more on gas

...so who took my advice and invested in natty?

This just out from EIA:

Working gas in storage was 3,071 Bcf as of Friday, December 20, 2013, according to EIA estimates. This represents a net decline of 177 Bcf from the previous week. Stocks were 591 Bcf less than last year at this time and 313 Bcf below the 5-year average of 3,384 Bcf

...but you really have to look at the chart on their website to get the full effect....we are headed for a shortage, a serious, frightening shortage....

    I have more to add that I have not said here yet ... Wall Street is still panning the gas drillers
(I believe there are only about two rigs left, lonely little critters ....) The anal-ists still believe that drillers think the way they do, in nanoseconds, that the drillers do not remember how many false hopes have arisen in the last six years since the collapse, or how long it has actually been since the prices paid for gas were actually higher than what it costs them to get it out of the ground and out to market (which they have to do with one hand because the other hand is occupied fighting off the extremist environmentalists who want ALL of the benefits but NONE of the risks).

     What that means is, they are not going to rush right out and buy new rigs and go drill.  Not because of one or two months worth of high prices.  Anyway, its cold outside.  No one likes drilling in North Dakota very much when the temperature in the morning is 25 degrees below zero.  The drillers are pretty happy to let things ride as they are, allow the inventories ride on down to zero, let a few Wall Stereet twits find out what an unheated, unlit office feels like ....let a few tree huggers stick out their tongues and get stuck there ... and let the prices rise to a decent level and stay there for at least a couple of years ....

     This is gonna be fun.  By the way, there's still time to get in cheaply......

newest

This is my newest girlfriend.

she really knows how to "get my goat".....

War

     Most people realize by now that the U.S.A. is becoming more stratified than any nation before in history....there are the four hundred or so white males who own, together, approximately half of all the world's wealth and then there are the rest of us.
     And those four hundred or so realize that they had best do something pretty dramatic to distract the rest of us from redesigning the guillotine.  Usually, war has more drama than anything else.  But the arabs have simply refused to cooperate in this effort.  so.

     Lets review the history of the U. S. military in the past sixty years.  Lets strip out their false statistics and propaganda and gloss, and just tell the unvarnished truth.

     First there was a war with North Korea.  A backwards, undeveloped, feudal nation.  We lost.

     Then there were several years of peace and actual prosperity.

     Then, by inches, then by feet, then by yards, and then by miles, we went to war with another tiny, backwards, feudal nation in the far east, North Vietnam.  The press and the politicians all told us about the evils of communism and if we lost here then, domino by domino, they would take over the entire world. Between 200,000 and 400,000 south Vietnamese civilians were killed by our military.  Between 500,000 and a million were killed or maimed by agent orange alone. the Viet Cong reported over a million soldiers killed.  And the U.S. military reported over 50,000 Americans killed and 150,000 wounded.  The national debt soared, the federal budget exploded, the arms makers made fortunes.
We lost the war.  The world did not turn communist.  The economy of Viet Nam under the communists has recovered and grown remarkably in the ensuing peace.

     Our chosen dictator in Iran was deposed.  150 American terrorists disguised as military personnel were taken prisoner.  An effort to free them by the very best minds and equipment U.S. money could buy, failed.

     Then our country was attacked by a small group of men from Saudi Arabia.  Incensed, we united as a country behind our flag (all American flags are now made in China) and went to war.  However, we are far too dependent upon the oil from Saudi Arabia to go to war with them, so instead we went to war with two other countries nearby.  Perhaps our five star generals need new glasses?  Or new maps?  Anyway, we have been fighting these two wars against two of the most backward nations in the world, for like over 10 years now, and spent literally trillions of dollars making the arms dealers, once again, richer than ever, and exactly what have we accomplished?  We still can't leave because that would be admitting that once again we have lost.  But since there was nothing to win in the first place, how could we do anything else?  We have devastated their societies, their social structures, their infrastructures, we have scared the bejeezeus out of their civilian populations by raining death down upon them indiscriminately.  We have made a hell of a lot of good people angry with us, new enemies that we did not have before.  But we still can't or won't leave....

    Next up is China.... most populous nation by far in the world, larger in land mass than the U.S., having more resources, coal, oil, copper, iron ore, rare earth metals, mountains, rivers, farmland, desert, and smog. An economy that has boasted the most improvement worldwide for decade after decade.  They are hungry.  And they want what we have been bragging to them all that we have.   I can't wait until they land the first landing parties in Monteray ....

immigration reform

OMG.

I can hear it already.

"If you love this country, you can stay ..."

I better go pack my bags, I've only been here ten generations
and I believe we have lost the original VISA granted by the Algonquins ....

Economics

     We all know about Orwell's "1984".  Snowden did not reveal anything we didn't already deeply suspect.

     There was a science fiction story that I read as a teenager that has been teasing me in much the same fashion.  For years now, I've been secretly wondering if a fiction author actually hit on what is really ailing the world economy today, and hit on it fifty years ago.... I did not think that I could ever find it but lo and behold, google helped me out and here it is.

