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Which Horizon?

     Did the nation heave a sigh of relief when BP announced that their latest gambit to “cap” the Deepwater Horizon gusher will result in hosing up fifty percent of the leaking oil? If so, the nation may be sighing too soon since the other half of the oil will still collect in underwater plumes and hover all around the Gulf Coast like those baleful mother ships in the most recent generation of alien invasion movies. I shudder to imagine the tonnage of dead wildlife flotsam that will wash up with the tide for years to come. It will seem like a “necklace of death” for several states, though even that may not be enough to distract them from the more gratifying raptures of Nascar and NFL football. 
     For the moment we can only speculate on what the still-unresolved incident will mean for America’s oil supply. The zeal to prosecute BP for something like criminal negligence has bestirred a Department of Justice comatose during the rape-and-pillage of the US financial system. BP may be driven out of business, but then what? The net effect of the oil spill, one way or another, will be the gradual shut-down of oil drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico. New government supervision will make operations very costly, if not non-viable, and the surviving companies will probably pack up for the west coast of Africa where supervision is almost non-existent.  Anyway you cut it, the US will produce less oil and import more — and have to rely on the political stability of places like Angola and Nigeria, not to mention the simmering Middle East.
     So far, also, the US has done nothing in the way of holding a serious national political discussion about the the most important part of the story: our pathological dependency on cars. I don’t know if this will ever happen, even right up to the moment when the lines form at the filling stations. For years, anyway, the few public figures such as Boone Pickens who give the appearance of concern about our oil problem, end up down the rabbit hole of denial when they get behind schemes to run the whole US car-and-truck fleet on something besides gasoline.
     This unfortunate techno-narcissism shows that almost nobody wants to think about living with fewer cars driving fewer miles. We’re going to be dragged there kicking and screaming, but that’s our destination, like it or not. All the effort now going into developing alt-fuels and “green” cars is just a form of “bargaining” on the Kubler-Ross transect of grief.
     Traveling around the US, it’s easy to understand our failure to come to grips with reality. The nation is fully outfitted for extreme car dependency. You go to places like Atlanta and Minneapolis and you understand how deep we’re into this. We spent all our collective national treasure — and quite a bit beyond that in the form of debt — building the roadway systems and the suburban furnishings for that mode of existence.  We incorporated it into our national identity as the American Way of Life. Now, we don’t know what else to do except defend it at all costs, especially by waving the talismanic magic wand of techno-innovation.
     The obvious remedy for the oil-and-car problem would be to live in walkable towns and neighborhoods served by the kind of public transit that people are not ashamed to ride in. But it may be too late for that. We’re going to be a much poorer society from now on. We squandered the financial resources for that transition on too many other things. We’re stuck with our investments in houses and their commercial accessories, built where they were built, and no Jolly Green Giant is going to pick them up and move them closer together in an artful way that adds up to real towns. A reorganization of American life will occur, but now it will be on much less deliberate terms, a much messier and more destructive operation, a default to the smaller scale by extreme necessity, with a lot of losses along the way. The Deepwater Horizon incident only hastens the process. 
     Anyway, the collapse of suburbia is running neck and neck (and hand-by-hand) with the collapse of capital. Angela Merkel, flicked US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner off like a flea over the weekend at the G-20 meeting in Sitges, Spain. Germany doesn’t want to hear about bailouts and stimuli anymore. Germany is looking to reinstate something like a “normal” economy based on producing things of value and paying for things when you have the capital to do it. Germany is pulling the plug on the debt-o-rama banking rackets — at least insofar as these rackets leave Germany holding the bag for a growing list of deadbeat nations. I don’t see how the Euro survives. the remarkable appearance of prosperity in places like Greece and Spain turned out to be a combination of borrowed money and all-time-high tourist flows. Both of these “resources” are heading way down. There’s a dwindling supply of middle-class candidates for tourism, especially in the US and the UK, and the Europeans have woken up painfully to the recognition that existing debt is unserviceable. National dominos are wobbling left and right, from Hungary to Latvia to Portugal….
     Even the severe steps initiated by Germany may not be enough to keep the lights burning in Europe since the continent has little oil and nat-gas of its own. Europe’s experiments with wind power have been valiant (and France’s nuclear venture has been daring), but neither of these things will offset the problems associated with peak oil, especially if trouble starts in the Middle East. It was chastening for me to bike around Berlin a week ago and realize that even nations with sturdy cities and good railroads can fall into political chaos. Berlin was a charming place when Hitler arrived on the scene and twelve years later it was a smoldering heap of shattered brick and glass.
     The American Way of Life is not so charming, but its very sprawling character may prevent a political maniac from controlling enough of a base to hold all the states and regions together in a thrall of fascism — and there are all those firearms to think about. I maintain that the trend is down for centralized power here, in the direction of impotency and decreasing competence at anything. I don’t subscribe to the paranoid themes of Big Brother government domination, the surveillance state and related fantasies. It’ll be more Home Alone meets Risky Business — a dangerous place with no adult supervision.
     The New York Times ran a front-page story on Sunday suggesting that maybe there was something to this nutty idea of Americans preparing for trouble in the months and years ahead, paying down debts, putting some food aside, thinking about where to ride out a socio-economic storm. Their attitude was patronizing of course, and where the actual issues of our oil predicament were concerned, the editors went straight to their “go-to-guy” Daniel Yergin and his public relations shop, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the official PR whore of the oil industry. The Times obviously finds it amusing that some Americans see a collapse on the horizon. The Times is so deep into its own collapse that it doesn’t even remember how to cover a story.

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About James Howard Kunstler

View all posts by James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency and the four-book series of World Made By Hand novels, set in a post economic crash American future. His most recent book is Living in the Long Emergency; Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward. Jim lives on a homestead in Washington County, New. York, where he tends his garden and communes with his chickens.

329 Responses to “Which Horizon?”

  1. Joe June 7, 2010 at 9:20 am #

    First!

  2. Solar Guy June 7, 2010 at 9:33 am #

    SPOILER ALERT:
    YOU DIE

  3. Stephen_B June 7, 2010 at 9:40 am #

    The New York Times article was beyond pathetic. We’re half a decade into the post Peak era (more or less) and that’s the best they can do?
    Jim is right. They don’t remember how to cover a story, not that enough people would make sense of the message even if the paper did do a decent job of it.

  4. ministryofslack June 7, 2010 at 9:40 am #

    joe did it for the lulz

  5. timetobike June 7, 2010 at 9:42 am #

    It is interesting that no public official in the USA with any sort of political power has made any moves to weaning the nation from cars. If you know of one, please share it with this audience. (And the article in the New York Times was a bit patronizing, but it was interesting that it was there.)
    Since I have a forum, it’s interesting to note that the “extended unemployment benefits” (those received beyond six months unemployment) which may or may not be extended (beyond June 2nd) have been running at the rate of $100 billion per year for the country. Now to put those people to work on the railroad….. (or bike paths)

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  6. S White June 7, 2010 at 9:48 am #

    Greetings from Minneapolis, a place that shows up in several of Mr. Kunstler’s comments and examples.
    There was one public official who warned us about our dependence on oil and set a national goal to halt the expansion of our oil imports. He was about as highly placed in the government as it is possible to be, and he couln’t get the job done. No one listened.
    The name of course is President Jimmy Carter.

  7. Lynn Shwadchuck June 7, 2010 at 9:48 am #

    It does seem to be shaping up as you say, Jim. I was heartened yesterday to see about 1000 people show up to try and save prison farm programs across our country. One near me in the town of 115,000 we met in, is the largest urban farm on the continent. Apparently the government believes monoculture agribiz and mega prisons catered-for-profit are the wave of the future. In the speeches before we marched, a farmer talked about peak oil and Margaret Atwood brought up climate change. Food will be our first pressing problem as things unfold. It already is.
    Lynn
    http://www.10in10diet.com/
    Diet for a small footprint and a small grocery bill

  8. empirestatebuilding June 7, 2010 at 9:49 am #

    I am imagining a life without oil and money. I am in month 12 of my unemployment. I’d love to be working on bike paths or a railroad. Where is the end of this tunnel going to lead?
    Aimlow Joe was here.
    http://www.aimlow.com

  9. Unconventional Ideas June 7, 2010 at 9:52 am #

    Jim’s right. The USA will never intelligently work out ways for mobility post cars.
    The best solution for someone who prefers to approach life with both eyes wide open is to live in a place where a critical mass of people actually “get it.”
    Failing that, gather people around you who matter, and make the most of whatever life throws your way.

  10. Al Klein June 7, 2010 at 9:55 am #

    Those f*cking Germans! Don’t they know they lost the war? Reparations are still due and payable, in the form of going along with the Geithner debt-o-rama. Here’s the gig, people. Either “they” (i.e.the rest of the world) goes along with our financial escapades or they get nuked. Don’t tell me there isn’t that implicit threat. Why else have all those nukes? Don’t believe it? Then you really don’t know just how craven those in the driver’s seat are.

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  11. Jim from Watkins Glen June 7, 2010 at 9:57 am #

    Another terrific essay. One huge gash or a thousand razor cuts, either way you bleed to death. More people are resolved to a troubled future than what is understood by what passes for national media these days. I agree that the centers of power are so decrepit that it reduces the threat of a dictator filling a vacuum. I foresee something more tribal based on local control of water and food. “World Made By Hand” may prove to be quite prophetic. Joel Garreau wrote a great book called “The Nine Nations of North America” in 1981 that describes how arbitrary our geopolitical boundaries are. Things are going to unfold based on the laws of physics and nature, and humans just aren’t so damn special in that scenario.

  12. zen17 June 7, 2010 at 10:00 am #

    Time to get the body in shape so that we are able to react to the coming changes. Those who are dependent of twinkies and tv are going to be lost when they need their bodies and minds to function effectively
    http://wanderingsagewisdom.blogspot.com

  13. Puzzler June 7, 2010 at 10:01 am #

    Lack of adult supervision indeed. Most people mistakenly believe that the “experts” will fix things. These beliefs won’t break until there are lines for gas and breaks in the supply lines of food.
    Expecting rational, planned, preparation from the government/corporate oligarchy is fantasy. No politician or corporateer can or will speak the truth.
    ———
    Newspapers are a failed business model, so it’s fitting that the NY Times leads the way.

  14. piltdownman June 7, 2010 at 10:04 am #

    Jim –
    I was glad you commented on the Times article. It could have been written by an intern on some small town newspaper…
    What was particularly galling was that the “doomer” perspective was represented by a woman who was painted as a marginal nutball, while the anti-Peak Oil side came from an “authority.”
    But whatever.

  15. Unconventional Ideas June 7, 2010 at 10:04 am #

    I completely agree with getting in shape.
    To me that mostly means growing or buying local food to the greatest extent possible.
    It also means severely reducing car dependence and today beginning to get around in other ways like by foot, or on the bus.
    It’s late in the game, but anything sensible we do now will make things that much easier in the very near future.

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  16. hugho June 7, 2010 at 10:07 am #

    Thanks Jim for keeping up the good fight pointing out the obvious unsustainable path americans are trodding. I also just returned from a visit to a nameless placeless beach community in a foreign country, North Carolina. It is a pathetic depressing series of strip mall cities with cul de sac vinyl sided beige shitboxes inhabited by old white people who are rarely seen outside of their air conditioned boxes or new SUVs. The only visible industries were souvenir shops peddling cheap Chinese apparel and lawn care services all overflown by F-15s and attack helicopters training to invade the next oil producing country. There were a few codgers riding golf carts and lawn mowers but no one on any of the tennis courts. Sidewalks, bike paths and public transit don’t exist and the patent fact that the whole sorry place is one hurricane away from becoming a pile of splintered 2×6’s and fiberglass insulation hanging down from the majestic live oaks like Spanish Moss seems not to have occurred to anyone. It was a true american nightmare.

  17. againstthemachine June 7, 2010 at 10:08 am #

    I bought a copy of The Long Emergency shortly after it came out, and after reading it, gave copies to virtually everyone I knew. It struck me as terrifyingly and obviously true, but if my friends and acquaintances thought so, they certainly didn’t do much about it. Denial is a very powerful force.
    After living for the past 35 years in Paris, I have now moved to a village in Switzerland with a population of 300 people. We are perched on top of mountain, but there is a bus down every hour from 7 am until 8 pm, and another up the mountain from 6:30 am until 8:30 pm. From the nearest city at the bottom of the mountain to Lausanne and Geneva (including the airport) there are THIRTY trains a day. I feel sad when I go to the States, because life there could be so much simpler without all those cars. Any hope at all for that kind of future for the US?

  18. Cussin' Jack June 7, 2010 at 10:17 am #

    Our “way of life” is threatened …
    As sickening as the whole oil catastrophe is, you have to love the comments from public officials across the Gulf coast. In the face of the most horrific environmental disaster the U.S. has ever faced, Parish Presidents in Louisiana bemoan the idea of curtailing offshore oil drilling because some crazy number like 80% of employment and revenue directly or indirectly comes from oil … to hell with the fishermen and birds and fishes. “Their way of life is threatened.”
    Then there’s the mayor from the Panhandle of Florida who’s complaining about the tarballs saying “their way of life it threatened”.
    One has to ask, “Who’s way of life are they talking about?” Rabid, happy-motoring, Spring Break tourism? Petro-sucking, obscene-profit exploitation of should-be-off-limits offshore oil production? Third-generation shrimping family?
    “Way of life.” “Way of life.” I just love that phrase. As if we all have the same “way of life”.

  19. Me June 7, 2010 at 10:21 am #

    “When You Should Not Adapt in Place
    by Sharon Astyk
    Most of the people who take Adapting-In-Place, reasonably enough, are doing so because they intend to stay where they are or fairly nearby in the coming decades. They know that they may not be in the perfect place, but for a host of reasons – inability to sell a house, job or family commitments, love of place…you name it, they are going to stay. Or maybe it is the best possible place for them. But I do think it is important to begin the class with the assumption that everything is on the table. Because as little as each of us likes to admit it, it is. There will be many migrations in the coming decades, many of them unwilling and unwanted. And it is always easier (not easy) to consciously choose to step away before you are forced to leave than it is to abandon in pain and storm and disaster your home and never be fully able to return. So it is important to ask – who should not stay in place?
    For some people, getting out of Dodge is the way to go. That is, I think that some people should absolutely consider leaving where they are, and doing sooner, rather than later, because they have little or no hope of successfully remaining in place.
    Now some of this comes down to long vs. short term issues – and there are balances to be struck. For example, let’s say you live in a place that may be underwater in a couple of decades. You love it, you are in your 50s or 60s, your kids are here. Do you have to leave? No, you don’t have to, but you might want to think about your choices. For example, do you want to have to evacuate your location regularly due to coastal storms in your 80s? Do you have a support network that will make that possible, that will help you? If you plan to move when things get more acute, how likely is it you will be able to sell your house, as the area loses some of its habitability? Do you need to sell it? If you have family inland who would take you in, maybe risking that you might have to walk away is ok – or maybe it isn’t.
    Our homes are our homes, and our right to stay and choose them sometimes seems inviolable – but it isn’t. In the next decades there are going to be a lot of migrants – and you may be one of them. Migrating and settling in a reasonably liveable place might be better – or it might not, and you might want to wait and see. But don’t do it in ignorance – find out all you can. The reality is that many people do more research on what movie to see than we do about our future, and the risks and benefits of the locations we choose.
    So here’s my list of when to think seriously about getting out. There will be exceptions in every case – my claim is not “you definitely must go” but “think hard about what you are choosing.”
    1. If you have an ARM and can’t reset it, are already facing foreclosure or have no reason to believe you’ll be able to pay for your house. Or, if your current house was bought near the market peak and you require two ful incomes to pay for it and have little equity.
    The odds are good you aren’t going to keep your house in those circumstances – and the worst possible scenario for you may well be that you go into debt frantically trying to keep your old way of life open, which closes off other options. If you have a better choice, one that can provide some stability, or there is hope of selling and getting out from under, seriously consider it.
    If you do end up in full foreclosure, remember the magic words – “Produce the Note.” Rerquire that the company do full due diligence and stay in your house as long as you can – you might as well save up rent for the future. And unless your loan is a recourse loan (be very careful with state assisted refinances, since many of these turn no-recourse loans into recourse loans – you do not want to be paying for this forever) But do me a favor, and don’t trash the place on the way out – someone else, even you may eventually end up renting a foreclosure, so don’t trash what assets we’ve got indiscriminately.
    2. If you have young children or are elderly and have close ties somewhere but are living far away from them in a community that you are not invested in. Not everyone has people (family biological or chosen) who will give you a place at the table, thin the soup to make it stretch, let you sleep on their couch and otherwise cover your back. But if you do, recognize that these people are the beginnings of your tribe. Not all of us have tribes in one place – and some of us have multiple tribes. But if you aren’t rooted where you are in some deep way, if you live there primarily for a job, and you can get back to your people think about it seriously.
    The people who will most need the support of their family are young families themselves struggling to make do and older people who may need some help. Sometimes these people are even usefully related to one another . Not all family is good, not every friendship can go this far, but if you have these ties, they matter, and they are essential.
    3. If you have children or parents you need to care for far away. Again, this is ymmv, but if you are going to be dealing with your parents’ decline, or if you don’t have custody of your kids but want to spend time on them, you need to set it up in a way that doesn’t make anyone rely on airline or other expensive long distance travel. That means that if they don’t come to you, you go to them. It was once perfectly viable to live across the country from your kids, and say, have them spend summers with you – it may no longer be viable. I realize this will be enormously painful and disruptive to families, but if you are the resource for people very far away over the longer term, you need to find a way to be closer to one another, or accept that you may not be able to take on that role.
    4. If you live in an extreme climate, likely to become more extreme with climate change, but you are not particularly and unusually well adapted to it. That is, unless we check climate change, which at this point seems unlikely, (if highly desirable) at some point, many places are going to be uninhabitable for many of the people who presently live there. Some may become literally uninhabitable over time, but more likely, what we’ll see is that small populations, extremely well adapted to their environment, and extremely attuned to it, become native to many places as long as they are even marginally inhabitable. But the question is, are you one of them?
    That is, if you live in a very hot, dry place, and are an expert desert dwe;;er, gifted at retaining and using every drop of water prudently, and comfortable living without lots of input or air conditioning, and happy to live on the diet that grows there well, great, you and your descendents will probably do very well there if anyone does. But if you are fond of long showers, keep the a/c on six months a year and think that hamburgers are a right, you might want to think about somewhere else. If you have severe health issues exacerbated by your climate, you might want to consider leaving.
    If you need income from the sale of your house, you might want to think about it sooner, rather than later, because there will probably come a point at which the number of people who want to live there declines dramatically, and it will be even tougher to sell than it is now. Now even if some places do become uninhabitable, they probably won’t do so immediately – you might well be able to live out your life where you are. But remember that it will probably become gradually and increasingly hard – the summers will be worse, the storms will be stronger, the ice pack will be smaller, your allergies will be worse. Are you prepared to be that adaptable?
    5. If you live among people with lousy values. I’m on the record saying that most of us can probably get along in most places with at least some people. I don’t think everyone in your town has to be like you, or that ecovillages are the only (or even the best) way to find community. That said, however, there are exceptions. And even if you can find some small community in a larger culture of rotten values, you may find that it wears you down.
    Thus, if your neighborhood is chronically ridden with violence and crime, maybe it is a good idea to fight it – but maybe you’d be better off somewhere else. If you bought in a gated community full of self-centered rich assholes, and now you regret it because they are pissed about your garden, sometimes, if you can, living somewhere else might be nicer.
    If you belong to a minority community, you might want to live where people like folks like you, or at least tolerate them, rather than a place that is hostile to them. If you rely on a religious community, you might want to live where you feel that the cultural values reflect your own. If you don’t want to be surrounded by religious communities, you might want to live in a place with a strong secular culture.
    Personally, I’ve always had a lot of luck finding allies where I went, even if we didn’t share much. But there are root values we did have in common – integrity, kindness, a desire for community. If those things don’t exist, you might seriously have to consider another choice.
    6. If you don’t think your children (and by your children, I mean the children in your family, even if they aren’t your own) have a future where you are. Now this is somewhat speculative, and may partly contradict what I said above – you may, for example, simply not be ready to leave a place, even if you don’t think it will be sustainable in the long term. But it is worth thinking about the larger consequences of committing to a place that may not have a future. If your children have to leave to get work, if your children have to leave because it isn’t safe or is underwater, are your prepared to part with them? Are you prepared for your family to be parted in circumstances that might not be conducive to regular cross-country travel? More importantly, if you have land or something you hope to pass down to your kids, are you prepared not to be able to do so? Is it an asset that they will be able to do without? Again, you can’t know all this for sure, but it is worth thinking about.
    7. If you plan to move anyway. That is, if you have a family place or somewhere you have always planned to return to, if you can, sooner may be better than later. It takes time to build soil. It takes time to get to know people and build yourself into the life of a community. It takes time to see fruit trees come to maturity. If you were planning on going anyway after a few more years of earning, or something, now might be the right time. That said, however, I’d be awfully cautious about buying, and only recommend this *if you can* leave – either by selling your current place or if you’ve been renting. But building roots is important.
    8. If you aren’t prepared to live in the place you live as its culture demands. That is, as we get poorer and travel and transit become bigger issues, living in the country is going to be a lot different than it is now – instead of living essentially a suburban life, commuting to activities not available and relying on trucked in supplies, you may have to shop occasionally and mostly stay home in the country, making your own entertainment. Are you prepared to do that? Once upon a time the country mouse and the city mouse lived very different lives, but cheap energy changed that. It may well change back.
    Urban dwellers may have to make do in tougher conditions as infrastructure problems come up. My own analogy is this – if you’d be ok living in the worst neighborhood in your city as most of the people there live now, you’ll probably be fine. But if you’ve been affluent and comfortable and might not be forever, be sure you can afford the city and like the life. I believe strongly that city, suburb (most of them) and country all have a future – but the differences between them are likely to become more acute. If you aren’t prepared to deal with those differences, you might consider moving.
    9. If you live in a outer suburban housing development, particularly a fairly new one. This is the one exception I make to the question of whether the suburbs are viable. Generally speaking, I think a lot of suburbs will do fine, others will adapt in different ways – some may become more like small cities, others may be more country-like. But the ones that I think the least hope are the larger developments that were built in the “drive ’til you buy” model of the last few years, where lower income families have to move further and further away from urban or suburban job centers. If your suburb was built on a cornfield forty miles from your job, think seriously about how you will get along either in an energy constrained world or one where energy is much more costly because of carbon limitations. Do you really think anyone is going to run public transport out there? Is there topsoil? Is it a place worth maintaining and farming? Are there neighbors? Are there going to be? If you are already in a half-finished development, you really might want to get out.
    10. If you are native to another place. By native, I mean that many of us have a strong sense of place, and a strong sense of belonging to a place. My husband once went on a job interview at UIL Champagne-Urbana. He recalls looking across the land and seeing the horizon and thinking “oh, there’s the ocean.” But of course, there was no ocean there – his misperception lasted only a second, but revealed something about his ability to live in that place – he comes from people who live on hilly land around water, and know the flat horizon as the space of the sea. It is possible that he could have adapted to the flat open land of the midwest and learned to love it – but it is also possible that one’s sense of place should be respected if possible.
    I know people who have never fully adapted to their place, in the sense of being truly native to it – desert born people who could never breathe comfortably in the humid air of the southeast, warm climate people who found the cold of northern winters unbearable, city folk who find the country abnormally empty and silent, water folk who can’t imagine life away from a boat, country people who can’t tolerate the city. Most of us can endure these things if we have to – but why not be happier if it is possible?
    Not everyone is tied to a place – some people can live anywhere, others in a wide range of places. Some people can take their sense of place to wherever they go, and find a new home. But some people can’t. And it is simply the case that your body, and parts of your soul are shaped by your experience – a college friend of mine once spoke of people who grew up by the sea has sharing “water thinking” and noted that she who lived in Hawaii and I who lived in Coastal Massachusetts had that in common in our way of viewing the world. More mundanely, people who grow up in hot climates develop more sweat glands, and a better ability to cool themselves than people who grow up in cold ones – our physiology is shaped by our place.
    And our native knowledge of our place is valuable – in fact, it may be the most powerful tool we have. Now some of us will have to leave our native places, to journey again as people so often have. But if we can stay where we are, knowing our flora and fauna, knowing what grows where and how things smell when the seasons change and how to heal or feed or tend with what is native here is absolutely valuable – as is the ability to adapt that knowledge as our places change. So if there is a place where you feel at home, and no other constraints bind you, perhaps you will want to go there, and be there, and help other people be there.
    Again, all of these examples will have exceptions. No one, especially me is saying “move now!” And some people who probably should leave will not be able to for reasons of family and obligation, underwater housing and job commitments. But do think about all your choices, as you consider where you go and stay.
    In _Depletion and Abundance_ I write about Peasant economics, the economy of poor people around the world. In many cases, the best off of the world’s poor are those who live in a pass-down economy – a bicycle isn’t a private purchase, but one shared within the family, with close neighbors, and maintained carefully to be passed down to one’s children if at all possible. The same is true of property and other high value items. We who have had so many resources thrust upon us, will need to pass down to future generations what we can. Choosing where we begin, and what we bring to this is a central part of the project of adaptation to our future.”
    http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2010/06/when_you_should_not_adapt_in_p.php

  20. Ancona June 7, 2010 at 10:22 am #

    Living in Florida, I can attest to the problems we are already facing with the spread out nature of our “neighborhoods. When I was a kid, I could walk down to the butcher, bakery, and the grocery store. Now, I have to get in my car and drive for fifteen minutes to go to the nearest big-box to shop.
    The grocer is gone, the butcher is gone and the baker has been gone for fifteen years.
    When TSHTF, and it will, folks in this area will likely starve, or migrate to the very place where there will be no food…..the city.
    My family has started a sustainable path towards self sufficiency which includes storing food and growing produce. It is our intention to have chickens and a goat or two as well. While that may make for a rather bleak existence, at least we will be able to eat.
    With some work and follow-through, we have organized several others in our area to join in on hte garden and have increased its size to over 5000 square feet of french intensive raised bed style production.

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  21. Loveandlight June 7, 2010 at 10:22 am #

    I know what you mean about comparing Minneapolis to cities with walkable neighborhoods. I moved from such a city (Madison, WI) to Minneapolis. The saving grace was that the metro bus system of the Twin Cities is pretty good for a major American city. But if you must get around by bus, you very well might not like living in Minneapolis, let me tell you. And of course, the vast majority of the population of the area lives in the sprawling cluster of suburbs that cling to Minneaplis and St. Paul like barnacles to the hull of a sailing-ship. It was so nice to move back to Madison two years later! I have since moved to the southeastern suburbs of Milwaukee ({cough}white-trash ghetto{cough}), and I still find myself missing Madison a lot, even though the real-estate developers have raped the downtown area of Madison to Hell and gone.

  22. montysano June 7, 2010 at 10:25 am #

    Thanks in part to reading JHK over the years, my wife and I are concerned but not panicked. We live in a city of 200K in north Alabama. We live in a modest, affordable house and are debt free. If we had to give up our cars tomorrow, it would be inconvenient but life would go on. We have a grocery, pharmacy, and farmer’s market within easy bicycle range. My work is 5 miles away, and I try to commute by bike 30% of the time. I feel for the denizens of Atlanta, for whom most of this is not possible.
    Re: the Gulf Coast. This is going to be an ongoing, slow-motion disaster. Added to the obvious effects of the oil spill is the fact that much of the real estate along the MS-AL-FL coast is already underwater financially. As soon as the oil hits the beaches, the tourists will vanish and the overbuilt clusterfuck along the coast will become mostly vacant. Sad, yes, but inevitable, spill or no spill.

  23. trav777 June 7, 2010 at 10:33 am #

    Well, credit Teddy Ruxpin Obama for rushing forward to score political points by demonizing the companies that provide stuff people either GET at the price they feel they deserve or else RIOT over.
    If gas goes to $4/gal, heads will roll with “why the hell are you letting these oil companies gouge me like this when oil is so plentiful it pops out of every hole in the ground?!?!”
    The oil situation is a result of SYSTEMATIC lying by everyone in power for 40 years. I guess except for Jimmy Crater.
    Nobody save a precious few know what the oil situation is really like and we may as well be pissing into a Force 9 gale.
    The Gulf disaster is a direct result of the low-hanging fruit oil reserves all being exploited already. There are no more significant surface fields that have not already been in production for decades.
    The morons will both DEMAND that no more power plants be built CONCURRENTLY with no interruptions in electricity. No more drilling at the same time as demanding cheaper gasoline. No more pollution at the same time as gimme gimme gimme lots of merchandise.
    And there stands ready a politician who will talk as smoothly and vacuously as the present Chief Executive who will promise them ALL that they can have mutually irreconcilable things if they just vote for him.

  24. Karin June 7, 2010 at 10:38 am #

    I heard a story on Morning Edition Sunday about the disconnect between what is happening in the Gulf and our dependence on oil for our cars. The story took place at a gas station in Saranac Lake. Most of he folks interviewed could not imagine HOW they would manage without their cars/ SUV’s.
    Yup, it sure is not going to be pretty…

  25. Goat1080 June 7, 2010 at 10:41 am #

    I just watched “Waterworld” (Kevin Costner) and “Mad Max – Beyond Thunderdom” this weekend and my mind just kept going to Mr. Kunstler’s articles and books. I was even calling Kevin Costner “Kevin Kunstler”!
    Even though I had seen these flicks a decade ago they made a LOT MORE SENSE to me this time around. There are lots of things happening today – pointed out in Jim’s article – that ring shockingly true and stir up emotions when watching Waterworld and Mad Max. In the 1990’s, that “future” seemed totally abstract. Today, it seems like: in your face.
    Where I live in North Alabama there is ZERO public transit, ZERO train service and precious few local gardens – except what a few of us put out in our back yards.
    Throughout the USA and much of the world it is starting to look a lot more like “Bartertown”. We’re in the early stages, however I don’t see any clear course for things to “improve” significantly – if “improve” is defined as reving up the unsustainable borrow and spend energy- hungry car-centric “economy”. Looks like it has a terminal case of the debt-ridden blues. It’s going on a crash diet whether it wants to or not as all the resources required to run modern technology begin to run out. There’s that oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and Europe the financial basket case that just can’t get better for getting worse.
    The world doesn’t end – it just changes.

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  26. montysano June 7, 2010 at 10:47 am #

    @Goat1080;
    I’m curious: where in north Alabama are you? Feel free to email me at dbennett at tlsinc dot com.

  27. Goat1080 June 7, 2010 at 10:48 am #

    Ancona – good for you! Seems you are on the right path with your garden and community network. It is most important to have your own source of food or belong to a tight-knit community and participate in a community garden.
    Some people feel secure by living within walking distance of a supermarket. I wouldn’t put too much faith in any supermarket. Those shelves will be empty and all those freezers will be without electricity because the industrial farming system will fail along with the trucks and utilities. Only food you grow and store can be counted on.
    Keep up the good work! And take good care of your goats!

  28. ian807 June 7, 2010 at 10:54 am #

    Jim, it’s not “… the kind of public transit that people are not ashamed to ride in.”
    It’s … the kind of *people* on public transit that people are not ashamed to ride* with.*”
    I used to live in San Francisco and didn’t own a car. Public transit there really is that good. The problem is that ridership is unregulated. When I took the CALTrans train in San Francisco to San Jose, belligerent or drunk passengers were thrown off the train. When I take BART, I’m stepping over the drunk guy in the wheelchair that has tipped over on its side, who’s just puked, and who is cursing and punching at anyone who tries to help him.
    Public transportation is an exercise in dealing with people whose behavior I can’t predict or control. Care to expose your children to that?
    So, until that changes significantly, I’ll keep my car, ThankYouVeryMuch.
    Does this make me an elitist? Guess so.

  29. ozone June 7, 2010 at 10:55 am #

    “It [oil disaster] will seem like a “necklace of death” for several states, though even that may not be enough to distract them from the more gratifying raptures of Nascar and NFL football.” -JHK
    I’m glad Mr. Kunstler keeps harping on these “symptoms” of our national malaise and denial. Yep, there’s your “lifestyle” for ya. Those who think it’s about redneck-bashing alone should think again and attempt to see the Big Picture. It’s really long past time (if not far too late).
    Do what you can, and do it now; notions of hurt pride (and time wasted on it) can get you dead. There is no avoidance or way around the coming collapse; the only way is THROUGH, for good or ill.
    Look at Tripp; he’s taking his shot, clear-eyed and positively.
    Bon Chance!

  30. Paul Kemp June 7, 2010 at 11:03 am #

    It is pleasant to hang out every Monday morning with the few people in America who “get it.” I live in a walkable town of 2050, but almost nobody walks. They drive a block to the post office, then a half block to the bank and another block to the store. Why, if they didn’t, they’d have to walk back to get their Personal Security Safety Blanket with an armload of mail and groceries!
    One idea I came up with a few years ago was to bring back a free-enterprise version of the “county farm” that flourished just before the turn of the 20th century. Pull together some farmable rural land and building and open it up selectively to unemployed, willing-to-work people. This could provide the needed foodstuffs to local communities and provide employment and a roof over the heads for the residents.
    I go into the whole concept at http://commonwealthfarm.blogspot.com/
    I echo the comments here that getting in shape now, before we are forced to, is the smartest thing to do. Get used to walking again — it is actually very liberating not to be dragging a car around, worried about parkinglot dings and the insanity of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
    Get used to simple, natural, vegetarian food. It is better for us anyway and solves our problem of dependency on Big Pharma and a health care system that won’t be around to take care of us when we need it, anyway.
    Prepare now for the more likely way the future will play out, not the government’s misleading narrative: http://www.healthyplanetdiet.com/
    Thanks, Jim, and others for this weekly conversation on healing the nation and coming to terms with the new reality. “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was ___________ (fill in the blank).”

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  31. Uncle Al June 7, 2010 at 11:04 am #

    Government handles reality by modeling sequelae not blunting problems. Quantitative chattels allow evaluation and thus entail risk. Studies decorated with warehoused Chinese fire drills are paperwork, favored vendors, and productivity bonuses. Then… bad luck.
    Solar activity peaked in early 2002. The ongoing solar minimum is the longest and deepest in a century. Personnel in place are innocent toward the nasty status quo.
    http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/f10.gif
    radio flux
    http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif
    butterfly diagram
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Synoptic-solmag.jpg
    magnetic field
    Classical infrastructure investment since 2002 is a joke. Enviro-whiner Luddism driven by corrupt payoffs is dogma. US population increased by 20 million. A fat solar flare will blow the grid, chew on geosynchronous satellites, and whack GPS and its time signals. Dead electric sockets empower privileged minorities for looting and arson. Then… bad luck.

  32. DeeJones June 7, 2010 at 11:06 am #

    Aw, Jim, BP wont disappear, they will just do like many other companies do now: File for bankruptcy, then re-emerge with a whole new name, like SunnBunny Energy (with a cute new logo), but with all the debts and liabilities wiped out (but the profits and production intact)! Ain’t the ‘Merican legal system great, or what?!
    Yep, we are way too invested in the car culture.
    I think someone said that they would pry the steering wheel of their Yukon out of their cold, dead hands before they give up driving.
    got a crow bar? Or just use some of that oil on the beach.
    Say, did you know that Florida now has black sand beaches, just like Hawaii, and no volcanows! Lets go there now!

  33. lbendet June 7, 2010 at 11:08 am #

    Questioning the Chicago school.
    There was a little moment of truth that came out on Fareed Zhakaria’s GPS a few weeks ago when he asked Christine Lagarde the French Minister of Finance whether a new bubble was inflating and Lagarde responded that there was nothing else to work with!! (my jaw dropped–I couldn’t believe the honesty)
    I think that’s the problem Obama faced when taking office and I believe he got the Clintonistas on board because of that. They looked at the damage the derivatives wrought and they said let’s do more… (somewhere between 800 Trillion and 1.4 Quadrillion, but who’s counting?) As Carl Ichan exclaimed on Bill Moyers. They never saw numbers like that and they were freaking. The question was how to put a Keynsian band-aid on a Neoliberal global economy and make it look like a stimulus for the middle class.
    The neoliberal apprach is clearly toxic and uses debt to create wealth for those who own it. Not only is Germany not interested in going down this path as they actually produce real value, but now China is complaining about Goldman Sachs trying to siphon off gold and silver commodities.
    Everything’s a compromise. The paradigm of the Lincoln presidency as defined by Doris Kearns Goodwin in “Team of Rivals” has colored this presidency. Obama has vainly tried to bring the country to the center, but when the fundamental ideologies are so diametrically opposed, there’s no way that’s going to happen. He has only achieved watered down approaches to everything when more real leadership is needed. Unfortunately he also went along with deep sea drilling in order to get Republican votes for renewables.
    Now, getting back to this oil spill and BP. It came out last week that BP chose to use cheaper liner in their pipes along with all the other cost-cutting practices. Also some scientists have come out to say that there is yet another rig that they are worried about. The main point is that no regulation means cadmium is on the McDonald’s glasses for America children, oil rigs are a danger ….
    and wait till you hear the drumbeat to build more nuclear power plants!!

