The perils of being right

Kunstler got me thinking yesterday.

He is right. You can only be a decent and loved oracle if you tell people things are going to work out well. If there is anything that people cannot stand, it is people who were right about the cold times a comin'.

I think that Heinlein had the right of it.

"

A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight.

---

Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved.

Waiting

To me, it seems like forever that we have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. The housing bubble is gone, and the theft that preceded it have cheerfully gone unpunished, but the reckoning that seems necessary for the years of profligacy have yet to settle onto our collective heads.

But then, maybe what I hear speaking is my father's repeated reading of the Apocalypse when I was a boy and the desire or expectation that people will pay for their sins.

The sins are legion. They occupy all realms of the society. But perhaps rather than this being a call for the cleansing fire and tribulations, maybe it is just business as normal and a call to get back to work and figure it out.

This is truly sad

The idea of living alone and apart is as American as apple pie. Daniel Boone was said to have moved when he was able to see the smoke from a neighbors chimney.



This must be the saddest and most pathetic pathology in our country. The fact that we want to go it alone. Now the saddest and most pathetic of these are starting to show their ugly little heads.

So here is how I see it; A retired worker from Boeing, who prostituted himself for his whole life to a transnational, making jetliners which suck oil and probably driving his pickup truck lives a lifestyle which steals from future generations. He then goes and finds and unspoiled section and plops his nasty old ass in the middle of it and forbids the world to enter.

Fuck you pal.

You and your whole self-serving generation (along with the boomers that followed you) are the problem. You have taken far more than your share, and left the dregs for the future generations. Now you want to stop the world so that you can spend your self-absorbed remainder of life in denial of your sins.

Fuck you

Guess that I was a little crabby yesterday

Sometimes it happens. But today is allright. I do really get sick of the boomers. They are so greedy and so grasping and so grasshopper instead of ant it is just absurd.

The hard part is going to be their desire to vote themselves the things that they think that they deserve is going to grow and grow over the next twenty years. Old folk always vote...The legislative branch is terrified of the current social security parasites, just wait until the greedy boomers get hold of the social security system and benefits. There will be an orgy of blood sucking that will make a lamprey look like a piker.

I think that I will just lay low and try to create a personal space that uses as little as possible and is maintainable as I can make it. Start changing my lifestyle now and see how long I can make it without being a burden.

I really do not want to cripple my kid's opportunity for my own shallow desires. But at the risk of sounding self righteous, that appears to be the exception rather tan the rule.

A generation of rapists

We always knew. Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich warned us 30-40 years ago. L. King Hubbard called it out straight. But the truth got caught between us and our desires, so the truth was killed off and ignored so that our McMansions and Hummers could materialize and fuck the rest of the world.

It is sad. It Brings me to mind the song by Carly Simon "Thats the way I've alway heard it should be"

Their children hate them for the things they're not;
They hate themselves for what they are-

I would propose that the legacy of the boomers will be this:

Their children hate them for the things are;
They hate themselves for what they they're not

Our children will hate us for making them live through the reckoning, And they will hate us more when they realized we used their resources for our vanities.

A Slow Storm

I have to get a grip on it. It seems that my obsession about the insanity of the world is a touch out of control.

All in all, the world is not going to come to an end. It is however coming to a changing point and being ready for it is a matter of calm and resolution, not chicken little ranting. I sincerely believe that the issues that were identified in the 1960's and 1970's (end of oil and environmental degradation) are coming to fruit. But it is a long toss between:

1. topping the oil peak and moving past the 50% degradation mark and
   
2. the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.
   

The war in the Middle East in all of it's permutations in Israel, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, and the sordid and sundry little "terrorist" claques that goad the whole mess on are going to be with us for a while and it looks like we will lose the whole thing on that oldest of reasons, we just can't afford to stay in the game.

Keeping this thing going is a bit of a pain

Sweet, Sweet unemployment.

The world is turning around and now that I have the time to consider the world around me in some kind of depth. With my luck someone will offer me a job and cut short my ability to sit down and do some serious thinking.

