Mainstream Media Acknowledges Russian Decline

Times have changed for the Russian bear. With oil prices hovering around the $70s a barrel, Russia is unable to support Putin's ambitions. With the global climate failing to warm, vast Arctic oil and gas fields remain out of reach in a frozen wasteland. With a corrupt Russian leadership alienating foreign investors and failing to rejuvenate its own population and its own technology infrastructure -- Russia is in big trouble.

Today, the super-giant Shtockmann natural-gas field under the Arctic sea—Russia's only big hydrocarbon discovery since Soviet times—has just been mothballed due to the towering cost of extracting the undersea gas. At the same time, worldwide demand for Russia's gas has plummeted. And meanwhile, the government has punctured investor confidence by pressuring BP, one of the few major foreign investors left in Russia's energy sector, to hand over a giant Siberian gas field to a government-owned rival. It's time for Moscow to kiss goodbye those dreams of energy hegemony.

One problem is that the recession has eviscerated European demand for Russian natural gas (consumption dipped by 7 percent in 2009). Another is that demand in the United States for imported natural gas has fallen off too. Thanks to shale gas and other unconventional sources like tar sands, the U.S. is now close to self-sufficient in natural gas. It's a nightmare for Shtockmann, where the business plan hinged on freezing the product into liquified natural gas, or LNG, for export to the United States.

That made the Shtockmann field, with reserves of 3.7 trillion cubic meters, seem less like the strategic future of Russian natural gas and more like an M&M that fell behind the couch—tasty, but not strictly necessary and very hard to reach. The $20 billion cost of extracting the deep-buried gas in the harsh conditions of the Arctic has proved prohibitive for Gazprom and its minority partners, Total of France and Statoil of Norway.

That's a problem for Gazprom, which was the main cudgel of Putin's foreign policy just four years ago, when he played one European country against another in their eagerness to lay Gazprom pipelines across their territory. Now the European market seems oversupplied. More worrying still, Gazprom's traditional suppliers (gas fields in the Central Asian nations of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan) have begun opening their own direct pipelines to China, where gas consumption has a future. And though Gazprom still controls about 17 percent of the world's proven natural-gas reserves, many of its existing fields are beginning to run dry. Getting at the remainder—for instance at the Bovanenkovo field in the remote Yamal Peninsula in Siberia—will need massive investment of cash and know-how. Who wants to sink in that kind of money with no guarantee of returns?

That's why the latest attack on BP is so strange—and so dumb. A time of falling demand, unstable energy prices, and investor nervousness about emerging markets might seem like a bad moment to crack down on one of the few large foreign investors in Russia's energy sector. But that hasn't stopped Russia's Natural Environment Inspectorate, or RosPrirodNadzor, from threatening to throw BP off the giant Kovykta gas field in Eastern Siberia. The official reason for the threat is alleged environmental infractions—the same reasons cited by the Russian state when Royal Dutch Shell was persuaded to sell Gazprom its stake in an oilfield in Sakhalin two years ago for below market value. But the real reason seems to be that the state oil company Rosneft has its eye on BP's field. _Newsweek

The end of the Putin model?

Taking the "R" out of BRIC

The mainstream media is hesitant to present the whole sordid story: Russia's population collapse due to an abysmal national health infrastructure, and very low birth rates. The influx of fast-breeding and violent Muslim immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia. The rusting away of Russia's industrial and military infrastructure. And much more bad news for Russia.

Al Fin has been telling you all of this for years. The mainstream media -- being composed of unintelligent and indoctrinated products of a lobotomised academic culture -- will never quite catch up to a reality foreseen long ago by brighter lights.

But Russia, and much of Europe, are losing population too quickly to maintain what is left of a former greatness. Outsiders are pouring through the breech in the defenses. Very little time remains. They should use it wisely.

Europe: What Are You Doing to Your Own People?

H/T Gates of Vienna

Europe is turning to the dark side of censorship, groupthink, and persecution of outspoken and independent thinkers. European leftism by itself is enough to destroy the continent, with its intolerance of free speech and association, and its dieoff.org style faux environmentalism.

But when you tack on the onslaught of immigrants from Islamic countries -- people generally resistant to assimilation, intolerant to other ways of thinking, of typically low IQ, low aptitude for escaping welfare, of violent impulses and high fecundity -- Europe is putting an exclamation mark to her own suicide.

Hyper-Leveraged Economy Always Doomed

H/T Financial Armageddon

International investment bankers outsmarted themselves -- and devastated the global economy -- by going much too far out on the leverage limb.  Governments went along, because the money was just too good.

In other words, your government -- like the large investment banker -- is clueless as to how to grow a healthy economy.  Governments will try to spend their way out of a financial hole, regardless of the level of pre-existing debt.  You might ask Greece how that is working out for them.

Your government is out for itself.  You had best take care of yourself while you still have time.

BBC Caught in Huge Conflict of Interest Scandal

Government supported British media, the BBC, has been caught out in a huge journalistic ethics scandal that threatens to rock the institution to its very foundations.

Well, the BBC, a prime proponents of warming theory, or AGW, has heavily invested its pension fund in the theory, and thus have had a major non-Scientific reason for their bias. As revealed this weekend in The Express:
The corporation is under investigation after being inundated with complaints that its editorial coverage of climate change is biased in favour of those who say it is a man-made phenomenon. The £8billion pension fund is likely to come under close scrutiny over its commitment to promote a low-carbon economy while struggling to reverse an estimated £2billion deficit. Concerns are growing that BBC journalists and their bosses regard disputed scientific theory that climate change is caused by mankind as “mainstream” while huge sums of employees’ money is invested in companies whose success depends on the theory being widely accepted. The BBC is the only media organisation in Britain whose pension fund is a member of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which has more than 50 members across Europe.

