JHK’s Three-Act Play
In a place like upstate New York, north of Albany, where April is more generally known as “mud season,” and the wait for “ice-out” on the big lakes takes forever, and on frigid nights the windigos steal through the tops of the tall pines — it would seem foolish to complain about perfectly beautiful weather.
We just had a week in the 70s, with more to come. The grass went from ochre to bright green in about thirty-six hours. The buds are popping like mad. This is usually what the first week of May is like around here, and that fact alone may explain New York state’s relentless population drain over the past forty years.
I was out on my bicycle, naturally, taking it all in — like, why sit inside and sulk because the weather is strange in a pleasant way? — and I ventured into the outlands east of town, where an impressive number of gigantic new houses had landed like alien mother-ships in the former cow pastures and wood lots. Of course, the aesthetics were an issue apart from the socio-economics of it, but nonetheless interesting.
Each new, gigantic house seemed the result of a losing struggle to reinvent basic design principles that did not require re-invention. I doubt the spirit of joyous “creativity” among the star-architects has seeped down to the level of the provincial house-builders, who, after all, are just assemblers of modular materials like dimensional lumber and eight-foot sheet-rock. It’s their inability to assemble these parts coherently that’s really striking, so what you get is an endless variety of mistakes along with a complete absence of anything done really well — which may be the essence of what the “diversity” craze has really meant to us, the ethos of current times.
The abiding quality of all these houses was grandiosity (by which I do not mean grand-ness). That, too, is a signature of these times in America — the nation too big to fail and tragically destined to do just that on account of its too big to fail-ness. And, of course, one could not fail to wonder, cruising by these hideously ponderous houses, whether as a matter of fact they were failing in terms of the owners’ ability to keep up with the payments, for instance. One after another, I pictured a husband and wife within sitting in the sunny breakfast room on Easter morning humped in tears as they sorted through stacks of bills and bank statements… and I imagined the yellow foreclosure tape a few weeks hence atop the weird split-block portico treatments and misbegotten arrays of concrete balusters, and the colossal Palladianesque windows with their pathetic snap-in muntins (and the fantastic solar heat-gain, not figured-in by the designer-builder, that would turn the lawyer-foyer into something like a crematorium by two p.m.)… and the pension fund in Wisconsin or Norway that was sitting on the booby-trapped CDO that contained this sketchy mortgage and thousands of others just like it… and, well, this choo-choo of thoughts led to envisioning the train-wreck of economies and nations that lies in wait just around the bend….
One also could not fail to reflect on the recklessness of a nation that placed untold million-dollar bets on the idea that it would be possible to travel anywhere in an automobile from houses like these a few scant years from now. This far along in the tribulations of our time, most Americans still have not heard of peak oil, and the few who have regard it as some figment that Ralph Nader or Al Gore conjured up on an acid trip in a sweat lodge. The more sophisticated among the mentally unwashed are certain that the earth has a creamy nougat center of low-sulfer light crude oil, or they heard that the Bakken formation in Dakota holds more oil than Saudi Arabia, or that the whole US car and truck fleet will be electrified in a year or two, or that we can drill-baby-drill our way to permanent oil abundance, or just that the American can-do spirit will come up with something to keep Happy Motoring alive because we’re the greatest! Such grandiosity!
Personally, I look at these houses scattered around what was only recently a dedicated farm landscape and I am quite sure that the denizens within will be marooned in their great rooms, and that very probably many of them will have no job to go to — in the conventional sense of what we think a job is, in some corporation or institution — and that in a surprisingly short span of years these buildings will be ruins or squats. I think these thoughts after struggling up a rather steep hill more than half-a-mile (and many others previously). A trip anywhere from here, to do anything, and the return trip, would occupy an entire day even for someone in decent physical condition. Somebody accustomed to rations of Cheez Doodles and Mountain Dew would be dead by then. There will be lots of dead.
On the macro level, the feeling spreads across the USA that our troubles are behind us. Employment is ticking up. The S & P index only goes up now. The banks have stabilized and those “toxic assets” (which I call “frauds” and “swindles”) have been disarmed and safely buried under Yucca Mountain. Housing starts may still be weak, but the “gaming” industry is making great strides in places like the old Puritan commonwealth of Massachusetts, so soon we’ll have a virtually automatic economy of leisure-and-entertainment paid for by creaming off a small percentage of the quarters pumped into video slot stations. No doubt the Chinese will be jealous and try to imitate us.
All these lovely mild days, I was not unconscious of the eeriness of the weather and the possible insidious effects of it on the local ecosystem in everything from the added generations of deer ticks carrying Lyme disease and the death of the honeybees to the fate of this year’s apple crop. I confess: it made me very nervous. Something is happening… out there.
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A lot of people are in for a rude awakening, unfortunately. Most people are unable to reflect dispassionately and consider the possibility that maybe this time it really is different.
http://www.goldsubject.com/the-economic-meltdown-faq/
The size of homes have grown dramatically since the fifties, even as the average occupancy has fallen. This is a trend that needs to be reversed.
http://www.selfdestructivebastards.com/2009/11/real-green-houses.html
James Kunstler has great vision on the realm of possibilities in the future, but in “World Made By Hand” he misses some upsides. In it no one has any electricity after the systemic powerdown. Solar panels today come with a 25 year warranty and will continue to work well beyond that. I see no reason why my off-grid home still won’t have a fridge keeping food cold, lights at night, a pump providing my water pressure and my electric chainsaw cutting firewood. I’ve outlined a strategy in my book “Thriving During Challenging Times” to start integrating these tools into your life now while they are still readily available and you can afford them. I may not have cheese doodles and Mountain Dew but there are things you can be doing personally to prepare.
http://www.cammather.com/
Well, there you have it. A good ride, ruined.
I had a party conversation with someone this weekend whose thinking think was quite typical of denialist thinking about converging crises. Confronted by me with questions of sustainability, he responded quite aggressively that because he didn’t have survival skills, he would be among the first to die. He also talked about suicide as an option. This is all-or-nothing non-planning. People who do look at peak oil and economic-climate collapse often see sudden apocalypse about which there is nothing to be done. This allows them to carry on as if nothing were wrong. There is actually so much to be done with food, with community, with energy. It’s time to get busy. And to choose our conversations carefully.
Lynn
http://www.10in10diet.com/
Diet for a small footprint and a small grocery bill
“I think these thoughts after struggling up a rather steep hill more than half-a-mile (and many others previously). A trip anywhere from here, to do anything, and the return trip, would occupy an entire day even for someone in decent physical condition.”
Yes, and the salient aspect of your comment is the tremendous amount of energy that was required to produce your wonderful bicycle and the food stuffs you metabolized to fuel you “house hating” journey.
Yes even if and when petroleum shortages force any shift to human-powered conveniences – the inefficiencies introduced by fueling those humans propelling themselves will require any evermore spiraling rise in overall energy consumption.
Guess maybe you should have sat in the breakfast nook and read the Rolling Stone instead.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street
Later.
lawyer-foyer that rhymes only in the USA
Here in Southern Ontario where I live there’s often lots of treeless open space around those McMansions – great for small scale farming. Standing like so many giant chess pieces, each could house refugees; the neighborhoods could actually become that if the locals could get together. Perhaps dwellers could form a Victims of Success Self-help group.
Really the future will look like many strange and ironic things, but these can be the backdrop for a funky rennaissance of sorts. We’d do well to encourage that thinking, lest we surrender the field to those who can only look back at the imagined glory.
http://www.radicalrelocalization.com/
Ah Jim, spring is also tax season, and the sprigs of ruinous taxes are just starting to sprout.
Warning! To all fans of Obama or the income tax: DO NOT LOOK at this week’s image at The Nothing Store. It could cause you to get the vapors and faint dead away. Others are probably immune. http://www.thenothingstore.com
Great post. It seems that the art of architectural design has been reduced to the (often poorly executed) assembly of purchased consumer products. Cable TV tells that we are all designers, and that yes, you too can have the dream home you’ve always wanted! And despite the overwhelming number of TV shows, magazines, books and websites devoted to indoctrinating laypeople into the mystic arts of design, the landscape is increasingly littered with the products of our own unsophistication. Like any other skill or craft, design takes practice, which includes, importantly, performance assessment for future improvement. It doesn’t come in a box. I’m not sure what kind of ruins these houses will make, Jim. The Potemkinesque applied details are tacked onto a flimsy box and, stripped of their tectonic value, await the arrival of a bored teenager with a Zippo.
http://michaelvidoni.blogspot.com/2010/03/brick.html
I know what you mean, JHK. I’m taking a chance and planting some seeds now that I normally sow weeks from now in my garden. Time for me to get outside now and get to work, ticks or no ticks. The bats have had a big die-off. http://www.fws.gov/northeast/white_nose.html I wonder if we’re next?
I think we’re witnessing the last growth cycle before we begin the big slide into the undeniable long emergency. I suspect we have a few more years to evolve before we’ll be tested by the future we’ve created and it’s up to each of us how we spend it. Do we choose to transition to a sustainable self-sufficient lifestyle now, or wait for the reality to be cosen for us.
I hope enough people make the choice now. It will make the ride smoother for us all.
Enough with predictions. Jim… Have you heard the news that a poster child town for weathering to long emergency is emerging in northern California? Investigate what Willits, CA is doing.
Also… Have you any thoughts on the tiny house movement and the idea of radical downsizing?
“so what you get is an endless variety of mistakes along with a complete absence of anything done really well –”
Nice lines. Sounds like a job description for Obama and his pathetic loser crew of felons.
Oh and the one about ‘yellow foreclosure tape” well, make that one yellow ‘crime scene tape’ so when the broke and destitute formerly happy couple run out of ssri soup and hack each other and the kids to death with the long knives they caught in the Mickey Mansion purchase the local cops counting the days to pension time can mop up the mess for the next victims. -Mooo -Mooo.
Rejoice. NASCAR still on and philandering golfers back at work. America is still #1!
Yes, something is happening out there, our economy is quietly collapsing, all awhile the americanus boobus remains obsessively focused on idiotic team sports, a sex crazed sleeze ball golfer, and the approaching onset of the spring boating frenzy. Anything but facing the reality of a bankrupt and collapsing world. Anything !!!!
I can see a situation where people are starving and living in foreclosed homes, (or, perhaps cardboard boxes) with no power, and no water service, both having been shut off for non payment. These people I see spending their last pennies to buy gas to go searching for a TV set where they can camp out and watch sports, thinking (no, emoting at a sub-lingual level) that such behavior will makes things alright. Or perhaps, some will live on their 17 foot bass boats, JOY !!!!, and gather in groups around the game showing on a portable TV on a dock, playing out behavior patterns that in the past afforded them fellowhip, emotional support and a sense of belonging.
Then, at some point, Joe and Jane Sixpack, both working class and formerly middle class sub-species thereof, will realize that they are now destitute with no hope, whatsoever, of climbing back up; THEN, the proverbial shit will hit the fan. Crime will become the predominant modality for upward mobility. Its happened that way in Argentina in ’03 and in places and times too numerous to count in the past.
This current quiet period affords a preparation time that won’t come again.
Get ready for the quiet to end. A Dark Age is coming.
wardoc
The biggest flaw in the big houses being built across the landscape from sea to shining sea is the roof. The overwhelming majority of the roofs are made of composition shingles. This is a petroleum product with a relatively short life of 10 to 20 years – or much less during a severe storm.
Once a single leak occurs, almost immediately the sheetrock within starts to melt and soon after begins to collapse. The carpets or hardwood floors mildew and buckle. Without immediate repair (which usually involves a wholesale and very expensive roof replacement) the grand mega mansion – or any typical American house for that matter – soon decays into a decrepit slum, not fit for man or beast – except possibly for rats and snakes.
Now with petroleum prices skyrocketing and the finances of ordinary people being strained by unemployment, high fuel prices, etc. it makes me wonder how in the world many “homeowners” will be able to afford to keep the roofs of these big new homes maintained in the future.
Basically, with prices of roofing materials and home maintenance costs in general set to skyrocket soon I don’t see many of these houses “enjoying” a very long life span. Even if people “squat” in these houses after the owners default and move out I doubt the new inhabitants will be spending thousands or tens of thousands to fix the roofs. It’s just amazing how fast a typical subdivision house, no matter the size, starts to degrade once leaks appear – and utilities are cut off.
Is “just around the bend” more or less than “on the horizon” and all the other metaphors? Is “just around the bend” more or less than one Friedman unit?
The only consolation I see:
When it is “not possible to travel anywhere” that is the point at which our military will also not be able to ship troops anywhere to kill fetuses still living inside the mother.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20001722-503543.html
After spending a few weeks worth of blog postings on bashing Republicans and singing Obama and the democrats praises on “health care reform” (which it is NOT) I was wondering if you had become a shill for the democrats…today’s column did nothing to persuade me otherwise. I mean, come on on Jim, PEAK OIL and it’s ramifications are one of your MAIN topics and you just IGNORED Obama’s embrace of the Palin “DRILL BABY DRILL” mantra last week?!?!?!
Obviously, coming immediately after the “health care reform,” this was Obama’s attempt to throw a bucket of water on the bonfire that is the rise of anti-obamania that is starting to take hold in this country on the “right.” The question is does he actually believe it will do anything for our impending energy disaster or is it strictly a political move…and better yet, which is worse?
There is no “right” or “left” in this country…there are the informed, those of us who see that what passes for our government is STRICTLY political theater with two SEEMINGLY opposite protagonists being directed by a entrenched oligarchy, and the sheeple, who watch the TV news and believe the theater in front of them is real.
I thought you were one of the informed Jim, but the last few weeks makes me think you are are have at least one foot in each camp. You have to make a commitment Jim. You remind me of my father (who incidentally is about your age). He is the smartest man I ever met. He is also a REAL left-leaner who cut his political teeth in the 60’s when the two parties were actually running things so their difference were REAL. He also can not take one of his feet out of the “left” camp because deep down he doesn’t want to believe they have been equally corrupted by the military industrial complex….but they have and in my opinion are if anything MORE dangerous than the “right” because more they are duplicitous in their action’s given their history. Their history is built on helping the little guy, but they now do NOTHING of the sort, they just keep that facade up with things like the “health care reform” that is a handout to insurance and pharmaceutical companies while claiming it was for the little guy….lol.
The “right” I will not even bother addressing, because I think most of what you say about them is true. I hope to see you bashing the “left” and “right” equally in the future Jim. I’m convinced ultimately my Dad WILL get it entirely, he’s too smart not to…I have faith you will as well. 🙂
“Somebody accustomed to rations of Cheez Doodles and Mountain Dew would be dead by then. There will be lots of dead.”
So, you’re out and about on the nicest day in upstate NY in 6 months, and this is what your viewpoint is? Time for some Prozac, Jim?
Bobby, Jim’s just seeing the tragic side of the obvious. I wish he’d just enjoyed his bike ride, but you gotta admit it: there are a lot of blimps that cannot even walk from the car to recliner without wheezing.
They would be dead meat–a lot of meat–in any crisis sufficient even to shut off the AC in July.
I’m not gloating. It’s hard to make a go of anything without a community. Having spent a good part of my last weekend using fossil fuels to cut up storm-fallen pines and then chip them, I came face-to-face at how difficult it would be without gas or even a working machine and a full tank.
While my other equipment ran great, four hours of hard work would not make the old Ford tractor–our mower–turn over. For now, I can phone a guy with a roll-back truck to haul it to his shop, and for under $1000 it will return to me in great shape for several more years.
But then what? No loner farmer is going to make it in a post-Peak world. We’ll still have tractors, but fewer of them, and more local talent to fix them without a 70-mile round trip.
Or we’ll be as dead as the Cheese-Doodle eaters Jim loves to ridicule.
I really feel sad for anyone who happens to live in a place such as New York where the seasons aren’t kind and the Spring is muddy.
I’ve grown used to an entirely different kind of existence. I’m going on 21 solid months of absolutely stunning weather …
http://www.flickr.com/dmathew1
With each day more beautiful than the day before.
If you want some sense of scale, all of yesterday’s beauty was exceeded today by 9 am. I could have easily kept on going but to live in that manner is seriously unfair and unjust and probably also immoral.
Not that it matters. Tomorrow promises more of the same.
I can verify this by my experience throughout my life. Living in Florida is relentlessly beautiful though most Floridians don’t even notice.
This Universe is too large for humankind but it is just the right size for me. I could mourn for humankind’s sad fate but the dinosaurs existed longer before they went extinct and they werre utterly innocent victims of circumstance.
Humankind was a mistake from the beginning and the species has only become a greater mistake as it approaches its end.
Thank God their are ospreys, dolphins and butterflies. Otherwise this planet would be a total loss.
Jim, another great piece. I liked you’re part about cycling. You’re right, many in this country are so out of shape, not even funny. And I’m sure some will die, when they can no longer drive a car. I’m a hardcore cyclist, meaning I ride a road bike around 250+ a week, and do many long rides of 200 miles or more in a day. So I’m ready for what’s coming.
Regarding the weather. Here in IL, it has been very warm for Spring so far. Yet, no one mentions global warming when it’s nice out.
Finally, you’re right about our economy. Most don’t have a clue. This country is not going to recover. Right now, all this admin is doing is printing money, the banks are broke, and when the press stops, the train will crash.
The mentally unwashed
I was out on my bicycle
travel anywhere in an automobile
houses had landed like alien mother-ships
principles that did not require re-invention
assemblers of modular materials
humped in tears as they sorted through stacks of bills
yellow foreclosure tape
fantastic solar heat-gain
turn the lawyer-foyer into something
choo-choo of thoughts
led to envisioning the train-wreck
million-dollar bets
conjured up on an acid trip in a sweat lodge
earth has a creamy nougat center
of low-sulfer light crude oil
we can drill-baby-drill our way
to permanent oil abundance
we’re the greatest!
rations of Cheez Doodles and Mountain Dew
the eeriness of the weather
Something is happening
most Americans still have not heard of peak oil
– JHK
PUSH ON. DO GOOD. KEEP SMILING.
Hey, SmokeyJoe,
Thanks, I agree with your perspective on the difficulties that lone survivalists will have.
I was expressing my exasperation with JHK’s more morbid drama. Plus, I’m getting tired of being bummed out by this blog, even though there’s some truth contained..
I forgot to note how happy I am to see Cheez Doodles return to JHK’s columns again, like daffodils with the Spring.
I actually wanted to eat one the other day, but I settled for a potato chip.
Thanks, Bud, for posting the link to the Matt Taibbi article. I always appreciate his investigations spiced with language meant for old RS readers. Took awhile for the payoff, the tie to more widespread shenanigans. Certainly sounds like Orlov’s predictions are coming true.
“…One reason that officials in Jefferson County didn’t know that the swaps they were signing off on were shitty was because their adviser on the deals was a firm called CDR Financial Products, which is now accused of conspiring to overcharge dozens of cities in swap transactions… Delaware River Port Authority, the Pennsylvania school system, the cities of Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and Los Angeles, the states of Connecticut and Mississippi, the city of Milan and nearly 500 other municipalities in Italy, the country of Greece, and God knows who else. All of these places are now reeling under the weight of similarly elaborate and ill-advised swaps
Ahh, deer ticks. I had one on my back last year for four days before my wife and I discovered it. What a horrible experience that was, after she pulled it off of me. I think it released a large dose of it’s venom into me in response to being plucked off. I was sick for over a month after that. I took some doxycycline just to be safe, several horrible things can happen to you from ticks. Tick paralysis can be caused by their venom, along with all of the nasty diseases they carry. Be careful to check yourself all over after being outside around trees, bushes, and high grass/weeds. This is perfect weather for those bastards.
Did anyone see Andy Rooney’s bit on unemployment? http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6321005n
What he didn’t seem to understand is that there are so many managers out there because that’s all this country does anymore. We manage overseas suppliers. All of the real jobs that produce things of value have disappeared overseas due to corporate greed. We will be in trouble when we need to produce things locally again and nobody knows how to make anything anymore.
And don’t forget, extended unemployment benefits will “temporarily” expire for thousands of Americans today because the Senate went on its spring recess without approving a one-month deadline extension.
The point isn’t that Jim needs prozac, but that the disaster of sprawl has infested the land to such an extent that there is no place that you can go to that is free of it. It’s not even possible to enjoy a bicycle ride in the countryside without being assaulted by monstrous buildings that have no place being there. This is not a problem that you would have in France.
I think Jim is actually an optimist. He may see doom and gloom, but if he didn’t think there was even the slightest chance that his voice would be heard and his warnings heeded, he wouldn’t bother.
We enjoyed a bike ride yesterday, too, and I just kept thinking about all of the people who were missing out on such a great day, zooming by us all closed up in their cars.
the slow unravelling of civilization has begun.
men will be r-strategist species again.
the normalcy of our days is eerie, and has been for a while now.
is it any wonder stephen king is America’s chronicler of choice for Americana.
http://hurricanekatrinakaif.com
Greetings,
If Jim thinks the little patch of McMansions where he lives is an abomination then he should take a little trip out to Phoenix, Arizona. There, they make houses out of particle board, chicken wire and Styrofoam. Not only that, but these houses have no access to water other than what is brought in by the city and the land is worthless for anything other than being a desert.
Furthermore, these homes were constructed by the tens of thousands by unskilled illegal labor and it shows. For example, I have a friend that insisted on buying one of these (as an investment) and he took a level and demonstrated to me that nothing in the home was level; not the walls, floors or counter tops. We nicknamed the house “The Hall of Mirrors”. He sold that house to some other investor/flipper for a nice profit before the collapse but I can’t imagine that house still standing 10 years from now for they were in no way built to last.
Styrofoam allows you, though, to build some interesting architecture. It allows the builder to build a house that clearly looks like it was designed by 13 year old girls. My favorite are the 30′ tall foyers common to many of these homes. You know what else is common to these homes? Two commercial sized air-conditioners are usually needed to even attempt to cool one of these places off. $800.00 summertime electric bills are not at all uncommon either because these homes are not at all built for the extremely harsh desert environment.
I left Phoenix in 2008 to wait out this storm on my little sailboat but every now and again I check Zillow to see how these homes are doing and what they are selling for and a 60% to 75% decline in value is not too uncommon.
