Blow-Back to Collapse
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Order was being attempted in the northeastern US this morning as peoples work their way out of the massive natural disaster called Hurricane Irene — Vermont, New Jersey and upstate New York are flooding nearly out of control as rivers pour over their banks, washing away a lifetime’s work of many, many lives.
Scenes incomprehensible, but yet part of the ‘new normal:’ In Grafton, Vermont, 800 residents were stranded. “It’s one massive mess,” said Tara Taylor, who came out of Grafton to nearby Rockingham, along with her family. “There’s no words to describe this.”
And the bad news — life as we know it is going to get worse, and most likely to get worse fairly rapidly.
(Illustration found here).
One item that’s been placed on a way-back burner is the horror is still unfolding at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant — the news media laps up disaster and went way-out-of-control covering Irene, though, some pundits have said the whole event was over ‘hyped,’ but tell that to the people in Vermont, and, the storm is likely to rank among the 10 most expensive catastrophes in U.S. history, costing between $7 billion to $10 billion.
Meanwhile, a nuclear disaster would make Irene seem like a walk in a soft, spring rain.
Japan has been in trouble for awhile — they just selected their sixth prime minister in five years — and the ongoing, seemingly unending problems at the Fukushima plant ain’t helping any.
The newest piece of shit is radioactive waste from the plant.
According to Aljazeera English: Environmental experts in Japan are warning of new fallout from the country’s nuclear crisis. Radioactive waste is piling up at several sewerage plants, well away from the crippled Fukushima reactor. Months after the tsunami and earthquake that triggered the nuclear meltdown, the government still has no policy on what to do with the waste.
All these sewage plants have a major problem — workers with no proper training have had to store this real bad literal shit in big barrels and vats (material usually used by others like construction companies, but not now).
This situation is one of those with no end:
According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the amount of accumulated dehydrated sludge stored in water treatment facilities in 14 prefectures in eastern Japan was 92 000 tons as of July 28, while sludge from sewage treatment plants topped 35 000 tons as of August 12.
Press reports said some 37 000 tons of this total was judged to be radioactive.
More recently, NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, conducted its own survey of 17 prefectures and says the figure for radioactive sludge has now grown to about 50 000 tons, with over 1500 tons “so contaminated that it cannot be buried for disposal.”
It added that another 50 000 tons had still to be checked.
A lot of ugly, ugly shit.
Fukushima is just another knotty problem, but even as horrendous as it may be, the situation pales next to the biggest issues facing all of mankind — climate change and peak oil.
Climate change speaks for itself and is manifest in our daily lives — Irene is an example.
Peak oil, however, is one of them slow crawling disasters that people don’t pay much attention to until it’s way, way too late.
We watch oil prices as they’re reflected at the gas pump, but the nasty, down-low business of running out of the black shit is still hidden behind a screen, pretty-much unknown except to a few.
And the down-side to the peak is already here: Of the 16 big U.S. and European oil companies studied by Deutsche Bank analyst Paul Sankey, 14 of them saw their production of petroleum decline in the quarter. Collectively, the drop amounted to 12 percent of total liquids volumes, or 1.2 million bpd. Their average output for the quarter totalled, 14.67 million bpd. Even excluding the effect of Libya’s issues, the decline was 8 percent.
The US peaked in 1970.
And make no bones, the world’s current civilized life is fully based on oil.
Which means there’s gonna be a bad end to this.
In a related piece, energy writer and chemistry professor, Ugo Bardi, has a post up this morning at The Oil Drum about how this end will come about — swiftly.
Bardi’s article is inspired by comments from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a Roman empire-era philosopher, who in a letter quipped: “It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”
Yes, the way to ruin is rapid.
Using models, graphs and science texts, Bardi explores the possibility of a hard, quick collapse to the way nowadays be.
He concludes:
Very often, we fail to understand the delayed effects of our actions.
John Sterman reminds us of this point in a talk on global warming quoting Robert Louis Stevenson as saying, “Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
The models shown here tell us that the Seneca cliff is the result of delayed consequences.
As always, the future is something that we build with our actions and the models can only tell us what kind of actions will lead us, eventually, to a certain outcome.
