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Ba�al Zeb�b's Babes

These are happy days. The stock market is going up, the dollar is going up, gas is going down, gold is going down, and Preznit Dubya is on a bender at the Olympics. Economists are squealing with delight as it seems we can accelerate our unsustainable rush to use everything up before Jesus comes back. Banks can start lending again, making money appear out of nowhere, the Fed can pull rabbit after rabbit out of their hat, and maybe the house builders can even get back to turning perfectly good land into stucco shack ghettos as fast as possible. Oh, it's a good time to be alive. Except if you're in Darfur, Haiti, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Ossetia, or any of those other unlimited projects.

If you read any of my meager diatribes you know I take a light hearted approach to doom. That's because all doom is personal – all pain is suffered individually. We all come to that last thought before the light winks out no matter what wicked moves are played on the Grand Chessboard.

How can I possibly be serious about the inevitable? It's all a matter of timing. I don't know when for anything except for some astronomical events and only what for a very few things. One what is that the value of petroleum in a time series plot will look like a V – we're presently on the left leg – and another what is that "in the long run we're all dead." That's why I love these mad rushes back into Denial. It's a buying opportunity just like going back in time. It's a chance to plant a few more fruit trees and stock up on supplies. And it's the funniest thing in history to hear the propaganda industry "explain".

"International pressure on Russia is building," the professional propagandists say. Pressure from what, I wonder? Hot air maybe, blowing out of Washington? Hey, if they don't go back to being the losers in the Cold War like they're supposed to then we won't let them be in our private club for special friends.

"Now," says Condi as she stamps her foot angrily. Some scheming might have been done in Crawford back in August of 2001 some think. Now the Babes of Ba‘al Zebûb are headed back to the ranch. One wonders what a terminal bookend to Dubya's term might look like.

Writing on the Wall

How low will it go? Oil dropped to $113.10 today, down by almost of fourth from it's summer time high. You can get a gallon of the cheap stuff now in Barstow for $4.079 a gallon. Look out for twenty dollar oil, here we come. Let the good times roll.

"We told you so," the Cornucopians cackle while the Peakists hang their heads to keep from getting hit by another piece of falling sky. The stock market shot up in glee, the huge pickup trucks roared past me on the highway, even a few flags reappeared flapping from car windows. Meanwhile, we have nothing to worry about but the Olympic Games, China's human rights record, and John Edwards' affair.

But what's really changed? Nobody has suddenly made any more oil in the ground and nobody certainly has found a bunch more. Quietly, very quietly so as not to disturb the Americans, a quiet little war started in South Ossetia. Just as quietly a huge armada slipped off to the Persian Gulf. Hmmm – Caspian basin, Persian Gulf – this couldn't have anything to do with oil could it? Naw, we have plenty of that stuff, just look at how the price is dropping.

Meanwhile, back in the Heimatland, people who couldn't pay off their loans yesterday still cannot pay them off today. So Fannie posted a $2,300,000,000 loss in the second quarter, poor thing. Don't worry, honey, it's only money. Besides, the stock market is going back up again.

Yes, no, everything's changed but still stays the same. In the housing bill that bails out Fannie and Freddie, in Section 3083, the debt ceiling is raised to $10.615 trillion (that's $10,615,000,000,000). If your ceiling is the sky and you raise it, what do you have but the sky? The sky's the limit! Whoohoo! It used to be that most of us peasants were a paycheck away from personal doom. Now it looks more like we are about nine Big Macs away from anarchy.

The writing's on the wall, my dear.

4: They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.

5: In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.

25: And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.

26: This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.

27: TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

28: PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

Daniel, Chapter 5.

Now we know the Persians as Iranians but who were the Medes? As it turns out, they were the first Iranians.

Solutions

Do you feel sometimes like things are getting out of control? In Maryland cops delivered 32 pounds of pot to the Berwyn Heights Mayor, Cheye Calvo's house then the SWAT team showed up and shot his two Labrador retrievers. They had to chase one dog around the house to kill it. Oh and then it turns out that our very own Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is most concerned about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. So much so that us taxpayers must bail out the Chinese and Russians so they won't have to suffer any losses on their Freddie and Fannie stocks. And here you thought it was all about the poor homeowner. Yeah, you and I must simply be shit to fertilize the money tree.

Out here in California the state employees might be making minimum wage for awhile. Let's hope they have money saved up to make their mortgage payments. Or maybe they'll take out a few more credit cards and pay big bucks interest until the new budget is approved. Aren't we in a fix? If you try to drive without a license or tags the judicial system will make an example of you. But you can't renew because all the workers at the DMV got sent home. And if you can't drive you can't work, and if you can't work you can't make your mortgage payment. Then another house goes into foreclosure and Hank will have to give more of your taxes to the Chinese. What a country.

It's clear that some powerful interests made it so that automobiles are an absolute necessity for life in the States then went on to loose billions of dollars. People you know are probably going to retire to the poorhouse because of this as their pensions go under. It's unlikely Social Security will be there for them. Perhaps a few of the mad Scotch Irish will have to go kill some liberals to get even once their food stamps run out.

There's no way out of the fix we're in – no silver bullet, no magic pill – only Cargo Cults and Denial. People say I'm negative but I'm not. I'm positive. I'm positive we are going to Hell in an hand basket. People want answers. People want solutions. The answer is that some problems don't have solutions. Sometimes the solutions involve pain and suffering. In our present situation the solutions might involve stocking up on non perishable food, such as hard red winter wheat and beans, and trading dollars for old silver coins; tightening our belts and relearning how to dig the earth with a spade.

The party never ends

Almost 30 years ago Bill Catton succinctly explained the predicament of an overpopulated planet. Not only are we doomed to die off, but when it's over and the dust has settled, the ultimate carrying capacity of humanity on Earth will be less than when we started. Yet in that short time the human population almost doubled again from about 4.5 to almost 7 billion. Six or seven million souls are added every month.

In the modern tradition of gasoline burning Americans, I departed mid-July for a semi-annual road trip across the southwest to about the middle of the continent. Numerous writers have claimed recently that the increased cost of fuel is keeping people off the roads. "Staycation" has entered the lexicon. I don't believe it. There was as much traffic on interstates 15, 70, and 80 as I've ever seen. Americans drive the biggest cars they can find as fast as they can go. On the uphill approach to the Eisenhower Tunnel I'm sure one driver burned as much gas passing me in his Dodge Ram 3500 pulling a boat and trailer as I did coasting down the other side into Denver. The only change in people's behavior as a consequence of $4/gallon gasoline that I've seen is a significant increase in the level of whining and complaining.

Bill Catton was right. Paul Erlich was absolutely correct when he said that famine will stalk the world. Malthus' words of wisdom ring down through the centuries. Meanwhile we burn gasoline like there's no tomorrow (and maybe there isn't). I personally turned over 120 gallons of regular unleaded into atmospheric carbon dioxide propelling my jeep almost 2500 miles down the highway. Nearly everyone passed me, not because they don't know that driving slow saves fuel but because they don't care. They want to go as fast as possible. The cost in money is no big deal. They don't know and don't care about any other costs. Despite James Howard Kunstler's weekly incantations, the suburbs continue to grow. Every new wannabe metropolis I drove through – St. George, Cortez, Fort Morgan – was bigger than the last time I saw it. We just can't have too many shopping malls and McMansions.

