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The Future Is Now

You have to read this for its eminently readable and lucid explanation of the full economic and existential threat that the current confluence of economics, geology and sociology – exacerbated by untramelled war in the Middle East – poses to the Western status quo.

This is the text of a talk given by Chris Sanders at the 5th International Conference on Oil and Gas Depletion (ASPO-5) in Pisa:

[…]

Now the prospective end of the first half of the Age of Oil is most commonly addressed as a financial and engineering problem. Financial, so the argument goes, insofar as two or three decades of underinvestment in commodities has resulted in too little supply. Engineering, inasmuch as the necessity of finding alternatives is basically a matter of first finding adequate investment capital after which it is simply a matter of the market and scientific progress doing their work to create alternatives to oil and gas.

There is valid precedent underlying this point of view, of course. After all, the transitions from wood to coal and from coal to oil were managed against a backdrop of what appears to the collective memory to have been a linear march of progress onwards and upwards.

Viewed through the lens of geopolitics though, things look different. The transition from wood to coal initially favoured newly industrialising Britain thanks to her abundant coal resources. The transition that followed from coal to oil at the dawn of the twentieth century was, from financial and scientific point of view fairly straightforward perhaps. But two world wars were fought in the first half of the 20th century largely because one alliance was trying to get access to oil and the other was trying to deny that access. The deniers won.

The point here is that what looks straightforward from the perspective of the market trading floor, the scientific laboratory or the wellhead is something else altogether when the human element and the will to power are introduced. For the millions who died in the two world wars the transition from coal to oil was a major discontinuity. It is neither a coincidence nor insignificant that the fighting in the current world war to control the world energy net has been in the Balkans and latterly in Afghanistan and Iraq. In each case, what is at issue is control of energy supply and distribution.

The reason for this is simple enough, and is made abundantly clear from the oil and gas clocks showing world oil and gas reserve distribution. It is in the Persian Gulf and the former Soviet Union, mostly Russia, that the world?s remaining gas and oil reserves lie. This represents a substantial shift in the fulcrum of world power. For the first time in the history of the oil age the marginal barrels of crude oil and cubic feet of natural gas are not directly controlled by the Anglo-American powers.

[…]

Read more…

Sanders comes to the view that all this leaves Putin sitting in the catbird seat, a conclusion I blogged about the other day.

Murdering Scum Outed

Far be it for me to defend the racist scumbags (pictured above) who murdered Stephen Lawrence, that’s the last thing I’d like to do (actually, I’d like to see them have the shit kicked out of them on national TV, but that’s by the bye) but should a respected UK national newspaper be so blatantly making them easy for vigilantes to identify, find and possibly attack or kill?

From this mornings’ Guardian:

[…]

Among their haunts are the Old Post Office pub and the Eletriq Cafe Italian restaurant in Eltham, the area where Stephen was killed.

David Norris, 29, whose drug-dealing father, Clifford, is now out of prison, has four children aged five to 11. Until last summer he lived in his parents’ ?800,000 home in Chislehurst, bought with his father’s criminal proceeds. After a lengthy legal wrangle the house had to be sold to meet claims from HM Revenue & Customs. He now rents a flat in Plumstead but is rarely seen there.

By 2002 Norris had two minor convictions for driving offences and two for theft. But in September of that year he and Neil Acourt (see below) were jailed for a racist attack on an off-duty black detective on the same road where Stephen was murdered.

Norris, a passenger in a car driven by Acourt, threw a drinks carton and shouted “nigger” at an off-duty detective constable, Gareth Reid, as he was crossing the road. They were sentenced to 18 months in prison, later cut to a year on appeal. Passing sentence, the judge said Norris and Acourt were both “infected and invaded by gross and revolting racism”.

Shortly before being locked up, they wrote letters of praise to London nail bomber David Copeland, who killed three and injured 139 in three bomb attacks on blacks and homosexuals in 1999. “We’ve been done for abusing a black copper,” they wrote. ” We’re getting banged up. We hope we don’t get slammed in with a load of niggers.”

