Russiagate: the Cherry on Top

How about Russiagate, dude? It doesn’t get much better than that. The whole thing is a carpet of smoke under which to kick the contents of the purloined DNC e-mails. If just one so-called MSM journalist took a gander at those digital pearls he might have twigged that the DNC took a dump on its own process of choosing a candidate. They stole the nomination from the Bern! When the e-mails surfaced they screamed Russia to drown out the questions. That means they want to do it again. Otherwise they would have cleaned house. So now here they are again, new candidates who offer themselves to the good citizens of the Former United States who judge them on God knows what criteria. Said good citizens now know full well, if they have half en eyeball peeled, that their own opinion is worth diddly. It doesn’t matter what they think! The primaries are just there to let them believe they matter. It’s rigged!.

The Mueller investigation rivals and maybe surpasses the negotiations for the JCPOA in energy spent to no purpose other than blowing smoke. The language long ago wilted in that blast of bullshit. Here’s a little tidbit from my stupidity collection:

The prosecution’s initial response, as McCarthy put it, was to seek a delay “on the astonishing ground that the defendant has not been properly served – notwithstanding that the defendant has shown up in court and asked to be arraigned.”

The prosecution doesn’t want to prosecute on the grounds that it would be unfair to the defense, and the defense wants to be arraigned! Now this may just be me, but the cherry on top is that the Mueller report was redacted. Mueller doesn’t want any secrets about the admitted non-evidence for something that didn’t happen and would have been nothing if it had, to get out in public and so prevent a case from being prosecuted he is bending over backwards to not prosecute. Priceless! God bless America, land of bullshit. Meanwhile, the MSM scribbles it all down without a thought entering a single Harvard-educated noodle. This rivals the use of the expression “wing-nut” to describe someone who thinks Seth Rich’s murder might not have been a coincidence. Is this the work of the deep-state or the deep doo-doo state?

Here’s a passage I turn to whenever I feel the need for jaw-dropping incredulity:

Clinton took several trips on Epstein’s private Boeing 727 jet, flight logs show. But after Epstein’s arrest on sex trafficking charges, the former president has drawn a line in the sand.

Oh God, Scotty beam me up! I’ve fallen in among lunatics. Everything down here is just too, too okay.

People like to blame the deep-state guy with bodacious babes that coo over him on the poop deck of his billion dollar yacht anchored off the coast of Monte Carlo while he fingers a keyboard and rakes in a bundle by hitting “enter.” Okay, to be fair some of them live lives of quiet refinement or just putter around their elegant gardens. With a raised eyebrow they change the course of history. We’re talking bankers here, the real Big Kahunas. Interest rates are their meat and potatoes, and they have had interest rates with gravy since 2008. As Michael Hudson has so clearly explained, low interest rates hurt labor. These bankers make a bundle off labor by arbitraging wherever WIFI will carry them. Thanks to the generous Federal Reserve they suck blood electronically from the working stiff who gets ever stiffer. So if being in control means being able to stick a needle in Labor’s arm, these guys are in control. Meanwhile, the sixth mass extinction rolls up its sleeves.

What will these deep-state guys do when all their Benjamins aren’t enough to buy a ham sandwich? They can leverage their butts off, but that is not going to stop the onrushing calamity from sweeping them away with the rest of us. I don’t care how many big ones they fork over, starving guys will keep the food rather than accept their funny paper or digital equivalent. Deep-states control with rules and regulations enforced by police. Documents and Benjamins bamboozle everybody. But they are just paper or images on a screen. Hunger sharpens the mind, brings you into the moment, and tears away veils.. Hunger turns Benjamins and legal contracts into bumf. Hunger brings down empires when the police disappear because they haven’t been paid. Deep-state bankers will not be in a good position in their floating fortresses or moated castles on the day after. Their empire, like all empires, will evaporate.

But not all deep-state dudes are bankers. An unknown chunk of the deep-state population are spies. Ever since the Kennedy-assassination coup d’état, spies have crawled out of the woodwork. Every president now knows that spies can bump him off and get away with it. Shit, they’re spies: they do this for a living. Spies are guys who wear masks to work. They double-cross all and sundry from nine to five. At the drop of a hat a spy can become another guy from another country. They can go to bed as one guy and wake up as another. You can never know who they are really working for, and it’s not uncommon for a spy himself to forget who he is working for. More often than not they are self-employed minus the self.

Presidents are people too stupid to know that on their first day in office they become a hostage to these friendly dudes. If the poor slob is too dumb to twig on his own, “Remember Kennedy?” a young Secret Service guy will ask, punctuating it with a shit-eating-grin. Blink twice and look again at the Secret Service. Guess what they are doing. How could anyone want to be President other than a stupid guy or a guy on the mother of all ego-trips? Is this the guy who is supposed to be running the country?

