Is It Over Yet?

Did the world end?

Happiness Is The New Mid-Life Crisis

 THE NEW BREAKFAST SNOB 3.31.2012


Originally aired on WRIR 97.3 FM Richmond

Podcast: Right here.

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Garbage -Blood For Poppies
I have a Shirley Manson crush, a studio-production fetish and I love to roll in Garbage- especially when it is fresh, like this brand-new single.

Charlotte Gainsbourg  -All The Rain 
Damn. I'm surprised how much I like this. Which is a lot.

Joe Strummer -Sikorsky Parts  
One of my favorite High School cassette tapes had the first Clash LP on side A and Deep Purple's Machine Head on side B. Maybe that explains something.

Richard Thompson -Let It Blow
Oh goddammit.  I had a totally different song to play, but the CD wouldn't play. Which is why you should always have a back-up song cued up, hopefully one that will cheer you up out of your techno-failing funk. I had this.

Rowland S. Howard -Exit Everything
Oh , hell yeah. Nothing says "cheer the fuck up" like a seven-minute epic-drone murder ballad  by Birthday Party alumnus Rowland S. Howard. Cordite and Valium...if that doesn't work, nothing will.

Shivaree -I Close My Eyes
When I close my eyes, I remember that I've been seeing the same woman for nearly eight months now and thinking of her cheers me up in a completely different way than a good murder balled does. I find that comforting.

10 CC -Blackmail
When I was a kid 10 CC had a god-awful hit song which made it uncool to like them. But the band had some fookin' brilliantly  clever numbers - such as this one, which was on the same album as ...that other song.

The Funkees -Abraka
The Funkees are my favorite 70's Nigerian band. I'm getting into the psychedelic soul groove these days and this song is a great example why. Tip o' the mouse to Bill L. for turning me on to them.

The Godeck Whipperjenny- Put Your Thing On Me
You don't know these guys? Dave Matthews (the James Brown one, not the Jimmy Buffet-for-the-younger-generation one)  produced this album back in 1970 (?) and it promptly sank into oblivion. But here it is again...I'll be playing more of it in future shows.

Gong- Tropical Fish 
Recorded live at Hammersmith on the You tour. How cool is that?

The Animals- Closer to the Truth
If I'd known how wasted on drugs these guys really were, I might have started buying their albums years ago. Sadly, I'm just now picking them up.

The Doors- The Densmore Mosquito
Jim Morrison was dead at this point, which sorta sucks but this song doesn't miss hin- it has a fantastic Robbie Krieger guitar solo where the "west is the best" lyrics would have gone. Which is good enough for me.

Soft Boys- Give It To The Soft Boys
Another high school-era fave of mine. Sure is fun playin' this on the radio.

Hugh Masekela- You Told Your Momma Not To Worry
More great pyschedelic-tinged 70's soul, this from South Africa. 

Stevie Wonder- Love Having You Around
Get on my camel and ride!

Joan As Policewoman- Kiss The Specifics
The album that this is from, The Deep Field, is excellent music for *ahem*...you know.

Jeannine Hebb- Heartache
But alas, love is fraught with peril. Jeannine Hebb uses piano, voice and quick wits to navigate this minefield. So far, so good.

Andrea Corr- Stupidest Girl In The World
Guys do this kind of stuff too, so I think we all sorta know what she is talking about. So stop already.

Alice Cooper- The Second Coming
Hey! Andrea Corr and Alice Cooper have the same initials as me!
  
Zappa and Beefheart- Muffin Man
After the show, I went home and played this song on my guitar. There goes the neighborhood.

Pretty Things- She's A Lover
More high school-era past-blasting. This album, Parachute, was Rolling Stone Magazine's Album of The Year in 1970. Apparently, no one cared at the time.

Blue Oyster Cult- Screams
Yes. I played Blue Oyster Cult and it wasn't 'Godzilla'.

Funkadelic- Some More
Any song that rhymes 'science-fiction' with  'affliction' is probably either describing Hawkwind or serving as a portent of Hawkwind-to-come.

David Bowie- The Prettiest Star
But first...

Hawkwind- Quark, Strangeness and Charm
And now. The Hawkwind I promised. Astronomy rocks. Sorta.

Fiona Apple- Please Please Please
This song belongs on this show. In a good way.

Wire- On Returning
See ya next week!

