to the energy crisis itself, it goes beyond oil.  This is because our civilization uses more energy per day than comes to us in ANY form.  Windmills can do a lot.  Hydro-electric power can do a lot.  Passive solar power could do a lot.  But altogether they do not begin to match the energy-use of our civilization.  

I do not mention expansion of nuclear fission power because it is a different, and probably worse, death trip.  With luck it is already beyond our reach.  

Fusion too may be beyond our reach.  No reality-based politics can count on it.  

The short of it is, we will learn to use less energy.  The problem is, we don’t want to.  

There is a secondary problem which is tightly related:  Non-oil based sources of energy themselves depend on oil for their implementation.  This means if we were to have had a non-oil energy infrastructure, it had to be put in place before the oil crisis hit.  President Carter understood this implicitly.  It is a window that is now mostly closed.  

Eventually we will start doing what we can, but by then the means will be extremely limited.  The “soft landing” has passed.  

The third part of the Triple Crisis is biological, and it has two aspects.  The first is easy and obvious–global heating.  Burning oil increases the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which causes the atmosphere to retain heat.  The Earth is warming, and will get warmer.  Climates everywhere will be disrupted.  

Climate change will disrupt food supplies, with drought and flooding being immediate problems.  Changing climate zones will disrupt food production further.  

Global heating will also raise the sea-level.  The world’s most populated areas–on every continent–will be under water before the century is out.  This will cause further disruption.  

The less obvious aspect may prove more important.  When the US chose the death-fork, it chose to encourage rather than suppress destructive economic practices.  Over-fishing (Peak Fish occurred in 2004, and the World’s oceans are being deliberately fished to extinction with catches already dropping precipitously) and over-logging are just two examples.  Our civilization has decided, in its last years, to accelerate destruction of the biosphere upon which its existence depends.  This is an act of murder/suicide.  

It is also a key reason why it is no longer desirable to prolong our civilization.  

More perhaps should be said.  Murder/suicide is an important theme of American life.  But what to say about it?  Michael Moore devoted an entire movie to it, but ended up saying nothing at all.  Americans have accepted living in fear–well, he did say that much–and living in the violence that makes murder/suicide an inevitable facet of life.  But why? And how?  Perhaps I will take this up at another time.  Indeed, I had better, because it is these structures of thought that propel our civilization, and propel it to its demise.  And guarantee we will repeat our mistakes, over and over, endlessly–even post-collapse–unless we are willing to give them up.  

Meanwhile, I want to return to oil, and the War for Oil.  This is progressives’ weakest point, for the War for Oil was also an inevitable consequence of the death-decision of 1980.  Why inevitable?  Because dollar diplomacy can only do so much.  Because once the US became dependent on foreign oil, it meant that an ever-increasing glut of petrodollars would be in foreign (mostly Saudi) hands, to gradualy unbalance the economic system.  That the measures to compensate for the imbalance–globalization, cheap credit–might work in the short- and mid- terms but would be destabilizing overall.  That the system, being ever-voracious, could not allow competitors to control oil it wanted for itself.  And that finally, control means boots on the ground.  

It is almost sure that the War for Oil was launched too early–that the game of diplomacy had not been played out.  But the cartoon-crudeness of America’s political leaders is probably inevitable as well:  The best people do not go where corruption is the rule of the day, nor do they join strategies that have already announced their terminality.  

Why do I say weakest point?  Because we are acting like our peacenik friends, and it is not enough to con the electorate into “bring the troops home” (even if we can).  Unlike the Vietnam War, where we finally did bring the troops home, this time there will be consequences.  One can’t just say “oops!” after the fact.  Our “Way of Life” is about to change drastically (or disappear).  Bringing the troops home means embracing that change.  It means accepting that the price of oil is ALREADY beyond our control, and facing the consequences of that fact.  It means accepting not only that the War for Oil is ALREADY lost (it is) but accepting the changes that will have to be made because it is lost.  

Now the result of accepting these changes is actually better than clinging to what is already gone.  It means we really are ready to stop gassing up our cars with blood–even knowing that that could mean not gassing up our cars!  

When we achieve that, the Triple Crisis really will be our context, and we can begin to talk sensibly about what it is we have to do.  

It was Monday a week ago that Boston Joe posted a diary on Dr. Bussard’s fusor design for a nuclear fusion power reactor, as described in his talk at Google.  

After viewing the lecture twice, it seemed to me that the fusor is indeed a serious and promising line of enquiry–more promising than the tokamak (in its various forms, including ITER)–and I reposted Boston Joe’s diary at European Tribune, where it got a rather frosty reception.  But there were also some useful responses, including a link to the physicist Lubos Motl, who works in string theory, who posted on his blog a clear and concise summary of Dr. Bussard’s design.  

