The Great American Dream has always been just that, a dream — a vapor made solid and real by fantasy fueled by a desire to be well-to-do, or rich.
Historian James Truslow Adams is credited with coining and embellishing the phrase, ‘American Dream,’ and it’s been a most-vital part of US folklore — it drives everybody to go out and accomplish!
Adams defined the term as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement…It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
He wrote that tripe in the mid 1930s, when dreamy-naivety was in full bloom in the face of the daily grind of the Great Depression — nowadays we all know Adams was full of shit.

Mitt Romney knows as he blubbered out the GOP reality on NBC‘s Today show yesterday:

You know, I think it’s about envy.
I think it’s about class warfare.
When you have a President encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 per cent versus one percent — and those people who have been most successful will be in the one per cent — you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.
The American people, I believe in the final analysis, will reject it.

(Matt Lauer ‘Today’ host  — “Yeah but envy? Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as “envy,” though?”)

I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like.
But the president has made it part of his campaign rally.
Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street.
It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail.

Yeah, that’s it, we’re all envious of the fat cats and we really don’t have ‘quiet rooms.’

And according to a new Pew Research poll, also out yesterday, that there is a growing conflict between rich and poor in the US — 66 percent say there’s “very strong,” or “strong,” strife between these two classes based on cash.

Not only have perceptions of class conflict grown more prevalent; so, too, has the belief that these disputes are intense.
According to the new survey, three-in-ten Americans (30 percent) say there are “very strong conflicts” between poor people and rich people.
That is double the proportion that offered a similar view in July 2009 and the largest share expressing this opinion since the question was first asked in 1987.

This whole business didn’t happen overnight, either.
Via Raw Story: A study released in November 2011 found that the rich and poor have grown more isolated from each other over the past 40 years. In 2007, nearly a third of American families — 31 percent — lived in either an affluent neighborhood or a mainly low-income one, up from just 15 percent in 1970, according to the study conducted by Stanford University, and released in partnership with the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University.

The gap is not just a store for the semi-rich, but a wide divide.
And that hatful of GOP shitheads running for president will keep the divide dividing.
According to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice (via Think Progress): The share of tax cuts going to the richest one percent of Americans under these plans would range from over a third to almost half. The average tax cuts received by the richest one percent would be up to 270 times as large as the average tax cut received by middle-income Americans.

Patrons of the liquor store where I work (and manage) are mostly way-down on the 99 percent side of the economic poll, pulling out coins to pay for smokes and beer.
In the last few months, there appears an increase in a payment oddity — people are using both credit/debit card and cash to pay for shit on the same transaction, piling up change and then using an ATM card to cover the remainder.
Money at the bottom rungs ain’t easy to come in, but way-easy to go out.
And the whole shebang is getting stressful.
From the LA Times:

On a scale of 1 to 10, residents of eight U.S. metropolitan areas told psychologists they rated their level of stress as 5.2, according to survey results released Wednesday.
That may not sound so terrible — except that these Americans also said their ideal level of stress would be around 3.6.
“Have we reached the point of becoming a chronically stressed nation?” said Michael Ritz, a clinical psychologist in Irvine who serves as the public education coordinator for the California Psychological Assn.
“The data might suggest we’ve reached that point where it just [becomes] a fact of life.”

Or as they say: The ‘new normal.”

(Illustration found here).

“It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it” — George Carlin.

Way-rich trash, however: Reportedly, Romney spent $17 million since January a year ago to try and win the White House — no matter how one looks at it, that’s a shitload of cash.
And although the 99 percent work their asses off, the 1 percent has all the cash, and has it here in the good-old-most-equal US of A.

(Illustration found here).

Wealth is way unequal and US peoples, even the lowest of the low, are rich compared to the rest of the spinning globe.
From CNNMoney:

So where do these lucky rich people live? As of 2005 — the most recent data available — about half of them, or 29 million lived in the United States, according to calculations by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic in his book “The Haves and the Have-Nots”.
…
“It doesn’t seem right to define as middle class, people who would be on food stamps in the United States,” Milanovic said.
…
The true global middle class, falls far short of owning a home, having a car in a driveway, saving for retirement and sending their kids to college.
In fact, people at the world’s true middle — as defined by median income — live on just $1,225 a year. (And, yes, Milanovic’s numbers are adjusted to account for different costs of living across the globe.)
In the grand scheme of things, even the poorest 5 percent of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world.

