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		2005 November 29, Tuesday I'm going to San Francisco (the Bay Area to be exact) for a couple of days. Lucky me. I won't update until I get back (Thursday night, maybe Friday)... Some anti-war protestors want to re-instate the draft. I see their point. "If we continue at this pace, guess what's next: a draft," an African American sergeant sitting at the desk next to him chimed in. "What are we going to do then as a country -- are people going to Canada? Then you've actually forced the government to do that, because you've stopped the people who want to voluntarily serve by giving them a lot of flak for it. What kind of democracy would we have then?" Talk of crisis within the ranks only heartened the anarchists demonstrating outside. "Bring it on -- I would love a draft," said Wesley Everett, a 31-year-old from Queens who helped organize the protest. "It would expose how pathetic their war agenda really is. This won't win any popularity contests, but it's the truth. Today, there's so much in the liberal stand against the war in Iraq that is simply politics for the naive, who tremble at the idea of the war while at the same time demanding as much energy as they can use. We were lied to about Saddam's WMD because realists like Dick Cheney, Alastair Campbell and Ahmed Chalabi knew that the Western public would not accept that oil was even part of the mission in Iraq. They know that in our hearts, we just want them to get it for us... This is staggering. Bush has borrowed more money than all other presidents combined. His agenda is clear: destroy American as a global power, both militarily and economically. But why? ...Bush has borrowed more money -- $1.05 trillion -- from foreign governments and banks since taking office than all other presidents combined. From 1776 to 2000, the nation's first 42 presidents borrowed a combined $1.01 trillion from foreign interests, official statistics show. In just five years, Bush has out-borrowed them all. Over the last year and a half, I've removed more and more "food" from my diet. Red meat, then pork, then milk, then cheese (barring the occasional pizza), then milk, then soda (cokes and such). I ate more fruit and vegetables. A strange thing began to happen - several physical ailments that have been annoying me for the last decade disappeared, one by one; some were quiet painful. As vegetables replaced meat, I became healthier. I lost a lot of weight, and now weigh the same as I did in my early to mid twenties (I'm 36). I know it's now scientific, but I'm pretty damn sure I know where the blame lies... Consider the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving feast, the hybrid turkey raised in a factory farm in conditions of pain and squalor on a diet of chemical-infused feed. Close confinement requires the use of a long list of antibiotics to control such diseases as rhinotracheitis and colibacillosis. And let's not talk about what the bird picks up during processing. One of the last stages at the slaughterhouse is a dip in chlorine to wash off pathogens. But conventional turkeys are practically a health food compared to some of the other dinner options, such as roast beef. Turkeys, unlike cows, don't get pumped full of growth hormones. Hormone residues in milk and meat likely play havoc with our endocrine systems. 2005 November 28, Monday More examples of Fascism on the march! Woman arrested for failing to produce I.D. on a public bus! The Department of Homereich security is protecting us from nipple rings! Hoo-AAA! Australian senator has brains screwed on! Airport security is meaningless! I may have posted one or two of these eyesores before, but what the heck:     2005 November 23, Wednesday If you ever wondered why the US government is so desperate to secure all the oil and natural gas in the middle east, this photo of suburban sprawl should enlighten you. Be sure to scroll the image to the right - it's a very long panorama. Endless rows of McMansions, many miles from an urban center. There is NOTHING worth walking to in this image. Without cheap oil, these good folks will starve. To quote Mr. Kunstler: Our suburbs will prove to be a huge liability. They represent the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The project of suburbia represent a set of tragic choices because it is a living arrangement with no future. And that future is now here in the form of the peak oil predicament. Because they have no future, our suburbs entail a powerful psychology of previous investment that will prevent us from even thinking about reforming them or letting go of them. That's why vice-president Cheney said the American way of life is non negotiable. There will be a great battle to preserve the supposed entitlements to suburbia and it will be an epochal act of futility, a huge waste of effort and resources that might have been much better spent in finding new ways to carry on an American civilization. 