This should be required reading for Tyler Durden, Paul Krugman, Janet Yellen, and perhaps a host of other economists and folk ....and you might want to have a look, also ....

Frederik Pohl -- "The Midas Plague"

false idols

     Can anyone out there explain to me how worshipping the U.S. flag, singing to it, praying to it, and making zillions of copies of it to display inside, outside, over and under absolutely everything (or rather, paying the chinese people to make them for us ...)

     how that is any different from worshipping a golden calf or any other relic or idol?  And was that not exactly what we were warned against?

Paddy O'Furniture

     I went out last night to the local watering hole for a nip before bed.  They had a local singer performer who had an Irish aspect, an Irish name, and an Irish repertoire.  He was not very good,
which is neither here nor there, and I had trouble distinguishing his lyrics.
     At one point in the performance he took a breath to say about how uncommonly warm it was. Now if you haven't read my previous posts about natural gas, now would be a good time to check them out.  There was just something about his comment that did not stick right with me.
     The evening was warmer than the previous one, as well as the next one.  but checking with reasonabloy dependable sources in the internet I ascertained that the temperature was well within the norms for the given date and time.  As I performed this exercise I realized that his statment had not been a casual friendly gesture, but rather a political statement.  So one train of though launched in my brain was, "How sad, that as a society we have become so politicized, so opionated, that we cannot even have a conversatiion with a stranger about the weather without its being a political debate."  The next thought was, "How sad that we have become so politicized that we don't pay attention to the actual world around us anymore, we all have our minds completely made up already about how things are and we don't need for reality to intrude."

     Tomorrow night, the temperature is going to be uncommonly cold for the date and time.  On balance for the month, the temperatures have been slightly below the thirty year average.  Next week, the temperatures are going to be well below average, not only here but across much of the most populated areas of the continental United States.  Parts of Texas are seeing temps thirty or more degrees colder than average.  Already a few astute traders are beginning to notice.  Natural Gas spot prices are just beginning to rise, despite everyone's preconceived political beliefs.  It will be several weeks before very many people put it together.  Demand way more than it has been recently as electric generation, industries, residences, and even some transportation consumption has been added to the infrastructure.  Also, due to the lack of current operational rigs and the faster decay of fracked wells which have become our primary source  recently, the available supply is not what it has been and in fact will be insufficient to meet demand in the dead of winter.

     But I took heart in realizing that this is always how it works,  in the markets.  Feast or famine.  People catch on one by one, a few at first, then a few hoards, and finally the stragglers come along, the ones who always wait to make very, very sure, and who always buy at the top and then sell at the bottom.  Long about the first of May my Irish folk singer will finally realize that he is cold, and maybe he should invest in some natural gas or maybe install a gas space heater in his house or something.  By then I will be ready to take profits and getting ready for the beach....

true story

     I've known one young man who was way smarter than I am.  I think his name was Fred Meisel.  He lived just down the street from us in high school.  He scored 792 veerbal, 800 math on his SAT's.  He dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade ... to matriculate at Yale.

      The last time I saw him, he and I were sitting with Melissa Bartlett on her front porch, on a lazy spring day, enjoying the balmy evening in conversation.  I had dropped out of college to search for a reason for life.  But he said to me, "You are wasting your life.  You should be using all the talents you have to do some good, something worthwhile, with your life."

     Next day he got on a plane to go back to New Haven for graduation.  The plane went down in L.I. Sound and everyone on it was killed ....

Gas

might as well say this here, too.

After Katrina devastated the shallow water wells around the delta, natural gas prices briefly topped $17/mcf and some folks got dollar signs in their eyes.  With the advent of fracking, major new gas fields were opened up.  "Utica", "Marcellus", "Barnett", and even venerable old coal companies got into the act drilling for coal bed methane.  By 2007, Baker Hughes reported that there were almost 1800 rigs in the field in North America drilling for gas.

Well, the price collapsed, of course, all the way back down to around $2.50, well below what it cost to drill a new well and almost lower than what it cost just to keep the existing wells open.  All the new wildcatters were driven out of business, many properties had to be resold, and the only people making money were the outfitters.

Enter Wall Street.  Always eager to find new ways to fool the public, they started offering folks like Al Gore big, big money in order to convince the public of two things, one that there is a developing crisis under the label of "global warming" and two that US reduction of carbon-based fuel use would have an impact on it, and Wall Street could invent "carbon swaps" and "carbon credits" as yet another new financial vehicle to trade.  Al Gore became a multimillionaire and just to make a point he put fancy lights all over his house inside and out in Oak Ridge so it looks like a christmas tree at night.

Infrastructure takes a long, long time to change.  Adaptations to oil price changes and NG price changes take many years to work their way through the economy.... building NG pipelines to small cities takes time .... changing over millions of fuel oil furnaces to NG takes time ....building NG fueling centers and changing bus systems over to burn NG takes time ...convincing small town councils to change their habits takes times ....

