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In science, the term "Half Life" refers to the period of time that a chemical, or radioactive substance takes to break down into its elemental (none toxic) form. Poisonous radioactive isotopes can take hundreds of thousands or millions of years to play out their half life. Some artificial compounds and substances such as PVC have NO Half Life at all and are inert by definition and once created do not degrade below their individual chemical form, ever.

Ideology can be defined as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things.

 An American Democratic Party Member, as an example is an ideologue of the use of due process and lawmaking to obtain group consensus on behavioral boundaries and rights. An American Republican Party Member as an example is an ideologue that conforms to the premise of the reduction of law and policy and would rather that individuals work out group concessnus only using the law to enforce and protect individual behavioral boundaries and rights. wr

Sedition is the stirring up of rebellion against the government in power. Treason is the violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or state and has to do with giving aid to enemies or levying war without merit. Sedition is more about encouraging the people to rebel, where treason is actually betraying the country. Sedition laws somewhat equate to Terrorism and Public Order laws.

Ideologues in the Executive Branch of Government lying and using specious examples to get inflamed responses by the public and lawmakers in the Congress; and using Public Relations techniques to sway the public in order to create the support of the Congress to wage a war against a foreign sovereignty is an example of a concerted act of covert sedition used by a small power group of non-traditional ideologues to terrorize a sovereign foreign country. wr

Southwest Airlines recently took a bath because it had made a practice of hedging its fuel costs by taking a massive futures position in oil. It had to make a massive margin call and then sell out its positions just a month ago because the price of oil had fallen, and still free falling in price at that time. It lost several millions of dollars earmarked to hedge the cost of its jet fuel for passenger service; a practice which had previously given it a significant competitive edge over other carriers.

Individuals throughout the U.S.A. maxed out their credit by buying gasoline in the neighborhood of $4.00 a gallon on their cards, due to the extreme high cost of the barrels of oil used to make gasoline. Once their gas bills started coming in they had to start paying not only for the interest on maxed out cards but for the highly expensive gas in order to get to work and local errands like grocery shopping, too. That ended the love affair with credit in America. The results of that disaster are still unfolding with financial institutions taking hat in hand to the Congress and an Eight Hundred Billion Dollar bailout authorization on the books now and still more to come.

Right on their heels came the U.S. Automakers and their 17 Billion Dollar patch job "Loan." (Putting the total at almost One Trillion Dollars.).

Retailers and the home market industry are drying up and blowing away or are downsized to the point of pain; their laid off employees are also starting to max out their unemployment benefits and money is drying up in uncounted unexpected directions. Illegal's, which were a significant portion of the building industry unskilled tradesmen, are broke and having to bail out and go back to Mexico leaving their U.S. born children in the states such that State Welfare can support them. These consumers are taking their enthusiastic buying habits with them; cutting out a significant 7X portion of the economic engine with them. Americans who have been pink-slipped have no fall back at all because the jobs are just gone.

All of these problems don't just vanish when folks get over their fear and start putting money back into the perpetual financial engine in the game called consumer confidence.

To paraphrase Terry Maxon of the Dallas Morning News in an article about the airline industry:

"If you're spending billions more for fuel in 2008 than in previous years, that's billions that will not go to new <vehicles> debt retirement, pay raises, pension contributions, new service or the countless other better ways to spend the money.

In addition, the volatility of fuel prices meant that <industries> never knew what to plan for from month to month. A business plan that works at $100 for a barrel of oil is too conservative for $50 oil and can put an <industry> out of business at $140 oil."

Worse, OPEC and ONGEC the two major energy sources of the world market are both cutting back production in order to drive up the price of oil to previous "acceptable" prices. This means that we can expect to see a gradual increase in the price of gas at the pump and for our home heating and for the transportation industry and other industries, as well.

Government entities can't support highway and infrastructure expenses on reduced oil and gas calculated in gallon quantities, either. Many state and local governments are already placing stiff increases on the fuel that is being sold in reduced volume in order to take up some of the short fall of the new trend by citizens to use less gas and diesel. The U.S. government is sure to follow shortly.

1/3/09 More to follow wr