Author: Gaianne

I begin by touting the site of James Howard Kuntsler, whose Daily Grunt of 18 May on the collapse of intellectual thought in the academic world will having you laughing or crying (or both).  Not my topic today, but a warning nonetheless:  When the academic world gives up standards of truth, it gives up its reason for existing–and will not, much longer.  Like everything else in our society, it seems to be rotting and going down.  (I don’t doubt that the Republicans want this.)

More to the point is his Clusterfuck Nation essay of 15 May 2006:

   

Is it even possible these days to define a valid doctrine of political Progressivism?

This is the key point.  Progressives feel like they are creating themselves out of nothing, as though the progressive movement had never existed.  There is a reason for that:  

   

The notion of Progressivism per se really comes from that brief and amazing period in the early 20th century when technological advance was lifting so many out of misery that social justice actually began to seem a plausible political goal rather than an idealist fantasy, and social reformers raced to catch up with the advances of telephones, motorcars, and sanitary engineering.

 

The idea of distributing the goods of society fairly was a difficult enough notion to promote when those goods were seen to be increasing.  As the reality of scarcity sinks in how will people be dissuaded from simply grabbing what they can?  The fact that such behavior leads to an impoverished, depopulated outcome is not–to today’s mind–a strong practical argument.  

Before a practical argument can be made–and a less desolate out-come pursued–the public mind must be led to rediscover the reality and value of public goods.

The entire thrust of American life the past forty years has been toward the privatization of public goods.  . . .
     A true Progressivism of the years ahead has to begin by concerning itself with a redefinition of what our public goods really are — and in practical, not abstract terms. That’s why I harp on the project of restoring the railroad system. Not only will it benefit all classes of Americans in terms of sheer getting around, but it would put tens of thousands of people to work at something with real value. It would also begin the process of healing public space ravaged by cars for almost a hundred years.

 

That is only the beginning, of course, and he has more.  You have already guessed the fly in the ointment:  

     

The obvious problem, of course, is that the American public doesn’t want to make other arrangements. It wants desperately to hold onto the old arrangements.

 

Indeed.  If you noticed I have not posted for a while, I should mention here that my real life most inconveniently intruded, just as I neared my goal of writing for an entire season.  Which is beside the point.  The point being that the other week rather I was wordless at the responses as peak oil made its way into the media.  I might have expected it, and should have, yet I was stunned as both media and blogland were flooded with every quick-energy scam ever invented, plus a few we had not seen before.  Hydrogen will save us! Cold fusion will save us!  (My personal favorite:)  Space elevators will save us!  Debunking these would seem like arguing with a bunch of drunks who, discovering they have drunk the bar dry, start in on the rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet.  What is there to say?  

So at this point we are in the unenviable position of putting out a message the public does not want to hear.  But they will want to hear it, when they are

stuck in their oppressively boring suburbs wondering about the meaning of it all. The failures and disconnections of the living arrangement most Americans have been induced to choose will at last become manifest.

 

At that point, the idea of public goods–which fifty years ago was a commonplace–can be reintroduced as a new and attractive idea.  

A rhetorical point:  how can our message be said now so that it will be heard then?  This may not be my strength, since one must be able to extend some sympathy to the American plight (and those god-awful suburbs–which I really can’t), but conversely, indirection will not help either.  The truth needs to be said plainly, though with all possible sympathy.  

Three weeks ago I got into an unresolvable argument with a woman who teaches organic farming.  Well, who is right?  But she thinks of organic farming as a matter of healthy, good-tasting food.  She does not want to think that it has something to do with whether or not we survive.  

Fortunately, indirection may be going out of style:  For a very nice rant, see Grand Moff Texan on 12 May for a Roof of Bones.  Not that GMT is a recent convert–far from it–rather he is picking up and echoing the growing disquiet.  This is a thing of joy.  

Many progressives have not yet caught up with the facts on the ground.  We are still fighting the battles of the 20th century (and losing) without realizing that the whole field of action is about to change.  Which does not invalidate the old concerns, but certainly requires a recasting to the new context.  

It has to lead us in the direction of making other arrangements for how we live.

This is the key point, for progressives understand that people are not defined by things.  Scarcity does not terrorize us.  Justice involves how a society acts, not how many things it has.  

Nigeria’s oil production capacity has been cut to 631,000 barrels per day (bpd), or some 25 percent of the country’s total output, following attacks on a major pipeline belonging to Italy oil giant Agip.

According to a story posted on From the Wilderness.  The pipeline in the oil-rich Niger Delta was reported blown up on Friday night.
It appears that inhabitants of the Delta, of the Ijaw tribe, have demanded payment for the oil extracted by Western oil companies and reparations for environmental damage caused by drilling and operations, and being summarily rebuffed by the national government (reputedly thoroughly corrupt) and the companies involved, have taken direct action.  A group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has been formed and taken credit for attacks on oil installations and the taking of hostages.  

