US Conservatives Are Not Evil; They Are Insane

I really don’t think most US conservatives are evil or bad. I just think they are wrong. Actually I do not think they are wrong. I know they are wrong. Almost everything they say and believe is simply wrong. For the most part, what they believe are lies, nonsense, crap, idiocy and bullshit. If we know a human being whose beliefs are all nonsensical, we usually won’t say he is evil. We might be charitable and just say he is a nutcase.

Almost all of the problems with US conservatives are because they are ludicrously partisan. To be partisan is one thing, but a conservative will never admit he is partisan.

Let us look at some examples:

Benghazi Embassy scandal: There was no scandal. Al Qaeda is waging a global war on us, and they will attack our troops and embassies any chance they can get. The Administration tried their hardest to fortify the embassy, as hard as any other administration would have tried. The diplomatic aspect of the state in the State Department is nonpartisan. Embassy personnel are staffed via the Pentagon and the CIA and contractors. Under any administration, priority will be on protecting the lives of diplomatic personnel and the integrity of US embassies.

Democratic administrations are not so stupid as to scrimp on security overseas, and there is no evidence that Republicans protect embassies any better than Democrats. One of the worst attacks ever on a US embassy occurred in 1983 when Hezbollah hit the US Embassy in Beirut. Almost all the American “civilians” killed were working for the CIA, but don’t let that bother you.

As sometimes happens, our enemies got the best of us one day in Libya. This would never have happened under Gaddafi, but we overthrew him and put Al Qaeda in charge of Libya, so that’s why our embassy got overrun.

Truth be told, wasn’t the 9-11 attack on the US far worse than the Benghazi attack in which one ambassador was killed? On 9-11, 3,000 Americans were killed, on our own soil nonetheless. But somehow to conservatives this is not a failure to protect the US homeland and citizens, but an attack that kills one ambassador is? That’s just partisan bullshit; it’s nothing more and nothing less.

If the Benghazi attack occurred under a Republican President, conservatives would not have said a word. Security failures only occur under Democratic Presidents, never under Republican Presidents. If 9-11 would have occurred under a Democratic President, conservatives would still be screaming about how “the liberals let Al Qaeda attack us.” But since it happened under a Republican, you will never hear a word of this. This makes no sense. 9-11 was either a security failure or it was not. It can’t be the case that it would have been a security failure under a Democrat, but since it occurred under a Republican, it could not possibly be one.

Lie: Obama represents something called “Chicago-style politics.” The implication here is that Obama is corrupt to the core, a representative of corrupt Chicago Democratic Party-labor union machine politics going back decades. The truth is that that corrupt machine got dismantled quite some time ago. It is true that Democratic politics in Chicago used to be very corrupt, especially under Mayor Daley. Corrupt elections were the norm, and dead people voted early and often.

Corrupt Democratic crooks in Chicago stole so many votes in Chicago in 1960 that they probably gave John F. Kennedy the election. So JFK no doubt stole his way into office. The dead have not voted in Chicago in quite some time, and federal RICO prosecutions and raids have pretty much shut down the overtly corrupt aspect of Chicago politics. To my knowledge, Chicago politics nowadays is no more corrupt than the politics of any other large US city.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that Obama is part of any Chicago corrupt Daley-style machine. That machine was made up of old style ethnic Whites, and the new Democratic politics in Chicago is much more progressive, even radical, and clean. It’s true that Penny Pritzger, Rahm Emanuel and Bill Ayers were part of the local politics scene, but neither one is corrupt. In fact Ayers and other radical types would be very against that sort of thing. Emanuel and and Pritzger come out of US finance capital and are as corrupt or non-corrupt as anyone tied at the hip to Wall Street as almost 100% of the Republican Party is.

How about Obama since he has been in office? There is no evidence that the Obama Administration is particularly corrupt as an Executive Branch. Sure, they take lots of corporate money, but the Republicans take way more, and that’s all legal anyway. There have been very few serious corruption cases under Obama.

The truth is that corruption in the US reached an all-time recent high under Ronald Reagan. It was also very high under George Bush Jr. The more capitalist the political party is, the more corrupt it is. The Democrats are not so wedded to US big business and multinational corporations as Republicans are, hence you see a lot less corruption. Any political party with profound ties to Big Capital will almost always be extremely corrupt. This fact can even be shown on a worldwide scale. Parties that are more socialist or populist and less tied to the rich and Big Capital will tend to be less corrupt since there is less Big Money to go around and they at least pay lip service to the lower 80% of the population.

Conclusion: There is no “Chicago-style politics” anymore, and even if there is, Obama is not representative of it. The old machine is dead and gone, possibly never to be revived. That Obama is some corrupt, vote-stealing, bribe-taking, brutal Daley style machine crook is simply nonsense.