In May 2004 Norris was back in prison. He was jailed for 27 months for burglary and handling a stolen Range Rover. Croydon crown court was told that he had stolen hundreds of pounds’ worth of beer after breaking into a pub with a friend. In a separate offence, he was caught by police trying to jumpstart the Range Rover.

Neil Acourt, 30, also has a 2001 conviction for possessing an offensive weapon, for which he was sentenced to community service. He has shaved his head, changed his surname to Stuart and shares a council maisonette in Greenwich with his mother, Pat. He drives a black Golf.

Gary Dobson, 30, has a five-year-old son and lives in a flat in Woolwich with his partner, Charlotte Hunter, a secretary. In 1999 he was arrested in connection with a series of burglaries on commercial premises, but no prosecution followed.

Luke Knight, 31, maintains the lowest profile of the five, living with his girlfriend in Chislehurst.

Jamie Acourt, Neil’s 29-year-old brother, who lives in Sidcup, has one recent conviction, for theft in 1999 (with co-defendant Norris ). He is always dressed in sharp designer clothers and drives a black Mercedes. On Tuesday morning he left London on holiday.

If someone catches up with these bastards, I won’t cry for them -look, I just republished their details, which tells you all you need to know about my feelings on the matter.

But I’m a private individual with a small readership and it won’t make much of a splash. The Grauniad is read nation and world-wide and one would hope they’d be a little more responsible, especially so as these individuals have not been convicted for the Lawrence murder and have served their time for their other crimes.

What’s to stop another newspaper, Murdoch’s Sun maybe, or the Islamophobic Daily Mail or Express identifying someone arrested for terrorism and released? That was over 700 people last year.

This exercise in outing is something that the Guardian, with its history of fighting for individual rights and civil liberties, should emphatically not be doing.

Leave that to the blogs.

Into The Mystic

Back along in ’98, Art Bell interviewed two Hopi Elders about their prophecies and whether the End Times are upon us:

AB: Ok. I think that my first question?..if I may ask the first question?..and Robert, you’re welcome to ask one any time you’d like. I would like to ask Grandfather 1 why he has come forward in public at this time?

GF2: {Asks GF1 in Hopi language, then translates.}

GF1: {Answers in Hopi language.} It is our time to bring forth the message into the world. It has been taught to us by our Elders, from way back. That is why I have chosen to step forward and bring out the message today. There are people out there who are leading two lives?..who are there to stop us from putting forth the message, but it is the Elders, that taught us the wisdom, that are telling us to do this now for you and the rest of the world.

AB: With regard to what may be changing, Earth changes, is the time now very short?

GF2: {Asks, then translates.} It is time for the end times here, that was prophesized and through the dreams that were given to us also. Through those dreams, we are learning that we are getting very close to the end times.

Wow, isn’t that crazy? Myths and legends being treated as though they were for real? Surely no US mainstream media outlet would be so silly – would they?

Duh, of course they would.

Step forward that formerly-attached-to-some-semblance-of-reality news network CNN:

Media Matters –CNN or CBN? Phillips asks apocalypse authors: “[A]re we living in the last days?”

Summary: With Kyra Phillips’s discussion of the Apocalypse and the Middle East conflict with Christian authors Jerry Jenkins and Joel C. Rosenberg — who share the view that the Rapture is nigh — CNN has, for the second time in three days, featured a segment on the potential coming of the Apocalypse, as indicated by current conflicts in the Middle East.

For the second time in three days, CNN featured a segment on the potential coming of the Apocalypse, as indicated by current conflicts in the Middle East. The July 26 edition of CNN’s Live From … featured a nine-minute segment in which anchor Kyra Phillips discussed the Apocalypse and the Middle East with Christian authors Jerry Jenkins and Joel C. Rosenberg — who share the view that the Rapture is nigh. At one point in the discussion, Phillips asked Rosenberg whether she needed “to start taking care of unfinished business and telling people that I love them and I’m sorry for all the evil things I’ve done,” to which Rosenberg replied: “Well, that would be a good start.” Throughout the segment, the onscreen text read: “Apocalypse Now?”

