Category: Mischief Managed

A Local Perspective / Russian Fuel Tanker Arrives in Nome

I present a conversation regarding this news story from a fellow trend researcher who hails from Nome.  [With her permission under anonymity as ‘trend researcher’ or TR.]

One thing about the peak oil research I do, is that it has brought me to the most interesting, local perspectives on all things energy related, in a myriad of different places that I’ve never visited.  The connections through internet technology are vast, marvelous and mind-broadening.  In that spirit, I share this conversation – with some incredible photos from the article. [click to full view] ~ GP

Skier crosses the frozen Bering Sea ice to the Russian tanker Renda on Sunday.
Photo by David Dodman, KNOM Radio Mission Da

TR : The Russian fuel tanker arrived at my hometown to save them (temporarily) from $12 a gallon gas and heating fuel.  My brother was hired at 100 bucks an hour to lay an ice road with his cat for two fuel hoses, stretched 700 yards long connecting the tanker to the town tanks (after the shore-ice fasts around the vessel so there won’t be a spill).

They generally get fuel by barge in fall from Washington State refineries (after the crude is shipped from Alaska to Washington!); however, this year the barges could not make it due to the “Epic Alaska Typhoon” that was supposed to kill everyone but did not.  Then the barge could not get in due to an extremely early pack ice descent from the north, part of the global weirding.

Where do they usually get their fuel from?  In the paper, it stated they loaded up in South Korea and stopped in Dutch harbor for gasoline.

TR:  Russia is the only country with a cargo ship capable of moving behind an ice-breaker ship through pack ice a foot thick.  Meanwhile, believe you me, Big Oil is watching closely since the success of the trip adds fuel to their fire as they plan to drill near Nome through the pack-ice and then get the oil to the refineries…

The Renda off the coast of Nome on Monday, January 16.  Photo by Sue Greenly
Why the near mile long hose?
 

TR:  The ship can’t get any closer to land, very shallow there; Outer Continental Shelf.  The alternative was to fly fuel in by plane, all million gallons of it, planeload after planeload and send prices to levels most would be unable to afford.  All this to help a mere 3,000 people make it through a cold ass winter.

We’re glad to hear your hometown will have the fuel they need this winter and hope your brother makes a nice chunk of change.

TR:  He is a hero and that makes him even happier.
The Healy breaks ice near the Nome on Jan. 14. The Healy is assisting the tanker Renda as it moves into final position for offloading nearly 1.3 million gallons of fuel for the city.  U.S. Coast Guard photo by Chief Petty Officer Kip Wadlow
Read more about this 11 day journey and view more amazing photographs at Alaska Dispatch

Occupying Fear and Loathing – A Foreword

by Gabrielle Price

This morning, a good friend of mine – one helluva Marine – sent me a link to check out.  He always sends me anything to do with Hunter S. Thompson as we are both fans [only one of us takes that a little far…though, I’ve read that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery].  I suppose it is a bit different for a woman to have such an affinity for a man known for womanizing, boozing and doping it up.

But Hunter was so much more than his carnal instincts – much more than most would perceive from a movie based on his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  He was a patriot, a serious lover of freedom and the constitution, and one of the best writers, and I believe commentators of a moment in time because of his higher instincts.  He was poised at the edge of a political world on the verge of losing it’s ever-loving mind.  He was passionate.  And sometimes that passion was mistaken for hatred, or anger – though, he had plenty of reasons to be angry – like the rest of us.  I think that’s why he always resonated with me.  He was able to say, without apology, how he felt about what he saw happening to this country…and he purged his disgust and anger in a way that made me feel relieved afterward.  He said it for me – I didn’t have to – and ladies don’t talk like that, dont’cha know?

I come from a family that has its roots in both Virginia and Kentucky [where HST hailed from]. Hunter’s colorful language and flair for humorous descriptions and people, made his writing feel as if I had just sat on the front porch with him and spun yarns over a few beers.  I’ve been told for years that when I am angry, a bit of a southern drawl creeps in and that my writing style can only be described as Gonzo.  I never really embraced that until after he was gone and I began writing during the “stolen term” of the Bush Administration.  9/11 was a very hard time for a lot of people and Hunter spoke a lot about this.  It was really hard for me to see him go in 2005…but there was no need for me to ‘go Gonzo’ when his work was there for all to read.  I thought, who the fuck was I to pick up that baton?  There are other journos out there telling it like it is – maybe even humorous Kentucky colonels covering politics?

