Over the last week or so, I’ve heard from a remarkable number of people who feel that a major crisis is in the offing. The people in question don’t know each other, many of them have even less contact with the mass media than I do, and the sense they’ve tried to express to me is inchoate enough that they’ve been left fumbling for words, but they all end up reaching for the same metaphors: that something in the air just now seems reminiscent of the American colonies in 1775, France in 1789, America in 1860, Europe in 1914, or the world in 1939: a sense of being poised on the brink of convulsive change, with the sound of gunfire and marching boots coming ever more clearly from the dimly seen abyss ahead.
It’s not an unreasonable feeling, all things considered. In Washington DC, Obama’s flunkies are beating the war drums over Ukraine, threatening to send shipments of allegedly “defensive” weapons to join the mercenaries and military advisors we’ve already not-so-covertly got over there. Russian officials have responded to American saber-rattling by stating flatly that a US decision to arm Kiev will be the signal for all-out war. The current Ukrainian regime, installed by a US-sponsored coup and backed by NATO, means to Russia precisely what a hostile Canadian government installed by a Chinese-sponsored coup and backed by the People’s Liberation Army would mean to the United States; if Obama’s trademark cluelessness leads him to ignore that far from minor point and decide that the Russians are bluffing, we could be facing a European war within weeks.
Head south and west from the fighting around Donetsk, and another flashpoint is heating up toward an explosion of its own just now. Yes, that would be Greece, where the new Syriza government has refused to back down from the promises that got it into office: promises that center on the rejection of the so-called “austerity” policies that have all but destroyed the Greek economy since they were imposed in 2009.
This shouldn’t be news to anyone; those same policies, though they’ve been praised to the skies by neoliberal economists for decades now as a guaranteed ticket to prosperity, have had precisely the opposite effect in every single country where they’ve been put in place.
Despite that track record of unbroken failure, the EU—in particular, Germany, which has benefited handsomely from the gutting of southern European economies—continues to insist that Greece must accept what amounts to a perpetual state of debt peonage. The Greek defense minister noted in response in a recent speech that if Europe isn’t willing to cut a deal, other nations might well do so. He’s quite correct; it’s probably a safe bet that cold-eyed men in Moscow and Beijing are busy right now figuring out how best to step through the window of opportunity the EU is flinging open for them. If they do so—well, I’ll leave it to my readers to consider how the US is likely to respond to the threat of Russian air and naval bases in Greece, which would be capable of projecting power anywhere in the eastern and central Mediterranean basin. Here again, war is a likely outcome; I hope that the Greek government is braced for an attempt at regime change.
That is to say, the decline and fall of industrial civilization is proceeding in the normal way, at pretty much the normal pace. The thermodynamic foundations tipped over into decline first, as stocks of cheap abundant fossil fuels depleted steadily and the gap had to be filled by costly and much less abundant replacements, driving down net energy; the economy went next, as more and more real wealth had to be pulled out of all other economic activities to keep the energy supply more or less steady, until demand destruction cut in and made that increasingly frantic effort moot; now a global political and military superstructure dependent on cheap abundant fossil fuels, and on the economic arrangement that all of that surplus energy made possible, is cracking at the seams.
One feature of times like these is that the number of people who can have an influence on the immediate outcome declines steadily as crisis approaches. In the years leading up to 1914, for example, a vast number of people contributed to the rising spiral of conflict between the aging British Empire and its German rival, but the closer war came, the narrower the circle of decision-makers became, until a handful of politicians in Germany, France, and Britain had the fate of Europe in their hands. A few more bad decisions, and the situation was no longer under anybody’s control; thereafter, the only option left was to let the juggernaut of the First World War roll mindlessly onward to its conclusion.
In the same way, as recently as the 1980s, many people in the United States and elsewhere had some influence on how the industrial age would end; unfortunately most of them backed politicians who cashed in the resources that could have built a better future on one last round of absurd extravagance, and a whole landscape of possibilities went by the boards. Step by step, as the United States backed itself further and further into a morass of short-term gimmicks with ghastly long-term consequences, the number of people who have had any influence on the trajectory we’re on has narrowed steadily, and as we approach what may turn out to be the defining crisis of our time, a handful of politicians in a handful of capitals are left to make the last decisions that can shape the situation in any way at all, before the tanks begin to roll and the fighter-bombers rise up from their runways.
Out here on the fringes of the collective conversation of our time, where archdruids lurk and heresies get uttered, the opportunity to shape events as they happen is a very rare thing. Our role, rather, is to set agendas for the future, to take ideas that are unthinkable in the mainstream today and prepare them for their future role as the conventional wisdom of eras that haven’t dawned yet. Every phrase on the lips of today’s practical men of affairs, after all, was once a crazy notion taken seriously only by the lunatic fringe—yes, that includes democracy, free-market capitalism, and all the other shibboleths of our age.
With that in mind, while we wait to see whether today’s practical men of affairs stumble into war the way they did in 1914, I propose to shift gears and talk about something else—something that may seem whimsical, even pointless, in the light of the grim martial realities just discussed. It’s neither whimsical nor pointless, as it happens, but the implications may take a little while to dawn even on those of my readers who’ve been following the last few years of discussions most closely. Let’s begin with a handful of data points.
Item: Britain’s largest bookseller recently noted that sales of the Kindle e-book reader have dropped like a rock in recent months, while sales of old-fashioned printed books are up. Here in the more gizmocentric USA, e-books retain more of their erstwhile popularity, but the bloom is off the rose; among the young and hip, it’s not hard at all to find people who got rid of their book collections in a rush of enthusiasm when e-books came out, regretted the action after it was too late, and now are slowly restocking their bookshelves while their e-book readers collect cobwebs or, at best, find use as a convenience for travel and the like.
Item: more generally, a good many of the hottest new trends in popular culture aren’t new trends at all—they’re old trends revived, in many cases, by people who weren’t even alive to see them the first time around. Kurt B. Reighley’s lively guide The United States of Americana was the first, and remains the best, introduction to the phenomenon, one that embraces everything from burlesque shows and homebrewed bitters to backyard chickens and the revival of Victorian martial arts. One pervasive thread that runs through the wild diversity of this emerging subculture is the simple recognition that many of these older things are better, in straightforwardly measurable senses, than their shiny modern mass-marketed not-quite-equivalents.
Item: within that subculture, a small but steadily growing number of people have taken the principle to its logical extreme and adopted the lifestyles and furnishings of an earlier decade wholesale in their personal lives. The 1950s are a common target, and so far as I know, adopters of 1950s culture are the furthest along the process of turning into a community, but other decades are increasingly finding the same kind of welcome among those less than impressed by what today’s society has on offer. Meanwhile, the reenactment scene has expanded spectacularly in recent years from the standard hearty fare of Civil War regiments and the neo-medievalism of the Society for Creative Anachronism to embrace almost any historical period you care to name. These aren’t merely dress-up games; go to a buckskinner’s rendezvous or an outdoor SCA event, for example, and you’re as likely as not to see handspinners turning wool into yarn with drop spindles, a blacksmith or two laboring over a portable forge, and the like.
Other examples of the same broad phenomenon could be added to the list, but these will do for now. I’m well aware, of course, that most people—even most of my readers—will have dismissed the things just listed as bizarre personal eccentricities, right up there with the goldfish-swallowing and flagpole-sitting of an earlier era. I’d encourage those of my readers who had that reaction to stop, take a second look, and tease out the mental automatisms that make that dismissal so automatic a part of today’s conventional wisdom. Once that’s done, a third look might well be in order, because the phenomenon sketched out here marks a shift of immense importance for our future.
For well over two centuries now, since it first emerged as the crackpot belief system of a handful of intellectuals on the outer fringes of their culture, the modern ideology of progress has taken it as given that new things were by definition better than whatever they replaced. That assumption stands at the heart of contemporary industrial civilization’s childlike trust in the irreversible cumulative march of progress toward a future among the stars. Finding ways to defend that belief even when it obviously wasn’t true—when the latest, shiniest products of progress turned out to be worse in every meaningful sense than the older products they elbowed out of the way—was among the great growth industries of the 20th century; even so, there were plenty of cases where progress really did seem to measure up to its billing. Given the steady increases of energy per capita in the world’s industrial nations over the last century or so, that was a predictable outcome.
The difficulty, of course, is that the number of cases where new things really are better than what they replace has been shrinking steadily in recent decades, while the number of cases where old products are quite simply better than their current equivalents—easier to use, more effective, more comfortable, less prone to break, less burdened with unwanted side effects and awkward features, and so on—has been steadily rising. Back behind the myth of progress, like the little man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, stand two unpalatable and usually unmentioned realities. The first is that profits, not progress, determines which products get marketed and which get roundfiled; the second is that making a cheaper, shoddier product and using advertising gimmicks to sell it anyway has been the standard marketing strategy across a vast range of American businesses for years now.
More generally, believers in progress used to take it for granted that progress would sooner or later bring about a world where everyone would live exciting, fulfilling lives brimfull of miracle products and marvelous experiences. You still hear that sort of talk from the faithful now and then these days, but it’s coming to sound a lot like all that talk about the glorious worker’s paradise of the future did right around the time the Iron Curtain came down for good. In both cases, the future that was promised didn’t have much in common with the one that actually showed up. The one we got doesn’t have some of the nastier features of the one the former Soviet Union and its satellites produced—well, not yet, at least—but the glorious consumer’s paradise described in such lavish terms a few decades back got lost on the way to the spaceport, and what we got instead was a bleak landscape of decaying infrastructure, abandoned factories, prostituted media, and steadily declining standards of living for everyone outside the narrowing circle of the privileged, with the remnants of our once-vital democratic institutions hanging above it all like rotting scarecrows silhouetted against a darkening sky.
In place of those exciting, fulfilling lives mentioned above, furthermore, we got the monotony and stress of long commutes, cubicle farms, and would-you-like-fries-with that for the slowly shrinking fraction of our population who can find a job at all. The Onion, with its usual flair for packaging unpalatable realities in the form of deadpan humor, nailed it a few days ago with a faux health-news article announcing that the best thing office workers could do for their health is stand up at their desk, leave the office, and never go back. Joke or not, it’s not bad advice; if you have a full-time job in today’s America, the average medieval peasant had a less stressful job environment and more days off than you do; he also kept a larger fraction of the product of his labor than you’ll ever see.
Then, of course, if you’re like most Americans, you’ll numb yourself once you get home by flopping down on the sofa and spending most of your remaining waking hours staring at little colored pictures on a glass screen. It’s remarkable how many people get confused about what this action really entails. They insist that they’re experiencing distant places, traveling in worlds of pure imagination, and so on through the whole litany of self-glorifying drivel the mass media likes to employ in its own praise. Let us please be real: when you watch a program about the Amazon rain forest, you’re not experiencing the Amazon rain forest; you’re experiencing colored pictures on a screen, and you’re only getting as much of the experience as fits through the narrow lens of a video camera and the even narrower filter of the production process. The difference between experiencing something and watching it on TV or the internet, that is to say, is precisely the same as the difference between making love and watching pornography; in each case, the latter is a very poor substitute for the real thing.
For most people in today’s America, in other words, the closest approach to the glorious consumer’s paradise of the future they can expect to get is eight hours a day, five days a week of mindless, monotonous work under the constant pressure of management efficiency experts, if they’re lucky enough to get a job at all, with anything up to a couple of additional hours commuting and any off-book hours the employer happens to choose to demand from them into the deal, in order to get a paycheck that buys a little less each month—inflation is under control, the government insists, but prices somehow keep going up—of products that get more cheaply made, more likely to be riddled with defects, and more likely to pose a serious threat to the health and well-being of their users, with every passing year. Then they can go home and numb their nervous systems with those little colored pictures on the screen, showing them bland little snippets of experiences they will never have, wedged in there between the advertising.
That’s the world that progress has made. That’s the shining future that resulted from all those centuries of scientific research and technological tinkering, all the genius and hard work and sacrifice that have gone into the project of progress. Of course there’s more to the consequences of progress than that; progress has saved quite a few children from infectious diseases, and laced the environment with so many toxic wastes that childhood cancer, all but unheard of in 1850, is a routine event today; it’s made impressive contributions to human welfare, while flooding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that will soon make far more impressive contributions to human suffering and death—well, I could go on along these lines for quite a while. True believers in the ideology of perpetual progress like to insist that all the good things ought to be credited to progress while all the bad things ought to be blamed on something else, but that’s not so plausible an article of faith as it once was, and it bids fair to become a great deal less common as the downsides of progress become more and more difficult to ignore.
The data points I noted earlier in this week’s post, I’ve come to believe, are symptoms of that change, the first stirrings of wind that tell of the storm to come. People searching for a better way of living than the one our society offers these days are turning to the actual past, rather than to some imaginary future, in that quest. That’s the immense shift I mentioned earlier. What makes it even more momentous is that by and large, it’s not being done in the sort of grim Puritanical spirit of humorless renunciation that today’s popular culture expects from those who want something other than what the consumer economy has on offer. It’s being done, rather, in a spirit of celebration.
One of my readers responded to my post two weeks ago on deliberate technological regress by suggesting that I was proposing a Butlerian jihad of sorts. (Those of my readers who don’t get the reference should pick up a copy of Frank Herbert’s iconic SF novel Dune and read it.) I demurred, for two reasons. First, the Butlerian jihad in Herbert’s novel was a revolt against computer technology, and I see no need for that; once the falling cost of human labor intersects the rising cost of energy and technology, and it becomes cheaper to hire file clerks and accountants than to maintain the gargantuan industrial machine that keeps computer technology available, computers will go away, or linger as a legacy technology for a narrowing range of special purposes until the hardware finally burns out.
The second reason, though, is the more important. I’m not a fan of jihads, or of holy wars of any flavor; history shows all too well that when you mix politics and violence with religion, any actual religious content vanishes away, leaving its castoff garments to cover the naked rule of force and fraud. If you want people to embrace a new way of looking at things, furthermore, violence, threats, and abusive language don’t work, and it’s even less effective to offer that new way as a ticket to virtuous misery, along the lines of the Puritanical spirit noted above. That’s why so much of the green-lifestyle propaganda of the last thirty years has done so little good—so much of it has been pitched as a way to suffer self-righteously for the good of Gaia, and while that approach appeals to a certain number of wannabe martyrs, that’s not a large enough fraction of the population to matter.
The people who are ditching their Kindles and savoring books as physical objects, brewing their own beer and resurrecting other old arts and crafts, reformatting their lives in the modes of a past decade, or spending their spare time reconnecting with the customs and technologies of an earlier time—these people aren’t doing any of those things out of some passion for self-denial. They’re doing them because these things bring them delights that the shoddy mass-produced lifestyles of the consumer economy can’t match. What these first stirrings suggest to me is that the way forward isn’t a Butlerian jihad, but a Butlerian carnival—a sensuous celebration of the living world outside the cubicle farms and the glass screens, which will inevitably draw most of its raw materials from eras, technologies, and customs of the past, which don’t require the extravagant energy and resource inputs that the modern consumer economy demands, and so will be better suited to a future defined by scarce energy and resources.
309 comments:
2/11/15, 4:59 PM
latheChuck said...
Acute cognitive impairment, eh? Dementia? Do you see any of that in your neighborhood?
How about this headline, from MedScape.com: "'Strongest Evidence Yet' Links Anticholinergic Drugs, Dementia"
Maybe a pill to stop the sniffles isn't such a good idea, after all. Maybe lying awake in bed, trying to figure out how to navigate through this turbulent world is part of a solution, rather than a problem to be medicated away.
But, then, haven't we always known that Prozac was not supportive of critical thinking, just as we always knew that inhaling tobacco smoke was not supportive of respiration? I sense a tipping point, where the link between medication and dementia becomes too commonplace to be newsworthy, yet somehow manages to be ignored by the majority of the population.
2/11/15, 5:17 PM
sgage said...
2/11/15, 5:20 PM
Tom Hopkins said...
2/11/15, 5:25 PM
Kutamun said...
I love how they routinely refer to us as " the anglo zionist imperialists" ....
One Russian analyst suggested the anglo zionists ( us) are rehashing the old world war 2 tactic of the anglosphere ( as outlined in Engdahls " a century of war" ) . The theory goes that the US arms funds and fuels the nazis ( ukraine govt) ensures they are pitched into battle against russia with the aim of causing a lot of battle damage and international discredit to same ; at a certain point in the conflict support is withdrawn leaving the bemused neo nazi puppets twisting in the wind as they and their military are totally destroyed and the country descends into anarchy and chaos . In the aftermath , a power vaccuum in the destroyed country is filled by the anglo occupying force and a new , permanent front is established against the exhausted ( novo)russians for the next phase of the geopolitical war ..
Wouldnt mind betting this final front will run along the Dnieper river ...
I watched American Sniper the other day and really enjoyed its dispassionate representation of the Iraq war ...Clint Eastwood seems to not give a hoot for ideology and simply faithfully reports whatever it is that he is currently observing in the life of the american nation , leaving it up to the viewer to flesh out any moral meaning for himself . Above all i felt a sense of tragedy for the pathos of the entire senseless slaughter , and an admiration for the bravery of the fighting men of both sides . It was amazing how Clint showed the war seeping back into everyday american life , its darkness permeating the sunlit spaces of the american suburban dream , a subject we gave touched on here many times as the war is a place that exists in the hearts of the millions of vets , wherever they may be . " a thought is a thing and a mood is a place ". Wondered what it would be like to sit down over a beer and discuss the energy situation with the vets , pointing out americas twenty million barrel a day habit and ; would this help them put things in persepective ??
I like your butlerian jihad meme ..the retreat into archaism as Toynbee said wasnt it ? ...like huddling in the corner playing with grandmas things , works for me . Saw an article about our own greeny bard John Butler here in Oz who is famous for lamenting the demise of the planet . It said he hasnt been home for a year as he has been jetting all over the planet to various concerts on tour , but since buying his little organic farm he is feeling incredibly grounded ! , seriously , waht does that tell the young people !
2/11/15, 5:29 PM
Steve Morgan said...
"True, there still remained the exterior forms of worship and a nominal and oral reverence to God and Christ, but that was all; for the offence of the holy cross ceased, the power of godliness was denied, self-denial lost, and, though fruitful in the invention of ceremonious ornaments, yet barren in the blessed fruits of the Spirit. And a thousand shells cannot make one kernel, or many dead corpses one living man.
Thus religion fell from experience to tradition, and worship from power to form, from life to letter; and, instead of putting up lively and powerful requests, animated by a deep sense of want and the assistance of the Holy Spirit--by which the ancients prayed, wrestled, and prevailed with God--behold a by-rote mumpsimus, a dull and insipid formality, made up of corporeal bowings and cringings, garments and furnitures, perfumes, voices, and music, fitter for the reception of some earthly prince than the heavenly worship of the one true and immortal God, who is an eternal, invisible Spirit."
-No Cross, No Crown (1682)
Of course, he was calling specifically for self-denial and martyrdom, but perhaps that just shows how deeply ingrained in the American psyche that tradition is. After all, it does appeal to some, even today, in a land founded by religious eccentrics. Still, the carnival sounds more pleasant than a jihad.
The way you described the different avenues people are taking to search for a more meaningful and fulfilling way of life sounds a lot like a cultural or religious revival, too.
2/11/15, 5:53 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
All this talk of converging major crises sent me off to get a strong cup of peppermint tea before settling back down for further reading.
It is funny that you mention the advertising industry. Recently I spotted an article by a serious guy who has worked in that industry here for many decades. He writes in a sort of flippant, confidential manner, but the other week he sort of described collapse as a form of recycling: Time to recycle Australia's economy. I wonder whether he fully understood the full import of that particular article and his own place in that great collapse? Perhaps he believes that this is something that happens to other people? Dunno. It was weird though.
Maybe a few years back I may have mentioned my broken window theory? Not sure really, but it goes something like: If you have a house or other premises that has a broken window out front for all the world to see, and if that window is not repaired shortly, then soon enough a second and third window will quickly get smashed. That building will eventually become toast. I've witnessed developers use that technique to get around heritage demolition restrictions as after a short period of time the neighbours are cheering on the demolition. Clever huh? And, I reckon it is a good metaphor for our society too.
Anyway, the broken window theory can also be applied to smart phones. I don't have one, but pretty much all of them that I do see now have broken screens. This is clearly a design flaw (the little sprite sitting on my shoulder says - maybe? hehe!). Anyway, whatever. But here's the thing, people embraced them, but they are less excited about them as a result and I never miss the opportunity to lay the boots in. The other day as I spotted one whilst having a conversation with someone, I said: How did that happen? Reply: I dropped it. My reply: I took my very old school phone out and dropped it on the ground right in front of them and then laughed! Oh look, it still works said I! hehe! I'm still laughing about that to myself even now.
cont...
2/11/15, 5:55 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
I'm really grumpy about intermediaries and I'm always thinking up ways to circumvent their particular form of nastiness. Did you know that between the regulatory bodies, the professional bodies, the insurers and the tools of the trade - they take fully one third of what I earn before tax. That means I have to work four months every year just to pay for those leeches.
Mind you, I'm also starting to get a bit of push back - from mainly females too - in the local community who take umbrage at my existence. It is a form of normalisation I reckon, but it takes the form of: "why aren't you working today?" It is happening often enough that it is beginning to annoy me. Sooner or later I'm going to tell them I'm going to a funeral - they just won't understand that I mean the funeral of the industrial era! Just sayin...
That TV. I may have mentioned that I occasionally partake of that particular drug in very small doses. Anyway, over the past year or so I have cut back to very, very little exposure. The reason for that was because I began watching a show called: Breaking Bad. Look, everyone seems to like the show and it was acclaimed, but then I like stuff that they don't seem to so the “like” is clearly a relative concept. I didn't watch the whole series. Anyway, I ditched the TV for quite a long while after that because I found being exposed to the extreme storylines and extreme second hand emotions is not actually good for your health. Seriously the culture of escalation has arisen because you guys are programming it and it isn't a good reaction to circumstances under normal conditions. But that message is seriously getting sent out and it aint a good one.
Cheers
Chris
PS: I have a new blog post up with a massive wombat - gotta love 'em - more trailer repairs, some steel steps, hot weather and a very strange unidentified frog. Truly, I can't make this stuff up: One wombat to rule them all. Hope you like my little joke too?
2/11/15, 5:55 PM
Tom Bannister said...
https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/germany-emerges" Germany Emerges is republished with permission of Stratfor
I sense some theme music would be appropriate here too (Gustav Holst - The Planets - Mars, the Bringer of War):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0bcRCCg01I
2/11/15, 6:03 PM
Dave Zoom said...
2/11/15, 6:06 PM
Chester said...
Maybe it's just hard to see these trends on the macro level when you're young. In aggregate, millennials my age are probably worse off than our parents, but it's hard to see when as an individual, your life still progresses from stage to stage, your paycheck getting bigger and things still moving forward.
It's only when you sit back and think about it that you realize that you're not doing as well as you might have several decades ago. Feels like I should have more cash left to indulge in my own Butlerian carnival.
I do have money for a Kindle though!
2/11/15, 6:08 PM
Jason Fligger said...
2/11/15, 6:14 PM
Matthew Powell said...
2/11/15, 6:18 PM
Strovenovus said...
For myself, it was a sense of the emptiness of my days as I went through the routine of an ostensibly successful life that led me to this website. Although the insights that you give has a somewhat bitter taste at times, it also tends to help me see past the piles of debris that clutter this modern existence.
On a somewhat related note, here is further confirmation that peak oil continues to gain traction in popular culture, even amidst reports of a "surplus" of oil, though the article holds out the promise of renewed frack production when prices rise again. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a623e1e8-b11a-11e4-831b-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3RTDg0VmX
2/11/15, 6:22 PM
Grebulocities said...
Take two Oklahoma good ol' boys named Bill. Put them in a bank whose physical structure is a three-story shopping mall building next to a noodle shop in Oklahoma City. Give them a pathological inability to turn down borrowers. Add an oil crisis following a previous oil crisis which took real oil prices to a level that had never been reached before in the automobile age and would not be reached again until 2006.
Just like Galbraith's book on the Great Depression, I was blown away by the parallels to today despite knowing they'd exist ahead of time. It was based on drilling techniques allowing exploitation of new (deep in this case) but expensive gas. Almost all of the operators were small independent firms with names ending in "Energy ", "Resources", or similar, with the majors mostly staying out. Credit underwriting was laughable - literally, in that I burst out laughing when I found out about the revolving loans agreed to at bars and scrawled on napkins. People who raised questions were accused of not understanding the business. Above all, oil prices are claimed to be on a permanent climb, and this was not allowed to be questioned.
From here, the comedy keeps getting better! There is of course the clothes-free party you mentioned, which occurred on one of the many spur-of-the-moment trips on company jets to Vegas. One banker made so many fraudulent loans on horses (intentionally labeled as energy loans and issued to people who would buy his horses to yield him a hefty profit) that it caused its own mini-bubble in Oklahoma quarter hoses. Two Ponzi schemers utilized easy credit to scam each other. Energy companies that rarely or never earned enough to cover even the interest on their loans bought the latest Lear jets and other extravagant items - there were companies with more pilots than geologists! The regulators stumbled over each other and failed to stop the obvious shenanigans until the bubble had popped on its own. Penn Square itself is not bailed out, but when its failure causes the failure of Continental Illinois, the too-big-to-fail doctrine is born. And so on, and so forth.
Even the side of me that laughs at mayhem is terrified that we'll finally make a WWI-like blunder that turns our proxy war in Ukraine into a full-scale war between Great Powers. But I will admit that I'm really looking forward to the stories of financial buffoonery that we're going to hear when even the most "creative" accounting fails to save the frackers. The fracking bubble is so much larger than the Oklahoma bubble that I can't even fathom what we're going to hear soon...
2/11/15, 6:23 PM
Brian Kaller said...
Thanks for referencing my favourite science fiction book, as well as the SCA – I was enjoying one of their events just last weekend.
When I give talks about this sort of thing, I tell people that when we picture an ideal world, it always uses traditional technology. No matter how much CGI Hollywood movies has, their images of a Nice Quiet Life will be something without such technology – The Shire, say, from Lord of the Rings.
Even when the world pictured is more technological than ours – Star Trek, Blade Runner or Minority Report, to use a few examples – the heroes always enjoy their happy ending in a log cabin in the woods or something.
I also note how the usual energy curve – starting from nothing, rocketing to the top of the chart and crashing – looks pretty ominous. Depending on what you’re measuring, though, you could also flip the curve upside-down, and see a world that plunged into trouble in recent centuries and now is climbing out. Neither sums up the whole truth, of course, but I find it a useful exercise.
Also, my belated sympathy on the death of Mr. Catton – I had been reading Bottleneck not long ago, and can certainly see his influence in you.
2/11/15, 6:28 PM
Hanshishiro Kami said...
Interesting idea. I like it. It may work. Who knows?
And the reasons that make people change are often surprising. I know someone that become steampunk as a political statement.
The reason ?
If there were sufragettes on the 19th century and on the 21st century the Congress of the United States refuses to pass a law that would grant equal pay to wemen, there was no real progress. The logical step was to emulate those revolutionaries in the 19th century and fight for some serious change. And get some brass knucles, instead of brass googles.
2/11/15, 6:30 PM
hcaparoso said...
One thing I want to say is how much this blog has meant to me these past five years or so when I discovered it. I truly thought I was the only one thinking and feeling so much loss as I saw what was happening in the world. Even as a small child I would get upset when I saw trees cut down to widen a road, or put up an ugly building. And like you, I also was born in the Seattle area and so you know how lovely our trees are! But ALL trees are lovely and have feelings. I could feel them when my sisters and I would play out in the woods.
So thank you for the wonderful sense of community you have provided for people like me these past years. You are truly a beacon.
2/11/15, 6:33 PM
ratfink said...
2/11/15, 6:38 PM
Kaitain said...
That is certainly the impression I get from the Russian blogosphere and news media. The refrain I hear over and over again from Russians is, “we don’t want war, but we are ready for one”.
http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/2015/02/ukraine-march-to-ww3.html
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2015/02/social-warning-from-russia-we-are-ready.html
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/03/obama-just-made-things-much-much-worse.html
As for all the not-so-covert military advisors and mercs, I trust you saw the infamous footage of the “Ukrainian” soldier who told a camera crew to “get out of my face” in perfect American English. The real reason why Obama is talking of sending “defensive” weapons is because right now, the pro-Russian rebels are winning hands down and the Ukrainian military is on the verge of collapse, more due to its own incompetence than anything else. The pocket at Debalcevo has now been sealed and a sizeable percentage of what left the Ukrainian Army now finds itself in the same situation as Field Marshal von Paulus’s 6th Army at Stalingrad.
Give it a few more weeks and the only thing standing between Donetsk and Kiev will be the threat of American boots on the ground, which Russia has stated it will not stand for.
Speaking of the possibility of Russian air and naval bases in Greece, Cyprus has already publically offered the Russian Air Force basing rights.
As for Obama, I think Kunstler is right when he says that Obama is now running neck-and-neck with Warren Harding, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce for title of worst president in the history of the United States. Even Richard Nixon, for all of his flaws, was at least competent and aside from Watergate actually did a pretty decent job, while Obama seems to spend most of his time golfing, going to fundraisers and preening for the camera. His universal excuse whenever something goes wrong, like Benghazi or the rollout of Obamacare, is “don’t blame me, I wasn’t in the loop and had no idea what was going on”.