As Media Matters for America documented, the July 24 edition of CNN’s Paula Zahn Now featured a segment examining what “the Book of Revelation tell[s] us about what’s happening right now in the Middle East.” CNN re-aired this segment the next day. Media Matters also noted that Rosenberg is just one of several conservative media figures who have identified and expounded upon the purported signs of the Apocalypse to be found in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. During his appearance on Live From …, Rosenberg claimed that he had been invited to the White House, Capitol Hill, and the CIA to discuss the Rapture and the Middle East, and noted — several times — that the apocalyptic events described in his novels keep coming true.

[…]

Read Whole Article

The Hopi end times story is just as valid as the fundies’ end-times myth, ie they’re both imaginary bollocks, but I thought the job of news organisations was to report news, not to collude in mass hysteria based on unproven superstition.

CNN is being pumped out worldwide. Do Americans have any idea how insane the rest of us think they are for believing in this shit? It wouldn’t be so bad if they kept it behind closed doors, where it belongs, but now religion is being treated as though it were real and is now apparently the main impetus of US foreign policy.

It’s bad enough the US government is run by crazies and could kill us all, but now any semblance of credibility US media may once have had in reporting is gone too. Ted Turner must be spitting feathers.

[In other news news ( as it were) a Fox live reporting crew were shot at by the Israeli Defence Force for revealing their position live on air. Hoist by their own petard…]

Cheney – ‘Condi Rice Is Rubbish’

The only black and female member – how very handy – of the Bush administration is about to have an accountability moment not from the public or the opposition, (such as it is) but from her own side, Dick Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s offices to be precise…

Funny how they didn’t notice her incompetence back along when. It was just as bloody obvious as the nose on your face then, as it is now:

April 20, 2004

A Review of Rice’s Uncertain Alliances

Czech Mate for Condi
By JOSEPH KALVODA

Review in American Historical Review (1985):[please note that the reviewer evidently believes Dr. Rice is a man]

CONDOLEEZZA RICE.

The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983: Uncertain Allegiance.

Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1984.

Pp. xiv, 303. $37.50

To write a scholarly study on the relationship of the Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak army without access to relevant Czechoslovak and Soviet documents is difficult. Therefore, much of this book by Condoleezza Rice is based on secondary works. His thesis is that the Soviets directly influence military elites in the satellite countries, in addition to the Soviet Communist party interacting with the domestic party. Rice selects Czechoslovakia as a case study and attempts to show the role of the military as instrument of both national defense and the Soviet-controlled military alliance.

Rice’s selection of sources raises questions, since he [sic] frequently does not sift facts from propaganda and valid information from disinformation or misinformation. He passes judgments and expresses opinions without adequate knowledge of facts. It does not add to his credibility when he uses a source written by Josef Hodic; Rice fails to notice that this “former military scientist” (p. 99) was a communist agent who returned to Czechoslovakia several years ago. Rice based his discussion of the “Sejna affair” (pp. 111, 116, 144) largely on communist propaganda sources and did not consult writings and statements by former General Jan Sejna who had access to Warsaw Pact documents and is the highest military officer from the Soviet bloc to defect to the West since World War II.

Rice’s generalizations reflect his lack of knowledge about history and the nationality problem in Czechoslovakia. For example, in 1955 Czechoslovakia was not yet “the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic” (pp 83, 84). In May 1938 Ludvik Svoboda was serving in the Czech army, not organizing a Czech military unit in Poland. In the fall of 1939 he was captured by the Soviet invading forces in eastern Poland; he did not “[escape] to the USSR” (p. 43). Rice’s discussion of the “Czechoslovak Legion” that was “born during the chaotic period preceding the fall of the Russian empire” (pp. 44-46) is ridiculous. (It was “born” on September 28, 1914.) He is clearly ignorant of the history of the military unit as well as of the geography of the area on which it fought.

[…]

The writing abounds with meaningless phrases, such as is its “last word”: “Thirty-five years after its creation, the Czechoslovak People’s Army stands suspended between the Czechoslovak nation and the socialist world order” (p. 245).

