Archive for July, 2008
Monday, July 28th, 2008
Market Efficiency
Friday, July 25th, 2008
Gaming the Greens
Here comes the next wave of the overclass’s assault on the public mind…
The Chevron Corporation, in partnership with the relentlessly dreadful British magazine The Economist, has promulgated “Energyville,” a cutesy online computer game that touts itself as
an interactive online game that challenges players to meet the energy needs of their own city. Energyville, developed using data and content provided by the Economist Intelligence Unit, The Economist Group’s research arm, examines the economic, environmental and security trade-offs and opportunities associated with different energy sources.
The “game” (it’s a game, indeed, but not the innocent type), wraps itself in the flag of education:
Energyville was designed to show the complexities and the tough choices that have to be made to meet the energy needs of a growing, modern city. Given the importance of energy in everyone’s lives, Energyville is an opportunity to stimulate and inform the debate and help create awareness around our energy choices.
Energyville represents an average industrialized global city of almost four million people. Population growth and energy demands, impacts and costs, are based on projected socio economic and energy usage data from the Economist Intelligence Unit and other organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Energy Information Administration.
As players move through the game’s phases, they learn about the characteristics of the different energy sources and understand how different events affect their choices. The economical, environmental and security impacts of their chosen energy portfolio are calculated using an energy-management points system. Players can compare their scores with other players, challenge a friend and debate the results on www.willyoujoinus.com.
But there’s one very huge unmentioned catch: In Energyville, all “your” city’s sources of energy demand (as opposed to energy supply) are fixed by Chevron and The Economist! You have no choices about transportation or urban layout or housing density or any other kind of commodity production!
That, of course, is because corporate capitalism has zero capacity to withstand any substantial alteration in those all-important factors. Shrinking demand to save humanity and the planet would spell doom for our overclass. Ergo, no demand-side choices will be tolerated or even mentioned.
The extra scary part of this little propaganda “game” is that the green activist-intelligentsia seems to be naively gobbliing the candy and bounding right into the witch’s house.
We are in very deep trouble…
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
Spaceman Gore: “Let’s Drive to the Moon!”
Albert Gore, he of the Nobel Peace Prize and the 20-room mansion and the penchant for stating ideas only when he’s far out of power, has just delivered a speech calling for radical reform of the USA’s energy infrastructure.
In “A Generational Challenge to Repower America,” Gore says:
In recent years, our politics has tended toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction. Our democracy has become sclerotic at a time when these crises require boldness.
There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment. The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more – if more should be required – the future of human civilization is at stake.
[W]hen we look at [our] seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change. But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we’re holding the answer to all of them right in our hand. The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.
What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don’t cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home?
We have such fuels. Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy 2
needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses.
And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy, similarly, is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity for America.
The quickest, cheapest and best way to start using all this renewable energy is in the production of electricity. In fact, we can start right now using solar power, wind power and geothermal power to make electricity for our homes and businesses.
But to make this exciting potential a reality, and truly solve our nation’s problems, we need a new start. That’s why I’m proposing today a strategic initiative designed to free us from the crises that are holding us down and to regain control of our own destiny. It’s not the only thing we need to do. But this strategic challenge is the lynchpin of a bold new strategy needed to re-power America.
Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.
Bravo and amen, right?
Not right: Like the rest of the phalanx of overclass power-guardians to which he still belongs, Al Gore is unwilling to expose capitalism to any question. As a result, he actually does not mean what he says. Contrary to his own words, Gore remains utterly unwilling to permit consideration of the changes it would take to cure the disease he is trying to publicize.
Why do I say this? Where’s the proof?
Here it is:
We could further increase the value and efficiency of a Unified National Grid by helping our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars. An electric vehicle fleet would sharply reduce the cost of driving a car, reduce pollution, and increase the flexibility of our electricity grid….
If you want to know the truth about gasoline prices, here it is: the exploding demand for oil, especially in places like China, is overwhelming the rate of new discoveries by so much that oil prices are almost certain to continue upward over time no matter what the oil companies promise. And politicians cannot bring gasoline prices down in the short term.