Then, as prices for gas bumped along the bottom, Mother Nature decided to get involved.  She threw us a series of extra-mild winters and extra-mild summers.  Wall Street loved it as "proof" of their global warming thesis.  The drillers hated it as more and more of them went bust.  By the summer of 2012, there were less than 400 rigs still in operation.  The media and the politicians are all shouting from the rooftops about the modern day miracle of new gas and oil production in the USA.  They are practically guaranteeing full energy independence by 2020.

fat chance.

There's a funny thing about a fracked well.

The old, conventional wells, the oil wells, the mixed ones, and even the dry gas ones ... used to be, you just stuck a straw into the ground and the stuff blew out everywhere, the biggest problem was containing it.  Remember "blowout preventers" from DeepWater Horizon????  And the stuff just keeps coming and coming like the eveready bunny, for decades.

Not so with fracked wells.  Yes, there is shale almost everywhere....like the girl next door.  But there's another thing you remember about the girl next door?  Its very, very hard to get her to put out, maybe once or twice.  After that she marries you and she never puts out again.  Well its the same with fracked wells.  Their initial output is pretty modest in comparison with a conventional well.  But then, the output starts to decline almost immediately.  After a mere five years or so, its hardly worth the bother to even collect it.  You can try fracking it again, but that works about as well as divorcing your wife and then marrying her back again;  she is still not going to put out for you.

Enter the winter of 2013-2014.  Wall Street is trying to hide some "inconvenient truths".  The ice cover in the Antarctic las summer (winter there) was the largest on record.  ON RECORD!.  Since the beginning of satellite surveillance over 40 years ago.  Meanwhile the minimum reached in the Arctic was 1.7 million square miles greater than the year before.  It was the first year that the fabled "Northwest Passage" through Canadian waaters, did not open up for shippers and tankers, in six years.

Even the wooly bears in my area had mostly or all brown coats, a tell-tale sign that something "different" is up.....

I don't know about you.  You can do what you want.  I have more firewood in stock at this time than I have ever had before.  I did start the first fire late in September, a month ahead of schedule.  the temperature right now is hard frost, not unheard of, no, its about "normal" for this time of year, but we have not had a "normal" winter for a decade.  I also have over half my portfolio invested in natural gas companies.....with demand at an all-time high but the number of drillers approaching a twenty year low ... you figure it out .....

Aggression

From time to time there occur feelings or accompanying actions in my character, or my personality, or my soul, if you will, which pompous pedagogues like to label "aggressive."

I was born weak and grew up physically small while I was most often placed into social situations where the people I had to deal with were both physically larger and had more money and influence than I did.  However, like everyone, I experienced situations from time to time where people caused me pain, caused me harm, and I saw no beneficial reason for their actions but only a desire to cause pain or harm.  My natural reaction was to imitate them and mirror their feelings.  This generally resulted in further condemnation, punishment, and pain and harm.

After a great deal of pain and harm, I tended more often to turn my aggressive feelings upon myself, to deliberately injure or harm myself.  In doing so I discovered that this often created pain and suffering on the original perpetrators.  None of this is exactly rocket science although it does seem to be lost on most of the "psychiatric experts" of our day, who prefer a genetic or other chemical explanation to the outrageous suggestion that they themselves may actually be perpetrating more damage than they are alleviating.

After years and years of trial and error, of accumulating a vast array of experience tangential, inverted, reverted, and convoluted, I began to realize that there was never and is not and never will be anything "wrong" with me or my brain or my feelings or the things that I do.  God loves me very, very much and the people who believe otherwise are simply trucked up.

Furthermore, after a long, long time, I began, slowly at first, to understand, more and more thoroughly, that the one thing that all of the people who have tormented me all of my life have in common is that the "need" me.  They need to have me around because they need someone to control, to dominate, to look down upon, and to harass and punish and inflict pain upon.

And that little fact makes everything so easy.  All I ever have to do to get back at them, to release my aggression if you will, to express myself, and to teach them the lesson that they need so badly to learn, is simply to abandon them and go off and have a good time somewhere else.  It really drives them crazy....

...Like its going to do when the United States of trucking America collapses and all of the mothertruckers who have counted on their money to save them are going to realize that it is only so much paper and has no more value than sand.  Maybe they won't starve to death on account of all the sandwiches there, but they sure will suffer.  And I will exercise my greatest sin, and laugh.

feelings ...

(aside)  Nina Simone's rendition of the song by that name, at the Montreux jazz festival, 1976, ranks up there with my all time top life art experiences.  Check it out on you tube or someplace.

Life has given me cause to meditate and reflect, lately, upon the facet of my nature represented by my extreme non-violence, non-aggressive nature.  From time to time I wonder, if circumstances came down to blakc-and-white, could I kill a man if I had to in order to keep myself alive?  I do not know.  I'm pretty sure I could kill someone if I had to in order to protect someone I love, though.

