Unbelievable. Here's the story in this morning's paper:
East Baton Rouge Parish residents may see something these days that they might not expect from the parish school system: advertising.
It started in August with print ads in several local publications. In January, the school system will have ads on billboards and radio, all part of a new public awareness campaign.
“We just kind of want to get the public re-acquainted with the school system,” said Chris Trahan, director of communications.
The campaign began in May and June with a public opinion poll. Trahan is already planning future marketing campaigns, focusing on increasing community and parental involvement.
Under the logo “Better Schools. Better Futures,” the ads highlight facts about the school system that people may not know, such as:
The system had 24 national merit finalists in 2006.
Forty-seven percent of the system’s teachers hold advanced degrees. The system led the state in the number of Nationally Board Certified teachers. The school system is also increasing its marketing of its specialized programs.
Today from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Mall at Cortana, the school system is holding its annual EBR Mania expo for students who want to apply to its 14 magnet schools.
For the first time, gifted-and-talented programs — 14 schools now offer this service, up from nine last year — also will be on hand to showcase their wares.
Also, starting next week, Superintendent Charlotte Placide is holding three community forums to determine what kind of school construction residents want over the next decade. The forums are scheduled at Scotlandville High School at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Woodlawn High School at 6 p.m. Thursday and Capitol Middle School on Nov. 5 at 6 p.m.
School system leaders know they have a tough task re-engaging a community that in many cases bypasses the school system for private schools or suburban public schools.
At its peak in 1976, the parish school system had almost 69,000 students: 60 percent white and 40 percent black. By 1983, in the wake of a controversial busing order, the school had lost 13,000 students, and its racial breakdown was half white, half black.
Out-migration, by both black families and white families, continues, though overall enrollment has stabilized. As of Oct. 1, the school system had 46,341 students, almost 23,000 fewer than 30 years ago. The racial breakdown is now 83 percent black, 11 percent white and 6 percent Asian, Hispanic and other ethnicities.
(snip)
School Board member Jill Dyason, who has two children in public schools, said many residents in her southeast Baton Rouge district don’t even consider public schools. With the end of the desegregation case this past summer, they should reconsider, she said.
“We are in a different place. The instability is not there like it was,” Dyason said. “We now can listen to you, the parents, about your needs. We can try and address it, and we don’t have our hands tied.”
(snip)
Dyason said if people will just step through the door of a public school, even if they have no children in those schools, they can quickly separate fact from fiction.
“I hope that this will encourage people to take a real look for themselves, and not be misguided by the negative perceptions,” she said.
MS. DYASON -- a junior-high classmate of mine -- had better hope that when people step through the door of a Baton Rouge public school, the ceiling doesn't fall in on them.
I feel another ad coming on . . . gratis, of course.
And I didn't care. THE LAST TIME I went this far out on the avant-garde limb probably was 1978, because the B-52's "Dance This Mess Around" doesn't count. Not that that's weird or anything. Whatever.This might be the end of the podcast . . . or not. But sometimes you just get a wild hair, and there you go.
If this dooms everything, at least I'll have gone out with a bang. Or a thwang, as the case may be.
And I'll be a vicarious guitar hero.
So, what is it folks? Like? Not like?
Am I done dealin'? Too weird for consumption? More, you say?
My friend Rod Dreher has written an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal about Louisiana's latest flirtation with reform. There is sweetness and light and new hope down on the bayou; the wunderkind Bobby Jindal will be governor, having won in a primary-election landslide.
Well, you know what I think about this. If you don't, it's here. At any rate, Rod is "proud and hopeful" that the folks back home apparently did The Right Thing. I am, too. Kind of.
Reading Rod's piece, I delight in how well he channels the deepest emotions of all us Louisiana expatriates. And I want to believe. I want to believe in hope, because my home state . . . it do get into your blood and you can't get it out:
You notice something, though, when Louisianians meet in exile. Everybody misses home and will take any opportunity to talk about it. Our friends--Yankees, mostly--get the biggest kick out of our honest-to-God tales of Bayou State life (political and otherwise). My wife, a native Texan, confessed that when we first started dating, she thought my stories about my homeland revealed me to be a pathological liar--until I took her there to see for herself. She visited my Uncle Murphy's grave and saw the headstone he'd won playing bourré (a Cajun card game) with an undertaker. He had it inscribed with the epitaph: "This ain't bad, once you get used to it."
Louisiana makes a lot more sense if you read the beloved picaresque "A Confederacy of Dunces" as an exercise in literary naturalism. There's simply no place like Louisiana. You will not find more generous and life-loving people anywhere, and Lord knows, you won't eat or drink better. It's hard to get over that. But you do, mostly. Last Sunday, I ran into a couple I know at a Krispy Kreme shop here in Dallas. We got to talking about the Jindal victory, and the wife, a non-native who had fallen in love with Louisiana as a Tulane student, said warmly that she'd love to move back. The husband gave her a look that telegraphed, "Yes, we all would, dear, but come on."
Despite all the sentimental longing for LSU Tigers tailgating and the scent of Zatarain's crawfish boil on your fingers, moving home rarely crosses the minds of us expatriates. Louisiana is a great place to be from, but the sense of fatalism that pervades life there casts doubt on whether it will some day be great place to be. In Louisiana, to be educated is to love the state and hate the state--and, for many, to leave it.
I WANT TO BELIEVE. I do.
I want to believe, despite my memories of voting for the reformer Buddy Roemer in 1987. Despite my memories -- following the news in subsequent years from my new home in Nebraska -- of how Roemer got chewed up and spit out by the unholy trinity of Dat's How We Do Things in Loosiana, Dat's Loosiana for You and, the grafters' favorite, How You Gonna Hep Me Out Here? (wink wink).
I want to believe in the power of one man -- this Brown- and Oxford-educated son of immigrants who came home instead of doing the sensible thing -- to right in a term or two what the natives took 300 years to f*** up this badly.
