And hear our most excellent home-grown, all-Vermont Funk band, Electric Sorcery !! Playing 2:00 PM at the historic Gathering Inn, Hancock, Vermont !

The doors of sound have been ripped off the hinges by Electric Sorcery who routinely electrify Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Towns are regularly woken out of their slumber by the by the wicked sound of this power trio.

Electric Sorcery takes psychedelic music firmly rooted in the 70s and adds their own special twist. Funky rhythms and psychedelic guitar riffs come together to create an intriguing sound that is sometimes very heavy.... This is a fun listen and anyone who gravitates towards the psychedelic sounds of the 70s needs to hear this… - SeaOfTranquility.org 

Meet & Eat    Greet & Drink

Saturday, September 25, from 2 – 4 PM  

1295 Route 100

Diagonally opposite the Hancock Hotel

Please bring your concerns, your hard questions, and your ideas.  The Independent vision for Vermont is all about you, your families and communities !

Tricycle, really.

Saw this interesting vehicle in Burlington yesterday. Like a Baby Björn sling, the tricycle keeps the kid in front of the adult. The tricycle set-up surely gives a lot of stability. A fun sight!

If Vermont were to secede from the United States of Empire and become an independent nation-state, how could it possibly survive as a separate republic? How would it function? Are there any examples of smaller, sustainable nation-states which might serve as a role model for a state like Vermont, should it decide to leave the Union?

Electric assist bicycle motors are a boon for people who want the low cost, convenience, and exercise benefits of bicycling, but maybe not all the exercise benefits that the distance or topography of their trips would offer.

They're also great for cycling late at night without getting the metabolism too high for easy sleep. I used to keep an electric bike for night-time climbs of the 700 vertical feet on the trip from town to home, for precisely that reason. Alas, the motor burned out just after the warrantee expired, though I used it but weekly. I haven't risked any more money on an electric bike in the seven or so years since then.

Recently I read that the Tour de France officials are checking bicycles for hidden motors, after allegations that Swiss cyclist Fabian Cancellara used one when he won the Tour of Flanders and the Paris-Roubaix.

I understand that tiny, concealable, but significantly powerful electric motors represent a nightmare  for bicycle race officials. As someone who supports transportation cycling, however, I'm glad to see the technology has come this far. Not because I can see a point to paying $2500 or so for this level of miniaturization. But if premium technology this light and small is available, I assume that the less expensive technology for us ordinary blokes has improved significantly, too. (As the design adage has it, "Light, inexpensive, robust: pick any two.")

On the other hand, maybe amazing high-end technology is not the place to look for harbingers of better bike motors for the rest of us. The technology advances and economies of scale from China putting 100 million electric bikes on the road may be more important. 

This is a blow to Vermont liberals, lefties and democrats who have buried their heads in the sand to keep pretending that their Obama walks on water, folks who have buried any and all opposition to the ongoing wars, torture and domestic loss of liberties in exchange for a smile and a promise of 'change'. The Left can't ignore the only recently announced White House approval for a controversial expansion of offshore oil exploration. And now, in an ecological catastrophe of global proportions, the feds are even slower to respond, than the Bush Administration responded to Katrina. The Black Swan was popularised by Nassim Taleb in his recent book by that name. Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as 'black swans'—undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events.The Black Swan has its origins in a centuries-old scientific assumption that ‘All swans are white'. Just because nobody but Australian aborigines saw them until recently.To me, the Black Swan Event is a catastrophe that causes a chain reaction, in a world of global energy and food dependencies. It relieves the tension of that which is ready and waiting to happen, but hasn't happened. Academic snobs don't see it, but are experts at covering their tracks, afterward. Party politicians can't see it and even if they could, it's not within their daily protocol of memorised answers to pre-arranged questions by the mainstream media.The 'tension' is Peak Oil, if you haven't heard of it here's what it's about. Once that tension is released, centrally planned economies such as the fiat currency and debt-based US Empire simply break down. The centralised nanny-state with drones checking for protesters productive workers born in Mexico & pot plants (as despair, domestic violence & rape multiplies) simply doesn't work. The USSR disintegrated overnight. All empires go... once whatever dependency it was that fuelled its overstretch... goes. The tension... releases.What remains are localised economies based on minimal energy usage, the way the human race lived for most of its existence. Vermont is one hopeful example of a small, governable entity. Vermont was a independent republic until 1791. We can be free again! Imagine Free Vermont, and vote for Dennis Steele for Governor. Engage in, and promote, local food production.So what's the Black Swan? It's all over the newspapers, predictable in hindsight, but strikes to the heart of the Empires energy plans. The bastards will have to invade Venezuela now (at the very least, maybe Bolivia for good measure), just to continue fuelling the military overstretch, hundreds of bases worldwide, and the never-ending wars. All of which consume approximately half the oil said to be consumed by the US. Think of it, half the oil! This is the Empire's next move: US builds up its bases in oil-rich South AmericaFrom the Caribbean to Brazil, political opposition to US plans for 'full-spectrum operations' is escalating rapidlyThe rest of this post I dedicate to Michael Ruppert, whom I just interviewed for Montpelier's local paper, The Bridge. Ruppert will be touring Vermont in May, screening his film Collapse and dealing with questions and concerns from audiences. This tour is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing, the Vermont Independent Candidates, Radio Free Vermont, Vermont Transition Towns, and others:

• May 13 – Burlington Contois Auditorium, City Hall 7:30 p.m.
• May 14 – Montpelier Unitarian Church, 7:30 p.m.
• May 15 – Brattleboro Brattleboro Union High School, 7:30 p.m.
• May 16 – Woodstock Woodstock Town Hall Theater, 7:00 p.m. Features screening of film and Q&A with Michael Ruppert afterward

Click here for more information on the tour!'The oil slick is now the size of Delaware. It will be Ohio-sized within days. Florida has declared a state of emergency. All commercial fishing in the Gulf is threatened. All widlife is threatened. And when and if the slick gets to NOLA it will have a disatarous impact on energy production and the brave, battered, courageous people who live there. Coastal refineries may have to close... What might happen if the oil ignited? Oil should be at $100 before the end of next week. I suspect between $150 and $200 (maybe higher) this summer.'Worse: Napolitano and Salazar are already talking about huge claim funds. Massive class-actions against BP are starting. Insurance claims may well dwarf Katrina. The economy of the entire Gulf Coast is in jeopardy. From what I heard there is no real plan to stop the leak and no estimation as to when that will happen. (I might have missed that.) What happens when the slick hits Cuba? The rest of the Caribbean?'The current fradulent Wall Street bubble will pop in shorter order than anticipated.'Within about a week, man's greed and reach for energy have found natural and unyielding limits. Two coal mine disasters and an oil slick that will cause as yet unknown catastrophic damage, loss of life and property. And yet there are still those in this movement who think we need to argue with people who believe there's plenty of easy oil about anything.'It would be so poetic if history recorded that this was the event that marked the cliff edge of human industrial civilization. Maybe then someone will get the point. Maybe then we will find our hundredth monkey... And maybe Mother Earth will have poisoned us with the substance we have so greedily raped her -- and killed each other -- for... You want oil?... I'll give you oil.' 

Flights in Europe and over the northern Atlantic started again Tuesday, nearly a week after planes were grounded to prevent damage from volcanic ash. And now the airlines want taxpayers to funnel them more money.

You and I already pay to subsidize air travellers. Airlines are exempt from paying fuel taxes, for example, while ground transport pays hefty taxes on diesel and gasoline. After September 11, 2001, the US government funneled billions to the airlines.

Now, the industry wants more. The New York Times reports that Giovanni Bisignani, chief executive of the International Association of Air Transport, the IATA, has said, “I am the first one to say that this industry does not want or need bailouts.”

OK, so far so good. But then he contradicts himself. “But this crisis is not the result of running our business badly. It is an extraordinary situation exaggerated with a poor decision-making process by national governments.”

Did national governments do a poor job of deciding when to close the skies? The IATA has charged that governments have made decisions without clear risk assessment. That seems to be true--there's too little information about the effects of ash on airplanes to make accurate risk assessment. So the governments have relied on the precautionary principle--better safe than sorry. They would rather have more flights cancelled and more people delayed than risk airplanes falling out of the sky.

As for Bisignani's comment that the eruption of Eyjafjallajökul is “an extraordinary situation,” sure, it is.  Extraordinary situations are what industries get insurance for. What I want to know is why people who don't fly or who fly less than average should give even more money to the airlines to subsidize their stockholders, their highly paid executives, and people rich enough to afford to fly frequently?

