the song remains the same

Communication Breakdown, It's always the same. I'm having a nervous breakdown, Drive me insane. (Page, Jones, Bonham)

Here's an MSM headline from today, "Experts say cold snap doesn't disprove global warming". As if to subliminally suggest well, hey, we were right all along. Then you go with their flow and payment schedules and voila, they gotcha. What the headline actually says is cap and traders are civilization's heroes. Whatever programs they've agreed upon at this early (too late) date, programs that stripmine the global poor for the benefit of the waddling rich and whatever parts were shelved for later and whatever parts will never be acknowledged even among themselves, none of it addresses the issue the way the issue demands. However, we've come a long way - relatively. Something (the usual) is being allowed to surface. It appeared for a while it was not going to be addressed at all. (It still isn't.) That it is being tossed about like a bolo ball, always returning to the paddle held by the richest (and domineering) nations, is just another bailout in disguise, and there are many - such as the body scanning machine subsidiary waiting patiently under the same no-bid manufacturing umbrella as Abu Ghraib's shackles and waterboards. What is wrong with bailouts? As I understand the movement, the money window provides loans with a large and ominous ball of string attached from which dangles the requirement to "retrofit western or else". We could say, the lenders at the bailout window double duty as the nation's and the world's largest collection agency who's ability to collect rides herd on the sovereigns' ability to grovel penniless while mouthing platitudes and opening up their airspace, obviously a shabby reality subhead under the banner of World Economics aka Foreign Policy in which the global map is being redrawn at gunpoint extincting nice people like the Bedouins.

Retrofitting western means pony up while the pony is collapsing from an extreme overdose of lucrative, but finite, natural resources. When you're out walking and you see an SUV with a pony up bumpersticker you'd know the driver has been driven insane. I saw one parked at the post office last month. Try to stay out of his lane ...

What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to write complimentary emails to our representatives in congress? Are we supposed to disrupt protests and report on our neighbors comings and goings? No, we are supposed to send donations. That's all they want. Don't expect any return on the invesment. Nothing will buy us any truth. They are not, under any circumstances, including natural disaster and public condemnation, coming clean. Chris Floyd pointed out in his recent and excellent essay, Blowback On the Border: The Purpose of the Terror War System:

...And so, as I wrote the day after 9/11 (and quoted again recently, in this piece about Obama's surging Terror War):

"Blood will have blood; that's certain. But blood will not end it. For murder is fertile: it breeds more death, like a spider laden with a thousand eggs. And who now can break this cycle, which has been going on for generations?"

The cycle will go on -- because that is what is wanted. The purpose of the system is what it does...

Indigenous poverty, poor health and ignorance is policy within the system. In similar style, our friend Publius is being pressured to memorize his employer's corporate mission statement, the peoples of the western world are supposed to memorize and live, to the best of their abilities, the mission statement of the terror system. This is why it is unfailing, repeated in endless reruns, serialized, from top tier to the bottom rung, always with us, in our food, our water, our entertainments, our travels within the permissible minuscule radius. Its like living on a giant sheet of flypaper. Our wings are beating but our bodies stuck.

The facts and questions presented by The Oil Drum come in the format of eloquent essays, painstakingly researched, if you want to know anything about peak, that's ground zero to start. Yesterday's question was Why doesn't government talk about peak oil? I'd judge that question equally as thrilling as Led Zep's Houses of the Holy. We know why they don't, dont we. Today's Oil Drum roll, as you can see in my sidebar, concerns Iraq delaying peak for another decade or so due to massive supply. It shows a chart of deals made per oil field. The US is not on the list. Oops, after all that ongoing carnage? The disclaimer is a new Iraqi administration could revise all the deals when and if it pleases. If I was going to comment over there, I would ask, loudly, why in the hell would they ever give us any deals? Maliki, the current Howdy Doody, has his breaking point as we have seen before, whatever else he may be, can't be pleased to be forever cast in a patsy role and I suspect it won't hold for the long run. Just wait until he's forced to deal with Iran. Bad scene on the horizon... he will be forced against Amindenejad, a man known for making decisions on his own without any outside interlocutors.

We envision the neocon vampires in their midnight office of special plans toiling away at distasteful arrangements laboring to achieve a nefarious goal while bullhorning the goal (the system and its policies) as altruistic. Whenever it became too complicated and might possibly give away its corrupt intent, the items too noxious to speak of were snuck into secret files labeled classified on which a decal was pasted saying executive privileged. In other words, the system and its policies have their own designated language which is the language of True Blood. All the lawyers had to go back to continuing professional education seminars to learn True Blood. Some even managed to lobby for TV courses successfully as evidenced by Dexter and the Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy and the Tudors which they download and watch on their Blackberries between show trials between the hours of daylight and dawn lest they turn to ancient ash.

I wonder if anyone in Yemen (rhymes with lemon) is having an "Oh my God, what have we done?" moment? Likely, but in the spirit of The Vulcans, you'd better keep it to yourself because its all over now.