I HAD LEFT LOUISIANA by the time David Duke beat out the incumbent Roemer in the 1991 gubernatorial primary. The onetime Klan leader and Nazi foot soldier damn near became governor of Louisiana, losing to the crook Edwin Edwards but nevertheless winning a majority of the white vote.
Did I mention that, before running for governor, he served in the state House, representing Metairie, a mostly-white suburb of New Orleans?
When Duke made the governor's runoff, I threatened to never set foot in the state again if the little Nazi won. And I was dead serious. I was prepared to boycott everything about Louisiana, cutting off my pittance to the LSU Alumni Association and even giving up my beloved Community Coffee.
I told my parents this . . . my parents, the ardent Duke supporters. And on Election Day, they cast their votes.
For David Duke. I guess that tells you everything you need to know.
HOPE REQUIRES that I believe that the citizenry of my home state wants reform. Wants change. Wants better than what they have now.
I am to believe this of the self-same Louisiana citizenry that tolerates sending their children -- or somebody's children -- to unsafe, crumbling public schools . . . the same Louisiana citizenry that has embraced the likes of David Duke as a mainstream candidate for high office . . . the same Louisiana citizenry that is OK with maintaining a Third World enclave in the richest country in the world.
Compared to that leap of faith, it's kid stuff to believe Jesus Christ makes Himself present flesh and blood, soul and divinity in a wafer of unleavened bread and a chalice of wine. As a Catholic, I most certainly believe the transubstantiation thing.
As a native Louisianian, when it comes to the reality of true reform back home . . . not so much.
This I do know: You can't turn a supertanker heading full-steam for Hades on a dime. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of time. And if it's the SS Louisiana, a lot of dumb luck, too.
Oh, Louisiana, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.
As wildfires were charging across Southern California, nearly two dozen water-dropping helicopters and two massive cargo planes sat idly by, grounded by government rules and bureaucracy.
How much the aircraft would have helped will never be known, but their inability to provide quick assistance raises troubling questions about California’s preparations for a fire season that was widely expected to be among the worst on record.
It took as long as a day for Navy, Marine and California National Guard helicopters to get clearance early this week, in part because state rules require all firefighting choppers to be accompanied by state forestry “fire spotters” who coordinate water or retardant drops. By the time those spotters arrived, the powerful Santa Ana winds stoking the fires had made it too dangerous to fly.
The National Guard’s C-130 cargo planes, among the most powerful aerial firefighting weapons, never were slated to help. The reason: They’ve yet to be outfitted with tanks needed to carry thousands of gallons of fire retardant, though that was promised four years ago.
“The weight of bureaucracy kept these planes from flying, not the heavy winds,” Republican U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher told The Associated Press. “When you look at what’s happened, it’s disgusting, inexcusable foot-dragging that’s put tens of thousands of people in danger.”
Rohrabacher and other members of California’s congressional delegation are demanding answers about aircraft deployment. And some fire chiefs have grumbled that a quick deployment of aircraft could have helped corral many of the wildfires that quickly flared out of control and have so far burned 500,000 acres from Malibu to the Mexican border.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other state officials have defended the state’s response, saying the intense winds prevented a more timely air attack.
“Anyone that is complaining about the planes just wants to complain,” Schwarzenegger replied angrily to a question Wednesday. “The fact is that we could have all the planes in the world here — we have 90 aircraft here and six that we got especially from the federal government — and they can’t fly because of the wind.”
Indeed, winds reaching 100 mph helped drive the flames and made it exceedingly dangerous to fly. Still, four state helicopters and two from the Navy were able to take off Monday while nearly two dozen others stayed grounded.
Thomas Eversole, executive director of the American Helicopter Services & Aerial Firefighting Association, a Virginia-based nonprofit that serves as a liaison between helicopter contractors and federal agencies, said valuable time was lost.
“The basis for the initial attack helicopters is to get there when the fire is still small enough that you can contain it,” Eversole said. “If you don’t get there in time, you quickly run the risk of these fires’ getting out of control.”
I IMAGINE burned-out Californians will encounter similar competence and efficiency from the government -- and their insurance companies -- when it comes to getting roofs over their heads in the coming days, weeks, months and years.
Just think, the high-school kids who started the hottest fashion accessory for White Power Nation only got a suspension after they hung those first nooses from Jena (La.) High School's "white tree."
But their sick handiwork has struck a sick chord among whack jobs and redneck idiots across the land. The latest noose sighting is just across the state from Jena, as reported by The Shreveport Times, is at the LSU Health Sciences Center:
A worker found a noose hanging at LSUHSC-Shreveport on Wednesday morning, the same day the new LSU System president made his first visit to the campus. The rope was in a break room and had a noose on both ends, hospital administrators said.
Only certain workers can enter the room, a prepared statement says. Chancellor and Dean John C. McDonald would not say who can enter.
System President John Lombardi, who took the helm in July, likened hanging the noose to a hate crime. He said the act is "reprehensible and will not be tolerated." A federal investigation is ongoing, McDonald says in a release. LSUHSC administration refused comment on any other specific questions. The Western District of the U.S. attorney's office did not return a Times phone call for comment.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING as personal -- or private -- sin. Sin is a cancer; it metastasizes.
Sin is a big rock thrown into a tranquil pond; there are ripples.
And if the sin is ugly enough, and if a community puts up with it enough -- enables it enough -- it can have "legs." It can run amok. Just like those nooses hung from the "white tree" in a Louisiana backwater called Jena.
UPDATE: Here, from the USA TODAY editorial page Oct. 5, is one of the best things I've read on the whole Jena mess.
Well, it's probably a good thing that President Bush really couldn't care less about what goes on in New Orleans.
If he did, with stories like this in the news -- and you really, really can't make this stuff up -- he'd probably go all Vladimir Putin on their ass and bomb this American Chechnya back to the Stone Age.
To totally switch gears, however, can you think of a better place in New Orleans for an alleged armed robber to flee to than District Attorney Eddie Jordan's house? After all, the guy can't convict anybody -- even the worst felon would be perfectly safe under the D.A.'s wing.