2/11/15, 6:42 PM
Cliff said...
As for the feeling of impending change, I've had that feeling since 2008, at least. But things have somehow kept going along. And I've found instances of people saying back in the eighties, and earlier, that our current system has to collapse soon.
So I'm in this weird state of knowing that something has to give, and knowing that my parents' generation felt the exact same way.
2/11/15, 6:58 PM
Ventriloquist said...
"No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were:
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,
and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls;
it tolls for thee."
John Donne
2/11/15, 7:00 PM
Jeffrey Pikul said...
2/11/15, 7:07 PM
Avery said...
I'm interested in your name-dropping the SCA. This used to be a fairly small hobby, but I now know a grammar school headmistress who drives across the country regularly to sew dresses -- by hand! -- for major events. I wonder whether it might be possible to channel this energy into something bigger than just two or three day events.
2/11/15, 7:07 PM
Mickey Foley said...
Last year I quit my clerical job at a large financial firm. Unlike the Onion article, it took several months for the psychological benefits to manifest, but now I feel like I'm waking from a 15-year-old stupor (the length of time since I graduated from college). I think we've reached the point when corporate jobs offer no real advantages over farm work. But it's taken me a decade since I learned about Peak Oil to finally escape the rat race. There have been a few false starts followed by grudging "homecomings" to the corporate world, a stair-step climb toward self-improvement. It's hard to leave the only working world you've ever known, esp. when doing so forces you to leave your friends behind. But only none of my best friends have the time to hang out anymore, so moving to the boonies isn't as difficult a decision as it used to be.
If you have any sympathy for a dude with an English degree in this economy, check out my blog, Riding the Rubicon at http://ridingtherubicon.blogspot.com/
2/11/15, 7:08 PM
Marinhomelander said...
U.S. Mail.
If just a small cohort of teenagers would realize that Facebook is, so like yesterday, and start sending art projects, poems and objects through the mail, the explosion of its popularity would revive this great institution. Patriots buy stamps and use the mail.
As to the retrenchment of the powers that be, the most vacuous and morally suspect politician of our state, Gavin Newsom, the ex mayor of San Francisco, the man whose only job is waiting for the governor of California to die, the Lt. Governor, is now announcing that he is running for the main office in the next election.
Here in the environmental whitetopia of Marin County, solar panels are now mandatory on ALL new construction, in one of the first of many towns, we hope. The artisan cheesemakers, beekeepers and permaculturalists are selling everything they can produce.
2/11/15, 7:37 PM
Shane Wilson said...
I really do have my fingers crossed that Greece doesn't back down, and gives the boot to austerity, and that it cascades across Europe.
2/11/15, 7:37 PM
John Michael Greer said...
LatheChuck, now surprise me. I'd be astonished if the pharmaceutical industry came out with a medicine that didn't have some ghastly side effect or other. There's a reason I stick with alternative modalities...
Sgage, thank you and I'll look forward to your further comment.
Tom, exactly. I'll be talking about that, and related issues, very soon.
Kutamun, archaism has wrinkles to it that I'm not sure Toynbee grasped; still, I'll be referencing him as we proceed.
Steve, excellent! Yes, Penn's talking about a parallel phenomenon, and yes, there are issues of cultural and religious revival in here, too.
Cherokee, peppermint tea is probably a good choice. As for smart phones with broken windows, you're definitely ahead of the curve; I expect that sort of sly "gotcha!" to be an increasingly common pattern as the cutting edge blunts and breaks, and those who've had the common sense to stay well back of it get to return, with interest, the barbed remarks of the former techno-hip.
Tom, I hadn't -- thank you. As for Holst, yes, a very plausible choice just now!
Dave, I don't think intelligence is regressing, but young people are increasingly being taught not to use it -- and yes, that's a major issue. I'll be discussing it down the road.
Chester, that doesn't surprise me. My guess is that if this country crashes and burns, the folks in DC will be the last people anywhere on Earth to find out about it.
Jason, excellent! That earns you tonight's gold star with crossed monkey wrenches, for an inspired bit of retro-technology. Have you considered starting a side business in reconditioned small appliances that actually (a) work and (b) last? You might be surprised at the potential market.
Matthew, shouldn't that last word be "drude"? ;-)
2/11/15, 8:02 PM
August Johnson said...
I don't own a Ham Radio with a microprocessor in it, all the ones I have, I can repair. I don't consider the handheld radio used to access repeaters in the same class as an HF radio. Nobody “repairs” their own computer these days even though they say they do, they just swap out and throw away huge, complex pieces of the computer. Same goes for the modern Ham Radios, most of them are just a big pile of computers that looks like a radio. The latest ones even have a screen that looks like the one on the latest big smartphones. That screen dies and you can't do anything with the entire radio, it's now a brick, use it to prop your door open. A mechanical analog dial doesn't die. Besides, if you're using the latest “YaeComWood” radio or a 1960's Drake, the person at the other end can't tell the difference! The advances have mostly been in the WhizBang Factor. The old one carries your voice just as well as the modern one.
If I seem like I'm a bit grumpy here, it's because I've seen too many modern radios that had dead parts that couldn't be obtained only a decade after being new. I've also re-wound power transformers and IF transformers on old radios to bring them back to life. I actually have a decent stock of tubes and even discrete transistors to repair older radios but no way can I find all the custom manufactured ICs needed for recent ones.
I've been spending some time reading through old (1920's – 1950's) paper copies of QST, very informative! Very different from reading the electronic version, which I also have. Just holding the 1924 issue in hand is different from reading the exact same on a screen.
@Jason Fligger – I couldn't believe it back in the 90's when I saw the ad where Black & Decker announced their new toaster with a microprocessor to control toasting! It featured 4 memories so everybody could have their own setting.
@Jeffrey Pikul – I never got rid of my LP collection. And in a pinch, they can be played purely mechanically. No electronics needed. Try that with a CD or MP3!
@Marinhomelander – US Mail, exactly!
2/11/15, 8:04 PM
August Johnson said...
Thomas's Observation: The amount of Intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is increasing...
We noticed the trend to not use it even then!
2/11/15, 8:13 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Grebulocities, no question about the denouement of the fracking bubble. I'm laying in a supply of popcorn to pop while the gaudy details unfold.
Brian, that's a fascinating point, and quite relevant. I wonder just now much loathing of the current technological suites lies just beneath the surface of contemporary society.
Hanshishiro, if it inspired your friend to get off the sofa and do something more interesting, excellent. Brass goggles make a good addition to brass knuckles, though -- in a bar fight or a riot, you don't want flying bits of glass in your eyes, after all.
Hcaparoso, you're welcome and thank you! The skill of turning frustration into creativity is one that our great-grandparents knew well -- glad to know that it's still being cultivated.
Ratfink, we did indeed. Thank you!
Kaitain, I won't argue. I wasn't sure that anybody in our time could do a worse job in the White House than Dubya, but Obama is certainly giving it all he's got, and I'd say he's pulling ahead at this point.
Cliff, well, it's not as though things have stayed the same since 2008! It's important to remember that historical events take longer than a retrospective glance would suggest; the ongoing collapse in the US economy, measured by such things as total petroleum consumption, and a galaxy of other changes will be seen a century from now as a dramatic plunge, no matter how gradual it looks to those of us who are living through it.
Ventriloquist, true enough.
Jeffrey, I wonder if somebody could figure out a relatively simpler and thus cheaper press technology than the one used at the close of the vinyl era. In any case, though, the return of vinyl is an excellent example of what I'm talking about -- the revival of an old technology because it really is better than its newer replacements.
Avery, when I was a high school student in the late 1970s, the SCA scene in the Puget Sound area already got anything up to a hundred people out to local events. To this day, btw, most of the people I know who spin wool with a drop spindle either learned how to do it in the SCA, or learned it from someone who did.
2/11/15, 8:15 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Homelander, I could see it. It's not that long since the glory days of the APA, when a circle of aspiring writers would send manuscripts around a round-robin mailing list: each participant would get the packet in the mail with everyone's latest story, pull his previous story out and read the critiques on it, critique all the others, add a new story to the packet, and send it to the next name on the list. I could easily see something like that taking off again.
Shane, if that happens, be aware that the outcomes will probably include the collapse of the EU, the beginnings of a new arms race in Europe, and at least even odds of a major war in Europe during your lifetime. The Cold War and the EU are the only things that have kept that extraordinarily warlike corner of the world at peace for so long.
August, I'm delighted to hear it. I notice with some pleasure that even QST has been running articles on how to build old-fashioned rigs without IC chips from time to time. Now to find a way to get the word out into a wider audience...
2/11/15, 8:24 PM
Angus Wallace said...
Great post, I totally agree that joy is a much greater motivator than suffering! The retro movement has been around since the 1990s, but it really is gaining momentum and becoming more all-encompasing (rather than just fashion, it's now about lifestyle). I hope that means something...
I also wanted to add to some of the discussion about PV from last week. I feel that solar PV is sometimes criticised inaccurately.
We don't know what can and can't be done with PV, since it has not been tried at a societal level: a drastic cut in consumption opens many possibilities. I realise such a cut is not happening right now by choice, but think it's important to differentiate between what is technically possible and what is socially occurring, and not to use a false technical claim to argue against a societal response (which is what can sometimes happen).
From experience, solar PV production in winter can be better than has been stated here in the past: I average more like 4 kWh/day from a 2 kW system in winter. Of course, relying on solar for one's power means using resources as they are available, as Cherokee has repeatedly said. This is not a criticism of solar, but an acceptance of its limits.
Also, I believe that there is merit to a grid-tied PV system, and that if the grid is available it represents a better use of resources than an off grid solution.
More detail in this article.
(I hope this isn't too off-topic!)
Cheers, Angus
2/11/15, 8:25 PM
Øyvind Holmstad said...
http://steigan.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/obamas-prioriteringer.jpg
2/11/15, 8:31 PM
Ceworthe said...
As far as reenactment and hand crafting things go, there are many younger people who not only do it for the enjoyment of it, but specifically because they feeling will allow them to know skills to live when the expected excrement hits the fan. I recently made a quilting square for a communally made gift, and hand embroidered it
Older people were surprised I didn't just do it on a fancy sewing machine (I do not consider that embroidery, I consider that pushing a button), and the younger people were fascinated to know how it was done. Promising.
2/11/15, 8:39 PM
Sukey Jacobsen said...
2/11/15, 8:40 PM
John D. Wheeler said...
http://thelongascent.blogspot.com/2012/07/ripe-blackberries.html
(You have to lick it off your fingers after you attempt to pick it....)
2/11/15, 8:45 PM
Shane Wilson said...
Oh, I'm not necessarily cheering it on, and I realize it's a mixed bag, at best, with many ghastly drawbacks. I do realize, at the same time, that it's a necessary process of this stage of crisis, and one that must happen to get to the other side.
2/11/15, 8:48 PM
Kathleen Quinn said...
So, you’re right. Time to party. I just got back from the local pub where my son plays fiddle each Wednesday with a random assortment of other musicians who like what they call pan-Celtic music. (And since my son is only 13, I am forced to escort him there and then sit in a pub drinking a glass of wine and listening to great music. What hardships we parents are forced to endure for our children…) Everyone was happily preparing for the weekend’s big event in town—called Dance Flurry—at which hundreds gather for 3 days to dance and play music. It’s the happiest spot on earth for those 3 days, especially with our 2+ feet of snow and our unseasonably cold temps. Tired of the world that progress has made? This’ll cure what ails ya. :-)
2/11/15, 8:48 PM
Unknown said...
"Hon, whatever it costs to repair, your Singer will last another 100 years. Those plastic machines will last 2 years, tops. Don't waste your money!"
2/11/15, 8:51 PM
Shane Wilson said...
2/11/15, 8:53 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
2/11/15, 9:05 PM
Lucretia Heart said...
Groups exist all over that gather to dress up, celebrate, and re-create many different historical eras, such as the Edwardian era, inspired by Anne of Green Gables, Somewhere In Time, or-- most recently, Downton Abby. The same goes for the Victorian era and shows/books like Little House On the Prairie, Sherlock Holmes... well, you get the idea.
From what I've personally observed, most people start off in a limited fandom of a particular work of fiction that just appeals to them and introduces them to an era of history. From there, many go on to join societies that cover the whole era. By meeting others of like mind, they start to share ideas and skills towards the ideal of being more "authentic" in their re-creation and it just goes on from there.
As you've pointed out here, they/we do it for FUN, not to inflict hard work and suffering on ourselves. When you figure out how to play an older instrument, cook an authentic era meal, present a set of usable tools and so on... well, its just very satisfying.
Why, just today I made some silly art paper using scraps of paper from old bills and such with a bunch of elderly ladies who gather once a month to make various crafts out of old things and show each other what they've come up with and then practice together. The goal is to make the trash of the new look like and be usable as if its treasures of the old. There's nearly 20 women in this group and its been gathering now for almost 8 years. One example out of many I could name.
I was wondering if you'd ever hit upon this angle. I'm thrilled to see you went there. Now I'm eager to see where this discussion goes. I just wanted to support your own observations regarding these kinds of hobbyists with my own experiences "on the ground" as it were.
2/11/15, 9:08 PM
Ruben said...
This is the Delicious in my family's project, a Small and Delicious Life.
Naturally, you can read about it on my blog. Naturally, I will plead extenuating circumstances for the lack of recent updates.
But, if you sign up for my occasional email, you will be among the first to know of new things, and I can promise there will soon be a manifesto on Sauerkraut—more than you have ever wanted to know about sauerkraut, and yet all that you need to know about sauerkraut.
And JMG figured in one of my best posts: I don’t want salvation.
2/11/15, 9:15 PM
Ben said...
My sense is that here we are headed in a crisis of legitimacy leading to revolutionary dictatorship, while Europe and Asia seem to be driting towards a re-enactment of 1914.
Spring time is fast approaching. I already have seeds in the ground, and accquired a chicken coop. Will be getting peeps in March when the warm weather returns for good. My neighbors have a community garden, which we've started to work already. Interesting times ahead indeed.
2/11/15, 9:21 PM
Mickey Foley said...
1. Recognizing what's really important in life, that is, the social, emotional and spiritual aspects of life.
2. Realizing that these are not limited by material resources and could actually rebound as the industrial economy declines.
2. Appreciating the support of my family after losing touch with friends.
2/11/15, 9:23 PM
beneaththesurface said...
In many ways, I think my mother falls into this category. She doesn't own or use a computer at all; she still uses a typewriter. She doesn't use the Internet or email (and wouldn't know what to do if she had to do the most simple task online). She uses an old model of a rotary phone attached the kitchen wall (and of course, no cordless phone, no cell phone). She has no answering machine. No credit card, not even a debit card and pays everything by check or cash. When she wants to communicate with someone, she'll either make a phone call, or write a handwritten letter. She only uses a camera that uses film -- not the digital kind. She has an old black-and-white TV, but only watches it once in a while. No cable, no way of watching videos at home. Doesn't have a CD player (or any later music-listening devices), only listens to vinyl records. No dryer, no microwave, no working dishwasher, no power lawn mower. She uses paper maps -- not GPS -- when she needs to navigate. She laments computerization of medical care, of education, of government. She mourned when her local library finally got rid of the card catalogs. (Growing up in the 80s and 90s in my parents' household, I felt very different than my peers, but if anything it was good preparation for the post-peak future!)
Yet, I think if I were to ask her what way the future is headed, she would think technological trends will simply continue. She won't cooperate with them to the extent she can, of course, but the idea that technological regression might be the shape of the future, is unthinkable to her.
My mother has heard of "peak oil" because I've mentioned it to her, but I don't think she grasps all its implications (while I respect her choice not to use the Internet, I sometimes am sorry that she's not exposed to certain Internet writers--like you--who could offer different perspectives that the daily newspaper she reads lacks). I plan to give her a copy of After Oil 2 and I'm curious how she'll react to my story and others.
I think that if those who are critical of technological trends (but haven't yet shed the mythology of progress from their mental framework) could realize that they may increasingly have an edge in the future, they would feel empowered instead of depressed.
2/11/15, 9:35 PM
Lynford1933 said...
2/11/15, 9:36 PM
steve pearson said...
Very much enjoyed After Oil 2 as well.So many of the scenarios are the ones I have envisioned all my life.Strange- in the 70s when it looked like things were unraveling and I was a young man, I was all "bring it on". I think we would actually have had a pretty good shot at it then. I was working at Friends of the Earth in London in 73. The collapse of industrial civilization was our main topic of conversation and we felt it could be managed, perhaps with the same level of pain as the WWII years,but accomplished with a sustainable future on the other side.
It felt like the momentum reached a peak in early 74 and wobbled so tantalizingly on the edge and then slid back into BAU.
Anyhow, thanks for being you and writing and editing what you do.This is the one place I can discuss and learn without feeling I have to convince people of a whole parallel reality.
Regards, Steve
2/11/15, 10:27 PM
Andrew Crews said...
Thanks for your response to the fatalism of my last response. I do believe my reality check may have bounced on that one!;)
As an additional example, Many people I know are involved in the Paleo-lifestyle scheme. Eating like hunter-gatherers has had immense health benefits for myself and family compared to the processed crap marketed as "food" nowadays. In addition, the focus on replicating the physical load people of the past had to endures, makes for stronger healthier bodies. I have been saying for a long time, the simplest single high impact decision anyone can make to prepare for collapse is take care of their health and get in the best shape they can. Diet and exercise will be the health insurance of my generation. In addition, Fitness and health can be acquired regardless of age, one of the many persistent myths that demotivates people. The Paleo-lifestyle focuses on the simple pleasures of life, family, friends, hikes, exercise, good meals, and even meditation. These values have offered a welcome respite compared to the soul crushing outcomes of standard western values.
Also, I still use a old flip-phone made for construction and military contractors, Samsung rugby. Has probably 10 times the battery life and 100 times the durability of my wife's i-phone which she has to use for work. Ridiculous!
Best wishes,
Andrew Crews
2/11/15, 10:28 PM
Mark Rice said...
http://broncoincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/02/nanofibre-anounces-consortium-to-build.html
I see Dennis D beat me to the punch on one aspect of this.
2/11/15, 10:39 PM
Adryrn said...
This post in particular really resonates with my own observations of my generation (I’m 23). Perhaps my perception of how widespread the following hobbies are is warped because of how much time I spend on Tumblr, but I’ve seen a lot of people learning sewing and other crafting skills to make costumes or historically-inspired alternative outfits (steampunk, lolita, etc). Although access to the materials needed for these projects will likely run dry with the rest of the industrial economy, the resourcefulness and skills that these people develop in the mean time seem like they could be redirected to more essential activities.
August Johnson and Marinhomelander may find the existence of Postcrossing interesting. It involves the internet, but it’s still a start in the direction of greater postal service usage.
2/11/15, 11:37 PM
Snoqualman said...
Whereas, the orange glow and hot smell of vacuum tubes are very reassuring. They just feel...right.
2/12/15, 12:26 AM
Marc L Bernstein said...
Provided that Morris Berman is correct, it seems evident that the USA will not be among the 1st to follow in Japan's footsteps in this regard. Our nation is steeped in delusion, and the little colored images projected from a glass screen (that you mentioned) are akin to Aldous Huxley's "soma".
So many people that I know regard reflection as an archaic, quaint extravagance the time for which they do not have, all the while working at a job that they don't really like, staring passively at a television or habitually and unimaginatively viewing a computer screen.
It is possible, however, that the US empire will self-destruct in the not-too-distant future, the nation will split into a few smaller ones, and only then will a significant portion of the population take seriously the notion of reinvigorating crafts, techniques and technologies from the past and shedding many of the habits of the techno-narcissistic society of today.
2/12/15, 12:34 AM
Steelkilt said...
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6244
2/12/15, 12:36 AM
ed boyle said...
my mother came from a middle class english household, father a newspaper editor, she learned languages, only child, physically inactive, mechanically inept, tightwad like my father but could not earn anything so was not generous with her money, time or help for others, physically in terrible condition the last 15 years which cost enormous on caregiving last several years andbefore that enormous worries and mounts on caregiving.
At any rate I could call the one attitude and lifestyle modern progressive-cubicle, overweight, intelletual, reclusive, selfish, inept, lazy-this regardless of her inate positive human qualities as I loved hr very much. This was social programming of a one child middle class european background. I am criticizing the system, not the person. The other attitude is old fashiond conservative-gregarious, hard working, handy, generous, healthy-notwithstanding personal traits I could not stand and weaknesses.
It is as if I came from a marriage of a poor rural backwoods farmer with an upper class Boston yankee. As she was from england she was a foreigner so he had the advantage in America. But as British industrialism started earlier they were earlier weakened as humans, adapted to urban progress, a disease based on commerce, self isolation, physical ineptitude and laziness, intellectual arrogance-despite its usage in dispelling ignorance, a widespread disease nowadays. Romanticizing the working class values is too easy from this vantage point. I recal a monty python sketch where-expectation reversal-the young man is sick and tired of father's intellectual pretense in welsh mining community and is going toa mining job. Class steretypes are vry much ethnic-celtic, cockney vs. English, west end, oxford, etc. in UK.
In USA changing your stripes is a matter of getting a degree, a BMW, big mortgage in a gated community and a job on Wall Street. The rural whose kids play banjo, listen to country-'you picked a fine time time to leave me lucille'-work in factories, farms, coal mines, have large extended families and whose religious beliefs have not been slowly altered to a religion of success and possibl american exceptionalism good samaritan has become minimized. We are all wall streeters at heart now. If middle class british lifestyle was a priviliged disease ca. 1930, my mother's birth, due to cars, supermarkets, TV, it has become amass phenomenon. We are all lazy, selfish, inept, grasping, anxious, isolated, even medicated. My father was no saint but he utilized his body to the fullest and remaine in middle of life. It is largely a mechanical problem created by technology. Amish or poor mexican farmers have more in common with one another than with local urban office workers around the corner.
I find hard work a tonic. My kids sit the whole day learning for a world that may not exist.
2/12/15, 12:48 AM
Amazed! said...
She just loves it!
2/12/15, 12:50 AM
ben said...
one of these days it is going to get expensive to repair/line a wall.. and there is somthing really nice about a wall made by hand. or anything for that matter - speaking as a carpenter :)
2/12/15, 12:53 AM
KL Cooke said...
Nice photos on the Rockabillies site, but they look like a Hollywood set designer's idea of how the 50's looked. The 50's that I remember were much tackier. A lot of leftovers from the 30's.
If the Rockabillies had lived in the real 50's they might not find them quite as charming.
True story: In 1957, when I was 11 years old, my family visited some cousins in a small town in Wyoming. One of the neighbors had a tree in their yard they referred to as a Weeping Willow. My mother pointed out that it was actually a Russian Olive. The folks in question acknowledged that it was, but they preferred to call it a Weeping Willow. They were concerned that if it became known they had a Russian Olive in their yard, they'd be suspected of being communists.
2/12/15, 1:38 AM
changeling said...
2/12/15, 2:08 AM
nuku said...
Re made in China shiny toasters and other unrepairable items: Most of the cases of these items are put together with various special “tamper-proof” screws which require expensive specialized tools to remove. Some even use “one-way” screws which cannot be removed. The message is “don’t even bother trying to fix this shoddy piece of shit, just go down to the big box and buy another one.”
I personally make a big effort to buy things I can fix, many of which are well-made used items from the 50’s and earlier.
2/12/15, 3:24 AM
Chester said...
Your broken windows theory is actually a fairly well documented theory in criminology.
I never thought of applying it to cell phones though. Maybe to accept a broken screen represents a sort of resignation about the fragility or futility of modern consumer technologies.
2/12/15, 4:18 AM
Phil Harris said...
Like JMG said in a comment last year, the Ukraine ‘theatre’ has been going on for quite a while since about the time it became clear that Russian Federation was not going to conveniently ‘de-federalise’ and could discipline its post-soviet oligarchy and not sink into its own civil wars. There are other theatres of course.
Kaitain this week mentions Cyprus getting into the news again. Remember the ruthless financial squashing of Cyprus/Bank of Cyprus and Russian savers losing 60% in April 2013?
Cyprus was once a wholly owned part of the British Empire – I remember British paratroops firing over the heads of the crowd and killing the Mayor of Famagusta, I think it was, as he emerged on the balcony. Well, only part of the island is in the EU; the other belongs to the Turkish people with links to mainland Turkey. There is a fence. The Greek part, which is in the EU still hosts British Royal Air Force Akrotiri. This base has been used in just about every Near and Middle East action by UK/USA over decades.
(The close US military relationship with Turkey has needed some discretion from time to time and makes an interesting history as well.)
best
Phil H
PS Like Ukraine this interesting strategic area has seen manoeuvring for a good while. My goodness, we should remember the USA with a complicit UK and EU has a real talent for engendering or using civil wars especially in this late-phase! (Look at the British Empire in retreat and now the late-phase US especially perhaps since 1980s. As a tactic by Empires past-their-best this seems a recipe for blowback – what says the Toynbee?)
This from the BBC:
“Cyprus has denied Russian media reports that it is ready to lease two military bases to Russia.
"There is no question of Russian air or naval military bases on the soil of Cyprus," said Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides.
Earlier, Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta said Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades would make the offer on an official visit to Moscow on 25 February.
Cyprus is in the EU but not in Nato.
The leasing deal would concern an air base near Paphos and a naval base at Limassol, according to Rossiiskaya Gazeta. Russia can already use the bases temporarily.
But Mr Kasoulides dismissed the leasing claim, saying "there has never been any request from Russia about this", the Cyprus News Agency CNA reported.
He said President Anastasiades was referring to "the renewal of a military co-operation agreement with Russia consisting of maintenance of military equipment sold to Cyprus years ago, as well as the purchase of spare parts according to existing contracts".
He added that "as regards the offering of facilities, these are of a purely non-military humanitarian nature, such as the evacuation of Russian civilians from the Middle East if the need arises".
Russian warships can already use the Limassol base for refuelling and the Andreas Papandreou air base for humanitarian missions.
2/12/15, 4:19 AM
postpeakmedicine said...
http://www.themusicroom-online.co.uk/product_info.php/products_id/645
2/12/15, 4:32 AM
Greg Belvedere said...
In another related note, I left my library job to start the business partially because of sciatica caused by a literally unhealthy work culture. It has not returned since I left. I could see myself working in a public library again now that I'm in a more rural setting. But the urban system I left was known for sending good librarians out the door.
I like the concept of the Butlerian Carnival. As I have said before, I see bits of this everywhere and I find it important to focus on how technological regression can be more fun and rewarding than the current status quo.
2/12/15, 4:49 AM
Phil Harris said...
For those following Ukraine civil war, I find myself somewhat surprisingly, given their record, agreeing with the recent statements – wise words - made by Gorbacev, Prodi, Sarkosy and the admirably consistent US Ron Paul. Check out their bios and recent interviews. Prodi was PM Italy and President of EU Commission. Europe includes Russia of course (remember 1914?).
best
Phil H
2/12/15, 4:59 AM
Jill Barber said...
I too am one of those people that enjoys living the past, be it SCA or Renaissance festivals, and I was drawn to them by the prevalence of handmade things available. I've always wanted to be able to make things in "the old fashioned way", so I fit right into that scene.
@Avery, you should look up the SCA events Pennsic and Estrella.
2/12/15, 5:03 AM
Mister Roboto said...
2/12/15, 5:41 AM
Ares Olympus said...
There's still a "real" American dream that college pays off to those who work hard, and make the right connections.
Like I remember a few years ago people were complaining about unpaid internships that only rich kids could afford, but for those who make it through the hoops, they can get on high income tracks.
So as unfair as that is, it suggests the path of "selling yourself cheap" for learning new skills might also be a good path for those who can find a way to avoid debt, and live cheap.
And the good thing about that low-debt, low-expense path is you can do things you really want to try, and if your income expands, you don't have to increase your spending to match, and can instead invest it in ways that can keep your future expenses low.
In contrast, youth who get into big debt, like 100k, and 20 year repayment plans, they can easily get used to the idea that being in debt is a natural state, and make "weak" decisions on easy credit, and get sucked into a black hole where the future has to pay for the past.
Anyway, so that's the predicament that I see - those who can live cheap, avoid debt, and do things that make sense at any income will be the ones who can get ahead enough to consider wider options.
And the other side is the illusion of retirement. There's no safe level of savings that can cover a 30 year imaginary retirement period, especially given low interest rates now, even imagining things could keep going.
So as long as "they" can keep us worried about saving for our imaginary retirement, then even the best savers will just throwing money into abstract investments that make promises of big returns.
So once people find they can live on much less than their income, they have to find a LOCAL investment with more durability than our imaginary markets.
And lastly I do have to say that ObamaCare, for whatever its shortfalls, it does offer a low-income path to those who know how to live cheaply, without giving up all "honest" access to modern healthcare options.
So with the safety nets available between family and government, there's no excuses for experimentation for those who are ready, as Gandhi said something like that.
2/12/15, 5:41 AM
jonathan said...
for people who are interested in old ways of doing things, check out backwoods home magazine. you'll have to have some tolerance for libertarian politics, but there are outstanding articles on canning, heirloom seeds, 19th and early 20th century technologies and techniques, livestock etc. it's well worth the attention of anyone who has any inclinations in this direction.
final note: is there a better example of the false front of our society than brian williams? a serial fabricator of events and it only took 10 years or so to catch him.
2/12/15, 5:58 AM
George Coles said...
