the Ron Paul question...

i see the arguments as valid, both for and against the man.

"against" because he'll sever social services almost to the bone... and he'll do so during a time they'll be more needed than ever as the EU implodes and more U.S. municipalities grow insolvent.

"for" because he'll gut the defense budget, and put a stop (or at least a cessation) to the paranoid fascist police state we're rapidly becoming.

ultimately for me, until I hear more about his energy plan, i'm undecided on him...  if Paul thinks the free market will just seamlessly solve the energy crisis on its own without government help, he's more of an idiot than i'd ever have guessed.  Or he just doesn't understand - or accept - what we face. That's a very scary position to take for the leader of the "free" world, as we witness the world's spare capacity drawing down to a drip.

I'm not naive. I get why we spend 660+ billion dollars each year on the military. The defense budget is the only part of government that keeps getting a raise, and that is because its main function (for decades) is to keep bringing the oil safely home to all Western nations. NATO's geostrategy is absolutely ALL about energy, and that's why the Pentagon budget remains so bloated during a time of profound austerity already. ... Paul doesn't agree that it should be that way. He wants to close a lot of bases. That would usher in a major change to how the world oil pie gets divied up. I do hope Paul understands that the "drill baby drill" mantra is quite hollow ... Because any way you slice it, this continent does not have the reserves, nor the production capacity to cut imports very much at all. It's basic arithmetic, and that is the plain truth to anyone looking at the EIA's own data of flow rates on these various "heavy oil alternatives."

I like a lot of what Ron Paul says... But with "them" likely holding Congress, a Paul presidency would most definitely shock the system, ...   the problem is  I'm not sure this country is healthy enough to survive the surgery, and may not come out of anesthesia. The surgery I speak of would be cutting the cord to multi-national investment banks. Because make no mistake about it: when the next Lehman happens (BofA? Deutsche?), if it comes under a Paul presidency? It's domino time.

As for the racism dart they keep trying to pin on him, not buyin' it. At least not at this point. ... He was a fool to not take his name off that publication, sure, but I don't believe the man is racist. (though I'll admit his uptight reaction in "Bruno" was priceless).

What Peak Oil Looks Like | Energy Bulletin

What Peak Oil Looks Like | Energy Bulletin

It’s symptomatic that in the last few weeks I’ve fielded a fair number of emails insisting that the peak oil theory—of course it’s not a theory at all; it’s a hard fact that the extraction of a finite oil supply in the ground will sooner or later reach a peak and begin to decline—has been rendered obsolete by the latest flurry of enthusiastic claims about shale oil and the like. Enthusiastic claims about the latest hot new oil prospect are hardly new, and indeed they’ve been central to cornucopian rhetoric since M. King Hubbert’s time. A decade ago, it was the Caspian Sea oilfields that were being invoked as supposedly conclusive evidence that a peak in global conventional petroleum production wouldn’t arrive in our lifetimes. Compare the grand claims made for the Caspian fields back then, and the trickle of production that actually resulted from those fields, and you get a useful reality check on the equally sweeping claims now being made for the Bakken shale, but that’s not a comparison many people want to make just now.

On the other side of the energy spectrum, those who insist that we can power some equivalent of our present industrial system on sun, wind, and other diffuse renewable sources have been equally vocal, and those of us who raise reasonable doubts about that insistence can count on being castigated as “doomers.” It’s probably not accidental that this particular chorus seems to go up in volume with every ethanol refinery or solar panel manufacturer that goes broke and every study showing that the numbers put forth to back some renewable energy scheme simply don’t add up. It’s no more likely to be accidental that the rhetoric surrounding the latest fashionable fossil fuel play heats up steadily as production at the world’s supergiant fields slides remorselessly down the curve of depletion. The point of such rhetoric, as I suggested in a post a while back, isn’t to deal with the realities of our situation; it’s to pretend that those realities don’t exist, so that the party can go on and the hard choices can be postponed just a little longer.

Thus our civilization has entered what John Kenneth Galbraith called “the twilight of illusion,” the point at which the end of a historical process would be clearly visible if everybody wasn’t so busy finding reasons to look somewhere else.