I read that Toledo (my home town) will give you an abandoned home if you will agree to just mow the lawn, take care of the home and not let it fall into ruin. Places like Phoenix can not be that far behind.
I saw the Andy Rooney bit. He is right on the money, but I believe anyone that goes home from work and reads Shakespeare, voluntarily, would have a hard time with three-phase electricity.
“essence of what the ‘diversity’craze has meant to us”
Wow, Jom, it is nice to hear you admit, however obliquely, that maybe virtually open door immigration policies may not have have been A Good Thing. And, just maybe, some guys standing around on a street corner actually can’t build houses as well as trained carpenters? Could it be possible that the clever guys like us don’t need no boring apprenticeship attitude always was BS???
“Something is happening
most Americans still have not heard of peak oil
– JHK”
YES SOMETHING IS. OIL $87/bbl so far today.
Happy Motoring = DEAD. America to follow.
Good Riddance.
I like this much better than the trendy fear mongering of last weeks column that the fascists are coming and they are the tea partiers, IMO those of us concerned with peak oil and ecological and economic collapse are well served to keep our eyes on the decade plus time horizon and planning for such, and not to get to caught up in the MSM daily news churn and it’s disaster capitalist fear mongering on behalf of whatever political party happens to occupy the seat of the dying empire.
Just a thought…
take it easy, enjoy the warm sun,
it’s all good.
Michael Janzen is being extremely modest, so I am going to give him a plug.
Michael has a really nice blog that provides potential housing solutions and addresses downsizing and living in smaller houses… as a response to the extremely inefficient, unecological McMansions Jim writes about this week… that we see springing up like mushrooms all over America, forever destroying good farmland… because developers are out to make a buck. The invisible hand of the free market fails again.
Michael’s blog, TINY HOUSE LIVING, can be seen at: http://www.tinyhouseliving.com/
Good work, Michael!
It’s spring. Weather’s getting warming. Economy is heating up. Companies are making profits. People are getting hired. Living within one’s means is becoming hip. Jim’s negativity seems less and less poignant. Anyone else feel it?
Really? You might try reading: http://www.zerohedge.com/
It’s interesting to drive through subdivisions of the new McMansions in the evening, and to notice how few of these ‘palaces’ have drapes. Most inhabitants had to borrow so much to get into their McMansion, that they had no money for drapes. You’ll see cheap blinds, and sometimes even just sheets hanging up in the windows.
“… I see no reason why my off-grid home still won’t have a fridge keeping food cold, lights at night, a pump providing my water pressure and my electric chainsaw cutting firewood.”
Cam, you’re right. It will. At least all that will happen until a motorcycle gang/formerly urban street gang/hungry national guard unit/hungry neighbor happens by. At that point, you and yours will be cheerfully ousted, possibly alive but probably not. Unless you’re in with a group of people living within sound fortifications, who understand and know how to strategically use weapons (and have them, with enough ammo), I think your idea of a sustainable existence is more of a fantasy than anything else. For a more realistic idea of social collapse, you might look at ferfal.blogspot.com. This is written by a gentleman in Argentina who has lived through that country’s economic collapse.
Hint. He mentions weapons. A lot.
Solar panels today come with a 25 year warranty and will continue to work well beyond that. I see no reason why my off-grid home still won’t have a fridge keeping food cold, lights at night, a pump providing my water pressure and my electric chainsaw cutting firewood.
I know one good reason why: as soon as someone hears that chainsaw cutting kindling, or sees those lights burning late at night, or hears that pump pumping fresh tasty water, they’ll be curious, and then curiouser, and finally come to visit with a few of their friends and onlookers, and demand to know why you aren’t sharing your cool stuff with all the losers who didn’t have the foresight or cash to invest in fancy survivalist gear. Your solar-powered laser pistol will be no match for a mob with pitch forks and tire irons.
But then again, maybe the collapse of our empire will be full of hugs and kisses, unlike other collapses, which have all been almost uniformly difficult for everybody involved, except the few lucky super rich who burrowed into mountains or hired large gangs to protect them.
Here’s a thought: Perhaps what’s coming is not a Long Emergency but a first-class hot war. All who are still alive will be so happy to have survived that they will think that the living conditions, no matter how dreary, are wonderful. This is not so outlandish a prospect, methinks. Sure solves a lot aof problems, doesn’t it?
Odd that JHK — a week after singing the praises of his favorite, “mature, adult, responsible, intelligent”, regressive-gliberal-phlegmocrat (RGP): Status Quobama — would remain Silent Spring about Drill, Baby, Drill.
Then again, it’s the modus operandi of the average, Left-in-name-only RGP to grasp at straws.
As Ted Rall has recently observed:
—
“Obama ran as a centrist. It would come as little surprise if he were governing as one.
But he’s not a moderate president.
Obama is a Republican.
A right-wing Republican. Thanks to triangulation gone wild.
In his first year Obama chose to continue numerous Bush Administration policies, many of which originated in the far extreme wing of the GOP. Each of the following asterisks represents a broken campaign promise:
Keeping the Guantánamo torture camp open*
Continuing the war against Iraq*
Expanding the war against Afghanistan
Renewing the USA Patriot Act*
No-string bank bailouts
Continuing “military commission” kangaroo trials*
Reserving the right to torture*
Continuing the NSA’s “domestic surveillance” program of spying on innocent Americans’ emails and phone calls*
It took over a year, but Obama can finally point to two legislative achievements: healthcare reform and reducing private banks’ role in the issuance of student loans. The student loan bill, though a step in the right direction, is liberal but too modest. Student loans ought to be replaced by grants. Ultimately, universities and colleges will have to be nationalized.
Obama’s revamp of healthcare, on the other hand, goes too far, perverting the liberal desire to provide healthcare for all Americans into a transfer of wealth from poor to rich that the hard right never dreamed of.
Buying into the classic, flawed, American assumption that a bad system can’t get worse (ask the Iraqis and Afghans), ObamaCare entrusts 30 million new customers, to the tune of roughly ten grand a year each, to the tender mercies of private insurance companies.
ObamaCare pours hundreds of billions of dollars, some from taxpayers, the rest from poor people, into the gaping coffers of giant corporations. Once people find themselves paying even more for visits to the same crappy doctors and hospitals they can’t afford now, they’ll hold the Dems responsible at the polls. If Republicans stopped to think, they’d love it.
And if Democrats stopped to think, they’d hate it.”
—
Alas, Rall’s analysis is right but his conclusion is wrong.
I’m a repentant Left-in-name-only RGP but my family, like JHK and millions of others, still obediently toe’s the Party line.
College (mis)educated RGPs, with any money, LOVE Status Quobama and his regressive, imperial, capitalist (contrary to JHK’s absurd rants on the subject, “capitalism” is not remotely akin to the laws of physics) policies.
The average college educated RGP takes Big Brother’s (d/b/a Status Quobama and the Phlegmocratic Party) words to heart:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
So true, when you connect more than a couple of dots the picture looks bleak. Those dedicated to the status quo draw their own dots for a rosier picture. We’ve painted our picture with colored sand and, hey, maybe today’s the day the wind won’t blow.
College (mis)educated RGPs, with any money, LOVE Status Quobama
Many do. More, though, are getting a little nervous, because they sense the resentment growing in the people who serve them coffee, or sell them iPads, or pocket the change they find under the cushions in their sofas.
The Status Quobama-ites fear the lumpenproleteriat and they know that the charismatic CEO running USA, Inc. is running out of ideas. Pretty soon they’ll start agitating for more bones to toss to the growling dogs of discontent. Wrapped up in crinkly colored cellophane, these meager offerings will satisfy the appetite for change for a little while, giving the Quobama-ites just enough time to schedule a convenient leave-of-absence just as the barristas and broom pushers start behaving with unsettling impertinence.
We had warm weather in PA also. I spent the nice days bucking logs and stacking them for next winters firewood.
Do not fear the reaper. The garden has to die before it can grow again. Otherwise we’ll get the false springs – April can be the cruelest month. I saw a segment on Nightline about a town in Southern California that has been very hard hit by the drop in real estate. Basically a desert like so much of Southern California, they have taken to spray painting the lawns green to give them a lush air and attract byers. Potemkin Lawns. Wont it be better when the owl and the bittern are heard in the streets?
“Something is happening… out there.”
It is a conspiracy.!. 🙂
james, I with you on the big home syndrome that the upper 10% have to have. It is all about walking around with a Viagra-like machismo. These day traders, lawyers, or whatevers are out there showing off their wealth through expensive BMWs, or Porsches, or 6 bedroom MacMansions. Supersize my life, dude!!!
Big entrance ways with glass, marble, oak, and wasted airspace where dust collects daily is the First Impression into a houseful of extravaganza.
These folks are making the cash that the rest of American just cannot do. Their accountant tells them they need the big house for tax purposes. And, write off the Porsche as their commuter car.
I am familiar with a home not far from me where a couple went in and took a suitable home and rehabbed it in a big way. They probably sunk around $400-600K into it, plus the purchase of around $200K. One day a couple knocked on their door and offered them $1.4M for the place. The next week the owners moved on to another home. The money is out there because financial reform does not exist.
They are part of the have more side of the triple equation of the Haves, The Have mores, and now, the Have nots.
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
I don’t think that’s it – these people are a new breed. They don’t need privacy since they aren’t doing anything interesting. Why shutter the house – do you have something to hide? Also, it could be conspicuous consumption or “look to your heart’s content at what I have and you don’t”. It’s weird, but TV has changed people. Shutter, curtains, and blinds are for individuals, not consumer/worker insects.
Heard a great one on Face the Nation yesterday. The difference between Republicans and Democrats? When at Lesbian, Stripper, Bondage Clubs – Democrats will acknoledge each other and Republicans wont.
Karl Rove said, Find the pervert and take away his RNC credit card.
Wont it be better when the owl and the bittern are heard in the streets?
Picking over the bones of our ruined society, no doubt. Alongside other carrion beasts.
Nobody fears the reaper until he starts his reaping nearby. Many of us are brave enough watching from a distance the ongoing harvest of souls in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or any other slaughterhouse managed and maintained by USA, Inc., but once that ugly dude starts roaming our own streets, the karma is going to be amazingly poetic, and the bard of death will recite his lines with the precision of someone who has learned them all by heart many times over.
The owl and bittern will noisy witnesses, no doubt.
I just want to add my two cents to what Jim writes about the McMansion people fretting over their inability to pay their debts.
As a professional carpet cleaner in the Portland, Oregon area, I can confirm that many of those formerly “rich” corporate teamplayer McMansion dwellers are actually hurting, and badly at that. So many have fallen off the map of calling me for regular service.
In their minds, they are putting off the cleaning. I’m afraid reality says I’ll never hear from them again.
It’s not that my business has completely stopped. It’s that I probably will continue an annual double digit slide in sales receipts for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, I know I should be gardening more. I have very much accelerated my daily reading of topics like history, anthropology, and other cultural studies.
This is out of interest partially, and partially out of the supposition that a good grasp on people and society in general will be valuable going forward.
“Something is happening… out there.”
I have the same feeling, something is brewing quietly. It has to be. A couple weeks ago we were suffocating under the longest continuous snow cover in Iowa history. None of us had been outside in five months. Now it’s summertime and the buds can’t burst fast enough; as if winter never happened.
The city here is repaving streets like crazy, so every morning breeze and every ray of sunshine will be accompanied by jackhammers until the snow buries it all again.
Meanwhile, those who appear financially fortunate are squeezing the last drops out of their credit cards trying to maintain the illusion that they are better off than the rest of us. The banks, the utilities and the city contractors are ripping off every last dollar their militia can enforce from the formerly productive property owners who are now crippled by pseudo suburban ordinances. Their desperate panic is cracking through the facade of of their smiling receptionists.
We’re all supposed to run out and purchase new cars to drive on our new streets with loans we can’t secure with incomes we don’t have. The still employed bureaucrats are convinced that their paper houses on their semi-rural hilltop lawns are threatened only by our hoarding of imaginary treasure chests full of glittering gold that we hide from them in our basements.
This nation was got by shooting people and taking their property. Nothing has changed. My ancestral cultures have all been erased from the history books. After generations of scratching our way out of the poverty inflicted by our conquerors, we are simply falling victim to the same old acts. Murder and theft are okay as long as they are committed in the interest of the winning powers.
Petroleum gave the empire a century of unfathomable advantage. Now the momentum of that glory is echoing across the landscape like the scent of a withered rose.
All the expansion policies are still in place. The Papal Bulls that commanded enslavement of all non-christian persons and seizure of all their property are still in effect. Birth control is still prohibited by the dominant patriarchal religions. Conversion of indigenous to these religions results in overpopulation, which leads to famine and plague, which makes the peasants very willing to kill and die for more resources.
On and on. It’s time for a new paradigm. Those holding on to the old out of fear of damnation or pride of conquest have some long procrastinated waking up to do. They are going to have to acknowledge how evil they really are.
Something is in the air. Life always wins. If resource depletion on this continent reaches the levels of pre-renaissance europe, we’re in for a long heap of misery. Their ain’t no big hunk of “undiscovered” land of plenty across the sea this time, but the proud rulers are still acting as if there is.
Oil and copper are two crucial components of life as we know it. Both are getting more and more difficult to get. Thank you Mr. Kunstler for reporting on this reality that no one who is invested in can dare to look at without wholly deconstructing their identity.
Not only do I not see so much doom and gloom in your observations, I think even you are being rather gentle with the real horror of it all. Obviously, even a taste of reality is too much for most to deal with.
Behind the facade of civilization, the conquered are still being herded through their lives at gunpoint toward the “afterlife” aka death which is the only reward that is guaranteed them by their “Lords”.
Those who walk about this land content with their luxuries are ignoring the reality of the war and genocide that enable them to do so. Thank you for not being okay with the hyper-accelerated wasting of our lives and lands.
Hello James, I returned to the northern reaches of NY 23rd district in 2002, grew up here in 40’s, 50’s and early 60’s and lived here from the late 70’s to late 80’s. The mud season has virtually vanished in the recent past here in St. Lawrence county. The mud season of 2004 lasted perhaps a week and since then the ground has not been frozen deeply and so little winter snow has remained when Spring has sprung that we have had virtually no mud season for the past 3-4 years. Any chance global warming is playing a part in the effects noticed here? Naw.
On another front, I finally finished reading “The Long Emergency” with which I find large agreement with a few exceptions. The first of these is on page 113 final sentence of second paragraph ” Because hydrogen produces considerable heat at decompression, it could self ignite in a crash as the gas rushed out of a tank through broken valves.”
In general gases heat when compressed and cool when they expand. Hydrogen exhibits a Joule-Thomson inversion temperature of about 193 K (-80°C) and does exhibit a small temperature increase upon expansion to atmospheric pressure and temperature. Experimenters have measured this temperature rise at +9 to +19 K for hydrogen gas pressurized to 7500 psi; not considered a significant temperature rise likely to produce auto ignition. Experimenters over a 50-60 year time frame have suggested electrostatic discharge and metallic oxides friction and catalytic effects as likely ignition sources; but they were not widely accepted.
In 2005 Prof. Frederick L. Dryer from Princeton University, published a paper titled “Spontaneous Ignition of Pressurized Releases of Hydrogen and Natural Gas into Air”. This study demonstrated that when hydrogen gas experiences a sudden release into the atmosphere, via a pressure boundary failure at pressures above roughly 310 psi, shock-waves in the hydrogen gas stream produced autoignition in virtually 100% of the tests.
You are correct in your supposition that hydrogen gas escaping a high pressure tank will ignite spontaneously. However; the most likely reason for spontaneous ignition to occur is that downstream geometry and pressure combination’s will provide critical level shock-wave heated air sufficient to cause autoignition.
SNAFU
Damn, I tune in for my weekly dose of JHK “doom and gloom” and all I get is this bucolic bike ride through McMansionville. I bet if I stopped by your house you’d only have light beer…
Yeah…good job, Jim…way to fucking RUIN a completely nice bike ride with the inevitable thoughts of DOOM.
Dude, you need to relax or something.
To Sportdlr70
Whats wrong with Jim having one foot in both camps? I call the balancing. The rights basic premise, “Dont work,dont eat” has its appeal, as the rights” give us your unwashed masses” and “feed the poor, cloth the naked, shelter the homeless” WWJD?
You have been convinced by the right that their goals are the same as yours. THe right with their greed has sold you a bill of goods that puts the blame for all this de-mantling of America is the Leftys fault. A classic False Flag maneuver. Look, Look over there! to your Left! they did it!
M.F. You TOTALLY misread my post. The two camps are not the “left” and “right,” they are reality (the whole left/right paradigm in this contrary is strictly political theater meant to distract us) and Fantasy (there is a difference between the left and right in this country and they are battling for America’s soul).
JK see’s the reality, but like my father, he is so tied to the time when he cut his political teeth that he is not willing to entirely abandon his team (the left) in the fantasy world.
I was raised a Democrat and have never voted for a Republican in my life….and I’ll never vote for another Democrat either. It’s time for this TWO card monte to be exposed to the masses.
http://www.alternet.org/news/146184/naomi_wolf_thinks_the_tea_parties_help_fight_fascism_–_is_she_on_to_something_or_in_fantasy_land__
Ahh yes Spring is here and the American way of life is back again. Plenty of happy motoring, real estate transactions and shoppers full force at the local Wal-Mart. Life is good again the recession is over. In the resort area where I live bookings for vacations are far ahead of last year. Life is good take a vacation you cannot afford it doesn’t matter.
Opps has anyone bother to take a look at the bond markets lately. Alot of debt in the world you know but who cares we can keep this party going fr a long time.
Ah …Phoenix
JHK: 6 years ago [about] you wrote the excellent LE. so now in ‘yeast terms’ we are way deeper into TLE, in that in 6 years we are not 6? but 6 AND A HALF BILLION.
6 years = half a billion more peeps in TLE!
certainly a startling thought when you stop and think.
far as Phoenix goes see the USA as ‘ the prize’ and its left unguarded. Phoenix is the kidnapping capitol of the world and the kidnappings are mexi on mexi.
however mags like they new york amg whine about the white supremistst and such prattle when the fat sheriff there gets tough on wet backs and those in jail.
Who really gives a damn? Let the damn thing collapse whenever. Who knows if it will be catastrophic or gradually? Whether 5 years or 50 or more, so what? Why in the world is it such a big deal for the collective. If you want to prepare, then do so. Food, solar, bicycle whatever. It really doesn’t matter. There is nothing worth saving anyway that I can see.
Qshtik
Wow! This is way over my head. Where do you type the Linux code? Do you first copy the entire 400 + comments into, say, a Word doc and then operate on it from there?
FOR AWHILE THERE WAS A FEATURE AT THIS SITE WHERE YOU COULD SEE ALL YR COMMENTS
I have often wished that I could do a sort command to group all of my comments, or anyone elses comments.
Qshtik replied to comment from asia | April 4, 2010 10:07 PM | Reply
“woops…LA just had an earthquake!”
=======================
Asia, where are you located, LA or San Diego?
I WAS IN LA YDAY…and it felt like a 5.0 or 5.5 seaquake here.
from a chilean i hear that huge quake could be felt 500 or more miles away.
JHK: Great writer, speaker and social commentator, painter. Thank you for continuing to speak out about the things no one wants to hear. Northeast Ohio is also in the midst of some gloriously fine and mild weather, and it sends chills down my spine. It’s a good 4 weeks, too, early for this.
I think I’ll ride my bike to the corner store for some Cheez Doodles and do so while looking at the trees instead the houses.
Lately I’ve begun to dread the arrival of spring and I wonder if it’s because the snow and ice does such a great job of hiding all the ugliness here in Detroit. When the snow melts in Detroit, all you are left with are pot-hole filled streets, miles of empty brownfields and decrepit old commercial buildings that are sad reminders of better days when the city was known as America’s Motor City and immigrants flooded in from Eastern Europe and whites and blacks fleeing the poverty of the American south with hopes of finding work in the booming auto industry.
do you mean ‘its as if SPRING never happened’?
Who cares about poorly designed McMansions?
It’s like discussing the curtains on the Titanic.
And by the way, architects don’t design houses — unless it’s their own ego-statement (for themselves or rich clients). They’re too busy with big bucks public statements. McMansions (and every other lesser form of house) are “designed” by blueprint drawing firms.
Aside from the issue of decorations, most houses don’t work well as houses, because they are “designed” for appearance not function. And it’s even worse for architect houses — I love Frank Lloyd Wright’s house designs, but people who lived in them told of leaking roofs and poor layouts. I’ve been inside one and can confirm.
Puzzler, regarding Frank the Great’s botched houses… I’ve been in a few. Yes, leaks and mold are givens in most of Wright’s houses, notably those that were really aggressive in design, like Falling Water (“Rising Mildew” by the owner).
Wright designed a few really beautiful houses late in life, notably the Usonian Block houses, which are holding up pretty well. But for the most part, Wright displayed utter disregard for the comfort of his clients, and he pretty well established the model of the Ego-obsessed Starchitect who cares only for his own art and nothing for the end user who is paying for it all. Wright seems to have seen his clients only as the means to build his houses. When the owner of Falling Water called him up, hysterical, on Thanksgiving screaming that the rain was coming through the roof in sheets, all over the dining room table, Frank calmly told him to move the table.
Worst of all, Wright set a style whose bastard knockoffs- the ranch house and the god-awful split-level- defaced every post WW2 suburb in the U.S. He moreover hated cities and contributed the architectural philosophy that helped destroy every urban environment.
Let’s hope that in the “long emergency” that every post-WW2 split-level and ranch house gets leveled.
I was lucky this year that the glowing McEaster Bunny didn’t leave any toxic waste on the lawn.
Cheez Doodles will taste better when they become much harder to get.
Ah yes – “rural” bike rides through the twilight of the gods…
It is rather weird, surveying the darling wrecks of hallucinated affluence, just before they begin to cave in, like icebergs venturing into the tropics.
The problem is that they hold people – families.
Although I admit, a dozen rooms shared by two and a half people is a dearly-bought extravagance.
All those lawyer foyers with nary a notary in sight.
All that faux-fielded framed and fenced ersatz farmland with nary a tree of vegetable…
and the neighbor associations are STILL paranoid as all hell about laundry flapping in the wind.