I have been taking an online college course in Human Evolution lately.  I have a personal theory that the story of Cain and Able in the Bible has its metaphoric origins in the genocide of the Neanderthal species of hominids by the "Caucasian" race.  Hence, white skin is the "mark of Cain". Some other time I'll try to do a blog entry on some of the details I have found.  I'm sure its not a popular conclusion but there's masses of supporting evidence and I am by no means the only person to posit such a hypothesis.

Obviously I despise the aggressions of my people, made worse by their extreme efforts to hide, obfuscate, and redirect blame.  Most especially the ones who exhibit it the most, i.e. the ones on top.  Obviously I believe that sooner or later, God will make them pay for their behavior.  Most likely their ultimate downfall will occur within my lifetime and I will get to witness it, maybe participate a little bit.  After all my dad's name was "Sam", I am Sam's son.

I run some level of fear nearly all of the time.  Although mostly its way in the background, it comes to the front very easily and often.  It is common, for example, for me to be wakened from a deep sleep in terror, heart pounding, senses on high alert, and have no idea of what woke me.  My parents started to single me out for special attention before I reached puberty.  the counselors and the psychiatrists staunchly asserted that I would never be "cured" but would need their constant assistance all of my life.  Breaking free from their leeches took inhuman strength.

Fundamentally, I could not tolerate a minute more of my life without God.  This is not some intellectual, cognitive conclusion.  This is not something I arrived at by listening to ministers or reading any books.  This is atavistic, visceral, down at the most fundamental core of my being.  That is where He lives.  Simply put He is the only one that I can trust never to abandon me.  I can leave or I can drive away, virtually any human being.  Besides, all of you will die, sooner or later, that is the number one most essential fact of your nature.  There is nothing in the whole world that I can do to prevent you from dying, no matter how wise, how intelligent, how courageous I may act.

Somewhere on earth, a man was murdered last night.  I felt him go, I was awakened to feel his terror and then his recognition.  He was an aggressive man but he acted stupid.  That's pretty much all I know about him, I have no idea where he lived or who he knew or what he had done to deserve his fate.  Certainly I could not have done it, could never be accused of such.  Most everybody else is going to breathe a little bit easier today, though, and no one is going to miss him.....I wonder what his name was ....

cut more firewood.

The carbon credit trade advocates on Wall Street
have been masquerading as advocates of environmental consciousness
for the last decade.
Under the banner of Al Gore (among others), who has made a small fortune
with his propaganda campaign,
they have attempted to terrorize all of us with
horror stories about rising oceans and super storms.
Lately, their campaign has hit a few "speed bumps".
Some "inconvenient truths", if you will.

The minimum ice extent in the arctic this summer,
though still below the last thirty years' median,
was a million square miles larger than the previous summer.
Didn't they tell us it would be gone completely by now?

Meanwhile, the maximum antarctic ice extent hit a new record
since the beginning of satellite surveillance over 50 years ago.

The weather forecasters, disappointed by the lack of appearance
of ANY significant hurricane, have been giving names to
every little squall that has blown up.

Painstaking observations show that in the last 120 years,
the average rise in the sea level has been just over seven inches.
Its a bit hard to terrorize people about that after having promised a thirty-foot rise....

Climatologists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
have recently been forced to revise their statistical observation of
median observed worldwide temperature change to half of what they had previously offered,
throwing in extreme doubt their dire warnings about the future.

And probably the most troubling observation
to those people in such a hurry to damn fossil fuels is that
the sun has apparently chosen,
for reasons which are quite beyond contemporary scientists to even guess at,
and clearly beyond the slightest influence of man's puny civilization,
to lapse into a period of reduced radiation and sunspot quiet.
No one knows how long it will last, so far its been only 6 years
but there was a period in history (1645-1715)
which is referred to as "The Maunder Minimum"
which is also referred to as "The Little Ice Age"

disclaimer -- I own coal.  As a consequence of my research.

well, heck

why not?

Most everyone knows its going down now.

Bloomberg, this morning, is carrying no news at all.  Instead, their pages are plastered with feel-good editorials about growth and recovery, such blatant lies that not even the writers themselves are fooled anymore.

So, heck, why not start a new war?

Lets pick a country where there are already warring factions but both sides hate us.
Lets pick a country which has an ancient reputation as a world-wrecker.
Let us pick a country which has no wealth or natural resurces.
Let us pick a country which offers us no stategic or military significance whatever, but which does provide vital military security to Russia and to China and to Iran, countries which we very very much need to provoke and to incite to make war against us. 

Let us give aid to a group of rebels with strong ties to Al Qaida.

Let us see if we can reduce the world population by just a bit, before the coming debacle in the food production centers of the world as natural gas fertilizer and oil transportatrion become more scarce.

Let us see if we can increase the US feceral deficit.

Let us see if, by increasing our deficit spending, by increasing the rate of new debt accumulation, we can thereby bring about even more printing of money by the Federal Reserve, hastening the total demise of our currency.  All the while, threatening the world supply of crude oil at the same time.

Its all doomed anyway, lets see what we can do to bring it down faster.

heck, why not?  brilliant move, I say ....

now

it gets interesting.

