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People have gone to deserts for more than 2000 years to find solitude, inspiration, meditation, and freedom. This website delves into some aspects of desert life in the early 21st century with a geographical focus on Newberry Springs, California. The front page is my blog and the links on top deal with a few resources in a local context. Books
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond; why Europeons overwhelmed the First Americans and not the other way around.
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Recent Historyposted April 18, 2008Come, let us recite together the early history of the twenty first century. In year one an arrogant lad of privilege, with few redeeming characteristics, was selected President by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5 to 4 decision that overruled the constitutional prerogative of the state of Florida. Later two iconic buildings collapsed in their footprints after being hit by passenger jets. That same day a third building mysteriously collapsed into its footprint in what looked to be very much like controlled demolition. This was followed by two wars of U.S. aggression and an odiferous coverup. Numerous laws and Executive Orders redacted most of our Constitutional Bill of Rights. Air went out of the housing bubble while the costs of basic necessities, such as fuel and grain, shot up. How does the shit hit the fan? One blade at a time.Collapse is personal. Reality can explode in a hail of shrapnel, any time, leaving tattered carcasses in its wake in milliseconds. As an example of rank hypocrisy, I have to travel extensively for my job. Last week I was in Seattle and had to be in Tucson the next day. Our jet caught a tailwind out of San Francisco and we landed in Tucson a half hour early. I woke up a cabby up about 11;30PM and we headed north. While we sat at a light at Kino and 22nd and I thought about how driver's licenses grant one the privilege of endangering other people's lives - an automobile projectile burst into a steel sign post twenty feet away from my window while at the same time the Ford pickup that had just run the red light and hit the white car smashed into the front of the cab I was in. The white car went whirling by my nose, spraying debris, and ended up about fifty feet behind us with a dead driver inside. The Pearly Gates flashed before my eyes. A third mini van lay totaled on the other side of the median. I watched the driver of the Ford pickup wander around bleeding profusely from his head while the people in the mini van looked seriously injured. There was a pickax laying on the asphalt near my window. The cabby screaming into his cell phone, looked out a shattered windshield, then the paramedics and fire department were on the scene. My God that was fast. Go ahead and raise my taxes if that's all we pay for. Four people were taken to the hospital in ambulances and one went to the morgue. It became a crime scene that I wasn't allowed to leave until after my interview with a detective at 2:00 AM. Power went out over a swath of Tucson when I got out of the shower the next morning. Fortunately the emergency backup ran the elevators so I didn't have to call for help on my cell phone from the sixth floor. Escaping the building, I rolled up campus to Biosciences East, where I was scheduled to give a talk at 2:00 PM, and asked for a room to plug in my laptap. A short time later the power went out and the fire alarm came on. We were to evacuate the building. I reluctantly rolled down to the stairwell, we all looked at my wheelchair and wondered, "what are we going to do with Debra?" The building manger arrived. We looked into each other's eyes and realized that this was the first time he had every thought about it. Only I can truly appreciate the irony of being dropped down the stairs and cracking my fool skull open for a safety drill. So I refused and a group of my supporters, who also refused to leave, waited around for the alarm to go off. My talk went well. How does empire fall? One brick at a time or in a wave of Visigoths? Whenposted April 12, 2008With most of my thinking friends and acquaintances the question has become not if but when. When will the U.S. economy officially dip into recession? When will the oil peak be clearly behind us? When will gasoline and food shortages hit the U.S.? When will we have the next riot? We know some things will happen. There will be a big earthquake on a Southern California fault. Another major hurricane will hit the gulf coast. Another bank will go belly up. We just don't know when. The timing is the crucial question. Every day that doesn't bring a disaster is another reason why it won't happen, at least for a long time. Then when it does, it's too late. We're kind of like a flock of turkeys. We rush to the trough when the feed is poured then suffocate in a pile in a panic. Even some of our most venerated institutions, such as Wall Street, operate on two emotions: greed and fear. A bad report comes out, investors flee the market, the DOW drops 300 points, then bargain hunters rush in, and the DOW goes up 300 points. Where is the long term planning? Where is our much vaunted intellect, our so-called big brains? Meanwhile more dominos are stacked in a row, more stress builds on the fault lines. I doubt if anyone really knows how large the derivatives market has become, but I've heard some estimates on the order of 680 trillion. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe some day it will pop, confetti will fall from the sky, and we'll have a Norman Rockwell parade. We thought the oil peak came (crude plus condensate) in May 2005. But then the January 2008 production set a new record. I'm sure a lot of people will conclude that this just means the whole peak oil thing was a big hoax. Hell, gas will probably be back down to $1.25/gallon by Memorial Day. Meanwhile the pressure builds. But your survival rations may go bad before the fault ruptures. The timing of events is key.Flightless Birdsposted April 5, 2008A colleague of mine poised this question: why do some people rise in an organization, make more money, and become well off while others never go anywhere, mope around, and complain? He referred to himself as having moved up the ladder from a relatively humble beginning to midlevel management as compared to others we both know, but didn't name, who will remain forever on the bottom rung. He implied this was a very social question and that, given my penchant for reductionist thinking and analytical results, I might have difficulty with it. Though I'd still like to give it a shot.Let's begin with a thought experiment. Suppose you set a large number of people off on race. But before the starting gun, randomly assign each individual an initial location and a set of abilities. One's initial condition may include family status and one's abilities may include family connections. Skin color, gender, body shape, appearance, and nationality of origin all factor in. These are random factors that no one gets to choose. After the race has run for awhile, a few will be in the lead, most will be in the middle, and a few will be at the tail. It's human nature for those in the lead to credit their abilities and initiative while those in the rear commiserate their bad luck. I think the most admirable people are not necessarily the ones in the lead but instead, the ones who have gone the farthest given their abilities and starting point. Thus a Helen Keller is more admirable than a Dubya, for example, even though Dubya is the President of the United States whereas Keller was merely a rabble rousing Socialist. Have you walked from the Financial District in San Francisco down to Market Street? There are two distinct populations of people here. One lives up in the glass towers for a part of the day and away in nice houses the rest. The other population lives down on the streets. One population's begging from the other, and from tourists, is a significant aspect of the lower class economy here. And there's lots of local competition between beggars. The lowest common denominator is to ask passersby's for spare change. The more industrious will put on a show. Youth break dance while associates hit up the crowd for money. Folk singers have guitar cases laid out on the sidewalk with a few coins and bills scattered inside. An old black man in a top hat and costume entertains. But a real easy advantage is the pity factor. A castoff hospital wheelchair is a tremendous asset. I've gone by pitifully weak people in wheelchairs with a "please help" cardboard sign in hand only to find them up and partying about with friends later after the crowd has gone. It's relative advantage in a competitive, local environment that counts. Another question analogous to the one poised by my colleague is the question: why are there flightless birds on islands? In evolutionary theory this is explained by the concept of relative competitive fitness, where fitness means reproductive fitness. Genes of individuals who have the most offspring that go on to produce more offspring will come to dominate a population over time. The individuals that produce the most offspring are the ones who win the local competition for mates and resources. Given food resources on the ground or in the water and natural, mainland predators are absent, those birds that grow heavier and larger win the local competition. There is no reproductive advantage to be gained by putting one's energy into flight. The successful bird maximizes success over immediate competitors while minimizing its own energy output. We can think of this as optimizing a function of reward per unit effort. Usually some effort has to go into earning a reward. But you can see that if effort is zero then this function is infinitely large for any finite reward. Thus an individual can optimize this function by minimizing effort. A threshold comes when there is no reward and an individual loses out to his or her immediate competitors. The people my colleague was referring to are not competing against him any more than the beggar in the street competes against investment bankers in glass towers. Competitors are people at your own grade-level. If a minimum reward can be obtained for little or no effort, as is the case in many jobs, then some people will always try to optimize their own personal reward function by minimizing effort. All they have to do is stay above a threshold. Of course this falls far short of explaining why some people choose to maximize reward while others try to minimize effort. I think this was the question my colleague was getting at. What proportion is caused by nature (i.e. genetics) and how is that shaped by environment? The Magic of National Debtposted March 30, 2008"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." 
And will be deprived of their liberty, as well. During the decade before the Great Depression, Charles Ponzi
hit upon a grand scheme. Pay investors a high rate of return with money brought in from new investors attracted
to the high rate of return. Charles went from broke to millions to broke and convicted in about a year. Empires,
States, and Nations have a little longer cycle. As of this writing the United States' official debt is about nine
and one half trillion units of its own currency, or a little over two thirds of her Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Charlie went broke when his liabilities exceeded the total value of the underlying commodity by a factor of about
6000. If that holds true for empires then Uncle Sammy should be good for a national debt of at least 83,400 trillion,
if her GDP is the actual underlying commodity. "Deficits don't matter," as Dick Cheney famously said.