Right now, the world seems to be in a position where everyone is lining up at the edge of a cliff getting ready to jump lemming-like into the abyss. Everything seems to be pointing to an upcoming bad spell, but everyone has been so busy playing grasshopper instead of ant that any mention of the possibility of a diminishing lifestyle is met with cold angry stares.

Consider the news yesterday, the news services trumpeted a "major find" for an oil exploration in Ghana, yet when you spend a little time looking, even at the upper end of the estimated capacity (call it 600 million barrels), when you look at it and divide that number by the 80 million barrels a day that the world is using you get 7.5 days of oil. This is a Major find?

Peak oil and the need to look seriously about the world's (and especially the US and Europe) lifestyle is being systematically ignored. Nobody wants to hear it. I just wonder how long we can keep our fingers in our ears and humming the la-la-la tune?

Originally from April 14, 2006

a post from an aborted Blog

I am currently fixated on the use of energy in the world and the changes that this use will be undergoing in the next little while (say nine or ten years).

That we are at or near peak oil production appears to be a given at this point. One-half of all of the oil in the world has been used up since John Rockefeller and his cronies invented a new system of the world back in the 1880's.

I think that how a society, family, or person deals with the changes coming down the pike will define the well-being for that entity. I feel that energy use and the concommitant entropy issues will drive and define the individual in the coming years.

Needless to say, all of the answers are not at my fingertips. This is as much as anything a way to come to grips with the issues. So as much as anything, I will be trying to elicit serious responses from the people who look at this blog. Please give constructive ideas. Please try to be a scientist, not a true believer.

Welcome

Thoughts on Easter

I believe that the West is careening its way towards two different kinds of bankruptcy. The first is fiscal bankruptcy. While most people see this as the primary problem, I see it as a minor symptom of the second bankruptcy: Spiritual Bankruptcy.

The West has created a system where the individual is the be all and end all of the world. We in America and our cousins in Europe have created a system where the government rewards any excess in the name of personal liberty. It is as if Ayn Rand's amoral universe has come into play. We have the looters true enough, but for some reason we also have the self-absorbed and egocentric villains that she tried so hard to make attractive.

The bankruptcy is the loss of the glue that holds any society together, the idea that one's actions must be part of a long line of persons. That the actions that one takes must make both one forebears and ones descendants proud. The individuals that live today is merely links in the chain of life. We take as much as we possibly can for our personal comfort, knowing that we are impoverishing the generations that will follow us.

We must begin to live in a sustainable manner. Our children and children's children will curse us if we do not.

Boomers Driving the Car

Had a chat with Carol last night. We were discussing the impact that the boomers will have on the medical system. When you look at the population histograms between 2005 and 2025, you are absolutely astounded by the number of old people that we will be carrying in the future.

Carol seems to think that suicide is going to become an increasingly acceptable option for these folks. She thinks that it is because they will do it willingly to decrease suffering. I will agree that this will always be an aspect (for background look here), but more and more I think that the system will start breaking down in its ability to deal with these oldsters and suicide will gradually be more and more used because the system cant keep up.

F=ma

Newton's Second Law

The acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force, in the same direction as the net force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.

Let's set F equal to the ability of a society to exist. An arbitrary value will be assigned to denote "adequate" societal performance,

Lets set M as the population of the society

Let's set A as the product of the money supply and the velocity of that money.

Thus, when a nation's population increases, in order to maintain F at a constant, the money supply or the velocity of the money must increase. Since there is an inverse relationship of mass to acceleration, these must increase more rapidly than the rate of growth.

If money is leaving the country in external trade imbalances, the product of the money supply and velocity is made smaller and F drops below "adequate" societal performance.

Just a thought...I'll work on it more later.

The grand scheme of things

The hardest part about getting old is dropping the thought that somehow your desires and beliefs have any impact on the way that the world proceeds. We in America have this odd idea an individual will be able to change the world. I am more and more coming to the conclusion that the historic leaders were just people who got out in front of mass movements and claimed leadership. The mass movement was there first. The mass movement was the important entity. The so-called leader was merely an afterthought of the overall action.

The resumes leave the building

I posted three applications today for a company with no connection whatsoever to this parliment of whores that is called the biotechnology industry.

At the end of the day, I don't believe that the good that this industry does will outweigh the evil.