The stars were high above them and the moon was in the east

The sun was settin' on them when they reached Miami Beach

They got a hotel by the water and a quart of Bombay gin

The road goes on forever and the party never ends

Robert Earl Keen

The banks of Denial

Delusions line the banks of Denial, a deep, wide river that runs through America. Willful Ignorance stands tall on the shores, carefully cultivated by the Gods of the electromagnetic spectrum with endless, mindless chatter. Today our problems ended. Thank God that's over. The stock market shot up, the price of oil is finally going back down, and the troubles with Fannie and Freddie are ancient history. It was getting pretty bad there for awhile. Some people were late with their cable payment and a few other poor folks even had to put off upgrading to a bigger high definition plasma flat screen TV. Fortunately a fresh batch of zero interest credit card offers arrived in the mail just in time. And now that gas has gone down a dime you'd better hang on to that SUV or trade for a Hummer while you can still get the extra large, vintage model. Meanwhile, on the energy front, Al the Goracle recommended that the laws of thermodynamics be repealed for the good of the planet.

It's a good thing we're the smartest, richest people in the world. Even my dentist can see that what we need to do is start using our own oil instead of importing it from those awful foreign countries. The three wise businessmen at the table next to us in the restaurant agreed, we need to drill our way out of this. Everybody knows there's plenty of oil down there if those damn environmentalists would just let the oil companies drill for it. And at the office I was once again identified as a whacko conspiracy theorist for merely suggesting that inflation devalues our money. The government will take care of us. Don't worry. It will bail out IndyMac and make it whole again. It will see to it that Freddie and Fannie fulfill their mission to make housing affordable for everyone while the investors and executives make millions. The government will create wealth out of nothing and there's no end to where that comes from. It's only sore losers like me who won't believe and who won't have fun at the party.

Yes, this is a simple blog. I have no pretensions about explaining the way it is. If you want to see what's going on, look at the news links to the right. My attempts at posting solutions turn out to be mostly about failures. My water page is about how the groundwater table is dropping and how long it might last. My gardening page is mostly about insects and squirrels. My energy page must be plain wrong, given all the oil that everyone knows is down there and how the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to us. It's finally morning in America once again. If we all shut our eyes tight, clinch our fists, and wish really hard, the leghorn roosters in the media and halls of power will crow the sun up.

Best of intentions

The monsoon hit last night in a fury. The sky became a cosmic strobe light freezing pounding raindrops in midair with each flash of lightening. Bolts seared my eyeballs for several minutes after they were gone and their thunder rumbled across Silver Valley. I had to stay out and watch it, I haven't seen a storm like that in ten years, even though I was getting soaked by sheets of rain driven by howling wind. After it drove me inside and I saw that the power was out, the wind shifted to the south. Gusts of probably 60 mph pressed against my house as I frantically tried to batten down the hatches. This is when anything that isn't nailed down tends to be gone. Finally I lay in bed feeling the wind pound against the wall and wondering if my roof would come off. I don't know how, probably electricians drove out in the middle of the night in a big, diesel engine boom truck, but the power came back on sometime in the first few hours of the day.

Plans are for the Mojave to become the Saudi Arabia of solar generated electricity. Hundreds of applications have been filed to turn hundreds of square miles of public land into privately owned power plants. Sunlight will turn water into steam that will turn turbines spinning magnets in coils. The grid will be energized. Even Joshua tree-hugging liberals are going on about how this "wasteland" has no higher purpose than to power our toaster ovens. But all things are not equal. Although the energy crises can be written in terms of kilowatt hours the crisis de jour is in transportation and at its basis is oil. Humans have known for all time that petroleum burns but we didn't start using it until about 1859. Our ancestors weren't stupid and we aren't smart. Think of it this way. If you have a pile of wood and a pool of oil and you want to get warm, which would you burn? Our ancestors didn't burn oil because they didn't have internal combustion engines. Likewise we won't drive to the grocery store on solar electricity because we don't have electric cars. The grid may be energized by hydro, solar, and wind, natural gas and coal but it still runs on oil. Our cars run on oil and our food supply runs on oil. Not very much is interchangeable, except for food and oil. We can trade oil for food and food for biofuel and wind up choosing between eating or driving.

In the old Bugs Bunny cartoons Wile E. Coyote would chase the roadrunner out into midair over a canyon, stop, look down, walk around a bit, and ponder his mistake. Then sure enough, it was real, and a long whistle to a small poof in the bottom of the canyon would ensue. Just like Wile E. there's a time lag in our response to reality. Empty claptrap chicken wire and stucco shacks will bake under no money down zero interest rate signs in Las Vegas while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go under. Billion dollar high speed trains will be scoped and surveyed while casinos ponder their bottom line and wonder where all the tourists went. The desert will be bladed to build solar power plants by companies that have no future. All with the best of intentions, hopes, and dreams, followed by a small poof in the desert sand, we'll come back to the lives of our ancestors – a little mesquite, corns, beans, and squash.

Free advice

"Gas is soo expensive," my dentist said to her assistant over the whine of the drill. "It cost me $70 just to fill up."

"We're really cutting back," her assistant replied. "We don't drive nowhere we don't have to."

With a mouthful of anesthetic, latex suction tubes, and steel I fortunately wasn't expected to participate in the conversation. But they did pull the tools out long enough to ask if that was my Prius parked out back. The conversation turned to movies and movie stars, many of whom seemed closer than family. What else can you say about beautiful, witty people entertaining you in your living room every evening.

"Are you going to the party in Big Bear this weekend?"

"No, I have to work in Apple Valley that Thursday and by the time I come back to Barstow I won't have time to make it."

I wondered how much cutting back was really being done.

"It's going to be so rough going back to Vegas this afternoon. Traffic is already bad."

On the way home I saw a sight that's becoming slightly less common. A caravan of the biggest SUVs, Escalade, Expedition, Tahoe, Suburban, went roaring past, bumper to bumper, pulling boats and trailers with personal watercraft, trying to pass each other on the right in-between semi trucks. One last $200 hurrah at Lake Mohave or Lake Havasu. The only thing missing was the dual flags flying from the windows like horns on the beast; so common back on July 4, 2003.

"Are you as gloomy as I am?" a friend emailed me after I said that I'm known as Dr. Doom around the office. Actually I'm not gloomy, I'm pretty happy. Although I'm sorry for the suffering the party couldn't go on forever. Living within our means, both financially and ecologically, is not optional. My friend had reason to be gloomy as he'd gotten a four month notice of termination from his County of San Bernardino employer. Even though the American economy has shed jobs steadily for the past six months, government is still hiring. But at the County level they are asking staff they can't get rid of to take unpaid leave and dumping everyone else. This will work it's way up as the tax base dries up. At the Federal level, though, I think we'll just borrow money for wars and stimulus payments and a bigger military budget and aid to Israel and whatever else right up to the end. My bet is that the last U.S. government paycheck won't buy a loaf of bread.

My friend asked what I thought about the general situation so I emailed back with some free advice, worth about what he paid for it.

In the near term be prepared for shortages of fuel, food, and water. Also be prepared for the crime and social unrest associated with shortages. We are conditioned to expect a bailout. But this time the official response is going to look more like a police state than a welfare state. In the mid-term you'll need to provide for yourself locally, independent of long supply chains. In the long term life will never return to the glory years of the nineties. From here on down it's duck, cover, and make do.

In the deep currents running under most of the big factors of our civic culture, trouble in the financial sector, the mortgage mess, the military budget, commodity prices, are enormous transfers of wealth on the order of trillions of dollars. As we follow this trend, wealth and resources will come to be controlled by a very small elite minority, leaving the rest of us with not much more than debt.

As I said, I'm not gloomy. Recently I've discovered a couple useful things. Wheat grows like a weed out here in Newberry Springs and have you seen the price of wheat lately? I'll bet wheat is easier to grow, easier to harvest, and easier to sell than alfalfa. Take note all of you diesel tractor drivers. Melons and squashes do fairly well. They seem to resist the insects and the hard casing around the fruit means that I get to eat it, not the vermin.