The IIGCC is an interesting group. As their website explains:
The IIGCC is a forum for collaboration on climate change for European investors. The group’s objective is to catalyse greater investment in a low carbon economy by bringing investors together to use their collective influence with companies, policymakers and investors. The group currently has over 50 members, including some of the largest pension funds and asset managers in Europe, and represents assets of around €4 trillion.

Wait… I hate to be a skeptic, but did they just say… “Four Trillion Euros”? _BigJournalism

For four trillion euros, Al Gore, Raj Pachauri, Phil Jones, and Barack Obama would no doubt send 99% of the world's population to the antipodes of the universe with no chance of safe return. No wonder the BBC has been so gung-ho about man-made global warming! I wonder what skin the New York Times has in the game?

Right about now, anyone connected with politics and the media who has come out strongly -- well beyond reason and logic -- in support of big carbon taxes, big carbon trading, and multi-billion dollar reparations to environmental groups, the UN, and third world countries needs to be shot have their affairs looked into very scrupulously.

Organised crime is beginning to look very ethical in comparison to this climate scam affair. Shame on the BBC, and anyone else involved.

Can the Tea Party Movement Sprout in Europe?

Here is what the growing American Tea Party movement is about:

What the tea party activists do have is a well formulated set of ideas — small government, debt reduction, spending restraint, and an aversion to hurried, secret deal making. It is an agenda that is resonating with conservatives and independent voters who see the opposite behavior in Washington._J.Rubin 

It has been noted that Europe has the same problems with excessive debt, excessive spending, a bureaucracy growing exorbitantly large, and a central government that is nonresponsive to its citizens' problems, as the US government suffers from.  Some have wondered if a Tea Party movement for Europe might be just the thing:

Europe is in many respects an economic never-never land. It has a central bank to run a coordinated monetary policy, and a single currency, but it has several dozen finance ministries pursuing separate fiscal policies, many of which can be summed up as: Spend, spend, spend. In fiscal terms, "Europe" is often a riderless horse._RealClearPolitics

 Unfortunately for Europe, its people have never learned to emerge from the "groupthink" mentality which has dominated the Old World for millenia.  The Old World is known throughout history for murdering its prophets and wise men, and elevating its bloodthirsty maniacs to positions of power.  Old World residents are cowed in the face of authority.

Perhaps some Europeans can change, as they see their doors to freedom and prosperity closing irrevocably. More likely, the vast majority of Europeans will accept what they are told by authority and media, and behave like good little Euros.   And then, lights out.

Cautious Look Ahead at an Islamic Europe

We are not talking about a rapid replacement of Europeans by third world tribal muslims -- not across the entirety of Europe.  First, the replacement will occur within larger cities such as Marseilles, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussells, London.  Since these cities are the seats of power for entire nations, the shock waves of population replacement will rattle the windows and shake the house frames across all of Europe.

It is impossible to overstate the psychological impact of an entire advanced but gelded civilisation being overtaken by one more primitive and aggressive.

Some European nations will survive -- as Israel currently survives surrounded and infiltrated by tribal people who hate the existence of the more advanced nation.  Europe will become another battlefield of the "forever war."  The war that has continued since the beginning of Islam, and that will persist until either Islam is gone, or there is no threat to the overweaning dominance of Islam.

When particular European nations -- and parts of nations -- fall to a more fertile, vital, and aggressive third world Islam, the rest of the (non-Islamic) world will look on in horror.  Perhaps China will enjoy the spectacle, imagining itself immune from the type of suicidal immigration threat that Europe brought upon itself.   It is unlikely that the Anglosphere that survives -- Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US -- will take the collapse of Europe lightly.

But then, the Anglosphere will have Islamic problems of its own -- brought on by dysfunctional immigration and suicidal political correctness.

Perhaps the real impetus for the "age of the seastead" will be a swarming locust-like dominance of Islam over the land masses of Earth, forcing the remnants of the civilised nations into the seas, to the poles, and into space -- if they are competent and prepared enough.

Peak Oil Fails to Take A Lot Into Consideration

The Earth contains massive quantities of heavy oils and bitumens (among other unconventional fossil fuels). The videos below first describe Alberta's rapidly expanding bitumens industry, and then look at a promising method of converting heavy oils and bitumens into light oils for transport via pipeline. At today's consumption rates, Earth has well over a thousand years' worth of oil and oil-equivalents that are currently known and accessible. But realistically, humans will stop the large scale burning of fossil fuels within the next hundred years -- due to better alternatives.

HTL is based on the time-tested concept of thermal cracking and carbon rejection. The key innovation is speed - HTL incorporates ultra short processing times compared with significantly longer times for conventional technologies such as delayed coking. HTL has the added advantage over coking technologies in that it converts by-product coke to on-site energy, instead of incurring the costs of accumulating and managing large stockpiles of low value coke. HTL upgrading does not require catalysts, hydrogen or significant pressure. The net result is relatively small scale, low cost facilities that can be field located where energy and other heat integration benefits are maximized. _Ivanhoe

Ivanhoe Energy Company
Heavy oils and bitumens represent a huge worldwide resource of petroleum fuels. Ivanhoe Energy Company has developed a fast, high temperature, low energy demand cracking method for turning heavy oils and bitumen into light oils -- so that the oils can be easily piped to refineries. Its commercial demonstration plant in California proved the technology which is not being put in place in Canada, Ecuador, China, and Mongolia.

The video explains how hot sand is used to separate coke byproduct from the light oil, and how the coke byproduct is then used to fuel the ongoing heating of the recirculated sand. It is a low-water process which essentially fuels itself.