2005 November 21, Monday I'm sorry, but this is funny: Gas prices force owners to torch SUVs! Veni, Vidi, Vitiavi: THE VICES OF A DECLINING EMPIRE From Reagan to Sparta. World at tipping point? Scary: Peak Oil - center stage He's the has-been president 2005 November 18, Friday Everything old is new again: FIRST: download this video. It's a wmv file - I'm not sure if it'll play on a Mac. It's a slow download, about 45 megs. Half an hour of footage of US war crimes in Iraq. I challenge you to watch it and not hate America. I'm really confused. Suddenly we're all worried about Bush's chickenshit Stormtroopers using phosphorous on Fallujah? This story is ONE YEAR OLD! What the F*** is going on? Does a billionaire media mogul in a smoke filled room hit a big red button and give the newsrooms the OK sign to "push" the story? When this broke 12 months ago, the US media (including Dan Rather) was wetting itself over the fucking Marlboro man! (remember him?) I love this smart-alec quote: It will take a lot of work by Karen Hughes, the President’s emissary, to improve the American image abroad, to make up for the incendiary effect on hearts and minds. No kidding! Poor Karen, she's got her work cut out for her. How do you convince the arabs that you care for them, when you've just murdered several tens of thousands of innocent non-combatants? Hint: stop blowing the limbs off of arab women and children. Hint: stop setting arab women and children on fire. Hint... aw shucks; you get the idea. Here's the description of the GLORIOUS MILITARY VICTORY massacre in Fallujah, seen by an Iraqi girl: Image after image of men, women and children so burnt and scarred that the only way you could tell the males apart from the females, and the children apart from the adults, was by the clothes they are wearing… the clothes which were eerily intact- like each corpse had been burnt to the bone, and then dressed up lovingly in their everyday attire- the polka dot nightgown with a lace collar… the baby girl in her cotton pajamas- little earrings dangling from little ears. Some of them look like they died almost peacefully, in their sleep… others look like they suffered a great deal- skin burnt completely black and falling away from scorched bones. And what reaction did this Iraqi girl get ONE YEAR AGO from her American readers, when she posted accusations of same?: Last year I blogged about Falloojeh and said: “There is talk of the use of cluster bombs and other forbidden weaponry.” I was immediately attacked with a barrage of emails from Americans telling me I was a liar and that there was no proof and that there was no way Americans would ever do something so appalling! I wonder how those same people justify this now. Are they shocked? Or do they tell themselves that Iraqis aren’t people? Or are they simply in denial? The Pentagon spokesman recently said: "It's part of our conventional-weapons inventory and we use it like we use any other conventional weapon," I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Bush, his media whores, his trigger pullers, and the vicious yokels who support him are Fascists. Every last one of these miserable life-hating hypocrites deserves to roast screaming in a lake of fire until the final second of time. "I was only obeying orders" and "I didn't know" weren't excuses in 1945, and they're not excuses now. A just God would wave his hand and erase the United States of America from the face of the Earth. Or, to quote a wiser man than I: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever." President Thomas Jefferson 2005 November 16, Wednesday I've added a couple of scenes and storyboard panels to the Peak Oil cartoon. Still in progress! Energy companies fear a harsh winter could lead to a natural gas crisis. The Exile's Mark Ames has written a book about Going Postal. Fascinating... 2005 November 15, Tuesday This is the biggest news story of the year (not that you'd know by listening to the Corporate media: Kuwait's biggest field starts to run out of oil Time for a visit from the SS. The Secret Service, I mean: Burn in hell, Mr. President Oh George, will you never learn? 2005 November 14, Monday This should be on anyone's survival to-do list ... it looks like great fun: a solar oven made from a car sunshade! It's small, light, and easy to make: ...it has reached a higher temperature in a shorter time than all the other models I have experimented with so far ... a little above 350 degrees F. I have cooked black beans in about the same amount of time as on a gas stove; I’ve used it to bake breads, granola, brownies, lasagna, all sorts of vegetables, and to purify water. James Howard Kunstler quotes US SENATOR Chuck Grassley as saying: "You know, what? What makes our economy grow is energy. And Americans are used to going to the gas tank (sic), and when they put that hose in their, uh, tank, and when I do it, I wanna get gas out of it. And when I turn the light switch on, I want the lights to go on, and I don't want somebody to tell me I gotta change my way of living to satisfy them. Because this is America, and this is something we've worked our