November The Dozenth

 THE NEW BREAKFAST SNOB: 11/12/2011


Originally aired on WRIR 97.3 FM Richmond

Podcast: http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/55765 

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Pink Floyd- Up The Khyber

Melomane- Dreams of Ships and Lightning

Taxi To The Ocean- Flag On The Moon

Tadpoles- Race To The Mustard Patch

Oingo Boingo- Run Away

Stranglers- Toiler On The Sea

XTC- Life Is Good In The Greenhouse

Of Montreal- Death Is Not A Parallel Move/Beware Our
              Nubile Miscreants

Joan As Policewoman- Kiss The Specifics

Ray Manzarek- Downbound Train

Pink Frost- Who I Belong To

Roxy Music- Would You Believe

Sparks- This Is The Renaissance

Area 27- Driving With The Future Self

Capt. Beefheart- Peaches

Michelle Malone- Teen Lament

Neil Young- Come on Baby, Let's Go Downtown

Cat Dail- Future Fridays

Steve Hillage- Sea Nature

HuDost- Skeleton Key

Cecile Corbel- Suil a Ruin

The Purrs- Stay With Me

Cardiacs- Leader of the Starry Skies

Jeannine Hebb- I Believe

The Fierce and the Dead- 10'X 10'

Flinging

                          Where did my human go? Throwing shit isn't fun without a target.

It has been a while since I blogged and there's a good reason for that. Well two reasons, really, but only one of them is good:

1) I'm in love and would rather spend time with my new girlfriend  than blog. In hindsight, one clue that I was falling in love with her was my reluctance to blog about our relationship. I find that if you love are to love someone, it is necessary to respect them as well. And if you respect someone, you won't blog the details of that love...and I'm too emotionally intoxicated to think for long about much else.  Hence the lack of posting. That's the good reason.

2) The bad reason is an overload of outrage. Have you noticed how bad the news is lately?
I have. There's so much wrong in the world that it is difficult to pick any one topic from the tsunami of horrific headlines streaming across the monitors that fill my life. The inside of my head feels like it is Occupied. I agree with the majority sentiments of the Occupy My Head movement, but  it is difficult to sort them out at times. There is a lot of overlap, our problems are not a scattered number of random, isolated ones; what we have are  multiple inter-connected system failures at every level. Where to start?

How about piling on Herman Cain?  He actually deserves it.

Dude. Paying out quiet  settlements for one or more workplace-related sexual harassment incidents will ruin your political hopes in a way that merely being black will not. So quit whining, quit  campaigning and go get your inevitable job at Fox now so we can focus on something else.

I'm not a huge fan of Obama, but none of the GOP candidates are worth a fuck and most are barely worth a grope. The next election will be between The Disappointment We Know  and the Disaster We Don't.  It  makes me wonder if we even really NEED a President or Congress at all- why not just have the Chamber of Commerce  deliver checks to the Supreme Court and let the SCOTUS write the laws? Nothing would really change operationally, but we'd save billions on  election spending and useless politician's salaries and benefits. Plus counting votes costs money and money is in short supply. Freedom ain't free -you can call it an entitlement  and we gotta save money somewhere.

'Democracy' is just another corner to cut. Drown the government in the bathtub, put the captains of industry in direct control of the country and the Free Market will eventually liberate us all. Yep. Just wait.

Housekeeping and Peanut Rage

I meant to update my template or something- I forget exactly what I intended to do- and then I got distracted and kinda forgot that I had a blog and that I'd left it languishing in virtual limbo for weeks.

So what's happened lately with me?


- WRIR 97.3 FM, the radio station that I've been engineering/DJing at since 2005, completed our bi-annual Fund Drive last week and we broke our all-time record, despite lousy economic conditions and the direct competition from our local NPR station's own fund-drive. (We are wholly independent of NPR).

My passion for live music engineering was re-ignited by five excellent sessions- in the course of the fund drive, I engineered a local Gamelan orchestra, a jazz quartet, salsa greats Bio Ritmo, a twangy rock band called Mag Bats and a fast-rising Belgian duo called The Black Box Revelation, two guys who really tore things up- in a good way:



I had my own two shows as well, but I'm not podcasting them as they are full of fund-raising chatter and I'm not into editing audio files at the moment. The show returns to normal tomorrow, never fear. As if...

Hmmm...what else?

Oh yeah...I had been using a couple of internet dating services and going on a lot of nowhere-nothing  dates this summer, but I finally gave up on the dating services altogether . I kinda had to give up, because I met a warm, beautiful, intelligent woman who has been very kind and very good to me and I'm more than just a little bit sweet on her. We've gotten to the point where we are planning a vacation together, so I imagine she'd be pretty pissed off if I went on dates with women who aren't her, not that I would do that.

