From the Wilderness' Peak Oil Blog

Sunday, December 06, 2009

"Honey, I Shrunk the Dollar;" UK Ceased To Be Sovereign State; US Must Plan for Nuke Wars

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Theory of Everything (Going Wrong)

From Jenna Orkin:

Theory of Everything (Going Wrong)
Bank Crisis Shows Need to Expect the Very Worst: Study
Its 15 extreme risks were ranked in order as of mid-year. They were economic depression, hyperinflation, excessive leverage, a currency crisis, a banking crisis, sovereign default, climate change, political crisis, insurance crisis, protectionism, disunity in Europe, the end of capitalism, the end of fiat money, war and a killer pandemic....

...going long pharmaceuticals/short airlines was seen as combating investment losses from a pandemic.

JO Comment: Reminds me of a joke. An airplane is about to go down. The flight attendant announces, "Would all those who can swim please line up by the exits on the right hand side of the plane. The automatic slides are currently inflating and will be engaged shortly for your safety and convenience. Rescue planes should be arriving within an hour.

Would all those who cannot swim please line up on the left hand side of the plane. At this time we'd like to take the opportunity to thank you for flying Lufthansa."
Unthinkable: Collapse of Bond Markets
"China is Dubai times 1000 if not a million"
Food Stamp Use Soars Across U.S., and Stigma Fades
More seniors go to soup kitchens
Increase of 81 percent last year, USDA reports.
Half of children in 17 U.S. counties live in poverty (from Rice Farmer)
Money Starts to Trickle North as Mexicans Help Out Relatives
Almost Half of Turkish Migrants Want to Leave (Germany)
A Run on the Dollar Starts Soon (from Vantage Point)
China’s economic path is likely to be punctured sooner or later by a crisis
Fears of UK debt crisis
It's the Government, not family, that's falling apart
Militia movement resurfaces across nation (from Rice Farmer)
Angela Merkel alarmed by worsening credit crisis
Dubai debt crisis may end in “major” default
Dubai woes give China chance to buy oil, gold: report
Abu Dhabi will not race to Dubai's rescue
Arab States Move to Stifle Dubai Crisis
'Father of the Poor' Has Triggered Economic Miracle - Brazil
The Madagascar model: conflicts over natural resources will grow (from Vantage Point)
Audit would hurt economic prospects: Bernanke
Entering the Superproject Void
...in the era of infrastructure demise.
Freight Forwards Curve Warns Of Baltic Dry Index Collapse (from Rice Farmer)
Four Police Officers Shot Dead in Washington Coffee House
Cuban nationals land at Florida nuclear plant: NRC
At This School, It’s Marijuana in Every Class
Giving new meaning to the words "high school."
The Incredible Shrinking AOL: 2,300 More Employees To Be Cut
Bob Toll Predicts New Housing Crisis (from Vantage point)
Lou Dobbs Might Run for Senate, White House

War Drums
A Defiant Iran Details Plan for 10 Enrichment Plants
Iranian navy seizes five British sailors
Cuban army holds exercises for U.S. military attack
Increased Violence on the High Seas

Energy/Climate Change/Science
Russia Cuts Coal Exports to Asia
Australian Senate: Peak Oil Motion Defeated
Burning Forests for Electricity (from NYC Peak Oil Meetup)
Asia's Rice Culture Threatened (from Rice Farmer)
Next year may be hottest yet, Met Office says
25 Rivers on Flood Watch (UK)
Demand for locally grown food has farmers building greenhouses and trying cool-weather varieties (from Rice Farmer)
For Forest Kindergartners, Class Is Back to Nature, Rain or Shine
Philadelphia Unveils $1.6 Million Plan to Embrace Storm Water (from NYC Peak Oil Meetup)
Sunshine, sewage to power cities of the future
Scientists make plastic without using fossil fuels
Cost of adapting to climate change
Developing world farmers need an almost unprecedented shift of resources, says Anne Perkins.
KLM Claims First Biofuel Airline Passenger Flight
Meat grown in laboratory
Lab-grown Meat Could Solve Multiple Problems
Flowing air 'could be used to generate electricity for planes and cars'

Pandemic
IMF Funding Fueling TB Rise
H1N1 swine flu mutation spreads, deaths worldwide on the rise
Moldovan soldiers given onions to fight swine flu
Forget gold and silver, invest in garlic
Swine flu again.
New Ukraine Flu Worse than H1N1
H1N1 mutation found in some flu fatalities

Europe
'Who' for President, 'I Don't Know' for Foreign Minister
Swiss voters back right-wing minaret ban
Swiss official hints at reversal of minaret ban