(the poor dears’ sensibilites just can’t handle all the underwear aired out for the world to see.)
Meanwhile the climate goes about its business, just as business flounders through its dance steps – we shed parkas and wince, as if waiting for a far-off sound………..
I don’t know who you are, Mr. Mather,
but has it not occurred to you that
there are holes the size of a Mack
Truck in your refutation of Jim’s
thinking.
Foremost of these is COST. It takes
about $20-$30K to solarize a house and
while I’m happy for your opulence, the
vast majority of Americans cannot even
remotely afford to get “off the grid”.
They can’t even pay their CURRENT bills
for goodness sakes.
Secondly, there’s the vast problem of
SCALABILITY. We don’t even have a
start on a nationwide manufacture of
solar panels. We don’t have easy
mechanisms to recycle toxic batteries
or mass manufacture them as well.
Apparently, you haven’t read Mr.
Kunstler’s book where he argues both
cogently and prolifically about these
problems and with abundant data to
back his claims up.
In future, please attempt to back up
your claims with data. “I did it” is
NOT a valid form of argument and never
has been since before Aristotle.
Eleuthero
Just my two cents but I think the USA
is “a day late and a dollar short” on
preps for the Long Emergency.
I believe we’d have been behind the
curve if we started these preps in
1985. Now, movements like the “small
house movement” don’t address the
EXISTING base of huge homes. What
do we do? Trash them?
How about all the metal and plastic
that are already wasted on SUVs, ATVs,
and other hog vehicles? I know that
“hope springs eternal” but hope in
the absence of action doesn’t get it
done.
To make a mockery of a hopeful adage:
“It’s always darkest before ……..
PITCH BLACK”.
If we started TODAY, we might actually
be able to herd the cats that make up
our citizenry by 2030 by which time
we’ll all be hosed. For God’s sake,
I’d venture that HALF of the people
in America STILL believe we’ve got
zero sustainability problems in
perpetuity.
I applaud “small steps” and “green
shoots” but we need a good size
sappling by now and, frankly, only
5% of the people would even water
that sappling.
Eleuthero
Eleuthero said:
We do have a “start” on manufacture of solar panels in the United States. Here is an incomplete list of solar panel manufacturers in the USA… incomplete but at least it is proof of a “start”
BP Solar
630 Solarex Court
Frederick, Maryland 21703, USA
Energy Conversion Devices Inc (ECD Ovonics)
2956 Waterview Drive
Rochester Hills, MI 48309, USA
Energy Photovoltaics Inc (EPV)
276 Bakers Basin Road
Lawrenceville, NJ 08648, USA
Evergreen Solar Inc
259 Cedar Hill Street
Marlboro, MA 01752 USA
First Solar LLC
4050 E Cotton Center Blvd. Suite 6-69
Phoenix, Arizona 85040, USA
GE Energy (Solar Division)
231 Lake Drive
Newark, Delaware, USA
PowerFilm Inc
2337 230th Street
Boone, Iowa 50014, USA
Solar Power Industries
13 Airport Road Belle
Vernon, PA 15012, USA
Solec International Inc
970 East 236th Street
Carson, California USA 90745
SunPower Corporation
3939 N. 1st Street
San Jose, California 95134, USA
TerraSolar Inc
44 Court Street, Tower B
Brooklyn, New York, 11201, USA
United Solar Ovonic
3800 Lapeer Raod
Auburn Hills, Michigan 48326, USA
Obama’s economic stimulus plan (Investment and Recovery Act of 2009) requires any project receiving money to use steel and other construction materials, including solar panels, from countries that have signed the World Trade Organization’s agreement on free trade in government procurement.
China has not signed.
Because China has not signed, and to reduce shipping costs, solar panel manufacturers (like Suntech) will build solar panel assembly plants in the United States…
Thanks to Obama, we are likely to see more solar panel manufacturing in the United States.
We are very spoiled people. Some of us want change, but aren’t willing to sacrifice our life style to achieve it and we are enabled in this regard by purveyors of “green” products like florescent light bulbs, low flow toilets, and hybrid cars. The rest of us are too obsessed with hatred of the liberal elite to even consider that our lifestyle is unsustainable and horribly wasteful. A point was made earlier about how quickly a typical house will decline once the roof leaks and the utilities are turned off – quite right and its true of all man made improvements, let your town go a full year without patching the roads and you’ll see holes everywhere (at least in snow country) go 5 years and the roads will be an utter mess.
You have to read the MEANING behind my
words, Asoka, not an incredibly literal
interpretation of them. When I spoke of
a “start” on solar energy, I mean a REAL
start i.e., municipal or state initiatives
to have 50% of homes solarized in ten or
fewer years.
By the way, quite a few of those companies
you listed, like SunPower in San Jose are
a TOTAL JOKE.
I’d make ANY of you “green shoots” types
a very large monetary bet that in ten years
we won’t have FIVE percent of US homes
solarized … and I’m actually padding
the actual figure which I think will be
close to the truth i.e., ZERO-POINT-TWO
percent.
I wish the “Obama for America” types would
actually quote things which give TRUE hope
… like the abovementioned initiatives
which, if even a single city has adopted
it, would probably be a podunk-sized town
of a few thousand or less.
True hope, hope that galvanizes people,
must be based on actual fact. We have
no need for wishful thinking which is
what Gen-Y seems to specialize in.
Eleuthero
Hi Sportrdr70. I agree with you. I used to be a hard core Democrat, but I have found that over the years they have been slowly corrupted by corporations. Corrupted to the point that no significant legislation to benefit the country has a chance of passing if it will deprive some mega business of a few percent of profits. Left is pitted against Right, and as they struggle, the elite quietly rake in the money. When gas got up to $5 bucks a gallon, I watched some fat congressman summon the heads of the oil companies before his committee. He spent the whole time harrumphing and castigating the executives for the obscene profits they were making. The oil company heads made their obligatory remarks, and the hearing was over. The whole thing was a dog and pony show for the benefit of consumers. Except for that hearing, nothing was ever done about it. The irony is that when the country finally does go belly up, left and right will keep blaming the other even as things collapse.
Snap-in muntins really suck.
“All that faux-fielded framed and fenced ersatz farmland”
=====================
Alliteration lovers delight.
Budizwiser, Thanks for the link; I lived in Birmingham for 42 years. I can’t believe how bad that deal went, and I wonder how many more similar deals are in the works right now in other places.
Gulland
Well said and I agree [see quoted text below], but don’t make the mistake of romantizing native cultures. I am no fan of the “America can-do-no-wrong/The-white-man-is-awesome crowd, but I’m also wary when I encounter those who believe the, say, Aztecs were blissfully chilling in recliners watching TV and enjoying various other space-age inventions before the damn Spanish came along.
The bottom line is the natives could learn a lot from the white man, and the arrogant white man could learn a lot from the natives.
Here’s the solution: Let’s enjoy this beautiful, wonderous technology — magic really — in a sustainable way. No need to be native asetics or white hedonists.
“This nation was got by shooting people and taking their property. Nothing has changed. My ancestral cultures have all been erased from the history books. After generations of scratching our way out of the poverty inflicted by our conquerors, we are simply falling victim to the same old acts. Murder and theft are okay as long as they are committed in the interest of the winning powers.”
The problem with your thinking is
the idea embedded in it that the
Non-white races on earth are
exemplars of civility. I refer
to this as “noble savage worship”
The only reason we don’t hear about
the millions killed in the Congo
(blacks killing blacks) or Rwanda
is simply because our media focuses
on the G-8 nations.
History books also glorify Amerindian
tribes as if they were models of peace
and stability. Tribes decimated each
other long before the white man arrived.
Genocides have been commmitted by all
sorts of human tribes. However, if we
focus on killing/maiming/stealing/raping
within tribes NOT at war, we certainly
cannot reasonably come to the conclusion
that they are all roughly the same.
Eleuthero
Only in some parts of the USA do lawyer and foyer rhyme. 🙂
Good observations: a couple of comments. A lot of farmland, especially in upstate NY (where I used to live) has gone over to housing tracts because agri-business farming and cheap trucking has made the small 100-acre farms completely unsustainable. Things will revert, that much most of us believe. When? Who knows?
The 100-acre farm that I lived on (in the late 1940s, as a small boy) used to be an hour walk and a 60 minute train ride from Rochester. Now, with the Interstate, it is covered with houses (sic) that are a 20-minute drive from work in the big city. If you and others are correct, the work will return to nearer the houses soon.
A NASCAR-loving buddy told me that peak oil believers like myself are “just a bunch of snotty elitists. You don’t like suburbia, and car culture, so you hope to see it disappear. Well, it won’t!”
Yep, I guess I’m an elitist. Yep, it will disappear, and I’m in a way sorry that I won’t be around to see it happen, despite the grief and misery that will ensue.
Eleuthero:
I don’t read minds. I can only read the words you write. You have to make the meaning clear.
You said there was no “start”. You said we need a “real start”, you said SunPower is a “TOTAL JOKE”
NASDAQ
SPWRA SunPower Corporation NASDAQ USD 19.09 +0.08 0.42% 0.32 59.98 1.86B
SunPower appears to be a $1.86 BILLION DOLLAR JOKE.
To quote you, from one of your earlier posts today: “In future, please attempt to back up your claims with data.”
SUNPOWER MUNICIPAL AND STATE CLIENTS
* City of Anaheim
* City of Berkeley
* City of Cathedral City
* City of Chicago
* City of Chico
* City of Fresno
* City of Hayward
* City of Livermore
* City of Napa
* City of Oakland
* City of Pacifica
* City of Richmond
* City of San Buenaventura
* City of San Diego
* City of San Francisco
* City of Vacaville
* City of Vallejo
* AC Transit District
* Alameda County
* Connecticut Transit
* Contra Costa County
* Dormitory Authority State of New York
* Lake County
* Napa County
* New Jersey State Police
* New Jersey Dept of Military and Veterans Affairs
* Prince George County
* San Mateo County
* Solano County
* Sonoma County
* State of California
* State of New York
SunPower Retail and Consumer Clients
* Macy’s
* Wal-Mart
* Lowe’s
* Long’s Drugs
* J.C. Penney
* Tiffany & Co.
* Whole Foods
* Lunardi’s Markets
* Meyer Corp.
* Shiseido
* Koyo USA Corp.
* KTA Super Stores
SunPower Federal Government Clients
* Environmental Protection Agency
* Federal Correctional Institution
* MCAGCC Twentynine Palms
* National Institute of Standards & Technology
* United States Air Force
* United States Coast Guard
* U.S. Navy Coronado
* U.S. Navy Pearl Harbor
* United States Postal Service
* U.S. Department of Energy
* U.S. General Services Administration
* U.S. National Park Service
* U.S. State Department
* Franchise Tax Board
I just finished reading Peter Hessler’s COUNTRY DRIVING, about the auto mania in China. China (maybe thanks to a plug for family road trips by Condoleezza Rice) is building roads and cars, licensing millions of new drivers, and moving people away from their ancestral farms at an incredible pace, imitating the 1950s USA, but with petroleum on its way out.
Hessler merely tells the story, in an entertaining way, and does not comment on global warming, peak oil, or even air pollution. He simply tells the stories of various people, who show amazing flexibility and resilience as they try to find new ways of making a living as the old ones vanish.
It’s a good book, funny at times, and describes a type of freedom that we in “the land of the free” can’t even imagine any more.
This is slightly (and I emphasize the slightly) off topic, but please all of you please, please, please steer clear of that fucking daft oil episode of the “Aftermath” program on History Television… those cunts have no fucking clue whatsoever… I am ashamed to say I spent an hour of my life listening to that shit but I didn’t know it would be such the propaganda it was… talk to you all later…
Rupert
Eleuthero:
I will take that bet, based on the following facts:
1) Thirty-nine states and Washington D.C. have adopted a net metering state policy.
2) Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have mandatory statewide RPS policies while five states have voluntary goals. (A Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) is a regulatory policy that requires the increased production of renewable energy sources.)
3) The United States domestic solar photovoltaic market is growing rapidly and will continue to grow given Obama’s federal renewable energy policy incentives (a $2.3 billion tax credit in the clean-energy sector).
In 2007: 220 megawatts of solar were installed.
In 2010 between 500 and 600 megawatts of solar power will be built this year across the United States — about double the figure of last year — according to Larry Sherwood, who compiles and studies such data as a consultant to the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a nonprofit industry group.
This industry is just beginning to expand and manufacturing jobs are being created in the USA (17,000 new manufacturing jobs last month)
Over the past few weeks, some 1,300 megawatts’ worth of distributed solar deals and initiatives have been announced or approved.
Two weeks ago in California, regulators authorized Southern California Edison’s program to install 500 megawatts of solar on commercial rooftops.
Then a few days later, they recommended that Pacific Gas and Electric … be given the green light for its own 500-megawatt initiative that aims to install ground-mounted photovoltaic arrays near electrical substations and urban areas.
And there’s more: Sacramento sold out a 100-megawatt solar program in a week. And San Francisco inked deals to launch a solar initiative of their own.
I’m providing hard numbers (in megawatts, in dollars, etc.) and I’m referencing concrete legislation that has passed at both state and federal and municipal levels to promote solar energy manufacturing and solar installations.
Where are your facts, Eleurthero? What data do you have to make such a bet for ten years into the future? TEN YEARS! Yikes.
I used to dredge up Jim’s old columns, or my own remarks from a year or two back just to compare and reflect on the current wise-cracking.
At least one thing I haven’t said lately is the part about how there won’t be much of a “big TSHTF” event.
The great and powerful will arrange for most of us to learn to live a little more like the third world. Sooner or later the difference between Mexico City and Manhattan won’t be quite so large.
Bigger industrial wastelands, more cracks in the roads, bridges closed in the “poor” part of town.
That’s the way the “slide” comes.
Once in a while a family or two freezing to death makes the news. A utility “blows it” and several hundred die a city-wide heat wave with no “air” or electricity.
Oh it will all come to pass. But the commercials will keep most of us from ever rioting about it.
To Cam Mather and others: Yes there are things each of us can do to prepare for the long tedious (with occasional events of sheer terror) slide down the backside of Hubbert’s curve. The question is, how many of us are actually, seriously, doing anything about it? – and by “us” I mean all of us citizens of the industrialized world, not just those few reading JHK’s weekly output. That’s the crux of the problem; the answer is “very few”.
I just returned from Florida where I was visiting my parents. Saturday morning I took a long stroll around a section of the sun-baked concrete-and-asphalt city where they reside. I looked for solar hot-water panels; I saw zero (same result, looking across the suburban landscape on landing and takeoff from Tampa airport). Solar hot water is one of the most appropriate and effective technologies for a southern state awash in sunshine, yet there is effectively zero penetration of this primo market region for solar – even with federal and state tax incentives in place. What’s gonna convince homeowners to ever put up a couple of solar panels? The return on investment is better than gambling on Wall Street; the risk to investment essentially zero.
My father put up solar panels on their first house in Clearwater in the 1980s; the next owner of that house took them down – couldn’t be bothered with the minor annual maintenance – and 10 years later the perfectly good house itself was ripped down and a Florida-style monster McMansion built in its stead. Go figure. These are the trends, or lack thereof, that don’t encourage me.
Dick Lawrence
It’s hot and windy here also.
Trucks are rumbling down my street everyday. They are turning the small airport into a military base.
Now instead of propeller planes circling over my house all day long (what a waste of oil that is!), I’m getting jets and helicopters.
End of cheap oil? Bring it on!
The student pilots all speed down my street, oblivious to people or animals.
There was a big celebration when they widened and flattened my street 6 years ago.
I wondered why they bothered, at the time. Now I know. The military base was obviously planned all along, but they didn’t tell us.
This morning, on Democracy Now, I watched the wikileak of the US pilots killing Iraqi civilians from the air, cheering and chortling, as the victims writhed and died. I wonder how many more of these soulless killers will be trained at the airport by my house.
“For the moment, what you are attending to, is your reality” — William James
I know, I’ve posted this quote here before, but everytime I read this blog it comes home to me how true that is.
Oh Jimmy.
Still waiting for the apocalypse that just refuses to come.
Your life has become one long Y2k.
“For the moment, what you are attending to, is your reality” — William James
=======================
Since I am reading the above sentence without any context I’m not sure what WJ is getting at. Perhaps you could give me your interpretation, Dale.
Qshtik: “Since I am reading the above sentence without any context I’m not sure what WJ is getting at.”
You have ended your sentence with a preposition, by the way. Safire said: “(Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) But I digress…
You say I am. You may imagine that you can experience reality, but in fact all experience is indirect, second-hand, because in order for there to be an experience, an “experiencer” must appear.
This “experiencer” is the knowledge “I am.” It is this constant identification of the self with the “I am”-knowledge that is the problem.
You are experiencing the realm of duality, of thought, and of experience, which is not the final reality.
Walt Whitman could help you out of this quandary… if you even recognize it as a quandary. Since you say “I’m not sure,” you are indicating it is a quandary for you.
“Like curtains on the Titanic”, yes, just pull the curtains over that porthole so you don’t see the water creeping up the side of the ship, as the bow dips under the water.
Well, I’ve made my lifeboat, moved out of the US for good.
Like some said above, you got to prepare, and I’m making my preps.
So, if somehow, the US doesn’t make a crash-dive, good, but if it does crash & burn, well, I just gotta hope the fall out isn’t too heavy.
Hi Dave Matthews!
DeeJones said: “Hi Dave Matthews”
DM is making more sense as each week passes. His ruminations on beauty remind me of a temple I once visited in Tucson, Arizona, a Joh Rei temple.
Joh Rei reminded me of DM because Joh Rei’s primary goal (if I remember correctly) is to help people enjoy optimal spiritual and physical health through the appreciation of beauty.
And the temple in Tucson had fantastic, hauntingly beautiful, flower arrangements to contemplate. Created expressly for contemplation of beauty. And that is what people were doing there. It was all so peaceful and serene. Just the opposite of the culture and architecture JHK comments upon week after week.
I looked up Johrei (one word, not two) and this is what I found:
“Johrei is a multi-cultural, multi-faith, service organization of health and healing for all people and the creation of paradise on Earth.
The focus of Johrei work is the practice of the art of spiritual healing, the appreciating of art and beauty, Ikebana flower arranging and nature farming.”
I am afraid your explanation was of no help though I am sure you meant well. Since the WJ statement has great meaning for Dale I will await Dale’s explanation … or anyone else who would like to have a go at it.
Your statement: but in fact all experience is indirect, second-hand, because in order for there to be an experience, an “experiencer” must appear. reminds me of the tree that falls in the forest but makes no sound if there is no one (no sentient being whatsoever) there to hear it.
Did you get a healing session? I have – it’s great. It’s kind of like Reiki but more ethereal. They offer them for free typicaly – that might be a mandate of their teacher. The energy might be too subtle for some to notice, but I trust you are connected enough to feel it. It’s like a trip to Pandora just as Reiki is a wind from the Pure Lands.
Mountain Dew is a nectar of the Gods, but it has to be prepared properly. First you open it and let all the carbonation out – better to heat the environment than your own body. Then you boil it, yes boil it good. This will purify it and release many of the poisons. Now it is fit to drink, a drink worthy of Kings. How do you think those Mountain People can live 90 or a 100 years? Sure it’s sweet, get over it. The sugar preserves and masks the secret ingredients. Just brush your teeth. It’s no fault of the drink those people often don’t take care of their mouths.
There may be a new carbon tax put on if the UN and Obama get their way so stock up now. It can also be used as a topical for cuts – the sugar helps heal the wound. In this case, it does not have to be de-carbonated.
Another traditional remedy is vinegar. It can be great for sore throats. Also some say it can be injected into tumors to dissolve them. The court is out on that one unlike the obvious benefits of MOUNTAIN DEW.
I disagree with this propagandistic, revisionist statement @ 4-5-10 11:41PM:
“History books also glorify Amerindian
tribes as if they were models of peace
and stability. Tribes decimated each
other long before the white man arrived.”
The above statement is a blanket projection of western European social mores onto the original inhabitants of the “new world” Sorry, but just because we do it doesn’t mean they did it.
Actually, they were “models of peace and stability”. The internecine tribal warfare amongst them was mostly ritualistic and rarely fatal. Often, the female captives of such adventures were incorporated into their new tribes as wives. There was also quite a bit of trading going on between tribes too. This helped diversify the gene pool. The remnant Amazon tribes still practice this tradition.
Also, there were laws in the original euro-colonies forbidding whitey from running away and joining the “Indians” because so many people were going AWOL to live with the tribes.
It wasn’t until the euro-savages invaded that the wholesale, mechanistic, enslavement of native populations began in earnest. The Christians were responsible for the intentional demolition of most of native cultural artifacts as “instruments of the divil”. The crime was so extreme that archaeologists today have only tattered remnants to work with in their analysis of the past.
There is a whole revisionist, triumphalist, propaganda campaign in the media to present the natives as inveterate savages which ,unfortunately, has become woven into popular Umerikun consciousness.
African tribal warfare is increasing in intensity due to increased population pressure and the availability of automatic euro-weapons.
Too many awe-inspiring houses built by true craftsmen to lump every large house into one category of McMansions but I’ll buy the sentiment of this site that too many resources went into ’em to create a luxurious lifestyle for the owners. HOWEVER, that has been true for centuries and will continue to be true for centuries more. People of great financial wealth will always live in shelters grander than others. Our aspirational society seems to have confused debt with wealth though – this debt crisis has shown me the need for a Middle Party. Screw the Left AND the Right, the Democrats and the Republicans! It is now the Top and the Bottom, it will take a miracle for the Middle Class to survive……
All the bailouts and bullshit go to the wealthy and the poor while the Middle Class pays for it all.
indeed. as polpot slaughter millions[?] the world danced on. pete hammill in the nypost cica 1975 wrote about how ‘ the press didnt care about cambodians’
asokh…you of ‘the numbers’ or [ as counterpoint,vlad the bad]…how many peeps have been killed in africa over the last 110 years?
is it 6 million in darfur?
ethiopia..only the john birch society and THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER [!!!!] wrote that the horror there was from the dictator not the weather.