Here's an issue that is getting little attention now, but will likely hit the headlines again in a year or two. It's worth thinking it through before a crisis is upon us. As oil prices start to rise again, will we have the discipline to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve only for a “severe energy supply disruption,” the way Congress specified when it created the SPR?

First a look back at recent history.

As I predicted here a while back, the volume of passengers passing through the Burlington airport has declined in 2009. The BFP reports that:

"In January, 50,490 people flew from Vermont's largest airport, a 5.5 percent decline from January 2009 -- and the weakest January tally since 2004. The decline marked the 10th consecutive month of sagging year-over-year results at Burlington International."

by Dana Dwinell-Yardley

Do you know where you are? Do you know where you're going? Do you know how to get there?

These are good questions, often asked when examining one's life goals or larger purpose. But today I'm asking them in the most literal, physical sense: do you know where you are, right now? If you wanted to go somewhere else — somewhere you hadn't been before, perhaps — how would you figure out which way to go?

Okay, now turn off your electronic devices and answer again.

Thanksgiving Day is a special day for those following the peak oil news. Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, author of Hubbert's Peak, predicted that Thanksgiving Day 2005 would mark the peak in world oil production. After that, oil production would decline, irreversibly. And he may have been right. Crude oil production figures have been removed from the most widely influential official statistics, so it's not easy to check. Even if crude production numbers were easily available, the numbers are so uncertain that it's hard to see anything other than the biggest trends.

When Deffeyes made the prediction, almost two years before Thanksgiving 2005, his tongue was only slightly in his cheek. Oil production data are not nearly precise enough to establish a peak day.

Was Deffeyes at least right about the year of peak oil?

I looked for the answer in the official figures from the US Department of Energy and the International Energy Agency in Paris. The main tables on world oil production no longer report what's called crude oil and condensate. Condensate is a byproduct of natural gas production. What they call “oil production” now includes all manner of liquid fuels, including ethanol and synfuels, synthetic fuels. Peak oil is about, well, oil. Not how much alcohol is produced.  

Probably if I dug down into the web sites, or made some phone calls, I could find the crude oil data again. But when the two primary public energy reporting agencies in the world change the most prominent way they report oil production, and they do it in a way that could hide peak oil, I'm suspicious.

Second, even if I found the crude oil and condensate numbers, it requires a leap of faith to believe them. Matthew Simmons is an investment banker with decades of experience in the oil industry. The way he tells it, the unaudited oil production figures sound suspiciously like the finance industry's CDOs, collateralized debt obligations. The ones that played a big role in bringing down the world economy last year, when they turned out to be worth a lot less than people thought. Like CDOs, no one really knows what's in the oil production figures from each country. Incredibly enough, there's no outside auditor to check them out.

Simmons thinks that 2005 was the peak year for oil production. If so, Deffeyes might even have been right about oil production peaking on Thanksgiving that year.

Deffeyes' prediction looks pretty good even if we look at the unreliable and misleading data on total liquids, including ethanol and synfuels. There was a rapid run-up in price from 2005 to 2008, which you'd think would lead to greater production. But no, production stagnated in 2006 and 2007, and only increased slightly in 2008. Since then, economic collapse has reduced demand, so production in 2009 is down again, below 2005 levels. According to the official figures.

Regardless of the actual date of peak oil, we can give thanks for oil's blessings. As Deffeyes put it: "Thanks for the services of the first half of recoverable world oil. Thanks for the automobile, the airplane, diesel trains and ships, two-lane blacktop, warm houses, plastics, and a huge range of petrochemicals. [The Thanksgiving dinner itself] was produced with fertilizers, tractor fuel, pesticides, and transportation provided by oil and natural gas."

Of course, oil has been a mixed blessing. The age of oil has also brought the age of World Wars, poisonings from pollution on an unprecedented scale, destruction of cities for parking lots and ugly suburbs, and habitat destruction, climate change, and other pressures that threaten most species on the planet, including ours.

As we give thanks for the blessings of oil, let us keep in mind the curses of oil, and let us ask for the wisdom to use the remaining half of the world's oil reserves more for useful, durable products than throw-away plastic cutlery, more for insulating homes and constructing wind turbines than for heating drafty homes and generating electricity, and more for medicines and food production than for guns and warplanes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[This is an updated version of a post from 2007.]