The relevance to the War for Oil is this:  Nigeria is Africa’s top oil producer and the world’s eighth biggest oil exporter. As I have predicted, the war is taking the oil off line.  

Of ten oil hostages taken earlier, the three Westerners, two Americans and one Briton, are still being held.

This is a pattern we shall get used to.  

No deep thoughts here; merely a note that the unraveling progresses.  You probably didn’t see this on CNN.  

Remember the part early in The Handmaiden’s Tale where the women wake up to find their bank accounts are frozen?  (Also they are fired from their jobs.)

Well, come next week I cannot cash checks in my own bank on my own bank account.  

In May 2001 all of my ID was stolen (in a hold-up).  Starting (if I remember right) with my Social Security card, it took the entire summer–three months–to get that sorted out.  I finished with a new Connecticut ID.  

Comes time for renewal:  After a week of insomnia and nightmares (just routine PTSD that comes this time of year, though I’m not really planning to write about that) I get over to the Department of Motor Vehicles before my ID expires.  This usually makes things easier–but not this time!  The State of Connecticut does not recognize its own IDs as valid identification.  

Something to do with Bush’s New America, supposedly.  Thought I was living in a blue state.  Not true.  My point:  They are quietly changing the rules, and you may think things are okay in your state, but maybe they are not.  

Looking for ways to work around this.  I begin in earnest on Monday.  

Three weeks ago (Thurs–TAC VIII) I tried to write about the correct relationship of life and death.  It was inadequate.  I try again.  

It’s a little urgent:  Stirling Newberry writes that Americans are not ready to give up on Bush. [OOPS–if you went there, you know I should have said GOP! Not the same (though no less depressing)–that’s how information gets dirty. Sorry. FRIDAY 18: 05 EST] Why?  Because they think housing prices are still rising.  How can he write this without sinking into despair?  He is describing a people going cheerfully to extinction.  
Let us consider first what we know with some certainty.  Humans have existed for about a million years.  This is a very short span of geological time (though that is not my point).  For most of the million years humans have been hunter-gatherers.  Unlike our media fantasies, hunting is much the smaller part.  We know from the hunter-gatherers that still exist that gathering is the greater source of food, even though hunting may be more celebrated.  Perhaps more significantly, hunter-gatherers work about ten hours a week.  In some ways an arduous life, the anxious tension and endless labor of civilized life is not theirs.  Indeed, this is the life that humans are actually adapted to.  

About ten thousand years ago humans developed what we call civilization, based on the first forms of agriculture.  We usually think of this as an advance, but it is equally possible that it represented a deterioration in human life.  Its one clear virtue was the ability to engage in endless expansion through military ventures.  But this has its own price, and all civilizations, without exception, have collapsed.  Good or bad, it is a way of life for which humans are still not fully adapted–there just hasn’t been enough time.  

It is usual, and certainly easier, to look farther afield and consider other species of (plants and) animals.  Their histories are generally much longer, but again that is not my point.  My point is that we see them evolve over the course of millions of years in the geological record.  They can evolve only because they die.  A species that was truly immortal could not evolve, and therefore could not adapt, and therefore could not maintain its life.  

Death is necessary for life.  Without it, life could not persist.  

Now, I know of primitive religions that recognize this, but our civilized monotheisms, and the secularisms and atheisms that have followed them–that is, the modern world–preach the opposite.  They are wrong.  

The explicit goal of modern medicine is to extend life.  Well, of course! we think, but we are wrong.  That is a pointless goal–truly wrongheaded.  How did we get to think of life this way?  

I chose that as one example.  It is everywhere.  We ignore that death surronds our lives, before and after, and it is the before and after that defines the meaning of our lives, lying between these two boundaries.  

We are only vaguely aware of what lies beyond our lives, yet that is their real definition.  Their real meaning.  

Right now we know we lie on a geological boundary.  A great portion of the species that were, are now gone, and also, the situation of humans is about to change fundamentally.  What we are doing right now is creating this, and also shaping what the coming epoch will be.  Our meaning, right now, comes from that.  

Do we care?  

The question of what is worth saving, and carrying across the boundary, obsesses me very much.  I know that my own answers will not be those of most.  I know that much of what we think we value will disappear with no regrets.  

And some things will cross the boundary that we would not wish.  

I do not fear that capitalism will cross the boundary, because it cannot.  Rather, I fear the effect of capitalism on the boundary itself.  

