Sorry, My Head is Exploding

Per capita government debt in 2010 in descending order, thank you Irish Times. Big changes in 2011?

I wrote here quite a while ago that I would only touch upon this crazy world of ours and all its ills if I felt my head exploding.

My head is exploding with the confluence of all that is happening. I have many questions. And very few answers.

Why is everyone so shocked that the global economic meltdown is happening?

Did everyone seriously think that this unsustainable way of life would continue forever?

Didn't the serious imbalance of food, water, housing amongst the wealthiest and the poorest (of which there are far, far too many) weigh on those who are so privileged?

Why on earth was the population of the world allowed to explode (and continue to explode) to a completely unsustainable level while the majority of the Woo practitioners and their worshippers condemn birth control and abortion? And allow thousands upon thousands of birthed children to die each and every single day?

When and why did we allow psychopathic corporations to dictate who gets into the highest offices of government and then allow them to pull the puppet strings of their patsies?

How on this tiny planet did one country spend one trillion dollars illegally invading another (not to mention all of the others) and not expect it to come back and haunt them. For generations yet to come.

How can we be so flip as to say “technology will solve everything” whenever the subject of finite oil (peaked and gone in my humble estimation) is mentioned. And people run out and buy these great gas guzzling rigs to get their weekly groceries? Using decades worth of gas and oil that would supply tiny cars like mine for another 50 years if we all drove environmentally responsible vehicles?

Do those in charge (Demz Wot Rulez) not give one single shyte about their own grandchildren?

Whatever happened to making the way we run our little portions of the world smaller – i.e. Locally supplied power, etc., community gardens, etc. Instead we are planning multi-billion dollar hydro developments here in Newfoundland. I won't get into the destruction of tribal lands and environmental degradation this will entail. Mortgaging our great-grandchildren's lives (if they survive) and doubling our utility rates. All this in a province where wind and waves can be harnessed at a fraction of the cost. And locally.

Gaia is beginning to shrug us off like the pesky bunch of fleas we are, is there anything we won't destroy for money?

But, of course, the ICH* will save the repentant and the prayerful, like Rick Perry.

*Invisible Cosmic Housekeeper

A Telling Moment

Well, you'd never guess of course, but I do have a flair for the dramatic.

I pull up to the gas pump of my local GrocCon (that's what we call the wee local shops of our little outports that stock just about everything - from hammers to towels to milk to gas) and there is a sign outside:

"SORRY NO GAS."

"WTF?!", I ask him as I pick up my mail and drop off client packages.

"Well," he sez, "My gas delivery man tells me it is too expensive to fill up his truck to ship gas all the way out here so he stopped a couple of weeks ago."

"What's going to happen now?" I ask him.

"I tried a few more independents and they all say there's no profit in it for any of them. We've been selling gas here since 1925. Imagine! First time the pump has run dry."

I felt a frisson. One of those pesky geese running over my grave.

And felt lucky I drive one of those tiny cars - where I get 700km for 40 litres of gas which is now $1.40 per. While USians are paying $5/gall.

Pundits are saying the price will drop one more time and then head for the stratosphere.

The future is here. And we're not ready.

Tell me I'm a drama queen.

No Expectations

Awareness it has been said, is the greatest gift we can give ourselves. Looking at what is around us with fresh eyes, but most of all looking at our internal selves. Not obsessively but with the same keen eye. Particularly when we are uncomfortable or dissatisfied or feeling downright whingey. Which I was last week. Because I forgot not to be surprised at all the mallarkey around me.

I try and stay away from the news these days. It is all rather rotten as depicted by the newspapers and websites I browse. I don't have teevee which is an enormous gift I gave myself over 20 years ago now as when I visit other houses with their housegod CNN, it is all about disasters and crime and drugs and rapes. Which is not the real news anyway, is it? Ne'er a one of those talking heads addresses the doomed economy, our oil addicted culture, and our consumerist lifestyles which has turned around and bitten us savagely in the nether regions.

Meanwhile the pols lie and scheme and more-lie and more-scheme to get the largest slices of the ever diminishing pie for their corporate overlords before their subjugated masses all go arse over teakettle. And I realize I am one of the 1% who are thoroughly ZOMG awake and see it so painfully clearly.