Turned out, not so much…but I often imagined what he might say even though I lacked a few colors from his marvelous verbal palette.

Even in 2005, I was terribly naive about a lot of things that he wrote about [i.e. foreign policy, militarism] and I had some learning to do.  LOTS of research if I was going to have the audacity to put those hat and glasses on.

By 2008, when Bush was finally leaving – politics got more personal and just uglier than hell.  I understood more and more…but I didn’t write often about issues when I worked on my music project.  THEN the BP oil spill happened and I got fired up again.  Then I learned about peak oil and sat my ass right back down to study.  Nowadays, I see the political landscape from a safe distance [for my health and to maintain any friendships…agreeing to disagree doesn’t happen like it used to] and I wonder what Doc would have to say about this whole mess.

Then I figure he kinda already did say everything he wanted to say [or could say] about what he knew and saw and got the fuck out while the getting was good.  Wish he could have been here to see Occupy…

I’ve had days where I thought I was going to be done with writing altogether in these last few weeks…just ready to chuck it all in.  Trying to figure out how the hell to share peak oil information that would make grown men with muscle cars weep in a puddle of piss, and make Ikea shoppers go to addiction groups to deal with never being able to buy Swiss-modern petroleum based plastic everything from cups to shitty wall art.  Like Tyler Durden said, “Martha Stewart is polishing brass on the Titanic…it’s going down, man.”

I thought about this recent media trip, Occupy Fear and Loathing – which ended up nothing at all like what was intended; loss of footage, a camera, several missed interviews, didn’t get home for Christmas, a piece of shit truck with no stereo, a nightmare of a travel partner who couldn’t even pump gas who left me stranded in Phoenix…and who still has my documentary footage.

I wondered what the fuck point is there in writing about the trip or anything at all.  And just when I thought I couldn’t stand to read another link…

We come back to this morning’s message with this link that was shared with me.  A report from the Los Angeles Review of Books, called “Love, Boxing and Hunter S. Thompson.”  In the beginning of the report is a synopsis where one of the authors mentions two books – for my purposes, I will mention only the one – and thank the author and my friend from the bottom of my Gonzo heart.

Tom Lutz – “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas […] colossal failure of mission, spectacular performance of the art of being sidetracked, of being shanghaied by errant attention, or, perhaps, [a] perfect example of the way art is, at its best, a perversion, a turning away from more straightforward intentions.”
Ho ho!  Res ipsa loquitur.  Let the good times roll.
Rest in peace, Doc.  I got this.