A Tale of Two Towns

It was not the best of times. In fact, it may have been the worst of times. The golden boom that lasted from the end of World War II until the first decade of the twenty first century had come to an end. Hungry, angry Americans were standing in bread lines in the Midwest.

Throughout the southwest people watched the price of their houses plummet.

An unprecedented number of so-called "middle class" could no longer even afford to keep the lights on.

In the swank golf course resort community of Helendale, California, the for-sale signs went up. While over at it's doppelganger dirt poor, hayseed country bumpkin cousin the for-sale signs came down.

When I moved out here to Newberry Springs I became the laughingstock of the country club set at the office. I was mocked daily. I lived with the underclass in a hayfield next to meth labs and copper wire thieves. Everyone else at the office lived at Silver Lakes in Helendale or up in the granite boulders of Victorville or Apple Valley. Some proudly commuted daily from as far away as Hesperia. As new people came in they looked around Barstow, drove to the outliers, then bought in Silver Lakes even as the housing market started to slide. They paid close to $400,000 for houses on the water, an artificial sump, with about enough space to slip your hand in between their house and their neighbors. They sat out on their patios, watched their neighbors and laughed at them. They went golfing on weekends. And now the party's over. Almost every other house has a for-sale sign in front of it. People who can't sell either pay a huge mortgage while watching their asset rot or they rent it out. And you know what that means. Some nasty, dirty, miserable, brutish, mean, short Scotch-Irish moves in and down go the property values yet more. Now all the talk of the country club set in the office break room is about the crime wave. Rich helpless white people are being beaten to death in their McMansions by the have-nots. All the marks are crowded close together like ducks on a pond.

Out here in Newberry Springs I watch the wind blow the dirt of the Mojave River up into the Cady Mountains. I'm dirt poor, my neighbor is dirt poor, why would a thief burn $4.56/gallon gas to drive all the way out here to try and beat blood out of us turnips? If he did my neighbor has a big dog and my other neighbor has a pack of 'em. How many chain link fences would a burglar have to climb to check to see if anyone's home? And if he was wrong, how many of us would fill his arse full of buckshot?

Yup, I sit our here and watch the corn struggle to survive. I watch the beans and peas shrivel up in the heat and the grasshoppers gobble broccoli. But pity those rich white folks over at Silver Lakes. They don't even have enough yard to grow a squash. It still doesn't cost much to commute into town. Just get a hybrid and drive slow. I've been getting about 55 mpg driving at 55 mph. A tank lasts over 500 miles and costs about $44 to fill up even at the most expensive place in town. If you come up behind me either pass or slow down. It could be worse. You could live in Helendale.

Dominion

We were told early in our education that humans and other predators are at the "top of the food chain." Coyotes eat rabbits, hawks eat rodents, bigger fish eat smaller fish, but humans have "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" Some people are foolish enough to believe this late into life. Other people are foolish enough to move to the Mojave Desert and quickly learn that ants own this place. People are somewhere quite a lot farther down the food chain.

For the second time since I moved to Newberry Springs in 2004 my water well went dead in the first half of June. The first time it was the pressure switch so I got suspicious, looked closely at it, and sure enough, a long column of tiny insect communists were trailing in and out of the pressure switch. I called up Eagle and ask them to come out. I said I thought I knew what the problem was and, oh by the way, can ants get into the pressure switch and short it out or something?

"You bet, we must replace twenty of those a day this time of year." He said they pack them full of ant powder, which by back calculation I figured must last about two years. Eagle roared out in a big diesel truck and swapped out the part with a new one that was probably manufactured from pieces made all over the world and assembled in some place far away. Without them I would dry up and blow away. Now every year I'm sure to be out there waging chemical warfare at the wellhead right around the start of Varmint Moon.

It seems that lately dominion hasn't been going so well. In fact it may become necessary in the near future to renegotiate our covenant. Research departments of Big Pharma can't seem to come up with new antibiotics as fast as microbial pathogens can evolve tolerance to the old ones. These days you can go to a hospital in an ambulance with a bug and leave in a hearse with a superbug. Even some of the certain victories of the past, such as tuberculosis, have turned into losses. Then we have the hydrological catastrophes, Iowa following Katrina. In this changing climate we might rebuild the levees to withstand a 500-year flood only to be hit in the next few years with a 1000-year flood.

The question is, how do we rebuild cities with multibillion dollar damage using fewer, increasingly worthless dollars, replace grain shortages and ruined farmland using higher priced diesel and fertilizer, all the while growing the economy and fighting endless wars for oil? When do we either renegotiate the covenant or sign the surrender papers? I don't think the ants will even notice when we're gone.

Varmint Moon

June is the month when all of the difficult animals in the Mojave Desert come out. Round tailed ground squirrels annihilate every green plant. The houseflies get so thick you can't breath. Ants swarm through the house. I left a Ziploc bag of banana chips on the counter thinking it would be OK because it was sealed. Argentine ants chewed holes through the plastic bag. I opened a tool cabinet and reached in, stopping just short of grabbing a black widow spider. Sometimes I think the Mojave is about the second most difficult place to live in the world, second only to the dry valleys of Antarctica.

The political varmints are out this season, too. John McNasty is campaigning as a war hero, as if war were something to be a hero about. We learn that he, with no surprise, is most concerned about being an elite. Rather than suffering with the grunts in a POW camp as he would like us to believe, he collaborated with the enemy for special favors.

No wonder supporters of the horrid, power mad, and now finished, Hillary are lining up behind McCain. And what's to hope for in Obama but more of the same. Didn't he just go to the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and claim that Jerusalem was the undivided capital of Israel? If Dubya doesn't get Iran bombed before January he can count on Barry to get 'er done and then some. I truly sympathize with the downtrodden who sincerely believe that Barack will bring real change to this country. But Obama's change will be a few cents on the dollar. The sad fact is that the whole sordid business is a hollow façade and the only ones we can count on are ourselves. Whether it's floods and tornados in Iowa or high fuel prices in California it's up to us to make do. Corporation America is concerned only with power, continuity of power, and projection of power

I'd like to offer practical suggestions. I put up screens to keep the flies out, sprinkle chemicals to keep the ants at bay, fence the round tailed ground squirrels out of the garden (which takes a bad enough hit from the wind, heat, and grasshoppers), and I look cautiously for spiders. But what to do about the politicians? I wish ignoring them would make them go away. What kind of democracy is it when Edward Dowling wrote:

"The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it."

The third greatest obstacle to democracy is our survival, which is the focus of our future.

Home to Olduvai

In the broad sweep of history we are at a turning point. The daily slope of the long slide is given by the price of gasoline. At the station I commute past it ticked up another eight cents today to $4.599/gallon. It's all over the "news" but not a single source, none of the broadcasters, dare say that we stand on the brink of the Olduvai Cliff. Richard Duncan's leading indicator is rolling blackouts on the grid. But there are more demons lurking in the shadows beside electrical power outage. For no other reason than my own dark amusement I troll the daily headlines for other leading indicators and post them here.

Climate models indicate extreme weather as a consequence of global warming.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Flooding rivers across Iowa forced more residents to evacuate, with at least 10,000 people in Cedar Rapids among them as the rising Cedar River burst its banks Thursday

Rescuers had to use boats to reach many stranded residents in the city of 120,000, and people could be seen dragging suitcases up closed highway exit ramps to escape the water. It wasn't clear just how high the river had risen because a flood gauge was swept away by the swirling water.

