World

It dawned on me that a number of DVDs that I have seen in the last year tell a great story when viewed in series, and all of which is fascinating to behold. I didn't particularly see them in the order I am about to propose, but when seen together, it is an interesting look at history from the formation of the earth through geologic history, and a wide sweeping look at human history and possible destiny, topped with a cherry on top in the form of Jesus as the model human to put right what has gone wrong.

All this stuff I got from Netflix, so the links will be to the pages where you can find these videos. Watch in this order for maximum narrative impact.

• Miracle Planet (five part series). This one takes a look at the long history of the planet Earth and is built on an argument that life is seemingly a stroke of luck that has somehow lasted for billions of years despite radical shifts in climate and terrain and so forth. It ends with the advent of the homo sapien and its edge over Neanderthals due to the former's power of articulate speech as its defining feature, something that paved the way for communication of increasingly complex and abstract information and ideas. Which is a good set up for:

• Guns, Germs and Steel (three part series). A National Geographic series built on the themes in Jared Diamond's book of the same name. Diamond asks how it was that the Eurasian branch of humankind was able to thrive, innovate, and spread its kind to all manner of places, and to dominate human history. He credits geographical advantage of fertile lands as the basis for early civilization that surged ahead of other hunting and gathering peoples, and innovation that arose out of that advantageous circumstance. Such things as exposure to domesticated animals secured our resilience to diseases that later were fatal to vulnerable New World populations. High technology and well developed use of horses helped the history of domination wherever Eurasian peoples went. It is all a great look at how domination is essentially foundational to civilization and violence is a major tool by which it spreads. Other civilizations had not the advantages of such successful agricultural effort, and perhaps lacked the resources or literacy that Eurasian peoples had, and so never progressed in the same way.

• What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire This comes out of the Peak Oil "doomer" camp from which I sort of consider myself. This takes a brutally honest look at the world situation (peak oil, global warming, food shortages in the face of overpopulation, etc.) and its foundations in our mythologies of progress and love of technology. Consider it the extended tale of what Guns, Germs and Steel is talking about. (Diamond is well known for a book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.) It too reaches back into the roots of civilization and shows how the whole system is set to somehow succeed to the point of failure eventually. It concludes wondering how life would look if exploitation, domination and violence was not the leading paradigm, and if life were lived more reverently and in tune with what the Earth is able to provide.

• A Crisis of Faith: The Series (four part series). This covers a few different bases in each of the different films but it comes back to the role of how we've lost touch with the mythic universe that keeps us as characters within a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The first one is somewhat like Life At The End of Empire in that it takes a look at our present situation and its roots in the myths of progress, and Enlightenment materialistic thought. It asks why in the age of moon landings and nuclear technology we are losing our way as people with a sense of meaning. The second one examines economic injustice in America, particularly how it affects blacks here. The third looks to the story Percival and the Holy Grail and how it narrates development into a fully human being. The fourth episode is a great "portrait of a radical" and shows how Jesus of Nazareth was the ideal human who lived a remarkable life of service to fellow humans and how he exposed the systemic injustice of his time and place—something not at all too different than today. The last two videos of the series are meant to illustrate how domination-rooted human mess can be pushed aside by lifting up our compassionate humanity in the face of the devastation the world brings. The emphatic message is that we need to turn inward and downward for our wisdom and not outward for external gratification and acceptance. That would pave the way for more genuine enlightenment ala what Jesus demonstrated.

The theme that comes up repeatedly is that our problems are rooted in the very civilization we wish to save with all our valiant efforts. Technology heaped upon earlier technology has done a lot to forestall the problems associated with earlier strides in civilized life. Social arrangements such as division of labor have allowed us to fall into traps of some being better than others, some working like dogs, and others living as kings. In some ways, one might say that Jesus was an anarcho-primitivist with his talk about the Kingdom of God and the notion that everyone was equal in the eyes of God. It seems that there hasn't been a time during the civilized world that has been adequate for the coming of the Kingdom; a lot of what Jesus was talking about was trusting that life would go on just as well if we didn't set up shelter, hoard food, or have fancy clothing. He spoke of relinquishing the trappings of the material world so that we could get down to the business of living. Well, perhaps his words and civilization would clash forever until one or the other falls to nothing, but which would fall to nothing first? If you subscribe to the thesis of What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, then maybe we're seeing the fall of not just another civilization but the fall of the most advanced one we've known, back to something simpler and more in touch with reality. Maybe the overly complex arrangements need to fall apart so we might discover why we wanted to get civilized in the first place: to put to use our elevated thinking and speech to better ourselves. As Crisis of Faith says, we're awash in information, but not so in wisdom. We're in love with quantification, but we don't know what it means or what to do with it. That's because we move too fast and don't know where we want to go.

