There's No Fuel Like An Oil Fuel

i heard today that there's thousands of national guard troops patrolling the streets of new orleans because of some "teen" shooting deaths there ..... boy, that's a first: we never gave a shit about n*****rs shooting each other before ..... oh, i remember .... new orlean's gonna be a gated community, and you don't want any uppity darkies running around with firepower, no way ..... gotta say one thing about the bush: he's a uniter, not a divider .... why, i can't tell the difference between new orleans and baghdad, can you? no running water, no electricity, no schools, lots of dark complected pissed off people, and troops, whom we all respect and support, of course, just blasting away .....

i'm enthralled with republican rhetoric and logic, especially when it goes like this ...... gee, you iraqis sure better get it together fast so we can--ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha--leave you to enjoy your democracy .... i mean, come on, guys; get your government together .... come on, you wogs: get your military together, hey, you rugheads: get your police together, along with everything else .....

what appalling, breathtaking, insulting fucking arrogance ..... what a shameless bunch of nattering cocksuckers these feces-tongued republicans are ...... it's like going into a china shop, sweeping everything off the shelves, smashing it to bits, taking a dump on the floor, and then saying, yo, bitch! clean this motherfucker up and do it fast ..... you lazy fucking whore ..... what are you, stupid? do i gotta do everything around here?

last i looked it was the united states that went in, unasked, uninvited, and illegally; that bombed the shit out of everything; that looted the fuck out of everything; that ..... do i really need to go on, to make a point?

and why am i talking to you? if you're reading this, why ...... you're now one of the Silent Majority ..... you know, you're one of the seventy-seven percent that think bush is doing a fucked job, that think the war .... i mean, our invasion ..... was a mistake, and that we should get the fuck out of there ...... yes, that's right: you've made the transition to the group richard nixon identified as " the silent majority," the majority of people whose views, attitudes, beliefs, desires, and national policy wishes are ....

being ignored, just like richard nixon said ...... only they're being ignored because they're not in accord with the best interests of major corporations, notably the fossil fuel industry ......

speaking of which, an old friend (and all my friends are old now) just wrote this:

I find myself horrified of late (what's new) not just by the appallng behavior of the monsters (Cheney, Abramov, Feinstein, et al,) the usual suspects, the overtly genocidal morons, but by a source of future human misery, I have not yet seen labeled as even potentially less than a Godsend panacea (like tornadoes?). Usually I find someone, no matter that they are on KPFA instead of ABC, Funny Times instead of the NY Times, who can help inflame my paranoia. But in this matter I find no reinforcement in the general media. So I turn to you, as a high mucky-muck in the Democratic clusterfuck, and a blogger. Blogs I understand are now, like the Beatles were, bigger than Jesus. So, would you briefly consider my depressing thought,
and tell me if you might help me get the argument out on the table, in the light of day.

my long-time friend, stephen schuster, whom i met at an east coast prep school in the very early sixties, continues: Bio fuels are being touted as the eco answer that we smug "caring" people may fuel our nature loving SUVs with, having our cake and eating it too. By growing sugar or corn, or whatever, supposedly renewable energy sources, we can rid ourselves of our petro miseries. The problems here are ....

We are already destroying (have already destroyed) the aquifer under the Great Plains. The dust bowl will become a permanent condition. Libya was a garden in Roman days. Lebanon was also. Lumbering for the Roman fleets deforested Lebanon and left many sections of lifeless desert. So we're not in unknown territory here.The sugar crops in Florida have been destroying the eco system of the Everglades and presumably the rest of what Disney World and the beach condos have spared. Fertilizers have created oxygen killing algae leaving water which won't support life.

So... the best that domestic production of "fuel" crops can bring are less dependence on Godless Arabs (wait, make that God intoxicated Arabs), the concomitant improvement of our trade deficit, the use of "fresh carbon" rather than stored carbon, and great profits for domestic mega farmers like Archer Daniels, Purina and so forth. In return we destroy the soil and the water supplies both incoming and outgoing. So .....