  34. Bob Wise June 7, 2010 at 11:12 am #

    Jim,
    A couple of points of light in the general gloom-
    1. New Amtrack stations are being planned for Titusville and Cocoa, on the east coast of Florida. Not “high-speed rail” but real, old fashioned passenger service. I hope in a few years to be able to visit my daughter in Ft. Lauderdale by train.
    2. Atlanta has the infrastructure in place for a real, viable public transport system. The MARTA train is so good even yuppies take it to the airport. The bus routes connect to the train and go virtually everywhere. True, you may step off the bus onto a clay path, because many neighborhoods lack sidewalks. But the skeletal infrastructure already exists for a comprehensive public transport network.

  35. trippticket June 7, 2010 at 11:51 am #

    Well said, Bob Wise. Atlanta may cease to exist as “Atlanta,” but Stone Mountain, East Atlanta, Grant’s Park, Little 5 Points, etc, etc, will be lovely little villages well connected to the others by a pretty damn decent MARTA system.
    And thankfully, big government will no longer play a role. Pay attention to your local elections; they’re all that really matters.

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  36. asoka June 7, 2010 at 11:52 am #

    Good column this week, Jim.
    I have traveled extensively in South America… of course, without a car. They have BUSES.
    DRILL, BABY, DRILL! (the mantra of Conservatives and Republicans in 2008) was never more than RAPE AMERICA FIRST!
    We now have the proof as our coastlines are blackened. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s overview of offshore activity, 4,000 platforms operate in the U.S. federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, primarily off the coastlines of Louisiana and Texas, and off the coast of Alaska, producing approximately 1.5 million barrels per day; contrast that figure with U.S. current oil consumption of 21 million barrels per day.
    That comes out to 7% and that 7% can be offset through conservation efforts, without any increase in imports. Offshore drilling is not necessary. The problem is not really that big or dramatic, but you are right that NASCAR and NFL take precedence in the minds of many Americans.
    Then we have idiots like Ron Paul who vote against (or refuse to show up to vote for) any kind of legislation designed to solve our energy problems. For example, this is just a smattering of Congressional bills Ron Paul has voted against:
    Energy and Environmental Law Amendments (“Cap and Trade”)
    Trade-in Vouchers for Fuel Efficient Cars
    Renewable Energy Credits and Other Business and Individual Credits
    Hey! Aren’t Libertarians supposed to be FOR individuals? Not Ron Paul.
    Housing Bill with Energy Tax Credit Extensions
    Alternative Energy Tax Incentives
    Prohibiting Foreign States or Associations from Forming a Group to Control Oil
    For Ron Paul “free enterprise” seems to trump national sovereignty. In any event he votes NO on almost every proposed solution to the energy problem.

  37. bigview June 7, 2010 at 11:53 am #

    “Home alone meets Risky Business” – good one!
    Personally I was worried about the “Home alone meets The Shining” scenario.
    Its possible to see that the US is a big continent and will always have pockets sufficient to regenerate the whole nation into what Celente described as “a world better than the one we are leaving.”
    Cheers to all.
    And here’s to Celente’s better world.

  38. Paul Kemp June 7, 2010 at 11:53 am #

    I suspect the American way of dealing with the coming shortage of oil for our precious motorized Way of Life is seen in our botched attempt to secure more oil by invading Iraq.
    Remember when we were told that the Iraq invasion would pay for itself? It hasn’t worked out that way, has it?
    Now, demanding “tribute” from the Germans to support our failing banks is our latest attempt to intimidate the world into owing us a living. We wouldn’t nuke our allies, would we? I suppose some argument for that could be concocted, but let’s hope it doesn’t play out that way.
    But, Yes, Unconventional Ideas, we do need to band together for security and efficiency to create our own social safety nets. There is strength in numbers for those who agree on where they want to go.
    We need to build our own communities of those with specialized skills we will need to weather the predictable changes that are coming: medical, dental, herbal, agricultural, mechanical, etc.
    Our communalism of the Sixties and Seventies was just a trial run for the impending future.

  39. Prelapsarian Press June 7, 2010 at 12:02 pm #

    If memory serves, Al Gore briefly floated out a trial balloon in the 200 primaries about the problems with the suburban sprawl way of life. Polls showed it to be a loser issue, and the campaign quickly shelved it.
    Gore could have learned from Jimmy Carter. In 1979 he told the American people that they had an oil consumption problem, were sunk low in an ethos of materialism and a culture of narcissism. The “malaise speech” effectively ended his political career. Reagan came along to tell Americans that they were perfect just the way they were, and to get out there and shop (and if wages are going down, just use credit cards). Ever since, the political class, as well as producers of popular culture, have taken as axiomatic that the American public needs its butt kissed on a regular basis. It’s virtually impossible now for this country to subject itself to exacting criticism in the mainstream public discourse.
    For a free download of Kunstlerian-style invective — Words that Draw Blood — go to http://www.lost-vocabulary.com.

  40. Ken June 7, 2010 at 12:10 pm #

    It is interesting that BP is making a big deal about capturing about half the oil from this well. I told them a week ago how they could stop all of it a week ago within 48 hours of implementing my idea. Still have not heard back from them since then.
    It was so obvious to anyone with even a moderate understanding of what was happening here that the top kill procedure was not going to work. Pumping thousands of barrels of mud down a 21″ hole was never going to plug it. Why? Because the oil is coming up that hole at something like 5000 psi pressure. The oil continued to push by the mud on it’s way to the surface. Wasted effort of time and money.
    What is needed is a stopper made of rubber and Kevlar to plug the hole. The stopper could be made in a diameter of about 18″ and 36″ long so to allow the stopper to be put in place without being pushed out of the hole by the tremendous pressure below. That way the oil would continue to flow around the stopper initially. The stopper would be hollow in the middle with 3″ kevlar reinforced walls. This is the area that would contain either an inert high pressure gas like nitrogen or hydralic fluid. Once the stopper was placed into the hole by the robots there, the gas or fluid could be quickly pressurized from 1″ cable from a ship at the surface.
    The pressuring of the stopper would only take seconds to accomplish. It would quickly expand to a diameter of 21″ diameter and seal the hole. This is why the stopper needs to be made from rubber.To stop it from being pushed out of the 21″ wellhole by the pressure below it needs to lock into the sides of the steel hole. This is easily acomplished by putting either carbide or industrial diamonds onto the exterior surface of the stopper. These materials are much harder than steel and would lock the stopper firmly in place, completly stopping the flow. The gas or hydralic pressure could be maintained at the required 6000 psi or greater until it hole was permantly sealed with concrete. Problem solved.
    Will anyone do it?
    Ken

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  41. trippticket June 7, 2010 at 12:16 pm #

    Treebeard’s comment from last week:
    “”East Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans) obtain the highest mean IQ at 105. Europeans follow with an IQ of 100. Some ways below these are the Inuit or Eskimos (IQ 91),…”
    (ad infinitum)
    This echoes a post I made to Vlad, that got Eleuthero all riled up, a few months ago. But apparently having a higher IQ is actually synonymous with exploitative mischief.
    Who is constantly expanding and destroying the planet as they go? Who drills deepwater oil wells in the Gulf? The Australian aborigines? The Malay highlanders? Nope. It’s the agrarian populations of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and their descendents (e.g. Americans and Canadians). And that ability to grow and hoard nutrient-dense foodstuffs, at the expense of everything and everyone else on the planet, is almost guaranteed to be responsible for the disparity in intelligence quotients too. Not an inborn favoritism.
    You say it like it’s some sort of gift from above (and hence our destiny to conquer) when we’re really feeding ourselves on the cancer of our own existence. What little expansion and exploitation they engage in was learned from us.
    Big brains don’t seem to correlate with endurance. Not in the long view anyway. They seem to love to congratulate each other on their inventions of cults, Klans, REITs, CDSs, CDOs, and all other manners of Ponzi-schemed ridiculousness, but endurance is not their game. Hell, most of the right’s high and mighty corporations will not live as long as the average human. It’s take and then take faster with us.
    How ’bout we talk about the methods and means of endurance instead of repeatedly (and almost always incorrectly) pointing fingers.
    You could start by watching the skraelings.

  42. Me June 7, 2010 at 12:18 pm #

    “Aw, Jim, BP wont disappear, they will just do like many other companies do now: File for bankruptcy, then re-emerge with a whole new name, like SunnBunny Energy (with a cute new logo), but with all the debts and liabilities wiped out (but the profits and production intact)! Ain’t the ‘Merican legal system great, or what?!”
    Meanwhile, college loan debt is undischarbale even after filing for bankruptcy.

  43. Fouad Khan June 7, 2010 at 12:20 pm #

    I’m almost beginning now to enjoy the anti-climax joe’s super-naturally punctual “first” comments provide.
    Following up the poignant round ups of our profound collapse every monday with a banal celebration of success at a meaningless game, he could be an emblem of America’s empty “we’re number one” denial-ism.
    He’s gonna be shouting “first” as the human race drops into the deep, dark sinkhole of civilization collapse.
    http://hurricanekatrinakaif.com

  44. Sir Bikes June 7, 2010 at 12:31 pm #

    North Carolina. I bet you were talking about Wilmington. It’s funny cause it’s true. Besides clueless people in denial, one of the biggest problems here is the DOT. When your money comes from driving, more driving is all you’re going to get. They control all the roads in the entire state. Local leaders have little say, and DOT builds for autos and autos only. $4-5 Billion for a new Cape Fear Skyway, Billions more for a 17 Hampstead Bypass. Bikes? Peds? Public Transportation? What’s that? We’re all retired rich people so why would we want that? The redneck logic is everybody drives, so why would we build for anything else but for cars? DOT is the enemy.

  45. Jon Rynn June 7, 2010 at 12:43 pm #

    Yes! JHK dares to mention the Unmentionable, that the only way to decrease oil dependence on places like the Gulf and Nigeria (which apparently experiences a Deep Horizon blowout-equivalent every year), is to decrease the use of…dare I say it…cars!
    But this doesn’t even get into the very heart of the problem, which is the single family home. No car, no single family home. Both are “nonnegotiable”. Neither is even raised by environmental groups, much less the mainstream media.
    However, allegedly up to 25% of the population wants to live in a walkable neighborhood, while only 5% do. So I proposed building 100,000 250-unit apartment buildings on the Roosevelt Institute blog (http://www.newdeal20.org/2010/06/04/building-a-greener-future-lets-stay-together-11576/). I think that would be a good start. Link those centers up with rail of whatever variety we can muster, some continent-spanning wind networks, and bad-a-bing, the start of something beautiful.
    By the way, as important as finance is, it’s “only” money. If you still have enough resources, energy, and skills to construct an indefinitely sustainable infrastructure, you can do it, debts be damned.

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  46. keithishere June 7, 2010 at 12:55 pm #

    A long article today and interesting as usual but I have taken a break reading it to post this urgent comment.
    I invite others in our loyal crew to visit a thread I started at:
    How To Stop The Oil Leak
    I am attempting to generate enough pressure to force the White House to stop kissing BP’s ass and take action to stop the leak.
    It’s obvious to me IMHO we now have a president who is not comfortable with science and probably not understanding the science behind peak oil.
    Please contribute if you can, if the thread gets long enough it might get noticed.
    Not just sitting on my ass this week, feels good.

  47. ~micheal~ June 7, 2010 at 1:10 pm #

    James, you say, “The obvious remedy for the oil-and-car problem would be to live in walkable towns and neighborhoods served by the kind of public transit that people are not ashamed to ride in.”
    Let’s see, 300E6 souls divided by 10E3 souls/town equals about 30,000 new walkable towns to create from scratch or upgrade to fully functioning “walkable town” at what, say a billion or so a pop. Optimistically, we would need only about $30trillion to implement this “OBVIOUS REMEDY”.
    Perhaps, the “obvious remedy” is really what is now transpiring.?. Just maybe the obvious remedy for population overshoot for any species is and has always been…
    Well, I don’t really need to spell it out. “Obvious remedy” is merely prattle bot speak for “I don’t have enough logical things to say today but I have to fill this space with something”.
    May You Be Among The Survivors

  48. wagelaborer June 7, 2010 at 1:12 pm #

    So if the media doesn’t cover it, it doesn’t happen?
    Rich Whitney, Green Party candidate for Illinois governor, just finished a sustainable transportation tour around Illinois.
    http://www.whitneyforgov.org/sustainable-transportation-tour
    He spoke everywhere he went on the need to move beyond the car driven mode of transportation, continual road construction, and sprawl-causing building codes.
    Perhaps you should ask your local media why they do not cover alternative candidates with ideas for moving beyond fossil fuel burning.

  49. k-dog June 7, 2010 at 1:28 pm #

    So far, also, the US has done nothing in the way of holding a serious national political discussion about the the most important part of the story: our pathological dependency on cars. I don’t know if this will ever happen, even right up to the moment when the lines form at the filling stations.

    How true and the spill in the gulf is showing every loyal reader to JHK’s column who and salivates when our president mentions “Our Addiction To Oil” does not know what he is talking about and is just kissing ass.
    The willingness of Obama to kiss BP’s ass and let them run the show shows me that he has not been following the science behind oil production at all. Call me crazy but I bet 90% of us who follow peak oil could come up with a way to stop that leak pretty quick so Obama’s failure tells me he has no clue about our predicament.
    We need to shame him into educating himself: I have a thread which may help.

    HOW TO STOP THE OIL SPILL

    Please contribute if you can. Enough posts could result in the thread being noticed which could turn up the heat on the administration in a round about way. It’s a start.
    Enough heat could cause Obama to learn about and understand our predicament and get to work being the president instead of gallivanting about the world kissing the ass of the very elite who got us into this mess.
    He needs to be reminded that the people elected him and are no longer going to cut him the slack we have been while he learned the job. He needs to get to work and stop the photo-op bullshit.
    Please contribute if you can.

  50. k-dog June 7, 2010 at 1:34 pm #

    Thanks

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  51. ~micheal~ June 7, 2010 at 1:38 pm #

    “When You Should Not Adapt in Place”
    by Sharon Astyk
    OR
    “How to Rearrange the Deck Chairs”
    The reality is that virtually everyone should move but the other half of the coin is that there are not enough survivable locations for everyone to move to. That is why it is call the total collapse of industrial human society.
    So, the prattle bots are going to bleed a buck and a bit of fame out of the situation by giving worthless sermons on deck as the ship is sinking.
    On the bright[?] side, these sermons help to keep the lambs calm and give the officers and crew an opportunity to slip away in the few lifeboats.
    Like Perry Arnett said many years ago early in the Peak Oil discussion, “It will be in no one’s best interest to factually report the reality of the decline of fossil fuels once it begins in earnest” which is how I should leave it. But parts of today’s blog post and some of the comments have struck me as just too ridiculous to ignore.
    ~apologies for my ranting~

  52. idunn June 7, 2010 at 2:15 pm #

    “I maintain that the trend is down for centralized power here, in the direction of impotency and decreasing competence at anything. I don’t subscribe to the paranoid themes of Big Brother government domination, the surveillance state and related fantasies. It’ll be more Home Alone meets Risky Business — a dangerous place with no adult supervision.”
    I wish I could agree with your prediction of decentralization, but here in Western Mass. we still remember Shay’s Rebellion, which was put down by force (and led to the creation of the Constitution). This all took place using 17th-century communications and technology, no surveillance state needed. I think centralized, tax-funded power will be the last thing to go.

  53. SeaYoung June 7, 2010 at 2:59 pm #

    Having circled to planet fifty two times so far, I realize that there is really nothing new. That being said, why can’t we see political, social and economic catastrophies before they happen? JHK brings this to light in his observations of Berlin and how “it” could happen here.
    I see the tea partyers and Sarah Palin as unwitting accomplises to JHK’s prediction of malaise in the USA. Agree? Their surprising influence has proven to be effective in moving state and congressional elections. I am amazed that all do not share my observation that Ms. Palin’s political participation is on par with the endless variety of reality show contestants and star wannabes. I think she is simply out for the bucks. Period.
    The Tea Party and resigned Governor Palin are players, but not the king pins. Who is the missing link?

  54. Nicho June 7, 2010 at 3:01 pm #

    There was one public official who warned us about our dependence on oil and set a national goal to halt the expansion of our oil imports. He was about as highly placed in the government as it is possible to be, and he couln’t get the job done. No one listened.
    The name of course is President Jimmy Carter.

    Actually, Nixon called for energy independence in 1974, and Gerald Ford did in 1976. Nixon started a program called Project Independence.

  55. schizoid June 7, 2010 at 3:05 pm #

    Jim’s right. The situation looks mighty grim.
    Here we are on a polluted, overcrowded planet, with dwindling resources of all kinds — not just oil. The nations of the world are controlled by international bankers who have installed their puppets in major political offices of every nation on Earth.
    The ventriloquist puppet masters then lie to us about everything (except the 9/11 attacks, as Jim has assured us) and their state-controlled media provides ample, meaningless diversion to keep us from worrying about real problems.
    International banking criminals have plundered the treasuries of nearly every nation and a global financial collapse is eminent. Now, diversions much bigger than American Idol or national sports events will be needed to mask the true extent of our global problems.
    War will be the next diversion because a common enemy has always united the citizens of nations and made them willing to sacrifice their freedoms and accept severe rationing of food and other necessities.
    Peak oil and peak everything else will be avoided as world population is drastically reduced by the upcoming wars.

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  56. suburbanempire June 7, 2010 at 3:15 pm #

    BP may not have money or experience enough to plug their leek, but they seem to have pleanty of money to buy “warm fuzzy” tv ad spots during the evening “news”…… and since the news is “brought to you by BP” I should imagine a fair amount of sugar coat goes into the editorial process.
    All the “news” can do is speculate on plugging the pipe with the opinions of Americans (human hair, rubbler balls, garbage…. what’s next? Tampax?)
    I took responsibility for the spill last week (as an North American consumer who demands cheap gas) and so far I seem to be the only one!
    Since the world has become some kind of B-grade freak show perhaps it is time to shake things up http://www.suburbanempire.com has a new look this week and some suggestions on where a cut could be made in our national budget.

  57. zerotsm June 7, 2010 at 3:15 pm #

    It is interesting that BP is making a big deal about capturing about half the oil from this well. I told them a week ago how they could stop all of it a week ago within 48 hours of implementing my idea. Still have not heard back from them since then.
    It was so obvious to anyone with even a moderate understanding of what was happening here that the top kill procedure was not going to work. Pumping thousands of barrels of mud down a 21″ hole was never going to plug it. Why? Because the oil is coming up that hole at something like 5000 psi pressure. The oil continued to push by the mud on it’s way to the surface. Wasted effort of time and money.
    What is needed is a stopper made of rubber and Kevlar to plug the hole. The stopper could be made in a diameter of about 18″ and 36″ long so to allow the stopper to be put in place without being pushed out of the hole by the tremendous pressure below. That way the oil would continue to flow around the stopper initially. The stopper would be hollow in the middle with 3″ kevlar reinforced walls. This is the area that would contain either an inert high pressure gas like nitrogen or hydralic fluid. Once the stopper was placed into the hole by the robots there, the gas or fluid could be quickly pressurized from 1″ cable from a ship at the surface.
    [quote]The pressuring of the stopper would only take seconds to accomplish. It would quickly expand to a diameter of 21″ diameter and seal the hole. This is why the stopper needs to be made from rubber.To stop it from being pushed out of the 21″ wellhole by the pressure below it needs to lock into the sides of the steel hole. This is easily acomplished by putting either carbide or industrial diamonds onto the exterior surface of the stopper. These materials are much harder than steel and would lock the stopper firmly in place, completly stopping the flow. The gas or hydralic pressure could be maintained at the required 6000 psi or greater until it hole was permantly sealed with concrete. Problem solved.[/quote]
    You forgot one major problem. There is a drill pipe inside the riser, so you can’t insert a plug. The drill pipe can’t be removed, it’s wedged in the defective BOP.

  58. zerotsm June 7, 2010 at 3:19 pm #

    In the peak oil denial department: The Ticker Guy thinks all will be solved if the government, political types and environmentalists will just get out of the way and let us build hundreds of fission reactors. See http://market-ticker.org/archives/2380-There-Are-Times….html A lot of Kunstler bashing in his quotes from today’s ClusterFuck Nation.

  59. jean-joffroi June 7, 2010 at 3:19 pm #

    Keep plugging away, Jim, and at least some will get it…eventually.
    Great article, although actually the G-20 were meeting in S. Korea. It was that other elite and much more secret cabal who were goofing in Sitges, planning who-knows-what surprise for the lumpen — the Bildebergers!

  60. blueskyday June 7, 2010 at 3:22 pm #

    Hi all, I’m that marginal nutball in the NY Times and have enjoyed reading the comments. 🙂 I responded here with the full reality of my situation and thought processes here: http://blueskyday.com/2010/06/06/reponse-the-the-peak-oil-story-in-the-new-york-times/
    Here’s an interesting article about the media flirting with peak oil, hmmmm: http://peakgeneration.blogspot.com/2010/06/media-flirting-with-peak-oil-following.html
    Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I have to say that they really threw the transition movement a few bones by including the comments about not moving to the country, needing a community and teaching others to grow their own food. I think it could have been much, much worse – I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I saw the article. I’ve gotten nothing but interest in learning more and doing more from non-peak-oil-aware friends and strangers alike. I hope it opens the door to a mature conversation about peak oil.

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  61. Smacktle June 7, 2010 at 3:24 pm #

    Kuntsler gets spanked by Denniger. WHOA!
    http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/2380-There-Are-Times….html

  62. Smacktle June 7, 2010 at 3:28 pm #

    Nobody has a clue what’s gonna happen. Not even the “smart people”.

  63. asoka June 7, 2010 at 3:33 pm #

    Smacktle said:

    Nobody has a clue what’s gonna happen. Not even the “smart people”.

    But smart people can at least see the problems and smart people can propose solutions. For example, today Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC), representing Europe’s main renewable energy companies, issued a report that is one of the most detailed to date to work out the nuts and bolts of a near-total shift to green energy such as wind or solar power. Such proposals often stop at wishful thinking.
    The report said that global investments in energy would need to total $18 trillion by 2030 — almost five times the entire U.S. federal budget for next year — to set the world on a path to generating about 95 percent of electricity from non-polluting renewables by mid-century.
    If you don’t think that is a smart idea, or you think it is “impractical” or “impossible”, then you deserve the future your inaction and your uninformed cynicism will bring.

  64. Gregg June 7, 2010 at 3:36 pm #

    Currently, the highest priority for any local government is “keep the cars moving!” It’s where the lion’s share of funds go. So, it shouldn’t seem unreasonable that bicycles get the short end of the stick. Few people ride them, the distances are typically too great, the weather too variable, not to mention the maniacal drivers hell bent to get from point A to point B faster than Relativity permits. Due to the obesity epidemic, many people aren’t physically able to ride a bike or even able to amble around a walkable city. In the suburban infrastructure, bicycles will always be a scarcely tolerated minority.
    With walkable communities linked by bicycle accommodating mass transit, the story would be quite different. People would be in better shape by virtue of the disadvantages of owning a car. Covered breezeways could be a solution to inclement weather. Unfortunately, we’ve squandered the labor power of four generations on an untenable arrangement. To make matters worse, we have indebted our productive activity far into the future to pay for all of it.
    The current crisis in capital is just a preview of coming attractions. Without the growth in hydrocarbon energy there is no possibility for economic growth. When the current system has collapsed, there may not be the capital resources or even social cohesion to assemble the walkable communities linked by bicycle accommodating mass transit. We may be concentrating all of our efforts just to stay fed, modestly clothed, and tolerably housed. The work of civilization is not directed at necessities.

  65. Bicycle Tourist June 7, 2010 at 3:43 pm #

    Jim, does the fact that you were able to cycle around Berlin and survive the experience mean anything? That is, are the Germans more attuned than us to making provisions for human powered transportation, biking or walking? I cycled around Augsburg for three years in the sixties, but the strassenbahnen were excellent and convenient alternatives.

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  66. asoka June 7, 2010 at 3:47 pm #

    He needs to be reminded that the people elected him and are no longer going to cut him the slack we have been while he learned the job. He needs to get to work and stop the photo-op bullshit.

    Besides going after BP with the Justice Dept. (which Obama is doing) and insisting the taxpayers are not going to pay for BP’s mistakes (which Obama already did), what else should he do, specifically?
    Are you now a proponent of government who thinks government (or the military) can fix a problem that BP cannot fix?
    Such trust in government!

  67. sfnate June 7, 2010 at 3:51 pm #

    Karl Denninger over at The Market Ticker has gone completely apoplectic over Jim’s column today.
    Read, appreciate, and savor the rage. It is a pretty delicious display of crazed libertarian outrage. Karl is generally quite hostile to anything resembling socialism, or collectivism, or whatever lefty bugaboo might be hiding out there in tall grass waiting to pounce on the Ayn Rand’s unprotected hind quarters.
    Anyway, I got a chuckle out of it. A sad sort of chuckle, really.

  68. Gregg June 7, 2010 at 4:00 pm #

    You’ve hit the nail right on the head. It’s the money. Private capital won’t move unless there’s a clear path to a profit. And that profit has to be greater and more probable than some competing investment opportunity. Otherwise, capital moves toward the opportunity with the greatest return.
    In the global capitalist system, governments are often prevented from socially and environmentally responsible investment for several reasons. Bureaucratic inertia comes to mind. Governments are not usually allowed to engage in industries that private capital deems profitable. For governments to allocate capital, they must first raise the capital either through taxation or the promise of future taxation, i.e., debt. Then there’s the rathole of private contractors sucking up huge quantities of government money while delivering very little for it.
    In a nutshell, there may be no profit to be had in mitigating the coming energy famine and resultant collapse. Governments will be too strapped by ongoing crises to put resources into projects with far off deliveries and questionable value. Think of Haiti.

  69. sportrdr70 June 7, 2010 at 4:08 pm #

    Here is the link to Denninger.
    http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/2380-There-Are-Times….html
    I see both truths and fallacies in Denninger and Kunstler’s writings. I consider myself a dictionary definition liberal (which is to say, libertarian). Anyone who reads JK and takes it for gospel is the definition of naive. All you have to do is live in one of the the towns that JK visits and then eviscerates on this blog to know that, though he may wrote effective prose, his facts are less than accurate. The final straw for me was when he wrote about Atlanta. I’ve lived in downtown Atlanta for 6 years after spending the first 30 odd years of my life in DC suburbs. His description of Atlanta was so far off-base it was ridiculous. I read JK for entertainment, not facts. Karl is a bit of a hot head and I don’t agree with him on everything either (I disagree with at least 1/2 of what he says about energy in the above post), but he is a great source for reading about the financial obfuscation (most of it illegal) that is currently taking place in the US (and around the world). What I don’t like about JK or KD is they are both SMUG to the point of being nauseating. They could both stand a great big helping of hubris.

  70. Smokyjoe June 7, 2010 at 4:16 pm #

    Daniel Yergin: wrote a great history of the oil age, then became a shill for Big Oil.
    What a nincompoop.
    To our “dictionary definition liberal” I’ll add that not everyone who accepts the reality of Peak Oil goes as far as JHK. We won’t fall as far as he fears, or lose as many cars and car-based amenities as he wishes. He has a serious hatred for motor vehicles. I accept that with a grin, because it comes from a good place. Cars have made a wreck of our world, and I say that even though I love cars and driving.
    It won’t be a World Made By Hand Future. It’ll be a more beat-up, run down version of now. Detroit Lite, if you would. Peak Oil may matter less because so many folks won’t have anywhere to go in their cars, as the economy based on sprawl continues its collapse.
    Whatever fallacies in JHK’s thinking at times, he recognizes an essential fact of modernity: we built an unsustainable way of living. Now it’s falling apart as surely as the roads are crumbling around here.

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  71. sfnate June 7, 2010 at 4:27 pm #

    SMUG to the point of being nauseating
    Somebody needs to figure out whether reading all this hyperbole and vitriol is making us better, or sicker.
    I’m serious.
    I just spent the past week stumbling around in a deep dark funk feeling like I was going to vomit my guts up, the news has been so uniformly bad for so long.
    To self-medicate, I stagger over to these blogs, but every bottle I pull out of the medicine cabinet has the same bitter pills.
    If the medicine here makes me sicker, am I closer to a cure?
    Is what we are reading some kind of harsh chemo-therapy that is slowly killing us while the cancer in our souls gets stronger?
    Maybe it’s time to start looking for some home remedies and let the expert opinionaters practice their medicine on each other.
    I know that ultimately we must heal ourselves, but if our fear causes us to seek out the culture doctors, we should probably keep in mind that not everyone who practices medicine knows what they are doing.
    I’ve been learning that the hard way, I guess.

  72. wagelaborer June 7, 2010 at 4:28 pm #

    I was trying to respond to you, but thought that others may be interested in someone who is running for office and actually has a program to switch from the use of fossil fuels.
    http://www.whitneyforgov.org/sustainable-transportation-tour
    Interesting that everyone ignores the link. Apparently, it’s more fun to speculate about our horrendous future, (in the secular Left Behind way), rail against the politicians we have (hey, but they’re electable!), and/or squat on a piece of land that will save you from societal breakdown,
    than to band together with others in your society to try to improve our infrastructure to make it more liveable for not just us, but others on this planet and generations to come.
    Nah. Just buy a gun and some ammunition, and you’ll be fine.

  73. Funzel June 7, 2010 at 4:46 pm #

    Ken,the pressure pushing up the oil would probably crack the pipe if you relying on friction to hold the plug in place.A machined plug with large valve and an O-ring,seized to the inside dia of the pipe and external clamping to counter the pressure may keep the plug in place without bursting or slipping.This repair would probably suffice to keep the oil flowing at reduced pressure and volume without spilling in to the water.A total shut off would be risky without reinforcing the whole assembly.

  74. Laura Louzader June 7, 2010 at 5:08 pm #

    There is a Libertarian solution for the undeniable predicament of fossil fuel depletion, and for our unsustainable systems and terminal auto dependency:
    YANK THE FUNDING. GET THE U.S. GOVERNMENT OUT OF THE BUSINESS OF DECIDING HOW WE WILL LIVE AND SPEND OUR MONEY.
    For the past 65 years, our government has driven the development of our auto suburbs, the destruction of our towns, cities, and railroads, and the massive exodus out of the Northeastern, Midwestern, and Mid-south cities and to desert cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix by the power only the government has to allocate massive amounts of capital to what it wants to succeed, while starving and punishing that it wants to fail.
    Airlines have been subsidized while railroads were deliberately murdered by punitive tax policies and regulatory throttling.
    The auto suburbs were built by FHA, VA, and the government-chartered “private” GSEs like Fannie and Freddie and Ginnie, which throughout the 50s and 60s remorselessly “redlined” our cities. You couldn’t get an FHA or VA loan in the cities during the post-war era, and by the time this policy was reversed,it was too late- NOBODY would lend money to buy in many of our cities.
    We took tax money from Chicago, NYC (the nations two largest net taxpayers), as well as Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Memphis, St. Louis, Syracuse, Rochester, Newark, Boston, and other traditional old cities to build the interstate highway system and the Colorado River plumbing system- more than a half dozen dams on the Colorado River that make it possible to water cities of 4 million in the middle of the desert, the better to depopulate the old cities and sweep masses of people out to unsustainable communities.
    Give these old cities back their tax money. Stop taxing me to provide other people with subsidized gasoline and interstate highways. Start decommissioning the BuRec dams we will no longer be able to afford to maintain.
    Let people decide, within the limits of their means, how they will adjust to the inevitable collapse of the sprawl-burbs and unaffordable expense of auto dependency.
    Face it, no matter how we arrange it, whether by top-down fascist government programs, or by default, the slide down the slope is going to burn the backside. It is going to be miserable no matter what.
    We never could afford the Sprawl Society. It was made possible only by top-down five-year plans supported by massive amounts of tax money. If auto owners and suburban home owners had had to pay their own way all along, suburbs would still be enclaves for the rich just outside city limits, and there wouldn’t be nearly so many of them. There would be a quarter the auto ownership- most families would own just one, and many wouldn’t own one at all. And people would have much lower debt loads were it not for auto dependence, and the Fed-driven debt creation machine we are now bailing out.
    The Libertarian way is to do as you well as long as it does not violate anyone else’s rights, which means that you cannot impose your costs on anyone else by force.
    We have had the costs of excessive auto dependence and the massive systems that take so much energy to support, crammed down our throats by policy makers for the past 80 years whether we chose them are not. If the cost to the taxpayers of our oil were billed to the end user, gasoline would cost $10 a gallon. An interstate highway now costs over $100M a running mile to build, vs. $20M for a railroad. Which is more economical.
    Whan people have to bear their own costs, they have to economize. Let them choose how. If they want to live in their cars to own a car, that will be their choice.
    The semi-socialist manner of allocating our resources has been used for 65 years to drive our economy in such a direction as to enrich production home builders and auto makers, while creating an illusion of “plenty” that never was for real, as evidenced by our levels of personal debt since the 1970s. Let’s try another way- pay your own costs. And don’t make others pay them.

  75. asia June 7, 2010 at 5:11 pm #

    its cornucopean drivel IMO:
    ‘We can build nuclear plants, as France has done. Number of people who have died as a consequence and square miles of polluted, radioactive land over there? Zero. And before you try to tell me about limited U-235 to build nuclear piles with, you better start reading about both Fast Breeders and Thorium. We can, quite easily, provide the entire world’s population with an energy footprint that looks like ours in the “piggish” United States. We simply refuse for reasons that have nothing to do with the underlying physical, practical or thermodynamic realities, but rather are a function of political games and BS.’

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  76. Jersey New June 7, 2010 at 5:16 pm #

    Someone should reach out to Ernest Borgnine to see how he fueled his cab in “Escape from New York”, the 1981 film.
    We’ll need his expertise soon.

  77. Noslen June 7, 2010 at 5:47 pm #

    Front page two years ago:
    ‘A post-petroleum world’
    Concord Monitor. Sunday, June 15, 2008
    http://www.concordmonitor.com/article/post-petroleum-world
    New Hampshire. First in the nation!

  78. k-dog June 7, 2010 at 6:23 pm #

    What Obama should do:
    Obama should remove BP from the scene, put the military in charge of sealing the well using BP’s assets (ships robots ect.) and any other assets as needed. The Army Corps of Engineers could get the job done. BP can’t because they are still quite obviously trying to recover the well and not trying to plug it up.
    The need for decisive action is urgent. The upside down funnel link BP is using won’t be able to survive a serious storm much less a hurricane of any magnitude.
    What should Obama do:
    Act presidential which means doing something not posing for pictures and making endless speeches to impress the current audience.
    Do I trust government, not particularly but Obama might get some work done besides his string of unending compromise once his approval rating starts going down the tube.
    He might actually have to close Guantanamo, stop using drones against civilians in Afghanistan purge Ben Bernanke and the other holdovers from the Bush administration. In short break a few eggs an make an omlette instead of waking the center line all the time.
    Do I trust government , not particularly but even hard core republicans have been known to embrace climate change once they are shown a petition with a few thousand signatures on it from their home district.
    Howar Zinn said:

    As far as disappointments, I wasn’t terribly disappointed because I didn’t expect that much. I expected him to be a traditional Democratic president. On foreign policy, that’s hardly any different from a Republican–as nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike. So in that sense, there’s no expectation and no disappointment. On domestic policy, traditionally Democratic presidents are more reformist, closer to the labor movement, more willing to pass legislation on behalf of ordinary people–and that’s been true of Obama. But Democratic reforms have also been limited, cautious. Obama’s no exception. On healthcare, for example, he starts out with a compromise, and when you start out with a compromise, you end with a compromise of a compromise, which is where we are now.
    I thought that in the area of constitutional rights he would be better than he has been. That’s the greatest disappointment, because Obama went to Harvard Law School and is presumably dedicated to constitutional rights. But he becomes president, and he’s not making any significant step away from Bush policies.
    ….
    I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president–which means, in our time, a dangerous president–unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.

    I agree with Howard Obama needs a little help and push to do the right thing.
    Obama can talk the talk but apparently has trouble walking the walk.

  79. William Neil June 7, 2010 at 6:48 pm #

    Since I live just outside the Beltway around the nation’s capital – yes – that Beltway – and enjoy it’s gridlock as much as any of James Howard’s readers, I thought I might take a stab at understanding why the Maryland-Metro DC region stopped thinking about rail alternatives to the car after the Metro system was completed decades ago.
    My findings turned into an essay, where I broach the notion, quoting of all the possible utterers- an urban real estate developer’s “moral imperative” to get folks out of cars. So the essay was written: “A Citizen’s Guide to the Missing Green Rail Vision for the MD/Metro DC Region” and published in Jan. of 2008, and now posted online courtesy of ourfuture.org. Here’s the link for readers:
    http://www.ourfuture.org/institute/blog-entry/2010051913/missing-green-rail-vision-mdmetro-dc-region
    You can also get there by just Googling the title. Enjoy.