I'm feeling a sense of real-life happiness that is entirely new and wonderful to me and I don't plan on fucking it up. The future looks good with her in it.

 I've also  been a repeat guest on a internet radio talk show streamed on New Dissident Radio called Breaking Taboo. The show is archived on their site, you can download and  listen to all the recordings, not just the ones with me on them. The show's host, the multi-talented Lakota Phillips, also has a new show called Rebel Goddess.

Oh, and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy is pissing me off. There's been considerable media hoopla about the soaring price of peanut butter- the day I first heard this news, I went to my local store and found the store brand of all-natural (ingredients: peanuts, salt) PB was on sale for $2.00 per 16 oz jar.  A 5-lb bag of potatoes, on the other hand, cost nine bucks! Both items were more expensive than the low-end ground beef ($1.69/lb in bulk), which says a lot more about ground beef than it does about the Peanut Famine.

Before I forget: Never buy peanut butter that contains any added oil. A peanut is 50% oil by weight and there is no reason to add oil to PB- what food processors do is remove the healthy peanut oil ( which is sold separately as a commodity) and replace it with much cheaper industrial-strength hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. The kind of oils that shorten your lifespan.

Read the label of your average Name Brand PB and ask yourself this: what part of the peanut does hydrogenated cottonseed oil come from?

Furthermore, if you have some extra time and really want to save money, make your own damn peanut butter. Here's how you do it:

-Throw peanuts into a blender or food processor. Add some salt or a touch of honey if you wish.

- Turn the device on.

-Turn it off and stir up the nuts.

-Turn it on again.

Repeat until you have peanut butter, which isn't really 'butter' at all. (It's really peanut paste, for Godzilla's sake!)

- Make someone else clean the blender.

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See ya on the radio!

Don't Make Me Hit You

It has been a long, long time since I beat the shit out of somebody just because they deserved it. In fact, I'm pretty sure the last time was the winter of 8th Grade and that the person was my brother- I had baked a batch of Christmas cookies for my Grandparents and my dirty rotten bother stole them and took them to his homeroom class for their Xmas party. When I discovered his misdeed, I punched him out as best I could, which really wasn't very much of a beating- I was plenty pissed, but he was still my brother and I didn't really want to harm him, I just wanted him to know that he fucked up when he messed with my Grannie treats. He needed a lesson in respect and he got one, albeit a totally wimpy version. I mostly sat on his back and punched his shoulders, if I recall...anyway.

Why am I telling you this? Because this morning I came as close to getting in a punch-up as I've been since I quit drinking, and it was all about respect. Or lack thereof.

A few weeks ago I was out on a date (with a woman that I'm still dating) and while we were out,  we ran into J, the guy who fills the snack machines at my office. J is a big fat Jamaican who I usually enjoy shooting the shit with when he makes his rounds- he's a funny , if a bit obnoxious chap. Which is fine.

He stopped and said hello to me and kept going, which was diplomatic of him. I was on a date after all, and it would have been rude to interrupt us...so far, so good, right? J is an alright dude, eh?

Well, I saw him this morning for the first time since that chance encounter  and he asked me a very rude 'dude' question. I generally don't get into that sort of discussion with guys, so I pretended not to hear him until he asked me a second time.

"No, nothing like that", I replied tersely. I had overslept and missed my shave, shower and coffee- I was in no mood for manly trifles.

Then he said something  that I really didn't like and won't repeat here.

"Look", I started in on J, "there was a time when I'd  have been OK with that. But that was a long time ago and I'm not an out-of-control fucked-up kid anymore. Before any of what you described happens, I want to be sure that I like and respect the other person. And vice versa. That takes time, it isn't a contest or a race, it is a long-term two-way project. That isn't what you are talking about. You are just talking about meaningless fuckery."

J looked at me as if I were crazy, and perhaps I am. Ten years ago, I never would have imagined that I would be dispensing angry, improvised lectures on  the virtues of chivalry to a chauvinistic Jamaican  truck driver in the break room of a high-rise office building.

"Women don't want to be respected", J told me.

Then he elaborated on how women really want to be treated. His description began with "Like pigs..." and got worse with every word. It was unbelievably ugly and it made me want to punch him, but the sad thing is, there are women who do feel that way about themselves- my mother was one-  and J had learned to identify that characteristic in women and to exploit it for his own personal gratification. He was a sexual parasite and proud of it.

 "You are turning bright red", observed J.

