When the oil stops flowing

It will come as a shock to most Americans and the media, but as the election reaches a crescendo on the issue of preparedness and energy, neither presidential candidate - nor anyone in local, state or federal government - has developed a contingency plan in the event of a protracted oil cut-off. It is not even being discussed. Government has prepared for hurricanes, anthrax, terrorism and every other disaster, but not the one threatened daily - a protracted oil stoppage, whether caused by terrorism, intervention in the Persian Gulf or a natural disaster.

It is like seeing a hurricane developing without a disaster plan or evacuation route. Our allies have oil shortage interruption contingency plans, but America does not.

THE BEST experts predict that if we suffer as much as 10% for any period of time, let alone 20%, it will be a neighbor-against-neighbor "Mad Max" scenario as food shortages swell and a storm of economic collapse surges across the country. Indeed, experts have been warning about this looming calamity for years. But the government and presidential candidates refuse to even consider the possibility or develop a contingency plan.

Yet our allies have developed oil contingency legislation and other administrative plans that will permit their nations to survive a stoppage. These measures include severe vehicle traffic reductions, enabling fast alternative fuel production and mass vehicle retrofitting, as well as rush public transit enhancement, and mandated changes in driving habits. Unquestionably, for America to survive such a catastrophe will require a very painful, multilayered program of immediate-term, short-term, mid-term and long-term fixes that will change our society and transform it off oil. The nation has no real alternative fuel or retrofitting infrastructure. But every lawmaker, mayor, governor and every candidate must develop such a plan - and now.

When the oil stops flowing in the Jerusalem Post.

Why squatter cities are a good thing

Rural villages worldwide are being deserted, as billions of people flock to cities to live in teeming squatter camps and slums.

Stewart Brand says this is a good thing.

Why? It’ll take you 3 minutes to find out.

Stewart Brand's TED talk on squatter cities.

Learn to Speak Redneck!!!

Bageant in tuesday's Guardian. The comments are more illuminating than the editorial piece, but by all means, read it all because it's genuine news that you may really be able to use. Up from the comments there;

The US redneck is downtrodden, exploited, screwed over and spat upon, and he knows it. He's no fool, he can see through the BS better than any fancypants liberal. But there isn't a single molecule of social solidarity, of trust in his fellow man, of faith in collective action, left in his ultraindividualistic body that can transform his lumpenproletarian rage into progressive politics.

The redneck is almost an anarchist except that anarchists believe the state is unnecessary for maintaining social order and cohesion because mankind is innately social and cohesive. But the redneck believes that mankind is innately animal and that the state just a way for the fat and pampered rich and the weak to protect themselves from the law of the jungle, in which otherwise he, the strong individualist-survivalist with all the guns and ammo, would rule.

It wasn't always so. The collective struggle of the granddads and grannies of today's rednecks against the gun-toting robber barons of America was epic. It's that struggle that May Day celebrates. Where today's rednecks revel when the US bombs and destroys other countries, the US working class of the late 19th and early 20th century was resolutely antiwar. The Anti-Imperialist League militated against America's genocidal invasion of the Philippines. The IWW - the so-called "wobblies" - mobilized against the US entry into WWI and its members were carted off to concentration camps or dumped in the desert for "sedition" by Woodrow "make-the-world-safe-for-democracy" Wilson.

But the very successful strategy of the ruling class against America's immigrant poor was to pit them against each other, nation against nation and race against race. As Martin Scorsese epically depicted, the immigrant poor gouged each others' eyes out under the shadow of Lady "give me your downtrodden" Liberty. Factory bosses sent immigrant strikebreakers from another country, speaking another language, on strikers, provoking bloody gunbattles that left lasting divisions in the working class.

The modern redneck is a mutant created by a thousand violent traumas, from the machine-gunning of workers by troops and Pinkertons, Sacco & Vanzetti-style executions, and Bisbee-style mass deportations to starvation during the Depression, red scares, McCarthyism, and mob control of trade unions. He is the ultimate antisocial lumpenproletarian, imprinted with a thousand hatreds and mistrusts, whose ultimate faith is in the survival of the fittest, and whose political ideal has far more in common with fascism than any progressive agenda.

Old girl read the hell out of that teleprompter last night. I'd be lying to you if I claimed that I didn't PIP the "speechifying" into the outstanding tennis. While I had next to no interest in anything written by the GOP counter-narrators - I was very curious about her capacity to function as the embodiment of their identity politics gambit.

Two-Fisted Tales of British Woe....,

The British chin is falling and that traditionally stiff upper lip is starting to quiver just a little bit. Should be very interesting to see how our traditional alliances hold up in the face of the massive operational failures the U.K. has bound itself to under the rubric of Bushco's middle-eastern misadventure.

