a brief snapshot in time

this is what you said you wanted, america:

i hope you'll be happy with it.

and this is what you've brought into your midst, my cousins across the pond:

and you've freely given up your guns.

can we just once and for all put this idiocy behind us now?

and maybe turn our focus to slightly more pressing and tangible threats such as, oh i dunno, the impending utter and complete collapse of the financial and monetary systems of the western world, or the calculated, systematic and ongoing destruction of our civil liberties?

just a thought.

link

if you watch only one commencement address this year, make it this one

i am a pigeonholer, a stereotyper, a disciple of pattern recognition and hard, unpleasant truth.

post-2008, i divided the pundits and leaders of the world into two simple categories:  those who saw it coming and warned us, and those who didn't.

after four years of blogging and talking myself blue in the face, i have also come to divide the rest of the world into two categories:  those who look to the first group for guidance on what's coming next, and those who cannot be dissuaded from their belief that the second will lead us out of the mess they either didn't see coming or helped create.

watch this, and then tell me:  into which pigeonhole shall i place you?

let's check in with our european cousins for a moment, shall we?

1.  the pain in spain is mainly very plain*

twelve days ago, when questioned about his country's increasingly fragile banking sector, the prime minister of spain, one mariano rajoy, stated, unequivocally and emphatically,

There will be no bailout.

eleven days ago, after a meeting with spain's deputy prime minister, who had just-so-serendipitously happened to find herself in the US on long-planned, unrelated business that day, the managing director of the IMF, one christine lagard, dismissed the possibility of an imminent bailout of the spanish banks by stating, unequivocally and emphatically,

There is no such plan.

early this past week, as things deteriorated further, the general consensus arrived at by the financial masterminds who know such things was that it would cost $40 billion to safeguard the integrity of the spanish banking system.  everybody then sat back and waited for the real number to emerge, which, when the bailout everyone knew was coming was announced over the weekend (which is when all such announcements are made), turned out to be more like $125 billion, or one-tenth the GDP of spain.

from whence will this money come, you might ask?  well, that's an interesting question.  the bulk of it is to come from two emergency funds set up last year called the ESM and the EFSF, respectively, which have been funded by the various countries which make up the european union.  the good news is that the ESFS alone has almost $200 billion set aside, which will more than cover the spanish bailout.  the bad news is that $93 billion of this $200 has been pledged by, well...spain.

after you've tried to wrap your minds around that a minute, consider the following:

this is an "unconditional" bailout--i.e., none of this "austerity" nonsense for spain that ireland and greece were subjected to, which pretty much ensures that there is not even the pretense of an expectation that spain will ever be able to repay this loan.  this is, unsurprisingly, not sitting well with the irish, who are already loudly clamoring for a renegotiation of their deal--or, most especially, the greeks, who in one week will hold a special election which will decide whether their new prime minister will be the pro-austerity candidate, or the radical left-winger who has pledged to tell the european central bank to shove their austerity up their collective asses (hmm, i wonder which one will win?).

this is also a "primed" bailout, which means that the ESM and EFSF will jump to the head of the line of creditors, pushing the existing spanish bondholders outta their rightful, legal position as first to be repaid.  this should do wonders for the already-shaky esteem in which private-sector bondholders regard, oh, italian, portuguese and french bonds.

finally, this "bailout" in no way fixes anything--the spanish banks' assets are still as worthless as they were on friday, if not more so--but it serves the purpose of providing them the liquidity to continue making their interest payments and thus stave off the inevitable a little longer.

which will be enough for the markets, no doubt.  thus freshly assured that all is well once more, i fully expect a marvelous rally tomorrow.  it's as if no one remembers what, almost a year ago to the day, the prime minister of luxembourg, one jean-claude juncker, had to say about the way crisis is managed by the powers that control such things:

When it gets serious, you have to lie.

2.  hopefully it's 2-ply, and quilted for comfort.

so the other day a friend of mine, who always sends me interesting things, passed along, without comment, a press release from a...paper company?

took me a minute.