Used in this way, models can be extremely useful and can even be applied to systems which are much more modest than an entire civilization, for instance to a single company or to our personal relationships with other people.
In all cases, the Seneca effect will be the result of trying hard to keep things running as usual.
In that way, we may run out faster of the resource that keeps the system running: be it a physical resource or a reserve of goodwill.
The way to avoid this outcome may be to let the system run the way it wants, without attempting to force it to go the way we want it to go.
In other words we need to take things in life with some stoicism, as Seneca himself would probably have said.
Thinking of the worldwide situation and of the problems involved, global warming and resource depletion, what the models tell us is that the Seneca cliff may be the inevitable result of putting too much strain on already badly depleted natural resources.
We should try, instead, to develop alternative stocks of resources such as renewable (or nuclear) energy. At the same time, we should avoid to exploit highly polluting and expensive resources such as tar sands, oil shales, deepwater oil, and, in general, applying the “drill, baby, drill” philosophy.
All those strategies are recipes for doom.
Unfortunately, these are also examples of exactly what we are doing.
Bardi notes in his piece an article by Dmitry Orlov, called ‘Peak Oil is History.’
Orlov says:
Let us look at it another way.
As I mentioned, Peak Oil theory has been quite good at predicting the depletion profile of certain stable and prosperous countries and provinces.
But these predictions become meaningless when extrapolated to the world as a whole, for one very obvious reason: the world cannot import oil.
Let me say it again, this time in title-case, bolded and centered, to emphasize the significance of this statement:
Planet Earth Can’t Import Oil
When faced with insufficient domestic oil production, an industrialized country has but two choices:
1. Import oil
2. Collapse
But when faced with insufficient global oil production, an industrialized planet has just one choice: Choice Number 2.
That’s just great, bro.
A Fictional War
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Even as Vermont drowns in its own water, the politics of war still plays on the airwaves, especially after The Dick Cheney made the rounds boasting of his new literary efforts in disengaging the truth from a lie.
Seemingly, the further away from the invasion of Iraq and closer to the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, we all get, the repulsive ugly of George Jr.’s term as a war president becomes even more apparent — the real question is why are these people not in jail.
In the newest wrinkle, an October 2002 letter from Tony Blair’s office reveals he and George Jr. were going into Iraq come hell or high water: A letter from Blair’s private secretary reveals that “we and the US would take action” without a new resolution by the UN security council if UN weapons inspectors showed Saddam had clearly breached an earlier resolution. In that case, he “would not have a second chance.”
(Illustration of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Head of a woman‘ found here).
On the letter from the UK’s The Guardian (the link above):
In a devastating passage, Rycroft (Blair’s secretary) added: “In other words, if for some reason [such as a French or Russian veto] there were no second resolution agreed … we and the US would take action.”
The Downing Street letter is particularly significant considering the government’s repeated emphasis in public at the time on the need for UN approval before any invasion of Iraq.
Another of that public to private bullshit.
Also from the UK yesterday, Baroness Manningham-Buller, former director general of the domestic security service, who retired in 2007, said Blair and his lackeys had been warned prior to any war action an Iraqi invasion was a major f*ck up.
Via The Telegraph:
In an interview with the Radio Times, Lady Manningham-Buller suggested that she argued at the time that the Government should focus on defeating al Qaida and winning the war in Afghanistan instead of attacking Saddam Hussein.
“Iraq did not present a threat to the UK,” she said.
“The service advised that it was likely to increase the domestic threat and that it was a distraction from the pursuit of al Qaida.
I understood the need to focus on Afghanistan.
Iraq was a distraction.”
She said it was “for others to decide” whether the Iraq war had a mistake but added: “Intelligence isn’t complete without the full picture and the full picture is all about doubt.
Otherwise, you go the way of George Bush.”
And The Dick.
In a realistic look at The Dick’s most-wonderful new book, ‘In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,’ a column at antiwar.com by political activist, Medea Benjamin (Susan Benjamin), co-founder of Code Pink, explains the tome actually needs to be in a bookstore’s fiction section.
