Friday, May 16, 2008

Just a Good Ole Boy.......,

Huckabee in Kentucky going for the tee, hee, hee.....,

Project Holocaust

R.K. Moore is a good guy and an interesting thinker whose online musings I've monitored for some years now. Some years ago, for a couple months, I carried on a brief topical correspondence with Mr. Moore. In this article (which you should click to read in its entirety) he attempts a very large-scale orchestrated objective reduction of numerous dots he's connected relating to the food crises and their presentation in the media.
One of the things I’ve noticed about the mass media is that it carries only a few themes at a time. There’s always one main theme – a kind of hypnotic focus point – which right now is the US Democratic Primaries, and in the past has been anything from a hostage crisis to a celebrity murder trial. The main theme can be vacuous in content; it needs only to take up a lot of news airtime, and keep people glued to their sets. And then there are always a few secondary themes being carried as well, with interruptions from time to time for natural disasters.

The secondary themes are highly selective. World-shaking events are going on all the time that mainstream TV never mentions. Things like genocide in East Timor – which went on for decades invisibly, and then suddenly it was in our face just when an intervention required justification. That is to say, secondary themes are selected for a purpose. What they are telling us is less important than why we are being told. We can find the news itself much more reliably in other places, mostly online. When they bring a theme to our mainstream attention, that means it is important to them that we view that scenario in certain ways. In other words, they are preparing us for things to come, getting us to frame our thinking in such a way as to be able to accept what we might not otherwise accept.

“Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King I got forty red white and blue shoe strings And a thousand telephones that don’t ring Do you know where I can get rid of these things And Louie the King said let me think for a minute son And he said yes I think it can be easily done Just take everything down to Highway 61.”
· Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited

Highway 61 is a rather direct allusion to Highway 66, which is the most famous cross-country US highway. That then leads to a somewhat more comprehensive allusion, to the Madison-Avenue empowered American mass media, which also goes from coast-to-coast, and which can sell anything at all to the masses – not only telephones that don’t ring, but wars that don’t make sense, buildings that collapse at free-fall speed, concentration camps, and torture. Why are they taking global famine down to Highway 61? Why has it become a media theme? What are they selling us this time?

I think it is very clear that we are being prepared for a massive global holocaust, and the evidence I have seen for this is now much stronger than it was five months ago. There are two kinds of evidence. One kind of evidence is about the hunger crisis itself, and the various conditions forcing that crisis. The other kind of evidence comes from the nature of the interventions that are being planned and announced, to alleviate the crisis.
I'm not sure about the extent to which we're being prepared, particularly as the intensity of the Greatest Depression begins to mount and become undeniable in the U.S.. However, there is a sinister logic to the notion that if an out-and-out holocaust is about to unfold in the planet's southern hemispheric countries, that at the very least, a massive great depression and concurrent set of privations would have to be underway in the developed world - if for no other reason than to maintain narrative consistency and the appearance of actual scarcity induced disruption.

Anti-Psychotic Drugs and U.S./UK Kids

At CNN Health; American children take anti-psychotic medicines at about six times the rate of children in the United Kingdom, according to a comparison based on a new U.K. study.

Does it mean U.S. kids are being over-treated? Or that U.K. children are being under-treated?

Experts say that's almost beside the point, because use is rising on both sides of the Atlantic. And with scant long-term safety data, it's likely the drugs are being over-prescribed for both U.S. and U.K. children, research suggests.

Among the most commonly used drugs were those to treat autism and hyperactivity.

In the U.K. study, anti-psychotics were prescribed for 595 children at a rate of less than four per 10,000 children in 1992. By 2005, 2,917 children were prescribed the drugs at a rate of seven per 10,000 -- a near-doubling, said lead author Fariz Rani, a researcher at the University of London's pharmacy school.

The study was released in the May edition of the journal Pediatrics.

UK Strengthens Its Cannabis Law

In BBC Political News; Cannabis is to be reclassified as a class B drug, Jacqui Smith has said. The home secretary said she wanted to reverse Tony Blair's 2004 downgrading of the drug because of "uncertainty" over its impact on mental health.

The move from class C means the maximum prison sentence for possessing cannabis rises from two years to five years.

