The Ass in the Hole — the Lottery
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, Terror | Leave a Comment
In a world pretty-much gone crazy, the most-stupid is the lottery and even worse is the dumb-ass people who play it.
Tonight, the so-called Mega Millions has more than $540 million up for the demented to slobber over, spend money they don’t have for a fortune they’ll never get, and even giggle insanely as they lose.
A goodly portion of those players are pure assholes.
And a good portion are delusional, thin-skinned, self-centered assholes.
The lottery is the biggest scam in public view right now — maybe even beyond the GOP presidential race.
(Illustration found here).
I manage a liquor store, where along with the normal fare of booze, cigarettes and the assorted unhealthy byproducts, we also sale lottery tickets — the way-least profit maker and by far the most-labor intensive.
All those news clips you’ve seen in recent days showing clerks dolling out lottery tickets does not in any form or fashion display how those clerks actually feel — they hate it with a passion, and most-likely they also hate your sorry ass for wasting their time.
Just about every crook of the curveball come through our doors every day, drinkers, smokers, tokers, and shitload of asshole jokers, but nothing, however, carries an unnatural feel to it, an oily, moisture-appeal to it, like the lottery.
And it’s way-way-really creepy — the kind of shit-thing Stephen King would cook up in a short story.
The process reminds me of an old Twilight Zone episode, ‘To Serve Man,’ in which humanity gets eaten — “It’s a cookbook!”
People involved in the lottery are strange and creepy, very thin-skinned and easily provoked into displays of emotional outrage.
If you (or anyone you know) play the lottery on any kind of regular basis, you, or that person should go to a quiet place and think hard about how you think about stuff.
The lottery is probably the exact mirror of crime in plain sight.
The California Lottery was established in 1984 with Prop 37 and was touted that it not only supported eduction in the state, but the operation brought in customers who would spend money on profit-making merchandise — wrong!
This week, in the wake of the chum-feeding, bloody, shark-infested frenzy of the Mega Millions, our actual bottom line has not been helped — the recession has cut business here by $2,000 to $3,000 a month and right now we’re in what I call the ‘winter trough,’ which won’t improve until about spring break.
The lottery is way-more a pain in the asshole.
And a real public problem.
The late great Andy Rooney from a couple of years ago:
What I always want to read is stories about lottery losers, there never are any.
There ought to be a law making it compulsory for anyone who reports the name of the winner of a lottery, to also give the name of all the losers.
The names would be followed by the amount each person lost — just the way they give the amount the winner got.
Lotteries usually pay out less than half of what is bet.
It’s the worst odds of any gambling operation.
You see people buying lottery tickets all the time and it’s obvious that most lottery money comes from the poorest people.
They don’t look too smart either.
Some of them cash their unemployment checks and buy lottery tickets with that money.
Then they need more help from the rest of us.
There was a National Gambling Impact Study and in every one of the 48 States that has gambling — only Utah and Hawaii don’t — the people who make the least gamble the most.
Lower income people in Massachusetts, for example, spent 15 times as much on gambling as people who make a decent living.
And despite the odds.
This the most-popular saying: ‘You’ll have a greater chance of getting struck by lightening than winning the lottery.’
But this, the oddest take on the odds of winning: Still, it’s a lot more likely that you will be legally executed than win the lottery. In fact, you are 30,000 percent to 200,000 percent more likely to die in a legal execution than to win the lottery.
Craps!
Players push the education angle, but that’s a $3 bill.
Off a lotteries report from the National Gambling Impact Study Commission and Florida’s lottery: Gary Landry, spokesman for the Florida Education Association, says “We’ve been hurt by our lottery…The state has simply replaced general revenues with lottery money – at a time when enrollments are increasing. It’s a big shell game.”
Here in California, despite the so-called lottery ‘donations,’ schools are hurting as budget shortfalls have brought spending on public schools to a historic low, relative to most of the US.
Supposedly, although the last fiscal year the lottery contributed $1.1 billion to California schools — the San Diego Unified School District could face a state take-over, while the entire education sector awaits a $1.7 billion cut that may wipe out high-school sports and student busing, and trim the academic calendar by seven days next year.