But where does the money come from? I have an image of warehouse full of printing presses all running at full speed cranking out thousand dollar bills shrink-wrapped on pallets and handed out like brightly colored beads to the Canarsee Delaware Indians in exchange for Long Island. But the reality is yet more sinister. In 1913 Congress dispatched its constitutional duty under Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution: To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures to private banks under the Federal Reserve Act. Now suppose you're a banker and you just got this cherry deal. What would you do? You would issue loans at interest on the basis of your good fortune. And what would be behind these loans? Thin air, mostly. That's because all the depositors never ask for all their money back at once. Thus the banks keep on reserve only the fraction necessary for instant redemption. It's called fractional reserve banking. And what happens if a particular bank gets a run on withdrawals? It simply borrows from another bank (the Central Bank) on a short term loan. How far could Charles have gone if he was in collusion with many other mountebanks? How far could he have gone if the underlying asset were forcibly stripped from millions of taxpayer as tribute? That's why we can nationalize everything that comes along, whether it be a billion dollar a day war in Iraq, a thirty billion dollar bailout of Bear Sterns, or a forty four trillion dollar promise to the Baby Boomers and their spawn. Uncle Sammy can make it right. Green Hypocrisyposted March 8, 2008A wave of religiosity sweeping over America, perhaps the Third Great Awakening, holds that if we all swap incandescent light bulbs for florescent, drive hybrids, and stop using plastic bags everything will be alright. These people are awakening to the coming of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Petroleum Depletion, Climate Change, Water, and the human Population. These same people travel incessantly to modern day versions of the tent revival; the conference. If only we educate everyone so they wake up in time we can save the planet. Al Gore has done much more than most to educate Americans about Global Warming. He has also come to epitomize the hypocrisy of the green movement as he works on his PowerPoint slides in his mega-mansion, leaves for the airport in a limo with a tear in his eye for his beloved planet, then jets off to yet another meeting, another conference, and another emotional presentation. How many wealthy, concerned Boomers actually give up much more than plastic grocery bags? As James Lovelock wisely points out, we are way beyond the point where hand wringing will make any difference. Most of the things we will do not only don't help, they actually make things worse. Take for example biofuel. The Holy Grail of the Third Great Awakening is that we must achieve "energy independence". But a recent report in the journal of Science shows that converting cropland and forest to biofuel production actually increases overall carbon dioxide emissions several fold. Besides, biofuel such as ethanol from corn takes more energy to produce than it returns. It's not actually a source of energy but a sink that consumes badly needed water, fertilizer, and drives up the cost of food. It's just another frog from the mouth of the false prophet.
"And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet."(Revelation 16:13) Jevon's Paradox implies that anything you or I give up someone else will use. Trying to make everyone simultaneously do with less is totalitarian. The fact is, events are out of our control. We are floating on a river of history, riding on a leaky raft in the middle of the stream, the roar of the rapids ahead growing gradually louder while most of us are partying instead of paddling. The current of events will sweep us along and we'll all either live or die with the consequences. As a wise man once said, "come the revolution, things will be different". If you want to go green and not be a hypocrite, stay home and raise a garden. Bernanke Pesosposted February 18, 2008Banks have an identity problem sort of like Baptist churches. Say, for example, there are three Baptist churches on a block - not uncommon in Midwestern towns - then the road veers right. First there's the Baptist Temple, then you come to the Southern Baptist, and finally the First Baptist Church. So if you're trying to give someone directions, do you tell them to turn at the first Baptist Church or the third Baptist Church? The First National Bank is a similar conceit. There is only one national bank that matters and that is the New York Federal Reserve. The other regional Federal Reserve banks are so much facade to make the rubes in the territories feel like they are in on the game. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is where they loaded shrink wrapped bundles of one hundred dollar bills on pallets into a Hercules transport plane and airlifted them to Baghdad where they were handed out like candy at a parade. It's where a cabal of wealthy private bankers meets to fix the most influential price - the price of money. It was from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that hundreds of millions of dollars of "liquidity" was injected into the banking system following the recent sub-prime downturn. Did you ever stop to wonder how much different that is than how your checking account works? Do you wonder where it's taking us It's kind of like floating on a sea of liquidity, this wide river of money. At each stop along the way, milk goes up, gas goes up, wheat goes to an unheard of $20/bushel in Chicago. The river of liquidity is wide. The official National Debt is nine and a third trillion dollars, or about thirty and a half thousand dollars for every person in the country. God only knows how much more we owe. So how do we pay? With Bernanke Pesos, of course.The Horsemenposted