In the US, though, poverty is way-more closer to home: A record 15.4 million suburban residents lived below the poverty line last year, up 11.5% from the year before, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of Census data released Thursday. That’s one-third of the nation’s poor.
And the problem will never go away due to the nasty fact the US is one of the most-unequal countries in the world — the rich play at politics: Income inequality is more severe in the U.S. than it is in nearly all of West Africa, North Africa, Europe, and Asia. We’re on par with some of the world’s most troubled countries, and not far from the perpetual conflict zones of Latin American and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our income gap is also getting worse, having widened both in absolute and relative terms since the 1980s. It’s not a problem that the “Buffett rule” would solve on its own, but at least the U.S. political system is starting to acknowledge how serious things have become.

And the rich assholes elected to national office, what do they do?
Make life harder for the rest of us dumb-asses: Due to Congressional inaction during last month’s tax deliberations, the new year ushered in a tax increase to public transit riders. Currently, commuters who use public transit, commuter buses and van pools may see their annual commuting costs increase by more than $550 based on a bias in the tax code that benefits driving over taking public transit. In addition, the failure to extend the benefit has resulted in a tax liability increase for companies offering the benefit.

And I’d like to close with this from the comments section of the semi-daily, must-read Drumbeat (@ The Oil Drum) that eloquently displays just how f*cked we all are:

The human brain, encased in bone and thoroughly nourished with blood, is the interpreter between itself and all else.
Images and sensations go in and slowly an analog world is built, and possibly with some effort an intellect is born.
The human system cannot truly be separated from its environment from where it derives its building blocks and returns its waste.
It is a product of the environment, the flow of energy and matter.
We have not evolved a tongue that can taste the cesium, strontium, lead and mercury in the air and water, nor olfaction that can sense the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
Instead we have designed and created technological sensors that can extend our perception.
Unfortunately the results these sensors display are not wired into our limbic systems so as to elicit a panicked response.
We have alarming data, but the alarms are not sounding, we do nothing, because we have no motivation.
There is no pain, no primate fear-invoking stimuli like growling predators, snakes, spiders, and so on.
So we sit and slowly euthanize ourselves and our children in front of our faux reality televisions.
As long as there are no shocks that arouse our evolved fear circuits our civilization will slip quietly into a coma, helped along by little dribbles of propagandist’s morphine, just enough to blunt any perception of our near terminal situation.

So whatever happens in South Carolina won’t make much difference.

“There is less clouds in the sky than before. Too much sun, which isn’t good for the plants, a lot less rain. How do you expect the plants to grow?”
…
Hundreds of thousands of people depend on the tea sector, but if climate change is responsible for the hotter weather being experienced now, it is just a matter of time before these plantations perhaps disappear altogether.

(Illustration found here).

Although Bangladesh tea picture is rosy right now — The average price of Bangladeshi tea rose 2.1 percent to 159.28 taka ($1.96) per kg from the previous sale, said an official at the National Brokers Limited, the country’s largest tea broking firm — the future isn’t so bright.

A warming world will make dust of leaves and plants.
Via Climate Progress:

The results of studies that try to quantify the effects of climate change on biodiversity loss — which include damage to the micro scale level of subspecies and genetic variation — are perhaps most shocking.
When, however, you focus on the response to climate change at the macro level, the ecosystem level, you get a better understanding of what is one of the major drivers of that biodiversity loss: forced migrations.
And even here, the numbers may be larger than one would expect, as a new assessment by NASA and Caltech published in the journal Climatic Change shows that by 2100 some 40 percent of “major ecological community types” — that is biomes like forest, grassland, tundra — will have switched to a different such state.
According to the same study most of the land on Earth that is not currently desert or under an icecap will undergo at least a 30 percent change in vegetation cover.
Based on IPCC temperature projections for 2100 [which are probably on the conservative side] of 2-4 degrees Celsius warming scientists of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology ran special computer models to calculate the most probable ecosystem responses across the planet.
This average temperature rise is of similar magnitude to the warming that occurred between the Last Glacial Maximum and the onset of the (milder) Holocene — with the big exception that the current warming is happening about 100 times faster — and for ecology that makes a huge difference, the authors stress.

