I don’t know about you, but I really like Jesse Ventura. They used to call him The Body, now they’re calling him “The Mind”, and for good reason. Listen to how well-spoken and articulate this guy is. And not only that, he knows of what he speaks. The guys got experience and he tells it like he sees it.
Here’s an interview on that goofball Howard Stern’s show.
I’ve been wanting to write about this issue for a long time, which is sure to radically affect the price of gold in the next few months and years. Recently, there has been some analysis surfacing debunking ‘peak oil’ theory . By way of background, peak oil was a concept first proposed by a guy named M. King Hubbert in 1956, who accurately predicted that US oil production would “peak” in or around 1970, which it did.
Now, people are applying his analysis to world oil production, and estimates for world peak production variously range between 2007 and 2020.
There’s a bigwig consultant from Calgary named Peter Tertzakian who wrote a book called 1000 Barrels a Second. A concise interview with him can be found here. I read the book and it provides a good background to the history of energy starting with whale oil. His thesis is that we are entering an energy break-point and concomitant re-balancing period where oil will no longer be cheap. What he calls light, sweet crude is fast disappearing, and there’s no new magic bullet alternative to replace oil in the future. This may not be true, however. There’s quite a bit of information coming out these days about possible “free energy” alternatives.
But even so, the sheer scale of the use of oil today rules out any quick fix to the problem. F. William Engdahl, an analyst I’ve posted on previously, has stated that he no longer believes in the peak oil issue, because there has recently surfaced information that Russian geologists have found “deep sources” of oil, and their findings suggest that the fossil fuel theory is false, and that ‘deep geological processes’ are involved in the creation of crude oil. This is a tantalizing idea, but since the knowledge only exists in Russia, it’s unlikely a revolution in crude oil drilling will solve the peak of “conventional” oil production in Western countries. I don’t think Putin is about to share his secrets with the West.
While peak oil may be a farce in a sense, I think there’s a cold hard reality manifesting itself. The big industrial age boom has spent itself, and the re-balancing period is at long last coming into being. Whether or not there are vast reserves of oil left matters not. We’ve used up the majority of the easy-to-access reserves, and it seems the power-brokers are using the real or imagined shortage to force what they see as upstart oil producing countries, such as Venezuela, some of the Gulf states, Iran and Russia, into bankruptcy. Lindsay Williams claims to have contacts in the circles of power who told him as much. When you listen to the George Soros clip in this video, notice how he condemns the “major oil-producing countries” for being the, “enemies of the prevailing world order.” He says they have been, “using oil to maintain power”. It’s obvious he completely misses the point that there is a growing consensus around the world that opposes that Western recipe. It seems like he completely underestimates Russia, Chavez, Iran, China. As he belittles Chavez for his “Bolivarian revolution”, suggests that it will fail, and decries efforts of the Russians to jostle for influence in the region, I can’t help but to laugh at their desperate attempts to hold onto what little control they have left.
If Williams is right, we’re in for a rough ride in the coming years. A guy named James Howard Kunstler came out with a book called The Long Emergency a few years back. Here’s an overview of how the shortages and costliness of oil will affect life in “suburbia”:
This idea is supported in a very recent book by a Canadian economist, Jeff Rubin. Here’s a short talk he gave on the same topic:
The idea that a small group of elites is trying to break the upstart countries and “consolidate” power, as Alex Jones suggests, seems more and more to be supported by an assortment of sources. Of course, I don’t think it will turn out exactly as they want. There are too many variables and intangibles that will affect the outcome, some of which I want to write about in future posts. But the fact remains that these guys are intent on trying to force the issue and do a power grab at the expense of the rest of the world. While they go about it, we’re all going to suffer the consequences of expensive oil, volatility in prices, stage-managed “crises”, bio-weapon beta-tests (i.e. pig flu) etc. etc. I make this point simply because I want to be prepared for what’s coming. Hopefully the doomsayers are wrong, and things will just go along nicely through 2012 and beyond. However, these guys who wield influence are real wierdos. Who knows what they want to pull? Cornered mongrels are the most dangerous. Let’s hope the Bolivarian revolution succeeds. I’d trust Evo Morales over George Soros any day.