The crash is upon us.
First to collapse are all the countries of the far east,
separately and together.
Japan, struggling with an aging populace
all wanting benefits when so few are still working,
and meanwhile Fukushima is pouring radioactivity into the Pacific
and they can't afford to clean it up.
China, which has been fudging and lying even more than the US about its economy
India, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand,
all having been surviving and prospering on exports but now nobody is buying.
What money they still have is all coming here
and keeping the US from total collapse -- yet --

Next, Europe will fall
as the German people finally reach their limit
in trying to "buy" the entire continent
by supporting failing economies of Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, etc
and even France and the UK have been leaching off of them.

Meanwhile the entire Middle East goes up in flames
as the failed policies of the would-be colonialists in Washington become more apparent.
We have tried to bully the entire region but its just not working anymore,
now that death is more desirable than servitude to us ....

For awhile the capital will still flow to New York
and still sustain us
but as the stock market falls
and faith and trust in our government completely collapses,
our cohesion will also fail
and it will become each man for himself ...

our population has been carefully taught to be so frustrated, angry, mistrusting, vengeful
and it is armed to the teeth with guns, pistols, knives, ammunition, assault rifles,
body armour, and so forth ....
killing will be random and ubiquitous ....

God has a plan.God still loves us,
still loves His creation and everything in it.
He just has quite a bit of housekeeping to do.
The darkest hour will be just before the dawn ....

The Matrix

     I (finally) watched "The Matrix" last night.

     Many, many insights.


     Probably all people of my age, particularly political, religious, and corporate leaders, ought to watch this movie in order to gain some understanding of what the young people of this culture, this society, think about them and their constructs.  So many older people are still clinging to the ideas that the system is sound.  They preach to the young that working to improve mankind's lot from within the system is the purpose we are all intended for.  They really believe that, and they really believe that the kids will fall in line, sooner or later.  How quaint.

     Then, there is the total misconception of energy.  If you haven't watched it, one of the supporting theses of the movie is that the sun has been burned out but that life goes on.  The world is owned and controlled by digital machines which use human beings as energy source, as "batteries".  Huh?  Do the young people really have so little understanding of the physical properties of potential and kinetic energy?  Well, of course they do.  How else could I explain how young people can be so bamboozled into believing that solar, or wind, or hydrogen (!) can be used as an eergy source in the future more potent than crude oil? 

     Then, there is the total flattening of computer programming, computer data, and the process of human learning.  The movie proposes that a human can be taught a subject by simply inserting a floppy disk and reading it, in about three seconds.  No wonder the kids today take school with such a blazee attitude.  Why bother learning math or physics or engineering, when it can simply be loaded in, on the spot, if the need ever should arise? 

     I am of course appalled that most cashiers today cannot even make change correctly in their heads, they need the cash registers to do it for them.  The other day I was debating with a cashier friend of mine whether or not this skill is even needed.  She stauchly insisted that she did not ever need this skill because the machines could always do it faster and more accurately.  So I asked her quickly if she could give me change, two tens for a five.  The exchange was made and I went on my way, content to let her win the discussion.

     Most impactful to me was Hollywood's age-old fantasy about true love and sex.  Central to the plot is how one kiss, accompanied with a vow of true love, could bring a human being back from death.  No wonder there are so many divorces in this country.  There are so, so many people who believe (and I myself was counted with them for the majority of my adulthood, which is why I've been divorced four times) who blindly believe that there exists for them a sexual partner who will save them from their own foolishness, all of it.

     Thank God for God.

The price of love

     Scarcely 30 years after Jesus' crucifixion, Emperor Nero gave the order for Jerusalem to be overrun.  Most residents, men, women and children, were put to the sword immediately.  All those buildings and belongings which could be burned, were burned.  All those structures of brick, stone, and mortar, were razed, til there was not remaining one stone upon another.  the few survivors were scattered and sold as slaves in distant parts of the empire.  Just for good measure, the ground was then copiously salted.


     Jesus offered hope, he offered ultimate love, joy salvation, redemption.  But he did not offer an end to suffering or injustice, not at all.  Others following in his footsteps made such rash promises but He never did.

     From the earliest that I can remember in my life, I have been teased, ridiculed, criticized, badgered, abused, beaten, and belittled.  From the earliest that I can remember, I had faith that I could be happy, and not only that I could but that it was my right to be happy, to love and to be loved.  For a long long time I found events to be highly confusing, because it was precisely at those times when I felt the most joy that other people were most apt to put me down and try to hurt me.

     I went back and forth between trying to live as others told me I ought to live, and trying to live as I wanted.  Neither one offered any satisfaction, but only pain.  Til finally, I began to really feel God's love for me, to notice all the things, big and small, that He has done just for me.  He showed me how wonderful it is to do for other people.  Not so much giving material goods for those really have little value, but what people cherish the most is the giving to them of control, to empower them.