Acceleration of the process is the key.
And not only has the world kicked the climate change can-of-worms on down the dusty road (via 2020), but has failed to even fund the ‘normal’ disasters, making the planet “dangerously unprepared” for future crises.

Earlier this month, the American Geophysical Union at its annual meeting in San Francisco painted a cruel picture of the can of worms.
The problem is bigger, faster and shitty-er.
Via Climate Science:

Four years ago scientists thought the Arctic would not be ice-free in summer before 2100.
Two years ago, the estimate was 2060.
This year, scientists say the ice could be gone by 2030, possibly even 2020.
As Arctic ice melts and temperatures rise, vast stores of methane frozen under the Arctic Ocean are starting to thaw and vent to the atmosphere.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 20 to 56 times as powerful as carbon dioxide.
Researchers had seen small plumes.
But a recent survey showed, to their shock, large areas of the ocean pocked with continuous, powerful plumes stretching a half-mile or more across.
In the Andes, conventional wisdom held that residents had 20 years to 40 years to find a replacement for the dwindling glaciers serving as key dry-season water reservoirs.
That time is up, reported Michel Baraër, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal.
The era of “peak water” is past, he said, and hundreds of thousands of people living downstream face an immediate future of diminished and more variable flows.
…
“The planet is going through incredible change,” said Jonathan Foley, director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.
“Through rapid uses of the environment, we are pushing our planet in extreme ways.”
…
“We are now on a very different planet than anyone has ever seen before,” Foley said.
“All of our predictions are going to be wrong.
We are going to be very, very surprised.”

Of course, not everybody — some can see the future in the tea leaves.

In one of the most ironic and laughingly insulting remarks of the political year came yesterday from US Speaker of the House John ‘The Boner’ Boehner: “We’re here. We’re ready to work,” Boehner told reporters on Capitol Hill. “We can resolve these differences … and give the American people a real Christmas present.”
A Boner aide chirped that the GOPers were elected to change the way Washington does business, but instead should have said, ‘giving the business.’

The GOP has been stalling a tax cut for 160 million Americans, as well as extended emergency federal unemployment benefits and the so-called “doc fix,” a delay in significant scheduled pay cuts to Medicare physicians, both of which expire at the end of this month.
Republicans cower the rich, and lie about the poor.

And those rich have their panties in a bind.
In an eye-opening post at Bloomberg, some shit from the rich (h/t The Big Picture):

If successful businesspeople don’t go public to share their stories and talk about their troubles, “they deserve what they’re going to get,” said Marcus, 82, a founding member of Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit that develops talking points and op-ed pieces aimed at “shaping the national agenda,” according to the group’s website.
He said he isn’t worried that speaking out might make him a target of protesters.
“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”
…
The top 1 percent of taxpayers in the U.S. made at least $343,927 in 2009, the last year data is available, according to the Internal Revenue Service.
While average household income increased 62 percent from 1979 through 2007, the top 1 percent’s more than tripled, an October Congressional Budget Office report showed.
As a result, the U.S. had greater income inequality in 2007 than China or Iran, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook.
…
Two out of three Americans support raising taxes on households with incomes of at least $250,000, according to a Bloomberg-Washington Post national poll conducted in October.
…
Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc. (PAYX) and a former New York gubernatorial candidate, said in an interview this month that while there are examples of excess, it’s “ridiculous” to blame everyone who is rich.
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.
Ken Langone, 76, another Home Depot co-founder and chairman of the NYU Langone Medical Center, said he isn’t embarrassed by his success.
“I am a fat cat, I’m not ashamed,” he said last week in a telephone interview from a dressing room in his Upper East Side home.
“If you mean by fat cat that I’ve succeeded, yeah, then I’m a fat cat.
I stand guilty of being a fat cat.”
…
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up.
At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”

And one wonders why the US is in such shit-shape.