But that is not precisely my topic today.  Rather, I want to note how I surprised myself with my enthusiasm for this research proposal, and what it meant that I should be so enthused.  For three days my entire mood was shifted and lifted!  

Why?  

(Though in a very limited way) the fusor design promises a way out–an amelioration–of what is coming, and no matter how hard I try, I cannot face THAT without a sense of desperation that I have not really acknowledged.  

I need to back up, and also perhaps indulge myself a little, and say what this series “The Autumnal City” is about.  My title is taken from a novel that I will now never write.  For mood, imagine Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Samuel R. Delaney’s Dahlgren.  For theme, the transition from a reality that is organized linearly to one that is probabilistic and connected web-like.  I am definitely a child of both the modern and post-modern experience.  For topic, the 1960s–what else!? 😉 and possibilities not taken.  But the Autumnal City itself, of course, refers to a world that is about to pass away.  

It refers to us.  

Last winter I attempted to write each week for an entire season, and nearly succeeded.  Perhaps I just ran out of things to say.  But now once again it seems I should write.  The choice of venue–a political blog–is problematic.  Politics is about to become very irrelevant.  But as politics becomes irrelevant,  public discourse will become very relevant–if the better scenerios are to be reached!  The political-economic-geological transition we are entering will be shaped by thoughts and actions that are occuring now.  What should they be?  

There is something very odd about writing now, as most of what needs to be said should have been said twenty-five years ago.  We are really, really behind.  Beyond admitting I was personally incapable then, I should like to recall Izzy’s recent diary Before They Called it Aids.  It catches the mood just right.  Too many of us were worrying about the immediate crises of the 1980s that arrived with President Reagan to think into the strategic implications.  Would it have mattered?  Well, much underlying work that should have been done will not get done, as we only begin now to think about the world that will come.  There might have been a soft landing, but that window has closed.  So that is certainly too bad.  

So here we are, and time is very short.  I want to refer to James Howard Kundstler’s Clusterfuck Nation of last Monday 27 November ’06 (scroll down) inspired by a recent visit to the Interstate malls of Minneapolis Minnesota.  One of his best pieces, ever.  

It is so over.  

This week he links to Dmitry Orlov, who has previously written in detail about the collapse of the Soviet Union in three articles posted at From the Wilderness.  Orlov’s current summary of those articles is very concise, exceedingly funny, and thoroughly morbid.  This is the truth that none of us wants to look at.  

Oddly enough, Orlov’s proposals are in plain sight.  After Katrina, who can doubt that survival depends on the ability to form practical, co-operative groups?  Government won’t do it; corporations won’t do it.  

That too is so over.  

A key issue is timelines, which I am beginning to see is one of my weaker talents.  I underestimated by a factor of eight how long it would take Bush to destroy civil liberties, and while economic collapse is certainly on schedule–with the housing market already in a coma, and the dollar moving into a serious and presumably terminal slide–to say it will hit this winter is certainly different from saying how long it will take to play out, which is another matter entirely.  On the one hand we may see total collapse in 2007, but again, suppose it takes years to unfold?  After all, the Great Depression took nearly four years from onset to bottom.  

It is only in the slow melt scenerio that the fusor is relevant at all.  There has to be enough time to build it!  But not only that, it is only in the slow melt scenerio that fusion power is needed to stave off more evil alternatives, specifically, new fission reactors and a massive switch to coal burning.  (In the fast-collapse scenerio there is not time to build and do these things.)  So my wild hope of last week is revealed to be a grasping at straws.  Reality is more modest, with a good chance that fusion power will not matter.  

Food is much in my thoughts these days.  Can people be gardening by next summer?  (Ironically, I have no talent myself.)  And that may not be soon enough.  Yet it hardly seems likely to happen.  People are still asleep–it’s contagious!  I feel sleep seeping into my head with each happy, irrelevant conversation I have, to the point I can hardly think about this stuff myself.  

That is why I have to write:  I have to keep trying.  

Meanwhile:  Maybe I am wrong.  It’s my only hope.  

Promoted by Steven D. As James says in the comments, “This is some good shizznit.”

The media excitement over the “death” of “Zarqawi” does not excite me, but it has led to a plethora of diaries on several blogs.  This is natural, but some of the postings suggest that many folk are missing the essential points of information war.  Whence this.  
There are many ways to enter a disinformation system.  One way is to have psycopath(s) running your government, as is now the case in the US.  In the US disinformation is organized.  This has actually been true for several decades, but the increased scale of the of the disinformation in just the past few years means we are now a Propaganda State:  The whole of our media works together to create a ficticious universe, that we are then meant to accept as our political and economic reality.  

From a political point of view, this has been explored in dystopian novels such as 1984 and Brave New World.  So I take that as understood.  But I need to add that the centralization of media in the US has now allowed a single, unified story-line to be created at the highest levels of government, and disseminated through many seemingly independent channels to create an appearance of versimilitude.  The system in America right now resembles the PK of Nazi Germany, with the difference that the PK had fewer channels, but did not need them anyway.  

