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.

Why Should I Write

It is really a pretty big question.  My output on this blog has dropped off radically.  Most of this is because the issues that I feel to be important have been written about by yours truly and I find rehashing the same old thing to be intellectually stale.

Most of the doomer literature fobbed off in blogs are TEOTWAWKI in nature.  The world is ending. Life is going to be a pile of shit.

I think that the world is going to be just fine.  The human race will adjust population-wise to a more sustainable level.  The energy use of the smaller population will decrease in net and per-capita terms.  A lot of the technological appurtenances that we hold so dear will be defaulted on.  In other words, we will be living a life appropriate to our means, not our desires.

I beat a drum which no one likes the rhythm.  The discordance of saying "we have taken too much, we cannot all be rich, we cannot all have everything"' is not appreciated in the vast majority.  Hell, it really isn't appreciated by my fellow doomers.

I really can't see how the whole thing is going to play out.  We might go Wiemar, or we might not, we might have a revolution, or we might not.  A new Andy Jackson might rise and start things fresh, or he might just stay at home.

What I do know is that I feel strongly that change is coming.  Unlike Harold Camping, I don't pretend that I have a secret formula where, if,  I can just get my calculations straight, I can peer though a clear glass into the future.  My glass is dark, and its reflections show much more of my prejudices and fear than the visions of a future world I so desperately wish to get a glimpse of.

Just an excellent cross posting

A homerun over at truthdig

Why Liberal Sellouts Attack Prophets Like Cornel West

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_prophets_like_cornel_west_make_liberal_sell-outs_attack_20110523/

Posted on May 23, 2011

By Chris Hedges
The liberal class, which attempted last week to discredit the words my friend Cornel West spoke aboutBarack Obama and the Democratic Party, prefers comfort and privilege to justice, truth and confrontation. Its guiding ideological stance is determined by what is most expedient to the careers of its members. It refuses to challenge, in a meaningful way, the decaying structures of democracy or the ascendancy of the corporate state. It glosses over the relentless assault on working men and women and the imperial wars that are bankrupting the nation. It proclaims its adherence to traditional liberal values while defending and promoting systems of power that mock these values.The pillars of the liberal establishment—the press, the church, culture, the university, labor and the Democratic Party—all honor an unwritten quid pro quo with corporations and the power elite, as well as our masters of war, on whom they depend for money, access and positions of influence. Those who expose this moral cowardice and collaboration with corporate power are always ruthlessly thrust aside.

The capitulation of the liberal class to corporate capitalism, as Irving Howeonce noted, has “bleached out all political tendencies.” The liberal class has become, Howe wrote, “a loose shelter, a poncho rather than a program; to call oneself a liberal one doesn’t really have to believe in anything.” The decision to subordinate ethics to political expediency has led liberals to steadily surrender their moral autonomy, voice and beliefs to the dictates of the corporate state. As Dwight Macdonald wrote in “The Root Is Man,”those who do not make human beings the center of their concern soon lose the capacity to make any ethical choices, for they willingly sacrifice others in the name of the politically expedient and practical.
By extolling the power of the state as an agent of change, as well as measuring human progress through the advances of science, technology and consumption, liberals abetted the cult of the self and the ascendancy of the corporate state. The liberal class placed its faith in the inevitability of human progress and abandoned the human values that should have remained at the core of its activism. The state, now the repository of the hopes and dreams of the liberal class, should always have been seen as the enemy. The destruction of the old radical and militant movements—the communists, socialists and anarchists—has left liberals without a source of new ideas. The link between an effective liberal class and a more radical left was always essential to the health of the former. The liberal class, by allowing radical movements to be dismembered through Red baiting and by banishing those within its ranks who had moral autonomy, gradually deformed basic liberal tenets to support unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization and permanent war. Liberalism, cut off from the radical roots of creative and bold thought, merged completely with the corporate power elite. The liberal class at once was betrayed and betrayed itself. And it now functions like a commercial brand, giving a different flavor, face or spin to the ruthless mechanisms of corporate power. This, indeed, is the primary function of Barack Obama.

The liberal class, despite becoming an object of widespread public scorn, prefers the choreographed charade. It will decry the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or call for universal health care, but continue to defend and support a Democratic Party that has no intention of disrupting the corporate machine. As long as the charade is played, the liberal class can hold itself up as the conscience of the nation without having to act. It can maintain its privileged economic status. It can continue to live in an imaginary world where democratic reform and responsible government exist. It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the corridors of power. But the uselessness and irrelevancy of the liberal class are not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the indignities of the corporate state. And this is why liberals are rightly despised by the working class and the poor.