It's not so good for agriculture and staple crops such as corn. So much for ethanol as a gasoline substitute.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. corn futures soared more than 4 percent to a fresh record high for the fifth consecutive trading session on Wednesday as flooding expanded in the U.S. Midwest, harming the 2008 corn crop.

An earlier leading indictor is society's response to fuel and food shortages. People aren't bonding well over this hardship.

Worldwide protests over the rising price of fuel escalated today, with the Philippines presidential palace besieged by lorries, fishermen burning their boats in Thailand, and Spanish petrol stations running dry as hauliers blockade major roads.

Violence has already claimed lives of lorry drivers on either side of the dispute, while one haulier was nearly burned to death in his cab by strikers.

As store shelves go bare in Western Civliization.

Spaniards fear a strike that has disrupted deliveries could cause shortages and they are stockpiling fuel and food. Traders at Madrid's main food wholesale market said supplies of fresh food would start to run out soon.

This is not a happy world and this is not a happy blog. You have to pay for fantasy. Reality you get for free. Shortages will hit the U.S. like a 9/11 or a Katrina. FEMA will stand down while hired Blackwater Security goons target practice on the lower class. The last bit of emergency fuel will go for helicopter evacuations of elites to their fortresses. We're left with mostly psychological preparation. Of course timing is everything. "When" is the most important question. If it doesn't happen tomorrow, or next week, or before the November elections, and it probably won't, then you are welcome to go back to buying fantasies. Happy endings cost extra.

Demand destruction

If the price of gas doesn't go down soon we may see commodities traders tarred and feathered, riding down South Wacker street on rails. This is because a lot of people, looking for someone to blame, think speculators are behind the high prices. Pundits tell us that oil is in a "bubble" and will soon "regress to the mean" and become "normal" once again so that we can go back to driving our Hummers to the mall. They seem to have about three main arguments for this scenario. One is that the high prices will make a lot of marginal oilfields economic and will spur new exploration, which will bring new supplies to market. Two is that high prices will make alternative energy sources economically attractive. And three is that high prices will reduce demand. To me only the third argument makes sense.

Oil discoveries peaked in the U.S. in the mid thirties. This was in the days before environmental regulations. Drillers turned every promising patch of geology into Swiss cheese looking for the black gold. Despite this effort oil production peaked in the U.S. in 1970. Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, came online in the eighties and, although production went up for a few years, decline prevailed and made Alaska oil production a small hump on a downward path. Worldwide, oil discoveries peaked in the sixties. Now worldwide oil production is peaking and four barrels are burned for every new barrel discovered. It doesn't matter what the price is.

We are not looking for energy in general, we are looking for transportation fuel. Stuff to squirt in our Beamers to make them fly down the road at 80mph. So what if we have wind turbines. So what if we have solar panels, low grade coal, and steam on a stick. You can't put these in your tank. Sure your Beamer will run on moonshine but some poor schmuck farmer needs a lot of diesel to grow that corn, there's only so much farmland, and ethanol is really just a long-winded transformation of petroleum. So let the price go up, it doesn't matter. Your car still runs on gasoline.

Which leaves demand destruction and therein lies the rub. Destruction of demand implies destruction of the economy as we know it. The first to go is the frivolous – the Sunday drives, cruising Main. Then come the electives, the family vacation in the big Road Slug. Local economies dependent upon tourism suffer accordingly. As each wealth class gives up an elective, a lower class gives up a necessity. Food that farmer is growing costs more because diesel costs more. So does trucking it to the store. The cost of energy pervades every consumer item until people are forced to triage. Do I give up medicine, food, or transportation this week? And where does that leave us? Do we have anything left for an alternative energy Manhattan Project ? Can we even repair the damage to irrigation and infrastructure left by the devastating weather? Or do we simply drop down to the next level and wait for depletion to up the ante?

People need hope. But what does this mean when "getting ahead" becomes "not falling behind?" How will the daily mall cruiser cope when hope means staying alive? I see people somehow going on like we always have. Whether through the medieval Black Death in Europe or the earthquake last month in China, people continue on. Hope comes from the very act of continuing on.

Dry wind

The wind came up again today after taking a break for a few hours. Tornados are tearing up the Midwest. The stock market went down four hundred points and oil took a record two day jump to a new record high. All of the major trends are holding course. Unemployment also took a big jump. Israel has become exasperated with trying to goad Uncle Sammy into bombing Iran and so is fixing to drop U.S. bombs on Iran itself from U.S. planes flown by U.S trained Israeli pilots.

Oh and last month there was a tipping point of sorts. More people now live in cities than the country for the first time. These new urban poor are the ones who are going to have the roughest time of it. Country people have always had it tough and we're used to it. But the new urban poor just moved to the city for a better life. They have hope. It's the dashing of hope that makes things worse.

A few of the old reliable hands appear to becoming even more confused. Bill Bonner thinks oil is in a bubble and will soon "regress to the mean," that is it will become "normal" again. Even though Bonner read Taleb's book and talked him up, somehow it just didn't register. He hasn't come to grips with the notion that normal doesn't apply to oil anymore. It's a new normal just about every day now and Black Swans are flying in flocks.

Trends to watch for. States don't have the money to pay all of these new unemployment claims. It's like the Boomers and entitlements. Too many people are hitting under funded, looted insurance all at once. Hunger is working it's way up the food chain. Just like peak oil is the ultimate constraint on greenhouse gas emissions, so is starvation a sure cure for the obesity epidemic. But the media would have you think there's not much more to worry about than Hillary and Barry making up.

It's a dry wind that's blowing.

Reality bites

As I get older I'm able to remember less and less. And I've never been able to see into the future. So if I don't know what's going to happen and can't remember what just did happen, how can I even expect to know what's going on right now? At about age 12 or so I abandoned faith for reason and that looked for awhile like it might work. But then I started to see holes in that. There's all of this uncertainty. I got into statistics because it seemed to deal with uncertainty. Except, as Taleb shows, it only works with known uncertainty, like the variability in how tall people are. It doesn't work with unknown uncertainty, such as how rich people are. Suppose, for example, you have a bar full of beer drinkers and how tall they are is proportional to how much money they earn. A six foot guy earns $60,000 and a five foot guy earns $50,000. There's even a varsity basketball player pounding down stout who makes darn near $70,000. Then in walks Bill Gates and he's almost one hundred miles tall. You see normal probability distributions don't work with money.

It's all chaos. Though all chaos theory can show you is why even fully determined systems are unpredictable yet self-organizing. Chaos theory can't tell you what's going to happen next or predict the probability that Bill Gates will walk into the local bar. Besides, you can't possibly know what's going on right now because all of the information you get is filtered and sterilized. Most of it is outright propaganda intended solely for the purpose of controlling your behavior. As we wallow in this sea of misinformation, disinformation, and pure propaganda, clutching for straws of truth, may I offer this one small solace. You will know reality because reality bites.

Where is this leading? Us Baby Boomers lost our grip on reality in the sixties and never regained it. It's just been one fantasy after another: acid trips, disco, SUVs, dot.coms, house prices that only go up, no money down negative amortization loans. None of these things were real anymore than CNN is news. You can feel reality nibble at $4.50 per gallon gas. For most of us out here a trip into Barstow for groceries now costs at least ten or twenty bucks, and the cost of those groceries is directly related to oil. Oil has found new support at over one hundred dollars a barrel. Boomers are getting old and very few have saved for retirement. How could anyone save with real estate tanking and the dollar rapidly going south. So what's next? Debt slavery? Bring back the Sixties!