Despite the surge, pump prices up here in northern California remained the same — I put $20 worth of gas in the Jeep on Saturday with the cost at $3.89 a gallon for regular, the same as the last time, though, that’s still above the state average of $3.61 a gallon, 27 cents a gallon higher than the 2007 record and 36.9 cents higher than last year.
Why the 20 cents difference, I don’t know.
The national average this past weekend was $3.29, still 31.8 cents higher than last year.

(Illustration found here).

A positive report on the growing confidence among U.S. consumers — at a six-month high — is leading an increase in crude oil prices, which will eventually fuel an increase at the pump.
Oil prices did have a slight hike — from liveoilprices: ICE Brent crude oil futures for January 2012 delivery ended the week’s trading session at $108.88 a barrel on the ICE Futures Exchange, or 0.7 percent higher on the day. Brent oil futures closed last week’s session (Friday 2nd December) at $110.10 a barrel.
And WTI: US Light crude oil futures for January 2012 delivery was trading at $98.66 a barrel, 08.40 GMT this morning in electronic trading on the NYMEX.
And so it goes.

Despite US peoples driving less, down 1 percent since February, oil is up, creating a kind of contradictory situation, according to the Wall Street Journal, of dropping demand vs rising oil prices.

U.S. gasoline demand has dropped to a 12-year low, yet consumers are paying the highest-ever prices for this time of year.
The reason: Rising global oil prices are in the driver’s seat.
The paradox isn’t limited to the gasoline pump. Home-heating oil users will see record-high bills, despite using less fuel, according to an Energy Information Administration forecast.
Diesel fuel prices are up 25 percent from a year earlier at record November levels, fueled by a powerful one-two punch of surging demand both in the U.S. and abroad, the EIA and analysts added.
…
The stuttering U.S. economic recovery, high unemployment and lofty gasoline prices all are cutting deeply into demand for the most widely used petroleum product in the world’s biggest oil consumer.
Gasoline demand in the last four weeks is down 500,000 barrels a day from a year earlier, EIA data show.
…
All the factors seem to be tilted toward those who are selling oil products.
“Everything we’re talking about is good for the oil companies, but not so good for the consumers,” said analyst Dominick Chirichella at the Energy Management Institute.

That ugly 1 percent again.

And just five, short years ago — CNN in November 2006: The Nov. 17 Lundberg Survey of about 5,000 gas stations across the country showed the average price of a gallon of self-serve regular gas was $2.23, a penny lower than the same week a year ago, publisher Trilby Lundberg told CNN. Gas prices had fallen 84 cents in the previous 12 weeks, Lundberg said. The previous survey, taken on Nov. 3, showed the average at $2.18, she said.

Back then, the future was so freakin’ bright, we all had to wear shades — since then…

(Illustration found here).

Have a more-than-mundane Monday.

Major global banks are exacerbating the fight against global warming by supplying power utilities and mining firms with ample funds to build coal-fired plants, according to a report released by non-governmental groups at the climate talks in Durban.
…
Among the top 20 banks listed in the report are institutions from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Switzerland, China, Italy and Japan.
JP Morgan Chase, Citibank and Bank of America are the top three banks on the list.

(Illustration found here).

Although the report urged banks to shift portfolios from coal-fired plants to renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, the chances, of course, of this happening is near-laughable if the whole scheme doesn’t first make you cry out your heart.
Tristen Taylor from the environmental group Earthlife: “Between 2005 and 2010, coal financing almost doubled. If we don’t take banks to task now, coal financing will continue to grow.”
What does that mean, ‘take banks to task?’
Ha…Ha…Ha…Ha.

And just to keep this right, the World Energy Outlook 2011 report warned there’s still time to clean up the earth’s toxic shit, but that precious window of opportunity is really, really small: “Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”
A window that closing fast — but money in hand now is way-better.

From the US EPA:

When coal is burned, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury compounds are released.
For that reason, coal-fired boilers are required to have control devices to reduce the amount of emissions that are released.
The average emission rates in the United States from coal-fired generation are: 2,249 lbs/MWh of carbon dioxide, 13 lbs/MWh of sulfur dioxide, and 6 lbs/MWh of nitrogen oxides.
Mining, cleaning, and transporting coal to the power plant generate additional emissions.
For example, methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is trapped in the coal, is often vented during these processes to increase safety.