The liberal class is incapable of reforming itself. It does not hold within its ranks the rebels and iconoclasts who have the moral or physical courage to defy the corporate state and power elite. And when someone such as Cornel West speaks out, packs of careerist liberals—or perhaps one should call them neoliberals—descend on the apostate like hellhounds, never addressing the truths that are expressed but instead engaging in vicious character assassination. The same thing happened to Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, Jeremiah Wright and others who defied the political orthodoxy of corporate capitalism. The corporate forces, which have taken control of the press and which break unions, run the universities, fund the arts and own the Democratic Party, demand the banishment of all who question the good intentions of the powerful. Liberals who comply are tolerated within the system. They are permitted to busy themselves with the boutique activism of political correctness, inclusiveness or multiculturalism. If they attempt to fight for the primacy of justice, they become pariahs.

Leo Tolstoy wrote that there were three characteristics of all forms of prophecy: “First, it is entirely opposed to the general ideas of the people in the midst of whom it is uttered; second, all who hear it feel its truth; and thirdly, above all, it urges men to realize what it foretells.”

Prophets put forward during their day ideas that the mass of people, including the elite, denounce as impractical and yet at the same time sense to be true. This is what invokes the rage against the prophet. He or she states the obvious in a society where the obvious is seditious. Prophecy is feared because of the consequences of the truth. To accept that Obama is, as West said, a mascot for Wall Street means having to challenge some frightening monoliths of power and give up the comfortable illusion that the Democratic Party or liberal institutions can be instruments for genuine reform. It means having to step outside the mainstream. It means a new radicalism. It means recognizing that there is no hope for a correction or a reversal within the formal systems of power. It means defying traditional systems of power. And liberals, who have become courtiers to the corporate state, must attempt to silence all those who condemn the ruthlessness and mendacity of these systems of destruction. Their denunciation of all who rebel is a matter of self-preservation. For once the callous heart of the corporate state is exposed, so is the callous heart of the liberal class.


Chris Hedges is a weekly Truthdig columnist and a fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “The World As it Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.”

In Memorium

I used to listen tho this guy quite a bit back in the day.

Gil Scott Heron died in a New York Hospital.  He was 62

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcHOq8i5Pyk

Old Stuff

Found and old blogger style set of post from back in 2005 that Google reminded me of.  I will be posting these up, nothing of particular interest, just a look at my sordid past.

Aisles

It really is kinda sad watching the white folks perform their little pathologies.  The greater bulk of these folks have had a steadily declining lifestyle and real income for years now, yet they cling desperately to the idea that things will be "going back to normal".


You can sense this in the stores that these folks infest.  The white folk like the big box stores, you know, the huge fuckers.  They steer their shopping carts down the aisle and gaze at things that they don't need.  They put something in their cart eventually and queue up at a line where a bored and disinterested clerk passes the object over a bar code scanner and the profits are tallied at corporate headquarters across the country .


The stores where I shop are a bit of a different story.  There are no shopping carts usually, just hand baskets.  The aisles are narrow and packed with items which I can read only one side of the label.  You excuse yourself when people pass through the same aisle because they aisles are narrow.  You try to learn the basics of any number of languages:  perdón and извините and 谢谢 are helpful and gratefully recieved.  The vegetables are limited and you had better be able to ask làm thế nào mới.  


The minor inconveniences of shopping in these places are more than paid for by shopping in a place that is alive.  Where the folks that are shopping next to are grateful for the gifts of their life, and the owners are proud of your business and take the money from your hand themselves.


The middle class whites of this country are going to be a memory soon.  The middle class, as we boomers grew up to envision it, was never anything but a mirage.  We will be going back to the normal state of affairs soon.  By practicing now, you can start to recognize that where we are going back to is a richer place than the sterile hell that we imagined as paradise.

Choosing Wrong

You know one of the things that I am thoroughly sick of is my neighbor's strongly held belief the "goodness of mainstreet America".

I cannot think of a shred of evidence to support this claim.

What brought this all up is a conversation held in my carpool yesterday morning.  My moron carpooler asked what I thought about Reiki, when I responded that there may well be something to it that it appears to have some positive benefits and no seeming harm, she became indignant.

You see according to her, Reiki is a form of Satanism.  She then went through and vented for a while on the ungodliness of America to allow such things to be taught.