Henny Penny! Forget Protecting Marriage With Prop 8

There is plenty of talk these days about how if gays are allowed to marry then all of Western Civilization will collapse. So the logic goes that we must "protect marriage" —or else! I take issue with this, not just because it is complete hyperbole, but because the collapse of Western Civ so far probably has more to do with granting rights to those who should not have such rights to exist and thrive. Call me un-American but I think that if we want to legislate controls over an institution that has the power to wreck families, mess up civilization, and perhaps even sign its name to a royally messed up ecosystem that might not recover in several of our lifetimes—effectively ruining civilizations that rely on clean water, fertile soil and renewable resources, then the time has come to rein in the power of corporate capitalism by revoking corporate personhood (or visit POCLAD). Maybe now that capitalism is imploding worldwide due to its very greed-fostering nature, there could be some move toward limiting corporate power by removing its legal protection as if it were a living human being.

I like to think we're moving toward a post-corporate world, but I think it has to get worse before it gets better. It will take some more time and lots more damage to economies, ecosystems, and human dignity before the scoundrels are run out of town. The industrial-capitalist and financial-capitalist world is going to have some 'splainin' to do to those who lost homes and fortunes, fertile soil to toxic waste, or limbs to factory jobs, but for now, there is still plenty of power wielded by bands of robbers known as corporations who have legal rights the same as—and sometimes superior to—yours and mine.

But some would like you to think that gay people who wish to be married brought all this ruin upon us. If you want to talk about legally protecting what is unnatural, why not look into corporate personhood and what woes that has brought?

Epiphany

Things are just too confusing these days. Something has to give.I've come to the conclusion that civilization is just one big tail-chasing exercise, and one day the old dog is going to lay down, tired, and won't get back up for some time to come.

The New Jerusalem Isn't Built In A Day

I don't know how to feel except small. My daily life seems like an exercise in futility and meaninglessness. The more material my activity, the more I feel this way. Sitting at the computer and doing these blogs seems pointless these days. It has been just mind bending and heart rending to hear the bad news piled on day after day regarding the hurricane and the lame political response that followed. I also have to admit I go seek this stuff out, but if I didn't I know that I would feel neglectful of great need, if only to acknowledge the existence of such a thing.

Frankly, I think a lot of the outright depressing things I've pondered are getting their day now. The wheels are almost visibly in motion. More and more people are getting behind the peak oil theory. The news is getting saturated with it. More and more people are talking collapse of this structure or that. More and more nihilism reigns. It's overwhelming. It's a brewing storm, even as real storms brew and do their damage on a breathtaking scale, my storm is bigger. My storm of course is the one that will spell the end of the oil-fed industrial era, and it's hard to imagine anything saving our system. But I actually don't think we have a system worth saving, and that it's time for a new one that doesn't carry with it the destructive gravity that sucks man and nature into its black hole. But then I'm not sure that our present system's dissolution necessarily yields to a better system automatically. I think we have another several decades of withdrawal to contend with, and when it's done, who would be able to recognize it as the world we know now? It won't be that at all.

I constantly ask myself what makes me the slightest bit prepared to face what appears to be a massive change on all fronts, all within a few years or a decade. Like, change that is broad enough to render most of my day to day experience null. What will all my web design experience mean when computers are a luxury item? Or what will my recording experience amount to when the devices won't turn on, either to record things or to play them back? I have a few things going for me, but its hard to tell what impact they will make. Still, I find myself jumping at the idea of learning some old fashioned methods for living, but still not willing or able to seek them out. I dunno, yesterday a friend was talking about a friend of hers who knew how to preserve and can fruits, and I was all ears. I was somewhat less ears when she moved to the topic of knitting and crocheting, but I encouraged her and her daughter to learn it like their lives depended on it. I think if anything, my future will be more along the lines of dissecting industrial era artifacts and reclaiming their parts for new uses. Or maybe it will be tearing up paved streets to make way for urban gardens. Kelli anticipates being a minister. Her work will be cut out for her as people watch their lives of materialism go down the drain.

Kelli has been making bread this year and doing more home spun cooking, but still using store bought ingredients. We need to learn more about making our own food, and how to get it reliably enough to live on, or to minimize the need to pay for it. We certainly need to get off the packaged and processed food kick. That is set to be a failed system before long, at least when it becomes too expensive. I wish I could really just make music on an acoustic guitar, but my attempts to do so are disappointing. I fear all my electric stuff will be a burden I might have to sell or just walk away from. Drums are energy crisis proof at least.