A man New Orleans police believe committed an armed robbery -- and afterward fled to the home of District Attorney Eddie Jordan -- is also a suspect in the home invasion and shooting of a police officer and his wife a day later, several police sources confirmed Wednesday.
The bizarre confluence of events began the evening of Oct. 11, according to those sources and police documents obtained by The Times-Picayune.
The 20-year-old man stopped by Jordan's house minutes after he allegedly fled after an armed robbery outside a nearby Shell gas station. He arrived at Jordan's house on foot, having run away after the robbery victim rammed his sport utility vehicle into the car carrying the suspect, police documents said.
Investigators later also connected the suspect, Elton Phillips, to an eastern New Orleans robbery and shooting by two gunmen, who critically wounded a police officer and shot the officer's wife in the foot after breaking into their home late at night.
On Wednesday, Jordan said he didn't know Phillips, and didn't know Phillips had allegedly committed armed robbery shortly before arriving at his home. The district attorney said his longtime girlfriend Cherylynn Robinson knows Phillips, and she in fact had spent Oct. 11 -- her birthday -- with him and his relatives in Baton Rouge. He said Robinson is not related to Phillips.
After Jordan saw a news report naming Phillips as a robbery suspect, he said, he immediately called New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley.
"I called Warren Riley and said I wanted to speak to the police," Jordan said. "I called him immediately after I discovered he had been wanted for an armed robbery," he said, referring to Phillips.
But investigators had difficulty interviewing Jordan, according to documents. Those reports indicate investigators repeatedly called Jordan's cell phone over the course of three days, but he failed to answer and his voice mail was full. At one point, investigators went to Jordan's home and rang the doorbell for 10 minutes, but no one came to the door.
An investigator finally confirmed Jordan had gotten the interview request by sending it through an intermediary, Ralph Brandt, head of Jordan's trials division, according to a police document. The investigator had told Brandt that Jordan's lack of cooperation could result in bad publicity, the document said.
The officers "didn't express concern about any substantial delay," Jordan said. "The question was, 'How do we find this guy?'¤"
Jordan said he could not be reached simply because it was a busy week, not because he sought to avoid investigators.
"I don't know if you've been reading the papers lately, but I got some things going on," he said. "I got one or two things going on. I'm getting it from all sides."
Jordan, who is black, has taken heavy criticism this week after a federal judge ruled that the assets of his office could be seized to pay off a $3.7 million judgment against his office for racial discrimination in the firing of white employees.
The world has reached the point of maximum oil output and production levels will halve by 2030 -- a situation that will eventually lead to war and disaster, a report claims.
The German-based Energy Watch Group released a report Tuesday saying the world's oil production peaked in 2006 and from now on will drop by around 3 percent a year. It says that by as early as 2030, the global availability of oil will be half of what it was at its peak.
"It's a very serious result," said Hans-Josef Fell, a German lawmaker from the environmentalist Green Party who commissioned the report. "I fear the world will come into a big economic crisis in the coming years."
The report warns that coal, uranium, and other key fossil fuels are also in declining supply. It predicts the fall in fossil fuel production will bring with it the threat of war, humanitarian disaster, and general social unrest.
But Leo Drollas, who leads oil and gas market analysis and forecasting at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, said there are plenty of supplies and no looming crisis. He said the report sounds like "scaremongering."
A while ago, I was gazing out the kitchen window at the lawn guys a couple of houses down. They were doing what probably was the fall's last mowing, along with some seasonal aerating. I'll bet they used up a gallon and a half of gasoline, easy.
It occurred to me that this ritual of American suburbia in five or 10 years will seem as foreign to us as quilting bees, canning season or making tallow candles to beat back the darkness from your unelectrified cabin. YOU SEE, the jig is almost up for America Uber Alles and the easy life of the middle-class. The oil is running out, and the phenomenon called "peak oil" is just around the corner, maybe no further off than three years hence.
After that, global oil production will start to slide several percent per year, all in a world of exploding demand for cheap energy. Needless to say, the effect on an entire economy -- an entire way of life predicated on lots of cars running on lots of gas -- will be devastating and will change forever the way we live.
That's not me saying this. It's this, "this" being an analysis in the British magazine Money Week:
The American middle class consumer though indebted still travels to the fry pits and big box retail stores lining the eight lane highways. And they are still spending money with that good old up tempo American resilience to jolts from the outside world. In spite of the fact that they can no longer use their homes as ATM machines by progressively re-mortgaging when property prices were going up.
Sub-prime crisis or not, the Fed will rescue the system and the American way of life will go on as always, with a few temporary tweaks and household budgetary adjustments... won’t it? After all, didn’t George Bush Snr. forcefully declare at the Earth Summit in 1992 that “the American way of life is not negotiable.” And the centrepiece of that way of life is suburbia and has been for 60 years.
It spawned suburban sprawl and the ‘drive-in utopia’ and enabled millions of people to live a long car drive from their work. The ultimate American story has been and is played out in the suburbs to the delight of the Simpsons scriptwriters and makers of dark movies such as David Lynch.
So is American suburbia screwed? Does it represent, in the words of James Howard Kunstler, admittedly a car hating, new Urbanite iconoclast, “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world’’?
Will much of American suburbia become the “new slums” peopled by the “new and impoverished proletariat”, while others scramble to escape? Are we soon going to be talking about America’s “former middle class”? To quote Sam Goldwyn, it’s a “definite maybe.”
How come? At its root, there’s a simple unvarnished fact. And it’s not about over-stretched borrowers. It’s a crude and brutal fact that the ‘cheap oil fiesta’ is over. And what exactly is the problem? It’s this. Americans remain oblivious to the red light on the fuel gauge, and the long and short of it is that the whole suburban phenomenon was and is built around the car, and the central dogma that oil will remain abundant and cheap for ever and anon. Upon that is predicated the system that has sustained the daily lives of the vast bulk of Americans - the ‘American dream’ - since the late 1940s.