Lie: Obama is killing the Keystone XL pipeline because he has ties to the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who will lose big money if the pipeline goes through. Truth is that Obama, corporatist that he is, largely supports the Keystone XL, but he is under huge pressure from environmentalists to cave in. So Obama the corporatist is caught between his Big Money backers in Big Oil (Obama is a strong supporter of Big Oil) and the environmentalists on the Left of his party.

Obama, being a rightwing corporate capitalist whore, is inclined to support the pipeline because his corporate pimps demand it of him. However, he is pressured from the Left to kill the pipeline. So he is caught in a bind. The only wavering he is doing at all is because he is under pressure from environmentalists. If he stops Keystone XL, it will be because the environmentalists convinced him.

Conclusion: Obama has no position on Keystone XL, but is inclined to support it. But he is under pressure from his Left to kill it. The verdict is up to him.

Lie: Environmental organizations lie about the environment because they are paid many millions of dollars to lie about it. This is simply not true. Environmental groups are not corrupt, and there is no money in protecting the environment. There are no rich or business interests paying off environmental activists to do this or that. The entire environmental movement really is anti-capitalist.

Its goal is to shut down or regulate various capitalist enterprises so they can not make any money at all since they are not allowed to start up or because their operations are shut down. In other cases, it seeks to regulate capitalist enterprises in such a way as to limit the profits of Capital. The capitalists are the ones with money in capitalist societies. Since the goals of environmentalists’ projects are to limit or in some cases to disallow capitalists’ profits, no capitalist will ever support this movement.

It is certainly possible that there are rich people somewhere dishing out millions of dollars to environmental groups in order to lie about environmental problems, but there is no evidence that this is occurring. Anyway, US environmental problems are bad enough that there is no need to lie about anything; the truth is bad enough as it is. I have been following this movement for decades now and I have never uncovered a single case of environmentalists inventing nonexistent problems or even exaggerating current ones. There’s no need to do so. If projects are environment-friendly, environmentalists are content to let them go forward.

Conclusion: There are no environmental groups lying about environmental problems as the truth is bad enough. 100% of the lying is on the side of the capitalist destroyers and polluters who obviously have huge pecuniary interest in lying. No one is giving millions of $ to environmentalists to make up lies, and there is no evidence that no one ever has.

Lie: China and India are causing the majority of global warming, so we needn’t worry about global warming here in the US. Pollute away!

The truth is that China and India together cause ~8% of global warming in the world. Sure it is on the rise, but that is the current figure. Most global warming is coming out of the West.

Conclusion: The West is causing global warming, not the rest of the world.

Lie: Barack Obama, radical Islamist Kenyan born Muslim, is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The MB are radical Al Qaeda style terrorists who hate the US and Israel. It is true that the MB are radical Islamists and they are pretty nasty. But a Republican administration would probably also support the MB regime in Egypt. Egypt gets that $2-3 billion/year as a payoff for making peace with Israel back in 1979.

So all those billions are not going for the radical Islamist MB in Egypt, instead it is going for a bunch of Jews squatting in Palestine. It’s a payoff to the Jews, nothing more, nothing less. If you’re upset about it, head on over to Hymietown, find yourself a deli, and complain to anyone who will listen to you.

Truth is that due to geopolitics, a Republican administration would probably have to support the MB to the tune of $2-3 billion a year too. If you cut off all that aid, Egypt might just tear up that peace treaty with Israel, and we can’t have that. So the aid stays, no matter which administration is in charge.

Besides, there is not a whole lot of evidence that the Egyptian MB is any more radical Islamist than the radical Sunni Islamist regimes in the Gulf. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen are all run by radical Islamist regimes. In fact, the Egyptian MB has very deep ties to the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia, and it was the emigration of many MB Islamists to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes that helped fuel Al Qaeda in the first place.

What created Al Qaeda? Al Qaeda was created when large numbers of MB activists from Egypt and then later from Syria migrated to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes in Egypt and Syria. The Wahhabi clerics had been rather quietist up until this point. But the MB cadres were radicalized by persecution and torture in their homelands, and they riled up the locals, turning up the heat on the quietist Wahhabi clergy. It was out of this union of Mediterranean MB activists with Saudi Wahhabi clergy that Al Qaeda itself was born.

Conclusion: Obama probably doesn’t like the Egyptian MB regime any more than any Republican would. But the rules of geopolitics are that Egypt must be supported as a consequence of US support for Israel. As with so many things in the Middle East, all roads lead back to Jerusalem.

Fracking Stopped in California

I received this mail:

We just won a major victory against fracking in California, and I wanted you to be the first to know.

