Airlines, Corn Syrup and Good Shoes

Even monkeys aren't stupid enough to burn their home up to make

cheap Ikea shit and grow burgers for beef on what used to be rainforest.

Maybe they would be if they had bigger brains. I hope not....

My advice of the day:

Go buy good shoes. You'll need them. Gas is going to be six bucks a gallon by the end of the year. So you'll be walking more. Or biking.
Or taking the bus, although you're not going to be taking it to anywhere in Northern Wisconsin. They don't go there anymore.

And that furnace in the basement? I suggest buying a space heater or three, because natural gas is going up too, almost as fast, and the folks who used to sell us liquefied natural gas are now selling us crude oil and burning it themselves. It may not be a big part of the gas market, but those empty LPG tankers and terminals sitting on our coasts are proof that the oil nations would rather burn it for themselves, just like the gas we have to bid on.


And by the way, at least half the gas cost increases are due to the BushCo. policies that made our dollar worth so much less. The idiots who voted for him should all go super glue their mouths shut and fingers together.

And you better get used to staying close to home. Aviation is going to go back to what it was when I was a kid. Expensive, and for the rich.
One of the major airlines just announced that they're charging 15 bucks just to check A BAG.
Not an extra bag. Just a suitcase. Imagine how fun the overhead bins will be when all the people who can barely afford to fly react to that.
Not that it will matter. The days of cheap flights are over.

Maybe we'll get trains again. Built by unemployed autoworkers. GM is laying off 24 percent of it's workforce by the end of the year, having lost 38 BILLION dollars this year.
When it gets bad enough, there will be a new New Deal. And maybe we can get something lasting built, instead of a lasting legacy of new robber barons and tax cuts for the rich.
We're driving around and living with an infrastructure that our current population is too stupid to fix by voting in better folks.


I see a return of a different lifestyle in the wind. One where taking a trip means a week on a big boat, and not one of those bloated floating buffets full of porky white people from Topeka drifting around the Caribbean eating corn syrup laced crap food and showing just how ugly cellulite is when you're twenty seven and have the body of a sixty year old glutton.

And how about that corn syrup in everything? Thanks, Herb Kohl and Tammy Baldwin, for supporting the farm bill and the ethanol madness of our stupid agricultural mining system.

Yup, that the right word. We're mining our topsoil. It takes thousands of years to create, and we're flushing it right down into the gulf of Mexico, creating a huge dead zone where all the crap we dump on our farms, lawns and streets causes huge algae blooms and kills everything that needs oxygen to breathe.
All to grow corn for soda, most of the processed food on the market, and to burn in our cars, because we just can't be bothered to live a life where we walk, plan ahead and take the bus, or figure out how to share.
Happy Friday everyone. I'm going to go stick onions and seeds in my garden, and pull weeds. At least I can tend to my little plot and tribe.

From the Wall Street Journal:

DETROIT -- General Motors Corp. said about 19,000 hourly workers have accepted buyout or early-retirement offers from the company and most will leave its payroll by July 1.
The move will cut the auto maker's U.S. hourly work force by about 24%, and it comes as GM is preparing a number of additional cost-cutting moves to be announced next week at its annual shareholder meeting. The 19,000 acceptances met the company's expectations, a person familiar with the numbers said.

$135 A Barrel oil, a chicken Tractor and my garden

This photo is of a chicken Tractor I made for my pal Skuby, a movable day time pen

for her chickens, so they can range around without being eaten by hawks or racoons or foxes or dogs. Great idea, stupid name.

I expect eggs for doing this job!

So, how about those record oil prices?

Better tune up that bike, plant that garden, think about getting some chickens and start looking at brown rice and beans as a lifestyle, folks.

Because today, Oil's at 135.00 a barrel. We could be looking at eight bucks a gallon in a year or two. Sooner if somebody cooks off few bombs in the right places, or BushCo decides to bomb Iran, something they're talking about, dreaming about and planning for.

And then there's this little bit from the Wall Street Journal, not a paper known for being run by dirty fucking hippie tree hugging fuzzy thinking SUV haters:

The world's premier energy monitor is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of its first attempt to comprehensively assess the condition of the world's top 400 oil fields. Its findings won't be released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future crude supplies could be far tighter than previously thought.
A pessimistic supply outlook from the IEA could further rattle an oil market that already has seen crude prices rocket over $130 a barrel, double what they were a year ago. U.S. benchmark crude broke a record for the fourth day in a row, rising 3.3% Wednesday to close at $133.17 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
For several years, the IEA has predicted that supplies of crude and other liquid fuels will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day currently. Now, the agency is worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to surpass 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.

Dirty Fingernails

It's been pointed out to me that it's been a month or more since I blogged.

That I should start up again.

So here's a poem I like by Emily Dickinson.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog

And a totally unrealted photo of a monkey.

I haven't been blogging because I have been sinking my fingers into dirt, breaking ground with shovels and forks and planting my garden with 34 tomatoes, Swiss chard, onions, beets, marigolds, Castor beans, pole beans, grapes, lettuce, spinach, basil, cilantro, snow peas, calendula, sunflowers both giant and dwarf and dahlias and lilies and fennel and hops and garlic and cabbage. And a few things I don't recall right now.

I also haven't been blogging because I read too much. I've been watching things fall apart in our economy, our climate and our culture. I've been thinking about how global climate change denial is growing, how we ignore our government torturing and drugging and deporting and imprisoning people, how our unsustainable ways are burning up resources, and also thinking about what an ugly freak show our media and the folks who lap it up are making out of the presidential race.

And I am sick onto the point of insanity of the way the Bush administration seems to waltz right over the top of the thin ice we're on.

So rather than harp on the ugly, I took time to think about these things.

And then I decided my new lifestyle is going to be preaching and practicing gardening, biking and spitting in the face of it all by growing as much of my own food as my little back yard can make, and learning to use this monkey brain of mine to spit in the face of borrowed trouble and try and enjoy the wild ride ahead.

Now's all we have to work with. I keep forgetting that And now's enough.