The story of Easter Island, with which many of us are becoming familiar, is much on my mind.  But it wasn’t until I saw pictures that it began to haunt me.  A rugged island, with the austere, windswept, treeless beauty of a land lying high in the arctic–that is what the photos show.  Only, it doesn’t:  It is almost within the tropics.  

Last week NorthDakotaDemocrat suggested on the thread of Thurs–TAC IX that bird flu may well save us from that.  Yes, but personally, I hate the idea of dying of bird flu:  I would prefer a better way.  Will we be allowed a better way?  

Will we allow it for ourselves?  

But yes or no, the real question is:  Do our choices acquit us?  

Call it the Triple Crisis.  That’s apt enough.  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.  Holistic thinking is required and we don’t do holistic thinking.  Only compartmentalized thinking is permitted discourse.  Besides it would mean changing our Way of Life (of driving around in cars all the time) and that is Non-Negotiable.  

Coming back on line after having been sick–(which is why I didn’t post last week, it was really that bad)–is a bit of a shock.  Events have advanced ahead of schedule.  First, my browser tells me that the PATRIOT Act–the great Undead of legislation, is re-passed, with all but a few Dems signing on to kill the Republic.  My own (Dem) delegation voted death.  

Drowned like a baby–you gotta love Rethug imagery–in a bathtub indeed!  
I drop by The Grand Moff Texan and see that the US Army is stocking up on depleted uranium munitions.  The war for Iran (he thinks) is on.  So forget all my happy predictions of two weeks ago.  And it is nuclear war, for that is what DU is:  No blast or fire, but all the nuclear contamination of a real bomb, contained in an artillary shell.  Clearly we are in a race against time–how much devastation shall the empire cause before it is brought down?  How much can the world sustain?  The golden dome of Samara is only the beginning.  You have no idea what is about to be lost.  

There and here.  

There will be a price.  The price is blood.  But my crystal ball says little more about that.  Except:  Your tears will be in vain.  I say now–get used to what you have created.  The soft-landing scenario has passed.  

On political blogs we talk about politics.  But if this week’s passage of the undead-PATRIOT Act does not render politics irrelevant, then the exterior constraints–specifically the War for Oil, will take care of that.  In fact, the real reason the P*** Act was re-passed is that the War is going to entail some unpopular measures, and it will require the whole force of the police and military, unencumbered by due process and rule of law, to hold the populace down.   Open intimidation.  Soft style:  Anybody can be sent to Guantanamo as a terrorist–and will be.  Hard style:  Guns in your face.  Hard or soft, it is coming.  The War for Oil is going to possess everyone’s attention, in one way or another, for the US is about to be committed to it totally.  No aspect of life will be unaffected.  Most Americans will not notice until their cars are short of gas and their children are being sent off to die in far-away (oil) countries, but that day nears.  If we go ahead against Iran, that day comes this summer.  

It will continue until there is not enough oil to feed the war machine.  Here’s a question:  In the absence of any economy, is there enough American oil–Prudhoe and the rest–to keep the War Machine going?  

It becomes very hard for the left to articulate a political program, because to explain its rationale means mentioning the unmentionable, specifically, that survival is going to become a local affair.  As oil goes off line, our national economy will collapse, and with it our national infrastructure.  There are actually good things we could do, such as revitalize the railway network, but unless there is a cartel making money out of it, it just won’t happen, and even then we only support the wasteful and the destructive, not the efficient and conserving.  

Context:  This week we are seeing national food-labeling legislation designed to outlaw (state protections of) honest food labeling:  Our national government is wholly malign.  

It is not going to change in November’06 unless the Dems tap an as yet undiscovered reservoir of sanity and competence.  I think that is as likely as the Saudis finding a second Ghawar.

Committed to oil, we are committed to increasing climate change.  If you are sentimental, there is something you should do.  Record the biosphere in your area.  Write about it, photograph it, paint it, video-tape it–no don’t do that, that’s pointless–make a record that is durable.  The unsentimental fact is that the biosphere in your region is likely to simplify:  Plant species will die under the stress of weather they are not meant for, but they will not be replaced by more suited species, for there will not be time:  Climate zones will be shifting too quickly.  The short word for this is desertification.  In geological terms, a lot of new niches are about to be created to be filled (in geological, not human, time) by new, not-yet-existing species.  This is an exciting time for geologists of a million years hence.  

The excitement for us, of course, is somewhat different, as we procede, willingly, to wreck everything we have known and loved.  

Today a friend says to me:  “It is such a nice day today.”  Warm sun was melting the snow which had fallen heavily on Sunday.  