Her statement to MPs came despite the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs' review - commissioned by Gordon Brown - saying it should stay class C.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Oil Supply vs. Demand

I wonder if much of the debate about the run-up of oil prices could be resolved simply by looking at this graph. The Age of Aquarius at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil.


World Oil Supply & Demand (all liquids) from 2003-
2007
Source: EIA supply and demand data

Chicago Joins the $4.00 Gas Club

My children and I love to play a driving game called "yellow car, lucky day" - I'm sure some of you know it. The goal is to be first to spot and tally up the largest number of yellow motor vehicles. Yellow tractors but not lawnmowers count a half point, purple cars count two points, but they have to be truly purple not oxblood colored, or whatever that ugly deep reddish brownish color sometimes passing itself off as purple is called.

Anyway, I thought we could start our own blogospheric version of the game except the object would be to spot $4.00/gallon gasoline for sale in a locality near you. We'll call this the $4.00 Gas Club. Send a picture with details to subrealistro@gmail.com.

Now don't cheat and use gasbuddy.com and please do send a photo or a link to a photo of the offending purveyor on flicker or other web photo archiving site. Who knows, the $4.00 (and soon $5.00) Gas Club could have stronger legs than the "A Kneegrow Said It" club. Oh yeah, given what I expect to see coming down the political pike, the "A Kneegrow Said It" blogpost category gets its very own contest too. The only rule there is that offending submissions have to have been spotlighted on a mainstream media outlet and used as a sockpuppet proxy for what the showcasing pundit would have loved to say themselves, but can't, and so exploits a willing and expendable proxy. Doubtless James David Manning will be in high demand after his moment of infamy on Limbaugh's boradcast yesterday.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The Trinity of Hell - A Kneegrow Said It

Today I encountered a completely new milestone in my continuing examination of the rorschachian reflections of the collective American psyche evoked by Baraka Obama's presidential candidacy. Rush Limbaugh has been working for some time to push the envelope of permissible, racialized political speech related to the Obama candidacy via proxy. Here to date, he's done this by having his engineer Mr. Snerdley function as his official Obama spokesman. Snerdley has been all too glad to clown for Limbaugh. Today however, Limbaugh took his racialized political strategery to levels never previously experienced by providing a national broadcast showcase for commentary by the exceedingly idiosyncratic James David Manning. Without further ado - the first installment of A Kneegrow Said It. Given the course of the campaign for the presidency, I expect many more such exploratory probes of what's permissible in the American political mainstream;

Shibboleth

Shibboleth (IPA: /ˈʃɪbəlɛθ/[1]) is any language usage indicative of one's social or regional origin, or more broadly, any practice that identifies members of a group. Apparently the shibboleth has become the subject of academic research. Two vintage cultural discussions of this topic predating this study from VisionCircle days come to mind, first a discussion of Roland Fryer's Acting White and second an early discussion with Negrorage aka TheGrayConservative about the cultural phenomenon of Blackness. But before we turn attention to the gist of the study - let me state what should be obvious. The thing we know as culture is comprised of myriad unconscious behaviours and cues (thus the subrealist dimension) which serve to identify one as a member of a given cultural grouping. The term that I've used for some years to describe this phenomenon comes from Alan Carter and is called "microsynchronization of body language". Some of us easily and effortlessly model multiple cultural configurations and can easily segue into and out of cultural milieus at will, and others, not so much. So-called nerds and autistic spectrum individuals seem strongly disinclined to trouble themselves with cultural microsynchronization, thus the stereotypical and nearly universal characterization of the "nerd" type, which largely defies cultural embedding.

While everybody responds to it in varying degrees, once you're aware that this form of comprehensive unconscious signaling takes place - the synchronization of your body language is no more complicated than the synchronization of your language or dialect. It's simple mimicry. A careful student of microsynchronization and practitioner of subtle mimicry can wield exceptional influence in a rich variety of social contexts - here's the abstract in question;

What leads humans to divide the social world into groups, preferring their own group and disfavoring others? Experiments with infants and young children suggest these tendencies are based on predispositions that emerge early in life and depend, in part, on natural language. Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language speakers, and preschool children preferentially select native-language speakers as friends. Variations in accent are sufficient to evoke these social preferences, which are observed in infants before they produce or comprehend speech and are exhibited by children even when they comprehend the foreign-accented speech. Early-developing preferences for native-language speakers may serve as a foundation for later-developing preferences and conflicts among social groups.
The term originates from the Hebrew word "shibboleth" (שיבולת), which literally means the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain [2] or, in different contexts, "stream, torrent"[3] [4] It derives from an account in the Hebrew Bible, in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish members of a group (the Ephraimites) whose dialect lacked a /ʃ/ sound (as in shoe) from members of a group (the Gileadites) whose dialect did include such a sound.