In response to a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity and allies, a federal judge ruled today that the Obama administration violated the law when it issued oil leases in Monterey County without considering all the risks that fracking poses to water, air and wildlife.

It’s a watershed moment in our fracking campaign — the first court ruling invalidating a federal lease sale for failing to address the monumental dangers of fracking.

The court decision, at last, recognizes that fracking poses new, unique risks to California’s environment and can no longer be ignored.

These companies are increasingly vying for Monterey Shale, a massive geological formation holding some 15 million barrels of oil. Extracting that oil will almost certainly require fracking, a controversial practice that uses huge volumes of water mixed with sand and unregulated toxic chemicals to blast open rock formations and extract oil and gas.

Fracking’s bad news for animals and people that rely on clean air, water and land.

Today’s decision was the result of a lawsuit we brought in late 2011 challenging the federal Bureau of Land Management’s decision to auction off 2,500 acres in Monterey County to oil companies.

I am a sensible person. I generally support oil and gas drilling on land and even in water where wells already exist. However, this latest fracking scheme seems like a gigantic mess. Vast amounts of water are injected into the ground combined with a witch’s brew of chemicals, many of them toxic. This mess is intended to break up shale rock formations that hold oil or natural gas, which is then pumped from the Earth.

There are very serious problems with this process. In many parts of the US, fracking has resulted in serious pollution of ground water. The water coming out of your tap smells terrible and seems toxic. In some cases, you can light a match over a glass of water and catch it on fire. Your tap smells like gas fumes. Many people in the area start getting strange illnesses, apparently from drinking the water. In many cases, so much water is sucked out of the ground that personal wells go dry. Now you don’t have any more water for your home. There seems to be evidence that it is killing people too, as death and cancer rates rise in fracking areas.

There is even evidence that fracking is causing earthquakes by breaking up underground rock formations.

Fracking makes people sick.
Fracking kills people via diseases.
Fracking dries up local ground water supplies.
Fracking pollutes local ground water, making your tap water toxic.
Fracking causes earthquakes.

It seems to me that this technology is stupid and toxic, and it makes no sense to utilize it. We probably shouldn’t even be doing it altogether.

All over this ultra-corrupt land, oil and gas companies have bought off local, state and national officials to fast track fracking over residents’ objections. The “liberal” Obama Administration has been strongly in favor of fracking and has often tried to force it through without any environmental reviews, saying that is won’t have any environmental effects.

In California, “liberal” Jerry Brown (who has reinvented himself as another Barack Obama as he has become much more conservative over the years) has similarly shoved through fracking proposals for all of California. Brown’s commission quickly issued a ruling that fracking would have no environmental effects and was fast-tracked for all of California. Brown is wrong, but this is just one more example of his endless treks into conservatism.

With “liberal” friends like Jerry Brown and Barack Obama, who needs conservative enemies?

Monsanto Corporation: Portrait of Evil

I recently received this mail:

An agricultural giant called the Monsanto Company has risen to the top of the corporate food chains thanks to their genetically modified corn and soybean seeds, seeds bred to withstand and even produce their own herbicides and pesticides.

But in the decades since they’ve appeared on the scene, two more things have sprung up: a new crop of “superweeds” that have evolved to resist our chemicals, and root worms that have become insecticide-resistant “superworms,” both of which are set to swarm the Midwest in the coming year.

Rather than come clean, Monsanto has been covering their tracks, working to market their corn as fresh produce and spending millions to kill California’s Prop 37 requirement to label their corn and soybeans as genetically modified products.

The FDA still doesn’t require safety studies for Monsanto’s new strains, they’re designing food to produce dangerous chemicals, and these same chemicals have been breeding superworms that will devastate the landscape in the decades to come.

Don’t stay silent. Please, join us in calling on Monsanto to stop fighting Prop 37 in California, and spread this information on the danger of genetically engineered crops to as many friends as you can.

It’s time we knew what’s in the food we’re eating and the crops these companies are growing. Stop the superworm swarm: Join us in calling for greater transparency at the Monsanto Company!

Here is what is going on. Monsanto Corporation has been marketing herbicide and pesticide resistant genetically modified crops. The purpose of this is to allow you to plant more crops. However, the whole mess has backfired terribly. The more pesticide resistant crops they plant, but more bugs get resistant to pesticides, so you need to apply more and more pesticides to get the same effect.

In addition, planting herbicide resistant crops allows more use of herbicide. However, the herbicide resistant crops apparently hybridize their genes with weeds, creating “superweeds” that are resistant to herbicides. This means you need to apply more and more herbicides to kill the same weeds. Application of herbicides goes way up. As this sick corporation also makes herbicides, their herbicide sales go way up too. This is obviously insane to anyone with a brain.