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwire - June 7, 2012) - Fortress Paper Ltd. ("Fortress Paper" or the "Corporation") (TSX:FTP), announces that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Landqart AG, a leading manufacturer of banknote and security papers, has had a material banknote order reinstated. This order was unexpectedly suspended in the fourth quarter of 2011 which negatively impacted the financial results of Landqart's operations in the first half of 2012.

so, basically, a subsidiary of a canadian company (a swiss subsidiary, to be exact) that makes money-printin' paper got a cancellation from some government with money-printin' aspirations late last year on an order of sufficient size that it materially impacted said company's profits--but, glory be to god, said money-printin' entity has changed its mind and decided to go for it, so it's happy days again, at least at landqart AG.

who will this money-printin' entity turn out to be?  i dunno, but i figure it's a safe bet it'll be the one who denies it the loudest.

While the government struggles to save one crumbling enterprise at the expense of the crumbling of another, it accelerates the process of juggling debts, switching losses, piling loans on loans, mortgaging the future and the future's future. As things grow worse, the government protects itself not by contracting this process, but by expanding it.

that evil bitch who

was wrong about

everything, 1974

________________
*sorry, couldn't resist

three completely unrelated stories

1.   Robert Mugabe asked to be 'UN Leader for Tourism' 

robert mugabe, you ask? i could give you my own little thumbnail sketch of this international statesman, but let's just quote from the story:

[T]he Zimbabwean president, who is widely accused of ethnic cleansing, rigging elections, terrorising opposition, controlling media and presiding over a collapsed economy, has been endorsed as a champion of efforts to boost global holidaymaking.

they forgot to add looting the national treasury in order to enrich himself, his family and his cronies, but i guess they wanted to avoid a run-on sentence.  oh, and this new 'UN Leader for Tourism' is under a travel ban, too.  perfect.


2.  House to Examine Plans to Let United Nations Regulate the Internet

but, gee, they might have some doubts about the wisdom of this idea

At a hearing earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also criticized the proposal. He said China and Russia are "not exactly bastions of Internet freedom."

so i guess there's really nothing to worry about.

well, except, for maybe


3.  Obama Admin Cites 'Int'l Permission,' Not Congress, As 'Legal Basis' For Action In Syria


 

 my favorite passage from the above recent cspan clip:

[Secretary of Defense Leon] Panetta was asked by Senator Jeff Sessions, “We spend our time worrying about the U.N., the Arab League, NATO and too little time, in my opinion, worrying about the elected representatives of the United States. As you go forward, will you consult with the United States Congress?”  

The Defense Secretary responded “You know, our goal would be to seek international permission. And we would come to the Congress and inform you and determine how best to approach this, whether or not we would want to get permission from the Congress.”*

but, really, national sovereignty--who needs it?  i'm quite happy at the prospect of turning over the burdens of self-determination to an august international governing body of such demonstrated wisdom, and being a citizen of this brave new world.  how about you?

________________
*h/t info wars

why i'm sitting this one out

in 2008, guttermorality began life as a political blog, and i published dozens of posts during that year leading up to the election, operating as i then did under the delusion that such things still mattered.

no more.

amuse yourselves if you wish with this year's diversion, and argue endlessly over contraception and gay marriage and how best to get the economy moving again (or whatever other straw men they throw out there for you to squabble over), and why your guy is a better servant of the people than the other guy. knock yourselves out.

me?  i'll continue doing what i've been doing since my eyes opened--trying to figure out the real game, and hiding what little non-paper wealth i have in safe places.