Economics is a much-hard education.
The LA Times reported this morning that California education honchos estimate $100 million from the Mega Millions jackpot, but the real news in the story is at the bottom:
But Palmer (State Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer) cautioned that the $1.2 billion in state lottery revenue is already figured into the budget, which is projected to fall woefully short of school needs.
The spike in lottery sales will give schools a boost, but even profits from the record-setting $540 million jackpot will only make a tiny dent in the budget shortfall.
“Lottery revenues do contribute to the state’s general fund budget, but to put it in perspective, K-12 expenditures are projected to be $39.2 billion,” Palmer said.
The $100 million windfall from this jackpot will make up less than 1 percent of that amount.
In Georgia, the lottery is even worse — Bloomberg News says that state’s lottery players are the biggest suckers in a nation of pure-bred suckers — the ‘Sucker Index‘ as it were:
“You’re taking from those with few means and helping those with more means,” Charles Clotfelter, a Duke University economics professor, said from Durham, North Carolina.
“To link that tax revenue to a benefit that goes largely to middle-and upper-class citizens is a little stunning,”
“It’s a pro-rich wealth-redistribution technique in Georgia,” Clotfelter, co-author of “Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America,” said in a telephone interview.
In a more obvious ‘Sucker Index’ display, AOL’s Daily Finance put it this way:
If you buy $1,000 worth of $1 lottery tickets on Day 1, then statistically speaking, the average lottery payout of 60 percent means you’ll have $600 left to spend on Day 2.
Spend that $600 on Day 2, and by Day 3, you’re down to $360.
Keep going, and by Day 14, you will have (on average) just $0.78 left jingling in your pocket.
In other words, two weeks of playing the lottery has left you too broke to afford a single lottery ticket.
You’ve gambled away nearly every cent you started with.
And more odds in other shit:
– Getting pregnant from a one-night stand: 1 in 20
– Getting struck by lightning: 1 in 10,000
– Dying in an airplane crash: 1 in 355,318
– Being dealt a royal flush in a given hand of poker: 1 in 655,750
– Dying from a flesh-eating bacteria: 1 in 1 million.
– Winning the California Super Lotto Jackpot: 1 in 18 million.
The lottery business has always naturally attracted crooks, and the notorious Louisiana Lottery was the last legal raffle in the country prior to the modern era.
Backed by New York gamblers in the years after the Civil War, the Louisiana company raked in millions of dollars for its bosses, who contributed only $40,000 a year to the state.
It was so corrupt that the U.S. Congress at last stepped in with a law prohibiting the use of the mails for lotteries, and in 1895 forbade lotteries in interstate commerce.
From Time magazine in May 1963 on the first legal US lottery in 70 years, just passed in New Hampshire:
Curiously enough, there was a time when lotteries and raffles in the U.S. were considered not only moral but indispensable to the nation’s growth.
In colonial days, Jefferson, Franklin and Hamilton all favored lotteries as governmental revenue raisers. George Washington was an enthusiastic ticket buyer even when he was President.
The Continental Congress raised money to pay soldiers through a lottery.
Hard-pressed property owners often put their holdings on the market through lotteries, and Jefferson himself, in debt near the end of his life, appealed to the Virginia legislature for permission to run a lottery.
Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale made money through lotteries, and all the colonies — later the states — held lotteries to build bridges, roads, churches and schools.
How quaint.
Great greed has changed all that and now it’s delusion in the face of reality.
Just a bunch of deranged assholes.
Silent Screaming
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Irony is today’s word.
Just as ‘The Artist,’ an ode to silence, won Best Picture at last night’s Oscars, the organization known for anti-silence, WikiLeaks, dumped another load of classified files onto the public — this batch emails from US-based intelligence firm Stratfor, supposedly depicting the company’s “web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods.”
Thus to become more than a quiet riot.
(Illustration found here).
From WikiLeaks:
The Stratfor emails reveal a company that cultivates close ties with US government agencies and employs former US government staff.