(snip)
Instead, we tend to go with those who see the free market price oil price more likely to hit $100 per barrel than $30 and in any case to stay at $70 and above given geopolitics and demand pressures. We are seeing the growth of bi-lateral or multi-lateral neo-mercantilist oil supply deals between the likes of Russia and China, Angola and Nigeria and China, India and Russia, and Venezuela with various consumers. This is leading to shortfalls of supplies available for the rest of the world via the NYMEX and other bourses.
So if the world is indeed heading down the arc of oil depletion, and if geopolitics and neo-mercantilism bring significant insecurities into US oil supplies, the American suburban lifestyle built round the car will start to destabilise and wobble with deep and wide ramifications.
Just ponder this... the average Caesar salad travels 1,500 miles to the supermarket shelf. And those 12,000 mile supply chains of cheap, if increasingly ‘tainted’, Chinese goods will begin to look uneconomic with a $100 per barrel oil price. Indeed at anything much over $70. Moreover, US agriculture, currently being reshaped by the oil-intensive ethanol-from-crops movement, has been consolidated in a very small fraction of the population, and relies on pumping oil-based products – fertilisers and pesticides - into the soil to yield food crops.
Maybe, to misquote and modify Randy Newman: “if he were alive today, Thomas Jefferson would be rotating in his grave.” Assuming that in some degree or other, the era of American suburbia is ending, at a speed yet to be determined, America will be forced to recalibrate itself to some degree. This could yield a lot of opportunities amidst the turmoil. For example, in general terms, ‘the local’ supplier will bulk larger vs ‘the distant’. There will a ‘made here’ and ‘still made here’ placards reflecting more home grown businesses, and not just restaurants and beauty parlours but textile and auto-parts manufacturers among others. More small towns will be developed and built.
OF WHAT I'VE BEEN READING lately, the above is the rosy view from a Brit who has more faith in American ingenuity than I do. A more prevalent view among those warning that "peak oil" is nigh, is that the economic upheaval brought by the increasing scarcity -- and costliness -- of the lifeblood of Leviathan America may bring about a situation where it's every man for himself, that "state of nature" described by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his masterwork, Leviathan.
And, according to Hobbes, life in the state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
I think there is a growing possibility of severe social and personal pain and dislocation, of societal upheaval and even political chaos. These are not conditions that we have ever experienced and seem implausible, even incredible. But, the bleak scenario we may face is not because human beings - and Americans especially - can't live this better way of life, but because we have organized our lives in ways that make any such easy transition implausible if not impossible.
There are obvious ways in which this is so: take, for instance, the example of banking. The modern capitalist system is built on the health of a banking system. The health of a banking system rests most deeply upon a foundation of economic growth: no one would lend out money at modest interest if they believed first, that there was great risk of default, and second, if the money returned in the future (even with interest) was worth less than money in the present. Our banking system hums along in the backdrop of economic growth; in a backdrop of economic contraction, the banking system would become dysfunctional. Some bankers might succeed by making good bets on individuals, but the systemic backstop that the future will be brighter than the present would disappear (this is the same principle by which we do better betting on the market than necessarily on individual stocks; we can afford to have some losers in our portfolios in the backdrop of a rising market. Just as a rising market makes everyone look like financial geniuses, so too a growing economy makes our high-finance Hampton banker boys look brilliant).
Beyond such specific examples, however, there is a deeper cause for concern which is tied most fundamentally to the very plausibility of the modern liberal system. Modern liberal society is premised on growth - constant, unrelenting growth. Liberal democracies have always and everywhere come under severe stress, and very often have disintegrated under conditions of prolonged economic contraction. Much of modern history records not the stability and "normality" or naturalness of liberal democracy, but its profound fragility. America has come to believe that liberal democracy is its birthright, even that it is the natural condition of mankind. There is much evidence to contradict this belief: liberal democracy has in most cases been a difficult political arrangement to maintain, perhaps above all because it requires belief in its fundamental justness from the populace. In the absence of the prospects of limitless growth, the populace of many liberal democracies have rejected the justness of liberal democracy, and their societies have unravelled, at times descending into conflict, civil war and chaos.
Why should this be so? In a nutshell, liberal democracy contains an internal contradiction: liberalism is a political theory of basic economic inequality; democracy is premised upon the belief in political equality. Democracy exerts an egalitarian pressure upon liberalism, to which liberalism must offer some compensation. The earliest theorists of liberalism understood well that they were commending a theory of economic inequality: in the justly famous Chapter 5 of the Second Treatise on Government, John Locke argued that liberal society allowed and even encouraged increasing economic differentiation between the "industrious and rational" and the "quarrelsome and contentious." Advanced liberal societies permitted the exacerbation of the position between these two sorts of humans: the rights of liberal society required defense of the State, above all, to prevent the assault on wealthy "estates" (or property) by the larger "quarrelsome and contentious" classes. Locke foresaw the potential of proto-Marxist temptations among the poor to deprive the wealthy of property. In the end, the promise of State protection of property was not sufficient: liberal society cannot last if there is a persistent desire on the part of the lower classes to encroach on rights of property. A repressive (Western) liberalism has generally not proven successful.
(snip)
People will not gladly or easily accept sure knowledge of a future of decrease. The idea that we will gradually and easily slip into a "better future" in which the stock market continuously loses value; in which our houses grow less valuable year after year; in which our purchasing power, via our dollar, buys less every passing day; in which our children can expect to make less money, to have a "less successful" future than previous generations; in which we will have to adjust our expectations to accept work of a more manual nature, for less money, and with less leisure - that we will go gladly into that "better life" without a tumultuous political upheaval and a vicious fight over the valuable scraps that remain is implausible if not pure fantasy and dangerous wishful thinking.
OY. If only Deneen were an ill-informed crank making this stuff up out of whole cloth, which he isn't.
As a matter of fact, one of the leading experts on "peak oil" two years ago sounded alarm bells in Washington. But instead of sounding the alarm bells with the American public and industry, our leaders already had taken another tack in 2003 -- invade the country with the world's third-largest oil reserves.
