L’ESA envoie son premier satellite de géo-positionnement et Slashdot en informe les masses (de geeks). Quelle belle occasion pour faire naître des trolls !

Entre autres, une perle :

You don’t understand, it’s nothing personal. In the first place, Europeans don’t hate ordinary American people as such. But it’s not ordinary American people who are running the show. Most ordinary American people don’t even know or understand what their government are doing, including (especially) most the ones who think they do know. The only problem we have with (some) ordinary Americans is their slavish tendency to believe whatever line of bullshit they are fed by the political and corporate establishment on Fox and CNN and disbelieve everybody else.

Secondly, global politics isn’t about good and bad, it’s about the exercise of military and economic power and control of information, to pursue the interests of the groups you represent.

To cut straight to the chase: I promise you that Washington’s invasion of Iraq had nothing at all to do with liberating anyone and everything to do with gaining control of significant oil supplies in order to forestall an imminent and rapid worsening of the ongoing energy crisis.

To the extent that forestalling the effects of “peak oil” will keep everyone in the US comfortable for a couple of years longer than would have been the case without the Iraq invasion, you could say that the US govt’s actions were beneficial for the US public. But because it is only a temporary fix, this is a policy that doesn’t lead anywhere other than to further wars, both military and economic. It only buys time. But time for what?

If the US government were interested in the long term future of the US economy there would already be two crash programs in effect: one to reduce the nation’s debt, and another to reduce dependence on oil, the latter starting with both a significant increase in tax on gas station pump prices right now (with much of the increase being spent on development of renewable energy sources - wind, wave, geothermal, solar, nuclear) and an aggressive program of public education aimed at decreasing domestic fuel consumption. These are the only actions that could make a positive difference.

I am talking about massive investment here, not the peanuts that is currently being spent or even considered. It is just not happening though. Instead the actions that have been taken, in toto, contribute to one goal only - to prevent the public at large, for as long as possible, from cottoning on to what will happen when either one of the following two scenarions hits:

(1) the growing disparity between global demand and global supply of oil pushes the price up (slowly at first, then over 5-10 years up to the $200-$400 a barrel range); (2) one or more of the world’s larger economies decides to divest their national reserves of hundreds of billions of dollars, in favour of something more stable and less inflationary - massively devaluing the dollar overnight and precipitating a complete collapse of the US banking system within days.

Both of these scenarios are on our doorstep right now. The Iraq adventure was intended to address both. But it will not solve either problem for long.

While the US very probably intended an expanded military presence in the Middle East to make OPEC think twice about redenominating oil sales in Euros (coming as it did right after Saddam Hussein did the very same thing), it hasn’t made much difference to Iran who intend to open their own petrochemicals trading exchange on March 26, just ten weeks away. They are expected to offer at least some contracts denominated in Euros, and possibly all. Russia has also been making noises about moving their own oil and gas sales onto the Euro. And China already unpegged their currency from the dollar last summer.

I raise the question of what the US government thought they were buying time for, with their current economic, energy and foreign policies. Now the longer they manage to prolong the current situation the worse it will get for the unknowing public at large when these crises do finally emerge. As far as the economy is concerned it will be like falling off a cliff edge. So it can only be one thing, given who these people are and what their known preoccupations are.

See, in the meantime the elites who control government policy, who know all about these two problems, and who have control of large amounts of money (most of which usually isn’t their own) are able to divert large sums into gold, commodity futures (esp. energy!) and other safe instruments held in secret accounts. I doubt the real titular owners of this money will ever see it again, only those who control it now will ever know where it has gone - even the fact it has disappeared won’t come to light until it’s too late and everyone will have other things to worry about. The longer these guys manage to eke it out before the shit hits the fan, the more money they can salt away and the deeper they can build their private underground bunkers.

The “peak oil” scenario and the moribund state of the dollar described above are both well understood and even acknowledged by senior figures in the international banking community and in the US government, though there is still a sense of unreality among the grass roots that have been told or figured it out because nobody really knows what to do about it without Washington on board.

The bit about what the political and corporate elites in Washington are actually doing instead, is merely my own speculation. But I think it’s the most plausible explanation, under the circumstances.

I encourage you to read about Peak Oil. There is plenty on the web. Just google for “Peak Oil” and hit the top couple of links.

(L’original ici )

J’adore.