The Invisible Hand

Just in case you question the fact that Texans are probably some of the smartest folks around, here's proof.  The University of Texas Investment Fund is taking physical delivery of its gold holdings.  As for proof that Americans are all THAT dumb, Jerome Corsi's book supposedly proving that Obama ain't a legal president (as if you needed proof) has spun up to #2 on Amazon's best-seller list in one day -- pre-release.

There is hope, if not change.

Of course, Obama did keep his promise about "change," since that's about all folks have left in their pockets right now.  And there's plenty of 'hope' that they can find some more 'change' in the sofa cushions.

Back 13 years ago, or so, I started telling friends and family to watch out...the End of the World was coming.  At the time, the dollar index was around 111, gold was $280, silver was $5, gasoline was $1.50, the Dow was 14,000, and I was telling people to beware of Bush and Obama.  They said I was the craziest damn sunnuvabitch that ever came down the pike.

Now, the dollar index is 74, gold is $1,500, silver is $45, gasoline is $5, the Dow is below 13,000 (nominally) and not many people would disagree about Bush and Obama.  And I'm still the craziest damn sunnuvabitch because I moved to the opposite side of the world to watch the fun.

A few people are starting to ask me to help them get out, though.  Guess I'm just ahead of my time, is all.  It really does pay to read a little history once in a while.  You can learn a lot from seeing how all the previous bone-headed social experiments turned out.

Meantime, the world is going completely bonkers.  There's so much stuff happening at the micro-level that it's hard to keep up with it all.  Better to stay up at the meta-level where one can perceive trends in the Big Picture.

Trends are things like the news of Stuxnet breaking late last year, targeting Iran's nuke plants, and all the problems occurring with nuke plants worldwide right now, not just in Japan, but in Germany, the US, the EU, and Russia.  They didn't all get hit by earthquakes and tsunamis.  You think there's a connection?  Maybe Stuxnet got out of control?  LIHOP/MIHOP kind of questions.

Trends like mass die-offs occurring all over the place, that all began with the BP fiasco and GoM murder.  Now BP has revealed that it used artificial microbes on the spill.  Now, one year later, critters are dropping out of the skies and washing up on beaches, in or around coastal areas.  And do you think there's a connection between bird, bee, fish, and animal die-offs, and things like genetically-modified plants, magnetic anomalies and increased Earth rumblings?

I keep going back to pointillist painters like Georges Surat.  When you are up close to the paintings, they are just little blobs of color, but when you step back far enough, they create rich images.  Everything in life is a matter of perspective.  If you stand back far enough from history, you can perceive long-term trends and conditions.  You can also perceive the Invisible Hand that has guided events to this particular intersection.

There's no magic to seeing the future.  Once one understands how things work, and can see the omens and portends, it becomes rather easy.  On the micro-level, you can't always foresee discrete events, but on the macro-level, you can definitely follow the stream of events.  But, there is one curious part to current events.

It seems that the Invisible Hand is losing its grip.  Yes, this Hand definitely benefits from increasing chaos and entropy, but only when it contrives and controls them.  What the Hand seems to have missed is that no matter how big your perspective is, there is always a larger one.  You can stand back quite a ways, but someone else can stand back quite a ways further.

An excellent parable for times like these is "Jurassic Park," the book not the movie.  In the book, the megalomaniacal owner of the island thinks he can control and manipulate Life.  Because he has the power to bring ancient life-forms back from the grave, and even customize the genome to suit his needs, he thinks that he is, in effect, God.  What he discovers is that there is always a bigger perspective.

I get the distinct impression that Life is spiraling out of the grip of the Invisible Hand.  In its hubris and megalomania, it has forgotten that in the hierarchy of the Universe, there is always someone higher up the shit pile from you.

If anything, that is what science should have taught us.  We invent bigger telescopes and discover that what we thought was the end of the Universe was really just the beginning.  Then we invent bigger microscopes and discover that what we thought was the smallest possible thing was really made of smaller things.  Over and over, we see this progression, and over and over we see scientists pontificating as if they now know and understand everything.