The HTL process represents the application of a commercially-proven technology to a new feedstock. The technology initially was developed in the 1980s by a predecessor company of a private, Ottawa-based company called Ensyn Corporation. Ensyn has been applying its RTP technology (the biomass equivalent of HTL) on a commercial basis since 1989. Seven commercial Ensyn biomass processing facilities are in operation in the United States and Canada.

...In late-2004, Ensyn commissioned the 1,000-barrel-per-day Commercial Demonstration Facility (CDF) in the Belridge heavy-oil field in Southern California. The purpose of the CDF was to confirm product quality and yields in a significantly scaled-up facility. Numerous successful runs were carried out in the period beginning in 2005 and through mid-2007, culminating in the successful processing of Athabasca bitumen in mid-2007.

In 2005, Ivanhoe completed a merger with Ensyn Group Inc. and now has full control of the patented, proprietary upgrading technology for the development of heavy oil. Ensyn Corporation retains the rights to biomass applications.

Ivanhoe now is working with AMEC, its tier one contractor, on the design and engineering of full-scale HTL facilities related to the commercial initiatives under way.
_Ivanhoe

The world still has plenty of crude oil. But the quantity of extractable crude oil is eclipsed by the quantity of heavy oils, bitumens, kerogens, coal, and natural gas (including methane hydrates). Better means of extracting and converting these alternatives to light oils and liquid fuels are inevitable, as political peak oil continues to set in.

Political peak oil is primarily a consequence of most of the world's oil falling into the hands of oil dictators and corrupt national oil companies -- who enjoy consuming the profits from their oil fields, but do not wish to put the proper investment into personnel, maintenance and new technologies that optimal oil field management requires. Thus oil that should be extractable becomes non-extractable, and equipment that should last 50 years, rusts into disrepair in 10 to 20 years.

Political peak oil is secondarily a consequence of misguided climate and faux environmental policies of more advanced nations, which makes development of abundant oil, gas, coal, kerogen, bitumen, and heavy oil resources much more expensive and difficult than it should be.

Human innovation is necessary to bypass as many of the obstacles put in place by political peak oil as possible.

From a post at Al Fin Energy

Expect Massive Layoffs in Public Sector Employment

Thanks to labour union overreach, and the inability of elected officials to deal with the tough tactics of union enforcers, the groundwork for massive public employee layoffs is being built across the US. The ongoing recession - depression highlights the problem, but it would have erupted sooner or later even without the Obama downturn.

Cities, states, and municipalities are sinking by the minute. And unless unions agree to concessions (which they won't) massive layoffs are coming everywhere you look.

...Layoff stories are endless, and layoffs in the public sector have barely started. Those layoffs are likely to be staggering unless Obama and Congress are willing to go much deeper in debt, specifically to bail out failed states.

The budget deficit religion in Obama's state of the union message will surely be put to the test.

4th quarter GDP numbers will give one last reason to celebrate. However, that will be the last hurrah. The next GDP report will be nothing more than a rear view mirror look of inventory rebuilding, failed stimulus plans like cash-for-clunkers, and housing tax credits.

Here's a sobering thought for all the stock market bulls: The best of this "recovery" is now likely behind us, the official unemployment rate is still over 10%, and massive layoffs are on the horizon for city and state workers across the country. _Mish_via_NewsAlert

First the private sector is parasitised by the public sector. Then the public sector itself falls apart for lack of a private sector to support it. At that point sundry violence and reorganisation occurs, and the process tends to start over for another cycle.

There is no safety in public employment. Just a temporary abeyance of the laws of the universe.

Happy Days Are Here Again

Worst unemployment picture since WWII

Obama Doesn't Know What He's Doing

Long-term unemployment skyrockets

Middle class collapsing

Dependency on government a growing addiction for Americans

This is the Obama - Pelosi age, the age of the oxymoron "social justice." Destroying the country to save it is the path that radical revolutionaries often take -- from Mugabe to Castro to Chavez to Kim to Pol Pot to Stalin to Hitler and so on.

Captain Obama at the wheel, the USS America headed onto the rocks, and in the ballroom Pelosi is gathered with Greenpeace, the trial lawyers, labour union bosses, the IPCC, Al Gore and the carbon traders, and a host of lobbyists, singing "Happy Days are Here Again!"

Pay no attention to those deep grinding noises coming from below. Those are just some noises left over from the previous administration. Captain BO has increased speed to full ahead, so we will soon be out of the rough spots.

Previously published at Al Fin Potpourri

Hello Unions? Good-Bye Prosperity!

Physical capital—some of it in the form of natural endowments such as a deep-water harbor, much of it the product of human investment in dwellings, factories, offices, and infrastructure—is, of course, a profoundly valuable partner in both our work and play. The greater the quantity and quality of such capital (all else the same), the higher will be our productivity and wages and the more stimulating, satisfying, and comfortable will be our leisure hours.

Such capital will, however, always be a tempting target for interest groups seeking to redistribute some of its returns from its owners to themselves. Since physical capital is immobile, it can be “taken hostage” by opportunistic actors and its value appropriated in ways that will soon be described. And since it is durable, the ill effects of such actions will generally be disguised for years or decades. _PDF CATO PDF

Cities represent a concentration of both populations and capital. Persons looking for opportunities flock to cities for jobs, higher education, and for political connections to various syndicates and collectives -- both licit and illicit. Labour unions are an important political collective, representing a bridge between licit and illicit political organisations.

Detroit was once a very wealthy city, bursting with opportunity. Among the many organisations and collectives that flocked to Detroit to grab a peace of the booty, were the labour unions.

