Down is really Up

Filed Under Energy, Environment, Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I put $20 worth of gas in my Jeep, this time at $4.29 a gallon for regular, a shocking $.15 drop in price in just more than two weeks, the last time I put fuel in the old Comanche (I don’t get out much).

All this in time for the infamous Memorial Day Weekend in which many, many US peoples take to the road, although this year the traveling might be light — although gas prices are now lower, they’re still $1.05 more than at this same time last year and the Energy Information Administration reports prices will be hiked 40 percent more during the upcoming summer.

Although the price at the pump appears to be decreasing, the price of crude oil is moving back upward again.
According to liveoilprices this morning: Brent crude oil futures for July 2011 delivery ended the week’s trading session at $114.98 a barrel on the ICE Futures Exchange yesterday evening, $2.55 higher than last week’s closing price of $112.43 a barrel.
Adding this caveat that those oil prices could be too conservative.
And WTI: US Light crude oil futures for July 2011 delivery ended the week’s trading session at $100.70 a barrel on the NYMEX, $0.88 higher than last week’s closing price of $99.82.

Crazy, and, crazy.

Although the portion of my monthly income going to Jeep fuel is way-dinky, that’s not the case for regular, ordinary peoples, who do have a life out there — some folks get out more, or have a fairly-decent commute to work (I live just a mile from my store) and these pump prices bite down hard on them.
And if they have kids at home, the situation has got to be even worse (mine are all grown, and for most of the time, are pretty self sufficient).
US family budgets are taking a big pop — nearly one dollar out of every $10 in a typical household budget now goes toward vehicle fuel, 40 percent higher than normal.

Households spent an average of $369 on gas last month.
In April 2009, they spent just $201.
Families now spend more filling up than they spend on cars, clothes or recreation.
Last year, they spent less on gasoline than each of those things.
…
“These increases are not something consumers can shrug off,” says James Hamilton, an economics professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies gas prices. “It’s a key part of the family budget.”
…
The median household income in the U.S. before taxes is just below $50,000, or about $4,150 per month. The $369 that families spent last month on gas represented 8.9 percent of monthly household income, according to an analysis by Fred Rozell, retail pricing director at Oil Price Information Service.
Since 2000, the average is about 5.7 percent.
For the year, the figure is 7.9 percent.
Only twice before have Americans spent this much of their income on gas.
In 1981, after the last oil crisis, Americans spent 8.8 percent of household income on gas.
In July 2008, when oil price spiked, they spent 10.2 percent.
Average hourly earnings, meanwhile, have risen just 1.9 percent in the past year.
That’s only just enough to keep up with inflation.

Not getting ahead, but just staying even.
Despite those domesticated woes, fuel for the machinery of war is beyond horror, on all counts.
In order to get precious $400-a-gallon fuel into Afghanistan, one mega-dangerous route is via Pakistan.
Today, another attack on a NATO tanker there has resulted in at least 15 dead, mostly civilians, one a nine-year old kid.
From AFP: “Suddenly the fire erupted again and at least 15 people including five young boys who had been collecting oil in their buckets were burnt to death,” he said…They were collecting petrol to be sold later in the open market where one litre fetches around 100 rupees (about 1.2 dollars), he said.
The price of fuel is relative.

‘Cold, Cruel and Irresponsible’

Filed Under Everything, Media, Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment

Never in US political memory has the discourse become so full of one-sided hate and animosity toward the unwashed masses, i.e., the poor and other meaningless pieces of considered flotsam supposedly throttling the rich from getting even-more richer — Republicans are ranting against humanity.

And the shocker is that these GOP claptrap assholes appear not to give a shit anymore and will say the first mean-spirited thing that apparently comes to mind, like that Kansas state representative who claimed illegal immigrants should be hunted down and shot like feral hogs.
(Illustration found here).

One thing, however, is that these guys are monstrously naive and stupid about the general public — people will take this shit for so long — like that Kansas asshole, for instance.
Democratic leaders in the Kansas state legislature reported Friday they will offer up a resolution condemning Virgil Peck (the asshole): “Although Rep. Peck has the right to free speech … that right does not include the advocacy of gratuitous, deadly violence against other human beings,” the resolution states.
Peck squeezed his shriveled nut-sack a bit and blubbered out what was put forth as an apology, that he’d made “an inappropriate comment,” but the offering didn’t impress anyone and didn’t “display the remorse that is necessary to remedy this wrong.”
The unrepentant Peck ain’t the only turd coming under the stern, hot light of reality.

David A. (“visit to the woodshed“) Stockman in Sunday’s New York Times:

Trapped between the religion of low taxes and the reality of huge deficits, the Ryan plan appears to be an attack on the poor in order to coddle the rich.
To the Democrats’ invitation to class war, the Republicans have seemingly sent an R.S.V.P.

The backlash is flaring up amongst common folk against GOP mean-spirited political bullshit in nasty, town hall confrontations, and even some Republicans, like Stockman, pointing out just how “cold, cruel and irresponsible” are these people with their antics.

The above utterance of ‘cold, cruel‘ came from the lips of GOP flak Alex Castellanos,  who let it slip out Sunday morning on NBC‘s Meet The Press, and although he tried to back-peddle a bit, the words betrayed truly the vicious, uncaring sentiment seeping from the right onto everything they do. (h/t and good look at Castellanos’ TV appearance at Crooks and Liars).
In fact, the ‘cold, cruel‘ attitude has so scared GOPers, especially those in the US House who voted on that Paul Ryan bullshit earlier this month (which included a sweeping overhaul of Medicare): House leaders have scheduled a Tuesday conference call in which members are expected in part to discuss strategies for defending the vote they took this month on a budget that would transform the popular entitlement program as part of a plan to cut trillions in federal spending.
Anything helpful to the poor is government waste.