HOW MANY MILLIONS HAVE BEEN KILLED IN AFRICA? and by whom? oil companies? dictators? cubans doing the bidding of the ussr….
buddist type BS….yr experience is yr ‘reality’
‘African tribal warfare is increasing in intensity due to increased population pressure and the availability of automatic euro-weapons’
sadly africa implodes as the chinese and USA grab for the oil.
do folks here know the truth about the huffingtons and their involvement in east timor?
a sobering thought for me as i hear arriana whine on kpfk.
shes also involved in a dreadful cult [msia.org]
What bothers me is that because of poverty, I am obliged to live along as if nothing is inclement in a socio-economic meltdown. I cannot buy land (too expensive), cannot do much of anything because the price tags are too high. I suppose I’ll just be tossed along in the current of history unfolding at a furious uncontrolled rate;
blind-sided by the lack of ability to prepare.
I don’t know if I agree with the plausibility of the “long emergency” scenario and tend to think the petro-culture will simply seize up in it’s tracks and ensuing pandemonium will follow.
History is replete with examples of societies being turned turtle by circumstances and a new way forward emerging from the gridlock of the past. Or, a new way backwards into regressive, deconstructed mayhem.
I’ve always lived on very little so It would not be too much of a stretch to live on even less.
I’m so spoiled by the mega-abundance that petro-culture has provided; I don’t know if I could adjust to a “world made by hand”.
Usually, when complex, resource-intense societies degrade the effects are so severe that many people perish very quickly and a sort of “rule of the jungle” ensues. Survival would favor those with a capacity to forage from piles of waste and fight effectively with (and without) many different weapons. All of the effete, bourgois modes of living would give way to something very harsh and unforgiving.
Perhaps we will return to some sort of pre-columbian wilderness of tribal societies. However, I won’t be around to find out what eventually happens. The young are in for a hell of a ride.
“This far along in the tribulations of our time, most Americans still have not heard of peak oil, and the few who have regard it as some figment that Ralph Nader or Al Gore conjured up on an acid trip in a sweat lodge.” JHK
That is one of the best lines ever!! Thanks for a bright spot in a dark time.
I know Ralph would love it. Never had a good feel for Al’s humour. But what the hell, Al won and lost. He should be bitter. How about Ralph on the High Court? He still has his mind and his family members are long lived? Think of the great minority opinions! Would added a little humour before the Internet goes dark.
“buddist type BS”
=================
Well why didn’t somebody say so? That explains it totally.
“buddist type BS”
Buddhism and Christianity are those “new age” type religions. They’ve only been around for a couple thousand years, 500 BCE and 30 BCE.
What I was referencing the Vedas, the basis of the world’s oldest organized religion, Hinduism, which dates back to 1,500 BCE … quite a bit older than either Christianity or Buddhism … neither of which improve upon Hinduism’s unadulterated truth:
1. Human nature is divine.
2. The aim of human life is to realize that human nature is divine.
If you don’t believe the first proposition, then that shows you haven’t done the second to arrive at the proof of its truth. No biggie. You’ve got time. If not this life, the next… or the next.
“Because China has not signed, and to reduce shipping costs, solar panel manufacturers (like Suntech) will build solar panel assembly plants in the United States…”
Then I hope they get crackin’ soon and make them affordable for the masses or this “solution” is going nowhere.
“Then I hope they get crackin’ soon and make them affordable for the masses or this “solution” is going nowhere.”
Good news for you…
The prices for high power band (>125 watts) solar modules has dropped from around $27/Wp in 1982 to around $4/Wp today. (The solar energy industry typically uses price per Watt Peak (Wp) as its primary unit of measurement.)
And it can be even cheaper if you install it yourself. As a rule of thumb, the solar module represents 40-50% of the total installed cost of a “solar system”. Equipment costs are also coming down.
On top of that you will get tax credits to offset costs. Remember that solar has higher upfront costs, but lower long-term costs. The economics are driven by a balance between the high initial cost of a solar PV system and very low subsequent running costs.
And it is only going to get better and better as we fully embrace alternatives to oil, especially if oil prices go back up to $150 a barrel. Solar will then be positioned as the cheaper alternative and installations will increase in an unprecedented manner.
found in Rochester Democrat and Chronicle discussing NYS Education Cuts
BerigVintrange wrote:
another cost associated with “suburban sprawl” is the need to bus so many students,
what a pickle we’re in having believed we’d always have our post WWII wealth and
as a nation monopolize world industry, well, now we have lots of competition and we’re stuck
with poorly planned car dependent communities,
then there’s city kids being bused out of their neighborhoods, defraying any sense of communi-
ty,
at least in the cities we could make education neighborhood-based, reweaving the city into communities of neighborhoods again,
I’d rather see the highway infrastructure costs be user taxed, via a gas tax, make those who
drive pay their actual portion of this expense,
and, develop mass transit connecting retored retail-enriched downtowns with their suburbs,
it would save money, energy and the environment, not to mention the personal health benefits of less sedentary lifestyles
found in Rochester Democrat and Chronicle discussing NYS Education Funds
BerigVintrange wrote:
another cost associated with “suburban sprawl” is the need to bus so many students,
what a pickle we’re in having believed we’d always have our post WWII wealth and
as a nation monopolize world industry, well, now we have lots of competition and we’re stuck
with poorly planned car dependent communities,
then there’s city kids being bused out of their neighborhoods, defraying any sense of communi-
ty,
at least in the cities we could make education neighborhood-based, reweaving the city into communities of neighborhoods again,
I’d rather see the highway infrastructure costs be user taxed, via a gas tax, make those who
drive pay their actual portion of this expense,
and, develop mass transit connecting retored retail-enriched downtowns with their suburbs,
it would save money, energy and the environment, not to mention the personal health benefits of less sedentary lifestyles
I disagree with this statement @ 10-6-10, 2:14PM
“Too many awe-inspiring houses built by true craftsmen to lump every large house into one category of McMansions but I’ll buy the sentiment of this site that too many resources went into ’em to create a luxurious lifestyle for the owners.”
As mentioned by previous writers these houses are pieces of crap. They are designed to return a massive profit to the banks at a minimal cost outlay. The material used is absolutely the cheapest plywood, OSB, wallboard, concrete, and wet, green lumber cut from tree plantations or 2nd and 3rd growth national “forests”.
They can throw one of these energy gulping monsters up so fast that I have taken to calling them “mushrooms”. There can be raw woods one year and within a year there is a whole raft of these contraptions tossed up with city streets included. I’ve seen it literally take 5 months from site clearance to move-in day.
The building contractors have it down to science and Mexicans do all the work. I’ve noticed they have a formula that they use every time they build. Also, they never seem to give a damn about passive solar or site positioning for solar.
Site preparation, slab, wooden stick frame, plywood and OSB roof with composition shingles.
Insulated paneling, then brick, sandstone or limestone veneer. Wiring, plumbing and wallboard out the ass. Add some “dormers” or a “cupola” with a conical roof on the real fancy ones. Throw in some faux, Victorian embellishments or
a column or two. Or maybe go “mediterranean” or
“colonial” ; it’s all just garbage, ticky-tacky,
ostentatious, pseudo-prosperity which could deflate into a pile of useless… (you catch my drift).
Probably the only skilled craftsmanship is in the tiled bathrooms, cabinetry and finishing carpentry. These things are wanna-bees just like the people who inhabit them. They are pretentious nods to a much more prosperous and noble age which has long since vanished. They remind me of museum “mock-ups” build to replicate the actual mansion; you know, like the blank white plaster that replaces half of the broken marble statue.
Okay Q, I know, it’s 4-6-10 not 10-6-10.
Jeez, you remind me of my mother.
from earlier post:
I recall an article about 10 years ago concerning one car company’s experiment with ways to overcome the soul-deadening effects on employees from performing the same assembly operation endlessly. They set up small teams (4-6 workers, I forget) and had them assemble the entire car. I never heard how that experiment turned out.
ISNT THAT THE WAY JAPANS DONE IT FROM THE BEGINNING?
‘the timing of this is far from accidental. Usually the Jews just “discover” gnostic writing this time of year but this time they went for juglar – as if there isn’t endless pedophillia in the Hasidic Community’
AS IN THOSE DISGUSTING PICTURES AT JEWWATCH.COM?
‘I’ve always lived on very little so It would not be too much of a stretch to live on even less.’
how about less heat/ clean water/ police/fire/road upkeep?
NOTE TO JIM K FROM EARTH….l.a. is so broke city ‘services’ will be 3 days a week….not 5!!!
Asia, I have to admit that it would really be a drag to have to freeze butt, boil all water & defend myself from aholes. I doubt if I would have to worry about pot-holes because I’d probably have to walk everywhere I went.
This sounds like what the homeless already go through everyday.
This just in from todays Democracy Now broadcast:
“Record Temperatures Reported in Northeast”
“Temperature records are being broken across the United States this week as the Northeast and Midwest have experienced summer-like weather. In Caribou, Maine, the temperature soared to 82 degrees on Saturday, shattering the old record for the date by 24 degrees. In New York City, temperatures this week are about 20 degrees above normal.”
JHK, you note the “Palladianesque windows with their pathetic snap-in muntins.” Why doesn’t anyone else seem to notice these awful things? About 25 years ago, I was at a lunch meeting with some architectural preservationists and while advocating thermal modernization of original window systems, I suggested that snap-in muntins have all the class of plastic fireplace logs. I caught an unpleasant glance from an architect in our group -who had just installed replacement windows with said snap-in muntins.
My argument was (and is) that this type of ersatz ornament is typical of the American “Disney Land” approach to life -its all good if we all tacitly agree to believe that the phony is real. If it is implemented in bad taste, all the better as it demonstrates the superior strength of our convictions!
[since that time we now all have remote control fireplaces; a couple of AAA batteries in a plastic remote “fire starter” and we’re roughing it -without any sense of irony]
Furthermore, the McMansion “architecture” is a revival of faux traditionalism with a pathological twist, IMO. Psychologically, these places speak volumes about our culture’s view of the future and exposes the insecurity that those home buyers feel. Years ago, optimism along with physical and economic security drove architectural design into uncharted waters. What is now known as mid-century modern epitomized the overall spirit of the American public. We seemed to say, “Right or wrong, progress is progress!” Sometimes we were right, sometimes we were wrong. Somehow though, we didn’t seem to fear the future. And this with a Cold War going on.
Look at when the abominably incoherent / “grandiose”/ simplistic modern interpretations of “traditional architecture”/ clinging to idealized images of the past that never existed/ really started rolling. Mid to late 80’s? Hmmmmm? Isn’t this when an unacknowledged undercurrent of fear began to filter into the collective unconscious mind of this country -what with soaring deficits, loss of real wages, protective regulations swept away- and along with them, any hope of a simple, productive and pleasant work life ending in secure retirement? We saw the broken trust of big business in their denial of pension agreements; we saw the promise of government to protect and serve the public interest eroded through mindless deregulation and “tax simplification” that made daily living more difficult and less secure; and the collapse of the assumption that government and business could at least be trusted to operate in a somewhat transparent and fiscally responsible manner. The entire rug was being pulled out from the upper middle class on down.
Our collective belief in the long-running American narrative was being shaken to its core, yet “In Delusion We Trust” kept most of us from having the courage to visualize the end of that trend line -i.e., where we are now. But the subconscious fears were at work as expressed in the now distorted traditional image of “home.”
Not surprisingly, these homes are just as bizarrely conflicted in their design as the a public psyche that has adapted to believe things in conflict with reality. These homes simultaneously lay bare the ego, bravado, insecurity and fear of their owners. They, and we as a nation, can not even manage a facade that is resolved and harmonious anymore.
Just my $2 (devaluation of middle class earnings since 1980, you know…)
Hey, have y’all heard the good news? Oil is approaching $90 a barrell. Apparently, according to pundits who lick the likes of Lloyd Blankfein’s ass, this means the economy has recovered. Yay!
What the pundits don’t tell you is it’s either peak oil or inflation in essential items. Is bread next?
Perhaps, as peak oil means peak bread as well. And bread is definitely an essential — unless you hang with the likes of Lloyd B.
In that case, caviar in golden tins is an essential.
Thank god for Chinese slave labor.
I agree with the genetic diversity thing. From a long-term evolutionary perspective that makes a hell of a lot of sense, but, c’mon, I’m sure those 12-year-old girls stolen from their parents in an inter-tribal dispute, who then became the playthings of some chieftain, did experience some trauma. That shit would be scary.
If you don’t think so, you’re ability to romanticize the American ancients is incredible.
May be “approaching $90” thanks to the recovery, but the average will be around $80 for the year.
JHK thinks we will be going back to agriculture, others think we will be going back to manufacturing, others think we will be going back to services. Well, we won’t be going back to any of these things: and in fact agriculture will become even more large scale, even more optimized and will employ even less people worldwide then today. It will become even more chemical intensive. Manufacturing also will become more automated with robots and microprocessors, even more optimized and even fewer people will work in manufacturing worldwide. Services is and has always been a farse, they are not needed.
What we have is the result of applied science to production, technology has and will increasingly eliminate most work and labor as we know it. This is an automatic process, no one can do anything about it, the forces to eliminate work are just too many and too strong worldwide. What will happen is most people will not have any work anymore and will not need to work. We will simply get free salaries, and will buy baby, buy instead of drill baby, drill. The first countries that will understadn this and simply payy people to live, give them a basic guaranteed salary, and a high salary at that, something like 3,000 dollars a month will have finally understoos how the real economy works and will work in the future. We have huge excess capacity in all productive endeavors worldwide that don’t know how and whre to discharge, we don’t need more work, we need less.
There will be even more sprawl and even more skyscrapers built worlwide. Peak oil is a fantasy of JHK, he does not know that the chevy volt is a breakthrough that will kill his fantasy of peak oil, because it is uses the engine as a generator to produce electricity for the elctric motors, and this engine can be fed ehtanol or methane or gas, or biodiesel or french fried oil. And huge BUSES, mass trasit with SIMPLE BUSES will also kill his peak oil fantasy.
JHK has a fundamentalist, religious – fundamentalist approach to society, in the sense that pleasure must be punished, we shouldn’t have McMansions and consume and go around in cars, etc. But this view is false and distorted because the automatic economy through applied science to production has eliminated work and labor and imposes us to simply enjoy, consume and sprawl as much as possible. This is the truth not his punishing view of going back to the past and everyone becoming farmers again.
Worldwide economy globalization will impose a basic pay rate that goes from 100 to 800 dollars a month. This is the average, about 300 to 400 dollars a month, the real average salary that will become standard. Everything else will become free, health care, homes, food, etc. There is simply no way to stop the huge excess capacity and production machine worldwide, it is and will generate a huge amount of wealth, that we don’t know how to deal with psychologically.
JHK thinks we will be going back to agriculture, others think we will be going back to manufacturing, others think we will be going back to services. Well, we won’t be going back to any of these things: and in fact agriculture will become even more large scale, even more optimized and will employ even less people worldwide than today. It will become even more chemical intensive. Manufacturing also will become more automated with robots and microprocessors, even more optimized and even fewer people will work in manufacturing worldwide. Services is and has always been a farse, they are not needed.
What we have is the result of applied science to production, technology has and will increasingly eliminate most work and labor as we know it. This is an automatic process, no one can do anything about it, the forces to eliminate work are just too many and too strong worldwide. What will happen is most people will not have any work anymore and will not need to work. We will simply get free salaries, and will buy baby, buy instead of drill baby, drill. The first countries that will understand this and simply pay people to live, give them a basic guaranteed salary, and a high salary at that, something like 3,000 dollars a month will have finally understood how the real economy works and will function properly in the future. We have huge excess capacity in all productive endeavors worldwide that doesn’t know how and where to discharge, we don’t need more work, we need less.
There will be even more sprawl and even more skyscrapers built worlwide. Peak oil is a fantasy of JHK, he does not know that the chevy volt is a breakthrough that will kill his fantasy of peak oil, because it is uses the engine as a generator to produce electricity for the electric motors, and this engine can be fed ethanol or methane or gas, or biodiesel or french fried oil. And huge BUS trasnsit networks, mass transit with SIMPLE BUSES will also kill his peak oil fantasy.
JHK has a fundamentalist, religious – fundamentalist approach to society, in the sense that pleasure must be punished, we shouldn’t have McMansions and consume and go around in cars, etc. But this view is false and distorted because the automatic economy through applied science to production has eliminated work and labor and imposes us to simply enjoy, consume and sprawl as much as possible. This is the truth not his punishing view of going back to the past and everyone becoming farmers again.
Worldwide economy globalization will impose a basic pay rate that goes from 100 to 800 dollars a month. This is the average, about 300 to 400 dollars a month, the real average salary that will become standard. Everything else will become free, health care, homes, food, etc. There is simply no way to stop the huge excess capacity and production machine worldwide, it is and will generate a huge amount of wealth, that we don’t know how to deal with psychologically. There are 100 million manufacturing workers from Pakistan to Indonesia and in Latin America and you guys think manufacturing will be coming back ? Insane …
From the Talk page on Johrei article at Wikipedia:
“Beware of this cult
someone edited and cut out the following part of the wekipedia page I had added. he is probably right that it goes against wikipedia article policies, sice I couldnt find any references to back up what I said, that doesnt make it untrue. and I truly was a member of the church for about 3 years. the worst years of my life, and I think I owe it to the public to warn them of the dangers of world messianity. but I think it belongs at least on the discussion page.?If someone can find a refference with information against world messianity, I suggest he write about it on the wikipedia page. my post said the following: – counter argument
– – – as an ex member of the church i would like to warn prospective followers that the church publishes many papers portraying many miraculous healings but i never witnesed one.
– – during their lectures they have also claimed to have resurected people from the dead, but they claim this happens in Angola (where it is almost impossible for the common member to check it’s verasity.
– – Also, some members and even senseis suggest that other members should stop taking medicines.
– – I belive that johrei and other things in world messianity are supperstitions and the church is after the money of members and prospective new members.
– – i hope that even if you want to delete this counter argument you will at least mention that johrei is considered to be superstition by some people.”
I certainly don’t want to delete what you write. I believe in freedom of speech and freedom of worship.
My only involvement was one Sunday eight years ago, when I was there for about an hour enjoying the beauty of the flowers.
I didn’t see anything at all that looked like religious fundamentalism. I left Johrei behind eight years ago and only thought about it today because of David Matthews post about the beauty he is experiencing in Florida.
There is so much beauty in the world and I am appreciating it more and more.
Does that mean I am part of a cult? I think so.
Cult comes from the same words as culture and cultivate, words that are beautiful and alive.
The history of the word “cult” is:
Etymology: French & Latin; French culte, from Latin cultus care, adoration, from colere to cultivate
I care for the world, I adore beautiful flowers, and I cultivate my spirit. I am part of the cult of life.
That’s a fine answer, Asoka. Very stylish.
Alas, plumbing a word’s etymological depths avails us little. The word is used the way it is used, and not much can be done about it.
Of course, I mean avails us little politically. What you or I get from the exercise (and I confess I frequently indulge in it) is a private pleasure.
You wouldn’t take my bet if you realized
how FEW average homes are serviced by a
500-megawatt output.
Asoka, it’s obvious that you post so
prolifically here that you CANNOT have
time to do adequate research so let me
educate you. An average American home
uses between 7 and 14 Megawatts per year
depending on location.
So the “grand initiatives” that are creating
500-600 MW generation (and you don’t cite
the TIMEFRAME over which they generate the
500-600 MW) is going to be paltry even if
that is a per-day output. Do the math.
Even if we assume that these generators
are outputting 600 MW per day, you’re
supplying TWENTY THOUSAND HOMES. A burg.
I exhort you to stop spending ten hours a
day on this site and start doing elementary
arithmetic. Even if we succeeded in getting
a hundred solar generation sites going in the
next decade on the scales of the model projects you cite (optimistic since many entire COUNTRIES
like Brazil are GIVING UP on solar), you end up
a decade later even unable to solarize the
entirety of … SEATTLE.
And I’m using the most unbelievably optimistic
of scenarios since, in actuality, you have a
200 MW plant here and a 333 MW plant there
and, in toto, you’ve got a couple dozen such
experiments and THEY were over a decade in
the making. A hundred of the 500-600 MW
scale is panglossian optimism that would make
a florid manic seem like a Cassandra. And even
if Cassandra was dead wrong you’d end up
solarizing 0.63 percent of the USA.
I was waiting for you to fall right into the
numeric trap and you took the bait hook, line,
and sinker. You’re just determined to be Mr.
Obama’s lead cheerleader on this CFN blog and
when you don’t do your homework it rather makes
you look like a shill … and not a thinker.
Case closed.
Eleuthero
A little basic physics: A 500 MW plant can generate
5000 GWhr of power sufficient for 500,000 homes using 10,000 kwh per year. It is important that one understand the basics of the units of power (watts) and energy (watt-hours) and realize they are not the same.
Quiz,
William James was a late 20th century philosopher/psychologist, more likely a Baptist than a Buddhist.
What he was referring to was not just the obvious fact that “experience” forms a framework for how we interpret reality but the stranger phenomenon of how what conclusions we draw from that experience, creates a reality all it’s own.
JHK and a few of the posters here do a remarkable job demonstrating that. Jimmy goes out for his bike ride and all he seems to see is evidence for his economic theories. That’s no judgment on the validity of those theories, just evidence that what he experiences is now influenced by his beliefs in a way far more profound than he likely suspects. What he attends to IS now his reality.
Whenever we see ourselves drawing strong conclusions about things, it’s a good idea to keep this in mind. It may seem obvious to the more ‘open-minded’, but we seldom recognize how deeply this tendency to reify can go.
Which is not to suggest that this is necessarily a bad thing. If what you are attending to is ‘healthy’ mentally or physically then you could conclude it’s a good thing….relatively. If, on the other hand, you are locked into a cycle of seeing a great deal of negativity because you believe Americans are all cheese doodle eating swine, well…..you’re the bean counter, you do the math.
“All of the effete, bourgois modes of living would give way to something very harsh and unforgiving.”
I think that your statement that our ways of living will give way to something harsh and unforgiving is entirely correct.
Even if we make a relatively peaceful and orderly transition from an oil based industrial economy to a non industrial, non oil based agricultural world, I don’t think we fully realize how hard it is to grow enough food to feed a family. Can you imagine if we go back to ploughing fields using a horse or an ox instead of a tractor or harvesting by hand? Do we have any idea what crop yields would be like if we have no chemical fertilizers or pesticides?