 

israel loves iran

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i read this and just shook my head.  nobody wants this war that's coming--not the iranian people, nor the israelis, nor the americans.

nobody.

except for the military-industrial complex and its shills (because that's what they do), the american president, perhaps (because, when it comes to war, even disillusioned voters rarely change horses in mid-stream), the israeli government (because they seem hell-bent on playing into the hands of the enemy), and the iranian government (because what better way to rally the people behind a regime on the verge of collapse than to present them with a common threat from without?).

it's always been that way, of course.  the people never want to fight, suffer deprivation and die, unless they've been whipped into a sufficient frenzy of bloodlust against the "enemy" by the master propagandists who lead them.

*     *     *     *     *

i remember the night of 9/11, when, in contrast to the images of the rest of the wildly-celebrating muslim world flashing across my TV screen, the iranians held candlelight vigils in somber unity with the americans.

and even as filled with rage as i was that night, it was so clear to me--it was right there for the asking. all we had to do was bury the past we had done so much to create, drop the sanctions and offer this literate, cultured people the helping hand needed to allow their fledgling secular government to take hold and flower.  and we'd have had it:  that holy grail, a large, stable, oil-rich democratic ally in the middle east.

ah, but where was the money in that?  no, much better to ramp up the rhetoric and the sanctions, declare iran part of the axis of evil, rebuff its government's repeated efforts at rapproachment, enrage its populace and create the climate that would allow the fundamentalists to sweep into power, and thus set the stage for what's coming.

and, meanwhile, far better to squander countless lives, a trillion dollars and our national prestige in order to impose an ephemeral, phony democracy upon a neighboring people ill-equipped to handle it, which will survive only so long as we're there to enforce it, after which the country will descend into the sort of chaos which will happily ensure our continued military intervention unto perpetuity--perfect, right?

seriously, anybody left out there who still doesn't believe that war is choreographed long before it happens should have his head examined.

quote of the week

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We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this.  Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?

wall street CEO

what a difference a decade makes

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presented for (a) all you empiricists out there who insist dollar debasement inflation isn't a problem; and (b) anyone who thinks that anything foisted upon us by anyone in power during the past 10 years was a good idea.

h/t mark mchugh at across the street

would you buy a used krugerrand from this man?

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so today i'm scrolling through my news aggregators when i come across the following:

wait--the great keynesian oracle of the left has, after a decade of dismissive condescension whenever the subject is raised, finally deigned to address the 800-pound bull in the room?  "oh, this is gonna be good," i think to myself as i click.

what follows are select quotes from dr. krugman's little treatise, interspersed with my comments.

he opens with the following parenthetical:

(Yes, it’s 4:30 AM where I am. I found myself wide awake, thinking about gold prices. You got a problem with that?)

i have not the slightest problem believing this--the barbarous relic's galling and unfathomable rise against all keynesian reason has no doubt caused the good professor any number of sleepless nights.

In assessing economic prospects since the financial crisis of 2008, there have been two kinds of people: inflationistas and deflationistas.

actually, there's a third kind of people he apparently can't fit into his model:  those (like me) who believe that as the crisis progresses, essentials like food, water, fuel and farmland will experience breathtaking inflation, while non-essentials (i.e., ipads and pretty much every other first-world frill one can think of) won't be worth the pound of rice one would rather have.  but i digress.

I am, of course, a big deflationista

well, no shit, paul--that's the only way you can claim with a straight face that all that stimulus couldn't possibly cause inflation (in fact, all of the chaos and death that took place over the course of the recent "arab spring" as a partial result of your and your cronies' misguidedly inflationary policies--maybe that's what should be keeping you up at night).

But what about gold? As some readers and correspondents love to point out, you would have made a lot of money if you’d bought gold early in this mess. So doesn’t that vindicate the inflationistas, to some extent?

a good question, i say.

