THE REMAINDERS OF LONG DIVISION
2009 and the Settling of Overdue Accounts

BARACK OBAMA AND CLEAN COAL – A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY

By

Michael C. Ruppert
(c) 2009 Michael C. Ruppert. All Rights Reserved

Jan 5, 2009 – I have had a few very strong and clear core beliefs and lingering questions since about the time I passed from toddler to childhood. I remember wondering with great intensity, when I was about three or four, "What happens to my waste when I flush the toilet? Where does it go? Where does the trash we throw out go? I realized, even in 1955, that all we were doing was moving a mess from one place to another.

Then, just a few years later, as I was taught long division, I would get a problem like: 51/1561 =. Diligently I would draw the long division box, enter the numbers and start figuring it out. But after a long time and several sheets of paper I would come out with an answer of .032671364509929532351057014734145… It wouldn't stop. I raised my hand and asked the teacher and she said that some division problems never worked out. She explained to the class that what we did was to round off the answer to the first one or two places. I remember that my immediate reaction, marked by cognitive dissonance, was "Well what happens to all that stuff you chop off?"

"It doesn't matter", said the teacher.

It doesn't matter.

At the time my father was with Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin). He was also a navigator on SA 16 Air-Sea rescue planes in the Maryland Air National Guard. What the teacher told me about division contradicted a world dominated by my father's military "everything must be neat" life philosophy where absolute precision in thought and action determined who lived and who died on a battlefield. I could not possibly have formulated the thought at that age but I intuited that there was a conflict between the precision of mathematics and the way the world I lived in was managed. "Neat and orderly" under an empirically-defined system without natural, spiritual or holistic groundings just meant chopping off a lot of insoluble problems and sending them… someplace.

Things might not work out perfectly in math, but might there not be some other way to view and resolve "problems"? Something different from the way we solve them now?

Flash forward to 1974. I am now a UCLA honors graduate and in my first year on the streets as a probationary LAPD officer in South Central Los Angeles. I saw things I could never have imagined; lives not only wasted but way outside the neatness of society's glorified self image. Criminals and victims alike fell through large gaps in a paradigm that was compelled to sell itself as being able to resolve everything with neat (and neatly explained) answers. Almost instantly I viewed police work as the task of playing trash collector for "remainders" of human life. They didn't matter in that ecosystem. By 2004 when "Rubicon" was published I had firmly concluded that the impending collapse of industrial civilization had everything to do with "remainders".

It had to do with the remainders left over after dividing an infinite growth paradigm by finite energy. It had to do with dividing ethnically and economically functioning geographic regions by arbitrarily drawn British borders as happened from Jordan to Bangladesh between 1900 and 1947. It had to do with the division of labor, land, commodities, natural resources, life and the ecosphere (all of which are limited) by a "free market" economy that was not free but manipulated and which required infinite growth.

It had to do with the division of an American people, self-gratified by a manufactured public image – some of which was true – being divided by CIA-sponsored coups from Iran to Indonesia to Guatemala to Brazil to Vietnam; from coups inside this nation (i.e. JFK, MLK and RFK), to the occupation of Iraq.

It had to do with dividing so-called clean coal by the monumental toxicity of coal's actual waste that will never be cleaned up… at any price. It had to do with dividing nuclear energy by the poison that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.

It had to do with blithe and dishonest statements that there were two trillion barrels of "oil" in oil shale by the fact that it's not oil but kerogen and it has to be cracked out of rock by heating it to a third the temperature of the sun; by using enormous amounts of fresh water; by destroying millions of acres of productive farm and ranch land, and by the fact that it will never be viable by any standard.

What happens when we divide infinite economic growth with its 96% correlation to greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere?

What happens when we divide the 2,000 or so POW/MIAs left in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by Henry Kissinger's statement that we got everyone out?

What happens when you divide the fact that a 1998 CIA Inspector General report established conclusively that the CIA dealt drugs by the fact that Congress said the matter was closed and there was no evidence?

What happens when you divide the fact that Wall Street needs to launder hundreds of billions in drug money to stay afloat; by the rule of law? Divide the Savings and Loan scandal by Enron and WorldCom et al, plus the fact that there were three times more paper mortgages being traded as derivatives than there were actual properties; by the fact that we (collectively) never mustered the will to fully address any of these crimes when we should have?