It is preparing the 3-year Forecast for the Commandant of the US Marine Corps, and it trains US marines and “other government intelligence agencies” in “becoming government Stratfors”.
Stratfor’s Vice-President for Intelligence, Fred Burton, was formerly a special agent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and was their Deputy Chief of the counterterrorism division.
Despite the governmental ties, Stratfor and similar companies operate in complete secrecy with no political oversight or accountability.
Stratfor claims that it operates “without ideology, agenda or national bias,” yet the emails reveal private intelligence staff who align themselves closely with US government policies and channel tips to the Mossad — including through an information mule in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Yossi Melman, who conspired with Guardian journalist David Leigh to secretly, and in violation of WikiLeaks’ contract with the Guardian, move WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables to Israel.
An example of Stratfor’s use of so-called ‘methods:’
“[Y]ou have to take control of him.
Control means financial, sexual or psychological control… This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase”
– CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla on 6 December 2011, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on the medical condition of the President of Venezuala, Hugo Chavez.
What a noisy mess.
Even worse, contrary to public disclosures, maybe bordering on near-sarcasm:
Ironically, considering the present circumstances, Stratfor was trying to get into what it called the leak-focused “gravy train” that sprung up after WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan disclosures :
“[Is it] possible for us to get some of that ’leak-focused’ gravy train ?
This is an obvious fear sale, so that’s a good thing.
And we have something to offer that the IT security companies don’t, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred and Stick know better than anyone on the planet… Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of ´leak-focused’ network security that focuses on preventing one’s own employees from leaking sensitive information…
In fact, I’m not so sure this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution.”
These files will be pored over in the coming days and a lot of disturbing, and most-likely illegal stuff will surface, and will once again display how ugly Americans can be when they think their shit doesn’t stink, or worse, they have no shit.
And it’s this American attitude that’s fueling the chaos in Afghanistan right now — seven US servicemen were injured this weekend in not-quiet-at-all riots over the supposed burning by American personnel of the Islam holy book, the Qur’an.
Although President Obama has publicly apologized for the Qur’an burnings, the GOP presidential nit-twits jumped Obama hard on it — Rick Santorum slobbering the move “shows weakness;” Newt Gingrich proclaiming the apology is akin to “surrender;” and Mitt Romney called it an “enormous error.”
Between them there’s not even a bird-sized shit for brains.
And there’s always more to a story that smacks the ears.
From the New York Times, though buried way down in the story:
Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.
“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.
“They always admit their mistakes,” he said.
“They burn our Koran and then they apologize.
You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”
Sorry.
Glenn Greenwald adds this kicker-thought on the subject:
Along those lines, just imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump.
Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them?
Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?
Indeed again.
And the shooting on Saturday of two US military officers in a supposedly secure Afghan government ministry has also displayed US compassion — NOT!
Juan Cole this morning enlightens a bit:
Two US military advisers to the Ministry of the Interior were shot dead on Saturday by an Afghan security man.
It turns out, according to recovered security tapes, that they were watching footage of the protests and cursing out the protesters, then speaking badly of the Qur’an.
The Afghan argued with them that they should be more respectful, and when the argument escalated, he drew on them and shot them both dead.
If this story is true, it distills the arrogance and bigotry of some US personnel in Afghanistan (they are in someone else’s country).
They didn’t deserve to meet that end, but cursing the Qur’an in a Muslim country in front of a local Muslim is about the most foolhardy act I can imagine.
The strong evangelical element in some parts of the US military makes it particularly unsuited to more or less running a largely illiterate Muslim nation that is deeply religious.
Evangelicals are the American group that has the highest disapproval of Islam.
Is the GOP listening, or in a cone of don’t-give-shit silence.
And what makes the whole Afghan situation even worse is the horrible horse shit heaved up by hard-case military assholes.
In this instance, Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who called the shooting of the two officers as “outrageous,” without any background on it.
And claimed in his air of authority, the incident reveals the “shallow impact [the United States] has on this primitive society.”
A total jerk — one must remember McCaffrey was among those so-called ‘military analysts‘ that bullied the fog-brained US public into supporting the Iraq invasion — the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for exposing the Pentagon Message Machine, on which Barry was a major player.
