THE REMAINDERS OF LONG DIVISION
2009 and the Settling of Overdue Accounts

BARACK OBAMA AND CLEAN COAL – A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY

By

Michael C. Ruppert
(c) 2009 Michael C. Ruppert. All Rights Reserved

Jan 5, 2009 – I have had a few very strong and clear core beliefs and lingering questions since about the time I passed from toddler to childhood. I remember wondering with great intensity, when I was about three or four, "What happens to my waste when I flush the toilet? Where does it go? Where does the trash we throw out go? I realized, even in 1955, that all we were doing was moving a mess from one place to another.

Then, just a few years later, as I was taught long division, I would get a problem like: 51/1561 =. Diligently I would draw the long division box, enter the numbers and start figuring it out. But after a long time and several sheets of paper I would come out with an answer of .032671364509929532351057014734145… It wouldn't stop. I raised my hand and asked the teacher and she said that some division problems never worked out. She explained to the class that what we did was to round off the answer to the first one or two places. I remember that my immediate reaction, marked by cognitive dissonance, was "Well what happens to all that stuff you chop off?"

"It doesn't matter", said the teacher.

It doesn't matter.

At the time my father was with Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin). He was also a navigator on SA 16 Air-Sea rescue planes in the Maryland Air National Guard. What the teacher told me about division contradicted a world dominated by my father's military "everything must be neat" life philosophy where absolute precision in thought and action determined who lived and who died on a battlefield. I could not possibly have formulated the thought at that age but I intuited that there was a conflict between the precision of mathematics and the way the world I lived in was managed. "Neat and orderly" under an empirically-defined system without natural, spiritual or holistic groundings just meant chopping off a lot of insoluble problems and sending them… someplace.

Things might not work out perfectly in math, but might there not be some other way to view and resolve "problems"? Something different from the way we solve them now?

Flash forward to 1974. I am now a UCLA honors graduate and in my first year on the streets as a probationary LAPD officer in South Central Los Angeles. I saw things I could never have imagined; lives not only wasted but way outside the neatness of society's glorified self image. Criminals and victims alike fell through large gaps in a paradigm that was compelled to sell itself as being able to resolve everything with neat (and neatly explained) answers. Almost instantly I viewed police work as the task of playing trash collector for "remainders" of human life. They didn't matter in that ecosystem. By 2004 when "Rubicon" was published I had firmly concluded that the impending collapse of industrial civilization had everything to do with "remainders".

It had to do with the remainders left over after dividing an infinite growth paradigm by finite energy. It had to do with dividing ethnically and economically functioning geographic regions by arbitrarily drawn British borders as happened from Jordan to Bangladesh between 1900 and 1947. It had to do with the division of labor, land, commodities, natural resources, life and the ecosphere (all of which are limited) by a "free market" economy that was not free but manipulated and which required infinite growth.

It had to do with the division of an American people, self-gratified by a manufactured public image – some of which was true – being divided by CIA-sponsored coups from Iran to Indonesia to Guatemala to Brazil to Vietnam; from coups inside this nation (i.e. JFK, MLK and RFK), to the occupation of Iraq.

It had to do with dividing so-called clean coal by the monumental toxicity of coal's actual waste that will never be cleaned up… at any price. It had to do with dividing nuclear energy by the poison that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.

It had to do with blithe and dishonest statements that there were two trillion barrels of "oil" in oil shale by the fact that it's not oil but kerogen and it has to be cracked out of rock by heating it to a third the temperature of the sun; by using enormous amounts of fresh water; by destroying millions of acres of productive farm and ranch land, and by the fact that it will never be viable by any standard.

What happens when we divide infinite economic growth with its 96% correlation to greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere?

What happens when we divide the 2,000 or so POW/MIAs left in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by Henry Kissinger's statement that we got everyone out?

What happens when you divide the fact that a 1998 CIA Inspector General report established conclusively that the CIA dealt drugs by the fact that Congress said the matter was closed and there was no evidence?

What happens when you divide the fact that Wall Street needs to launder hundreds of billions in drug money to stay afloat; by the rule of law? Divide the Savings and Loan scandal by Enron and WorldCom et al, plus the fact that there were three times more paper mortgages being traded as derivatives than there were actual properties; by the fact that we (collectively) never mustered the will to fully address any of these crimes when we should have?

What happens when you divide the fact that, after scheduling war games to move most fighters out of the Northeast Air Defense Sector on 9-11-01, Dick Cheney injected 22 false radar blips onto radar screens and was also commanding a live-fly hijack drill as the attacks occurred, by the fact that the official version is that 19 hijackers operating from caves did it all alone?

What happens when you divide the fact that whatever created all life loves men and women equally, by the gross gender inequality fostered by cultures and religions around the world?

What happens when you divide the absolutely illegal imprisonment without trial and habeas corpus of all the detainees at Guantanamo by the fact that no country wants to be the rug that the U.S. sweeps those remainders under. (Australia has just refused a second request to accept them.)

Where did/do the remainders go? I can tell you one thing based upon a lifetime of study and experience. All those little tiny things that are cut off and forgotten go somewhere where they too collect compound interest of a spiritual, energetic, and emotional nature.

On this blog – and in the world at large – there is one group which looks at our current problems and insists on analyzing things under the erroneous assumption that these problems can be predicted, analyzed and treated by resorting to more (mere) long division… with larger and larger remainders. These people will always be wrong and they will never grasp what it is that now threatens life on the planet – namely the way they view and respond to it. Remainders can be especially dangerous when it comes to race, politics and geostrategy.

Those who can and will adapt to the new emerging paradigm will be those who have freed themselves from long division. They will be the people who discard the notions that everything has a neat empirical answer; that logic and technology will find ways to make all remainders go away. The survivors will be the ones who throw out long division as a primary methodology for perceiving the world they live in.

On a minute-to-minute basis now it is the remainders that are the big wild cards in the collapse of industrial civilization. They are having ever-larger impacts. The Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories are remainders. The Americans who have quit looking for work and fallen of the statistical charts are remainders. At the end of all these long problems lie the two to five billion people who will perish in a die off… as remainders.

And let us get one thing very clear. Free markets have no long-term vision. The long-term vision of politics is not much better, maybe a hundred feet further down a road that stretches thousands of miles.