The Gracious Cynic

I've already told you what a life I've been leading this last month. But it pales in comparison with everything coming out of Katrina land, which also seems to be bringing peak oil on even faster than welcome. And more revelations of how utterly useless and despicable this administration is, and damn near everyone and everything we've come to rely on is failing us. Even for prophets like me with some disturbing visions, this is scary mainly because it's a lot of crazy scenarios coming true. People who know about my peak oil awareness efforts have been asking me if this is "it." Is this peak oil, they wonder? Yeah, and a whole lot more, it seems. It's just stunning how unrelenting the news has been lately.

Yesterday I met and had dinner with a fellow named Graeme Elliott who is in his mid 70s or so and has been prodding me to do more and more peak oil and post carbon awareness efforts. His encouragement led me to do the EONSNOW site and the movie showings, and anything else I do, like contact some media, or just be a mouthpiece for the various topics that relate. Anyhow, Graeme is a veteran in the progressive causes, with the leading causes being nuke disarmament and freeze in the 80s, and also economic conversion from a military economy to a peace economy. He happened onto peak oil last year, like I did, and we met this April.

We went to an Italian restaurant this time and it occurred to me, and was forceful enough to honor it, that this meal could be among the best I will enjoy before all sorts of uncertainty sweeps across this country and the world as oil and gas go their unpredictable routes as they both deplete and leave us with a huge question mark over our conventional ideas of food production and distribution. One has to wonder how many miles the various items on my plate traveled before they met their fate on my dinner plate. Or how much natural gas and oil went into their production? And the cooking? Is this something that will carry on in this wonderfully consumeristic fashion? Before we got down to eating, I told Graeme, 'I just want to stop and appreciate this meal, while we are still able to eat like kings.' With that, I stopped to marvel at what a task it is to put that food on the plate before me. And I also quivered with a little guilt and fear that I barely know a damn thing about how to put it there if this massive industrial food production apparatus should be crippled and ultimately die. So I gave thanks.

As we sat and ate like kings, neither of us could escape the utter horror that is the fate of the Birthplace of Jazz, now under a few stories of water. For a suburban white boy from the drought-ridden southwest, it's impossible to comprehend a city under water. I've been to New Orleans once in late 1996 when I worked for Mike Keneally's tour. I remember it being a great place laden with REAL funk in every sense of the word. I got there a few weeks after a stop in the other sin city (Las Vegas) and remember N'awlins being vastly more impressive and honest than Vegas which seemed like a big contrived cartoon of a place which had no tradition or soul to it at all but for that of a capitalist. In N'awlins, me and the Keneally/Vai band and crew ran around and shot pool and drank beer till 7:30 in the morning, all in just a couple of places which now I can't remember. I just remember having one of the best times on the tour in N'awlins, with all the fun simply starting AFTER the show ended and was struck. Maybe at midnight or later before we prowled the empty streets in the late autumn. I have some pix of me on Bourbon street and one of Bryan Beller when we traded places (see Bryan Beller's journal of the tour). He and I were eating gumbo at a restaurant when he stopped to leave a phone message for the Keneally fans who were then using the still-new and exciting Keneally presence on the web. My memories of New Orleans are good, and I'm glad I got to see it before it became Atlantis. Like Atlantis, it was a cultured city. I think it was one of only a few American cities that had any genuine culture that set it apart and made it world class. I wonder if the ghosts of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet are going to be wandering around there now.

I read something very disturbing as I waited for Graeme. In Michael Ruppert's book, Crossing the Rubicon, the author makes a somewhat puzzling comment about the current administration's understanding that a post peak oil era will very likely have to have a severe reduction in population back to what the earth could support without the meddling of fossil fuel derived fertilizers, pesticides, and the production machinery to grow and harvest all that food. He says that humans will have to revert somehow to a population of two billion or less. And, this is where it gets scary when I think about it (I've subscribed to the dieoff idea for a year or more now, so that's not a brutal as this new idea of how this dieoff could be brought on by those who don't concern themselves with life). The book says that the administration knows what is going on, and perhaps this awareness informs their decision to let 3000 die on 9/11, or all these war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or, now that a new crisis is upon us in the southeastern US, is it worth noting that NOT doing much in the way of rescue efforts is sort of a hands off way of letting the population shrink in a "natural disaster"? Pardon the deep cynicism, but I think Ruppert might be onto something here.

Think about it. Everyone knows the usual ways nature can reset itself when a species overshoots the carrying capacity of its host. There are floods, fires, earthquakes, disease, famine, cannibalism, miscarriage (spontaneous abortion), and other things of those sorts that can bring a population into line with reality. Humans have the unique ability to enhance that list to include war and violence, abortion-on-demand, infanticide, euthanasia, and our project for the last century: destroying the natural world segment by segment by turning everything into a commodity or waste dump in the name of profit and power. The fascists in power operate in a perfectly corporate fashion (after all, fascism is just the merger between government and corporation). That is to say, since a corporation relies on externalizing as many costs of doing business ("leave that work/expense for someone or something else outside our company"), who is to say that a hurricane is not a golden opportunity to let someone or something outside the company do a little work that would be rather expensive or too objectionable to the public if the company (government in this case) were to undertake the project itself? A hurricane is not on the payroll, and its effects can be "spun" to appear to be totally unanticipated. Ditto a tsunami.