And that may well be exactly why we're in the Iraq quagmire today. But more on that later.
When global oil production peaks, the economy is likely to shrink in direct proportion to dwindling fuel supplies, says Dr Robert Hirsch of the think tank SAIC.
Speaking at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference in Houston, he also warned that as peak approaches, producer countries including OPEC and Russia are likely to husband their reserves for future generations and limit exports, potentially sharpening the decline in oil available to importing nations.
And, of course, we get back to Iraq. You know, the country with the world's third-largest oil reserves -- greatly undertapped oil reserves, thanks to the sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime. Again, here's some of an article by Strahan, the British journalist:
But despite the oil majors’ undoubted interest and influence, the decision to attack was not taken in the boardroom. Iraq was indeed all about oil, but in a sense that transcends the interests of individual corporations – however large.
The elephant in the drawing rooms of both the White House and No 10 was the fact that global oil production is likely to ‘peak’ and fall into terminal decline within about a decade - the inevitable result of 40 years of dwindling oil discoveries and ever-rising consumption. Oil production is already on the slide in 60 of the world’s 98 oil producing countries - including the US and Britain. Dr Michael Smith of the oil consultancy Energyfiles forecasts another 14 will join the descent during the next ten years. Aggregate oil production in the OECD has been falling since 1997, and all major forecasters – including noted optimists such as the International Energy Agency and Exxon Mobil - expect output for the entire world except OPEC to peak by the middle of the next decade. From then on everything depends on the cartel, but unfortunately there is growing evidence that its members have been exaggerating the size of their reserves for decades, and that their output could also falter soon.
As I report in The Last Oil Shock, the international oil consultancy PFC Energy briefed Dick Cheney in 2005 that on a more realistic assessment of OPEC’s reserves, its production could peak by 2015. That would tip global output into terminal decline, almost certainly bringing soaring oil prices, deep recession and worse. A report published by the US Department of Energy, also in 2005, concluded that without a crash programme of mitigation 20 years before the event, the economic and social impacts of the oil peak would be “unprecedented”. The evidence suggests that these fears were already weighing heavily with Cheney, Bush and Blair.
In a world of looming oil shortage, Iraq represented a unique opportunity. With 115 billion barrels Iraq had the world’s third biggest reserves, and after years of war and sanctions they were also the most underexploited. In the late 1990s Iraqi oil production averaged about 2 million barrels per day, but with the necessary investment its reserves could support three times that output. Not only were sanctions stopping Iraqi production from growing, but also actively damaging the country’s petroleum geology by denying the national oil company access to essential chemicals and equipment. In one of a series of reports to the Security Council, UN specialist inspectors warned in January 2000 that sanctions had already caused irreversible damage to Iraq’s reservoirs, and would continue to lead to “the permanent loss of huge reserves of oil”. But sanctions could not be lifted with Saddam still in place, so if Iraq’s oil was to help defer the onset of global decline, the monster so long supported by the West would have to go.
As I reveal in The Last Oil Shock, the CIA was also well aware of Iraq’s unique value, having secretly paid for new maps of its petroleum geology to be drawn as early as 1998. Cheney also knew, fretting publicly about global oil depletion at a speech in London the following year, where he noted that “the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies”. Blair too had reason to be anxious about oil: British North Sea output had peaked in 1999 - and has been falling ever since - while the petrol protests of 2000 had made the importance of maintaining the fuel supply excruciatingly obvious.
WHICH MIGHT BE WHY Vice-President Dick Cheney has a strikingly different take on the wisdom of invading all of Iraq and occupying it than Defense Secretary Dick Cheney did in the wake of the first Gulf War.
Of course, taking all of Iraq this time, then occupying it, hasn't worked out so well. Nor has the resulting chaos done much for exploiting those Iraqi oil reserves.
Returning for a moment to the dire predictions of Hirsch, the oil-supply expert, here's Deneen again. Just so that we're perfectly clear on what we might be facing much sooner than we think:
The impact of an ongoing negative growth economy in a society that is premised upon ongoing and permanent growth will be catastrophic. Everything we assume about the future would change. Few jobs, few bank loans, difficulty providing goods and services (including food), shrinking numbers of college educations, the evaporation of our national wealth, declining levels of research and innovation across the board, no retirement accounts, the decline of the middle class and devastation of the lower classes, etc.
In answer to a question whether "peak oil" will occur as a gradual plateau or a sudden and drastic decline, Hirsch points to the high likelihood of increased resource nationalism (a phenomenon we are already witnessing around the world). He notes that private oil companies no longer control petroleum resources; national companies do. As awareness of peak oil spreads, there will first be a further spike in oil prices and a growing inclination of resource-rich nations to hold their remaining oil in reserve for domestic production and in expectation of further rises in price. This response will, of course, only accelerate and deepen the crisis.
Hirsch foresees the likelihood of gas rationing as a reactive answer to our current inability to begin cutting back our consumption. Nature will exact her price, whether we are willing to pay for it significantly now or drastically in the near future. Our techno-optimists tell us that technology will come to the rescue. The nice thing about holding this position is that no one has to act responsibly or like an adult. It was once the case that adults acted with prudence, awaiting not the best case scenario but preparing for the possibility of a worse. Our liberals and conservatives alike tell us that technology will save us, but mark my words, when TSHTF they will be the first to blame someone else: the Saudis, the Iranians, the Russians, Hugo Chavez, you name it. Our impressive military will be called upon to secure our vital national interest, wherever it might happen to be buried. And at that point no one will be able to suggest that perhaps we have ourselves to blame, because we did nothing when intelligent but obtuse people knew what was coming at the end of our wild ride down Sunset Boulevard.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS when a society lives beyond its means. This is the very real consequence of sin, of avarice on a societal scale.
We have gotten what we wished for. It didn't make us happy, nor did it sate our appetite for more, more, more. And now we're going to lose it. All.