 He was right. I was so angered by his callous display of sexism and and gleeful tales of degradation that I was having what almost amounted to an out-of-body experience. I wasn't exactly sure what my body was going to do- it looked like I was getting ready to throw a punch at J, which would probably have been a big mistake, since he is a full foot taller than myself and outweighs me by at least 120 pounds.

So I walked away and went back to my cubicle to drink coffee and think about abusive men and the women that they attract. Abusive men always seem to have at least one girlfriend and/or wives, so there must be plenty of women with the requisite psychological damage needed to fill those roles. That really sucks.

My new friend is not like that. She's very pretty and of course I'm attracted to that, but it her person-ness  that has earned my respect. Out of that respect , I am not going to blog any details about her except for a few positive things that really took me by surprise:

- She's a good mother. That might sound like no big deal to some people, but I find it to be a very attractive trait. That's new to me.

- She'd probably laugh uncontrollably and question my judgement if she were to read this, but I think she manages her time very well. That says a lot about a person. A lot good.

- She remembered my birthday and is taking me out to celebrate it! Happy!

I spent my last birthday alone in a Fort Lauderdale hotel, stuck on a shitty business trip. I just checked my blog from 2009- I don't even mention my birthday at all, so I'm guessing I didn't do anything that year...in 2008 there's a brief , depressed mention but no celebration. I did find a short story I wrote- it is a dark piece, but also one of my personal favorites (reposted here). I'd forgotten about it...I bet I could publish at least two books if I went back through all my old archives. Later for that. My point is, my birthday is usually a non-event.

This year is a little different. I'm looking forward to my 45th birthday. Friday  I'll be engineering a live studio performance by a small Gamelan orchestra, after which I'll be treated to dinner by a beautiful woman...so that kinda rocks as far as days go.

Next week is our station's Fund Drive and I'll be engineering a LOT of live shows as our DJs pull out the stops during our pleading period- we don't have advertisers, so we rely on listener donations- without them, I wouldn't have been able to air this fabulous broadcast:


THE NEW BREAKFAST SNOB: 9/10/2011
Originally aired on WRIR-97.3 FM Richmond

Podcast here

Helios Creed- Dimension 5

King Crimson- Prozack  Blues  (live)

Brian Eno- King's Lead Hat

The Purrs- Feeling Fine

Be Bop Deluxe- Love With The Madman

Stackridge- Marzo Plod

Joni Mitchell- You Turn Me On (I'm a Radio)

Captain Beefheart- This Is The Day (live)

Pink Floyd- Pigs on the Wing

Mothers of Invention- Directly From My Heart To You

Angelfish- King Of The World

David Bowie- Beauty and the Beast

The Kinks- Powerman

Funkadelic- Nappy Dugout

The Stranglers- Go Buddy Go

The Tubes- I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk (live)

Elvis Costello- Stella Hurt

Oingo Boingo- Whole Day Off

Crack The Sky- Skin Deep

Of Montreal- Everything Dissappears (When You Come Around)

Cursive- Making Friends and Acquaintances

Bird York - What Are You Running After?

Cat Dail- Squeeze Your Play

Elu- Beautiful Things

Kalliopi- Summer Is Over

Iron Butterfly- Stamped Ideas

Gong- How To Survive
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Six Years After

Yesterday was my sixth anniversary of sobriety and I forgot to celebrate it. I did take the day off from work, but that was to go to DMV  in order to  get my driver's license renewed. It really wasn't that bad of an experience, I enjoy watching people too much to get bored easily and when I finally did get to the counter my vanity got a huge boost. After handing her my license,the matronly attendant did a quick double-take, she looked down at my old photo, then up at the new me, then back and forth again.

"You've lost weight since this was taken", she observed.

"Yep. About sixty pounds", I boasted.

"I...do you mind if I ask you how you did it?"

"Sure", I replied easily, "I quit drinking."

And for me, it is an easy reply. I'm not ashamed to be an alcoholic, I was born that way and there really isn't anything that I can do to change my genetics- but I can take responsibility for my behavior, hence the sobriety. Plus I'm afraid of dying.

Six years and two days ago, I left work early because I didn't feel very good. I'd been nauseous for weeks and it had been  impossible for me to keep my beer down long enough to get drunk the previous night. I was too sick to drink but I really, really wanted a drink.

So I drove myself home and found a couple of Natural Ice cans in the 'fridge. I gulped one down, felt a  sharp stabbing inside of me, then threw up into the kitchen sink. I looked down at the foamy, bloody mess in the sink and decided that I'd drink the second beer a little slower...at some point, I wandered upstairs and posted the following dreadful poem on this blog:

So much pain.
Barely holding it together.
Not alone.
Not MY pain.
Let's ignore it and hope it goes away.
That'll work.