  80. AMR June 7, 2010 at 6:50 pm #

    The NYT peak oil article wasn’t great, but it was better than nothing. As poorly researched as it was, that article was very much better than the average fare in the average small-town rag.
    I read small-town rags from time to time. The quality of their reportage is spotty because a lot of them hire veritable hacks as reporters, and even more so because they reprint a smattering of the most severely abridged wire service articles. The crap that a lot of papers cherrypick from the wire services is absolutely insulting (and quite a few big-city papers are guilty, too).
    My main gripe with the NYT peak oil article is that it provided no statistics. Oil and gas production and consumption statistics provide the context needed to show that peak oil isn’t just the hobbyhorse of some nutters. Instead, John Leland presented the debate over peak oil as a very simplistic one between some eccentric survivalists on one side and an approved on-call expert on the other, with neither side showing any understanding of energy statistics. The Times has at least one reporter, Jad Mouawad, regularly assigned to the energy beat, so Leland or his editors should have been able to find some relevant statistics to include in the article.
    This article would have been better if it had been written more seriously and hadn’t been written as a glimpse into another cultural sideshow (the Times loves that sort of thing). Still, it’s a good start.

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  81. asoka June 7, 2010 at 7:05 pm #

    Thanks, k-dog. I agree with both you and Zinn on the foreign policy issues.

  82. AMR June 7, 2010 at 7:08 pm #

    This is why BART has its own police force. When people can’t comport themselves on a train or bus, there comes a point at which the cops ought to be called. If the BART cops treat troublemakers with kid gloves, there well might come a point at which the nearest city cops, sheriff’s deputies or highway patrolmen could assert jurisdiction and give the assholes the boot.
    Really, what you’ve described sounds like a basic collapse of public order, and it’s not limited to trains in the Bay Area. Have you been to the Tenderloin lately?
    When I’ve been on BART, I’ve never encountered anyone like your drunk and disabled friend, but I don’t doubt that Caltrain is better suited to eject problem passengers just by virtue of having conductors on every train. The same goes for buses and trolleys relative to subway lines in Philadelphia. People who want to cause trouble on SEPTA almost always do so on the subway rather than risk having the police called by an irate bus or trolley driver or Regional Rail conductor. It’s too bad that this doesn’t seem to hold true on Muni buses.

  83. HR FEHR June 7, 2010 at 7:29 pm #

    Perhaps I will get an auctioneer to come in and give me a price for all of this crap I and my family have accumulated over the years.
    All of this useless shit that does nothing more than collect dirt and take up space. All trade with China did was allow us to buy 3 to 4 times more shit and not have enough money to pay for it because our jobs went over there.
    Consumerism is a scam. It is such an incredible waste. Ah to wake up in the morning and have a cup of Joe and watch the sun rise. Go out make enough to live on for the day, as I practice my chosen spiritual life style, come home crash and go to bed.
    And never ever own a single thing anymore other than one. The simple life. How I long for it. How tired I am of all of the BS that has come to consume the daily routine.
    Disneyland (world) is the devils playground. It rots our collective sole.

  84. Diogenes June 7, 2010 at 8:21 pm #

    HR FEHR wrote: “Disneyland (world) is the devils playground. It rots our collective sole.”
    “What does it presage, this wisdom of fools? Doubtless, since it is a forbidden wisdom, it presages both the reign of Satan and the end of the world; ultimate bliss and supreme punishment; omnipotence on earth and the infernal fall. The Ship of Fools sails through a landscape of delights, where all is offered to desire, a sort of renewed paradise, since here man no longer knows either suffering or need; and yet he has not recovered his innocence. This false happiness is the diabolical triumph of the Antichrist; it is the End, already at hand.” (Foucault, “Madness and Civilization”, p. 19)

  85. treebeardsuncle June 7, 2010 at 8:30 pm #

    Hi.
    You must be familiar with how General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tires bought up the public transit rights of way back in the 20’s through 40’s and shut them down. This was done after Sloan at GM remarked how the auto market had saturated sometime in the 20’s with maybe 10% of the population who could potentially drive actually having cars. Thus the competition was deliberately destroyed. America and most of the world now have been deliberately made-over for the benefit of the following industries in this order of priority:
    I. Real Estate Speculation and the Associated Banking Interests
    II. Arms Contractors
    III. Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas Suppliers
    Note the that the petrochemical industry is tied to both the agricultural industry and the drug industry.
    Questions
    I. The first question I have here is whether by destroying the tropical rain-forests and other flora and diverting agricultural production from food and timber etc to fuels, can the vehicular fleet continue to be maintained and operated?
    II. What do American suburbanites want?
    They want to drive as fast as they can regardless of the circumstances, frequently, long distances, in giant vehicles. They want to eat poisonous “fast food”, watch tv, and swipe credit cards. Sometimes they want to sit and watch spectacles of sporting events. They also insist on living in detached single-family houses with big utitily bills, high transportation and maintenance costs, and surrounded by sterile homogenous landscapes. So how much longer can this be maintained? Can it be maintained for as long as 10 , 50 , or even 200 years?
    III. What I am really asking is how long can this way of life be maintained in the face of increasingly constrained resources and rising competition from emerging nations, particularly in east Asia. I figured what would limit the economy was the inability of American middle and working class consumers to maintain their debt service payments. This has already occured.
    Geoff

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  86. CaptSpaulding June 7, 2010 at 8:59 pm #

    People will not change their (erroneous) ways until they are forced to, usually by having something catastrophic happen to them. Case in point, businesses and banks prior to 1929 were pretty much free to rock and roll without restraint. It took the catastrophe of the Depression to make the government enact rules & regulations to control the excesses of business. Perhaps the catastrophe on the Gulf will bring about some needed changes in our energy policy. Unfortunately, if the catastrophe isn’t big enough, people suffer but nothing changes. For example, the financial debacle on Wall St. hasn’t brought enough pain to force real changes in regulating the financial markets. We’d probably have to have the level of pain reached in the 30’s before the Govt. would actually reign in the financial criminals. Obviously we haven’t reached that level of pain, or the Govt. wouldn’t be buckling under to all the lobbyists. Most average citizens are the same. They are comfortable in their ways and will not change their habits until they are personally brutalized by circumstances. Than and only then do they “voluntarily” change their ways. Too bad it has to be that way.

  87. cogdis June 7, 2010 at 9:33 pm #

    Lynn,
    It is unfortunate that the prison farm programs are on the way out. Their biggest value was teaching responsibility. But I’m not sure how much they contribute to reducing recidivism. A 1000 people came out to try and save the farms? That’s impressive. I remember hearing the biggest reasons the gov’t wants to end the program is to free up the realestate for a mega-prison in Kingston and because the programs cost a lot to run ($4 million/year). I’m not really sure the broader Canadian society benefits from this program. It sounds like it was the regular agri-business model. Am I wrong? We need a comprehensive response to the peak everything scenario. I don’t want to end up talking to bees on a rooftop.

  88. piltdownman June 7, 2010 at 9:38 pm #

    AMR –
    The Times article “felt” like a minor league article, whether it was written by a Princeton or Harvard grad or not. It just smacked of “small town…” I live in a small town — and I understand how poor the journalism is…..
    And I don’t believe “It’s a start.” I believe it was, rather, a chance for them to say to themselves, “OK, we’ve done that story now, let’s get back to the standard stuff….”
    And this is coming from someone who thinks The Times is the best paper in the U.S..

  89. piltdownman June 7, 2010 at 9:40 pm #

    I’m supposed to trust the Army Corp? I mean, they were so good in NOLA….

  90. phantomlimb June 7, 2010 at 9:51 pm #

    The documentary, “Big Rig” underscores how fragile the entire over-road transit system has become. Very few truckers earn a passable living, when fuel prices rise above $3.50/gallon they lose money – filling a 300=gallon tank each day.
    Three days with the 18-wheelers off the road and the whole transit system comes to a halt. Food can’t make it’s 1500 mile waddle to the American family dinner table, everything relied-on with this over-wrought system starts to go without.
    Not to mention tens of thousands of angry Teamsters and independent truckers.
    On a parallel path with the sturm & drang of roads for motorists, large trucking transit infrastructure (warehouses, switching stations, storage, etc.) – the stuff that makes industrial-park America go, all is built on transient vulnerability.
    Maybe when Target and Walmart start running out of Tide detergent and the greeting-card racks start going bare, people will begin the realization that their cycle of dependency was built on nothing more than a flimsily orchestrated trucker-nation. Another over-reliance on technology with a directional arrow to nowhere.

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  91. Laura Louzader June 7, 2010 at 11:00 pm #

    Hi, treebeardsuncle.
    I like your screen name.
    Yes, I am well aware of the collusion of GM and Firestone in destroying our transit agencies, and it could not have been done without government collusion. GM’s best laid plans would have been undone by economic constraints, such as the average family’s roots in old city neighborhoods where many families went back 6 generations, as mine did in St. Louis- and by the difficulty of affording the costs of the car and the tolls on highways.
    Tolls on the interstates that put the cost of their construction directly to the user would have limited the growth of the burbs and auto use. Most people simply could not have afforded cars had they had to pay their full costs at the outset. In fact, in those days, the bus company charged fares according to distance traveled, in the form of zone fares, and the closer to work and shopping you lived, the better. Dad would take the bus to work downtown and Mom could fulfill most household errands within a few blocks of the house or flat, with an occasional trip downtown or to the neighborhood branch of the local department store chain, by bus or rail.
    Our automobile use and the spread of sprawl would have hit against natural economic constraints without the multitude of policies and programs designed to reward the construction of suburban sprawl and enable people of ordinary means to buy houses with little down, often at a ludicrously early age, and the new interstates to facilitate their movement to the new production cookie cutter suburbs. My own parents, who were twenty five and twenty three years of age respectively when they bought their first house with a no-down-payment VA loan, were among the second wave of newly minted suburbanites in 1956 when they bought a 3 bed ranch across the river from St. Louis. They could not afford a house in their native St. Louis without saving 20% down.
    Natural economic constraints would have kicked in quite early to nip this pernicious development in the bud. It astonishes me that people could be so baffled as to what the root of sprawl, recognized as a major problem as early as 1950, and the deterioration of our cities, was. Could they not see that they were subsidizing and promoting the developments and trends specifically designed to destroy our cities?
    Add to this lavish subsidies, both direct and indirect, for our airlines, and the ongoing program of dealing with the poor by tearing down their “slums” with their dense networks of family and neigbhorly connections going back generations and warehousing them in Corbu’s housing projects, and you can see how our political leaders played the key role here.
    Additionally, and this was perhaps the decisive factor, local municipalities granted massive indirect subsidies to businesses to move out of the city center to campuses located in the burbs. These days, almost every big box store or regional shopping mall was at least partially subsidized, often in the form of direct subsidies, and always in tax abatements and other “gimmes”, in the race to the sewer among suburbs hungry for something they called “economic development”, which was just a way to give some developer about $40M to get back about $4M in taxes. That is, if the place didn’t shut down before the municipality could recover as much as 10% of what it spent.
    Sure, we would have had heavy auto use and some suburban expansion without the helping hand of Uncle Sam, but nowhere like in scope or scale what we have now, and it would have been denser development with less car dependence.
    Additionally, families would have run up far less house debt without the aid of FHA and Fannie and Freddie and the rest, and there would be far fewer multiple-auto households.

  92. treebeardsuncle June 7, 2010 at 11:03 pm #

    Ok.
    So, the real estate, banking, and oil industries get another walk. That is expected. People go back to business as usual, shucking, jiving, and committing fraud. Knaves fleece fools even while they bring down the system to some degree.
    The question I have is when do we really start to see changes in the American suburban sprawl way of life. How much longer is this going to go on: 10, 50, 200 years or what?
    Geoff

  93. Stephen_B June 7, 2010 at 11:06 pm #

    Laura, while I check out Jim’s column every Monday, I don’t often stick around for the comments, but when I do, it’s always a pleasure to read anything you leave here.
    You really put it in a nutshell. Govt. has so severely warped the transportation scene, it’s no wonder we’re in the mess that we are.

  94. rocco June 7, 2010 at 11:10 pm #

    Sharon I just finished reading,In _Depletion and Abundance. Excellent useful suggestions that a working man can use. Unlike some of the peak oil doomers ideas that need tens of thousands of dollars your ideas can be done with hundreds of dollars. Thank you for the book.
    Jim: Once again excellent post,but the people cannot change or prepare when the press is no longer the press. In good old Rochester,NY a one newspaper town and its job to keep up the illusion not to report or inform.

  95. Headless June 8, 2010 at 12:22 am #

    Time to nationalize All natural resources; there are no technology arguments remaining to justify continued theft of The People’s resources–by foreign or American criminal oligarchs, as how much worse of a job could a government oil company do, and there wouldn’t be any question as to who was in charge and when they weren’t acting expediently.
    Karl Denninger has proven himself a moron again this week (see his comments on Jim’s article).
    Anyone see anyone or anything else to confirm Matt Simmons’ hypothesis that there’s an unsheathed hole in the bottom of the ocean that’s the real source of the oil, and BP’s efforts are meaningless even if 100% effective? If Simmons is right, vast swaths of the watery planet are going to be dead. Any confirmations?

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  96. treebeardsuncle June 8, 2010 at 12:50 am #

    Looks like the BP leak won’t be that big a deal. I expect the oil companies to get a walk. It is a hit to investors though. Besides BP, Cameron, Transocean, Haliburton, and Anadarko Petroleum have all taken hits. Look at the news on msn money and bloomberg etc. I own shares in Transocean, Cameron, Contango Oil and Gas, Denbury Resources, Noble Corporation, Diamond Offshore, Petrobras Brasil, Helmerich and Payne, Atwood Oceanics and Apache. I think this qualifies as a black swan that knocks out profiteering in oil for this season except for short plays that already went into effect. I feel disgusted for being involved with Transocean as their dodging of responsibility comes across as so blatantly dishonest and exploitative. I also have less respect for Cameron’s competence too. I have traded a lot of other oil companies too including both Smith and Schlumberger, Global Santa Fe, Ensco,Core Laboratories, Rowan, National Oilwell Varco, and a couple others.
    Geoff

  97. Eleuthero June 8, 2010 at 2:15 am #

    The USA and Canada are about as doomed
    as countries can possibly be. Since the
    suburban “White Flight” of 1965, all of
    our arable rural areas have been concreted
    over and all distances between all places
    are scaled to automobile distances.
    I don’t know if there’s “anywhere to run,
    anywhere to hide” because other countries
    just have different doom scenarios. China
    is the world’s greatest collection of
    smog, depleted water tables, silted up
    dams, and TOO MANY PEOPLE.
    Europe is more sensibly arranged and has
    good urban mass transit but it will be
    Russia’s bitch for natgas and everyone’s
    bitch for oil, especially with the North
    Sea in rapid depletion.
    South America has resources but Brazil is
    yet another massive environmental disaster
    in progress. Somehow I doubt that clear-
    cutting the Amazon Rainforest can possibly
    be very good for them. A lot of those
    damned South American countries have an
    oppressive Catholic culture or else they’re
    bonkers like Columbia, Venezuela, and
    Bolivia. I have friends in Brazil who
    tell me that you don’t dare go into the
    Brazilian countryside without a good gun.
    Kind of sounds like most of Africa.
    I think the only hope of the USA and
    Canada is MASSIVE construction of nukes.
    Spain (sorry, Asoka) is finding out the
    hard way that maintenance of altfuel
    assemblies like wind farms takes 2.5X
    more MONEY than maintenance of fossil
    fuel based energy infrastructure.
    Indeed, if (and that’s a BIG if) the
    USA can build nukes, our population
    density isn’t goofy like Asia and many
    parts of Europe and we could actually
    make it. However, there’s a certain
    bizarre-o “manana” attitude about all
    this at the highest levels of leadership.
    It’s so eerie that one can feel the
    stupidity.
    Eleuthero

  98. Patrizia June 8, 2010 at 3:26 am #

    I understand. We Europe (Italy and Germany) lost the war, so, after 65 years we still have to pay!
    But for how long?
    And did the US pay for Korea or Vietnam?
    What Merkel says is that the “Honeymoon” is finished.
    The conviction that you can get something (or a lot) with nothing is finished.
    Economy is not based on paper, manipulated paper.
    Economy is what you produce minus what you spend.
    Germans, in spite of Hitler, they still know Mathematics.
    American should refresh their knowledge.

  99. eightm June 8, 2010 at 8:09 am #

    The entire debate on public transit in the USA (and worldwide also, most of the world has the same problems, don’t be fooled, in many cases even much worse) is always framed ideologically, as right vs left, or consumerism vs greens, or something against something else, else, etc. It is always framed as a fight, as extremism, as something that is not normal, as exaggerations both in the impact of cars and peak oil, and in the impact of public transit “changing a way of life”.
    This is all wrong, if there is to be any success in providing mass transit (as opposed to “public” transit, since private companies can come online also with mass transit) it must be done gradually, intelligently and with no political – ideological – peak oil, etc. conotations. It can be done: start with a slight increase in gasoline to pay for a slight increase in BUS transit in communities, kick out the trouble makers from BUSES, make the tickets cost more to filter out the poor slobs that want to “express themselves”, get internet calling the BUSES from online, make the BUSES luxury, high class, make them be perceived as “cool”, as “middle class”, get companies and government agencies start using BUS services to get their employees to work, etc.
    Ever so often hike up the price of gasoline and with the extra tax furnish MORE BUSES, make an excuse as it is some kind of carbon tax, some kind of tax to pay off the trillion dollar bailouts governments gave banks to hog the money up and enjoy. Give people the freedom to keep on using their cars as much as they want, but make it increasingly convenient to use mass transit, so they use private cars only on some errands and not all.
    This must start from the USA, because the rest of the world is too stupid to do it on their own: they just imitate the American Model and think that that is the way to go: so now they are all building highways and building and buying cars like crazy: China, India and Latin America should have known better, but since America is run by cars, to be modern and progressive, all the other developing countries must run by cars too.
    It is even much worse and even more insane that the REST OF THE WORLD wants to imitate the USA, since they already have high density towns and cities that occupy a very small area compared to the USA suburbs and can benefit hugely by more mass transit.
    And stop talking about railroads, it will never done, it costs too much, BUSES are the real alternatives to cars. Silent inside and out, with private compartments, high class luxury BUSES. You already use all the money spent in the highway system without having to spend more.
    But since JHK and all you environmentalists are ideologically and religiously driven to FIGHT and be AGAINST cars and suburbs, this fight defines all of you, you love hating cars and suburbs and you all are really not interested at all in solving the problems pragmatically, you just make it more and more improbable that they will ever be solved. If there were 10 people out of a community of 100 in the USA suburbs that would like BUSES, after reading JHK, they would dwindle down to only one, because JHKs extremism has the opposite effect of what he “professes” it should have. But secretly he and all of you love this suburb hating, imaginary “peak oil collapse”, grow your own food in your backyards BS. But none of you love BUSES.

  100. Diogenes June 8, 2010 at 9:01 am #

    It is folly and blasphemy to seek improvement of Man’s material condition without improvement in his spiritual condition. The Wisdom of Materialism (consumerism) is the wisdom of the Antichrist–the return to paradise without innocence.
    http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/07-4

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  101. Funzel June 8, 2010 at 9:38 am #

    Eleuthero,we’ve heard it all before,”to cheap to meter etc.”
    millions of rusting barrels of nuclear waste are waiting to claim their victims!
    NO Nukes is GOOD Nukes !!!

  102. ozone June 8, 2010 at 10:38 am #

    “On a parallel path with the sturm & drang of roads for motorists, large trucking transit infrastructure (warehouses, switching stations, storage, etc.) – the stuff that makes industrial-park America go, all is built on transient vulnerability.
    Maybe when Target and Walmart start running out of Tide detergent and the greeting-card racks start going bare, people will begin the realization that their cycle of dependency was built on nothing more than a flimsily orchestrated trucker-nation. Another over-reliance on technology with a directional arrow to nowhere.” -P.L.
    Nice distillation of our hubris, techno-triumphalism, and apathy. Thanks. Add in the corruption (kickbacks and favors all ’round) that made it all possible, and you’ve got “Clusterfuck Nation” ™!
    I remove my consent; other things will be removed as circumstances dictate/allow. The federal government no longer “governs” any g.-d. thing besides their own existence. No trust; no deals…

  103. asoka June 8, 2010 at 10:54 am #

    Eleuthero said:

    A lot of those damned South American countries have an oppressive Catholic culture or else they’re bonkers like Columbia, Venezuela, and
    Bolivia.

    You damn countries you have never been to and don’t know how to spell (it is Colombia, not Columbia).

    I don’t know if there’s “anywhere to run, anywhere to hide” because other countries
    just have different doom scenarios.

    There are plenty of places to run to and plenty of places to hide. The Andes Mountains (in the same countries you are damning) have many places where rainfall is plentiful and water catchment systems are easy to create, where you can live well for US$300 a month. You just don’t know about them… but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
    These are, of course, places where neither heating nor cooling are necessary and where a car is not necessary. They have excellent systems of BUSES.

  104. dale June 8, 2010 at 11:09 am #

    “Obama might get some work done besides his string of unending compromise once his approval rating starts going down the tube.”
    =============================
    Obama’s ratings declined BECAUSE he engaged in a “string of unending compromise”, not before. More than any other Democratic president in the last hundred years, he has abandoned the initiative and missed an historic chance to effect real change. He could have put extreme pressure on Congress, but declined to do so.
    People were behind him, wanted real significant change, and instead he became the “professor” instead of the leader.
    Metaphorically, if the Republicans put a plank in their party platform saying they wanted to lynch Obama to a tree on the south lawn of the White House, how would Obama react? Based on his performance thus far, I think he would say that there are historic reasons for the Republicans to feel that way, and by means of compromise he will voluntarily begin to wear a hangman’s noose around his neck instead of a necktie for the remainder of his term.
    It just doesn’t seem to be in this guy to actually “lead”.

  105. trippticket June 8, 2010 at 11:15 am #

    “Looks like the BP leak won’t be that big a deal. I expect the oil companies to get a walk. It is a hit to investors though.”
    And as long as we see the planet through a warped, Coke bottle-bottom-esque lens, like this guy does, we will always have death and chaos to discuss.
    Keep those keyboards handy, folks.

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  106. zaxxon June 8, 2010 at 11:20 am #

    We Americans, the US variety (United Slaves) have a common problem that many say, we won’t acknowledge. We are gasoline gluttons. The Texas-Yalie-Thug said go shopping, and shopping we did.
    Now when I was a kid, Roosevelt said sacrifice, and sacrifice we did. No gas, butter, tires, meat, and a sundry list of other essentials without OPA coupons. And, in that mind-set I fear we have lost; we stompted the Germanic hoards and the Japanese Imperial Army.
    Osama bin Laughin’ is still at large, after billions of wasted dollars – does anyone in the US (United Slaves) have a clue? After almost a decade we can’t even secure the Baghdad International Airport highway to Baghdad proper. Am I missing something here?
    Please tell me I’m wrong – please tell me someone in The Beltway has a brain (that hasn’t been bought).
    Please…

  107. trippticket June 8, 2010 at 11:23 am #

    Dale, c’mon. That’s because he’s a step-and-fetch-it boy (thanks, Dovey) for the corporations just like all the other mainstream political choices of the past 3 decades. Do you really think any of this is about the people any more?
    Nancy Pelosi’s top 10 campaign contributors for the 2010 election cycle were all big Pharma corps. Tell me again who the beneficiary of this healthcare legislation is?
    These people know as well as anyone here that the jig is up, and they are “working” their tails off trying to grab everything they can on the way out. Wealthy elites are buying entire watersheds all over the world and hiring their own private militias to protect those investments.
    If everyone here could understand that, the discussion would turn on its head.

  108. dale June 8, 2010 at 11:32 am #

    “Do you really think any of this is about the people any more?”
    ================================
    If I did, I wouldn’t have posted the piece comparing politics to professional wrestling. That was the most appopriate analogy I’ve seen in some time.

  109. trippticket June 8, 2010 at 11:41 am #

    “I think the only hope of the USA and
    Canada is MASSIVE construction of nukes.”
    No, our only hope is for all the chuckleheads who think they are entitled to a well-watered lawn and a 30,000 mile/year driving allotment to get just the meager beginnings of a grip on reality.
    “Spain (sorry, Asoka) is finding out the
    hard way that maintenance of altfuel
    assemblies like wind farms takes 2.5X
    more MONEY than maintenance of fossil
    fuel based energy infrastructure.”
    Ever since I opened my big fat mouth on this infernal blog, I’ve been consistently offering low-tech solutions to our problems. A Prius is harder on the planet than a Camry. A solar panel costs more environmentally than a whole lot of grid-tied usage. I can only imagine what cold-fusion might offer up on our “behalf”!
    The only pathway from here, in my not-so-humble opinion, is conservation. Radical conservation. And an ENORMOUS push to grow our food much closer to home. (Which is really just radical conservation restated.) All this other stuff, even Jim’s beloved New Urbanism, is just smoke and mirrors, and a distraction from the task at hand.

  110. trippticket June 8, 2010 at 11:42 am #

    “If I did, I wouldn’t have posted the piece comparing politics to professional wrestling. That was the most appopriate analogy I’ve seen in some time.”
    OK. That is a bang-up analogy!

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  111. diogen June 8, 2010 at 11:43 am #

    “Osama bin Laughin’ is still at large, after billions of wasted dollars… After almost a decade we can’t even secure the Baghdad … Airport highway to Baghdad… Am I missing something here?”
    No, Zaxxon, you aren’t missing it, the other 265 million Americans are missing it… And it’s not Billions, we’re into Trillions now when you factor in ALL the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan.
    Hmm, how many cities could’ve had brand-new subways built for a Trillion $$$?

  112. diogen June 8, 2010 at 11:53 am #

    “I don’t know if there’s “anywhere to run, anywhere to hide” because other countries just have different doom scenarios.”
    I keep tellin’ you folks, CLEVELAND OHIO is the place to be when TSHTF. We have a lakefull of fresh water, international trading partner across the water, we’re surrounded by possibly the best farmland in the world 20 minutes from downtown, lots of industrial capacity, world’s largest Amish population in a few counties south of us (and they know how to farm the old-fashioned way). Did you know there’s a National Park just south of Cleveland? No? Check it out, Cayahoga Valley National Park. Housing is cheap right now. Plenty of rainfall to water the farms, gardens and orchards. Did you know we’re a grape and wine producing region? We have great theaters (Cleveland Playhouse), some of the best medical facilities (Cleveland Clinic), lots of educational resources (Case Western Reserve, Oberlin, etc.) If you miss this ground-floor opportunity now, you’ll be very sorry you didn’t listen to me 🙂

  113. scarlet runner June 8, 2010 at 11:54 am #

    Almost nobody wants to get their hands dirty. How many kids grow saying “i want to be a field laborer when I grow up”. What if suddenly we can’t all be doctors, lawyers, astronauts, reality tv stars and game show hosts? What then? I think we’re seeing the results now. All that is required is a change in attitude, an attitude adjustment.

  114. diogen June 8, 2010 at 11:56 am #

    Oh, almost forgot, and we have BUSES. But sorry, 8M, we don’t have free salaries and rents, so this isn’t the place for you, you may want to stay put in Berkely.

  115. trippticket June 8, 2010 at 11:56 am #

    I know it’s an unpopular opinion. Certainly not a glamorous one like high-speed rail, wind farms, and tidal turbines. But oil was THE source of energy that technical humans latched onto to overshoot their environment’s carrying capacity. We did that, we did it big time, and we are trying like hell to keep the ride going.
    But when the tune stops it won’t be one person sulking their way out of the party. There’s only about 1 chair available for every 6 or 7 people. And that’s on a good day, before the lion’s share of the planet’s resources were laid to waste, and before 27,000 species a year of our web of life were being obliterated by our handiwork.
    If 10% survive the coming, and inevitable, ecological collapse (forget peak oil) I’ll be surprised.
    I believe the only prayer you have is to radically rethink what a “need” is, and start down-scaling your operations at your earliest convenience. They say the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. Please don’t waste any more time.

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  116. Laura Louzader June 8, 2010 at 12:09 pm #

    Agreed that Cleveland is a great area for the LE and will experience a dazzling revival in the years ahead.
    I never saw such beautiful housing in good areas at such give-away prices, except in Detroit, another area that will rebound beautifully when they get over their car fixation and realize it’s not 1965 and never will be again. The building in Shaker Heights I spoke of always has something available. It is a high maintenance building, an elegant 20s vintage building, but it could be made to operate much more economically. 2000 sq ft of exquisite millwork and herringbone parquet floors, really elegant and intact, for $49K. I have seen others in that building for similar prices. Property in prime Cleveland nabes is being given away. Many small houses with generous yard for growing stuff available.
    These cities are wonderful opportunities for younger people. The only difficulty is that you have to live NOW, and for the time being, these are difficult places to get employed in. If you have a decent job where you are, you aren’t walking away, at least not until you have enough money to pay cash for a modest property and to live on for a few years. And very few people have that.

  117. Qshtik June 8, 2010 at 12:24 pm #

    They have excellent systems of BUSES.
    =======================
    Perhaps they do but are they SIMPLE buses and do they have private compartments and Rolls Royce suspensions? I think NOT 😉

  118. Cash June 8, 2010 at 12:45 pm #

    I think maybe politicians being politicians were hell bent on giving us what they thought we wanted and maybe that really was what a lot of us wanted.
    Anyway, I don’t know about you but I don’t know anybody with “more” that’s actually “happier”. They are bugged and stressed, they are not happy. It seems the more they buy the unhappier they are.
    I worked with a guy that prides himself on his liberal, progressive views and who mourns the destruction of God’s green Earth. The guy lives in a three thousand square foot suburban house, drives an SUV and got his daughter a new car to get to school which she could have easily accessed via public transport. He was always on a quest to buy something: a new dining room set, new computers, new home entertainment electronics, new cell phones etc etc. For that guy enough was never enough.
    That same fellow derided me for spending my adult life in urban apartments, not driving a car, not enjoying the luxuries of palatial, air conditioned houses, backyard pools, $2,500 barbeques etc. My boss was on my case for the same reason. He often said (loudly and inaccurately) that I could afford to drive a Jaguar on what he paid me. Why would I want to live the way I do if I can afford to do otherwise?
    My boss also lived in a large suburban house, had multiple vehicles, motorcycles and other such toys. Both co-worker and boss said that there was no way they could live the way that me and my wife live.
    Our neighbours in our old apartment building came from Algeria. Husband, wife, two small school age boys and a newborn live in a one bedroom apartment. Hubby told me that they were dirt poor in Algeria, that he brings home $700 a week, that they eat fresh meat bought everyday from nearby halal foodstores, that they give thanks for their good fortune at the mosque every Friday without fail. Five people in a one bedroom apt and he talks as if he’s found paradise. I envied them, I was a burned out cube dweller, drowning in deadlines and they were a picture of happiness.
    I knew an old man in Italy (died a while ago at a very old age). He was toothless and bent and was a survivor of the Great War. He said that paradise was wine, good food and a beautiful woman (OK, I know that’s sexist but that’s what he said). He smelled powerfully of garlic, bathed sparingly and only when his daughter in law yelled at him, he had a lobster red nose and was always cheerful and laughing.
    A lot of people think that ceramic this and granite that are the route to fulfillment, that “more” makes you “happier”. The old Italian and our Algerian neighbours weren’t buying it.

  119. asoka June 8, 2010 at 12:57 pm #

    Qshtik said:

    Perhaps they do but are they SIMPLE buses and do they have private compartments and Rolls Royce suspensions? I think NOT 😉

    I have traveled all over South America on buses. They have a transportation system comprised of a variety of kinds of transport.
    The private compartments are at the back of the bus. Do not expect to use them at Christmas season as passengers have been known to fill them with gifts, including bicycles.
    Between large cities they have SIMPLE buses with Rolls Royce suspensions and VHS movies playing.
    The municipal buses tend to be full, sometimes with standing room only. And some are recycled school buses with seats too small for North Americans to fit into.
    I have also seen people transport building materials on bicycles and use bicycles for personal transport between towns.
    The rural areas have “colectivos”… small vans, jeeps, etc. that run when the last passenger gets on board. You can sit for a while waiting for that last passenger to buy a ticket. But then the trip is comfortable and goes from bus station to bus station.
    In very rural areas, where jeeps cannot go, there are always mules and horses.
    Another mode of transportation is walking, but we have that option in North America, too.
    The various modes function together and make car ownership unnecessary. Municipal taxis (run on natural gas) are also fairly cheap and much cheaper to use than owning a car.
    I think it is a cheap shot to damn South America without knowing about its myriad hiding places.

  120. treebeardsuncle June 8, 2010 at 12:59 pm #

    I have stock in Diamond Offsore too whose rig is also leaking in the Gulf.
    Note that the Gulf coast resident’s don’t give a rat’s ass about the damage to ecosystems. They just want to keep taking money for themselves through oil, tourism, and fishing.
    Please note these statements:
    Sachs cut its ratings of deep-water drillers to “neutral” from “attractive” this morning, saying it expects the six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling to be extended, resulting in pressure on day rates and delayed pricing power.
    Goldman lowered Transocean (RIG) and Noble (NE) to “neutral” from “buy” and Diamond Offshore and Atwood Oceanics (ATW) to “sell” from “neutral.”
    [I have stock in all 4 of these companies and even though I am down around $45,000 from late April also due to the fuss over debt in Europe, I still have at least 15 times as much money as Trip. I think you said you had a measely $8000.]
    Gulf Coast residents and politicians opposed the moratorium, claiming that it would cost jobs and weigh on an already fragile economy.
    The full article is on msn money.
    http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Dispatch/default.aspx?blog=1680&feat=1767288&page=1
    Second rig reportedly leaking in Gulf
    Diamond Offshore plunges on reports that the driller’s Ocean Saratoga rig is spilling oil into the ocean.
    Posted by Elizabeth Strott on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 12:00 PM
    BP (BP) isn’t the only oil company with a leaking oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, according to BusinessInsider.com.
    Shares of Diamond Offshore Drilling (DO) fell $3.55, or 6%, to $55.66 this morning after the financial news blog said the company’s Ocean Saratoga rig is leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
    BusinessInsider said images gathered by Skytruth.org, which monitors environmental problems by using satellites, show an oil plume originating from the Ocean Saratoga rig.
    The Alabama Press-Register said that the rig has been leaking since April 30. The Saratoga, which is owned and operated by Diamond Offshore for well owner Taylor Energy, is about 12 miles off the coast of Louisiana.
    Diamond Offshore spokesman Gary Krenek told BusinessInsider that “the Saratoga is working under 500 feet of water in the Gulf.” Krenek said that Diamond Offshore was hired by Taylor Energy to plug and abandon the existing well. He declined to comment on the reported leak.
    The U.S. Coast Guard is looking into reports of the leak, Lt. Commander Chris O’Neil told Bloomberg News.
    •Is your stock a solid pick?
    Goldman Sachs cut its ratings of deep-water drillers to “neutral” from “attractive” this morning, saying it expects the six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling to be extended, resulting in pressure on day rates and delayed pricing power.
    Goldman lowered Transocean (RIG) and Noble (NE) to “neutral” from “buy” and Diamond Offshore and Atwood Oceanics (ATW) to “sell” from “neutral.”
    •How much has the oil spill cost shareholders?
    A blast on BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20, caused the rig to sink and spill thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The Coast Guard said that BP’s latest effort to stem the flow of oil is working: The containment cap that was placed on the leaking rig collected 14,800 barrels on Monday.
    BP said 42,500 barrels of oil have been collected over the past four days. Shares of the stock were down $1.35, or 3.7%, to $35.41.
    Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard said the amount of oil kept from spilling into the Gulf “has climbed steadily” from the first day the containment cap was installed, according to The Associated Press.
    Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Obama administration will reopen shallow-water oil and gas drilling after expediting new safety requirements. Gulf Coast residents and politicians opposed the moratorium, claiming that it would cost jobs and weigh on an already fragile economy.

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  121. scarlet runner June 8, 2010 at 1:27 pm #

    I have bluebirds in my back yard.

  122. diogen June 8, 2010 at 2:01 pm #

    “at least 15 times as much money as Trip”
    But are you as happy as Trip seems to be? Do you get the same enjoyment watching it grow as Trip gets from watching his fruit trees, perennial shrubs and vegetables grow? When my kids were little and they picked and ate strawberries from our garden, the joy it gave me to watch their blissful faces was greater than the anxious joy I got from watching my stocks go up (or anguish from watching them crash)… I’m just sayin’…

  123. asoka June 8, 2010 at 2:11 pm #

    All you Obama haters might enjoy this Obama bashing from, of all people, Frank Rich:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/opinion/06rich.html
    It has some good statistics about BP.