However, there actually is one extremely effective way to bring the costs of driving a car way down within a few short years. The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline.
In other words, cars are non-negotiable in Gore’s plan, despite the fact that they account for 70 percent of “our” addiction to petroleum. In addition, via its encouragement of suburbs and its stimulation of greatly increased industrial production of many kinds, cars-first living also creates a huge further unnecessary drain on our existing electrical power grid. Making cars and suburbs ain’t cheap.
Yet, Gore naturally assumes, cars-first must continue.
This non-negotiability of automobiles exists, of course, because corporate capitalism itself is not negotiable, despite its blatant non-sustainability and consequent extreme danger to the human future. The simple fact is that without the preservation of the ultra-wasteful but ultra-profitable autos-über-alles way of living in the United States, corporate capitalism would implode. Ergo, not even Al Gore can summon the courage to say “cars must go.”
Instead of saying that, Gore says says in his speech that “people rightly complain about higher gas prices” — as if cars could ever be made ecologically and financially inexpensive.
But the basic facts are inherent in the technology and the system that forces it upon us: In order to serve as the primary mode of everyday transportation in any society, the automobile requires sprawling cities. Sprawling cities in turn dictate long commuting distances for vehicles carrying one or a few occupants. Long commuting distances require relatively high-speed travel, in order to get those occupants to their scattered, appointed places reasonably on time. High speed travel in cars for one or a few occupants requires comparatively large-sized, collision-worthy vehicles. (Glorified golf carts going 45 mph are super-extreme deathtraps.) Comparatively large-sized, collision-worthy vehicles are inherently heavy and massively fuel-inefficient.
All in all, it’s simply an inescapable fact that building cars to carry one or a few occupants and equipping those cars with the hundreds of pounds of comforts, amusements, and safety mechanisms that make the trips bearable is also super-wasteful of energy, albeit also super-profitable for investors. No amount of design or alternative fueling is going to change that.
Yet and still, capitalists can’t and (barring a popular uprising) won’t do without all this waste/profit.
The planet, meanwhile, can’t do with much more of it. Generating enough new electricity from wind and solar to make it all happen: a) is almost certainly impossible, and b) would eat up the entirety of the new infrastructure Gore is now proposing. Whether we burn oil to do it, or sacrifice our one-time shot at building a sustainable electric grid to it, perpetuating autos-über-alles for much longer will spell death to progressive human society.
Hence, we must transcend Al Gore and the masters he continues to serve. As Gore himself says:
If we keep going back to the same policies that have never ever worked in the past and have served only to produce the highest gasoline prices in history alongside the greatest oil company profits in history, nobody should be surprised if we get the same result over and over again. But the Congress may be poised to move in that direction anyway because some of them are being stampeded by lobbyists for special interests that know how to make the system work for them instead of the American people.
Or, properly stated:
If we keep going back to the same policies that have never ever worked in the past and have served only to produce the highest gasoline prices in history alongside the greatest oil company profits in history, nobody should be surprised if we get the same result over and over again. But the Congress may be poised to will move in that direction anyway because some all of them are being stampeded by lobbyists for special interests the capitalist class that, who know how to always make the system work for them instead of the American people.
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Too Much Quality: A Profit Killer
Thorstein Veblen saw capitalists as saboteurs of modern science and industry. Their pursuit of profit obliges them to select wasteful product varieties, and then to refrain from maximizing the unit-quality of what they choose to produce. That’s because too much product efficiency and longevity hurts business.
And so it goes. Consider this July 14 item from Advertising Age:
The shaving business is slowing down in the U.S., even shrinking by some measures.
The economy isn’t helping, but the real factors behind the slowing of the $3 billion-plus shaving business are an aging population, a decline in men shaving and better products that last longer, according to a recently released report by market-research firm Mintel.
The fact is that “better products that last longer” are, contrary to the public professions* of the system’s executives and apologists, nothing like a top priority in corporate capitalism. Instead, they are a last resort in the ordinary course of big business.