Timing

How long? It's the most important question. You may have been absolutely sure in 1980 that gas prices would go way up. But you would have had to wait almost 30 years to see it happen. About that time Howard J. Ruff wrote a book along the lines of 'Repent ye the End is Nigh' only to become a laughing stock for the next three decades. Though I see now that he has recently released a new version in time for our current oil related crisis. People who followed his advice in the seventies, and it was very good advice, would have missed out on the dot.com boom and the housing bubble. They're in their sixties or seventies now, hunkered down in their fallout shelters, eating stale MREs. If you bought gold in 1980 you would also have had to wait 30 years to get your money back. Timing is everything. If you bought in 2004 you would have doubled the cash value. Although, realistically, I think gold stayed even and the dollar lost by half.

Now we have the Peak Oil crowd coming into their own. Some, like Colin Campbell, have been gloomy for a long time. Others are recent converts. As the curtain draws we see these actors caste in two roles. One has the wheels coming off the wagon this year while the other has us in Kunstler's "Long Emergency." By the way, after reading James Kunstler's latest screed, "We Were Lied To" posted June 2, 2008, I began to wonder if the poor fellow has finally lost his marbles. You see the timing of this peak oil question is of critical importance. If we have twenty years then be calm. If it's more or less now, which seems from the evidence to be the case, then batten down the hatches or run for the hills.

The shape of the downward spiral is also important. For example, drought and water shortages are a serious problem in the Mojave River basin. Groundwater levels in Newberry Springs are dropping at a rate of about one foot per year. So you do a calculation of your probably life span, drill your well a little deeper, and you'll be fine. Climate change is a similar issue. I can't get really worked up about a few degrees by 2050 because death by that time will have interfered with my concern. But if the wind doesn’t stop blowing here in a day or two everyone I have to deal with will get a little irritable.

We're coming up on one of our faux turnovers in the quadrennial election cycle and a lot of people, especially African Americans and perhaps recently disappointed feminists, are looking forward to a sea change. I wonder how hard the truth will hurt when they realize that Obama is more of a president for Israel than America. You don't have to look very hard or far to see whose interests our elites are serving.

Desperation

Madness on the cusp of desperation. I'm sure that's what a few million folks are feeling these days. You may not be able to squeeze blood out of a turnip but you sure can squeeze the piss out of poor people. Something like about 4.5 million poor people are getting ready to starve in Ethiopia, as usual. Just as long as it stays there on the teevee where it belongs, right?. Still we feel the squeeze as we squeeze the pump handle and watch those dollar signs spin. I drove by a sign yesterday advertising diesel for the low price of $5.04 a gallon. Then I came across this object lesson from the Pentagon. Don't even think about protesting.

Colonel Kirk Hymes demonstrated the weapon by staging what CBS somewhat oddly called "a scenario soldiers might encounter in Iraq" -- a handful of military volunteers, dressed as civilian protesters, who carried signs saying "peace not war" and threw objects at a small group of soldiers. A series of raygun blasts from half a mile away disrupted their chants and finally sent them running.

We're "into the Buck Rogers scenario," he gloated. Buck Rogers was the good guy, remember, and the good guys are the ones who want war, not peace as George Orwell foretold.

Then Joe Bageant posts this great story about his neighbor that illustrates well the points I was trying to make in my own brief run in with the justice system on the flip side of the coin. Joe's buddy slipped up once and now he's an indentured servant forever in the prison profit industry. You might read this and then watch out for that banana peel in your own life.

You don't have to look hard for bad news these days and I think the Pollyannas must be getting new extra thick prescription rose colored glasses. I wish I could tell you that life will be easier for those of us who have been expecting this now for several years. But the truth is that we'll suffer almost the same as those whose heads have been up their arses the whole time. It's like the difference between one who knows and anticipates the time of their death and one who lives for the moment. They both suffer the same fate, only the one who lives for the moment is happier while it lasts.

Superclass

In his sixth book, Powerdown, Richard Heinberg lays out four alternative future scenarios for how society will deal with the energy crisis. His premise is that oil production is set to plateau then decline and that energy use by humanity will decline along with it. Note that even if alternative energy sources could offset depletion of petroleum reservoirs, per capita energy consumption would still decline due to increasing population. Heinberg's four scenarios are:

Last One Standing – where nations fight over dwindling resources.

Powerdown – where everyone cooperates to reduce resource consumption.

Waiting for a Magic Elixir – where everyone lives in fantasyland until the shit hits the fan, and

Building Lifeboats – where the ships of state go down and a few manage to survive on rafts.

I think another unacknowledged assumption here is nationalism. Heinberg implicitly assumes that nation states will continue to act as discrete entities. But to me it looks like that notion has started to become archaic over the past couple of decades. Look at the former Soviet Union, for example. It broke up into how many 'stans? Then Yugoslavia taught us about Balkanization. Over the same period all of the former warring nations of Europe decided to become a Union. So I'm going to dredge up another archaic idea, a class society, propose a fifth alternative future scenario, and call it Superclass.

Throughout most of civilization people were born into classes or castes and stayed there all their lives. In Western Europe there were the nobility. In Egypt the Pharaohs. In India the Untouchables. Hardly anyone ever went from peasant to software mogul. Nowadays, even though we cling to a Horatio Alger myth in America and idolize common folks – mostly athletes, actors, and musicians – who have made it big, nearly everyone is stuck pretty close to their status at birth. Apples don't fall far from the tree. We also see that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The minimum wage hasn't gone anywhere in decades while, at the same time, corporate executive salaries are on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In the U.S. less than 1% of the population controls over a third of the wealth. There are about 1000 billionaires in the world. Keep in mind that a billionaire is one thousand times richer than a millionaire. And perhaps 10,000 people control most of the resources on the planet. Members of this Superclass have much more in common with each other than they do with people in their own nation, country, and hometown.

Now if you look at dwindling resources on a per capita basis, there's plenty to go around for 10,000 people if the rest of us 6.7 billion all live in mud huts on a bowl of rice and cup of water a day. No doubt the Superclass can fly their Gulfstreams around the world to poker parties with each other until the sun burns out. Peak oil would mean nothing. All they have to do is concentrate the wealth and keep the masses pacified. And it doesn't have to be a conspiracy, merely a natural evolution. So what kind of evidence might you look for to support or refute this hypothesis? You would look for evidence of concentration of wealth and pacification of the masses. How about lots of people on mood drugs like Prozac? More money to big pharma and lots of happy zombies. How about millions of people addicted to teevee and all the broadcasters owned by a few big corporations? African Americans have been one class with a rebellious streak, perhaps because of their treatment, and hard to pacify. How about a lot of them locked up in prisons operated by big corporations? Debt servitude. How about lots of people in over their heads on mortgages and credit card debt they can't pay off and a bankruptcy law written by the bankers? Wars. Notice how most of the soldiers are people seeking economic improvement and big corporations get the multibillion dollar no-bid contracts? Dieoff. Starve a lot of the very poor and make health care too expensive for the rest. Here it seems almost as if Mother Nature is in cahoots with the Superclass. Every time there is a tidal wave, typhoon, or earthquake it takes another 100,000. Look around and I think you'll find more evidence.

In this scenario peak oil is not an issue for the Superclass. Maybe that explains why you don't hear much about it in the media.