  124. diogen June 8, 2010 at 2:17 pm #

    BTW, treebeardsuncle, I bet I have at least 15 times more vegetable plants in my garden right now than you do, all organic, no chemicals, no hybrids, you wouldn’t believe the flavor, and you wouldn’t believe how cheap it was to plant ’em (we start our own seeds). We grow over $3,000 worth of veggies (retail value) for a seasonal investment of about $50. Can you match our ROI?

  125. DeeJones June 8, 2010 at 2:24 pm #

    “Ah to wake up in the morning and have a cup of Joe and watch the sun rise. Go out make enough to live on for the day, as I practice my chosen spiritual life style, come home crash and go to bed.”
    Then LEAVE the USA. Its that simple. Of course you will need some cash, so sell all that shit, cash out your 401/IRA, and hit the road.
    Thats what we did. Cent. America is a nice place to start. And we wake up in the morning and have that cuppa Joe, grown just up the Mtn. from where we live, along with fresh Pineapples, Papayas, Mangoes, & Bananas.
    The USA is a sinking ship, abandon it now, or abandon all hope of ever getting out.
    The Dee Jones Collective.

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  126. treebeardsuncle June 8, 2010 at 2:34 pm #

    Why do you think the USA is a sinking ship?

  127. treebeardsuncle June 8, 2010 at 2:38 pm #

    That is an excellent ROI. I rarely get more than a factor of 2 in a year. The best return I got was in HP buying it around $32.00/share in November of 08 and selling in the $70s the following summer. Nope, I don’t get as much pleasure from stock trading as it is lonely, sterile, and ecologically hurtful. Also, will need around 10 times as much as I have now to have secure real estate holdings and be set for life. However, I have one son who is 9, a second child expected next fall, and prospects for a third before long.
    Geoff
    (from Sacramento, Ca)

  128. Tom R June 8, 2010 at 2:38 pm #

    Minneapolis deserves as much criticism as any city for car-dependency, but it’s got a strong subcommunity at least, interested in reducing car dependence through walkable mix-use neighborhoods and biking options.
    http://www.midtowngreenway.org/
    http://www.niceridemn.org/

  129. Qshtik June 8, 2010 at 2:39 pm #

    I think it is a cheap shot to damn South America without knowing about its myriad hiding places.
    ========================
    All I’m trying to do is spoof 8M and what do I get?: A copy and paste of the history of transport in So. America.

  130. Prelapsarian Press June 8, 2010 at 2:55 pm #

    You got me interested in Shaker Heights a couple weeks ago, and it does have a fine stock of old housing, but the situation doesn’t seem to make much sense for an investor, even one who might be looking into moving into the property down the road. I believe the unit you are talking about has an HOA monthly fee of $501, and taxes of over $200 a month. With rent of only $900-1100 a month (according to the realtor), the return on investment for someone who pays all cash is quite low, and there is decidedly negative cash flow for someone who borrows to buy.
    Maybe some of the other buildings have a lower HOA. I certainly agree that the Cleveland area is an intriguing situation for someone looking for a place to live that has a chance to remain functional.

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  131. diogen June 8, 2010 at 3:01 pm #

    >Why do you think the USA is a sinking ship?
    Nah, don’t listen to Dee, she’s getting kickbacks from Costa Rica Real Estate developers (kidding),
    listen to me instead and check out Cleveland 🙂
    >Also, will need around 10 times as much as I >have now to have secure real estate holdings
    In CA perhaps, not in Ohio 🙂
    >and be set for life.
    Sorry, buddy, you’re never set for life thru material possessions, they can lose value, be stolen from you, lose their meaning to you, etc.
    I understand you need security, especially with all the bunnies you’re responsible for, but “set for life” is a receding target, I think…

  132. Smacktle June 8, 2010 at 3:39 pm #

    Where is this 18 trillion gonna come from? Easy to spew out numbers, but reality doesn’t add up.

  133. Smacktle June 8, 2010 at 3:40 pm #

    Why isn’t the beloved Obama going after the bankers?

  134. treebeardsuncle June 8, 2010 at 3:56 pm #

    Thanks folks for being so considerate.
    Still, I don’t think we are seeing enough input from the eugenecist so I am going to provide a little of that in his stead relative to the idea of where one should locate. One needs to find some place safe and secure. I think the upper midwest, particulary the 5 states of North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa are advantageous due to the lack of African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians and would form the nucleus of a white homeland. The other suitable nuclei are the Scandinavian penninsual and the northwestern Ukranian and Russian region including the Baltic litoral.
    Note in the following article (http://www.amren.com/ar/2002/07/#cover)
    it is made clear that the high prevalence of pyschopathic personality among blacks explains why their crime rates are so much higher than would be explained by their low iqs (with a mean around 67 in sub-Saharan Africa and around 85 among the mixed-race specimens in America) and resultant povery alone.
    Race and Psychopathic Personality
    Racial differences in “average personality.”
    by Richard Lynn
    For as long as official statistics have been kept, blacks in white societies have been overrepresented in all indices of social pathology: crime, illegitimacy, poverty, school failure, and long-term unemployment. The conventional liberal explanation for this is white “racism,” past and present, which has forced blacks into self-destructive choices. More clear-headed observers, however, have sought a partial explanation in the low average IQ of blacks.
    Richard Lynn.
    Low IQ can lead to crime because less intelligent children do poorly at school and fail to learn the skills needed to get well-paid jobs, or even any job. Unemployment is therefore two to three times higher among blacks than whites. People without jobs need money, and have relatively little to lose by robbery or burglary, and may therefore commit property crimes. The association between low intelligence and crime holds for whites as well, among whom the average IQ of criminals is about 84.
    Nevertheless, as Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein showed in their book The Bell Curve, low IQ cannot entirely explain a black crime rate that is six-and-a-half times the white rate. When blacks and whites are matched for IQ, blacks still commit crimes at two-and-a-half times the white rate. This shows that blacks must have some other characteristic, besides low intelligence, that explains their high levels of criminality.
    Prof. Herrnstein and Dr. Murray found the same race and IQ relationship for social problems other than crime: unemployment, illegitimacy, poverty, and living on welfare. All of these are more frequent among blacks and are related to low IQ, and low IQ goes some way towards explaining them, but these social problems remain greater among blacks than among whites with the same IQs. Low intelligence is therefore not the whole explanation. Prof. Herrnstein and Dr. Murray did not offer any suggestions as to what the additional factors responsible for the greater prevalence of these social problems among blacks might be. They concluded only that “some ethnic differences are not washed away by controlling for either intelligence or for any other variables that we examined. We leave those remaining differences unexplained and look forward to learning from our colleagues where the explanations lie” (p. 340).
    Psychopathic Personality
    I propose that the variable that explains these differences is that blacks are more psychopathic than whites. Just as racial groups differ in average IQ, they can also differ in average levels of other psychological traits, and racial differences in the tendency towards psychopathic personality would explain virtually all the differences in black and white behavior left unexplained by differences in IQ.
    Psychopathic personality is a personality disorder of which the central feature is lack of a moral sense. The condition was first identified in the early nineteenth century by the British physician John Pritchard, who proposed the term “moral imbecility” for those deficient in moral sense but of normal intelligence. The term psychopathic personality was first used in 1915 by the German psychiatrist Emile Kraepelin and has been employed as a diagnostic label throughout the twentieth century. In 1941 the condition was described by Hervey Cleckley in what has become a classic book, The Mask of Sanity. He described the condition as general poverty of emotional feelings, lack of remorse or shame, superficial charm, pathological lying, egocentricity, a lack of insight, absence of nervousness, an inability to love, impulsive antisocial acts, failure to learn from experience, reckless behavior under the influence of alcohol, and a lack of long-term goals.
    In 1984 the American Psychiatric Association dropped the term psychopathic personality and replaced it with “anti-social personality disorder.” This is an expression of the increasing sentimentality of the second half of the twentieth century, in which terms that had acquired negative associations were replaced by euphemisms. There are other examples. Mentally retarded children are now called “slow learners” or even “exceptional children;” aggressive children now have “externalizing behaviors;” prostitutes are “sex workers;” tramps are now “the homeless,” as if their houses were destroyed by earthquake; and people on welfare are “clients” of social workers. However, the term psychopathic personality remains useful.
    While psychopathic personality is a psychiatric disorder, it has long been regarded as the extreme expression of a personality trait that is continuously distributed throughout the population. In this respect it is like other psychiatric disorders. For instance, severe depression is a psychiatric disorder, but everyone feels depressed sometimes, and some normal people are depressed more often and more severely than others. It is the same with psychopathic personality. There are degrees of moral sense throughout the population, and psychopaths are the extreme group.
    There is a difference between blacks and whites — analogous to the difference in intelligence — in psychopathic personality considered as a personality trait. Both psychopathic personality and intelligence are bell curves with different means and distributions among blacks and whites. For intelligence, the mean and distribution are both lower among blacks. For psychopathic personality, the mean and distribution are higher among blacks. The effect of this is that there are more black psychopaths and more psychopathic behavior among blacks.
    Psychopathic personality explains many racial differences in behavior that are not explained by differences in IQ.
    In 1994 the American Psychiatric Association issued a revised Diagnostic Manual listing 11 features of anti-social personality disorder: (1) inability to sustain consistent work behavior; (2) failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior [this is a euphemism for being a criminal]; (3) irritability and aggressivity, as indicated by frequent physical fights and assaults; (4) repeated failure to honor financial obligations; (5) failure to plan ahead or impulsivity; (6) no regard for truth, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or “conning” others; (7) recklessness regarding one’s own or others’ personal safety, as indicated by driving while intoxicated or recurrent speeding; (8) inability to function as a responsible parent; (9) failure to sustain a monogamous relationship for more than one year; (10) lacking remorse; (11) the presence of conduct disorder in childhood.
    This is a useful list. Curiously, however, it fails to include the deficiency of moral sense that is the core of the condition, although this is implicit in virtually every feature of the disorder. All of these behaviors are more prevalent among blacks than among whites, and suggest that blacks have a higher average tendency towards psychopathic personality.
    Questionnaires can be used to measure psychopathic personality in normal populations. The first to be constructed was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which was devised in the 1930s. This instrument consists of a series of scales for the measurement of a variety of psychiatric conditions regarded as continuously distributed in the population, such as hysteria, mania and depression, and includes the Psychopathic Deviate Scale for the measurement of psychopathic personality.
    During the 65 or so years following its publication, the MMPI has been administered to a great many groups. Mean scores have been published by different investigators for a number of samples of blacks, whites, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians. All of these studies show a consistent pattern: Blacks and Indians have the highest psychopathic scores. Hispanics come next followed by whites. Ethnic Japanese and Chinese have the lowest scores. The same rank order of racial groups is found for all the expressions of psychopathic personality listed by the American Psychiatric Association, and these differences are found in both children and adults.
    Conduct Disorder
    The terms psychopathic personality and anti-social personality disorder, however, are not used for children or young adolescents up to the age of 15 years. They are instead said to have conduct disorders. The principal criteria set out by the American Psychiatric Association (1994) for a diagnosis of conduct disorder are persistent stealing, lying, truancy, running away from home, fighting, arson, burglary, vandalism, sexual precocity and cruelty. Childhood conduct disorder is therefore an analogue of psychopathic personality in older adolescents and adults. A number of studies have shown that conduct disorder in children is a frequent precursor of psychopathic behavior.
    Studies have found that the prevalence of conduct disorders is about twice as high among blacks as among whites. This is the case not only in the United States but also in Britain and the Netherlands. Other racial groups also differ in the prevalence of conduct disorders among children. As with all the other expressions of psychopathic personality, conduct disorders are frequent among American Indians.
    Children with conduct disorders are sometimes suspended or expelled from school because of constant misbehavior, particularly aggression. In both the United States and Britain, black children are disciplined in this way three or four times as frequently as white children, while East Asians have low discipline rates. In misbehavior in schools, as in so much else, East Asians are the “model minority.” In the United States, Indians have a high discipline rate.
    Lack of honesty is one of the core features of the psychopathic personality, and one measure of this characteristic is the default rates on student loans. About half of American college students take out loans but not all graduates repay them. The 1987 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study consisting of 6,338 cases reports default rates as follows: whites — 5 percent, Hispanics — 20 percent, American Indians — 45 percent, blacks — 55 percent.
    Bad credit ratings also reflect a failure to honor financial obligations. A report by Freddie Mac of 12,000 households in 1999 found the highest percentage of poor credit ratings was among blacks (48 percent). The next highest was among Hispanics (34 percent), while whites had the lowest at 27 percent.
    Psychopathic personality is the extreme expression of a personality trait that is continuously distributed throughout the population.
    A prominent feature of psychopathic personality is a high level of aggression, which is expressed in a number of ways including homicide, robbery, assault, and rape. All of these are crimes, so racial and ethnic differences appear in crime rates. High black crime rates have been documented by Jared Taylor and the late Glayde Whitney in The Color of Crime. For homicide, rates for black males are about six times the white rate, and for black females they are about four times higher. The homicide rate for East Asians is about half that of whites. The high homicide rate of blacks is also found in South Africa, and homicide is generally higher in black countries than in white and East Asian countries.
    As regards other crimes, the robbery rate for blacks is about twelve times the white rate, while the assault rate is about five times higher. The high black rates for these crimes are followed in descending order by Hispanics, American Indians, whites and East Asians. The rate for rape is about five-and-a-half times greater for blacks than whites, and two to three times greater among Hispanics and Indians as compared to whites, while East Asians commit rape at about half the white rate.
    Domestic violence shows the same race differences. Severe violence by husbands against wives is about four times more common among blacks as whites. Black wives assault their husbands at about twice the white rate. American Indians assault their spouses even more often than blacks do. High crime rates among blacks have been found not only in the United States but also in Britain, France, Canada and Sweden.
    A prominent feature of psychopathic personality is an inability to form stable, long-term loving relationships. David Lykken, a leading expert on psychopathic personalities, writes of the psychopath’s “undeveloped ability to love or affiliate with others,” and Robert Hare, another leading expert, writes that “psychopaths view people as little more than objects to be used for their own gratification” and “equate love with sexual arousal.”
    Marriage is the most explicit expression of long-term love, and a number of studies have shown that blacks attach less value to marriage than whites. Questionnaire surveys have found that blacks are less likely than whites to agree that “marriage is for life.” Two American sociologists, R. Staples and L. B. Johnson, write that “Blacks do not rank marriage as highly as whites” and that “Black Americans’ acceptance of this form of relationship is inconsistent with their African heritage.”
    In a study of an American sample of 2,059 married people, C. L. Broman found that “blacks are significantly less likely to feel that their marriages are harmonious and are significantly less likely to be satisfied with their marriages.” Other studies of racial and ethnic differences in attitudes have found that whites think about marriage more often than blacks, and have a stronger desire than blacks to find the right marriage partner. There are also racial differences in rates of cohabitation, which also reflects a commitment to a long-term relationship. A survey of 24-to 29-year-olds in Britain found that 68 percent of whites had cohabited but only 38 percent of blacks.
    Blacks in the United States, Britain, France and the Caribbean are less likely than whites to marry or enter into stable relationships. In an American survey of 18-to 64-year-olds carried out from 1990 to 1996, 61 percent of whites were married but only 35 percent of blacks. The most likely to be married were East Asians (66 percent). Fifty-five percent of Hispanics and 48 percent of American Indians were married. The same race differences are found in Britain. In a survey carried out in 1991, among 30-to 34-year-olds 68 percent of whites were married but only 34 percent of blacks. Studies of marriage rates for France in the 1990s have also found that blacks are less likely to be married than whites. These differences are also found for cohabitation, with fewer blacks living in unmarried cohabitation relationships than whites.
    Differences in marriage rates are reflected in differences in illegitimacy rates. In the United States, black illegitimacy rates are down slightly from their high in 1994, when 70.4 percent of black women who gave birth were unmarried. The 2000 figure of 68.7 is still the highest for any racial group, and is followed by American Indians at 58.4 percent, Hispanics 42.7 percent, whites 22.1 percent, and Asians 14.8 percent. The Asian figure includes populations with greatly differing illegitimacy rates, with native Hawaiians, for example, at 50 percent, Japanese at 9.5 percent, and Chinese at 7.6 percent.
    Low rates of stable relationships are found among blacks in the Caribbean islands. In a review of the literature the sociologists B. Ram and G. E. Ebanks write that “In the Caribbean in general … there is a substantial amount of movement from one sex partner to another and also a very high percentage of reproduction outside marriage.”
    When they do marry, blacks are less tolerant than whites of monogamous constraints. An extreme form of intolerance is murder of one’s spouse. In Detroit in 1982-3, 63 percent of the population was black but 90.5 percent of those who killed their spouses were black. Less extreme forms of aversion to monogamy are adultery and divorce. The Kinsey data on college graduates, collected in the 1940s and 1950s, found that 51 percent of blacks were unfaithful to their spouses during the first two years of marriage compared with 23 percent of whites. Several other studies have confirmed that the incidence of marital infidelity is greater among blacks than among whites. Blacks cite infidelity more frequently than whites as a cause of divorce.
    Blacks also have more sexual partners than whites. The Kinsey survey found that about twice as many black college graduates had had six or more partners before marriage than whites. Many later studies have confirmed this. A survey of 2,026 15-to-18-year-olds in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s found that 38 percent of blacks had had five or more sexual partners, 26 percent of whites, 21 percent of Hispanics and eight percent of East Asians.
    The same differences are found in Britain. In a study of a nationally representative sample of approximately 20,000 16-to 59-year-olds carried out in 1990, 36 percent of blacks had had two or more sexual partners during the previous five years, compared with 29 percent of whites and 18 percent of Asians.
    Delay of Gratification
    The impulsiveness component of psychopathic personality includes an inability or unwillingness to delay immediate gratification in the expectation of long-term advantage. The first study to demonstrate differences between blacks and whites in the delay of gratification was carried out by W. Mischel in Trinidad in the late 1950s. He offered black and white children the choice between a small candy bar now or a larger one in a week. He found black children were much more likely to ask for the small candy bar now, and this difference has been confirmed in three subsequent American studies. This racial difference has been noted but given different names by different writers. In The Unheavenly City Revisited, Edward Banfield writes of the “extreme present-orientation” of blacks, and Michael Levin writes of “high time preference,” an economist’s term for preferring cash now rather than a greater sum in the future.
    The APA Diagnostic Manual refers to the psychopathic personality’s “inability to sustain consistent work behavior,” and a number of studies have shown that blacks are less motivated to work than whites and Asians, while Hispanics are intermediate. For example, black students do fewer hours of homework than whites and Asians. Among college students with the same Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, blacks get poorer grades than whites, probably because they don’t work as hard.
    This helps explain black unemployment. Several American ethnographic studies of inner city blacks have concluded that many are unwilling to work. Thus, E. Anderson writes that “there are many unemployed black youth who are unmotivated and uninterested in working for a living, particularly in the dead-end jobs they are likely to get.” The sociologist S. M. Petterson writes that “it is commonly contended that young black men experience more joblessness than their white counterparts because they are less willing to seek out low paying jobs.” American Asians are the opposite of blacks in this respect. They have low rates of unemployment and it has been shown by James Flynn that they achieve higher educational qualifications and earnings than would be predicted from their intelligence, suggesting they have strong work motivation.
    In the United States, unemployment rates are highest among Indians followed in descending order by blacks, Hispanics, whites and ethnic Chinese and Japanese. These differences are frequently attributed to white racism but it is difficult to reconcile this explanation with the lower rate of unemployment among East Asians as compared with whites, and also with the higher rate of unemployment among Indians as compared to blacks.
    Blacks in Britain, Canada and France are frequently unemployed. In Britain, the 1991 census found that 26 percent of black men were unemployed, compared with 11 percent of whites and ethnic Chinese. In Canada in 1991, 13 percent of black men were unemployed compared with seven percent of whites. In France in 1994, 11 percent of black men were unemployed compared with eight percent of whites.
    Recklessness
    Psychopaths appear to enjoy taking risks because it stimulates them, and there are several ways in which blacks show greater recklessness and risk taking than whites or Asians. In the 1989-93 American Teenage Attitudes and Practices Survey, 9,135 youths aged 12 to 18 were asked to consider the question: “I get a kick out of doing things every now and then that are a little risky or dangerous.” Fifty-six point nine percent of blacks agreed, as compared with 38.6 percent of whites. Driving habits are an index of risk taking and recklessness. A number of studies have shown that blacks run red lights more often than whites, and have more frequent accidents. Five studies have shown that blacks do not use seat belts as often as whites. Hispanics and Native Americans likewise have more accidents caused by recklessness and risk-taking than whites and East Asians.
    Edward Banfield writes of the “extreme present orientation of blacks,” and Michael Levin writes of “high time preference.”
    Sexual behavior can be reckless. Among those who do not wish to have children, blacks are less likely to use contraception than whites, and this has been found in both the United States and Britain. One result is that black women have more unplanned babies than whites. In the United States in the 1990s blacks had about twice the proportion of unplanned babies as whites and Asians. In Britain, a survey of teenage births carried out in 1994 found that these were three-and-a-half times more common among blacks than among whites and Asians.
    The behavior of reckless men also causes unplanned pregnancies. Surveys have asked adolescent males if they would feel “very pleased” or whether they would care if they were responsible for an unplanned pregnancy. Twice as many blacks as whites say they would be very pleased or that they would not care. To be very pleased or not care about saddling a teenage girl with an unplanned pregnancy expresses a great degree of a reckless regarding the well-being of others. In the United States, the percentage of teenage blacks who have fathered an illegitimate child is approximately three times greater than that of whites, with Hispanics intermediate.
    Another consequence of reckless avoidance of contraceptives is that blacks are more likely to get sexually transmitted diseases — including HIV and AIDS — all of which are more prevalent among blacks than among whites and Asians. At the present time, about 80 percent of the word’s HIV carriers are blacks in sub-Saharan Africa.
    A common expression of conduct disorder in children and young adolescents is sexual precocity. Many studies have shown that blacks are more sexually precocious than whites and Asians. Surveys in the United States in the 1990s have found that about a third of black 13-year-olds have had sexual intercourse compared with 14 percent of whites and Hispanics, and four percent of East Asians. Similarly, a survey in Britain in 1990 found that by the age of 16, 18 percent of blacks had had intercourse compared with 13 percent of whites and five percent of Asians.
    We consider finally the psychopathic characteristic described by the American Psychiatric Association as “inability to function as a responsible parent.” One of the most straightforward measures of this is abuse and neglect. The American Association for Protecting Children has found that black children constitute approximately 15 percent of the child population and about 22 percent of cases of child abuse and neglect. The First (1975) and Second (1985) National Family Violence Surveys carried out in America examined the use of violence towards children, defined as hitting them with the fist or with some object, and kicking, biting and beating them up. It does not include slapping or spanking. It found that 1.2 percent of white parents and 2.1 percent of blacks inflict this kind of severe violence on their children.
    Data published by the United States Department of Health and Human Services for 1996 showed that maltreatment was about three times more common among blacks and about one-and-a-half times more common among Hispanics, than among whites.
    The most extreme expression of the inability to function as a responsible parent consists of killing a child. Racial differences in the homicide of infants in their first year of life were examined for approximately 35 million babies born in the United States between 1983-91. This study found that 2,776 of these had been murdered, the great majority by mothers or the mothers’ husbands or partners. The rate of infant homicides for blacks and Native Americans was 2 per 10,000, compared with 0.6 per 10,000 for whites and 0.4 per 10,000 for East Asians. In the early 1990s the racial differences became even greater, with blacks having four-and-a-half times the infant homicide rate of whites and Hispanics.
    Complete Consistency
    There is almost complete consistency in the racial differences in outcomes that can be considered measures of psychopathic personality. In everything from child behavior to sexual precocity to adult crime rates we find Asians at one extreme, blacks at the other, and whites, Hispanics and American Indians in between. These differences are not only consistent through time but are found in countries such as France, Britain, Canada, and the United States, which have very different histories of what could be called “racism.” Indices of high psychopathic personality in blacks are likewise found in the virtually all-black societies of Africa and the Caribbean.
    Racial differences in psychopathic behavior persist even when IQ is held constant, and the same racial differences are found in essentially every kind of measurable behavior that reflects psychopathic personality. The most plausible explanation for these differences is that just as there are racial differences in average IQ, there are racial differences in what could be called “average personality,” with blacks showing greater psychopathic tendencies. The argument that white “racism” is responsible for black social pathology is increasingly unconvincing.
    Richard Lynn is professor emeritus of psychology of the University of Ulster. This article is based on a longer paper published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, 2002, Vol. 32, pp.273-316.
    • • • BACK TO TOP • • •

  135. asoka June 8, 2010 at 4:48 pm #

    Qshtik said:

    All I’m trying to do is spoof 8M and what do I get?: A copy and paste of the history of transport in So. America.

    As Ronald Reagan said, “There you go again”
    You have made the claim that I have copied and pasted the history of transport in South America. It is a false claim. I challenge you (in bold letters) to search the entire World Wide Web. Feel free to use whatever search engine you like.
    My composition is original and does not appear on the Web… until today on this blog, until I created it from memory of my own experiences.
    Don’t spoof 8M. He has good ideas.
    8M is like Robert Theobald reincarnated, or maybe he IS Robert Theobald. 8M’s ideas about excess capacity mesh perfectly with Theobald’s writings on abundance and a guaranteed minimum income.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Theobald

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  136. asoka June 8, 2010 at 5:01 pm #

    there are racial differences in what could be called “average personality,” with blacks showing greater psychopathic tendencies.

    This is hilarious! I am enjoying your ignorance very much!
    I can just imagine Africa developing an instrument to measure the White man’s personality … concluding that Whites show “psychopathic tendencies” …
    You know, little personality quirks, like Whites enslaving whole populations of Blacks, murdering whole populations of indigenous first nation people in genocidal “manifest destiny” campaigns, engaging in napalm bombing and fire bombings of Asian civilian population centers, dropping nuclear weapons on babies, writing memos to justify torture of Middle Easterners, invading Latin America 187 times, raping the earth, puncturing the ocean floors, etc., etc.
    Whites would be shown by the African instrument to have a complete lack of understanding of animism or the sacredness of life.

  137. scarlet runner June 8, 2010 at 6:10 pm #

    I like white people, even though they are a minority. I don’t think they smell funny. My girlfriend is a white girl.

  138. treebeardsuncle June 8, 2010 at 6:48 pm #

    Hi, Asoka.
    Actually, white folks, particularly Nordics — which includes Germans, vikings, and much of the Scotts population — have a high incidence of pyschopathy too. Have heard it is associated with blue eyes. Think in North America –which is mostly white — the incidence is around 4% while in China it is very low, around .5%. (See the Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout.) Blacks incidence is higher though. Pyschopathy along with high testosterone levels is tied to maleness. East Asians have the lowest testosterone levels, whites are the the middle, and Africans have the highest. Whites’ iq is also intermediate between that of East Asians and Africans though whites have a larger standard deviation than east Asians thus they have both more morons and geniuses than the latter, even more than what would be expected from their relative mean iqs of 100 and 105. (Black iqs average around 85 in the states which has a largely mixed population and 67 in sub-Saharan Africa.)
    Incidentally I am more of a Jew-supremacist than a white supremacist. My intelligence profile has a charactristic Ashkanazi pattern as I scored in the top 1% among prospective graduate students in verbal reasoning on the graduate record exam with a perfect 800 in 1997 when I was 26. My math score was 780 and my analytic score was 720. Most likely it was due to Ashkanazi Jewish influence that Europe developed so much in the period from 800 – 1940. You certainly haven’t seen much progress come from the lately. The Germans weakened themselves like the Spaniards before them by taking out their Jews. Vienna is no great cultural center anymore. (I am descended from the Levine line on my mother’s mothers’ father’s. At least 3 of my mother’s grandparents came over from Russia in the late 1800’s.)
    See for example (in the following web site, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/printarticle.cfm?article=com.commentarymagazine.content.Article::10855):
    What accounts for this remarkable record? A full answer must call on many characteristics of Jewish culture, but intelligence has to be at the center of the answer. Jews have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests since the first Jewish samples were tested. (The widely repeated story that Jewish immigrants to this country in the early 20th century tested low on IQ is a canard.) Exactly how high has been difficult to pin down, because Jewish sub-samples in the available surveys are seldom perfectly representative. But it is currently accepted that the mean is somewhere in the range of 107 to 115, with 110 being a plausible compromise.
    The IQ mean for the American population is “normed” to be 100, with a standard deviation of 15. If the Jewish mean is 110, then the mathematics of the normal distribution says that the average Jew is at the 75th percentile. Underlying that mean in overall IQ is a consistent pattern on IQ subtests: Jews are only about average on the subtests measuring visuo-spatial skills, but extremely high on subtests that measure verbal and reasoning skills.
    A group’s mean intelligence is important in explaining outcomes such as mean educational attainment or mean income. The key indicator for predicting exceptional accomplishment (like winning a Nobel Prize) is the incidence of exceptional intelligence. Consider an IQ score of 140 or higher, denoting the level of intelligence that can permit people to excel in fields like theoretical physics and pure mathematics. If the mean Jewish IQ is 110 and the standard deviation is 15, then the proportion of Jews with IQ’s of 140 or higher is somewhere around six times the proportion of everyone else.
    The imbalance continues to increase for still higher IQ’s. New York City’s public-school system used to administer a pencil-and-paper IQ test to its entire school population. In 1954, a psychologist used those test results to identify all 28 children in the New York public-school system with measured IQ’s of 170 or higher. Of those 28, 24 were Jews.

  139. dale June 8, 2010 at 7:39 pm #

    Good article by Rich. I suspect that Obama, like most leaders, only gets one chance to get it right, and he has already muffed that.
    Nothing I’ve heard lately suggests he is so inclined to change now, even if this spill affords him that opportunity.

  140. asoka June 8, 2010 at 8:16 pm #

    Obama is so cool and even tempered somehow I suspect it would not bother him in the least to be a one-term president and if he continues to lead with such reticence that is what he will be … with a life-time pension, permanent Secret Service protection, and a place in history for being the first non-white POTUS.

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  141. Qshtik June 8, 2010 at 8:45 pm #

    Race and Psychopathic Personality
    Racial differences in “average personality.”

    ======================
    Black defendant to judge: “Yes your honor, I’m guilty … but my genetic makeup made me do it. Lookee here at all these studies I copied off the internet.”

  142. asoka June 8, 2010 at 8:56 pm #

    Consider an IQ score of 140 or higher, denoting the level of intelligence that can permit people to excel in fields like theoretical physics and pure mathematics.

    Hi treebeardsuncle,
    I don’t doubt your IQ or the intelligence of Jews, but I guess you didn’t get my drift about what IQ measures and what IQ cannot measure.
    The Black Nubian culture built adobe houses, what are now called Nubian adobe vaults, which are based on a catenary curve, and the buildings are still standing 3,000 years later.
    To me, that kind of human ingenuity is more telling than an IQ test, but I understand some folks like to be measured by test numbers.
    Here is a Nubian arch structure that is 3,200 years old and is still standing. Do you know of any White-built or Jewish-built structures still standing after 3,200 years? http://bit.ly/bQC1Lv

  143. asoka June 8, 2010 at 8:59 pm #

    http://bit.ly/bQC1Lv
    Sorry, I forgot to say you have to scroll to page 122 of the book. The Nubian arches are illustration 14.49.

  144. Qshtik June 8, 2010 at 9:22 pm #

    Tree,
    You may find this NYT Op-Ed piece interesting. It deals with the supposed exceptionalism of Jewish intelligence. Its author, Michael Chabon (a Jew) attempts to convince us that Jews can be as blockheaded as anyone but I’m not buying it. In his heart of hearts I don’t think he believes it either. He never mentions IQs.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/opinion/06chabon.html?src=me&ref=opinion

  145. diogen June 8, 2010 at 9:46 pm #

    Asoka, cool structures, I’ve been looking for design ideas for a root-cellar, and I think you just pointed me in the right direction.
    Why are we talking about Jews again? But since you guys are, I’ll say this: Jews have pathetically low POLITICAL IQ record: they lost their hold on the land (pushed into the sea by the Romans since they were too politically unwise to form some sort of a compromise like most other ethnic groups conquered by the Romans), they failed to find acceptance in most of the lands they lived (probably taken advantage of by their own clergy who above all wanted to maintain their power over their people), failed to make wise political alliances (usually bet on the wrong horse), failed to anticipate the rise of Hitler and Nazism, insisted on establishing Israel in the power-keg region of the world where they had no chance of fitting in (by 20th century they were thoroughly European by culture and even genetics), failed to establish a viable state in Israel capable of standing up on their own, failed to come to a reasonable co-existance with their Arab neighbors, failed to take advantage of opportunities in America to become farmers (something they were banned from doing in old Europe), etc…
    Analytical IQ is really a small part of overall intelligence. High IQ of Germans didn’t help them foresee the outcome of Hitler madness. In the long run, the best intelligence is the kind that helps people live in harmony with their ecological and social surroundings, and Jews have a mediocre record…

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  146. Laura Louzader June 8, 2010 at 9:59 pm #

    I was thinking of the old condos in Shaker Heights as places to live. $501 HOA is a very low HOA for a 2000 sq ft vintage unit if it includes heat. It should definitely include heat. If it does, it should perhaps be $550, for a $50 a month contribution to the building’s reserve for common area repairs.
    Vintage condos scarcely ever pencil out as good rental properties. The mortgage after 10% down, plus insurance, taxes, and HOA usually knock it out of rental parity by a couple hundred dollars. A larger down payment can even the situation out, but you want some positive cash flow on a rental. Additionally, a fine building will usually have restrictions on rentals.
    I have a question for you regarding the Shaker Heights area. Is this a walkable area, with a nice little retail district and access to reliable public transit?

  147. treebeardsuncle June 8, 2010 at 10:34 pm #

    Well, I have heard there are 8 types of intelligence and think they could be the following:
    verbal reasoning (Tested by questions on topics such as reading comprehension, vocabulary, sentence completion, and analogies)
    mathematical reasoning (arithmetic and algebraic computation, deriving formulae, proofs, functional operations etc)
    analysis (This is a bit more obscure. Logical elimination, sequencing, deduction, detective work etc fit in this category.)
    visual spatial (This is the preserve of artists, architects, mechanical engineers, construction workers etc. Geometrical problem solving, dynamical balancing, fitting together parts in an effective sequence, measuring distance, determining direction, and having a good sense of relative orientation of points in space are all aspects of this. Men really do tend to do better here. Just ask the average man or woman how to find some place a few miles out in a strange town.)
    emotional self management (This has to do with introspection, managing one’s moods, having a sense of nuance, developing self-control etc, developing higher states of conciousness and the like.)
    interpersonal social intelligence (Conforming to social norms, empathy, interpersonal cunning, persuasion, charm. knowing who is connected to who, and having a good sense of what others want to hear and playing on it are all part of this.)
    bodily kinesetic (This is the preserve of athletes, dancers, acrobats, trapeze artists, gymnasts, surfers, skaters, etc.)
    musical (There are a variety of aspects to this involving melody, pitch, harmony, rhythm, meter, improvisation etc.)
    Jews are strongest in verbal reasoning with some strength in mathematical reasoning as well and frequently also have strong analytical skills. As a people they score relatively poorly in both aspects of social intelligence.

  148. treebeardsuncle June 9, 2010 at 12:17 am #

    A key to changing the modus operandi of modern societies is to change the governing phylosophy of economic liberalism. It is necessary to reject the tenents of equality of individuals and the uniformity of application of liberal beliefs. I am concerned that Americans do not have much of a sense of family, place, history, or community and are too narcisistic, materialistic, and isolated. I am not in favor of the global corpocracy, free trade, the belief in egaliatarianism (equality and interchangability of individuals), and the maximization of immediate returns.
    This article addresses a great many of the ideas that have been discussed herein (http://www.amren.com/ar/1992/12/index.html):
    Alain de Benoist has a completely different view of society: “A people is not a transitory sum of individuals. It is not a chance aggregate. It is a reunion of inheritors of a specific fraction of human history, who, on the basis of the sense of common adherence, develop the will to pursue their own history and give themselves a common destiny.”
    As Dr. Sunic paraphrases him: “Real “organic’ democracy can only exist in a society in which people have developed a firm sense of historical and spiritual commitment to their community. In such an organic polity … the law must not derive from some abstract preconceived principles, but rather from the genius of the people and its unique historical character. In such a democracy, the sense of community must invariably preside over individualistic and economic self-interests.”
    Economism and Individualism
    This leads to the two other great flaws of liberalism: its emphasis on economics and its tendency to strip away a man’s traditional, organic ties, and leave him a solitary individual. Once all people are seen as equal and equivalent, parochial loyalties are pure prejudice.
    Common markets, currency unions, and supra-national organizations like the European Parliament are symptoms of both the attack on particularism and the victory of pure economics. If local loyalties no longer matter, only economic efficiency is left. The Deutsche Mark, the Pound Sterling, and the traditions and sovereignties they represent can all be brushed aside if a single European currency would be more efficient.
    The primacy of economics also explains the relentless ugliness of modern life — stores like warehouses, office buildings like boxes, middle class people who dress like tramps, the obliteration of good manners — because the esthetic and the cultural have no economic value.