 

~~~~~~~~~~
“I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.  At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey.  It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson / The Rum Diary (1993)
500ed-americosmos
Occupy your fear.
Then let it go.

A Simple Exercise

Official Excerpt from Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil

by Michael C. Ruppert

Take a 20-dollar bill out of your wallet and set it in front of you.  Now take a glass of water and set it next to the cash.  Pretend that the glass of water represents a barrel of oil.  Look at them both for a second.  Then ask yourself a question:  What do they represent?  If you keep distilling your answers down to their purest essence, you will see that the money and the oil both represent the same thing: the ability to do work.  Both are useless if there is nothing to buy, drive or eat.
And yet our economic system, what we call capitalism but which is really something else, is predicated on debt, fractional reserve banking, derivative financing, and fiat currency. Therefore it requires that there must be limitless growth into infinity for it to survive.  Growth is not possible without energy.
Now look at the barrel of oil and realize that the earth is a closed sphere, and that without the oil and natural gas, the financial system is doomed.  There is nothing on our horizon – other than wishful thinking – that can completely replace hydrocarbon energy.  The surest way to see this is to realize that, as the human race starts down the inevitable slope of shrinking oil and gas supplies, we have seen no hydrogen powered F 18 Hornets or M1 Abrams tanks.  We have seen no vegetable oil-powered Bradley fighting vehicles or solar powered guided missile frigates.
There are many factors that the rulers of the American empire now have to manage as they read their own delusional map of the world.  They have to:
  • Apportion dwindling resources among competitors, some of whom possess nuclear weapons;
  • Maintain and expand their control over enough of the oil and gas remaining to ensure their global dominance and maintain order among the citizens of the Empire;
  • Simultaneously manage a global economic system, made possible by hydrocarbon energy, that is collapsing and in which the growing population is demanding more things that can only be supplied by using still more hydrocarbon energy;
  • Acknowledge that they cannot save their own economy without selling more of these products;
  • Control the exploding demand for oil and gas through engineered recessions and wars that break national economies;
  • Hide the evidence that they are systematically looting the wealth of all people on the planet – even their own people – in order to maintain control;
  • Maintain a secret revenue stream to provide enough off-the-books capital for purposes of providing themselves a distinct economic and military advantage, improving their technological posture, and funding covert operations;
  • Repress any dissent and head off any exposure of their actions;
  • Convince the population that they are honorable;
  • Kill off enough of the world’s population so that they can maintain control after oil supplies have dwindled to the point of energy starvation.
In the case of the War on Drugs, I infer that the result of some 30 years of effort, fueled by billions of dollars and managed by the “best and the brightest,” is exactly what was intended.  This is the premise from which I began looking at the events of September, 11, 2001, as I watched the second airliner hit the World Trade Center.
I do not claim to have presented or reconciled every fact.  That rarely happens in a complicated homicide investigation.  The tasks of the investigator are to produce a reasonable explanation based upon evidence that establishes probability, and to eliminate reasonable doubt that a crime was committed and that the guilty have been successfully identified.

If I can make a case in this book that explains these events, identifies the suspects, and makes more sense than any other interpretation of the available and demonstrable facts; if I can then get it out in a way that further empowers our collective learning; if that helps to break down the destructively false paradigm that governs so much of our life today – then I have contributed something that is hope-giving for all of us.  Otherwise, the future looks pretty grim.  This is a race against time.

Michael C. Ruppert ~ April, 21, 2004
Got lifeboat?
The Refreshment Center is home of the
Official Excerpts from Crossing The Rubicon

A Matter of Life and Death

Foreword excerpt from the book Crossing The Rubicon ~ The Decline Of The American Empire At The End of The Age Of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert / published 2004

Shared with permission from Mr. Ruppert

The real deal on corporate media

by Catherine Austin Fitts

In 1990, a New York Times reporter writing about my work implementing financial transparency and controls as an Assistant Secretary in the first Bush administration resigned to prevent the Times’ Washington Bureau Chief from intentionally falsifying the story.  The bureau chief kept his job, a first rate investigative reporter left the news profession, and the story was buried.  This manipulation protected 1980’s black budget fraud at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”).  It was one of my many lessons on the economic interests and political loyalties of corporate media.
Indeed, during the 1980’s, the savings and loan industry and government insurance programs were stripped of an estimated $500 billion by syndicates of military, intelligence, and private financial interests.  The profits were used to buy up banking, industrial, and media companies and to finance political campaigns.  From a greater position of political, judicial, and economic power in the 1990’s, these same syndicates then stripped an estimated $6 trillion of investors’ value in pump and dump stock market and mortgage market schemes and an estimated $4 trillion of taxpayer money from the US federal government.
In 1997, the Washington Post killed a cover story on my efforts to help HUD insure the integrity of its mortgage programs, thus making possible the subsequent disappearance of $59 billion from HUD as a part of this orgy of “piratization” of government assets by private interests.  Soon thereafter, when I attended a private invitation-only reception with colleagues at her home, Katherine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, snubbed me by refusing to greet me in her receiving line.
Washington Post corporate interests profited from HUD programs used to gentrify Washington, DC neighborhoods.  Check out the last few pages in Graham’s autobiography – it’s there in black and white.  What’s not to be found in the pages of the Washington Post or Graham’s book is the “real deal” on who has profited from insider real estate development or narcotics trafficking in these same Washington neighborhoods – or from reinvestment of the resulting profits in stocks of local corporations like the Washington Post.
 
I do not mean to single out the New York Times or the Washington Post.  I have had similar experiences with the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, US News and World Report and Dow Jones Newswire, to name a few.  Trusted friends and colleagues have experienced similar situations with numerous newspapers, magazines, and networks owned and operated by corporate media interests.

George Orwell once said that omission is the greatest form of lie.  That’s the best description I knew of corporate media today.

 

The growing power of media
The cost to you of supporting corporate media is not just the subscription prices or the time lost to advertisements.  It’s the cost of omission – failing to tell you what you need to know.  Consider that this cost includes:
–  Your share of the $10 trillion that has been moved out of the US stock market and government without your having been informed by an alert and objective news media in time for you to take actions to protect yourself and your family.