Joseph Kalvoda teaches at Saint Joseph College West Hartford, Connecticut.

Read whole article

Nope, sorry boys, you don’t get out of it that way. Any fool could sea she’s always been totally out of her depth in international diplomacy – but that was what you wanted, wasn’t it?

UPDATE: Tristero has a different theory, one I think may be bang-on.

Harry’s Place, Free Republic for Brits

Guest-posting at Lenin’s Tomb, Justin Horton examines Harry’s Place, the British version of Free Republic, and finds it has very similar rabid wingnut tendencies, although it’s titularly a Labour blog:

[…]

HP’s writers are, briefly, McCarthyites. Their practice and purpose is to support the Iraq War, Israel, and general warmongering, by throwing mud at their opponents: by slandering those who oppose them as terrorists and anti-Semites. Their squalid means of achieving this squalid goal, I’d narrow down to two: a game called We Are Fighting Terrorists, Therefore You Are One and a slightly different one called Links.

In Links, or Two Degrees of Separation, you say this: because X is connected with Y who is connected with Z – who is apparently an anti-Semite – therefore X is an anti-Semite too. It is an easy game, because nearly everybody is connected with nearly everybody else, especially in a broad movement (the movement against the war being, as it goes, pretty broad, encompassing as it does most of the population of the world). Curiously, though, it is never played with the war’s proponents: we do not say, for instance, “Tony Blair is best mates with George Bush whose best mate was Ken Lay who was a prodigious crook”. Nor do we go via Lord Levy, or via Tessa Jowell’s husband, or straight to Silvio Berlusconi.

You Are A Terrorist bids us trace a similar connection: because some of the people fighting the US in Iraq are terrorists, you are one with them. (It has a corollary, roughly stated “because the enemy are bad, that means that we are good”: it is the same Certificate of Perpetual Immunity that Israel is awarded by its admirers and which is currently being used to justify the slaughter of civilians in Beirut.) It is, quite simply, traitor-hunting. It sniffs out and identifies fifth columnists, complicit with the enemy and acting on the enemy’s behalf. And this is, pretty much, what Harry’s Place is there to do. It smears the opponents of the war. To read, takes a strong stomach: to agree, takes an absent sense of right and wrong. Its arguments could not be more ad hominem: except that the objects of their attack are imaginary, devils of their own devise.

[…]

But nobody is listening. Which is, I understand – I finally understand – the whole reason why they have such a hysterical tone. What tone do you adopt when people believe you and your cause appears to be prevailing? Dismissive, perhaps. Triumphant. Perhaps most common, smug. But this sort of hysteria? It’s true, it can belong to triumph, or at least to the temporary triumph of the witch-hunt, the search for traitors, Joe McCarthy’s America, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Torquemada’s Spain. But this is not the hysteria of those who persecute the Unbelievers. This is the hysteria of the Unbelieved.

[…]

A bit overwrought, perhaps, but he makes a valid point. The rump of Blair’s supporters are growing increasingly shrill as the public’s credulity drops away with each new horror.

What I think Justin underestimates though is the actual, physical danger these people could conceivably pose to those they consider ‘traitors’. They aren’t on the political fringe – these are the core supporters of a government that doesn’t think twice about suppressing dissent, that has already colluded in rendition and torture and that wants to lock people up indefinitely without charge or trial, for trumped up crimes like the ‘glorification of terrorism.

The New York Times had a hoax anthrax attack from people who called the paper traitorous, and HP’s writers and commenters are those attackers’ spiritual kin. But it’s unlikely that something similar’d happen to a UK journalist or publication, in my opinion. Too crude. Labourites are a little more subtle than that, though there are some in Labour Friends of Israel that can be particularly vicious when it comes to those they consider traitors to the zionist cause.

Actual physical violence is unlikely, as I said, but if it does occur it’s much more likely to happen by proxy – one phone call could be all it would take to turn someone’s life into a Kafkaesque hell or even end it, and the putative HPer would have clean hands.

Remember Forest Gate and Stockwell?