  149. asoka June 9, 2010 at 12:41 am #

    treebeardsuncle on June 8:

    The best return I got was in HP buying it around $32.00/share in November of 08 and selling in the $70s the following summer.

    treebeardsuncle on June 9:

    I am not in favor of … the maximization of immediate returns.

  150. treebeardsuncle June 9, 2010 at 12:53 am #

    Thanks. You caught me there in inconsistency but mayhaps I am large and contain multitudes too. Ok. Well, I am not in favor of sacfificing future returns and the biosphere for immediate returns. Society needs to find a way to allow people to improve their living conditions and their social standing without doing so much ecological and social damage.
    Geoff

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  151. lpat June 9, 2010 at 12:55 am #

    Pick your favorite mapping program and get directions from Dusseldorf to Aachen, Germany. Just less than halfway to Aachen you’ll notice that your otherwise steady southwesterly route takes a strange rhinoceros horn of a detour. Zero in on the eastern side of that horn, just south of Jüchen, and you’ll notice something else strange. That area is empty. No roads. No villages.
    My father was captured by the Germans the evening of November 1, 1944. Over the cusp of June-July, 2008, he, my nephew and grandnephew and I retraced as much as possible of the route he travelled from where he was captured outside of Geilenkirken to Fürstenberg (Eisenhuttenstadt) on the Polish border. We drove while we were there, headquartering in major cities, Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, Hanover, Berlin and finally Paris, but we also saw quite a number of much smaller communities that Dad had passed through.
    The western part of Germany around Lindern, Linnich, Prummern is extremely flat. Church steeples—the first targets of American artillery because they provided observation posts—were the most prominent features of the countryside there, visible for miles. With here and there a hill standing alone. Most unnatural.
    When we got back home, I spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct our journey, to make sense of it. Trying to capture some of the pictures that had escaped during our whirlwind tour.
    Those lonely hills were kohlberg, kohlehalde—coal mountains, coal hills, the tailings from the now exhausted coal mines in the area.
    Now. Back to that rhinoceros horn. On our way out of Dusseldorf I’d noticed something quite curious. An exit sign—along the immaculate, high-tech German highway—with the exits x’d out with luminous orange tape (http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetness/80444857/in/pool-otzenrath). Thereby hangs a tale.
    It turns out that there was a highway which cut straight through that horn. It was obliterated, as were all the roads, houses, villages, graves, creeks, rivers within that horn. That area represents the expansion of the open pit Tagebau Garzweiler II lignite mine.
    Now. Mr. Kunstler is quite correct. Germany has made heroic efforts to farm wind. We saw windräder everywhere from Amsterdam through all of western Germany. By the thousands.
    And, yes. Germany appears to have thriving rural communities and small cities, unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the rural south here, with very clearly defined margins—village on this side of the highway, beautiful agricultural fields on the other; very, very little scrub land as I’m used to here.
    But the truck traffic on the Autobahns is absolutely horrendous, worse than anything I’ve seen between Memphis, Little Rock and Nashville. Americans are awed by the train system in Europe.
    Yet I have the feeling that the freight and passenger rail service supplying those rural communities has been obliterated. And Germany is now reduced to relocating graves and entire villages in order to mine the dirtiest and least productive form of coal in order to supply its energy needs.
    Google Garzweiler. Check out some of the pictures of the progeny of Godzilla and the Transformers.

  152. Prelapsarian Press June 9, 2010 at 1:37 am #

    I haven’t been to Shaker Heights — just checking it out online. But it is a pre-WWII planned community that appears to be walkable in the older parts and have lots of retail. I know it has a light rail for commuters into Cleveland that has been around for decades and goes right by these vintage buildings.
    But the news on their maintenance costs gets worse. I heard today about a much smaller 2-bedroom, with an HOA of $681 plus a monthly utilities bill of $337. You aren’t even into taxes yet before it’s a negative cash flow, even for all-cash buyers (again talking about holding the properties as rentals for a while). I guess they’re priced so low because investors aren’t even in the equation as potential buyers.

  153. D R Lunsford June 9, 2010 at 1:58 am #

    Let me use reality to argue for optimism about the spill itself, divorced of its unpleasant associations. A nearly identical event occurred in 1979, resulting in the eventual spill of 3 million barrels of oil. Of this oil, only some 2 or 3 percent had any impact on the living ecosystem. The great majority of spilled oil was never accounted for – the best theory is that, once the volatile gases had been driven off, the oil, now heavier than water, simply sank to the deep ocean floor and disappeared into the silt. Once the volatiles have been driven off, oil is no more toxic or dangerous than any other organic residue. Although this event did cause some fouling of beach areas and ecosystems, the damage to the environment was infinitesimally smaller than that form the Exxon Valdez. The chemistry of oil and salt water at depth makes these deep water blowouts a completely different problem than a tanker spill, something no one has bothered to point out, I imagine because the public are too stupid to understand arguments based on -egads!- chemistry and physics.
    Crying that the sky is falling is as faulty and unscientific as calling for unlimited drilling. I wish people could simply deal with facts.
    (Reference: IXTOC I blowout)
    -drl

  154. asoka June 9, 2010 at 2:02 am #

    “mayhaps I am large and contain multitudes too. Ok. ”
    Yes, that was Walt Whitman’s subtext. It is a good thing to discover. And thanks for calling me on calling you on consistency.
    A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

  155. Vlad Krandz June 9, 2010 at 2:14 am #

    But what is the percentage of Blacks and Hispanics? Surely you must realize by this point just how crucial that is. With their communal culture and ethnic nationalism, they will organize much quicker after the crash than the hapless Whites. And then comes the bongo party. You don’t want to be there for that believe me.

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  156. Vlad Krandz June 9, 2010 at 2:33 am #

    Despite their brilliance, Jews seem to have an extreme inferiority complex which they over compensate for massively. For example, despite their incompetence at art, they couldn’t just leave it alone. So now 75% of the art dealers are Jewish – and we are becalmed in the hell known as modern art.
    And of course there is their great fear that the goyim will awaken to the fact that they have innundated our country with aliens. The weaker Whites are, the stronger the Jews will be due to their position as leader of the alien mobs. Could a little bit of their dis-ease actualy be a feeling of guilt? Nah! Even if so, it would be immediately and completely repressed. They had the right to change America. I mean just because we defeated their enemies in Germany, so what? What did we do for them lately? They informed us after the war that we were just Nazis waiting to happen anyway.
    Anyway, lots of great info in your posts. Maybe you will have more sucess than I have at getting through to these folks. It’s truly frightening when an intelligent person like Laura talks about Detroit having a Renaissance without losing its current population – the population that trashed it.

  157. John Howard June 9, 2010 at 2:43 am #

    I have an idea: let’s send a message that things are serious by prohibiting use of energy to make babies. The fertility industry consumes billions of dollars a year, and tons of resources. On top of that, there is all the money and resources spent on genetic engineering research that would end if the prospect of using it to make babies was ruled out. Perhaps in 100 years, after we find out if society made it through the crisis and has available resources, we can start up the research and start allowing IVF and frozen sperm and eggs and stuff again.
    I also think we should add a big 20% tax onto televised sporting events, both on the tickets people buy and the advertising advertisers buy.

  158. asoka June 9, 2010 at 2:45 am #

    Gee, an attempt to compare the IXTOC I blowout to what is happening now?
    Compare the depth of each: only 50 m (160 ft) deep for IXTOC I in 1979. In 2010 the oil leak originates from 5,000 feet (1,500 m) below the ocean surface.
    As a result, massive oil plumes (dead zones) were not created with IXTOC I. They are being created today because of the depths involved. Marine scientists have found a 100-foot-thick layer of oil 1,300 feet below the surface about 45 miles from the well site. This obviously did not happen in 1979.
    Compare oil impact on beaches: only 162 miles affected for IXTOC I.
    Compare use of dispersants in 1979 versus 2010. Bobby Jindal said he saw miles of tar balls (created by BPs dispersants) which are covering the wildlife in 2010? Did that happen in 1979?
    Compare the distance off shore, prevailing ocean currents. In 1979 IXTOC I was 62 miles offshore in the Bay of Campeche. In 2010 the wellhead is 41 miles (66 km) off the Louisiana coast and we now have beaches contaminated for hundreds of miles, all the way to Pensacola Florida, and the damage might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast to about Cape Hatteras, N.C. and then head out to open ocean.
    Compare the volume of the two. IXTOC I was estimated to only be releasing 30,000 barrels of oil per day. The 2010 gusher: 100,000 barrels per day.
    MORTALITY: Finally, how many oil rig workers died in IXTOC I? The explosion at Deepwater Horizon killed 11 platform workers and injured 17 others.
    Any way you want to look at it you cannot compare IXTOC I to Deepwater Horizon … unless you work for the oil industry and want to minimize the impact, to minimize the fines and jail sentences.

  159. eightm June 9, 2010 at 3:35 am #

    South America sucks: it is poor, no running water, very little mass transit, crowded, dirty, crappy, no electricity, no sanitation, no roads, crappy houses, small houses, no heating or cooling, no stores, no malls, no highways, are you guys kidding me ? The USA suburbs are utopia, paradise on earth compared to 90 % of South America. Those countries will never go anywhere unless they embrace the American Model of consumption, single family homes, highways, stores, mega malls, etc.
    You guys probably only just lived in the hotel near your large city at most, you don’t know anything about 90 % of the real South America. The same goes for the real REST OF THE WORLD, you all talk about. Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East sucks for the most part, the same as in South America for the most part except for some large cities.
    Single family homes with a front yard, a backyard and two car garages ? at mostly 150 to 250 square meters (1,800 to 2,700 square feet) large ? two small houses for just the cars (that is what the garages are) ? a basement ? an attic ? Are you kidding me ? This kind of wealth in 90 % of the REST OF THE WORLD would be science fiction, utopia, would be paradise, would be something, and is something, and will remain something totally unachievable no matter how much those “developing” countries grow, no matter how many toyotas, or hyundais, or lexuses or BMWs or ipads they sell the only consumer worldwide, the American consumer. The American consumer has been feeding the rest of the puny poor world for 50 years now, if it weren’t for the American consumer, the rest of the world would have starved to death long ago.
    Oh and did I forget to tell you ? The going worldwide salary from bottom to top ( from factory worker to doctor) is an average of 100 to 1,200 dollars a month. Compare that to the going average salary in the USA that starts at 1,200 dollars a month and ends at over a million dollars a month, most in the USA make between 2,000 to 3,000 dollars a month. With 2,000 dollars you can pay two Indonesian factory workers a year salary.

  160. Me June 9, 2010 at 3:53 am #

    “Despite their brilliance, Jews seem to have an extreme inferiority complex which they over compensate for massively. For example, despite their incompetence at art, they couldn’t just leave it alone. So now 75% of the art dealers are Jewish – and we are becalmed in the hell known as modern art.”
    ____________
    Hollywood and much of the entertainment media.

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  161. ak June 9, 2010 at 4:48 am #

    Asoka:
    “Then we have idiots like Ron Paul…”
    You’re like the ones who called Jimmy Carter ‘stupid’.
    I respect the guy for what he stands for, and I will have to skip your rants from now on.
    (He votes against anything the FedGov is not authorized to do by the Constitution, and there are many other good things about him.)
    Just write something admiring about the current Prez, and it’ll All Be Good.
    Kokot!

  162. ak June 9, 2010 at 5:05 am #

    As an ex-HPer,
    I shudder that (Republican) Californians fell for Fiorina’s lines.
    Revolting!
    [del]
    .

  163. ak June 9, 2010 at 5:08 am #

    Cara Carleton Sneed,
    anyone?

  164. diogen June 9, 2010 at 8:34 am #

    >weaker Whites … stronger the Jews will be
    Vlad, jews ARE white, both in terms of skin pigment and in terms of culture, at least based on my impression of various jews i encountered on my path (never been to Israel, so don’t know about them), but the Eropean and American Jews I’ve met over the years are basically Caucasian thru their long intermingling with us (my biking buddy Dave and his kids are blond and blue-eyed just like my German relatives 🙂 I see them as an ethnic or religious group like Italian Americans or irish Americans. Your conspiracy theories about them wanting to dominate us are ludicrous, far as i can tell they just want to survive like the rest of us and have the same aspirations like anyone else i know…
    As far as minorities in Cleveland — a healthy society needs all kinds of people, rich, poor and everything in between. When the era of fossil energy is over, once again manual labor will be the source of our energy, and people who have not valued (or were capable of) education and manual skills (of WHATEVER color or race) will be a very valuable resource. Germany had to IMPORT millions of “Gastarbeiter”, guest workers, mostly Turkish when I lived there, because white high-iq Germans didn’t want to work in factories, fields or dig ditches (honorable work if you ask me).
    So, in your White Republic populated by high IQ whites, how long will it be before shrewd white businessmen start smuggling in Mexicans to work their fields?

  165. diogen June 9, 2010 at 9:18 am #

    >they will organize much quicker after the crash
    Sorry Vlad, I just don’ see the world as “they” vs. “us”. I don’t see blacks mexicans, jews etc. as a unified organized front against us, this just isn’t the reality I see. Sure, everyone has their favorite lobby, locally or nationally, but most of them are not ethnic or racial, most of them are special interest, usually business.
    When TSHTF we’ll all be in the same boat, we’ll float together or sink together. Agriculture will require massive labor inputs to replace fossil inputs, so having folks who don’t think the only way to be happy is thru a university diploma will be a great benefit to society, whether they are white, black, brown, yello or purple.

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  166. Qshtik June 9, 2010 at 11:23 am #

    It is necessary to reject the tenents of equality ….
    ===================
    I’m marking down your verbal SAT score to 799. It’s FUCKING tenets, not tenents.
    If I had a dime for every time I have pointed this out here at CFN I could retire. ….Wait a minute … I AM retired.

  167. dale June 9, 2010 at 11:58 am #

    Watched part of an interview with Sen. John “Foghorn Leghorn” Kerry on PBS yesterday. He was utterly convinced that once the policies were favorable to innovation in energy usage and supply that radically innovative sources would quickly evolve…ergo, don’t sweat PO folks. A little surprising to me he was so optimistic on this topic. Of course, there are those, on this website especially, who are just as convinced of the opposite.
    I long ago gave up on the idea that such innovative technology as Kerry speaks of can be so easily predicted, at least by people with limited knowledge and resources such as myself and others here. One thing is for sure, since I started following this site off and on about three years ago, many of the “doomers” have left, once the immediate disasters they were predicting didn’t come true. At one time “Dr. Doom” was the reigning authority on this site of the disaster about to befall mankind. He predicted $250 a barrel oil by 2012. I remember reminding him and others of the elasticity of the price of oil relative to demand in times past, only to be hooted at for being so ignorant or optimistic. Their predictions always relied upon ridiculous extrapolations of current trends, none of which need necessarily continue.
    People are funny about what they choose to believe. Having been involved for much of my career in building construction I remember watching the TT’s on 911 and wondering how long they could withstand the effects of the heat on the structural components holding the floors in place. The answer of course, was not long, and the type of collapse (implosion) was completely predictable to me, based on my experience. In spite of that I had a young man (with no training or experience in building engineering) try and convince me last week that bombing was the only way such a collapse could occur, and mentioned a “Phd in physics who agreed”. All this in spite of the fact that studies by teams of structural engineers, without any reason to be involved in a conspiracy, have easily concluded what experience had taught me. Even though he knows me, and knows of my experience in this field, he was still reluctant to yield on his wild hypothesis.
    Conclusion…..people, even well educated ones, often base their decisions of what to believe on factors other than reason, far more often then we tell ourselves.

  168. asoka June 9, 2010 at 12:20 pm #

    “I respect the guy [Ron Paul] for what he stands for, and I will have to skip your rants from now on.
    Here is what he stands for:
    http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/ron-pauls-racist-newsletters-revealed/
    I congratulate you on making the decision to skip my posts. Everyone who has high blood pressure, or anyone who doesn’t want to hear alternative views, should follow your example.
    Ron Paul hides behind the constitution to defend his racism.

  169. Puzzler June 9, 2010 at 2:20 pm #

    Fear is always a stronger motivator than reason.

  170. asoka June 9, 2010 at 2:39 pm #

    puzzler: “Fear is always a stronger motivator than reason.”
    As a tool to motivate people, fear has many disadvantages. Fear based motivation causes resentment resistance and revenge. It is seen for what it is, an attack. By its very nature, fear is not sustaining or sustainable without negative consequences.
    People who are motivated by fear will seek ways to extricate themselves from the situation that causes the fear. This will not always be done by fulfilling the desire of the ‘motivator’.
    People eventually get used to the things that they’re afraid of or change the situation so they don’t have to feel the fear. Most constants are canceled out after a while and many people have gotten used to living under threats. Fear motivation, then, eventually loses its capacity to influence.
    Threatening someone that they will be fired if they do not do their job correctly may have an impact upon the person causing them to try to improve their performance. However, that motivation is based on external forces and it requires that someone always be there to impose the threat.
    Because of these things, Fear motivation is the weakest force in our motivation definitions list and is reserved for the week and uneducated individuals who attempts to gain power by force.
    Fear is categorized as a motivation definition by virtue of its primal effect on all animals including humans. You will never see a book on training pets that would advocate its use.
    It’s not fit for animals, kids, employees, nor yourself, so don’t use it!
    — Phil L. Methot

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  171. asoka June 9, 2010 at 2:41 pm #

    CORRECTION: “Fear motivation is the weakest force in our motivation definitions list and is reserved for the weAk and uneducated individuals who attempt to gain power by force.”

  172. treebeardsuncle June 9, 2010 at 2:56 pm #

    Hi.
    No, we are not all in this together. For one thing there is no we. This is not the country that excisted back in the mid-twentieth century. The ethnic make-up is drasticly different. The population is much more balkanized. Also people are less social now than they were in the 50’s and 60’s. The influence of the producers of content for televiion are largely reponsible for that. People are very isolated and atomized. There is little group spirt (especially in the middle class white population). Such isolation and atomization suits the interests of corporate exploiters very well. There is not a democracy here either. The corporations control the government along with some representative from the public sector unions and a few others.
    A lot of you still belive blacks and whites are equal. If you think that you must not have taught large numbers of black children and teenagers. They really are different: unruly, loud, aggressive, hyper-kinetic, and totally unwilling to engage in the least with the curriculum. After a particularly imbecilic utterance from some grossly obese obnoxious negress demonstating non-standard language, with improperly conjugated verb forms, I commented on the “sentence.” and she said “That’s just the way we talk.” Anyway please read this article in full.
    I am posting it in 2 or parts as it is very long.
    (http://www.amren.com/ar/2009/07/index.html)
    A White Teacher Speaks Out
    What is it like to teach black students?
    by Christopher Jackson
    I recall a bad joke that explains, in crude terms, the relationship between blacks and whites in America today:
    “What do you call a white man surrounded by 20 blacks?”
    “Coach.”
    “What do you call a white man surrounded by 1,000 blacks?”
    “Warden.”
    I might add another line to this joke: “What do you call a white man surrounded by 30 blacks?”
    “Teacher.”
    Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state. I took the job because I wasn’t knowledgeable about race at the time, and black schools aren’t picky. The school offered me a job and suddenly I was in darkest Africa. Except, I wasn’t in Africa; I was in America.
    Not quite the way it really is.
    Blacks outnumbered whites about five to one at this school and there were hardly any Hispanics. Some of my classes were all-black, or nearly so, because the gifted and advanced classes siphoned off most of the white students and I taught regular classes. There were some black teachers but the majority were white.
    Most of the blacks I taught were from the area. They did not tend to travel very much, and I am sure there are regional differences in the ways in which blacks speak and act. However, I suspect my experiences were generally typical, certainly for Southern blacks.
    The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.
    Noise
    Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock. One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary white decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point — something that occurs to even the dimmest white students — blacks just tried to yell over each other.
    It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to pipe down. They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.
    Blacks are loud. It was not unusual for five students to be screaming at once.
    Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again — just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: “We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!” The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again: “Clinton good!”
    Anyone who is around young blacks will get a constant diet of rap music. Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 black boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: “Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?” The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim — in the crudest terms imaginable — that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For whatever reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular word, as in, “She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long grinding groan), she f**k dat aaaahhhh, she lick dat aaaahhh.”
    Many rap lyrics are crude but some are simply incomprehensible. Not so long ago, there was a popular rap called “Tat it up.” I heard the words from hundreds of black mouths for weeks. Some of the lyrics are:
    Tat tat tat it up.
    ATL tat it up.
    New York tat it up.
    Tat tat tat it up.
    Rap is one of the most degenerate things to have come out of our country, and it is tragic that it has infected whites to the extent it has.
    These are their heroes.
    Black women love to dance — in a way white people might call gyrating. They dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.
    Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students — there are — but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.
    “Black women be big Mr. Jackson,” my students would explain.
    “Is it okay in the black community to be a little overweight?” I ask.
    Two obese black girls in front of my desk begin to dance, “You know dem boys lak juicy fruit, Mr. Jackson.” “Juicy” is a colorful black expression for the buttocks.
    Blacks are the most directly critical people I have ever met: “Dat shirt stupid. Yo’ kid a bastard. Yo’ lips big.” Unlike whites, who tread gingerly around the subject of race, they can be brutally to the point. Once I needed to send a student to the office to deliver a message. I asked for volunteers, and suddenly you would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: “You pick da half-breed.” And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, “He half-breed.”
    For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?” Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.
    It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a “country” accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as “I’m gonna gemme a Coke.” Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.
    PS
    VK, what is your background? I would like to claim you as kin. At least 3 of my mother’s grandparents came from Russia. The other was either Russian or Austrian. My dad’s side is mostly British, with some German and Irish.

  173. diogen June 9, 2010 at 4:21 pm #

    “VK, what is your background? I would like to claim you as kin”
    Ha, this is funny. With your Russian/Jew background, Vlad does not want you as his kin, you’re his mortal race enemy.

  174. budizwiser June 9, 2010 at 4:31 pm #

    James, I thought I would address this post to you. I would like you to discuss your experience in investigating the compounding of energy recovery costs and ROI – given that the true nature of the world’s oil reserves depends on being able to “harvest” or recover oil bearing material at energy inputs below a one-to-one ratio.
    In light of recent events in the gulf – what effect will increased oversight and or possible regulation pertaining to “spill-proof” oil recovery have on the balance of off-shore reserves?
    Is it possible or unrealistic to quantify the change to ROI of off-shore reserves? Will noticeably increasing the safety and “spill-proofing” of future deep water recovery efforts affect the onset of Peak Oil? Or is this just another slight but historical “bump in the slide” down the mountain?
    Perhaps I can get the TOD to discuss. But I’d like to hear what you think as well.

  175. asia June 9, 2010 at 5:17 pm #

    tell us how…do you have a blog?

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  176. diogen June 9, 2010 at 5:17 pm #

    >No, we are not all in this together.
    >For one thing there is no we.
    This is where you’re wrong. “We” are all who live in my neighborhood (or city, or area), people of various colors and creeds, who will have
    to co-operate when TSHTF to exchange our skills, knowledge and abilities for all of us to survive. I know a black guy who has blacksmithing skills, do you think I care what color he is when I need some metal implement repaired? And do you think he’ll care I’m white when he needs help with his garden?
    Look at the military, white guys and black guys in the same unit are brothers, because they are Americans and they need each other to survive.
    The differences between blacks and whites you pointed out are cultural. Go spend some time in poor white Appalachian area, and you will have a similar culture shock. On the other hand, spend some time with the black/white/jew/hispanic middle class people I work with, and you’d have to admit that we’re more alike than different. And then spend some time with super-rich people of whatever race/creed and once again you’d be shocked at what they believe and how they act. I believe that most folks within a similar socio-economic bracket are more comfortable with each other, compared to other socio-economic groups, with little regard to race/creed, based on my own experience.

  177. diogen June 9, 2010 at 5:28 pm #

    No, no blog. We constantly improve the soil by composting everything other than animal products: leftover food, kitchen scraps, weeds, discarded plants, composted sawdust (can’t use fresh sawdust, it will suck out nitrogen from your soil). We started out with hard clay a few years ago, not it’s like black gold. Occasionally we get free compost, composted manure, mulch. This is the key — don’t feed the plants, feed the soil. Both the soil and the plants need nurturing. We save our seeds from year to year, and then start them in the winter using grow-lights (fluorescent tubes, one warm one cold) inside. We remove insects by hand (it’s fun to use the suction trap to trap flee beetles), encourage beneficial insects (by flowers and native plants), weed by hand (we get few weeds now that the soil is healthy). We use row covers to keep some insects away, especially from cucumbers and eggplants. We use netting to keep deer from damaging our food, but there are a few other ways I’m going to experiment with (placing wiremesh on the ground, using double fences, etc.) We do occasionally use small amounts of BT, but that’s OK. That’s about it. We mostly freeze and dry, but would like to do more canning. And I’d like to have a root cellar one day. There are lots of books on this style of gardening. The KEY is healthy and nourished soil.
    We use Comfrey to improve the soil too, occasionally we plant green manures for a season to capture nitrogen for various beds. Oh yeah, we use raised beds.

  178. asia June 9, 2010 at 5:35 pm #

    because its the titanic, with cali at the bow.
    i moved to cali in 1980. it was good.
    now the populations increased by 50% [almost]
    its mexifornia.
    turd world

  179. asia June 9, 2010 at 5:39 pm #

    ‘there were hardly any Hispanics’ YET
    and anyone in the usa should know young blacks are
    ‘very disfunctional as a group ‘ [according to a teacher i spoke to]
    AND VERY LOUD..they are usually from single mothers..thats a fact
    what planet do you live on?

  180. asia June 9, 2010 at 5:44 pm #

    i heard you cant get rid of comfrey if its not potted
    and whats BT?
    all that from 50$?

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  181. asia June 9, 2010 at 5:46 pm #

    and we have idiots like,,,uh……asoka
    maybe hes jealous of the pauls

  182. asia June 9, 2010 at 5:49 pm #

    theres a story in one of the ‘idiot ‘ type books..you might like
    does not mention race,……. repeat no racial overtone:
    guys are in lineup for woman to see who mugged her.
    guy says..should i wear my hat like it was when i robbed her???
    presumably he didnt know a line up was to ID the guilty among the innocent!

  183. treebeardsuncle June 9, 2010 at 6:46 pm #

    Ok.
    I am from Sacramento, Ca. Asia, I know this is how they behave. I see it at roller skating rinks too. I just recently learned how to skate backwards in my mid-30’s. Have heard it is hard to learn motor skills much older than that though.
    Anyway the reason I am saying these things is that a lot of folks really do seem to believe that there are no innnate racial differences. I am trying to show them that there are in fact are intrinsic inherited racial differences.
    *****
    asia replied to comment from treebeardsuncle | June 9, 2010 5:39 PM | Reply
    ‘there were hardly any Hispanics’ YET
    and anyone in the usa should know young blacks are
    ‘very disfunctional as a group ‘ [according to a teacher i spoke to]
    AND VERY LOUD..they are usually from single mothers..thats a fact
    what planet do you live on?
    *****
    Below is more from that article I was reading on the American Renaissance site. Also would like to note that people in general, including whites are very anti-intellectual and not interested in academics so that is not something that is unique to blacks.
    (From http://www.amren.com/ar/2009/07/index.html)
    Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an assignment or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was “diversity” history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work.
    Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totalling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.”
    My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”
    “Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people,” I said.
    She had an answer to that: “Dey half breed.” The class agreed. I let the subject drop.
    Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.
    Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement.
    After Katrina, at the Superdome.
    My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: “Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?” By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. “Yeah” was the favorite answer. As one student explained, “Get dat green.”
    There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.
    Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all — well — black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.
    One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.

  184. asoka June 9, 2010 at 7:06 pm #

    There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.
    Your display of ignorance (duh, from American Renaissance!) is killing me!
    All those yellow folks are alike, too, you know. 🙂

  185. diogen June 9, 2010 at 10:12 pm #

    Treebeard, those black students you describe all come from the same socio-economic group, no surprise they’re all alike. But trust me they’re as different from other blacks I’ve known — professional, educated, trained skilled labor, or even uneducated but who aspire to the middle class values — as those ghetto kids are from you. You’re forgetting the “nurture” part of the nature/nurture. It’s a very bleak picture you describe, but don’t forget to allocate some of the responsibility to the white politicians who created the misguided welfare state, welfare dependency, welfare mentality, well-intended but disastrous thing to American poor of all colors. As a parent yourself, I’m surprised you don’t have some empathy for those kids — born into poverty (both economic and cultural), some perhaps to addicted mothers, no fathers around, no proper parenting, they may as well be born in a jungle.
    Oh, and dont’ forget to factor in exploitive pop culture, dehumanizing TV, wacked-out values of ignorance, etc…
    It’s their great misfortune, and now you’re demonizing them.
    But you know what’s astonishing? I would bet that a few of those kids will eventually outgrow and overcome their circumstances and make something of themselves, and when they do their accomplishment will be much greater than the same accomplishment of middle-class kids with all the advantages given to them.
    We were told of a magnet school some years ago, most of the students are black, but because their parents cared about their education these kids were very different from the kids you described. Incidentally, white kids from desperately poor areas (rural Appalachia for example) are not much different from those blacks kids you experienced.
    It’s a very bad situation, but you have to rethink your understanding of it.

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  186. diogen June 9, 2010 at 10:25 pm #

    Asia, BT is Bacillus thuringiensis, biological pest control (as opposed to Chemical). It’s a bacterium that controls insects naturally. We bought a big jar of it years ago and we use just a few teaspoons every season. We already made an investment in tools, supplies, we don’t buy seeds or plants, so the seasonal $50, more or less, is for occasional replacement of supplies such as row covers, nets, etc. There are two kinds of Comfrey, one spreads like crazy, the other one doesn’t. SOme people say it’s impossible to eradicate it, but trust me — I can eradicate it easily. You can use a bit of Roundup, or you can mow it, then water it, cover it with clear plastic, and if the temps are over 80F, the sun will bake it and kill it. Or you can use the propane flame weeeder, it fries the roots. But don’t kill it, offer the roots to other gardeners, or sell it, people pay good money for it (we did).

  187. treebeardsuncle June 9, 2010 at 10:41 pm #

    I was quoting from an article posted on the American Renaissance site and will be posting more of it below. First of all, Diogen, I don’t believe that people are primarily shaped by their environment. I believe they are what they are mostly by virtue of inheritence along with some contribution of free choice and a relatively small input from the environment. Second, my primary focuse of complaint is not with various races but with the oppressive abusive schools and the various people who populate them. If this Long Emergency ever comes to fruition, I hope it takes down the US Department of Education, and the dimestore Nazi teachers’ union and the administrators. And no I don’t have much empathy for those low-lifes (black students in the south and in Sacramento, Ca), I see them as degenerates and wish to seem them as a different species. I don’t have that much in common with whites either as they tend to be –like most people — cold-blooded/hard-hearted, mean-spirited, anti-intellectual, cowardly, and vicious as well as status-conscious, prone to denigrate and exclude, and wasteful. I think what distinguishes them, whites, is a combination of creativity, moderate intelligence, and genetic variety which through mostly historical accident enabled them to become dominant in the 1500-2000 time frame. Also, a substantial Jewish contribution accelerated the development of their culture and a retreat of the Chinese allowed them to gain dominance of the eastern seas as well.
    This is more from the article (http://www.amren.com/ar/2009/07/index.html):
    How the world looks to blacks
    One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is “racis’.” This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? “Na, homework racis’.” Why did you get an F on the test? “Test racis’.”
    I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was “Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a’?” I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth-century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: “Dat racis’!”
    One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I didn’t like black people.
    “Do you think I really hate black people?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Have I done anything to make you feel this way? How do you know?”
    “You just do.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    He just smirked, looked out the window, and sucked air through his teeth. Perhaps this was a regional thing, but the blacks often sucked air through their teeth as a wordless expression of disdain or hostility.
    My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanics. Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans. Not the Mexicans.
    My students were sometimes unable to see the world except through the lens of their own blackness. I had a class that was host to a German exchange student. One day he put on a Power Point presentation with famous German landmarks as well as his school and family. From time to time during the presentation, blacks would scream, “Where da black folk?!” The exasperated German tried several times to explain that there were no black people where he lived in Germany. The students did not believe him. I told them Germany is in Europe, where white people are from, and Africa is where black people are from. They insisted that the German student was racist, and deliberately refused to associate with blacks.
    Blacks are keenly interested in their own racial characteristics. I have learned, for example, that some blacks have “good hair.” Good hair is black parlance for black-white hybrid hair. Apparently, it is less kinky, easier to style, and considered more attractive.
    Blacks are also proud of light skin. Imagine two black students shouting insults across the room. One is dark but slim; the other light and obese. The dark one begins the exchange: “You fat, Ridario!”
    Ridario smiles, doesn’t deign to look at his detractor, shakes his head like a wobbling top, and says, “You wish you light skinned.”
    They could go on like this, repeating the same insults over and over.
    My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants. They would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly advised us never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some outsider might overhear.
    Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans. Not the Mexicans. Blacks have a certain, not necessarily hostile understanding of white people. They know how whites act, and it is clear they believe whites are smart and are good at organizing things. At the same time, they probably suspect whites are just putting on an act when they talk about equality, as if it is all a sham that makes it easier for whites to control blacks. Blacks want a bigger piece of the American pie. I’m convinced that if it were up to them they would give whites a considerably smaller piece than whites get now, but they would give us something. They wouldn’t give Mexicans anything.

  188. Eleuthero June 10, 2010 at 5:11 am #

    I’m with you about conservation, Trippticket,
    and I practice it every year by driving only
    6000 miles/year, using my own bag for groceries,
    owning everything from cars to furniture to
    clothing until it BREAKS COMPLETELY. I do
    not “boredom shop”.
    However, the problem with pure conservation
    at this point is that: a) Americans won’t do
    it until they’re forced to, and b) It’s almost
    too LATE for pure conservation to work. How
    do we undo the concrete of suburbia to make
    it arable again? Where will we get the MONEY
    to build good mass transit?
    I don’t enjoy being a total doomster. Who
    does except for people with mansions with
    private armies? However, I don’t see anything
    but tokenism on energy. At least quickly-built
    nukes will keep the lights on while we do a
    full transition to electric cars.
    All other forms of altfuels just nip around
    the edges of the energy problem while costing
    too much to maintain and while requiring the
    existing fossil fuel infrastructure to machine
    and finish all of the components.
    I don’t know how ANYONE could think that wind
    was an answer. Good Lord … it takes hundreds
    of those big windmills just to light up sparsely
    populated areas. And they BREAK. Birds mess
    ’em up. Climatic events corrode them.
    Nukes come with big problems but having no
    electricity is a bigger problem.
    Eleuthero

  189. Eleuthero June 10, 2010 at 5:26 am #

    Treebeardsuncle,
    Yes, most whites ARE putting on an act
    like they love Blacks. The ones who do
    it the most are a specie of LIBERAL,
    especially in areas like California and
    Massachusetts which seem to contain a
    huge number of lily white people living
    in lily white areas and with all lily
    white friends who claim to “love” people
    of color. I’d sooner trust a dumb,
    prejudiced hick. At least I know I’m
    getting truth.
    Yes, I don’t like phony egalitarians.
    However, no one bothers to call Blacks
    and Hispanics on their OPEN hatred of
    people of other races. It’s like it’s
    officially okay for “people of color”
    to be racists.
    Like you, I’m an educator but I’m in a
    science and in twenty-one years in a
    public institution I’ve had maybe a
    TOTAL of 20 “people of color” out of
    around 8000 students. And of those
    only TWO “A” grades. That’s because
    in the Black and Hispanic communities
    education is considered “giving in to
    da man”. So, by definition, their own
    races think of them as “Uncle Toms” from
    the get-go.
    However, when our country enters the next
    leg of the Long Emergency, the tolerance
    in places like CA and MA will disappear
    faster than tree leaves in December. The
    whole idea of being “tolerant” to low-brow,
    low-class, anti-intellectual, thuggish
    attitudes as if they’re just like a
    variation of FASHION can only happen in
    a culture not yet beset by NECESSITY.
    Expect whites to have a “reconquista” of
    the major cities when the brown stuff hits
    the fan. Major race wars are baked in the
    cake.
    Eleuthero

  190. Eleuthero June 10, 2010 at 5:36 am #

    Deepwater drilling is another example of
    a concept that JHK has coined a wonderful
    term for: TECHNO-TRIUMPHALISM.
    My theory is that the world is not only at
    Peak Oil and Peak Water and Peak Base Metals
    and Peak Food, but mostly it has passed PEAK
    INTELLIGENCE.
    Schools have used social promotion and “Self
    Esteem” for about three decades (due to idiots
    like Dr. Spock and others). The result is a
    huge new generation of complete imbeciles
    created by our own moronic ideas about loving
    self before other.
    In “Generation Me”, author Twenge shows survey
    after survey where around 75% of 20-somethings
    think they’re “very attractive” and “very
    intelligent”. Right. They’re averaging about
    30 pounds overweight per person and they’re
    getting out of high school with 8th grade
    reading skills … or worse. Twenty percent
    of Chicago high school graduates cannot name
    all 26 letters of the alphabet. Truth really
    is STRANGER THAN FICTION.
    Franz Kafka looks like a pollyanna compared to
    anyone who’d care to depict this world.
    Eleuthero

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  191. diogen June 10, 2010 at 7:02 am #

    “I don’t believe that people are primarily shaped by their environment.”
    Really? How do you think your kids would develop if they were adopted at birth by, let’s say, a single black woman living in a black ghetto, who has no education herself and cares nothing about educating your kids, doesn’t read to them, does not lavish attention and affection on them, they learn to speak English from other street kids? My guess they would turn out just like the kids from that article you quoted.
    I don’t disagree that blacks hold racist views, thanks to the brainwashing from their black “leaders” and the misguided liberal educational system, not to mention pop-culture.
    I think you underestimate the influence of environment on the kids’ development.