My usual response has been that I have no idea what drives the price of gold

again, i totally believe him.

and then he goes on to take a gratuitous swipe at "glenn beck followers" before taking his readers down a twisting path to his sudden blinding insight:  gold is rising because of...wait for it...deflation!

how did he come to this unprecedented conclusion?  by a line of reasoning which is so torturous and convoluted--replete with diagrams and arcane references ("hotelling"--really, paul?)--that i won't even attempt to condense it here.  seriously, you gotta go take a look for yourself.

anyway, after contorting himself into a rhetorical and logical pretzel in order to make the square peg of reality fit into the round hole of his worldview, he comes to the following conclusion as regards his shiny new model:

And this says that the price of gold should jump in the short run.

really, paul--ya think?

he then goes on to gloat about how "intuitive" his new revelation is (so intuitive it took him ten years to dream it up), and humbly closes with the following:

But suppose this [my theory] is the right story, or at least a good part of the story, of gold prices. If so, just about everything you read about what gold prices mean is wrong.

that's right, doug casey--and jim willie, aubie baltin, peter schiff, doug mcalvany, roger weigand and all the other other clear-eyed analysts i follow who started tracking the rise of gold right after the dotcom bust back at about the same time the good dr. krugman was saying shit like

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

all of you rubes may have been right, but it was totally for the wrong reasons, you got that?

*    *     *     *     *

so now that dr. krugman has devised a face-saving way for him and his fellow academicians to climb aboard the gold bandwagon, will their mainstream followers be far behind?  is this the push gold needs to enter phase two of its long bull market?  stay tuned...

a post-labor day post

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i used to be such a conscientious blogger--you know, posting semi-regularly, responding to comments, following up on dangling threads, that sorta thing--but all that has pretty much gone by the wayside lately.

all i can offer by way of explanation is that i've become a deer caught in the headlights of world events--events i've long known would come to pass, and from which i've profited handsomely, but which have nonetheless stunned me with their unfolding speed to the point that i can do little but watch in dismay as the world as i've known it disintegrates before my eyes.

one of the things each of my chosen prophets predicted (and the thing which prompted this post) was that the global elites who caused this mess would, when the shit finally hit the fan, set the victims of their crimes against one another, thus effectively deflecting blame from themselves.

and this they've done, brilliantly:  first, by making their crimes so complicated that barely a handful of their educationally dumbed-down victims could begin to grasp the enormity of what had been perpetrated upon them; and second, by enlisting their bought-and-paid-for media shills and politicians to fan the flames of (lower) class warfare.

so the tea party's declared war on labor, and labor has just declared war right back, when their collective rage might be more constructively utilized by, say, banding together, rampaging through the streets and hanging investment bankers from every lamppost in lower manhattan.

not that i would ever advocate such a course of action, you understand.

the parable of the dented fender

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remember back at the end of this post where i proclaimed my love for my new car?

yeah, well, we always hurt the ones we love (or maybe that's just me).

when i went in for the estimate, i pushed the guy to try and keep it at or below $1,000, that magic number being my deductible--that way, i figured, i could just pay for it outta pocket and avoid filing a claim with my insurance company.  when he balked, i told him i'd be perfectly happy with a used fender, and the bumper didn't look too bad--it just needed a little touching up.

for a minute, it looked as if it might be possible--until he opened the hood, that is.  as he poked around, finding more and more wrong, my heart sank--as the total inched inexorably toward the $1,500 mark, i realized i'd have to file a claim after all.

with that realization, my attitude did a complete one-eighty.  screw the used fender and the touched-up bumper--if the insurance company was picking up the tab, we were gonna fix this fucker better than new, goddammit.  as he continued to poke around, finding more and more wrong and the total inched inexorably past the $2,000 mark [because by now he knew the insurance company was involved], my satisfaction grew--suddenly, i was all, like, "hey, look at this" and "don't forget about this" and "i know it's on the other side of the car, but can you fix this, too?".

in other words, i displayed the kinda behavior humans can reliably be counted on to lapse into when, as the redoubtable mrs. thatcher so memorably put it, it's "other people's money".

what's the point of this little parable, you ask?

simple:  next time you wonder why (a) healthcare and college in this country are so expensive; (b) government spending and future entitlements are orders of magnitude higher than revenues; (c) the welfare classes are rioting in europe; and/or (d) [insert leftist- or corporatist-induced economic distortion of your choice here],

come back, read this post and multiply the above numbers by a few trillion.

look out, here comes tomorrow

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[i know this blog hasn't been much fun lately.  i promise some entertaining shit soon.]

so the market's crashing and everybody's all, like, surprised and shit.  or should i say, everybody but my eleven readers, upon each of whose memory is engraved in letters of fire that immortal post i wrote back in april in which i laid out exactly why what's now happening would happen right about now, right?

no?

