Sad but true

The two party system that we are currently operating under appears to be ready to dish us up another big serving of crap.


Obama has been a disappointment.  I actually had a wee ray of hope that he would change something anything in the nest of corruption that we call a capital, but he let us down.  He has essentially become more Bushie than Bush. Pandering to the powers that be, caving into the monied interests, and generally being aa lapdog in the thrall of the Praetorian elite that have purchased the capital and its denizens.


The Republicans are getting ready to pull together their usual mishmash of corporate stooges, gun-nut fanatics, religious zealots, and imperial apologists. This year they are adding not just one MILF but two in order to keep the NASCAR guys enthralled with their dreams of a ménage à trois in the Blair house.

Huntsman might well prove to be interesting.  He isn't your normal Republican.  But, as a gentile who ran from Utah screaming, the thought is kind of scary.  Even with that being said, I may well have to shed my childhood prejudices and angst and work for the man.

I kinda doubt that we will see Obama in Washington post February 2013.  The man has done to little and taken too much for us to take him seriously.  He may well get re-elected, but I would have to get at least 4-1 odds to take the bet.

Voting on Intelligence

OK,  I will admit it up front, I didn't win.  But there is no bitterness involved and I am thinking that it is best I didn't win because it would have involved more work by yours truly.

So anyway, the story is this, The VAspa has a competition where anyone can put up their ideas on an internet site and anybody and everyone votes on which ideas should be considered for funding. 

What this seems to degenerate into is a high school popularity contest (or perhaps, a national election here in the good old USA), with people out there e-mail spamming everyone they can think of to go in and vote for their idea.  The relative merits of ideas are not discussed, with over 4500 ideas proposed, the chances that votes are actually used wisely, by reading and weighing all ideas and prioritising costs and needs are nearly non-existent.  The chance that a federal employee would be allowed to read and sort through 4500 ideas in near random order to vote intelligently is laughable.

But the process got me thinking about democracy in a more fundamental manner.  Think about the shrub and the lazy-O who have been our elected leaders for the past eleven years, hell, for that matter throw in Billy the zipper and the gipper and you will get nearly 30 years of marginally interrupted buffoonery (as you can figure out, In my mind the jury is still out on Bush I, he may well go down as not too bad).

Nope, I am starting to seriously question the idea of universal sufferage.  I just don't think that a society has the dignitas to manage to make the difficult and disciplined choice to pause before reaching out to grasp what one thinks one wishes. 

I am becoming more and more in favor of implementing some kind of poll tax.  It would have to be a percentage of wealth.  Lets say for example 7% (thank you Sherlock).  It may well separate the wheat from the chaff.

Intermediate Technologies

Consider for a moment the classic Hubbert curve:

I have always liked the way that the curve showed the depletion of a non-renewable resource.  Simple and elegant, It would appear to me to be pretty close to the truth.  So the world has now seemed to have passed the peak, where the maximum amount of oil pumped is in the past and now it will be getting harder and harder to access oil.  It isn't going away, it will just be harder to get.

So, all the peak oil blogosphere is going apeshit, talking about the end of the world as we know it.  Fine, in an absolute sense, that will occur.  But it will just be the end of a phase, not the end of mankind.

US energy consumption, by source, 1850-2000. Vertical axis is in quadrillion BTU

Lets look at the left side of the curve.  A whole bunch of folks in the world today remember those times.  They weren't that bad.  You might even argue that the 50's and 60's were pretty good times here in the USA and we used a whole lot less oil than we use now.

So what all this means to you and I is simple.  We go back to one car per family.  We wear sweaters and hats to help stay warm.  Kids go to school by walking or on the bus, Dad gets to works on a streetcar or in a carpool.  Mom stays home and cooks and steers clear of processed foods.  Not everyone goes off for fulfilling years of college to end up running a spreadsheet.  Everybody squeezes a little harder on their nickels.

It really won't be the end of the world folks.  We will do what every family has to learn in hard times, that pinching pennies is the normal scheme of things, that old cars can work a long time.  That vacations in the south of France are once in a lifetime things. 

We will just stop being spoiled.  Time to get over the tantrums.

Economy of Scale

When I really sit down and ponder the way that the world will be heading, the musing usually ends up in either one of two camps.

1. The Savior 
2. The Fall

Needless to say, I would much prefer the first.  I still have flares of hope when I see headlines about cold fusion and I still browse through physics articles hoping that someone has found a way to spoof that pesky second law of thermodynamics.

But it seems to me that this is not really the best use of my time.  Oh, don't get me wrong, hope is good thing, but this one rates up there with the "big" hopes like your family finally getting a clue and your job becoming fulfilling.  But I recognize that it probably won't happen, I had better get used to being disappointed, and keep right on hoping anyway.

There is going to oil for a long time yet, and it will probably power the world for another generation or two.  Here in the States, we are going to be buying a lot less of it.  The folks in China and India will be buying more of it.  But no one will be able to get the nearly unlimited stupid amounts of oil at a cheap price that we have somehow come to see as our due.

