Although prices at us gas pumps are down and people will still hit the road this week, they won’t spend much along the way, especially for patriotic merchandise, including flags, apparel and decorations.

And the mood is too hot to really enjoy the fabled July 4 fireworks — about a third of the country was in drought last year, and in 2012, it’s nearly three-quarters, and a heat blast still scorches the eastern Us with nearly 2 million without power (and NO AC!).
A lot of festivities will be short-lived or fireworks banned all together — just too dangerous.

You can fill the car, and drive real far, but spend little.
As of Monday, gas prices have dropped more than eight cents from just a week ago, now down to a national average of $3.37 a gallon for regular — down nearly 15 percent since January.

(Illustration found here).

The gas source — oil — is going through a neurotic period: “Oil is being driven by psychological factors,” said Eugen Weinberg, global head of commodities research at Commerzbank in Frankfurt. “Today’s selloff is a natural reaction after such enormous gains at the end of last week.”
Crazy.

And more crazy is Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson — last week the asshole way-downplayed the danger from climate change and we just need more oil: “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around — we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions The fear factor that people want to throw out there to say ‘We just have to stop this,’ I do not accept.”

What about the rest of us?
Chris Hedges at TruthDig makes the historical connection:

The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite.
They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary.
They say that all will soon share in the “expanding” wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing.
And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries.
At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards.
Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality.
Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth.
Karl Marx was correct when he called unregulated capitalism “a machine for demolishing limits.”
This failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities.
This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us.
Catastrophic climate change is inevitable.
Arctic ice is in terminal decline.
There will soon be so much heat trapped in the atmosphere that any attempt to scale back carbon emissions will make no difference.
Droughts.
Floods.
Heat waves.
Killer hurricanes and tornados.
Power outages.
Freak weather.
Rising sea levels.
Crop destruction.
Food shortages.
Plagues.
ExxonMobil, BP and the coal and natural gas companies—like the colonial buffalo hunters who left thousands of carcasses rotting in the sun after stripping away the hides, and in some cases carrying away only the tongues—will never impose rational limits on themselves.
They will exploit, like the hustlers before them who eliminated the animals that sustained the native peoples of the Great Plains, until there is nothing left to exploit.
Collective suicide is never factored into quarterly profit reports.
Forget all those virtuous words they taught you in school about our system of government.
The real words to describe American power are “plunder,” “fraud,” “criminality,” “deceit,” “murder” and “repression.”

Although those CEO-assholes are indeed in a criminal class, all of us are helping the cause.
Yesterday, I put another $20 worth of gas in my Jeep at still at the low price (for up here in northern California) of $3.99 a gallon for regular.
And the Jeep will burn that gas, adding more CO2 to an already CO2ed world.

A vicious circle with a real-bad end.