(sigh)  i really wonder why i bother sometimes.

well, lemme start this post with why what's now happening is not happening:  it's not happening because, as our "let 'em eat cake" president maintains, the recovery he so splendidly engineered has suddenly hit a patch of bad luck

You had an Arab Spring in the Middle East that promises more democracy and more human rights for people, but it also drove up gas prices -- tough for the economy, a lot of uncertainty.  And then you have the situation in Europe, where they’re dealing with all sorts of debt challenges, and that washes up on our shores.  And you had a tsunami in Japan, and that broke supply chains and created difficulties for the economy all across the globe.

the irony of blaming the "arab spring" uprisings which were caused in no small part by the inflationary policies of his phony recovery aside, what the president failed to mention in that nice little speech was the fact that, despite each of the incidents he cited, the american stock market had, by the end of june, regained the ground it had lost over the spring and was approaching its two-year highs.

in fact, the stock market has continued the climb it started back in march 2009 (i.e., the beginning of the "obama recovery") through all sorts of bad news that in any sane universe shoulda sent it tumbling to 4,000 long ago.

was this because the american "recovery" was sufficiently strong to weather such storms, as the president, his lackeys and so many in the media maintain?  fuck no--it was because, for most of the last two years and four months, at the first sign of faltering,  the plunge protection team (aka the fed) was there to pump whatever liquidity was required into the market to keep it buoyant [seriously, i only wish i had a nickel for every late-session turnaround "rally" the market has staged over the last couple years].

but then the quantitative-easing party ended: as of june 30, there were no more liquidity injections courtesy of helicopter ben.  the market see-sawed around through most of july like one of those staggering cowboys that had taken a bullet in a bad western, and then it was finally time to drop.

and drop it has, just like back on april 8 i told you it would:

if, as promised, [bernanke] ends QE in order to curb the inflation, our vaunted "economic recovery" that's been running on nothing but this fed-provided life support will promptly collapse, taking with it not only precious metals (temporarily, anyway), but the stock market, job creation, what's left of the housing market and whatever shreds of hope barack obama might still have of re-election.

i.e., what's happening now is a long-delayed continuation of what started back in 2007:  the inevitable death spiral of the american economy.

ah, but i was wrong about one thing, wasn't i?  see, usually when the market corrects in any serious way, it takes metals with it, if for no other reason than because investors are often forced to liquidate their winners to cover their losers.  but boy, not this time--people are starting to catch on.

so where do we go from here?  by the time you read this, tomorrow will have come, and i don't expect it to be pretty.

on august 26, ben bernanke will give a speech from the fed's annual economic symposium at jackson hole, wyoming.  why is this important, you ask?  because he used the occasion of last year's speech to announce QE II, which promised infusion of new liquidity gave the market another year of seemingly vibrant life.

if, as is widely anticipated, mr. bernanke uses the occasion of this year's speech to announce another round of, as governor perry of texas recently put it, "money printing" in an attempt to stem the current market bloodbath and thus kick the can down the road one more time, will it work again?  i honestly dunno--the world is waking up awful fast.

here is what i do know:  at the time of mr. bernanke's speech in august of 2010, you coulda bought an ounce of gold for a little over $1,200, and an ounce of silver for a little over $17.

august 2012?  extrapolate for yourselves, bitches.

day 15: and the world hangs breathless on our fate

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Playing poker is part of politics, as is theatrical posturing. That's fair enough. But what America is currently exhibiting is the worst kind of absurd theatrics. And the whole world is being held hostage.

some german newspaper

it's fascinating to watch as a fat, complacent government grown used to kicking the can down the road is finally forced to deal with the consequences of decades of political expediency and make damned-if-it-does, damned-if-it-doesn't decisions.

and this is just the warm-up round, folks.

day 12: why are we over there, again?