I was reminded of a festival a few years ago up in the hills a couple hours from where I live.  Though it was late spring, the weather had been cold and rainy the entire weekend–extreme even for the hills, which are always a bit wet.  Then the last morning came up sunny and warm.  
Everyone was smiling and marveling, remarking what a shame we should have good weather only at the end, when we were all packing up to leave.  I said nothing, not liking it at all.  No, it is not that I like cold and damp.  There was something wrong with the warm sunlight.  For one thing it was too humid.  For another . . . hard to describe; it just did not feel right.  We packed.  We left.  

The tornado came through the hills that night.  

This winter feels like that.  

There is a summer lethargy to my thoughts.  It is funny.  Last summer I was humming with activity: Every free, waking moment had a clear sense of purpose.  The project I was working on then is not finished, rather, I completed a stage.  Now my thoughts scatter in several directions, in vagueness.  Which things are going to matter?  

Even the political news is diffuse.  Cheney shoots a hunting companion.  It’s like something out of a Stephen King novel–except that it wasn’t even real hunting.  Horror is replaced by low comedy, and the realization that even the Mafia manages these things better.  And yet, as Congress falls in line behind another outrage, one gathers that key members have been invited hunting . . . It reminds me of Raed describing two years ago the clowns in the Iraqi puppet government.  Proud American, thinking we should get (will get) better puppets!  

What I am supposed to be writing about today is the correct relationship of life and death.  Would that I knew my subject!  Yet it matters, because without that, civilization is a boat with no rudder.  This is why fine-tuning capitalism will be of no use to us.  Sustainable energy is possible (at much lower per capita levels) but not for us, not while we cling to the idea that you can take without giving back.  If we try it we will find ways to repeat the same mistakes.  Our basic economic notions are just wrong-headed.  We ignore the costs we externalize just like we ignore death, not realizing that they merely wait for us, ever patiently.  And more:  They define what we are doing right now.  This is opaque:  It is not easy to see, even assuming we should want to.  It makes it hard to live without regrets.  

But to live without regrets is precisely the point.  

Another friend is moving to England.  Good for her!  I think I have decided on a going-away present.  During the last full moon instead of sleeping my mind was spinning with geometric considerations.  Yesterday they turned into the design for a mandala.  Will I be able to construct it before the party in a week and a half?  

I don’t think I will see her again.  

It is not spring that is coming.  Something else.  

We continue to hover over the fork of a timeline:  Will the US launch war against Iran this spring, or will open fighting somehow be avoided?  Polls show that once again (just as in the winter of 2003) Americans are quivering like abject slaves, think that the next sign of terrorism will be a mushroom cloud, and see the necessity of attacking Iran with force.  

Or do they?  Never one to be optimistic, I nevertheless remind myself that the polls themselves are part of the war propaganda.  

In any case, now is the time to act for peace:  

In the war-fork of the timeline the US faces physical destruction this year, nuclear or non-nuclear.  In the no-war fork, the worst is postponed, or actually avoided.  

Today I am interested in the no-war fork, and the possibilities that lie beyond a lesser, non-war, crash.  
Next door, at European Tribune, Chris Kulczyki has a very nice article, on the front page, on the question of economic systems and planetary survival.  He quotes Robert Newman:

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.

Mr. Kulczycki disagrees.  

Take it as a given that Newman is right and Kulczycki is wrong.  But I will go over there to argue that.  Here, I want to look at the backstory of what lies behind economic systems.  

Recall that Capitalism is an outgrowth of Mercantilism, and both together are only five hundred years old.  They were made possible by the particular political situation in Europe and the rise of Protestant Christianity as necessary conditions.  Innovations in military technology undermined the feudal relationships of the Middle Ages, gradually increasing the relative power of the merchant class, while Protestant Christianity emphasized personal over public or organizational standards for the just and the good.  The early Protestants hated the traditional sins as much as anybody, but it took less than a generation for the authority of individual conscience to be corrupted into individual excuses for greed.  General acceptance of mercantilistic thinking followed.  

For over a thousand-thousand years before that, humans in all lands, including Europe, organized their political economy in other ways.  While it is possible to analyze the economy of ancient Rome, or Golden Age Greece, or even a traditional fishing village, from the standpoint of capitalist economics, the utility of such analysis depends a great deal on one’s purpose.  Needless to say none of these peoples viewed themselves in such a way, moreover, a capitalist analysis leaves some important things out.  

The first thing it leaves out, is one’s proper relationship to the world.  Neither monotheists (Christians, Jews, and Muslims)  nor atheists like to face this, but the foremost concern in sustainable cultures is one’s proper relationship to the gods and the spirits.  This comes before material wealth.  Why is this?  I am not sure, but I do know this means the probabilities are against our creating a sustainable world without the proper reverence.  And history suggests that monotheism won’t work for that.  Why not?  My guess is that it is like monoculture–simplifying the real spiritual world, reducing it, and reducing the natural web of connections, beyond the point where sustainable life is possible.  