–  The dilution of your Constitutional freedoms and the vesting of power in a small group of individuals who defraud you (the public) of staggering sums of money and then use that money to buy up media and control your government and judiciary and to compromise your rights and the rights of the people around you.
–  The impact on you and your children of having your streets and schools overwhelmed with dangerous narcotics and prescription drugs.
Our financial system depends on liquidity.  In turn, liquidity depends on a popular faith in the system’s “rule of law.”  Global leadership’s power depends on the ability to combine criminal cash flows with liquid stock market and government securities.  This is why Mike Ruppert’s From The Wilderness [and currently Collapsenet.com] and a growing global network of Internet media are accomplishing so much as we shift our readership and subscription dollars to them.  The powers that be are highly motivated to protect the legitimacy of their financial system.  If a little bit of well-placed illumination exposes some of this criminality, the criminals take notice.  That little bit of illumination can also embarrass them a lot in front of their families and neighbors.  Who wants to go to a PTA meeting after Mike Ruppert has explained that you are on the board of, or a lead investor in, a company complicit in slave trafficking or the torture of children?
David can defeat Goliath if we provide the resources to finance the stones – as you have helped do by buying this book.
The record speaks for itself
The fact that America and many countries around the globe are being strip-mined in a manner that results in the destruction and “piratization” of our infrastructure and natural resources, the reduction of the value of our personal assets and retirement and health care benefits and the abrogation of our civil liberties is not something that the corporate media has made clear to you. Mike Ruppert has.
Allegations that the CIA and Department of Justice were partnered with George H. W. Bush and Oliver North through the offices of the National Security Council in a little Iran-Contra arms and cocaine trafficking operation in Mena, Arkansas; and that Hillary Clinton’s law firm was helping launder the local share of the profits through state housing agency securities and investments were never addressed objectively by corporate media.  Mike Ruppert covered these stories and broke the story of the possible connection between these allegations and the Clinton impeachment.

It is highly unlikely that you read or heard in the corporate media that the price of gold was being manipulated to turn off our financial “smoke alarm,” or to “piratize” significant inventories of gold out of government and central banks globally at suppressed values.  It is highly unlikely that you read or heard that money was allegedly being siphoned off from federal agencies using PROMIS-type software programs and that important financial securities and investigation records were destroyed in the Oklahoma City and 9/11 attacks.  Mike Ruppert’s subscribers have read these stories.

You did not read or hear in the corporate media that the events of 9/11 “just happened” to resolve a stalemate in the defense appropriations subcommittee created when, in the face of the “disappearance” of $3.3 trillion from the Department of Defense and a five-year refusal to produce audited financial statements, Congress was challenged with achieving a significant increase in defense spending.  Or that the events of 9/11 allowed the Federal Reserve to adopt highly inflationary monetary policies that postponed dealing with serious financial system flaws.  Mike Ruppert covered these stories.

You did not read or hear in the corporate media that our lives and economy are entirely dependent on fossil fuel, that world oil and gas production will soon decline, and what these facts have to do with the events of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Mike Ruppert covered these stories.

All these facts and allegations have been made abundantly clear by Mike and his publication From The Wilderness.  While corporate media refines the art of profitable omission, Mike Ruppert has risked his name, his financial security, and his life to warn us – again and again.

[Gabrielle again – I need to explain that Mike’s site From the Wilderness is archived and still available for anyone to view and search through.  I’ve used it many times to vet information because Mike’s work is solid – the kind of work I strive to do.  The reason why I am sharing this is so you will understand the historical importance of his book, Crossing the Rubicon and that membership to his site could now, quite literally, save your life.  We all see what’s going on in the new media now – the crackdown on protesters, the signing of the treasonous NDAA bill, the rising cost of fuel, and the tensions now rising with the US and Iran.  Mike predicted damn near everything that’s happening.  Get a membership to get your finger on the pulse of the world – and protect yourself.  Your government isn’t going to do it.  Back to the excerpt…]

An info cop’s beat: Watching your back

Through his website, radio talk-show appearances, speeches, DVDs, monthly newsletter, and email updates, Mike has been telling us for years what he sees, hears, and feels about “the real deal.”

Mike Ruppert had to leave the Los Angeles Police Department because he tried to prevent government-protected narcotics trafficking.  After learning that the corporate media would not tell the truth about this important story, Mike became a publisher.  In the face of widespread public denial of the fact of our economic dependence on “narco-dollars” and warfare, Mike persisted.  Mike is determined to help us face and recover from our financial addiction to an estimated $500 billion – $1 trillion of annual US money laundering.

In one sense, Mike is still a cop.  He’s publisher as “info-cop.”  His “info-beat” is the intelligence we need to protect ourselves – even if the lifting of the shades of denial means exposing our own complicity in the enjoyment of the fruits of the trickle down of dirty money.

Throughout the years, I have heard a lot of criticism of Mike and his work.  For example:
Mike is too aggressive.

It’s true that Mike is unbelievably aggressive.  Mike’s aggression is one of the reasons I am a subscriber to From The Wilderness.  I want to hear about danger real loud, real clear, and on a real-time basis.  I want Mike shouting “fire!” while I still have time to get out of the theater alive.  It takes incredible aggression to stand up to the military banking complex and the academics, think tanks, not-for-profits, and corporate media they fund.  All the money on the planet can, and does, buy a lot of attack poodles.  It is full-time entertainment just watching them nip at Mike’s heels and piddle on the fire hydrants when he’s around.

Mike has a point of view.

It’s true.  Mike always expresses an opinion on matters covered in his stories.  He is both a commentator and activist in a new genre of what Al Giordano of Narco News calls “authentic journalism.”  This is another reason why I am a subscriber.  A point of view is worth a heap of analytical power.  Mike’s job as “info-cop” is not to have an objective point of view.*  His job is make sure we are safe by sharing the information we need.  The only potential risk we can price adjust for, or dismiss is the risk of which we are aware.  If that kind of journalism comes with a vision and a perspective from the writer, I want that too.

Mike is “in your face.”

Mike is not shy.  You disagree?  You have a problem?  You got a question?  You can take it to Mike, have it out with Mike, and speak your mind with Mike.  Mike will say it to your face loud and clear.  You can do the same.  The only thing you can’t do is get him to agree with you when he does not.  Mike’s temper is big – but not has big as his heart.

Mike’s courage and intelligence can save not just your time and your money, but your life.
This one’s true, too.  I’m a case in point.