*snip*

Forget that.
I know I can.
If it's not too late.
Return to maybe.
Return to blender.

Fuck it all.

I don't remember writing that. I do remember that a couple of my friends had recently died of their bad habits and that my Uncle had killed himself, so I have a feeling of where the morbidity was coming from. It has been a long time since I've been able to go back and re-read any of my writing from those days, it is the work of a dying man embracing his own ruinous suicide and being too fucked-up to care about it.

In retrospect, it was pretty clear that I knew I was in trouble but I was having a hard time figuring out what to do about it, so I waited until I was a few minutes from losing the ability to make a decision before I finally made one.

In the end, I  decided to pick myself up off the floor and drive myself to a hospital. I'm not up to the task of describing what happened there, suffice it to say that I woke up after a three-day coma and was told that the docs were somewhat surprised that I'd regained consciousness. They expected me to die within 24 hours. I was only 38 years old and I'd done myself in, which kinda sucked. I had expected more, somehow.

Except that I didn't die. After a day or two of not-dying, I was evaluated by some shrinks and pronounced 'sane' enough to be released, albeit against medical advice. I was strongly urged to check myself into a rehab center or at least join Alcoholics Anonymous...I didn't take any of their advice. I had plenty of time to make up my mind while I was in ICU, I knew I wasn't going to drink again and listening to their dire predictions about my relapses and demise only pissed me off.  

I'll keep myself sober just so those bastards don't get the last laugh, I thought.

Maybe that was their intent. All I know is that it worked- for me, anyway.

I don't have a secret method or gimmick that miraculously cures alcoholism; I swear to Godzilla that I wish I did have one. If I did, I would share it with my friends and my family and sell it to celebrities-  I'd never have to work another goddamned day in my life if I could cure drunks of drinking. Of course, I'd probably be assassinated by agents of the the Liquor Lobby, but that's a whole 'nother rant.

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I Trust My Guitar

This past Monday I had the pleasure of being a guest on Lakota Phillips' talk program Breaking Taboo, which airs weekly on New Dissident Radio. It was the second time I've been on and I must say I really enjoy it. The free-wheeling,  uncensored talk format is a real change of pace from my own freewheeling, barely-censored music show...sometimes I wish that I had a radio talk show of my very own- yeah, like that could ever happen.

Wednesday night I had a dinner date, my third with the same woman. It is more like a slow, meandering walk through a forest than it is a mad race to the finish line...this is a new experience for me. Women sure were a lot easier to figure out back when I only dated alcoholics, but I have a feeling that the slow approach might yield better, longer-lasting results in the long run.

Thursday night I took a look into my larder and saw that I was out of almost everything that could reasonably be considered food...it didn't take me long to figure out that Cheerios and chutney may be alliterative, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they belong in the same bowl, so I headed to the local market, which has been randomly changing the layout of its aisles and contents as they remodel the interior. The milk is...where...there...where...here, whew...the supermarket experience left me simultaneously exhausted and over-stimulated andwhen I finally got home, I realized I had leftover Thai from last night. So I nuked that and by that time it was time for bed.

The office closed early Friday, so I went home and started working on my music show. Then I took a short nap. Then I got up and worked a bit.
Nap.
Work.
Nap.
Work.
 
This went on until about midnight, at which time I took an eight-hour nap.

I woke up this morning and found that I had no blank CDs to burn my show's music selections to, so I dashed off to store to buy some. When I returned, I noticed that last night I'd saved my show files as 96k mp3s, which is too low-fidelity for radio broadcast. I was forced to re-create all of my segments at the very last second and re-burn them as audio files. As a result, I barely arrived at the station in time for my show.

The show went really well but I was disheartened by the lack of internet listeners- my listenership has been slowly but steadily increasing and today's number was so dismal that at first I thought I was looking at my painfully vanishing 401k and not at our web meter. But the DJ who came in after me told me he'd listened to the stream just a while ago and it was noisy and distorted. Hmmm.

Sure enough, when I got home, my recording was totally ruined by digital noise and distortion.

I'd spent two days on it and *poof*, gone forever...but...but...aha! I still had most of the show saved as individual segments!

I threw them into the old mixing bowl, stirred in a few songs that I'd added on the fly during the broadcast, sprinkled it with some artist-promo program IDs and voila! Instant podcast- by instant, I mean twelve hours of repetitive, carpal-tunneling work, but at least it is done.