Prime fat-ass example: New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christy’s attempt to slash $820 million in state aid to schools was found last month by a state court to be in direct contradiction to state law because the cuts were slanted too heavily towards poor districts.
Christy, however, claimed Friday he just may defy the court order.
From newjersey.com:

Paul Tractenberg, a Rutgers law professor and founder of the Education Law Center, which filed the lawsuit challenging the cuts, said Christie’s comments go far beyond the usual grumbling about the court’s decisions.
“I don’t think governors have ever said flat-out they were thinking of ignoring a court order,” he said. “We’d be in uncharted terrain … We essentially convert government into a dictatorship.”

And in Tennessee on Friday, legislation prohibiting teachers from discussing homosexuality, even saying the word “gay” in kindergarten through eighth-grade classrooms was approved by a key committee in the state senate.
Via Raw Story:

The bill’s sponsor, Republican State Senator Sen. Stacey Campfield, said he was not homophobic, but the progressive blog ThinkProgress recently dug up a 2009 radio interview in which he compares homosexuality to bestiality.
“You teach about the Civil Rights Movement,” the state senator was asked. “Why not teach about the Gay Rights Movement?”
“Because they’re different types of movements,” Campfield responded. “If I want to talk about the bestiality movement, do you think we should be teaching that?”

Is the current GOP the party of Eisenhower, or even freakin’ Dick Nixon?
Hard to say, but they are indeed cold, cruel and irresponsible.

A Looking Glass: ‘Hanging By Your Fingernails’

Filed Under Madness, Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment

As the so-called ‘no-fly’ war in Libya enters it fourth day, the BBC reports early this morning an US two-seater F-15 jet has crashed, and though the story doesn’t say if the aircraft was brought down by hostile or not, one pilot is okay, while the second is being sought.

The Libyan intervention shatters that home-grown-alone circle created by Tunisia’s “jasmine revolution”, a movement which has rolled across the Arab world the last two months — and one wonders why Libya, and not Yemen, or Bahrain?

From The Automatic Earth:

And then of course there’s this: Most of Libya’s oil, some 80%, is in the east near Benghazi.
It’s some of the lightest, sweetest, easiest to extract crude oil left on the planet.
Its marginal extraction could be as low as $1 per barrel.
Libya also has about 41 billion barrels in oil reserves, the US has 21 billion barrels.
Libya has an estimated 1,500 billion M^3 of natural gas as well according to the National Oil Company.
This war, like any other, is first and foremost one of resources.
Getting rid of Gaddafi is a mere bonus, but the main idea for now might well be to split the country in two.
“We” are only interested in the eastern part.

And it literally boils down to that nasty deep-ground black crap.

Meanwhile, nearly a world away, the Japanese are in still the deep shits, and still the old line of a situation worse than earlier reports.
According to CNN: Reactors 1 and 2 at Japan’s earthquake-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered more damage from seawater than originally believed, the plant’s owner said Tuesday.
Radiation has bubbled up in local Pacific seawater, has tainted food (which WHO reports as ‘serious’), and now the wind has shifted landward, in the direction of Tokyo, a village of 35 million people.
How would you evacuate that many people?
And even if mega-preparedness is part of the Tokyo agenda?
From AFP via Raw Story:

All the experts interviewed agreed that cultural factors weigh heavily and Japan — especially Tokyo — is as well prepared for disaster as any society can be.
“If this had happened in a megacity with less preparedness capacity, the toll would have been in the millions, at least the hundreds of thousands,” said Valdes, citing Mumbai and Dhaka as being particularly vulnerable.
“In this sense, the scenario in Japan is positive despite all these horrible impacts.”
Since World War II, government at all levels in Japan has developed what is now a deeply-rooted, three-layered strategy for dealing with calamities.
They call it ‘self help, mutual assistance, public assistance’ — people are trained since kindergarten,” Valdes said.
But Birkmann said the unprecedented amalgam of disasters may have overloaded even Japan’s capacity to cope.
“The cascading event of an earthquake, a tsunami and … major difficulties with critical infrastructures might have reached a tipping point that one could not be prepared for,” he said.

Los Angles, in a simulated radiation emergency test last July, failed: “We were quickly overwhelmed by the scenario,” Ipsen said (Chris Ipsen, head of the Emergency Management Department for the city of Los Angeles). “There are a lot of things we need to tweak.”

Meanwhile, back to the Japanese reactors, and what to do?
Also from same above post at Automatic Earth:

Eminent US physicist Michio Kaku says that the Japanese government may call the situation at Fukushima stable, but that it would be “stable in the sense of hanging by your fingernails” (which I in turn would suggest is a perfectly apt description of our entire global economy and various societies).
Kaku indicates that the only “solution” he sees for Fukushima is for the Japanese army to start dropping massive amounts of sand, boric acid and concrete on the Fukushima 1 reactors.
Two of which are presently producing clouds of smoke, the origin of which is unknown to either TEPCO or Tokyo.
In other words, “stable” is hardly the first term that comes to mind.
And Japan may well be heeding Kaku’s words; just not admitting to it yet.

Just in case: If sirens sound, bend quickly over and kiss…