way into, and the American people are entitled to it, and if we're going improve (sic) our standard of living, you have to consume more energy." JHK's superb description of the good Senator's mindset: ...Grassley's statement displays something closer to childishness than sheer stupidity. It comprises a set of beliefs or expectations that are unfortunately widespread in our culture, namely, that we should demand a particular outcome because we want it to be so. This is exactly how children below the age of reason think, in their wild egocentricity, and it is the hallmark of mental development to grow beyond that kind of thinking. But the force of advertising and other inducements to fantasy are so overwhelming in everyday American life that they may be obstructing the development of a huge chunk of the population, something that becomes worse each year, as proportionately more adults fail to grow up mentally. This state-of-mind is made visible in Las Vegas, our national monument to the creed that people should get whatever they want. 2005 November 10, Thursday A religious fundamentalist has threatened an American city with destruction, and called for the obliteration of the American State department with a nuclear device. He hasn't been arrested and tortured interrogated yet. I wonder why not??????? 2005 November 9, Wednesday OHMYGOD-OHMYGOD-OHMYGOD-OHMYGOD-OHMYGOD-OHMYGOD! They've discovered WMDs in Iraq! Some lethal shit called "white phosphorous"; it's similar to napalm - only a monster like Saddam would be so cruel as to use this kind of crap: ...dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells. A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says: "A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact." Oh wait - sorry - news coming in - this chemical was used by the US military against innocent Iraqi civilians, so it doesn't count. My mistake! Holy Moly. (Whatever that means). Here's the New York Peak Oil Petrocollapse conference online. You can download MP3 files of all the speakers. It's hours and hours of apocalyptic goodness! (I recommend the speech by Kunstler). Not to be outdone, here's the UK Peak Oil Conference - with several MP3 files of lecturers, along with powerpoint (ugh) slideshows. Yet another Gary Brecher article about Iraqi IEDs - educational and entertaining as always. I wish I was a blue-blood aristocrat attending the Bohemian Grove, listening to Kissinger pronouncing the death of the Treaty of Westphalia. Those lucky six fingered bastards. 2005 November 8, Tuesday This is funny. Bush is a C***! If you like folksongs, ye may find this amusing: folksongs are your friends! Send an email to yourself 20 years in the future: email time capsule Here's something you should know about the avian flu vaccine Tamiflu was developed and patented in 1996 by a California biotech firm, Gilead Sciences Inc. Gilead is a NASDAQ (GILD) listed stock company which prefers to maintain a low profile in the current rush to Tamiflu. That might be because of who is tied to Gilead. In 1997, before he became US Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld was named Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences, where he remained until early 2001 when he became Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld had been on the board of Gilead since 1988 according to a January 3 1997 company press release. Never mind oil - the natural gas crunch could sink us first: In the chemistry industry alone, more than 100 plants have closed and more than 100,000 jobs have been lost. These jobs have been literally exported to other countries in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and China where natural gas is plentiful and up to 20 times cheaper. Business Week recently noted that of the 120 large-scale chemical plants under construction around the globe, only one is being built in the United States. 2005 November 7, Monday I've been working on a peak-oil cartoon - an animated intro. You can see the first couple of scenes here... 2005 November 3, Thursday Those of a survivalist/self-sufficency mindset may find these useful (to put it mildly): The U.S. Army Survival Manual FM 21-76 The Low Tech Library Kunstler in fine fettle: THEY LIED TO US! 2005 November 2, Wednesday George Monbiot grows his own food. GM doesn't let his rich dad stop him! No surprise here: Shale oil is a sham. Ten surprising things about Iran... More about the coming water crisis. Never mind out ongo-bongo land - what about my nice white REAL ESTATE? I wish I could buy this: Britain's underground city. It's got its own pub!! Two new moons for Pluto! 2005 November 1, Tuesday Why does ANYONE still have faith in the Demorat party? Pwease mister Bush, will you apologize to us??? God almighty - they've been infiltrated from top to bottom by Republicans. A purge would be 20 years overdue. Peak Oil - waiting for winter. All depends on the weather. Holy crapola. This grim piece is from a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal.     old posts - about us - contact