Secondly, and more obviously, Capitalism takes an exceptional attitude toward greed.  All other ways of life have noticed the existence of greed, but have felt the need to suppress it in the interest of common good.  Capitalist theory says greed generates the common good.  Now, both cannot be right, and I think we are soon reaching the point where it is obvious who has the right of the matter.  

Thirdly, Capitalism accepts and embeds an incorrect notion of wealth and poverty.  Wealth and poverty are opposites only in the narrow sense that they are extremes, but in fact they are part of one single thing:  You cannot have one without the other.  When capitalist economies create more wealth, an increase in poverty is the result.  This is inescapable.  

More could be said on this.  In 1987 Ann Wilson Shaef wrote a book called When Society Becomes Addict.  In it she compared thinking processes of Capitalist (and masculine) society to the thinking of alcoholics, and contrasts them to people who are in recovery or truly sober.  If you look at how capitalism stacks up against signs of alcoholism, it plainly looks like addictive behavior.  

In the early 1960’s, a lawyer named Bazelton in a book called The Paper Economy took up the point that although industrialization had produced an amazing surplus of goods, it made no impact on the extremes of wealth and poverty, nor on the existence of outright want.  The reason for this lay in Capitalism’s need to ever and eternally produce a profit.  Simply put, there is no money to be made in giving poor people what they need.  A further consequence, since the physical world is finite, is that the ever-inflating paper economy would have to find a way to detach itself permanently from the material economy, or else face a crash.  Since the holders of paper expect their paper to translate into real power, such detachment seemed unlikely.  It still does.  The crash he alluded to is imminent.  

Since the 19th century, capitalism has been embodied  in forms called corporations.  Bazelton describes how corporations got their start a century earlier, when national goverments chartered private organizations for special purposes, and brought in share-holders as a way of funding the ventures.  Essentially, these corporations were private branches of government, whose existence was justified by the policies they carried out for the public government and the taxes (portion of profits) that they returned to it.  

Corporations proved so successful at raising money that they became ubiquitous, and gradually the public government lost control over these forms of private government.  Since private governments were never responsible to anyone but their share-holders and the public government that held their charters, the loss of control means we came to be surrounded by private governments with no practical responsibility whatever.  That is, we have replaced public government by irresponsible, private government.  

Why irresponsible government is called freedom is no mystery:  as long as the public believes this obfuscation, the irresponsibility can continue–to the detriment of public well-being, but the increase of profit.  The final turn of the screw comes when corporations are relieved of the duty of paying taxes, thus eliminating their last justification for existing.  Literally they have become a cancer, existing only for themselves.  

The true opposite of wealth/poverty might be called prosperity.  Prosperity is when one works to create what is needed, and receives (perhaps in exchange) what one needs.  Prosperity concentrates on the flow (rather than the accumulation) of goods and energy:  Are they getting to where they need to be?  If anyone in the economy is conspicuously wealthy or conspicuously poor, the answer is obviously no.  

The idea of prosperity can be extended to one’s entire ecosystem.  To people with a spiritual understanding of the world, this comes naturally, which is to say, that is the practical meaning of spiritual understanding.  

Finally I come to my point:  Economics is the physical representation of social status.  All societies recognize differences between people, and create signs (such as clothing) and representations of those differences.  Some societies do not extend those representations into limitations on physical well-being; others accentuate displays of exhaltation and abasement.  

When we choose an economic system which extends social signifiers of physical abasement to include physical distress and destruction of its members, and extends this destruction to its environment (biosphere), this is a social choice, made politically.  It is a social decision about who we are as a society.  

As a society, this is an exhaltation that leads inevitably to self-destruction.  The Greek myth of Erisichthon represents and describes this.  

We have reached the point where survival depends on creating a new form of society that does not value exhaltation, and does not encourage its members to seek it.  Such a society will encourage us to develop our relationships to the world that sustains it and us.  

In June of 2004 I had a dream that for days haunted my waking life.  It was simple, but very, very vivid.  The season was green.  There was great confusion and fighting.  And then a flat, detached, verbal message:  

The United States will be destoyed in two years.

I woke.  
It would not have been the first time I had had a prophetic dream.  Occasionally, very occasionally, I have such dreams.  They are always vivid.  Sometimes they are labeled:  The dream itself claims to be prophecy.  Sometimes they prove true.  

This dream was not labeled.  So I had to ask myself:  What is it about?  

As it happened, my personal issues–longstanding, ongoing–were not at the time giving me much distress.  My daily life was ticking over routinely, neither bad nor good.  The dream stood unexplained.  