Russia
Government Expects Energy Sway to Decline
Under a plan entitled Energy Strategy 2030, the economy and budget revenues will steadily move away from the reliance on energy exports, spurring the changes.
Russia Cuts Coal Exports to Asia
Russia Moves To Rein In Gas Flaring, Mandating 95% Gas Capture by 2012; Signals About-Face on Climate Change
Producers say North Slope has 'no easy oil left
''Titanic Effect' May Delay Russian Development Plans in Arctic

Intelligence
Malaysian pilgrims issued RFID tags (from Rice Farmer)
After Data Loss, ID Theft Risk Soars
U.S. adults who get a Dear John data letter have a one in five chance of being victimized in the next 12 months, according to the survey, conducted by financial services research firm Javelin Research.
Blair told before invasion Iraq WMD were dismantled
Wikileaks Published 570,000 Messages from 9/11
NYT: Anti-terror air defense reviewed
The commander of military forces protecting North America has ordered a review of the costly air defenses intended to prevent another Sept. 11-style attack.
Watergate investigation reopened
CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception Declassified
CIA goes hiring in heart of Arab America
Ssh.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Bets Rise on Rich Countries Defaulting

From Jenna Orkin:

Bets rise on rich countries defaulting
Britain is out of money
Dump the Dollar! Buy Gold!
CNN!
Sovereign Debt Could Be The Next Subprime
Greece tests the limit of sovereign debt
U.S. faces surge in interest payments
Interest on U.S. debt at $4.8 trillion
Peter Costa: "The US Government Will Be Totally Bankrupt In A Year And A Half" (from Rice Farmer)
Treasury yields plunge sends warning
Don't say we didn't warn you this time -- a new crash is dead ahead (from Rice Farmer)
Dollar slump continues as top analysts see no bottom
Russia Diversifying Into Canadian Dollars
Report: Almost 1 in 4 homeowners underwater on their mortgages
Why the US, China are about to get divorced‎
Congress is losing its patience with the Fed
House panel votes to audit Federal Reserve
Economists Opposing Fed Audit Are On Fed Payroll
Ron Paul: Fed will self destruct when it destroys the dollar
Should we cheer?
Fed Will Destroy Itself and Gold Price is Rigged: Paul video
Bank Regulators "Reign of Terror" on Small Business Loans
Freefall In Small Business Loans
Housing Starts Green Shoots Wither On Vine
California Students Protest 32% Tuition Hike; State Budget Gridlock II Coming; Massive Deficits In San Francisco
Gulf Single Currency Delayed
...beyond the beginning of 2010. Is everyone sighing with relief?
Markets Take Off as Dollar Weakens
US Credit Shrinking More than Since 1930's
Commercial and Industrial Lending Drop 17% Since October '08
World Oil Demand Growth to Outpace Supply in 2010: Poll
Civil war risk of climate change
In his gloomiest prediction yet, Marc Faber sees big financial bust leading to war (from Rice Farmer)
JO Comment: And then we have the IMF head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn warning of war. So that's three on the same day. Gee.
Clean coal 'just a blueprint'
E.ON chief Paul Golby warns clean coal plans may never be viable.
As Sewers Fill, Waste Poisons Waterways
US: Three Mile Island Radiation "Not Significant"
A Chinese-owned GM?
The Rise of the Chinese Automotive Industry and Its Impact on the US Automotive Industry Lou Dobbs Might Run for Senate, White House
NYT: Anti-terror air defense reviewed
The commander of military forces protecting North America has ordered a review of the costly air defenses intended to prevent another Sept. 11-style attack.
Investors finally seeing the nonsense in efficient market theory
Study: Wall St. execs cashed in before collapse
GE May Be Closer to Selling Control of NBC to Comcast as Immelt, Levy Meet

UK/Europe/Big Brother
UK Police Routinely Arresting People to Obtain DNA, Report Claims
UK risks 'debt spiral'
Fuel bills blamed for 50% rise in winter deaths
Banks given £62bn were within hours of collapse
Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS received secret bridging loans last year when facing far greater peril than first thought.
Bank of England tells of loan to save RBS and HBOS
Bank secretly lent ailing institutions £62bn to save them from failing.
RBS may need more cash after £33.5bn fillip
Britain rejected Iraq 'regime change' in 2001
British officials heard war 'drum beats' before 9/11
Uproar over Italian Town's Foreigner Registration Drive

Energy/Climate Change
Gas shortage lingers in cities‎
Pakistan's Natural Gas Shortage to Widen in 2010
Shell favours gas for future production
Gas will be at the heart of Royal Dutch Shell's production strategy 'mistake'.
China Industries Face a Hard Winter on Gas Shortage
New report says world on threshold of irreversible climate change
1.5 billion people have no electricity
Greenhouse gas levels 'reach record high'