We go to the third world of the South, United Fruit Company, style and buy up land, replacing small subsistence farms which provide food to the indigenous population, with mega farms (efficicent eh?) which now plant mono crops to fuel our HumVees. This results in a society, Guatamala style, which allows the wealthy to import TV dinners, Frito's, and Whole Earth Greens, and the poor to, well, er, um, ...starve. If you thought the deforestation of the Amazon Basin for MacDonald's Burgers was offensive, imagine how much faster the good folks at Exxon will be able to destroy trees for sugar/corn, or whatever fast growing, nutrient absorbing crop they use, and will permanently create dead zones.

I really don't hear the obvious (to me) expressed (ex pressed like we used to have a press) in the public space. It should be, for the enormity of misery and death it will create can't be easily exaggerated.

i regret that stephen is correct: bio fuels are a staggering great boondodggle, along with things like compassionate conservatism, clear skies and healthy forest initiatives, and lockheed martin making and taking in more money the last four years than the department of the interior, congress, and five other discretionary departments combined ...... clearly there's an impetus for bio fuels: archer daniels midland and con agra wouldn't have it any other way--they stand to make another shitload and bundle, all at the expense of you and me ..... why? because that's why the good lord put us here ..... he may have been a-kiddin' when he put out false dahnosore bones to test our faith, but he was bang on the nail when he created the american people as sheep to be plucked, fucked, and sheared .....

let's just think about some of the unfortunate realities of shoving an ear of monoculture corn into your car's tank, as cargil shoves 'em up your ass: stephen mentioned monoculture, but didn't enumerate the nightmares that monoculture can bring ..... think "irish great potato famine" and you've got an idea, where dependence on an unvariegated crop led to agricultural, economic, and human disaster when it got infested ...... he mentioned lebanon, which used to be reknowned for "the cedars of lebanon," but didn't mention the overcutting on easter island that turned them into barren islands, inhabited only by great enigmatic stone heads, nor did he mention the disappearance of the anasazi from the american southwest ......

but wait! there's more! the over-emphasis of corn as an energy source and as a food supplement also contributes to the depredations and abominations of the fast food industry and the food industry's dependence on high fructose corn syrup ..... i regret that i cannot remember the name of the book, or of the author, who has just written about corn as a monoculture, along with its impact on diet, health, and society ..... but there is link between what has been described as an epidemic of obesity--and i don't just mean the fat-headed fucks in congress--and diabetes and other major health problems that now have a spectacularly early onset ......

oh ..... it's just a hah-potheosis? lahk eeee-volushun? 'n' globall warnin's .....

in terms of energy, the real kicker is, there are no benefits to bio fuels ..... why? because all bio fuels are fossil fuel dependent ..... bio fuels would not exist without fossil fuels for fertilizer and for pesticides, the fertlizers and pesticides necessary to grow monoculture crops on a con agra scale .... they rely on fossil fuels to power the combines that harvest them, as they rely on fossil fuels to manufacture those machines; they rely on fossil fuels for transportation through the infrastructure to processing plants (which run on fossil fuels), and on and on and on ..... without fossil fuels there would be no bio fuels ...... i'm no expert on this--shit, i'm only an expert on changing diapers these days--but it seems to me as much as we need legitimate energy sources, like wind power, the only wind power that corporations can use is the hot lying air that comes out of their mouths, and the mouths of their apologists and lobbyists and shills and whores, like the gas bags and wind bags and bags of noisome fart in congress, and the senate ....

and the white house ......

okay, stephen: i've done my thing ..... we'll do a bike ride on thursday, non-corn fed, and i've published this in my editorial page, which is read by three psychotic people ......

next: doctor pete talks about cretins, retards, asswipes, and not touring with nostalgia geriatrics ......