She lists 10 reasons why — most touching war crimes, torture and genocidal actions, but the #3 reason is financial:
War profiteering.
U.S. taxpayers shelled out about $3 trillion for the Bush-Cheney wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — a major factor in our nation’s present economic meltdown.
But Cheney and his cronies at Halliburton made out like bandits, getting billions in contracts for everything from feeding troops in Iraq to constructing the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan to building the infamous Guantanamo prison.
Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995-2000, leaving for the VP position with a $20 million retirement package, plus millions in stock options and deferred salary.
Before the Iraq War began, Halliburton was 19th on the U.S. Army’s list of top contractors; with Cheney’s help, by 2003 it was number one — increasing the value of Cheney’s stocks by over 3,000 percent.
Big bucks for The Dick.
And in that vein, a couple of members of the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan penned an op/ed in Sunday’s Washington Post, claiming billions and billions of US bucks have been flushed down The Dick’s toilet of war.
A few enlightening snips:
At least one in every six dollars of U.S. spending for contracts and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, or more than $30 billion, has been wasted.
And at least that much could again turn into waste if the host governments are unable or unwilling to sustain U.S.-funded projects after our involvement ends.
…
Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak interagency coordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees.
Both government and contractors need to do better.
…
The contractor workforce in Iraq and Afghanistan has at times exceeded 260,000 people and has sometimes outnumbered U.S. military forces in theater.
The roughly 1-to-1 ratio sustained over the years reflects a basic operating truth that Defense Department officials expressed in testimony to the commission: The United States cannot conduct large or prolonged military operations without contractor support.
…
Projects that are or may be unsustainable are a serious problem.
For instance, U.S. taxpayers spent $40 million on a prison that Iraq did not want and that was never finished.
U.S. taxpayers poured $300 million into a Kabul power plant that requires funding and technical expertise beyond the Afghan government’s capabilities.
Meanwhile, a federal official testified to the commission that an $11.4 billion program of facilities for the Afghan National Security Forces is “at risk” of unsustainability.
And that’s no fiction — after awhile that mounts up to some real money.
‘Exploding Brains” — Cont.
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Continuing the literary realism of a war zone from earlier: This hard and brutal story during Irene’s turmoil this weekend.
An Army Ranger captain supposedly killed four people in two states, one a young boy, wounded a couple of cops during a firefight on a rainy Pennsylvania highway, and although was at-large, armed-and-dangerous for awhile, was later found dead from a gunshot wound.
Two of the victims were his ex-people — ex-wife, ex-mother-in-law.
Reportedly, he shot and killed the ex, her boyfriend and his son in Chesterfield County, Va., then drove through the heavy Irene rains to Buckingham, Pa., near Philadelphia, where supposedly he shot to death the mother of his ex-wife.
And while doing all this driving and shooting, he was also hauling around his own 6-year-old daughter in his truck.
A key note from the BBC:
Egland had served in the US Army for nearly two decades and had deployed numerous times to war zones, authorities said.
It was unclear what drove him to kill.
Apparently and actually, he’d been called upon to kill for way-too-long.
And one doesn’t readily forget Don Rumsfeld’s most-callous performance in December 2004:
Specialist Thomas Wilson, a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit scheduled to roll into Iraq this week, said soldiers had to scrounge through local landfills here for pieces of rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass — what they called “hillbilly armor” — to bolt on to their trucks for protection against roadside bombs in Iraq.
“Why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?” Specialist Wilson asked Mr. Rumsfeld, drawing cheers and applause from many of the 2,300 troops assembled in a cavernous hangar here to meet the secretary.
Mr. Rumsfeld responded that the military was producing extra armor for Humvees and trucks as fast as possible.
A few minutes later, a soldier from the Idaho National Guard’s 116th Armor Cavalry Brigade asked Mr. Rumsfeld what he and the Army were doing “to address shortages and antiquated equipment” National Guard soldiers heading to Iraq were struggling with.
Mr. Rumsfeld seemed taken aback by the question and a murmur began spreading through the ranks before he silenced them.
“Now settle down, settle down,” he said.