Middle East/Asia
Report Starts an Uproar in India
21 politicians and journalists shot dead in Philippines
Philippines declares state of emergency after 46 are killed in election bloodbath
Iran begins war games to protect nuclear sites
Ahmedinejad Heads For Brazil and West Africa
US employing Blackwater for Pakistan assassinations
Dubai World’s debt freeze was carefully planned
Dubai Debt Rattles Confidence in Persian Gulf Borrowers
Stocks Slump, Bonds Rise as Dubai Roils Markets; Credit-Default Swaps Soar
Europe's VStoxx Index Jumps Most in Year on Concern About Dubai Debt Delay
Goldman Sachs's Hong Kong-Based Michael Evans Sells $12 Million of Stock
Dubai Surrenders Autonomy as Crisis Bolsters Oil-Rich Emirate of Abu Dhabi
CHINA'S NAVY MAKES "IMPRESSIVE" STRIDES, SAYS ONI
An ongoing modernization effort has provided China with an increasingly sophisticated and proficient naval force, the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) said in a new assessment (large pdf).
China’s New Missile May Create a 'No-Go Zone' for U.S. Fleet

New Song at New White Trash Site Co-Written by and featuring MCR

"We Can't Escape From" -- This was the first song I shared co-writing credits on with Andy and Doug. This song somehow makes my last post easier to deal with... It comes from a place of acceptance which is the only place to start from if one hopes to "hold it together". It let's us all recognize what we so obviously share -- our humanity. I came up with the chorus and the Native American chant partly as a result of inspiration provided by Carolyn Baker in her great book "Sacred Demise". I also added a few of the words but most of the work was done by Doug. Collapse must be approached spiritually and emotionally if one expects to survive. My influence in this song was to make it a lament, connected to struggle and inexplicable loss. A lesson I have learned through many years is that we are never stronger than when we are most vulnerable. The female voice is the incredible Kristen Vigard. And don't miss the new NWT song "Don't Dig Too Deep" which Kris just smokes. She came up with the vocals in just three takes -- off the top of her head.

What's she saying? -- Don't dig too deep.

NWT now has 25 songs mastered and we're making selections for a CD. Check out the site and give a listen. http://www.newwhitetrash.com. More coming soon.

MCR

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

THIS IS HOT

Look, the IMF's books are almost certainly as cooked as IEA's have been shown to be. If they suggest it might happen in four or five years I'd say that we would be very lucky to have just one. Critics can continue to scoff but with each passing day our predictions are coming true. This is not dot connecting or analysis anymore. They're telling us exactly what's going to happen in the Times of London.

Let them that have eyes, see.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article6928147.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=1185799

MCR

Monday, November 23, 2009

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post-Peak Oil World -- by Michael C. Ruppert – I don’t have enough good words to say about Chelsea Green Publishing. I’m told we should have books at the San Francisco and Berkeley screenings coming up and I’m going to be only too happy to be there to autograph them. They should be in bookstores by December 15th.

It’s even up on Amazon already too. This will be a little fresher than the first version in many ways. If the movie moved you to look deeper, this is where you must go next – without delay. Please read on…

AND THE SCARIEST NEWS STORY I'VE SEEN IN A LONG TIME

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-builds-up-its-bases-in-oilrich-south-america-1825398.html

I know I said I was through with this but there must be exceptions. This story shows that our map was even better than we thought. Just before the attacks of 9-11 both I and others like Peter Dale Scott were looking hard at Colombia and Venezuela. We were calling it the next Vietnam. This British story tells us that what was "postponed" by 9-11 has picked up far ahead of where it left off. Somebody just turned the burner up a notch. I also read today that Chavez's government had seized 48,000 acres of farmland that was unused and neglected. He's putting people to work growing food.... Good for him. That's what we should be doing here -- right now.

The United States imports half of its oil from Latin America.

We made a map.

MCR

The Mission of CoLLapse

Jenna Orkin

"Only be interesting," the writer Charles Simmons once said. In the temporal arts, in other words - literature, music, dance or drama - considerations of beauty, balance or unity are all outweighed by the bottom line: If you're boring, the operation may be a success but the patient will die.

By this measure CoLLapse is a triumph. It never lags, even for those of us who have heard its message a hundred times. (I was glad to be reminded about the thousand monkeys, however;) It is, if anything, all too interesting in the way that approaching headlights are all too interesting to a deer.