What happens when you divide the fact that, after scheduling war games to move most fighters out of the Northeast Air Defense Sector on 9-11-01, Dick Cheney injected 22 false radar blips onto radar screens and was also commanding a live-fly hijack drill as the attacks occurred, by the fact that the official version is that 19 hijackers operating from caves did it all alone?

What happens when you divide the fact that whatever created all life loves men and women equally, by the gross gender inequality fostered by cultures and religions around the world?

What happens when you divide the absolutely illegal imprisonment without trial and habeas corpus of all the detainees at Guantanamo by the fact that no country wants to be the rug that the U.S. sweeps those remainders under. (Australia has just refused a second request to accept them.)

Where did/do the remainders go? I can tell you one thing based upon a lifetime of study and experience. All those little tiny things that are cut off and forgotten go somewhere where they too collect compound interest of a spiritual, energetic, and emotional nature.

On this blog – and in the world at large – there is one group which looks at our current problems and insists on analyzing things under the erroneous assumption that these problems can be predicted, analyzed and treated by resorting to more (mere) long division… with larger and larger remainders. These people will always be wrong and they will never grasp what it is that now threatens life on the planet – namely the way they view and respond to it. Remainders can be especially dangerous when it comes to race, politics and geostrategy.

Those who can and will adapt to the new emerging paradigm will be those who have freed themselves from long division. They will be the people who discard the notions that everything has a neat empirical answer; that logic and technology will find ways to make all remainders go away. The survivors will be the ones who throw out long division as a primary methodology for perceiving the world they live in.

On a minute-to-minute basis now it is the remainders that are the big wild cards in the collapse of industrial civilization. They are having ever-larger impacts. The Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories are remainders. The Americans who have quit looking for work and fallen of the statistical charts are remainders. At the end of all these long problems lie the two to five billion people who will perish in a die off… as remainders.

And let us get one thing very clear. Free markets have no long-term vision. The long-term vision of politics is not much better, maybe a hundred feet further down a road that stretches thousands of miles.

Until the human race achieves a collective wisdom that acknowledges, incorporates and balances remainders instead of ignoring them, then mass, species-wide extinction – the ultimate "mark to market" is and will be our only ultimate destination. How far we go in that direction is up to us.

COMPOUNDING REMAINDERS – A couple of posts ago I made a comment about reading reports put out by places like the Brookings Institute. I called them "grist for the grist eaters". Someone on this list thought I was demeaning them for that. Again, I was misunderstood. Washington and the entire U.S. governmental and academic policy making establishment are grist generators and grist consumers. I was not criticizing our reader. I was making a point. All of these think tanks, policy institutes and quasi-governmental entities are master of long division. They divide, chop off a few remainders and then generate a grist report which is eagerly read by grist eaters who also generate their own grist for others to eat. More long division. More remainders that compound and mutate in the dimension of the unresolved; the Twilight Zone of Unintended Consequences.

It is because I have spent my life studying the remainders and not the grist that I have become so successful at making "maps" and predictions. I started as a remainder myself in 1977. When you study the remainders long enough you can discern the logic that created them.

All of our centuries of "remainders" are coming due. And as these remainders resolve the books of the earth, things will balance very quickly… Balance… Isn't that something we should have been seeking all along? Had we balanced (e.g.) Iran-Contra, 9-11 wouldn't have happened? Had we fairly balanced the S&L Crisis our economic collapse would have played much differently. Had CIA and Drugs been tackled fairly, George W. would never have been elected and the huge chunk of his father's staff that came back after 2000 would have been in permanent exile. Had the nation mustered the will to solve the assassination of JFK… Had "Crossing the Rubicon" been acknowledge by the federal government or the major media…

You see, we have been on the "Pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later" plan for almost all of our history, since we first cultivated crops. Of course we have almost always chosen the pay later plan.

Now is later.

A REMAINDER TO ROUND OFF IN OUR FAVOR – DIVIDE BARACK OBAMA BY CLEAN COAL

Some remainders work out favorably, as they do when I take a load of old clothes to Goodwill or make a charitable donation.

CLEAN COAL -- Barack Obama is going to face what may be his first presidential "balancing" with coal. We have all grown sick and tired of the blatantly dishonest ads rub by the coal lobbies about "clean coal". You know, the ones nailing Obama to a cross of-his-own-making by telling us that clean coal was our future during the campaign. There isn't one single clean-coal plant operating anywhere and there never will be. Even BEFORE the economic crash started, new coal-fired plants were being built willy-nilly. They were sorta supposed to be clean-coal but – after the plants were finished – the builders said, "Gee there's not enough money for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) right now. We'll come back and do it later, (thanks Julian
Darley). All those dirty plants are going online now.