I don’t think we understand the depth of skill and knowledge it takes to live that kind of life. I think that individually we are very specialized in our skill sets. This specialization (that comes from division of labour) made our society very well off in material terms. But, as a consequence, I don’t think that we as individuals have the wide range of knowledge and skills that people had 100 – 200 years ago.
We depend on 1% to 2% of the population to grow enough food for the rest of us. Mechanization makes farms massively productive. What happens if this mechanization is no longer possible?
I am not much interested in the political aspect. As an undergraduate one of my professors said: “The fundamental hermeneutic method is philological”
So, when I want to get past the contemporary assignation of meaning and go back to the original meaning, I look at the etymology. It can often be enlightening. As you say, a private pleasure.
So in a nutshell it sounds like Reality is in the Eye of the Beholder.
Eightm writes: “There will be even more sprawl and even more skyscrapers built worlwide (sic). Peak oil is a fantasy of JHK, he does not know that the chevy volt is a breakthrough that will kill his fantasy of peak oil, because it is uses the engine as a generator to produce electricity for the electric motors, and this engine can be fed ethanol or methane or gas, or biodiesel or french fried oil. And huge BUS trasnsit (sic) networks, mass transit with SIMPLE BUSES will also kill his peak oil fantasy. ”
Please file this under “T” for techno-triumphalism.
I was in Saratoga this weekend too. It is a wonderful small city with amazing turn of the last century architecture. I kept thinking that at some point in the past this city had plenty of money to build things of lasting value. Thankfully the current generation didn’t turn downtown into a Walmart.
I rode my bike from Lake George to Glens Falls along an old train line that has been converted to a bike path. Maybe it will be a train line again someday.
I rode my bike through Saratoga State Park. There are wonderful building there built by the WPA. I wondered why we are bailing out banks during this recession instead of building parks for the next generations. Please help me blog my way out of my malaise. http://www.aimlow.com
No, that would be nihilism. In WJ’s view, which is consistent with Buddhism, reality is arising in interdependence between you and other causes and conditions. This BTW, is also the position of many of the most imminent modern physicists regarding the implications of quantum mechanics (non-locality etc.). As was the case with Galileo, it will probably take a hundred years for the rest of science to catch up. The interesting thing is that Buddhist contemplatives intuitively reasoned this out about 2.500 years ago, a remarkable achievement by any standard!
Dave Matthews may be living in paradise but I’ll bet he cries when some thirteen year old girl beats him out of ten cents worth of royalties on a download.
Cows, I would not deny that the original inhabitants of this continent could be cruel to one other.
My argument is: there was no genocidal intent in internecine, tribal warfare. Oftentimes simply touching your opponent (counting coup) was considered a victory over them. Many times, captives were incorporated into the tribe as valued, and legitimate members.
Also, in addition, many of the tribes were matriarchal. Matriarchal tribes have a tradition of being more peaceful in general.
My argument is: that the natives are misrepresented in the mainstream media as being soul-less, murdering savages when in fact the white conquerors were the true, genocidal murderers. In our popular consciousness the whites are usually the heroes rescuing hapless victims from the murdering “Indians”. I argued that this is revisionist, triumphalist pseudo-history. The invasion of an alien euro-ideology based on enslavement, hierarchy and the extraction of the common tribal wealth for private profit is what precipitated the extermination of the tribes.
What happened to the tribes is a harbinger of what is in store for all of us if we continue to demolish the planetary biosphere to support our resource intensive, high-consumption lifestyles.
Sadly, our McHouse culture is transparent and illusory. Like our McHouses: our society requires enormous energetic input to maintain it’s ability to keep it’s occupants comfortable. Once the inputs are dampened or removed our McHouse culture “delaminates” (my favorite Kunstlerism) with rapidity.
Eleuthero said
So your syllogism goes like this:
1) Eleuthero set a numbers trap.
2) Asoka fell into the trap.
Ipso Facto
3) Asoka is not a thinker.
We have an honest difference of opinion. I gave numbers. You gave numbers. We are arguing about a bet that goes ten years into the future, and neither of us knows what will happen in the future.
My contention is that there are so many variables unaccounted for that we cannot say “Case closed” … in fact, that kind of attitude is unscientific because science always allows for the possibility of new data, new discoveries.
Aww, man, I want some of what this guy or gal smokes, thats the good shit, man!!
they must be just sitting in a grow room in Humboldt somewhere just sittin’ & smokin’, sittin’ & smokin’….
Ha! Like the government is just going to pay us not to work and to go out & consume. That goes against EVERYTHING the Republicans beleive in. Soylent Green is on the menu sooner than this little fantasy….
But really, I DO want some of this shit to smoke….
People here have no idea how much EXCESS CAPACITY is available worldwide: there are millions of workers in the world, millions of scientists working in technology and you guys think that just looking at a McMansion defines how society will evolve ? Worldwide economy has TOO MUCH MONEY on its hands, it seems to be around 100 trillion dollars available that DOESN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO ?!?!?? WHY ? because technology has automated manufacturing and agriculture, we can harness as much energy as we want from many sources, we can optimize energy uses with SIMPLE BUS networks controlled by internet scheduling, or by teleworking from the internet, etc. Are you guys crazy or what ? are you kidding me ? We now live in automated societies where work has been (should be) abolished and is no longer needed, we need free salaries, 3,000 dollars a month, FREE FOOD, FREE HEALTH CARE AND FREE HOMES! Wake up people, don’t buy knstler’s fundamentalist doom, it is all false.
JHK thinks we will be going back to agriculture, others think we will be going back to manufacturing, others think we will be going back to services. Well, we won’t be going back to any of these things: and in fact agriculture will become even more large scale, even more optimized and will employ even less people worldwide than today. It will become even more chemical intensive. Manufacturing also will become more automated with robots and microprocessors, even more optimized and even fewer people will work in manufacturing worldwide. Services is and has always been a farse, they are not needed.
What we have is the result of applied science to production, technology has and will increasingly eliminate most work and labor as we know it. This is an automatic process, no one can do anything about it, the forces to eliminate work are just too many and too strong worldwide. What will happen is most people will not have any work anymore and will not need to work. We will simply get free salaries, and will buy baby, buy instead of drill baby, drill. The first countries that will understand this and simply pay people to live, give them a basic guaranteed salary, and a high salary at that, something like 3,000 dollars a month will have finally understood how the real economy works and will function properly in the future. We have huge excess capacity in all productive endeavors worldwide that doesn’t know how and where to discharge, we don’t need more work, we need less.
There will be even more sprawl and even more skyscrapers built worlwide. Peak oil is a fantasy of JHK, he does not know that the chevy volt is a breakthrough that will kill his fantasy of peak oil, because it is uses the engine as a generator to produce electricity for the electric motors, and this engine can be fed ethanol or methane or gas, or biodiesel or french fried oil. And huge BUS transit networks, mass transit with SIMPLE BUSES will also kill his peak oil fantasy.
JHK has a fundamentalist, religious – fundamentalist approach to society, in the sense that pleasure must be punished, we shouldn’t have McMansions and consume and go around in cars, etc. But this view is false and distorted because the automatic economy through applied science to production has eliminated work and labor and imposes us to simply enjoy, consume and sprawl as much as possible. This is the truth not his punishing view of going back to the past and everyone becoming farmers again.
Worldwide economy globalization will impose a basic pay rate that goes from 100 to 800 dollars a month. This is the average, about 300 to 400 dollars a month, the real average salary that will become standard. Everything else will become free, health care, homes, food, etc. There is simply no way to stop the huge excess capacity and production machine worldwide, it is and will generate a huge amount of wealth, that we don’t know how to deal with psychologically. There are 100 million manufacturing workers from Pakistan to Indonesia and in Latin America and you guys think manufacturing will be coming back ? Insane …
I’m confused. Is the Dave Matthews being referred to the delightful misanthrope Dave Mathews who occasionally posts here, or the Dave Matthews from Virginia whose band is infamous for its boring, tediously improvisational rock?
Matt Groening, somewhere in his sprawling opus, made his position on the Dave Matthews Band abundantly clear: It’s not music.
Seriously, 8m, let me tell you why your little fantasy won’t happen.
Back at the beginning of the Ronnie Raygun era (prolly before you were born), some big Ivy school did an analysis of the supply side, big tax cut for the rich & corporations theory.
They came to the conclusion that what would work better would be the complete elimination of the fed income tax for anyone making (at the time) less than $100k/year. The reasoning being is that the government would save big on focusing the IRS on the rich and big corps, AND that those in that income level would spend every cent they made anyway, thus stimulating the economy (some at the upper end would start to save a little).
The also proposed that the wealthy should have a progressive, but fixed tax rates, with no or few deductions & exemptions. As for big corporations, they should pay a complete flat tax with NO deductions or exemptions, since they have them for things they would have to spend the money on anyway.
Well, guess what happened? Yep, you got it. the supply-siders won, and here we are today.
I read that during the Bush I admin, the same school went back over every thing and came to the same conclusions, supply side didn’t and would never work precisely because the rich would start investing all thier money in things to make themselves even richer, like hedge funds, etc.
Which is basically what has happened.
So, sorry, but it aint never gonna happen.
Now, how do I contact you off line for some of that great shit you are smokin’?
The Aztecs sacraficed hundred of thousands of people a year to their gods. They were terrfied that Quetzcoatl would return someday and punish them for perverting his religion of love. Quetzcoatl, a fair skinned man with red hair, had taught the people to offer their hearts up to God – a very different thing than cutting SOMEONE ELSE’S heart out and holding it up to the sun. And in a way he did return, in the person of Hernando Cortez who put an end to this disgusting civilization and its religion.
The Aztecs were interlopers from the north. They took over the technology and astronomy from others who had come before them. They must have been able administrators though in spite of their horrors. The priests would sometimes skin some of the victims and wear the skins over themselves. The Incas would sometimes skin a victim’s face and wear it as a mask. Nice, huh? Do you ever feel like doing things like that? Me neither. Some people think there may have been a practical aspect to the Aztec horror. After the heart had been cut out, the body would be toppled down the pyramid, cut up, and sold as meat. The Aztecs didn’t have herds and were far too numerous to hunt. They may well have been operating on a serious protein deficiency.
Yes some primitive people had a form of ritual warfare like counting coup. The same peoples would also usually engage in deadly combat at other times. The tribes of New Guinea line up a hundred feet or so from each other and throw insults and spears. It’s good fun and a test of agility to dodge them. They also go on murderous raids from time to time.
I believe the Hurons were completely destroyed by another tribe – so they
did not eschew the idea of genocide either even though it looks to have been rare and not against the individuals per se. The survivors would usually be able to join up with another tribe that spoke a similar language and hence not totally alien.
Canniblaism was widespread thoughout much of Africa, Australia, Oceania, Central America, and even into the South and Southwest of North America. I’m not sure about South America. It has been severely hushed up by the PC anthropologists of the Boas School. You are obviously a dupe of these Marxist Noble Savage worshipers.
Addenda: I asked a guy about the matriarchy once. The Iroquois had a council of women who made the chiefs and could break them as well. And they were one of the most warlike tribes on the continent. This guy, who worked with them on legal issues, said it only looked that way on paper. In reality, they were patriarchs like most tribes. I didn’t have time to go more into it with him. Sometimes people get confused between matrilineal and matriarchal. Many cultures have had descent through the mother, but very few cultures (almost none) are dominated by women. Just a few tiny ones here and there. No such culture could thrive and compete with other large peoples.
The Indians were very hierarchical with some even having slaves. The Cherokee had Black Slaves. Recently the Blacks tried to get legally incorporated into the tribe. They were voted out because the Elders knew they would use up all the money granted to the tribe.
see rifkins ‘ THE END OF WORK’..or see reviews at amazon.
i bought it 10? years ago thinking utopia was round the bend. no its like ‘TLE’ companion book.
Cannibla ism..is that what yr sometimes guilty of? blablabla ism?
and how many hours/years did you alot to digging up all this info? blacks banned from indian tribe…or does a ‘whites site’ do the digging for you?
indeed..the moose of maine are dying off due to warming.this will make it worse.
Yes, its like the press saying ‘ people are spending savings because they are confinent the recovery is here’.
‘how deeply this tendency to reify can go’
ala ‘ THE BLACK SWAN’?
Asoka, Eleuthro:
Apparently you did not read my response to Eleuthro
showing he had a basic lack of knowledge of energy and power and his case closed was based on errors leading to an error of at least a factor of 20. and this is before we enter the realm of “techno-triumphalism” which has at least some merit.
Foolish mind
Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work is a big yawn. It’s also America, America, America. Yawn.
Mindfool,
So his “numbers trap” did not even contain legitimate numbers? LOL.
I want to publish a retraction.
Yesterday I impugned the integrity of skilled electricians, bricklayers, masons, plumbers, framing carpenters, HVAC techs and concrete workers along with tile layers, cabinetry experts and finish carpenters.
My sincere apologies folks, keep up the good work, even though your useful skills are being wasted on those McMansions and McHouses.
But I’ve noticed that your “answers” to
many basic questions involve giving LISTS
as if the lists prove that scalable activity
is occurring in some arena. If you give a
list of fifteen solar companies, that is
NOT evidence that scalable solar will result
from that. That’s why I impugn your thinking.
Your responses either involve inundation with
lists (which prove nothing) or they lack numerical
application. For example, when I told you that
Sun Power was a joke you gave me a list of their
clients. In fact, MY COUSIN WORKS FOR SUN POWER
and they went through a huge layoff because,
bottom line, their products are terrible. If
you want my cousin’s name I’ll supply it via
private email if you wish.
You’re also dodging many other assertions which
could be easily answered like: 1) What vocation
do you have outside of posting on CFN, 2) Why
do you think a recanting of lists is a conclusive
proof of anything, and 3) Why do you assert a
“difference of opinion” when I give you FACTS
to deal with that you dodge like when I did
some calculations about what percentage of
America can be solarized even with YOUR rather
pie-in-the-sky enumeration of a few projects.
Solar scales very poorly. Brazil is the first
major country to nearly give up on solar (it
was broadcast on Bloomberg TV on 4/2). Battery
wear and disposal has never been scalably dealt
with. Most people don’t have the money to
solarize their house and when you’re “off the
grid” it means that a major malfunction might
mean no heat, no cooling, no cooking, no power
for a week even with panic repairs. There’s no
utility company to act as a backstop.
I’ve read a great many of your posts on this
blog, Asoka, and I’ve got no quibble with the
emotion of HOPE if it has soberminded facts to
back it up. I’ve also read copiously from sites
like theoildrum.com, Jim’s “Long Emergency”, and
from the writings of two friends of mine who
are petroleum engineers.
I think the sum total of data, however you slice
it, means that: 1) Altfuels depend on the
existing oil infrastructure to be built and
maintained, 2) Altfuels infrastructures tend
to break more, 3) Mass manufacture of altfuel
cells like solar panels is nowhere in sight,
and 4) Nothing comes close to nuclear.
Nuclear power is going to be the only way of
keeping the lights on. It’s a Faustian Bargain
but it beats autarky and violence.
Eleuthero
That’s why I asked Asoka for the TIME UNITS
during which the 500 MW was dispensed. I
fully realize that it’s kilowatt HOURS and
megawatt HOURS that are relevant, not just
outputted wattage.
Many people make claims based on nonstandard
usage of various terms of output which must
be time-based or they are worthless. If you
knew WHAT I KNOW you’d be rather more parsimonious
in meting out your vigilante justice on my
words.
You can now return to being Asoka’s ally if
you wish but you’re not going to bully me
when it was I who asked Asoka to clarify
his own terms of usage. Even you use
terms like 10,000 KWHr instead of being
nicer to the whole board and just saying
TEN MEGAWATT HOURS. Yet you couldn’t
even spell my name right so what should
I come to expect?
Finally, the market often produces a “proof
by (non)existence” of the viability, reliability,
and scalability of products when they’ve had
a few decades in the marketplace to work the
kinks out. As things stand, there isn’t even
a MIDSIZED American city that’s more than a
few percent solarized.
Mister Market tells you what many “geniuses”
do not want to hear. Sigh.
Eleuthero
When somebody like you comes along and makes the statement: “We don’t even have a start on a nationwide manufacture of solar panels” my providing a list of USA solar manufacturers is all the proof necessary that we indeed have a “start”.
When you make a statement that SunPower is a TOTAL JOKE [your capitalization], all it takes is a list of clients AND A NASDAQ LISTING FOR $1.86 BILLION DOLLARS to disprove your claim.
I have provided much more evidence than lists, like specific legislation, with BILLIONS of dollars of tax credits and subsidies available for solar, the largest legislative support for solar in USA history which was pushed by Obama and passed into law in 2009 as the Investment and Recovery Act.
You are welcome to your skepticism, though it appears to be based on anecdotal evidence from your cousin.
You have thrown out the red herring of “solar scalability”. Unfortunately for you, your argument (suggestion really, since you provide no hard data) is not supported by actual events.
Everyone who has worked in the solar industry is familiar with solar’s historical growth curve – an exponential increase since 1975 averaging somewhere around 30% per year, which is pretty astounding on its own.
What you may not know is that the rate of increase correlates with annual production capacity. Intuitively, one would expect that as the industry grew, it would become harder and harder to maintain exponential growth.
This is certainly true in the limit, or the entire universe would eventually be converted into solar panels. However, looking at the data over the past 35 years (especially the past 10 years), we see the opposite trend, i.e. as the industry has grown, the rate of increase has increased as well! This trend is due to both the rapidly dropping cost of solar power and more widespread public acceptance.
So your skepticism is not supported by the reality of what is happening in the solar industry.
Perhaps your skepticism is based on outdated preconceptions that no longer apply. In the 70s and 80s there was a high energy pay back time (EPBT), but that is mostly a non-issue today as nearly all PV technologies have a EPBT less than 2 years (i.e. the power produced during the first 2 years of a panel’s 25+ year operating life will equal the amount of power required to produce it), with some technologies paying back in less than a year.
The other constraint you raise relates to materials availability and that is also not a problem for scalability.
At Berkeley they did a great study of resource bases and material availability for a whole host of potential photovoltaic materials. You can read it here:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es8019534
This study and others like it have shown that there are some device designs limited by material availability to less than 1 TW/yr (CdTe limited by Te, CIGS limited by In and to a lesser extent Se). However, there are many other device structures that show effectively unlimited material availability.
In summary, you seem to be glomming onto issues you see as problems that, in your mind, damn solar, when the truth is that whatever problems there are are not intractable.
But your way you can continue ignoring the possibilities solar offers. It kind of reminds me of the Wright Brothers and the early critics of flight who gave assurances that airplanes would never be able to fly.
Most economical interpretations that have been attempted have totally failed to predict the future: kunstler’s is just as useless and failed as it is biased towards what he would like happens and not what actually happens. What actually happens is that there are 100 million manufacturing workers across the world and he thinks “we should go back to making something of value”. There are probably just as many if not even more farmers across the world and he thinks “we should grow our own food in our backyard”. At least he dismisses services as the jokes that they are: financial jobs are just there to rip off people, banks just do the same, the whole health care fiasco is an arena of cruelty and squeezing out money from people when they are in pain. Nice “progress”, nice “services”. Well these services are not needed.
What is needed is a huge BUS transportation system, simple BUSES that can connect cities and suburbs, managed by public or private companies, doesn’t matter. Mass transit is what is needed to improve energy efficiency and kill the peak oil fantasy and lie-deception. Also cheap rents, the idea of owning a home is retarded and old fashioned, homes should be for rent, and should be very cheap. There is excess real estate capacity all across the world, look at the skyscrapers in China, Dubai, all the buldings in Spain, etc.
The world is now a globalized economy, get over it, it must be measured globally, it is now one unit.
As soon as I read that the Chevy Volt
was going to make Peak Oil seem like
a relic I knew we had another Jiminy
Cricket optimist on our hands.
Tell me Dr. Science … where does the
CHARGE for the batteries in the Volt
come from?? From a power cord to your
ELECTRICAL OUTLET, that’s where from.
Tell me, EIGHTM, what powers the power
plants that supply the electrical power
that feeds the Volt battery?? Answers:
Coal, natural gas … FOSSIL FUELS.
Does ANYBODY here follow their own thinking
out to a logical conclusion. It appears
that most just find the conclusion they
WANT and then conveniently skip how the
FOSSIL FUEL INFRASTRUCTURE is going to
supply these “green” technologies.
Asoka is another of these thinkers that
follows a train of thought as far as his
conclusions will permit but no farther.
The solar panels he loves so dearly are
unbelievably dependent on the existing
fossil fuel structure for manufacturing
and they are NOT easily recyclable which
means they are a depleting material.
Even the ENORMOUS solar arrays now being
built in the Mojave Desert (and which are
actually being used by PGE and other
utilities) take up a truly gargantuan
amount of space to create an amount of
power that might power up Palmdale and
the tiny Coachella Valley communities.
It’s as if the solar zealots aren’t aware
of a simple thing like … if the area to
solarize a community is a fifth the size
of the community, you aren’t dealing with
a scalable technology. I can only reiterate,
for the THIRD time, that if solar was all
that Asoka claims it is, then why do the
developing countries consider it FAR inferior
to wind and geothermal??
Don’t give me that baloney about the exponential
growth since 1975. That’s 35 years, dude, and
in the meantime wind, among others, has just
made dogmeat out of solar. Until a SOLAR
CAPACITOR IS BUILT YOU CAN FORGET ABOUT SOLAR
AS A SCALABLE TECHNOLOGY.
Gimme a call when that happens because otherwise
there is NO PASSIVE STORAGE TECHNOLOGY that is
going to keep the lights on.
Nuclear is the only sensible way to fast-track
to keeping the lights on in 13 years when every-
body from theoildrum.com to the IEA says that
we MUST replace fossil fuel technologies to
keep cars running and lights on.
Asoka … show me a single country on the face
of the earth where solar supplies 20% of what
WIND supplies. Yet wind is a crude technology
which hasn’t had nearly the money thrown at it
that solar has. Solar is a BUST.