So I made a resolution to myself a few months ago. That I would no longer place any positive expectation on a person, a place or a thing in public life. When political patronage takes place I would just roll my eyes and say "Well, no surprises there, is there?" When the Gulf Oil so-called spill's (tsunami actually)aftermath is now resulting in horrific human health issues along with the fish, wildlife and mammal massacres, I am not shocked, I do not react, I didn't expect it to be better or fixed or cured or confessed. Or even for other insane drilling (and fracking, sweet Jaybuzz) to be stopped. It is just as I predicted. The world is being pillaged and despoiled and destroyed. And American Idol and their Survivory clones keep most sedated.

And maybe that's a good thing.

For who wants to be wide awake for the coming death throes of our once beautiful planet?

Call me a hardcore realist. Or cynical curmudgeon.

And quote of the day, added after original posting:

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
- Havelock Ellis

Blog Jam

Our sheltered bay bounces high with the waves today, spindrift doing a fine job of gliding across the gallopping white horses, to dissipate in frustration on the shore. My bridge to the beach is awash in a strange mix of small icepans and detritus from the cowed alders. High winds with an underlying layer of....could that be Spring crawling in?

I watch in astonishment as the waves go higher, finding it hard to imagine their enormous bulk before they shrink on their long journey to here, our sheltered wee bay.

World news is interesting today. No surprise in Ireland with regard to the ousting of the decrepid, incompetent and criminal Fianna Fail, the lifelong party of my father, who incidentally got his glory moments on RTE in the sixties as a returning officer for the elections. He would be abject at their performance in the last decade.

I see Michael Moore has turned his eyes to Thompson, Manitoba and the mining industry there. More squeezing by Dems Wot Rulez on the little folk in the mines.

And speaking of the little folk, I see very little coverage of the civic protests that are strengthening in the states down south of us here. Oh, sorry, forgot. Corporatocracy controlled media. Again.

And gas is going up. And up and up. End of this year should see many of the Humvees, SUVs and monster trucks off the roads. At long last there will be a safe ride (and still cheap fill-ups) for us icky bicky little 4 cylinder drivers, takin' back da roadz.

By the way aren't we, like, owed some compensation for our frugal use of gas while the rest of the world took ten times their share with their obscene monster vehicle consumptions? I've often thought about this. If everyone had driven the little guys, and rail ferried Da Stuff around, we'd still have stockpiles of gas for centuries. Greed and conspicuous consumption yet again doom us to a very uncertain future and limited mobility.

Back to wave gazing.

Who Needs Nuisancy Rules & Regs?

Amen, bro, amen!

Travelling

So I'm in Toronto. In the bliss of Highspeed.

Only when you're without what others take for granted does one appreciate the Small Stuff that makes life so much easier.

And talking of life ~

I wonder what it's like for the 12% of US homeowners now walking away from their houses. "Strategic Abandonment" is the new buzzword for this.

I wonder what it's like to be a fisher in the Gulf of Mexico and have this toxic spill swallow everything in its path.

I wonder what it's like in the EU and particularly in Greece and in the UK where life is about to change irrevocably with further economic collapses.

I wonder at the magnitude of this confluence of what is happening on our tiny planet as it twists and turns in its death throes. A commentary I heard on CBC Newfoundland as I was driving Ansa to the kennel summed up this whole disastrous way of life so beautifully:

"In the last fifty years or so we started to reverse the economic methodology of our ancestors wherein we now placed consumption before production when it HAS to be the other way around."

Amen, I thought. Of course. We have to produce before we consume. Is it too late for our grandchildren to rethink their worlds having been taught the opposite by their parents and grandparents?

And did you know that offshore in Newfoundland, they are digging even deeper for the oil than BP was in the Gulf?

And when the Newfoundland government was challenged on what we are doing to prevent another massive spill, here's a summary of what the minister said:

Natural Resources Minister Kathy Dunderdale says the oil industry is watching the events in the Gulf of Mexico to see what lessons can be learned from a massive spill there.

Ms. Dunderdale said earlier this week that the offshore industry is too vital to the province to ever curtail drilling.

Yes, Drill, Baby, Drill is the modus operandi in Newfoundland.

And flying over vast swathes of clear cutting gives me time to reflect on all of this.

And resign myself to the fact that those times I read about as a child are here. Now.