From the NYT story on the good general: Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.
Silence as we can see is not golden, though, one has to be an artist of some type in order to keep a lid on, or maintain the DL, of any news that might filter down to the US’ unwashed, near-ignorant masses.
Do we live in a vacuum, and if so, can anyone hear us screaming?
Ass in Charge — ‘take out the rubbish’
Filed Under Crime, Madness, Media | Leave a Comment
Down through history, dictators and other such types have always launched slaughter sprees when needed to maintain hold on power, no big deal — in Syria nowadays, however, the horror virally gobsmacks the face of the world.
And it’s bad.
This morning, two journalists — one French, the other an American working for the UK’s Sunday Times — were killed along with two dozen Syrians in the continuous onslaught on the city of Homs.
Near the border with Turkey, reportedly young men were captured, then executed: “Military forces chased civilians in these villages, arrested them and killed them without hesitation. They concentrated on male youths and whoever did not manage to escape was to be killed…Responsibility for this massacre lies with the general commander of the military and armed forces, Bashar al-Assad.”
(Illustration found here).
Although the US official stance has been one of caution, yesterday the Obama administration hinted that supplying arms to the Syrian opposition could be on the table — a “political solution” is the ultimate route, officials said, but White House spokes-guy Jay Carney opened the door a little bit, saying “we don’t rule out additional measures,” which could mean weapons to the ordinary folk now being gunned down.
One of the young Syrians who’d been posting video online on the violence was killed yesterday.
From the New York Times and Rami al-Sayed’s last posted message:
Baba Amr is being exterminated.
Do not tell me our hearts are with you because I know that.
We need campaigns everywhere across the world and inside the country.
People should protest in front of embassies and everywhere. Because in hours, there will be no more Baba Amr.
And I expect this message to be my last.
A horror apparently without an end.
And this via War in Context on the minute-to-minute nightmare:
The corpse, already waxy, wrapped in its shroud, a crown of plastic flowers around its head, lies in a corner of the mosque.
Kneeling next to the coffin, a boy in tears, his brother, strokes his face with infinite tenderness.
The dead boy was 13.
The night before, around 11 o’clock, he was breaking wood in front of his doorstep.
His father, eyes swollen, but upright and dignified among his friends and relatives, tells me what happened:
“He probably shone his mobile phone to see what he was doing.
And the sniper killed him.”
It was neither an accident nor chance.
Their street is constantly under fire from this sniper, who, based in the neighbourhood school, practises on cats when he has no other targets.
“We don’t even dare take out the rubbish any more,” a neighbour adds.
Another man shows me, on his mobile phone, the corpse of his brother, killed while he was protecting his 11-year-old son, before explaining to me that he had to break down the walls between his house and his neighbours’ to get out without exposing himself to gunfire.
One wonders about the mental shape of Assad — but he does, of course, carry those necessary genes for butchery.
What does he expect now?
Even if he kills every opposition voice, what then?
Next year, can he and his lovely wife visit the US, go to Disneyland?
Even in a modern, high-tech world, pure slaughter is still…
Afghan Reality
Filed Under Bullshit, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In all the bullshit noise this past week — even from yesterday’s ‘secular high holy day‘ along with the Three-Ring-Three-Stooges GOP political antics — there’s still folks dying in Afghanistan.
A war now beyond the decade limit, and from all indications, going really, really bad.
An example of the dumb-ass futility of it all: An American soldier shot and killed an Afghan guard at a base in the country’s north, apparently because the American thought the guard was about to attack him, Afghan police said on Sunday.
This war is so messed up, allies are shooting each other — the US GI’s trigger finger was in response to the Afghan military/police people killing NATO troops.
(Illustration found here).
Last month, an Afghan soldier shot and killed four unarmed French troops at a base in eastern Afghanistan, and the whole war operation is worse than deadly.
Civilian deaths increased again in 2011 — up 8 percent from 2010, which saw 2,790 deaths, and an increase of 25 percent from 2009, when 2,412 civilians were killed.