No, your lists of SunPower’s clients cannot
explain huge layoffs or the fact that the
stock has lost almost FIFTY percent of its
value in one of the great one-year bull
markets in NYSE history. I guess you also
know more than the collective knowledge of
the market as well.
You look at Sunpower’s “huge” projects and
one is SEVEN PV plants whose total output will
be 16.5 megawatts requiring a total of 63
hectares. Wow. That’s a LOT of space to
create a net amount of power which will power
a couple thousand houses. These projects,
according to Sunpower’s own announcement
will create a whopping [sic] FIFTY jobs.
And this is one of Sunpower’s high-powered
press releases.
If we stopped this diddling and fast-tracked
a couple of hundred nukes in this country,
we’d be a lot closer to avoiding energy
Armageddon than all of these altfuels things
from pig shit to solar that are not amounting
to more than marginal contributions.
Hell, we’d be farther along if we’d invested
in WIND like Germany where nearly 20% of
electricity is wind-supplied but, again,
to build, maintain, and operate the turbines
stands on the mighty shoulders of the EXISTING
OIL INFRASTRUCTURE.
If you’re out there reading this stuff, Jim,
I feel your pain, buddy. Your book studied
the non-nuclear altfuels to a fare-thee-well
and the market … and some large economies
… have agreed with you … with or without
regret that the altfuels haven’t come close
to working out.
It’s one thing to have Olympian levels of
denial in the unwashed masses who never
think of these issues. It’s another level
of sad when people who appear to be involved
in energy issues continue to try to be
Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill when
at-hand technologies, like nuclear, MUST be
built RIGHT NOW.
Eleuthero
Yeah right, dude, we should all waste thousands
of gallons of jet fuel to send rice to Japan so that
American rice growers have access to a market
that needs our rice as much as it needs a second
asshole.
Gawd … a utopian globalist. In a debate, which
will never happen but which I’d dearly love to
see, Kunstler would make mincemeat out of
your insanity. Yeah, let’s turn the whole world
into global migrant laborers who live in Dubai
this year, Bucharest next year, and Rio the year
after.
Houses are “outmoded” so I guess FAMILIES
are outmoded, too, … right?? You really ought
to double up on your doses of anti-nutter pills
because your model of civilization sounds like it
was invented by Dr. Strangelove.
Eleuthero
Read the link:
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/3dunhamjones.html
Notice EXCESS CAPACITY, overproduction are not concepts I discovered: they have been present for many decades, and get worse each year. Just robots and microprocessors automating jobs will create ever more free wealth, that societies don’t know how to deal with psychologically. Therefore the end mathematical solution to this is free salaries, mass transit, elimination of most work as no longer necessary. Or war and extreme conflict amongst many different sets of people over many resources and for many reasons.
If even a small percentage of production work in all sectors (primary, secondary and services) is serial and accumulative, there is absolutely no way that work will be available for future generations. By serial I mean for example how many buildings can you keep on building worldwide ? how many computer programs can you keep on writing worldwide ? how much further can you optimize production ? how many more new discoveries can possibly be made by thousands of scientists ? How many more consumer items can be produced and destroeyed yearly, etc.
From the link:
” Post-industrialism can be defined as the convergence of the “Information Age” and the “Service Economy.” Beginning in the 1970s, increasing competition from the recovered economies of Japan and Germany, as well as market saturation and stagflation, led American corporations to shift from strategies of high-volume mass production (Fordism) to strategies of high-quality, consumer-responsive, flexible production (post-Fordism).(4) Speed of innovation and changeable product lines have become key strategies for inducing demand, but require retoolable and increasingly computerized equipment and coordination.
This has occurred simultaneously with the development and mass production of computers and telecommunication networks. The availability of digital technologies and the need to better coordinate supply and demand (after the overproduction and recessions of the ’70s) has led to new corporate reliance on information about markets and inventories. New jobs were created in information services such as market research, advertising, and financial services, while telecommunications networks allowed corporations to shift manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor pools overseas or in suburbia, or to replace them through automation. While manufacturing is still an important function of the post-industrial economy, it has lost its dominant position to the production of images and information. Indeed, the hardware and software required for information management epitomizes the temporariness of post-industrialism. Even yearly upgrades do not keep pace with the speed of obsolescence. ”
and also:
” Feverish construction through the ’80s produced nearly 4.6 billion square feet of total store space in the U.S. — about twenty square feet for every person in the country, the addition of a 34,000-square-foot store every hour.(22) Population grew 10% in the ’80s, retail floor space 80%.22″
This is called EXCESS CAPACITY, more labor executed than is necessary.
Thanks for the link – which I just read (& presumably was read by JHK back when it was originally published in ’97).
I don’t get where you derive your “globalism is the answer” perspective.
From the link:
“Increasingly estranged from the
public realm, from a society’s commitment
to preserving its past and protecting
its future, we live instead in the
private, expedient landscapes of mobile
capital, dedicated largely to the
present. And such landscapes are
probably the least sustainable systems
imaginable.”
and
“As we pave paradise
and further distance jobs from cities,
we reproduce urban poverty in suburbia,
exacerbate racial and economic
segregation, and force increased dependence
on automobiles. We are
building neither a sustainable landscape
nor a sustainable culture.”
Although the article is an indictment of the architectural profession (as it was being practised at the time), I found it to be a succinct (and prescient) indictment of post-industrialism’s UN-sustainability.
Eleuth, you have provided me several laugh-out-loud momments this morning … thanks.
BTW, as to your 1:44AM post, the definition of recant is: to withdraw or disavow a statement, opinion, etc. The word you were going for escapes me at the moment.
I am mainly interested in this energy discussion from the standpoint of trying to make a buck in the market. I believe, as you do, that nuclear is the way to go (I own some NLR stock) but I think it is legitimate to advance on all fronts (wind, solar, wave, etc) to allow for the break-throughs that occur entirely by chance (see The Black Swan). I own some stock in a Chinese solar Co, symbol JASO, which popped up more than 9% yesterday based on improved outlook.
“This is called EXCESS CAPACITY, more labor executed than is necessary.” 8M
Oh, where do we start? Dude or Dudette, you seem to be assuming that this is the answer, but its not.
The PTB have to be willing & able to do two things first: Decide how to fill that capacity, and how to use it. But in the current Capitalist paradigm that rules, this will only be done if it can generate and/or increase the profits of the corporations doing it, and increase the wealth of those who run/own them.
If for some reason, they sat down with you and smoked some of that great weed you are smoking, and suddenly decided that “Hey! Thats a great idea! We will eliminate all taxes on the lower classes, and for those who are unable to find work because we shipped all their jobs to China, we will just pay them $3000 a month ($36k/yr) to consume all the crap now made in China that they used to make here! Wow! Pass that joint….”
Yeah, it would be great, but its NOT going to happen.
The right wing here will sooner start serving Soylent Green at McyDee’s than start paying someone $3000/month for not working.
You see, they have this horribly twisted “work ethic”, either you work, or you die. Right now its ok if you just crawl off to a box under the overpass and die. But soon, to use your words, they might start “executing” the excess labor capacity. Then start looking out for that new burger at BK: “It’s not Cow! It’s not Chicken! Its the all new Long Pork loose meat burger! Yummm! Now at a BK near you!”
So sorry dude, your Utopian fantasy won’t happen, at lest not in the USA.
But seriosly, how can I get some of that great weed you obviously are tokin? OH, hey, JHK sure could use a little too, ya tink?
‘how deeply this tendency to reify can go’
ala ‘ THE BLACK SWAN’
=========================================
Assuming the ‘black swan’ you are referring to is a JHK style collapse, that is certainly possible of course, but not a slam dunk as some here would suggest. The World/U.S. economic picture is exceedingly complex, unfathomably so, as a matter fact. Predicting the future of this puzzle?….we are no where near that level of understanding.
I think ‘Eightm’ is on to something when he mentions the moralistic POV doomerism almost requires. I agree that crass consumerism, 27/7 media etc., have some very serious downsides. As a regular practicioner of a religious tradition (spending far more time on it than any Christian I know) I would not make a case for materialistic values exemplified by the quote “the one who dies with the most toys wins!”. I’m actually very sympathetic to moral views which desire greater simplicity and less manipulation of the environment. I think we would all be happier with less!
That being said, I sit here in a warm, well lit room, with a full belly in front of a screen with ever changing images of whatever I choose. I’m not unaware of the contrast between my ‘ideal self’ and the ‘self’ enjoying these comforts. I have a friend who says he would be quite comfortable in 14th century Tibet, no advocate of modernity for sure. I don’t think I would so gladly surrender my 21st century comforts.
Can we have it both ways? I doubt it, not without population control in any case, but maybe that’s just my own moralistic bias showing through.
Maybe later I’ll open a nice vintage bottle of Santa Rita Valley Pinot Noir and discuss it with my wife over dinner. It’s just my karma, afterall……;)
I know what you mean about thinking things through. Like when a couple of years ago people suddenly realized that using grain to turn into fuel was contributing to food price increases and food shortages in poor countries like Mexico. I’m not naturally inclined to worry about the plight of hungry Mexicans but this bothered even a heartless prick like me.
Did any of the environmentalist big thinkers ever stop to think that turning food into fuel might make people starve? I doubt it. Or maybe they did and decided that impoverished Mexicans were expendable… tortillas and beans once a day vs tortillas and beans twice a day, what the hell, they’re poor anyway.
In our apartment building the owners decided they would replace old fashioned light bulbs in certain of our light fixtures in our apartments with the new fancy shmancy bulbs that allegedly use less electricity (it appears the owners drank the “green” koolaid). The thing is that if you throw out old bulbs you need to manufacture new ones which consumes, you guessed it, energy. Then the problem with the new ones is that they constantly blow out and need to be replaced which necessitates making more of them which of course consumes, you guessed it, energy.
I would be shocked if anyone took even the elementary step of calculating the difference in the energy consumed by manufacturing the new bulbs vs the old bulbs and then comparing that to the energy saved by the new bulbs ie energy invested vs energy saved. I suspect they would not have liked the answer. Better to not know.
I know what you mean also about the anti nuke bias. In Ontario for years we’ve been hearing that we’re facing future electricty shortages. Brown outs, black outs etc. So, dear oh dear, what to do.
Coal fired plants are a no no. The idiot Liberal premier of Ontario decided he was going to close them all. But, Dickhead, I said to him, what are you going to replace them with? Because electricity shortages loom.
So they had a look at nuclear power plants. We have some old ones here but our squeamishness about nukes is matched only by our technical incompetence in nuclear technology.
So, I said, Dickhead, go to GE or Westinghouse. Or barring that, seeing as buying nuclear technology from the evil empire would send your idiot, long haired, sandal wearing, dope smoking, lefty followers into shit fits, go to Pakistan. Or India.
It will never happen. You won’t get more nuclear power plants here. When you stop to think about the opposition: dope smoking lefties, environmentalist moonies, middle class nimbys, plus the court challenges, the environmental assessments it would be decades before a spade turns any earth. We will be utterly and totally fucked long before then.
So what did they do? They assumed the problem away! They said holy smokes, our projected rate of increase in power consumption isn’t nearly what we thought it was! Problem? What problem? There’s no problem!
Well, from my vantage point, I’m finding most “signs” pointing to a couple of future directions. Contraction or collapse. Although a sensible contraction MAY avoid chaotic collapse, I don’t believe that’s “assured”, but at least it might be a option to actually put hope and effort into.
I find all these technological, racial, and ever-expanding hyper-energy-dependent utopias to be dangerously delusional. Those that pursue them in blind, false hope will be those that will perish by their own creations. (Witness the fun had by those using aquifers poisoned by “fracking” for natural gas.) Be careful what you wish for.
“Everything else will become free, health care, homes, food, etc. There is simply no way to stop the huge excess capacity and production machine worldwide”
====================
8M, I want you to knock it off with this ridiculous wet dream of your’s right now. The world is going to continue getting up and going to work for the rest of my lifetime, your lifetime and everyone else’s lifetime and probably ALL future lifetimes. Think it through … what the hell would we do with ourselves? I have this nightmare of dying and going to hell where I am forced to watch women’s morning TV talk shows and soaps for all of eternity. Humankind has not evolved psycologically to sit on his/her ass in a cheap rental apt and do nothing.
I have no answers, there are no answers only automatic trends and processes: globalization is automatic, can’t be stopped, can’t be governed, as I said in another message above:
What we have is the result of applied science to production, technology has and will increasingly eliminate most work and labor as we know it. This is an automatic process, no one can do anything about it, the forces to eliminate work are just too many and too strong worldwide. What will happen is most people will not have any work anymore and will not need to work. We will simply get free salaries, and will buy baby, buy instead of drill baby, drill. The first countries that will understand this and simply pay people to live, give them a basic guaranteed salary, and a high salary at that, something like 3,000 dollars a month will have finally understood how the real economy works and will function properly in the future. We have huge excess capacity in all productive endeavors worldwide that doesn’t know how and where to discharge, we don’t need more work, we need less.
Worldwide economy globalization will impose a basic pay rate that goes from 100 to 800 dollars a month. This is the average, about 300 to 400 dollars a month, the real average salary that will become standard. Everything else will become free, health care, homes, food, etc. There is simply no way to stop the huge excess capacity and production machine worldwide, it is and will generate a huge amount of wealth, that we don’t know how to deal with psychologically. There are 100 million manufacturing workers from Pakistan to Indonesia and in Latin America and you guys think manufacturing will be coming back ? Insane …
Most economical interpretations that have been attempted have totally failed to predict the future: kunstler’s is just as useless and failed as it is biased towards what he would like happens and not what actually happens. What actually happens is that there are 100 million manufacturing workers across the world and he thinks “we should go back to making something of value”. There are probably just as many if not even more farmers across the world and he thinks “we should grow our own food in our backyard”. At least he dismisses services as the jokes that they are: financial jobs are just there to rip off people, banks just do the same, the whole health care fiasco is an arena of cruelty and squeezing out money from people when they are in pain. Nice “progress”, nice “services”. Well these services are not needed.
What is needed is a huge BUS transportation system, simple BUSES that can connect cities and suburbs, managed by public or private companies, doesn’t matter. Mass transit is what is needed to improve energy efficiency and kill the peak oil fantasy and lie-deception. Also cheap rents, the idea of owning a home is retarded and old fashioned, homes should be for rent, and should be very cheap. There is excess real estate capacity all across the world, look at the skyscrapers in China, Dubai, all the buldings in Spain, etc.
The world is now a globalized economy, get over it, it must be measured globally, it is now one unit.
I may be confused also. The comment I was replying to, I thought was a reference to the musician. Maybe he is not the one who posts here claiming he lives in Shangra-La or whatever it is. In that case, good for him. As far as the musician goes, it would only be Utopia until someone stole one of his dimes. I never saw the Simpson’s episode but I am sure it fit to a T.
“…like, why sit inside and sulk because the weather is strange in a pleasant way? …There will be lots of dead …added generations of deer ticks carrying Lyme disease…”
Too true, James.
Why stay inside to sulk when you can be out in the great, wide outdoors, pedaling and sulking?
Now while McMansion design certainly sucks the big one of kitsch, your own well-documented taste for quaint Father Knows Best pre-modernism is a kind of hokey nostalgia, too. As a fan of bygone crud, your architectural pot is only marginally less black than their mutant kettles.
In fact, you’re all enemies of promise. They with their SUV-ferried dreams of squander, you with your post-squalor dreams of the nation as a giant grim 4H Club administered by dyspeptic Solons in bike shorts.
Whatever will you do if it doesn’t come to pass? What is the half-life on doomsaying if doom doesn’t arrive? Can you ride the meltdown bandwagon for another year or two, or five, or ten, and how will you deal with it if there are not “lots of dead” and the honeybees are still a-buzzin’ and the boobs still in the Wal-Mart aisles and the NASCAR tracks belching contentedly?
What, then?
Since 2005 a colleague of mine has been trying to sell a house he bought at the height of it’s inflated value, a $900,000 McNugget of processed corn syrup farcitecture in one of the tonier suburbs outside Detroit.
Cheek by jowl with the context of suburban central-casting he’d bought into was his description that “at dawn and dusk the sky over my backyard is filled with seagulls from the landfill a half-mile away”.
As this home is now lucky to retrieve a third of what he paid for it and is still not sold, it would seem that a reasonable strategy would be for the gates of this gated community to come down and for the growing landfill to blend with the outlying edge of the sub-division as the two become inexorably intertwined… maybe then rename the whole thing, “Entropy Meadows”.
“Humankind has not evolved psycologically to sit on his/her ass in a cheap rental apt and do nothing.”
Hey, this is me you’re talking about.
Well OK it’s an expensive rental apartment. But believe me it beats sitting in a cube listening to the latest lies of some psychopath CEO whose only concern is to max out his bonus and the hell with the rest of us. You’re right, enough, we’ve been through this already.
“What will happen is most people will not have any work anymore and will not need to work. We will simply get free salaries…”
Where do I sign up?
“As a fan of bygone crud, your architectural pot is only marginally less black than their mutant kettles.”
=================
Great line PG.
And re: “What is the half-life on doomsaying if doom doesn’t arrive?” Quite long actually … longer than Asokian optimism I’d venture.
Eleuthero said at 6:51 a.m.:
Eleuthero, you don’t get out much do you? It’s a big world out there with lots of countries who know solar is NOT A BUST.
But, since you have, once again, thrown down the gauntlet by demanding a “single country on the face of the earth where solar supplies 20% of what WIND supplies…” I must once again reply with facts. Let’s take a single country called Germany:
Germany has 20,000 windmills supplying 10 million homes. Now, if my math is not wrong, 20% of 10 million homes would be approximately 2 million homes. OK, not approximately. It would be exactly 2 million homes.
Germany’s solar infrastructure produces 12,000 MW supplying 6 million homes.
If my math is not wrong 6 million is bigger than 2 million.
So, once again, you have failed in the numbers game.
Eleuthero said: “Solar is a BUST”
What other “BUST” industry has an annualized growth rate of 37% to 56%?
‘ Brazil is the first major country to nearly give up on solar’
Thanks!!!…but what about Germany?
‘so I guess FAMILIES are outmoded, too, … right?? ‘…certainly in communist countries they have attempted to put the individuals ‘tie’ to the state. if you read tom sowell etc he says the govt here trys to do the same.
just recently obama gave 140 million to planned parenthood to do hiv testing. 140 million we dont have..to test for a disease that western medicine doesnt cure or even treat well. clearly i see an agenda there.
long as workers can be fed they can work! excess capacity? meaning ‘we’ dont have the $$$ to buy more?
STOP QUOTING YOURSELF, NUMBNUTS! ! !
That’s about 4 times you’ve repeated the same long passage of BS.
It wasn’t worth saying the first time — OK I’ll give you the first time, free speech, the right to show you’re an idiot, etc. But repeating by cutting and pasting your own crap over and over is beyond the bounds.
You added yourself to my scroll-on-by list with your first post, along with Asoka and Vlad, but damn it my scrolling finger is getting tired. Stop it!
Eleuthero (aka Siberian Ginseng, a Mind food)
I had a sense that I agreed with much of what you espoused, so I checked your posts for the last few months and found that my memory was sound.
What I note is that you flaunt your ignorance with concomitant anger when that is the situation. The way you discuss solar power indicates a lack of depth of careful reasoning. Saying you have a COUSIN who knows something or you know two engineers who have revealed some mystical knowledge to you smacks of osmotic acquisition of insight rather than careful analysis.
I have a COUSIN who is in charge of much of SHELL Oil’s search for alternative power generation. Moreover, I supervise about twenty engineers some of whom have as a primary duty alternative energy and its contribution to sustainability.
I might add that I lost a substantial amount of money when I bet that Public Service of New Hampshire’s nuclear plant would not be stopped. Moreover, I have some internal knowledge of Yucca Mountain and its technical and political shortcomings and strengths. I would add that an off the grid house has multiple possible backup solutions for when there is technical failure, including a rarely used gas generator.
For energy storage on a larger scale pumped hydro storage can store large amounts energy
available on short (seconds) notice. See for example: (Wiki)
the Tianhuangping Pumped-Storage Hydro Plant in China,[16] which has a reservoir capacity of eight million cubic meters (2.1 billion U.S. gallons or the volume of water over Niagara Falls in 25 minutes) with a vertical distance of 600 m (1970 feet). The reservoir can provide about 13 GW·h of stored gravitational potential energy (convertible to electricity at about 80% efficiency), or about 2% of China’s daily electricity consumption
The point I’m making is that energy delivery, storage, and conversion is part of a systems engineering problem, and while naivete has its place, the financial and technical decisions DO
involve multiple tradeoffs that need to respect the political diversities of both neo-Luddites and
techno-triumphalists.
Sorry to break the thread but when someone
labels me as a “dupe of Marxist noble savage worshipers”, I must respond even if it is only
a jab from Vlad. Probably shouldn’t even bother
with it but this topic, along with racism,
really needs airing out after the Vlads finish
revising and distorting it to their nefarious
ends.
Yes, the Azteca did ritually murder people
atop their temple pyramids. Although reprehensible, it was a religious rite not genocide. Remember, my argument was about European genocide of entire pre-columbian
tribes. Also, what about good Christians
ritually murdering millions during the Inquisition? Lets face it, humanity loves to kill ritualistically so singling out the
Azteca is not a valid rebuff of the natives.
Yes, the Hurons were destroyed by another
tribe: the Euro-tribe. Stealing land, wealth
and slaves, trying to kill everyone off with superior, mechanistic weapons and introducing alien diseases is commonly defined as genocide.
The euro-tribe excelled at this because of an ancient ideology that extolled the virtues of hierarchy, domination and enslavement of other ,presumed, inferior peoples.
Yes, Hernan Cortes did conquer the Azteca through an astonishing series of near miraculous
events(for him), and cunning subterfuge, which culminated in the murder of Moctezuma. The Spanish then began the enslavement of every native in central America and the total destruction of their culture and religions.
Millions of natives were worked to death in mines and on plantations or died outright from the
alien diseases brought in by the savage interlopers. The Christian church proceeded to
murder every infidel they could capture and destroy every artifact and codice they could
find. Mexico city is build on the rubble of the
demolished city of Tenochtitlan. Every priceless
artifact of gold was melted down and shipped to
Spain as ingots. There are only a handful of
artifacts made from gold left for Marxist
scientists to study. By the way, it’s not worship,
it’s the science of archaeology or anthropology.