It is outside of reason to think that a little God-given death would be handy when you are faced with peak oil and its population crash? Is it not within reason to ask why so many "brown people" (as George Carlin would say) are not prioritized in rescue efforts? It might take a lot of money to kill all those brown people with guns, and that might look bad come next election season, but delaying or not sending a competent relief effort or diverting funds from the levee project? What could be better? These fuckheads can appeal to their base by reducing the size of government and not giving "hand outs" for people who should know better than to weather the storm. I have to wonder now. Is the whole "culture of life" line a 100% Orwellian thing? The republo-fascists are the party of death. Start war. Do their best to ignore or downplay the natural tragedies which interestingly take out a good number of poor brown people. These fuckheads don't mind making folks suffer, do they? I just have to wonder how much of a population reduction they would be able to take credit for. After all, somehow, we got four BILLION people to knock off before things can settle down. What new and clever ways of letting people die, or killing them can these assholes come up with?

It all saddens and shocks me to think that now our government has assumed the role of God in deciding who lives and dies. The thing that bends my mind is that they want to preserve life for a generation who would grow up to have only the table scraps of our glory days, but want to look the other way when it comes to the living. If anything, they should be cooking up every way to allow birth control and abortion so that fewer mouths ever come into existence because the last thing humans need is more mouths to feed. I think there should be varied and wonderfully liberal options about end of life matters. Humans need to depopulate with willful intent. War is not good enough. It is not compassionate. Allowing people to die naturally is desperately needed, but neglecting the needs of survivors of a natural disaster is not compassionate. Allowing people to die willfully is desperately needed, but driving them to commit suicide by destroying their friends, family, economy, and hopes is not compassionate.

No one likes to think that their ostensible protector would be responsible for not just failing but abandoning that role, but in this time of Orwell-as-prophet, I don't rule out a lot of crazy scenarios.

Cause For Hope

A black woman gives an older white homeless woman some pizza in inner ring surburban San Diego and reminds her kids that they "don't know how good they have it."

If this were another time and place, the homeless woman would have been black, the passerby would be white and would perhaps spit on or kick the poor huddled figure, if such an act was worth the effort. Otherwise, total neglect would suffice and be socially acceptable.

America has changed. Or black folks are resiliant and forgiving. I thought after seeing this exchange yesterday that there was not much that blacks have to thank whites for after centuries of mistreatment, continuing to the present day. It takes grace to overcome all those years of history, and to do something so fundamentally right as this. It takes grace to admit that anything you have is good enough to give thanks for. This black woman did not appear to be well off any more than most other hourly slaves who work at WalMart and a million other service jobs in San Diego and across the nation.

One day, America will be riddled with homeless and displaced folks of all colors, shapes, and sizes. The post industrial/post carbon age is dawning upon us and will only get worse. The illusion of individual wealth that defined the 20th century might be on its way to evaporating, leaving a lot of people with shattered senses of self. All the consumerism and individualism will meet its logical end point before long, and people will be reduced to sharing whatever remains of the petro-fueled industrial era. Reduced to doing the good things that never really stopped being fundamentally good or necessary, just neglected. My vision for America in the 21st century is a dire one. I make no effort to hide it. I see some terrible things in front of us as our petro-era balloon deflates, and people find themselves with scraps of what was once a great nation. The scraps will be worth only what they can be used for to ensure survival. A lot of things that now exist for vanity or recreation will fall by the wayside. All the ridiculous things we surround ourselves with will be up for reevaluation if they somehow owe their creation and usefulness to oil or gas, or our idea that even the smallest pissant can live like royalty. Recycling of components and materials will be widespread; money will be next to useless if somehow people can't agree on what it worth. Value will be measured in how well something sustains life.

The coming era could make or break the Christian project. I hope it renews it and I hope that people will be called again to live like Jesus wanted us to live—selflessly even in the hardest of times. I hope people of faith can really be the ones to model the practical aspects of what we now consider charity but will ultimately be the deeds we engage in to ensure mutual survival. I don't think anyone will really be immune to the effects of a widespread petro crash because it will also take the global economy with it, along with the industrialized production of food and most of the transportation schemes in the world. Not everyone will be able to join an intentional community on the edge of civilization, after all. Most of us will have to make the most of what we have around us. And with the dissolution of far flung systems of technical support and transportation, we will find ourselves far more bound to smaller geographical regions and far more dependent on one another within those regions to make our infrastructure and communities work. What choice will we have? We will actually have to trust our neighbor, and vice versa. Now I am speaking like a revolutionary because our present zeitgeist is one of distrusting everyone around us so we can be patriots. Sad.