Tomorrow, while the rest of you drink beer, eat tasty grilled meats and frolic in the sun with your friends and family, I'll be shopping for a mop and new shower curtain.

Then I'll do housework and later on I'll fix some pasta for dinner.

Long live Rock and Roll.

THE NEW BREAKFAST SNOB SEPT.  3, 2011. 

Broadcast every Saturday from 1pm-3pm on WRIR 97.3 FM, Richmond. Podcast here.

Joan As Policewoman- I Was Everyone

Cafebar 401- You Got Something

Michelle Malone- Light of Day

Paula Cole- Road to Death

Sparks- Biology 2

Funkadelic- I Wanna Know

Can- Half Past One

The Tubes- I'm Just A Mess

Patti Smith- The 25th Floor/High On Rebellion

Portishead- Insensible

Massive Attack- Live With Me

HuDost- Glacier

Pinback- AFK

Angelfish- Mummy Can't Drive

Garbage- Driving Lesson

Richard Thompson- MGB GT

Capt. Beefheart- New Electric Ride (Live)

Stackridge- No One Is More Important Than The Earthworm (live)

Mothers of Invention- Oh No/Orange County Lumber Truck

John Cale- Bring It On Up

Jimi Hendrix- Hey Baby (New Sun Rising) live

Chrome- Zombie Warfare

Pere Ubu- Life Stinks

The Kinks- Mountain Girl

Bill Laswell- Assassin

Monday Machines- Ruined Morning (bonus)
I began this re-created broadcast using a very cool program ID that Cary Grace made for my show, so I thought finishing  with a very appropriate song that she wrote for me would be a fitting end to it all.

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What Could Go Wrong?

Godzilla bless you, Daryl Hannah. We need more celebrities to step up and get busted for speaking out against the XL Keystone Pipeline.

The Keystone XL is a proposed 1,700 mile pipeline that will carry Canadian crude oil across the middle of America, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

What could go wrong? It's just raw crude oil, and the Oil Industry hasn't spilled any oil since, like, forever.  I mean, we can be pretty sure that the Big Oil's streak of bad luck is over and nothing bad will ever happen, anywhere along the entire length of the pipeline. No earthquakes, no tornadoes, no floods and...

...hey, did you notice this- the line runs very close to Oklahoma City, which , sadly is still remembered as the place where American terrorist Tim McVeigh blew up an office building. My guess is that he'd have picked the pipeline as his target instead, had that been an option.
The Keystone XL pipeline would be a tempting target for anyone with explosives and a serious grudge against America.

The objective is to reduce our dependence on 'foreign'  oil, which I guess means America annexed Canada and it didn't make the news or something, because last time I checked, Canada was a foreign country.

I wonder if Saudi Arabia is worried about the competition from the XL line? It would be in their best interest if some wackjob did something horrific to the line. Not that anyone would.

Speaking of Saudi Arabia:

Did you know that they are building solar powerplants in Saudi Arabia? They would rather export the oil than burn it in their own air. Right now the plants are in their first stages, but it is only a matter of time and research  until the technology is developed into an advanced enough state to be commercially viable. My totally non-scientific guess would be that it will take decades before 'Green' energy can be produced at massively commercial levels, so the sooner we get started the better.

If America won't lead the way in renewable energy, the Saudis will. Of course, they'll be building nuclear power plants as well, so it isn't as if they Saudis are 'Green', they are just smarter than we are. They'll be powering their luxury resorts with wind farms and solar arrays and exporting their smog to us.When the oil runs out, they'll sell us the technology we should be developing now.


Remember how we finally succeeded in our mission to spread Freedom on Iraq, at the cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars? Did you know what the newly-Freedomed Iraqis want to do?:

Many of the world's biggest energy companies may have to surrender most of the gas from Iraq's vast southern oilfields to a processing and export project led by Shell, a final draft contract between Baghdad and Europe's biggest company shows.

Under the $17bn gas deal to be ratified by the Iraqi cabinet, Baghdad has pledged to do what it takes to ensure these fields supply the Shell-led Basra Gas Company (BGC) joint venture with all the raw gas and natural gas liquids (LNG) it needs, including for an LNG export plant.

We spilled all that blood and treasure to set up a State that promises to give OUR oil to the damned Europeans. What a bunch of ingrates! Are we gonna have to invade them all over again?

Maybe we should invade Holland instead, Shell is a Dutch company.

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