Managed Democracy

Throughout the years I've been reminded repeatedly that democracy is the best form of government and capitalism is the only sure way to run an economy. On both of these points I have only two thoughts: one, I don't know, and two, I'd like to find out. Consider the argument for democracy here in the world's greatest. As I understand it, democracy is rule by the people. Or in a more modern sense, the people vote to elect representatives to carry their water at a parliamentary governing body. One person, one vote. But what have we this year? I hear on the news that Florida and Michigan are being "punished." You can't punish a state, you can only punish the people living in that state. So sorry people in Florida and Michigan. You don't get to choose between the woman whose spouse is a former president and the man of partial African American descent. You've been ruled out of the "democracy" by a small committee of powerful people somewhere. And what are these beasts called Super Delegates? It would appear as though the votes of some of the Superclass are worth more than hundreds of thousands of the votes of ordinary people. Unless you live in Florida or Michigan. Then your votes aren't worth anything at all. As Sheldon Wolin puts it, we live in a managed democracy where the façade of democracy is useful as it provides an illusion of legitimacy to those who hold power over us. Most of the common people have figured this out and don't even bother. But, wouldn't you know it, their apathy is also useful to those who hold power. It makes the system easier to manage.

For all practical intents and purposes it appears that our economy is more centrally managed than the Soviet Union's ever was. Adam Smith had this idea that individual buyers and sellers, each offering what they had and bidding for what they needed, was an invisible guiding hand that directed goods and services from producers to consumers in the most efficient possible manner at the right price. But you and I don't sell watermelons or buy shoes from the cobbler. We sell our time and buy our necessities from a few major, globalized corporations whose board members all sit on each other's boards. They give us options as a multiple choice. Coke or Pepsi? Would you like fries with that? They tell us what we should want on teevee, where they own all of the wavelengths. They set the prices and we can either pay or not.

Move up the scale and what's the most important price of all? It's the price of money. Is that set in the marketplace between buyers and sellers? No. It's set in a secret meeting of a small committee of bankers called the Federal Reserve. All of the other big players: Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan, etcetera wait outside the door for the whisper then the markets react. How is this all that different from the centrally planned Soviet system, which we were told caused that Union to disband?

Democracy and Capitalism are probably good ideas. I really would like to find out. But it's unlikely that we ever will. Scarcity will come because of peak oil. Hunger and want will stalk the poor. Foundations of McMansions will settle and crack on poor soil. And when it's time for the mask of Managed Democracy to drop and reveal its true face of Inverted Totalitarianism, the people won't resist. No, they will rush forward to embrace the new police state. If there is not an official place to rat out one's neighbor, who might be engaged in the subversive practice of growing watermelons to buy shoes, the people will demand that one be established.

Cut 'em loose

Dmitry Orlov makes a recommendation in his new book, Reinventing Collapse, that is sure to win over the law and order crowd. Orlov claims we're going to have to release convicts from prison sooner or later so we ought to do it sooner and gradually rather than later and all in a big whoosh. His point is very practical. Once our complex society can no longer support a large percentage of our population on free room and board they're going to be cut loose. And when that happens there'll be a spree like we've never seen before.

How did America, land of the free and home of the brave, come to have the largest percentage of its population incarcerated of any nation in the world? Larger even than South Africa and Communist China. One factor is that politicians can always run a 'crack down on crime' campaign and get elected. Law abiding folks, who are most of the voters, want their neighborhoods to be safe and sane. Next the newly elected Congress Critters pass laws making common activities illegal. People get sent to jail for having a few seeds of a plant that grows wild along roadsides in the Midwest and happens to make you hungry when you smoke it. One strike you're in and three strikes you're really in, forever. Draconian sentencing laws can send someone to prison for life for borrowing a bicycle if they happened to have screwed up a few times in the past. Finally, we turned the prisons over to corporations to run in a businesslike manner. And what do businesses need most? More customers.

Yesterday I answered the call to perform my sacred civic duty to serve on a jury of an accused person's peers. As far as the legal system is concerned, I'm the flip side of the same coin. Just like the accused, I get told when and where to appear and if I don't show up on time then all of a sudden I'm on the other side of the coin. Most of the people who are summoned want nothing more than to be excused. You can see them visibly squirm as they lie to the judge. Anything to get out and get away, back to their mundane existences. The pool of potential jurors was so small in the courtroom, and so many people had excuses, that there weren't twelve people sufficient to start the trial. You could see the judge's frustration. Then I was the last one up and started an argument about a finer point of principle. Contrary the judge's instructions, I will decide the case on the basis of both the facts and the law.

"The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the facts in controversy."

John Jay, First Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court, 1789.

"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts."

Samuel Chase, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1796.

"The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact."

Oliver Wendell Holmes U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1902.

"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided."

Harlan F. Stone, Twelfth Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court 1941.

It looked like the judge wanted to come over the bench and strangle me. First I got a long lecture and then, when I persisted, another long lecture. I was dismissed and a jury wasn't seated.

More and more people live in prison, in a kind of graduate school for learning the criminal trade. When they get out they know more about their careers than when they went in. Having half of the criminal population in prison at any one time means the resource (i.e. the victims) can support twice the overall size of the criminal population. More people with a criminal record means fewer people qualified to serve on juries (and keep in mind the minimum mandatory ratio is 12 to 1). So when do we reach the tipping point or are we already there? Those same people who sit on juries also pay taxes for the upkeep of the convicted. If prison corporations aren't making a profit they can tell the politicians, "pay us more or we'll start opening cell doors." It looks to me like privately run prisons can both incarcerate the convicts and hold the people and politicians hostage. And if we don't pay up they will cut 'em loose and go into business posting armed guards around the mansions of the rich.

Harbingers

The ancient Greeks were so perceptive of the human condition that everyone since, from Shakespeare to the Ottoman Turks, has studied their writings. In the Aeneid as told by Virgil, Cassandra, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, spurns the love of Apollo, god of light and reason. Out of spite he curses her to foretell the future but be believed by no one. Poor Cassandra foresaw the coming of the Greeks and the fall of Troy. She saw through the ploy of the Trojan Horse while everyone around her thought she was mad.

In every culture from ancient history on there are tales of those who said aloud that shit was going to happen only to find themselves mocked and ostracized or worse. Jeremiah told the Israelites they were about to be carried off to Babylon and the governor's son had him arrested. The story of Henny Penny comes down to us from the Jataka Tales of Buddhist Indian folklore circa sixth century BCE. Crying "wolf" too many times characterizes our disdain for the bearer, or worse prophesier, of bad news because we all know the boy was just doing it to entertain himself. For balance I'm looking around to find tales of someone seeing a dark future, everyone gathering around to do their best, work together, and forestall the worst of it. I'm still looking.

So why would anyone stick their neck out and say out loud in a public way that our multitudes swarming over the planet, our rapacious consumption of resources, our dominion over fish and fowl to the point of extinction, all the markers of our very success as a species, are the harbingers of our own doom? Some of these modern day Cassandras are tenured professors and more or less untouchable. But I know from observation that they take serious hits to their career by speaking thusly. I suppose one could make an evolutionary argument – groups that listened to the voices of doom avoided catastrophe and went on to propagate their genes yada yada. But if that were really the case then those myths would dominate our collective memories and not Chicken Little. Personally, I think the Greeks were right. We, the Cassandras, have been cursed by the god of reason.

In the months after September 11, 2001, I started to share with a few colleagues my thoughts on energy flows through our complex society and what that foretold for our likely future scenarios. "Look at this," I said as we bombed down I-40 in two tons of hurtling Chevy Tahoe. "Do you think that this can go on forever and what happens if it can't?" Needless to say, I quickly developed a reputation as a Conspiracy Theorist. That's our culture's way of marginalizing anyone who doesn't parrot the daily wisdom emanating from the teevee. Now a funny thing. Those very same people come sneaking back into my office wanting to borrow books on peak oil. They want to know how high the price of oil has to go before all of those alternative sources they've been promised suddenly come on line. They even listen to the subversive concept of "energy return on energy invested." You know what this means, don't you? This means it's too late to do anything about it. And when you hear about it on teevee, that means the horse got out of the barn.