I advise folks to listen to their grandparents and immigrants and get an idea of how another generation or ethnic group had to live in the absence of all the lazy-making gadgets and habits we now have. Or consult the old folks and immigrants to understand the time and place before individualism was not as rampant as it is now. Individualism is what will wreck America. Hell, it is ALREADY wrecking America. What was once our favorite characteristic will be our Achilles heel if we don't relearn how to cooperate without competition. The corporate dog-eat-dog mentality MUST die, or people will continue to be reduced to nothing from all the competition that pits otherwise good people against each other in a race for bigger, better, faster, more.

I'd like to think if a black woman who had ancestors who suffered as slaves under white rule can bring herself to help feed a white person down on her luck, then anything is possible. It is a reminder that things don't need need to simply kowtow to cultural and historical inertia and that we should never take anything for granted.

EONSNOW

I have been working feverishly on my new project called EONS NOW which is the place where my legit attempts to bring peak oil to the public will be conducted. I suppose that I will still be annoying all you faithful readers with commentary on the matter as it springs to my head; I don't regard it as being solely an academic sort of pursuit, and the solution is one that could only come from having one's brain on and encouraging others to do the same. This particular blog has done a lot to help me find my way with the range of topics that interest me.

EONSNOW.orgThe new site will be self expanatory enough so once you check it out, you can see what I am trying to accomplish. If any of you are interested in the range of topics that peak oil encompasses, or those that would be solutions to such a dilemma, now is the time to step forward and help me out. Even if you know of people of like mind, at least send them my way.

My new site is one part of a fuller program that I am involved with. There is an organization called the Post Carbon Institute that is a think tank and motivational organization to get people to take this stuff to the local level. They have an international presence, and on their web site, they have a new program similar to Meetup.com with a number of localized groups who converge on sub sites to plan and discuss. I am also part of a beta testing period for that project. I think that I'll let that place go do what it does, and try not to do too much redundant stuff on my site, using EONS NOW for more localized stuff. Right now the formation of these two sites is sort of like amoebas having gymnastic sex, so the ideas are fluttering about and sooner or later will settle down.

The theme of EONS NOW is contained within its name; End Oppressive Non-Sustainability Now. It came to me as I was looking for a short name that would be easy to remember, and the notion of "eons" struck me as a handy word, as it depicts a division of time in earth history, and if the fading days of oil energy and the industrial world are not indicative of a new division of time in earth's history, I don't know what is. But before I even got that philosophical, I really had been thinking of how non-sustainable oppression is, and oppression is a key part of all our lives in the way that modern commercial culture is akin to an abusive, addicted husband in a marriage, and we civilians are the wives who can't just get up and leave without sheer force of will. We have been abused by advertising for so long we have handed over our faith in our own abilities to entities that are out for profit. They have convinced us that we can't clothe ourselves, feed ourselves, shelter ourselves, or entertain ourselves without their might and influence. So they have crafted a good or service that will do it for us. Insecurity is at the root of most of our problems in society now, and a lot of it has to do with our collective emasculation—stripped of pride in our own work and efforts to define our world in our image and not that of what a company wants to sell us.

So what EONS NOW wants to do is to do a lot of what you see here already: shine a light on how we have allowed someone else to sell us our daily needs and our dreams, and to show how that is destructive to the entire society, making people dependent on psychopathic corporations in the same way as a woman is beaten and scared into submission because the alternative is supposedly worse. Oppression is violence because it denies people of their potential. Advertising is psychological abuse because it tells us we are not as good as whatever they have to sell, or our lives will amount to nothing if we don't take the presribed bait. Or maybe now that a 60 year old man's cock isn't going to work without a couple of these pills. The last thing we need is shit like that and the denial of legal and safe contraception. That isn't even the pinko commie liberal in me talking. That is the side of me that knows that the current system of exploitation of all resources and most of humanity is a system doomed to fail, and will make us eat collective shit for the greed of others.