On this fantastic post, I couldn't help thinking of John Ralston Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards" when you were describing our "leaders". Surely we have reached a point where most thinking people recognize that the Enlightenment idea of progress is flawed and incomplete. And as Saul points out - and I daresay you do so very well also - reason itself has it's own massive limitations.
Thank you for your writings.
2/12/15, 6:01 AM
Yupped said...
One of the things I watched with sadness in these years was the decline of smaller gardening stores. I talked to one owner of a struggling organic garden center a few years ago, who believed gardening was in decline across the country because of organized sports - parents didn't have time to garden anymore because they were busy driving kids from one sports engagement to another at the weekends. And sports themselves got so industrialized in this time - excessively organized, standardized, parentally-managed, de-risked, etc.
Basically we all went nuts, it seems. We were marketed big, organized, squeaky clean and risk free lives, it seems, and quite a few of us piled on. I did for a while, very glad I got out.
So these days I look for the return of smaller scale activities, less managed, more diverse, involving more actual work and readiness to get messy. So, people brewing beer in buckets in their basements seems like a good development to me, but the trend towards fancy brew pubs not so much. Although every bit helps I guess and anything that gets us back in touch with true variety and depth of life helps. A neighbor started a chicken flock last year, and began by buying a pre-made coop online. This year they expanded their flock and made more coop space by hammering and wiring up a bigger run themselves. Seems like a good trend to me.
2/12/15, 6:05 AM
dfr2010 said...
Yesterday I finished up two batches of marmalade (orange and grapefruit) from fruit my neighbor had given us from her sister's trees. Today, I have three cockerels to slaughter, and will use their carcasses as practice for learning to caponize. We brought out a baker's dozen of red broiler chicks out of the brooder shed yesterday, and hubby has finished framing the new chick tractors and hopes to have them done tonight or tomorrow. Meanwhile, he has been raking up the leaves that the older chicks have been scratching as we scoot the current two chick tractors across the front. After supper, I still manage to get a few rounds done on knitting socks. We do our dishes by hand, as I doubt the well pump could keep up with a mechanical dishwasher.
Life at the dead end of a dirt road off of another dirt road ... we find it very satisfying!
2/12/15, 6:14 AM
Lord of the Barnyard said...
A solid thank you for being who you are and doing what you do.
I was/am one of the louts that needed/needs to hear your '[somewhat] palatable to the common understanding' version of things.
Something triggered reading this weeks essay (and last weeks comments) as to what I could do.
I wanted a plan that somewhat appealed to my vanity. If you're not going to enjoy whittling, don't start whittling. I was worried for a bit that everything I did enjoy was superficial.
2/12/15, 6:22 AM
Vashti said...
Hoarding possessions is a game for the rich - mobility is key. I've already lost my paper library once, arguably as a result of collapse. I don't intend to do so twice.
2/12/15, 6:42 AM
Andrew said...
Interestingly, in typing that my iPad autocorrected us to U.S.
2/12/15, 7:10 AM
Nastarana said...
2/12/15, 7:15 AM
Tracy Glomski said...
This model is one of the few celestial globes currently available on the market, and it is a typical example.
This model is the one I recently acquired. Its vintage is 1977. There is not only a significant difference in aesthetics, there is also a difference in functionality. When I searched for a new globe with a horizon ring, I was unable to find one that included that part.
Sometimes the old things aren't perfect, either. The mounting bracket for my vintage globe's horizon ring was brittle, and it broke in transit. It doesn't matter. I'm going to have a metal bracket machined for it, and it will be even better than new.
2/12/15, 7:20 AM
RPC said...
2/12/15, 7:37 AM
Glenn in Maine said...
2/12/15, 7:43 AM
Clay Dennis said...
Another good example within cycling is the growing number of young people who ride their bikes as daily transportation who have eschewed gears. They have realized that most people outside of serious hill climbers don't need the 22 speeds provided by the high tech derailers found on almost all store purchased bikes. For urban riding a single speed or fixed gear bike is just fine and much lower maintenance than its multi-speed counterpart. The "fixed gear" crowd is often marginalized as a hipster subcult just as reinactors are, but perhaps they just see the future more clearly.
2/12/15, 7:54 AM
Joseph Ratliff said...
I've always had the feeling like, over the past two centuries and perhaps even further back (Da Vinci as one example), that we've had our chances to "wake up" and live out a meaningful life as a species.
One example of a person who thought beyond most of our species is Nikola Tesla.
From what I've read about him, he seemed to "get it."
Leonardo Da Vinci also seemed to "get it."
Even Einstein seemed to get it.
What is "it"?
Our connection with the Earth, and the Universe. The individuals I have named (there are others) seemed to think about our connection to our planet at a level we did not understand.
Maybe a future evolution of our species might think more like them?
Unfortunately, the rest of us (minus a small percentage of exception), didn't get it.
So, overall, we had a few examples of those who got it (JMG included, and there are others), but a few was not enough.
2/12/15, 7:55 AM
Travis said...
2/12/15, 8:15 AM
Kyoto Motors said...
On a side note, I respectfully submit my latest blog entry to you and your readership. It comes on the heels of my entry for the "squirrel" contest. This one's not a second attempt at participation; just a follow-up ;-)
http://kyotomotors.blogspot.ca/2015/02/the-dream-of-free-energy.html
2/12/15, 8:23 AM
beneaththesurface said...
@Kathleen Quinn
I will be at the Flurry Festival too this weekend! Nothing more fun and joyous than lots of traditional dancing, music, and storytelling.
2/12/15, 8:29 AM
Cathy McGuire said...
Power was out here all day Monday, due to a windstorm; I was pleased that it caused me very few problems, due to my usual emergency preps and my woodstove, but I was chagrined to feel a bit of “withdrawal” from the internet… so I’m gonna have to make an effort to be on here less. But I was also dismayed to find out that those who had smartphones or tablets could still (as long as batteries held out) get onto Facebook et al, and probably spent the day, thus missing any lessons a power outage held for them. :-\ (I was a bit less pleased to find my entire back fence blown down, but even that is not a crisis).
On advertising – during my first (and only) advertising class, in the 70’s, the teacher – a highly paid ad exec - told us that the old metal shaving razor was clearly superior to the new plastic ones. “So how, then,” he asked, “do we sell them the plastics – how do we make them believe these are better?” I thought, “Nope – I’m outta here.” Thus ending my advertising career. ;-} I love being clever with words, but lying is over the line for me.
@ Cherokee: Love the line about “going to a funeral” – I may have to borrow that!! But that is sexist, to question a man, not a woman, in down during the day… betcha they don’t realize that.
@Marinhomelander: If just a small cohort of teenagers would realize that Facebook is, so like yesterday, and start sending art projects, poems and objects through the mail, the explosion of its popularity would revive this great institution. Patriots buy stamps and use the mail
I spent a couple happy decades making/sending mail art and strange mail – but the Post Office really cracked down on that after the anthrax scare (it’s not your grandmother’s PO anymore) and I can still mail a dogtoy without covering, but no more toilet seats or balloons… ;-)
Some of these things you are writing about have made it into my new novel, which is up to Chapter 8 over at www.cathymcguire.blogspot.com
2/12/15, 8:35 AM
Anna said...
2/12/15, 8:51 AM
Bob Patterson said...
2/12/15, 9:02 AM
Justin Patrick Moore said...
I think an eclectic approach is also in order -no need to limit oneself to one of just the above three -though my own emerging style is more on the retrofit/down home funk side.
Of the gear my wife and I have salvaged from the past is a 1940's Chambers stove and a Queen Anne treadle sewing machine.
I think too we can expect to see bioregional variations on these trends as this subculture grows (as the dominant collapses). I mentioned in a previous comment, somewhat tongue-in-cheek living the 1920's lifestyle because Cincinnati has so much Art Deco architecture. That art movement might have a bit much respect for the machine, but I still love the buildings in this city borne of that style (including one Masonic lodge across the river in Covington, KY). Aesthetically though I'm more aligned to the Arts & Crafts movement, as well as the Avant-Garde of John Cage. Not as incongruent as it might sound.
On a related note, for those who haven't heard it, J. Kunstler talked with dandy aesthete Lord Whimsy in a recent podcast:
http://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast-264-conversation-with-an-aesthete-jhk-yaks-with-lord-whimsy/
One of Whimsy's ideas that I really like is that of "Aesthetic Chivalry"...and I don't think much in the recent world of design could be said to be Chivalric.
Downward Ho!
2/12/15, 9:05 AM
Bob Patterson said...
2/12/15, 9:14 AM
Shawn Aune said...
Another great example of our strange ability to know more than we think we know.
These feelings of imminent something often lead people to attempt to answer the question of why it is happening.
The normal human response is to blame the people one is already biased against.
That's why the Right leaning human knows something is coming and blames the Commies, Statists, Socialists, Useless Eaters and the like.
The scapegoats whipped by the other end of the political spectrum are Capitalism, Corporatism, Fascism*, The Oil Industry and Corruption.
Interestingly, the deepest thinkers on both sides tend to gravitate towards the same handful of appropriate responses but call them different things...
Form a community. Whether they call it a commune, green village or redoubt doesn't matter.
Take back self-sufficiency. They plant gardens and have supplies stored in case of emergency.
Take back self-governance. They get involved with local politics and organize for change.
*What they call Fascism isn't anything of the sort as pointed out by our own JMG in a previous post.
2/12/15, 9:31 AM
Moshe Braner said...
2/12/15, 9:46 AM
carol.b said...
2/12/15, 9:56 AM
bdy1 said...
I worry that the Butlerian Festival is more like downloading the re-mastered Sgt. Pepper’s FLAC than it is a return to the culture of analog innovation that allowed Sgt. Pepper’s to happen in the first place. And I don’t differentiate much between the Renaissance Fair, Comicon, Atomic Ranch, Mad Men, Warcraft, Eve and America’s Army, other than to reflexively like whichever culture feels fresh today and discard the moldy.
I see more hope in the practicing blacksmiths, the micro-brewers, artisan bakers, organic growers, perma-culturalists and so on – folks employing today’s informational free-for-all toward the creative edge of the pre-industrial project. And I think most of us agree that as energy becomes a flow again (rather than a flood) those practices will be critical to our living. But those guys are thriving now – not because they make ecological sense but because they make new better beer, better bread, and better produce. New beer – the product of an evolving technological culture that needs abundance to thrive. Abundance is a political end that we can have with or without peak oil.
John, I’ve been following and catching up on your project for the past year or so. I think it’s strongest when you criticize current policy and offer concrete technological responses to that policy’s inevitable outcomes. But I’m afraid that, without a set of equally concrete political responses to “not let the crisis go to waste”, guns will win the aftermath. Who, in your opinion, is best talking about how to organize the wind-down? Where are the new ideas for channeling, focusing and diffusing systemic social power? Which old models offer the best bases for innovation and evolution a-la organic farming? Any names, titles or links? I want this year’s political porter!
2/12/15, 10:08 AM
Renaissance Man said...
(Because, according to my friends, I'd be much less likely to end up in the local emergency ward -- again -- if I did just sit on the couch. Oh, well...)
However, I do admit to watching TV shows and movies via DVD, because, say, hand-stitching a leather horse-harness is a long, tedious process that requires me to spend lots of time sitting down and requires minimal attention, but yet more attention if I were trying to read something. I am too easily bored, so TV is just distracting enough to keep my mind occupied.
As you do not watch popular media, I do not know if you are aware of the increase in alternate-history shows of late. To be sure, they are not a dominant genre, but there are more and more of them, and that fact is, I think, significant.
I will mention three popular shows, e.g.:
Vikings -- supposedly about the life and times of the semi-mythological Ragnar Lothbrook. While it does not glorify life in viking era (there are devastating diseases) neither does it portray life in those days as brutally filthy and unbearably miserable, either. Life looks hard, but livable.
Game of Thrones -- set in an imaginary world bearing a very strong resemblance to 14th/15th century Europe and Asia, the vision portrays people's lives as hard, but, again, neither unbearable, nor romanticized. It would be possible to live reasonably comfortably in such a world, even as a peasant (if not being sacked by roving armies. Then, again, a huge number of people in our modern world are experiencing exactly that right now and most have lived through that through the 20th century. North America and Western Europe are the exceptions, not the rule.)
Murdoch Mysteries -- A police drama, set in an alternate, steampunk Toronto, ca. 1890 - 1910. A world that demonstrates that much of the gee-whiz high-tech equipment in "modern" police shows could have been achieved with much simpler devices using engineering of the turn of the 20th Century. There are anachronisms, of course -- DNA wasn't discovered for another 50 years -- but the hypothetical engineering is sound.
The key feature in these shows is they do not presume that all the trappings of modern, pseudo-Jetsons, middle-class North-American lifestyle are necessary requisites for a decent living. Quite the contrary, they assume that decent living can happen without all the plastic and chemicals and electromagnetic-distractions to which we are exposed on a daily basis. They present a compelling vision of living well with much simpler technologies: ones that could be produced using far less energy, far less resources, much more labour, and within the skills available to anyone who cares to learn the requisite craft.
The ideas you present here are slowly percolating into the subconscious of the popoular culture through popular media. But I submit that people are not exactly returning to the past, so much as re-imagining what life with earlier techologies could be like.
2/12/15, 10:16 AM
daelach said...
Now what took the biscuit was the Greek trade deficit with Russia in the same year - 7.2 billion Euros! Since Russia doesn't export that many things, it had to be fossil energy. Here you see another strong motivation why Greece is turning towards Russia.
Of course, the Greek will not be able to pay their debts, so the austerity stuff doesn't make sense. Defaulting the debts and returning to their own currency will be the only solution in the long run. The downside is just that afterwards, Greece will only be able to import what they can pay by exports. To put it the harsh way: picking olives just isn't a way to afford BMWs. Then again, with global de-industrialisation, BMWs will drop out of fashion anyway.
Some remarks on the latest gizmos - most notably the "everything connected"-stuff, also known as "internet of things". The complexity just is not manageable anyway. They don't solve problems for the customer, they just pop up new problems like hacking attacks. BMW latest "connected drive" issue is just an example of why you don't want that stuff.
While we're at it, olives don't have such problems. Maybe it's not the worst idea to keep the olives and to refrain from the BMW.
As for vinyl records - there are good reasons why they dropped out of mass use. The dynamic range is crap compared to the CD, listening to LPs causes mechanical wear to them (even if no scratches happen), the channel crosstalk is considerable. The original definition of "hi-fi" was made so lousy because otherwise, the then-current vinyl technology would not have qualified as hi-fi at all. There is growth in the vinyl industry from customers who value nostalgia over sound, yes - but the relative growth is impressive only because the base it refers to is so small. So the CD doesn't count as an example where things were better with older technology.
On the other hand, the problem with CD music productions today isn't the medium CD, but the "loudness war" where the dynamic compressors are squeezed out to the max in order to have the "music" sound louder. However, reverting to vinyl is NOT the solution here since the problem occurs already in the mastering, i.e. before the sound is pressed onto a medium.
2/12/15, 10:17 AM
Laylah said...
Relevant to last year's discussion of scientism, it looks like someone at Salon is either reading the ADR or independently noticing one of the same trends: http://www.salon.com/2015/02/07/anti_vaxxers_climate_deniers_and_the_crisis_of_authority/
2/12/15, 10:51 AM
heather said...
After raising a family of five kids in a mostly typical, modern western middle class manner, my parents currently live off the grid in a yurt on a mountainside in Hawaii. Their current arrangement is partly by choice and partly by economic necessity; they are building a homestead with several of my siblings and their families there. When I used to talk to my mother about visiting, she often seemed embarrassed by their arrangements- she worried that I or my kids would be grossed out by the pit toilet or bored by the lack of electronic hoo-hah. We had one of the best conversations of my adulthood when I introduced her to concepts from this blog, and saluted her on collapsing early. She was delighted that I, the most "successful" kid of the brood by industrial-world standards, admired their choices and adaptations and saw them as new pioneers, so to speak. Offering her a new mental framework about "progress" and the future certainly gave her a new, more positive perspective about "lacking" many modern accoutrements and our relationship a new mutual understanding and connection. Another unexpected life gift that I credit to our host.
Re. living real life from other historical eras, I recently followed up on a tip from another frequent commenter here, LewisLucanBooks, and picked up the book "How to Be a Victorian: A dawn-to-dusk guide to Victorian life", by historian Ruth Goodman, of BBC historical farm show fame. It was terrific. In addition to many practical arrangements that I plan to try out, the book fostered the simple realization of the prevalence of hunger, the serious threat of disease, and the sheer difficulty of keeping home, self, and clothing clean under resource constraints. All were useful correctives to any romantic notions about a simpler past that one might harbor.
--Heather In CA
2/12/15, 11:00 AM
Joe Roberts said...
The irony is that daily life in 2015, for all its expensive gadgetry, is actually closer to the 1955 of the original Back to the Future, only with shoddier products, meaner people, more stress, and much less cohesion. (Pretty much what you already wrote, JMG.)
2/12/15, 11:06 AM
David said...
Less on the technology front, but pertaining to the sense of "something about to happen" feeling that is in the air:
I have often wondered, when it came time for the present Union to dissolve (when and not if), what the "spark" issue or event would be. It was readily apparent, I think, to the contemporary observers in ante bellum America that slavery was the crisis issue. Less obvious was that the election of a particular president would initiate secession of the South (beginning with my old home-state slash insane asylum of South Carolina).
But what would precipitate such a reaction today or in the near future? Your narrative in TLG is certainly plausible. I have wondered if the divide over pot legalization might be another candidate, if an over-zealous executive were bent on bringing the legalizing states to heel.
With recent news coming from Alabama, I am beginning to wonder if gay marriage might be another possibility. Of course, much of the state Chief Justice's rhetoric may be just rhetoric, but it was the fire-eaters in old SC that pushed the populace over the edge to secession back in December of 1860. Were the Suppreme Court to stike down state bans, as many expect it will come June, what would happen if Alabama refused? If the state supreme court issued a ruling ordering the probate judges to not issue those licenses? Or the legislature passed a law (as some have discussed) to effectively fire any state worker complying with the federal order?
How would the federal order be enforced? It would be difficult to imagine the feds sending in the 101st to stand guard in each Alabama county courthouse to ensure that gay couples were issued a license. Where would such defiance lead?
Mostly, I think this is another case of a reactionary gas-bag deflating himself, but I do wonder...
2/12/15, 11:24 AM
I R Orchard said...
Living through the period(s) was just as agonising as today. Gramophones and toasters may have been built like battleships but they cost a small fortune at a time when I was earning about $850 a year.
The theme of this week's essay is a vindication of my inclinations. Time to stockpile garden hoes and forks, hand saws and planes. The time isn't far off when they'll be worth far more than a 50" TV or an SUV. Thanks, JMG.
2/12/15, 11:31 AM
murph & freeacre said...
We had to get rid of our Teflon after fumes from over-heating killed the pet birds in our home.
I still write checks to pay my bills. Don't have to worry much about identity theft.
I have given up on new vacuum cleaners, after that last three made mostly from plastic weren't up to the job. Now I get old school heavy ones from thrift shops that work well. Hardest part is finding replacement bags for them.
I recently read your "Star's Reach" in paper book form. Loved it.
freeacre
2/12/15, 11:55 AM
William Fairchild said...
Thanks for your blog. I often feel like you are one of the very few authors who has the fortitude to say, "Yes things suck, yes they they will get worse, way, Way, WAY worse. Take a breath, calm the **** down, get a shovel and rock the car dangit! You can get out of the snowdrift." My dad always kept a few bags of kitty litter, tire chains, and a trenching tool in the trunk. I cannot tell you how many times I saw a "fancy schmancy" truck stuck, and my fat, bald, old Pop kept toodling along in his rear wheel drive, four door, Buick. I feel you are like Dad. "Toss some weight in the back and keep a shovel handy."
BTW do the have the "chain law" in WA or MD? Out here in the Midwest it is illegal to use tire chains.
On techno-regression, I recommend it, at least on a part-time basis. Part of my job duties at my day job is to train the newbies. Recently I heard the new guy cranking the tug (tractor) over and over and over on a cold day. It dawned on me that they (the millenials) are used to fuel injected, computer moderated engines. "Pump the gas 3 times, hold the pedal down 1/2 way, and crank it", I hollered. He was up and runnin'. Thank goodness that tug has an automatic tranny.
This culture keeps building "smart" fuel- injected, flat-screened, overly-complicated mousetraps, and then is shocked when they find little brown mouse-turds piled up under the kitchen sink.
So I can dig it, ditch the Kindle, get a library card.
As well, have you read "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart, published 1949? If not, I think you might enjoy it. As will others who follow your work I think.
"Men come and go, but earth abides."
-Ecclesiastes 1:4
"Young man," he said, "are you happy?" The young man named Jack looked startled at this question, and he glanced in both directions before answering, and then he spoke.
"Yes, I am happy. Things are as they are, and I am part of them."
-from "Earth Abides" George R. Stewart
2/12/15, 12:02 PM
hcaparoso said...
Thanks for a comment that brought Grandpa back to life for me!
2/12/15, 12:05 PM
Cathy McGuire said...
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20150211-is-simplicity-too-complicated
Does managing everyday life feel as if it is becoming too complex and stress-inducing?
…Technology is meant to make everyday life more efficient, but ironically, it too creates it share of unnecessary complexity with profuse password prompts and inboxes brimming with 500 new emails per day…. Could the solution be to create complexity-free zones, which at least sometimes, would help keep us balanced and less stressed.
The suggestions are inane and laughable, but it ends well:
… All of these suggestions have one thing in common that is as valuable as anything you can imagine — they create time. With time comes greater control and less stress. Simplicity is one of those rare states where the old adage that less is more actually holds true.
2/12/15, 12:06 PM
Dammerung said...
Now obviously the Timewave singularity didn't happen on schedule, but his arguments about the acceleration of human consciousness through use of entheogens seems to have some validity to me. But even if so, does this acceleration take place "somewhere else" rather than the technological world we're all so predisposed to seeing progress in?
There's a choose-your-own-adventure of arguments out there, by brilliant, honest, and well-meaning people, and sometimes I just despair of ever hoping to untangle it all enough to see where I (and civilization collectively) is really going.
2/12/15, 12:24 PM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
Oh yes, well worth reading. So much of what he wrote some Christians (and atheists) and to your point, believers in progress, would still take great exception to. He might consider the latter to be idolaters.
A little more about the quote from No Cross, No Crown: he was not really calling specifically for martyrdom in the way we might think of it today. That was more the Puritans' gig. The lessons Penn has for today are many. If you think of "self-denial" as self-discipline and restraint, with some altruism/caritas thrown in, not to mention some becoming humility in the face of the divine and the messages god might have for one, then what he was saying makes more sense to the modern English speaker’s ear.
This kind of attitude fits very well with LESS, particularly in its more druidical territory. To get more of a flavor for Penn's beliefs regarding nature (and what our attitude towards Earth should be), and the education of children, see "Some Fruits of Solitude and "More Fruits of Solitude," which he wrote in prison. Have you looked at these?
One of my favorite quotes:
And it would go a great way to caution and direct People in their Use of the World, that they were better studied and known in the Creation of it. For how could Man find the Confidence to abuse it, while they should see the Great Creator stare them in the Face, in all and every part thereof? Their [humans’] Ignorance makes them insensible, and that Insensibility hardy in misusing this noble Creation, that has the Stamp and Voice of a Deity everywhere, and in every Thing to the Observing.
He is simultaneously calling for what we would think of as studies in ecology, human self-restraint with regard to ecosystems, and speaking to that sense of the divine in nature that for me fits well with what I understand of druidism. Also relevant for today were Penn's relations with the American Indian tribes: he treated with them rather than making war and respected indigenous ways. You could even say that the above quote displays some American Indian influence.
All in all, his thought was amazingly radical for the 17th century (which got him in trouble), and is still radical today—if it were mainstream, we might not be in quite the fix we’re in.
2/12/15, 12:51 PM
Matt Wallin said...
2/12/15, 12:55 PM
GHung said...
Our school system has gone all electronic (iPads) and dispensed with text books completely. One wonders how they'll teach the kids if/when their cloud-based educational system crashes. I'm going to contact the schools here to see what books I can scrounge from them; math, science, etc..
This essay also meshes well with some recent questions I've had regarding what we value and why. Case in point: I have a copy of the very first printing of Gone With The Wind (May printing), signed by Margaret Mitchell, with dust jacket and a letter to my Great Grandmother from MM saying how nice it was to see her again at the book signing in Atlanta. My Grandmother was a social contemporary of MM in Atlanta at the time, and she, my Mother and Great Grandmother went to the signing; the first signing of GWTW apparently. Turns out the May printing was a 'false start'; the publisher delayed actual publication until June, so this signed copy with provenance is worth a lot; much much more than our family Bible printed in 1720. Go figure.
The reason I've brought this up is that I've considered selling this family heirloom and using the funds to buy more useful things, such as a collection of text books, as I mentioned earlier. Seems to make a lot more sense than holding on to something that has no real practical value (I have another, less valuable, copy of GWTW if anyone really wants to read it). The 8 -12 thousand dollars I may get for the signed copy (Ebay prices) would buy a lot of books of a more practical nature, and some nice goats to boot. Thoughts? Thoughts also as to why societies value things as they do, and how those things are an indication of where a society is on the up/down slope.
2/12/15, 1:30 PM
GHung said...
Too bad they never perfected smellivision.
2/12/15, 1:58 PM
Steve storm said...
2/12/15, 2:07 PM
latheChuck said...
No particular moral to the story, just data to consider...
2/12/15, 3:05 PM
Kathleen Quinn said...
Yes we are in the US, fortunately on such a small “worthless” patch of clay and swamp as to be of interest to exactly no one, I am thinking, especially not to the folks I described (the largest farmers/landowners in the county). May it continue. My plan is to sort of fly below the radar, and convince everyone I don’t know what I am talking about. It’s not hard Thanks for the reminder to make sure it is all locked up right and tight. I was spooked by this article on folks in Florida forced to sell their condos for pennies because the builder wanted to convert them to rental units. http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2015/2/6/florida-condo-law.html Very much a reminder to read the fine print.
As to firearms, yes I have them and know how to use them. As do all my neighbors. Perhaps more importantly, I have great relationships with all my immediate neighbors. That’s a worthwhile investment, too! Thanks again.
@beneaththesurface
Have fun at Flurry! A great antidote for the extreme temps expected here this weekend. I lean towards contras—perhaps we’ll cross paths. I’m easy to find—tremendous enthusiasm and very little coordination! ;-)
2/12/15, 3:08 PM
svealanding said...
As an example, when oil started to become popular fishermen used smaller crafts that mainly worked near the coast and landed a certain amount of fish. In case one area was fished too hard the fishing would be bad for a while and then other fish populations from other parts of the sea would repopulate the costal waters. This day we have fished so much in teh seas that there are no populations that can repopulate the costal areas.
I am aware that you have not said that we will litterally go back to what once was but I find that a lot of people seem to believe that we might. "It will be like in the 18th century." - no it won't because we don't have the knowledge. That can be handled but we don't have the resources. Two or three hundred years ago there was a lot of low hanging fruits. All those are gone now and if we have to go back and make do with technology of e.g. the ninteenth century we will not have the standard they did, since the technology of that day will not work to extract the depleted resource base of today.
That's how I look at it, maybe I've missed somthing?
2/12/15, 3:11 PM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
I've been buying books cheap at library sales. As they change out their collections and get heavily into electronics, you can pick up all kinds of good stuff (among plenty of dross).
2/12/15, 3:14 PM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Brilliant! I fell out of my seat laughing with glee when I read the phrase "Butlerian Carnival." I'm do a toast to all of us on the lunatic fringe this weekend. Cheers to all of you!
Also, I wanted to say thank you for the response to me from last week. A thank you from my generation, and I'll make sure understanding of the ecological model spreads!
Regards,
Varun
2/12/15, 3:43 PM
escapefromwisconsin said...
Consarn it, JMG, how did you get inside my head (except for the commute and the TV watching)? Must be those Druid powers. I've been coping with this recently and it's got me near the end of my rope. Don't forget the rampant careerism, college degree pecking order, Machivelian politics, enforced cheerfulness, conformity, and surveillance out of 1984. Lately I've been pondering if the only choices left to us in America today are which box we want to inhabit - cubicle or coffin. The latter's looking better than the former every day.
Although I have not read Dune (but should), as I recall, the Butlerian Jihad was launched not because of technology per se, but because we allowed technology to do our thinking for us. What better description is there than this relentless push toward "artificial intelligence," "smart cities," and "the internet of things?" It seems like artificial intelligence is driving out real intelligence, and the smarter the phones the dumber the people. I believe it was Keven Kelly who said the business model of the future is "take any business sector and add AI." I find it hard to see how this is going to benefit anyone but a small handful of companies looking for the next profit sector to milk. I don't need my refrigerator to tweet what the contents are, or need to adjust my thermostat with my smart phone. Yakoff Smirnoff's go-to joke during the Cold War was about how in Russia the TV watched you, but now it's a reality in modern-day America. All I can think of is how useless all this stuff is, and I think others are starting to see that too. We'd much rather have decent food, meaningful work, affordable housing, and reasonable vacation time, but that's not on offer, apparently.
2/12/15, 4:20 PM
Gregory said...
The path to a fuller, more meaningful life is opting out of consumer culture and becoming immersed in some of these activities you mention.