...in the early decades of the 20th century unions usually represented less than a tenth of Detroit’s labor force. And, as we have seen, the city’s growth was spectacular, while its industrial base produced enormous wealth not just for entrepreneurs, managers, engineers, and traders, but for laborers as well. In 1930, there were 275 U.S. counties with at least 5,000 manufacturing workers within their borders. Those in Michigan’s Wayne County (which includes Detroit and adjacent cities such as Dearborn, Hamtramck, Highland Park, and River Rouge) earned average wages higher than those in all but three other counties—which contained Youngstown and Warren, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana (where the nation’s largest steelmakers had facilities). Manufacturing wages in Detroit exceeded the national average by fully 33 percent, and when compared to wages in smaller factory towns elsewhere the contrasts are even more dramatic: factory workers in El Paso, Texas, earned only 60 percent as much as those in Detroit, while workers in York, Pennsylvania earned 56 percent as much and those in Greenville, South Carolina, 40 percent as much. Detroit’s absolute and relative prosperity is difficult to reconcile with pro-union rhetoric during this period (and historic treatments since), which stressed the need for countervailing power for workers in the face of employers’ unfettered monopsony power. 

 ...Though firms in Detroit and other American industrial cities had kept unions more or less at bay for the first third of the 20th century, the onset of the Great Depression created an extremely favorable ideological and political environment for unionization. The erroneous but widespread belief that falling wages and prices were a cause of the Depression rather than necessary adjustments to restore growth in employment and output contributed (along with many other factors) to the passage of several pieces of federal legislation that encouraged the cartelization of labor and product markets. Of central importance was the National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act, which eliminated many of the strategies commonly used by firms to defend the quasi-rent value of prospective or existing physical capital. For example, it took labor disputes out of the courts and vested enforcement of the Act in a politically appointed National Labor Relations Board; prohibited several “unfair labor practices” judged to be obstacles to organization; and enforced exclusive bargaining and union pay rates for all workers—whether union members or not—in Board-certified bargaining units. But, as we will see, by limiting defenses against the appropriative actions of labor cartels, such legislation would actually increase firms’ reliance on the remaining ones—especially redeployment of productive capital to less vulnerable locations and input substitution. Again, this would have dire consequences for “union towns.”

 _CATO _PDF

The results were particularly dire for Detroit as a union town. Several additional cities in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, and other states with strong union control have paid "the ultimate price" for their affiliation with unions: crime, poverty, capital flight . . .

Labour unions have largely plighted their troth to the US Democratic Party, as shown by campaign contributions of unions to the two majour parties.
Wherever the Democratic Party controls, labour unions rule -- and prosperity will fly away sooner than later. With the election of the radical-left Democratic Party congress and president, unions were gleeful in anticipation of a rising dominance by unions over commerce and industry nation-wide.

But something odd happened on the way to the celebrations. Somehow, "the people" -- the ones the unions and the DP are supposed to be looking out for -- began to catch on. The working classes began to understand that the DP and the unions did not really care about them, but instead were only looking to line their pockets. If the next elections were held today, neither Obama nor much of the DP contress would fare well.

Small, local unions can sometimes give workers an advantage when they are under dire circumstances. But the benefit is usually only temporary and limited to a small percentage of the population. As the ripples of union interventions spread throughout the economy as a whole, glaring problems begin to reveal themselves. Union pay and benefits rise out of all proportion to the productivity contributed by the workers themselves. Society's resources are mal-distributed as special interests take over the divvying up of the booty. Prosperity and opportunity fly out the window.

That is where many US cities find themselves today, and where the entire country will find itself if the Obama - Pelosi reich is allowed to carry out its radical agenda of "social justice" and "environmental justice."

A Story You Will Not Likely Hear About in the MSM

Does anyone really know what happened to trigger the financial collapse of US and world markets in September and October of 2008? Henry Paulson was US Treasury secretary at the time, and his memories of the events appear to be vivid.

Russia’s five-day war with U.S. ally Georgia started on Aug. 8, the same day as the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Games. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told U.S. President George W. Bush during those ceremonies that “war has started,” according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman.

“The report was deeply troubling -- heavy selling could create a sudden loss of confidence in the GSEs and shake the capital markets,” Paulson wrote. “I waited till I was back home and in a secure environment to inform the president.”

...Paulson said he was surprised not to have been asked about the Fannie and Freddie bonds during a trip to Moscow in June. “I was soon to learn, though, that the Russians had been doing a lot of thinking about our GSE securities,” he said of his meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, who succeeded Putin in the Kremlin the previous month. _Bloomberg_via_BusinessInsider

The economic leaders of the US were clearly panicked in the early fall of 2008 by what they felt was a "near-collapse" of the entire economic system. The panic was transmitted to the US president and the US congress, who rushed a large economic rescue through in record time. I disagreed with the bailout at the time, but it was obvious that US leaders were thoroughly spooked. They acted out of desperation to "save the economy", unlike the later Obama administration bailout plans which were deliberately laid out to help Obama supporters -- and no one else.

I remember watching a news clip of Putin confronting Bush at the Beijing Olympics. Putin smirked as he walked away, and Bush appeared to be in shock. Something of an unfriendly nature was communicated between the two men. Of course, the Russian invasion and occupation of Georgia was just beginning at the same time.

The massive selloff that triggered the desperate actions of the US government originated somewhere. The idea that it may have been orchestrated by powers unfriendly to the US government is not a new one.

But the combination of economic sabotage with military aggression is precisely what one would expect from either Russia or China.