Until the human race achieves a collective wisdom that acknowledges, incorporates and balances remainders instead of ignoring them, then mass, species-wide extinction – the ultimate "mark to market" is and will be our only ultimate destination. How far we go in that direction is up to us.

COMPOUNDING REMAINDERS – A couple of posts ago I made a comment about reading reports put out by places like the Brookings Institute. I called them "grist for the grist eaters". Someone on this list thought I was demeaning them for that. Again, I was misunderstood. Washington and the entire U.S. governmental and academic policy making establishment are grist generators and grist consumers. I was not criticizing our reader. I was making a point. All of these think tanks, policy institutes and quasi-governmental entities are master of long division. They divide, chop off a few remainders and then generate a grist report which is eagerly read by grist eaters who also generate their own grist for others to eat. More long division. More remainders that compound and mutate in the dimension of the unresolved; the Twilight Zone of Unintended Consequences.

It is because I have spent my life studying the remainders and not the grist that I have become so successful at making "maps" and predictions. I started as a remainder myself in 1977. When you study the remainders long enough you can discern the logic that created them.

All of our centuries of "remainders" are coming due. And as these remainders resolve the books of the earth, things will balance very quickly… Balance… Isn't that something we should have been seeking all along? Had we balanced (e.g.) Iran-Contra, 9-11 wouldn't have happened? Had we fairly balanced the S&L Crisis our economic collapse would have played much differently. Had CIA and Drugs been tackled fairly, George W. would never have been elected and the huge chunk of his father's staff that came back after 2000 would have been in permanent exile. Had the nation mustered the will to solve the assassination of JFK… Had "Crossing the Rubicon" been acknowledge by the federal government or the major media…

You see, we have been on the "Pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later" plan for almost all of our history, since we first cultivated crops. Of course we have almost always chosen the pay later plan.

Now is later.

A REMAINDER TO ROUND OFF IN OUR FAVOR – DIVIDE BARACK OBAMA BY CLEAN COAL

Some remainders work out favorably, as they do when I take a load of old clothes to Goodwill or make a charitable donation.

CLEAN COAL -- Barack Obama is going to face what may be his first presidential "balancing" with coal. We have all grown sick and tired of the blatantly dishonest ads rub by the coal lobbies about "clean coal". You know, the ones nailing Obama to a cross of-his-own-making by telling us that clean coal was our future during the campaign. There isn't one single clean-coal plant operating anywhere and there never will be. Even BEFORE the economic crash started, new coal-fired plants were being built willy-nilly. They were sorta supposed to be clean-coal but – after the plants were finished – the builders said, "Gee there's not enough money for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) right now. We'll come back and do it later, (thanks Julian
Darley). All those dirty plants are going online now.

How much money will there be for CCS when the Dow is at 5,000, when we have 15% unemployment, civil unrest, you name it?

CCS is a hugely expensive, energy intensive and resource-wasting proposition that will solve nothing. For unknown reasons, George W, Bush's Energy Secretary Sam Bodman pulled the permit for the only clean-coal plant that was about to go online.

The other half of the clean-coal lie is that all of the destruction and toxicity of mining and burning coal has been somehow remaindered (gristed) out of the equation and somehow "gone away" Well, there's a huge chunk of Tennessee that's just been poisoned by a billion tons of totally toxic coal ash, filled with arsenic, deadly heavy metals and carcinogens. "Clean coal" never addresses the ash from burning coal or even the toxins released when coal is merely "mined". (When mountaintops are removed, along with all the trees and wildlife.

Some groups have taken to airing TV spots that totally strip clean-coal down to the lie that it is. I can't wait for someone to start airing ads exposing the American Petroleum Institute's Lauren Hutton campaign of disinformation. That woman should be truly ashamed for the lies she has been so well paid to tell.

If THE PEAK OIL/SUSTAINABILITY MOVEMENT has the slightest bit of political savvy it will recognize that our war is not one to convince everybody of all of our positions at once. Sisyphus would know better. But what happens if we knock legs out from under the defenders of the old, suicidal paradigm one at a time? As the house collapsed we would be the only ones left standing. As far as I'm concerned, the TVA spill in Tennessee was one of the greatest blessings ever. It is the club with which clean coal can be beaten to death very quickly… in a way that our new President might well be grateful for.

I strongly believe that Mr. Obama knows all of the problems with coal. I also suspect that one of his tough choices to get the nomination and get elected was to deal with the energy lobby. But he can be cut loose if enough pressure builds behind the TVA debacle.

If the Peak Oil movement has a lick of sense it will drop everything and spend its time, money and effort delivering the coup de grace to clean coal by flooding the Obama administration and congress with emails, calls and letters exposing the hoax of clean coal. Henry Waxman, the new Chair of the House Energy Committee and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar should be buried in correspondence.

We all know the names Campbell, Simmons, Heinberg, Darley, Savinar, Hirsch, Bartlett, Bartlett, Quinn-Bachman, etc. At any one time all the giants are waging their wars and doing their great works. But what if – on just one issue – they all got together and focused their energy on just that? The one that's right in front of us; a battle where a great victory can be won; where our growing influence can have a deep impact?

I repeat myself to say that this administration is willing and eager to listen. But if we do not speak up who is to blame? For years I said that such efforts were useless. I was absolutely correct. It is the collapse of the economy and industrialized civilization that has beaten some parts of Washington into a state of semi-reasonableness. Their calculators cannot handle this problem.

I remember being so angry after leaving the last ASPO-USA conference in Sacramento. I proposed to myself and a few others (in semi-jest) that instead of having an Association for the Study of Peak Oil we should found a rival organization and call it, the Association for the Response to Peak Oil. We need that… right now. We need to lobby with organized force and resources.

We don't have anything like that…

MCR

[QUESTION: Has anyone noticed that the trial balloon about a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got shot down? There has been no confession. That story was a trial balloon. And we are the ones who shot it down. (God bless Paul Thompson.) – It's just like the recent story about bloggers who shot down Obama's choice for DCI. We have more influence than ever.]

I'm sending a big wink back to Donna Brazile at CNN. Thanks.
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Jenna Orkin adds:


Google "Problems" and "clean coal" and you get over 400,000 hits. At least a few are on point.

Start with the bait and switch of factoring in the 'benefits' of carbon sequestration when calculating the environmental impact of coal-to-liquids but leaving out the cost out when doing the accounting.