I used to think about these things (brewing beer, raising small livestock, gardening, repairing things myself) in a utilitarian sense - as a grim necessity in the face of crises ahead. Having begun to practise these things, I now feel as though they are part of an enjoyable, meaningful life and contribution to a liveable, sane, happy local culture.
2/12/15, 4:26 PM
latheChuck said...
Sure, we can protect ourselves from the side effects of medications by not taking them, but we also need to protect ourselves from the side effects of our demented neighbors (and leaders) who are taking them.
"How could they be so stupid?" we ask, when we see the news. Now we know.
2/12/15, 4:26 PM
Ozark Chinquapin said...
Although I have no personal involvement in the Greek situation, I do wonder if we'll be faced with a similar situation in at least parts of the US in the not too distant future. Up to this point, the US has had plenty of third world nations to bleed dry, but once the overseas empire falls apart, I wonder if the US will start catabolizing the weaker and more troubled of the 50 states, putting a few at a time in the position that Greece and other southern European countries have been forced into by the US. Taken far enough, it would probably lead to the collapse of America, but that hasn't stopped the EU from taking that path, and it could keep on going for a while if the majority of the states and the votes were reaping the wealth gained by bleeding the unlucky ones dry.
2/12/15, 4:45 PM
exiledbear said...
2/12/15, 4:46 PM
Scott Bohachyk said...
I also felt this was one of your better posts. My frustration and anxiety lies in the fact that almost no one I know personally seems to be interested in this type of discussion. I used to be a teacher and managed to pique the interest of several students, one who is now contacting Charlie Hall for grad school advice, but by and large, it's been sobering to realize how unaware people are. Unaware or unwilling to accept the situation we're now in, I'm not sure.
Anyway, keep it up. I'm trying my best to engage people in this conversation. Do you accept invitations to universities for speaking engagements? uWaterloo, Ontario would love to have you over.
2/12/15, 6:08 PM
Unknown said...
Renaissance Man, Murdoch Mysteries is a retitled series. Original title, or at least the one under which it has been airing on a minor cable station I receive, is The Artful Detective.
It irritates me that the doctor is not wearing accurate clothing for the period, but that is a commonplace of costume dramas not produced by the BBC or ABC. I would expect to see a female physician of that period wearing a white blouse with leg-o'mutton sleeves, a dark close-fitting waistcoat with a menswear-style long dark necktie, perhaps a bib apron over it when she is working. Most women during that decade dressed their hair with tight curls close to the head; this was a blip between looser mid Victorian women's hairstyles and the Gibson Girl do that came in around 1900.
You can usually tell when a period movie or series was made by looking at the clothing, hairstyles and makeup of principal female characters. They are nearly always modified in the direction of the current fashion, perhaps in fear that audiences will think the actress is funny looking if she's dressed right. Bangs are a dead giveaway of a show from the mid twentieth century.
2/12/15, 6:18 PM
Cathy McGuire said...
2/12/15, 6:24 PM
Greg Belvedere said...
Funny that you bring up McKenna. I actually think his archaic revival sounds a lot like the Butlerian Carnival. So I do think there is some agreement between the two (never thought I would say that). Though I think McKenna's idea was more of just an aesthetic than what JMG has proposed/identified.
I truly enjoy McKenna. I thought of his critique of the big bang this week when I read about physicists coming out with an alternative model, "Science is saying give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest."
Having said this, I think he came out somewhere very different from JMG because he was a bit heavy on people like Kurzweil and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I don't care much for Kurzweil, but I enjoy de Chardin and think that if there is progress it is not straight technological progress. Even if you buy into the timewave, it is fractal. So progress does not go forward forever and it is hard to judge the size of a peak or valley.
2/12/15, 6:49 PM
Repent said...
I think I like the 60's culture. (Even though this was slightly before my time) I use psychedelics, I love rock and roll, I have a vinyl record player, and I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about 'what's out there' in space.
Rap singers cursing and dancing about on TV showing their belly buttons hardly compare.
2/12/15, 6:59 PM
Julian R. said...
I have always found the beauty of old ways and things to be appealing though. So, I've not been bummed out about the downward trend of industrial society. I feel hopeful that some day humans will live a life free of noises from machines or other people's radios, because there will be none.
Growing up riding horses and having fun in a low tech way probably instilled this knowledge in me that happiness can be had without electronics and motors.
My favorite old tools are Austrian Scythes and good quality harnesses for horses.
2/12/15, 7:11 PM
Thomas Prentice said...
"Irish govt fears global media coverage of ‘political policing,’ anti-austerity activists say"
"Following three days of “heavy handed” dawn raids on the homes of Irish anti-austerity activists, a solidarity protest was held outside the Irish embassy in London...
"The demonstration was organized after 11 Irish anti-water charges campaigners were arrested, detained and questioned by police...
"[ELECTED IRISH OFFICIALS ALSO ARRESTED]: Among those hauled into police custody were socialist TD (MP) Paul Murphy, and leftist Dublin councilors Mick Murphy and Kieran Mahon.
"All three men are public representatives of Ireland’s Anti-Austerity Alliance, which has campaigned tirelessly against the Irish government’s debt repayment strategy to international and EU creditors.
"!!!Other anti-water charges campaigners arrested by Irish police include two boys aged 16 and 14.!!!
"***Ten*** officers were reportedly dispatched to arrest the 16 year-old, while six officers showed up at each of the remaining activists’ doors."
Read more here from RT
http://rt.com/news/231783-political-policing-quash-dissent/
2/12/15, 7:19 PM
Melissa M. said...
This song was running through my head for some of it. (warning, non-graphic nudity, and the original non-video version has one bit of profanity) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWKTFuAFcOY
I like this strategy of partying into the future. Much like a fox cub chasing leaves or tussling with its siblings, the fact that it's fun, doesn't change how useful that experience will be in order to chase rabbits and face foes.
In not unrelated news, I was rather thrilled to discover that in turning a greenwood bowl blank, when it's working right, you can get a spectacular rooster tail of very long shavings flying up into the air (and hopefully not landing on the neighboring student). Dried wood is cantankerous in comparison. (hmm, down the road, those long shavings might have goodwill/barter value as firestarter or packing material.)
David, on a grimmer note, that spark might be the vaccination issue, especially if politicians are inspired by pharmaceutical companies try to make it mandatory, or remove the personal belief exemption. Officials offended by pot, and Fundamentalists offended by Gay marriage, have nothing on the potential savagery of parents (on either side of the issue) if they feel forced to protect their kids.
2/12/15, 7:48 PM
Carl said...
For some beginning beer brewing kits check www.morebeer.com or Brew Your Own magazine at www.byo.com for recipes. Byo would have lots of recipes and more beer would sell extract kits and other things you'd need. Also check if where you live there is a brew shop, and they might offer a class or have a club that can help you.
Good luck, Carl
p.s. I started home brewing about five years ago after JMG suggested it as a good fall-back occupation.
2/12/15, 7:56 PM
oilman2 said...
My 22 year old is gung-ho building a low energy organic farm with me. Every weekend new friends come to help and learn building techniques, farm practices and so many things no longer taught in our schools. My 30y/o son refuses to live in anything more than 700 sq/ft in size, and has enough furniture to allow guests to sit - little more. My 29 y/o daughter brews beer every weekend with her friends, or goes to anything resembling folk fairs or goes shopping at flea markets for 'vintage stuff'. My 26 y/o and her husband only buy things that can be repaired, hang their laundry and other things their neighbors consider 'quaint'. She uses the USPO for shipping her quilting, and is known by her name at the counter.
I have heard all 4 express they prefer less complex things, even if they communicate via texting and smart phones. They buy little that does not last, and all are avoiding debt at most any cost - preferring to save and wait.
This is very different from many people - some may be from my mutterings actually being listened to, some from their own experiences buying crappy things, but mostly it is because they earn less and so are choosing to spend more wisely with an eye to a restricted future (per them, not me placing words in their mouths). They want things to last and not be forced to buy a new every few years.
Their Mom reads on Kindle, but they prefer going to book stores and estate sales with me to look for well made and meaningful books - I never have to ask any of them twice. They like Goodwill and flea market shopping, because they are more concerned with clothes that last and are made of cotton - eschewing man-made fibers as a rule. They support anyone making things with their hands over factory made things. They buy laundry detergents and soaps based on ingredients - avoiding carcinogens even if it means paying more. Fast food rarely happens but sack lunches abound, especially on trips and at the farm. And oh that cold, home brewed beer....
They know and smell the change in the wind, and look backwards more because the present is rather bleak in terms of literature, music, basic foodstuffs and community (again, per them, not me). They do not know what is coming, but they all feel something slouching towards them on many fronts.
I just wanted people to know that many young people are not living on Facebook, Twittering their life away or simply playing video games. Many simply have parents that DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING SAVE EXISTING IN A CUBE FARM and going to work and coming home exhausted and wrung out. If something breaks, it is replaced or the proper repair guy called - simple skills like fixing a wiggle-waggle on a washing machine are more and more rare. These young people want more than that - their hunger to know is palpable when they show up to help at my farm...
This type of thinking about our offspring is erroneous, and likely put about by preceding generations making extreme generalizations based on specific experiences. This is bad planning - as we age, we need help - and it isn't going to come from our parents... Sharing what we know is far and away more rewarding than complaining.
2/12/15, 8:23 PM
Scythe of Relief said...
That kinda reminds of what David Holmgren has to say in ths short 5min clip. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVS45dbNL-E
2/12/15, 9:02 PM
Unknown said...
I attended a historical reenactment this evening. It was fun; it ties in with previous writing by JMG about the need to participate in local civic organizations.
The occasion was the hundredth anniversary of the dedication of the San Anselmo Public Library. They performed a partial reenactment of the dedication, opening with a song from the 1915 program (The Gondolier, with piano accompaniment.) Members of our town council in the guise of the historical mayor, library board president, judge and president of the Women's Improvement Club addressed us with speeches containing quotations from those dignitaries. Transitioning to the present, another council member read a poem And Yet the Books by Czeslaw Milosz, we sang Happy Birthday, Dear Library, and had cake and champagne.
They shoehorned a lot of historical background into the speeches. I learned that seventy-five percent of the public libraries existing in the US in 1915 were organized by the efforts of women's clubs. The local Women's Improvement Club's fundraising efforts over a few years fell short of what was needed for a building. They persuaded a local judge and former congressman who had been a law school classmate of Andrew Carnegie to visit him and ask for a donation of $10,000, which he gave.
Carnegie only donated library buildings to communities that showed they could keep the buildings open. San Anselmo in 1915 had fewer than 2500 residents. The city government appropriated several hundred dollars to furnish the library and buy books, and they hired a full time librarian.
2/12/15, 9:04 PM
Chris G said...
ps there are of course many such music festivals around the country (and there could be many more) and they're all different flavors but Pickathon stands out for its really peaceful vivacity, "chillness", and for lack of a better word genuineness. Easy as it may be, it's also clear that people have devoted considerable effort to transcend the madness being created in our society at people's expense for some wacky idea.
2/12/15, 9:08 PM
Kevin said...
http://issuu.com/powellriverliving/docs/1502_february_2015/14
2/12/15, 9:20 PM
Stephen Heyer said...
Brilliant! I’ve never seen it put like that.
But as soon as I read that I saw Truth, and a lot of things I’d been vaguely thinking arranged themselves into a coherent pattern in my head.
Oh! And just passing through somewhere as a tourist isn’t much better.
2/12/15, 9:44 PM
Ruben said...
Go straight to Brew In A Bag, do not pass Go. Collect awesomeness.
BIABrewer.info
2/12/15, 10:09 PM
Ien in the Kootenays said...
2/12/15, 10:15 PM
Stephen Heyer said...
The sad thing is that often it isn’t the technology that is a fault, it isn’t even poor design, it’s design that is far too dedicated to ringing out every possible cent of corporate profit, to the point of ruining what might otherwise be a good product.
This can happen as readily to non material products like computer operating systems too. Currently, a lot of us here in North Australia are running Windows XP and are thoroughly used to it – it does everything we want.
But of course, Microsoft evidently does not think it can make it’s normal obscene profits out of looking after old products so is trying to force us into later versions of Windows. The trouble is, when we try them we find that a lot of functions we use every day have been put in different places, look different and have to be used differently: We have to relearn them and even then they are still more awkward to use, yet in the end mostly do the same thing and no better.
I suppose it is not surprising that they are less efficient as by XP Microsoft pretty much had the user interface optimized. Changing it for the sake of making things look different enough to convince people to go to the trouble and expense of getting a new version of Windows just had to decrease, not increase its utility.
I guess they had to make it look different as, from a user’s point of view, any real improvements are so slight as to be invisible.
Mind you, for all my disapproval of this kind of corporate behavior there is one USA mega firm that leaves me in stunned admiration – Apple. I mean, where do they find that customer base so enthusiastic (all right, stupid) that it lines up all night so as when the stores open in the morning to pay top dollar and then some the new model that is slightly different from the old one.
2/12/15, 10:17 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Øyvind, exactly. I want to hear the Democrats who were drooling all over him six and a half years ago look at that and tell us how much he cares.
Ceworthe, good to hear. As for the Germans, that may be the case; if so, they may not be too happy when history repeats itself.
Sukey, thanks for the recommendation.
John, true enough. It's like a bit of graffiti I once saw in a big box store parking lot. "If you had enough, how would you know?"
Shane, oh, granted. I just hear from way too many people who think they want things to crash and burn.
Kathleen, what was the quote from Sinclair Lewis? "You can't get a man to understand something if his income depends on not understanding it," I think it was. Enjoy Dancy Flurry!
Unknown, your daughter is a very sensible girl, and her teachers even more so!
Shane, US boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't do that, and I see no reason why the same phenomenon in the Ukraine would do more. The ugly fact is that Americans by and large don't care if we go do war, so long as it's predominantly the children of the poor who have to do the killing and dying.
Pinku-Sensei, hmm! Is le Nain Rouge any relation to l'Homme Rouge des Tuileries? Might explain a thing or two...
Lucretia, yes, I thought we'd hear from some participants! As this week's post tried to suggest, I think there's a lot more going on in the various reenactment/re-creation scenes than dress-up games, and I'll be talking about the possibilities at more length as we proceed.
Ruben, I'm all in favor of sauerkraut -- it's a significant element in local cooking here in the north central Appalachians, courtesy of a lot of German settlers in the 1700s. I'll look forward to the manifesto.
2/12/15, 11:16 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Mickey, okay, got it. I get a lot of people who think I'm actually saying the end is nigh, thus the kneejerk reaction on my part.
Beneath, I've met a lot of them myself. Cracking the myth of the inevitability and invincibility of progress -- that's a tall order, but it's something that has to be done. It's when that comes crashing down that we know the Ring has gone into Mount Doom for real.
Lynford, that's very good to hear! I basically don't use any electric tools in the basement shop these days -- hand tools do the job with a lot less noise and mess -- and I'm glad to hear others are doing the same.
Andrew, it's easy to get sucked into fatalism. Our entire culture is geared to convincing people that their only choice is to go along with the march of progress, even if that march is visibly headed straight over a cliff; it takes time, effort, and reflection to realize that you can choose to do something else.
Mark, you're in the contest!
Adryrn, welcome to the comments page! Yes, I've encountered a lot of young people learning practical skills that way. Now to begin moving gently toward the raw materials you'll be able to get as things wind down...
Marc, I'm far from sure he's right about Japan, but I'm quite sure you're right about the US. It's going to take a hefty shock to snap most Americans out of the trance. Mind you, shocks of at least the necessary intensity are on their way.
Steelkilt, glad to hear it!
Ed, no, not all of us are Wall Streeters at heart, even though it may look that way sometimes. I hear from a lot of people who are taking concrete action to move toward something more sane.
Amazed, I'm not at all surprised. It's fun in other counties, too!
Ben, excellent! I hope you either have apprentices or are planning to get some.
KL, the difference, of course, is that the real 50s had a lot of holdovers from the 1930s and these remade 50s have a lot of holdovers from the beginning of the 21st century. I'll be talking at some length about how that difference shapes the strategy I'm proposing.
2/12/15, 11:32 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Phil, oh, granted. We're far from the beginning and just as far from the end of this story.
Postpeakmedicine, excellent! I'm delighted on both counts.
Greg, I wonder how many people know that with the most popular e-reader, you don't actually buy the book -- you lease the right to use it for as long as the provider lets you, and they can take it back at any time, without notice. I'd much rather have the physical object sitting on the shelf.
Phil, thanks for the recommendation.
Jill, glad to hear it. The passion for the handmade, and for taking part in that, is an important dimension of all this.
Mister R., no argument there.
Ares, a large and growing number of young people are saying no to the college debt trap, and doing something more sane with their lives. It's to them and those like them that a lot of this is directed. The American dream? These days, in practice, it's an American nightmare.
Jonathan, no doubt someday I'll have to go look up who Brian Williams is.
George, I think the failure of progress is only beginning to seep into the minds even of those who think of themselves as thinking people. As for the limits to reason, yes, I've discussed that at some length.
Yupped, no argument at all. Of course you know my basic thesis: the last three decades or so in the industrial world have been one of history's all-time blind alleys, a period in which our civilization cashed in its hope of a sustainable future on one more round of extravagance and wretched excess. Now the bill's come due -- and LESS, Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation, is the one viable option we've got left.
Dfr, no, you're not part of a trend, you're setting the trend. If I'm right, not that long from now, all your son's friends are going to be jealous of what a cool mom he has!
2/12/15, 11:48 PM
Jason Heppenstall said...
Instead I'll just say that I've been recently working now and then as a day-labouring woodman, just to earn a little extra cash. My task is to clear away the brash as the other fellow does the main coppice work. I then have to grade the wood into products - it's mainly hazel so we are looking at fencing stakes, beanpoles, interesting twisty bits for a local rustic furniture maker, and smaller diameter stuff for making arrows. The rest is graded into firewood or charcoal and only the completely unusable stuff gets burned on a big fire.
The funny thing is, between me and my pal, I think we have four degrees. We both lived in London at one point and pursued careers in the media. The forest work is hard, the pay is meagre but the setting and rewards are worth it. It's probably the best job I've ever worked.
2/13/15, 12:59 AM
Angus Wallace said...
Regarding the fidelity of vinyl, you're technically correct that the dynamic range of CDs is usually greater, but (having both vinyl and CDs) I'm not convinced CDs sound better in practice (when the vinyl is in good nick). The point about mastering is very relevant too. I don't know about new vinyl releases, but it's relevant that it took CDs to introduce the "loudness war".
I once heard it said that an audiophile is a person who listens to the equipment and not the music (this is not directed at you, but I think it's a good point nonetheless).
CDs are more robust than vinyl, but when they fail they do so catastrophically (i.e.. a scratched CD is often ruined).
The main thing I love about vinyl is going into an op shop and picking up weird stuff that I'd never find any other way. Also, classical vinyl (Faure, Vivaldi, Bach, etc) is extremely cheap and usually well-looked-after.
2/13/15, 1:24 AM
Jason Heppenstall said...
- My nine-year-old daughter got an ereader for Christmas and is already 'over it'. She requested a new book recently and added that she would rather wait a week for the paper version than get the instant download.
- My sister has stopped using email in her personal life. Instead she has gone back to writing letters with a fountain pen on nice paper. My kids love writing to her, and receiving letters back.
- My wife has found a niche making upcycled furniture using cast off charity shop clothes as fabric. People seem to love it and are willing to pay more for such items.
- This summer I will be helping someone to build a roundhouse made from not much more than wood, straw and cob. I'm rather excited about learning these new skills and the project is being managed by Tony Wrench, who is something of a 'hobbit hole' guru.
As for friends and acquaintances, most people I now surround myself with are doing creative things the 'old fashioned' way. Just off the top of my head I can say that amongst their numbers are brewers, basket makers, bee keepers, fish smokers, cider makers, knitters, alpaca rearers, greenwood carpenters, blacksmiths, garden producers ... and that's not even getting into the astrologers, wassailers, healers, geomancers ... I'm lucky to live in such an 'interesting' place.
There are even some local guys building a steam powered motorbike that runs on wood chips.
So, all in all, no misery here - just doing things a bit simpler than we used to do, and enjoying it.
2/13/15, 1:33 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Many thanks, I still chuckle to myself about it.
A storm rolled in here tonight and my lady and I sat on the veranda enjoyed a mead and simply watched the lightening and rain roll in from afar. Nature is truly spectacular and she put on a good sound and light show.
PS: I commenced reading Twilight's Last Gleaming this morning and am enjoying it. The story keeps up a cracking pace. McGaffney's an excellent character and I approve thoroughly, although I have to admit that I'm waiting to read a Blind Freddy reference... By the way, I never before remarked that it was an interesting title for the book too. Very thoughtful.
I'm only about half way through the comments yet and I notice that no one (yet - 142 comments and going strong) seems to have touched upon the concept which you introduced about advances being offset by regressions elsewhere. It is funny how people feel that they and their families are somehow "safe" in an SUV, when they are in fact undermining the very biosphere that support their existence. It is kind of weird way of thinking you have to admit? In societies with a stable or declining resource base, advantages for one person, become a disadvantage for another (or others).
Cheers
Chris
2/13/15, 2:03 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Yeah, good point, and you are entirely correct. Your place is a bit closer to the equator too, so you will get more winter sunlight than here so the numbers for average winter solar PV generation are spot on.
Exactly, I vacuum during daylight hours as do I weld and all of the other things that require heavy usage of electrical energy. Make bread whilst the sun shines is what I reckon.
Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.
Hi Chester,
Many thanks for the correction. Bummer, I thought I had an original thought too. Oh well, the best ideas are other peoples, I guess.
Yeah, there are an awful lot of them. I spotted a guy driving a van the other day promoting a mobile fix up service for the screens. Honestly, what does that say to you, that that service is actually economically viable in the first place?
Hi Cathy,
Yeah, it is weird, but I do revel in my rebellious out of sync life. It is actually good fun and I thoroughly enjoy it.
However, I've had years to accustom myself to the criticisms of others regarding the above and I wonder what the emotional impact will be on males who aren't doing what I'm doing by choice? Dunno, but years ago I had a neighbour who was a stay at home dad who was quite depressive about the situation. He eventually had a "bushwalking accident" and died and I always felt that he'd just had enough and offed himself in a way that left insurance money for the wife and kids. Now the weird thing was that after he was gone, they all looked much happier and brighter. Just sayin...
Did you know that in WWI and WWII, many ladies used to drop feathers off at the houses of conscientious objectors.
We live in an exceptionally homogenous culture and I certainly hope the future brings in a bit more colour and diversity. We could certainly use a different narrative as this current one is pretty boring...
Cheers
Chris
2/13/15, 2:17 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
I enjoyed the film too and felt pretty much the same way about it.
The conditions are untenable. Unfortunately I also had the thought (blame the sprite on my shoulder whispering into my ear!) that the only way to win the war is to admit that we are there for the oil and simply forget about the whole messy democracy thing.
Hand the whole country over to the war lords split up upon whatever geographical area those people can effectively control. Effectively it becomes a proto-feudal state.
Set up a system of basic rules which are easy to understand for all so that there is a sort of rough and impartial justice for all. It doesn't have to be fair.
Announce to the population your intentions to hand control to locals and tell them that an insurgency will not be tolerated.
Encourage people to get on with work and life and try and extract as much oil and wealth as feasibly possible.
The war lords can be responsible for the welfare and policing of their respective populations.
Then simply wait.
However, sooner or later one of the war lords is going to do something wrong and test the boundaries and your mettle because that is in the nature of people.
The correct response is to then advise the people to leave and then flatten one or more towns completely - thus removing the support base for the war lord (impoverishing him and his family) and making an example of him in the process.
But such actions should be clear to all that that individual war lord has breached clearly understood rules.
Dunno, but what I saw on the film rang alarm bells as it is a costly war of attrition.
Cheers
Chris
2/13/15, 2:36 AM
The Court Jester said...
2/13/15, 2:53 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Different people put differing values on possessions and I agree that mobility is an excellent survival strategy - on the condition that few others are following that strategy.
I note that your photo includes a cat, would you walk away from your companion animal as you would your books?
No judgement, just stuff for you to think about.
Chris
2/13/15, 3:10 AM
O said...
2/13/15, 3:42 AM
Ben Iscatus said...
Ode But Not To A Kindle
The Kindle’s slim, and yes, it has good looks
But no, it never will replace my books.
Encroaching mildew, paper-mites and dust
Are decorations that I've learned to trust –
These well-thumbed pages with their spines creased white
Have been my comforts on a winter’s night.
I'll never pack them in a cardboard box
Or lob them in a bin like worn-out socks.
Fine substrate both for poetry and prose,
With acid musk that wrinkles up the nose,
Suffusing into furnishings and walls,
The smell of print and paper never palls!
A Kindle may be à la mode and sleek
But books on shelves are more than shabby chic:
Their covers call to mind the many themes
Which have inspired us and enriched our dreams.
Arranged in rows, encased by solid wood,
Their provenance is better understood;
And put on view, they’ll be caressed and browsed;
Those e-books would stay cold and unaroused.
A library brings on a secret thrill,
Accumulated wisdom; drink your fill!
See – books that guide, enlighten and amuse
All intimate together. Now, which to choose?
As kids, we’ll banish villains' evil spells
With wishes found in ancient fairy tales;
As teenagers, with Vance or Tolkien
We’ll take on half the galaxy, and win!
Let love and money battle for our souls
In Regency romances (thank you, girls).
Let’s voyage to Ithaca with Ulysses
And argue ethics with old Socrates;
Let’s study art (view what we’ll never own)
Quote Shakespeare, Keats and poets barely known;
Then with history and science pretend
We know the world’s beginning, or its end.
From epic tomes, to books on wine and food,
We’ll sample all, depending on our mood.
Great minds created them with quill and pen -
With our warm hands, we'll quicken them again.
2/13/15, 3:45 AM
Arun said...
http://adisridin.blogspot.in/
Thanks, Arun
2/13/15, 4:15 AM
Trent Appleman said...
Your sort of successor to the MAD doctrine, stockpiles declining in tandem with bluffing on a grand scale, influenced me In tandem with your neo-regionalism towards speculation about the likely results that neo-regionalism would have in the event of a war between two or more of the three Great Powers, being Russia, China, and the US. The term is deliberately borrowed from the early 20th century, which had a different conception in place than ours of superpowers.
If Peak Oil does indeed result in the denouement which you have been sketching out, then it would seem that WW3 is likely to exhaust the parties participating in it; that as, to accelerate a drift towards neo-regionalism which was already inevitable in the context of Peak Oil. Various labels have been floating through my mind, among them “The War Without Victors” and “The War Without a Post-War Economic Boom”. The crescendo we are living is truly beautiful.
Trent
2/13/15, 4:48 AM
latefall said...
The situation is indeed lamentable, and there is plenty of blame to go around. If I am right even a German Marshall Plan (loan IIRC) would not cover it by now. And it isn't even about investing or rebuilding, it is to cover running costs (no destruction of war). Olives and sustainability indeed.
There are two big problems I see now: Organizations have created a problem that goes well beyond currently acceptable individual levels of corrective measures. Sure the organizations were all driven by people in the end. But it is not the same individuals you can reach with corrective measures, compared to the ones with the majority of the responsibility in producing the situation.
And of course neither Germany nor France come out very clean if you look at e.g. frigates, submarines, or Siemens for example. More: http://www.stopwapenhandel.org/sites/stopwapenhandel.org/files/EU_MilSpending_Crisis.pdf
I really feel sorry for the young Greek people. Their new political leadership may represent a glitch in the Matrix and all, but in the end they are still caught between thermodynamics and a creditor that paid the last installment for WWI debt in October 2010. Ceworthe may have a point (and then some).
@Germany in the EU
The other problem is that I think JMG is quite right when he stresses how important the EU is for the average peace loving German (as well as other European). Even though one may take issue with some of Herfried Münkler's conclusions I think his analysis of WWI is pretty sound (http://dbtg.tv/cvid/3170044), paraphrased: Empirically, if somethings starts to go seriously wrong in Europe there is a very large probability Germany will pull the short straw some time before it pans out. Germany is in a position that tolerates very little reckless behavior and should keep that in mind. By the way Münkler gets the end of empires, cycles, and sustainability.
At the moment there is a bout of very nice discussions held in the German parliament which chime well with this blog: sustainability (no/different growth, earth system boundaries, questioning of progress, tech regression), nuclear waste storage (admission to failure & censorship, now want public outreach and participation - send in your stories perhaps?)...
Of course this is only one relatively bright facet of a much more complex (and frustrating) network. Still, especially when they were discussing the public participation stuff I had the impression they were thinking of us a little (more so if you are young and can speak German ;)).
2/13/15, 5:13 AM
Eric S. said...
When his health took a dramatic plunge last Friday, I went home to be with him during his final days. The nurses came by a few times to help turn him and change him, but he got to spend the whole dying process sitting up in his own bed, holding his dog with me and my mother rubbing his legs and singing his favorite hymns. He fell asleep for the last time Monday night and I slept by his side for the entire night so I could be there for him if he crossed the threshold, my mother couldn’t quite handle the death rattle anymore by that point. At around 4:00 in the morning, my mother woke up in the night, came in to kiss him on the forehead and say goodbye one last time and he drew his last breath, then, my mother blew out the unity candle from their wedding that she’d kept lit from the moment he began to slip away and with a breeze and a whisper he was gone. There was a beauty to the whole process… there were some hard hours early on, but at some point his body just realized what was happening to it and took over, helping him slowly retreat within like it had been preparing for this moment since the beginning. All I could think this weekend was that if I could die, I would want it to be like this… which was, well… in every way the old fashioned way of doing it.