In the Book of Judges, chapter 12, after the inhabitants of Gilead inflicted a military defeat upon the tribe of Ephraim (around 1370–1070 BC), the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the Jordan River back into their home territory and the Gileadites secured the river's fords to stop them. In order to identify and kill these disguised refugees, the Gileadites put each refugee to a simple test:
Gilead then cut Ephraim off from the fords of the Jordan, and whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, 'Let me cross,' the men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say Shibboleth.' If anyone said, 'Sibboleth', because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell on this occasion.

– Judges 12:5-6, NJB
As some of you may have observed in the comments over the weekend, there are some subrealist shibboleths, as well. So called racial realists of any stripe or persuasion are quick to get the gas face and be banished to the murky swamps from whence their beliefs and thinking emanate. Seriously - anybody who pretends that prejudice is universal to an arbitrarily defined group of people, or, that complex behavioural patterns that are obviously culturally determined are rooted in dimly understood genetic wetware - is basically stuck too deep in the mud of stupid to waste cycles trying to extract. As far as I'm concerned, those folks don't even have entertainment value.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Peak Wood

This article provides a simple and highly accessible primer on the cyclical rise and fall of complex civilization. In addition, it actually references the Sumerian god of the forest and its conservation "Humbaba".

I'll never forget the first time I went into a supersized grocery store, in New Hampshire I believe, some twenty-odd years ago. It was easily the most impressive collection of food that I had ever personally witnessed. Dumbstruck, I referred to this for me unprecedented phenomenon as "the mighty Humbaba", and that term has stuck ever since. My children know exactly what I'm talking about when I refer to the now somewhat typical big box store or grocery store as "Humbaba".

Humbaba was the lord of the cedar forest - a giant with a face of coiled intestines. Gilgamesh the Sumerian hero fought and killed him and then cut down his cedar trees. The Epic of Gilgamesh is translated in full here;
The importance of oil is not that it provides energy; energy can be had from anything. The importance of oil is that is provides cheap energy. A society's complexity is not a function of the total energy throughput, but the ERoEI--Enery Returned on Energy Invested, or ROI in pure energy economics terms. Since the general problem (if not the specifics) is such a common one, allow me to explain with an example from our own history: the end of the Bronze Age, the beginning of the Iron Age, and a crisis we might today call, "Peak Wood."[...]

Every civilization eventually falls prey to diminishing returns. The problem of Peak Oil--like "Peak Wood"--is just one dimension of this much larger, intractable problem, inherent to the nature of any complex society. What separates extant civilizations from extinct ones is whether or not a less attractive alternative existed, which could become the basic strategy for a new iteration in the cycle of expansion and exploitation. But eventually, miracles run out. Eventually, the deus ex machina leaves us to sink or swim on our own merit. The crisis of Peak Oil is precisely the kind of crisis that has always collapsed civilizations, and if history is any guide, then it seems very likely that we have finally run out of luck, and the time has finally come to pay back 10,000 years of debt.
In addition to being a good and satisfying read on its own, invoking the sacred name of the great Humbaba, it links to the anthropik blog and website, jeffvail, and some other good resource sites, as well.

Why Organelle?

One of my favorite reference sites is Organelle. Hopefully by now, you will have already availed yourself of this extraordinary resource. If not, no time like the present. Enjoy.

Why are you doing this?
Firstly, it is my experience and understanding that we as a species, and Earth as a planet are facing a variety of unprecedented threats for which both are vastly more unprepared than human beings imagine. For the humans, early (current) results include cataclysmic changes in human health and cognition. For the biosphere, the results vastly exceed what can be briefly discussed. Simply stated, the anciently and arduously conserved biocognitive libraries of Earth are being burned, wholesale. Humans believe this has little to do with them, and, as far as action goes, egregiously ignore these matters. No one finds wholesale atrocity surprising anymore. We accept it as a fact of life, whether it is the physical atrocities of war and ‘research’ or the cognitive and relational atrocities bred in the thriving soup of our human cultures.