February 17, 2008Every student of eschatology must know the names of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful" (Revelation 19:11).War, Conquest, Pestilence and Death, traditionally. But why Death, I wonder? He comes eventually to every living thing so he hardly seems to rate the privilege of riding in the Apocalypse. Or maybe he's the only essential member, bringing to each of us our own personal apocalypse. "and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death" (Revelation 6:8).There could be more than four, it seems. "the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand" (Revelation 9:16)If you do the math, that comes out to about two thirds of the current U.S. population. Though I doubt that we are all going to be riding horses on the Apocalypse. For instance, some of us are too fat to get up off the sofa from in front of the television set. Our Apocalypse will be cardiac arrest on the big day. All of us taken together, though, could count for at least one of the Horsemen. Let's call that one Population. The Good Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus warned us about Population, but everybody now knows he was wrong, over and over again. "The pessimists are always wrong." says Paul Harvey.That leaves what? 199,999,999 Horsemen to go? Another one is Global Warming, a dandy fellow. He's global, with hair spray and air conditioning, a jet-setter, he gets around in fast automobiles. His twin cousin, Global Cooling, was around when we evolved into humans. Some say he even had a hand in it. Energy is his close friend and companion. Without Energy, Global Warming would go nowhere. Then there's Water. Global Warming is involved with him, too. They make a fine Threesome, those three: Global Warming, Energy, and Water, riding together. Now were are down to a manageable 199,999,997. "And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword." (Revelation 6:4).And the sword is the flame that burns red, in our cars, in our furnaces, and in our plastic junk from Wal-Mart. It's called Petroleum. Energy's crisis will take peace from the earth everywhere that there's oil in the ground. Burning Petroleum causes Global Warming. And oh how we need Petroleum. Have you ever tried to drive a car without it? I have and I know that it's called Walking. Global Warming will shift the Hadley Cells northward, bringing drier air to the parched Mojave Desert. The Mojave could become more like the Atacama Desert. Lake Mead could go dry. The Colorado River will certainly run low. But Saint John went to the desert to have a Revelation, didn't he? So we've come almost full circle, back to the Globally Warmed desert in Newberry Springs, with perhaps a post modern day Saint John living somewhere down the road. That's why I think life will generally get harder. The horsemen are like a vise steadily closing in. The world's human population is largely young, with a huge reproductive capacity, while our most essential resource is in decline. Per capita consumption must therefore go down. No doubt locally things could improve. Exurbs could connect Phoenix and Tucson with Las Vegas. Casa Grande, Wickenburg, and Kingman could be subsumed in houses and strip malls. Aqueducts from the Great Lakes could turn the Mojave Desert into a tropical forest where it never rains. We could all live out our lives in Peace and Prosperity. Land values in Newberry Springs could skyrocket. But overall, the outlook is Grim. "And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone" (Revelation 9:17).Jacinth is a red transparent form of the mineral zircon, by the way, a silicate of the fortieth element, zirconium. Brimstone is an archaic name for sulfur, just so you know. Most of the world's spare petroleum capacity is in high sulfur oil, Brimstone Petroleum. And it will keep going up in price in the face of a Recession. Demand is by necessity while supply is constrained by geology. It's the red horse that will get our attention. Ghost Dancingposted February 10, 2008Shortly after the defeat of the plains Indians, when they were safely penned in the reservations and dependant for food on the agencies, a new religion swept over the tribes. Desperate people believe in and do desperate things. Bigfoot's band was involved in the ghost dancing shortly before the Seventh Calvary mowed them down at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The tenants of the Ghost Dance religion were similar to Christianity with a few twists. The Dancers believed that by wearing ghost shirts they could not be hit by bullets. The Messiah would come and true believers would be lifted up while the white man was swept away and the land and bison restored. The Indians were to be hovering in the sky while the carpet of the old ways was unrolled. Then all of the dead would come back to life. Something like about half of the people in the US today, and maybe up to three quarters in Barstow, believe in the Rapture, where the Messiah comes back, true believers are drawn up into the sky to meet him, and the dead are resurrected. Magical thinking is ubiquitous in our species and serves an important purpose. It provides hope when all other hope in reality is gone.So I wonder, as our society spirals towards hardship, who will be the new Wovoka? Is the belief that we can all run our cars on biofuels (i.e. moonshine) the new Ghost Shirt? Will we come together and pray for God to roll back the drought? I gave a talk last week to a group of government purchasing agents, learning about how to buy "green", and at the end someone said, "but there's got to be hope." Yes indeed. There is hope. Funds, Terms, and Stealposted January 2, 2008
With apologies to Jared Diamond, who tried to boil down the reasons why Pizarro knocked
Atahuallpa out of his litter, and not the other way around, down to the basics. Why did
the Europeans displace the first Americans? Because they could, obviously. But some natives hung on.