Then, I could already see that America was moving toward disaster;  what I did not see was how the timeline could be so short.  In the year and a half since, actions have been taken that have accelerated the time line greatly, and now I do see, or start to.  By last summer (30 July 2005) Ian Welsh at The Blogging of the President could write that that the economic crash would come in mid-to-late 2006.  This is the view that comes–not from dreams–but from crunching the economic numbers.  

So many things can change the time line–to extend it, or to bring it forward.  

This Sunday last I woke tense as a bowstring:  It was like being back in my childhood.  It took a while to understand this.  In the mid-to-late 1950’s, the world hovered on the edge of nuclear war.  This was, on the one hand, because the US was using the threat of nuclear war as a bluff in a very risky geopolitical game, but also because, high in the military and intelligence agencies, there was a faction that actually wanted the war to occur.  

Their calculation was that the US would loose a few cities–perhaps a half dozen, not more–and this was an acceptable price for being able to conquer the Soviet Union outright by force.  (Optimistically, they thought the US would withstand such damage intact, and that a beaten Soviet Union could easily be occupied.)  I was aware of this attitude, and it gave me terrible nightmares.  

As it happened, this faction was always kept down, until JFK was elected, smoked some dope (Timothy Leary describes this), and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, gradually reduced Cold War tensions.  (Ironically this was after having run and won on the issue of the ficticious “missile gap.”)  The threat of nuclear war receded.  

We are returning to those days, when some planners want to launch nuclear war for reasons of policy.  

Why?  

Firstly, the Bush people are desperate.  The bluff and counter-bluff of Iran is not the main point;  the main point is that all their policy initiatives are now  failing.  Having switched from soft imperialism to the hard imperialism of military force, they find that the US Army is pretty much destroyed (though not the Air Force and Navy).  

The Bush regime is obsessed with reclaiming control.  They really cannot imagine they are not omnipotent, and when reality hints otherwise they get in a mind to throw a tantrum.  More effective options are still available, but that would entail admitting reality, re-calculating, and adjusting–and that is the precise thing they don’t want to do.  Ignoring reality is called “being tough.”  We have chosen leaders whose masculine insecurity has reached absurd–and absurdly dangerous–levels.  

(There is a reason Bush does all those crotch shots.)

Meanwhile, what is the biggest tantrum they can throw?  

Secondly, America has changed.  In the ’50s and ’60s Americans would have been outraged at any policy resulting in the loss of even a single city.  Now, to our surprise, we discover that one of America’s largest and most important cities can be destroyed through willful government policy and neglect, and no one cares.  Certainly no one who counts; nor the great Middle Class.  Americans have always been hugely disdainful of the lives of others (“life is cheap in [name your country]”); now they have become equally disdainful of the lives of other Americans.  This opens up a window for the friends of nuclear war.  

An opening wedge for nuclear war is already public–the proposed use of “tactical” nuclear bunker-buster bombs.  It should be remembered that the Soviets never accepted the idea of “tactical” nuclear weapons, always asserting that they would respond to a “tactical” one in the same way as to a “strategic” one.  This was a logically sound response, and the US could never treat it as a bluff.  Just so, however the world might respond to the launching of nuclear war, it is unlikely they will seek to serve America’s semantic convenience.  

How likely is nuclear war now?  Not very.  My dream certainly does not assert our destruction is nuclear.  But the probability is no longer “essentially zero,”  and this changes the shape of all the other probabilities of the future.  For one thing, it imposes on those who oppose America the need to increase their asymmetry, so as not present a nuclear target.  Europe is starting to make very subservient postures, and this is wise.  China will soon have to make a great show of yielding, though if this is done right, they too will gain more than they lose.  Americans are not the only people who can bait-and-switch:  An era of rotating crises seems imminent, each one minor, and each one building on the previous and on the Bush administation’s inability to actually accomplish anything in the real world.  From Latin America to Nigeria to Iraq to Iran to the ‘Stans to Korea to Taiwan and back again, the possibilities are endless.  

Meanwhile, sadly, but obviously, we are now in pre-war days.  Just as in the first half of 1914, when everyone could see that Europe was heading toward war, though no one could see what would set it off, now the opportunities for open conflict are multiplying.  The stakes are clear, and the US has demanded total surrender:  No negotiation is possible.  

Nuclear war will most likely be avoided by American implosion, which would obviate it.  Asymmetrical war is designed to promote this.  It is already the direction we are heading.  

This is the year that things happen.  