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so after ranting on the subject just last night, i wake up to the following headlines:

a decade ago, we committed our military might, the lives of thousands of our soldiers, our treasure and our national prestige to the dubious tasks of waging war and nation-building in afghanistan and iraq.

and for what--so that these countries can descend into chaos as soon as we withdraw, leaving their region far less stable than had we done nothing?

if there's a god up there, may he damn to hell the foolish, arrogant men who foisted these follies upon us.

____________
update:  i can be a little cranky when i first get up.

day 5: presenting the mkf unified theory of the evolution of art, part 2

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years ago when i was a lowly second-year architecture student trying (and failing) to re-create a pencil perspective of some baroque building or other, i remember at some point flinging my french curve across the room in disgust and deciding that modern architecture didn't evolve because some early 20th century geniuses had a collective vision--it evolved because the bauhaus crowd were a bunch of lazy motherfuckers who realized it was easier to compose a building using only squares and straight lines and call it a new "style" than take the time to develop the skills necessary to draw--much less artfully employ--all those goddam curves and curlicues.

and i was only half-kidding.  the modernists, in a single stroke, threw out about 95% if not more of the architectural vocabulary that had developed over the millennia--i kinda think of modernism as the ebonics of architecture.

and as i started looking around me--at contemporary painting and sculpture and music--i saw much of the same reductivism at work.

is it, i wondered, because, as a civilization evolves, it strips away all the extraneous crap to get to the essence of a particular art form?  or is it because, as a civilization becomes corrupted by abundance and everything becomes easy, it relaxes its standards and allows anybody to call themselves an artist?

or maybe it's not that clear-cut; whatever--here's the mkf unified theory of the evolution of art: 

to the degree technology advances in a given civilization, artistic technical virtuosity tends to decline.*

if i had to prove the theory?  well, i couldn't, but i'd sure postulate the following:  take any average renaissance painter, sculptor, musician or architect and plop 'em down in the middle of now, and, once they stopped laughing, they'd be up and running in the modern version of their respective art form in fairly short order.  do the reverse, and the modernists would be reduced to panhandling raphael and botticelli on the streets of florence for loose change.

am i right? i dunno--you got a better theory?

________________

*since i first developed this theory, computers have of course changed everything--the technical virtuosity of the scientists has made artistic virtuosity easy.

day 4: presenting the mkf unified theory of the evolution of art

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a.  painting

       classical:

       modern:

b.  sculpture

       classical:

 

       modern:

c.  music

        classical:

  
        modern:

d.  architecture

       classical:

       modern:

  

sober update:  actually, this one wasn't quite ready for publication yet, seeing as how it's missing the "theory" that's actually the point of the post, but i've been really good at hitting the wrong button lately.  i'll try to finish it tomorrow.

day 2: my last-ever global warming post (unless, of course, it's not)

believe it or not, i'm not a global-warming denier; rather, i'd call myself a healthy skeptic.

not just because of the recent exposures of shoddy science, cover-ups, conflicts of interest and outright fraud within the movement.

and not just because the movement's disciples keep moving the goalposts as the planet stubbornly refuses to warm on schedule per their vaunted computer models (thus requiring the awkward branding shift from global "warming" to global "climate change").

and not even because of all the high-living fat cats at the top of the movement preaching austerity to the rest of us as they position themselves to reap huge fortunes from the carbon-offset schemes they've devised to save us from ourselves.

no, my skepticism goes beyond all that--in fact, a wall street journal article from back in february summed up my feelings on the subject in a couple well-written paragraphs:

We do know that carbon dioxide and other gases trap and re-radiate heat. We also know that humans have emitted ever-more of these gases since the Industrial Revolution. What we don't know is exactly how sensitive the climate is to increases in these gases versus other possible factors—solar variability, oceanic currents, Pacific heating and cooling cycles, planets' gravitational and magnetic oscillations, and so on.