Now, somehow genetically modified corn and soybean crops are also producing “superworms,” possibly nematodes that eat the roots of crops. The superworms have become resistant to pesticides, requiring greater and greater applications of pesticides in order to kill them. This seems to be definition of insanity.

Proposition 37 on the ballot in California was stupidly voted down by “liberal” California voters after Monsanto and other corporate maggots outspent the pro campaign for 20-30-1. The proposition sensibly called for labeling genetically modified foods. Then people could decide whether or not they wanted to buy them. Surveys show most people don’t want to buy the stuff.

The problem with Frankenfoods is that no one knows whether they are good for you or not. Many studies have been done indicating that Frankenfoods might actually be bad for both humans and pets and animals raised for food. No one knows the exact effects that these Frankenfoods have on our health, but caution is advised until all the data are in.

The government has been utterly corrupt in its approval of Frankenfoods. Over and over, the US government has ratified that these foods are safe despite countless studies casting doubt on that. University professors who did studies showing that Frankenfoods were bad for you have been bullied and threatened with their jobs. Monsanto and other giants have bought off and corrupted educational institutions such as universities and many governments. The whole thing sticks to high heaven.

Frankenfoods are stupid. If they don’t hurt our health or that of our food and pet animals, they are causing a nightmare in our agricultural fields. None of this makes any sense!

Wind Power Kills Birds!

Click to enlarge. Cats kill far more birds than wind turbines do.

Disgusting rightwing idiots on Fox News have been going on an on about wind power lately. They have suddenly become environmentalists. They are really fake environmentalists, because they are opposed to environmentalism almost 100% of the time and only support it cynically when it suits their needs. Anyway, these fake enviros have been going on lately about wind power and how bad for the environment it is. Why is it bad? Because it kills birds! Since wind power kills birds, it’s bad for the environment and we should all oppose wind power!

One wonders why idiot rightwingers even oppose wind, solar and other energy in the first place. I mean, energy’s energy right? Are there not capitalist enterprises utilizing wind, solar and other forms of energy to make a buck? Ok, so why are they bad then? Turns out that all conservatives are whores for the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry is opposed to alternative energy because they don’t like competition! Real simple. That’s all it is. We need to keep on burning fossil fuels until we burn the whole planet down with our global warming.

Wind turbines do kill birds, especially in certain locations like Altamont Pass. Last time I drove there, I saw quite a few dead birds of prey like owls and hawks dead by the side of the road. A sorry sight.

However, as you can see, the number of birds killed by turbines is vastly surpassed by the number of birds killed by cats. 5,200 times more birds are killed by Killer Kitty than by turbines. Cats are an extremely serious problem in terms of killing mammals, birds and rodents. You really ought to keep your cat inside. If you do let it out, put a bell on it. A belled cat will almost never kill a bird. Not so sure about other animals. Cats will kill wild animals no matter how well they are being fed. You can’t feed a cat enough to make him stop killing. Killing is in his blood, in his nature. He simply can’t stop. He’s addicted to killing.

Bison, Cattle and the Great Plains/Rocky Mountains

I got this from Defenders of Wildlife. I have no idea why these idiot cattle ranchers in Montana hate buffalo so much. Does anyone have any ideas?

I have a feeling that it might have to do with brucellosis. It is true that bison do have brucellosis, and theoretically they could transmit it to cattle. Cattle can be devastated by brucellosis. However, to my knowledge, there has not yet been a single case of bison to cattle brucellosis transmission. Apparently bison need to have very close contact with cattle to transmit the disease, and that just does not happen in the wild. It might occur in a zoo or game farm or some artificial environment where you threw the animals together.

I understand at least as of 15-20 years ago, there were parts of the northern Great Plains that were actually losing population in many areas of the states. I think especially of North Dakota and South Dakota. Some counties are nearly hanging up the Going out Business sign as the number of residents goes too low to support county services. Some towns have become virtual ghost towns. Many of the remaining are elderly people living alone. There are many abandoned old homes in some of these counties. If you have the guts, you can poke around these old homes. They still have a lot of period furniture, old clothes, old books, old lamps and other accessories. Wild animals are now reclaiming a lot of these old homes and you will often ferret them out when you go into these old houses.

I am not sure what the depopulation is all about. Does anyone have any ideas?

Anyway, I believe that what we ought to do in these depopulated areas is have the state condemn the land and buy it out. Then run bison on it or allow private bison ranchers to lease the land and run bison on it. Or sell it to bison farmers so they can run bison on it. If no one wants to run bison on the land, you can open it up to private harvest by hunters or you can lease use of it to private bison harvesting concerns so they can harvest the bison and ship it to slaughterhouses for packaging to consumers.