  192. diogen June 10, 2010 at 7:08 am #

    “Expect whites to have a “reconquista” of
    the major cities when the brown stuff hits”
    I’m not so sure about that. What would they be doing in the jungle that major cities have become? Presumably at that point the economy would be severely downgraded, how exactly will they be making a living in major cities? At least in the countryside they can work on farms to help farmers grow food.
    I am with Kunstler on that, smaller cities and towns with access to nearby farmland have a better chance of relative normalcy during the Long Emergency.
    “Major race wars are baked in the cake.”
    I hope you’re wrong about that, although you may be right.

  193. eightm June 10, 2010 at 10:55 am #

    FALSE. There are no peaks, only environmentalists fantasy and desire for peaks to exist. The green bunch want to provoke peak oil, etc. they want to force it to exist since they cannot come to grips with the reality of the fact that technology and science from 1900 to 2000 has increased our standard of living hugely and will continue to do so no matter what JHK says and desires.
    Check out:
    http://www.jefflindsay.com/Overpop.shtml
    http://www.objectivistcenter.org/showcontent.aspx?ct=835&h=53
    http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/9243/UN_Study_Ends_Overpopulation_Fears.html
    Worldwide population won’t go past 15 billion in the next 50 to 100 years. That is nothing compared to the explosion that went from 1 billion to 7 billion today from 1800 to 2010.
    Peak oil is total BS, we have ethanol, biogas, algae, natural gas, electric, mass transit and many many other solutions for transporation.
    Global warming, I am not sure of, it probably is just more BS. Nature, societies, economies have a way of self regulating, of automatically expelling excesses, of automatically finding a new equilibrium point, of automatically, with no intervention, of finding solutions to instabilities and problems.
    You can clearly see the agenda of all the people writing on this blog, all of these greens and environmentalists, no one really wants to solve problems, they just talk about fake entitites like races, jews, blacks, growing food in your backyard. Nothing that is real or serious, that could better the world for real. Like mass transit that is achievable through buses, cheap rents in higher density communities. Oh, but it is more fun talking about blacks and jews and their “race” and all that kind of BS. What a bunch of losers, “reactionary” and “conservative” losers.

  194. trippticket June 10, 2010 at 11:10 am #

    “they just talk about fake entitites like races, jews, blacks, growing food in your backyard.”
    Oh, but 8M, I assure you the food growing in my backyard is VERY real. And very delicious. Despite all the talking heads’ suggestions that food is just liberal nonsense;)

  195. trippticket June 10, 2010 at 11:30 am #

    “We grow over $3,000 worth of veggies (retail value) for a seasonal investment of about $50. Can you match our ROI?”
    Bravo, Diogen! You obviously understand that nothing can replace, in the human psyche, the ability to produce abundance without chemical inputs, commuting, or an economy for that matter. All this other stuff is secondary (and most often counter) to being a functional part of nature.
    I hope more people get to experience it as energy descent takes hold. I wouldn’t trade my life on my little urban farm in the ‘hood for Treebeardsuncle’s or 8M’s or anyone else’s. Nobody’s.
    And within the decade (I think) 100k and 8k will be the same thing. Nothing. Paper scraps and memories of another time. Only then will these folks realize what a waste of time all this other mess was, and is.
    A hurricane full of crude. Increasing solar storm activity. Web of life disintegrating around us. What in the world suggests that a stock portfolio means dick in the big picture? I hope those paper equities taste good with St. Augustine grass as a side dish.
    TBU, if I could give you one little piece of unsolicited advice it would be to enjoy and spend your money on whatever makes you happy as quickly as you can. I don’t think there’s much hope in you making good decisions, so might as well enjoy yourself. Me, I’m investing mine in life support systems. As fast as I get it.

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  196. Funzel June 10, 2010 at 11:43 am #

    treebeardsuncle,you claim to be so intelligent coming from the bedouin tribes of askeNazies have you noticed at all,that this blog is dedicated to comments on current events rather than your Race BS,trying to perpetuate the myths generated by your kind and hollywood,about blond and blue eyed people???I suggest you bring yourself up to date on current events,particularly the terror state of Israel,then tell us how intelligent you and your cohorts are.

  197. trippticket June 10, 2010 at 11:44 am #

    “Ok. Well, I am not in favor of sacfificing future returns and the biosphere for immediate returns. Society needs to find a way to allow people to improve their living conditions and their social standing without doing so much ecological and social damage.”
    From an earlier post:
    “Nope, I don’t get as much pleasure from stock trading as it is lonely, sterile, and ecologically hurtful.”
    If it’s ecologically hurtful then you are sacrificing future returns and the biosphere for immediate returns.
    Try again.

  198. trippticket June 10, 2010 at 11:47 am #

    And if it’s lonely and sterile then it is socially damaging.
    Strike three.

  199. trippticket June 10, 2010 at 11:51 am #

    Nurturing soil, plants, and animals is real. That’s the best stuff. Better than the naysayers could ever imagine. I’ve been where they are – day-trading stocks in a great bull market, micro-managing my 401(k), living on the lake.
    Too fake, too anxious, and too damaging to our Mother. Find something real.
    Tripp out.

  200. eightm June 10, 2010 at 11:55 am #

    Given how much this blog has been “polluted” with the rascist crap and BS, let’s put some real stuff in here, stuff that shows what all you ennvironmentalists really are:
    From:
    http://www.objectivistcenter.org/showcontent.aspx?ct=835&h=53
    The War on Food
    But perhaps nowhere are the anti-human motives of the environmentalist movement clearer than in their war on our most basic necessity: our food.
    Environmentalists and “animal rights” activists have assaulted virtually every aspect of food production, distribution, and consumption. They assail pesticides and agricultural chemicals that have boosted yields and ended global famines. They attack safety measures such as food irradiation, which destroys microorganisms that kill 5,000 to 10,000 Americans annually. They block farmers and ranchers from expanding their use of land and water, and raising chickens, cattle, hogs, and sheep. Now they are targeting our diets, even declaring—as a New York Times writer did recently—that we produce “too much food” (Michael Pollan, October 12, 2003).
    These are integral aspects of their broader agenda to restrict the presence of people on the planet. For if they cannot mandate population control, they seek to accomplish the same objective by allowing deadly diseases to run rampant and by depriving people of basic necessities, such as food.
    Am I exaggerating? The October 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly carried an eye-opening article by Jonathan Rauch: “Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?”
    “Frankenfood” is the pejorative environmentalists use to describe genetically modified or engineered crops. It is meant to conjure images of mad scientists (to greens, there are no other kind) who maniacally manipulate nature, with apocalyptic results. Rauch’s investigation of genetically engineered food, however, presents a very different picture.
    The problem the world faces, he explains, is this. Within the next half century, global population is expected to soar about 40 percent, to around 9 billion, before leveling off. During those coming decades we have to find ways of feeding all those new mouths. However, 38 percent of the earth’s land area is already used for crops or pasture. We have exploited existing technology to the point of diminishing returns in squeezing greater yields out of that land. The global need for more food and jobs has driven desperate people to expand into previously untouched areas, cutting down more forests. It’s also led to increased use, sometimes overuse, of pesticides and other agrichemicals—which is every environmentalist’s worst nightmare.
    Biotechnology, however, promises a way out of this grim future scenario. Crops can be genetically engineered to resist harsher climates, insects, diseases, and fungi. At test sites, yields have demonstrably and dramatically increased, without the use of more chemicals. This means we may well be able to feed those coming billions on existing farmland, rather than having to expand further into forests and wilderness areas. And we can do it safely, while reducing our reliance on chemicals.
    So biotechnology could solve a pending hunger crisis, spare millions of lives and millions of acres of wilderness, and free us from dependency on chemical “poisons.” Every environmentalist’s dream, right?
    Well, that conclusion rests on an assumption: the assumption that environmentalists are motivated primarily by a love of nature, rather than by hostility to Man’s presence in it. Rauch went to the Web site of Greenpeace, where he found this: “The introduction of genetically engineered (GE) organisms into the complex ecosystems of our environment is a dangerous global experiment with nature and evolution. . . . GE organisms must not be released into the environment. They pose unacceptable risks to ecosystems, and have the potential to threaten biodiversity, wildlife and sustainable forms of agriculture.”
    Note that Greenpeace is worried primarily about the hypothetical “risks” of genetically engineered crops. And the risks they are worried about are not to humans, but to “biodiversity, wildlife and sustainable [organic] forms of agriculture.” Those risks—and not the risks of mass starvation—are “unacceptable.”
    And at the Web site of the Sierra Club, Rauch found an echo of the Greenpeace position in Sierra’s endorsement of the so-called Precautionary Principle.
    The Precautionary Principle is the greens’ ultimate weapon. It is the principle that no new technology should be permitted unless it is first proven to have no downside risks or negative consequences. Of course, no new machine, mode of transportation, medical treatment, means of communication, energy source—no invention of any kind—would have ever passed such a test. Every new technology throughout history has had some negative aspect. Every vaccine, for example, harms at least a handful of people who are allergic to it, even though it may save millions of lives. So we weigh risks against benefits constantly. We adopt innovations not because they are perfect or pose no risks, but because they are a demonstrable improvement over what we have had before.
    But the Precautionary Principle demands a platonic perfection of every new technology, in effect treating them as “guilty until proved innocent.” And it proposes that the force of law prevent the introduction of anything new unless it somehow can be proved to be without risk to anyone. The Precautionary Principle amounts to the enshrinement of fear over progress. Its consequence would be the idealization of stagnation.
    Yet that’s the premise mainstream environmentalists uniformly endorse. Says the Sierra Club: “In accordance with this Precautionary Principle, we call for a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops and the release of all GEOs [genetically engineered organisms] into the environment, including those now approved” [emphasis added].
    In other words, the Sierra Club would retroactively ban the use of biotechnology in agriculture, even in those cases already scientifically demonstrated to be safe and effective.
    Consider the stakes for human lives and well-being. Then consider where the environmentalist movement has cast its lot.
    This is “idealism”?
    Here is Rauch’s own explanation for the greens’ otherwise unfathomable opposition to an “earth-friendly” technology:
    “For reasons having more to do with politics than with logic, the modern environmental movement was to a large extent founded on suspicion of markets and artificial substances. Markets exploit the earth; chemicals poison it. Biotechnology touches both hot buttons. It is being pushed forward by greedy corporations, and it seems to be the very epitome of the unnatural.”
    So, because of their fundamental hostility to self-interested human activity, environmentalists would much rather that we face the prospect of mass starvation than allow anyone to profit by preventing it, or use “unnatural” means to do so.
    But this should not come as a shock. Starting, as they do, from the premise of nature’s intrinsic value—a value independent of any valuer or purpose—environmentalists are driven by that premise’s inescapable logic to consistently oppose every human effort to use the planet. To use the planet means to change it; and if untouched wilderness and undisturbed “ecosystems” are ends in themselves, then Man can have no moral right to feed, clothe, or house himself.
    So far, only the most outspoken fanatics of the movement are willing to state this view so explicitly, though every day their numbers increase and their voices get louder. But the inner logic of environmentalist premises drives even the most naïve and benign among them to oppose, ever more consistently, every activity that sustains human life on the planet.
    Some visitors to my ecoNOT.com Web site have expressed reservations at the harshness of my criticisms of the environmental movement. But in this article I have surveyed the actual toll in human lives from this movement’s activities. And my brief survey does not begin to measure the full magnitude of destruction and misery caused by people who should know better—and who often do.
    Many people are willing to give environmentalists the benefit of the doubt and help them maintain their public façade as well-meaning idealists. But whenever the naked consequences of their actions are made clear—when they are confronted with the reality of diseased babies and starving children, of crushed automobiles and disintegrating spacecraft, of sweltering apartments and blazing forests—and when even then they fail to recoil in horror and repudiate their agenda, such people may be called many things. But “idealist” is not one of them.
    And I, for one, mean for the world to know that.

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  201. ~micheal~ June 10, 2010 at 12:08 pm #

    From the Daily Grunt, 06/08/10:
    “Dear Mr. Kunstler,
    I think you have correctly identified the elephant in the room: Peak Oil and our dependency on that almost magic stuff.
    But I believe you are still ignoring the dinosaur: Overpopulation. Walkable communities are all nice and well but how are you gonna feed 7 billion people without oil and gas? You don’t. And according to Bertold Brecht “Erst kommt das Fressen und dann die Moral”, I have serious doubts about 5 or 6 billion people starving away peacefully.
    Maybe science will come to the rescue, though nothing short of big style nuclear fusion will do it, but I doubt that, too.
    I wish you all the best”
    ————————————————-
    “Dear _________
    I don’t ignore it.
    I have stated many times that there’s little to say about it because we’re not going to do anything about it. There won’t be any policy or protocol. Instead, the usual suspects will assert themselves: starvation, disease, violence.
    I get lots of letters from people who say the same thing as you. What’s the point? To say “I’m smart and you’re dumb because I know what the real problem is?”
    What do you suppose we’re gonna do about it? Kill all female babies? Nuke China? Pass a “one-child” law in the US Congress?
    Jim
    James Howard Kunstler
    ————————————————-
    James,
    The point is that to continue to discuss the discomfort and danger of the frigid air temperature on deck may be missing the point considering that an iceberg has just ripped a death knell gash in the hull and we’re sinking.
    “What do you suppose we’re gonna do about it?”
    Well, the first thing we’re gonna do about it is quit ignoring it and quit sedating the masses with pointless distractions.
    And then, we’re gonna…
    …oh, crap, I always forget – if the masses find out what is really happening, there will be complete panic, instantaneous disintegration of the social order, and the elites won’t be able to finish their lifeboat preparations.
    “Never mind.”
    [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3FnpaWQJO0]
    ~toktomi~

  202. Uzi Silber June 10, 2010 at 12:09 pm #

    Perhaps I should be flattered that Jews and Israel mysteriously and invariably find their way into discussions of peak oil, a topic which equally mysteriously often attracts crypto jew haters…
    in answer to some people above, Jews, like any other ethnic group, are not racially pure, whatever that means. having said that, Jews who lived in europe over the past two milleniums didnt mate much (aside from some conversion and pogroms) with the populations among whom they resided, due largely to centuries long persecution and segregation.
    this being the case, huge proportions of jews retain DnA connecting them to ancestors who lived in the Land of israel 2000 ago. indeed, the cohanic gene connects a majority of Cohens, kaplans, katzs to a single person who lived there 3000 years ago.
    also, there generally are great differences in appearance between say ethnic Poles and Jews who lived in Poland for centuries.
    as for Israel, it was most certainly NOT established by the Europeans; Jews in the pre state period diligently established viable stste institutions in the Land of israel during the decades leading up to independence in 1948.
    Also, there has never, ever, been a time in the past 3000 years when jews were absent in the Land of Israel. through the ages, other nations living alongisde jews under the yoke of the ancient empires all disappeared. somehow the jews survivied. if we arent the winners of history, at least were its survivors.
    Also, as tiny as it is, and surrounded as it is by primitive dictatorships of varying degrees of islamic brutality, Israel is one of the most dynamic countries in the world, boasting many nobel prize winners, the largest tech sector outside silicon valley, scientific advances galore.
    and its gorgeous too. like an amazing little sustainable town of human scale in a horrible sea of suburban sprawl…

  203. DeeJones June 10, 2010 at 1:29 pm #

    Say, TreebeardsunkleChester
    CAN YOU PLEASE STOP CUTTING&PASTING ENTIRE ARTICLES HERE, AND INSTEAD JUST PASTE A LINK TO THE ARTICLE? THANKS.
    And 8M, would you quit smoking that crak. Its seriously messed up your brains, if you had any to begin with.
    Thanks, now carry on with nothing to do with TLE…
    Dee

  204. treebeardsuncle June 10, 2010 at 2:09 pm #

    Diogen, you make some good points. People’s use of language is largely affected by the environment in which they mature. However, whites generally show greater ability to learn how to speak and write in a manner that is grammatically correct than the blacks even when raised in similar environments. On another note how do you explain that the best runners are nearly always black? At the risk of upsetting DeeJones et al, I am going to insert another segnment from that englightening article of what it is like to teach those dear little precious moronic hobgoblins.
    Maybe you englighten liberals would like any daughters you might have to grow up around those strapping uninhibited fine negro lads. Is that what you want, you open-minded liberal folks?
    (http://www.amren.com/ar/2009/07/index.html)
    What about black boys and white girls? No one is supposed to notice this or talk about it but it is glaringly obvious: Black boys are obsessed with white girls. White parents would do well to keep their daughters well away from black schools. I’ve witnessed the following drama countless times. A black boy saunters up to a white girl. The cocky black dances around her, not really in a menacing way. It’s more a shuffle than a threat. As he bobs and shuffles he asks, “When you gonna go wit’ me?”
    On-campus arrest.
    There are two kinds of reply. The more confident white girl gets annoyed, looks away from the black and shouts, “I don’t wanna go out with you!” The more demure girl will look at her feet and mumble a polite excuse but ultimately say no. There is only one response from the black boy: “You racis’.” Many girls — all too many — actually feel guilty because they do not want to date blacks. Most white girls at my school stayed away from blacks, but a few, particularly the ones who were addicted to drugs, fell in with them.
    There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women together is sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There are many degenerate whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks — especially the boys.
    Black schools are violent and the few whites who are too poor to escape are caught in the storm. The violence is astonishing, not so much that it happens, but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling, seemingly perfectly content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then, suddenly start fighting. It’s uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the halls and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden they started fighting with another group in the hallway.
    Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidently scuffed a black boy’s white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his body up against mine and threatened to attack me. I stepped outside the class and had a security guard escort the student to the office. It was unusual for students to threaten teachers physically this way, but among themselves, they were quick to fight for similar reasons.
    The real victims are the unfortunate whites caught in this. They are always in danger and their educations suffer. White weaklings are particularly susceptible, but mostly to petty violence. They may be slapped or get a couple of kicks when they are trying to open a bottom locker. Typically, blacks save the hard, serious violence for each other.
    There was a lot of promiscuous sex among my students and this led to violence. Black girls were constantly fighting over black boys. It was not uncommon to see two girls literally ripping each other’s hair out with a police officer in the middle trying to break up the fight. The black boy they were fighting over would be standing by with a smile, enjoying the show he had created. For reasons I cannot explain, boys seldom fought over girls.
    Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference. I don’t know how many girls got abortions, but when they had the baby they usually stayed in school and had their own parents look after the child. The school did not offer daycare.

  205. Al Klein June 10, 2010 at 4:10 pm #

    Treebearduncle, your comments about the environment in schools that are mostly black are both enlightening and disturbing (to say the least). On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure that what you report has always been that way. In other words, perhaps it’s the result of the general devolution of civilized behavior in the US. Here’s why I suggest this may be so: Maybe 30 years ago my wife and I stopped going to movies because we were tired of the ubiquitous pot smoking and talking. So for several years we simply did not watch movies (except on TV and with the VCR). Then after about 5 years, we decided to take in a movie at a theater in downtown Philadelphia. When we entered the theater, much to our surprise we were just about the only white people in the audience. All black, large numbers of adults and large numbers of children of all age brackets. At first my wife and I were a bit scared. But after a few minutes we felt comfortable and felt in no way threatened. I expected that we would not be able to enjoy the movie because of talking and general antisocial behavior. Wrong. The audience was as quiet as could be and there was no talking, no food fights, no deviant behavior of any kind. And no pot smoking either. I understand that my sample space is very small (one instance) but my experience does not comport with yours. What’s different? Perhaps time. Generally, the populace has become less civil. Perhaps blacks are more affected by this than whites because they are closer to the margins. And of course the young are frequently more uncivil than their elders.
    Incidentally, every once in a while my wife and I talk about the incident I reported. The reality was so different form our expectations that it left an indelible memory. What say you to this?

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  206. asia June 10, 2010 at 4:25 pm #

    in the 1990s i went to hollyweird..at nite..yikes.
    there were 3 live music clubs.
    at the palace it was punk.
    on the boulevard it musta been black [not rap].
    the blacks were much better dressed and behaved
    than the whites and white punkers.

  207. asia June 10, 2010 at 4:33 pm #

    My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants.
    meanwhile in south mexifornia american blacks are told to not show at school on cincodemayo..or theyll be beaten or killed.
    so why should they have a better attitude?

  208. Qshtik June 10, 2010 at 5:09 pm #

    in south mexifornia american blacks are told to not show at school on cincodemayo..or theyll be beaten or killed.
    =====================
    Sounds like it’s a battle for the bottom of the barrel.

  209. diogen June 10, 2010 at 5:32 pm #

    Uzi Silber, we don’t care, go away.
    Or better yet, tell us how your country is going to manage the energy descent. When you guys can’t get enough diesel and jet fuel to power your war machine, you’re done for, aren’t you?

  210. asia June 10, 2010 at 5:46 pm #

    ‘closer to the margins.’
    indeed…each years immigrants most strongly impact the poor and last years immigrants..competing for jobs/apts /handouts.
    even space in jails and of course hospital beds

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  211. asia June 10, 2010 at 5:47 pm #

    8m..can you keep each post to 1000 words or less?

  212. Qshtik June 10, 2010 at 5:51 pm #

    Two things come to mind as I read this piece on extreme environmentalists:
    1) veganism (I’m sure you know the type – usually female – who won’t exploit any animal but who personally have had a couple of abortions … try wrapping your mind around that.)
    2) people who won’t kill a bug because it might be the reincarnation of somebody’s grandmother (example: my wife’s cousin Paulette).

  213. diogen June 10, 2010 at 6:38 pm #

    Treebeard, you can’t judge an entire people by the way the kids of a sub-group of this people act, this is ludicrous. Another thing, it’s a fallacy to talk about “The Blacks” or “The Whites” or “The Jews”, because there’s wide variation within each group. Take the blacks for example. Have you never met educated middle-class blacks? Maybe you’ve led a sheltered life and you haven’t. Well, I have, and let me tell you that other than darker skin and curly hair, they are really just like us in their values, aspirations, etc. The best thing to happen to White America in the last 20 years is the Black middle-class, they are our bulwark against race wars. Unfortunately, they haven’t been doing enough for their brethern (in terms of showing them the value of education, job skills, strong families, saving and investment, etc. I hope that will change.
    Once I told Vlad that he can’t generalize about whole races or ethnic groups, he replied that of course you can, this is called statistics. Well, I bet HE wants to be treated as an individual, he doesn’t want people to generalize about him solely on his skin color (if they did, they might say he’s a liberal, and that would hurt!)
    I have relatives in both West Germany and Ost Germany (former DDR). Same ethnicity, same history, same traditions, same people? No, after 50 years under a communist dictatorship they became a very different people. Shaped by environment.
    You need to learn how to see people as individuals. Some are bad and some are good, in whatever color or ethnicity. Once Cash (or Qstik) said he had a black boss, one of the smartest guys he ever met. Vlad would say “an abberation”. Well, when you have a lot of abberations, your jusgement about what’s normal may be off.
    Sure, there are differences between races, even between ethnic groups, but so what? I value good similarities between people of any race — humanistic values, caring for the Earth, for one’s family, being a good neighbor, doing a good job, being friendly and curious, being fair, and having a good sense of humor. Think about it.

  214. diogen June 10, 2010 at 9:35 pm #

    “They assail pesticides and agricultural chemicals that have boosted yields and ended global famines. ”
    8M, Google “roundup resistant weeds”, read about and be afraid. Farmers have been using Roundup and similar Monsanto weedkillers to kill competition for Roundup-ready soybeans, corn and wheat. It’s been great: plant corn, when weeds start growing spray Roundup, it kills the weed but not corn or beans (they’ve been GM to be resilient to Glyphosphate). Well, mother nature genetically modified weeds — now they are getting to be resistant to Roundup as well. What does it mean? You can’t kill weeds! What does it mean? Lower yields. Farmers are beginning to till/plow fields again (more fossil fuel use, more carbon emission from both the fuel and from turning of the soil).
    Some farmers are reverting to (GASP) pulling the weeds out by hand again. Pigweed is pretty much unaffected by Roundup in many states now, and it damages farm equipment. Many ag experts say it’s the biggest single threat to Monsanto-style agriculture (pretty much most of our corn/soy/wheat crops). Pigweed grows much faster than foodcrops and chokes them out.
    When it comes to agriculture, your ideas are dangerously outdated, my friend. Farmers in key farming states are scared, and you should be too. Stick to BUSES and free salaries and other like subjects where you’re the expert. And consider learning to grow some of your own food, or you may go hungry in a few years, or will go broke buying groceries.
    Here are some easily-readable references for u:
    http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/invasion-of-the-superweeds/?ref=energy-environment
    http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/03/business/weeds-graphic.html?ref=energy-environment
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html

  215. Vlad Krandz June 10, 2010 at 10:26 pm #

    It’s not about “he said, she said”. Flawed as they may be, there are the social sciences. Severely marred in their interpretations by political correctness, some good work still manages to get done. Blacks have been analyzed in the laboratory, interviewed by trained psychologists, observed by sociologists, and their lives measured by police, insurance, and medical statiticians. Conclusion: they are quite different. Their middle class, so called, is a result of affirmative action. It would vanish like the mist in the morning if and when that crap is ever repealed.
    Your mentality is the result of an efficient and vicious post WW2 progam of American Propaganda. You have to fight it – and you begin by forgiving yourself. It wasn’t your fault that it happened. Just as it isn’t your fault that you can’t stand Blacks. Just take the first step and admit it. And not just you have been hurt. Just think of how many German Women have been violated by the Black American soldiers of the occupation army. Just like countless German Women were raped by the African Mercenaries the French brought in after WW1. What an incredible insult. No wonder true Germans still loathe the French.

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  216. Vlad Krandz June 10, 2010 at 10:46 pm #

    Social Scientists (real ones, ones who actually use science and not just deduce from fraudlent PC maxims)find that IQ is between 60 and 80 percent inherited. That’s a big gap – more work needs to be done obviously. But there is a principle that you aren’t getting: you can ruin or stunt a bright kid by an abusive environment. That could be actual physical or emotional neglect – or just a industrial revolution grind of putting him or her in a factory for 16 hours a day. But on the other hand, you can’t make a dull kid bright no matter how much you stimulate him or what programs you put him in. The large genetic component of IQ is the answer to this. The billions spent on Blacks in the Head Start program has not benefited Black kids at all. It’s just a very expensive form of day care. As Arthur Jenson said decades ago, nothing can be done to raise the lowly Black IQ. They are what they are -what they have earned in the genetic workshop of the ages.
    Blacks are different right from the get go. Talk to someone who does daycare. Right from the begining they are far more active physically. East Asians are very quiescent. And Whites, as usual, are in the middle. They seem bright at first. Certainly they sit up and walk sooner than Whites. But the early promise fades. The bones in their head harden up and stifle the growing brain. By age six they are already falling behind.
    Also talk to someone who works in the food industry. No other people are more demanding and at the same time leave such little in tips.

  217. Vlad Krandz June 10, 2010 at 11:10 pm #

    I’m glad Jews are speaking out about Blacks. But they came to the Amren Conference and immediately tried to silence other Whites and starting yelling about Nazis. So there you go – another White movement coopted before it even begins. If White Nationalism ever took off, it would be coopted by the Jews just as they coopted Conservatism. Before you know it, White Nationalism would be dedicated to fighting for Israel – just as millions of White Christians are; even to the extent of being against fellow Christians in favor of the Jews. Now that is a disgrace if ever there was one.
    We will succeed in taking back this country or more likely, just part of it, by doing what the leftists did – having a policy of “no enemies to the right” as the various leftists had the policy of no “enemies to the left. No public criticism can be allowed of individuals or groups who are farther to the right than you. Now can you imagine the Jews adopting anything like this? Not criticing Whites they don’t agree with? Being content not to be IN CHARGE of something? Neither can I.
    Jews have thousands of organizations throughtout the World that look out for their interests. They are the most organized people in the world. Whites have almost nothing. Sensitivity to this is a minimum mark of sincerity.

  218. Vlad Krandz June 10, 2010 at 11:33 pm #

    Your vision of life is boring and insufferable. There is more to life than working, riding in buses and watching TV. If that’s all there is, than people will start riots just for the fun of it. People need some kind of spiritual life, whether they get it from religion or the soil. Man cannot live by bread alone or bread supplemented by the Simpsons. And busses can’t help either.

  219. treebeardsuncle June 10, 2010 at 11:35 pm #

    Hello negro-lover, I have heard of the talented tenth. There were some of those high-performing blacks even before affirmative action, although many were undoubtedly of mixed blood. I believe in noting distinctions and making judgements based on those distinctions. Here is some more information on those delightful knucle-dragging jibbering hobgoblins from the same article (http://www.amren.com/ar/2009/07/index.html):
    Aside from the police officers constantly on patrol, a sure sign that you are in a black school is the coke cage: the chain-link fence that many majority-black schools use to protect vending machines. The cage surrounds the machine and even covers its top. Delivery employees have to unlock a gate on the front of the cage to service the machines. Companies would prefer not to build cages around vending machines. They are expensive, ugly, and a bother, but black students smashed the machines so many times it was cheaper to build a cage than repair the damage. Rumor had it that before the cages went up blacks would turn the machines upside down in the hope that the money would fall out.
    Security guards are everywhere in black schools — we had one on every hall. They also sat in on unruly classes and escorted students to the office. They were unarmed, but worked closely with the three city police officers who were constantly on duty.
    Rural black schools have to have security too but they are usually safer. One reason is that the absolute numbers are smaller. A mostly-black school of 300 students is safer than a mostly-black school of 2,000. Also, students in rural areas — both black and white — tend to have grown up together and know each other, at least by sight.
    There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a good way to make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who wanted drugs. An addicted girl — black or white — became the plaything of anyone who could get her drugs.
    One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13, and there he was sitting next to little, white Caroline.
    One day, I asked him, “Why do you come to school?”
    He wouldn’t answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked air through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: “He get dat green and get dem females.”
    “What is the green?” I asked. “Money or dope?”
    “Both,” said Yidarius with a smile.
    A very fat black interrupted from across the room: “We get dat lunch,” Mr. Jackson. “We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss.” He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day.
    “Nigga, we know’d you be lovin’ brickfuss!” shouts another student.
    Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look good. Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.
    How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy — in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers — and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.
    Crack cocaine.
    One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food — not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an extreme example, but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.
    There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie to environmentalism? Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level.
    The solution is more diversity — or put more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word in education, and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is why liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught. For example, teachers are told that blacks need hands-on instruction and more group work. Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through reading and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that lend themselves to a different kind of teaching.

  220. Vlad Krandz June 10, 2010 at 11:44 pm #

    You haven’t understood the great secret: Jews want to be hated – it helps them retain their precious identity. From another angle: Jews hate other people (see the Talmud quotes above) so why shouldn’t they be hated back?
    Many Jews in America have given up the ancient hatred and are marrying out. The more Orthodox are going out of their minds in anxiety. Something must be done.
    The Jews were offered Madagascar – an island large eneough to hold all the world’s Jews with room to spare. But they turned it down – they want to be in the thick of things; to be the center of the world. Peace is boring. The prophecy of World Domination must be fufilled.
    The Jewish claim on Palestine is equivalent to the Irish claim on Turkey – some Celts lived in Asia Minor long ago. So lets organize the Irish and Irish Americans to invade Turkey and drive out the natives.

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  221. eightm June 11, 2010 at 3:26 am #

    And you hit the nail on the head: what JHK and all environmentalists want is the FIGHT, the CONTRAST, the CONFRONTATION, not the problems solved . They are bored, have to find some excitement, some action, some imaginary emergency, some imaginary catastrophe, some imaginary crisis that is going to kill us all, some comet that will hit the earth, some water that won’t be available anymore, some food that won’t be there anymore, peak oil, peak everything etc. etc.
    They find a niche, oil is finishing, or tuna fish are dying, or any other of thousands of useless worries and totally useless imagined emergencies to then whip out against anyone that wants to solve problems and get things done. Who cares about any of these crisis anyways, they will all solve themselves as they have been doing in the last 50 years: so weeds evolve and adapt, good, that shows you how resilient nature is, we will adapt accordingly and on and on it goes. So thousands of species disappear, who cares, nature will make other species appear, other crops another equilibrium, who cares. More jelly fish maybe ? Anyways there is no “normal”, there is no “right” mix of species, or any possible “right” combination of any elements at all: it is all a fluke, casual, and random combination according to the equilibrium of temporary forces and counterforces that create a configuration.
    You want a real pure natural world ? Go to Mars, or the Moon, or the Sun where nature really expresses itself in all its empty (to humans little, puny, idiotic minds at least) splendor.
    Our minds are always wrong.
    The oil spill in the gulf ? it is no problem in a year it will have all been absorbed, life goes on as usual as it always has done and does. So Nigeria is polluted ? who cares, it fixes itself up by itself, I hear of no mega emergency in Nigeria, they are happy, or anyways it didn’t become a major extinction of people, at least not yet.
    But if you really want to solve problems, like simple BUSES, free salaries since the economic system is now so rich as to be able to provide it (and create huge consumerism in doing this), cheap rents for high quality homes, instead of fooling people with the myth of home ownership, you become “boring”, there is no mega crisis, no mega fight to perform.

  222. eightm June 11, 2010 at 3:51 am #

    Another thing about environmentalists is that their fight, their contrast defines them identifies them. They would lose their “identity” if the fight would be solved, if the problems resolved. Like The Jews and Arabs.
    In fact, on a side note, why don’t all those Palestinians and Jews that live in that area and are tired of that fight that will never be solved, because the fight defines, identifies the fighting parties ( they would lose their identity if they didn’t fight and gasp, become normal peaceful human beings) go to one of five possible countries : USA, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, BRAZIL or ARGENTINA ?
    Is that so hard to do ? Is that so irrational ? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone ? Or is that fight just and excuse, and as soon as one conflict is solved, another will pop up out of nowhere tomorrow because people are bored and like to fight ?
    And how long are they going to continue talking about their past, the nazis, world war 2, the british, etc. etc. ? Must this history and who is to blame for what go one forever ? Why not throw it all away and try to construct a future ?

  223. eightm June 11, 2010 at 6:28 am #

    Hey fairies, here’s a real catastrophe to watch out for:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
    Almost human extinction, cool ….

  224. Me June 11, 2010 at 6:59 am #

    Hollywood is largely to blame for the downfall of the world.

  225. diogen June 11, 2010 at 7:49 am #

    “Just think of how many German Women”
    Vlad, what about Russian soldiers having done the same by hundreds of thousands, with the approval of their leadership?

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  226. ozone June 11, 2010 at 9:42 am #

    What do the true believers in business-as-usual have to look forward to to?
    Here’s one fun thing… Enjoy, suckers.
    And always remember: nothing will be done/remedied by TPTB until it’s far too late.
    http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2010/06/june-10-2010-bp-forrest-gump-mr-bean.html

  227. Qshtik June 11, 2010 at 10:46 am #

    Also talk to someone who works in the food industry. No other people are more demanding and at the same time leave such little in tips.
    =========================
    Vlad, first you zero in with laser precision to the crux of the Black issue, namely, whether it is true that: “nothing can be done to raise the lowly Black IQ. They are what they are – what they have earned in the genetic workshop of the ages” and then you spoil your entire post with a non sequitur like the excerpt above about Blacks being lousy tippers.