"The era of cheap energy is well and truly dead and therefore Britain would do well to get its energy from sensible places and think imaginatively about where those places might be," Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks told BBC's Newsnight.

"There is a huge global grab for energy going on. We've got to make sure that Britain is protected; that we have the energy we need."

Thanks to my man RC who placed this little Guardian bon mot in my inbox;

Britain is facing "arguably the worst" economic downturn in 60 years which will be "more profound and long-lasting" than people had expected, Alistair Darling, the chancellor, tells the Guardian today.

In the government's gravest assessment of the economy, which follows a warning from a Bank of England policymaker that 2 million people could be out of work by Christmas, Darling admits he had no idea how serious the credit crunch would become.

Food crisis: Indians asked to try rats

PATNA: A state government in eastern India is encouraging people to eat rats in an effort to battle soaring food prices and save grain stocks.

Authorities in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, are asking rich and poor alike to switch to eating rats in a bid to reduce the dependence on rice. They even plan to offer rats on restaurant menus.

“Eating of rats will serve twin purposes — it will save grains from being eaten away by rats and will simultaneously increase our grain stock,” said Vijay Prakash, an official from the state’s welfare department.

Officials say almost 50 per cent of India’s food grains stocks are eaten away by rodents in fields or warehouses.

Jitan Ram Manjhi, Bihar’s caste and tribe welfare minister, said rat meat was a healthy alternative to expensive rice or grains, and should be eaten by one and all. “We are very serious to implement this project since the food crisis is turning serious day by day,” said Manjhi, who has eaten rats.

In Bihar, rat meat is already eaten by Mushars, a group of lower caste Hindus, as well as poorer sections of society.—Reuters

Will Survivalists Get the Last Laugh?

Yesterday on AlterNet; This future cultural, environmental and geopolitical miasma is where the survivalist and the mainstream converge in agreement. Both camps, pardon the pun, are convinced that we're screwed down the road.

"The next Great Depression will be a tremendous leveler," Rawles prophesies. "If anything, life in the 22nd century will more closely resemble the 19th century than the 20th century. Sadly, the 21st century will probably be remembered as the time of the Great Die-Off."

"I don't consider it a total wipeout," Kunstler counters. "It's a very big change, but people are resilient and resourceful. Look, imagine if you were a person who had survived the Second World War in Europe, and you were walking around Berlin in the spring of 1946, a year after the end of the war. A once-magnificent city has been reduced to rubble. Your culture is lying in ashes. Yet, people pick up and rebuild."

That is, if they're sticking together. If they're scattered and fending for themselves, and taking armed retreat defense tips from SurvivalBlog, that makes rebuilding a bit more complicated. Which, in the end, is where survivalism is most ambiguous.


Is it a growing population of forward-looking realists who are smartly preparing for the die-off brought on by climate crisis and economic collapse, so they can pick up themselves and their people, and rebuild with that "can-do" spirit, as Rawles calls it? Or are they simply gadget-fascinated fundamentalists afraid of change and challenge, so afraid that they'd rather hide and hoard than join the fight?

The jury is still out. But, according to Rawles, it will soon have its diversity mirrored by survivalism's changing demographic.

"I think that in the next couple of decades," he explains, "we will witness the formation of some remarkable intentional communities that will feature some unlikely bedfellows: anarchists and Ayn Rand readers, Mennonites and gun enthusiasts, Luddites and techno-geeks, fundamentalist Christians and Gaia worshippers, tree huggers and horse wranglers. We welcome them all. Because the threats are clearly manifold: peak oil, derivatives meltdowns, pandemics, food shortages, market collapses, terrorism, state-sponsored global war and more. In a situation this precarious, I believe that it is remarkably naive to think that mere geographical isolation will be sufficient to shelter communities from the predation of evildoers."

A Little Taste.....

IndyMac Bank seized by federal regulators. The Pasadena-based thrift's failure is the second-biggest by a U.S. bank. Doors will reopen Monday.

The federal government took control of Pasadena-based IndyMac Bank on Friday in what regulators called the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

Citing a massive run on deposits, regulators shut its main branch three hours early, leaving customers stunned and upset. One woman leaned on the locked doors, pleading with an employee inside: "Please, please, I want to take out a portion." All she could do was read a two-page notice taped to the door.

Not Your Grandma's Depression

James Howard Kunstler says what neither presidential candidate is willing to say;

We're a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.