And the problem is that coal/oil plants are in reality inefficient.
In fact, coal is actually harming the US economy, according to an American Economic Review report from last September, titled, “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy.”
Via Think Progress:

Solid waste combustion, sewage treatment, stone quarrying, marinas, and oil and coal-fired power plants have air pollution damages larger than their value added. . .
Coal plants are responsible for more than one-fourth of GED [gross external damages] from the entire US economy.
The damages attributed to this industry are larger than the combined GED due to the three next most polluting industries: crop production, $15 billion/year, livestock production, $15 billion/year, and construction of roadways and bridges, $13 billion/ year.
“Five industries stand out as large air polluters,” the authors write, “coal-fired power plants, crop production, truck transportation, livestock production, and highway-street-bridge construction.”
…
“The findings show that, contrary to current political mythology, coal is underregulated,” Legal Planet’s Dan Farber comments.
“On average, the harm produced by burning the coal is over twice as high as the market price of the electricity.
In other words, some of the electricity production would flunk a cost-benefit analysis.
This means that we’re either not using enough pollution controls or we’re just overusing coal as a fuel.”

In the nasty words of giant asshole Don Blankenship, head of Massey Energy: But I also know — I also know Washington and state politicians have no idea how to improve miner safety. The very idea that they care more about coal miner safety than we do is as silly as global warming.

And also remember that banksters are so, so full of lying shit, using honeyed words to smoke up the room: “Interestingly, almost all of the top 20 climate-killer banks in our ranking have made far-reaching statements regarding their commitment to combatting climate change,” said Yann Louvel of BankTrack, an NGO that monitors the activities of banks.

They’re banksters, that’s what they do, same as Terminators.

A woman shot pepper spray to keep shoppers from merchandise she wanted during a Black Friday sale, and 20 people suffered minor injuries, authorities said.
…
Fire department spokesman Shawn Lenske said the injuries to least 10 of them were due to “rapid crowd movement.”

And the pepper-sprayer got away — police were still looking for the woman.

(Illustration found here).

Despite all the pushing, shoving and pepper spraying, The National Retail Federation, an industry trade group, forecast a 2.8 percent increase in sales this holiday season, though, down from the 5.2 percent last year.
The big sales, however, just ain’t there: In a research note on Tuesday, Wells Fargo economist Mark Vitner said: “Bargain hunters may have a tougher time finding those markdowns this year, as retailers are keeping a sharper eye on profit margins.”
So that pepper spray really won’t do you any real good.

Reportedly, shoppers will be cautious today, and onto into (shudder!) Christmas.
According to Accenture, a global consulting firm, 72 percent of US consumers plan “careful” or “controlled” holiday spending with 88 percent spending the same or less than last year, but that flies in the face of a supposedly 19 percent of customers this year compared with 14 percent last year, who plan to spend $750 or more.

One idea for this ugly, Black Friday, is don’t spend.
Lindsay Curren, editor at Transition Voice, recommends doing a whole lot of different shit today, but also to celebrate Buy Nothing Day:

But the best part of Buy Nothing Day may not even be the sticking it to The Man part.
It really may be the profound relief of taking the day off from any and all forms of consumer interaction. If I go out, it’s for a walk.
I don’t drive, because that “spends” gas.
I don’t see movies, because even though we have a locally owned cinema three blocks from my house, it’s just the day I choose not to go.
Instead we keep our lights low and kick back for good reads, family games, a little outdoors time, and yummy Thanksgiving leftovers.
Buy Nothing Day has turned into my Thanksgiving bonus day — no cooking, just hanging and relaxing.
I believe if you try it, you’ll like it.
For me, the best path to success is planning to use Buy Nothing Day for ease and reflection.
Make sure you’ve got enough food on hand, some good stuff to read, and ideas for filling those glorious unstructured hours.
Talking to your family members can be so cool!
Or try throwing an old fashioned family theatrical.
Play charades!
Make cards!
Look at old family photos.
I don’t think you’ll miss the low, low prices at all.
And it’s just a small step from there to looking at what else you can give up in this frenzied culture to buy yourself some peace of mind and time instead.

If you do go shopping today, don’t forget the anti-pepper-spray solvent.

Hence, the supposedly GOP presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich on OWS:

“Now, that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, ‘Go get a job right after you take a bath.’”