From McClatchy on Saturday:
Mir Ahmad Joyenda, deputy director of the Kabul-based Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, and a former member of Parliament, said the rise in civilian deaths reported by the U.N. was a reminder that ordinary Afghans were at risk of violence “from morning to night.”
“Nobody’s safe, nobody’s secure,” said Joyenda. “Everyone is suffering.”
The country’s f*ucked.
And now one US solider has opened up something closer to the truth.
Lt. Col Daniel L. Davis has described a reality on the ground considerably inconsistent with the official statements the military presents to political leadership or the American public (via antiwar.com).
Davis posted a document with Armed Forces Journal on his observations on the reality of the other side of the Afghan war.
A few snips:
I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.
I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people.
Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.
From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.
…
On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.
Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.
“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked.
“Do you form up a squad and go after them?
Do you periodically send out harassing patrols?
What do you do?”
As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression.
Then he laughed.
“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”
According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints.
In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.
…
To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.
In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province.
Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier.
One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful?
How do I do that?”
One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’
Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’
They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”
…
If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable.
Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public.
But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress.
I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.
Read the whole post — might piss you off.
Also read the New York Times story on Davis.
And this reader’s comment from another NYT piece on Davis highlights the historical significance of the US military’s continued amnesia:
Those of us who are old enough remember General Westmoreland’s glowing reports on progress in Vietnam right up until we airlifted people out of Saigon by helicopter.
Reality ain’t no bowl game.
Asleep at the Pump
Filed Under Economy, Energy, Environment, Technology | 1 Comment
After a visit to the laundromat this morning, I put another $20 worth of gas in the old, problem-plagued Jeep, wincing (both the Jeep and I) at a pump price of $3.99 a gallon for regular — up more than a dime since the last time.
And apparently based on the so-called favorable employment report released Friday, U.S. sweet crude increased by $1.48 to end the week at $97.84 per barrel, while Brent picked up $2.51 to finish at $114.58 per barrel.
Gas-pump prices appear erratic, depending where ye be: Statewide average in California is $3.73 a gallon for regular, up 3.7 cents in a week, but meanwhile, a good friend of mine residing less than two hours south of me recently paid $4.19 a gallon — Sup with that?
(Illustration found here).
Maybe we should take the plunge already and go Eurozone — $10-a-gallon gas would force stiff-necked US peoples to alter lifestyles and move on before the whole thing becomes reality.
New fuel for old vehicles — there’s about 240.5 million cars and light trucks cruising US highways and the average age of those vehicles rose to 10.8 years last year from 10.4 in the year before, due mainly to bad times in Detroit and the economy.
Apparently from indications beyond a recession, US peoples have been easing off the private vehicle for awhile now.
Via AlterNet two years ago:
Among the trends that are keeping sales well below the annual figure of 15-17 million that prevailed from 1994 through 2007 are market saturation, ongoing urbanization, economic uncertainty, oil insecurity, rising gasoline prices, frustration with traffic congestion, mounting concerns about climate change, and a declining interest in cars among young people.
Market saturation may be the dominant contributor to the peaking of the U.S. fleet.
The United States now has 246 million registered motor vehicles and 209 million licensed drivers — nearly 5 vehicles for every 4 drivers.
Kids and cars:
Perhaps the most fundamental social trend affecting the future of the automobile is the declining interest in cars among young people.
For those who grew up a half-century ago in a country that was still heavily rural, getting a driver’s license and a car or a pickup was a rite of passage.
Getting other teenagers into a car and driving around was a popular pastime.
In contrast, many of today’s young people living in a more urban society learn to live without cars.
They socialize on the Internet and on smart phones, not in cars.
Many do not even bother to get a driver’s license.
This helps explain why, despite the largest U.S. teenage population ever, the number of teenagers with licenses, which peaked at 12 million in 1978, is now under 10 million.
If this trend continues, the number of potential young car-buyers will continue to decline.
Plus these kids now are also faced with an incredible financial burden, not only with a humongous student-loan debt, but a bleak employment picture (despite Friday’s numbers) — unless one is an oil/gas person (corporations are people).