His brother and mother came by at one point during the first day, though and had a very different perspective on the whole thing… they were horrified… they kept asking why he wasn’t in a hospital, why there was no oxygen tank (which the hospice nurses had said would just dry him out and make him uncomfortable)… why they didn’t have a drip with sugars and fluids in his veins… They were even suggesting that we even give him a tracheotomy and put him on a breathing machine to stop the death rattle… They didn’t have an answer on how any of that would do anything to make his death a better experience for him, and all of those suggestions were things that would have just drawn out the process and prevented his body from doing what it was designed to do. It would have stripped his death of everything he’d expressly wanted it to be. They wanted that because that’s what death was to them “supposed” to look like. It was the civilized, advanced way of dying in a medical system designed to prolong life rather than ease its end.
2/13/15, 6:35 AM
oilman2 said...
In "farmland", we generally operate on slim margins, have money constantly tied up in future production and require simple but reliable performance from equipment.
Faced with what was available, I chose a 1974 International tractor with fresh mechanical makeover. My neighbor bought a spanking new John Deer (our saying is "Nothing Breaks Like a Deer...). There is no ECU on my tractor, and every tie rod and bearing is overbuilt for purpose.
When the JD tractor broke, it sat in the field for 2 days. Another tractor was required to pull it out of the field and then get it on trailer to go to the shop. It was 9 days to get his JD back. My neighbor, normally quite handy mechanically, told me that several things make him likely to pursue my antique tractor philosophy.
The JD is designed to meet specifications - who wrote them is a mystery - but only to meet them. Sheet metal is half the thickness of my Intl, and it bends like cardboard under actual heavy use. Tie rods of his 65hp are smaller than my 50hp, and the injector pump is a single piece assembly with built in filter. When it fouls or breaks, it is a smooth $1800 plus labor compared to my simpler field replaceable $400 pump.
The JD has an ecu, and the JD ecu is encrypted. You cannot even hack it effectively using normal computer diags - it must go into the shop. If you break the encryption, you have JD on your back under the DMCA, as the encryption is copyrghted... There are numerous "safety features" which are lockouts - if they malfunction, the JD is useless and must go to the shop. Many of these safety switches and such are bolted in with weird combinations of standard, metric and Torx nuts and bolts. My neighbor is beyond disgusted with his new $90,000 JD.
My generator was designed the same way, with proprietary fasteners (which I replaced to make it user serviceable). There were even 'dummy' fasteners on the housing, attached to nothing - you have to understand where things SHOULD BE attached to avoid trying to remove 'ghost fasteners'...
These are intentional design decisions - from the decision to only MEET a specification produced by management to the obvious efforts to force you back into the dealers arms for repair of everyday components. Kubota, New Holland and Mahindra run similar philosophies sans encrypted ECU.
When manufacturers design products to force you to return to them for repair, they force you to make a choice. If they all do it, you can still move backwards and refuse to play this insane game. But most people are conditioned that 'new' is better, and 'warranty' is necessary as insurance against high cost repairs!
Hypercomplex insanity is present in far too many places where simpler is both better and more reliable. Safety is fine, but designing products that attempt to replace common sense leads to more complexity. It is impossible to 'fix' stupidity. Designing for idiots as operators and being simply greedy for maximum profits are what leads us down this road where we turn around and look for a more logical and effective path - regressing to earlier generations with reduced complexity and more reliability.
2/13/15, 6:59 AM
Wolfgang Brinck said...
The discovery of agriculture partially got rid of the problem of hunger because it allowed people to produce a surplus of some sort of staple. Still, there were crop failures or losses of stored food to rats and late winter and early spring were months when hunger was not uncommon. I think that the practice of fasting which was part of many religions was an attempt to ritualize a skill which many people had to practice unwillingly, that is the skill of going hungry.
So when working on your pre-industrial life skills, don't forget fasting.
2/13/15, 7:17 AM
Justin Patrick Moore said...
Every Winter Solstice another group of our friends puts on a party and variety show with stuff like the above, plus juggling, comedy, etc. There is homebrewed beer and a pot luck. The people who started it came to the conclusion that "we can entertain ourselves". And create community while doing so. This is very much different than the isolation of television.
( Even at the library where I work, most conversation revolves around ones viewing habits. It's as if Americans have forgotten how to talk about anything else. )
These kind of events can create cohesion for these subcultures and help them grow.
2/13/15, 7:23 AM
Alphonse Houner said...
The holes are there today and they are not very small and it is looking like the thing will lose bits and pieces until a thread bare shadow of the original is all that is left. Perhaps this is similar to the unraveling of the Roman Empire subsequent to the third century C.E. They didn’t seem to realize what was going on and then it wasn’t going on at all. Perhaps the real question should be what was our “third century” and where are we in the process now?
This was a very good post and for those of that have followed your writings, and took action, there is some solace in knowing that your actions have not been for naught. Then again, the most recent report from NASA, released on February 12th, indicates an unlivable world by late this century in which case it is all for naught.
Hmmmm…..
2/13/15, 7:26 AM
FiftyNiner said...
2/13/15, 7:49 AM
Paula said...
2/13/15, 8:01 AM
patriciaormsby said...
There are several parts of this week's essay that are really quotable, your note on combining religion and politics in particular. When I first became a Shinto priestess and an ambitious acquaintance said, "Pat! Let's make a new religion!" that is what came to mind. I'm not as articulate as you, so I just looked down and sort of walked away.
@ Marc: Japan, I think, has a long way to plunge before anything but the most superficial form of retro culture will begin to appear. From what I can tell from my rural outpost, Japan is going through a sort of cultural collapse. I don't think it will turn out the way Dmitry Orlov describes, though. Japan'll collapse in its own way.
Rural communities are dying out, as the young continue to move to Tokyo, because that is what is necessary in order to achieve the expected level of material prosperity that would allow a young man hope of marriage. Despite the poor state of Japan's economy, the big cities still offer some work opportunities, because frankly there is not a lot of competition. Most of the young people I know in their 30s are single, living with their parents, working as temps or not at all, and have no prospects for their future.
My town held its last annual Obon dance more than five years ago. I attended an ancient festival at a local shrine recently, and this year they'd discontinued using the services of a priest. (I would perform this for free, but the town is just not interested enough.)
I became a priestess to help support a community (in Tokyo, and still lively, but undergoing a similar crisis of attrition). Shinto makes an effort to keep certain pre-electricity techniques alive by training their priests in their use. They do not share this knowledge with the public, but perhaps in the future they will have an opportunity to do that.
I sometimes think, though, that most people in Japan would rather sink into a fairy-tale world and slowly starve while pretending to be happy than face a future without "progress."
I had a student in her 30s who loves Disneyland, and she was in a class with several students in their 60s, who perceived an unfolding tragedy and were not hesitant to say so. I cheerfully suggested to her to "create your own Disneyland here in town!" That went over like a lead balloon.
She and I inhabit two separate universes.
2/13/15, 8:10 AM
Joe Roberts said...
Legislators or judges in states could simply choose to disobey a federal directive or law in blatant disregard of the federal system, as Judge Ray Moore of Alabama has done this past week, and such actions, while small on their own perhaps, could quickly snowball into a multi-headed crisis the federal government is in no position to counter (never mind reduced resources; the idea of an actual U.S. civil war declared by the president/feds, as opposed to civil unrest from the ground up, is pretty much unthinkable today).
It seems amazing that something as trivial as same-sex marriage could instigate such as series of events (trivial only in the sense that SSM inconveniences nobody and costs nearly nothing to implement), but it is the issue meeting the most resistance in conservative quarters these days.
My primary point is that Americans think the federal system is unsinkable only because we think it is unsinkable; once rogues in the states start defying the system and don't get the federal pushback they got in the 1860s and 1960s, we might see how fragile the system really is.
2/13/15, 8:55 AM
Dave Stoessel said...
My first thought is that there is a LOT of waste in the system and squeezing it out may take a while. Food and utility prices could double and many in the middle class would still eat. Retirements may be threatened but many would not be hungry for a while.
We are NOT going to war with Russia over Ukraine. Our military is overextended and not winning.
Consider your own likelihood of going bankrupt if you could make perfect $100 bills in your basement. Our government can and will do so until the world dumps it as a reserve currency. As that is happening we will segue way to new money... I fear the game has years to run. I simply wish for a nice clean "jolt" that will expose some machinations that will BEGIN to raise some awareness among citizens.
2/13/15, 9:07 AM
Tye said...
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389
2/13/15, 9:15 AM
Greg Belvedere said...
2/13/15, 10:03 AM
Christophe said...
Kudos for learning about the magical benefits of lime plaster. It's antiseptic and self-healing qualities make it far superior to gypsum. Also its ultimate strength once it finishes curing after a hundred years or so -- it ends up durable as limestone rather than crumbly as chalk. Lime is locally available and can be used to dissolve one's enemies without a trace (not recommended).
Unlike portland cement, lime reabsorbs all the CO2 that is released during its transition to quicklime. It's firing temperature is much lower than portland's, so much less fuel gets burned. By adding controlled amounts of pozzolans, lime can be turned into hydraulic lime cement with a much broader range of properties and uses than portland cement.
So many rich and superior traditions have been offered up before the altar of the Great God Progress. Let's cut the false god's belly open and reclaim all that it has consumed. Then we can throw the demon in the lime pits and dance rings round while it slowly dissolves (makes for a more silky, workable lime to boot.)
2/13/15, 10:47 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...
You might check to see if Sotheby's, Christie's or Butterfields's Auctions are having any upcoming all book sales. Swann's Auctions specialize in books and printed material. Include the letter, and be sure to mention it if contacting any of these people. It will enhance the value. Auctions are a crap shot, but, considering the quality of what you've got, you'll probably do well.
Americana Exchange (www.rarebookhub.com) is an eye opening look at the rare book biz.
Yeah, selling off family stuff can be a wrench. But putting the money in plants, equipment and animals is so satisfying. It eases the ache. I know, I've done it. Lew
2/13/15, 11:15 AM
Edde said...
Great post, THANKS!
We do hand made acoustic music at Imaginary Road House (which is my bike shop during the day;-). Not sure what era that comes from, feature "old time" music and dance, blues and folk... We have a '53 Rockola juke box that played 78s and an acoustic piano. Not quite '50s juke joint;-)
Paraphrasing Emma Goldman, If I can't dance I won't be in your revolution.
@Clay Dennis - Yep, carbon fiber IS a poor substitute for steel bikes. Lugged, fillet brazed, tig welded - all good though the first two are much lower tech.
That said, imho most one speeds and fixies are nothing more than a trendy sales trip for youngsters. People who use bikes for more than play need gears to help tote loads (try a Long John with a single speed, loaded with 100 plus pounds of stuff and need to get up a half-mile long 6% hill). And older & less-abled folks need gears to be able to haul themselves up hills. Of course 9, 10, or 11 speed cassettes are nonsense but even 3 speeds or 5 make good sense. Internal gear hub transmissions, even though they are more complex, are often easier to use and are more durable. YMMV.
BTW, I operate a bike shop (mostly recumbents and recycled uprights) and have since '95.
Good luck to us ALL!
edde
2/13/15, 11:26 AM
The other Tom said...
I have a personal library of perhaps 500 physical books that line the walls around me. It is comforting, to be in this room. I have not saved everything I have read, only the ones worth browsing again and again, to freshen my perspective. When someone comes over to have a Guinness and bs,this is the room we hang out in. Many of my books have my own index page I slipped in so I can quickly find favorite passages, relevant to whatever we talk about.
I have noticed that people who read exclusively on screens often read differently than those who read hardcopy. They are in a hurry, more likely to skim than read deeply. I think this is OK if you are trying to extract bits of information but useless for anything profound or subtle. I am tired of hearing people say they read a classic novel in an evening. If it was worth the experience, then what's the hurry? I can ask them about Dostoevsky novel a month later and they barely remember it.
I think internalizing knowledge is a far deeper influence than pulling a fact up on your smartphone, taking a quick look, then letting it back into cyberspace. A lot of people now have forgotten that the patterns and connections are more important than fragmented information. I realize, from the quality of the comments, that ADR readers totally get this, but I think much of our modern insanity results from this fragmentation of thought.
At the risk of meandering too much I think it is exactly the same dynamic that numbs personal relations and makes Americans crazy. They don't think their own stories are important, and they don't want to "waste" time on anyone else's stories either. Should it even be surprising, that this country is crazy?
I had an epiphany on this 20 years ago when I did a cross country bicycle trip and was looking forward to returning home to share some experiences. What I found instead was that no such conversation ever happened because everyone was working 70 hours a week and they were too overwhelmed to talk about anything but their jobs, their house, etc. This was a fork in the road for me because I absolutely cannot live around those who think hanging out with friends is a waste of time, and now I am in a place where people know how to "waste" time.
A book or trip or any experience becomes kind of meaningless when you can't share it or bring it home. After all, Ulysses was gone for 20 years and he got to tell his story.
The relevance of this, I hope, is that in a LESS condition our stories will be important again, whether they come from books or from our own experiences.
2/13/15, 11:41 AM
Phil Harris said...
Courtesy of your respected blog and audience I want to record my personal commemoration of this day, the 70th Anniversary of the bombing of the city of Dresden. This raid was part of a "terror bombing" (Churchill’s phrase) campaign aimed at civilians and their housing and infrastructure.
I recommend the book Slaughter House 5 by American POW and author Kurt Vonnegut. Looking today for reference in UK newspapers I can only find the conservative Daily Telegraph making remotely suitable acknowledgement. In some of our other papers there is spin and revisionism.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11410633/Dresden-was-a-civilian-town-with-no-military-significance.-Why-did-we-burn-its-people.html
On this solemn day I reflect on the dreadful campaign. I was 4 years old at the time and remember vividly the earlier fire in our street on the outskirts of London. I can still here a woman, trapped in her house with her young children calling to our mother, but see no justification for what was later done to the German cities. I understand a case can be made that the terror bombing was a war crime.
Phil Harris
2/13/15, 12:26 PM
Moshe Braner said...
Regarding vinyl and CDs: CDs did not introduce the "loudness war". It was a combination of changing musical genres (to the worse IMO, but I'm old :-) and (perhaps not unrelated) the appearance of the Sony Walkman (portable tape-cassette player). As people started listening to music while walking, running, in noisy cafes or subways, or simply while driving cars, more often than at home, the dynamic range of the technology was no longer relevant, and even somewhat softer passages in the music were no longer acceptable. CDs just happened to come out at about the same time, so suffered from the same "mastering" fad, in some genres anyway.
Vinyl can last a long time in storage, but not very long in regular use. Much of the music I listen to (and dance to!) came from LPs (and even 78s) directly, or via cassette copies - but I've digitized them and play them as MP3 files. The issue IMO is not whether the exact technology I use at the moment is sustainable, but what does it take to sustain the diversity of musical cultures through the current bottleneck of cultural uniformity. For me, that includes digitizing recorded music (first the cassettes that self-destruct just sitting on the shelf, and eventually some of the hundreds of LPs I still have sitting around) - and also playing music myself, on an acoustical instrument.
And for medium-level tech, one my my roles as I see it is to keep various things working, by using my skills in electronics and soldering, along with the huge mass of spare parts in old surplus hardware that will still be with us for a long time as we descend through "scarcity industrialism".
2/13/15, 12:31 PM
Carl said...
Sorry not related to this weeks post but scientists confirming what you predicted about mega droughts out in California and the southwest from your July post last year.
http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Megadroughts-predicted-to-ravage-the-Southwest-6078504.php?cmpid=email-mobile
A major study will be published soon. The climate scientists say to expect these long lasting droughts at the end of the century but I'd say we got it going on now in northern CA . Today in Napa it is suppose to be 78 d f and there is NO snow in the sierras below 8000 ft and about a foot above that. This summer should get interesting.
Carl
2/13/15, 12:52 PM
Shane Wilson said...
Oh, I was thinking of the poor, conservative, rural, white working class that makes up the bread and butter of the U.S. military regarding civil unrest. They don't even have the appetite for going after ISIL, and that's the epitome of evil. Rural conservatives' opinion of Putin run the gamut from ambivalent to supportive, they certainly aren't going to want to go to war with him and Russia. This is where the senility of the elites comes in and their misjudging the masses.
For those scapegoating the South, gay marriage is just an issue that certain politicians think they can benefit from saber rattling. Granted, people in the South and other conservative areas still demonstrate higher levels of opposition to gay marriage, but it's not an issue they care THAT deeply about. Hense, the noticeable lack of protest, while gay people go about getting their marriage licenses in peace. There's no George Wallace standing in the courthouse door. The governor of Alabama has stated that the state should defer to the courts. As for the weakness and incompetence of the Federal government, you don't have to be conservative in the South to recognize that. People of all political persuasions accept that as truth today.
2/13/15, 1:40 PM
Renaissance Man said...
Murdoch Mysteries is the original title; started as a three TV movies in 2004, produced by a Toronto TV Station and Cable company.
It is chock full of anachronisms and fanciful inventiveness: Steampunk. What we could do with 21st C knowledge, 19th C technolgy & Beaux-Arts style. Murdoch manages to invent sonar, metal detectors, radio, flies a monoplane (15 years before the first one ever flew & years before the Wright brothers flew at all), drives an electric car prototype, hobnobs with almost every famous person from that era, &c., &c.
It is hardly historically accurate.
But I enjoy it because it is possible to do these things with with 19th C tech, even if that didn't happen, it could have. We don't need IC or plastic chips to achieve the same effects.
Just look at the discussions about ham radio here: Radio could have been produced with 19th C technology, even if no one had got around to inventing it yet.
I just rather like the idea that it's possible that we might be able to maintain a higher standard of living during the inevitable coming dark age than previous dark ages, or that when things begin to recover, people may have access to labour-saving technology not necessarily powered by coal & oil. I wish I could preserve some victorian spinning & weaving machines that were powered by water wheels via overhead shafts, for example, or create a wind-powered metalshop, or...
Obviously I cannot do much about that, personally, but I'll do the little bit I can, preserve some books and knowledge & hope for the best.
2/13/15, 2:24 PM
whomever said...
this context (Note I only ever read the original; the general consensus among
my friends was
to ignore the sequels). The universe of Dune is obviously in its own
dark ages that might well match the ones we might be coming upon; an unstable
feudal arrangement, shrunk trade and lost technology, corrupt
center desperate to get the vital resource they need and eventually falling to
the hungry war-bands.
The thing I find especially interesting is that you read it and think "ok,
spice=oil, obvious metaphor, etc", but then you realize it was written in
1965, and therefore predated all the various oil shocks, Iranian revolution
and the Saudis not being America's poodle. You have to wonder if Herbert
sensed what was going to come?
It does post-date Hubbert's paper, which I suspect Herbert would have been
familiar with, as he seems quite into ecology and systems.
2/13/15, 2:32 PM
editor said...
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/new-high-tech-farm-equipment-nightmare-farmers/
2/13/15, 3:25 PM
Laylah said...
Like texting somebody to ask if she's free next weekend to help gather windfall apples from the vacant lot for a batch of cider. ;)
2/13/15, 4:09 PM
FiftyNiner said...
2/13/15, 4:45 PM
Kutamun said...
I love it mate , you could be President , sounds exactly like what theyve done !
World consumes 90 million barrels a day , Murica chews 20 of em , soone China will be chewing 20 ( currently around 15) ....simple
Have you checked out the trailer for the next installment of Mad Max ? Looks awesome
Stay safe up there
Kuta
2/13/15, 4:52 PM
LarasDad said...
Thank you for that wonderfully detailed narrative of your father's passing, especially this " but at some point his body just realized what was happening to it and took over, helping him slowly retreat within like it had been preparing for this moment since the beginning."
I too witnessed my father's last breath (at age 91) but have always felt somehow guilty of having allowed him to die cruelly of starvation/dehydration (with the informed consent of his wife, my mother). He was in hosptial as he could no longer swallow without choking (after a succession of mini-strokes and suffering from advanced Lewy body dementia) -- but he also had a no intubation order in his POA.
So I think as I internalize your words that that sense of doubt and angst will also "slowly retreat within".
Again, thank you.
2/13/15, 5:35 PM
samadhi said...
I've been reading your blog for a while now but this is my first comment.
I've noticed your outlook has taken a sharp turn towards doomer territory lately. First it was about ebola spiraling out of control. Next low oil prices would crash the fracking industry kicking off a depression. Now it's about Ukraine igniting the next global war.
I think you are getting a little anxious about the next step down. I've been expecting it too but I don't see it happening in any of the scenarios you are putting forward and I think this is going to hurt your credibility. I think taking a step back and explaining events as they unfold rather than trying to predict the precipice before we step off it would be a more appropriate stance to take. Making predictions and watching them fail to materialize can only hurt you in the long run.
2/13/15, 5:37 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
According to the webmaster of EsoterX, the answer appears to be yes. Both Le Nain Rouge and The Little Red Man of Destiny are descended from the Nain Rouge of Normandy, a subtype of Lutin, or French domestic spirit or fairy. Both of them share the characteristics of being harbingers of doom. However, Detroit's Red Dwarf isn't actually a French immigrant to the New World. As "the demon of the straights," he appears to have been known to the Native Americans/First Nations people before the French ever settled in the area. Perhaps he was a similar kind of local being who was interpreted by the French as something familiar to them and then took on the characteristics of what they assumed him to be. I'll stop there, as discussions of theota, theoregions, and the theosphere really belong at your other blog.
2/13/15, 5:56 PM
Stephen Heyer said...
You know, until fairly recently I thought the same thing, but then I noticed a tidal wave of new developments exploding out of the labs. And I do mean exploding, rather than one new method of, say, extending the lifespan of mice by 15% or 20% there will be a half dozen, ditto for new treatments that attack essential chemical pathways in cancer cells without harming normal cells, or revolutionary advances in solar cells or microprocessors or new high strength materials (Hey! Metals are making a comeback).
I think what is happening is that somewhere around the turn of the century new techniques and machines became available that made it a lot quicker, easier and cheaper to examine many fields in unprecedented detail. That is about 15 years ago which is just about right for the leading edge of the explosion of new developments to be moving out of pure research and into pre-production.
Another 10 to 15 years will put product on the street.
Rather than technological progress slowing, it’s looking more and more like we’ve just gone through another event horizon like the one that occurred unnoticed a century ago and gave us the 20th century. But then, event horizons are far more easily seen in retrospect.
By the way, in this usage an event horizon is not a singularity, it is a historical period where from before it people are unable make any worthwhile predictions about what life will be like after it, in fact they usually don’t even see it until it is well past.
So how does all this fit into the discussion about some people (even me) preferring some older technologies and social arrangements? Well, it shows that reality is complex: Some new technologies are just more useful or attractive than others, some are worth replacing old technologies with, and some older technologies still turn out to be superior and lots are perfectly adequate, if that is what you like..
Then of course situations vary, one technology might be superior in some circumstances but inferior in others. For example, as peak oil, peak phosphate and peak lots of stuff begin to hit agriculture, it looks like agriculture in the near future is going to be a complex mix of systems ranging from traditional large scale (vast open fields, huge tractors) through vertical farms in the heart of cities to traditional, small, intensively hand cultivated organic farms, each according to local conditions.
Ok, I know that in the long term a lot of this might not survive collapse, but I’m primarily interested in the area of the future I’m likely to experience. Incidentally, a lot of sensible, knowledgeable folk have a gut feeling that some huge and hairy beast is waiting around the middle of this century, that is, if humans don’t do their usual trick and destroy themselves for no good reason.
I’d kind of like to meet that beast, but know that is a big ask and would probably require access to some of those anti-aging therapies the mice are enjoying.
2/13/15, 7:01 PM
Myosotis said...
What a surprisingly fun way of thinking about making changes. I see a lot of this around me, but Portland is currently very trendy for the self-conscious sort of hipsterism. I've noticed that the people who commit to the very Portland lifestyle always seem to have well-off parents. A little discouraging.
2/13/15, 7:53 PM
valekeeperx said...
Very challenging to make heads or tails of things these days. While I don’t doubt decline and descent, expressions of firmly rooted belief in Progress continue apace here in the Land of Make Believe (SoCal). Shiny new residential housing spreads are blooming (in formerly fertile farmlands), massive new “logistical distribution centers” (i.e., warehouses) are tilting up, and our political and corporate elite have broken ground on the multi-boondoggle high-speed rail system. Cargoism? Build it and they will come……
All of this in spite of the new normal of drier, hotter weather and less water. Funny how the usual conditions (hot and dry) of the area are given a special name (drought) apparently to convince ourselves or others? that we don’t actually live in a desert or is it just to add a little more drama to our lives? Folks, rain has always been the unusual event here……in the future, it will just be more unusual (see the link).
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/1/1/e1400082.full.pdf
More observations (paraphrased)
“We should just build more desalters. We’ll never have to worry about running out of water ever again." As long as we ignore the man behind the curtain, you know, the one pulling the levers and pushing the buttons that provide the massive amounts of energy needed to push the water through the desalter membranes, and the supply chain that provides the replacement membranes, and the wells and pipes to collect the source water, and the pumps and pipes to distribute the cleaned water, and deal with the brine wastes, and (whispered) the costs, and……
“It will start raining again soon and bring things back to normal. (Nevermind that we’ve known for some time now that California can experience dry periods lasting decades, even before we started messing with the ecosystems.)”
“Hey, did you hear about Kanye?......”
Sigh......gods help us.
Time for a substantial helping of fermented and distilled liquid refreshment. Now that’s a proper use of water.
Salud.
2/13/15, 8:24 PM
D. Mitchell said...
Many of my friends and family do not understand this mode of living. They believe I do this to torture myself or prove to everyone I am some sort of domestic guru. The truth is I find happiness living this way. It reminds me of my Amish parents and makes me feel closer to nature. Nothing is closer to nature than having to plant, weed, harvest, and put up food on her schedule not our own. Also, nothing reminds you how much we waste either.
I find joy in living as simple as possible. Many others do not...in my own home my husband is a technophile that believes technology will save us. I am trying, slowly, and patiently to show him that there isn't a magickal fix around the corner. He also patiently suffers through my renovations that bring our home closer to an ideal 1800's homestead than a 2015 homestead. Together we manage, though it has lead to some interesting compromises.
There are many other's I have found that would like to live an off grid, as in no electricity, existence, but have not found how to do it. I know how to, but enjoy the internet and safe lighting too much to go off grid right now. In the meantime we are making out house better at using what energy we do use, reducing the energy where possible, and making sure that the energy we rely on in the future will be there.
This tax season we hope to get a solar batch hot water system in our house. We also hope to hook the stove up for hot water during the winter. If we are already using it for heat and food, why not hot water to wash the dishes too?
We hope to put Ivy on the side of the house that gets hammered in the summer and makes it much too hot as we live down south. We are also adding "whirly birds" for hot air to escape in the summer. We repainted the roof with highly reflective paint to keep the attic cool. We are adding more insulation also. All of these changes do not add electrical burden, but should help our home be cooler, as it is more of a little box baking in the sun than a home.
We are taking your advice seriously, before going completely off grid...make the home more energy efficient. Thank you for all that you do. Dody
2/13/15, 9:56 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
You've gotta be quick here. hehe! There was a song a year or two back by the most excellent local story teller: Seth Sentry about his frustration with science that they hadn't yet delivered on the hover board. I suspect that he is most unimpressed by the lack of progress compared to the claims: Seth Sentry - Dear Science
He's an excellent hip hop artist. Aussie hip hop certainly has its own flavour and is unlike anywhere else on the planet. I can recommend some other tracks if anyone is interested?
Cheers
Chris
2/13/15, 10:29 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Vashti, I'm not sure if you've been reading this blog long enough to have encountered my references to the remarkable blindness to whole systems that's pervasive among the tech-minded these days. What you've said, though, is a great example. These books you think you're going to keep downloading -- do you have any idea how much physical infrastructure, powered by how much fossil fuels, is needed to keep that capacity available to you? You don't see the pallets of new hard drives being unloaded at data centers every single day to replace the ones that burn out, the megawatts of power being burned every day to run those same centers and the rest of the internet, and so on down the very long list of requirements, but that doesn't mean they don't exist -- and counting on their continued existence seems, shall we say, quite a gamble to me.
Andrew, I'd forgotten that line! Many thanks for the reminder.
Tracy, thank you -- that's a good one to add to the list.
RPC, if you got reenactors from every era in which human beings have fought other human beings, the ones at one end of the line would carry stone-tipped spears and wear mammoth hide. Homo sapiens is a very warlike species.
Glenn, you're going to need some money until the money economy comes apart completely, and I have no way of predicting when that's going to happen. For now, one foot in the old reality and one foot in the new is pretty much a requirement.
Clay, doesn't surprise me at all -- plastic is, well, plastic. As for gears, I'd noticed a lot of teenagers on one-speed bikes; if I were to get into bicycling again, though I'd probably go for a three-speed, since that's as many gears as I ever tended to use even when I had a ten-speed back in the day. On a hill, low gearing is kind of useful.
Joseph, most human beings in most of the cultures in human history have "gotten it," in your phrase. Modern industrial civilization happens to have a carefully cultivated blind spot to our connection to the rest of reality. That bad habit will be whacked out of us in good time.