Bison is said to taste a lot like beef but it is very much better for you. The Plains Indians lived on bison meat for millenia and there was little evidence of any harm to them from this diet. Bison meat is very lean and low fat.

In particular, the Great Plains evolved with bison! There is a whole ecosystem that has been almost completely destroyed out there with the elimination of the bison. Prairie dogs and the black footed ferret are two of those that have been hit the hardest. The black footed ferret was nearly driven to extinction, mostly by extermination campaigns waged by cattle ranchers against prairie dogs. Cattlemen slaughter prairie dogs because they say that stupid cows trip over their prairie dog burrows and the dogs compete with cows for forage.

As you can tell, I have an extremely low opinion of cattle ranchers! However, they do have some potential. Perhaps we could allow ranchers who agree not to exterminate everything that is not a cow on their land to charge a lower price for their beef. Call it “endangered species beef.” Even better yet, hit those ranchers who will not undertake these measures with a tax that raises the price of their beef by maybe 10% above the conservationist ranchers. The good ranchers would be allowed to sell for cheaper and slap a pro-environment label on their beef. This is a sort of a market friendly regulation that I like, but as you can see, it still involves government regulation, taxation and so on. But carrot and stick approaches are usually nice.

It’s the latest threat to wild bison conservation.

All we have worked for could be severely compromised if a batch of bad bison bills passes through Montana’s state legislature. Some of Montana’s most extreme anti-wildlife legislators are attempting to make restoration of wild bison to the Great Plains nearly impossible.

A Massive Assault on Bison

The worst of the bills, SB 143, would:

• Order Montana officials to “immediately” kill or remove all wild bison migrating into Montana;
• Prohibit wild bison relocation anywhere in Montana except to the National Bison Range – where wild bison are already located;
• Establish a bison hunt “statewide and at any time of the year;” and
• Allow landowners to shoot wild bison on private land.

To add insult to injury:

• SB 256 would make Montana’s wildlife agency liable for any property damage from wild bison, a precedent meant to financially prohibit bison restoration;
• SB 341 would require Montana’s wildlife agency to navigate a massive list of additional hurdles prior to relocation of any wildlife species and prohibit relocation if the species could impact livestock grazing, clearly intended to prevent bison relocation; and
• HB 396 would attempt to give county commissioners veto power over bison restoration within their counties – even on tribal lands and our federal public lands.

Our Plan for Bison

Defenders of Wildlife’s Rockies and Plains team is working overtime to turn back this cruel assault on bison recovery.

We’re working with a diverse coalition of tribes and conservation organizations to testify against these bills and mobilize opposition; we’re getting word out to the media to bring attention to these bills; and we’re organizing Montanans to show up at the Montana capitol, make phone calls and send emails to exert grassroots pressure on legislators and the governor.

Our efforts are beginning to pay off. Three of the eight anti-bison bills are now dead. But five more remain a threat to wild bison in Montana — and we need your help more than ever to continue this critical work.

Last year, we helped relocate 61 pure wild bison from Yellowstone National Park to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. It was the start of an historic effort to restore Yellowstone bison to key places in the Great Plains – an effort that is now in jeopardy, unless we can turn back this latest assault. Please help today!

That Long Newspaper Spoon

Repost from the old site.

Let’s see what’s on the end of that long newspaper spoon… William Burroughs, “Naked Lunch” (1959).

This book really ought to be mandatory reading for all second graders, by the way.

On the end of that long newspaper spoon? A mean gruel and lies, cons and mind-heists.

Let us look at a few recent topics: How I Helped Moved a Factory To Mexico, from Business Week, actually a pretty good business publication. This article goes to show you the sheer insanity of the US government. Sure, global forces often more or less mandate taking plants out of the country.

The factory in the US closes, and $18/hour workers lose their jobs. The jobs go to Mexico, where the same work pays $3/hour, including benefits. Since $3/hour is not nearly as good as $18/hour, the flood from Mexico to the US continues.

Almost no one in Mexico is starving. As an illegal alien farm worker from Oaxaca told me over drinks at the bar about Oaxaca, “Comida, si. Dinero, no.” In Oaxaca, there is plenty of food, but no money. So everyone heads up here. Why, cuz they are starving? No, so they can buy 27 inch color TV sets.

US workers lose when US jobs are shipped overseas, then lose once again with the mad, lunatic illegal alien invasion that is ruining US working class jobs all over our nation. We have been shipping jobs to Mexico wildly since NAFTA in 1994.

One would think that this flood of jobs to Mexico would have resulted in a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration, but in fact, 1994 approximately coincides with a total explosion in the illegal immigrant tsunami to the US.

