What are you going to do when the price of gasoline doubles or triples from its currently rising price?  The people in the United States, while only making up 5% of the world's population, consume about 25% of the world's oil.  Since oil is a finite resource, it seems like common sense that once emerging consumer mega-markets like India and China ramp up their consumption of oil-based energy products, like gasoline, the price will continue to rise since supply is finite.


While I want to touch on some big picture items of interest, I would also like to hear what you might do personally given this future scenario.  How would your life change?  If commuting to work began costing you a significant portion of your actual income, would that become a consideration in your choice of employment, or perhaps your choice of residence?

One thing is certain.  Change is coming.  Whether it happens to each of us sooner or later given our diverse situations and locations is a variable.  For the sake of discussion, let's pretend gasoline costs triple the amount it currently costs.

That's crazy talk.  Not necessarily, my friend.  I did originally check the White House web site for a cool photo of George W. Bush recently walking into his Crawford ranch actually holding hands with the Saudi Arabian leader like some teenage love-sick couple, but I couldn't find it there.  I happened to be watching the news when this meeting took place.  It happened.

You can read about the official Energy Policy of the Democrusader, but sadly there is no mention or photos of the Bush-Saudi love-fest that would have given Michael Moore an 'I told you so' chubby.  Personally, I don't care which foreign head of state Dubya prefers to play a little weekend tonsil-hockey with on his big-boy ranch in Crawford, TX.  He's a grown man.  That's between him and Laura.

Obviously, when your country is so addicted to oil that it's sucking it down 500% more than the average global idiot, you may have to do a little whoring to keep your drug dealer happy.  It's not like Dubya has much of a choice as to whom in OPEC he can pleasure and service.  I think the soon to be Mullahs-with-nukes in Tehran took being labelled an Axis of Evil as a sign that the U.S. has been considering the lunch money bully option for their oil reserves.  We are in the neighborhood.

Charles H. Featherstone says, "If there were commercial quantities of oil in Hell, Exxon executives would not call God and demand regime change. They would buy an extremely nice lunch for the Devil, and they would talk contract and concession terms". However, to continue the metaphor, if the Devil refused to play ball, then the C.I.A. and the U.S. Marine Corps remain at the ready.

Hey!nbsp; Clean up your SUV.  It may be a museum quality artifact, sooner than you think.  Personally, I'm looking into Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (NEVs).  I would just ride a bike, but I can't now.

[Headphones] :: Birthday-partyparty mix (lo-fi stream) - RX

A stream of conscious.  What does that mean?  Free flowing thoughts pour forth.  Unknown ideas and related concepts become strung together in some fomat.  If one has a train of thought, a stream of conscious must fire through the neurological pathways in the brain like a speeding, twisting and turning roller coaster ride.  When the mind pouring forth these ideas is as large as every thought expressed on every web page on the planet, just casually browsing the web can turn into a flash flood of the digital planet.

Sounds romantic, anyway.  Sometimes, I find an interesting thing on the web, but not so big a thing about which I feel like writing an entirely informative blog entry.  When this happens, I usually copy the web address into a notepad file called blog_ideas.  Other times, I see something on the news and check it out.  Unfortunately, that usually leads me to forty-two other web sites.

Early yesterday morning, it seems blogdrive servers were messed up by some dark skies, thunderstorms, and some pesky lightning.  Helpee and CBG were on top of the problem quickly and soon everything was back to normal.  But later that same day on the opposite side of the country, my own weather was cooking some meteorologically nasty brew.

Some people comment that there are no seasons in Florida.  While we may not have clearly defined quarterly seasons like Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter -- Florida has its own seasons with different names.  We have Pollen Season, and Tourist Season, and Forest Fire Season.

One of the most well known seasons in Florida is Hurricane Season.  Hurricane Season last year was pretty rowdy and widely reported in the national news.  In my area, I only had to be concerned primarily with hurricanes Charlie, Frances and Jeanne.  Hurricane Charlie was my first ever, cherry-popping hurricane, so it was kind of fun in an adrenaline-filled, thrill-seeking way.  Unfortunately, Charlie wasn't so fun for everyone.