     That has not ended the persecution.  These days, in fact, the threats grow greater and greater, as totalitarian regimes, police states, central control, spread across the earth.  I sense more and more danger.
There is more and more jealousy emanating from desperate greedy folk who are terminally dissatisfied with what they have and always require more.  There will always be people who have convinced themselves that duty and obligation prevent them from loving, from being happy. Not enjoying it themselves, they don't like happy people spreading joy.  They don't like it at all.  The religious and secular leaders, as ever in cahoots, insist that joy is impossible, always out of reach in this life, and one must buckle under to a heavy yoke to have any chance of salvation in the "next" world.

     There will never be an end to pain.  There will never be an end to persecution.  That was never the point.  The point is, they have already been defeated.  Their own doom is just as sure as the fall of the Roman Empire (and of course, every other empire which has been built, before and after.).  Nothing that they build or write will endure, and everything they do is vanity, meaningless.  Only love endures .....

big brother

     Of course, the primary reason why I have not been blogging lately is the revelation about all of NSA's spying, as our country abandons the core values which it once held dear and plummets towards a police state, a dictatorship, a one party system, controlled by the handful of men who own over half the world's total wealth and treat everyone else like debt slaves.

     Snowden did us all a tremendous favor with his heroic personal sacrifice.   Most americans understand that, even if many are too afraid to say so.  But the net result is quite evident in this quarter's financial reports from corporate america.  Microsoft stock fell through the floor, Intel, Blackberry, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, they are all falling as their revenues decline, as their number of clients declines ....

     Citizens are going back to talking with one another.  Face to face.  So far, talk is still free.  So far, there are a lot of places in the country where people can talk to one another without fear of being surreptitiouusly bugged, recorded and spied upon.  Its pretty funny to see the electronic communications media slowly hemorrhaging like this, I couldn't think of anything they more justly deserve for their pandering.

     I wish I thought it would stay that way.  I do have the satisfaction of understanding language well enough to know that the oppressed will always have more creativity and versatility than the oppressors.  The word will get around, no matter what they try to do.  In the end they ALWAYS lose, but they are too arrogant, conceited and stupid to learn history.....

the end is near

     Most of my friends and companions happen to believe that everything this morning, the rain, the grass, the trees, the clouds .... it all smells a whole lot like Armageddon.

     My readings in history tell me that the odds that the book of Revelations is factually correct AND that the time period under discussion is NOW, are quite small. In fact, the Roman Empire, at the time known to be the entire civilized world, managed to collapse totally, over several centuries it is true, but nevertheless totally .... and yet, Jesus was not sighted, neither the antichrist or any of those other characters .... and certainly, many, many other supercilious, egocentric empires have also collapsed in the interim, and it has not meant the end of humanity, the end of the known universe, the end of time, or even the end of white bread.

     My opinions have never been widely read, never widely accepted, its just that, while I have always been somewhat early in my predictions, I have, fortunately or unfortunately, been correct ..... my opinion is that this is not the fall of man we are facing, however it is the fall of civilization as we know it ... in the next five to fifty years, the great  majority of the people now alive are going to die, in ways that they did not expect .....
and the age of technology, made possible by the use of fossil fuel, is now over, forever and ever .... those who survive will have to use the labor of their own backs, as well as that of animals and primitive windmills and watermills, built primarily with wood and other natural materials ...

...and the good thing is that they will be, mostly , vastly happier than you all are now, but that's kind of an intangible thing which is hard for me to explain .....

Economic Recovery

The following chart is copied from Zero Hedge who attribute the data to the Energy Information Agency.

Unlike most government-supplied statistical data, this chart data has not been massaged with "seasonal adjustments", "birth-death adjustments", "chained inflation adjustments", or any other kind of spin.

The reader can judge for himself what kind of economic recovery the USA has been experiencing since the collapse of the housing bubble and the resulting stupendous responses by the Federal monetary authorities.

Incidentally, the reader may also question what has been trumpeted in major media and elsewhere as a great oil renaissance, the current reduction in crude oil imports, which is often extrapolated to predict total energy independence in a few more years.

my type

     I guess its safe to tell this story:

