Eclectic Writer

I get busy, raising kids, going to school, working, and watching with horripilation as the as the stock market, housing prices, and the economy plunge the foundation of my life down to Cocytus.  So its been a while since I posted anything.  I imagine myself now swimming in Cocytus, that bottomless frozen sea, constrained by the giants on the rim of Malebolge, waiting for the next shoe to drop.  Cocytus is a special place.  Traitors, as distinguished from the “merely” fraudulent in that their acts, are frozen here. This betrayal is not the type we associate with the selling of national secrets, or merely being a liberal in a nation that the minority defines as Conservative. To be frozen on Cocytus involves betraying one in a special relationship to the betrayer.

This is the type of betrayal that occurs when a government that rules by consent of the governed leads through lies and legislates through obfuscation. President George W. Bush has a special ice cube reserved in Cocytus, surround by his entire administration, and the Conservative House and Senate.  Democrats have a place here to; Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and every Democrat that promised to do all it took to end the Iraq War and stop the Presidential Rampage through the Constitution.  Even Obama, that man of hope who voted recently to approve the FISA bill’s anti-constitutional provisions, has a place here for betrayal.

We are here, also, we citizens.  Even the defense of “Don’t blame me I voted for Gore” doesn’t keep us out.  We provide the foundation for our government with our consent and we are the real source of government power.  When the President told 935 lies to take us to war, we did not investigate, we surrendered to promised safety.  When the President declared we would be an “Ownership Society” and all become rich as Croesus because housing prices would go up forever, we accepted the bribe and never asked how we would get endless wealth and what we would pay for it.

We all get busy with this or that detail of our lives and forget that tyranny is created by compliance.  We exchange our freedom for trinkets and toys brought to us by Consumerism.  Due diligence falls to bread and circuses.  We all swim in Cocytus and worry that we are not at the bottom yet, and that Dante forget a lower circle reserved for the compliant.

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The headline seen on Yahoo  ”43 nations creating Mediterranean union“ raises some interesting questions.  The article describes them as “a vast though vague body its boosters hope can nudge this disparate and conflicted swath of the world toward peace and stability.”  More specifically, these 43 nations are exhorted to “unite to deal with global warming, growing migration and shrinking water and energy resources.”   Peace, stability, and a solution to global warming are important goals.  There are enormous impediments to the “Mediterranean Union” achieving  anything.  A lot of them are its members.

First, 23 of those nations belong to the European Union and do not have a Mediterranean coast to worry about, and may be more concerned with projects in their own back yard or the broader goals and inside political bickering within the European Union.  Many of these nations are Muslim and certainly do no see eye to eye with a euro-centric view of the Mediterranean.  More than one of the European Union nations are concerned with Muslim immigrants. 

Interestingly, Israel, Syria, and the Palestinian territories are members and sat down at the table together.  The conflict they bring can hurt, but the moves Israel and Syria have made to negotiate, after more than 50 years, can only be helped by understanding common problems faced by everyone in the region.  So far the group has managed to agree on “a region-wide solar energy project, a cross-Mediterranean student exchange program and a plan to clean up the polluted sea.”   Those goals alone are a pretty tall order, and will require cooperation, dedication, and a lot of money to solve. 

After reading about the “Mediterranean Union” I have to ask where the United States is within this mix.  Though not a Mediterranean nation, the U.S. has an interest in Peace, stability, and a cleaner Mediterranean; and actually bordering on the Mediterranean is not a requirement.  It seems that under the Bush Regime of the American Empire that cooperation between disparate and even antagonistic nations is not desired.  The US remains so deeply mired in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the collapsing economy that there it is impotent when faced with larger world problems.  The election also has the US mired it observing its own electoral navel to see which piece of identical party lint will come out on top.  Until a new President ascends to the Imperial Thrown in the Oval Office, there will be little energy given to the issues and problems faced by that region.

The UN’s scope being on the whole world, and its focus as a world wide debating society eternally deadlocked by a bureaucracy that rose out of World War II’s allied victory dance and US dreams of US Hegemony, keeps it from being much involved or from working to face these problems outside the Mediterranean basin. 

It is fun to look at the map and realize that the organization resembles in its planning and reality the old Roman Empire, with a few additions.  But unless Sarkozy intends to pull the Iron Crown of Lombardy, worn by the Holy Roman Emperors, out of mothballs, its approach is solidly based on regional ties and the search for a soluiton to common problems.  It also appears that the European Union may be moving fully into a Post Imperial age, developing a broad based regional organization that can compete economically with the rising Asian Super Powers of India and China.  We should all remember that when people face common problems they often develop close ties that can and do affect the world at a fundamental level.  The close ties and rivalries that grew out of Allied Powers problem with the Axis in World War II drove the force of history through the last half of the Twentieth Century.  The development of a Mediterranean Union may well be one of the defining forces in history of the Twenty-first Century, especially if the United States Imperial Hegemony recedes into history.