After NAFTA, workers and consumers in the US, Mexico and Canada all lost ground. Got that? Workers in Mexico, the US and Canada all got screwed by NAFTA. Some say they never made it up since either. Only business cleaned up, and only some businesses at that.

All free trade agreements between disparate nations, that I can tell, are going to have the exact same effects as NAFTA. Probably all free trade agreements that the US has negotiated since NAFTA have had similar effects, probably on a smaller scale.

Workers, consumers and public all get screwed. The environment takes a massive hit. Crappy Mexican trucks flood our highways and destroy them. All free trade agreements are always sold with the same load of crap that NAFTA was, as benefiting workers, consumers, the public, and hell, even the environment, why not?

Nearly the entire US media, from top to bottom, is in on this lie, and if you only read the MSM, you will never figure out the con. Workers, consumers, the public, the environment, and lots of small businesses get screwed by NAFTA-bullshit, and on top of that, we get an avalanche of illegal aliens.

Wow, what a deal! Hail NAFTA! Hail free trade!

File under lies, lies, and more lies: As reasonable folks may have guessed, Business Week (once again, heads up to a good capitalist magazine) columnist Ed Wallace informs us that there is no gas shortage. No gas shortage, no oil shortage, no nothing like that.

Has the media ever told us that? No. Have the politicians ever told us that? No. What do the media and pols tell us? That there is a gas and oil shortage! Why is there a gas and oil shortage? Oh, so many things! Especially, rising demand in China and India! Oh, but what a load of crap that is!

We are also told that we are somewhere near Peak Oil (but no one knows when that hits or what it even means) and this is the cause of the problem. Forget it. Peak oil implies a supply-demand equation, and no such mathematics is working like that here.

The cheerleaders for capitalism tell us that one of the great things about capitalism is supply and demand. It is true that this is an excellent way of fixing prices, and it is possible that socialist economies ignore this at the risk of their extinction. But oil prices have nothing to do with supply and demand! Nothing!

The fundamentals of the oil and gas market are exactly the same as when oil was $60/barrel back in 2006. Whether the market can go back to the $20/barrel in 2002 is not known; possibly it cannot. Check out this great, prophetic Tom Friedman column from that year wondering if the Iraq War will shoot oil to the horror of $60/barrel.

But as far as supply and demand go, oil ought to be no more than $60/barrel and I assume that gas should be no more than $2/gallon or so. So why is it $120/barrel instead of $60?

Because capitalism doesn’t necessarily work on supply and demand. The rest is just sheer speculation. Traders are pulling their money out of the sinking dollar and plunking it right into oil and other commodities, and it’s sure been a nice ride all right. Just a bunch of speculators bidding the price up like crazed buyers at an auction; that’s all it is. That’s the cause of your $4/gallon gas.

Oil reserves are at their highest levels since 1999. Gasoline reserves are at their highest levels since 1993 (!) But surely demand is rising, China and India and all that? Nope, demand has been falling all year now and will probably fall even into the summer.

On the other hand, oil refineries are not necessarily doing that well at all, at least according to them. They are getting killed by high oil prices on the one hand and low gasoline demand on the other. In order to make a decent profit, refineries have deliberately cut back oil production. The purpose of running the refineries at low speed is to push up the price of gas even further.

Distillates such as airline fuel and diesel have seen their prices so through the roof, and there are shortages of these, but they are deliberately created by the industry. If there were, why are we exporting more distillates than we are importing. Not only that, but imports of distillates have crashed by some 40% in a year.

It would seem that in all of this insanity something like a National Industrial Policy would be called for. For decades, countries South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and now China, not to mention most of Western Europe, have done just that.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that capitalism with no government (free market neoliberalism) is an orchestra of great musicians with no composer. At some point, it’s the economic equivalent to an insane asylum or an elementary school playground.

We can also see that that all of the feverish nostrums peddled by the politico-media Lying Classes are loads of garbage? We need to fly to Saudi Arabia and beg the Saudis to turn up the oil spigots! We need to drill in the Arctic!

We need to drill everywhere, off the beach next to your house! We need to get rid of environmental regulations and taxes that make gas so expensive! And last but not least, the favorite of right-wing liars everywhere, we need more refineries!

We do not really need any of these things, at least at the moment. The oil refineries lie is one of the most evil of them all. It is probably peddled by the stinking garbage in human forms that run the oil industry itself.

The line goes like this:

-Oil is high!
-Why is it high?
-Hardly any new refineries since (insert year)!
-Why not?
-Evil environmentalists! Evil regulations! They’ve made it impossible to build new refineries!
-(sputtering) Bastard environmentalists and regulators! Get rid of them so we can build more refineries!
-Yes, yes, yes!