The housing bubble can now be seen to have turned over this past autumn.  Prices are no longer climbing, buyers are down, and inventory is accumulating.  This does not mean much–yet.  But as new interest rates kick in and sellers find they just cannot hold on to their properties, prices will come down drastically.  Whether this is a crash or a slide, prices will be heading toward one quarter of this year past–yes, if you bought this year you can look forward to 25 cents on your dollar if you ride this all the way to the bottom.  (You local mileage may very.  Some regions never did rise much, and will consequently fall less.)  Prices will return to somewhere near where they were before the bubble started (if not lower).  Housing will no longer be “a good investment,” and this will disrupt the entire US economy, whose only “growth” has been in sectors that service the real estate industry.  How fast the dominos fall, I have no idea, but this year it begins.  

That the dollar is overvalued, and may be due for a slide or a crash, has been noticed by none other than the IMF, which posted a report noting that private panic selling could occur and be a sufficient disturbance to make a crash begin.  So now the “real” people are noticing it:  It is almost mainstream.  Once it is on CNN or in the WaPo, the crash will have arrived.  Notice they are not worrying about the Chinese, who, in this context, seem to be a lesser threat.  😀

Oh yes, the Chinese.  Suddenly the US is happy to entertain the Russian proposal on Iran’s nuclear programs, (well, not that happy), and the wingnuts are calling for a war on Syria (instead).  Was Iran taken off the agenda?  This is actually extremely good news, but for the dollar all it really means is that the Chinese won’t move on it until somebody else does.  (Then it is all over.)  Good news all the same.  

This is the year to get out of the US, if you are going to:  Regardless of whether Bush and Cheney are impeached, the political situation is going to “get interesting” with increasing rapidity.  Right now there are no real obstacles to travel, but that will change.  I am optimistic on impeachment, but not on what follows:  The Powers-that-Be need their militarization, and their war for oil, and I believe that civil liberties will continue to be the loser.  In any case, this is the year that chaos begins to enter your life–from the outside.  Halliburton just won a massive contract for building prisons for “illegal immigrants.”  Gay people with children are the canaries-in-the-coalmine–when the state moves in on them, you better be on your way out the door.  If you are going.  

If you are staying, it is time to think about contigencies.  At what point will the government likely become interested in you?  What is your plan for that?  The good news is that the greater the coming chaos, the less control the government will have.  That opens up a window for personal tactics and strategy.  

I wandered over to From the Wilderness, and the Nigerian delta is really heating up with the recent kidnapping of an oil-worker support/service team.  Fighting has cut oil production by nearly ten percent.  Nigeria has not been in the news much, and it won’t be.  But it is a key region in the war for oil.  The US has said it will not send Marines until ?:/ the region is more stable, but one way or another it looks like military forces in Nigeria will have to increase–more, larger war.  

So have I said it?  Price your house way down and unload it, or else plan to live in it unsold some years.  Get out of dollars.  Be creative and diversify.  Yes, people like gold, and it is worth putting some assets into, but really no one knows what any commodity is going to do.  Or any currency.  Only oil is guarranteed to climb as a general trend.  Remember the people in New Orleans:  The ones who did well thought carefully about what was coming and ignored or evaded the government completely.  Think about how you plan to face what’s coming.  

No one else can.  

Life after this year?  Probably, but that is another plan, and another diary.  Think food.  

I really did not want to write today.  

Jerome a Paris writes:  Why bother? When will it end?  

That is my mood:  We are in dark days.  Not the worst surely, but that is the whole problem:  Worse days are coming, and we know it.  Meanwhile today just drags along.  

Late last week the US staged a missile and air attack on one of its own allies.  This was, perhaps, a minor event, but it was shocking for what it said about American behavior.  It was not a mistake.  The US simply does not believe it needs so much as a by-your-leave to level any village, anywhere in the world, in pursuit of “terrorists.”  The villagers themselves were surprised to discover they were high-level Al Qaeda operatives.  But the US got its body-count, which, seemingly, was the whole point.  

A year ago we used to joke that–to fight terrorism–Bush would bomb Paris.  Maybe he won’t, really, but if so it is because years ago DeGaulle built the Force de Frappe, and pulled it out of NATO.  Sadly, he understood that someday France would need its own, independent, deterent.  

Meanwhile, how bad was this really for the Pakistani government?  That it was a grotesque humiliation is clear.  But does it really advance the day when the government falls to Muslim extremists?  Hard to say from this side of two oceans, but it certainly doesn’t delay it.  This week bin Laden comes up with a new speech.  Well, really, how could he miss such an opportunity?  He couldn’t and he hasn’t.  

And maybe Bush really figures that his only hope to avoid impeachment is to provoke a new terror attack on the US and revive the “united-we-stand” days of 9/11.  Will Americans really fall for such a transparent ploy?  It would seem a truly desperate tactic.  Yet, on present evidence Americans will fall for anything.  

And why not?  For this whole thing, all of it, is really about one thing, and one thing only.  Indeed the whole of local, national, and international politics can be reduced to a single concept–one word:  

Oil.  

