Remembering Standing Rock

Photo courtesy of Jason George, Colville, Washington

Special Prosecutor Now

In “days of old when knights were bold and toilets weren’t invented…” the Royal Ones whom we nostalgically elevate and glorify in movies and TV shows (“Game of Thrones”, “Star Wars” etc. etc. etc. etc…), were, in reality, monsters. For instance, “charity” in those days meant, to the Royal Ones at least, throwing the rotting leftovers from your sumptuous meals out into the streets in a location meant for beggars to pick through. Given the fact that the European strain of American democracy that fermented on this continent was conceived and predicated on the notion that that sort of thing was to be forever verboten here, a dispassionate observer (say, Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional Tralfalmadorians[i]) wouldn’t be able to avoid noting how ubiquitous, constant and inexplicable this nostalgia about long-gone royalty from an alternative-facts world is.  As Vonnegut observed in his book about an American Nazi during WWII, ‘Mother Night’, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”[ii]

All this is a lot to expect a reader to digest in one paragraph, I know. But you’ll have to agree it’s nothing compared to the latest tidbit that fell off the edge of the Trump Dynasty’s golden spread last weekend? Are all you beggars ready to chomp down on this one? Here goes:

“…As supporters and opponents digested the provisions of the healthcare bill passed by the House…a letter revealed the Pentagon was finalising a lease on a privately owned apartment in Trump Tower for the use of the White House Military Office, which carries and safeguards the “football”, the device that contains the top secret launch codes the president needs if he wants to order a nuclear attack…”[iii]

Remember that bacteria was unknown in medieval times, so if you threw up or died from eating rotten food it was considered the Will of God. So consider, as we devolve back to those good ol’ Dark Ages when everybody knew their place (etc. etc. etc. etc…), is it the Will of God that our Orange Despot-wannabe is arranging to have “the button” secreted away on his “private property” at our expense for his financial gain??!!?

What kind of monster is this, and what kind of monsters have we become to allow such a thing?

Call your representatives. Now. Demand a special prosecutor. Now. Call Mitch Mcconnell (202) 224-2541 and Paul Ryan (888) 752-4050. Call them traitors. Be polite if you want to be, but I don’t think it’s necessary at this point.

Make them jump. 

Now.

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[i] “...they were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber's friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings about time…” Slaughterhouse Five, p. 26

[ii] Credit to author and playwright David Macaray for remembering that one.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/05/13/sorry-folks-donald-trump-everything-we-deserve

[iii] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/13/tracking-trump-james-comey-fbi-fake-media

Talkin' Bomb Shelter Blues

Steal This Song

Our "leaders" and our craven media are once again trying to sell us on the idea of nuclear war as a do-able thing. This has happened before. Below are the lyrics to "Talkin' Bomb Shelters Blues", a song I wrote in the early 80s when the Reagan people (every bit as crazy and murderous as the Trump team) were trying to sell us on the idea of "refurbishing" our bomb shelters as a first step down the mental rathole of accepting the idea of nuclear war. 


Well I picked up a paper the other day
and was surprised to see the front page say
our bomb shelters were under stashed
in the event of a nuclear holocaust.

Our concerned president was underway
to try and get us citizens to pay
for a years supply of canned air and grits
so we'll be prepared for when the big one hits.
(y'know, everything that makes life worthwhile, canned asparagus, DVDs, condums…)

I remember bomb shelters from long ago
when folks were spendin' lots of dough
diggin' holes in their backyards and fillin' 'em with cement
and callin' 'em security, an investment!
(They'd take out loans on 'em, which is mighty strange when you think about it a certain way, but what's stranger was the banks would give 'em to 'em!)

Well, I put down that paper and I felt sad
it took a little while and I got mad
about all the jive that I have heard
'bout how the world has had it, so give it the bird.

There's Mister Big saying' bigger is better
and the bigger the big, well the better the better
and if we gotta fight big to get the better
lets all get fried in the glorious together!
(we'll make the whole world one big strip mine. Then we'll all be rich…right?)

And there's plenty of Doomsday tales for you
some comet's gonna split the Earth right in two
California's gonna shake of right about Texas
or the planets lining up for a big Solar Plexis.

And theres all those religions goin' round
circling' down on the ol' common ground
Say the end is comin' and it's comin' fast
so forget this world, save your spirit's ass.

But wait a minute…

Have you seen the sky turn grey and then turn blue?
Have you listened to the rivers and the mountains, too?
Don't you think there's something bigger here than me and you
tryin' to tell us get together before it's through?

And if they push the button like the sayin' goes
and the world turns on like a big light bulb
and you're down in some hole with no night or day
What the hell you want to live for anyway?
(sex?!)

So when you're talkin' bomb shelters, you're talkin' defeat
when you fix 'em up you can have my seat
I'll be up here tryin' to make ends meet
not down in some hole playin' hide and seek.
(I ha….ate canned asparagus!!!)