Why? The first CO2 sequestration project in the US, the FutureGen plant in Illinois, was scotched by the Department of Energy when costs headed towards $1.8 billion.

How much CO2 are we talking about, anyway? Turns out that for every gram of coal burned, there's more than 3.5 times as much CO2 produced. Better remove a few more mountain tops if you're serious about this sequestration business, 3.5 times as many for anyone who's counting, regardless of whether they have any coal under them.

Student Throws Utah Oil and Gas Leasing Into Chaos
Taliban Militants Kill Three Accused Spies (New!)
Iranian Military Official Calls for Oil Embargo
Shades of 1973
Capacity of [Caspian] Oil Pipeline to Double
Russia Accuses US, Ukrainian, Czech and Turkish Nationals in Georgia Conflict

And in Western Africa...
US, AU and Russia Demand Mauritanian Democracy
Is Long Beach Airport for Sale?
How about New York State? The cover of last week's New Yorker Magazine depicted a grizzled geezer bearing a sign that read, "The End is Nigh Sale."
Chavez Prevents Shopping Mall

...and for any post-holiday blues:
Achmed the Dead Terrorist Sings Christmas Carols

10:20 EST 1/1/2009 Russia Cut Off Gas Supplies to Ukraine -- JO


12:31 EST 12/31/2008 RUSSIA-UKRAINE GAS TALKS COLLAPSE -- UH OH...

We're going to be saying Uh Oh! a lot. This is very serious in terms of potentital for loss of life. FTW's pages are filled with stories not only about the Ukraine and Russia but about how Britain -- at the end of the Russian gas food chain -- has between 30,000 and 50,000 "excess deaths" each winter. "Excess deaths" are situtations where the poor and the elderly must choose between feeding coins into heat-vending radiators... or eating. A disruption in Russian gas to
Europe could result (especially in this economy) in 100,000 or more British deaths and who knows how many more from France to Holland, to Belgium, to Germany, to Denmark, to the Czech Republic to...

Clearly this is the die-off scenario we did not want to see. The "free" markets at work. The Ukraine/Russia tension also holds fertile seeds for a nuclear confrontation in short order. At this point I cannot rule out a Russian military occupation of Ukraine. In fact, it looks to be only perhaps two steps removed from that as it stands now... And who could oppose it. OK, I see parallels with Europe in 1938 with the Anschluss -- the rape of Austria. There is no one Hitler
this time... It is now every Hitler for himself and that's what's really scary.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7806616.stm

I'm working on a large piece for next week. About two or three weeks ago I told you what my predictions for 2009 were. They haven't changed.

Please make this New Year's full of love; special and worth remembering.

I feel a bit like Tiny Tim... "God bless us, one and all."

MCR
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JO adds:

Medvedev Hopes For Better Ties with Ukraine, US, in 2009
But in case that doesn't work out, see article above for Plan B.
Gazprom Reeling

Kashmir Elects a Government Friendly to India
To Hurt Taliban, Pakistan Seals Off the Khyber Pass
US To Widen Supply Routes in Afghan War

Mckinney Relief Boat Hit By Israeli Ship
http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com

A Palestinian in touch with her relatives under bombardment, first hand accounts includes an update on Israeli harassment of a ship trying to deliver urgently needed medical supplies.

Free Gaza - end the blockade

Haaretz

Israeli newspaper with better coverage than US media, not ideal but does allow some dissenting voices through.
-- Gaza links provided by "M."

Kuwait Scuttles Venture With Dow Chemical
To the tune of over $17 billion.

As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.

"...He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says... When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia."

Reported in that bastion of wack-o conspiracy theories, the Wall Street Journal.

--JO

STAY FOCUSED ON INDIA AND PAKISTAN

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan-india27-2008dec27,0,4960186.story

--
MCR
************************************************************************************

JO adds:

The following article must have been written just before the one above.

Pakistan Moves Forces Away From Afghan Border
A... Pakistani security official would not say where the forces were being sent...

No First Use of Nuclear Weapons Is Not in Pakistan's Favor
Op-Ed in Pakistan Daily by unnamed author.

A CHRISTMAS EVE MESSAGE -- MY FAVORITE SPIRITUAL PASSAGE

[This post is dedicated to our regular poster RanD... You knew I had this already. But you just say it so much better than I do sometimes.]

Throughout out man's history as one major epoch passed and a new one emerged, mankind's religions and interpretations of God have changed dramatically. But did God itself change? By definition that is impossible. This isn't the quote that's coming but another of my favorite spiritual writers, a guy by the name of Joel Goldsmith, once offered a definition of God as something that is self-created and self-sustaining... unto infinity. He told the tale of a nuclear
physicist who had just presented a theorem demonstrating the everything in the universe was a form of hydrogen -- one proton and one electron. Ipso facto: there was no place in the universe where God wasn't. Now compare that with John, Chapter1...

Religions follow business models just like businesses do. Christianity, since around 300 AD anyway, has had the most "successful" business model and has helped shape every aspect of our lives, especially, business, finance and commerce; infinite expansion, capitalism, slavery and relentless population growth.

I think it inevitable that all religions are facing great challenges at the moment; some much worse than others. I think Buddhism and Taoism are probably most immune from this because they incorporate every challenge we see today in one way or another. The Indian parable
of the four blind men and the elephant is apropos here. -- Four blind men come across an elephant. One grabs the trunk and argues, "An elephant is very like a snake!" One grabs the ear and says, "No! An elephant is very like a leaf!" The next one grabs a leg and proclaims, "You fools! An elephant is like a tree." The last grabs the tail and proclaims, "I must kill all you infidels, "An elephant is exactly like a rope!"... In the meantime the elephant just stands there waiting for
someone's consciousness to expand. For the record, I believe that Christ, Mohammed, Isaiah, Buddha and Lao Tze were all prophets -- among others -- who in their lifetimes achieved enlightenment in some form. I believe that all of mankind is being challenged to do the same thing. Every individual is being held accountable for its own level of spiritual awareness.

Think of it this way: The next phase of human spiritual growth will also appropriately be called relocalization.

We must anticipate, expect and encourage new spiritual thought as much as we MUST encourage new political, economic and social thought at this epochal shift in human existence.

So, with that being said, here is a quote from George Fowler's "Dance of a Fallen Monk" which is (today) my favorite.