“Hell, I’m an old man, it’s early in the morning and I’m gathering my thoughts here.”
He said all organizations had equipment, materials and spare parts of different vintages, but he expressed confidence that Army leaders were assigning the newest and best equipment to the troops headed for combat who needed it most.
Nonetheless, he warned that equipment shortages would probably continue to bedevil some American forces entering combat zones like Iraq.
“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.
A war of choice based on fabricated evidence — Don really has some kind of un-mitigated gall, huh?.
‘Exploding’ Brains — Re-Writing History
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“I didn’t set out to embarrass the president or not embarrass the president,’’ Cheney told Gangel. “If you look at the book, there are many places in it where I say some very fine things about George Bush. And believe every word of it.’’
– Dick Cheney, lying again on NBC
(Illustration found here).
Deep in the middle of Hurricane Irene’s churn up the US eastern seaboard this weekend, Colin Powell braved the elements to take the stand Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation to unleash some much-heated words about The Dick Cheney’s new book of near fiction, ‘In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,’ another entry in an already ugly pile of bogus-books belched-out this year from a group of assholes trying to explain away/justify George Jr.’s eight horrible years as president.
And as The Dick had told NBC’s Jamie Gangel, “There are gonna be heads exploding all over Washington,” because of the great, wondrous revelations in the book, Powell’s visit to CBS was apparently to show his head was still intact.
Powell explains:
“My head isn’t exploding, I haven’t noticed any other heads exploding in Washington DC,” said Powell, who scathingly suggested this was the kind of language expected from a supermarket tabloid, not a former vice president.
…
Powell also accused Cheney of seeking to smear his successor as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, as well as ex-CIA director George Tenet.
“He’s taken the same shots at Condi, with an almost condescending tone.
She tearfully did this, or that.
And he’s taken the same shots at George Tenet,” said Powell, who, like Cheney, was a Republican appointed by Bush.
…
“Mr. Cheney may forget that I’m the one who said to President Bush, ‘if you break it you own it’,” he said, adding pointedly: “Mr. Cheney and many of his colleagues did not prepare for what happened after the fall of Baghdad.”
…
Powell added: “Mr. Cheney is free to say what he wishes, but so far I haven’t seen anything in it that is as explosive as he claims it is, and I don’t see any heads laying on the street.”
The only head we want to see laying in the street is The Dick’s.
Bob Schieffer, host of Face the Nation, was near-about giddy last night reporting on Powell’s interview during a segment of CBS Evening News — the media loves bullshit.
Read a run-down of The Dick’s early political life revealed in the book at Politico — really nothing new.
In Newsweek, a comment on the book took a different tone, reflecting how the political waters have become not so muddy and nasty was it was a couple of years ago — President Obama has adjusted George Jr.’s playbook for these perilous times.
The money bit:
When he signed the deal in 2009, he was in bunker mentality—an embattled ideologue gearing up to defend a deeply unpopular terrorism policy under constant attack from the left.
As his tome arrives in bookstores at summer’s end, the battlefield has changed dramatically.
His defense brief lands after the court of public opinion has ruled—in his favor.
President Obama has largely adopted the Cheney playbook on combating terrorism, from keeping Gitmo open to trying suspected enemies of the state in military tribunals.
Obama’s drone war, which has quadrupled the number of attacks in the past two years, reflects Cheney’s whatever-it-takes approach.
The leftist wrath once trained on Bush’s veep is aimed at the Democratic incumbent these days.
Even the Bush-Cheney pro-democracy doctrine, born as a substitute rationale for the Iraq War after the failure to find WMD, is bearing fruit, toppling dictators from Cairo to Tripoli.
The dirty little secret of the last few years is that the man George Bush called “Big Time” won.
We’re all Cheneyites now.
Some terrible shit, huh?
The Dick’s tome follows others seeped in the delicate art of re-writing history — George Tenet, of CIA fame, disgracefully blubbered out his own recollections; L. Paul Bremer, the US chief in Iraq during the chaos horror of the early Iraq mess, dribbled his version of events (supposedly Bremer and George Jr. got along well because of ‘their shared interest in physical exercise;’ and even Condi Rice is putting the finishing touch on her view, ‘No Higher Honour,’ set for release in November, and is reportedly a ‘candid’ look at the Bush White House — more bullshit to blubber the airwaves and make Schieffer more animated.