There is a site called Dieoff dot org that takes on the extreme end of the peak oil scenario. It still can scare me like little else has, but I refuse to let it slip away under the rug. My mentor JDL has said that a culture of success will collapse of its own weight, and the ultimate collapse is human collapse itself. If the threat of that is not oppressive, I do not know what else is. Now is not the time to outlaw selective fertility under the guise of preserving all life for God's glory, at the same time as we wage ill-justified wars. No, we don't need more population in a time of great misery. The terrible bind we are in is one of facing oppression in our food choices—do you want GM food or do you want chemical-pumped fare? In maybe two generations or less, I think we could face oppression at the other end: not having food choice at all when the suicidal seeds now made and sold by corporate agribusiness fail us, and the earth itself is too toxic a place to grow enough to support our population. Either it has been paved over, or it has been pumped with chemicals, or is home to suicidal seeds that last the one year they are intended to last. Stripping the earth of its own ability to reproduce and feed itself and its creatures is a fine definition of oppressive tyranny. I've heard it called "intergenerational tyranny." I believe it was the Cherokee nation of American natives that would ask if their decisions would also be good for the seventh generation. Now the dominant question is something approximating 'will this earn us double digit profits for the next quarter?' Popular western and transnational corporations planning for three months away or the Cherokees who are thinking of what will happen in 150 years as a result of their decisions today. What do you think is a more prudent course?

Anyhow, themes such as these are what will constitute at least my share of EONS NOW dot org. Peak oil will undermine most of the notions we have now regarding wealth, property, growth, economy, and community. We can either be devastated by it or we can consider that maybe the time in which we live is actually the period that is plagued with problems, and that maybe it's a good thing to see these already-damaging systems dissolve.

Hijacking Adagio

I just got the Leonard Slatkin recording of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings and some other tracks that I am not familiar with yet. This morning, I put it on and within a few notes of the Adagio, I actually teared up some. This stuff got all up inside me with no warning, despite having heard it a few times in my mp3 collection, whatever scattered versions I may have collected. I knew only a little about the Adagio, but the stuff that stuck for me was knowing that it was sort of the unofficial compostion of national mourning. It was the soundtrack to the funerals of Franklin Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy. Not a bad association to have, especially for Barber who wrote the thing when he was about 23 or so. Man, I remember what I did when I was 23 and it wasn't even worthy of the tape I recorded it to.

But this last week has been one of working hard on getting my peak oil presentation together, and making the website and some promo stuff for it. And whenever I am involved in reading about that stuff, sometimes it is very hard to do that and not hurt. I mean, who wants to envision a world in tatters, especially the sort that we have now, with all our needs met and all our desires ready to be fulfilled? Who wants to envision population crashes and sustained warfare against anyone who has something we haven't (and vice versa)? Who wants to think of getting our drinking water out of a river or lake into which a factory pumped effluent for 30 years? The images in my head about the overlapping and reinforcing clusterfucks that might lie ahead are disturbing.

A few weeks ago at my church, our minister Jerry Lawritson gave a very comprehensive lecture (sort of an extracirricular thing he offers once a year) on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was willing to give up his right to consider himself a Christian once he committed himself to working with a conspiracy group with an aim to kill Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was a model Christian, despite entering into a plot which was designed to fulfill what under normal conditions was definitely not a Christian act. But Hitler was not your normal man, and the WW2 years were not normal conditions. Anyhow, the lecture was really stirring on its own merits, but the music I was asked to play before hand (I am the dude who records various church events, and does other vaguely technical stuff) was Anton Bruckner's 7th Symphony in E, but only one part: the adagio. The notes that came with the lecture are as follows:

On April 30, 1945 as news of Hitler's death traveled across Berlin, even as the Russian army entered the heart of the city, Berlin radio played this very music by this same conductor [Wilhelm Furtwangler] to mourn the fuehrer. Bruckner would have been appalled. Incidentally, the last recording made by Herbert von Karajan was Bruckner's 7th as he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic. Karajan had been the darling of Field Marshall Hermann Goering and a member of the Nazi party. It was a fact he never recanted. The corruption of talented people and culture was a Nazi specialty. This music reminds us that the demonic often wears a nice face.

Indeed. What part of Hitler's contribution to history earned him the right to have beautiful music played at his funeral? You know, the Church even allowed him a "Christian" burial, and not a summary execution by the side of an open pit grave, which would be more fitting for a man of his station. How does this happen and not go unpunished?

By many accounts, FDR and JFK were good presidents. Good enough to have Barber's Adagio For Strings played at their funerals, anyhow. And a damned fine piece it is. In fact, it is one of the best things I have ever heard, anywhere, at any time. It is just passion put to music. It is not dissonant or upsetting. It is not happy and gay. It is not overly long or too short. It is not particularly virtuosic, but it is not without musical merit. It is just good human emotion conveyed through four types of string instruments. And as an elegy, it certainly makes sense. It does have that slow moving graceful sort of presentation about it.