  228. diogen June 11, 2010 at 10:57 am #

    “Jews want to be hated ”
    Really… in that case why give them what they want and make them happy? Makes more sense to accept them — that would really drive them crazy.
    Did they also want to be marginalized, hunted down and murdered? Hmm, wonder if they too get 12 virgins and an endless supply of beer when they get there 🙂

  229. CynicalOne June 11, 2010 at 11:01 am #

    [Q]Perhaps I will get an auctioneer to come in and give me a price for all of this crap I and my family have accumulated over the years.
    All of this useless shit that does nothing more than collect dirt and take up space. All trade with China did was allow us to buy 3 to 4 times more shit and not have enough money to pay for it because our jobs went over there.
    Consumerism is a scam. It is such an incredible waste. Ah to wake up in the morning and have a cup of Joe and watch the sun rise. Go out make enough to live on for the day, as I practice my chosen spiritual life style, come home crash and go to bed.
    And never ever own a single thing anymore other than one. The simple life. How I long for it. How tired I am of all of the BS that has come to consume the daily routine.
    Disneyland (world) is the devils playground. It rots our collective sole.[/Q]
    HR FEHR,
    I’m still catching up on reading all the comments, but I just had to say, I’m right there with you. A simpler life is what I wish for and I try to work towards that, even if it’s just a little, every day.
    It helps that I’m able to work as a homekeeper while my husband “brings home the bacon”. I never cared for the rat race of the 8-5. I’ll be baking bread a little later, after I’ve tended the garden (it’s cloudy and cooler here today, perfect for working outdoors) and gathered the eggs. We do start every day with coffee together and watching the sun rise. It just sets the tone for the whole day.
    Clearing the clutter, however, is an ongoing project. It took a while to accumulate too much and will take a while to clear it out.
    I wonder what happened to “us” along the way? Did we truly lose our collective mind?

  230. dale June 11, 2010 at 11:21 am #

    “Vlad, first you zero in with laser precision to the crux of the Black issue, namely, whether it is true that: “nothing can be done to raise the lowly Black IQ. They are what they are – what they have earned in the genetic workshop of the ages” and then you spoil your entire post with a non sequitur like the excerpt above about Blacks being lousy tippers.”
    ==============================
    Bahahaha! Qshtik, you are truly funny without realizing it! Vlad posts another of his twisted under educated racists rants and the only fault you can find with it is he calls blacks lousy tippers!!
    Listen genius, you don’t contain “multitudes” you most obviously contain enormous vacuity. If you really want to understand what genetics has to say about race, why not read what geneticists have to say on the subject? Which in a sentence is; ‘race is a statistically insignificant way of differentiating people’ Got it Einstein! Differences WITHIN races vastly, (that means very large) exceeds differences BETWEEN races. This statistical difference (between the WITHIN and the BETWEEN) is so great it renders the issue of race moot. Is that simple enough for you? NO! Don’t answer that.
    Don’t bother trying to ‘debate’ this with me. I’m not interested in debating topics for which there is no meaningful counterpoint. I accept the results of large statistical samples and the judgment of geneticists who interpret the data. Like you and Vlad, I’m neither a geneticist or a statistician. If you don’t believe them, so be it, but then such ‘inconvenient truths’ are easily ignored by those who come to conclusions based on prejudice or whimsy rather than science.
    Stick to correcting grammer, that’s something your passibly knowledgeable about.

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  231. treebeardsuncle June 11, 2010 at 11:54 am #

    Dale, that is partly true. Most human variation is randomly distributed across the races. For example bushmen contain most of human variation. However, it is that 15% of difference that largely defines us in terms of intelligence, behavior,and appearance, and also leads to a variety of differences in exactly that biological functioning which is most related to relative fitness in varying physical and social environments. Women differ from men in only 1 chromosome out of 23, which one might think would only lead to about a 4% difference. However, hardly anyone thinks that women are equivalent to men in behavior, appearance, and physiology. If you think they are, why don’t you and Diogen try relating to men as you would relate to women if you were single and horny and see how that goes over, you mind-warped nitwit.
    Incidentally I really am a scientist with a BA in physis from UC Santa Cruz, an MS in phyiscs from UC Davis, an MS in electrical engineering from UC Davis, 3 years of experience working for the Navar Air Warfare Station Weapons Division in China Lake as an electronics engineer and a little over a year as a product development engineer at Intel. True, I don’t care for working and don’t like knuckling under so now I trade stocks and travel.
    Incidentally here is more about that charming vicious crew of degenerate hobgoblins, bugbears, and gibbering mouthers. Try spending some time with 30 to 50 adolescent black males and see how you feel then. I bet you have never done it. I have rarely been around more than 3 of them at at time. Once they congregate in a group of that number and definitely to half a dozen, even if their behavior is not menacing, you clearly see that the motions of their bodies are just bizare. Really, they are almost a different species. This is the link:
    http://www.amren.com/ar/2009/07/index.html.
    Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn’t work with blacks. Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed, most liberal teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some indefinable cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must change, America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics into hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep changing until we find something that works.
    Public school has certainly changed since anyone reading this was a student. I have a friend who teaches elementary school, and she tells me that every week the students get a new diversity lesson, shipped in fresh from some bureaucrat’s office in Washington or the state capital. She showed me the materials for one week: a large poster, about the size of a forty-two inch flat-screen television. It shows an utterly diverse group — I mean diverse: handicapped, Muslim, Jewish, effeminate, poor, rich, brown, slightly brown, yellow, etc. — sitting at a table, smiling gaily, accomplishing some undefined task. The poster comes with a sheet of questions the teacher is supposed to ask. One might be: “These kids sure look different, but they look happy. Can you tell me which one in the picture is an American?”
    Some eight-year-old, mired in ignorance, will point to a white child like himself. “That one.”
    The teacher reads from the answer, conveniently printed along with the question. “No, Billy, all these children are Americans. They are just as American as you.”
    The children get a snack, and the poster goes up on the wall until another one comes a week later. This is what happens at predominately white, middle-class, elementary schools everywhere.
    Elementary school teachers love All of the Colors of the Race, by award-winning children’s poet Arnold Adoff. These are some of the lines they read to the children: “Mama is chocolate … Daddy is vanilla … Me (sic) is better … It is a new color. It is a new flavor. For love. Sometimes blackness seems too black for me, and whiteness is too sickly pale; and I wish every one were golden. Remember: long ago before people moved and migrated, and mixed and matched … there was one people: one color, one race. The colors are flowing from what was before me to what will be after. All the colors.”
    Teaching as a career
    It may come as a surprise after what I have written, but my experiences have given me a deep appreciation for teaching as a career. It offers a stable, middle-class life but comes with the capacity to make real differences in the lives of children. In our modern, atomized world children often have very little communication with adults — especially, or even, with their parents — so there is potential for a real transaction between pupil and teacher, disciple and master.
    A rewarding relationship can grow up between an exceptional, interested student and his teacher. I have stayed in my classroom with a group of students discussing ideas and playing chess until the janitor kicked us out. I was the old gentleman, imparting my history, culture, personal loves and triumphs, defeats and failures to young kinsman. Sometimes I fancied myself Tyrtaeus, the Spartan poet, who counseled the youth to honor and loyalty. I never had this kind intimacy with a black student, and I know of no other white teacher who did.
    Teaching can be fun. For a certain kind of person it is exhilarating to map out battles on chalkboards, and teach heroism. It is rewarding to challenge liberal prejudices, to leave my mark on these children, but what I aimed for with my white students I could never achieve with the blacks.
    There is a kind of child whose look can melt your heart: some working-class castaway, in and out of foster homes, often abused, who is nevertheless almost an angel. Your heart melts for these children, this refuse of the modern world. Many white students possess a certain innocence; their cheeks still blush.

  232. Joe June 11, 2010 at 11:58 am #

    First!

  233. Qshtik June 11, 2010 at 12:13 pm #

    Listen genius, you don’t contain “multitudes” you most obviously contain enormous vacuity.
    ========================
    WOW! I think someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
    I think you need to calm down and go back and carefully read what I wrote. Somehow I have given you the impression that I agree with the statement “nothing can be done to raise the lowly Black IQ” … etc. Wrong. What I’ve said is that the truth (or falsity) of that statement is the crux of all this discussion about Blacks. Further, I am pointing out to Vlad that he does no good for his argument by using a non sequitur like the tipping practices of Blacks which anyone can see has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of genetic inferiority. As to my own beliefs on this issue the answer is – as I have said so often over the past year – I DON’T KNOW. Unlike you there are many things in life about which I am uncertain.
    And BTW, your reference to me not containing multitudes is totally misused. That quote from Walt Whitman by way of Asoka is supposed somehow to be a justification for inconsistency and God knows I detest inconsistency. So … when you say ‘”you don’t contain “multitudes”’ I take that as a compliment.

  234. dale June 11, 2010 at 12:32 pm #

    For starters;
    “Incidentally I really am a scientist with a BA in physis from UC Santa Cruz, an MS in phyiscs from UC Davis, an MS in electrical engineering from UC Davis”
    ===================================
    You can call yourself a “scientist” if you wish, I would suggest you are an engineer. If you were listing your qualifications to suggest that this would give you any credibility on this issue, you failed completely. I can’t think of two subjects (physics and electrical engineering) more distant from genetics. You might just as well have a degree in the Humanities. In fact, I would suggest your knowledge of human variation and statistics would be greater if it were.
    The point isn’t what degrees you and I have or what we think, at least it shouldn’t be. The point should be what science has determined regarding race and the answer to that is in the first of my posts.
    The rest of your post, minus the gratuitous discussion of teaching, is filled with racist based stereotypes and is not worthy of a response.
    As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, the basis on which people make decisions on what to believe, is much less often the result of reason then we like to think. You are an excellent example of that phenomenon.

  235. dale June 11, 2010 at 12:43 pm #

    BTW — Like the rest of the racists on this site, (yes, you are one) you actually choose to ignore genetics and focus of often dubious statistics which, beyond any doubt, contain variance based on culture, education, and 100’s of years of systemic oppression.
    Are blacks doing worse in school? I don’t doubt it. “WHY” might be a more interesting question than jumping to the conclusion it is based on genetics and ignoring the science which states otherwise.
    Culture does have a tendency, over a period of time, to rewire our neurology. This phenomenon is now under discussion on such topics as the effects constant video game playing is having on youth.
    So if you are such a “scientist” where is your discussion of these other causes of variations in performance?

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  236. dale June 11, 2010 at 1:19 pm #

    I apologize for my tone, but I do get quite exasperated by the narrowness and stupidity of this racial discussion here. Probably a good sign that I should stop visiting the comments page altogether. But I digress;
    “I DON’T KNOW. Unlike you there are many things in life about which I am uncertain.”
    =================================
    Ignoring the gratuitous insult….are you aware that “I.Q.” is a widely discredited measure of native intelligence? This is due in part, to the inclusion in its question base of so many extraneous factors involving culture, context and method. It has more recently been suggested that we have multiple I.Q’s and efforts to quantify intelligence with a single number is an absurdly simplistic generalization.
    “I.Q” is not a simple measure of native intelligence, it is strongly skewed to measuring how closely you relate to the norms and priorities of the dominant culture and what it values. Would it be any surprise, in that case, that whites have historically done better in that regard than blacks?
    “God knows I detest inconsistency. So … when you say ‘”you don’t contain “multitudes”’ I take that as a compliment.
    ============================
    Too bad, …..I’m more inclined to agree with Emerson; “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
    “Further, I am pointing out to Vlad that he does no good for his argument by using a non sequitur like the tipping practices of Blacks which anyone can see has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of genetic inferiority.”
    ===============================
    Perhaps this should be a clue to you that Vlad’s argument has nothing to do with genetics, or for that matter, reality.

  237. Cavepainter June 11, 2010 at 1:20 pm #

    The best anyone can hope for in the future (and I’m speaking of us in even the most developed and proportionately not so overpopulated countries) will be a life something like that of late 19th Century America. That more favorable prospect for America holds only if we stabilize population, meaning ending immigration immediately – the only factor driving population growth in our nation for more than four decades now.
    Sorry, but those now compressed into the sprawling slums around Sao Paulo, Johannesburg and the countless other similar places, will simply die off, as too will rural populations that have increased beyond capacity of local resources to sustain them. Of course, in that “thinning out” process the landscape will have been laid bare by desperate struggle to postpone starvation.
    Japan might do pretty well, having a stable, homogenous population, a culture of intensive, organic agricultural practices, no coveted resources otherwise and being an island nation secured on all sides by water. Then there’s Israel, a whole different case: on native resources only about 2-7% of its existing population can be supported, but being armed with nuclear weapons it will for a time be able to extort resources from afar, lengthening out the time-line ‘til its Biblical theme park closes.
    The developed world (so called) never constituted even 20% of the world’s population, yet it was able to leverage practically all of the world’s resources through the 20th century. Resource depletion and despoiled environment in consequence of extraction and transport practices (not to mention the ruination and waste of war for securing those resources) is putting a lie to the notion that such “development” can be extended globally, therefore offering hope to the vast increase of population that has occurred over the course of industrialization.
    That’s only the materiality half of the problem. Maybe the more problematic part is our human brain’s evolved capacity for delusional thought; that tension management programming that enables conception of intervening divine forces. Yep, you’ve got it, the “God’s on our side” exclusionary clause that allows us to deny harsh reality. You see, our big brain consumes 25% of our caloric uptake, and tension is a caloric liability. Acquiring and conserving calories was the lesson of survival through evolutionary time. It’s “Back to the Future” all over again.
    Of course, there will always be very small minorities who manage to garner inordinate power and, hence, privilege. Gives new meaning to the term “gentrification”, huh?

  238. Qshtik June 11, 2010 at 1:23 pm #

    then we like to think.
    =======================
    than we like to think.
    Tell me truly Dale, do you actually know the difference between then and than? I have pointed this out so many times that I am beginning to wonder. It just seems hard to believe that you make the same “typo” so frequently.
    Once this is resolved I’ll be ready for further discussion of your statement that Treebeardsuncle’s post is filled with “racis” – based stereotypes.

  239. Qshtik June 11, 2010 at 1:42 pm #

    I’m more inclined to agree with Emerson; “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
    =========================
    I too agree entirely with Emerson. The key word in his famous line is foolish. It is quite obvious to me that Emerson is not saying one is foolish to be consistent.

  240. asoka June 11, 2010 at 1:48 pm #

    CFN has now become a good source of racist propaganda.
    JHK asks this week WHICH HORIZON? … and I have the answer, based on this week’s comments. The horizon is 1865.
    The great intellects of 1865 had precisely the same view being expressed this week in CFN’s comments.
    For example, Thomas Carlyle, writing in The Spectator in 1865, said, “The Negroes are made on purpose to serve whites, just as the black ants are made on purpose to serve the red.”
    Writing in 1865 the great British biologist Thomas H. Huxley maintained that “the highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.”
    After returning from an expedition to Africa, anthropologist Edward B. B. Tyler declared that “monkeys were far more civilized than these naked savages. Never saw such scoundrels as Africa produces. Quite on a level with that of the brute and not to be compared with the noble character of the dog.”
    In his book The Land of the Dollar, Author G.W. Stevens wrote, “Niggers are like monkeys. It is not only their subnormal sloping foreheads and large protruding lips. They sit about in the streets and babble like monkeys; always pinching and playing tricks.”
    Thomas Nelson, in his book, The World and its People, contended that “the Negro is best described as an overgrown child, vain, self-indulgent, and fond of idleness.
    Rudyard Kipling wrote, “Blacks were lazy, vicious, and incapable of any serious improvement, or for work except under compulsion. In such a climate, a few bananas will sustain the life of a Negro quite sufficiently.”
    The 19th century had an endless list of distinguished intellectuals who seemingly took gratification in insulting the intellect and character of blacks.
    Some on CFN are continuing in that great 19th century tradition. Racism is part of our clusterfuck, and that does not bode well for us on the horizon.

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  241. eightm June 11, 2010 at 2:27 pm #

    Thee are 3 kinds of people who write on this blog (as all greens and environmentalists are): jackass, nincompoop, cock. So asoka is a jackass, the guy with the beard – the rascist is a nincompoop, and JHK himself is a cock. Deejay is a jackass and vlad is a nincompoop. Hey what if I am black ? well what do you know! What if I am Obama ? or BUSH ? how do you know, what do you know ?
    Truth be said, I am a genius, just study my prose carefully, from all the archives, you will notcice this. I have a giant brain. I love plastic, artificial, nature sucks, is not worthy of minds.
    Remember : our minds are always wrong.
    And attack the person not his ideas…

  242. Cash June 11, 2010 at 2:37 pm #

    Don’t mean to butt in this conversation but it wasn’t my boss. It was two black guys who worked in corporate finance in our US HQ. Like I said, these guys’ minds were/are subtle, sharp and quick with a great depth of accounting knowledge. Very, very bright fellas.
    I also talked about meeting black tax execs working for major Canadian banks (ie entities with hundreds of billions in assets and liabilities, tens of billions in revenue and cash flow that would choke a horse). These guys were entrusted with these jobs, not because they’re black, but because they’re brilliant with long track records of academic and career achievement. Canadian banks are also globe spanning businesses with enormously complex legal structures and tax issues. Idiots don’t get jobs like these.
    While I’m at it, my take on black underachievement and criminality is that the black population of the new world was ferociously abused for centuries, enslaved, brutalized, sold like animals. So, surprise, surprise, there are a lot of really fucked up black people. After hundreds of years of this bullshit is it any wonder? And I’m not excusing it, I’m explaining it. Plus, do you expect black people to be all lovey dovey with whites after what whites put them through?
    A while back I posted a comment about seeing a black family come into a local restaurant in my hometown when I was a kid (decades ago). From the sound of them I would say they were from the US south. The father asked the owner if they served black people (the owner said yes). Can you bloody imagine black men coming back to the US after serving in Vietnam or WW2 and being barred from staying in motels or eating in restaurants? To the rest of us these are such simple things. So blacks are bitter, violent and messed up. And we expected what exactly?
    I think that these problems will probably get better over time but not if we regress and start treating blacks like shit all over again.

  243. diogen June 11, 2010 at 2:42 pm #

    If 8M thinks the discussion hit the bottom, it’s time for me to go.
    It’s been great fun, but I found another forum where people have things to say which are relevant to sustainability, self-reliance, stimulating ideas of past, present and future, living in harmony with nature and fellow humans, etc.
    To those of you here and everywhere who are misanthrops and racists (you know who you are) of whatever persuasion: you don’t seem happy, your hate’s eating you.
    To those of you here who contributed worthy ideas and thoughts, thanks for sharing and good luck. Especially, good luck to Tripp.
    Just didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye 🙂

  244. dale June 11, 2010 at 3:18 pm #

    “CFN has now become a good source of racist propaganda.”
    ===================================
    Unfortunately quite true. Which is why I will again, like Diogen withdraw from this site until (or if) JHK does something to fumigate the place. As it stands I would be greatly embarrassed if someone looked over my shoulder and saw what I was reading.
    As a parting comment the Buddhist perspective on racism should be something that people here consider. From the Buddhist perspective racism is a mental affliction, not unlike an affliction of the body such as cancer, which causes great suffering. In the same way, racism causes great suffering of the mind, most particularly to the person suffering from it, but to a lesser extent, society at large.
    The causes of such afflictions as racism are too profound and numerous to go into on this forum, but it would suffice to say that it is highly contagious. Anyone who doubts this should consider the example of Hitler and how easily the contagion was spread under his rule. What’s worse is that these type diseases are progressive and become worse over time if not treated. One can expect the hatred to grow and the resultant distortions of perception, such as fear, to multiply. The nature of this affliction is so obvious that often even those who are suffering from it, can’t honestly deny it’s effects.
    Persons suffering from racism should be regarded the same as anyone suffering from a painful disease and one should naturally either have compassion, pity or pray for them, depending on your own tradition and proclivity. However, one should also exercise care in exposing oneself to this affliction. To those of you thus suffering who wish not to be, I would suggest doing some reading of the Dalai Lama’s works. To the many racist here, I have compassion for you and hope for your recovery.
    Good bye and good luck.

  245. mattg June 11, 2010 at 3:51 pm #

    I just got my yearly bonus today because for the moment I work for a good company. I’ll bolster the economy and prepare for the future by buying a pile of shotguns and a pallette of ammo. Also usefully in case of zombie outbreak and shooting out the undercarriage of all the F-350s driving around my city.
    Luckily though I live near the Alberta tar sands so when appocalypse comes I’ll be able to get gas for my motorcycle!
    The future sounds grand.

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  246. DeeJones June 11, 2010 at 4:21 pm #

    Hasta Luego, Dio & Dale. This bored has indeed gotten bogged down in racist BS, and obviously JHK doesn’t give a shit.
    Of course, that could be the intent of certain posters, to destroy interest in the site.
    Anyhow, I also have better things to read & do, I will continue to read the main posting, but the comments are getting to be just too much garbage to wade through, especially from 8m (that must be his brain size).
    Best of luck….
    Dee Jones out.

  247. dale June 11, 2010 at 4:39 pm #

    Copy of email I sent to JHK, I urge others to do the same:
    Jim,
    I strongly urge you to consider shutting down the comment section of your blog, which has become a gathering site for racist postings more numerous than any having to do with your writings on Peak Oil and it’s aftermath. If I were you I would be worried about being tainted by this nonsense and wouldn’t be surprised if you wind up on a list at the Southern Poverty Law Center, as a site needing monitoring.
    Best Regards,
    Dale

  248. asoka June 11, 2010 at 4:40 pm #

    eightm said:

    So asoka is a jackass

    Thank you, eightm!
    The jackass is a noble animal and history is replete with its honorable accomplishments.

  249. asia June 11, 2010 at 5:23 pm #

    BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    When a lib [ buddist!] wants to shut others up cry ‘RACIST’!
    Jim,
    I strongly urge you to consider keeping yr wonderful comment section of your blog, which has become a gathering site for free speech!

  250. asia June 11, 2010 at 5:24 pm #

    where are you going?

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  251. asia June 11, 2010 at 5:26 pm #

    Dale,
    for once be a buddist..see yrself in 8 or whomever.
    you believe the universe never beagan, he believes whatever he beives.
    the difference is in whats believed not the human capacity to believe.

  252. Nudge June 11, 2010 at 6:06 pm #

    Dale, not to worry, JHK has no intention of shutting down the comments section.
    But it’s been horribly amusing to watch you learn, in oh-so-slow motion (just imagine thoughts creeping like liquid helium), that the comments section here is spammed full of racist rants.
    Hey, weren’t we all supposed to be driving compressed-air cars by now?

  253. asoka June 11, 2010 at 6:32 pm #

    Yes indeedy, Nudge. With spiraling fuel prices it is about time we heard some breakthrough! And it would be most useful in a heavily populated country.
    And fortunately, India’s largest automaker Tata Motors is set to start producing the world’s first commercial air-powered vehicle.
    The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre for Luxembourg-based MDI, uses compressed air, as opposed to the gas-and-oxygen explosions of internal-combustion models, to push its engine’s pistons. Some 6000 zero-emissions Air Cars are scheduled to hit Indian streets by August 2010.
    The Air Car, called the MiniCAT could cost around Rs. 3,50,000 ($ 8177) in India and would have a range of around 300 km between refuels.
    The cost of a refill would be about Rs. 85 ($ 2).
    The MiniCAT which is a simple, light urban car, with a tubular chassis that is glued not welded and a body offiberglass powered by compressed air. Microcontrollers are used in every device in the car, so one tiny radio transmitter sends instructions to the lights, indicators etc.
    There are no keys – just an access card which can be read by the car from your pocket. According to the designers, it costs less than 50 rupees per 100Km (about a tenth that of a petrol car).
    Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 to 300 km or 10 hours of driving), a factor which makes a perfect choice in cities where the 80% of motorists drive at less than 60Km. The car has a top speed of 105 kmph.
    Refilling the car will, once the market develops, take place at adapted petrol stations to administer compressed air. In two or three minutes, and at a cost of approximately 100 rupees, the car will be ready to go another 200-300 kilometers.
    http://kanikasweet-tech.blogspot.com/2010/05/tata-motors-to-introduce-air-car.html

  254. Nudge June 11, 2010 at 7:53 pm #

    Hi Asoka. That’s rather a lot of “scheduled to happen” or “X vehicles will be hitting the streets by 20xx”.
    Why the focus on cars? Do we mistakenly assume cars mean economic activity?
    Calculations may well show that the common bicycle outdoes the [as-yet vaporware] compressed-air car in terms of utility delivered vs energy invested in construction.
    What is with the racist kooks here anyway? Don’t they know we’re all descended from the same critters a couple million years back in Africa? Oh, that’s right, they must be using those Texas schoolbooks that don’t say any of that stuff.

  255. scarlet runner June 11, 2010 at 8:14 pm #

    Nudge is right. Walking and bicycling are excellent ways to get from point A to point B. You just might get yourself in shape, body/mind connection and all.

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  256. Vlad Krandz June 11, 2010 at 8:46 pm #

    Don’t “worry” – he’ll be back. He always comes back. Like a bad penny. He was the same in Kinder Garden – a pompous, thumb sucking tattle tale, always running to the teacher to fight his battles for him. Free speech? He doesn’t even know what the phrase means.

  257. Vlad Krandz June 11, 2010 at 8:58 pm #

    You’ve lived a very sheltered life. The hatred is not going to stop because the goverment is putting Non-Whites above us and Encouraging them to hate us. Divide and conquer. Surely you don’t expect us to lay down and take that? Or do you really think relationships are just a one way street? I, like many new racists, once tried to live the PC life. And like many, I find out that it was a fraud; that the minorities hated us and that the harder we tried the more contempt they had for us. And the Minorities knew the goverment was backing them to the hilt in this.
    All Multi-Racial States have a pecking order: in our’s, Straight White Men are on the absolute bottom. So let there be no talk about acceptance. And btw, gays are being put above Blacks. Think they’re going to like that?

  258. Vlad Krandz June 11, 2010 at 9:13 pm #

    Went to the Rick Ross site. Not bad. I’m not sure I agree about the Westboro Baptist Church though. I met Reverend Phelphs’ daughter at an anti-gay marriage rally. She is one of the most beatiful people I have ever met. She literally glows with the love of God and the expectation of His Return. Any “cult” that could produce a person of her quality is AOK with me.
    Showing up at funerals and mocking the soldiers is hard to take, I grant you. But from their point of view, it is necessary. As they see it, America has been fully taken over by Satan so any and all niceties of social behavior are moot. There is one and only one imperative: take America back. And when you consider things like partial birth abortion, (piercing a baby’s skull and sucking out the brains) can anyone be so sure that they are wrong in their assesment? Or how about Gay Pride? All over America, cities are flying the rainbow flag. We are a conquered and occupied land.
    Maranatha. The King is Coming.

  259. Vlad Krandz June 11, 2010 at 9:22 pm #

    Good post Cave Painter. Modern Man has yet to equal the noble men who painted in France thirty thousand years ago. They were tall like Gods, and had larger brains than we do now. They were defeated – overwhelmed by Middle Eastern Immigrants who had better technology but were not better men. We have their skeletons and better yet, their skulls. They were White Men, and of a very high order.

  260. Vlad Krandz June 11, 2010 at 9:29 pm #

    Happy now? You unbalanced this blog with your racism. There was only room enough for one – Me! Now we’re in big trouble – he’s going to the teacher and we’re gonna get kicked out. Who are you going to be in your next incarnation? I’m going to be the Otter who is worshiped as a God in my favorite Saki story.

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  261. asoka June 11, 2010 at 10:05 pm #

    Vlad said:

    the goverment is putting Non-Whites above us and Encouraging them to hate us.

    Vlad, can you cite one single example of a government publication that encourages hate toward anyone?

  262. asia June 11, 2010 at 10:24 pm #

    helen thomas, who had a right to her opinion.
    the WH raced to deny her right to voice her opinion.
    the PC factor.
    someone asked about hot air cars and yr post just
    below…well are they ‘online’ for the usa?2011?

  263. asia June 11, 2010 at 10:25 pm #

    whatever Budda had wasnt measurable by iq tests and brain scans.

  264. asia June 11, 2010 at 10:29 pm #

    you sure are ‘ a jumble’ in eastern philosophy and hateful chrisitanity.
    you might in a perverse way enjoy ted nugents book[s].
    see at amazon..hes the rock star turned bow hunter.
    and stop gay bashing!

  265. asia June 11, 2010 at 10:32 pm #

    cars mean economic activity
    cars = plastic and aluminum which in turn = earths fast death.
    the only green car is one painted that color.
    JHK has great insight into this in his book TLE….waterways messed up by roads..as well as roadkill.
    o and the TEGU has appeared in florida..as if fla didnt have enuff problems.
    Invasive tegu lizard worries Florida wildlife officials – latimes.comJun 6, 2010 … A nonnative lizard called the tegu is the latest worry for Florida wildlife officials. Released into the wild by exotic-pet owners who tire …
    http://www.latimes.com/news/

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  266. asoka June 11, 2010 at 10:35 pm #

    Hi Nudge! Are you hinting this may be a “vapor car” (no pun intended). Four passengers in a small car that does not run on fossil fuels versus bicycles? Bicycles probably still win. The emphasis is not on cars, but movement. Two feet will do, but the convenience for grocery shopping, for protection from elements, etc. leads some people to choose cars over bicycles.
    There were nay-sayers in plenty when Ratan Tata, one of India’s most respected business leaders announced a few years ago that his comzpany, Tata Motors, would manufacture and sell a car that would cost Rs100,000 (under $2000) to India’s teeming millions.
    Tata went on to prove the cynics wrong when he launched the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, last year at the price that he promised, setting off a virtual scramble amongst car makers around the world, including Japanese car maker Nissan, to make similar cars.
    Tata Motors seems to be sitting pretty with development of a European version of the car now underway and likely to be launched in that market, next year. Plans are also on for an electric-Nano and possibly even a Nano that will run on compressed air! The company already has an agreement with French firm, Moteur Development International (MDI) for using compressed air as an energy source for its cars in the future.

  267. asia June 11, 2010 at 10:36 pm #

    ‘CFN has now become a source of propaganda.’
    IF THAT AINT THE KETTLE CALLING THE POT BLACK!
    yeah bubba …your propaganda!
    the govt will save us, apple corp is doing great, econ bounces back…adnauseum

  268. asia June 11, 2010 at 10:37 pm #

    The Jews were offered Madagascar
    when and by whom?
    they couldnt wander far on an island [sorry its a bad pun but couldnt resist]

  269. asia June 11, 2010 at 10:38 pm #

    my dad ran the nypd..not top cop but close.
    as he got old they tried to force him out by giving him one of the worst jobs..head of homicide for harlem…
    i wont go any further into what he said.

  270. k-dog June 11, 2010 at 11:12 pm #

    Well its late in the week but time marches on and who do you want in charge Piltdownman?
    Three choices.
    Obama
    BP
    The Army Corps of Engineers
    There are no other choices.
    Latest reports, the leak is an Exon Valdez every the 8.5 days. Time is wasting
    Currently BP is in charge but Obama could change that.

    I offer my services: http://forum.thedailyshow.com/tds/board/message?board.id=story_suggestions&thread.id=26712
    /

    Obama could put me in charge. See post #150

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  271. k-dog June 11, 2010 at 11:33 pm #

    Dale,
    When I said:
    “Obama might get some work done besides his string of unending compromise once his approval rating starts going down the tube.”
    I was unclear. I do not see his string of unending compromise as a positive accomplishment.
    We agree right down the line.

    HOW TO STOP THE OIL LEAK

    Please see post #150

  272. asoka June 11, 2010 at 11:42 pm #

    asia Goebbels said that I said: ‘CFN has now become a source of propaganda.’
    You misquoted me. You used quotes and did not quote me correctly. You are one of the propagandists.
    dale quoted me correctly: “CFN has now become a good source of racist propaganda.”

  273. wagelaborer June 12, 2010 at 2:23 am #

    Most Americans are anti-intellectual. That’s why Bush was so popular, remember? Because his smirking idiocy supposedly appealed to the rest of the uneducated idiots in the US.
    To some Americans, probably about the same ones, idiocy is only tolerable housed in white skin.
    Teenagers are annoying to most adults, and have been for centuries.
    Ghetto blacks are frequently not too bright, and their culture is very different from middle white America, but not from rural white America.
    It has been shown that upbringing has a very strong impact on intelligence. Ghetto blacks and rural whites treat their children with violence, poor nutrition and lack of verbal stimulation.
    Head Start is not capable of turning children who have been stunted by their upbringing into model students.
    If the US was serious about improving intelligence in its citizens, we would have programs to stop teenage pregnancy, teach people how to nurture their infants, and give support to parents.
    We have none of that. We have a glorification of idiocy, from the President on down.
    This fear of black people is truly laughable. This site features long speculations about how white America will react when they are subjected to the economic stresses to which black America has already been dealing with for 30 years.
    Most people predict violence, looting, murder, etc.
    JHK predicts people marching to the Hamptons and killing the rich.
    But you don’t see black people doing that. If they murder anyone, it’s family members, just like white folks.
    (Not counting the millions of people that the white leaders of the US have killed since WW11 that weren’t family members, just peasants and such in countries possessing resources coveted by the white US ruling class.)
    Diogen pointed out that a white baby, raised in a slum by an uneducated black teenaged mother, would not, by virtue of its superior white genes, emerge with a 1600 SAT score.
    On the other hand, a baby with black genes, raised by white people in Hawaii, can turn out very verbal and capable.
    And, finally, so what if people vary on IQ scores?
    The US, while glorifying idiots, paradoxically holds that only the educated should earn a decent living.
    Why?
    If someone isn’t capable of advanced mathematics,
    why should they be doomed to a life of grinding poverty? Why should a menial job not pay a decent wage?
    If you all are so smart, why are you morally incapable of concluding that every human deserves a decent life?

  274. Patrizia June 12, 2010 at 7:28 am #

    “Thomas Nelson, in his book, The World and its People, contended that “the Negro is best described as an overgrown child, vain, self-indulgent, and fond of idleness.”
    This and all other definitions of Black would perfectly apply to my neighbors.
    Too bad they are Germans and belong to the “Arian race”.
    Weren’t they supposed to be the best?
    This is a clear example how syllogisms do not work:
    Arians are intelligent, all Germans are Arians…so all Germans are intelligent

  275. Nudge June 12, 2010 at 8:26 am #

    G’morning Asoka. Wow, you have outlasted the rest of us at this site, I think, unless perhaps EIEIO is around under some other moniker these days. You probably know where to find the rest of the old gang .. we mostly post links to their blogs from our blogs.
    The compressed-air car may not run on fossil fuels itself (indeed, most pure electric cars haven’t got the means to burn FF’s themselves, unless perhaps someone carries a kerosene lantern) but the energy to compress the air might very well come from FF. Compression is a particularly lossy process due to the thermal issues (see pv/t) that may be on par with the charge/discharge losses of chemical batteries. Wikipedia has an excellent page on the current state of battery technology. To summarize: it still sucks. Anyway, the question to ask is this: is India awash in grid power with which to run these lossy compression needs, or is its grid in bad shape and running at 100%+ load? If it’s the latter, then this is categorically a no-go. Air compression sucks up a lot more energy than is delivered via the mechanical harvesting of said energy at the point of release.
    I was poking some good clean fun at the now-absent Dale (who, most assuredly, will return) because a couple years ago he said by now that we’d all be driving compressed-air cars. But then, he’s been known to say that by now we’d all be driving EV’s too, and, surprise, that hasn’t happened. Nope, he’s still in his ratty old Subaru, wondering when his real-estate infestments are going to recover their 2005/2006-era valuations.
    Asoka: an off-topic question please: do you know any bicycle dealers in Mass who might carry those European-style commuter bikes like the ones shown on the following site? So far, no luck. Although my gasoline needs are less than almost everyone else’s, I’d like to move away from automobile dependency and get some more fresh air and exercise. Most everything I go to regularly is within 5 miles.
    http://www.copenhagencyclechic.com/
    And I’ve finally got my apartment’s electrical consumption down to under 30 kWh per month. These sub-$10/month electric bills feel like sticking it to the energy industry. Wish moron people would get on board with the program. We are at the very end of the cheap energy era.

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  276. Cash June 12, 2010 at 10:27 am #

    Vlad, my life has hardly been sheltered. Granted, my life experience has probably been very different from yours.
    I disagree with you on race but I agree with you on one thing: what makes me go apeshit is seeing discrimination against white people to atone for the sins of generations past. I heard from people I trust that our provinial govt has basically said in some job postings that white men need not apply. This is unjust.
    IMO what IS just is a colour blind meritocracy. In my experience in Canada people in the business community do not give the slightest shit what colour or sex you are. If you are best for the job you get the job and if you screw up you are gone, gone, gone. Everyone gets mercilessly crapped on regardless of colour, race or creed. Early in my career a boss warned me because I had a big head. He put me in my place. He said to me -you think you’re smart- you’re not special- like everyone else here you are one fuck up from the unemployment line.
    This system has worked for me in spades. Remember my background: one short generation ago my forebears were scratching in the dirt with a donkey and a stick watching toddlers die of malnutrition. Look at me now, I’m a prosperous, university educated professional (retired).
    What could have happened is this: my parents could have been denied entry into Canada by virtue of being past enemies. Or I could have been denied opportunities by virtue of my parent’s ethnicity and socio-economic status. Or I could have been shunned by neighbourhood kids, teachers etc for the same reasons. But none of this happened. People were fair. To my parents’ and granparents’ generation they bore no grudges.
    Sorry for the long post but one last thing: let’s assume that you’re right, that blacks and other non whites are inferior to whites by various measures. But these measures are only averages. They don’t say anything about the individual. Remember the black guys I referenced in my earlier post. Highly accomplished, educated, experienced. Would it be fair to deny them the benefit of a meritocratic system because they’re black and because academic studies show this number or that number? You are a racist but I think that you can admit the gross injustice in that. All I am arguing is even if you are a racist and you think blacks on average are inferior just be fair to the individual and judge them on their own merits.