• When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money.
~ Cree Prophecy

Breeding, Burping, Belching and Barfing our way to 'Blivion

I was responding to a brilliant post by R.J. Adams over at Sparrowchat on the fix we've all gotten ourselves into on this wondrous planet of ours when it hit me: the wealth of information on our current crisis that is at anyone's finger tips if they'd care to look for it. And not what MSM are telling us either.

But of course, I'm even more firmly convinced that most people (I'd say something like 95%) would rather go around fast asleep, they don't really want to know anything about our current conditions.

An ex of mine called today. Validating for me yet again why we are no longer together in marital bliss. He's a good man, but he really is snoring. He was ranting about the refusal of his city council to put in yet another Walmart type sprawl-store. Loss of jobs, he bleats, loss of tax revenue to the city, loss of farm acreage improvement. Council should just wake the f*** up. How does one argue with this, if argue one must considering all past arguments and arguments yet to come. Peace out, I decide, much like my mother did when it came to my father. Pearls to swine or something like that if I threw even the basic data at him.

Which gets me to some serious news on CBC radio the other night. Peak oil. This expert talking that we should have been preparing 20 years ago. But we haven't. And there is a massive looming crisis in oil shortage, like now this year, no oil for the pernicious automobile not to mention freight to get us our food or fertilizer for our crops. And no: technology is snoring behind the 8 ball. There is no technology. It will be sudden, massive and catastrophic. And we are twenty years behind.

And did you hear about the banks refusing to finance the farmers for seeds this spring? Connect the dots on that one.

And to quote Leonard Cohen: "I've seen the future, baby, it is murder" - read about the employment rate of 41% in Mendota, California, to get a glimpse of what this will look like for the rest of us waiting in the wings.

Meanwhile, here in North America, conditions for the 'bailouts' (Oh LOL on that one!) are now being set for the automakers to come up with some firm strategies. Kicking the dead dog over and over again. Dems Wot Rules Us have no answer and much like Kevin Rudd did when Oz went on fire, will tell us, at some point in 2009:

You're on your own!

Yes. We are.

'Blivion.

See, Hear, Speak No Evil, etc.

I suppose it is appallingly predictable: the manner in which our elected officials are blind to the real issues of the world: the impending climate change catastrophe, peak oil coming and going without a whisper, and the crash and burn of the ephemeral paper trails which constituted the bulk of the stock exchange ‘wealth’. Not to mention looming water shortages, disease, starvation and the resulting global unrest.

Our Canadian federal government has taken a holiday from it all - Why worry? – with the Governor General’s blessing and won’t resume governing us all until late January. That’s next year, folks. They’re also, co-incidentally, avoiding a no-confidence vote in parliament. Why are citizens surprised? They’re avoiding every other issue, the jobless rate, the collapse of the auto industry and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Of which we don’t have much left due to that arctic melt thing.

Well, the collapse of the way we’ve run the world until now really. But no one is looking at that. Let’s keep the sheeple sedated with reruns of Big Brother or Canadian Idol or some such drek.

Meanwhile in other parts of the real world:

· The collapse of major retail chains is imminent after Christmas (warning: do not give or receive gift certificates, most will be worthless).

· Green crabs have taken over much of the water surrounding this area of Newfoundland. Killing everything in sight and devastating the fishery.

· No one wants to give up their plastic grocery bags (I did my own independent survey at several places where I shop, I am one of 100 that shop with cloth bags, that is 1% of all shoppers in a tiny island where disposal is a problem and the cliffs and forests are festooned with these plastic aberrations that should be banned everywhere on the planet). And yeah, they’re oil based which brings me to:



New, SEVERE CUTS is the word being bandied about when OPEC meets on December 15th. As in SHORTAGES. As in further changes to our WAY OF LIFE. Which is going to prove highly negotiable in spite of what Bush The Decider promised way back in the dim history of the foundation of the new and improved Homeland, reminiscent now of the German Fatherland. (And why is Motherland considered a sissified term? Oh, I get it. Mothers, at least the nurturing kind, don’t usually carry AK47s or patrol with Blackwaters).

Enjoy the gas holiday everyone, it is going to be brief and the stuff of nostalgia in less than 6 months.

Cranky? Yeah, I am. How didja guess?