That was then, this is now;

the upshot will be something at least twice as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s: people with no money in a land with no resources (with manpower that has no discipline), hardly any family farms left, cities that are basket-cases of bottomless need, comatose small towns stripped of their assets and social capital, an aviation industry on the verge of death, and a railroad system that is the laughingstock of the world. Not to mention the mind-boggling liabilities of suburbia and the motoring infrastructure that services it.

Promises to be a very wild ride indeed. Oh yeah, those are current pictures from the tent city in Ontario California.....,

Back to the Great Depression

The UK Times Online had the temerity to post this article with a question mark.

“Some of it is clearly to do with the oil price but essentially what we are seeing is a slow-motion car crash,” said George Magnus, senior economic adviser at UBS.

“The first act was the housing market, the second act was the credit crunch, and what we are now seeing in this third act is the bigger picture of a downturn that has a long way to run.”

Few are gloomier about that prospect than Albert Edwards, strategist at Société Générale in London. “America is leading the way, diving into deep recession as a collapse in consumer confidence induces the great unwind,” he said. Edwards compares the economy with a pyramid scheme that is poised to crash to earth and interest-rate changes can do nothing to avert it.

He thinks Wall Street and the other main markets have a lot further to drop, and will end up 70% below the peaks of last year. That would imply a level of just 500 for the S&P 500, which was at 1,280 on Friday, and 4,500 for the Dow, compared with Friday’s closing level of 11,346.

The FTSE 100, which closed at 5,530 on Friday, will plunge to 3,000, he predicts. The good news is that he expects the oil price, which was above $142 on Friday, to slump to $60 a barrel. The bad news is that he sees this occurring as a result of “deep” recession in the advanced economies and a sharp slowdown in emerging markets.

“The last time loan losses were at these levels was 1934,” he added. “I don’t believe we are going back to a 1930s environment with people living in tents.” That's because people nowadays lack the gumption and knowhow to pitch a simple tent to protect themselves from the elements and to survive. The 1930's environment was rife with folks who had initiative, knowhow, basic survival skills, and some semblance of community to which to turn in the face of systemic governance catastrophe.

Fertiliser shortage hits India's farms

From the BBC News;

Increasingly many countries across the world are beginning to recognise that expensive fertilisers, or even a supply shortage, is not just a problem for the farmers.

It has a direct effect on the cost and availability of food. Across the world countries are looking at farmers to produce a bumper crop this year to overcome global food shortage. As fertiliser prices go up – food prices go up as well, threatening to force millions of poor people into starvation.

Back on the farms, Mr Sehrawat is still waiting for his supply.

"It is really urgent that we get our supplies," he says.

"You can wait for monsoons - that's not under anyone's control - but you can't be made to wait for fertilisers.

"At this rate, people have to keep waiting for rice on their plates. Nothing is going to grow on our fields."

With general elections next year, the government in India could suffer the political consequences of poor agriculture output.

And the anger of unhappy farmers who cannot reap the benefits of a good monsoon.

It's always the details that come around to bite really, really hard. Fertilizer - as we all know - is a petrochemical dependent on natural gas feedstocks.

India consumes millions of tonnes of fertiliser each year.

Production costs have risen on the back of soaring crude oil prices.

Globally fertilizer rates have tripled in the last year.

Prices of the three main fertilizers, nitrogen, potash and phosphate, have gone up by almost 300%.

Diammonium phosphate costs nearly $1,300 (£650) per tonne whereas farmers in India pay around $250.

The Indian government subsidises the price by nearly 85% for farmers, which in turn means India's subsidy bill is getting bigger each year. At the current forecasts it amounts to almost 2.5% of the country's gross domestic product.

Gas Jacking?

So a month ago, it was about construction site and abandoned house copper jackings. Now it's down to straight up gas jackings. I don't mean the tried and true drive-offs no, that's a dignified old-school method for uncompensated fuel appropriation.

And it's not about siphoning either. With locked caps and sensor balls in the tank, those are increasingly difficult to accomplish. This new maneuver is straight out of the methhead's cookbook of high-risk, low thought, low yield hardscrabble crime and criminality. Gas thieves puncture tanks, steal fuel; SUVs easier targets;

"What made this particular method so dangerous and concerning for us was the way in which they were doing it — using cordless drills to puncture holes in these tanks," he said of the rash of cases his department has investigated this spring. "The heat, friction generated could have easily sparked a fire. It just made for a dangerous situation for the suspects and the community."

Tank puncturing has yet to reach the radar screens of law enforcement organizations such as the National Sheriffs' Association, or the Automotive Service Association, a group that represents independent garage operators.

If you're still rolling around in a big old gas guzzling truck, best to check underneath on the regular and keep your eyes peeled for scurvy looking types roaming the neighborhood with gas cans....,