"Now I understood for the first time that all these problems are caused by a race asleep and thrashing about in its panicked nightmares. There will be wars and holocausts and genocides as long as God is portrayed and thought of as a tight-minded Legislator, a feudal Lord, n offended King, a hypersensitive artisan -- even if church managers condescendingly tack onto that ridiculous list the not-very-convincing footnote that He is also loving. As long as people dream that they are insecure and needy, in some sort of eternal jeopardy, there will be atrocities. But as the human race grows up spiritually, and as individuals gain a personal experience of the God they have been worshipping in fear, they will recognize that much of their theology and philosophy is built on nightmares. That will be the day of the rethinking of presuppositions and of vested positions. That will be the day of peace. I suddenly found myself unwilling to sit it out in the mountains of Utah. I wanted to play an active role in the process of the world's awakening."

Happy holidays to all, with a special message of love and gratitude to our growing tribe.

Carl Jung might be pleased. And God, with no concept of time, just is.

MCR
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JO adds:

Meanwhile, back at the unspiritual, materialistic ranch...

US Warned India in Early October of Potential Terrorist Attack
The Fool's Gold of Carbon Trading


The mainstream media wake up to the nightmare:

Fed Refuses To Disclose Recipients of $2 Trillion
Trade secret. See, it's taxpayer money but the Fed isn't the government so transparency isn't required. Heads I win, tails you lose.

“It would really be a shame if we have to find this out 10 years from now after some really nasty class-action suit and our financial system has completely collapsed,” [Lucy Dalglish, executive director of Reporters Committe for Freedom of the Press] said.

Barney Frank, sounding downright defensive

"Let me start with that second despicable comment you just made I am surprised at you that you would do something like that."

"You wrote the bill," Stahl points out. "You’re, quote, 'the smartest man in Congress.' How did it happen that you wrote a bill that the secretary of treasury has the power not to fulfill in the way you wanted it fulfilled?"

"Because there’s a metaphor that works here: you cannot push on a string. There’s no Constitutional way to force them to do things," Frank says.

A Second Mortgage Crisis on the Horizon?
Peak Money

Since Dick Cheney called the "War on Terror" a war that would not end in our lifetime (because that is how long it will take to use up the second half of the oil), we could call the global financial crash triggered by reaching the limits to growth "the economic crisis that will not end in our lifetime."


Quote of the day (strictly speaking, the actual day of the quote was December 12):

[D]espite yesterday’s setback, we wouldn’t be surprised if this rally continued for several more months. No particular reason. It’s just the way Mr. Market works. Investors have gotten scared...they’re taking precautions. They’re closing their wallets...they’re asking questions and reading prospectuses carefully. Mr. Market will want to loosen them up a bit...get them to relax, let down their guard and come out into the open – so he can destroy them.

Robin Williams on Obama Election
Businessman's Version of The Night Before Christmas
See comment posted at 12:24 pm

THE TRIAD THREAT AND THE EMERGING TERRAIN OF PIRACY

Dec 23, 2008 -- About a year and a half ago a landmark conference was held at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. which -- for the first time -- linked the obviously related crises of climate change and Peak Oil. I was one who celebrated that belated bridge as I boarded a train from Manhattan to DC with my right thumb aching from six externally fixated pins holding shattered bones in place, my arm in a sling. (The thumb works fine now.) While the conference was a great milestone it was, in my opinion, a checkpoint that should have been passed much earlier. At the time I was convinced that the milestone was a bit like the French army in 1939 which was perfectly prepared to fight the First World War. Already the clear cracks were emerging that signalled the start of economic collapse. As I had said in my speech at NY's Cooper Union in May of 2006, there was a clear possibility, even a likelihood, that economic collapse would trump everything... and indeed it has. Throughout 2005 and 2006 I warned as
loudly as I could that all eyes needed to be first on the economy. Peak Oil would remain the ultimate cause of collapse but the first blows striking at the legs of a three-legged stool would be economic ones, rendering effective response to address the other two legs, extremely difficult and possibly impossible.

In my last public interview in early July of 2006, just weeks before I left for Venezuela, I made clear statement that I thought the economy would get us first and that it might be a death blow. This is almost certainly the best interview -- out of maybe 200 TV, film, radio and print interviews I have ever given. It was certainly the most comfortable and relaxed, even though FTW's office computers had been smashed just a week before. I spoke as clearly and unguardedly as I ever have. A great deal of credit went to my comfort with the interviewer, Janaia Donaldson, and the fact that Megan Quinn (now Megan Quinn Bachman) of Community Solutions was sitting just a few feet away. I had flown her into Ashland for a presentation on
sustainability at Southern Oregon University that day.

I just watched this 27-minute interview on YouTube again and it was so compelling in terms of recent events that I thought I'd recommend it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRo5jdWQPDI&feature=related.

It is now abundantly clear that the economic collapse is a global one and occurring much faster than almost anyone anticipated. There just isn't going to be any one region that escapes.

PIRACY AND THE GULF OF ADEN

More pieces of the landscape are emerging with respect to piracy. It's not possible yet to say that I have the full landscape but I am very concerned. One of the alternative futures that all of us in the Peak Oil movement saw was that economic and social tensions arising for the effects of Peak (the loss of cheap energy) would result in nuclear war. It's not a stretch to say that a nuclear exchange would render issues of climate change and Peak Oil moot. Recent development vis a
vis piracy have my antenna extended to the max. I cannot draw any conclusions yet but there are clear grounds for worry and to keep our eyes fixed on the Gulf of Aden.

It was just announced that Iran is also sending warships to the Gulf. Apparently an Iranian ship has been seized also. (It's very helpful to look at a map while analyzing this.) That makes the U.S., Russia, India, China and Iran (along with NATO countries) heavily deployed in a relatively small body of water which lies just outside the Straits of Hormuz (Iranian and international waters) through which about 30% of the world's oil passes. Now if you go back and look at this blog's main page you see the quote that if there's a gun on the table in Act One of a play it's a sure bet that someone's going to get shot. Either the involved powers have agreements for safe operations in these waters or they don't. If they have an agreement we do not know either how solid or shaky it may be. I do strongly see that a rapprochement of sorts is already underway between the U.S. and Iran but have no idea how solid it is. Like George W. Bush, Ahmadinejad is on his way out. His tenure was guaranteed by having the enemy of Bush to rally his domestic base. For years I have been (correctly) saying that there was never going to be either a U.S. or Iranian attack on Iran. And, in another one of those far-forward looking pieces, I predicted a
rapprochement between the two countries. Here's the link:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/032706_rapprochment.shtml.

