The chief thing is that the U.S. government has abandoned the rule of law.

Rule of law, Nice idea. When’s it going to start?

Rec’d, Dr. Kirk.
And this:

“Somewhere, Mossadegh’s ghost is laughing. I hope he’s hanging out
with Vonnegut’s.”

Brilliant.

When the oil runs out the US military will not only have nothing to run on but nothing left to fight for.

The American people haven’t yet figured out that the CIA, Our Military, and all those Government Agencies that are supposedly protecting us, are a joke. Both 911 and Pearl Harbor proved they are incapable of protecting us, yet we keep falling for the Bull that they are, and paying for it. They can’t stop illeagal aliens, drug smugglers, and just about every kind of crook there is from ripping us off. Yet we are dumb enough to believe they are protecting us. Our Military that sole job is to protect this Country, is every place else but this Country. The people are so stupid that there is little hope us. They believe all the bull shoved at them, and support all of it.

“Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye, world.”

As usual, Connie Sachs was right.

“No bloody monkeys”.

Too late. For half a century, we’ve let the monkeys in uniform and the monkeys in trench coats effectively rule our foreign policy – more precisely, rule our war policy. Now our hand’s in the jar, clutching a gob of tar sands: and we’re too witless to let go.

Monbiot:

“Turner claims that to keep the temperature rise close to two degrees, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions must peak in 2016 then fall by either three or four per cent a year. A 3% rate of decline is most likely to deliver a temperature rise of 2.2 degrees this century; a 4% annual cut would produce about 2.1%(3). That’s more or less consistent with his 2050 targets.
So far so good. But a recent paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, using the same sources, comes to completely different conclusions(4). It agrees that to deliver a reasonable chance of preventing more than two degrees of warming, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere need to stabilise at a maximum of 450 parts per million, carbon dioxide equivalent (ppmCO2e). But it shows that to achieve this, global emissions of greenhouse gases from the parts of the system we can control need to peak by 2015, then fall by 6-8% a year between 2020 and 2040, leading to “full decarbonization sometime soon after 2050.” Even this, it shows, relies on an optimistic reading of the current data. Turner’s suggested cuts are more likely to produce four degrees of warming than two degrees.”

Monbiot again:

Even ignoring all unconventional sources and all other greenhouse gases and taking the most optimistic of the figures in the two Nature papers, we can afford to burn only 61% of known fossil fuel reserves between now and eternity.

Or, using Meinshausen’s figure, we can burn only 33% between now and 2050. Sorry – 33% minus however much we have burnt between 2000 and today.

So the question that arises is this: which fossil fuel reserves will we decide not to extract and burn? There is, as I have argued before, no point in seeking to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels unless we also seek to reduce their production. Yet, apart from the members of Opec (who do it only to shore up the price), no government is attempting to limit the amount of fuel extracted. Far from it; they all pursue the same strategy as the United Kingdom: to “maximise economic recovery”.

Bye, bye, world.

Actually, that oxymoronic element seeking new ways to militarize are deep into use of outer space solar energy, as I understand.

Jared Diamond’s book Collapse (yes, I know, I got a lecture from the check out lady at Barnes & Noble about why he is Pop and not a serious anthropologist) gives examples over and over again how we are nothing more than a bunch of filthy, greedy and ignorant monkeys. Forever fouling our own nests, eating up all the fruits and moving on. Except that there is no place to move on to anymore. And we have done a real bang-up job of fouling Everything this time. Maybe our collective angst has to do with the suppressed realization of the filthy mess we are about to have to abandon , but aware that this is pretty much IT.

When the oil runs out the US military will not only have nothing to run on but nothing left to fight for.

Not to worry.

If the military men and women are good at anything, it’s laying the groundwork to ensure an adequate supply of future enemies.

Or, turning this years’ ally into next year’s Hitler.