Fracking firm admits it causes quakes

Fracking firm admits it caused earthquakes in England

When two small earthquakes struck near Blackpool, England in April and May, suspicious eyes turned toward the hydraulic fracturing operation in the area. In a move few expected, Cuadrilla Resources, admitted that its shale fracking operations were indeed responsible.

In a press release issued today, Cuadrilla explained the findings of an investigation of the tremors

So there it is. ... In black and white. ... A fracking corporation ADMITTING their technology literally causes earthquakes. Couple that with the rash of minor quakes throughout the rust belt, Oklahoma, Arkansas, etc. the past 3-4 years.

Then notice how clever the soothing "new natural gas" commercials are that have become so prevalent lately. Good looking blonde comes marching out, speaking melodically about the "wonders" of "new, safe technology" in the "field of natural gas extraction!!" ... and dreams of "energy independence for a brighter American future" because "it just makes sense." :rolleyes:

They're so careful never to say the word "fracking", "fracturing" nor anything about the toxic chemical shake that gets injected under the bedrock of U.S. neighborhoods and often into their drinking water. That kind of "surgeon general's warning" doesn't spur investment and happiness and gumdrops and lollipops. Nevermind that a growing number of Americans can light the water from their kitchen sink's faucet on fire. As the stunned director says so simply in the documentary Gasland: "ah, that's not supposed to happen."

Increased fracturing, or "new drilling techniques," to conquer this "continent" of natural gas and shale oil here in America? It will do nothing but accelerate the environmental rotting process of this once-great nation.

Even if the United States DOUBLED it's shale oil and natural gas production, assuming private enterprise somehow came up with all the mind-boggling infrastructure and logistical costs associated with such an expansion (during a time of austerity measures, mind you)... wait, no... say TRIPLED. ... It STILL isn't gonna come close to satiating more than a tiny fraction of our 89 million barrels per day appetite. Have you seen the figures for current production, comparing conventional and unconventional oil and gas? I have. They're easy to find on "teh Googles." For total unconventional production, it ain't a big number, annually, at all.

Then imagine the legal costs for any drilling corporation that devastates a U.S. community for "ever more" of this crap.

In the end, it's simple. The dirtier it gets, the more the costs are going to rise. Whether we're talking strip mining the American frontier, or drilling deep under the U.S. sea bed. ... Those costs are going rapidly upward. Both in terms of the infrastructural/extraction/refinement/distribution side of it, AND in the environmental and legal side of it.

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, theologist, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America:

"I'm an enemy of fundamentalism, period. ... The new Christian right (wing) in this country are heretics. The notion that we are called upon to amass wealth, ... I mean, that's not Biblical. It's not supported by the Bible." 

------------

"Our decline began when we shifted from an empire of production to an empire of consumption... by the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society," and domestic oil production began it's steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed... 

We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle - as well as an empire - we could no longer afford... we began to use force to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil... and the bill is now due... America's most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals, but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free market capitalism and globalization... they have dynamited the foundations of our society.


In the 17th Century these speculators would have been hung. Today, they run the government and consume billions in tax-payer subsidies. These corporate forces will never permit real reform. It would mean their extinction. The oil and gas industry will never allow us to achieve energy independence. That would devastate their profits. Real reform would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in weapons contracts."

 -  Empire of Illusion speech.

G'day mate!

From the Australian government's senate committee report:

"The case is made that the global peaking of crude oil production has happened 2005-2008. This triggered the financial crisis in a banking sector which had a pre-condition of accumulated debt. The recession which was to be expected after peak oil has now damaged the economy, making it harder to respond to the evolving oil & energy crisis.

The root cause for the global financial crisis was and still is the untested assumption of perpetual economic growth, an almost religious belief that fueled investments to underpin such growth, the use of accumulating debt to finance it and the slowly dawning realization that such growth could not and cannot happen due to high oil prices and limited oil production."

http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/fuelenergy_ctte/submissions/sub0103.pdf

White's Law

From Wiki: 
White's law, named after Leslie White and published in 1943, states that, other factors remaining constant, "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased".^[1]