Those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it.  Another way to look at it, is if you don't mark your trail, you will end up walking in circles.

It would seem that the Invisible Hand has met the Unintended Consequence.  It is discovering that all the machinations and contingencies don't conceive of every possible outcome.  No one and nothing can do that.  Thus, the Powers That Be are becoming the Powers That Were.  In the process, Mankind must suffer, because we have never been down the alternative roads.  At least not as a species, though there are some notable experiments in alternatives.

Throughout our history, there have always been kings, whether overt or covert.  The time has come to try something new.  Humans have tried every conceivable variation on the theme, and it always ends the same: Disaster.  Will we ever achieve Utopia?  Possibly, if we survive the experiments.  One thing is sure, though, we will not survive the current paradigm much longer, at the rate we are going.  We have overrun the Petri dish.

The problem has always been that when the zoo-keeper dies, so do most of the zoo's inhabitants.  But a few survive and revert to their natural state.  They adjust and adapt until they are comfortable in the new state of things.  Then they become confident and begin manipulating the new state until they grow in power and pride. Ultimately, that new paradigm dies, as well.

It is the nature of Nature.  There is no escaping All That Is.

In the meantime, it is interesting to watch, from a distance.  It is a challenge to maintain perspective when events almost demand that we drop down to the minute level to survive.  It is great theater from a dispassionate point of view.  I am gripping the arms of the chair as I wait for the next scene.  The Director is a genius!  He has telegraphed just enough that we can anticipate the plot, but not the action.  Just like Spielberg's 'mine-car scene' in the Indiana Jones series.  He found that the scene was much scarier when the camera turned and let us foresee what was coming, because it was the anticipation, not the actual events, that got our hearts racing.

And so we grab our popcorn and peanuts and a Big Gulp of sugar-water, and sit back for the ride.  Where this train is going, no one knows at this point.  But, the camera keeps panning around to let us foresee just enough that the hairs on our necks stand up.

One thing we know for certain.  At the closing credits, all the main characters will be gone.  Should be interesting to see how we get there.

BurP: Now What?

Leonard Horowitz and Sherry Kane Step In Some Truth

In case you're not up to date on the latest conspiracy slang, LIHOP means Let It Happen On Purpose, and MIHOP means Made It Happen On Purpose.


To review: the evil BP was drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) in about 10,000 feet of water in a block named Macando. They were leasing one of the most advanced deepwater rigs in the world from TransOean, and there were a number of sub-contractors on the rig to handle various aspects of operations, such as the Dynamic Positioning system, the drilling, mudding, casing, and so on. Such operations are at the bleeding edge of technology. The pressures and tensions involved in working in 2 miles of water depth are astounding. The weight of the drill string required incredibly powerful machines to grip and hold the pipe. The water pressures require the use of remote operated vehicles (ROVs) to keep a visual on the well-head, as well as manipulate various geer, since divers cannot go that deep. Huge thrusters are used to keep the rig stationed over the well, since anchors are impractical in water that deep.

There are many other considerations, but you get the idea that the people who operate out there are not dummies. They are highly trained and skilled technicians who are fully aware that if they make a mistake, it is most likely catastrophic.

The top man on the rig is the Company Man. There are two of them working in 12-hour shifts, overseeing all operations and approving every step of the process. The top guy on the Deepwater Horizon was one of the best inthe business, and he was pulled off the rig a couple of days before the disaster, during a critical phase of casing the well, or pumping cement down the hole and up the outside of the steel tube inserted into the well, to keep the hole from collapsing.

The process was under the control of a VERY well-known and respected contractor. They are in charge of the mix for the concrete and calculating the number of spacers that are inserted, and the flow rate, and a number of other variables involved. These are carefully calculated and nothing is left to chance. The contractor specified using over 100 spacers for the casing, because of the pressures involved and the geology of the well. Amazingly, the BP company man who had replaced the #1, who was pulled off to get some useless training landside, overrode the contractor and reduced the number of spacers to around 20.