The thing is, this whole line is just an incredibly devious lie peddled by Oil Company Scum and their gargoyle allies in government and media and rightwing politics. No regulations have gotten in the way of building any new refineries in the US.

The industry itself has flat out refused to build new oil refineries in the US because industry does not want to create more refinery supply. Low numbers of refineries are good for keeping gas supply low and prices high. The conversational ruse above is designed to get rid of existing environmental and other regulations at existing plants.

This ethanol mandate crap is about to do the same thing to food prices. My advice if you are worried about your money to put it into food stockpiles, preferably non-perishable. Food is going to go up in value quite a bit soon – it is already – and it is not going to be pretty.

It’s looking ugly and it’s going to get uglier. We socialists have in general done a superb job of feeding people and a way better job of feeding people than capitalism has (despite the Mt. Everest of capitalist lies about how socialism starves people) and hopefully a hungrier world will find more socialist-oriented policies are better for filling the belly.

My bullshit detector was screaming the other day when Yahoo Headlines shouted in my ear that Congress was going to be briefed on how evil North Korea was helping wicked Syria build a diabolical nuclear reactor.

I remember well when Israel bombed the plant in question.

I looked into the story extensively at the time and my conclusion was that Syria was building a chemical weapons plant, not a nuclear reactor plant, at the site. The North Koreans are experts at chemical weapons stuff and the Scud missiles to shoot them with, and that was apparently why they were there.

Now there is reportedly a new video showing that evil Syria was just about this far (index and thumb nearly touching) from building a devilish nuclear power plant, to build nuclear bombs with, to load on missiles, to shoot at Israel, to kill all the Jews!

To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews!

Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2. Holocaust 2.

This is obviously a Jewish media cabal influenced article, and all such articles include the Holocaust Porn fetish typical of most Jews nowadays.

The Holocaust traumatized them, but they’d already predicted it for millenia, and it had already been attempted over and over according to them, because Jews really do love to believe that their enemies have been trying to exterminate them all from day one!

The whole history of the Jews, according to them, is Jews fending off mad Final Solution attempts by Persia-Nazis or Roman-Nazis, or Russian-Nazis, or Arab-Nazis, or This-Nazis or That-Nazis.

You can’t understand the Jew until you get to the Holocaust Porn thing. It’s not just his own death; that’s bad enough. The baddies are never going to be satisfied with one Jew. They are going to do every single last one of them.

Understanding this helps shed light on phenomena like Zionism: Go Nazi ourselves, steal some land, arm to the teeth with nukes, and dare the anti-Semites to wipe us out.

How bout Iran? Does Ahmadinejad want to kill one Jew? Course not. He wants to kill them all.

Does the PLO and Hamas just want to kill a Jew here and there for sport? Nope, they want to “destroy Israel” = code for kill all the Jews.

Why do Jews need to go to Israel? Because evil whatever-Nazis in the Diaspora are getting ready to kill all the Diaspora Jews.

For Chrissake man, it’s porn! It’s Holocaust Porn! It’s a fetish already. How else to explain the absolutely sickening and clearly unhealthy Jewish obsession with the horrors of the Holocaust. Holocaust museums, coming soon to a city near you. Holocaust Museum, my Jewish girlfriend took me to visit her very own, this was an essential part of our romance.

What’s a Jew reading these days? Oh, a Holocaust novel. Or maybe some non-fiction, surely with a Holocaust twist somewhere in there. Hollywood has a Holocaust hardon . Seems every year there’s more and more Shoah tales.

I do not have enough information yet to look into the North Korean – Syria reactor thing yet, but I have studied Syria’s nuclear program in the past. My take was that Syria has been working on a nuclear program for about 25 years now but has made little headway due to shortages of money, technology, brains, etc.

This is actually quite common; many smaller countries have similar nuclear projects in the ruts. People just do not get it. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was any nuclear program. They require a highly developed economy and always take years and often take decades to even get going.

Even when they do, there is one problem after another. The super brains like A. Q. Khan of Pakistan are few and far between, and he’s under house arrest.

So let us say I am somewhat skeptical that Syria was about “this close” to building a nuclear weapon.

Stanislaus National Forest Ordered to Redo ORV Plan

Here.

A court has ruled that the Stanislaus National Forest’s approval for its ORV plan is illegal.

What happened is that ORV users will simply never stay on trails or roads. They always go off road (hence the name ORV) cutting new trails all over Hell and high water. Instead of shutting down the roads, the Forest Service typically authorizes them posthaste after they made as new ORV trails.