Travis, go ye henceforth, then, and do that thing!
Kyoto, bicycling is certainly one option. Me, I'd be happy to see streetcars and old-fashioned urban rail.
Beneath, good. "Come to the dark side; we have more entertaining crafts..."
Cathy, thanks for the anecdote about advertising; with your permission, I may use that one of these days.
2/13/15, 10:39 PM
JML said...
2/13/15, 10:57 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Bob, which incentive's the greatest varies from person to person. One person's motivated by the practical issues you've noted; another reacts viscerally to the nauseous vulgarization of contemporary pop culture; still another might be motivated by religious insight, or what have you. To my mind, it's important to include as many incentives as possible.
Justin, I'll take your word for it -- the thought of common ground between William Morris (whose work I enjoy very much indeed) and John Cage (I'll pass, thanks) makes my head hurt. Still, the broader point you make is valid, and I'll be talking about it next week.
Bob, how many of the corporate people you know are giving up their jobs voluntarily and embracing LESS, and how many are being forced out? If it's more the former than the latter, life may get interesting soon.
Shawn, exactly. Get past scapegoating and slogans, and most people have a surprisingly clear idea of what we all need to do. It's just a matter of finding a critical mass.
Moshe, I agree. No matter what gets kluged together to keep some kind of money system running as the wheels come off the current casino economy, money in the twilight of a civilization is a trap, and moving as much as possible to moneyless economies is one of the reliable ways out of it. Mind you, as I noted to Glenn from Maine above, as long as the system stays in place, some money will be necessary, but that need can be minimized.
Carol, I wonder if there's any way to work out a rescue operation to get those paper copies when they get chucked. I pick up discarded books from the local public library in much that same spirit, but if the thing could be more organized, it might help.
Bdyl, I'm not greatly interested in politics, so you'll have to find someone else to help you there. To my mind, politics is symptomatic, not causal, and I'm considerably more interested in working on the level of causes.
Renaissance, interesting. No, I wasn't aware of that.
Daelach, the single currency, not the balance of trade, is the most important feature concentrating wealth in northern Europe at southern Europe's expense. That, and of course loans forced on nations so that investors in those nations don't take a loss on even the most stupid investment. Those, not trade, are the key factors in the Greek debacle. That said, keeping the olives and ditching the BMW sounds like a good plan to me!
Laylah, I saw the Salon piece -- that and a couple of other recent essays are going to get a post soon. Once again, it looks like we're nearing an inflection point.
Joe, I may just have to read up on the supposed 2015 in Back to the Future II, and do a post comparing what we were supposed to get with what we got. It might help some people get a clue.
2/13/15, 11:06 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Orchard, I think you've missed the point of the post. I'm not claiming that the Fifties were a halcyon time; I'm claiming that they were a time when people got by on a lot less energy per capita than they use today, and that Fifties technology is therefore much more likely to be viable in an energy-constrained future.
Freeacre, thank you! Have you considered sewing reusable cloth bags for your vacuum cleaners?
William, I have indeed! A professor of ecology in the first college I attended, back in 1980, recommended it to all his students. A good lively read, and good to inspire thoughts, too.
Cathy, the media dabbles with it now and again. The thing to watch for is if it starts becoming a steady presence.
Dammerung, in McKenna's case, it's probably because I didn't fry my brain on way too many drugs. The Timewave didn't just flop in 2012 -- none of its predicted concentrations of novelty showed up on schedule, and so it probably belongs in the same drawer as all the other failed theories of history out there. As for Hancock, I don't happen to know much about his predictions for the future, but his claims about the past are one of the things I use to get a room full of stodgy Masonic historians chuckling at the beginning of one of my talks. He's got some interesting things here and there, but Freemasonry being imported to Earth by refugees from Mars in 11,500 BCE? Come on.
Adrian, many thanks for this! I was hoping that one or more of the Friends on this list would comment and provide some context; I've read Fruits of Solitude -- it's in volume 1 of the Harvard Classics, which I'm delighted to own -- but nothing else of his.
Matt, the thing I'd point out is that inhabitants of the cultural mainstream spend all their time in fantasy, too -- they think they live in a world where it's possible to have infinite growth on a finite planet, and human action can't possibly wreck the natural cycles that support our existence. I'm far from sure that exchanging that fantasy for one that's less toxic is any kind of problem.
Ghung, to my mind, everything depends on how much value you and any other family members you have place on that book. If it's something you treasure, or that younger generations of your family will treasure, don't you dare sell it -- the money's not worth the loss. If it's just a curio, though, cash it in and do it quick, before the investment economy hits enough of a bump to bring down the price of collectibles.
Steve, nope -- I'm fond of beer but don't brew it myself, at least at this point. Why do you think I'm so enthusiastic about encouraging other people to get into brewing? ;-)
LatheChuck, that sounds about right.
Svealanding, there are some specific cases where there's no way back. There are others where that's not the case -- for example, nothing stops you from downshifting from an electronic tablet to a paper notebook and a pen, from email to paper mail, from driving everywhere to walking, or what have you. The claim "there's no way back" in general is mythology -- part of the religion of progress, which, like all mythology, fastens on a few specific events and uses those as paradigms for human existence in general.
2/13/15, 11:30 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Escape, it doesn't take mysterious Druid powers, just open eyes and a willingness to talk about what everybody knows and nobody wants to discuss.
Gregory, excellent. Thing is, if I tried to talk about it in terms of having fun, it would be dismissed as nostalgia. I'm taking a risk with this post in mentioning that yes, a life less hag-ridden by technology really is more fun.
LatheChuck, okay, and that's a valid point. Reason I reacted the way I did is that I'm beginning to assemble raw materials on another post on the suicide of science, and that's a useful data point.
Ozark, the US has been pumping wealth out of some of its regions for a very long time. Why do you think so much of the South and rural West are mired in intractable poverty, despite the agricultural wealth produced there? It's our old friend the imperial wealth pump, bleeding the periphery dry for the benefit of the centers of power.
Bear, thank you!
Scott, you're welcome. I don't generally do university speaking gigs, since the audiences are more resistant to what I have to say than just about anyone else -- understandably so; young people who've mortgaged their futures on the fantasy of upward mobility generally aren't willing to consider the possibility that they're chasing a phantom, will probably never get out of debt, and ought to be learning handicrafts instead!
Repent, then by all means go get yourself some tie-dyed shirts and John Lennon glasses, decorate your pad with india-print bedspreads, and, like, keep the faith, baby! One of my favorite bumper stickers, which I've seen on the back of a VW bus this year rolling down the streets of this little Appalachian mill town, simply says, "The Hippies Were Right."
Julian, those are first-rate tools. If you feel like giving things up, by all means give them up -- but consider doing it, as I suspect you are on some level, joyously, as a way of embracing other things you value more.
Thomas, good gods. Does the government really want another round of Irish Troubles? They may just get it.
Melissa, those shavings will be worth their weight in light sweet crude as firestarter -- you might consider collecting them, drying them, and then making them available to your friends and family in little recyclable cloth bags. A match or, better still, a flint and steel and a little bit of charred cloth, and you can get a nice flame fast with dried shavings. BTW, thanks for the song; if Druids could get superpowers, the one I would most like to put in an application for is the one that would allow me to cause natural environments to appear magically in sterile modern settings -- ivy, rabbits, and all.
Oilman, you've raised some very sensible kids. Congratulations; that's not an easy thing in this age.
2/13/15, 11:51 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Unknown Deborah, if that variety show were to rent an inexpensive stage somewhere and sell tickets for a show once a month, with a mix of new and familiar acts, I bet they'd get a decent turnout. We're about ripe for the first steps toward a revival of vaudeville.
Chris, that sounds like a lot of fun. Being a member of my generation, I have a hardwired appreciation for electric guitars well played, but these days I'd rather listen to someone strumming a mountain dulcimer or doing something complicated and sweet on an acoustic guitar.
Kevin, you're on the real cutting edge; the tech-geek types with their iEverythings are so twentieth century!
Stephen, I had roughly the same experience when I thought of the comparison. It really does put certain things into perspective.
Ien, whatever works for you, go ye forth and do that thing. Just don't rely on the e-whatsit for everything!
Stephen, I use XP also -- it's easy to do, as long as you make a habit of using old computers from the local tech-recycling store or from friends who've upgraded. I do wish somebody would come up with a good freeware OS that does to Windows what OpenOffice does to Word et al. -- replaces it with a good-enough equivalent that doesn't require dependence on the Dark Lord of the computer industry.
Jason, sounds like an excellent career move to me! As for your family and friends, it sounds as though they've gotten a whole basket of clues, neatly wrapped and distributed cheerfully to all and sundry. Your nine-year-old's attitude is particularly cheering to this old-fashioned lover of printed books.
Cherokee, many thanks! I don't recall at the moment whether I got in Blind Freddy reference or not -- I spent a lot of long nights hammering that book into shape, and am still a little vague about some of it. As for the point people are missing -- why, yes, they are. I propose, in an upcoming post, to make it clearly visible to Blind Freddy, at least.
Jester, that's a fine metaphor. Thank you.
O, yes, but consider the possibility of having fun at it while we're doing it.
Ben, the ability to turn a good readable occasional poem is another skill worth cultivating -- many thanks for displaying it.
2/14/15, 12:12 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Try country wines like meads, ciders and lemon wines. Honestly, you can't stuff them up.
A good starter book is Craig Hughes: "How to make Cider, mead, Perry and Fruit Wines".
With that book under your belt and a few experiment brews, you'll be spotting possibilities with all sorts of organic products.
People fixate on beer, but it is technically quite complex compared to the above drinks.
Cheers
Chris
2/14/15, 12:19 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Trent, that's quite plausible.
Latefall, if they're discussing that sort of thing in public in the Bundestag, it might just be possible to head off the worst end of the possibility curve. That's a very positive sign.
Eric, my condolences. The loss of a father, even when it happens in a natural and appropriate manner, has got to be a gut-punch of an experience. That said, it's good to hear that there are still people in this country who have the courage and common sense to take the one thing in this world that's inescapably theirs -- the experience of death -- out of the hands of the sickness industry, and do the thing in a dignified, humanly becoming manner.
Oilman, that's a great story. I'd have to guess that people who know how to rebuild old tractors are doing quite well just now, too.
Wolfgang, an excellent point, and one that can be broadened. Learning how to deal with not getting something you want is a crucial lesson, and one most of us will get to practice in the future -- might as well learn how now.
Justin, okay, that's two readers commenting about a nascent revival of what looks very much like vaudeville. One more and I'll be ready to announce a trend!
Alphonse, we simply don't know what's going to happen with the climate. All we can do is take up the challenge and see what happens.
FiftyNiner, thank you!
Paula, thanks for that also.
Patricia, I'd have probably just said, "No thanks, I'm happy with the fine old antique I have now." In regard to the abandonment of Obon and Shinto ceremonies at festivals, that's appalling -- I wonder if they have any idea how much will unravel if that's allowed to go by the boards. Not just culturally -- I'm currently researching a book project on the relationship of traditional religion to agriculture and soil fertility, and coming up with some astonishing things. (I'd like to discuss that with you sometime via email, if that's of interest.)
Joe, good. That's exactly the issue, of course -- the federal government remains in power only so long as anyone who refuses to play along gets stomped. One obvious display of weakness or incapacity, and it's all over.
Dave, you're thinking in terms of fast collapse. We're already in collapse; it's just a longer, more drawn-out process than Hollywood stereotypes make it look. Spinning the presses makes money but it can't produce real wealth; the middle class may still eat as the economy comes apart, but what happens when those who actually do the day to day labor that keeps the system running no longer get enough to eat, and either starve or walk away, a little at a time?
Tye, thanks for this. There's a bleak humor in watching someone insist that the only solution for data loss is to make sure that the data's in the most transient storage medium of all!
Greg, thanks for an excellent example of the way that the word "new" nowadays means "another rehash of the same old thing," and anything actually new is unthinkable. Now to work out more ways to undercut that...
2/14/15, 12:32 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
I look forward to that future post and will keep an eye out for Blind Freddy - you never quite know when he is going to stumble into view! It truly surprised me that no one has tackled that difficult realisation. Perhaps it was my travels to the third world that took away any form of pretence? Blind Freddy would know the answer for sure, but I haven't spotted him for a long while now – perhaps he is needed elsewhere? Who knows?
The farm scored about 1.2 inches of rain last night, but it is now exactly like the Amazon rainforest (which I've actually been too) here tonight. The inside of the house is at 75% humidity and tomorrow promises a high of 36'C (about 98'F). Think I'll start early tomorrow with the outside work. That is global weirding for you...
Incidentally, fiction comes from the heart so it is hardly surprising to me that the details are a little bit fuzzy for you.
Hi Kutamun,
Haha! It is a good plan isn't it? It is certainly how I would set out the chess pieces and it is also the lowest cost option that yet still provides an adequate return. There would be a bit of grumbling though from domestic and international groups. The simple answer is to cut off their funding or tax exempt status and they’ll be towing the line before...
I have often had both the pleasure and responsibility of being the boss and once or twice over the past few decades upon announcing my departure I have had subordinates tear up and openly cry. Truly I had nothing more to give them, it was just my time to go.
Anyway, at those times I was very uncomfortably reminded of Galdariel in the Lord of the Rings speaking to Frodo:
"And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”
What a strange thing our lives are. Temptation to power is a strong drug, whilst strict limitations are a freedom that few understand nowadays. How do you feel that you measure up?
PS: Hope that you received a decent dump of rain. It was very well received here.
Cheers
Chris
2/14/15, 12:48 AM
KL Cooke said...
"My kindle got wet and stopped working. This after buying several electronic books, many of which I hadn't completed reading, and now none of them are accessible. Paper has advantages. I have books from when I was a teenager over a quarter of a century ago that are still quite readable."
When I was a young teenager in the early 60's Grove Press had recently won the censorship battle and published Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in paperback. I had a copy that I used to read in the bathtub, so my mother wouldn't catch me with it. One time I goofed and dropped it in the water. After it dried out I could still read it just fine.
2/14/15, 1:00 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Those figures are exactly what I would expect at about 39'N latitude. I'm at about 37.5'S and suffer a bit of over shadowing in the early winter mornings.
Good work.
Chris
2/14/15, 1:04 AM
FiftyNiner said...
Your account of your father's passing is so very similar to what I and my family just experienced in January. My mother had been diagnosed with dementia about ten years ago and for quite a while the progression was very slow.(Her internist explained that technically she did not have Alzheimer's because by definition Alzheimer's is early onset dementia starting before the age of 60.) In practical terms that is almost a distinction without a difference, because the end stage of all dementia is essentially the same.
On November 25 last year I called 911 and had mother transported to the hospital in our small, rural county.
I had been off work caring for her at home for 19 months at that time. Her eating had become sporadic and she complained of an inability to swallow. She was in the hospital for eight days and her inability to swallow only worsened. We moved her to the nursing home on December 3 and that was the last day she ate a normal amount of food. Then my education on death an dying began in earnest. She came to the nursing home with the IV still in place, so she was properly hydrated for some weeks, but eventually her doctor said that the IV had to come out--mainly due to her long-term congestive heart failure. The nursing home followed established protocol and said that she needed to be "evaluated" by a surgeon for a feeding tube in the event that we decided to go that route. The evaluation was to take place on a Monday afternoon at 1:00 PM but for some reason the surgeon's scheduled got changed and he did the evaluation early in the morning. After he saw mother he had the nursing home call me, and the first thing he said was: "I want you to understand that 50% ALL patients who receive a feeding tube are dead within 30 days." I appreciated his candor. I asked a friend, a retired RN, about feeding tubes and she told me that in 40 years as a nurse she could not recall one instance in which a feeding tube improved a patient's life or added to their longevity. All six of mother's children decided together that there would be no feeding tube. The internet provided some very useful information: (1) The inability to swallow is virtually universal in end stage dementia and is part of the process that has been termed the "death spiral". The patient is not hungry at this point. ( I am convinced that the brain as the major organ of the body takes charge of the dying process and if allowed to will engineer the most peaceful death possible.) (2) The use of feeding tubes in nursing homes in the US follows a geographic pattern. The lowest use is in Maine at 7% and the highest is in Mississippi at 40%. Since I am in the Heart of Dixie I get it that the way we "take care of" someone is to feed them. My mother loved food and was an amazing cook, but even through her dementia when she told me she was not hungry, I believed her. To have force fed her at this point would have been cruel and disrespectful. All of her children said what they needed to say to her at dusk on January 17. She went quietly to sleep and had a restful night. I came home and slept better than I had in months. At 7:00 AM her nurse called to tell me that Cheyne-Stokes (death rattle) breathing had begun. I was in no rush. I told her that as soon as I finished my coffee I would come on.
I arrived on the hall at 8:05 and mother had died at 8:00 AM. on a beautiful, clear Sunday morning. We buried her in the gown she was wearing with nothing done to her body but to lay her in the coffin. That is what she wanted. We were able to do that for her but her death was on her own terms. I will forever be thankful that Grace from some source made me realize that there comes a time to back away from the bed and just be thankful for the 87 years that we had this wonderful person in our lives. Our culture leads us to believe that death is something that happens to us. I understand now that we participate in our own deaths just as we participate in our lives.
2/14/15, 3:48 AM
daelach said...
Now we should not forget that it was Greece who faked the figures in order to get into the Euro - with the correct figures, they would not have been accepted. What has been done was building up a bubble, raising the standard of living over what they could have afforded. The Greek economy was not out-competitioned by northern Europe because Greece never had much much to take part in competition. There was no Greek machine industry that Germany or France could have ditched.
As for the state saving stupid investors, that's not specific to Greece, it's the same for Germany. Merkel labeled puring federal money into the banking system as "without alternative" because those banks were "system relevant". The total German public debts (not just on the federal level, but also those hidden in the states and municipalities) went up from 1.5 trillion Euros in 2008 to over 2 trillion Euros in 2010 - because around 400 billion Euros were poured into the banking system in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. The only difference is just that the debt collapse Greece is facing now is still a bit in the future for Germany.
Actually, I have wondered whether there might be a strategy behind Germany pouring so much money into other's countries' debts, especially when it is clear that e.g. Greece will never be able to pay them back. Maybe the idea is to coordinate the debt collapse (which is inevitable in the long run anyway) so that it will happen all over Europe at the same time, in which case a currency reset might be much easier. Another point is if the currency collapses everywhere, then it won't make sense to relocate, preventing intra-EU mass movements which would just add up to the chaos. There might be a point why Germany hands out money in a useless way to postpone the collapse elsewehere until Germany itself is in the same phase.
2/14/15, 4:17 AM
daelach said...
The German military has become rather small, just as the reunification contract had demanded. Plus that the German military apparatus is in quite a bad shape, according to the "Spiegel" magazine. Out of 109 Eurofighters, only 42 are fully usable. Out of 89 Tornado bombers, 38 work. Out of 83 CH-53 transport helicopters, only 16. The NH90 helicopter isn't better with 8 out of 33, neither the "Tiger" helicopter with 10 out of 31. The old Transall transport aircraft? 21 out of 56. The A400M aimed at replacing them is delayed. Renting Antonovs (like for the Afghanistan war) for making war against Russia doesn't sound like a valid idea. Oh, and only half of the 13 "Patriot" air defence systems are fine.
Not that other military branches are that much better than the air force; e.g. the army had to confess that only 70 out of 180 "Boxer" armoured fighting vehicles are ready for use. The fighting tank Leopard 2, the crown jewel of German tank technology? Out of more than 2000 units in former times, only about 200 remain today. The latest update level of that system, 2A6, might make it to 80 units if some get out of the maintenance status. Too few to mess with Putin.
And that's just the issues with the material. The German military has severe recruiting problems after the compulsory military service dropped out. Getting new officers isn't difficult, but the crew service is totally unattractive: lousy payment, no career perspective, being stuck at the bottom of the status chain.
I'm looking forward to the German government coming up with a "bright" idea that the UK had already in practice in the 1980s: convicted petty criminals being offered the choice to go to jail or to serve in the military - for more time than the jail sentence, but with the offer that the criminal record would stay clean. I saw how "motivated" the British crewman soldiers were since I grew up in the British sector. Friendly and polite men, but disillusioned and without morale.
Plus that the political support for war is tiny in the German population. A clear majority of the voters has always been against taking part in the Afghanistan war; it's just that a majority of the political establishment was for it. "Representative democracy" at its best!
I don't see Germany ready for war. Neither the military equipment nor the will of the people. Given the outcome of the last times Germany waged war, that isn't likely to change. You can't even pull the usual "YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!!!11" propaganda trick here since that would immediately be met with the "YOU NAZI!!!!11"-response.
Plus that "making war" would be a major decision, and since Merkel abhors decisions in general, it is highly unlikely that she will make that decision. Actually, that's why she's so popular. "No decisions" at least means "no immediate blunders", and that's about the maximum competence you can expect from today's politicians.
2/14/15, 4:21 AM
Arnold Fouts said...
2/14/15, 6:57 AM
Cathy McGuire said...
Also, on the subject of losing data/books:
Google's Vint Cerf warns of 'digital Dark Age'
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389
Vint Cerf, a "father of the internet", says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost... he believes this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete...He fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a "digital Dark Age".
Yup - the man knows and is trying to warn us!
And I was following the thread of drought in SW (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31434030
"The American south-west and central plains could be on course for super-droughts the like of which they have not witnessed in over a 1,000 years") and ran across info stating the Sau Paulo, one of the largest cities in Brazil, could be out of water by this March - at which point they propose a "rationing" system of 5 days without water and 2 days with!! It's frightening to read the news, but it's a perfect example of government in deep denial until the last possible minute:
http://peakoil.com/forums/s-america-s-largest-city-on-verge-of-collapse-pt-2-t70883-220.html
2/14/15, 8:08 AM
Andy Brown said...
"Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules -- and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress -- Ransom K. Ferm"
2/14/15, 8:18 AM
Myriad said...
(The frame story of the 1980's anime anthology film Robot Carnival comes to mind. As Wikipedia summarizes it: "The opening takes place in a desert. A boy finds a small "coming soon" poster advertising the Robot Carnival, and becomes frightened and agitated. He warns the people in his village, most likely to escape, when a huge machine with many robots performing in niches on its exterior grinds its way right over the village. Once a magnificent traveling showcase, it is now a decayed, rusted, malfunctioning, engine of destruction." Of course that's, metaphorically, the opposite of the Butlerian Carnival you're describing.)
Cheap shoddy consumer goods have been commonplace for as long as I've been alive. What's different today is the frequent lack of the mid-priced option, the model that costs two or three or four times the cheapest one in exchange for quality and durability. Instead, the higher priced models have the same poor quality and lack of durability, in exchange for a list of dubious "features." Sewing machines, for example; you can get a flimsy unreliable one for a hundred bucks, but four hundred bucks won't buy you a sturdy one; instead, it'll be an equally flimsy unreliable one with a menu of 128 decorative stitches. You can get a high-quality durable single-function "professional" machine, but it will cost between one and three thousand. (I now use a forty-year-old basic model Pfaff from an estate sale; a gift from the gods, after struggling with more recent machines.)
The same appears to be true of bicycles: I get by with a $110 toy-store junk pile because I can repair it myself, but as far as I can tell, $500 couldn't buy me a noticeably better one, if new.
I wonder how much of American gun culture arises as a reaction to declining product quality in other areas, to which firearms are at least partially an exception. It's amusing to contemplate how gun buyers would react to the attempted introduction of the "i-Shooter" that fires only unique "i-Ammo" that comes in "convenient" single-use magazines, with proprietary chips in them that prevent any private reloading or third-party manufacturing...
2/14/15, 8:18 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
1) "The Collapseniks have been forecasting the crisis for 10-15 years" because we have been IN the Crisis Era since 2001! I know, I fought that notion myself, but the signs are all there.More details can be found in Strauss & Howe's book FOURTH TURNING, because I'm wasting sunlight today as it is. (Laundry to do, weather coming in Tuesday, etc).
2) "The demon of the *straights*?!?! He/she/it torments heterosexuals or mundanes? Or do you mean "straits" as in narrow bodies of water? Inquiring minds and spelling geeks are dying of curiosity.
2/14/15, 8:35 AM
Eric S. said...
By the way, I saw you mention another essay on science on it's way in an earlier comment. Chasing this thread may lead you to some interesting fodder. Looks like the "Big Bang Effect" you worked into Star's Reach is starting to unfold a bit earlier than expected. Given the amount of shame and ridicule pop science places on people who question Lemaitre's attempt at plastering Catholic Theology onto physical cosmology (usually placing them right alongside creationists, climate change deniers, and anti-vaxxers), there could be some big consequences for the legitimacy of institutionalize a science if this new line of inquiry leads anywhere:
http://m.phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html
2/14/15, 8:43 AM
Roger said...
Cyprus should have taught a lesson, that economies based on tax evasion and taxi driving aren't viable, and, in any case, can't share a currency with Germany.
Ok, Greece isn't Cyprus or Italy or Spain. No matter, the greater lesson is one of common sense and reasonably good judgment.
You wonder how can a place as fractious as the United States possibly share the greenback. Or how a place as scarred by conflict as Europe can't learn from history and see their way through this.
But sense and judgment are apparently in dreadfully short supply among the big thinkers and you see this playing out every day.
The United States has enough commonality of language and culture such that a Blue State New Yorker can easily move to Red State Texas.
Aside from maybe re-learning how to walk (and wear a hat and properly holster a gun) the New Yorker can make a go of it. That's why a shared currency works, there's adequate mobility of people.
And if New Jersey crashes and burns economically there's federal fiscal transfers.
The same doesn't apply in Europe. Contrary to what a lot of us here think, Europeans are not all fluent in five languages. And this is a big barrier.
Then there's culture. Maybe this is over-generalizing, but an Italian in living in Germany would chafe at not being able to go to his mother's house every day for a long lunch and a nap. No quick meal at his desk for him. And a German living in Italy would die of rage. Efficiency? Not there. To Italians the time-conscious German would be insufferable.
In my view there's a lot of blame to hand out for the Greek situation, to bad guys and idiots and utopian dreamers of many countries. It should have been obvious that a currency shared among such culturally and economically different places could never work.
I've read the Greek government lied its way into the Euro. And, if that's so, it boggles the mind that Eurocrats had no idea. How could this be? If they didn't know then they were incompetent. But, if they knew about it, were they in on the scam? Either way it's rotten.
Then you see that Syriza boy show up at 10 Downing dressed like a gigolo. You avert your eyes. He's supposed to be the Greek Finance Minister. What's the deal? Would it kill to wear a suit and tie? You know, this is serious so at least LOOK serious. At least try.
2/14/15, 9:04 AM
jean-vivien said...
One civilian was killed and three police were wounded on Saturday in shooting at a public meeting in the Danish capital Copenhagen attended by the controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks, police and the Danish Ritzau news agency reported.
Vilks stirred controversy in 2007 with published drawings depicting Mohammad as a dog which sparked threats from Islamist militant groups.
He has received numerous death threats and has lived under constant protection by the Swedish police since 2010. Two years ago, an American woman who called herself Jihad Jane was sentenced to 10 years in prison for plotting to kill him.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/14/us-denmark-shooting-idUSKBN0LI0N720150214
Seriously... shooting someone dead is criminal and insane for a motive like that. But "published drawings depicting Mohammad as a dog" is not criminal. On the other hand, is it sane ? I have ssen the drawings, they are not even beautiful... Even the Lovecraftian gods get better graphical treatment ! What point is contemporary art trying to make ? If that is progress, then progress is turning into something very weird and you can bet your hats that people are soon going to ditch it down the drain.
2/14/15, 9:17 AM
valekeeperx said...
Woke up this morning and the thought emerged that perhaps Progress is an anti-religion. Is this something that you’ve stated previously?
I’ve wondered for a while how our current religious sensibility could have originated. It seems so itchy and reactive.
2/14/15, 10:32 AM
Mark Rice said...
There is always Ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntu.com/download
Installation is usually very easy. Installing additional programs is actually easier than installing programs on Windows.
Or, the next time I am in Baltimore, I could make a trip to Cumberland and install it on a machine of yours.
2/14/15, 10:36 AM
james albinson said...
There are many versions of Linux that are low end hardware friendly - try Puppy Linux for example, or damnsmalllinux - from personal experience the latter will run on a P100/48Mb laptop. Also AbiWord is a smaller wordprocessor than OpenOffice, and just as good for almost all purposes. Don't overlook the BSD unixalikes, FreeBSD, etc. They are not resource hogs. It may be better to talk to a local unix guru, rather than rely on tech support 4000 miles away. There are other free OS's out there - look at www.distrowatch.com for more info than you can readily digest at once - search for low-resource distros for older machinery. Best Regards.
2/14/15, 10:47 AM
Steve Morgan said...
Thanks for the context and clarification. I took the parts about self-denial and the "bitter cup and bloody baptism" less metaphorically than perhaps was intended. I'm a complete novice at 17th century religious texts.
I hadn't seen the Fruits of Solitude(s) yet, and I'll definitely need to find a copy.
About the only thing my library has is an electronic copy of his collected political writings, in which there's a large section on "Liberty of Conscience," which intrigues me. I'll be adding his works to my thrift shop and used bookstore wish list. Thanks again!
2/14/15, 10:50 AM
Val said...