The conquest went on the length and breadth of North & South America and ,essentially, is still preserved in the continued repression of the remnant native tribes. This sounds like the definition of savagery to me.
Many native cultures were matriarchal, peaceful,
egalitarian societies of peers. I know that this is very threatening to your Wagnerian, warrior cult ideology of male domination and supremacy
but such societies did “thrive and compete” with
other neighboring tribal units.
I can understand why you are threatened by Boas:
“Boas was especially concerned with racial inequality, which he had demonstrated was not biological in origin, but rather social. Boas is credited as the first scientist to publish the idea that all people–including white and African-Americans—are equal. He often emphasized his abhorrence of racism, and used his work to show that there was no scientific basis for such a bias.” as quoted from wikipedia
I don’t consider myself a “dupe”; I’m more of an amature historian. I totally abhor the totalitarian revision of history into crude sound-
bites of easily digestible dog turds for the stupid euro-savages to gulp down unquestioningly and smugly regurgitate at one another in a misguided and xenophobic attempt to feel superior to native people and cultures.
So, I got to do a devil’s advocate thing here and say “what if”.
What if Frank Gehry and other starkitects are simply stating the same thing our buddy JHK has been saying all these years, only…with…’buildings’. Maybe they are using their techno-bully pulpit to say our shit’s all retarded…and we just don’t get it. They probably have their own little private yahoogroups somewhere where they are just coming up with ideas and laghing their asses into one a them shapes that their libraries are all twisted into.
What if?
Now if Frank Gehry can laugh his ass in the shape of one of his buildings, I’d pay to see that!
I think architecture is one of those fields (politics is another) where some operate in the mode of let’s see what kind of crazy batshit we can get away with.
Wouldn’t it be great if the Mexicans brought back that old religion? And then you and you and all the PC’s could fufill all of your masochistic fantasies by being sacraficed by Non Whites? If you don’t like the White Race then you should leave America and live amongst the people you dream are better. That’s the only way you are ever going to awaken from your ugly PC dream of hatred. Racism against your own people is a terrible sin.
Yes, Whites acted savagely and Indians acted savagely. We were better fighters because of our swords and guns, that’s all. But all in all, despite our common fallen human nature which we share with the Indians, we were a higher culture. In the case of Cortez, he was obviously under Divine protection. That evil civilization needed to be destroyed. As for the Inca, they weren’t nearly so bad, kind of like the ancient Romans. That was pure imperialism on our part – just as conqering hundreds of tribes to form the Inca Empire had been for the Incas.
You apply today’s PC morality retroactively to our ancestors but not to other Races. Most unfair. Also you focus only on our aggresion and not on the good things we tried to do for the conqured peoples. Very few of those peoples would want to go back to the old ways now that they have lived our way.
There are almost no matriarchial cultures – you are obviously confusing this with the matrilineal or descent though the mother. You are probably some kind of male feminist or something. Real women hate male feminists as do many feminine feminists even though they would never admit it.
Vlad said:
Yo, Vlad, doncha know where you are, dude? America is a multicultural society, where whites will very soon be a minority.
If you don’t like the non-white races, you should leave America and live amongst the people you dream are better.
We are in charge now, not you white folks, architects of banking scandals, you white folks who stole and robbed the country blind.
I can understand why you might want to stay… you know we are a moral people who will not subject anyone to the abuse we have suffered from whites. We will not discriminate against you or in any way harm you as long as you know your place and don’t get violent.
Your continued physical presence here, in a country with a Black president, is proof what I am saying is correct.
8m is right. The production process doesn’t need all the workers that the world has available.
The obvious answer is to lower the amount of hours worked. And to lower the amount of people produced in the future.
Duh.
The capitalist answer is to leave millions unemployed while forcing the employed to work overtime.
Giving everyone a guaranteed income sounds downright crazy to the people of today.
But Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon proposed it back in the day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
Ask yourself why you have internalized the views of the ruling class so completely that providing for the needs of all persons seems so utterly ridiculous.
Quite right Soak. We intend to leave – and take a goodly chunk or two of America with us. This isn’t America anymore. The American Dream leaves with us. I feel sorry for any Whites who really believe this PC crap you peddle – like poor Olli. At least most of the group here doesn’t buy your idea that Blacks have never practiced genocide.
Shit! I just read the latest Krugman NY Times column. The bastard is suggesting inflation is a good way to deal with debt. Inflation is bad for the poor and middle class but good for the rich, as it’s the rich who can exchange inflated dollars for other investments — gold, oil, foreign currencies, etc.
Krugman is looking out for his rich readers in Manhattan apparently.
Anyway, some observations on the race thing:
There is no way to put the racial diffusion genie back in the bottle — we are a mobile, inter-cultural/racial world. The people who have tried to do that throughout history — Hitler, Rwandan leaders I can’t name, etc. — have only unleashed unimaginable pain and suffering.
If you think your race is so great — whatever it is — prove it by being a good, useful person.
Also, there’s a concept in anthropology called ethnocentrism. It basically has to do with people judging other cultures using their own cultural reference, without taking the time to understand the other culture. Essentially, it boils down to an apples and oranges comparison and is an ignorant thing to do.
Anyway, it seems like there should be a similar term regarding eras — that is judging past cultures by today’s standards. Not to justify any of the horrors unleashed by Cortez and crew, but he — and his Aztec enemies — were living in a time that had very different standards from ours. So our condemnation seems a little anachronistic.
I think that’s what makes me cringe so much about Hitler and modern-day genocides. I basically don’t expect such behavior from a human being living in the age of science, cars, mass education, etc. But as for Cortez, fuck it, what else was he going to do? The dude was a hired killer living in an era of witches, demons and an invisible man in the sky who wanted to save souls (and gold, apparently).
He did his job and he did it well. And, yes, a lot of people suffered and died because of it.
Exactly Wagelaborer.
Essentially, the key to resloving all of our dilemas is active de-population… if we want to have any hope of surviving sustainably into the future.
Unfortunately the “O” topic is rarely raised: far too politically incorrect or religiously touchy.
Without addressing this critical factor, we will continue to fester like a fungus (dare I say cancer) on this wonderful little blue orb until we have completely killed off our own host. No amount of technology will save us otherwise. Ironically, technology is what has brought us to this predicament.
Vlad said: “We intend to leave – and take a goodly chunk or two of America with us.”
Who is we?
Who introduced the legislation leading to the breakup of the United States?
What is the number of the bill in Congress which will lead to the breakup of the United States?
How many will be leaving, once the bill becomes law?
You do understand that any extralegal effort will fail, and any violent effort will be met with crushing state violence? Hello, Vlad, you still with us as a rational being?
Or are you like Charles Alan Wilson, who threatened Senator Murray, saying he carries a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and would not “blink” when confronted. “It’s not a threat, it’s a guarantee.”
Then a pimply-faced college-graduated FBI agent put the cuffs on him and took him to jail.
Big talk from cowards who like to threaten and intimidate while hiding behind a firearm. Whatever the caliber, they will end up in prison.
You try any kind of secessionist shenanigans, Vlad, without legal authorization and you won’t get far. You forgettin’ who in charge now, boy?
“The world is going to continue getting up and going to work for the rest of my lifetime, your lifetime and everyone else’s lifetime and probably ALL future lifetimes. Think it through … what the hell would we do with ourselves?”
================================
I would suggest that part of the answer, is to redefine what we call work, and reassess how we determine value.
Why even give such crud any cred?
I wonder what would happen if we brought home 50K or so of our overseas forces, in countries without any hostilities, and retrained them as the equivalent of “Seabees”. Put them to work building high speed rail networks and wind farms in the upper Midwest.
Humm…they would be speading there money here, rather than Germany or Japan, rebuilding the country, giving the military a better agenda and keeping the boys in shape doing something other than lifting weights. Naw…..couldn’t work, right?
“You forgettin’ who in charge now, boy?”
========================
Vlad, do not forget Safire’s Rule #4.
dale, I like the idea. I would just make one small change. There are 250,000 troops now deployed overseas.
Instead of 50,000, I would bring home 200,000 (including every single troop in Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, and Pakistan).
I would then double their pay for doing domestic work as uniformed agents of the federal government … in a time when anti-government hate is being propagated by irresponsible people like FOXNews, Sarah Palin, and the TeaPartiers.
The money saved by not flying them around to places like Okinawa, South Korea, etc., and the money saved from shutting down the bases on foreign soil, would easily pay for the increase in salary. Fortunately, they already have socialist government-run health care.
Asoka and Dale,
If the powers that be saw fit to pull 200,000 troops from overseas the answer as to what should be done with them is simple … discharge them and let them seek employment like everybody else that’s unemployed. If business and the capital markets thought it was economically viable they would already have put 200,000 people to work “building high speed rail networks and wind farms in the upper Midwest.” There are plenty of already-trained construction workers looking for such jobs. The military’s expertise is in training people how to kick in doors and shoot people. Get real will ya.
I had a sense that I agreed with much of what you espoused, so I checked your posts for the last few months and found that my memory was sound.
What I note is that you flaunt your ignorance with concomitant anger when that is the situation.
Oh shit, Eleuthero. Looks like you have come up against one of the deadliest kinds of keyboard warriors, the dreaded Archivest.
At first he sounds friendly (first paragraph), then he homes in for the kill (second paragraph). Bastard.
Oh, the other bastard is Mindfool’s grammar in his second paragraph. Never mind.
I was trying to “net it out”, in terms of employment and not overload the current already strained domestic market. By keeping them in the military, they also would be available for more conventional duties if needed, sort of an active reserve.
Qshtik, I guess you don’t live in one of the many areas still benefiting from WPA projects, which will built during depression, and which would certainly not have been built if “business and capital markets” were the only determinant of what is valuable and needed.
…..and get real yourself, young men “trained to kick down doors” are excellent timber for retraining to do something currently more needed then sitting in tanks and foxholes, or lifting weights in a camp in Germany.
This country is crying for investment in energy and transportation. We stand an excellent chance of becoming a technologically backward country which seems able to do nothing well but make weapons, not a long term strategy for success.
Too right, Dale. Armaments is the US’s biggest export. Meat is the second. Tools to kill, and the muscle meat of hapless animals killed solely for their muscle meat the second. Wah hey!
Here … how ’bout this idea. Let’s take every unemployed person in America and induct them into the military. Instead of training them how to kick in doors and shoot people and shipping them overseas just leave them where they are and have the military/govt train them to do the projects you and Soak feel need doing — never mind what business and the capital markets think is viable … what do they know? Pay these new “soldiers” double regular military pay … what the hell, why be chintzy, make it triple. If your plan and Asoka’s plan is good why is this plan not better?
‘Yes, the Azteca did ritually murder people
atop their temple pyramids. Although reprehensible, it was a religious rite not genocide’
does it matter the motive? yr narrative points to the fact the spaniards BEAT THEM AT THEIR OWN GAME,MASS MURDER.
‘Get real will ya’
why dont you take yr own advice? asking asoka to see things [developed worlds unsustainablity] the way you or i do is a fools errand!
his advice is standard asoka…get peeps jobs/ things ill be wunerful. hes the art linkletter of CFN!
Bring the troops back home, some people here are saying. I agree, as our current wars are unsustainable, cannot be won and are merely a way for a broke, morally bankrupt state to attempt to keep one aspect of its economy — war production — going.
But I fear what lies in wait for thousands of weapon-owning testosterone-fueled trained killers with PTSD who find that there are no jobs for them back home.
Perhaps a massive public works program could keep their itchy trigger fingers occupied, but I don’t know.
There is a great photo in today’s NYT Weekend Arts section (pg C27). It was taken in Shanghai in 1948 and shows “people storming a bank for gold in the days before the Communist forces arrived.” Perhaps we’ll see something similar in Greece in a week or so.
“asking asoka to see things … the way you or i do is a fools errand!”
=================
Granted Asia, but I feel a certain duty to point out the absurdity of Asoka’s simplistic bromides.
Qshtik: “I feel a certain duty to point out the absurdity of Asoka’s simplistic bromides.”
That would take enough people to help the unemployment problem. In fact, that’s what they can do with the ex-military.
If your plan and Asoka’s plan is good why is this plan not better?
====================================
Once again Quiz, I was suggesting something which would put to better use money we are already spending, at least in terms of the labor.
If pragmatism were the basis for why things are done in either the public or private sector, then perhaps you can discribe to those of us who are mystified, why we need to garrison countries we conquered 50 years ago and which are now richer then we are per capita? The utility of that is a complete mystery to me.
In the category of bumper stickers I just don’t get……..”No farms, No food”.
Am I missing something, was someone…anyone….. advocating eliminating farms??? Why not, “No birds, no feathers”, or “No cameras, no photographs” or “No dogs, no dog shit” WTF??
dale, I saw those bumper stickers here when a local referendum was trying to preserve farmland from being built upon by McMansions.
The developers won (with millions of dollars of out of state money) and the farm land was destroyed.
So, yes, someone was advocating eliminating farms, and they did. The developers have now built over that farm land with ugly huge poorly built McMansions.
Qshtik: “I feel a certain duty to point out the absurdity of Asoka’s simplistic bromides.”
Yes, because the complicated bromides advocated by the last several administrations have worked so well.
Absurdity appears to be in the eye of the beholder as well.
Qshtik: “….shows “people storming a bank for gold in the days before the Communist forces arrived.” Perhaps we’ll see something similar in Greece in a week or so.”
The communist forces are on the march in Greece?
asia: “asking asoka to see things [developed worlds unsustainablity] the way you or i do is a fools errand!”
I might be convinced by substantive arguments, but all I’m seeing are ad hominem attacks against me and against fools.
Some of my best Conservative friends are fools, and I don’t take kindly to your insulting them. Even fools may offer valuable insights from time to time.
“The utility of that is a complete mystery to me.”
=====================
It’s a complete mystery to me too but I don’t get the idea of shutting that all down and ill-spending the money “saved” in a new way. Why not just shut down the foreign bases and not spend the money at all? Govt as an employer of last resort is not viable. Look at the mess Greece has become with half the people as govt employees and pissed off having to work beyond 60. Shrink the military and the rest of the govt too.
I still keep hearing the words”high speed rail”from some of you incurable dreamers.Do you think,when this financial fiasco is over with(don’t count on it)and things are getting “better”,anyone of us will have enough money to pay for 180MPH family round trip to visit grandma on the other end of the crumbling US of A ??This is another pipe dream by the moneylenders,the same bastards that gave us Weimar,financed war after war and are stealing us blind.
I predict most of us won’t have enough resources to buy a new set of tires for the 30 year old JUGO,that’s sitting next to your prime residence,under the spaghetti junction overpass.
As for that Wiener,that wants to put building nuclear powerplants on”fast track”,you’ll be lucky to be alive,reading a cook book(during day light hours)how to preserve meat without refrigeration and how to can polk salad.
NO NUKES is GOOD NUKES,trust me.
I said “something similar i.e. run on the banks.
“Govt as an employer of last resort is not viable.”
This is being said by Qshtik, who worked 26 years as a bean counter for a defense contractor who got government money to employ Qshtik, who was counting money involved in projects funded by government money.
In other words Qshtik is saying: “I got mine. I’m retired now. So you all can go to hell. Shrink government. Lower taxes. Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care. I just want more money from my stocks and investments. Oh, and Asoka is a simpleton.”
“NO NUKES is GOOD NUKES,trust me.”
=====================
I don’t trust anybody who fails 19 times in one post to enter a space where a space belongs.
“In other words Qshtik is saying: “I got mine …… Oh, and Asoka is a simpleton.”
======================
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)
Ad hominem attacks.
I’m increasingly getting the feeling, Asoka, that you’re an imposter. Not a black. I think I’ve got a good idea of what you’re really are. Sooner or later I knew your mask would slip. Anyway, even if you are the real thing, an extraordinarily smart black, you’re apparently still too dumb to know that the world has changed, and ad hominem attacks are not only now allowable, but are practically the only game left in town.
Human beings are a failed species. Human beings are primates that seem to understand only hierarchy, sycophancy, and ascent structures such as delusional religions like Christianity.
Human beings are at end game. Every political dispensation, most possible ideologies have been tried, and they all lie in ruins.
Just about the only thing remaining is to wipe people’s faces in their shit. And, boy, am I eager to do just that.
So now we are worried about bringing home our solders,with their nervous trigger fingers.Could it be our salvation,our only hope to rid ourselves of the ruling gangsters,thieves,billionaire leeches and downright treasonous politicians.If they can protect foreign corrupt governments from their fed up population,why can’t they be used to guard our borders,round up all those imported miracle workers,that feed and house a family of 7,including their elders on crutches and wheel chairs,picking a few oranges and tomatoes,part time?
Who is financing all the TV and spanish speaking radio stations here?
Who is allowing Mexico to unload all their breeding hordes of liabilitiy,Gangs and indigent here?
It’s high high time to get to the bottom of this and take appropriate action!
Could it be that the PTB,who trained your children to be killers and murderers just as soon not have them come home for reasons they must have finally figured out?
hi funz!
Who is financing all the TV and spanish speaking radio stations here? UNIVISION?
Who is allowing Mexico to unload all their breeding hordes of liabilitiy,Gangs and indigent here? US GOVT
Could it be that the PTB,
Whats the PTB?
when i want to get scared all i have to do is look at the LATimes or [for a minute] watch TV news.
the la times notes that ‘illegals and multicultuarlism are more accpeted, young whites dont like prop 187[?]..someone whos worked with mc cain for amnesty..blablabla’
Martin hayes, ‘the Ad hominem attacker’…who or what do you think is asokas ‘real’ story?
“Asoka’s simplistic bromides”
==============
bromide: (br?’m?d’) A mide, or ineffective cure, used or suggested for use by a “brother.”
“ruling gangsters,thieves,billionaire leeches”
========================
A computer hardware note to Funzel: the largest key – approx 4″ wide – on the standard keyboard is located in the center of the bottom row of keys. It is called the “space bar” and its use is intended to aid in comprehension of typed sentences and paragraphs. Give it a try.
Where is the morality of ruling tens of millions of people who want out? Doesn’t the whole concept of “the Union” imply that it is voluntary? Traditional White States, who are lucky enough to not be burdened by minorities, should get out before they are so burdened. How does being part of the United States benefit any of these states? It doesn’t and it’s only going to get much worse very fast.
As for revolution, it may not even be necessary – I hope not. If you know history, you know that Empires often fall apart under their own weight and boy do we have alot of weight. You and your cohort have done your job of destruction only too well. Now you say you want to preserve the United States – after damning it to hell for decades? Please. And you know what? Destoying is much easier than creating. What you people so gleefully destroyed you will not be able to replace. The minorities you so idolize do not have the stern virtues of the original European Stock. Much of what is already here, will fall into ruin. And what they build will be inferior to what has been.
Asoka’s real name is Legion, for He is many.
But the Devil must be given his due: the war industry has been a hideous drain on our spririt and resources. Now they are about to destroy some of what they made, a needless surplus of death. And selling the crap to other countries, that was real great. The fault is not just with America but modern day humanity as such. We are a profoundly flaw and fallen species.
There’s a better answer – get rid of the illegals. That will solve the unemployment situation with one fell swoop. Now I know that that’s not on the table – but the question is why it’s not on the table. Who decides what’s on the table? Remember how they used to say illegals do the jobs White Americans wont do? Interesting how that slogo got dropped but fast when White Americans started needing those jobs.
Vlad said: “We are a profoundly flaw and fallen species.”
That is one way to look at it. We seem to be intent upon extinguishing ourselves as a species.
Scientists estimate there are 10 to 30 million plant and animal species on the planet. Each year as many as 50,000 species disappear.
Of those 50,000 species that disappear, how many are “profoundly flawed and fallen” like us?
Obama just signed an agreement to reduce nuclear arms by one third. First Black president achieves an historic arms reduction agreement.
But white USA, all its presidents and leaders and most of its white citizens have been enamored with militarism and weapons development and have poisoned the earth with its arms sales.
#1 USA arms dealer. Making profit on death.
During the Bush administration this was the story:
Is this an admission that you see Blacks as not that smart in general? Then why did you take me to task about my viewpoint then if you share it to some degree? Perhaps a question of style… I do appreciate that btw – it’s just that we’re way past the point in our Civilization. During the whole desegregation thing educated Whites tried to act with civility and we’re just savaged by the media. The Truth must come out and damn the consequences. The consequences of not telling the truth are a continuation of current trends – and that is unthinkable.
Hey race traitor, how’s it going? How’s life up in the all White North? Nothing like living your truth, huh? You make me sick.
who or what do you think is asokas ‘real’ story?
Asoka’s boast that “we” will soon rule America and his invocation of ad hominem a short while later suggested to me that we are dealing with an imposter.
We know that blacks are content to sup at the table prepared by whites while insulting the host, but they are not usually given to threatening to appropriate the house and evict the owner. A plateful of free food usually suffices to take the edge off their eternal grievances.
Then there’s the ad hominem shibboleth. Only a small number of groupings like to trundle this out, among them self-described skeptics who use it as part of their armory of “logical fallacies”, and devotees of Ayn Rand. A certain subgroup is overrepresented in both of these groups.
A certain subgroup of hypocrites and zealots struggling for the throne, but who face a very real problem: the closer they get to the throne, the more they will be exposed. Thus they prefer to work in the shadows, grooming people like Obama to do their work. On blogs like this, though, they can just pretend to be black.
Yes, I’ve heard about Black hunters in Africa laughing and mocking an animal as it’s in its death throes. How different from the Noble Native Americans who apologize to the beast and say a prayer for its spirit! The White Man who hunts for pleasure and gets his picture taken with his foot on the trophy is out of synch with the Universe as well. Such arrogance. Nontheless it is the hated White Race who is trying to save the Environment now – whatever our past sins. In Africa, they have to try and keep Blacks from wiping out endangered species for food or to sell to Chinese Medidine.
The Indian wasn’t always as in synch with the Environment as he became later. Whole species were hunted to extinction in the remote past such as the Wooly Mamoth.
Not a word here regarding JHK’s Daily Grunt entry from April 3? Does anybody read those?