Now this is where the second set of folks come in, the ones that see this constraint as harbinger of the fall.  This is where I think that they are just being silly.  In a way, it is kind of insulting to the folks here in the USA.  I agree with folks that we are a spoiled, lazy bunch, but when the chips are down, we will sullenly and unwillingly grow up and begin doing the right thing to deal with the problems.

Oh, don't get me wrong, we will thrash around and throw a couple of tantrums (read here; wars) and some of the brats will try to take all the toys for themselves (Read here: Banksters and Wall Street), so the process will not be all that pretty, but we will eventually will be living a considerably lower impact lifestyle and we will be getting along just fine.

It just won't have a three car garage.

Outrage Junkies

I have been pruning my reading list lately.  For a while there, I was reading two or three digests a day, a couple of web sites, the Oil Drum, Mish Mike Ruppert, you know the entire gloom and doom, the world is shit subculture.

I have been purging sites off my need-to-read list to accommodate this notable lack of desire on whinging and sports level deconstruction of the current rough patch and its possible (please note here the word possible, as the gloom and doom crowd only deal in certainties) long term effects.

So I am reading more books now, I am not prepping like mad waiting for the apocalypse.  I keep my pantry stocked sensibly and I am ruthlessly paring my costs and watching my nickels.  I have come to the conclusion that the most sensible way to approach problems like the ones we are facing is to keep things in perspective, lower my expectations along with my needs and living arrangements and figure out how to ride along in the flow.

How much of your time is spent waiting breathlessly for the next downleg in the market to be the one that brings down the whole house of cards?  How many precious minutes of your life do you spend reading Stoneleigh and Max Keiser screaming about the abuse of the banks and how they are getting your share?  What is needful isn't rightful indignation about someone else's store of digital bits that can never be spent.  The "wealth" being accrued to the elites will vanish, like the supposed wealth we think of as ours.

We have succumbed to the idea that our opinion and lifestyles are actually important.   The Martha Stewart lifestyles that we have become so attached to have always been a chimera, a sad posturing in search of status and self-worth.   We have to instead figure out where we need to end up in a world going into decline.

Tribes

It would appear that we are a state composed of tribes.  Now, in the past, tribes came from a specific forebear and maintained their identity by mythos.

There has been a move in the recent past to create tribes whose identity is wound around a set of common beliefs, whose contact is mediated through the internet and whose goals are, at best, ambiguous.  In a sense, this blog can be considered part and parcel of the doomer/prepper tribe, though I have no intention of becoming a dues paying member.

I cannot see that this will stand.  The internet is progressively becoming less free and more moderated.  Thus any tribe that chooses to set up shop in the ethereal lands of cyberspace will find its identity subsumed by the mass of tribes competing there.

The internet is ultimately a blending machine, taking the raw material of minority opinion and grinding it through a opinion machine where the new and useful are ground off to comply with the majority opinion.  It is a slow process, but it is usually sped up significantly as soon as the members of the group discover that they can make money on the deal.

No folks, you can make all the arguments you wish about the ability of the internet to create tribes, but the truth of the matter is that the tribes that you create in cyberspace are usually mutual mental masturbation societies.  Real tribes are all around you in the physical world, you just have to hold your nose, choose one, and get to work.

Cans

Growing up in Utah, I have a tendency to veer toward the survivalist mode.  My high school buddies had family food supplies down the basement.  It was a normal and accepted part of the culture.

But now I am up in the Northwest, and food supplies up here are the mark of the survivalist culture that sprouted up in the seventies.  You know....the types the ones that lock themselves in the bathroom with a copy of "Patriots" and a bottle of lube.  Heavy on guns and machismo, these folks are rapidly getting older.  My sons now refer to them as "Lard Ninja's" as for the most part they are middle-aged men who have taken a hard turn toward the portly and still insist on wearing camouflage as a fashion statement.  Actually, Cabela's has created an entire market segment out of this demographic.

Anyway, back to the subject.  I have around thirty #10 cans of dried food in the basement.  Now, taken alone, these would last the family for around a month maybe two.  I see them as extenders, a way to round out the food that we are able to get hold of in our daily existence.  My choices tend toward the dried vegetables and other items that can add flavor and consistency to a bland menu.  Beans and rice and flour are pretty damn boring on their own.  Spiced up with veggies and some spices and then you get into "ethnic" food that tastes pretty damn good, thank you very much.

I think that we will be moving back from the just-in-time delivery of prepared food that we have developed during the last twenty years to a system where raw ingredients are purchased and food preparation will take up more of our lives.   Food preparation will necessarily become the bailiwick of whichever family member is unemployed in the general economy.  Since there have been around seven million people drop out of the job market in the past four years, if these folks have a lick of sense, they will be buying more and more raw foods and cooking at home.