That's the purpose of the quest described here. Are there deterministic reasons why humanity stays
anchored like lichen on some rocks and sweeps through in transient waves like sand in others.
Or is it merely random characteristics, obstinance in the face of hubris, pretension on the cusp of vanity.
Hubris, with the help of a few pious Jesuits, built a mission on Second Mesa in 1629. The village of Old Oraibi had already been there for over 500 years. The village is still there just to the north of the church in this photo. It's the longest continually settled spot in the U.S., founded circa 1100CE. 
Pretension built rock stadiums in Chaco Canyon; pretension to a Romanesque Culture in the
desert southwest. Pretension similar to that of the current expansion of Phoenix.
The ancient people of Chaco Canyon were swept away eventually, starving to death.
Eventually, so will the people of Phoenix be swept away and for the same reason. Its
resources aren't local. Chaco Culture saw its nadir after Old Oraibi was settled, by about 100 years
or so. Old Oraibi is still there on the mesa. For long term sustainability you don't have to survive
the average hard time, you have to survive the worst hard time.
Because how bad can it get? Bad enough to hide in pockets in a cliff, that's how bad.
The people hid in these holes when things got really bad, circa 1300CE. Later on they
hid here from the Spanish Conquistadors and again from Kit Carson and his ilk.
We don't understand this, it's obvious. Phoenix is a case example.
I stopped at the Chevron in Needles, California,
on my way home from this quest. A young woman came up and asked me for money, "We're trying to get home
to Phoenix and we're broke. Can you help? We didn't even have Christmas this year" Most of
her money, I could see, went for cigarettes, booze, and meth. I gave her a dollar, which
would buy about a quart of gas at that price. The Spectre of Phoenix will be an SUV with an empty tank.
I don't mean to be picking on Phoenix. Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the desert triangle do just
as well. Not if but when will the pretension be swept away, and how. Next, we come out onto the plains,
where humanity diffuses in waves.
Chivington was a fool. Most of his regular militia were trying to avoid
the Civil War and the danger of getting shot. Black Kettle thought that sitting under
the flag meant time out. Chivington lost most of his men to alcohol and what the Pentagon
now calls "friendly fire." The Cheyenne were very much like ducks on a pond. They were
camped by the trees because the White Man said they would be safe there. Chivington and his boys
were out to get them some Injuns.
Sand Creek was the first big massacre of the plains Indians.
There had been many preceding of the eastern natives. I took this photo on December 29, 2007. That's the 117th
anniversary of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota, the last of the big massacres. The
plains Indians had about three hundred good years. So far we, their replacement, have had about 150.
"We're flat busted and
we have to get home to Phoenix" makes me wonder if the big desert cities are the maw that devours this
culture. Where do people go to die? Will the Hopi finally be ruined when the tourist dollar
dries up? You know the future is the most interesting thing about the past.
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A fellow named Helmich homesteaded this place on sand dunes and Miocene sediments.
In our time line this happened right after the plains Indian wars in the late 1800s.
He must have been a good German. His cellar was just to the left of where the
windmill tower is now. He planted rhubarb, which I ate as a child since my 
Just to the north of the Helmich Place the Hughsons got a toehold, dug a cellar, and
built a house. One generation homesteaded, one lived
out their lives here, and the third left. The house was abandoned and later blew away in a tornado.
In a good year this land will support a few cows with a windmill and salt. In an average year
you can hope for a good year. But in a whole slew of bad years you have to go away. The land is
what it is. Even the bison had to move around.
The Europeans first made the plains Indian's lives possible then impossible. The first
was inadvertent when they lost a few horses. Before horses, sparse plains Indians wandered
around with dogs and hunger pangs. After the horse, bison were like meat in a supermarket.
Despite the fact that agriculture had been around for thousands of years, the plains Indians
showed that the Upper Paleolithic was still an option right up to less than 200 years ago.
A horse and bison economy and culture grew up over about 300 years, from 1500 - 1800. Early
in the 1800s, though, the
Europeans started coming. And by the end it was all over.