~~~~~~

So am I, as I am sure so many others can say now that have read Rubicon since and seen Mike’s appearance in the movie Collapse.  It moved me to write, make changes and take time away from a lot of things in my life to confront these crises – there are many.  After the BP disaster is when I found Mike’s work and I came to realize the stark truth about peak oil.  I spent six months alone in a hotel room, writing and integrating this information in hopes of finding some way that I could share it, as well as focus on solutions.  It was a long, dark, rabbit hole of wrangling with my own cognitive dissonance [and personal consumption habits].

* As for the observation about Mike’s job as “info-cop” not having an objective point of view, I was reminded of a quote from Hunter S. Thompson [I love my writers with moxy, if you can’t tell…] and I have often thought of Mike as my “Gonzo-Intel” – because he is not afraid to tell it like it is.  The quote : “So much for Objective Journalism.  Don’t bother to look for it here – not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of.  With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism.  The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.” – Hunter S. Thompson

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Michael Ruppert at his home during the #Occupy Fear and Loathing Media Tour in December.  There is more video footage of my interview with him on the way – but I wanted to convey to you, in the best way I knew how – how important this man’s work has been and continues to be, not just to me personally.  I think it’s imperative for us all and why I am proud to make my site a Collapsenet affiliate.  I thank Mike for granting permission to use excerpts from Rubicon to convey this message to my readers.

Now, as I put on my Gonzo hat, I share with you an edited quote from Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction for good measure : “If I’m curt with you it’s because time is a factor.  I think fast, I talk fast and I need you guys to act fast if you wanna get out of this.  So, pretty please…with sugar on top. Buy a fucking membership.”

Collapse is happening so quickly now that I don’t have time to keep up with the signs – Mike and his team can and I trust them.  I am making my own preparations and hope you do too.

Here is Mike’s most recent interview on The Joe Rogan Experience

[Special thanks to Max Mogran at Oil Free Fun.]

This chart appeared in Crossing the Rubicon in 2004 but was originally published in a book
called, The Oil Crash and You, by Richard Duncan…in 2001.

Occupy Fear and Loathing Tour / Documentary Trailer w/Michael C. Ruppert

Interview by Gabrielle Price

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhfKppG31P8]

Much more from our interview with Michael to come.  We wanted to share this as it is relevant in timing to world events happening now.  Many thanks to Michael and his assistant and fellow Trend Researcher, Max Mogren for their time and commitment to helping others face collapse consciously.  Find others building lifeboats and keeping the lighthouse fires burning at Collapsenet.com. There are many free resources available at Collapsenet as well.

Remember : You don’t have to outrun the bear ~ just be faster than the slowest camper.