Multiply this reality by the number of industries being allowed to organize production on behalf of private saboteurs, and you begin to see yet another dimension of why this social order will not make it through this century. The Earth and its people can’t stand it.
*”The chairman of the board will always tell you that he spends his every waking hour laboring so that people will get the best possible products at the cheapest possible price and work in the best possible conditions. But it’s an institutional fact, independent of who the chairman of the board is, that he’d better be trying to maximize profit and market share, and if he doesn’t do that, he’s not going to be chairman of the board any more. If he were ever to succumb to the delusions he expresses, he’d be out.” — Noam Chomsky
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
A Low Blow: The Real Political Economy of War and Oil
In his July 9 Counterpunch piece, Ismael Hossein-Zadeh attempts to disabuse us of the notion that the United States’ blatantly illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq is mainly about oil. In Hossein-Zadeh’s view, this interpretation is not just wrong, but “is designed to divert attention from the main forces behind the war, the armaments lobby and the pro-Israel lobby.”
As part of his effort to build that argument, Hossein-Zadeh also trashes the Peak Oil thesis, which contends that we Earthlings will eventually pass the point at which we will have used up the “easy half” of the globe’s stores of petroleum. Hossein-Zadeh goes so far as to say that “the Peak Oil theory is unscientific, unrealistic, and perhaps even fraudulent.”
I wish Hossein-Zadeh were right. If the present war stemmed from “some powerful special interests (vested in war, militarism, and geopolitical concerns of Israel)” rather than the deepest needs of our economic elite, it would be somewhat easier to stop. And it would be great news if the world were not facing deep Peak Oil troubles.
Alas, not only is Hossein-Zadeh wrong on both counts, but the way he builds his case is so profoundly unfair and misleading, his own argument serves to narrow and distort, rather than widen and clarify, the reader’s access to the very important information and issues Hossein-Zadeh touches upon.
Issue #1: War and Oil — Access or Control?
Hossein-Zadeh finds the war-for-oil thesis absurd because it makes “the implicit but dubious assumption that access to energy resources requires direct control of oil fields and/or oil producing countries.”
But, here, it’s Hossein-Zadeh who is doing something sneakily dubious: Without admitting it, he reduces the the issue of control over oil regions to access.
Noam Chomsky has long been pointing out what Hossein-Zadeh also argues: that fighting a war for access to oil would be almost absurd. That’s because petroleum is a commodity bought and sold on a world market, no matter where’s it’s produced. Hence, invading a petro-producing nation in order to compel it to release its oil supplies to the world market would be of only marginal benefit to the invading nation, since it would still have to bid for the “liberated” oil on the world market.
But, unlike Hossein-Zadeh, Chomsky does not stop there. On the contrary, he refuses to equate the issue of control with the issue of access, as Hossein-Zadeh does. Indeed, just yesterday, Chomsky wrote an op-ed for the Khaleej Times Online:
“The demand could hardly be more intense. Iraq contains perhaps the second largest oil reserves in the world, which are, furthermore, very cheap to extract: no permafrost or tar sands or deep sea drilling. For US planners, it is imperative that Iraq remain under U.S. control, to the extent possible, as an obedient client state that will also house major U.S. military bases, right at the heart of the world’s major energy reserves.”
Why does Chomsky believe such control is so imperative?
I wouldn’t presume to speak for Chomsky, but there are many aspects of controlling Iraq that go beyond the issue of merely ensuring that it sells its oil supplies. Among these are a permanent occupation’s ability to maximize U.S.-based corporations’ entry into the sure-to-be lucrative oil-drilling business in Iraq; to turn any other major-power’s intervention in the Middle East into an attack on the USA (and so to ensure legitimacy for deep, immediate US participation in future oil wars); and to greatly heighten the US’s ability to make war on other Middle Eastern nations, or even the entire region, as oil prices (and hence the bargaining power of the Middle Eastern bloc of OPEC) continue to increase.
None of these advantages has much to do with mere access to oil, but, since he equates control and access, Hossein-Zadeh fails to acknowledge any of them.