I can tell you right off the bat that ORV use in local national forests is simply a disaster. Even authorized trails are usually eroding very badly. ORV’s are just fine if they stay on dirt roads, but of course they never do that.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone with an ounce of environmental consciousness would want to ride a destructive ORV either on ORV trails or much less off ORV trails rampaging through unroaded lands.

My experience with the local forest service is that the FS is 100% beholden to the ORV Lobby. They even have a special worker set up as an ORV coordinator. This person’s job is to suck up to the ORV Lobby as much as possible. All FS plans do nothing but suck up to the ORV crowd and almost never do one single thing to address ORV abuse in our national forests.

It is true that the ORV crowd is a bunch of vicious and savage rednecks. They are scary and can appear violent. In rural communities near national forests, almost 100% of the population is made up of toothless backwoods rednecks who are completely in bed with the ORV crowd. I remember once I went to an FS meeting where they planned to close some roads on the national forest. Now one might argue why they needed to do that, but honestly it needs to be done.

This is the problem, and this deals with real roads, not even BS ORV trails and whatnot. The forest service has cut all manner of roads through a typical national forest, typically for logging purposes. Now if the FS maintained these roads, that would be one thing. But they don’t. And the roads simply must be maintained. If you don’t maintain a road, you need to close it off so it doesn’t erode anymore than it already is. Because an unmaintained road is going to be eroding. And the more people that drive on it, the more it is going to be eroding.

The FS lacks the funding for road maintenance for obscure reasons. Probably the main reason is that Washington has been starving FS budgets for a good 20-30 years now. Whether the FS starves its own budget by making low budget requests is not known.

Even a modest attempt to shut down even 6 miles of roads way back in the furthest backcountry was met by howls of rage from those attending.

The Real US Forest Service: Dishonest, Connving, Anti-Environmental Political Hacks

The Forest Service main goal is to suck up to the resource abusers like the ORV crowd, the grazers and the loggers. There are specific positions for grazing specialist, forester and ORV coordinator. Their job is to appease the grazers, the ORV crowd and the loggers by maximizing grazing, ORV use and logging on the national forest.

There are many “environmentalist” positions also set up on the local national forest. These include positions like wildlife biologist, fisheries specialist, archeologist, botanist, etc. 100% of these types are complete hacks whose job it is to go along with the environmental abuse by the abusers detailed above. The wildlife biologist will never find that any proposed project harms any wildlife. The fisheries person will never find that any project harms the streams or rivers. The botanist will never find that any project harms sensitive plants. In fact, I saw the local botanist routinely sign off on projects that destroyed 1000′s of sensitive plants.

The archeologist will always find that there are no significant archeological projects in the way of the project. Once you get them alone, these “environmental scientist” types will typically start blasting away at the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws. The local ranger station had Rush Limbaugh on all the time, and it was the wildlife biologists favorite station. What kind of wildlife biologist listens to Rush Limbaugh?

The only pro-environmental regulations and work done on the forests was done above the local forest level. Around here that means the Pacific Southwest Research station. These guys were true environmental scientists, possibly above the political pressures of the local forest,  and quite a few nice proposals came out of that office. They issued some great regulations for the California spotted owl, for instance.

I must say though that on the local forest level, I met some of the worst and most disgusting political hacks I have ever met in my life. Bureaucrats who would do anything to keep their jobs and would never stick their neck out. In addition, I have seldom seen so much overt lying and dishonesty as I saw with the local forest service crowd. Their lying simply had to be seen to be believed.

I also spoke to “environmental scientists” at other forests and frankly they were exactly the same as the ones at my local forest. Political hacks every single one of them. Basically disgusting people.

Court Orders EPA to Set New Rules on Soot

Here.

A federal court rejected Barack Obama’s EPA’s attempts to set a weak standard for regulating soot, instead ordering them to set the stronger standard ordered by the Clean Air Act. Soot pollution results from coal-fired power plants, industry, oil refineries and diesel trucks.

Under the new rules, the worst effected communities will have to implement the latest and best anti-pollution equipment and they will have to reduce pollution by 5% per year.

It is amazing how anti-environment this radical leftwing Marxist socialist Maoist President is.

EPA Delays Cement Plant Emissions Controls Once Again

Here.

They have only been delayed for 14 years now. Initially, they were delayed for 10 years after the Clean Air Act of 1990 because the EPA simply refused to implement them. Then the Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that the EPA’s refusal to implement the standards was illegal and ordered them to set rules for cement plants. These were then delayed all through the Bush Administration and in addition, all through the first Obama Administration. Now the EPA has proposed some rules, but it delaying their implementation by 2 additional years.

This is crazy. Cement plants’ emissions kill 2-5,000 people a year in the US and they injure many thousands more by causing diseases, principally asthma.