These volumes of mule shit not only are messing with actual history, but are cruel and ugly to those who bought into George Jr. and The Dick’s lies spanning nearly a decade.
A case in point is another dickhead’s so-called memoir, this one by Don Rumsfeld — the title taken from Rummy’s ignorant/cute phrase, ‘Known and Unknown,’ which blew even more smoke up the ass of collective America.
Last Friday, the bullshit ran smack dab into the face of reality.
From The News Tribune in Tacoma, WA:
Two people were removed from a Donald Rumsfeld book signing Friday at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, including the Yelm widow of an Army Ranger who blames the military for her husband’s suicide.
Security officers for the former secretary of defense escorted Ashley Joppa-Hagemann out by the arm, she said Saturday.
She and Jorge Gonzalez, the executive director of Coffee Strong, a Lakewood-based anti-war group, confronted Rumsfeld as he promoted his memoir, “Known and Unknown.”
According to an account posted on Coffee Strong’s website:
“Mrs. Joppa-Hagemann introduced herself by handing a copy of her husband’s funeral program to Rumsfeld, and telling him that her husband had joined the military because he believed the lies told by Rumsfeld during his tenure with the Bush administration.”
Joppa-Hagemann complained about Rumsfeld’s response Friday to her account of Staff Sgt. Jared Hagemann’s multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and his death at age 25. Hagemann belonged to the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment.
The website said Rumsfeld’s “only response was to callously quip, ‘Oh yeah, I heard about that.’”
…
Joppa-Hagemann says her husband took his own life to avoid another tour in Afghanistan after Rangers pressured him to drop his plans to leave the military.
She has been pushing for a ceremony honoring him.
Her efforts were the subject of a front-page story in Thursday’s News Tribune.
She said Jared Hagemann believed when he enlisted that he would be fighting in Iraq for “justice for 9/11” and to find weapons of mass destruction.
“All I could do was just really be happy at that moment that I got to tell Donald to his face that he was a liar,” she said in an interview Saturday, “and put a face to a soldier that because of him is no longer alive.”
And all Rummy had to say, “Yeah, I heard about that?”
A lot of people are looking for justice, but sadly they won’t get any from all these assholes, who have created nothing more than a growing library of lies.
No Time for Time
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(Illustration of Francisco Goya’s ‘Disaster of War‘ found here).
US peoples — and for the final matter — all the world’s peoples stand not-so-nimbly on the edge of a strange and nefarious, swiftly-shifting, era in time, where all these multi-layered gushers filled with historical debris are coming swiftly from all directions, inundating all aspects of modern life.
And it’s not just these continuing confounding natural disasters, currently taking the form of Hurricane Irene, which already has caused 11 deaths in four states, and just after 9 a.m. Pacific time Sunday is knock-knocking at the Big Apple’s door, or those horrible string of tornadoes this past spring.
Or even that 5.8 shaker pulsating out of Virginia last Tuesday.
Anxiety — WTF.
An Ipsos poll in early August indicated not only are US peoples in a record majority think the country is ‘off on the wrong track,’ but the future looks like shit — almost half (47 percent) now say that ‘the worst is yet to come,’ an increase of 13 points from last summer when this question was last asked.
Uncertainty is manifested throughout a most-shoddily built, Ponzi-schemed structure that’s modern civilization.
As such is nowadays can be summed — from The Big Picture this morning on financial insanity, though, it could applied to a shitload of stuff: Banks are increasingly following Tennessee Williams’ advice for survival: “We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.”
And in the adage, ‘timing is everything,’ contain some bits of truth.
A capture I found is these words from Emily Dickinson:
Departed to the judgment,
A mighty afternoon;
Great clouds like ushers leaning,
Creation looking on.The flesh surrendered, cancelled,
The bodiless begun;
Two worlds, like audiences, disperse
And leave the soul alone.
Every man/woman to their own tent and be ready.