However, my perspective today is not political (though there are political implications) but personal, that is to say psychological.  Simply put, when someone lies to you, they are trying to corrupt your understanding of reality, and when lies are organized into large-scale, coherent story-lines, then it is right to say they are trying to destroy your understanding of reality.  

Elaborating slightly, disinformation is the technique of weaving truth and lies together so that the lies become more plausible, and the entire story-line has a greater feeling of truth.  Disinforming is more sophisticated–and more effective–than lying, because most people find it hard to believe that truth can be used to deceive them.  This is a grave error, and the propagandist counts on it.  

There are many ways to assess truth.  One of the easiest is independent checking.  A key task of a propaganda system is to eliminate the means of independent checking, while simultaneously disguising that this is being done.  

Another is internal consistency.  This is not fool-proof, for a well-crafted lie will be created with consistency in mind, yet, the ordinary reality of propaganda is that it is targeted at people who can not think very deep or very far–most of us–and therefore does not have to be logically perfect.  More important for the propagandist is that it feel consistent, which requires knowing the emotional attitudes of the target, but which is actually much, much easier to achieve.  Modern advertising has created a large body of such knowledge, at the same time it has successfully asserted the (specious) right of corporate organizations to disinform.  

There is a very large difference between systems in which some information is bad or falsified, and systems which consist of disinformation exclusively.  In the former, ordinary tests of truth serve one to sort the true from the false, and further measures, such as noticing if some people are liars and discounting the worth of their pronouncements, serve to clean up the data stream.  Elaborations on this are possible.  

But in a disinformation system, sorting the false from the true by ordinary means does not serve, for several reasons:  Sorting is time-consuming, and you cannot do it for every thing that you read and hear all the time; secondly, it is difficult to create a basic pool of known facts in the first place; thirdly, humans are really not designed for this, and it shows up as an emotional incapacity to focus that much attention.  The upshot is that falshoods inevitably slip by, and you end up believing wrong things.  

There is a consequence to this, and I should state it concretely:  If you listen to the media, you will go crazy.  This is unavoidable.  This is because listening to the media is emersion in a disinformation system.  Unfortunately, you cannot see it in yourself, but you can see it in others, so you do–as it were–get a warning.  Also, as a disinformation environment persists, some people will break down spectacularly, and that you will get to see that, too.  

Going crazy is not a on-off are/aren’t thing:  There are degrees, and there are things you can do, even if you cannot limit your exposure to the disinformation more than you have already managed.  Since limiting your exposure is the single most important thing you can do, I assume you have already done that.  

I describe one thing you can do, beyond limiting exposure, in its parts:  

1. Reality exists.  Your problem is that you don’t know what it is.  But the existence of reality itself is not a problem.  You remember the phrase “We create our own reality.”  That phrase is batshit crazy.  If they believe it, they have lost control of their own delusions.  If you believe it, you are in deep, deep trouble.  
2.  You will never know what reality is.  This is not as bad as it sounds, because you can sort-of know.  In a truthful environment you know quite well, practically speaking, and there is no worry at all.  But as disinformation corrupts an environment, knowing becomes more difficult, and then it becomes uncertain.  
3.  When you reach the point where your knowledge is uncertain, and you will, you must start keeping track of the uncertainty.  This can be very annoying, but there is nothing to be done about that.  You may go for years without resolving the uncertainty in fairly important matters.  Sorry, that is the way of it.  
4.  Eventually, the uncertainty will spread until you are simultaneously living in separate, incompatible time-tracks.  Most of us have reached that stage with Zarqawi, if we go back and look at what we really know.  Does he even exist?  If 30 % of Jordanians and Iraqis think, based on their knowledge of family and politics, that he either never existed or died long ago, how does that weight my probabilities?  And who did the US kill now? What are the probabilities around that?  And so on.  
5.  Living simultaneously in contradictory time tracks can be fairly unpleasant, but it can also keep you alive, as you select your actions to be appropriate in all the likely realities.  It is important to remember that there is nothing wrong either with you, or with how you feel, for it is a natural consequence of living in the disinformation system.  It is a sign of retaining sanity.  
6.  When you quit retaining sanity, this will all change, but I won’t try to describe that.  
7.  This all seems like a lot of work, and it is, but since most of propaganda is less concerned with arranging facts than managing emotional buttons, you will get a lot of clues about what is likely and what is not, and many story-lines will get eliminated.  Better still, proveably false story-lines will point directly to the techniques of emotional manipulation.  These techniques will form a pattern, and once you recognize the pattern, you can check consistency in both directions–from the “facts” to the emotional buttons, and back again.  

8.  At this point you will have seen through the better part of their game and be ready to start your own blog. 😉