What if spies are at the top of the deep-state pecking order? Spies revel in the unspeakable, to wit the actions of The Former United States at Abu Ghraib. “We lie, cheat, and steal” Mike Pompeo said, putting his best foot forward. Always actually being someone else plays havoc with your sense of identity. A spy you think is you partner could rendition your ass to a dry well in the shifting sands of Outer Slobovia. Spies will torture other spies if no one else is handy. They will torture their best friend if the guy they are pretending to work for gives the high sign. Spies have no fellow creatures by definition. Now you are telling me that a bunch of these guys are going to sit down and maintain a civilization? Not that I’m saying civilization is a good idea.

Whether spies or bankers are at the top of the deep-state totem pole is a question for think tankers. Either way, their powers are far less then they imagine them to be. The deep-state is both deadly and helpless. The more or less continuous floundering around might tip us off that they are incapable of addressing anything important. Unfortunately, they have a lot of dangerous toys.

The big question is, will homo sapiens exit the planet without extinguishing all life? The oil patch is getting kind of weird. Saudi Arabia, wanting to make a public offering of stock, had to admit that Ghawar is producing about 35% less oil than they had been leading us to think. The North Sea is toast. Shale oil companies have lost $280 billion in the last decade.

Steve Schlotterbeck, who led drilling company EQT as it expanded to become the nation’s largest producer of natural gas in 2017, arrived at a petrochemical industry conference in Pittsburgh Friday morning with a blunt message about shale gas drilling and fracking.

“The shale gas revolution has frankly been an unmitigated disaster for any buy-and-hold investor in the shale gas industry with very few limited exceptions,” Schlotterbeck, who left the helm of EQT last year, continued. “In fact, I’m not aware of another case of a disruptive technological change that has done so much harm to the industry that created the change.”

It has dawned on said investors that the shale gas revolution is a bust. While the Dow went from 17,000 to 27,000 in five years, Chesapeake Energy (CHK) stock price went from 27 to less than 2 and short interest is still high. Investors are bailing out. Bye-bye capital investment, bye-bye shale gas, bye-bye deeply-indebted drilling outfits. Energy independence? That would be a no. And this time there’s no plan B. Any “wing nut” knows that, willing or forced, deindustrialization is in the cards.

If we continue to industrialize, the human race will extinguish itself in resource wars. Like drowning men for air, states will fight for energy. When the news that the Former United States is out of gas at last penetrates the confused hive, panic will radiate into the hive-mind. Out of gas is a wake up call. A public in withdrawal from a diet of bullshit and fun will be pissed off at being out of gas. Somebody must be to blame. Somebody must pay. War will be very popular, real wars, finally, atomic wars. They will be fun, sort of. Once they start, no one will be able to stop them. And this time they won’t stay over there.

Russiagate and the on again off again threats of war with Iran are, in fact, sowing seeds of indifference to Armageddon. It’s the boy-who-cried-wolf effect on steroids. The taboo against atomic war is loosing its strength as the adrenaline rush of every false alarm dissipates in stupor. The propagandists lie without knowing why, just because that is what they do. Everyone is exhausted. They have to get closer and closer to pushing the button just to get a rise out of everybody and so justify their existence. Newspapers have become the MSM, kissing cousin to msg, an additive you don’t want in your food. When Armageddon comes, everyone will be indifferent. Sayonara. Surely this is not what the dudes of the deep-state want. The deep-state, like everyone else, is being frog marched along by the hive mind. We are a species preparing for our extinction, like the living-dead Musselmen in Primo Levi’s description of Auschwitz. We live in the culture of near-term human extinction. The ability to actually act for a purpose is absent as we helplessly await the finale.

You know, I know, and the denizens of the deep-state know that if the human race is to survive it has to deindustrialize, and if it doesn’t the planet will deindustrialize for it. We will die in a cauldron of war, starvation, disease and every other form of suffering if we continue this frenzied pace. Not that we are likely to save ourselves in any case, but we still have the chance to not do any more damage, or as little as possible. Perhaps we can depart without too much suffering for ourselves and other species. We still have the chance to not incinerate the planet in our wars. We can go gracefully. It is the very least we owe to our so beautiful and generous home. If the deep-state actually ruled the world they could address the imminent need to deindustrialize. But they are helpless, doing only what they can do, arbitrage and torture behind the scenes until the end of time.

States are worthless. States are deep-states that exist to go to war with other states or, at the very least, threaten to go to war and so extract taxes from their bewildered populations under the pretext of defense. As long as there are states, hive-minds in death machines, they will perceive military threats and force continued industrialization through extraction of substance from their slaves. The conclusion, it seems to me, is obvious. States are a fatal bad habit. They exist because we let them.

 

Michael Doliner studied with Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago and has taught at Valparaiso University and Ithaca College. He can be reached at: planeofexistence@gmail.com.