     Some little while ago, Star and I happened to be invited to a weekly session of Karaoke at a local redneck bar.
     Star of course was in her cups.  She did not mind a bit if everyone else there were so self-absorbed they hardly even noticed her.  She so enjoys being on stage, singing her heart out, and well, being the Star that she is.
     We happened to be sitting at a table with one other guy, the young man who invited us, and about seven women.  I guess that there just aren't that many guys who sing.  I liked the odds.
     One of the women started to introduce herself to me and familiarize me with her story.  She was likeable enough.  She was reasonably educated and traveled, even had a few insights.  Her experiences with Africa had been somewhat different than mine.  This woman was modestly attractive although she might be criticized for having one too many french fries upon occasion. What the ladies like to call "curvaceous" but the medical profession has other terms for.   But padding can be fun to play with.  And I'm always happy to get attention.
     The conversation continued, and Star kept on singing in the background.  Careful examination revealed to me that this woman was approaching that age of femininity where a whole lot  start to show signs of that "deer in the headlights" look, particularly those who are single, and most particularly those who have used their sexuality as a trading tool.
     Then, she had the audacity to suggest to me that Star was "not my type".  I suppose we don't fit the mold.  An old, troll-like white man from an NPR background and a very young, lithe woman from more of a club background.  But that's precisely why both of us like it so much.
     I just rankled at the suggestion that this strange woman who was focusing on me, knew about what my "type" was.  What did she know of what I had seen and done in the last 62 years?  What I had enjoyed, what I had accomplished, or the people who had hurt me and how they had done it?
     As the evening progressed and the waitress became more familiar with our empty glasses, the temperature in the room began to rise by several degrees.  This pudgy lump of Crisco in front of me was definitely starting to soften, even to liquify a little bit.  I can't say that I was not affected.  However, I began to surmise that her ulterior motive was to induce me to go home with her, thereby leaving Star to fend with herself.  Typical of a white woman to be thinking something so crude and unmannerly, I thought to myself.
     So I gave her my phone number and explained to her that I am not so crass to abandon any date to her own devices after bringing her out myself, and I turned back  to have a word with the center of my attention.
     When I next reversed my gaze, the bitch was already working on another man.  I of course never heard from her again.

       They still don't get it, do they?  Once you go black, you never go back.   And its not just because chocolate tastes so good.

Grillo

     This is supposed to be the land of the free, isn't it?  this is supposed to be the home of the brave, isn't it?

     Would someone please tell me why there has not been one american, not one, brave neough to get up in front of a crowd and say things like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eyCpidT53nY

hierarchies

     It seems to me that I can say there are three basic styles of peoplle participating in any kind of economy.  There are leaders, there are followers, and there are independents.
     It seems to me that the leaders who build new systems, new hierarchies, are great, gifted men with immense vision and strength .... we can be talking about a new industry, like Henry Ford built, a new system of government, like Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Madison, and all the founding fathers built ... we can be talking about a new religion, like Paul of Tarsus and all the apostles built.  Men whose strengths lie in inspiring others to change their direction and fall in behind.
     It seems like the far and away the most number of participants are the followers.  These are people who may be less gifted but their strength comes in doggedly cooperating for the sake of companionship and cohesion.
     And it seems like out in the fringes, most of them only tolerated by society, are the real thinkers, the artists, the musicians, the single shop keepers, the novelists, the movie directors, people who act alone and give everyone else the real meat of civilization, all the stuff that makes life worthwhile for everybody else,
ubt somehow it never seems to be absorbed and accepted and loved until after those individuals have passed on.  In their day they suffer different levels of ostracation labels and straightjackets of supposed madness and sometimes involuntary incarceration,  persecution, even crucifixion.

     And the problem comes in with hierarchies, institutions, organizations, that have some age to them, some level of expectation that they will always be around.  The problem always seems to arise, sooner or later, that inferior men, with inferior vision, less that selflessness, come into positions of power within the hierarchy.  Usually they are born into it, children and grandchildren of great men, who have the particular affliction that they always feel personally inferior to their forebears and feel the burning need to try to outdo them, but always the only way to accomplish that is to cut corners, introduce flaws, weaknesses, prejudices, little points of potential failure, until inevitably, just as night follows day, a nail falls out of a horse's shoe, of the general leading the army into battle or,a rivet made cheaply shears, the bulkhead gives way and the ship floods, a country priest sins against an altar boy and his higher-ups all try to cover it up instead of correct it, and the whole hierarchy collapses.

     And so it is now, with globalization, a worldwide economy, worldwide manufacturing, communication  and trade and distribution system.

     Can't you just feel it?

The Pope

     So ....

     Exactly why does anybody think we need a new pope, now that this one has resigned?

     I mean, what for?

     Whatever they were supposed to accomplish, if they have not succeeded after more than 2000 years, what makes them think it will ever get done?

     just askin .....

replacement

It is suggested by many that, within the lifetime of many people today, scientists and engineers will be building computers and robots so sophisticated that they will be able to think as well or better than any human being and they will completely replace humans in the workforce.

It is suggested by many that the typical adult male in our society thinks about sex approximately once every seven seconds.

So I am still waiting to see or have demonstrated to me a computer or robot which thinks about sex every seven seconds.

I am certainly looking forward to it, however.

directions

     I was out cutting and stackiing the day's supply of firewood, when I first heard them coming.
     I was pretty sure of the direction to look, the sound was not fooling me with echoes off the buildings or hills.  I looked up in the grey, snow-laden clouds and I looked and looked for a long time.  The barking, calling, crying for each other' assurances to stay in line increased in volume.
     Finally I saw them, high, so high, higher than a vulture would ever dream of flying, mucch higher than  the infernal helicopters constantly encroaching upon my security and freedom.
     They were snow geese, in a single near-perfect formation, well over a hundred of them.

     These were not the locals, in pairs or groups of seven out for morning rituals. They were not even the Canadian Geese from Toronto, migrating to the mangrove swamps of the Chesapeake.