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43 nations creating Mediterranean union
Israel Holds Peace Talks With Syria
 

For the first time in history the Fed is being investigated by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) as if we were just another third world nation on the dole looking for a hand out.  The story “The Shrinking Influence of the US Federal Reserve” reports that Ben Bernanke is the first Fed Chairman in history “to submit to the kind of humiliation.” Though the story does not say so, the humiliation is shared by President Bush and his administration, under whose watch the has happened. The good thing for Bush is that:

When the final report on the risks of the US financial system is released in 2010 — and it is likely to cause a stir internationally — only one of the people in positions of responsibility today will still be in office: Ben Bernanke.

The next President, either Obama or McCain will have to face this problem and be blamed by the side not in power. But history will mark President Bush as the man who humiliated the American economy.

Who would have thought that simplicity would be too expensive.  People from big urban areas often take up the rural life because it is simpler, cleaner, more American.  Now, the the appearance of peak oil and sky high gasoline may make rural life as extinct as the dinosaur. In “High gas prices threaten to shut down rural towns” High gas prices threaten to shut down rural towns” the end or the age of oil threatens what some see as the most American of the American ways of life.

Having grown up in the rural town of Blackwell, Oklahoma, I sometimes feel a yen to return to the small towns and small ways of my youth.  Who would have thought that these places placed back away from it all would be the canary in the coal mine for peak oil?

High gas prices threaten to shut down rural towns

FORKS OF SALMON, Calif. — The price of gas isn’t an annoyance here. It’s a calamity.
Peggy Hanley uses a generator that burns a gallon of diesel fuel every hour —at about $5 a gallon— to power Forks General Store, the only place to buy groceries for miles around. There’s no electric service, so Hanley, the owner, uses the generator to run eight refrigerators, nine freezers, lights and two ice machines for the store, which has been in a trailer since a fire destroyed the original building in 1994.

There are no utilities and no public transportation in this unincorporated town of a couple hundred people along a narrow road that winds through the mountains 314 miles north of Sacramento. Many people here buy gas for their vehicles and gas or diesel for generators that power their homes.

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The first thing you have to get past with this story is the condescension and the bad puns. But it is worth asking yourself, “If a chemical can give me a religious experience, could all religious experience be Chemical?”  Our brains, after all, are nothing more than complex chemical computers.  When we experience God, are we touching the infinite or simply on a self induced long strange trip?

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“Ass, Gas, or Grass! Nobody rides for free.”
I was a teenager, I used to keep a sticker on the dashboard of my first car that said, “Ass, Gas, or Grass! Nobody rides for free.” Well it looks like peak oil has brought those days back, in a big wayl.

“The Smoking Gun” brings us a story of Sex, seedy hotels, and gasoline.

Sex For Gas
Police: Kentucky john paid prostitute with $100 fuel card
JULY 2–A Kentucky woman is facing prostitution charges for allegedly trading sex for gasoline. Angela Eversole, 34, was nabbed last weekend during a police stakeout at a Days Inn, where she allegedly trysted with customer Kenneth Nowak. According to court records, Nowak admitted paying for Eversole’s services, in part, with a $100 Speedway gas card.

I wonder if that lady of negotiable virtue was trying to finance her simple, rural lifestyle. I guess if it’s gas that turns your motor over you should go with gas.

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One last story rounds out this roundup, and this one is also about that slippery black liquid that becomes that seductive amber fluid, oil. From “Asia Times Online” there is a story that hits one of my own drumbeats, “End of the petroleum age.”  Peak oil is here to stay, and we will never again see that cheap mana from heaven for our tanks.  It seems that even the heads of states that pump and control that wonderful resource upon which our way of life is built are being forced to face the truth.

“End of the petroleum age.”

By Michael Klare

At the hastily convened global oil summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on June 28, top officials of producing and consuming nations from around the world attempted to find a combination of solutions that would somehow extricate us from the current crisis over sky-high energy prices. These proposals ranged from increased output by major producers such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to restrictions on the activities of international oil speculators.

All were based on the premise that the crisis can be resolved through the right mix of actions, thus restoring an environment of cheap and abundant oil, a premise that is fundamentally flawed. More and more, the evidence suggests that this is not just a temporary crisis. It is the beginning of the end of the petroleum age.