How much money will there be for CCS when the Dow is at 5,000, when we have 15% unemployment, civil unrest, you name it?

CCS is a hugely expensive, energy intensive and resource-wasting proposition that will solve nothing. For unknown reasons, George W, Bush's Energy Secretary Sam Bodman pulled the permit for the only clean-coal plant that was about to go online.

The other half of the clean-coal lie is that all of the destruction and toxicity of mining and burning coal has been somehow remaindered (gristed) out of the equation and somehow "gone away" Well, there's a huge chunk of Tennessee that's just been poisoned by a billion tons of totally toxic coal ash, filled with arsenic, deadly heavy metals and carcinogens. "Clean coal" never addresses the ash from burning coal or even the toxins released when coal is merely "mined". (When mountaintops are removed, along with all the trees and wildlife.

Some groups have taken to airing TV spots that totally strip clean-coal down to the lie that it is. I can't wait for someone to start airing ads exposing the American Petroleum Institute's Lauren Hutton campaign of disinformation. That woman should be truly ashamed for the lies she has been so well paid to tell.

If THE PEAK OIL/SUSTAINABILITY MOVEMENT has the slightest bit of political savvy it will recognize that our war is not one to convince everybody of all of our positions at once. Sisyphus would know better. But what happens if we knock legs out from under the defenders of the old, suicidal paradigm one at a time? As the house collapsed we would be the only ones left standing. As far as I'm concerned, the TVA spill in Tennessee was one of the greatest blessings ever. It is the club with which clean coal can be beaten to death very quickly… in a way that our new President might well be grateful for.

I strongly believe that Mr. Obama knows all of the problems with coal. I also suspect that one of his tough choices to get the nomination and get elected was to deal with the energy lobby. But he can be cut loose if enough pressure builds behind the TVA debacle.

If the Peak Oil movement has a lick of sense it will drop everything and spend its time, money and effort delivering the coup de grace to clean coal by flooding the Obama administration and congress with emails, calls and letters exposing the hoax of clean coal. Henry Waxman, the new Chair of the House Energy Committee and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar should be buried in correspondence.

We all know the names Campbell, Simmons, Heinberg, Darley, Savinar, Hirsch, Bartlett, Bartlett, Quinn-Bachman, etc. At any one time all the giants are waging their wars and doing their great works. But what if – on just one issue – they all got together and focused their energy on just that? The one that's right in front of us; a battle where a great victory can be won; where our growing influence can have a deep impact?

I repeat myself to say that this administration is willing and eager to listen. But if we do not speak up who is to blame? For years I said that such efforts were useless. I was absolutely correct. It is the collapse of the economy and industrialized civilization that has beaten some parts of Washington into a state of semi-reasonableness. Their calculators cannot handle this problem.

I remember being so angry after leaving the last ASPO-USA conference in Sacramento. I proposed to myself and a few others (in semi-jest) that instead of having an Association for the Study of Peak Oil we should found a rival organization and call it, the Association for the Response to Peak Oil. We need that… right now. We need to lobby with organized force and resources.

We don't have anything like that…

MCR

[QUESTION: Has anyone noticed that the trial balloon about a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got shot down? There has been no confession. That story was a trial balloon. And we are the ones who shot it down. (God bless Paul Thompson.) – It's just like the recent story about bloggers who shot down Obama's choice for DCI. We have more influence than ever.]

I'm sending a big wink back to Donna Brazile at CNN. Thanks.
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Jenna Orkin adds:


Google "Problems" and "clean coal" and you get over 400,000 hits. At least a few are on point.

Start with the bait and switch of factoring in the 'benefits' of carbon sequestration when calculating the environmental impact of coal-to-liquids but leaving out the cost out when doing the accounting.

Why? The first CO2 sequestration project in the US, the FutureGen plant in Illinois, was scotched by the Department of Energy when costs headed towards $1.8 billion.

How much CO2 are we talking about, anyway? Turns out that for every gram of coal burned, there's more than 3.5 times as much CO2 produced. Better remove a few more mountain tops if you're serious about this sequestration business, 3.5 times as many for anyone who's counting, regardless of whether they have any coal under them.

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