  277. anglo June 12, 2010 at 12:01 pm #

    “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”
    – Abraham Lincoln
    “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. Whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”
    – Thomas Jefferson
    How did your country degenerate so far from the above originally held tenets ?

  278. Cash June 12, 2010 at 12:35 pm #

    It has been shown that upbringing has a very strong impact on intelligence.- Wage
    Agreed.
    Not long ago I was on a Toronto streetcar (an electrically powered trolley). I heard somewhere behind me a daddy talking to his two kids (a little boy and a little girl). The kids were going on about little kid stuff, a birthday party, their bikes, swimming and I can’t remember what else. I couldn’t help chuckling at some of the things they said.
    Something made me turn to look behind me (can’t remember what). Daddy was a middle aged white man and the two little kids were as black as can be. Adopted from Africa I would guess. Unusual for sure. But they sounded like a midde class white family, the kids had interests and concerns of little kids from the middle class and daddy had the vocabulary and speech of a well educated and well-off professional.
    Point is that upbringing also affects other things besides intelligence. It affects your outlook, aspirations, living habits, perceptions of who you are, your place in the wider society.
    Life is a crapshoot to some extent. You can’t know what goes on in a family, but I think that, judging by that little scene of familial bliss in the streetcar, those little black kids will do ok.

  279. Funzel June 12, 2010 at 12:56 pm #

    Pat,these “Germans”you describe I am sure were not born that way,they very likely got that way associating with some of their neighbors.

  280. Cash June 12, 2010 at 1:25 pm #

    Vlad, according to what I’ve read those cave painters were descended from Africans that trickled out via the Middle East sometime after 100,000 years ago. Dark skinned no doubt at least at first. The need to metabolize vitamin D would have had natural selection opt for whiter skins. But they were tall and strong ie African in build. I read that scientists have found skulls of archaic sapiens roughly 200,000 years old in east Africa.
    Anyway have you heard that some guy is trying to reconstruct the DNA of Neanderthal? I heard that it’s about 60 percent complete. One raging debate is whether modern sapiens inter bred with Neanderthal during the tens of thousands of years of co-existence in western Asia and the middle east. According to one study that compared the recontructed Neanderthal DNA to DNA of Africans, Asians and Europeans, African DNA has no Neanderthal DNA mixed in with it but Asians and Europeans have between 1% and 4% neanderthal DNA. So Neanderthal did not mate with Africans in Africa but rather with their descendants as they populated Asia and Europe.
    One guy said a while back that if you want to see the neanderthal body type you have to look in Italy and Russia ie barrel chested, thickly muscled. Hmmm…that would be me. I wonder how much of my own DNA is Neanderthal. My wife would likely say, based on her personal observations, probably most of it.

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  281. MINDfool June 12, 2010 at 1:48 pm #

    Cash,
    Your reply deserves endorsement. What needs to be recognized is that your genes are maneuvering that robot that they believe is you to maximize their chance for survival. This may mean interbreeding or maintenance of close familial relationships. The messages they send are of course filtered and supplemented by the higher knowledge we could call your spiritual being, including societal behavior patterns. I found interesting a book by Malcolm Gladwell , OUTLIERS which presents a pop psychology perspective on “success.” Included in the bits of info are clear examples, e.g. sufficient IQ, not high IQ is a determinant. Much of everything else is a crapshoot, but there are other traits with their own Q’s. One of the more interesting observations was that Korean Air Lines used to crash their planes about seventeen times more often than other airlines because of societal politeness rules. Another observation of interest was that familial behavior patterns last for centuries. Thus, southerners are more polite than northeners until they get riled and then they become over the top confrontative.
    Even these comments are made with a broad brush, but perhaps an understanding of psychology will be as important when TLE hits as agriculture or firearms.

  282. Pepper Spray June 12, 2010 at 2:33 pm #

    JHK, I don’t think it is a stretch to project a general breakdown in behavior as centralized power becomes impotent. The Katrina aftermath is a good example.
    There are many who assume they will be able to take what they need with the aid of fire arms.
    They don’t seem to get that their survival plans involve theft and armed robbery. They also seem oblivious to the fact that many who have prepared for an interruption of services have also prepared for them and their foolish plans to take what they need from the prepared by force.

  283. Doc Doom June 12, 2010 at 3:29 pm #

    Wow, been so long MoveableType forgot me. Wot? No moron Dale to kick around anymore?
    Ok, let’s pick on Pepper Spray. Pepper, even if you’ve made plans for defense of your garden, have you ever been in a fire fight? Let’s say you win round one, how about rounds 2 to whatever ends your defense effort, out of ammo or an intruder gets a lucky shot?
    Best to be in a place where you don’t have to resort to such tactics to survive. There’s still some time left to move there.
    As a rule, it takes 10 times the effort for defense to adjust to the latest offense. The odds are actually with the pirates.

  284. Nudge June 12, 2010 at 4:34 pm #

    Doc Doom! Anymoron of this useless chatter re racism and I would have been forced to chastise some of the participants. Fortunately for them, my favorite stainless-steel ruler is locked up at the office just now. Sister Mary you-know-who does not like God’s little children getting their knickers so twisted up over this stuff. It’s practically worse than the Big-Endian vs Little-Endian wars.
    Since Sgt. Pepper Spray and them like him haven’t got ammunition factories in their basements, I assume that any hungry horde will eventually overwhelm any stationary bullets+beans type survivalist, if only because they’re so many vs so few defenders. This is not unlike that “cannons vs fortress walls” debate that was finally resolved in the opening weeks of WW1, with the result that nobody expects any given fortress to be “impregnable”. Another form of this debate is presently underway in naval circles, where (gasp!) it’s being learned that a zigzag-capable supersonic cruise missile costs far less than, say, the aircraft carrier it’s able to take out.
    But you know how things go. Humans are generally slow learners. Just look at Dale if you need anymoron proof of that.
    I hope Asoka is getting me that answer about bike shops, because it’s been slim pickings so far. Once more for them who aren’t paying attention: we’re on the cusp of the end of the era of cheap energy. If you’ve got a clue, adapt quickly.

  285. asia June 12, 2010 at 6:01 pm #

    ought to be a stand up comic!
    re: cheap energy..enegry is the problem..peeps use it to destroy the biosphere and each other.

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  286. asia June 12, 2010 at 6:10 pm #

    ‘This bored’…pun intended?
    if not its….’ board ‘

  287. asia June 12, 2010 at 6:14 pm #

    ‘Latest reports, the leak is an Exon Valdez every the 8.5 days. ‘
    if yr correct this is alarming!

  288. scarlet runner June 12, 2010 at 6:19 pm #

    Its not what you think, Pepper. Your garden with its bounty will already be plundered long before the armed invaders get there. Its the relatives, your brother-in-law, your neighbors, the kid across the road who’s hungry that you will see raiding your garden first. What do you do?

  289. Bobby June 12, 2010 at 6:40 pm #

    You’re correct, imho, Asoka. During the last New Hampshire presidential primary, there was a tax-evading married couple, who put up a standoff, complete with a huge arsenal of various weapons. (They are now living at taxpayers expense for the next 30 years, in separate prisons, and whining about the possibility of dying in jail. Oh, did I mention that they were of very high income?
    I heard Ron Paul, who was up there campaigning for President, make a comment that these people were “…just like Gandhi.” Huh?

  290. asoka June 12, 2010 at 7:23 pm #

    Nudge,
    Check out mybike in Boston. And congratulations on your success in lowering consumption… and, as usual, admiration for you clear and focused message about the end of the easy energy age.
    http://mybikeonline.com/electric_bikes/electric_bikes.html

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  291. asoka June 12, 2010 at 7:34 pm #

    Nudge said:

    I assume that any hungry horde will eventually overwhelm any stationary bullets+beans type survivalist, if only because they’re so many vs so few defenders.

    Agreed.
    I always wonder what would happen if three of the hungry horde, dressed in black at night, positioned themselves and came at a house from different directions setting it on fire on different sides with simple molotov cocktails… the stationary bullets+beans type survivalist would have to voluntarily exit, perhaps relocate, leaving the garden behind.
    Biggest waste of money I can imagine is spending on guns and ammo for “self-defense” or “protection”.

  292. Nudge June 12, 2010 at 9:27 pm #

    Asoka, thanks for the mybike link. Interesting stuff.
    Did you catch the way the EIA just changed its forecasts from rosy to ‘oops’? TOD had a whole thread about it. Basically the EIA is now predicting oil supply stagnation instead of the CERA-like endless-growth numbers it formerly provided. Given that the EIA people seem to be wearing rosy+3 factored shades, one might reasonably suspect that the truth will be somewhat worse.
    In the comments section on that page is a graphic we’re calling the denial squid:
    http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6556#comment-644367
    The end of the cheap energy era need not hit America so hard, but unfortunately we’re being obtuse about it and not taking the many hints sent our way. Oddly enough, much of the rest of the world is still geared to run on expensive oil. Most of those places have still got vast numbers of people riding to work on bicycles, working train networks, local light rail, lower rates of automobile ownership, less grossly-spread-out suburbia & exurbia, more city shopping venues instead of huge malls accessible only by highway, etc.
    As it’s configured now, we can’t run America on anything but cheap & abundant oil. That needs fixing.

  293. asoka June 12, 2010 at 10:23 pm #

    Nudge,
    The EIA report is focusing on the supply side (badly it seems), but there is another side.
    U.S. liquid fuels consumption declined by 820,000 bbl/d (4.2 percent) to 18.7 million bbl/d in 2009, the second consecutive annual decline, and that happened despite the cold weather that gripped much of the Nation in late December 2009 and early January 2010. (Conservation efforts may be working)
    Total U.S. liquid fuels consumption in those 2 months (Dec. 09 and Jan. 10) still fell below the levels seen in the same months a year earlier.
    As supply falls, so does demand. No revolution yet, no pitchforks, just conscious consumer decisions to cut back on consumption of fossil fuels.

  294. asoka June 13, 2010 at 12:31 am #

    As we look out at WHICH HORIZON? perhaps we should look back at what we thought was the horizon just a couple years back.
    Remember here on CFN when there was fear of an Obama government setting up FEMA concentration camps? Hasn’t happened.
    Remember when there was so much fear of Muslims who were called Islamofascists? Cheny said Obama was weak and would be tested by an attack on America in his first year in office. Didn’t happen. (9/11 happened on Cheney’s watch)
    Remember when there was all that talk about Obama was going to take your guns away? Didn’t happen.
    Remember those Oath Keepers? They say they’ll honor their pledge to uphold the United States’ Constitution by defending against federal encroachment on states’ rights. Like a lot of Right-wingers these days, they believe they’re doing the Lord’s work based on the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not expressly granted to the feds remain in the hands of the states.
    Ah, but there’s a conundrum! It’s Article 3, which gives the Supreme Court the power to say whether a law oversteps the powers designated to the Federal Government. Believe it or not, the Founders never intended for the most reactionary law enforcement personnel in the country to decide disputes between the states and the central government, so they created a court to do that job. It’s one of the enumerated powers in the Constitution!
    Remember the North American Union story pushed by the John Birch Society? The “international elites” were going to “replace the United States” with a transnational government. Pure xenophobia and paranoia. Didn’t happen.
    Remember how Vlad week after week reminds us about the decline of married white people who identify as “Christians.” That group has been the GOP’s most loyal demographic. Well, the decline is happening. Vlad is telling it like it is. Thank God for the decline of that hate-mongering demographic, or perhaps I should say thanks to LOVE, as people fall in love and marry. Long live miscegenation.
    Remember the wedge issues (the culture war) that Republicans tried to use to divide us? Ain’t workin’ no more. Young folk ain’t buyin’ that gays affect “unit cohesion”. They don’t buy the whole “homosexual agenda” thing. The generation gap cuts across a range of social issues — including interracial marriage and abortion.
    Other wedge issues include unions and gun ownership. In 2008, John McCain beat Obama by 25 percent among all gun owners, but Obama won over union members who pack heat by a 12 percent margin. Union members are more likely to vote their economic interests than be blinded by culture war distractions. Conservative FAIL.
    Remember all the fear expressed about whites becoming a minority in the USA by 2050. Ain’t happening. Why? Because the fearful racists do not include white people of “Hispanic heritage.” When you factor those white folks in, 74 percent of the population will remain pasty in 2050, down just six points from today.
    All in all, I would say fear is not a good motivator. People are seeing through fear tactics.
    One thing we should watch out for are false narratives pushed by the media. Like this one: the voters are pissed and will throw out incumbents. WRONG. No incumbents were kicked out last Tuesday. Will the media change the narrative now? I doubt it. Change could be on the horizon.
    WHICH HORIZON are you watching?

  295. Doc Doom June 13, 2010 at 2:42 am #

    “(9/11 happened on Cheney’s watch)”–asoka
    Some of us have a good idea why that happened on Cheney’s watch. We even think he was doing moron than just watching.
    Shuhhhhh! Don’t tell Jimbo I wrote that.

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  296. Vlad Krandz June 13, 2010 at 3:03 am #

    Very impassioned but still wrong. Blacks raised by Whites don’t have White level IQ’s. IQ is mostly genetic by all accounts. And White Appalachina kids score higher than upper middle class Black kids. Again for the umpteenth time: you can ruin a child’s mind by a lack of love or gross abuse – but you can’t created what isn’t there to begin with. And conversely, all those White Yuppies who are trying to turn their kids into super brains are probably causing more harm than good. Children need lots of downtime where their own interests can develop from within. Only this lays the foundation for future creativity. Endless classes and activities (learning Chinese!) will hurt the more sensitive – the ones most likely to become creative.

  297. Vlad Krandz June 13, 2010 at 3:12 am #

    The Sirens of Titan whisper of hydro carbons. The Black Gold and Texas Tea may not be so rare or so biotic after all. The paradigm is begining to fail. Not that that will save us of course. We are still doomed whether by Fire (nuclear war, Solar Flare EMP’s) or Ice.

  298. cleitophon June 13, 2010 at 6:42 am #

    1)Apparently you have no concept of the net energy involved in developing biofuels – it is incredibly inefficient and takes up vast amounts of farmins land, that is needed to feed the ever growing world population!
    http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-17b-energy-budgeting
    2)Technology will not save us! The whole concept of eternal technological and scientific progress is a sham. We have heard of peak debt and peak oil – now add peak innovation, which occured in 1873:
    http://accelerating.org/articles/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.pdf
    Think of ideas and innovation as oil. First you tap the easy stuff, at when you run out, you end up drilling on deep water in the mexican gulf. Its the whole low fruits/high fruits thing. Look at the age of nobel prize winners: its exploding, for the simple reason that it takes longer to reach viable results. No only that…the results are less impressive and groundbreaking than before.
    When did you last see truely novel and life transforming technology. You don’t what you see are development and improved efficiency on OLD stuff. Cellphones with go-faster-stipes. Cobinations of old stuff like telephones and computers = the internet. Finally, ALL that stuff is dependent on one thing: ENERGY! and there are no truely incredible innovations there.
    PS. Why does the logon for this site not work? I have to reset my password for every log on!

  299. deblonay June 13, 2010 at 8:15 am #

    In regard to the oil crisis in the Gulf…it seems to many American have a view of the powers of the President as like that of some primitive tribal god or idol.who can rectify all wrongs….the American people must realize that nature will not always bend to their wishes,and there are problems that don’t respond to bombin or threats .

  300. Nudge June 13, 2010 at 8:32 am #

    Good morning Asoka. You touched on something in one of your comments here that I’d like to run with (or at least take a brisk walk with) if you don’t mind.
    There is a substantial group of not-very-closeted bigots & racists out there who are sort of acting out the role of the Klan Lite .. and at the moment they are commonly referred to by their detractors as the TrueAnger™ TrueBirther™ PeeParty activists. You’ll spot them easily by the emails they flip back and forth among each other with pictures “proving” that president Obama doesn’t use flags in the background when he speaks in public, or “proving” that president Obama’s birth certificate is fake, or “proving” that Obama wants to take away all their air-conditioners, or other such nonsense.
    For the sake of the continued revenues of entertainment-manufacturing firms such as Disney World and Fox News Entertainment (yup, that’s their real name – note the ‘entertainment’ component) it’s good that there are so many easily-misled and -distracted rubes out there in the general population.
    Many of the PeeParty types I know personally are the type who will glance around carefully to make sure no one else is nearby, then say something derogatory about a class or group of people who happen to have skin of a different color. Frankly, I would have a lot more respect for these types if they just let the pretensions slip and could simply admit openly that they’re racists or bigots and that they can’t stand [insert ethnic nouns]. It would be so much more honest on their part. But instead they feel the need to trade juvenile emails about “Obama’s gonna take away your [whatever]” and then none of them ever seem to notice that these things never actually take place.
    Asoka, how familiar are you with the types of corporate-instigated propaganda being deployed here in the US via corporate-owned media conglomerates? The focus is to cause hate-based distractions that keep large segments of the population at odds with each other instead of noticing how the richest corporations are making out like bandits due to their extralegal status and political corporations. If he were alive today, Josef Göebbels would recognize the stuff in a heartbeat .. it’s the classic “pin the tail on the scapegoat” game.

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  301. Nudge June 13, 2010 at 8:38 am #

    Oops .. frelling ghost of Typokey past .. should read “political connections” not “political corporations” in the last paragraph.

  302. deblonay June 13, 2010 at 8:56 am #

    actually the racism offered by the TeeParty activists has an older name…it’s called fascism !

  303. Funzel June 13, 2010 at 9:44 am #

    Nudge,somehow I have the feeling,your BS about “scapegoating”is trying to convince us that Goldman,Sachs,Lehmann,Blankfein,Greenspan,Wolfowitz,Geithner,Emanuel,Madoff,etc, that have caused the global financial mess,will be your designated scapegoats,when every one of them should be hanging from a lamppost.

  304. Nudge June 13, 2010 at 11:52 am #

    Funzel, not to worry, the masses will be at each other’s throats over the rumor that “49 percent of the people pay no income taxes” instead of noticing how Goldman Sachs had a record year in 2009 and paid only an effective 1% rate.
    In similar fashion, the PeePartiers will be up in arms about “illegals getting free medical while their own taxes rise” instead of noting how the so-called healthcare reform act is functionally identical to the one put out in 2006 by the American Heritage Foundation (a plan that was authored by the healthcare industry in order to assure its continued profits) and does not give away free care per se but instead requires everyone to pay into a private plan, and that the plan was authored by those same companies. The healthcare giants just invested in a little creative distraction, that’s all, and it’s working fantastically.
    Likewise, PeePartiers will seethe in anger over the rumor that “welfare queens are using food stamps to buy beer & cigarettes” instead of noting that food stamp use is vastly on the rise and that the companies most profiting from it are the same ones putting HFCS into all kinds of low-priced foods ~ the kind that poor people almost cannot avoid due to the price points.
    Do you get it, Funzel? Corporate wealth would much prefer we fight each other than notice how they’re robbing the bank.

  305. Nudge June 13, 2010 at 12:44 pm #

    If the PeePartiers were serious about “smaller government”, the first two things they’d go after would be our ginormous military expenditures (50% of the money on earth spent on military stuff is by the US) and the long-running and cozy relationships that exist between the government and every fripping industry & corporation rich enough to lobby it. There are many of these, and they’re the pigs at the trough.
    But no, that’s not on their agenda .. or rather, it’s not on the agenda of their corporate owners. They are sort of like what the BrownShirts were to the Nazi party back in the 1930s and to the vast class of apparachtiks upon which relied the communist party of the USSR. They are what we not-so-politely call “useful idiots”.
    The biggest clue to all this should be right in front of everyone’s faces, but no, that particular prime-time location is reserved for American Idle, Dancing with the Stars, and NASCAR. The big clue I’m referring to, which should be front-and-center, is the way the profits of the Fortune 1000 companies (as a whole), as well as the disparity-of-wealth between rich and poor in the US, are both sharply on the rise. Even more ironically, they call it a “recession” when in fact it’s more like looting on a grand scale, with the government in the back pocket of any corporation doing it. That’s precisely what’s taking this sucker down.
    Here’s some of that back-pocket action for you. Check out the way the SEC, staffed with current, former, and future employees of Wall Street firms, saw nothing wrong during the era of Madoff’s classic ponzi scheme, or Goldman Sach’s high-frequency trading, or AIG’s disastrously-unreal derivative plays, or Mozilo looting Countrywide while pushing its reps to issue more NINJA (no income, no job or assets) loans, or Moody’s slapping its AAA-grade seal onto bundled mortgage securities that were obviously oozing toxic junk. This stuff continues into the present era, of course, with the MMS staffed with current, former, and future members of the oil business. It exists in every government regulatory agency that’s got a revolving door between it and the industry it serves.
    Haven’t seen those PeePartiers going after any of this stuff yet. Nope, they’re still the same closet racists as before, comfy in the back pocket of the same industries raping them blind. The joke’s on them.

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  306. helen highwater June 13, 2010 at 2:29 pm #

    This is a reply to Laura Louzader’s Libertian rant. So, Laura, just what do you think will happen to all the people who can’t pay for everything they need? Are they just supposed to die? And what about libraries, schools, roads, bridges, sewers, hospitals, and all the other amenities that we all use? Are those of us who can’t afford to provide all these services out of our own pockets just supposed to do without them? I agree that government doesn’t spend its money (our money) wisely, but the alternative you suggest, which is that government not take any of our money in taxes and we just use whatever we can earn to provide everything we need for ourselves is pretty unrealistic. How the heck could I going to pay for a road to get me to the grocery store? Or a school for my kids? Any ideas?

  307. wagelaborer June 13, 2010 at 2:46 pm #

    The human brain is not fully formed at the time of birth. The first three years of life are extremely important for it to reach its full potential.
    Proper nutrition (i.e., breastfeeding), stimulation, (carrying the baby around, labeling the environment, face-to-face interactions, etc.) are extremely important.
    I’m not talking about Chinese classes for older children.
    And you didn’t address my main point.
    Why is it that you believe that only the educated should have a decent standard of living?
    Sewer workers and bus drivers are just as important to our society as are accountants and speculators.
    Maybe more important.

  308. wagelaborer June 13, 2010 at 2:51 pm #

    How about the distraction we’re going through right now?
    Americans of all political persuasions are upset and furious about the destruction of the Gulf.
    This is a perfect time to introduce the idea of reducing the use of fossil fuels. I have been bringing it up to everyone I know, and even Republicans agree.
    But no.
    The right wing media is focusing people’s anger onto Obama, and the left wing media is focusing people’s anger onto BP.
    No one in the media is talking about the need for public transportation, changed zoning laws, renewable energy, etc.
    And only the Green Party candidates are talking about it in the campaigns.

  309. asoka June 13, 2010 at 3:38 pm #

    Cleitophon said:

    Apparently you have no concept of the net energy involved in developing biofuels – it is incredibly inefficient and takes up vast amounts of farmins land

    Apparently you don’t know that biofuel can be produced without touching any farmland.
    http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Biodiesel_from_Algae_Oil

  310. Qshtik June 13, 2010 at 3:59 pm #

    Why is it that you believe that only the educated should have a decent standard of living?
    =================
    Wage, where the heck do you get a question like this from Vlad’s 3:03AM comment to which you are replying? Maybe you are reading something you think exists between the lines. Vlad may believe that (generally speaking) only the educated will have a decent standard of living but I doubt he believes only the educated should have a decent standard of living.
    If your question had read “Vlad, why do you believe that the uneducated will have a lesser standard of living than the educated?” the answer would be: The Law of Supply and Demand … a law as real as any in physics … a law despised by socialists which cannot be repealed.

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  311. asoka June 13, 2010 at 4:31 pm #

    RE: reply to Laura Louzader’s Libertian rant
    During the 1980 presidential campaign, the Heritage Foundation burst onto the national scene with the publication of “Mandate for Leadership,” a comprehensive set of policy recommendations which became the intellectual underpinning for the “Reagan Revolution.” Heritage’s blueprint included trickle-down economics, a major emphasis on deregulation, and massive cutbacks in social programs.
    With Reagan the libertarians managed to under-fund or de-fund government regulatory agencies, and instead create government agencies larded with corporate-friendly officials receiving corporate perks and kickbacks.
    The libertarians pushed mantras like “unleash the creativity of corporations and all will be well” and “drown the government in a bathtub”
    That is the philosophy that has dominated conservative policy initiatives over the past three decades.
    As vice president Dick Cheney did all he could (starting with the secret meeting with oil people) to destroy about a half-century or more’s regulatory work with regard to oversight of fisheries, forestry, oil, gas, and minerals.
    If it was supervised, if it was overseen, if it was regulated by the federal government, Cheney with his marvelous bureaucratic talent moved in and essentially replaced the people who were in the positions that were central to this regulation, this oversight, with people who were either lobbyists for the industry being regulated… or executives from that industry.
    BP and the rape of the environment in general is a natural result of Laura’s libertarian anti-government, pro-market policies. People who have been screaming “get government out of our lives and our business” deserve blame for the environmental deterioration that is happening.
    http://theminimalist.net/
    Those of us who are minimalizing our carbon footprint and are seeking alternative, renewable, zero-emission lifestyles do not deserve blame.
    http://theminimalist.net/

  312. Doc Doom June 13, 2010 at 4:32 pm #

    Maybe a more fitting and appropos symbol for the USA should be the oil-covered GOM pelican. I note that one just made the cover of Time magazine. We should retire those bald eagles.
    Among all our other problems, it’s going to be quite embarrassing in the future to wander out on vast stretches of concrete superhighways in horse and buggies. Your grandkids might ask about the need for banked curves and overpasses (for faster skate boarding, kids), traffic light poles, and all those too-tall-to-climb high rises over in the distance.

  313. asoka June 13, 2010 at 4:46 pm #

    THE STORY OF STUFF
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8
    A video that explains a lot about the clusterfuck and the horizon.

  314. DeeJones June 13, 2010 at 4:53 pm #

    Pssst.. Dale, they all came out of the woodwork, Nudgee, Dr Doomb, as soon as you signed off.
    Maybe even Jonny Rico will start posting again.
    Things might start getting interesting again.
    Or not, there is still Vlad the Impaired, and now hes’s got a little buddy, TreeBeardsUnkaChester.
    Oh well, same-o-same-o
    Dee

  315. DeeJones June 13, 2010 at 4:57 pm #

    ‘We should retire those bald eagles.’ dR Doomb
    Naw, i think that a carrion eating bird of prey is PURRFECT for the Good Ol’ USA, don’t you?
    Dee

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  316. asoka June 13, 2010 at 5:00 pm #

    THE MINIMALIST MANIFESTO
    http://theminimalist.net/the-minimalist-manifesto/

  317. Qshtik June 13, 2010 at 5:19 pm #

    This is a reply to Laura Louzader’s Libertian (sic) rant.
    ========================
    First Helen, an administrative request. When you reply to someone’s post please do so by clicking on the REPLY button so there will be a link back to the original comment. I would love to know what Laura said that prompted your reply but I’ll be damned if I’m going to click back thru 300+ posts to find it.
    That being said … I get kind of a mean-spirited kick out of reading these presumably rhetorical questions of yours:
    1) Just what do you think will happen to all the people who can’t pay for everything they need?
    2) Are they just supposed to die?
    3) Are those of us who can’t afford to provide all these services out of our own pockets just supposed to do without them?
    4) How the heck could I going to (sic) pay for a road to get me to the grocery store? Or a school for my kids?
    And the classic line straight from the heart of a typical socialist “that we just use whatever we can earn to provide everything we need for ourselves is pretty unrealistic.”
    WHEW! CLASSIC MARX. You, Wagelaborer, Asoka et al need to get a clue about life and human nature.
    P.S. Answers to the questions above might be:
    1) They will probably have to steal what they need or do without because they are bound to get severe resistance from other people being called upon to provide for them. The common man simply is not all that altruistic.
    2) Perhaps yes if, God forbid, it comes to that. It wouldn’t be the first time in world history.
    3) Perhaps yes, if it comes to that.
    4) I don’t know. Ask around and find out how other people have managed to get to the grocery store and the school. When I was a kid we had no car. My Mom shopped once per week. She walked to the store (about a mile) and brought the groceries home in a taxi. My brother and I walked to school (about a mile).
    LIFE IS HARD!

  318. asoka June 13, 2010 at 6:05 pm #

    Cranky old qshtik said: “The common man simply is not all that altruistic.” and “LIFE IS HARD!”
    Here is a news report from today, June 13, 2010:

    Members of Westport’s Christ and Holy Trinity Youth Group had a bumper crop of cars to wash today to raise funds for their one-week trip to Mississippi on June 26 to help build houses for Hurricane Katrina victims. It will be the fourth post-Katrina trip for the group which consists of 39 high school students from Westport, Wilton and Fairfield. They will be accompanied by 10 adults.

    After Katrina hit there was a brief period of violence in which people died. There has been no Katrina-related killing in the intervening years… but the altruistic relief efforts have been ceaseless and continue even today.
    So what planet do you live on qshtik?
    Violence is sporadic and rare, but altruism is the order of the day, every day. We are hardwired to be altruistic, not to kill each other.
    Killing is a transgression, an aberration. If it was natural and innate, we wouldn’t need to send people to “basic training” to teach them to kill.
    I imagine even most of the days of your life you are engaged in cooperative and peaceful activities, and you only kill other people sporadically.

  319. asoka June 13, 2010 at 6:47 pm #

    CORRECTION: I imagine even most of the days of your life, QSHTIK, you are engaged in cooperative and peaceful activities, and you only kill other people sporadically, IF AT ALL.

  320. Qshtik June 13, 2010 at 6:50 pm #

    STOP Asoka, you’re killing me! 39 kids are going to Mississippi for a week to build houses. I love that plural. I wonder how many they’ll get built in a week?
    And 10 adults will accompany them. Their job will be to hold the drinking and pot smoking to a minimum and try to prevent the boys sneaking into their daughters’ rooms and getting them knocked up.
    Let me know when tens of millions converge and work for months or years to put a significant dent in a pressing problem.
    And BTW, who’s talking about killing people.

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  321. Nudge June 13, 2010 at 6:52 pm #

    DeeJones, I think it was Dale threatening to leave again that inspired this small hilarity incursion. I’d have fallen off my chair laughing, but Dale has actually done this many times (insert shades of “waaah! I’m gonna take all my toys and go home!”) and we are long accustomed to his sulking. Usually it means a grand prelude to his re-appearance, several months later, to brag about his real estate infestments. (if you were around for it, Dale explained how he made money creating some of that useless overpriced exurbia that JHK mentions now and then)
    Someone on TOD had a rather pertinent quote about oil-soaked marshes. Let me repost the whole thing here:
    http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6594#comment-649115
    posted by papicek on June 13, 2010 11:35am
    A marsh cannot be cleaned without destroying it. Three things break oil pollution down: evaporation, sunlight, and microbial action. Evaporation and sunlight take a long time and stop being effective when dead march plants and animals fall on the oil, burying it and shielding it. Microbial action does a lot – to a point. Bacteria will eat many of the compounds present in oil, then they’ll stop and return to their regular diet. For all intents and purposes, the oil remains toxic for decades.
    In 1969, the oil barge Florida ran aground in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, spilling approximately 175,000 gallons of #2 fuel oil into the bay. The scientists at Woods Hole were (somewhat morbidly) happy about this – here was an oil spill right in their backyard – and as a result, the oil that fetched up in Wild Harbor marsh in West Falmouth is quite likely the most studied oil spill site in the world.
    The last study that I know of was published in 2003, and found that the amount of oil still in that marsh remains the same as it was when it was last surveyed back in 1973, 30 years before. Another study documented that the oil in that marsh is still toxic for burrowers: mussels and fiddler crabs (who dig down until they hit the oil layer, 2 to 6 inches below the surface, then burrow back up to the surface). All species there show diminished growth, feeding and breeding activities. Fiddler crabs who come into contact with the buried oil stagger about like drunks.
    Oil in a marsh is going to stay there and remain toxic for a lifetime. At least. There’s no sugarcoating this, and there’s no technological fix.
    /end quote
    Massachusetts can always adopt as its mascot the oil-soaked and -befuddled lobster. Presumably every affected state has got something in particular to go with this theme.
    Doom, if you ever want a fascinating (albeit fictional) take on what our distant descendants might think upon encountering the massive ruins and earthworks we’re bequeathing them, check out Paul O. Williams 7-book set “the Pelbar Cycle”.

  322. asoka June 13, 2010 at 7:36 pm #

    QSHTIK SAID: “And BTW, who’s talking about killing people.”
    Qshtik, you have been talking a lot about killing. Not long ago, June 1 I think, you were making a point and posted these quotes:
    “It is permitted to take the body and the life of a Gentile.”
    Sepher ikkarim III c 25
    ——————–
    “It is the law to kill anyone who denies the Torah. The Christians belong to the denying ones of the Torah.”
    Coschen hamischpat 425 Hagah 425. 5
    —————–
    “A heretic Gentile you may kill outright with your own hands.”
    Talmud, Abodah Zara, 4b

  323. Qshtik June 13, 2010 at 8:51 pm #

    Asoka, you really are shameless … acting as if my download/copy/paste on June 1st in any way could be considered me talking about or approving of killing. I await your apology.

  324. asoka June 14, 2010 at 12:50 am #

    Qshtik said: “…in any way could be considered me talking about or approving of killing. I await your apology.”
    Qshtik, you worked for 26 years for a defense contractor who makes gyroscopes used in cruise missiles. You supported the bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan. You support our troops.
    You obviously approve of killing. Your whole life has been dedicated to promoting killing.
    You were not in the streets with anti-war protesters. You were working for the “defense” establishment making sure the death contracts got funded.
    And now you want to say you do not approve of killing? Too late for that. Have you no shame?

  325. cleitophon June 14, 2010 at 1:10 am #

    There have been extensive experiments in developing biofuels from algae, and they just arn’t viable. They’ve all been scrapped!
    “Most of the projects involve the use of closed photobioreactors, in which the micro-organisms are grown in a controlled manner by feeding them CO2 and nutrients. Sadly, after decades of development, none of those projects have ever demonstrated the technology on a large scale, let alone over long periods of time.”
    In fact, they even attempted to increase the lipid content of the algae artificially, by design. However, this strain grew slower and resulted in a net decrease:
    “One of the most important findings from the studies on lipid accumulation in the microalgae is that, although nutrient stress causes lipid to increase in many strains as a percentage of the total biomass, this increase is generally accompanied by a decrease in total cell and lipid productivity.”
    http://news.mongabay.com/bioenergy/2007/01/in-depth-look-at-biofuels-from-algae.html
    It is simply not an economically or physically viable technology!

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  326. treebeardsuncle June 14, 2010 at 5:33 pm #

    Hi.
    Well, I think it was helpful to do so to expose the wimps (Diogen and Dale) and finks (Dale). Have run into this kind of crap since kindergarten literally. I felt like digging a hole in the sand with my hands out on the playground by a Montesori school in Carmichael when I was a 5-year-old student there. Some brat comes up and says “You’re not supposed to dig holes.” so I take a couple seconds break to punch him in the face and then he runs off crying to the teachers. These gutless tattle-tales can’t fight their own battles so they run off to the authorities to protect them. Well, I ask you this, who are you creeps going to run to when there are not the authorities around you are used to, to protect you? What are you going to do without the schools, police, lawyers, office staff etc? Who do you think is going to be calling the shots in society then?
    Geoff
    Vlad, you can answer that one I bet.

  327. treebeardsuncle June 14, 2010 at 8:34 pm #

    Am wondering if this site has been closed yet.
    Well, there, Dale is a familiar type I remember from the playground. When I was in kindergarten at Montessori, I felt like digging a hole in the sand in the playground. Some little creep came up and said “You are not supposed to dig holes.” so I took a break for a couple seconds to punch him in the face. He then went crying off to tattle to the teachers. Am reminded of similar types in the colleges such as UC Santa Cruz who cannot tolerate a difference of opinion or an intense personality and run off over one’s head behind one’s back. Am wondering what these rat-finks will do when there are not police, school authorities, lawyers, and officials to whom to complain. It is good to know who some of the weak ones are, Diogen and Dale, the latter who has a history of running away like a whiny spoiled brat.
    Geoff

  328. Attorney March 20, 2011 at 8:21 am #

    Nutty idea indeed. We will see who has the last laugh, the Times or those people who are thoughtfully preparing for financial crisis.
    I love how you close out the post, “The Times is so deep into its own collapse that it doesn’t even remember how to cover a story.”
    I would say the Times is so arrogant that it couldn’t recognize collapse even if collapse was staring the Times in the face (which it is!)
    Thanks.
    Jim

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