Murder is terror

2003: "Hey, you're Al Qaeda, we're gonna kill you and steal your oil."
2011: "Hey Al Qaeda, can you help us kill this other guy and steal his oil?"

Moral of the story: If you get in bed with the CIA, you'll prolly end up dead.

The End of Suburbia

Two interesting reads from Yahoo! of all places, although I totally disagree with the title of the quoted article. We've been here for a couple of years now.

In the years following World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented consumption boom. Anything you could measure was growing. A Rhode Island-sized chunk of land was bulldozed to make new suburbs every single year for decades. America rounded into its present-day shape.

Along the way, there were three inexorable trends at the base of the societal pyramid. First, we plowed more energy into our homes each and every year. We cooled and heated our houses more (sometimes wastefully, sometimes not), brought in more and more appliances, added televisions and computers and phones. Per capita electricity shot up from about 4,000 kilowatt-hours per US resident to over 13,000 kilowatt-hours by the 2000s. Second, we needed more electricity because our houses got huge. The median home size shot up from about 1,500 square feet in the early 1970s to more than 2,200 square feet in the mid-200s. Third, we drove more and more miles every year to get around and between our sprawled-out cities. Back in 1960, Americans drove 0.72 trillion miles. By 2000, that number had reached 2.75 trillion miles. In 2007, vehicle miles traveled hit 3.02 trillion.

Now, though, the relentless growth in those figures is coming to an end. The AP's Jonathan Fahey reported last week that the utility company research consortium, the Electric Power Research Institute, projected that residential electricity demand would drop over the next ten years.
-Yahoo! Finance

Filipinos afraid to take a stance in Spratly row?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the Philippine Left's relative silence over the issue of Chinese violation of Philippine sovereign territory in the Philippines. So-called "Nationalists" are wary of any excuse to increase US military involvement in the region, and rightfully so.
However, just because you don't want the US to have an excuse to intervene/occupy doesn't mean that it's okay for another imperial country to steal your resources.
That's what this issue is really about.
Both countries have been stealing Philippine resources for generations. Both countries are promoting civil war in the Philippines, from multiple sides. Neither country has the best interests of the Filipino people in mind.
However, the hardcore Philippine Left is dominated by maoists, who, for obvious reasons, seem to feel that China can do no wrong. In contrast, they will make all kinds of noise to protest whenever the United States steals oil from any other country.
I understand that people are afraid that taking a Nationalist stance on the Spratly issue plays into the hands of the western imperialists, but sitting on your hands while China steals your vital resources is an even worse strategy. China ain't run by Mao. China is runnin with the bankstas...even after getting slapped across the face with a Christine Lagarde appointment as IMF chief.
This is just another example of how blind devotion to ideology leaves you...well, blind.
On the other hand though, a series of protests is being called for today in front of Chinese embassies in the US. The protests are being organized by Fil-Ams that are not exactly nationalists. They will most likely be calling for US assistance/intervention. I don't agree with that either.
It's a complex issue that requires everyone to look at the big picture. The big picture is, China is stealing vital resources from the Philippines, and that ain't right.

The New World Order

China, meet Russia.
Russia, meet China.

So Saudi Arabia is the king of OPEC, and they say they're gonna open up the pumps, but it ain't that easy.

Khalid al Falih, chief executive officer of state-owned Saudi Aramco, recently warned in April that at the country’s current rate of growth in domestic oil consumption, Saudi Arabia would burn a staggering 8.3 million barrels a day of its own oil by 2028. That is almost its current level of production.
-Globe and Mail

So much for OPEC.
Pumps in Russia, on the other hand, have already been flowing freely.

Russia, the one country actually capable of producing 10 million barrels a day, isn’t even at the table at the OPEC meeting. And it’s been Russia that has been adding the most to world exports over the better part of the last decade as OPEC exports have faltered.

Oil production in Russia, the world’s largest producer, rose to a near post-Soviet high of 10.26 million barrels a day in May. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which has been hard pressed to maintain even a nine million barrel a day production level, Russian production has been north of ten million barrels a day since September 2009.
-Globe and Mail

Interesting.
Invading, occupying, and stealing all of the oil out of Russia won't be such an easy task for the United States (the world's largest consumer of oil). Russia actually has a military. Oh yeah, AND a shitload of nuclear missiles. I guess we'll actually have to purchase it.
Speaking of which...
China has become the world's largest consumer of energy, but still uses up only half as much oil as the US. That could certainly change if Russia wanted it to, and why wouldn't they want it to? They know Beijing's new aircraft carriers weren't built to attack Moscow. Oh yeah, and the two countries just opened up a direct oil pipeline between Russia's East Siberia and China's city of Daqing.

So Russia has all the oil, and China owns everyone's debt, but the banking cartel is run by Europeans and Americans.
I'm bearish on the latter two.