A lot of fundamentalist types -- of both the Protestant and Catholic persuasions -- thought they had it figured. The wrath of God will come upon us, borne on the waves and winds of a monster hurricane. Or shake the world with the power of an earthquake.
Engulf the world in a nuclear fire?
INSTEAD, maybe God's just chastisement of His deeply crooked people will come in with the relative quiet of oil wells slowly going dry. One after another, world without end, amen. Maybe the judgment of the Almighty comes, as it always has, in giving rebellious and willful humanity all the rope it needs -- plus free will.
If and when our Western house of cards comes tumbling down upon us, don't blame God. We could have been less avaricious. We could have lived more simply. We, at any time, just could have cut it out.
We didn't have to be our own hangman. We didn't have to take the rope and make a civilizational noose out of it.
IT'S NOT God's fault. It's ours.
Did you really need that $35,000 SUV? Did you really need two of them? Does your family need to be a three- or four-car family?
Did you really need that 4,500 square-foot house in the exurbs? Did you need to live in the exurbs -- or even the suburbs -- at all? Did I?
Does everybody in the family need two cell phones, a BlackBerry, three iPods and a mega sound system in each car?
Do you need Evian, Aquafina or any other kind of bottled water (and the petroleum needed to make the throwaway plastic bottles it comes in) when the stuff out of the tap is the same two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen?
AND WHAT ABOUT the $250 -- a piece -- you just dropped on Hannah Montana tickets for your two preteen daughters, who really, really didn't need to go to a damn Hannah Montana concert? You'd raise holy hell if your county government imposed a $500-a-year tax on you to build and subsidize convenient, low-cost, energy-efficient mass transit.
Yes, you would.
Well, now the conductor is coming down the aisle, announcing the end of the line. Your fare card is spent. Please exit to the back.
OK, this is primitive television . . . a videotape of a Dec. 3, 1950, kinescope of Toast of the Town, which would be renamed TheEd Sullivan Show (after its host) in 1955.
This clip, years before television had the opportunity to become completely stupid -- though it always has had its moments -- features Stan Kenton and his orchestra, with a solo by an up-and-coming trumpeter in the band, name of Maynard Ferguson.
Them was the days.
Y'know, I'll respect MTV if it ever features anything -- like this clip, for example -- that stretches its audience beyond the concepts of getting loaded and getting laid.
But that's just me, an old fart who remembers MTV when it actually played, uh . . . music videos.
What's that? "What's a kinescope?" you ask? It's this.
I've always loved Kyu Sakamoto's"Sukiyaki," a song that has absolutely nothing to do with the title, which originally was "Ue o muite arukō" ("I Look Up When I Walk") for its original Japanese release in 1961. The American re-release was all over American Top-40 radio in 1963, when your Mighty Favog was a toddler Favog, and I guess it stuck.
Thing is, the happy melody belies a sad, sad song. Here are the lyrics:
I'll look up while I'm walking Ue wo muite arukou 上を向いて歩こう
So the tears don't fall from my eyes Namida ga koborenai youni 涙がこぼれないように
I think back to spring days Omoidasu haru no hi 思い出す春の日
It's a lonely night Hitoribocchi no yoru 一人ぼっちの夜
I'll look up while I'm walking Ue wo muite arukou 上を向いて歩こう
And count the scattered stars Nijinda hoshi wo kazoete にじんだ星をかぞえて
I think back to summer days Omoidasu natsu no hi 思い出す夏の日
It's a lonely night Hitoribocchi no yoru 一人ぼっちの夜
Happiness is above the clouds Shiawase wa kumo no ue ni 幸せは雲の上に
Happiness is above the sky Shiawase wa sora no ue ni 幸せは空の上に
I'll look up while I'm walking Ue wo muite arukou 上を向いて歩こう
So the tears don't fall from my eyes Namida ga koborenai youni 涙がこぼれないように
Even while I cry I walk on Naki nagara aruku 泣きながら歩く
It's a lonely night Hitoribocchi no yoru 一人ぼっちの夜
Sadness is in the light of the stars Kanashimi wa hoshi no kage ni 悲しみは星の影に
Sadness is in the light of the moon Kanashimi wa tsuki no kage ni 悲しみは月の影に
I'll look up while I'm walking Ue wo muite arukou 上を向いて歩こう
So the tears don't fall from my eyes Namida ga koborenai youni 涙がこぼれないように
Even while I cry I walk on Naki nagara aruku 泣きながら歩く
It's a lonely night Hitoribocchi no yoru 一人ぼっちの夜
It's a lonely night Hitoribocchi no yoru 一人ぼっちの夜
THIS VIDEO is from a Japanese TV show -- Shall We Meet at Seven? -- broadcast in June 1963. You have to love the quirky -- by American standards -- videography.
Thanks to Steve Pederson, Nebraska not only surrendered the Big 12 to Texas and Oklahoma . . . and Oklahoma State and Texas A&M . . . and Missouri and Kansas State . . . and Colorado and Texas Tech, but now it's surrendered the state of Nebraska to Nebraska-Omaha.
In its Wednesday editions -- hitting the streets just before the impending Apocalypse -- the Omaha World-Heraldreports on Husker Nation's final humiliation:
There is a team ranked No. 28 by one of the computer formulas used to determine the Bowl Championship Series standings, but it is not angling for a shot at a bowl game.
This team is ranked just behind UCLA, USC and California, and just ahead of Clemson, Penn State, Purdue, Texas A&M and Oklahoma State, and is not complaining about falling seven spots, from No. 21, despite winning last week.
This team is the University of Nebraska . . . at Omaha.
"If that's where they have us, then that must be exactly where we should be," UNO coach Pat Behrns said, laughing.
While UNO, at 7-0, has proven to be one of the top teams in Division II, there aren't many who believe that the Mavericks are playing at a level to compare with college football's heavyweights. That includes Kenneth Massey, whose computer formula currently has UNO among the best teams in the land.