Any questions?

Remember Nuclear War?

Donald Trump Holding Court at Mar-A-Lago Grasping Golden Tomahawk Missiles While President Xi Jinping (in background) Runs Away

Leaked Virtual Brain Imaging (VBI) from Trump's thinking on April 6, 2017, compiled from state-of-art Ratheon Spying technology

Here's a quiz.

Do you know where your president was when he launched World War 4 (with North Korea and China)?

We know he launched World War 3 (against Syria, Iran and Russia) from his vacation palace at Mar-A-Lago (which, in Spanish means: "Sea-A-Lake" which is a perfectly normal name) while having a friendly visit with his friend, Chinese President Xi Jinping, which is perfectly normal for "the Trump Era"[i].

While some expert pundits who are very impressed with the size of Trump's missiles are not sure whether there have actually been any world wars launched from vacation palaces since the days of the Louis the 14th (the Sun King) and his Palace of Versailles a few hundred years ago, they are comfortable with the notion that a U.S. president vacationing through existential world crises of his own manufacture is, in a word, normal. In fact, everybody who's anybody is valuing their "down time" over our species' survival these days. It's all the rage.

Just look at Congress, the pundits point out to their consumers (us). Right after World War 3 was safely launched from Trump's overstuffed throne, and also immediately proceeding their criminal embedding of a corporate fascist into our Supreme Court, this corporate, fee-for-use Congress went on their own vacations, leaving Trump at peace to start the military gears churning toward World War 4 (against North Korea and China).  

Pundits generally agree then, and it should furthermore go without saying to any premature Putin-lovers out there, that too many cooks spoil the broth, and that there is obviously no need for Congress to do any of that arcane and expensive advise-and-consent stuff. Why not save the taxpayers a few bucks then, and let the Congress just go home for a little golf or whatever, which of course should not include reaching out to their constituents (consumers) to gauge how We The People (consumers) actually feel about all of this perfectly normal stuff because, you know, reaching out is very, very expensive, not normal in the Trump Era and therefore no longer necessary.

So I want to be very clear here, that I also think all of this is very, very normal and that I really don't mean to blame those poor, overworked pundits and congresspeople for not doing their jobs during an existential worldwide crisis of their own making. After all, they earned their stock options just with their Gorsuch heist, don't you agree?

But something is bothering me, nevertheless, and I have to say that I'm still wondering where Donald Trump physically was when he launched World War 4 (against North Korea and China).

Did he actually have the audacity to launch two world wars from an overstuffed throne at his vacation palace? 

I know it's just a technicality now, because all of this is so very, very, very normal. But what I'm wondering is this: 

Are there any U.S. leaders not on vacation while they collectively threaten to fry our whole wide world including our children, grandchildren and hope itself?

All Hail the Sun King, then?

When America was Great
Atomic Annie bombing the Nevada desert because it chose to resist.

[i] Jeff Sessions, 4/11/17

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-border-immigration_us_58ecd3eee4b0ca64d9192852

Terrorism Defined

There's some confusion among media pundits in these Days Of Trump about what Terrorism is and isn't. 

Poor pundits! They've spent the last five months since the November elections practicing a peculiar brand of high-profile, full-body soul-searching, with the apparent goal of making sure that we, the traumatized public, fully appreciated that they were so wrapped up in their high-profile tele-world that they "didn't see Trump coming", and therefore didn't report the fact. This, in turn, has led to some of them, occasionally, reporting real news, which has been a good and refreshing thing.

All that has changed, however, and as always, all it took was a bombing. This time in the name of the suffering childen whom, just a mere month ago, the Trump Administration was actively trying to drown in the Mediterranean surf. How confusing it must be to the traumatized public to witness the all-knowing, big-souled pundits climbing back onboard the Empire Express for the mere price of 59 Cruise Missiles ($80 million or $1.3 million apiece) launched in the general direction of those same children who are supposed to be the missiles' beneficiaries!

Therefore, as a public service, I'm offering a simple definition of Terrorism, as short and as sweet as any definition our pundits and politicians have hard-driven into their speed dialing explaino-machines. Here it is:

Terrorism is not:

-A white man traveling from Baltimore to New York City to murder "blacks".

 

-An armed takeover of a federal wildlife preserve by U.S. Mormon white supremacists from Nevada.

-A U.S. white man murdering worshippers in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

-A U.S. sponsored, militarized and partially-privatized police force brutally repressing the free-speech rights of indigenous peoples in North Dakota.

-Anything a white man does or does not do.

Terrorism is:

-Something that a white man--or his allies--can bomb.

Sociopaths and their Fracking Frackers; Jobbing the Bakkan

"Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over.”