Issue #2: The Plausibility and Non-Fraudulance of Peak Oil
Hossein-Zadeh is remarkably unfair to the Peak Oil thesis.
“Peak oil theory is not altogether new,” he writes. “It was originally floated around in the 1940s.”
True enough, but Hossein-Zadeh leaves out what the father of Peak Oil theory, M. King Hubbert, predicted with such great accuracy — namely, that the production of oil in the United States itself would peak in the early 1970s. At the time Hubbert made that prediction, the US was still tapping new gushers with ease, and Hubbert’s prediction was ridiculed.
Nobody ridicules it now, however, because, despite Hossein-Zadeh’s pooh-poohing, it was dead-on right.
But Hossein-Zadeh is not just hiding information about the genesis of Peak Oil theory. He also goes out of his way to muddy the story of how it relates to present issues and future prospects.
“To begin with,” Hossein-Zadeh says, Peak Oil theory “discounts or disregards the fact that energy-saving technologies have drastically improved (and will continue to further improve) the efficiency of oil consumption. Evidence shows that, for example, “over a period of five years (1994-99), U.S. GDP expanded over 20 percent while oil usage rose by only nine percent.”
This is simply a false charge against Peak Oil theorists, who distinctly and consistently acknowledge the reality of improving technology.
But it is also a particularly deceptive shift of perspective. The real news in what Hossein-Zadeh says is not that energy efficiency has improved, but that, as shown by Hossein-Zadeh’s own reference, despite its improvement, the United States used 9 percent more energy in only a 5-year period! How comforting is that news? How sustainable is the system that produced it?
One wonders if Hossein-Zadeh has ever pondered the Jevons Paradox, of which the above fact is a rather obvious and important case.
Hossein-Zadeh is similarly misleading in his treatment of advancing oil-discovery technologies. “Computers have helped to reduce the number of dry holes. Horizontal drilling has boosted extraction. Another important development has been deep-water offshore drilling, which the new technologies now permit. Good examples are the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and more recently, the promising offshore oil fields of West Africa.”
All quite true, and yet Hossein-Zadeh provides no discussion at all of the overall rate and size of the new discoveries made possible by all the new techniques. In reality, both the rate and the scale of new oil finds continue to fall, despite the marvels of the new technology.
The greatest recent discovery is a perfect case in point: The Tupi field, located last fall in the deep waters off the coast of Brazil, has been described as “huge” in the press. How huge? About 33 billion barrels. Sounds great, until you do the math and realize that 33 billion barrels is roughly one year’s worth of oil, at present burn rates — rates which all observers agree are destined to grow higher.
And how does 33 billion barrels compare to what the Middle East has left? Saudi Arabia has 8 times more oil left than the whole of that “huge” new Brazilian discovery. Taken together, Iran, Kuwait, and the UAE have ten times as much crude still in the ground. Even poor old Iraq itself has more than triple those 33 billion barrels. As a whole, the Middle East still has over 20 times more crude left in the ground than the largest new deep-water discovery.
Issue #3: The Specialness of Oil
Hossein-Zadeh alleges (wrongly) that the “Peak Oil thesis pays insufficient attention to energy sources other than oil. These include solar, wind, non-food bio-fuel, and nuclear energies. They also include natural gas. Gas is now about 25 percent of energy demand worldwide. It is estimated that by 2050 it will be the main source of energy in the world. A number of American, European, and Japanese firms have and are investing heavily in developing fuel cells for cars and other vehicles that would significantly reduce gasoline consumption.”
Beyond its simple falsity, there are two additional huge problems with this facile claim.
First, Hossein-Zadeh ignores the problem of Energy Returned On Energy Invested, or EROEI. This is the fact that every fuel you can burn for electricity or locomotion requires up-front inputs of energy, in order to build and move the machines it takes to collect and process the prospective new fuel. It costs energy, in other words, to get energy. That’s true even for oil.