I'm no Polyanna on this. We have no idea what kinds of communications exist between the major powers. I would like to think that concentrating this much naval power in a relatively small and totally strategic body of water can be done without incident. But as the economic collapse continues, desperation will increase in like measure. So, the nightmare scenario is that with all those tankers and all those warships in a small body of water, it might be only a matter of time...

SAUDI ARABIA

I've written so much about Saudi Arabia. I recommend all of FTW's older writing on the subject but especially this one called "Saudi Arabia: The Sarajevo of the 21st Century:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/082102_saudi_arabia_1.html.
Of course you should go to "Rubicon"

In an historical context I think back to the fact that the U.S. engineered and forced the collapse of the USSR by absolutely destroying oil prices in the mid and late 1980s. Oil was the main staple for Soviet forex revenue and as the oil price collapsed (OPEC magically increased reserves with a pencil and eraser, allowing glut-production under its quotas), the Soviet Union was doomed. Without forex cash the Soviets could not compete with a massive U.S. arms buildup and military expansion. Well it looks like the same thing is happening to Saudi Arabia (whether by intent or as an unforeseen consequence). The Saudi monarchy is hopelessly corrupt. There are more princes on the dole there than raisins in a box of raisin bran. For several years I reported on how the financial corruption was so severe that, even as oil prices climbed rapidly between 2001 and 2006, the Saudi government was borrowing money to keep its social welfare programs afloat while the toyals skimmed everything else off the top.

Those social welfare programs were essential because between that carrot and the stick of a Saudi police state the undereducated, largely unemployed masses, almost all influenced by Wahabi extremism, were kep under control. Now that the price of oil has collapsed it's one of those Wile E. Coyote off-the-cliff moments. After the recent 2 mbpd OPEC production cut oil prices are still plummeting and OPEC is begging Russia to cut production as well to stabilize and raise oil prices. I think it's likely that Russian will cut production because they too are experiencing sharp declines as they pass their second peak. (The first was engineered by the collapse of the USSR and was "artificial".) This Russian peak is geologic. So is Saudi Arabia's which is standing in the middle of the town square, stark naked, just waiting for someone to "see" it and gasp.

Then just yesterday I clipped a story (thanks Rice Farmer) the said that the Saudi government will have a budget deficit in 2009.

Now I seriously doubt that all those corrupt Saudi princes have stopped their insatiable looting. As dinosaurs in the old paradigm they have the same exposure and liquidity positions as all the other dinosaurs. Consequently I am anticipating some serious upheavals throughout the Kingdom next year. We took great pains at FTW to document how the U.S. and much of the region had positioned itself starting back in 2002 to deal with an ultimately inevitable Saudi
collapse. The answer: when in doubt, Balkanize!

If this scenario is correct then my best case would be that key players might be positioning themselves to respond to such an event with some kind of coordination. Iran, by virtue of its location and critical importance would -- of necessity -- be an essential player. Saudi Arabia's life expectancy as a unified kingdom is now less than three years IMO. The instability which might follow that would be life-threatening for all of us. That threat would magnify if Pakistani warships, also close by, decided to express a vital national interests in the Gulf of Aden.

Again, these are only working hypotheses at the moment. But they are very worrisome. While I am seeing grounds for some optimism with apparent US/Sino/Russian naval cooperation in the area, Iran must be involved. But I keep going back to my analogy of a bunch of wet cats being tied in a burlap sack.

MCR
*************************************************************************************

JO adds:

Lugar Urges Quick Action in 2009 on US-Russian Nukes
US Wants Details of Russian Purchase of Israeli Made Drones
Oligarchs Seek $78 Billion as Credit Seizure Empowers Putin
US Sets Up Diplomatic Mission in Crimea
Protests in Russia

“The authorities are like a person who has been diagnosed with cancer who refuses to believe that it’s terminal,” said Yevgeny Kiselyov, a political analyst who was ousted as director general of NTV during Putin’s presidency. [FTW Admin adds: See December 13 entry for this blog.] “Russian leaders and the media have tried to convince the public that there is no crisis at all.”

On Dec. 12, a bill was submitted proposing to expand the definition of treason to “a deed aimed against the security of the Russian Federation, including her constitutional order, sovereignty, territorial and state integrity.”

Kiselyov said these moves reminded him of 1937, the start of Josef Stalin’s Great Purge, when any public criticism of the authorities could be interpreted as high treason.

Forward Thinking on Backwardation
Article on the recent unprecedented backwardation in the gold market signifying, according to the author, drastic reductions in availability.

By the renegade (let's have a moratorium on the word 'maverick') Professor Antal Fekete.

In this article I want to enumerate the reasons why I believe that permanent backwardation in gold would bring about the descent of our civilization into lawlessness similar to that following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

Death of Pollster Mike McConnell
Reported in mainstream media, finally, albeit in the UK.
Neo-Mercantilism and the Politics of Economic Integration
US Trade Rep Supported NAFTA Freeway
Limits To Growth and Greenwashing

Reproduced from the "comments" section of today's earlier post:

eyeballs wrote:

Hi Jenna!

Again, I'm not out to contend and prove, but would like to clarify. I've lived in Taiwan since 1988, except for 5 years in Oregon, recently. I'm in Taiwan now. The Diaoyutai article does not say what Mike says it says.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JL17Ad01.html

Three things matter around these ridiculously tiny islands: national pride/national security (or in Oriental parlance, "face"), fish, and petroleam reserves -- in that order. If the total oil and gas reserves were efficiently harvested, they wouldn't run Shanghai for a week. Everyone knows that. But they would be commercially viable, barring accidents or international interference, so the governments involved all have to somehow answer the question: Why aren't WE harvesting this booty? But a great deal more money is being made between China, Japan and Taiwan (which, as the "Republic of China", officially claims not only the Diaoyutais, but Beijing) and loss of goodwill would more than offset the dram of petroleum available. So they talk about it, they bluster about it, and one HK guy with an ROC flag died after jumping into the sea and trying to reach the main island as the Japanese Navy did maneuvers around his boat.