China already has the ability to temporarily obliterate the worth of the US dollar on international markets if it chooses. It is unlikely that China participated fully in Putin's scheme. But wealthy international supporters of Senator Obama's campaign for president may well have seen some benefit to their candidate, should the US economy falter in an emphatic manner, just before the election. Certainly Putin, at least, has enjoyed much more freedom of play and international influence since Obama's election -- despite Russia's economic problems and ongoing demographic and public health collapse.

The really important things that are happening every day, behind the scenes, are unlikely to ever be revealed by the media. But you can be assured of hearing everything imaginable about the sex life of Tiger Woods.

China is Making Waves Around the World.

...that prosperity also attracts more Han Chinese immigrants, which dilutes the ethnic Tibetan majority, and angers ethnic Tibetans. StratPage

China needs lebensraum, and it intends to get it by hook or crook. Occupying Tibet and Xinjiang is not enough. China needs Taiwan, it needs Siberia. China needs Africa and it needs more of Central Asia. China needs big parts of South and Central America, and China needs as much of the Caribbean as it can get. China needs room to grow. But is it possible that China is getting ahead of itself here?

China's economic invasion of Africa in the last decade has been running into more resistance. The Chinese custom of importing Chinese to do the work, including manual labor, for construction projects, has caused increasing anti-Chinese feelings in African countries. There, high unemployment, and cultural differences, are leading to more clashes between Chinese and the locals. Chinese firms are being forced to hire more locals. The Chinese don't like this, because the Chinese work harder and more efficiently, and the locals don't like being ordered to try and keep up. This Chinese invasion is spreading to the Middle East, South America and sensitive (to India) nations like Nepal.

...the Chinese market is what drives Chinese economic growth now. The export market is gravy, and a way to learn how to build better products and steal technology.

...All this economic activity has increased Chinese dependence on the sea. This is unique in Chinese history, for in the past, China was self-sufficient and ignored naval matters. No more. The admirals are pointing out that, without control of long sea routes to Africa, Australia and South America, the Chinese economy would choke.

...Decades of the "one child" (for urban couples especially) policy, and the preference for baby boys, has created a girl deficit. In the next decade, over 20 million more Chinese men, than women, will be looking for mates. Already, legal brokers, and less legal gangsters, are supplying the shortage by attracting (or kidnapping) young women from neighboring countries. This is not popular with the neighbors, and causing increasing tension. _Strategy Page

Analysts who assume that China has grown out of its need for foreign export markets are getting ahead of themselves as well. China built up a healthy trade surplus during a time of global economic expansion. But China could easily use up its nest egg attempting to create a booming domestic economy when its current method of governance is not arranged to deal with domestic prosperity.

China's top-heavy wealth disparity is manageable as long as the top-heavy CCP can keep an eye on most of the powerful men in China, and as long as the government can control the technology of information and wealth transfer. If China is to develop a truly prosperous domestic economy -- instead of just talking about it ad nauseum -- it will inevitably lose an unacceptable amount of control.

Mark Steyn thinks that China will break on the basis of demographic stresses. But I suspect that China will crack wide open on the basis of its inability to deal with the contradictory forces arising from a prosperous expansion while attempting to enforce totalitarianism at the same time.

It is likely to end either in war, or warlordism.  China has known much of both over the millenia.  It is likely to know much more.

It's Not Lying If You Follow the Rules.....

And if you are a radical crusading for the new utopian order, there are no rules. Everything is a scripted deceit meant to engineer the new radical utopia. There is no truth, there is no meaning except the goal. Power to the (radical) people.

Remember: never let a devastating catastrophe that ruins millions of lives go to waste. Use it to your advantage. Crusade on, radical engineers of society. There are no rules for you.

Xtra: The first installment of "The Revolutionary Holocaust" by everyone's favourite beloved talk show host, Glenn Beck.

More Videos Here

The type of pseudo-intellectuals who are attracted to left radical ideas are precisely the persons whom no one who has anything important to do would miss were they to fall off the edge of the planet. People precisely like Barack Obama, whose followers consist mainly of zombies and opportunists.

The key to removing the ability of these miscreants to do harm, is simply to demonstrate that they are not needed.

Mr. Obama Needs a Robot er, Reboot

Once hailed as the Messiah and the Chosen One, Mr. Obama has run onto hard times -- a mere year after assuming the US presidency. Despite the unfailing support of the news and entertainment media -- the media's willingness to ignore Obama's gaffes, miscues, and absurdities -- the US public is getting tired of Mr. Hopey-Changey. Particularly since an extended financial recession and jobs crisis can be laid right at the door of Obama and the Democratic Congress.

Obama and Pelosi were warned not to pursue the nationalisation of the health care industry, the automobile industry, and the banking industry in the middle of a credit crunch and a jobs shortage, but the left-radical crusaders had waited too long to put their boot-print on the lone superpower of the world. In their eyes, the US had stood in the way of world socialist reform -- whether under the guise of climate change or under the naked banner of "social justice." Now, after a year of Obama - Pelosi, the US is much deeper in debt with nothing good to show for it, and no relief in sight.

The US public is slowly catching on to the emptiness of Obama's soaring rhetoric, and the destructiveness of his true ambitions. They are beginning to vote against the Obama - Pelosi agenda. Even formerly supportive international observers are beginning to question whether there is any substance behind the now threadbare emotions barely propping up the Obama bandwagon.

US President Barack Obama suffered a painful defeat in Massachusetts on Tuesday. With mid-term elections looming, it means that Obama will have to fundamentally re-think his political course. German commentators say it is the end of hope....

