A Crude Awakening - Peak Oil Video

For anyone who hasn't yet seen it, the award-winning video, A Crude Awakening, is about as good as you'll get to an introduction on Peak Oil. It is well worth the investment of an hour and a half of time to watch it.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-665674869982904386]

Corporate Media Dips a Toe into Peak Oil: Addendum

"The U.S. media, in general, wants to avoid discussing why many scientists believe that global oil production will probably peak in the near future, if it hasn’t already. They prefer happy talk of oil sands, coal-to-oil and cellulosic ethanol developments even if those developments have little probability of replacing declining conventional oil production. In the end, the talk may soothe the minds of the motoring public, but it won’t change the probability of peak oil."

This quote is lifted from an article by Roger Blanchard in the Energy Bulletin in response to a Peak Oil article carried in the New York Times, March 5, 2007. Also, considerable Peak Oil coverage in the English language mainstream media, though not in the NAmerican mainstream media, has been offered by The Independent. See here, here and here.

So, yes, there has been some Peak Oil coverage in the print media (ergo, not mass media, as that is the domain of the tube), but falls far short of what Peak Oilers would consider a reasonable educational initiative. And most certainly, the words "Peak Oil" have not been uttered by any sitting government in the Western world. The political concerns should be self-evident. If the message is not massaged and managed "correctly" then a mass hysteria, stock piling, and run on banks is quite possible.

So to refrain the post of January 11th, it is left to the Obama administration to drop this bomb shell into the public's lap. The motive for doing so and the manner in which the message will be managed remain to be seen. One thing is certain, Western governments can not sit on the Peak Oil lid for much longer.

When the cat is finally let out of the bag will said governments be able to stroke a purring, household pet, or will they have on their hands feral consequences for which there are no known, easy and ready "strokes" because the condition is wild, wild, wild?

Henry Kissinger: The NWO Non-Useless Eater

It stands to reason that as the world economic crisis deepens, the orchestrated calls for a "new world order" will increase. To the degree that the economic crisis has been engineered to allow for the full-blown unveiling of a NWO is left to each individual's level of political perception, sophistication and opinion. Be that as it may, the recent calls for a NWO have been ramped up to a new level...and they are no longer diplomatically veiled. A good overview of this "surge" is offered by The August Review article, Chorus Call for New World Order.

But what better NWO cheerleader to trot out than that beloved war criminal and non-useless eater, Hank Kissinger, hisself. This may very well be his last kick at the can and he spares no punches. To do so, he is given front page exposure by the International Herald Tribune with the op-ed piece, The Chance for a New World Order.

This is on top of the recent CNBC interview with Hank held on the floor of the NYSE (nice symbolic backdrop!).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBCFtJQPnOg]

This brazen media offensive will only increase. The time has arrived (because it has been orchestrated?) for the NWO agenda to be fully unleashed and implemented. Look for the complimentary releasing of the Peak Oil cat from its bag by the Obama administration some time this year. How it will dovetail with "the test" which has been forecast and will be dropped into his lap soon after the inauguration remains to be seen.

None of this ramping up should come as surprise. As the condition/crisis matures it is next to impossible to keep the blinders on the public's eyes. How the public will respond once the blinders are removed is the great unknown. It's handy to have the fall-back position of several hundred FEMA "detention centers" and a couple of battle-tested Army brigades.
Hang on. We are in for a ride! What? You expect history to be a touchy-feely cakewalk?

Corporate Media Dips a Toe Into Peak Oil

The Montreal Gazette has released a story on Peak Oil by William Marsden with the byline: The age of oil is ending. No mention of the nefarious two words, but the ball is rolling. So here we go; the public is finally getting prepped. There are all sorts of signals coming out of the U.S. administration-elect that the shit is about to hit the fan in a very serious way.

The BDI Song Bird

In pre high-tech coal mines the miners used to rely on a caged song bird to warn if there was a build up of dangerous gases. When the song bird dropped dead, it was time to quickly get out of the shafts.

Well, the BDI song bird is chirping its head off and going into death convulsions.