UPDATE: Apparently, a couple of Chinese guys were invited to this year's Bilderberg meet.

Peak Oil

This Catalyst investigation is a great, digestable breakdown of the Peak Oil issue. This 12-minute clip explores how we may look back at 2011's sky-high fuel prices as the "good old days, when gas was cheap."

"I think it would have been better if the governments had started to work on it at least 10 years ago."
-Dr. Fatih Birol
International Energy Agency

The International Energy Agency says we passed peak 2 years ago.

One year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster

BP is apparently doing quite well a year after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded a mile above its blown-out well off the coast of Lousiana, spilling at least 5 million barrels of light crude and a huge amount of methane into the Gulf of Mexico.

NEW ORLEANS – It's hard to tell that just a year ago BP was reeling from financial havoc and an American public out for blood. The oil giant at the center of one of the world's biggest environmental crises is making strong profits again, its stock has largely rebounded, and it is paying dividends to shareholders once more. It is also pursuing new ventures from the Arctic to India. It is even angling to explore again in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where it holds more leases than any competitor.
-Associated Press

Unfortunately, Gulf residents are not doing so well. In addition to the fact that Gulf fishermen are struggling to make a living in the now-polluted waters, workers who cleaned up the spill are suffering from a variety of otherwise unexplained illnesses.

"They told me it (the chemical dispersants used by BP) was just as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid and there was nothing for me to worry about."
-Gulf resident Jamie Simon

The toxic spewing lasted for 87 days, and made for great internet viewing. Experts are divided over where all the oil went. Did it just naturally disperse/get eaten up, or is it still lurking on the sea floor?

The discovery of oil on the seafloor also begins to account for the 23 percent of the oil that was not recovered directly, dispersed chemically or naturally, evaporated or dissolved, burned or skimmed, according to a report released Nov. 23 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
-Cosmic Log

Samantha Joye, the outspoken University of Georgia scientist who first discovered the massive underwater plumes of oil that BP and US government officials have repeatedly denied the existence of, continues the work of searching for the truth despite intense backlash.

"I think it is not beyond the imagination that 50% of the oil is still floating around out there."
-Samantha Joye

Earth's Day

It happened two days before the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, but it was centuries in the making. An oil rig floating a mile over its well went BOOM! and Mother Earth has been bleeding badly ever since.
An oil spill bigger than Massachusetts, Connecticut, AND Rhode Island combined continues unabated in the Gulf of Mexico.
Oil kills, in case you didn't know, and a whole lot of it has been leaked into one of the more ecologically siginifcant areas on the globe. This is some major MAJOR shit. To quote Mike Ruppert, it's "Cataclysmic." The Earth has had a fever for some time, now it is fighting back against the disease of human greed. It ain't just BP. It ain't just Halliburton. It ain't about Bush/Cheney or Obama. The whole damn system of easy living is guilty.
Mama, I'm rockin your jersey and I'm cheering from the stands. Do what you gotta do.

I can hear my mother call
Late at night I hear her call
Oh lord, lord I hear her call
She said, "Father, father it's for the kids
Each and every thing I did.
Please, please don't judge me too strong.
Lord knows I meant no wrong.
-Funkadelic

"Fundamentally it's really an issue of funding"

Check out these choice nuggets from a recent Tribune article.

"Bay Area roadways are in horrible disrepair, according to a new report that says state highways in Oakland and San Francisco are the second-worst in the nation and are only going to get worse without a significant infusion of cash."

And where will this money come from? The quick answer is the feds, which means China. Do they want to invest in better California roads? Are cars really the transport mechanism of the future? The Chinese seem to prefer bikes and trains in their own country.

"What's more, nearly 50 percent of Bay Area bridges and overpasses are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete."

Yes, half of all bridges and overpasses. Considering how there are more and more people living under these bridges and overpasses these days, someone should be concerned.

"With California's population continuing to grow, the state must improve its system of roads, highways, bridges and public transit to spark economic growth, avoid business relocations, and ensure the safety, the report said."

It's good news that people still want to come to California, and those people deserve better than outdated thinking.

Healthy Food in the Hood

This is ultimately the problem:


So the answer is obviously localization, right?
But what if you live in the concrete jungle?
Watch food activist Bryant Terry talk about quasi-apartheid in the food system, and advocate for projects that address food insecurity in the “food deserts” of low-income communities.

So how do we start to achieve "Food Justice?"
In this clip, he joins forces with Jason Harvey of the Oakland Food Connection during an organic soul party.

Jason Harvey talks about a
Rooftop garden project in East Oakland.

And because “You can’t live on a corner store,” The People’s Grocery

If you made it through all of those, congratulations, here is your parting gift:
The Hood Diet