In a way she is my touchstone of what it takes to be an American.  Our way is the best, we only need to become the fine folks that our forefathers were.  Proof of your goodness lies in your wealth.  You know, an American.  Her houses are underwater and she struggles with paying the bills.  Her husband hasn't had a job for two+ years.  She complains because the folks who manage her four timeshares are indignant because she hasn't paid them.  

Look here folks all of us are surrounded by folks who just can't seem to manage to think things through.  These folks make up the bulk of the US population.  So, if a majority of the population is a bunch of fools who cannot take the time to pay attention to the world around them and who lash out blindly at anything that doesn't fit their mass-produced, self-aggrandizing self images, can we call such a population good?

We are an odd culture, with our behaviors and our actions wildly divergent from our pronounced ideals. But the blogs that we read and the beliefs that we espouse all seem to come back to the belief that "The American People", if they are just allowed to make the choice, would set things to right and drive out the evil cabal who is doing bad things.

More and more, I am coming to the conclusion that the leadership in Washington is a true and accurate representation of the beliefs and views of the populace.  The fiscal bankruptcy we are seeing is a true reflection of the crazed and needy desires of "The American People".   The increasingly draconian and intrusive machinations of a security apparatus the earnest manifestation of the desires of the majority of the populace to repress anything different than their self-image.

I am not at all certain that a mature culture can be built out of such material.  I don't have any idea of what to try next, but I am becoming increasingly convinced that democracy is a poor substitute for a republic.

Moving the Boulder

I am just beavering away, trying to live my life.  I watch the news to see what is coming and attempt to predict which way the train is going in order to dodge.  That is all.

I have a running bet with Locutius.  I am saying that the US will not exist as we knew it in 1997 (when the bet was made) by 2015.  In my mind the bet has already been won.  He still hasn't ponied up the beer.

But that is the extent of my prediction.  I don't really see any apocalypse coming.  Just a readjustment of lifestyles to something sustainable (read here: Poor).  What we were striving for was never really possible.  A nation of people living like ancient kings never had the requisite underpinnings to keep such a thing going.  What happened in the US was a systematic looting of the future to fund current excesses.  All of the theories of the ever-expanding middle class and the eradication of poverty were pipe dreams that were unsupported by reality.

Our political dialog consists of little more than shifting blame and concentration of wealth.  The general population, led by the oligarchs, appears to enjoy nothing better than blaming the poor and the meek for accepting alms.  The self-made of the tea party bully the poor and tell them that they must take less that they are undeserving of the small pittance received.  The trillions poured into the coffers of the wealthy are not mentioned.

The worship of wealth and the material has found its temple here in the US.  We loathe the bankers that rape us, but the great bulk of the population would give away their children to the the rapist to be allowed a minuscule share of the crumbs. We have made the blindness of market capitalism a shibboleth, the ramifications of the system, with its inexorable march toward plutocracy a tenet of faith rather than an awkward symbol of original sin that the system truly represents.

Maybe on this day we ought to take time to know our place in the universe.  Not as perfect children made by God to take what we wish, but rather sinners redeemed by a savior.

Just for Laughs

The Daily Show - An Energy-Independent Future
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Just Checking In

I can't say that I miss the self-imposed pressure of writing every day, but I do miss the occasional rant.

Most of my hiatus has been from the gloomy fact that my lack of a cheery take on the endgame seems to be in the process of occurring. What surprises me more and more is that the folks out there just don't seem to care one little bit.

But then I got started thinking, and, as this is a rare occurance, I thought that I would write down the results of such madness.

The reason that folks aren't talking about this much is that they are trying to figure out what the hell to do when the game that they are going to lose is over.

There you have it. You see, the real problem is not that we are going down. Folks know that and can figure out how to deal. What they can't deal with is the psychological beating they will give themselves finding out that they a a loser schmuck like the rest of the world.

The educational system and the parents of the last forty or so years have jammed into all the little heads that they are winners and wonderful people. They believe strongly that their opinion matters and that they deserve all the goodies that they have dreamed for themselves. Politicians and bosses have promised delivery of said goodies in order to shut them up and keep them going to the same boring job and voting in the same rigged elections.

Now the hard part for the little winners. Finding out that they are the schmucks. Their middle class bourgeois fantasies of golf, crafts, and pederasty are wilting in front of their eyes, and they are going through the painful moment in the game where they realize that their game plan has not worked and they are going to be handed their asses.

So, give them a little time. They have some catching up to do.