                                                                                                Charles Ponzi, 1882-1949

Proprietary Capitalism is our modern, Bizzarro-world term for the relatively-old scheme of con artists separating “fools” from their money. It’s where We the People are not allowed access to the information we need in order to make informed decisions about industries who scheme to profit off of our ignorance, and it’s all the rage now. “Intellectual property rights” was the battle cry when Silicon Valley started cannibalizing its apple orchards and pooping out shiny gizmos, and now you see the shiny poop of intellectual property rights everywhere, on the chemical industry, on the privatized school industry, on the music industry, on everything. Our very culture has been devoured and “privatized” by the bastards in full view of everyone, a daylight heist, and our only questions seem to have been “How much is the next shiny gizmo going to cost and when can I get mine?”

Speaking of digestion: Consider all the high-priced claims of oil patch con artists about how the Bakkan oil patch and its lower intestine, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) are going to poop out endless jobs across the North Dakota plains and downward towards New Orleans and everywhere else the Black Snake slithers. (Eee…eww!) Jobs, right? Dirty jobs, but jobs all the same. Right?

Well…consider the words of a petroleum industry operative who spent almost four decades working for the likes of AMOCO, BP, and other suchlikes. Art Berman currently makes a living as an oil industry expert, a consultant and contributor for corporate news outlets on oil trends for the smart investor who desires to place her bets on the table where the money flows downhill, toward her. Easy Street, right? But wait…On March 1^st, Berman wrote in Forbes Magazine that:

           

“All major Bakken producers continue to lose money at current wellhead prices…there may be nowhere for the Bakken to go but down. Higher oil prices may not help much because the best days for the play are behind us. Future profits were sacrificed for short-term objectives that lost the companies and their shareholders money…investors should be worried. As analysts cheered the resilience of shale plays after the 2014 price collapse, nearly a billion barrels of Bakken oil were produced at a loss...vast volumes of oil were squandered at low prices for the sake of cash flow to support unmanageable debt loads and to satisfy investors about production growth.[i]”

Why is this not the news we as well as the low-lying investor should have been hearing since the pipeline was first announced in 2014? After all, wouldn’t Republican governors who would sing the praises of “private property” while simultaneously authorizing “eminent domain” seizures of the very same at least want to know that the whole scheme is based on an economic model that even Charles Ponzi couldn't job to the rich of his day? Why are we hearing instead about all the “jobs” that Ponzi's economic scheme will generate for all us poor folk now?

Silly you. You forgot about “intellectual property rights”, haven’t you?

“The Bakken play represents the fullest application of modern horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies,” Berman writes. But with a couple of downsides.

“There is no way to stay away from water and it is produced from day one in large volumes. The Bakken has produced 1.5 billion barrels of water along with its 2.2 billion barrels of oil over the decades. Where are they putting it and what does that cost?”

Indeed. Where are they putting all that water? And furthermore, what have they put in all that water?  Well, intellectual property rights dictate that these Lying Leviathans don’t have to tell you any of that, because the information you need in order to know whether or not you are being poisoned for the sake of someone else's quick buck is…get ready…private property!

Wow, and that’s the root of the other downside that Berman mentions in his article. Think of the underground fracking patch as a giant balloon with finite pressure and lots of holes being drilled into it. At first the additional pressure needed for oil to bubble to the surface is generated with the toxic, proprietary slurry mix. After a while, though, the pressure needed to make the oil bucks bubble out of any single well is generated more and more by the gas pockets that develop underground in relation to the environmentally-destructive fracking activities. From then on, as the patch gets more and more overdrilled (which the Bakkan has been) the pressure drops for all the wells and everybody’s oil money heads south of the Red Line. This is basic physics, and basic capitalism, never mind the environmental costs, which investors never do.

So, in the oil expert’s own words, while the very efficiency of fracking technology has led to the over-drilling and the rapid depletion of the field, “pressure data (of the over-drilled patch) is not publicly available and is needed to complete the case.”

Did you catch that? The evidence for depletion of the Bakkan oil patch, the very information we as a society (and she as an investor) need to determine whether or not the environmental catastrophe of the patch and the associated pipelines is in any way economically justified is proprietary, under the very same rules that has kept the details of the environmental catastrophe itself (the fracking mix, for instance) from us all along. It’s none of your business, the Rich Man tells us. That’s enough democracy for you. We’re running this country now, so run along and eat some cake.

Why is the Dakota Access Pipeline being built at all? Quite simply “…for the sake of cash flow to support unmanageable debt loads and to satisfy investors about production growth.”

It’s not for jobs. It’s not for “energy self-sufficiency”. It’s not even for any traditionally-defined version of free-market capitalism. It’s a Ponzi scheme where the Rich Man and the politicians in his pocket are the only beneficiaries and We The People and the Land are the chumps.

Nice, huh? And that’s not coming from cyber-left field. It’s in black and white, in Forbes, and maybe that’s the beauty of this horrible moment we have willfully visited upon ourselves. Black and white becomes color, at least it becomes the Bizarro comic-book world we should have recognized it as all along.

Let’s get real and get busy, shall we?

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[i] https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurberman/2017/03/01/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-the-bakken-shale-play/#620678491487