Now I don't know about you, but when I hire experts to do something, I tend to listen to them.

The contractor was so alarmed by this action that they pulled their people off the rig the morning of the explosion with an unscheduled helicopter pick-up. Hours later, the well blew out, the rig sank and the rest is history...or is it?

You see, the damage is not yet finished and the well itself may still be spewing. We don't really know. Here's why...

During the capping operations to try to stop the well from dumping millions of gallons of oil into the GOM, a hurricane blew in. Following policies long established, all top-side operations stopped when the storm reached a certain distance, and crews and vessels were pulled back to port when the storm reached another 'line in the sand.'

Until that point, an ROV had been parked on the sea floor streaming video of the well head to the world via the internet. If you hunt around, you'll find pre-storm video feeds. Look carefully. Notice all the data on the screen. Find the latitude and longitude numbers and punch them into your GPS. Now, find video after the storm, when BP announced they had miraculously capped the well. Now note the lat/lons and punch those into your GPS. What do you notice?

Hmmmmmmmm...

Looks to me like they are different wells. Looked that way to Matt Simmons, too. Now you may recall that Simmons is, oops I mean was, one of the foremost commentators on the oil patch and was followed religiously by investors in the sector. Now he noticed a slight problem with the lat/lons on-screen. He did a little homework and found that the new coordinates matched a previous well, known as "Macando A", that BP had capped previously because it had become unstable and threatened to blow out.

Now you may not have heard Simmon's warnings. They were squelched by the media just days before he was 'heart-attacked' and 'drowned.'

Maybe you haven't noticed that the Company Man who was responsible for the spacer decision has 'taken the fifth' at the Gulf Hearings, conducted by the Crimin...I mean the Feral Gummint.

Skip ahead a bit.

The GOM is responsible for a lot of weather in the norther hemisphere. Ocean currents come up from the south and swirl around in the GOM for a while, where they get nice and warm. They then proceed up the east coast of North America and slide across the Atlantic, where they slam into the west coast of Ireland. This process, known as the Gulf Stream, releases enough heat to moderate the climate in Europe, which is why it rarely snows in Ireland and England, and places like Holland, France and Germany enjoy less-than-deadly winters, despite being a hair's breadth from the Arctic Circle.

Now, let's play a thought game. Suppose you were to squelch the release of heat from the Gulf Stream, or even modify it, with, oh I don't know, let's say OIL. That tiny bit of warming, enough to raise temps a degree or two, vanishes and what happens? Massive snow storms. Record low temperatures. Hundreds if not thousands die from the cold. Records that are centuries old fall.

Oh, and let's not forget that the GOM also provides enough warming in North America that it keeps deadly winters from striking there, as well. So, it that heat is trapped by, oh I don't know, let's say OIL, then what happens? How about blizzards, record lows, hundreds of deaths. Even Cancun, which is an island off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula at the southern most boundary of the GOM might experience record low temps during, oh I don't know, the Global Warming Conference, let's say.

If that were the case, and I'm not saying it could happen, then that would make BP directly and indirectly responsible for thousands of deaths on two continents, as well as global weather modification, destruction of incredibly sensitive habitats, and so on.

And all that would happen because the top Company Man was pulled off a rig days before a major blow-out caused by his replacement who ordered a highly respected contractor to reduce the number of spacers they had carefully calculated and which they claimed to have capped even though a respected analyst had noticed that the lat/lons were wrong shortly before he died an untimely death.

It's a darned good thing this is all just hypothetical. Otherwise I'd be tempted to say that this was a MIHOP terrorist event on a scale that makes 9/11, 7/7 and Mumbai pale by comparason. And then I'd have to look over my shoulder all the time to make sure I didn't get 'heart-attacked.'

It could never happen, right?

Just in case you're wondering how some goombah living in Indonesia could know all this, well...in my past llfe I worked for 10 years in offshore construction as a marketing and business development specialist. I know a lot of people who know things about this mess.

Nuff said.