Ron Paul: Who Owns You (Narrated By George Carlin)

George Carlin was one of the good ones, one of the last of an almost extinct breed.

Sonnet for the Situation

So much hope and pain these days
billions of humans struggling with it all
in billions of different and identical ways
desperately hoping that we won't see the fall

the descent from decadence to complete desolation
seems to me that we wont have long to wait
untill this warrior nation is forced into contemplation
how did we become such a twisted sad state

We who once reached for the stars
are now demented killers and conquerers
our pathetic youth, materialists filling bars
still something in our sad souls still stirs

Idealism runs stong in our veins
even if it's left our conscious brains

the leaders lead, the fools follow, the thinkers recoil in horror
worry not about the future, because their can always be more
after all this age is strange, but the only constant is change

Petrol Prices

"Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so."

My goodness how people love to bitch about changes in the Market. I suppose if you were fundamentally ignorant of almost every single aspect of the economic activity of the world complaining is a lot easier than becoming informed. Being the helpful current affairs junky that I am, I have decided to break it down nice and simple like for you all. So there are these companies that retrieve, distribute and sell petroleum right? And they do this for profit. The largest companies are state-owned operations like Saudi Aramco and Petrobras, but the ones we Americans deal with the most are multinational companies. You see if state run companies ever tried the shady shit that the multinationals did it would be very obvious who could hold accountable. So what we see in the unprecedented rise in the per-barrel price of oil is almost entirely the work of the big five- Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron Texaco and Conoco Phillips. Now these corporations would also be able to be held accountable if they did anything too blatant to raise prices, but they are hardcore capitalists, and thus very wily. They know for a fact that the end of easily available oil is going to, in time, completely eliminate the market for their good and service. Consequently they are seeing that they get top dollar while the demand lasts. The occupation of Iraq, the political tensions with Iran and Venezuela, and MEND's continued actions in the Niger Delta have all played completely into their desire to get higher profits than any corporations in the history of Capitalism. So it really isn't that complicated, and as a result could be fixed relatively easily if the American consumer was keener on flexing its economic muscle than the traditional brainless bitching. As much as they destory the world and harm its inhabitants, I can't even really blame the oil companies for doing what corporations are designed to do- make money. Is it their fault that poor countries governments don't stop them and Western consumers are subserviant idiots being led by corrupt opportunistic leaders? I personally would argue that as much as they profit from these situations, it wasn't they that created them (although they played a large part).

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." -Marcus Aurelius

The Mighty Market

"When a man moves away from nature his heart becomes hard."

Allow me to say, in the parlance of our times, that shit is getting wild and looks to be getting even more so in the very near future. The thing we got going here called civilization looks as though it will collapse under its own weight and crush us all. This is largely the result of unbridled use of resources over the past 200 years. In that time the worlds population has more than tripled and our race has become integrated into one mammoth entity commonly called the Market. People and products flow all over the place in a network so complex and fluid that no one really knows how it all works. It has in a few generations fundamentally altered just about every single facet of our existence. In many ways it has helped us all learn more about the different cultures and even done a great deal to increase our knowledge of everything from Astrophysics to Zoology. There is one minor problem to all this however, and that is that we only have one planet to populate, and that being done, we seem incapable of stopping, even when it becomes glaringly obvious that we don't have enough to go around anymore. Our traditional checks of war, famine and plague have all been somewhat neutralized by America's complete military dominance, improved agricultural technology and amazing medicines. We love to exhibit these advances as proof of our spectacular progress. Unfortunately the operating of this Market is based almost entirely upon the affordable availability of one resource- petroleum. This fueled the madness that was the 20th Century and is responsible for the world in which we live. It is an undeniable fact that almost all the easy oil has been gotten, and that the costs associated with extracting what is left will be a huge economic burden. Now oil prices don't only affect transportation, but also food production which is largely dependent upon petroleum based fertilizers. Long story short, the 60 years of economic growth and relative peace since WWII is going to come to an abrupt end. Starvation will rip through the third world like a hurricane and will sweep away whatever semblance of authority there was. The wealthy nations of the world will find that all their capital doesn't amount to anything when their is no fuel to propel their economies. The standard of living will plumet and social unrest will be bound to follow. In such an environment it isn't hard to believe that warfare will return with a vengence as the 6.5 billion people on earth fight tooth and nail. This time not for religion, race or state, but purely for survival. Morality has always been the providence of peace, and naturally leaves the stage as soon as Aries arrives. So here we will be with all these weapons and not enough stuff for everyone... The gears of history have always been lubricated by blood, and I fear that the Market may very well soon require unprecedented amounts to keep functioning. I guess it just wasn't in the cards for us to be able to cooperate enough to make this whole society thing work in the long run; what a bummer for us. The leaders of the G8 recently convened to work towards lowering the price of oil to ensure their economic viability- what a bunch of myopic demented dipshitsOf course nobody wants to be the person to say that the party has to stop, especially when nobody knows how to stop. The G8 is really just a gang of heartless addicts that are so profoundly materialistic that they care about nothing except their GDP. It is going to be one hell of a show, of that much at least we can be certain. All the tamed and trained people in wealthy countries are going to find going cold turkey rough going. At the very most we have a decade or two before all this goes down. So my advice is to get used to living off what your local area can produce, get used to no electricity, and certainly don't have any children.