BTW, have you encountered the phrase "retro chic"? It's been kicking around for a while. Might come in handy.
2/14/15, 11:14 AM
Bob Patterson said...
2/14/15, 11:59 AM
Leo Knight said...
First, people see something on the internet, and assume it must automatically exist in the real world, exactly as they saw it. They can't seem to grasp the complex web of suppliers that brings them goods, or at some point, their desired choice may not be instantly available. I imagine they expect life to work like a Star Trek replicator: "Tea, Earl Grey, hot."
Second, at one point I had to run out and replace some flowers that had gone bad. When I left, the five other workers in the shop were bent over their "smart" phones, in some form of trance. When I returned about ten minutes later, I found them in the same positions, unchanged. Eerie, and upsetting, since they could have done some actual, you know, work in that time. Did I mention this is one of the busiest days of the year for us?
Third, one of our drivers took quite a long time to complete a delivery. When she returned, she explained that her phone, with its GPS, had died, and she needed to charge it up to know where she was going. Maps, altough they have drawbacks, don't need batteries.
Fourth, I have had to drive a variety of newer vehicles this week. The sheer volume of electronic, automatic functions in modern cars and trucks makes me crazy. One van left the lights on for about 15 seconds after engine shutoff. At first, I thought I had done something wrong. Well meaning people kept pointing out that the lights were on. I can't imagine the effort and ingenuity needed to create such things, and I don't need or want any of them.
2/14/15, 12:15 PM
Yupped said...
We're now looking for a passive solar home with a bit more land. We can find a good few properties from the 70s and early 80s, and it's clear there was an effort back then to build that way. Wish we all could have kept at it. Homes from the last 25 years seem to be based on the assumption that what we all need are shiny spaces to put our TVs. Bad trend there.
2/14/15, 1:35 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
They're also found in Strauss and Howe's previous book on the topic, "Generations: The History of America's Future." One of the changes I noted in their predictions of the onset of the crisis was that it kept getting earlier. The original prediction was it would hit around or slightly after 2010, while in "The Fourth Turning" the authors thought it could start as early as 2005. 9-11 rushed things according to either timetable, but it definitely started the current crisis era. If Strauss and Howe are right, then the current crisis should resolve itself by the early 2020s. What most people who follow their cyclical theory of history hope for is something like the American High of the 1950s or Era of Good Feelings of the early 1800s. Instead, they're going to get a period more like Reconstruction for the South--a period of austerity and rebuilding--if they're lucky. Strauss and Howe's readers forget that the authors' cycles can go down as well as up, even though reversal of progress, destruction of America, loss of modernity, and even human extinction are explicitly listed in the conclusion as possibilities resulting from the current crisis.
For what it's worth, both our host and James Howard Kunstler seem to be familiar with Strauss and Howe. Kunstler appears to have read "The Fourth Turning" a few years back and sprinkled references to it in his Monday blog posts then. It might be worth searching for them.
"2) "The demon of the *straights*?!?! He/she/it torments heterosexuals or mundanes? Or do you mean "straits" as in narrow bodies of water? Inquiring minds and spelling geeks are dying of curiosity.
Mea culpa I'm afraid my Freudian Slip was showing. It's actually "The Demon of the Strait," as Detroit means "The Strait" in French. That written, Le Nain Rouge is much more likely to torment "mundanes," i.e., the common man and woman, than "The Little Red Man of Destiny." That particular spirit communicated with royalty, including Napoleon, who paid particular attention to its pronouncements, and apparently disappeared with Napoleon. No monarchy, no spirit.
2/14/15, 1:38 PM
Iuval Clejan said...
2/14/15, 2:15 PM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
2/14/15, 2:27 PM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
There are also some modern "translations" of Penn's works you might find worthwhile, with less wrestling with the 17th century English. They are faithful and well done and include explanatory notes: excellent for someone starting out. You could google Quaker Books.
I, myself, prefer the originals, but have spent some time learning about that period. I understand that others may only come to the original texts later. To me it's a little like "translating" Shakespeare. (Yes, shockingly, modern "translations" of Shakespeare do exist.) I'd rather take the time to learn the vocabulary and appreciate the richness and meaning of the original.
That being said, "Beowulf" is beyond me and I struggle with Chaucer, so do value a facing-page gloss and vocabulary help.
Happy reading!
2/14/15, 2:49 PM
latheChuck said...
I'm thinking of doing (in addition to the Guy Clark tunes: "Stuff That Works" and "Homegrown Tomatoes", thanks to Bill Blondeau) a brief talk about amateur radio and emergency communications.
We put the show together while the pancakes are cooking. I wonder whether we might find an excuse to do this more than once per year, but then, we do get together to sing and pray weekly.
2/14/15, 3:07 PM
latheChuck said...
2/14/15, 3:14 PM
Mark Rice said...
I grew up and lived in a time and a place where nothing really bad happened. There were no famine's, no wars, no revolutions, no overt coup d'etat. Nature and history show this is not the usual state of affairs. Having experienced a very unusual time and place, my feeling of what constitutes normal is bound to be a bit distorted.
My parents were of the "Greatest Generation". They grew up in the Great Depression and came of age during World War II. They then set out to create a place where such things never happened. I think they wanted to insulate their children from such realities. They succeeded in the insulation and sort of succeeded in creating the place where nothing happened. In a way this was a well intentioned effort.
I grew up in a suburb that could only be reached by car. "Criminals" from the inner city did not find their way here. In this suburb, all the children were above average. It appeared that all played by the rules and everything was OK. Even though we were "middle class" we were comfortable.
At the time I had no idea of the "wealth pumps" in operation. In the year I was born, UK and the US arranged a coup d'etat to overthrow the democratic government of Iran and install someone who would operate that end of the wealth pump to our benefit. For most of my life I had no idea about this or other similar actions around the world. I still want this sort of world where nothing truely bad happens around me to continue. And I can see where the members of the "Greatest Generation" sheltered us from reality having some good intentions.
2/14/15, 3:22 PM
Moshe Braner said...
- tee hee! Around here some years ago the state was trying hard to get mercury-containing devices out of our fumbling hands, e.g., they were collecting thermostats with mercury switches, so one couldn't get them at the materials recycling place... (But I do like my programmable thermostats - besides the older ones I did keep on hand.) And they were offering free newfangled digital fever thermometers in exchange for old school mercury ones. So I traded one old one. After a single use, I rinsed the digital one out -carefully, trying to only wash the part that goes into the mouth - and water got inside the electronics and it never worked again. Glad I kept the other old one.
"The same appears to be true of bicycles"
- there I disagree. I am really amazed how nowadays one can buy a really good bike for $300 or so brand new (or $30 at a yard sale). By really good I mean: thick aluminum frame that will never rust, brakes that are 10 times better than the ones back in the 1980's, light weight, good gears, comfortable seat, etc. Remember, before the fossil fuel age, Napoleon ate with an aluminum fork, to show off his wealth: it was pricier than gold. Even now, some people refer to aluminum as "congealed electricity".
"Maps, although they have drawbacks, don't need batteries."
I live on a dirt road and am surrounded by miles of woods. I've often walked around the many informal trails for hours, not seeing anybody. And although I've taken maps along at times - and made my own, partly using GPS - I usually get home based only on the direction of the sun, and my familiarity with the area. Once I went for a walk on a winter afternoon, and it started snowing and got darker and darker. I got lost. Well, at least temporarily disoriented. :-) Found a familiar landmark. Lost again. I knew I was only a few hundred feet from the road, and still going around in circles. Made it home OK, but since then a compass and flashlight always live in the pocket of my hiking coat. Meanwhile, over the years, the police were up here a couple of times every year trying to guide a lost hiker out of the woods (via phone and sirens), and other lost hikers have knocked on my door well after dark. When I told all this to a younger and newer neighbor of mine (and a capable woman, who also serves in the National Guard), she just laughed it off, saying "I've got my smartphone". Ah-huh.
"There are many versions of Linux that are low end hardware friendly"
- I have dabbled in Linux a bit a couple of times, hoping to liberate myself from Windows, and each time retreated since it seemed way too complicated. And I've been using computers since the 1970's, including Unix in the 1980's. So I still use Windows (XP at home). My goal is to get some specific things done on the computer, not to spend my time playing System Administrator. And I use a lot of free software on Windows that is not available on Linux. Wish it were otherwise. But like I said, "appropriate" technology is situation-dependent. I still run Windows 98 on a couple of really old computers around the house. The latest (Windows XP) PCs I bought include a desktop for $40 and a "netbook" for about $100 - used of course.
2/14/15, 3:25 PM
EBrown said...
More at www.cairncrestfarm/blog/ My wife takes really nice photos too (better than most blogs).
2/14/15, 3:28 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
http://www.abebooks.com/books/features/100-most-searched-out-of-print-books.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-C150127-h00-bookfiAM-123324GN-_-01cta&abersp=1
Pity about the outrageous price on the hand knitting book.
We now return you to the butlerian carnival.
2/14/15, 3:35 PM
NomadsSoul said...
My condolences.
2/14/15, 4:49 PM
Doctor Westchester said...
For the category of "For the man who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail" I was going send you the article about the internet pioneer is going to solve the problem of the coming digital dark age with even more unreliable technology but someone beat me to it. So I'll offer this gem about how we will survive the worst of climate change instead: http://aeon.co/magazine/society/welcome-to-earth-population-500-million/
2/14/15, 6:05 PM
Moshe Braner said...
@latheChuck: "I got a nice 13.8V/19A power supply for my ham radio equipment for $50."
- I think I saw that model here in a RS store (which was not marking things down just yet, a couple of weeks ago?). I would love a 19A supply, would fit my rig, but ignored that specific one since it's a switching supply, i.e., is likely to generate RF noise, just what you don't want attached to a radio. My biggest old-school (analog) regulated supply is only 9A, that limits my transmitter power to less than 100W, but it's quiet. Another good option is a big 12V battery (for operation even if power goes out), and a charger (to replenish the battery when power is available). And solar panels if possible...
2/14/15, 8:01 PM
Donald Hargraves said...
I've tried the Kindle, presently I have no idea where my Kindle is at and don't care.
And as for Stephen Heyer's amusement towards Apple users, until recently one could say Apple was an exception in this age of mediocritization of everything, for they always sought to make things (at least) a little bet better. Some derisively (although accurately, in retrospect) called it the "Steve Jobs Distortion Field," and while it made for a religiously devoted following it also insured (through Steve Job's dedication) that the products stood up to a certain standard above the norm.
Under Tim Cook that image of focus has taken hits, with the most recent (and most damaging, imho) being the Bendgate issue with the latest iPhones. While the Consumer Reports article missed the boat (their test put the pressure on the center of the iPhone, not at the weak spots near the buttons), it's all too obvious that the iPhone 6 and 6plus were made to handle much LESS stress than the 5's and 5S's. Add to that the reduced battery time for the iPads, and it appears that Apple has joined the race towards the bottom (and maximization of profits).
2/14/15, 9:37 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Oh yeah, am I grumpy or what. I can't remember whether I mentioned this here but last Saturday night I celebrated Waitangi day with some Kiwi friends. It was lots of fun, they had a BBQ and I took some very yummy food from here.
However, I just noticed an article in the newspaper: Berries off shelves after Hep A scare.
Now, being blueberry season here and having local blueberry farms which I purchase fresh blueberries from, it never actually occurred to me that someone would serve up frozen blueberries to myself and my lady, but last Saturday night they actually did just that. Well done them.
I could walk to blueberry farms from here and yet somehow the supermarket chains tend to believe that bringing them in from China and elsewhere is a good idea.
What do you do? Crazy days...
Hi Eric,
Many thanks for sharing your story and I respect the courage that your father displayed. You have my condolences.
Cheers
Chris
2/15/15, 12:54 AM
omerori said...
I just finished translating your post from two weeks ago - "The One Way Forward" - into Hebrew, and posted in on my wordpress.com site:
https://omerori.wordpress.com/2015/02/15/onewayforward/
I'm asking for retroactive permission, I hope it's ok with you. If there's a problem with it tell me and I'll remove it immediately.
2/15/15, 3:20 AM
Pauline Bicker said...
I found your essay very interesting. The old ways of doing without modern appliances and some of the technology of today, will work well with me. I have some hands on experience needed by many today and beyond. You have given examples to begin with now and to expand on, your encouragement is inspiring people towards the Butlerian Carnival, that is wonderful. Thank you for the great essays over the last few months in your blogs.
Pauline
2/15/15, 5:51 AM
Ozark Chinquapin said...
2/15/15, 7:25 AM
LarasDad said...
Thank you for sharing these words of wisdom:
"Our culture leads us to believe that death is something that happens to us. I understand now that we participate in our own deaths just as we participate in our lives.
As I had commented to Eric S previously, the candor and courage evident in your retelling of the events of your mother's passing has given me and anyone else who has lost a loved one in similar circumstances much to be joyful for and that much less for which to feel guilty.
@ lathechuck,
fyi, this may be why such good pricing is happening
Bankrupt electronics retailer RadioShack Corp
2/15/15, 7:30 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
For a different OS have you tried Ubuntu? I had a Dell laptop some years back that came with XP, kwot crashing. I swapped out for Linux Ubuntu and the laptop lasted a full decade, probably would have made it another 5, but I gifted it to my dad and he put windows back on it. The laptop was dead within a year.
You won't be able to play any video games but you can sure write on it and not worry about viruses and malware.
2/15/15, 7:57 AM
Maria said...
I especially love films from the 30s. Some of them are relentlessly cheerful -- which is not a bad thing when the world seems to have gone mad -- but a lot of them are interesting because they're time capsules of an era with different (dare I say better?) values.
I've always felt a little lost in the era I live in. Now it doesn't seem like a problem so much as a potential solution. I'm eager to read more.
2/15/15, 8:03 AM
Christophe said...
Greece is working overtime to appear deadly serious in this game of financial chicken. The lack of a suit might be to give the impression that Syriza will not end up flinching at the last minute, as all those compromising, suit-wearing bureaucrats can be expected to do.
Then there is the possibility that Varoufakis' style is intended to communicate less to the talking heads across the table and more to the population back home. Greece is attempting to create a new style in finance, diplomacy, and governance, so wearing an archaic styled suit might look like hypocricy to the people, or worse, betrayal.
When a status quo comes tumbling down, its fashions, fads, and tastes usually end up buried under its rubble. European hegemonic power is fracturing apart at the seams of the oppressive business suit it dons, and all sorts of disallowed expressions and whimsies will come bursting out of the cracks in its edifice, shredding it to the four winds.
Scarecrows may continue to wear tattered-tailed suits and will probably become emblematic of the old style. As for Greek finance ministers, look to that space to see which whimsies might replace the old style in one corner of a far less globalized world.
On a more critical note, calling the adult males of marginalized populations you want to keep submissive "boy" has a long and less than egalitarian history in the United States. You might want to try subtler rhetorical techniques against European finance ministers.
2/15/15, 9:10 AM
Marcello said...
Do you realize that child cancer in the USA affects something like 20-30 children in 100,000 and many of those actually survive due to better treatment? Infant mortality in 1850 was in the order of 200-300 in 1000 and it is now 6 in 1000. That's not the kind of stuff people are eager to reenact.
2/15/15, 10:35 AM
cpendlebury said...
I went linux native in 2011, (Debian) would never go back. It's well worth the adjustment period, and might even make you reconsider your opinion on the (lack of a) future of computing.
I'd also suggest that's pretty urgent. WinXP is not safe to use while connected to the internet.
2/15/15, 10:54 AM
Iuval Clejan said...
2/15/15, 12:39 PM
Steve in Colorado said...
C.S. Lewis
I have wanted to say something about the way folks here seem to be thinking about moving back to earlier (and more appropriate) levels of technology. There is an air of resignation to some of the talk, framing the discussion in terms of a chronology, "what date on the progress timeline will I need to roll back to," rather than a choice of what is the appropriate technology for the resources and tasks at hand. A subtle difference perhaps, but it hides a couple of important underlying themes.
First is, a continuing belief in "the religion of progress." The assumption that time represents a continuously increasing level of technology is perhaps the first of the tenents of the Progress Religion. No reason for it to be so, and we have plenty of examples where newer does not equal better. Yet when we look at the problems we are facing solely as one of rolling back to an earlier time, that is the belief system we are employing, whether we admit it or not.
The second part of this is the idea that we will be turning the technology/progress clock back, and be "stuck" at some point on a timeline, with all level of progress to that point. A chronological re-enactment of sorts. Again, no particular reason for this to be so. There is no reason that we cannot and will not pick and choose useful pieces of technology from many points along the timeline and keep them alive because of the benefits they offer. I certainly hope that we will be keeping some of the better technologies going forward; not all will be viable in the future but some could be if they prove useful enough.
I think we should be looking at all of technology as a toolbox, and selecting the appropriate tool for each task. No doubt some of the current tools will not be available in the future, for better or worse. But they are still just tools. Do you feel retro every time you pull out a screw driver and tighten a screw? How about a hammer and nail? Very old technologies, yet they still are the best solution to many problems even today, which is why they are still in widespread use.
Remember too, many of the older technologies came from a time when resources were very plentiful, they were not designed for efficiency of materials or energy. Requirements which will likely be far more important in the future.
As a society/species, we need to get out of the religion of progress paradigm. It hasn't served us well, and has led us into the crisis we are now facing. Time to start viewing technology as a tool. One that we choose to employ how and when it serves our needs.
2/15/15, 1:41 PM
Bill Blondeau said...
I'm lucky enough to have been running Linux, at home and at work, since 2003 with few interruptions. (The interruptions mostly involved recent Macintosh work machines.) Once you get used to the basics, it's difficult to go back into the snakepit of Windows.
I'm available for a moderate amount of unpaid Linux advice and assistance. I solemnly swear I'm worth every penny.
@latheChuck, very glad that Guy Clark is working out for you. "Homegrown Tomatoes" was one of my favorites, back in the day.
2/15/15, 2:07 PM
Shane Wilson said...
my guess is that the UNITED States will not survive the end of its empire, that the end of empire will also bring about the dissolution of the US, as JMG mentions in his recent novel. It won't go down w/out a fight, tho. My guess is that Canada picks up some new southern provinces (former states) to form a Great Lakes based country, and may cleve up West/East (perhaps a Cascadia with Victoria or Vancouver as capital?) in the aftermath. Tho it's pure speculation @ this point. But as soon as the empire is seen as weak and fallible abroad, it will be seen as weak at home.
2/15/15, 2:29 PM
Radu Visan said...
Ubuntu is a good option, but you should know its current interface is even more absurd than that of Windows 8. Fortunately, there are desktop packages that can replace it. Two (of many) alternatives that make sense and work better with older hardware are Gnome Classic:
http://www.howtogeek.com/189912/how-to-install-the-gnome-classic-desktop-in-ubuntu-14.04/
and LXDE:
http://www.howtogeek.com/107368/how-to-install-the-lightweight-lxde-desktop-on-ubuntu/
2/15/15, 4:08 PM
Graham S. Wright said...
As an aside I will mention that this assumes conventional h-bombs with dirty fission triggers. More possibilities open up if it is possible to make fusion bombs without fission triggers. I read an article linked from a comment on the Oil Drum a few years ago that indicated this was possible. It was an article very critical of the continuous-burn magnetic confinement fusion research effort. With clean H-bombs one could think about things like artificial tsunamis that would fill pumped-storage reservoirs for hydro power.
2/15/15, 6:29 PM
wiseman said...
Germans don't take quick lunches at their desk, it's an American thing.
It's usually an elaborate lunch which includes a dessert.
2/15/15, 7:01 PM
Myriad said...
2/15/15, 7:21 PM
FiftyNiner said...
Your response to Shane Wilson as to what has kept stability in Europe since WWII of course is spot on. I am 62 years old and I remember getting off the school bus on our country dirt road when I was 10 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and my parents being very concerned about what might happen. We were less than 40 miles from Florida. Through my lifetime I think there has been much wisdom here and in Russia, i.e., the USSR, as to avoiding direct conflict between the two countries. In the devolution of the USSR and all the credit being taken by or given to Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II and no credit given to Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia in the intervening years, reverted to being the autocracy that it naturally is and always has been. But the irony is we have been moving toward autocracy at the same time. The fly in the ointment for all humanity, of course, is the existence of the vast arsenals of nuclear weapons that will render almost every conjecture about the coming future of the world moot. Is the problem that the two leaders, Obama and Putin, are too young to understand how it is that they are supposed to play the game?
I read just this week that it is estimated that Vladimir Putin is worth $77 Billion. Moscow now is the city upon the earth with the highest number of Billionaires. Quite a change in a short quarter century! But we must remember too that when he and his family were killed at Ekaterinburg in 1917, Tsar Nicolas II, was the richest man on earth with a net worth in 1917 dollars of $50 Billion, which makes him one of the richest people ever to have lived. Does anyone doubt that the oligarchs run the world?
2/15/15, 8:26 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Other Tom, no argument there. When Sara and I moved across the continent in 2009, 63 banker's boxes of books came with us -- that's what was left after we ruthlessly purged our collections. A book, for me, is more than a linear sequence of words -- it's a multisensory object to which, if it's any good, a great many personal memories and emotions will eventually attach. There's a richness there that those who only pay attention to data will never know.
Phil, a useful reminder that no nation in wartime stays on the side of the angels.
Carl, if the scientists are right, the weather you've had there for the last few years is considerably wetter and cooler than you can expect in the future. My working guess? Those who leave now are smart.
Shane, there's a difference between the sort of talk about federal incompetence you hear nowadays (I hear the same thing here in the Appalachians) and the sort of thing that leads to a collapse of governmental authority. The thing to watch for is when it goes past talk, and people (and local governments) start taking tentative actions in defiance of federal edicts. You'll no doubt have read quite a bit about the run-up to 1860, so you know what to look for...
Whomever, there were plenty of people in 1965 who realized what was coming -- it's just that they've been systematically erased from the history books. The borrowings in Herbert's novel are among the few traces of the 1960s limits-to-growth literature to survive.
Editor, thanks for the link! No surprises there...
FiftyNiner, that's my take as well.
Samadhi, when I wrote about Ebola, I noted that things would get bad if a lot of resources weren't thrown at the problem right away. Fortunately, they were, and we dodged that bullet. The collapse of the fracking bubble is happening; the Obama administration's moves toward a proxy war in the Ukraine are happening; measures of economic activity are dropping like a rock -- check out the status of the Baltic Dry Index one of these days, just to name one. I'm trying to give my readers a heads up as crisis becomes imminent; if that troubles you, well, that can't be helped.
Pinku-sensei, thanks for the data!
Myosotis, well, yes -- there are reasons I fled Oregon and headed for an old mill town on the other side of the continent, you know.
Valekeeperx, sometimes it's the best use of water there is in times like these. Have you considered planning for relocation?
2/15/15, 9:23 PM
Shane Wilson said...
2/15/15, 9:37 PM
John Michael Greer said...
JML, it's worth reading.
Daelach, oh, granted -- it's just that a lot of people talk as though the trade deficit is all that matters, when there are other ways to work the wealth pump. Yes, I'm also aware that Greece faked the figures that got it into the Euro, and that it's not just Greek loans that aren't allowed to fail -- it's the conventional wisdom these days that no investment, no matter how stupid, must ever be subjected to the healthy discipline of the market.
As for Germany's armed forces, I wonder how many people in the Bundesrepublik these days remember that those who won't volunteer to fight for their own country will sooner or later be drafted into the army of its conqueror. Would you prefer to learn Russian or Arabic? It may come to that, you know.
Cathy, thank you! As for Vint Cerf's article, I've got to do a post one of these days on the people who recognize a real problem and then suggest a solution that involves doing more of what caused the problem, and will just make it worse. I wonder if it's ever occurred to Mr. Cerf that "the cloud" is even more evanescent than the technologies he's worried about losing...
Andy, I'm currently receiving data from an old-fashioned print release of Carl Jung's Aion, so appreciate the quote!
Myriad, of course it's not just innocuous fun and games. I'll be talking more about the sinister purpose behind it as we proceed.
Eric, rest and decompression definitely sound like a good idea at this point! As for the Big Bang thing, I saw that, but don't have the physics background to make more than the most tentative sense of it -- it'll be interesting to see how the debate shapes up.
Roger, the only way Europe could function as a single economic and political unit is in the aftermath of military conquest. Napoleon tried that, and so did a couple of tolerably well-known Germans. Short of that, no question, it ain't gonna work.
Jean-Vivien, exactly -- I expect to see more and more people saying "and this is supposed to be progress?" as we proceed.
Valekeeperx, hmm. If it's an antireligion, what's the religion that's the source of all its concepts, and whose value judgments it reverses?
Mark (and everyone else who's recommended Ubuntu or other Linux OSs), I dabbled in Linux a while back, and found that it required a lot more time under the hood than I was interested in spending. All I want is a box that will support a very modest number of basic programs, and do so on a simple more or less user-friendly graphical interface. If there are versions of Linux that provide that, rather than catering to the geekoisie, I'd be interested, but not otherwise.
Val, no, that's a new one for me. I'll check it out.
Bob, thanks for the tip.
2/15/15, 9:43 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Yupped, fascinating. If walkability's coming back in, some other pleasant possibilities may open up as well.
Iuval, do you remember all the times I've talked about how people get stuck on the notion that the future must be all good or all bad, that it can't possibly be a mix of things, the way, say, real life generally is? Ahem.
LatheChuck, okay, the Bellman's Law applies: "what I tell you three times is true." I proclaim the arrival of a trend.
Mark, of course there were good intentions involved. The road paved with good intentions leads where?
Ebrown, delighted to hear it.
Doctor W., I wonder if the word "hubris" is in those folk's dictionary...
Cherokee, given the amount of internet noise given these days to Grumpy Cat, I wonder if you could fund a massive expansion of your farm with Grumpy Koala or the like. ;-)
Omerori, thank you! Yes, you're welcome to post a translation, so long as there's a link back to the original post. Hebrew's a new one -- the blog has appeared in quite a few languages so far, but that's the first I know of in the Semitic language family.
Pauline, you're welcome and thank you!
Ozark, it's an interesting question. The wealth pump has a certain similarity to oil wells -- once the supply has dropped below a certain point, the flow slows to a trickle, and attempts to boost it don't work for long. That may work in favor of the Ozarks et al.
Maria, not silly at all. You're an early adopter of the next great trend! ;-)
Marcello, yes, I'm aware of that. My point is that progress has had its downsides as well as its upsides.
2/15/15, 9:54 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Steve, good! Where's that Lewis quote from? I want to cite it in a forthcoming book.
Graham, if you want to enter it in the contest, you have until the end of the month, but you need to follow the contest rules given in this post: your entry must be made as a blog post, and should pretend to be either a dishonest press release from the shysters promoting your scheme, or a sycophantic media article about the scheme. Many thanks!
FiftyNiner, Russia is a very large country with immense resources; it's no surprise at all that the people who run it get very rich. I think you'll find that Putin knows perfectly well how to play the game, and if things proceed the way they've been going, he's likely to win it, too.
Shane, if that picks up in a visible way, yes, that would be a sign worth watching, too.
2/15/15, 10:00 PM
cpendlebury said...
I'd suggest getting someone to set up a 'Linux for Grandparents' style box for you, and you'll find it simpler than XP ever was.
2/15/15, 10:35 PM
Moshe Braner said...
- funny, I've been doing that for 9 years now, and with no anti-virus protection software installed, and have suffered no ill effects. (Or is that why I have the flu right now?)
It's not the tool, it's how you use it. In the case of malware, most of it arrives as email attachments or links, and those that have "bugs" are so obvious (to me) that if they had 6 wriggling legs and antennae it would not make them any more obvious. Yes I know there are also "worms" that arrive without one "opening" anything. Make sure you set up the "firewall" in your router.
2/16/15, 1:07 AM
latefall said...
Regarding the language under arms: Well, we learn English today. Some did learn Russian (also before the GDR). French is neither new nor forgotten (see flag). Arabic would be something new I guess (but I could also imagine they decide on French in Europe for reasons of simplicity).
Re political unions and currencies: I really don't get why people keep insisting some groups of poor people have to use one kind of money, while some groups of richer people another.
I do understand monetary policy and the basic macroeconomics a little. There are countless examples where groups do or don't use all kinds of currencies that fly in the face of the above. Sure there can be issues with a central financial authority that may not have everyone's well being on the its mind all the time, and (imperial) wealth pumps etc. exist independent of that. We aren't discussing the re-introduction of the Ost-Mark a whole lot in Germany.
Re toaster:
I don't own a toaster and I don't miss it. I prefer buying proper bread that tastes fine, without using electricity to add acrylamides for taste. Granted getting good bread can be a challenge in some places in the US (but you can easily make your own).
Re ebooks:
Kindle?! Seriously, there are other options that are less of an incarnation of consumerism and planned obsolescence...
I'm of the generation that (was told it) had to move several times. It is hard to imagine how much paper I would have had to drag with me to have access to the data I more or less often look at to do my work.
Sure if I had known I'd be (teaching my kids how to be) planting potatoes and then cart them to the nearest market it would simplify things some. But still how many private libraries do you find in slums, or with 19th century seasonal workers? I sure know where I put my used ebook reader/little von Neumann machine. Even if it may end up being a bridge tech.
@Eric S: Thanks for sharing. I think I can relate to what you feel. Reminds me of my grandparents that were first to go. Also reminds me I should speak to my father more.