When I think of it, the images come to mind: mostly the stark and disturbing images of the 20th century come to mind, but also the images that I see when I read about peak oil and the possible things to come along with that. It's a lot of sadness, disaster, doom, and pain. But more than that—it's mourning the loss of a whole chunk of humanity and its progress, as for the first time in centuries, I think we are about to take steps backwards, de-evolving. Being de-evolved is not as bad as going through the process of de-evolving. When I think of de-evolution, I see sights of people mourning the loss of the material items they surrounded themselves to keep themselves "happy." I could see them mourning the loss of the environment, and their latent shame and regret in handing over their God-given rights and freedoms to a government that promised doing so was for their best interest. I see people in America huddled around an oil barrel fire pit in downtown squares and industrial parks. People living in slums where they need to recycle scraps from the industrial age to survive. I see people making odd use of cars and appliances as they end up disintegrating into little more than parts and containers. I see people beaten down when they realize they had money but no wealth, and all the while with their own fervent support of the system. I see people wandering almost like zombies in search of food, and having to settle for some rather dire solutions to get by (robbery, assault on others, prostitution, etc.) I see young people born after the oil crash who still hear their parents and grandparents talking about planes, cars, rock concerts with lighting, NASCAR racing, and rockets going into space. The young people have no way to relate to all that and all they can do is express anger and hatred toward anyone who was to blame for ruining the world for them while still being regaled with stories about the "good old days." Some of these people might just want to kill old people for ruining the world for their own greedy pursuits, or maybe even total indifference toward the older folks, leaving them with little option but to curl up and die. I see a reversion to the days when women are little more than chattle, and are the subject of a lot of misdirected anger and aggression. I see illiteracy as a pretty widespread thing because even today, literacy is in a perilous spot. I see a broken education system that will never return to the good old days in the mid 20th century when education came within reach of more people than ever. I see people having to do a lot more physical work for no money but instead having to settle for the satisfaction of knowing that they are alive (if people still have the ability to consider that a good thing). I see people having to use family planning methods we consider barbaric (abortion, infanticide, selling children, whatever) only so that they can allow the already born to survive. I see the compassionate people having abortions to save people unneeded suffering at least while things sort themselves out. After all what sort of world will we turn over to the next two generations in particular? Toxic, dysfunctional, warring, colder, more disease-ridden, broken, corrupt. What will the next two generations think of you and I if we sit by and let history steamroll over us without raising a finger because it was more important to watch American Idol or The Nanny, or to go cruising the boulevard in search of easy pussy, or whatever garbage passes for culture and recreation now? How will we look our grandchildren in the eyes and not expect them to spit in our faces or to kill us in our sleep while we are diabetic, unfit old farts who only sit around and bemoan the loss of all our luxuries while they have to eat out of the trash and drink toxic stew?

Part of my response to the Barber Adagio this morning was a whole string of these images flooding my head, along with the realization that if Hitler (or anyone misguided enough to carry on his program after he died) could give himself a pat on the back with the Bruckner adagio, then some fuckhead such as Bush, Delay, Frist, or any of these other assholes could do the same. I mean, we are dealing with sick people. Absolutely pathetically and pathologically sick people. They are somehow under the impression that their shit doesn't stink, or that we have been lulled into complacency and olfactory fatigue so that we can't tell that it does, or blinded so that we can't even see they are shitting at all. Or maybe they are confident that since shitting did not appear in the Bible, it therefore did not exist, and that anyone who is convinced otherwise is a God hating athiest scientist or liberal. There are increasingly blurring lines between what Hitler was doing and what our present administration are doing. Piece by piece, they are hijacking this once great nation, a work of art in the pantheon of governmental systems. Hijacking. That is the word. It was not given to them, and even still we are not really turning it over willingly. They are playing peoples fears, the same as National Socialists did in the 20s and 30s in Germany. They are catering to people's existing insecurites and neurosis that they are somehow in danger of losing their dignity if they can't be in a position of sheer power and self delusion. They are driving it like they stole it, because steal it is just what they did. They have no plans for the future—a situation which made Bill Moyers ask, what business do these people with no vision for a future have governing this country? Indeed. Why are they holding the reins? We are governed essentially by nihilistic fascists. They have no desire to preserve the world, or to enhance cultural or scientific development except to further very narrow agendas. They have no interest in the future. They believe the world is so wretched and broken that it must all be flushed down the toilet.

They aren't speaking for me. And I would wager a guess they aren't speaking for you either. In fact, the nutcases who the Bush party can claim "voted" for this madness amounts to about one percent of the GLOBAL population, and only a little over 1/6th of the national population! So where is this mandate they supposedly have? Or have they just hijacked the place for their own business? When will they steal Barber's Adagio For Strings and defile that piece of humanistic greatness the same as the Nazis defiled Bruckner? After they remove a few more civil liberties, and convince people that science and secular humanism is what is bringing ruin upon our nation? Recently I read about a Baptist minister that excommunicated a church member who did not vote for Bush. WTF? Sorry, but some things just are not for sale, and some things are not for hijacking. Some things are too precious or sacred to let fall into the hands of bad men. In fact, I might venture to say the entire world is too precious and sacred to let fall to the hands of bad men.