...This week, ... a week when Obama should have been celebrating the first anniversary of his inauguration -- may have been the president's worst yet. Scott Brown, an almost unknown Republican member of the Massachusetts Senate, defeated the Democratic candidate Martha Coakley for the US Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. The defeat in a heavily Democratic state not only highlights Obama's massive loss of popular support during his first year in office, but it also could spell doom for his signature effort to reform the US health care system.
_Spiegel

German commentators? Check back in 50 years to see if an independent Germany still exists outside of the Dar al Islam. While their own country is being taken over by outsiders, German commentators take their valuable time to advise President Obama on how to retain his revolutionary momentum despite apparent losses in special elections. Just kidding. It is always interesting to get an outside view -- while it lasts. ;-)

The question: Does Mr. Obama need a robot? Perhaps a robot that looks and talks like him, but has a better rounded personality? A robot who says one thing and then does the same thing he says he will do, for a change? A robot who actually serves his constituency instead of serving special interests both within the US (unions, trial lawyers, investment banks) and outside the US -- while at the same time taking strong actions to hurt the backbone of the US economy and destroy US employment?

Such an Obama robot replacement might come as a relief to the American people. German commentators would of course be appalled. They had been so much counting on an American president whose policies -- while dysfunctional -- were in agreement with their own sensibilities.

Understanding that Obama Has Done Everything Wrong

Image via PajamasMedia
Only a few Americans have caught on to the Obama - Pelosi scam as of January 2010. But their numbers are growing in what could be an important groundswell reaction against the Grand Revolutionary O-P Revolutionary Reich.

Obama Has Done Everything Wrong

The Scott Heard Round the World

Democratic Senator Bayh: Revolutionary Leftists Grab Total Control of Democratic Party

Obama's Problems Spreading from the Eastside to the West

Turning the US Into Detroit

Obama: Turning Love Into Loathing

Jews Hate Palin but America Needs a Change

America has suffered under recent changes that leave it with little hope. The hard working self-determination of America's founder population is rarely seen in a Washington DC that is focused upon stripping the US' private sector for the benefit of FOBs. The trend for America is decidedly downward -- unless the nation turns away from a corrupt dependency upon hyper-centralised government, and toward stronger, more independent-thinking citizens.

America's Jews represent a hard working and high achieving segment of the nation's population that ordinarily might appreciate a politician who espouses hard work and independence for citizens. But a majority of American Jews express outright animosity toward the Tea Party movement, and toward politicians who hold traditional American Founder's values. Why?

On one level, part of the explanation lies in misunderstanding and media-induced panic...The press ran with the story, despite its falsity, that Palin was a Buchananite...An Obama spokesman chimed in the same day, telling a Florida paper that “Palin was a supporter of Pat Buchanan . . . a Nazi sympathizer.”

The notion was planted that Palin herself was, by association, anti-Israel, and Jews remained convinced of that, despite her unflinching support for the Jewish state, the presence in her gubernatorial office of an Israeli flag, and her eagerness to attend a rally protesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the UN in the fall of 2008 (which was canceled at the behest of Obama supporters, no doubt to deprive Palin of that platform)

...In her first national interview, Charles Gibson of ABC News mangled the details of a June 2008 talk she gave at the Assembly of God church she attended in her hometown of Wasilla. “You said recently,” Gibson told her, “in your old church, [that] our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Palin had actually said something far different. She had encouraged the assembled to “pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God.”

...Popular Jewish and non-Jewish female politicians—from Senator Diane Feinstein to Madeleine Albright to Hillary Clinton—have been modest to the point of frumpiness in appearance and professional in style, and therefore perfectly acceptable to Jewish women who aspired to similar positions of responsibility. Palin was another story... _Commentary

But America is clearly in trouble, and if some American Jews choose to reject a return to the national policies which made it possible for their forbearers to thrive in the US in the first place, perhaps it will be such reactionary Jews who are left behind this time through.


What are some of the things that rational Americans wish to happen -- to restore prosperity and a future to the floundering ship of state and the country at large? Interestingly, it is not just the libertarians and the Tea Party movement that see how badly the US government has bumbled its way into the abyss of suicidally corrupt incompetence.

An economy built upon constant and relatively free innovation is inherently difficult to sustain in a democracy. This is not so much a matter of anti-market ideology as of the painful realities of economic change. Innovation forces change, and the pain involved tends to be felt immediately while the benefits are usually diffuse and harder to perceive in the short term.

It is therefore natural for people to organize to prevent the spread of significant innovation. The original Luddites were cotton weavers who, in the throes of Britain's Industrial Revolution, responded to their displacement by automated weaving technology directly: They smashed looms. In America, people in similar situations rarely assault property en masse, but they do form political coalitions to pass laws that restrict innovation. It is understandable that the enormous waves of innovation always sweeping over a dynamic free-market economy will arouse great unease and opposition. But for that economy to prosper, the unease and opposition must be overcome. _National Affairs

Jim Manzi's piece in National Affairs is worth reading in its entirety. Manzi attempts to prescribe a solution to the Obama - Pelosi quagmire without actually stepping on too many toes, or offending the sensibilities of the mainstream pseudo-intellectual "elite" too badly. An impossible task. Yet he scores some telling points.


Wealth must be created before it can be enjoyed, shared, and transferred.  The Obama - Pelosi reich has demonstrated that it has no idea how to create wealth -- it only knows how to confiscate.

The emergence of sustainable global wealth will only occur with the coming of sustainable global trade.  Under the O-P policies, the US will sink ever lower into debtorship, the US dollar will shrink to little value, and the international economy will suffer for the loss of a stable force for global trade and commerce.

The pseudo-intellectual elite running America's newsrooms, classrooms, publishing houses, entertainment studios, and huge financial trading houses, do not have the interests of ordinary Americans at heart.  These pseudo-intellectuals now have a US government that they can support, obfuscate for, lie for, and pretend to suffer for.  But more Americans who belong in the productive class are beginning to understand the ways in which they have been led unwittingly to support an established order that is willing to use and toss them away like pawns.