The Baltic Dry Index tracks the price of shipping bulk cargo. It is a concrete barometer of the global trade in economic building blocks like iron ore, coal and grain. The BDI is not a traded index so no one profits from the index itself, which makes it virtually manipulation proof. It is what it is; its numbers tell a fairly accurate story.

As recently as last June, around the same time that crude peaked at $147 a barrel, the BDI stood at a reasonably healthy 11,600. It has currently plummeted to 791. That’s about a 94% drop in goods actually being shipped worldwide.

Put simply, the cost of shipping has dropped through the floor. For example, sending a tonne of iron ore from Brazil to China in early June would have set you back more than $100 per tonne, or around $15m per voyage. But freight rates have now dropped to only slightly over $10 per tonne, or just $1.5m for the 70-90 day journey.

The BDI's plummet points towards unprecedented disaster around the world, especially as it relates to food. Products are simply not being shipped. The products aren't being shipped because there aren't any orders for them.

Of particular interest in the following video is the correlation between the decline in crude shipping and the tanking of the DPI.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXATSV8S3-M]

DarthDubious, Song Bird #1

Hubris and Nemisis, Song Bird #2

The Independent, Song Bird #3

NAmerican Secessionist Movement Asleep-At-The-Wheel

It took just about a month for the mainstream media to catch up to a story on the disintegration of NAmerica that first broke on November 25, 2008. I refer, of course, to the WSJ article which ran on December 29: As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S. The WSJ article is getting a lot of play in the blogosphere. The original Izvestia story, as was covered by Global Futures, was touched on with a post in this blog and can be jumped to here (link to the original Global Futures article inclusive).

The motives for such an esteemed gatekeeper as the WSJ to run with this story is left to individual imaginations. It is safe to say that the determination of motive will vary to the degree of one's political smarts and where one sits within the conspiracy cosmos, i.e. alternative interpretation of "news." The acknowledged role of the corporate media within such "conspiracy cosmos" goes without saying.

More to the point, the issue for the NAmerican secessionist movement (NASM) around this story is not if Prof. Panarin is a nut job or to the degree, if any, that his theories on the break-up of the United States serve Russian propaganda purposes. The issue for the NASM here is the degree to which it has been caught with its pants down. By all rights, the NASM should be all over this story and the wide public attention it is receiving like a dirty shirt; it should be collecting PR premiums, via the positioning of the NASM in the public psyche, hand-over-fist.

Unfortunately, the NASM is asleep-at-the-wheel because it is currently structured to be asleep-at-the-wheel, i.e. there is no structure. Within a context of political organization, the movement is straddled with a non-organized gaggle of non-affiliated state/provincial and regional secessionist initiatives ranging from the politically astute and professional (Quebec, Vermont, The South, Texas, Alaska), to fledgling start-ups, to the competition amongst Cascadian organizations as to who can design the prettiest web site.

The Middlebury Institute, widely recognized as being the clearing house for secessionist news and information, makes no mention of the Panarin story. The American Secession Project is likewise out of the loop, which stands to reason as it has been dormant since 2007.

After the major international media breakthroughs accomplished at the Second NAmerican Secessionist Convention held in Chattanooga, TN in 2007, the NASM took a step backwards with the poorly organized Third NAmerican Secessionist Convention held this past November in Manchester, NH. For the media it was a non-event, likely due to a combination of Obamamania, lack of interest, and poorly executed press releases.

2008: Financial Meltdown + Peak Oil = ?

Here's a small tap up the side of the head in case anyone need's jarring from Newton's Sleep. We all know things are bad and about to get much worse. The following snapshot of the 2008 performance of the world's stock markets captures the meltdown quite succinctly. This comes via Davos over at Chris Martenson's site who, in turn, pointed me towards Bespoke Investment Group. Remember that stock market performance usually foreshadows by several months where and how economic performance will go. If you wish, you can overlay Bob Chapman's January 7th commentary for greater nuts n' bolts clarity. Now factor in the consensus, nicely arranged in a post by Cliff Wirth, that global oil production peaked in 2008, and we have a stage set for some interesting, painful and...very different times. Okay, back to sleep now.