2/16/15, 2:08 AM
FiftyNiner said...
Agreed about Putin and Russia, but the current dilemma begs the question: "Is the EU a modern geopolitical fiction, the result of an overactive Anglo-american imagination, rendered all the more wimpish by the recalcitrance of the UK in becoming a truly leading partner in the enterprise?" If the answer is "yes" then it would follow that NATO truly is a paper tiger and Putin can probably have his way with "old girl" Europe. If American foreign policy has been for the past century or so, as some have suggested, the continuation of the British Empire by other means, then we probably deserve the mess we find ourselves in?
2/16/15, 3:38 AM
Nastarana said...
Shane Wilson, I suppose you are aware that the Koch plutocrats and allies are attempting to establish their personal satrapy in the upper Mississippi Valley and around the Great Lakes, the grand prizes being GL water and Midwest farmland. Look at a map of Koch installed state governors and you are looking at c.20% of the world's most precious resource. The long suffering residents might eventually call in Canada for rescue.
I believe it was fear of "mutiny and desertion" among the military rank and file which brought the Vietnam adventure to its end, not civil unrest at home.
Mr. Geer, when I moved across country, CA to NY(upstate), I ditched the cheap furniture and brought about 5000lb of books, after weeding and multiple trips to the Goodwill. I found out that beverage boxes, usually given away for free by the liquor stores are excellent for moving.
2/16/15, 5:21 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Look up Ubuntu. It is VERY user friendly, kinda like windows 95 without all the bugs. I'm not particularly computer literate, but the basic stuff needed to keep the Ubuntu OS going is within my skill range.
Regards,
Varun
2/16/15, 8:30 AM
valekeeperx said...
“If it's an antireligion, what's the religion that's the source of all its concepts, and whose value judgments it reverses?”
Sorry, I used the wrong term. I’m thinking more of the religious sensibility as a whole. Maybe I should have written anti-sensibility. The religious sensibility currently represented by Progress may have originally started as an anti-sensibility? As you have indicated (please forgive if I am off the mark here), the religious sensibility inspiring humanity for the last 2,000+ years has focused on ascension, control, biophobia, human-centeredness, dominion, and the notion that we deserve better and more. Maybe it was a reaction to the sensibilities of nature or Earth religions? Or, perhaps religious sensibilities go through cycles? I’m afraid I don’t have the background knowledge to make a more definitive conjecture, just a hunch.
From what I’ve read, the First Peoples here in California maintained a fairly stable relatively small population for millennia and kept the region as a rather lightly managed garden, using low level technology. Apparently, any aspirations for more and better didn’t get much if any traction. It seems they remembered the long dry periods.
Regarding relocation, yes, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time mulling it over. There are some significantly limiting factors (family and work), not least of which are my limited persuasive abilities, that I’m not sure I could ever overcome. Though, my comment was intended more to add to the larger picture of uneven decline we are all painting together. As you’ve said many times, the descent will occur unevenly along different time frames. Still, there are some Butlerian bright spots even here.
Best regards
2/16/15, 8:51 AM
donalfagan said...
@Murdoch Anachronisms: He also has a lady friend who is a forensic pathologist and a sexually-liberated woman.
@Doomer Talk: I take recent events not as harbingers of imminent collapse, just more bad news that fits the general trend. I'll know things have really changed when I stop getting credit card offers.
2/16/15, 9:21 AM
Yupped said...
2/16/15, 9:29 AM
Shane Wilson said...
My guess is that a vacuum opens up in the U.S. when the empire implodes. Nature abhors a vacuum. Call me a monarchist, but IMO the Westminster system has proven more resilient than the U.S. system, and Canada is the Crown in North America, a Westminster parliamentary system. My guess is that an Ottawa based country secures the southern provinces (ex states) to secure trade routes and prevent piracy on the Great Lakes. My guess is that the southern provinces will fill the same role as East Germany did post unification. Canada doesn't really have a rust belt in the same sense as the U.S., as it couldn't afford to throw Ontario and Toronto under the bus the way the U.S. did the Great Lakes states. Therefore, Ontario is in a way more powerful and affluent position than any of the states to its south. There's no comparing Toronto and other major cities in Ontario with Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, etc. Apples and oranges. My guess is the Atlantic provinces may join up with New England, and a B.C. based Cascadia forms.
2/16/15, 9:47 AM
Shane Wilson said...
2/16/15, 10:09 AM
Mark Rice said...
I starting using Linux in the bad old days of the early 2000's. Then it required a bit of work.
The past 5 years or so have been different. Ubuntu became a Debian for the great unwashed masses. I do not get any nerd macho points for using Ubuntu. I installed it on a netbook a few years. This was very easy.
Every couple of years I use the GUI to upgrade to the latest LTS version. So far even this has been painless. If Ubuntu required much working under the hood, I would stop using it.
2/16/15, 10:41 AM
Unknown said...
Rubbish.
I replaced a fully linseed oiled from birth steel frame after three years in Portland OR because it was rusting from the inside out.
I replaced that stupid relic with a carbon frame and have had no issues with so called deterioration, delaminination, catastrophic failure or any other such nonsense propaganda in seven years of daily transportation use.
I agree that steel is a workable material but can't go bashing something thats far superior in my real life EXPERIENCE.
Rain Waters
2/16/15, 12:23 PM
John Roth said...
Nothing is safe to use while connected to the internet. The only really safe thing is to have two computers, one of which is never connected to anything and the other of which is only used for communications. You only move files on media, and you have a file cleaning program that can deal with the usual run of nasties that get incorporated in files. The internet connected system is arranged so it can be cleaned to the bare metal and reloaded from media - this is called the “nuke it from orbit” malware recovery policy.
Of course, this is onerous enough that most people, even the ones who ought to know better and have the skills to make it work, ignore the problem.
@Steve in Colorado
Exactly. To me, “1950” means restrictions on the length of supply chains and the complexity of manufacturing processes that were common in that era, rather than a particular technological suite.
The thing that has not been mentioned up front, though, is eliminating planned obsolescence. According to the Fount of All Knowledge, planned obsolescence was invented in 1929 by General Motors. Eliminating that is as much a social change as a technology change.
@FiftyNiner
Nuclear weapons deteriorate; it’s a natural result of being made of radioactive material. Leave them alone long enough without remanufacturing the fissionable core, and they won’t go bang. “Long enough” is classified (meaning I don’t know it) but it’s most likely under a decade. A country that no longer has the technology to re-refine the fissionable material and remanufacture it to specs won’t have a nuclear arsenal.
I just heard a comment to the effect that the wealthiest 58 people in the world have as much wealth as the bottom half of the entire planetary population. And no, this is not the most absurd that it’s ever been. Augustus Caesar is supposed to have disposed of half the wealth of the Roman Empire. Of course, he owned Egypt as his personal property by right of conquest; it was not a Roman province.
2/16/15, 1:13 PM
Raymond Duckling said...
Now to cpendlebury and the Linux crew... I was already not going to comment on this issue, but this was my failed attempt at the Krampus challenge, so I cannot help it.
If you had asked me one year ago if Linux was ready to go mainstream, I would have answered: "Yeah, just look at the Ubuntu distribution." But after actually doing the experiment, I would take that opinion with a full bowler of salt.
1. If you can put your hands in hardware that is ~5-7y.o, this is still doable by an intelligent person with minimal previous knowledge, as long as they are very detail oriented and able to follow instructions. If you are trying to salvage anything older than that, you need a professional just to recover from the eventual bricking of the device (when, not if).
2. Even if you install it once, there is no guarantee that it will not break a little bit down the road (unlike Windows *products*). Linux fans are one demography amongst the most sold into the Progress paradigm, and as such they always expect you to have relatively recent hardware. They also expect you to keep upgrading the OS or its components on a regular basis. Even the so called Long Term Support versions, LTS for short, only are supported for 3 or so years. Compare it to WinXP's ~12 years support (or more if you are willing to pay for the extension).
I am aware that this is not the case for all Linux distros, some of which are specialized in older/smaller hardware... but this takes us to next point.
3. Outside of the very shallow veil of friendliness... Linux community is still uncompromisingly user-hostile. You cannot expect to get any help if you cannot speak the techno-babble, lurk at the obscure forums and in general be willing to become "one of us" with the people in there.
I am saying this last thing because one of the suggestions was to install "Puppy Linux". There is no such thing as *the* Puppy Linux, there is a large bunch of Linuxes that all use the same Puppy framework and behave more or less consistently, but you really need to know what you are doing because you are in hard core hobbyist territory now, and you wont get a straight answer from anyone there. This was an awful suggestion for a non technical n00b.
In summary, you can have your Linux box, if you know a computer geek well enough to get a hold of him and help you with all the problems you are likely to face. You should pay good money for this service and everything, but you must make clear that this is a serious service and not allow him to treat it as a weekend project to be excited about and then forget in a few days.
The realization that this model was not going to fly came one day, when I was visiting a friend. This is blue collar neighborhood, so people are struggling but still have some money to burn and take modern amenities more or less for granted. I ran into these entrepreneurial teenagers, with a cardboard sign and a bunch of pirated DVDs and USB keys. The sign read "PC formatting. $100MXN". So, you can be completely infested with viruses, and for about $6.50USD you can have these guys wipe your hard disk clean after making a best effort to salvage (some of) your personal files. From talks with some older people, I'd guess that their typical customer already expects computers to "break" and loose information from time to time, so no problem there.
If you think about it, a large number of people into Linux either go to engineering schools, or the equivalent of 2 year degree. On price alone, those are not going to compete with the pirate teens and their cardboard sign.
2/16/15, 1:38 PM
Vashti said...
However: I don't need to download anything. I don't need the Internet - this is why DRM is an evil. All I need is *some* form of hardware - and computers from 30 and 40 years ago are still functioning without parts - and *some* form of power. Even in the worst sort of collapse, people will still be generating small scale electricity on some level.
2/16/15, 2:18 PM
Kaitain said...
It looked to me like Varoufakis was going for the Silicon Valley hipster look that Steve Jobs popularized. In certain industries in America these days, that is considered to be appropriate business attire, and not just for pimps and gigolos. Sure he wasn't wearing a suit and tie, but I though he was well dressed. Beyond that, I thought Christophe made some very good points.
2/16/15, 2:41 PM
August Johnson said...
I have Ubuntu on an HP mini210 netbook because the Windows 7 Starter Version restore DVD decided it no longer would install on the hardware that it came with!
The user interface that Ubuntu comes with is horrible! In the process of supposedly making it "easier" to use, they have made something that makes no sense at all. I had to search forever to find out how to add a program to the menu even though I could start it from the command line! The reason I still have it running is that I got the programs I needed finally running and don't want to go through hell again with some other OS. If the restore DVD didn't insist on giving fatal windows errors when installing, I'd go back to it! No, it's not problems reading the DVD! I can't imagine inflicting this on someone other than another tech geek!
2/16/15, 4:41 PM
Debra Lacy said...
As a fiber spinner, I take great joy in the creative process of making something from scratch and by hand. There's a real connection to the end product. Spinning is a great social activity too, with monthly meetings, spin-ins and an annual conference organized by the Northwest Regional Spinner's Association. I think the social connection with friends while supporting an old craft is as important as the creative process. We demonstrate at highland games and fairs and people are quite fascinated by it. It's an industry in of itself with a wide range of business models from fairly large manufacturers from all over the world to local crafts people who are woodworkers doing artisan wheels like fine, custom furniture.
Ironically, the rage around my neck of the woods is a portable electric spinner for those of us who are getting older with bad knees that make treadling difficult. It's built by a local craftsman wood worker who will build one out of exotic wood upon request. Otherwise the standard is cherry or maple. I still spin on my 25 year old Schacht wheel built in Bolder, Colorado. I've had the bearings replaced once. I also own a functioning antique wheel. I have what is jokingly referred to as a fiber IRA stash in my garage. My family and friends love getting hand knit wool socks for presents. They fit better.
It's amazing when you pick up a craft how a whole new world opens up with products, fellow fiber enthusiasts and community coming out of the woodwork.
2/16/15, 6:06 PM
tideshift said...
http://gizmodo.com/the-gorgeous-typeface-that-drove-men-mad-and-sparked-a-1686081182
I've built a tabletop press and been playing around with making bookmarks so far, partly inspired by your work, and also AJ Liebling: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
2/16/15, 7:54 PM
Carl said...
Regarding relocating out of of CA, I've made some progress. I talked to my wife more about our droughts and future mega droughts and she agreed we should have a plan b if the rains and snow don't come back soon. I showed her possibilities back east and even Cumberland, MD (I saw a foreclosure in Cumberland for $15,000 and it didn't look bad) Of course your snow storm and Boston's 95 inches of snow and counting didn't help me ;-).
I'm thinking, even if we bought a house back east and rented it, at least we'd have some where to move to if we needed it right away. I know that wouldn't be making connections in the community or starting a garden, but it is hard to leave two good paying jobs, take two kids out of school, when the drought could end next winter. This summer they'll be just enough water, but not next if there isn't above normal precep.
Hard to know what to do, Carl
2/16/15, 8:24 PM
cpendlebury said...
To get back on topic -
I recently refurbished a brace drill. It was covered in rust, which I removed and oiled. I was pleasantly surprised at how much more torque it has than my cordless drill, despite being slower (and much quieter).
The other interesting piece of tech I've been playing with is nomograms, analog computing devices along similar lines to a slide rule. Allows complex calculations to be done with a straight-edge, because all the work was done in making the nomogram. Generated using a python library called PyNomo.
It's becoming clear that plastics are a problem. They leach endocrine-disrupting chemicals in ordinary use, and BPA isn't the only one. Phasing them out of your lifestyle necessarily starts bringing you to older, less energy intensive ways.
Next project is refurbishing a early 20th century Singer sewing machine.
As for fax, cheques and landlines, I say good riddance to them. I hope they don't come back.
2/16/15, 8:30 PM
FiftyNiner said...
I am a graduate of the University of Alabama(1978), which of course is located in Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloosa has always been called the "Druid" city and the explanation given is because of the large number of water oaks(Quercus nigra) planted in the town and surrounding area in the early nineteenth century. Does there exist an actual relationship among the ancient Druids and this particular species of oak tree or is this, as I suspect, derived from a bid of literary romanticism of the time?
2/16/15, 9:48 PM
steve pearson said...
@ unknown, I do believe the previous commenter said 20 years and you are rubbishing him based on 7. If you are going to be that rude about it, why not wait another 13 years.
cheers, Steve
2/16/15, 9:59 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Grumpy koala is a great idea, but implemtation is possibly well beyond my skill set. As a bonus, there is no need to make them grumpy like that poor unfortunate cat, they already are!
I actually spotted a koala nearby high up in a mana gum a few weeks back. They're notoriously hard to spot as they share the same fur colour as their favourite tree. The koala looked as though it was enjoying itself - just having a bit of an afternoon kip.
As to massive expansions... Well, as a bit of a confession, I actually enjoy the crisp but human pace that things progress along here. Throwing machinery, people and resources into this place would be all too easy to do. However, like your blog entry this week points out in no uncertain terms - for those with eyes to read - there are always unintended consequences to that massive expansion. And I can think of quite a few without putting too many brain cells towards that thought experiment.
But grumpy koala, that is an outstanding bit of marketing.
Cheers
Chris
2/16/15, 10:18 PM
Tyler August said...
Very much enjoying the positive spin on de-teching. I find it deliciously ironic that one of the main discussions in the comment thread involves the best way to run a personal "machine in the likeness of a human mind."
Just to savor the irony, I'm going to weigh in.
My own personal experience over the last decade is that it's very hit-or-miss. If your hardware is supported on-CD (or DVD, now) by the installation of the distro you're using, it's fine. Easy as XP. Easy sailing and you don't need to ever look under the hood... unless something breaks. XP or Linux, something may break, but then I don't usually bother fixing it. I just go back to my backups, and re-install the OS. Fixing? Forget it. It's not because I don't know how; it's because it's not worth the effort.
If your OS does not install cleanly, usually because you don't have the drivers-on-disk, you're in ghenna with Windows OR Linux. (And increasingly, with XP, there is a problem at that point. Newer hardware doesn't come with drivers.)
I should point out, though, that if a Word-Processor is all you want, a dedicated (supposedly) heirloom-quality dedicated word-processor is now available for pre-order here: https://hemingwrite.com/
Unfortunately, I don't know if there's any way to get files off of it without an Internet connection. Which would make it rather pointless-- but at least some of the geekoisie are thinking of these things.
2/17/15, 6:27 AM
FiftyNiner said...
Have your every written an essay about Kondratiev cycles, or waves, as they should more properly be called? I know very little about his theory, but I would be very curious to hear and would value your evaluation immensely!
2/17/15, 6:48 AM
Roger said...
OK, you object to my calling Yanis Varoufakis a "boy". I'll point out the obvious, that there's a world of difference between men of an oppressed American racial minority and the Greek finance minister.
Was I being disrespectful to Yanis? You bet. He had it coming. And no, I don't think that subtler rhetorical techniques are called for given what's at stake.
Seriously, the guy shows up with his shirt hanging out.
You know what? I saw his get-up as an up-raised finger to his foreign counter-parts. A really boneheaded thing to do. There's no possible excuse. There's varying levels of possible calamity out of all this and some mutual good-will is necessary to avert the worst.
Please, does he think the Greeks were innocent in this fiasco, that it's all the scheming Frau and her German henchmen? There's no clean hands.
Yanis is one of the most powerful people in his country. He needs to show up not just well-briefed but looking all business. In a suit, with a tie.
2/17/15, 9:25 AM
Ruben said...
Atomic Vaudeville
2/17/15, 9:43 AM
PatriciaT said...
Re: Butlerian Carnival. Great post. I think that role-playing in many of the historical reenactment groups can be helpful in developing a different mind-set, in addition to learning new and useful skills, interacting with others in positive ways.
2/17/15, 1:23 PM
Kaitain said...
Well, the EU just announced its latest list of sanctioned Russian and Novorussian officials, politicians, military leaders and organizations. Again, the result is derisive laughter and Russians who see this as a badge of honor, not something to be ashamed or afraid of.
http://cassad-eng.livejournal.com/120862.html
Someone once said that you can judge a man's character by the enemies that he makes and it seems that many Russians see it as something to be proud of that the Obama administration and/or the EU has blacklisted them. I think it also shows the level of contempt with which the Obama administration and the EU are held in Russia and many other parts of the world.
2/17/15, 1:43 PM
William Knight said...
JMG, surely you have hear of GNU/Linux? There are very many user-friendly distributions for it these days.
2/17/15, 3:40 PM
Unknown said...
Nastarena wrote, 'I believe it was fear of "mutiny and desertion" among the military rank and file which brought the Vietnam adventure to its end, not civil unrest at home.' I would add rising rates of opiate addiction among the troops. One form of mutiny which occurred often enough to be known to civilian antiwar activists was the fragging of junior officers.
Perhaps carbon fiber bicycle frames last longer than steel in wet climates, and vice versa in sunny dry ones.
I don't expect a political union between British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. unless the Chinese think it's a good idea.
2/17/15, 6:22 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Latefall, when you have two countries with radically different economies and cultures using the same currency, that currency's going to become a means to pump wealth from one country to another. The US has used the primacy of the dollar to pump wealth from most of the world into the US, and Germany's benefiting from the same process as regards the Euro. Thus the very sensible Greek response.
FiftyNiner, William Butler Yeats predicted the EU many decades in advance in precise terms: "What discords will drive Europe to that artificial unity -- only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle -- which is the decadence of every great civilization?" That is to say, I expect the EU to be a footnote in the history books in a century or so, a failed experiment in the decades just before Europe was conquered by -- whoever.
Nastarana, sounds about right!
Varun, I notice that pro- and anti-Linux fashions are both represented here!
Valekeeperx, I see modern scientific materialism as the rationalist form of the same sensibility of ascetic life-denial that's been so pervasive for the last two and a half thousand years. Like most rationalist views, it simply takes a more crassly materialistic view of things, trying to ascend to heaven on a rocket rather than getting there in some subtler way.
Yupped, thank you!
Shane, most interesting. If that shifts from weariness and distrust into active, violent hostility, crunch time is very close.
Mark, thanks for the tips.
Vashti, if people are generating small amounts of electricity, they'll have much more important uses for it than your Kindle -- refrigeration, for example. As for computer access, depends on your wealth and social standing. If you're rich, maybe; if you're not, I doubt it.
Debra, excellent! Do you ever spin with a drop spindle? That's my wife's preferred instrument.
Tideshift, many thanks for the link. You've built a tabletop press? Can you recommend a source for plans?
Carl, we got all of two inches of snow. That said, if you come to a town like this one, you need to bring your job with you; it's not a place where you can count on getting employed locally.
Cpendlebury, I'm a lot more fond of hand drills and nomographs than I am of computer operating systems, anyway, so thanks for this.
2/17/15, 10:10 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Cherokee, yes, I remembered your comments on koalas. Wombats seem far cheerier. You might be interested to know that my wife on occasion uses a cute animal photo blog for mental detox; whenever they have an animal-cuteness poll, there's always a place to vote for wombats, and they usually come in very high in the stats.
Tyler, yes, I've been enjoying that as well. I've wondered who's going to be the first to suggest I get a Difference Engine!
FiftyNiner, I've read about K-waves but haven't written about them. I should probably revisit the whole theory of economic cycles one of these days.
Ruben, okay, it's a trend.
Patricia, thanks for the link.
Kaitain, I read in non-US media that when the first set of sanctions got slapped on, the Duma passed a resolution requesting the US government to honor every one of its members with the same sanctions. No, they're not impressed.
William, for certain values of user-friendly, sure!
2/17/15, 10:18 PM
Shane Wilson said...
There's just a certain logic to a country that includes the Great Lakes, and has the Ohio & upper Mississippi Rivers as boundaries. My guess is that NY gets cleaved between upstate and Hudson River valley. There's already more cultural cross pollination between upstate NY and southern Ont./Toronto than between upstate and NYC. The Bills even play games in T.O. for their significant Toronto fan base. Now, where the line gets drawn between the Hudson River valley & upstate...
The irony is that I think the neb-Confederacy will be the future country that most resembles the original US--a republic with autonomous states and a limited centralized national government. I think the neo-Confederate constitution will borrow more from the original US constitution, and have a lot more legacy from the former US constitution. I make that assessment because the civil religion of Americanism, worship of the founding fathers, and Federalism is strongest in the South.
2/18/15, 8:01 AM
Shane Wilson said...
@Steve
not sure about the Canadian prairies, though they did seem to do a better job settling them, or, should I say putting up large® cities on them. Neither of the Dakotas, or possibly even Kansas has cities the size of Winnipeg, Saskatoon, or possibly Regina.
2/18/15, 8:21 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Yes, but clearly they're all wrong and I am right. ;)
2/18/15, 8:48 AM
latefall said...
No real disagreement with these points:
1. "radically different economies and cultures"
2. "that currency's going to become a means to pump wealth"
But how do you judge 1. except in hindsight?
Also, like I tried to say: you have these differences also within a society. If I borrow money from a rich guy with a tie (or bank) I expect different consequences for defaulting or renegotiating, than I do if I got it from my local drug dealer, or Russian oligarch.
Or to put it another way: Maybe a poor guy in Greece has more in common with a poor guy in Germany than with a rich guy in either country...
Also, East and West Germany began to divide culturally. For many politicians a unification was out of the question. How about Korea? What about the Commonwealth or OIFrancophonie? I think very few people can say today which cultures will inevitably rub the wrong way in the future.
Regarding point 2: Of course it will. But it could be many other things. With Germany's current attitude towards organized violence their alternatives are indeed relatively few (e.g. corruption, which I expect is heavily used). Generally though you don't HAVE to resort to a currency at all, only since about WWII I think most other options are frowned upon (sometimes).
As for the sensible thing:
"About 81 percent [of the Greeks] said they wanted to remain in the euro zone." -Reuters
And I am on their side (I think). At least I helped a tiny bit with organizing their march and participated.
@Roger re Varoufakis' dress: I love it! Don't you think he wants to spark exactly this kind of discussion? My take on it is that he was not there to talk business but politics, thus dressing a tad closer to the people he represents is not a bad idea. Some of the other points you make are valid though. If we could fix the language part in Europe I think in 100-200 years a lot would get better and probably stay better for a long time.
I've worked a lot with fresh off the bus ("high end") southern and eastern Europeans. If you've left your home once, and have a tiny bit of antenna this can be managed just fine in an academic engineering environment (where language is not a major issue).
Reminds me, funny enough my "highest net worth" business presentation went pretty good in dickies pants and a decent unicolor shirt. Although to be fair it was probably not the run of the mill rich folks attending.
Ties & suits just make me think of lamp posts... and bad excuses for not riding the bike to work.
@Vashti: I am with you on that (at least for the forseeable future). Around here people either have a smart phone (also all Syrian refugees my friends teach have one), or hop into the internet cafe. Having a good linux distri on flash memory (+backup) is really good for that.
re Linux
I've been doing linux since a little before 2000 on and off. If I want to salvage an old machine or run a mini on premises server this is what I do:
1. Download a couple (2-6) of distros that approximately fit the bill on distrowatch and put them on usb flash memory.
2. I plug in the flash and see which gets me online (or whatever the machine's main purpose is) with minimum trouble.
3. As soon as I hit a bump the distro goes to the bottom of the stack. Rationale: time to first bump correlates strongly with total amount of fuss before completion.
4. If I am half way through my first batch of distros I start downloading more so they are ready when the first bunch goes to dev/null.
5. If I have more than one option I take the one that smells best (e.g. stability vs features vs fast desktop on forum comments).
6. If I don't really see an improvement and don't really have to upgrade I don't.
I like to give (persistent) live systems to other people for checking if it would work for them. Sometimes they switch to the live system and never bother to do a full install for years, which is totally fine.
2/18/15, 1:10 PM
Anne Patterson said...
2/18/15, 1:23 PM
Unknown said...
Renaissance Man, thank you for the correction on Murdoch Mysteries. I overlooked your reply on my first pass.
I saw a TV program about a restored, or possibly continuously operated, water powered, belt driven factory. IIRC it's in the eastern U.S. and they are making wooden crates in it. If you Google "water powered box factory" you might turn it up.
2/18/15, 1:59 PM
latheChuck said...
2/18/15, 2:24 PM
Glenn said...
I know nothing of Linux, but I do have a bicycle. Chrome moly steel frame, bought new from Bridgestone in 1991. I'm on my second set of wheels, second rear sprocket, third set of crank bearings, third set of pedals, second set of headset bearings, second set of brake pads and second set of control cables for brake and shifters. Oh yes, second set of brake and shifter handles. For 24 years, that's pretty good.
And I'm on the original chain, and original frame. I've used it from Kodiak AK, to Guam, and for the last 14 years here on the wet (Western) side of the Cascades. All notoriously wet or humid places. The bike lives under a tarp shelter when not being ridden.
Real world experience carried out over almost a quarter century. Yes, steel bicycle frames last just fine.
Glenn,
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
2/18/15, 2:30 PM
Steve in Colorado said...
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on your question.
Yupped is right, the Lewis quote is from "Mere Christianity." It also is from a BBC Broadcast Lewis did on 21 March 1944. The book "Mere Christianity" is a collection of Lewis's BBC broadcasts during WW2.
BTW, I can't help but smile at the irony of so many comments this week being about a solution to a tech/PC problem. Some useful info, I just found it an odd juxtaposition of topics and blog.
Goodluck to all.
2/18/15, 7:38 PM
Darren Collins said...
Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-staring-at-glowing,2747/
2/18/15, 9:04 PM
tideshift said...
I used a design by Charles Morgan (Victoria, British Columbia) at
http://www.monoprints.com/techniques/bottlejackpress.pdf?PHPSESSID=075ba0bf6163ba9ff9be755cbb904402
He did an earlier version of the plans in 2006, which I used, and then he updated it in 2009, which is the version online now. The press itself cost about $100 to make, using scavenged countertop pieces and lumber, plus new hardware and a $20-$30 2-ton Craftsman bottlejack.
I've equipped it by buying type-cases, furniture, reglets, chases, quoins and other serviceable antique components on eBay and at John Barrett's Letterpress Things (Chicopee MA). http://www.letterpressthings.com
I got some antique type on eBay, but because I want to eventually be able to print a double-sided broadsheet newspaper in 10-point Century Schoolbook font, I ordered a large lot of new type from M&H Type Foundry in San Francisco -
http://www.arionpress.com/mandh/ -
founded in 1915. It's now their centennial year.
I've also started doing some linoleum cuts, to make notecards with images rather than just text.
Photo of my press is online at my blog:
https://steadystatecollege.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/100_3712.jpg
2/19/15, 6:46 AM
Debra Lacy said...
2/19/15, 6:35 PM
carol.b said...
2/21/15, 6:00 AM
indus56 said...
2/21/15, 9:24 AM
Mark Tweedie said...
2/25/15, 4:35 AM
Clark Harris said...
2/25/15, 7:12 PM
AlnusIncana said...
It's good to get a nice pat on the back sometimes (I haven't had a TV since I moved away from home 12 years ago.)
Unrelated, I have personal reasons for celebrations!!
Today is the last day on my cubicle work.
After a youthful mistake of going into a career that wasn't for me, and 5 years of toiling away to recover from that mistake, I am now in position for a second change.
I look forward to all the extra time to spend on my Green Wizards projects enormeously.
3/13/15, 7:01 AM