Of greater practical value are the fish stocks. Fishermen from various nations, or regions, or whatever, go there, get chased off by someone's navy, protest, etc. Again, the question is posed: Aren't these OUR fish? So in order to show its testicles, each government must go through the motions of lodging a protest, etc. And again, nobody lets this get out of hand because the Sony business and the Chinese low-end tech components and the Taiwanese investment are just too important to fuck with for a few fish.

Of greater importance to China -- and presumably Japan, is security. It's hard to imagine a serious military base on even the main Diaoyutai, which is about the size of a football field, thurst out of the ocean by high, jagged cliffs. But an acknowledged (tollerated) 24/7 military "presence" there would block either Japan's southern waters, or put a serious hole in China's eastern perimeter. For this reason, permanent military presence has not been established by either. It is a demiliterized zone - although warships significantly travel there, to renew one claim or another. All parties are very careful not to actually escalate.

There is slightly more oil and gas around the Spratley Islands, south of Taiwan. Again, the total reserves are not much, but worth something. But these are claimed by Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, China ... and of course Taiwan. Taiwan has an airstrip on the biggest island, in fact. Vietnam may have a sub base in the archipelligo and Philippine troops are also stationed around some cays. China considers the whole lot to be part of the motherland, citing the continental shelf, among other things. (The same argument is also employed to demonstrate that Taiwan is an integral part of China.)

My point is that no one is "fighting over the scraps". Everyone is, on the contrary, trying very hard NOT to fight, while at the same time justifying their "sovereignty". These island groups highlight subtleties of Asian politics that differ from the Palmerston/Perry "gunboat diplomacy" of imperial Western powers. China will not take these islands -- or Taiwan -- until the value of trade and the threat of a debilitating war diminish beyond their actual value. And if fighting ever took place, it would not be primarily for the petroleum reserves... it would be for the symbolic confirmation that China was, in fact, The Boss. The PRC is obviously heading in that direction with some enthusiasm, but it's not there yet.

http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2008/04/new-chinese-ssbn-deploys-to-hainan-island-naval-base.php

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/a-chinese-aircraft-carrier-not-if-but-when

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/18/asia/AS-China-Aircraft-Carrier.php

I don't dispute Mike's basic point that resource wars will become fiercer, for ever smaller bits (unless we can somehow, perhaps by Protocol, solve the matters peacefully -- and I'm not holding my breath). But in this case, he's wrongly interpreting a complex, ongoing situation that is not, in fact, escalating. It's important not to let skewed interpretations reinforce existing expectations, 's why I mention it.

Blessings!

MCR said...

DEAR EYEBALLS: I have never so thoroughly enjoyed being corrected and instructed. Please feel free to chime in any time you want. Thanks!

MICHEL -- What a great catch that story on the Iranian Navy and piracy. It's a huge piece of the map. I need a couple of days to chew on it... I don't think I like it much.

MCR

***********************************************************************************

JO adds:

As you read the following from the Somali pirates front, bear in mind who's doing the talking:

Pirates Capture Ukrainian Ship Bearing Arms to Kenya
Mysterious Cargo Aboard Iranian Ship Seized By Pirates Raises WMD Concerns
Iran: Pirates and Secret Wars

Last week, the UN approved a resolution allowing foreign troops to pursue pirates on land in Somalia

Africom, here we com. [sic]

JO
*************************************************************************************

MUST READ

http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/2008/1219.html

This guy has it about right, though I disagree about wealth destruction. There is no wealth as we have known it when there is no energy. Wealth will be measured in completely new (old) ways: food, water, land, shelter, clothing... and gold.

Read the whole story, but this quote knocked my socks off:

"I then showed a chart of the monetary base (all paper dollars and coinage in existence). It took 200-years for the monetary base to go from $0 to $800 billion, but in just the past 3-months it has grown from around $800 billion to $1.5 trillion, and by the time you read this it will probably be surpassing $1.6 trillion. That's double the number of paper dollars in existence since last summer!"

That's one of the reasons he says that what's coming is worse than all previous financial disasters COMBINED. He includes everything from the Great Depression to Weimar Germany, to the Tulip Bubble.

MCR


JO adds:

The graphs in the article will look sickeningly familiar to anyone who's ever glanced at the hockey puck curve of population growth since the discovery of oil.


WHERE'S ELLIOT SPITZER WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

There's Good News and Bad News in Recent Events

By

Michael C. Ruppert

Dec. 18, 2008 10:00 Am PST -- Just after the debacle and demise of Elliot Spitzer last spring, Jenna sent me the below article. What I have listed below is all the reference data I have. (Maybe she can put up a link.) This was some fabulous critical analysis. (I didn't fact check it.)

DID BEAR STEARNS FALL OR WAS IT PUSHED? HOW INSIDER TRADING SAVED JPMORGAN AND LOOTED THE AMERICAN TAXPAYER

Ellen Brown, May 12, 2008
www.webofdebt.com/articles

Elliot Spitzer was a serious guy and I have to agree that he was conveniently removed long before he could – as Governor of New York – put some serous people in jail behind this criminal collapse that the elites knew was coming. Sure, the collapse would have been here anyway, but it might have been mitigated much better. (It can still be mitigated much worse.) There is so much yet to come. And old Bernie Madoff, as significant as he is, would have turned out to be a smaller
fish that Spitzer might have nailed a while ago compared the real tuna that have yet to surface. They may never. Elliot Spitzer is a forgotten memory now and Madoff is rattling the world.

Spitzer was a very risky bet all along for anyone believing in white knights. I believe he had some seriously good intent. He had very big cojones for sure. But he did not have a national base and he obviously did not have the smarts or self control to avoid a self-inflicted wound. Way back in the 9-11 movement from 2003 through 2005 there was one activist who just kept insisting that a solitary state politician would crack the case. The activist kept pushing the movement to spend time, money and energy convincing Spitzer to pick up 9-11 and run with it. Petitions, donations, pleas to organize and demonstrate to make Spitzer save the world. All I could say to myself was, "You f—ing idiot." I sighed in disgust at the belligerent naiveté and all the wasted energy and attention that was flushed. At the time Spitzer was the NY Attorney General with no federal jurisdiction or standing to crack anything as big as 9-11. He would never have stood a chance. Without a broad governmental base, especially in at the federal level, Spitzer was totally vulnerable. Using a military metaphor, he had no armor, no air cover, and no heavy artillery.