If one is not a FOB, then one is not held in any value by the faux elite who are temporarily in charge of most of the mechanisms of state, education, and popular culture.   That crystal clear fact is being disseminated rapidly through the new media.  The repercussions of such a growing awareness among the middle classes and productive classes are beginning to play out.

Al Fin does not see politics as the path to the next level.  But smart politics can  prevent a great deal of human misery, and create conditions that allow the next level to develop more smoothly.

Don't be stuck on stupid.

Be Prepared for Anything

An Ice Age is an example of a long term survival setting. If you are prepared to survive an ice age, you are prepared for almost anything. But the chances are that you are like the residents of New Orleans during Katrina -- not even prepared for a few days without electrical power, ATMs, and supermarkets. Where do you go to learn to prepare, beyond the silly mainstream media offerings of "survival-lite"?

Preparedness Pro is a website that offers good articles on survival and preparedness, as well as on-site, hands-on preparedness classes. For example: Are you interested in a backup generator for your home or cabin? Backup Power Generators: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 take you through the selection process and tell you where you can obtain them for the best price.

Survival Blog is a well-known and respected personal effort by James Wesley Rawles. Survival Blog offers a wide range of survival advice -- much of it provided in letters and emails relating first-person experiences with different devices and approaches to surviving difficulties.

The Survivalist Blog is another well-known preparedness blog. Here is his "Best of 2009 Survivalist Articles".

The Prepper E-Book site offers practical articles from The Survival Mom on a wide range of "be ready" topics. Example: this posting provides links to 9 articles on the topic of "bugging out / evacuating" in a hurry. By preparing ahead of time, you can have what you need, where and when you need it. There is also a prepper forum where people can compare experiences and recommendations with others with similar concerns.

Tactical Intelligence is a site that deals largely with "gear" -- survival implements that are either ready-made or improvised.

The sites above usually have links to other prepper and survival websites and services. There are at least hundreds of them, but it is generally best to start with those that are well known that serve a wide audience. You can find fairly decent free online survival videos at YouTube and other "how-to" video sharing sites listed on the Al Fin sidebar in the "Reference" section.

So, how would you prepare for an ice age, anyway? Ice sheets have been known to grow miles thick. How does one live, stay warm, grow food, maintain transportation networks, and provide schools, health care, power, sanitation, and other essential services when the land is covered with ice 1 mile thick?

First, you need a large source of combined heat and power -- a nuclear plant is ideal, a coal or bitumen / kerogen plant might also work. You would need plenty of fuel to last hundreds of years. (You should begin to see the advantage of a nuclear plant, thinking of fuel volume for that length of time. Remember that next level humans will live hundreds of years or longer, on average.)

Second, you need a method of distributing heat over a large area, preventing that area from accumulating snow and ice on a year-to-year basis (winters may last 9 or 10 months). Al Fin ice age architects recommend redundant systems of conductive, convective, and radiative transfer of heat. A village-sized geodesic dome incorporating a network of heat-pipes should provide safe shelter for the community itself. Similar structures for croplands should extend the ice-free area well beyond the residential zones. (Crops and living zones will require artificial lighting most of the year -- confirming the wisdom of locating a nuclear power plant close by. Imagine trying to survive an ice age with solar and wind power!)

Third, you need to provide a wide range of human expertise for your community -- and sound means of transferring that expertise to new members. The community will need to provide its own power, water, farming, health care, education, defence, sanitation, entertainment, maintenance, construction, search and rescue, clothing, and a wide range of other services generally overlooked.

Fourth, although the coming ice age is unlikely to progress to "Snowball Earth" -- when the ice reached the equator from both North and South -- it won't hurt to plan for extremes. To achieve a Minimum Viable Population, plan for a village of about a thousand breeding pairs -- or a group of villages whose combined populations provide a thousand breeding pairs. (Most geneticists may recommend a founder population of at least 10,000 breeding pairs, but Al Fin geneticists have discovered that 1,000 breeding pairs should be sufficient for most situations where "time-to-discovery" of other compatible human populations is no longer than 10,000 years.)

Fifth, follow a plan of expanding the "ice-free zone" around your village(s) and agricultural / industrial / power generation zones. Always incorporate your ice-melting infrastructure into any new construction. Nature will never stop trying to defeat your efforts, so you must never stop using your brain and body to assert your own intentions.

Prepare yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally to be a survivor. Then begin prepping for yourself, your family, your closest associates. Learn, teach, experiment. Always think in terms of "what could go wrong, and what could I do about it?" That should teach a bit of humility, and hopefully provide motivation for what you will have to learn to know and to do.

More: The Lifeboat Foundation has several projects dealing with existential risks which might be helpful in the event of a glaciation, including space habitats and "lifeshield bunkers." Josh Hall has devised a "weather machine" concept that would have the power to throw the Earth into an ice age, to bake the planet beyond livability, or anything in between.

Previously posted at Al Fin

US Economy Suffers Under Utopian Ideologue

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue warned the U.S. faces a double-dip recession because of the taxes and regulations under consideration by the Democratic Congress and President Barack Obama.


“Congress, the administration and states must recognize that our weak economy simply could not sustain all the new taxes, regulations and mandates now under consideration. It’s a sure-fire recipe for a double-dip recession, or worse,” Donohue said in a speech providing the Chamber's outlook for 2010. _TheHill

Going John Galt?  Why not?  Nothing in the Obama - Pelosi agenda is oriented toward the practical need for more work opportunities for millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans.  Nothing in the O - P master plan will boost small business startups and proprietor owned and run businesses.