I do not believe we can give answer to these challenges without some very new and powerful methods of approach and forms of understanding. It is my sincere belief that Cognitive Activism holds forth promises of new and extremely powerful ways of understanding both the genesis of these matters and their resolutions.

If you want to paint me with a label, for some reason or other, the label transhumanist might be relatively accurate, in that I believe we have not yet glimpsed even the tiniest portion of our real cognitive and relational potentials. However, I am an a-mechanical transhumanist in that I do not really believe that machines and our relations with them ‘enhance’ us. It is not enough for there to be an apparent benefit to some dimension of our activity (i.e. relation with machines); the costs of creation, relation, and protection (maintenance) of machines must necessarily be available for evaluation if we are to decide they are ‘beneficial’. But these costs are neither examined, nor available for examination, since many of them exist in terrains we are but poorly equipped to recognize or evaluate.

Simply stated: machines and organisms compete for the same terrain and resources. This has severe cognitive ramifications for human beings, as well as physical ramifications. Humans are almost miraculously cognitively malleable and are prone to biocognitive emulation of various functions and features of their common relationals. In the case of machines, the more we relate with them, the more we become like them. Yet a machine is not even the shadow of an organism. It is the shadow of some function of an organism. This is not something we want the experience of ‘becoming alike with’ cognitively, physically, emotionally, nor in any other way.

Each person (and organism) possesses kinds and forms of relational ability (intelligence potentials) that would make the sum of our science, religion, and fiction look like a charred matchstick compared to the Sun. Having had a direct experience of some of these potentials and abilities, I believe it is possible for us to rediscover them together, with the aid of some new ways of relating to identity and knowledge.

In essence, I see the potential for a sudden revolution in human relational intelligence, something more dramatic than anything we can currently imagine. If we can remove the elemental obstructions at the roots of our relational intelligence, we have the chance to radically and positively change what it means to be human.

Childish Superstitions

In today's UK Guardian; Einstein's letter makes view of religion relatively clear.

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own.

A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views.

Due to be auctioned this week in London after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions".

Monday, May 12, 2008

The Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007

On Thursday, April 24, 2008, the President signed into law S. 1858, the "Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007," which authorizes through fiscal year 2012 new and existing programs at the Department of Health and Human Services concerning newborn screening. A detailed analysis of the implications for genetic privacy and consent rights shows how the government plans to treat the DNA of every newborn:
  • Establish a national list of genetic conditions for which newborns and children are to be tested.
  • Establish protocols for the linking and sharing of genetic test results nationwide.
  • Build surveillance systems for tracking the health status and health outcomes of individuals diagnosed at birth with a genetic defect or trait.
  • Use the newborn screening program as an opportunity for government agencies to identify, list, and study "secondary conditions" of individuals and their families.
  • Subject citizens to genetic research without their knowledge or consent.
Soon, under this bill, the DNA of all citizens will be housed in government genomic biobanks and considered governmental property for government research. The DNA taken at birth from every citizen is essentially owned by the government, and every citizen becomes a potential subject of government-sponsored genetic research.

S. 1858 imposes a federal agenda of genetic data warehousing and population-wide genetic research. It does not require consent and there are no requirements to fully inform parents about the warehousing of their child's DNA for the purpose of genetic research.

Playing the Iraq Oil Card

If anyone had any doubt that Iraq was a lot about oil, they shouldn't after the recent Capitol Hill appearance by our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker. In a closed House hearing, Crocker put the fear of god in Congress. His message: If we leave Iraq, Iraq will destabilize the Gulf, and a destabilized Gulf equals unstable oil prices.

Nobody really knows, which is just what the Bush Administration is counting on. They got us into this mess in the first place by preying on people's fears, and now they are continuing to do so. And $10 a gallon for gasoline is his equivalent of an economic WMD.

The truth of the matter finally goes mainstream, now was that really so hard?

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Patent for a Pig (Pt.1 of 5)?

Patenting living organisms is already settled case law in the U.S.

Thereby paving the way for some VERY BIG business plans indeed.....,

Please read the notes that accompany this youtube video and links to the remainder of the series and related videos.

As with the terminator seeds, it's not just about the organism itself, it's about the organism's offspring, as well. If this is what they'll do to farmers in the U.S., just imagine what they'll try to do with farmers outside the view of the American public?