Just a brief note for those of us interested in diversifying our portfolio (if we had one), it looks like good news for gold. I’ve been reading lots of reports that the Chinese, Saudis and various Asian and South American countries, the countries of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Org.) are slowly diversifying out of US debt instruments such as bonds and T-bills. Without foreign financing of US debt, the $ is doomed. It must be only a matter of time before the Chinese yuan becomes the world’s reserve currency. In the interim, gold is surely going to take that role.
Onto other matters, when ‘the chimp’ came to my hometown to speak at a luncheon for business types, there was a moderate protest outside the Telus Convention Center. I followed the story re: the protestors on the CBC site. I actually spent hours reading the comments on that story and contributing my own. I kept getting frustrated because the moderators on the site NEVER posted my comments. You could read hundreds of morons make inane or trivial comments, but there was never any real information. I tried to post links to articles which detailed the efforts of thousands of people and many different groups, to entreat Canadian law enforcement to uphold Canadian law and arrest the man for torture, war crimes etc. One comment, (which I had to pare down for length and so was really tame in the end) finally made it, and some clown replied, “where’s the proof? He’s never been charged with any crime.” So, I replied with links and sites detailing the international effort to bring the chimp to justice, such as the efforts of the Center for Constitutional Rights in Washington, the Justice Robert H. Jackson Conference on Federal prosecution of War Criminals (Jackson was the famed special prosecutor at Nuremberg), or Lawyers Against the War, and countless others. Most of these links come from the globalresearch website. Of course, that detailed reply was never posted. After that, I gave up on posting comments to (disinformation) news sites like CBC. It’s useless because they censor serious commentary. That’s the main reason I started this blog. At least I can get it off my chest here, whether or not anyone reads it. Anyway, today I found this video, which details in a much more visual way what I had in those “lost” comments.
If you don’t have time for the whole documentary, just watch at 17 min. in, there’s a cartoon about the whole “luncheon” in Calgary that’ll give you a chuckle for sure. Here it is:
Excuse the alliteration, but it seemed appropriate as this man was a wordsmith, even in English. I came across his books in Bangkok: one in my favorite used bookstore, and the other in the night-table drawer in a hotel I stayed at. It was there in the same way you find the Gideon Bible in roadside motels in Canada.
His writings are concise primers on Buddhism, and helped me to clear away the debris that had accumulated around the spiritual tradition in my mind over the years. He had a way of making “dhamma” accessible to lay-folk like myself. Dhamma is the “right path”, and I’ve never forgotten his admonitions to prepare my psyche for the nuclear age! This is part one of a documentary on the man that I found.
Go to the EXTRA VIDEOS TAB at the top of this page to watch parts 2 and 3.
The monopolization of media ensures that only dominant ideologies get airplay. Alternative media not only circumvent the “quarantine” on information, they provide better quality sources of information. Lectures and talks are becoming available more and more recently: some produced for the Net, and others more traditional, meant for a live audience. I’m liking the broad spectrum of dissenting information out there, though I know it’s drowned out by the “media of the spectacle”. But I continue to find good journalism and good inquiry.
It’s amazing how little people know about the concepts of socialism, communism or Marxism, or democracy for that matter, considering there are so many critics out there willing bandy the terms about. But, as you’d expect, they deserve in depth treatments, like those given in longer talks, not at all like the mainstream interviews which never allow the dialogue to linger on serious or complicated matters.
The point here is that there is a deep, structural analysis available. It’s not about different “schools” of economics or approaches to regulating banks or setting up rules. It’s ultimately about how we structure our society. As Wolff implies, if you don’t see a democratically-run economic system, you won’t see a democratic politics either. Marxian analysis lays bare the structural problems with the current system. If ‘the workers of the world unite’, the system will change the way Richard Wolff suggests, and we’ll be able to cast off the manacles of the 9 to 5 job as a global society.
It’s an infectious idea, which is why there’s a black man in a white house working around the clock to think of ways to suppress it. But, we’re seeing the end of an era: the Bilderbergers are meeting this weekend in Greece. There’s crosstalk all over the Net about the so-called committee of 300 of the elite class being challenged by other groups from around the world; challenged by the Chinese, who are taking steps to diversify out of the US$ and use the SDR Special Drawing Rights, a kind of international “reserve” currency; challenged by Asian gangs or what have you. But, the system is under pressure to change, as you can see in this talk “Capitalism Hits the Fan” by economics professor Richard Wolff.
See the same fellow on Real News:
For the history of banking cartels in particular, watch this series of videos by the respected Richard C. Cook. He has an impressive resume and is a good orator:
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