That particular 9-11 activist is in my number-four spot for having done more to damage the real 9-11 movement over time than anyone else. I'll tell you who the number one and two destroyers of 9-11 were… but that's all you'll get from me: Amy Goodman and Alex Jones (in that order). I just don't have time for dead-end bs. None of us do now. For me the sex life of politicians is utterly irrelevant to anything… Vive la France! Now, some of the less-sophisticated minds who come here will say, "See, this is proof that there's a master plan."… Bullshit. All Elliot Spitzer's public assassination is, is the proof that the dinosaur elites saw the shit storm coming and they cut the legs out from under a guy who would likely – as Governor – have shown the ubiquitous corruption now just emerging in the stark light of day. Do you think Madoff was the end of that? As Bernie Madoff demonstrates, the elites are out of their league now. They are "dying" too. Even the highest rungs must be starting to sense the impending climate change and ecological/energy/economic event horizon that is upon them.

Spitzer's great failing was that he could not control or subvert his personal needs to protect his larger mission. Forget about whether his actions with an escort were right or not. (Like I said, I could care less.) They were, in our ridiculous moral climate… vulnerabilities. They demonstrated a choice of self over service, and risk taking that was not justified if his mission was that important. He handed his enemies the means for his own destruction and you can bet that they could have put him down any time before that. They have handles (leashes) like that on a great many powerful people. For as much as has been thrown at me over thirty years I have never given any reason for anyone to discredit me. That has come at a great personal price. There were risks I just never took, and life opportunities and experiences I avoided just to keep myself on the field. All that could be done to me was to manufacture a fictitious scandal and it failed. It did extract a heavy toll but I'm still here, intact, with a great new book out in a few months. (No announcement yet. Don't ask.)

So I haven't written for a while because everything that is happening is just so smack dab in the middle of the map we made in "Rubicon" and at FTW that it's heartbreaking to watch: The breakdown of the economy, the collapse of moral and ethical standards, and ever-increasing dysfunctionality. Everything is broken. I am saving the really good news for last… It is Christmas time.

DarkNetz commented that she had seen a big CEO on a videotape sounding like he was quoting from my video, "The Truth and Lies of 9-11." He was. She wondered who else read us. I can tell you that a great many powerful people read me and have for years. They are even more powerful than this one CEO. They just dare not mention my name yet. They can't acknowledge Colin Campbell, Matt Simmons, Richard Heinberg and many others either. I am getting less angry about that as time passes because I know that this will pass too. The old paradigm cannot afford to "see" us in the Peak Oil movement. They read us under the blankets with flashlights, afraid of getting caught – like Spitzer with his mistress. They know how accurate our map has been and those executives who did find us have benefitted from our accurate predictions and map making. There's a reason why "Rubicon" was at or near the number one spot in both Politics-Reference and Public Affairs-Reference for the first eight months of this year at Amazon

But, as the old paradigm dies, things will be stripped away until we who have been sounding the warnings will be the only things left to look at.

And talk about accurate predictions. Here's just a few…

CHRIS COX AND THE SEC

Everyone's asking, "How did the SEC miss Madoff? It had warnings. Go back and pick up "Rubicon" again. Look up Chris Cox in the index. You'll find him in the chapter on Russia. He chaired hearings on how the U.S. looted Russia in the late 90s under the direction of Al Gore.
You'll see that he said some honest things but that he stopped short when any political capital he might have acquired from truth-telling turned into possible collateral damage for Republican interests also backed by the now shaken elites who back both parties… But remember, all constituencies are unwinding now. Who are Republicans? Who are Democrats?

Chris Cox is not the brightest bulb on the tree and he is certainly no troublemaker. He was just the perfect guy for SEC as things started coming down.

AND SPEAKING OF RUSSIA…

Bush got his global free-fire on Somalia. But it's not all his. A new player joins the U.S. and Russia in the Global War on Piracy. (I'd call it G-Wop but I'd get sued, rightly, by Italians.)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aPOE5B7jOAmk&refer=home

I described this a week ago. In another recent story from a few days ago I saw that, for the first time ever, China has sent warships to patrol the Gulf of Aden against piracy. OK, let's see. It's the first time Chinese warships have ventured beyond the Pacific and Indian oceans. The US, Russia and China are moving to control the seas around the Horn of Africa and the Straits of Hormuz. It's pretty clear that parts of the die-off map are being handled by the big three powers together. They are moving to control Middle East oil, 60 percent of all the known oil on the planet. I suspect a tripartite and very secret agreement that a lot of the "who-eats-and-who-dies" decisions will be made this way.

But the scariest thing of all is that OPEC has just moved to cut more than two mbpd from production and the oil price is still falling. The elites just cannot control the economic implosion… a supernova implosion it appears.

The Bumpy Plateau, described so accurately and by so many, for so long, is looking like one steep initial crash, followed by a flattening out with maybe a flicker of recovery, then off the cliff we go. The reaction to OPEC's move tells me that we have very little time.

To read more about the Bumpy Plateau go to:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/members/100406_markets_react.php.


JAPAN AND CHINE FEUD OVER SCRAPS
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JL17Ad01.html

What this story says is what we told you at FTW for years. All the major powers know there is very little oil left to find and they are fighting over relatively tiny reserves that are close by. We must have published four or five stories on the Sino-Japanese dispute but the first one started came after China tried to extend its territorial waters to the continental shelf. I mentioned it first, vis a vis Japan, in "GlobalCorp", which is proving to be one of my most enduring essays ever. We followed it closely in our section "Key Stories From Around the World" (which is no longer available from the archives but will be next year we hope).

CALIFORNIA COLLAPSING

My state is so broke it's shutting down major construction projects and laying off tens of thousands right before Christmas. How is your state doing? I see a bridge collapsed in Atlanta today… lack of maintenance I'm sure. Two nights ago Nat Geo ran a great show on collapsing infrastructure… everywhere. It showed clearly not only how expensive, but how energy intensive it is to rebuild thing like sewers, water pipes, aqueducts, and the grid.