Why instead would not the...small business person pull in his horns and wait out the statist experiment, as our present 10% unemployment rate suggests is actually now happening.....


....what we are witnessing millions of times over are the following conclusions of the small entrepreneur: “This guy hates me and what I stand for, and wants to appropriate lots of what I make and give it to others he likes better. Therefore I am not going to take any risks, since he’s either going to take lots of what I already made or even more of what I hope to make.” _VDH

This is the age of skyrocketing government debt without end.  The entire point of most of the ongoing debt appears to be redistributing wealth and opportunity away from productive persons toward others who are more likely to vote for O - P and friends.

...The relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more. We find that the threshold for public debt is similar in advanced and emerging economies… _PrisonPlanet

A utopian ideologue who happens to also be an incompetent clown. And you zombies thought things couldn't possibly get worse!

South America's Very Own Zimbabwe

The Venezuela of Hugo Chavez is in the early stages of a Mugabe-style economic revolution. Never underestimate the ability of a left-populist dictator to destroy a once thriving economy.

The consumer price index for Caracas posted a 28.6% year-on-year increase in November. Inflation for last year is expected to come in below the 31.9% level posted in 2008.

The country's entrenched inflationary problems, which economists blame on sputtering domestic production unable to meet consumer demand, are compounded by shrinking economic activity. The economy now faces declining activity and high inflation, the classic symptoms of stagflation.

The Venezuelan economy contracted 2.9% in 2009, confirming the country's first recession in five years, according to preliminary estimates published Dec. 29 by the Venezuelan central bank. _WSJ

Venezuela devalues currency

Venezuela on the verge of devastating electrical power collapse

Currency black market thriving in Caracas

24% of Venezuelans live in abject poverty

All your banks am belonging to us

Mr. Chavez is a social reformer, a believer in social justice -- just like Mugabe and Obama. If the policies of Chavez result in the same type of devastation for Venezuela as Mugabe has brought to Zimbabwe, surely it is just a coincidence?

Mr. Obama is maneuvering the US economy into the same landing approach pattern as his predecessors, Mugabe and Chavez. Zimbabwe has already landed ($1 trillion dollar bank notes etc). Several others are on the same approach. A soft landing cannot be guaranteed.

Peak Oil Doom: Is It Logical?

A large number of websites are devoted to the idea that western civilisation is doomed by "Peak Oil." The Oil Drum is one of the most popular such sites, and you can find many others on their blogroll. The definition for Peak Oil appears to change as predictions from the old definitions inevitably fail.

To understand the reality behind Peak Oil better, here are two well reasoned analyses:

Michael Lynch "Crop Circles in the Desert" PDF

... the number of drilling rigs in Saudi Arabia is not very different from what it was three decades ago. The increase seen in the last 20 years reflects rising production and the need to offset depletion, plus the recent expansion program. Andnote that the U.S. industry is currently employing 1,400 rigs, more than40 times as many as Saudi Arabia.76 Thus, in order to believe the thesis that Saudi oil output is near a peak, it is necessary to believe that production costs will soar and productivity decline in a manner never seen before, contradicting both resource economics and industry experience. Incremental change is the norm, particularly when dealing with large numbers, and the possibility that costs could become prohibitive in the short term due to depletion is essentially absurd.

Robert Rapier "Reflections on the Saudi Wars"

If you simply rationalize away wrong predictions, you will likely continue to make them. But I have also learned that people using shoddy analyses to make predictions are also unlikely to own up to failed predictions. There appears to be a strong correlation between them embracing shoddy analyses that gives them the "right" answers - and rationalizing when the "right" answers turn out to be wrong.

Two recent news stories relevant to peak oil:

Fears of Oil Depletion are Exaggerated

"Assuming an extraction rate of 35 per cent, the Arab oil deposits in place could reach 2,738 billion barrels. This means the oil quantities that cannot be extracted by present technology are around 1,809 billion barrels, which are nearly 645 billion barrels above the world's proven oil resources. These quantities, if they can be extracted, will meet the world needs for 60 years.

Peak Oil: Are We There Yet?

Though oil may peak some time in the future, CERA concludes that there is little doubt that existing and potential future resources can support capacity growth through 2030.

Fossil fuels are a finite resource -- given the long period of time necessary to create them. That is a truism. You are not justified in making a leap to the assertion: "world oil production has already peaked!" You must support such an assertion using undisputed facts. The Peak Oil Doom movement has avoided the use of supported logic, in favour of emotional appeals to "the scarcity instinct," that deep fear inside many humans that keeps telling them that doom is just around the corner.

Hydrocarbons, on the other hand, are not a finite resource. Hydrocarbons are an infinitely renewable and sustainable energy resource that wait only for human ingenuity to catch up to human vision.

Peak oil does, in fact exist in one form -- political peak oil. Policies being put in place by Obama's DOE and EPA virtually guarantee high energy costs in the US and a greater need to import overseas oil. The Obama - Pelosi government is stepping all over the US energy industry's ability to produce energy of almost all important forms -- oil, coal, gas, oil sands, oil shale, nuclear, etc. Such destruction of home-grown energy potential is sure to constrict US economic growth.

"Green energy" initiatives cannot come close to making up for this government-induced energy starvation. Such economic suicide could only be based upon ideological obtuseness -- in this case, carbon hysteria.

Obama is incapable of learning and changing. His brain was fixed in its stupidity at a very early age. Only by getting rid of the entire cabal of death-wishers that populate the US government executive and legislative branches (and many federal courts) can the US economy genuinely recover.

Self-limiting delusions such as peak oil, global warming catastrophe, overpopulation, widespread environmental devastation, etc. are the mental shackles that prevent us from growing a better world.