Given the unknowns, it's possible that even if we spend trillions of dollars, and forgo trillions more in future economic growth, to cut carbon emissions to pre-industrial levels, the climate will continue to change--as it always has.

as it always has.

oh, and speaking of "solar variability",  get this:  scientists who had up until very recently been convinced we were heading into a period of intense solar activity have--as scientists frequently do-- suddenly changed their tune.

According to three studies released in the United States on Tuesday, experts believe the familiar sunspot cycle may be shutting down and heading toward a pattern of inactivity unseen since the 17th century.  

and how did the sun's "inactivity" affect us here on earth back in the 17th century?  glad you asked, because i was curious about that too.

Experts are now probing whether this period of inactivity could be a second Maunder Minimum, which was a 70-year period when hardly any sunspots were observed between 1645-1715, a period known as...

wait for it--here it comes...

the "Little Ice Age."

got that, folks?  according to the scientists over here, the planet's warming--unless, of course, the scientists over there are right, in which case we're about to get our collective asses frozen off.

see where i'm going with this?

*     *     *     *     *

whenever i'm drawn into a discussion with a global-warming fanatic, i always end it with some variation of the following:

"ok, hotshot, i've just appointed you king of the world, given you carte blanche.  solve global warming--you've got 5...4...3...2..."

and, of course, they can't.

because what it comes down to is this:  the world is not gonna give up its cars, its chemicals and its concrete.  no civilization in the history of humanity has ever voluntarily regressed, and we're not going to, either.

and despite all the pie-in-the-sky bullshit to the contrary, there isn't a green option on the horizon with even a snowball's chance in hell of supplanting oil and/or coal in our lifetime.

is mankind a cancer on the planet?  are we fouling our own nest to the point of engineering our own extinction?  yeah, and yeah.

so let's expend our energies on mitigating our impact where it's practical--like accelerating the development of green technologies, curbing the birth rates of the third-worlders and maybe cleaning up the oceans, for instance--and leave the weather to the gods where it belongs, ok?

quote of the month

One of the conclusions that I try to coax, lead, and/or nudge people towards is acceptance of the fact that the economy can't be fixed.

chris martenson

a couple years back when everything really started going to shit and the red and blue teams and their respective cheerleaders were casting hysterical blame back and forth at one another whilst simultaneously assuring us, the scared sheep, they they and they alone knew how to fix it, i looked around for a few voices of reason who could tell me what was really happening.

while i found several--peter schiff and gerald celente among them--chris martenson turned out to be the guy i was looking for.  he's not an ideologue; rather, he's a scientist, and taking his "crash course" was not only among the most productive and eye-opening afternoons i've ever spent, it's also one of the reasons i drink [try it--it's free, it's broken down into easy, doable doses, and i promise once you're done, you won't ever look at the world the same way again].

since then, i've come to depend on his analysis--he strips away all the bullshit like no one else.  a case in point would be the recent post from which the above quote was taken.  read it here--it won't take long, and in a few paragraphs, and after looking at a couple simple charts, you'll understand for yourself what the paul krugmans of the world simply refuse to see, let alone acknowledge.

it really just comes down to math, folks--it's that simple.  the world as we know it is about to change forever, and the sooner you accept that fact, the more time you'll have to prepare for what's coming.

cheerfully submitted,

mkf

buyer's remorse is a bitch, ain't it?

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state of mkf:  sitting here reviewing the fallout from this story, laughing at all the idiots who were surprised (it's either that, or cry), sipping my cocktail and wondering how much liberal-jew money we'll see pouring into the campaign coffers of [insert name of republican presidential candidate here] around this time next year.