Resilience

Resilient is a new buzz word in ecology. And it seems like only yesterday when ecology was a buzz word. A resilient ecosystem is said to be able withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary, or have adaptive capacity. The economy might be thought of as human ecology. After all, they have the same Greek root – eikos meaning house. When a coyote eats a rabbit that's part of the ecosystem. When a human eats a rabbit it's part of the economy, where the rabbit may have been raised by a Burmese farmer, prepared by a French Chef in New York and served to a Saudi on a cheap American vacation.

The Native Americans had a resilient economy. If the crops went bad maybe the Mesquite beans up in the hills were doing OK. Hopefully some buck bagged a deer on the hike up there to find out. When the Mesquite beans played out it was time to roast agave and pick prickly pear. They had alternatives. They had plans B and C and D. They had adaptive capacity. Modern Americans believe we have resilience because we go through this charade of a presidential election every four years. Nixon was pretty bad, remember? But whew! We elected Jimmy Carter and it was a whole new era until the Shah was overthrown, the American hostages were held on teevee for months, the helicopters burned in the desert, and the price of gas went through the roof. I suppose most of us middle aged people remember the gas lines best. But then it was a "new morning in America" and the Gipper told Gorby to "tear down that wall." Oh never mind that Iran Contra stuff going on in the basement. After all we whupped Grenada's butt, the only successful U.S. invasion of a country full of poor people in my lifetime. Then there was a standing ovation in Congress for the wimp who ripped Saddam a new one and eight years of Bubba's peccadilloes. Now after 7 years of Dubya we just know things have to go better with Barry. We also believe we have a good personal financial plan if we buy lottery tickets every week on our credit cards.

Do you think about diesel when you go grocery shopping? How many people think about groceries when they get cut off on I-15 by a semi? Instead what do we do? We heave ourselves out of the car, waddle into the supermarket, pull frozen boxes out of the freezer aisle, and swipe our plastic card. Maybe we're in a hurry so we drive through Mickey Dee's. We know nothing else. Prehistoric people were hunter gatherers. Our ancestors were farmers. We're shopper gatherers. Our ecology is diesel tractors, natural gas fertilizers, diesel combines, diesel semi trucks, and the checkout line. There is no alternative. We have no plan B. Diesel goes to $4 a gallon. There's grumbling and resentment. Diesel goes to $4.50. Congress has to do something. Diesel goes to $5. Fear is on people's faces. Diesel goes to $6. Any little blip: an explosion, a pipeline, an assassination; little old ladies get trampled in a panic and the shelves go bare. What are you going to do?

The Been Theres

There is a class of American, and probably other elites, who are the Been Theres. You'll know them by their discussion of geography. You might mention Costa Rica in some casual conversation and they'll say, "Oh yes, I've Been There." Or mention Italy and you'll hear, "we've Been There. We went last summer on our anniversary." They might know nothing at all about the people or the culture but they can probably tell you a good place to eat. We were interviewing a German this week and I happened to ask, "what part of Germany are you from?" "Dusseldorf," he replied. "Oh that's one place in Germany I've never been," my co-interviewer cut in. "But I have been to Munich," he continued, making sure we both knew of his Been There credentials.

The culture of the Been Theres is wide and shallow. They know mostly about the hotel where they stayed, the restaurants where they ate, the airports, and maybe a few well known tourists attractions. They know little about the people or local history because one has to live in a place for some time to experience that. I stayed in a hotel in Boston one night, near the Logan Airport, then drove up to a private high school for rich kids in Andover, New Hampshire. I was there for a Gordon Conference but I didn't learn as much about the area as I would have by studying a map and doing a web search. A few years later I was back and this time drove south to Plymouth. There I saw the Rock that is one of the foundation myths of America. Oh what a farce. Pick a rock, any rock, and there it is. God's destiny for his sole, chosen people.

My Grandparents never aspired to Been There status. In his later years my Father's Father would venture off the ranch to visit his offspring diaspora and return so thankful to be home that he would swear to never pass through the gate and onto the highway again. You can see a photo of the windblown sandhills he loved so much at this link. My Mother's parents made their annual trip to the West Coast to see their daughter and grandkids so many times that they had each stop memorized, kind of like my annual trip to the Midwest now to see them. Only one in our family has made it to the Been There league and she's in Honduras this week

But the Been Theres have some hard times coming. Their ranks will be squeezed. The Middle Class riff raff will soon become former Been Theres (Has Been Theres?). Big silver birds are landing for the last time; the corporations that fly them are merging and folding. Soon an airplane ticket will once again be a real status symbol. In the back you'll see the business class wadded into fetal positions, their knees under their chins, and up front will ride the Superclass, having grapes on gold platters peeled for them by voluptuous serving wenches. Who knows, maybe the engines will be running on biodiesel made from grain that poor starving wretches are not eating.

Me, I have no more desire than my Grandparents. I look at my small patch of windblown dirt and see the whole richness of the Earth. I look up at the Newberry Mountains and see exotic horizons. I look around at my neighbors and see all of the diversity of humanity. It's an ego that needs a passport. It's a mind that needs a place

Stimulus payment

At our core we as a people are having a discussion about the very nature of reality. I owe this thought to John Michael Greer, writing about second hand ideas (or in this case third hand ideas or perhaps recycled beer cans). On one hand we have the "better and better" crowd where America is the best. On the other hand we have people's careers invested in collapse. Personally, I'd rather have my career invested in a big retirement stash. How can you go your whole life predicting the end, being mocked and ridiculed as Chicken Little, only to have everything turn out fine and for everyone to live happily every after? You know then that you are damned sure vested in the end times, if only for vindication. As Greer points out, this discussion has gone on since Cassandra went moping about Troy, going on and on about how the Greeks were coming. Nobody, however, who is going hungry at the moment, and of this I am very sure, has any doubt about reality. USA Today ran a piece (link might not work) on bread lines. Some people even called to see if someone would pay their cable bill. Having gone hungry myself a few times in my first few years out of the nest I can attest to its marvelous capacity to focus one attention on the truly important things in life from an ecological and sustainability point of view. The panicked screeching from the cable teevee folks, I'll bet, is caused by the psychological realization that they are gradually moving towards a lifestyle more common in Bangladesh rather than hunger.

Then today in the mail comes a letter from my dear old Uncle Sammy with butter for the soup kitchen bread. What about tax relief, I wonder? How about a good ole tax rebate? But no, this is a stimulus payment. Our Uncle is borrowing money from someone, maybe the Chinese, to pay us to be stimulated. I feel a heady rush of excitement coming on. Why can't we stimulate the economy the old fashioned way by fighting wars that nobody wants or buying weapons that no one should ever use? Or maybe we are and even that's not working. So it's time to butter the bread lines.

Supply and demand

Please, please," said Dubya, "please pump more oil" on his knees before the King.

U.S. President George W. Bush met Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh earlier on Friday to ask for more oil from OPEC to tame record oil prices. (Reuters)

"Supply and demand are in balance today," said Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi.

Of course. Supply and demand are always in balance with the sliding scale of price. And price is sliding up. Oh it's the speculators. No it's the weak dollar. What does investment banker Matthew Simmons think? Could it be supply? Perish the thought.

In the gay nineties you couldn't find a single party goer who thought the music would ever stop. Now we've "hit a rough patch," as our dear retro leader tells us. And you can't throw a rock without hitting a doom and gloomer. Once upon I time I was the only one in these parts, known contemptuously as Dr. Doom around the office; believer in Conspiracy Theories. Now I'm an optimist by comparison. On the other side you'll always have the cornucopians. Technology will save us because "we have big brains" (anonymous BLM employee). But the discussion now seems to come down to how bad is it going to be? We have the hard landers, the soft landers, the skeptics, and the clueless. And we aren't even in an officially declared recession yet. How will it play out? If we only knew.