Seed Police?

Last year, William Engdahl peaked the curiosity of inquiring minds with his text Seeds of Destruction - The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. Can the development of patented seeds (genetically modified organisms - GMO) for most of the world’s major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?

The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920’s, has embodied what they termed ‘negative eugenics,’ the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines.

Comes now Vanity Fair with an investigation of stringent, sweeping, and unsettling intimidation practices by Monsanto in the U.S.;

Most Americans know Monsanto because of what it sells to put on our lawns -- the ubiquitous weed killer Roundup. What they may not know is that the company now profoundly influences -- and one day may virtually control -- what we put on our tables. For most of its history Monsanto was a chemical giant, producing some of the most toxic substances ever created, residues from which have left us with some of the most polluted sites on earth. Yet in a little more than a decade, the company has sought to shed its polluted past and morph into something much different and more far-reaching -- an "agricultural company" dedicated to making the world "a better place for future generations."[...]For centuries—millennia—farmers have saved seeds from season to season: they planted in the spring, harvested in the fall, then reclaimed and cleaned the seeds over the winter for re-planting the next spring. Monsanto has turned this ancient practice on its head.

Monsanto developed G.M. seeds that would resist its own herbicide, Roundup, offering farmers a convenient way to spray fields with weed killer without affecting crops. Monsanto then patented the seeds. For nearly all of its history the United States Patent and Trademark Office had refused to grant patents on seeds, viewing them as life-forms with too many variables to be patented. “It’s not like describing a widget,” says Joseph Mendelson III, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, which has tracked Monsanto’s activities in rural America for years.Indeed not. But in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, turned seeds into widgets, laying the groundwork for a handful of corporations to begin taking control of the world’s food supply. In its decision, the court extended patent law to cover “a live human-made microorganism.” In this case, the organism wasn’t even a seed. Rather, it was a Pseudomonas bacterium developed by a General Electric scientist to clean up oil spills. But the precedent was set, and Monsanto took advantage of it. Since the 1980s, Monsanto has become the world leader in genetic modification of seeds and has won 674 biotechnology patents, more than any other company, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
From where I sit, this dot-connecting spade work does far more to bolster Engdahl's contentions than to repudiate them. Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear.

Oh, and while I was at it, I happened upon this earlier article at Greenpeace discussing Monsanto's foray into "life as intellectual property" - Monsanto files patent for new invention: the pig

Green Acres

What will the U.S. government do when prime farmland in Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois is being sold to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE? From the oil-exporting nations' point of view, farmland is a good investment. They already have the fertilizer plants.

One can easily envision armed Chinese troops patrolling farmland in Africa, with a cleared DMZ and minefields to keep the starving locals from "straying" into Chinese-owned farmland; and armed convoys trucking produce to the nearest airfield for shipping back to China.

China looking to buy farmland abroad to stay self sufficient in food

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Not Black and White - Rethinking Race and Genes

Late last year, I was compelled to keep my foot planted deep in William Saletan's ignorant, overreaching backside. Saletan was down to the same insidious and habitual stupid human tricks that certain of our visitors seem to be perennially stuck on. Shame. As it turns out, Saletan has finally come around to the errors and omissions plaguing his thinking. While it's at least five months and some years too late to warrant respect (I mean really, only a true simpleton could go down this path in the first place) - at the very least - his epiphany is worth noting;
policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can't find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you're a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks.

By itself, this problem isn't decisive. After all, racial analysis did lead to the genetic findings about beta blockers. But as the conversation shifts from medicine to social science, and particularly to patterns laden with stereotypes, the moral cost of framing such patterns in racial terms becomes unsupportable. We can't just be "race realists," as believers in biological distinctions among races like to call themselves. We have to be realists about racism. No fact in human history is more pervasive than our tendency to prejudge, fear, despise, persecute, and fight each other based on even the shallowest observable differences. It's simply reckless to feed that fire.
Of course Saletan equivocates waaaaay too much, understandable given that it's humiliating to be found out as intellectually underendowed. That said, at least he's taken the first step toward scientific and intellectual sobriety. He's no longer in complete denial of what's trivially obvious to those of us with the eyes to see. Let's hope everyone is capable of bootstrapping themselve up and out of the psychological stone age.