As Peak Oil theorists like Richard Heinberg have discussed at great and careful length, all existing or hoped-for “alternative” fuels have gigantic EROEI problems. Hydrogen fuel cells, as Hossein-Zadeh surely knows, are merely batteries. As such, their existence says nothing whatsoever about where the new electricity they might store is to come from. At present (and very possibly always) both wind and solar collection have negative EROEIs, meaning it takes more energy to manufacture, install, and maintain the required collectors than those collectors will produce in their lifetimes.
The same problem plagues so-called “alternative fuels” for cars. Cellulosic ethanol, burnable moonshine made from grasses, leaves, and barks, remains so financially and geothermally uneconomical, it is still not commercially available, despite a long run of promises.
Likewise, despite the smug bumper stickers on the road in our hipster districts, biodiesel remains a big net EROEI loser. It takes more petroleum to put used French-fry oil in your old VW than the biodiesel provides.
Even corn ethanol, presently by far the best alt-fuel, probably has a negative EROEI, if the counting of its inputs and processing costs is fair and comprehensive, rather than sponosred and apologetic. And we already know that corn ethanol crop-growing also crowds out food production. This has already begun to make food more expensive on this planet, where 2 billion people live on less that $2 a day. If it were ever to make a serious dent in fueling the world auto fleet, corn-for-cars would be a death sentence for hundred of millions of people.
The inescapable basic science behind all this is the fact that, as Peak Oil crusader James Howard Kunstler argues, oil is simply a very special energy form:
Oil is an amazing substance. It stores a tremendous amount of energy per weight and volume. It is easy to transport. It stores easily at regular temperature in unpressurized metal tanks, and it can sit there indefinitely without degrading. You can pump it through a pipe, you can send it all over the world in ships, you can haul it around in trains, cars, and trucks. You can even fly it in tanker planes and refuel other airplanes in flight. It is flammable but has proven to be safe to handle with a modest amount of care….It can be refined by straightforward distillation into many grades of fuel…and innumerable useful products….It has been cheap and plentiful.
It is very unlikely that humanity will ever find another energy source that comes close to matching all these benefits.
But oil’s specialness is not just a matter of fuel properties. It also has to do with the crucial importance of the automobile to the entire corporate capitalist overclass. While Hossein-Zadeh talks breezily of alternative energy sources, he utterly disregards what would happen to the capitalist world economy if Americans were ever to stop using private cars on the present massive scale. To put it bluntly, that kind of change would deal a huge, potentially mortal blow to the worldwide economic pyramid, which relies upon the constant steady infusions of economic waste/profitable spending that arise from our auto-ueber-alles way of living here in the USA. The denizens of the pyramid-tip are not about to sit back and let this happen. Hence, we get, among other things, the special place of Israel (a crucial aircraft carrier and cultural stir-stick for US oil politics) in US politics.
Because of the extreme dependency of capitalism on the American cars-first scheme, oil is extra-important. If we are smart and nimble, we might be able find a way to use dwindling energy supplies to eke out wind and solar infrastructures that can sustain modern electrical grids on something like present scales. But we will absolutely not be able to create enough new electrical generation to powering 250 millions automobiles in the US alone.
Combined with the bad EROEI prospects for the so-called alternative fuels, this means that cars-first in America will still mean big oil. But, to fracture a famous Sammy Cahn lyric:
Love and marriage, love and marriage
Capitalism and the horseless carriage
This I tell you brother
They can’t have one without the other.
Hossein-Zadeh papers over all this.
Issue #4: The Future Value of Iraqi Oil
Hossein-Zadeh invites readers to join him in thinking that Peak Oil theorists claim that there should be a present imbalance between supply and demand.
But that is simply not the contention of any serious Peak Oil thinker. All that Peak Oil thinkers are presently saying is that we are now near to or atop the plateau phase, the several-year period during which Earth’s oil supplies have peaked, but have not yet started to decline.
Hence, from the Peak Oil perspective, the current existence of still roughly equal supply and demand is in no way a contradiction of this thesis. Nonetheless, Hossein-Zadeh — who apparently thinks Peak Oil will never arrive — proposes that it is.