I had wondered, particularly hearing advance reactions to the film, whether it was biased one way or the other, pro or con Mike and his ideas. It is not. It is wysiwyg Mike. He does not play to the camera, at least any more than he would to a gathering of friends over dinner. In an important way, however subconsciously, he has been waiting for this moment most of his adult life. For I am not the only person to have mused with him about who should play him when the movie was made of his career. (I said Anthony Hopkins if he wasn't so old. Mike preferred William Hurt.)

That day may yet come. Meanwhile, Mike does a superb job of playing himself. His role as prophet of the collapse of civilization is the one for which he was cut out as he surely realized when Chris came calling with a camera and a notion of throwing Mike's findings about the CIA up on Youtube.

"He had other ideas," reads the slug line in the movie's introduction. And how. For anyone who has followed Mike's work closely, there's something so fitting about this project that one marvels. For how often does life fulfill one's fantasies more or less exactly as one had imagined them? And an indie movie with the commercial possibilities of a theatrical release coupled with VOD is just that deus ex machina, and not a moment too soon.

As one of those most closely associated with Mike's work, I won't even try to be an impartial judge of this movie. Besides, I am at least as interested in people's reactions to it as I am in the film itself. For this movie is not simply a work of art to be appreciated; it has a mission whose success is the most important measure of the film itself.

On that score, so far so great. Media such as the New York Times which studiously ignored the Peak Oil conferences held here in 2005 and 2006 are now respectfully acknowledging the most controversial of Peak Oil advocates. (The Times sent a researcher, though not a reporter, to Petrocollapse in 2005; presumably his main research function was to count the house and report back to The Powers That Be on how big the movement was in NYC and how much they had to worry.)

I also wasn't sure how the onslaught of information in the movie would go over with a general audience. It has aspects of the lecture however jazzed up with cartoons and archive footage. But one of my students who saw it in New York said it was easily comprehensible. Given that she's new to the topic as well as to the English language, this is a relief. And most of the reviews of the "scariest movie ever" genre indicate that people are getting the message.

So what's the down side?

The movie needed more definition. Was it an exposee of Peak Oil, a portrait of Mike or both? If the first, it needed at least a shot of the plethora of books, reports and conferences on the subject, thereby revealing the impressive array of experts from various disciplines who are 'concerned.'

But according to interviews of the director, Chris Smith, with Laura Flanders, among others, it was intended to be the second, a portrait of Mike the man.

In that case too, it needed some fleshing out. Not a lot; the great thing about movies is that a picture is worth a thousand words and when you have words as well, you can really cover ground. There's a clear effort to explicate this doomsday prophet. Who is he to be telling us all this? Where does he come from? What are his credentials?

These questions are dutifully addressed but others are skirted and not, I think, out of discretion. Anyone concerned with niceties wouldn't have conducted the interview in a meatpacking warehouse to create the atmosphere of an interrogation. (I can only imagine how Mike reacted to that. Let's just say that cold isn't his favorite environment.) His personal life is alluded to in the person of Rags. But surely, the director might have asked, that's not the whole story, but only the latest chapter.

On that score, the Rosetta Stone is a throw-away line where Mike is talking about how early in his career, people would ask him why he didn't give up his crusade and get a more balanced life. He answers to the effect that he tried but looking around, he saw that there was, in fact, nothing else in his life. So he had no choice but to go on with his investigative work.

A shot of his article, "New Year's at Bellevue," would have thrown into relief that history as well as the emotional moments he is both generous and helpless enough to share with the world. It would also have conveyed the putative personal collapse alluded to in the title.

The movie will doubtless usher in a whole new chapter of his life. My foreign student was moved to want to comfort "that man" who seemed so lonely with only his loping dog for companionship. And the New York Times reviewer seemed to want to protect him from the "cruel" director interrogating him with his "predatory" camera and "[un]sympathetic... embrace."

It also ushers in the next chapter for us all.

Friday, November 20, 2009

REMEMBER THIS

One of the best things I ever did at FTW was to bring up good writers and thinkers. FTW was the first to publish Dmitry Orlov who has done so much to prepare us. He desribes what we can expect.

The Five Stages of Collapse

1. Stage one: Financial Collapse
2. Commercial Collapse
3. Political Collapse
4. Social Collapse
5. Cultural Collapse

I think everybody needs to break out their Dmitry Orlove reader right about now. We are just entering the second stage. We can expect to be able to function as something resembling normal until the end of Stage Three. That means there will be warning signs and time to prepare. We will not get caught flat-footed. How could we? We're the ones who made the map. Trust this. As to how long each stage lasts... that's anybody's guess right now.

Another rule of thumb is that with each new stage, things get less and less predictable/reliable.

What a horse race this is to get our message out as quickly as possible. The winds are now behind us.

MCR