The Greatest Depression

Overview; (read the whole thing, it's intense)

The U.S. economy is in an intensifying inflationary recession that eventually will evolve into a hyperinflationary great depression. Hyperinflation could be experienced as early as 2010, if not before, and likely no more than a decade down the road. The U.S. government and Federal Reserve already have committed the system to this course through the easy politics of a bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, and gross mismanagement.

The U.S. has no way of avoiding a financial Armageddon. Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a solution to not having enough money to cover their obligations. The alternative would be for the U.S. to renege on its existing debt and obligations, a solution for modern sovereign states rarely seen outside of governments overthrown in revolution, and a solution with no happier ending than simply printing the needed money. With the creation of massive amounts of new fiat (not backed by gold) dollars will come the eventual complete collapse of the value of the U.S. dollar and related dollar-denominated paper assets.

What lies ahead will be extremely difficult and unhappy times for many. Ralph T. Foster, in his "Fiat Paper Money" (see recommended further reading at the end of this issue), closes his book’s preface with a particularly poignant quote from a 1993 interview of Friedrich Kessler, a law professor at Harvard and University of California Berkeley, who experienced the Weimar Republic hyperinflation:

"It was horrible. Horrible! Like lightning it struck. No one was prepared. You cannot imagine the rapidity with which the whole thing happened. The shelves in the grocery stores were empty. You could buy nothing with your paper money."

This Special Report updates and expands upon the three-part Hyperinflation Series that began with the December 2006 SGS Newsletter, exploring: (1) the causes and background of the evolving hyperinflation and great depression; (2) why circumstances will differ from the deflationary Great Depression of the 1930s; (3) implications for politics and the financial markets; (4) considerations for individuals and businesses.

Fairytale Tellers....,

Ollie North in Townhall.com about Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson's Domestic Energy Production Act of 2008. You almost want to feel sorry for these people, and you have to feel sorry for the people who believe them;
While Washington's political elites in both parties have debated and dithered, the price of crude oil has risen to $123 per barrel -- nearly double what it was at this time last year. The average cost of a gallon of gas at the pump is approaching $4 per gallon. Some analysts now are predicting that the price of a barrel of oil could approach $200 in the next two years -- and that gasoline could be $6 a gallon. An equal amount of diesel may cost truckers as much as $7.50.[...]The newest oil refinery in the United States was built by Marathon in Garyville, La., in 1976. Since then, every effort to construct new facilities has been thwarted by protests and lawsuits from "environmental" groups and government red tape. It has been 12 years since the last nuclear reactor came on line to generate electrical power in the United States.

Time and money are wasting. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas has proposed a realistic solution: the Domestic Energy Production Act of 2008. Her bill would permit exploitation of more than a trillion barrels of U.S. territorial oil and nearly 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas -- more than the combined hydrocarbon reserves of Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela, Libya and Iran. The measure also would streamline the process for building new refineries and clean, safe nuclear power plants, as well as funding to develop alternative fuels.

But none of that -- and the consequent reduction in energy costs -- ever will benefit American consumers, unless Congress acts. Until they do, we will have to plan on spending our tax refund checks -- and a whole lot more -- at the pump.
Should have heeded the prescient leadership of Pres. James Earl Carter thirty years ago when there was time enough to do something about what's around that signpost up ahead.

Can you even begin to imagine how shocked and awed the folks who believe chindribble like this townhall.com article are going to be when the stuff really hits the fan in earnest?

Friday, May 09, 2008

Hellury - Segregation Now! Segregation Forever!

"Though my opponent has run a terrific campaign, in primary after primary, I have proven that I am the more electable candidate. I am more electable because I am white.


Barack Obama--Wow!--he's certainly inspired a lot of hope, but as voters in Indiana and North Carolina make up their minds, as the superdelegates make up their minds, they should remember that Barack Obama is black. They should also remember that a whole lot of white working-class Americans are racists. White racists are an important part of the Democratic Party, and time and time again, they've supported me because I am white. I am ready on day one to govern as your white American president."

and there it is BAM!!!!

Baraka Obamamandius IS America's Rorschach Test.

Master Arbitrageur Nancy Pelosi Is At It Again....,

🇺🇸TUCKER: HOW DID NANCY PELOSI GET SO RICH? Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks ar...