No, this is not an April Fool’s gag…
-AK
Vlad, I don’t know how smart blacks are. I haven’t met all of them. I didn’t say Asoka is unusually smart for a black, just that he’s unusually smart but that there is a question mark over his claim to be black. He is becoming combative in a manner that has aroused my suspicions that he’s an imposter. But it is incontestable that he’s smart.
Yeah, I saw the Zero Hedge story. I swear, everything is a fuckin’ Ponzi scheme in this bullshit economy. We can’t pay our debts, we can’t inflate them away (countries like China are too smart to let us do that — thank God!), we sell more gold on paper than actually exists and the worldwide toxic derivatives figure is something like $700 Trillion — that’s like 10 times the GDP of the entire world. In short, it’s all fraud. And the fact that guys like Paul Krugman — who are SUPPOSEDLY extreme left — try to make it seem like this way of doing things is OK scares the hell out of me.
To Vlad: Yeah, I agree it’s ridiculous to hear the whole “Americans won’t do those jobs” refrain. But, nonetheless, I give the Mexicans props, for they — Third-world style — work their ass off and do whatever it takes to survive, often stuffing three generations under one roof in the process. Of course, the bullshit overpriced housing bubble we went through ensured that that was the only way you could survive if you were of the working-poor class.
It all comes back to Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, et al., whether we’re talking illegal immigration, credit-default swaps, the housing bubble, high sewer taxes, or the dumbing down of the American populace.
Therefore, let me say something that makes me feel better each time: Fuck Goldman Sachs!
Let’s leave the immigrants alone and focus on the real enemy, damn it. Do you think the illegals would have come in droves if the housing boom didn’t demand cheap roofers and Chinese drywall?
Oh, and let’s not forget how marijuana prohibition has empowered the Mexican drug cartels, and, thus, fueled illegal immigration.
That’s another step forward on the illegal immigration front — legalizing weed. It will bring the prices down and kill the funds to the Mexican Mafia and thus lessen the Mexican gang presence in the US. But, alas, the likes of Sarah Palin have blinded Middle Americans to this reality.
Anyway, all you California CFNers, vote to legalize it come June.
“But it is incontestable that he’s smart.”
So, affirmative action did something right in giving me an education usually reserved for whites?
So, affirmative action did something right in giving me an education usually reserved for whites?
Sure.
That’s Dmitry Orlov, who seems never to be wrong about anything, or maybe I’m just a dumb acolyte.
So those at the top know the show can’t go on, and the name of the game is to keep the rest of use in the dark.
Question: Why, Asoka, are you batting for the ruling elite who are, right now, stocking their escape pod with tasty victuals? On CFN, no less.
Martin Hayes said:
Escape to where? Look around you. We live in a closed system. Spaceship Earth.
We are all in the same boat. You can have all the “tasty victuals” you want in your end of the boat, but when the boat is destroyed, by greed, by ignorance, your fate is the same as those who have no “tasty victuals”
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, on CFN no less.
Indeed, Cash, the extreme “environmentalists”
don’t appear to understand that if you can’t
even keep your LIGHTS on then you’re not going
to be terribly concerned about whether the
casing for a nuke waste container lasts “only”
a thousand years or ten thousand years. The
human race will be very lucky if it doesn’t
go through a dieoff “keyhole” where only 5-10%
come out alive within a scant few DECADES.
I also agree with the sentiments of many that
misguided, non-systemic “environmental” thinking
came up with brainchildren like ethanol and other
“fixes” that don’t think through whether we’re
just “robbing Peter to pay Paul”.
As for the solar debate above, I’m certainly not
opposed to funding good R&D for ALL energy
resources. However, we have to have a
prioritization list where we use nukes for
QUICK energy (while acknowledging that it
has problems in the long run) but it can
buy time for “Black Swan” breakthroughs in
technologies that are just terribly uneconomic
RIGHT NOW.
Solar is a FABULOUS area for RESEARCH but we
are being too quick in IMPLEMENTING costly,
toxic, bulky, unscalable technologies in this
area prematurely when it is numerically obvious
that we’re many decades away from being able to
solarize a MEANINGFUL part of America (say, 20%
or more of the whole population). I’m nonplussed
by these gigantic arrays costing billions to
build that ultimately energize, in toto, a
place the size of Tucson.
We should use the technologies that are ALREADY
scalable right NOW to solve the SHORT TERM problems that are less than ten years away as
a stopgap to buy time to research the better
LONG TERM solutions.
The problem with much of the “green” movement is
that it has a subtextual premise that it’s okay
to abandon “dirty” energy even though most sober
scientists know that this “dirty” energy is an
absolutely necessity to buy the time necessary
to build the ultra-clean energies.
No soberminded person WANTS to sully the waters,
pollute the air, or poison groundtables. However,
we have to acknowledge that we’ve waited FAR too
long to abandon un-hip, un-PC energy sources right
now when they ARE the stopgap that buys the time
for better solutions!!
What good will it do the human race to, say, get
through 50% of a frantic total solarization of
America and then when we have nothing to keep
the lights on or heat the homes we can mumble
wistfully about “almost” while we’re scrounging
for roots and berries.
The road to hell really IS paved with “good
intentions”.
Eleuthero
Your math has more sophistry than your
racist arguments. And make no mistake
about it, you’re as big a racist as
Jesse Helms.
Your argument above about Germany is
SOPHISTRY OF THE HIGHEST ORDER. Take
note MINDFOOL for your observation of
“fools” is amiss. Asoka claims that
SIX MILLION GERMAN HOMES ARE SOLAR
POWERED COMPARED TO TWO MILLION VIA
WIND.
Really? Asoka then claims that the 20%
of German homes that are wind-powered
comprise TWO MILLION HOMES. Then he
tries to wipe shit on my face by saying
that “6 million is a bigger number than
2 million”. No shit, Sherlock. However,
you then have to reckon that, by your own
calculations, SIXTY PERCENT OF GERMAN HOMES
ARE SOLAR-POWERED. To rub the same shit on
you … if 6 million is 3 times 2 million
then 60% is three times 20%. Capiche???
This, fellow CFN denizens is an “intellectual”?
Is anyone going to do the fruitless search to
disprove a contention that is PRIMA FACIE
ridiculous???
Finally, Asoka would have us ignore FRANKLIN
DELANO RAINES, the black man who ran FNMA, in
Asoka’s quest to find the white man infinitely
culpable. Fannie and Freddie comprise, by
far, the BIGGEST PART OF THE CREDIT DISASTER.
Indeed, it DWARFS AIG.
I guess old Franklin can’t do arithmetic any
better than Asoka has demonstrated herein.
If we are to believe Asoka, EIGHTY PERCENT
OF GERMAN HOMES are wind or solar-powered.
Of course, a sensible person with SOME powers
of deduction knows very well that the form of
sophistry that he engages in is this: Solar
companies CONTRIBUTE power to utilities. So,
it might be true that 60% of German homes get
SOME contribution to solar where “some” is
ANY NUMBER GREATER THAN ZERO PERCENT.
Asoka’s argument, unqualified as it is, is like
saying that if a house get ONE WATT of power from
a solar contribution, that house is “solar
powered”. While it IS true that 20% of
TOTAL OBTAINED POWER in Germany is from WIND,
it is BATSHIT CRAZY to try to say that 60% is
from solar.
Now, let Mindfool observe where the real
foolishness lies. Maybe this time his
spelling will improve along with his powers
of deduction.
Eleuthero
For Mindfool,
So I’m off by a “multiple of 20”, eh?
Thanks for the confirmation pal!!! I
claimed that the newly constructed
Italian arrays will only power a few
podunk towns of a few thousand citizens.
Twenty times 9 thousand is 180 thousand.
Wow, if it was 600,000 then that would
be (within a crude approximation), about
ONE percent of Italy but 60,000 would be
0.3% of Italy. Gee, I’m so impressed by
this technology that I’m soiling my
trousers as we speak.
When are we going to stop this word mincing?
However you slice it, it takes an enormous
monetary investment to get to a point where
you’re very far short of ONE percent of
total national power output. And that’s
my main point and you damned well know it.
And these miniscule-to-small gains are
obtained via the construction of VAST
infrastructures that wouldn’t be economic
at all if they weren’t backed by national
subsidies on a grand scale … and all
constructed by enormous machines which
run on the OIL INFRASTRUCTURE.
And when is some honest soul going to start
looking at the sheer SQUARE FOOTAGE OF
BUILDING MATERIAL to get even this scant
percentage of total national power output?
I’ve scarcely seen more sophistry, mostly
arithmetic legerdemain which factors out
ECONOMICS and BUILDING CONSTRUCTION solely
to arrive at a final utopian endpoint.
I close with a quote from none other than
Jim’s “Long Emergency”: “… We know how
to manufacture storage batteries out of
plastic and lead, and we know how to build
charge controllers, inverters, and other
devices for regulating the storage and flow
of electricity — but can we make these
thingsin the future without oil, gas, or coal?”
The answer to Jim’s rhetorical question is
NO if you look at the very constituents of
plastic itself and if you look at the things
which mine lead and other metals necessary
to make components for solar power generation.
And Jim has solarized his Adirondack vacation
home and is, by no means, anti-solar. His
own experiences also reveal how DELICATE the
technology is but what he does NOT say is how
an AVERAGE person will deal with disruptions
of off-the-grid homes. Few Americans have
ever dealt without power for more than ONE
day. Imagine outages of a week or more when
the parts become scarce WHEN THE OIL INFRA-
STRUCTURE TO MAKE THEM MUST BE RATIONED.
The solar zealots hone in on aspects which
unmask ONLY the “blue sky” part of their
argument and they avoid systemic analysis
of solar power … how the parts are made,
how the manufacturing plants will be run,
etc..
Meanwhile, oil is $85/bbl, PEMEX had a 2%
output reduction LAST MONTH, and Saudi
Arabia “plans” no output increase (as if
they COULD). Good luck building your
giant solar arrays. Do you plan to get
the plastic from algae???
Eleuthero
I always get a nice “warm and fuzzy” feeling after reading through a few days worth of comments. All the “angles” are reflected, all the sub-plots exposed, all the answers explored.
Much of cross-talk is a result of this forum’s lack of matched perspectives as well as relative meaning of the “future” or “us.” One person sees the end of the world next week, while another brushes off any concern for at least 100 years, and maybe not then either.
It would be refreshing to find an Internet resource of more moderated, more filtered content. Something a kin to taking a census consensus about the futures of petroleum consumption and mankind.
For instance, what will the population of the US be in 2020? What will petroleum consumption of the US be in 2020?
For those who “study” Peak Oil, the plateau has been reached. The Earth will never produce 90 million barrels per day. Deal with it.
I hate to over generalize but from what I hear and see it seems to me that too many “environmentalists” have only a glancing familiarity with logic, reason, common sense, the real world etc.
So you get from them over the top emotionalism in discussions of real life problems like how the fuck do you keep electricity flowing, not only for mundane things like your stove and refrigerator but running incubators and surgical rooms in hospitals.
The green set goes nuts because they equate nuclear power plants with nuclear weaponry so its been absolutely toxic for a politician to even bring it up. A recently recanted lefty that vehemently opposed nuclear power plants on those grounds in the 1970s and 1980s went public and said it was terrible error that put the province in a real bind.
Its the same gang of lefties that screams that we don’t have enough access to high tech medical machinery. Well how the fuck do you run those, Fred Flintstone pedal power?
Something for the older environmental set: the Sixties are over, the Vietnam War is finished, the Beatles aren’t reuniting, John and George and Janis and Jimmy are dead. So is Nixon, rest all their souls. I too miss the music and energy of the times. But it’s long gone. Time to move on.
Eh Asoka? Over to you. Blast away.
see: frosty wooldridge website and book:
THE NEXT 100 MILLION.
he doesnt have to convince me. the last 100 million [post 1965] ruined the US and the next 100..well!
what will the population of the us be in 10 years? if its now 310 million itll be 330 to 400.
its kinda like sayin ‘ what will the population of mexico be in 10 years’?
which mexico? the mexico below our border or the ‘ mexico ‘ here?
50 years ago the US had no ‘ latino’ population. now we have 50? million and they are breeding like rats. or muslims. or ?
Who is we?
A BETTER ? IS WHO ARE YOU???
that WE you just mentioned is wondering…who the f are you anyway?
the ANC is asking its members to not sing any more hunt songs..about hunting white humans.
i read that in the LATimes this week.
‘A mide’..is that miLd?
Yeah, maybe plastics from algae – not a new idea.
Let’s get back to facts: Germany gets 6% of its electric energy from wind and 1% from solar.
For what (pun?) it’s worth total solar insolation is about 1.5 billion Terawatt-hours. Most is unusable. Total energy consumption is (earth – 0.15 Million Terawatt-hours) (US – 20% of that). There is still a three to four order of magnitude difference between energy input to earth and usage.
I repeat – most is unusable.
Politics/Economics – Many years ago I said something like: “As long as crude at the wellhead is 10 cents a barrel, a free market approach will quickly extinguish alternative energy attempts.”
Change the number to $1, $10, or even $100 and not throw in peak oil and the result is the same. The history of the eighties and nineties? Read it and weep.
So a planned approach like Germany has its place. 25% of ELECTRIC demand by 2050. Possible!
Nuclear has its place. As one who has walked thru Ignalina (A Chernobyl look-alike) and seen the chewing gum and duct tape approach to early Russian nuclear attempts, I worry, that humans in their efforts to cut corners, will DO SO.
I remind/inform that with boundless solar energy, conversion is totally feasible. For example: ScienceDaily (Apr. 17, 2009) — Scientists at Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have succeeded in unlocking the potential of carbon dioxide – a common greenhouse gas – by converting it into a more useful product. The scientists made carbon dioxide react by using N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs), a novel organocatalyst. In contrast to heavy metal catalysts that contain toxic and unstable components, NHCs are stable, even in the presence of oxygen. Hence, the reaction with NHCs and carbon dioxide can take place under mild conditions in dry air. We are running cars on E-85 Ethanol now, methanol is also usable in fuel cells. To get this implemented on any sort of scale will take much time. But even nuclear plant construction, with all of the logistics can take decades, AND the problem of what to do with the wastes has NOT been fully solved on a political, economic, or scientific manner.
At least Asoka paints an optimistic picture, and I suppose I am a techno-triumphalist.
Note(Wiki):
Obama and China’s President Hu Jintao announced on 2009-11-17 a far-reaching package of measures to strengthen cooperation between the United States and China on clean energy. The presidents began by establishing a U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center to facilitate joint research and development of renewable energy technologies by scientists from both countries. The center will be supported by $150 million in public and private funds over the next five years, split evenly between the partners. Initial research priorities will be building energy efficiency and electric vehicles.
The two countries will also leverage private sector resources to develop clean energy projects in China through the U.S.-China Energy Cooperation Program (ECP). More than 22 companies are founding members of the program. The ECP will include collaborative projects involving renewable energy, smart grids, electric vehicles, green buildings, combined heat and power and energy efficiency.
What Joe Bageant and I seem to agree on though is that population is in “yeast” growth mode and unless we “rapture” (“beam me up Scotty”) to another place (STARGATE?) we may end up as SOYLENT GREEN.
THANKS FOR THE LINK..I wouldnt have found it otherwise.
how do you find from homepage?
here it is for us who can find:
, 2010
No, this is not an April Fool’s gag. . . .
Something weird is going on the gold markets. A story out of Eric King’s King World News site says the Commodities Futures Trading Board (CFTB) in collusion with JP Morgan has been rigging the gold markets for years. I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but this is pretty juicy stuff. Nor do I pretend to understand the technicalities of the method used. The nub of the story seems to be that JP Morgan massively manipulated short sales using the paper Gold ETF market and had paper gold leveraged up against real metal at 100:1 ratio. Read for yourself and draw conclusions. The mainstream media has not even touched this story.
TO WHICH I SAY ‘THE MEDIAS’ IN ON IT..in a sense.
So you are you saying asoka isnt black? hes a white [or non black] race baitor?
someone last week counted the # of responses here, but not the number of lines. id guess asoka has ‘ the most lines’ here week after week. not that i read much of them.
‘ The Earth will never produce 90 million barrels per day. Deal with it’
but mexico and central america can produce another 90 million people! not in a day but maybe in a few decades.
And in other news…We’re swimming in oil. We have oil in the ground. Oil above ground. Oil in tankers just floating around. So much oil we can’t store any more. Gas should be at $1 a gallon for cripes sake.
Pretty soon water will be more expensive than oil. Wish you could drink oil…..Oh well, good thing we have free money and speculators to keep the price sky high. The O man must be laughing all the way to the bank. He and Bush sure have big smiles when they get together….
For more detail on gold price manipulation:
http://news.coinupdate.com/strange-reactions-to-precious-metals-manipulation-evidence-provided-to-cftc-0219/
Asia, it isn’t about the race thing, it’s more the number of lines.
Let’s see what we have here: a black with one or more postgraduate degrees who shills shamelessly and at length for business-as-usual and has a thang for Buddhism.
I don’t know if Asoka is black (impossible to know), but he’s certainly a chimera.
All I can say is… The Tea Partiers are looking more and more ‘normal’…. and i ‘voted’ for Obama…what a mistake..!
and now the Tea Party folks are starting to look ‘normal’…they understand that the government in undermining us…..ooops and i voted for Barackstar!!
Ever read Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”? Maybe Asoka’s mask isn’t a mask; perhaps he really is the monster he pretends to be.
In our search for knowledge, we must generalize. G stands for general intelligence in psychometrics – the branch of scientific psychology that studies human intelligence. If you attain racial consciousness, you would become as one with the Ancients whom you revere – for they thought this way. Christianity made war against this understanding and undermined the gens, the great families. Although a Christian, I cannot accept the suppresion of pagan wisdom in regard to this. The Jews had it too, but the biological aspect of the Old Testament was never brought into Christianity.
In other words, don’t sing the songs in front of journalists. The rumour is that when Mandela dies, the pangas come out. And the Whites are still heavily armed – even though firearms are mostly illegal now, many Whites have probably cached some anyway.
Mandela sings the kill Whitey songs along with all the others.
In this false spring, Joe Bagaent’s endorsement of voluntary simplicity:
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/03/hope-is-for.html#more
More on Simple Living Movement:
http://www.simpleliving.net/
I don’t recall the Poe story, though I did read all his work in 1979.
“Racial consciousness” seems to me to be a fanciful idea, an abstraction too large to meaningfully mesh with the gears of human nature. Especially in these deracinated times. If racial consciousness means anything more than the quotidian fact that people of the same color generally trust, befriend and employ people resembling themselves, then I don’t know what it is.
I suspect it is a glorified way of declaring one’s bigotry.
These kind of vain abstractions – “proletariat,” “Untermensch,” “infidels” – breed monsters.
As a human being, I’m not going to think about “white” if I want to keep my sanity: I’m going to think about specific white people I’ve known and form a judgement about them. Right now, in the land of my birth, certain white people whom I know by name are playing a high-stakes game of feeding their fellow whites to the (black) crocodiles hoping they’ll get eaten last. Not exactly an edifying sight.
What’s the opposite of a Clusterfuck?
A concerted, well thought-out plan, collectively agreed upon. So where’s the part of this BLOG that moves in that direction?
“A concerted, well thought-out plan, collectively agreed upon. So where’s the part of this BLOG that moves in that direction?”
I have presented the plan but there is no collective agreement on it.
In summary,
NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE: Less military spending to pay for more spending on rebuilding domestic infrastructure.
POPULATION: More voluntary sterilization, abortion, family planning, etc.
ENERGY: More alternative energy development (wind, solar, geothermal, etc.). R&D on distributed residential nuclear energy (instead of giant corporate plants) and nuclear waste solutions.
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: Move your money out of big banks and into local credit unions and small community banks.
I could go on, but with just that you can see we have no agreement … so the clusterfuck continues.
This morning I listened to Hillary and Gates explain the new nuclear treaty. Granted, I am not schooled in the nuances of diplomatic language but it sounded like we promised not use nuclear weapons “unless someone really ticked us off or we really really felt we have to.”
279 Comments total as of 2010-04-11 13:26 (Pacific)
More than 1 comment by:
Thanks for that listing. Asia, Qshtik, and Vlad are hot on my tail.
Now I know I need to post more, much more, to maintain my slim lead in quantity … I am already #1 in grammar, spelling, and quality.
“I have presented the plan but there is no collective agreement on it.”
“How can two walk together unless they be agreed?”
You are acting as prophet for another god. You have presented a plan, not the plan.
“You shall have no other gods {rulemakers} before Me.”
Until we get this part right, we will continue to suffer under false gods {rulemakers and by extension their planmakers}.
Repent {change your minds} The End Is Here
A concerted plan of Action moving forward in a postive dirction:
1. National Infrastructure – Think a new Continental railways buildup for the next 30 years. (Sort of like building the NY SUBWAY SYSTEM all over the continental USA.)
2. Population: More Euro-White People to immigrate to compensate for the recent Latin tilt – Also, More Africans
3. Energy: Nuclear Energy Plant Construction (Ask yourself, Why is the rest of the world blowing away the USA in this department? why?)
4. Community Development: Strve hard/Take are of elderly and children at all costs – a good way for a nation to get lucky.
Thanks
It’s certainly not the weather driving people out of the upstate, its the TAXES. New Yorkers are so beaten down by heavy taxes that when they travel to other states and see what they can afford, they quickly send out resumes and land jobs elsewhere. My NY buddies go to purchase a house and the bank tallies up the taxes first to see if they can even afford that! Then they add on the mortgage. In many cases, the taxes are as much or MORE than the mortgage! You have to wonder what the heck you are getting that would be worth paying for your house repeatedly every couple of decades. No wonder no one can afford to live there. I hear the public schools are pretty good.
You bring up a very valid point. It’s crazy how in this economy, people are still building bigger and bigger houses, only to find out they can no longer afford them. I guess it sort of keeps certain segments of the economy rolling. I’ve noticed my local Spring Electrician keeps busy.
Being born in Albany, NY it is really weird now living in Tucson, AZ. For one, we don’t have basements in any of the properties here and growing up it was by far the best part of a house. Back East there are grand, majestic homes while here it is mostly mud brick style properties. I really miss the homes back East, the ones here just don’t compare.