(Illustration found here).

This the guy sharp-tongued Rachel Maddow most-rightly called a “bottom feeding” scammer, full of “hypocrisy moment(s)” and who’s full-time profession has been selling access to himself as someone who is influential because of his time as a public servant. He has been marketing the Speakership of the House for his own private financial gain to anybody who will pay him.” (h/t Raw Story)
Maddow is cool, but for me only in short doses, little bursts of energized, well put-together tid-bits, which after awhile rags the nerves somehow — she does, however, a good job tearing a gut-sized, new asshole on Newt.
And I agree — but the bigger shit-pile notion is the strange state of the US of A when someone as obviously detestable as Newt could be anywhere near where he’s at in the shape of things.

Newt is a bluster-master of idiot bullshit.
On Friday, at a talk at Harvard, Newt said child law labor laws are “stupid,” and “entrap” youngsters into poverty.
Via Politico: Newt also revealed how to save failing schools — fire the janitors, hire the local students and let them get paid for upkeep.
And the bottom-line to all this buffoonery — “…give people a chance to rise very rapidly.”
Man lives not by bullshit alone and hot air rises.

We just may be in the midst of the biggest bubble in history.
The complacency that the accumulation of all the ills of the many and massive bubbles that have ripped through the global economy in the past twenty years can simply be resolved by quantitative easing, monetization, printing money or whatever you wish to call it is simply stunning to us.

When that guy at Penn State claims, “I shouldn’t have showered with those kids..,” and he’s even given a space of time to utter such shit, then one big reality bubble has exploded.

(Illustration found here).

And when somebody as freakin’ dumb and bombastic like Newt Gingrich can soar in the polls, then a twisted, political-bullshit bubble has burst upon the face of the multitude: …Gingrich has seen his support jump 14 points since October.
Newt?
GOPers must surely hate Mitt Romney with a great, great passion.

Of course, Newt’s short-lived rise is directly related to Herman Cain’s own public-reality bubble blowing up around his ass — yesterday he had a couple of problems, one was the former boyfriend of Sharon Bialek, who confirmed her story from 1997, that indeed Cain acted like an asshole: “She said that something had happened and that Mr. Cain had touched her in an inappropriate manner.”
And the other problem is the problem he’s had all along — he’s a big mouth, nit-twit.
He revealed it in in a bad, bad interview in Milwaukee, but displayed an even-more immature foreign-policy approach in a right-wing radio broadcast this past weekend that just in case he don’t make president, secretary of defense would work just fine: “That could be the one that I could be excited about,” Cain told conservative radio host Michael Savage, adding “to help the generals and commanders on the ground to get what they need, to do what they do best, and that is kick the you-know-what out of everyone in the world.”
WTF!

And one big bubble in the process of being pricked this morning is the OWS movement’s ground-zero plot of ground, Zuccotti Park in New York, being cleared by police.
From the New York Times:

One protester at Foley Square, Nate Barchus, 23, said the eviction was likely to galvanize supporters, particularly because a series of gatherings had already been planned for Thursday, the protest’s two-month anniversary.
“This,” he said, referring to the early-morning sweep, “reminds everyone who was occupying exactly why they were occupying.”

And NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg blubbered the biggest, and most ironic, bullshit-filled, lie-bubble so far this particular day: “Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags,” he said. “Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.”
Seventy people have reportedly been arrested so far, but it’s still early.

And on the bubble of a shifting US, a piece by Corey Robin found at Aljazeera English, and how the OWS movement carries a way-heavy reasoning:

In the past few months, I’ve had a fair number of arguments with both libertarians and anarchists about the state.
What neither crew seems to get is what our most acute observers have long understood about the American scene: however much coercive power the state wields — and it’s considerable — it’s not, in the end, where and how many, perhaps even most, people in the United States have historically experienced the raw end of politically repressive power.
Even force and violence: just think of black slaves and their descendants, confronting slaveholders, overseers, slave catchers, Klansmen, chain gangs, and more; or women confronting the violence of their husbands and supervisors; or workers confronting the Pinkertons and other private armies of capital.

A bubble ain’t reality.