Maybe a bit of inequality right there: Exxon’s $41.1 billion in 2011 profit translates into nearly $5 million in profit every hour, or more than $1,300 every second. The annual profit comes near the record revenues of $46.23 billion in 2008…Between 2008-2010, Exxon Mobil registered an average 17.6 percent federal effective corporate tax rate, while the average American paid a higher rate of 20.4 percent.
Maybe venture into the ugly-oddness of fuel:
Gasoline prices are higher at the beginning of 2012 than at the beginning of any previous year ever — even at the beginning of 2008, a year when the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline reached a record $4.114 on July 7.
In its Daily Fuel Gauge Report, AAA Texas noted Friday a national average of $3.467 for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline — up from $3.455 a day ago, $3.389 a week ago, $3.288 a month ago and $3.116 a year ago.
“We’re seeing the highest gasoline prices that we’ve seen,” Sarah Schimmer of AAA Texas said Friday.
“2011 was a record year, and in 2012 we’re definitely seeing higher prices.”
And all this for mobility, not only just for driving my Jeep around town, but oil/gas framed within the way-big picture of how the existence of an entire civilization depends on the black, bubbly shit — no way yesteryear can continue into the nowadays.
In reality, peak oil is actually the end of easy oil, low prices at the pump and so forth, and this peak supposedly occurred worldwide in about 2005 — so we’re already on the downside.
One interesting look at future possibilities comes from “Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse,” a collection of essays from economists, environmental scientists, a couple of architects and even a corporate lawyer on the premise of how close we are to being totally f*cked.
From a review by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall of Fleeing Vesuvius and posted Friday at DissidentVoice:
The title refers to the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD, specifically the large number of residents who failed to save themselves, despite weeks of earthquakes, gaseous clouds and other obvious signs that an eruption was imminent.
For more than a decade, a growing body of evidence suggests that the planet is on the verge of economic and ecological collapse.
Yet the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing to prepare for the stark conditions ahead.
…
All (the essay writers) are in basic agreement around the book’s central premise: the industrialized world needs to urgently downsize its energy use, both to stave off catastrophic climate change and to conserve dwindling fossil fuels.
In his Introduction, “Where We Went Wrong,” the late Irish economist Richard Douthwaite points out that one barrel of oil provides the equivalent labor of a man working forty hours a week for twelve years.
He goes on to stress that before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible — an economy relying on human labor and animal power is too inefficient to support it.
By definition capitalism depends on capital accumulation, the production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital (property and machines) to expand production even further.
Producing a surplus of this size only became possible because of the vast amount of cheap (practically free) work performed by fossil fuel energy.
And Ms Bramhall also reveals a brightness from the essays, not all doom-n-gloom: The last five sections of the book focus on solutions, with inspiring examples of new approaches to land use, agriculture and industrial design from individuals, groups and communities who have begun the transition to a less energy-intensive lifestyle.
Inspiration needs to have already been popped — too much pie-in-the-sky without actual political reality.
One updated sample chapter of Fleeing Vesuvius can be found at The Oil Drum.
And another review of the essay collection can be found here.
A major snag in the optimism — the above-mentioned political reality.
So says Kumi Naidoo, head of the environmental group Greenpeace, who spoke Friday at the big-wig, pow-wow Munich Security Conference, and chimed a loud alarm.
Via Raw Story:
“The moment of history we are in can be described as a boiling point or a perfect storm,” he told the assembled gathering of world leaders, ministers, top brass and defence policy experts at the annual Munich gathering.
“We are seeing a convergence of multiple crises happening at the same time. A food crisis, climate crisis, poverty crisis … and then of course the financial crisis and a demographic crisis and a global governance democratic crisis,” he added.
“The bottom line is that too many of our leaders … are sleepwalking us into a crisis of epic proportion,” he claimed.
One of those doing the sleepwalking is US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who’s also in Munich, Germany, this weekend for the conference, but her schedule has no room for end-of-life-as-we-know-it antics fostered by environmental activists — Clinton will most-likely reminisce about “…what a key partner Europe is in the global security, economic, democracy promotion agenda that we have.”
Just wake ‘em later.