"It's kind of a flaw in the system," he said. "We're not allowed to use margin of victory, just wins and losses, for the BCS. And to be fair, everybody starts out at zero at the beginning of the season — from LSU down to the worst NAIA team. You don't want to assume that a Division II team isn't as good as a I-A team until that's proven on the field, and sometimes it takes more than six or seven weeks, even a whole season, until enough results are in to make it conclusive."
Massey, 30, who earned a mathematics degree from Virginia Tech and is based in Tennessee, began computer ratings as a hobby in the mid-1990s. His ratings have been used as part of the BCS formula since 1999.
He said it wasn't as easy for a Division II team to sneak high into the overall ratings when margin of victory was part of the formula. Using margin of victory, UNO is No. 78 in the Massey Ratings.
Massey said UNO's wins over North Dakota and Northwest Missouri State — two teams that are otherwise unbeaten — have helped push up its rating to No. 28. The next highest Division II team behind UNO is North Alabama at 66. North Dakota is No. 76 and Northwest Missouri State is No. 79.
Staying undefeated against a schedule filled with teams with good records keeps a team's rating high.
"They are propping each other up, but as soon as that house of cards crumbles — and it only takes one upset — things will change," he said. "They'll still be ranked high compared to other Division II teams, but they won't be overly high as they are now."
(snip)
"I've never really seen a Division II team play a (BCS) team," Behrns said. "Most of the Division II teams that have gone out and played I-AA teams have done a decent job, but that's still a heck of a step up."
Just for the record, Nebraska is No. 53 in the Massey Ratings, well below the Mavs. Using margin of victory, the Huskers are at No. 75, three spots better than UNO.
"They're not better (than Nebraska), but they've been more impressive this year," Massey said. "They haven't lost a game, and Nebraska has. In order to say Nebraska is better, you have to have prior knowledge — you have to know that Nebraska is bigger and faster and is a Division I team. But (to the computer) Nebraska hasn't shown anything on the field to indicate it's any better than Omaha."
CAN THERE BE ANY DOUBT that Coach Bill Callahan is just as toast as the fool who hired him? It's just that new athletic director/old legend Tom Osborne is too decent a man to fire his sorry ass before he has well and truly hung himself with all the rope he's been handed.
When indiscriminate sex becomes an entitlement program and a children's-rights issue, it's not long at all before we start treating our children like animals, and parents start acting like pet owners -- only without the doting -- and health-care professionals become veterinarians for bipeds.
Then again, that would be an insult to the compassionate and professional veterinarians I have known.
Here's a story from the Portland (Maine) Press Heraldabout a school board member's proposal that is all the more ridiculous for being a compromise measure, as opposed to the undiluted evil of last week's original decision:
A Portland School Committee member wants to give parents the power to keep their children from participating in a controversial new plan to make prescription birth control available to students at King Middle School.
Benjamin Meiklejohn submitted a resolution Monday, to be considered by the committee on Nov. 7. The proposal would give parents the option to block access to prescription contraception if they enroll their children in the King Student Health Center.
Meiklejohn's proposal also would limit access to prescription contraception such as "the pill" and "the patch" to students who are at least 14 years old.
The committee's 7-2 vote last week would make King the first middle school in Maine to offer a full range of contraception in grades 6 to 8, when students are 11 to 15 years old, school officials said.
Meiklejohn said some committee members urged him to delay submitting his resolution, fearing it would fan the flames of a national media frenzy over the committee's decision. But Meiklejohn said it would be a mistake to put off action on an issue that has divided the community.
"We should bring some resolution to this issue as soon as possible," said Meiklejohn, who voted against providing prescription birth control at King.
Although students need written parental permission to be treated at King's health center, state law allows them to receive confidential care for reproductive health, mental health and substance abuse issues. So parents who allow their children to be treated there may never know whether their children receive the pill or the patch or any other reproductive health care.
King's health center, which is operated by the city's Public Health Division, has provided condoms as part of comprehensive reproductive health care since it opened in 2000.
John Coyne, School Committee chairman, said he supports the general ideas behind Meiklejohn's proposal, but he wants to make sure it wouldn't break state laws that ensure access to health care and privacy of minors. Coyne also voted against offering prescription contraception at King.
"I would never want to put out something for the board to vote on that is illegal," Coyne said. "If we can figure out the legal issues around this decision, maybe we can come up with something a little more palatable to me and others."
Committee members Rebecca Minnick and Susan Hopkins said they probably wouldn't vote to reduce the scope of reproductive health services provided at King. Other committee members couldn't be reached for comment Monday.
"If it saves one girl from getting pregnant too soon, it's worth it," Minnick said.
OR, AS DOSTOEVSKY once wrote:
Now assume there is no God or immortality of the soul. Now tell me, why should I live righteously and do good deeds if I am to die entirely on earth?. . . And if that is so, why shouldn't I (as long as I can rely on my cleverness and agility to avoid being caught by the law) cut another man's throat , rob, and steal.
Or, for that matter, give birth-control pills and patches to 11-year-old girls. After all, in Portland, they're already giving rubbers to 11-year-old boys.
It's been my experience that people generally act like animals only when those in power assume that they are, then treat them accordingly. And that includes the realm of lowered, or nonexistent, expectations.
Our dignity lies in He who created us. Otherwise, we're somewhat smarter than Fido, but about half as pleasant to be around.
Or, in this case, alleged crook. Anyway, in today's latest lesson on "Crooked politicians don't just grow on trees on the capitol grounds," we have the latest Louisiana politician in the feds' crosshairs: state Sen. Derrick Shepherd. I COULD GO ON AND ON, but The Times-Picayune in New Orleans tells the story so well:
An FBI agent testified in open court Monday that state Sen. Derrick Shepherd helped a twice-convicted felon launder nearly $141,000 in fraudulently generated bond fees last year, keeping close to half the money as part of the arrangement.
Shepherd was easily re-elected to the state Senate on Saturday, winning 61 percent of the vote. Last year, he finished a strong third in a 2006 run for Congress and then endorsed the embattled incumbent, U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, helping him secure a ninth term.