When it rains in here, it seems to be a hard down pour.  Sure, it may sprinkle for five minutes before and after a thunderstorm, but mostly storms come of out nowhere when the Sea Breeze and the Gulf Breeze collide directly over my house.  When that happens, I lose my satellite connection and I have to find something else to do.  So, yesterday, I watched some television.

My local television news is not something I regularly watch.  Yesterday, I watched my local weatherman explaining about the upcoming hurricane season.  Argh!!  Already?  About all I caught was that the National Weather Service is monitoring the seasonal high pressure system that has a steering effect on the path of hurricanes.

They call this high pressure system, "The Bermuda High."  I would have thought it would be called the Jamaican High, if anything.  Whatever its name, I hope it steers all this year's hurricanes off into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where they can cool off and die a quiet death.

It would be nice.  There are still thousands of people living in temporary housing from Charlie in a trailer park from hell, visible from the I-75 highway down near Fort Myers, Florida.  To add insult to injury, FEMA just announced that it plans to send letters to about 7000 Floridians demanding that they pay FEMA back to the tune of $30 million dollars.  Yet, there are literally tens of thousands of homeowners who have not fully recovered from last year.

[Headphones] :: Hurricane Jeanne is Gone - JfZ

There is a reason why I no longer post daily.  In contrast, there are blogs with a half-dozen or more entries per day.  I had to hold true to my every-other-day discipline not to publish anything about Jennifer Wilbanks, the Georgia peach who is now dubbed, "the Runaway Bride."  You see, after following the apparent abduction story of John Mason's fiance with much interest, I was awake the other night when news flashed that she had been found alive.  "How wonderful," I thought.  During the previous several days, I was glued to the TV news reports about this story.

Of course, the media ate the story up and hyped it in the hopes of big viewership ratings.  Statistically, abducted people end up dead.  Whether the abductee is a child or a female, usually they are snatched up by some psychopathic sexual predator who has a day to remember with them, kills them so as not to leave a witness to their depravity, and then buries them in some wooded shallow grave.  Unless it is like a Scott Peterson redux.  I'm not a legal scholar, but logic tells me that you can only have three or four trials of the century before people start ignoring the manufactured and featured news.

Speaking of the news, I have a personal rant I need to get off my chest for a quick mention, and then I'll return us to the regularly scheduled train of thought.  Last year, my little slice of paradise successfully survived four hurricanes in nearly as many weeks.  I mean, sure the power went out, branches and trees fell, and it was a stressful month or so.

When the storms passed, my happy little life returned to normal in short order.  But, just recently I awoke to blinking LEDs on everything I could survey within my small kingdom because of some electrical outage from a passing thunderstorm.  Even though it may be several days until I synchronize the clock on my microwave oven with the one on the coffee maker, what pisses me off most is that all evidence points to a lightning strike on the Cold War sized satellite dish that provides me with television.

Yeah.  So what?  I'll tell you, "So what?"  Most of my television is piped through a third-party proprietary cable system originated from several satellite dishes and antennae arrays located out in the back forty of the grass and sand meadow, who some call a nine hole golf course.  While I think the sport of golf is truly lame -- a sport for fat, rich, old people who need half-a-day away from their spoiled and snotty families -- I'm bummed out that lightning must have struck those archaic dishes out on the golf course.

Why?  Because the only one left working is only providing me with the joys of Fox News, Christian Broadcasting and Shopping Channels.  After I felt the need to stab my own eyes out watching Fox's "Beltway Boys" and then stopped myself from performing a self-lobotomy with an ice cream scoop from watching these "Bush Butt Boys" on Fox, I watched three movies tonight about the old testament.  Unlike the ass-kissing Beltway Boys, at least Moses had a pair of balls big enough to speak his truth to power.

Mental Note: If one were to buy into the notion of Satanic symbolism, why aren't people alarmed that Moses' initial reason to jerk Pharoah's chain came from a burning bush (Flames=Hell) or that he was told to prove his Exodus message was truly from God by throwing his staff on the ground -- at which point it turned into a (Asp=Satan) serpent? 