    No, these were the long distance fliers, the serious travelers, the committed, the ones from Calgary, from Fort McMurray, from Lake Athabaasca.

   flying ....SOUTH?  towards Port-au-Prince, or Corozal Town .... on groundhog day?

um, do they know something that I don't ???????????

     (you must know that I perch my nest not only overlooking the main east west rail line of the country, but also under the main migratory path of miscellaneous different aviarians, particularly the geese ......)

     Aimlessly I wonder what the global warming scientists make of it ..... maybe they just don't pay attention because it does not fit with their preconceived notions of how things need to be for their self-aggrandizement ....

     Most Christians that I have listened to, entertain this immense logical fallacy within their stated beliefs, one which cries out to the wilderness for resolution.  But human beings have evidently a limitless capacity to deceive themselves when it is convenient to do so, and so everything proceeds as if all is well.

     Most Christians claim that they believe that God created the entire universe and everything in it.  Most Christians claim that He is all-powerful and all-knowing.  Many also claim that He knows everything about what is to come.

     But then, they turn around and staunchly state their belief in the Devil (never mind that nearly everything they believe about Satan originated in the mind and poetry of John Milton, some 14 centuries after everything in the Bible was codified and set in stone; we can discuss that another time.) and they name the Devil as the enemy and the source of evil and usually the perpetrator of all evil .... which reduces to a belief that there is such a thing as evil, that there exist  bad ideas,  bad actions and many easily induce that therefore there are bad people.

     The fallacy is glaringly obvious, is it not?  Is God in control?  Diod He create everything?  Then where did this devil fellow come from?  and how can he do all the things attributed to him, unless God actually chooses and wants for him to do so?

     I have my own answers for all of this .... God's been more than patient with me in working them out and leading to udnerstandings which do not require any such paradoxes and hypocrises, because for some reason I can't function that way, I won't tolerate lying to myself, I cannot live with that kind of internal conflict.  How you all do it is beyond me.

God bless .....

Cabbages and Kings

It occurs to me that if Charles Dodgson were alive today, he would have so much of the same crap to make fun of, except that only it seems to be a lot worse ....

On the other hand, he would never be allowed to publish, and in fact he would no doubt have been thrown in jail and the key ceremonially destroyed (or placed upon an extremely oversized glass table, out of his reach?), for his relationship with Alice, now wouldn't he .....

Socializing

     This past week has seen about a dozen different incidents which all reiterate an old, favourite theme of mine.
     I have had communion and discourse with a retired far eastern man and broken bread with him.  We've talked about religions; he styles himself as an independent, loves nature and the earth and this world, but does not fully trust any human being or any organized faith.  At heart he and I see eye to eye; I attend a protestant church mainly for the friendship and warmth (an AME church, actually!) and to make music, but I commune privately with God and do not accept the assertion that Jesus is the only way to find Him.
     I have had communion and discourse with an indian man and broken bread with him.  He has training in the Hindu faith and traditions and teaches Yoga, but he also styles himself as an independent and he and I also find common ground in matters of the heart and spirit.
     I have had communion and discourse with a young african american man and broken bread with him.  We share much frustration at the continuing disintegration of our society, of customs and propriety and common decency, of a work ethic, of the spread of willful stupidity, sloth and decadence.

     All three of them, and others, silently cry out to me of their loneliness and isolation.

     Through all of this I keep coming back to this simple fact in our society now.   That there is basically no place left where people can congregate and socialize and meet other people, chit chat or debate or tell tall stories or play .... with just certain exceptions, one being inside ones own family IF one has a family, one being church IF one is willing to embrace whatever particular flavor or furniture style of mythology which that church espouses, or a bar IF one has money and is willing and able to continually buy and consume drinks for the duration of one's attendance.

     I see that as a problem.  In fact, I think its fatal.  No, I can't fix it, I have no idea how to go about it.  But I think it accounts for the inexorable breakdown of everything else. Want to blame something for the lone gunmen, the mass murders which seem to be occurring with more and more frequency these days?  Or the crime, the lack of trust, the high prison rate, the recidivism, the high divorce rate, the lack of family cohesion? I guess there's nothing to do but to wait for total collapse.  It won't be much longer ....

animals

     I think that the only difference between men and other animals is that men think that there is a difference between men and animals.  Think about it ....

Social

     Seldom ever addressed, one of the crises, the crying unmet needs of our society, are opportunities for socializing.  No longer may kids go out and play" on the street, and teenagers will be routinely harassed by authorities any time and place they get together.  If adults do it, its called "loitering."  There are a few places left where people can still go, like bars or churches, during restricted hours, but there is a strong expectation for money to change hands for the opportunity.  Why should people always be required to spend money in order to meet, congregate, converse, and relax together?  Obviously not everybody can afford to do so.  The problem is the most acute for people who don't have families.  This has to be a contributing factor towards all the craziness today ... what is called "normal" in our culture and society is something bordering on total escapism and autism, like adapting to a permanent cocoon ....