Man, I am so glad I keep my TVMINDPOISONING to a minimum. It frees up a lot of mental space so I can get down and do some real thinking.

A Bad Sign

You know it is not a good sign when you see a 99 cent store liquidating its inventory, with all things priced at 69 cents.

I'm not making this up. A week or so ago I was in the Sports Arena area taking some stuff to Goodwill, and just before I got there, there was a sign on the curb with this announcement. No shit.

So The War Isn't About Oil, Eh?

On the eve of the second anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, I was perusing the Iraq timeline on Cooperative Research dot ORG and found this morsel of information. Cooperative Research dot ORG is also home to the findings of one Paul Thompson, who wrote a book called "The Terror Timeline" that chronicles about 25 years of events that have made mainstream news, and once put in some order, tell a convincing story that 9/11 was not inevitable or unpreventable. Even Richard Clarke (ex-counterterrorism expert) now uses that book to help teach his Harvard class. So it carries some legitimate weight. It also happens that Paul (aka Harlan) Thompson is a member of my church, or used to be when he lived here before he went to Stanford. His mother and father are still regular core members of my church, and I see them each week. Harlan now lives in New Zealand after years of working in southeast Asia. He is only about six years older than I am. Once upon a time, we were in the same Sunday school group together.

Anyhow, here is something that can be found on the website. I don't know if this is his own research, but it's compelling. The sources are cited and the articles are linked to from Cooperative Research. This one bit is about halfway down the page, but there are other interesting things along the way.

April 2001. A report commissioned by former US Secretary of State James Baker and the Council on Foreign Relations titled, “Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century” is submitted to Vice President Cheney. “The report is linked to a veritable who's who of US hawks, oilmen and corporate bigwigs.” The report says the “central dilemma” for the US administration is that “the American people continue to demand plentiful and cheap energy without sacrifice or inconvenience.” It warns that the US is running out of oil, with a painful end to cheap fuel already in sight. It argues that “the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma,” and that one of the “consequences” of this is a “need for military intervention” to secure its oil supply. It argues that Iraq needs to be overthrown so the US can control its oil. [Sunday Herald, 10/05/02; Sydney Morning Herald, 12/26/02 Sources: Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century]

Okay. I hope everyone is happy that we got brave men fighting for that oil. I've said for a while that it's a double edged sword that the Bushies are at war—they really are fighting for us, they just didn't tell us the real reason. It would be nice if they would have just said, 'people, we gotta go get the oil so you can drive that Hummer, or so that NASCAR can keep burning gas senselessly, or so that a million businesses can stay open around the clock, or at least leave their lights on all the time.' People are rightfully pissed that the war was sold to them under false pretenses, but they really aren't ready to hear the real reasons for it, nor are they ready to find out what it would take to prevent such wars.

So two years have gone by now and we've lost 1520 guys, and injured many thousands more, not to mention all the "collateral damage" deaths of untold Iraqis. And yet the Hummers keep rolling off the lines, and NASCAR keeps on running. People keep flying for cheap to Disney World and Las Vegas. My question is, when will this pursuit for oil finally go out of style because getting the stuff costs too much? I'm not talking about the $50 or $80 barrels of crude. I'm talking about dead guys. When will people finally have lost enough brothers and fathers and sons to this war that maybe they think its not such a good idea to be energy pigs, and to vote for idiots such as those who rule our country now? Okay, the Hummer costs $55,000 and you can afford it. Great. Maybe you wouldn't mind sending your son over to the war to get the oil you need to run that POS. Maybe you voted Republican in the last election. Great, go fight the war that you asked for. I didn't ask for that war. I don't have enemies in Iraq. I'm willing to not be stupidly arrogant in my energy consumption. Maybe the price will rise to unbearable levels and people will wake the fuck up.

I've heard it said that the only thing worse than running out of oil is NOT running out of oil. If we keep getting the stuff for cheap, we will continue to abuse it, and each other in the pursuit of it. It will continue polluting our environment, it will continue allowing wanton destruction of land, it will continue the nightmare that is globalization, it will continue the power plays in business and politics. If that isn't scary enough, maybe we'll all get stuck in traffic. Evidently all the other stuff doesn't register with most people, so maybe the threat of losing more of our valuable time to sitting on the freeway will jostle people out of their slumbers.

WTF? Why do I even try? The nation will be bankrupt even before peak oil gets us.