Unfortunately, this thinking allows me to re-board some of my thoughts about Jennifer Wilbanks.  As I've already mentioned, I was awake when the news flashes came in.  Live. Some uncut and uneditted footage for the sake of expedient broadcasting of the news. CNN, MSNBC, and FOX  -- all jousting for the best spot and the newest, startling development.

Well, when Jennifer was found to be alive, people spoke of Elizabeth Smart miracles, and faith, and thank you for your prayers, and we knew God would answer our pleas.  Being a bit sarcastic (you think?), I thought of those sports teams who thank Jesus for the touchdown and the win, and the championship, and the champagne in the locker room, and the party in the house and the front lawn in Duluth, Georgia.  No one blames Jesus when they lose, do they?

It's never God's will that your loved one had a raccoon drag their skull fifty yards from a crime scene and identification of the body is delayed several days because the coroner can't get fingerprints from a corpse so decayed in a shallow grave.  No one really gave Jesus any high-fives or props when they found Chandra Levy's body scattered down a park hillside, did they?

Here's the thing that somehow got under my skin.  Everyone around this couple is so enamored with their feel-good, born-again christian psychological bullshit that they can't see the sword of Damacles hanging over their head, they refuse proven psychological normatives in the place of their disco-era faith in God, and they are obviously more concerned with their own vanity and what the community will think of them, rather than the reality of the situation and the facts on hand.  No wonder Dubya was re-elected.

Before you pop off that cut-n-paste hatemail from Pastor's website, read your bible.  I may bash Bush, and I may bash Evangelicals sometimes, but I do it because I'm continually surprised and simultaneously horrified that these so-called Christians don't bother to read their own bible.  There are some interesting fables in the bible.  I mean, Moses could probably have kicked ass against King Arthur's Merlin in some WWF smackdown.  What gets me all grumpy toward some of the self-righteous and hypocritical people thumping some revised version of their bible is that they are the same people so quick to point our how violent, evil, or nefarious the Qu'ran is in some childish method of finger pointing and tattling.

I have to say, "You all need a time-out in the corner."  Dunce caps are optional.  Don't worry.  Even though my sins have caused the Almighty to smite my good cable channels, I have total faith that sometime on Monday, some guy named Jesus (or Bubba) will fix the problem.

And that poor bastard, John Mason.  Talk about rejection.  His woman would rather cut off her hair and fake a kidnapping than get married.  Got cold feet?  Go Greyhound.

[Headphones] :: Allah's Helicopter (beta) - JfZ

[@ thunderstorms]

Dear Nervous Netizen:
You have reached the blogdrive blog of John Furie Zacharias.  If you were searching for something interesting to read, perhaps a little mind candy to get your mind off of your stressful life, you could be in the right place.  Then again, you may be exposed to even more information here that could trouble you.  It may add to your acid reflux disease, add to your night sweats and insomnia, or cause itchy, unscratchable hives to develop under your scalp.

In an ongoing effort to justify the rantings of various paranoid schizophrenics with whom I share the contention that THEY really are out to get you, I decided to create Dark Skies.  In addition, it has been brought to my attention through wiretapped conversations gathered in the darkest, most secret and smoke-filled boardrooms of the people who actually control the World Wide Web that I should publish information here in a format available to persons with dial-up modems and low resolution monitors.

You should be aware that some of the information presented here could be cynically labelled as the Thunderstorms in the Imajica Lite version.  To dispel this criticism, I have named this blog Dark Skies to reassure regular readers that the only thing 'lite' about it will be that you won't need to be jacked into a T-1 connection and also have a high-resolution HD flatscreen plasma monitor to enjoy it.

While I most certainly intend to mirror some entries from Thunderstorms here in this bandwidth-friendly format, be assured that I also intend to develop this site on its own.  I will publish additional, unique-content entries here that will not originate from my other sites.  I'm looking forward to ruining your day.

Regards,

-JfZ