The oil scene, however, is a slow news generator right now, buried among some horror stories, like the ugly, disgusting ugly shit at Penn State (hence, the double-ugly), or the coyote-female-ugly from Herman Cain, or the blockhead, dumb-ass utterings of Rick Perry, or the clashing OWS crusade, or the fiscal escapades of the Europeans, or….you get the not-so-pretty picture.

Unlike climate change, the oil/energy situation is a slow-coming catastrophe — disaster seemingly right now measured in pennies.

(Illustration found here).

According to all indications, oil prices are starting another climb upward, even as the Libyans start cranking back up its own oil production, supposedly to be back to pre-revolt levels within months.
From liveoilprices: Brent oil prices closed Friday’s trading session at $114 a barrel as the spread between Brent and US WTI oil moves back to around $15 as US oil supply data pushes the American oil contract higher, back near the $100 mark.
And WTI is following suit: WTI oil futures end the week near $99 a barrel which is a 4 month high as traders cheered positive sentiment data out of America and the US dollar was trading lower which typically fuels commodity prices to rise.
And if the shit gets deeper in the Middle East — Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities, or something similarly dumb — oil could go whacky: “It is the $200 a barrel scenario.” says Philip Verleger, an independent consultant who correctly predicted in August 1990 the price rally after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Touchy, touchy.

The pump prices in northern California are still more than a dime more than down south, and is still higher than the US as a whole, but some folks are worse than others.
I guess it’s all in how it’s handled locally.
Despite all the obvious indicators, no one is shouting out the coming calamity — no one playing playing the role of a Paul Revere in proclaiming the quick-coming-end of cheap oil.
Only business as usual.

The LA Times on Saturday:

The Energy Department says surging diesel prices have “provided incentives to refiners to shift some production away from gasoline.”
The result is more expensive gasoline.
The average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline in the U.S. on Friday was $3.438, up 57.4 cents from a year earlier, according to the AAA Fuel Gauge Report.
That’s 32.7 cents a gallon higher than the old record for this time of year, set in 2007.
The average cost in California on Friday was $3.839 a gallon.
That’s 70.4 cents a gallon higher than a year earlier and 47.3 cents a gallon higher than the record for fall reached in 2007.

And in October, US peoples spent 8 percent of their household incomes, or an estimated $332.40, at the gasoline pump — and in a time when traditionally pump prices go down, the numbers are spiraling up.
The experts claim next year will be a female dog: “We are at the highest fuel prices ever for this time of year, even though they have dropped a bit in recent weeks,” said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. “I think we will see prices in 2012 that will break … records.”
Indeed.

What do we do? Drill, baby, drill?
President Obama continues his wishy-washy, environmental bullshit by announcing last week a proposal to open some Arctic areas to oil drilling, and such in the words of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, “…we must proceed cautiously, safely and based on the best science available.”
Incredible amount of bullshit — need some high waders.

The LA Times had a most-excellent opinion/commentary last week on the subject, titled, “New oil leases in the Arctic: How dumb is that?”
Money bit:

It’s a discouraging time to be a friend of the Earth.
The Obama administration, seemingly, is looking for some way, any way, to approve another environmental nightmare, the Keystone XL pipeline.
And last week came this cheery bit of news:

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped last year by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
Really now, is this the best we can do?
In October, the world’s population hit 7 billion; most of those people are busy doing their part in heating up the planet by burning fossil fuels — and our response is to go looking for more of the stuff?
If the world were named Michael Jackson, and fossil fuels were called propofol, someone would be going to jail about now.
Forget stopping the bullet train.
We need to stop the doomsday train.
A few years back, I attended an engineering day at Stanford. One presentation on oil and the environment featured this quote, from a Saudi oil minister: “The Stone Age didn’t end because of a lack of stones.”
There’s only one way to save those polar bears — and ourselves — and it’s not by drilling for more oil.

Don’t the people in charge know there’s no hanging onto oil?
Not only is the shit finite, but it’s bringing an end to civilization as we know it.

In a timely time, today Dr. Richard Muller, the climate-change “skeptic” who changed his tune, will speak at a US Congressional climate briefing: “Undeniable Data: The Latest Research on Global Temperature and Climate Science” — heffy title that, kind of like the ‘undeniable‘ part.
Should be interesting.