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PETER KAUKONEN, San Francisco Bay Area guitarist, has played, toured, and recorded with Black Kangaroo, Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and Johnny Winter.

3 Comments

Steve shaw says:

Its a shame that the folks of the USA dont embrace more eco friendly technology than they do. On a recent trip home to my Dekalb Illinois back in May I discovered that Rochelle Ill. had this gigantic windfarm being erected. By that I mean that these windmills that could generate a buttload of electricity were being placed on the flat as a flitter terrain of northern illinois which is usually windy. There must have been about two dozen of these montrous devices going up. Nice thing about it all, federal regulations mandate that any 'kilowatt' being produced by such a device can be and must be sold to the utility at the same 'kilowatt hour price', damn, what a deal. Basically this means that good ole Commonwealth Edison I grew up with in Dekalb has to pay for the windmill produced electricity at the same rate it charges customers. Talk about pounding sand up an orifice!!! I digress.....my kids are younger, 16 and soon 18 and their world will not be as nice a one as the earth I grew up in. Damn shame. But hopefully,,,some entrepeneur will come up with the technology to clean up our collective screw up of messing with mother nature. Wouldn't it have been nice if we all, myself included, had listened back in the sixties and seventies, eighties too, to the folks who predicted the climate changes, etc. What were we thinking.......uh, pass that doobie over here...

Submitted by Steve shaw on Thu, 07/17/2014 - 12:44
Gee dad, wrong ... says:

When I was a little girl my dad (see link below) worked for a company that specialized in solar power. He told me that when I grew up that everything would be solar powered!

Gee dad, wrong again.

He also told me that if I was Jewish and got tattooed that I was going to hell.

I said, "but dad, we eat pork and shellfish..."

He said, "there are degrees to hell..."

I'm beginning to suspect that dad didn't have all the answers.

In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that no one does.

Submitted by Gee dad, wrong ... on Thu, 07/17/2014 - 12:45
Nick aka "Enfield" says:

Well shit Doc, where the hell do I start!?!? Things have changed one helluva lot in Iowa since you left West DesMoines.
Nitrates in the rivers are worse. Only an idiot or severely desperate and starving person ever eats any fish out of them. Cancer clinics for carp and catfish would be packed to overflowing if made available. The only fish that seem to thrive are those damned Vietnamese, algae-eating, jumping carp.
Crop rotation in central Iowa is a thing of the past. What few farmers are left just heap on more fertilizer, weed killer and pesticide. Many of the morons have ripped out the windbreaks and other trees along the creeks their grandfathers planted 70 years ago. They can't afford to let an inch go out of production. Never mind there aren't enough rail cars around to cart off the harvest. Aint unusual to see corn piled three stories high outside the grain elevators.
It's been since before you left here most of the small familly operations are gone. The days have vanished since the small farmer had his own hogs, cattle, milk cows, chickens and vegetable garden. He has to be up to his neck in either just corn, soybeans or his ass and soul indebted to the meatpackers that set him up with those ecological disasters called livestock confinement operations.
The meat packers make a mockery of the states anti-trust laws by not only owning their processing plants but also the afore-mentioned farmers, trucking companies, purchasing stations and the state legislators that keep their backs turned. Several of these companies received subsidies to train unskilled workers for their first three months, most of whom were shit-canned on day 91. The vast majority of these workers are undocumented. They are paid not quite the rate as the local workers they displaced received in 1973. Hell, they lied through their teeth to them telling them Iowa didn't even get cold in the winter.
Shit, I could go on for page after page. Look, I know not everyone is wild about corn made ethanol. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is a testament to the toxicity of mid-western agriculture. All I'm saying is we're just as screwed using ethanol as not. You might just as well save a few bucks converting to it. My perspective here tells me boycotting or resisting the change aint gonna make one difference anyway.

Nick

Submitted by Nick aka "Enfield" on Thu, 07/17/2014 - 12:45

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