Sound-biting The Chimp, NPR Audio- Stenography Drives Another Nail Into My Skull

Their headlines on the 11 am, MDT newscast led with the faux-earnestness of The Chimp extolling the virtues of drilling off-shore and in ANWAR as, at least implicitly, rational responses and prophylactics to the current price of petroleum products. Then they moved on.

And I am afraid I must have terrified the dogs, all the dogs in the neighborhood by the piercing shrillness of my keening for the death of the truth.

It is not a matter of anyone's "opinion" that allowing even the immediate and exhaustive exploration, drilling and exploitation of every inch of the 50 United States, their territories and tributaries, starting at noon today will NOT have ANY discernible impact on the current price of oil, will not lower the price paid at the pump--the PPATP--a single, coppery cent, not a sheckel, keine pfennig, nary a peso. NOT to have made any such reference is, in effect, becoming complicit in a lie: "catapulting the propaganda," as the Chimp let slip one day.

It would have been an act of truth--of nobility, of honor, of conscience--had the NPR news-reader rejoined the Preznint's patent falsehood with a terse remark, to the effect that oil which cannot get to market until 2020 CANNOT effect the PATP TODAY, for the love of screaming Jeezis and his pederastic acolytes!

But no, it the moment passed, unremarked. Mebbe the programmers there figger NPR listeners are sufficiently discriminating to be able to infer an implied subtext.

But I'm not so sure. These are, after all, the same people who claim to admire Scott Simon, and send in submissions to "This I Believe."

In Oil, but throughout the so-called 'energy sector,' we have a commodity whose production is easily manipulated for gain, along with a pliant, amorphous mythology of markets, and huge technological barriers to real understanding, embedded with the indices of international politics and economics at work creating and maintaining the "value" of oil. The price--and hence the ultimate cost--of USer/Western Civ reliance on petroleum has not even begun to be felt. USer economic macro-theory socializes cost, privatizes profit. That may be the immanent contradiction which finally undoes the whole wobbly, corrupt, feculent affair.