Now the simple, logical thing to do would be to look at three problems: collapsing infrastructure, severe water shortages and near total soil depletion in urban areas and fix much of them with one simple stroke. How? Pass an immediate federal law requiring all states and localities receiving federal aid to review, rewrite, and suspend prohibitions against composting toilets in residences. They're safe. The good ones have no odor at all and are very sanitary, fine for any house… They also produce some of the best fertilizer in the world that doesn't have to be driven anywhere. The human waste not needing to be disposed of wouldn't come flowing out on the streets when there's no money left to fix sewers. The soil would be healthier to plant gardens in, and we'd have flushed that much less fresh water that would then be available to water the gardens. The disease sure to follow from massive sewer failures wouldn't happen either.

Naw! That's too simple.

THE AUTO BAILOUT

At this point, had Bush not done something, he would have made one clear statement above all else. "We know the Big Three aren't going to make it and we're not going to waste a penny on them." That would have been the right decision but we would have seen one go before Barack Obama took office. That might have been a tailspin he couldn't pull out of, even temporarily, by the time he got there. That's all this was… buying a little time.

ROD BLAGOJEVICH

Could be a nasty protracted cat fight here. It will be a great sideshow at the end of the universe.

MIRACLE ON PENSYLVANNIA AVENUE

OK, now for the good news…

President-elect Obama has named Colorado State Senator Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior. Salazar is a really good guy who gets Peak Oil. Here's a quote from Salazar that I used in my new book "A Presidential Energy Policy":

"To hear Bush touting Western oil shale as the answer to $4 per gallon gasoline, as he did again yesterday in the Rose Garden, you would think it was 1908 . . . or 1920 . . . or 1945 . . . or 1974. Every couple of decades over the past century, the immense reserves of the oily rock under Colorado and Utah reemerge as the great hope for our energy future.

"Bush and his fellow oil shale boosters claim that if only Western communities would stand aside, energy companies could begin extracting more than 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil from domestic shale deposits. If only the federal government immediately offered even more public lands for development, the technology to extract oil from rock would suddenly ripen, oil supplies would rise and gas prices would fall.

"If only…

"Furthermore, energy companies are still years away -- 2015 at the earliest -- from knowing whether this technology can cost-effectively produce oil on a commercial scale…

"… It would take around one ton of rock to produce enough fuel to last the average car two weeks.

"… How is a federal agency to establish regulations, lease land and then manage oil shale development without knowing whether the technology is commercially viable, how much water the technology would need (no small question in the arid West), how much carbon would be emitted, the source of the electricity to power the projects, or what the effects would be on Western landscapes?...

"The governors of Wyoming and Colorado, communities and editorial boards across the West agree that the administration's headlong rush is a terrible idea… "

19 Salazar will stop the last-minute actions of the Bush Administration to favor preposterous oil shale development in their tracks… Again, we have more access. Salazar knows us.

It is pretty clear that Obama is following an FDR pattern in his cabinet. FDR put polar opposites in his cabinet and watched them fight. He learned that way. Like I said from the start, Barack Obama's presidency cannot and must not be judged on a few snapshots (Oh yeah, Polaroid went bankrupt today too.) You have a Neocon, energy idiot as National Security Advisor (Jones) but his portfolio isn't energy is it? What Obama is saying to all of us is, if you've got an agenda bring it forward. We'll listen. Now is the time. The Secretary of the Interior has more influence on domestic energy policy than anyone except the Secretary of Energy and the President.

We have several toes in the door I'm telling you.

DEMOCRACY AND THIS BLOG

This blog is not a democracy. This blog is also not a government. Neither I nor Jenna was elected by anybody.

We have no obligation to let disrupters, mental cases and the ill-informed occupy this space or our minds. This is a self-selected group, run by me and Jenna with the express purpose of facilitating knowledge, information, learning and experience between like-minded individuals. My job (Jenna does 95% of the work) is to make sure that this list functions as effectively as possible. It just so happens that we have chosen to share our discussions in a way that can be read frequently by anyone in the world who wishes too. We have nothing to hide.

We have no obligation to anyone to compromise the effectiveness of our list in the name of democracy because we are not a government. We are problem solvers, not problem makers. Jenna lets the growing number of talented stalwarts see just a little of the huge volume of messages intended to destroy our effectiveness. She is doing a fabulous job and I support her 100%.

We welcome and encourage new participants to comment. That they come with an open mind, a willingness to work a little, and good intent is all we ask.

There are some of you who very shortly will find all of your comments rejected without being read or posted. All I can say to that is… tough shit. We – all of us who work hard to make this blog good – are saving lives. As the skipper, my job is to help make you more productive and
eager to come here every day. That's all I care about.

I can't say how much deep affection I have for the regulars here. Soul mates. Brothers and sisters. Sons and daughters. Family. We're feeding each other health food. It's getting close to Christmas and the thought I'd like to close this long entry with is a quote I got from you guys. Its significance was recently reinforced in something that came up in a discussion between me and a new friend; a talented young writer named Emilie (write your own script). It took on special meaning as I just absorbed and meditated on the myriad ironies that adorn this year's Christmas tree.

This line -- which I got from this list -- sums up my whole life experience more succinctly than anything I have yet seen or heard.

It's not about how large you live. It's about how well you live.

MCR
*******************************************************************************

Jenna Orkin adds:

Russia Plans To Test Obama, Diplomat Says
Russia, India China Cooperate On New Aircraft Carriers
Russian Arms Exports To Top $8 Billion

India is a major buyer of Russian arms ranging from advanced fighter jets to aircraft carriers, though some of those deals were postponed by price increases and delivery delays.

Moscow is also striving to sell more to the Middle East, Southeast Asian and Latin American states.

At Meeting in Brazil, Washington Is Scorned

With the rise of China as a principal export destination and the visit last month by President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia to court Latin American leaders, there are more frequent reminders that the United States is becoming an ever more distant player in the affairs of the region, said Riordan Roett, the director of the Latin American Studies program at Johns Hopkins University.


Russia Blames Dawood Ibrahim For Mumbai Attacks
Russian Warship Sails Into Havana Bay
Russia To Provide Free Fighter Jets In Beirut

Did Bear Stearns Fall Or Was It Pushed?
as per MCR's hint.

EPA Could Speed Up Approval Of Coal Plants

“There are a bunch [of coal plants] that they are going to argue now don’t have to consider carbon dioxide, and which will be beyond the reach of the incoming Obama administration,” said Bruce Nilles, director of the anticoal campaign at the Sierra Club, an environmental group.

Energy Dreams: Looking Towards a Bright Future Using Much Less Energy

JO