Special Agent Peter Smith testified that Shepherd, a lawyer who often handles personal-injury cases, attempted to make his dealings with bond broker Gwendolyn Joseph Moyo appear legitimate by writing the words "settlement proceeds" on the memo lines of the checks.
However, investigators have found no evidence that Shepherd did any legal work for Moyo, Smith said, although he said that Shepherd had delivered a "vague invoice" to a federal grand jury to explain the payments. The document was basically illegible, Smith said.
"To me, it looks like he was trying to disguise it, to make it look like this was for a personal-injury case," Smith said of the notations in the checks' memo lines.
"I suppose the government takes the position that it's money laundering?" Moyo's attorney, Pat Fanning, asked Smith.
"Yes," Smith testified.
In a telephone interview, Shepherd strongly denied committing a crime.
"At no time have I ever testified before a grand jury, nor at any time have I ever committed any crime whatsoever -- state, local or federal -- in my life," Shepherd said.
"To all of the rest of your questions, no comment," he said.
The allegations involving Shepherd burst into public view during what would normally be a low-key proceeding: a detention hearing for Moyo, who investigators say sold a series of bogus construction bonds.
Moyo, 52, who owns a home in the Eastover subdivision of eastern New Orleans, was arrested at the federal courthouse Thursday after she arrived at the grand jury room without any of the documents she was ordered to bring.
While Moyo is at the center of the government's case, it was clear at Monday's hearing that the government is investigating Shepherd's involvement. Smith said Shepherd has already been interviewed by FBI agents in connection with the inquiry.
They still have questions for him, Smith indicated at another point, saying with a grin that Shepherd has "been invited to the grand jury."
Fanning suggested that prosecutors' desire to jail Moyo was partially borne of a desire to pressure her to "flip" on Shepherd. He noted pointedly that Moyo would not agree to "wear a wire" when the FBI first interviewed her in July.
"Do you remember my client being asked to cooperate against Derrick Shepherd?" Fanning asked Smith.
"I don't remember specifically saying that, but I probably did," the agent said.
Moyo has yet to be charged with a crime, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Magner told U.S. Magistrate Judge Alma Chasez that he expects a grand jury will indict her this week. Moyo was arrested based on a complaint filed by Smith last week.
Moyo's first conviction, for issuing false contractor bonds, came in Arizona in 1989.
She won some notoriety in the Washington, D.C., area when she offered the following year to testify against Mayor Marion Barry, a friend of hers, regarding what the Washington Post described as "alleged drug use and contracting irregularities."
But her attorney said that prosecutors couldn't meet her terms, and she never turned state's evidence. The following year, Moyo was convicted of using a fake Social Security number.
After her first conviction, she was banned by law from the insurance business. But she didn't stay away from it for good.
YOU KNOW,politicians in my home state may have the equivalent of a Ph.D in crooked, but Louisiana voters are definitely riding the short bus. Which goes a long way in explaining a lot.
“It’s just brazen down here. In Louisiana, they skim the cream, steal the milk, hijack the bottle and look for the cow.”
Alice Harte Charter School in Algiers will be closed Tuesday, due to roof leaks and flooding caused by today's severe rainstorms.
Officials regret the inconvenience and are doing everything they can to get students back into the facility as soon as possible, said Brian Riedlinger, chief executive officer of the Algiers Charter School Association.
"Unfortunately, this building has a lot of problems, and weather like this really illustrates the need to upgrade our school facilities," he said.
Parents should monitor the news for information on the possibility of resuming classes Wednesday.
Earlier this year, officials condemned two classrooms at Harte, due to severe mold infestations. They relocated some students to a church across the street to await remediation and repairs. Harte currently serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
For more information, parents can call the ACSA's Central Office at (504) 393-0926. Teachers and staff are expected to report to school Tuesday.
Some people got a lot of nerve. Here's a good one from The Associated Press:
President Bush asked Congress on Monday for another $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and finance other national security needs. "We must provide our troops with the help and support they need to get the job done," Bush said.
The figure brings to $196.4 billion the total requested by the administration for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere for the budget year that started Oct. 1. It includes $189.3 billion for the Defense Department, $6.9 billion for the State Department and $200 million for other agencies.
To date, Congress has already provided more than $455 billion for the Iraq war, with stepped-up military operations running about $10 billion a month. The war has claimed the lives of more than 3,830 members of the U.S. military and more than 73,000 Iraqi civilians.
Bush made his request in the Roosevelt Room after meeting in the Oval Office with leaders of veterans service organizations, a fallen Marine's family and military personnel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The White House originally asked for $141.7 billion for the Pentagon to prosecute the Iraq and Afghanistan missions and asked for $5.3 billion more in July. The latest request includes $42.3 billion more for the Pentagon - already revealed in summary last month - and is accompanied by a modified State Department request bringing that agency's total for the 2008 budget year to almost $7 billion.
Bush said any member of Congress who wants to see success in Iraq, and see U.S. troops return home, should strongly support the request.
"I know some in Congress are against the war and are seeking ways to demonstrate that opposition," Bush said. "I recognize their position and they should make their views heard. But they ought to make sure our troops have what it takes to succeed. Our men and women on the front lines should not be caught the middle of partisan disagreements in Washington, D.C."
Democrats were not swayed.
"We've been fighting for America's priorities while the president continues investing only in his failed war strategy - and wants us to come up with another $200 billion and just sign off on it?" said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "President Bush should not expect Congress to rubber stamp his latest supplemental request. We're not going to do that."
So far, President Bush has spent the better part of a trillion dollars just to dig a deeper and deeper hole. And we all know what they say about the definition of insanity. . . .
No.
No, Mr. President, no more money for your stupid little war. Bring the troops home before they get in the way of the Turks taking care of their own War Against Terror against our terrorist friends, the Kurds.Bring the troops home before you and your crazy-ass vice president get any more bright ideas.No more money. No, no and hell no.
The proper congressional response to Bush's latest mau-mauing, ideally, would lie in drawing up articles of impeachment.
