September 1, 2012
Yellow school bus by Jean Boyer
The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round and round all over town.
We’ve had, at the least, a very interesting week here in the US. The Republicans cancelled the first day of their convention on Monday because of Tropical Storm Issac and then proceeded full speed ahead Tuesday through Thursday as Issac veered west into the Gulf and made landfall in Louisiana as a category one hurricane.
Despite all the preparations and evacuations, Mother Nature refused to be deterred, overriding a levee in one parish and squatting over New Orleans long enough to drop 20 to 30 inches of rain on unlucky Louisianans before moving on north across land into Arkansas as a tropical depression by Thursday. The remnants of Issac’s rain bands reached Missouri yesterday and here in Springfield it is still raining off and on.
Parts of Arkansas and Missouri got three to four inches; here we will be lucky (and I mean that sincerely) to get an inch or so in total. Even the three to five inches in parts of Arkansas and Missouri are a day late and a dollar short as far as drought relief goes, being around seventeen inches low on rain for the year around here. But, as they say, something is better than nothing, unless you got caught in some of the flooding.
In spite of their bow to the reality of a possible hurricane, once their convention got going, there was no mention of the little problem of global warming and climate change by Republican speakers there – unless you count Mr. Romney’s dig at the President, saying, Obama had promised to stop the rise of the seas and heal the earth. But there was a lot of promises about drill, drill, drill and energy independence from Mr. Romney.
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama gave Shell Oil the go ahead on drilling up in the Arctic Ocean and the energy department announced on Friday that it has awarded funding for thirteen research projects in eleven states to capture and turn methane hydrates into more fossil fuels to burn, burn, burn.
At the big Central Banker’s meet and greet up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this week, Mr. Bernanke reckoned he might consider a QE3 to poke the economy some more in spite of the fact that QEs 1 and 2 spent, spent, spent 2.3 trillion dollars doing the same thing with diminishing effects on anything except making the bankers richer. Next week, the European bankers will have their own meeting to, once again, figure out what to do about Greece, Spain and Italy.
Yet, with all this drill, drill, drilling; burn, burn, burning and spend, spend, spending, gasoline prices this labor day weekend are the highest they’ve ever been this time of year, food prices keep going up and wages and job quality keep going down. We’re spending down the last of the cheap, easy oil to produce the expensive dregs and setting the world on fire to do it. It’s not going to get appreciably better from here on.
And all this week, as I read the news, that little song about the wheels on the bus kept running through my mind. For it’s abundantly clear, the Masters of the Muddle who run the world are determined to drive that BusinessAsUsual bus full throttle ahead right into the brick wall and, whether the driver is a democrat or a republican, a liberal or a conservative, the wheels on the bus will go round and round … until they can’t go around anymore.
My advice is still the same. Get off the bus, now.
The Conflicted Doomer 
I couldn’t help but watch in horror as through all the blatantly obvious climate events of this year alone has failed to illicit a response from the government here in the USA.
There is only one reason for that. It is deliberate.
Arctic sea ice hits lowest extent ever measured (and it’s still melting) – check.
Hottest winter, spring, summer, year, decade ever measured – check.
Most extensive drought in 50 fifty years, and getting worse – check.
Worst floods in recorded history – check.
Hottest seas in eons – check.
Most acidic oceans ever measured – check.
Most greenhouse gasses released in a single year – check.
Highest sea levels since Pleistocene – check.
Most permafrost melted (with record releases of methane) ever measured – check.
Massive crop failures and record high food prices – check.
Most severe weather events ever recorded – check.
From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/31
and yes i am so glad i moved the vegetable garden closer to the house this spring. For winter…..which of course is going to be a lot snowier than usual here because of the changes in the jet stream…. storms will sit over area’s for a significant amount of time when they do come in……the stalling of weather patterns will continue,
Got wood?
Hi Wendy, I know. I try to be positive about climate change, (like, you know, we’ll have a massive economic crash this year and can’t afford to get the rest of the fossil fuels out of the ground/oceans/sand) but it’s getting harder and harder. I fear George Monbiot is right. We have enough left to fry ourselves.
I can’t even guess what winter will be like here in the middle of the country this year, but I know it’s getting increasingly difficult to outwit the weather to get a decent garden.
On the brighter side, now that we’ve been getting a little more rain (and Pepe le Pew has headed east for the winter) I’ve got five new cantaloupes of various sizes on my vines. 😀
When I hear ‘wheels on the bus’ I always think ‘Big Wheels’, the ones in the bus, the blowhards, not the wheels that can blow out where the rubber meets the road.
Speaking of buses, many school districts around here can’t afford to run their buses any more, but the public buses seem to be mostly empty.
Two families I know have let their houses go under and moved elsewhere to rent. A third is successfully restructuring their not so underwater loan and staying. So two families thrown under the bus and one crawling out from under somewhat bedraggled. This kind of stress does not make for happy marriages I’ll wager.
I look in horror at the prospect of a GOP presidency and in dismay at the prospect of another four years of what has been in place.
It doesn’t matter that the spare tire on the bus is flat, does it?
Hey Grave, it’s pretty scary out there for families. I was reading somewhere the other day that almost 50% (?) of the jobs created are low paying service jobs or temps whereas most of the jobs that were lost had been pretty decent middle class jobs.
LOL, no it doesn’t matter that the spare is flat. They’re gonna drive that bus ’til it hits the wall, no matter who wins the election. Wish I could believe they’d actually do something useful, but I don’t.
If the bus busts through the wall and there’s a nice garden on the other side, that would be something.
LOL, dream on thou eternal optimist.