As a result of this cavalier claim, he also short-circuits some very important questions.
Chief among these is “What if Peak Oil theorists are correct?” What if we are about to pass, or have just now passed, the point at which oil producers will be able to keep pace with future demand? What if we are indeed on the mountain-top, looking forward to an epoch of declining supplies?
Among the many things this would almost certainly mean is that the value of Iraq’s remaing 115 billion barrels of untapped oil reserves would be a great many times higher a few years into the future than now. If, as leading Peak Oil experts predict, a barrel of oil will cost $300 or $500 within the next decade or so, imagine the importance of what Chomsky talks about: “an obedient client state that will also house major U.S. military bases, right at the heart of the world’s major energy reserves.”
Of course, both Chomsky and Peak Oil theorists could be wrong. But, even so, what does it do for the cause of peace, justice, and decent human survival to foreclose their arguments based on elisions and straw-man dismissals? Shame on Hossein-Zadeh and Counterpunch for doing just that.
Monday, July 7th, 2008
The Shove That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Yesterday, The New York Times once again proved Alexander Cockburn‘s thesis that the role of the mass media in the United States is to make non-sense out of what would otherwise be obvious. In a front-page thought-piece titled “American Energy Policy, Asleep at the Spigot,” the Times‘ reporter Nelson D. Schwartz did his level best to render reality unfathomable.
The first confusion came in Schwartz’ title, which insists that we are facing problems of “energy policy,” rather than “transportation policy.” This, despite the fact that Schwartz himself reports that “the problem is … parked in our driveways” and that “[n]early 70 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil the United States consumes every day goes for transportation, with the bulk of that burned by individual drivers.”
This mis-titling is more confirmation of my claim that our overclass’s addiction to car-peddling remains literally unmentionable in mainstream public circles.
And Schwartz’ attempts to make sense of why “the problem is parked in our driveways” are likewise conventional, which is to say utterly baseless and diversionary.
Schwartz reviews the history of legislative inaction on the long-predicted arrival of serious automotive energy-supply trouble. But why did that inaction happen? What forces keep the babysitters known as Congress from dealing with the mounting costs and dangers of our cars-first transportation arrangement?
Instead of seeking real answers, Schwartz dutifully reels off the usual propaganda line that it’s all a matter of unchangeable co-equally shared national culture: Our driveways are car-filled, Schwartz says, because of “America’s love affair with the automobile.” This “love affair,” he assures us, reflects “Americans’ famous propensity for voracious consumption.” See? It’s just all of “us,” doing what “we” do.
Undoubtedly to meet contemporary standards of mainstream reportorial “balance,” Schwartz even quotes the arch-reactionary pseudo-intellectual and former Congressman Newt Gingrich, who, in reply to those who would dare propose the even the meager palliative of raising automotive miles-per-gallon standards insists that because “[o]ur culture favors driving long distances in powerful vehicles and the car as a social expression,” the idea is too outlandish to even consider.
Of course, neither Schwartz nor Gingrich presents a single scrap of evidence to support their familiar mega-assertions. They don’t have to, because the “love affair” propaganda in which they trade has the neat (and intended) effect of erasing capitalists from the picture. Hence, it is sacrosanct, and treated as true upon mere assertion.
The reality, of course, is that no other product is as important as the motor-car to the continued existence of corporate capitalism. Both in itself and through all the allied facilities, products, and services its dominance over daily mobility in the USA implies, the private automobile is exquisitely profitable and irreplaceable to the owning class. No other good promises such a bonanza of renewable, intensive, business-boosting waste/money-spending.
In fact, without the ability to continue to sell millions of new cars and fuel and service more millions of old ones, our corporate overclass would be in very deep trouble. Switching to streetcars and bikes and walkable towns would kill the Golden Goose. Hence, they simply will continue their apocalyptic automotive “shove affair,” and continue to brook no questions about it.
In the process, “all the news that’s fit to print” will also continue to suppress the most elementary facts we need to know, if we are to rescue ourselves from onrushing Carmageddon.