I didn’t really want to write about this either, but today it is time.  I don’t have anything new to say–it is an old subject.  In fact it is so old that some 35 years ago it was part of my high-school curriculum.  There would even have been an exam question on it:  How much oil is left in the world?  

Seventy years.  

Of course, that answer was approximate:  Since that time more oil was discovered, but also since that time, the rate of usage grew faster than predicted.  The effects cancel out, and today there are some 35 years left.  

Worse, this past year the Saudis promised to increase production to stabilize prices, but for the first time in two decades they have not done so.  The geopolitical and the geological indicators agree:  They have not because they cannot.  World oil production has peaked.  It will never be greater than it is right now.  

About the time I was graduating high school, the United States entered the time of choice:  Whether to invest in a new energy infrastructure to secure its future, or to seal its fate.  

It did not invest.  

Two political oil-crises in the 1970’s showed what was at stake, and for a few years the US toyed with the idea of revamping its energy economy.  But Carter was rejected at the polls, and the new government abandoned the new economy.  A deal was worked to get the oil flowing, and it would be oil, and only oil, until the end.  This was called “Morning in America.”  

This was the death decision.  It was not the final moment, when nothing further can be done–indeed we have not even yet reached the final moment, in theory.  But it was the last good opportunity:  The choice could only get progressively harder, and the future possibilities less and less pleasant.  

In 1980 Americans went to the polls and voted to destroy their country.  

To this day I cannot tell you why they did it.  The obvious reasons have been rehashed on this blog more than once.  But the real reasons?    

How bad is it?  Our dependence on oil has actually increased since oil-crisis days:  It now takes 10 calories of oil to grow one calorie of corn.  This means that not only is our industry and transportation dependent upon oil, but also our food.  

There is more to be said, and you can find it by googling “Peak Oil” and “Mass Die-off.”  The summary is that no combination of conservation and energy alternatives can replace our current oil use.  Our civilization will cease to exist.  Will humans still exist?  Optimists will be busy learning about organic gardening.  But this, and other survival questions I leave for another day.  

Today I write about the plan, for there is one.  Not to survive–the death choice stands–but to buy time.  The plan dictates national and international politics.  It is the roadmap and the justification for the cartelized state.  The plan is simplicity itself.  The US is, by military means, to secure all of the world’s oil reserves needed to keep oil flowing to itself.  By this means the US makes sure to be the last civilization standing.  After that?  Well, there is no after that.  

Arguably, mere control of the oil market was, and would have been, sufficient.  Iraqi oil was to come under US control–the whole point being that Saddam Hussein could not be trusted–to keep the flow of oil maintained in the near-term.  In the mid-term the oil countries of Africa were to be brought into the US orbit, the ‘Stans of the Caspian Sea region, and of course, Venezuela.  (This last is a small point, though a very sore one.)

But defeat in Iraq has changed all of that:  Iraqi oil remains off line and the oil market is short; perhaps worse, having foolishly and predictably destroyed its army in Iraq, the US can no longer be sure of Africa, nor the ‘Stans, nor Venezuela.  Having committed itself to a policy of pure force, the force to hold these countries is not there.  

Yet defeat in Iraq is not defeat in the plan, just a setback requiring a revision.  The militarization of the US now needs to be brought forward on the timeline (this would have happened anyway):  A greatly expanded army is now needed to bring back those countries that are breaking away.  Yes, all of the countries I have mentioned–and more–will have to be occupied by main force.  Permanently.  

It is crazy:  It cannot work.  

What else is new?  

Into this we throw Iran.  Will the US really attack this year?  It is hard to believe, but good sense has never stopped Bush before.  To bridge the gap until the Army can be rebuilt, an assault with “tactical” nuclear weapons against a major oil-producer may be just the dramatic display of force Bush feels he needs to demonstrate his resolve.  

American strategy is now based on the logic of two-year-old boys:  If he throws a big enough tantrum, certainly the world will just quiver and seek his pardon.  

Actually, it is more likely that Iran will cut the strait of Homuz and send the American economy straight to the bottom.  

Or not even that:  The Chinese might want the strait kept open.  Well, there is an easy deal they can cut:  Iran leaves the strait open in exchange for some . . . interesting . . . weaponry.  

In addition, consider that the Chinese announced last summer that they were getting out from under the dollar.  I assume they were well started before they made the announcement.  How well along are they?  Maybe they can make a second promise:  They can dump their remaining holdings and send the dollar into the dumpster.  The American empire will be over.  

At this point we can see that everything really depends on the Chinese.  That they want peace is obvious.  That they are preparing for war may be less obvious, but certainly they have been considering that possibility all along.  

What they will do, they aren’t saying.