There are about 6.5 billion people on this planet and probably 10,000 or less control most of the resources. You know you are one of this superclass if you travel around in your private Gulfstream jet. One likely option is that this superclass diverts grain out of the stomachs of poor people and into the tanks of their Gulfstreams. This option is ecofacism.

Don't hold your breath for equality. Democracy is doomed, if it ever existed. The superclass is going to need a police state to keep the masses under control and there will be a lot of goons for hire.

I see enormous motorhomes driving down Newberry Road pulling oversized SUVs and I wonder what the drivers think about all of this. Maybe: 1) gas is high, 2) Arabs have all of the oil, and 3) they are evil.

Solar Farms

One might look up and think there's a new gold rush going on in the Mojave. Folks are lined up in a long queue with sun farm applications at the Bureau of Land Management for every open spot of desert. A few days ago I made the outrageous, heretical claim that alternative energy would not be profitable anytime in the next few decades, or at least that's what Exxon Mobil thinks. Now here we have famed oilman T. Boone Pickens buying wind turbines. What gives? Well, most likely, I was wrong. But there's more to the story, as always. First there was the Energy Act of 2005 that cuts tax breaks and has a "soft" requirement to implement "renewables". Next there's the California's Renewables Portfolio Standard that was established by Senate Bill 1078, which requires the state's retail sellers of electricity - investor-owned utilities, electric service providers, and community choice aggregators, to get 20 percent of their retail electricity sales from eligible sources of renewable energy by 2017. California's energy agencies subsequently committed to achieving the 20 percent target by 2010; seven years early. This is not market demand, it's central government planning – that horrible committee we claimed brought down the Soviet Union. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. After all, solar probably has an energy return on energy investment of about 10 or so. Still, if you try to go off the grid with solar and batteries you are going to be paying a lot more for juice and have a big maintenance headache on you hands. This problem is particularly acute in the need for batteries. You could spend $2000 for just enough lead acid batteries to run a freezer and they'll last maybe three or four years. By then the price could double.

But enough of these laws and tax incentives. The whole Earth is a solar collector and has been for four billion years. Nearly every likely spot on the planet is covered with solar receptors called plants that turn radiation into energy called carbohydrates. Already we intercept 40% or more of the planet's primary productivity for our mass of humanity. Now we're going to intercept the rest for the machine? Let's hope not. Let's collect solar on the margins where it is of no use to the ecosystem. That means solar on our roofs, not virgin desert. My recommendation – lobby for a law to force the power companies to buy surplus electricity from individually owned sources at the peak retail rate. Then plant panels and wind towers where ever they fit into your landscaping and have the checks direct deposited.

Standard Myths

Free speech radio (KPFA) is in its spring fund raising season and there are a few new documentaries to check out. The first two thirds of The Eleventh Hour, narrated by Leonardo DiCapprio, seemed nearly truthful; albeit breathless in a dramatic orchestra pounding panic. Yes it's getting a little warm and the ice is melting but this film is a tornado siren in Oklahoma. Then it waltzes off into fantasy land. All we have to do, you see, is restructure our economy, relocalize, and start using all of that abundant, renewable, clean energy that's out there for the taking. The last hour was a rapid fire of half truths and make believe. Yes there is enough solar energy falling on planet Earth to power all our cars, trucks, tankers, industry, electrical grid, and then some. We know that. If you can't do the calculation for yourself I'm sure you can find it on the web. That's not the point. How do you propose to cover the Earth with solar collectors and still leave room for the ecosystem? What do you plan to eat after farms are converted to power plants? Did you factor in the efficiency loss of converting solar to electricity to hydrogen then distributing it to a transportation network? How much energy and materials will it take to build that infrastructure and where will it come from? Yes we could save a lot by localizing our living spaces and restructuring the economy. But do you think that you'll just wake up one morning and it will be done? These people are actors not engineers. Next they have to explain why the economy and civilization are not moving in the direction of all that clean, abundant, renewable energy. It's those evil corporations, you see. They've addicted us to oil and now they're deliberately squeezing the supply to drive up prices and obscene profits.

We have here the beginning of a new and powerful myth. When something goes wrong, and especially when it happens to us, we expect two things. We expect someone to bail us out and we need someone to blame. Exxon Mobil is a perfect villain. Not only is it the largest corporation in the world but its first quarter revenue was up 34% to $117 billion and profit was up 17% to $10.9 billion. We're the damsel in distress and who will be the white knight riding to save us?

But whether you think capitalism and profits are good or evil, I'm sure we can agree that Exxon Mobil is out to make a profit, which leads to some questions. Exxon Mobil's production is declining so why isn't it plowing all that profit into exploration? If there is all that clean, abundant, renewable energy out there then why isn't Exxon Mobil moving into that market? It seems that if we are suddenly going to transition to solar, wind, and biomass then the biggest energy company in the world would want to be our supplier. What is Exxon Mobil doing with its profits? Well, it seems that Exxon Mobil is buying its own stock.

In the spirit of Bill of Occam I offer a few answers. Exxon Mobil is not plowing money into exploration because it is not a good return on investment. At some point we know that it will take more energy to find and produce a barrel of oil than comes out of that barrel of oil. Likewise at some point it also costs more. Exxon Mobil thinks we are at the point where the rate of return, i.e. the profit, is too small. Why isn't Exxon Mobil moving into the clean, abundant, renewable energy market? Because that market is not profitable and will not be anytime in the next few decades. Anyone who thinks wind, solar, and biomass are profitable is welcome to put solar panels on their roof, a wind turbine in their backyard, and an ethanol plant in their garage. Keep track of your receipts and you'll find it's a conceit. Why is Exxon Mobil buying its own stock? Obviously because it thinks it's a good deal. As we slide down the oil curve those proven reserves will become precious. As the oil fields are depleted the price will skyrocket. Finally, why does Exxon Mobil tell analysts like Jim Jubak that it's long term planning is for oil at $50 per barrel? Because he is a useful idiot.

It is a philosophy of deception. Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

Smell the Coffee

Everyone was talking about the stock market and their portfolios in 1997 when I flew to Tucson for a job interview. That's all the couple in the seats behind me on the airplane talked about – how much their stocks were up, what to buy next, hot tips. The next morning when I stopped for coffee on my way to the Harshbarger Building the people at the next table over were talking about the stock market. Even then, as a bottom-feeding graduate student, I could see it was time to sell. In 2006 I stopped at a Borders book store in Bakersfield. Nearly every book on face display in the business section was about how to flip houses. The gig's up, I thought. Time to pay down the mortgage and credit cards. The crowds rush to every good thing and trample it to death until it's not a good thing anymore; everyone looking around at his neighbors to see if they have found a better deal. Recall the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Hordes rushed to Sutter's Mill, they dashed to Comstock, they pounded dirt at Cripple Creek and everywhere they went they left behind holes in the earth and piles of tin cans. Now everyone is talking about the high price of gasoline. Is it time to sell commodities? Is a crash in oil and grain futures coming? Should we sell the silverware and pawn our gold jewelry while we still have a chance at the high prices?

One is up, the other is down, and they're not symmetrical. Think of it this way. People are notoriously bitter complainers. Any little slight is a serious insult and by God we are entitled to our entitlements. We may pay only as third as much for gas here as they do in Europe but if gas goes to four bucks this summer, watch it become the campaign issue. Both candidates, heads and tails, will promise to make it right. House prices go down a little and house owners start screaming. Then comes Uncle Sammy riding to the rescue. Does this mean house prices will go back up? Or does it simply mean that people whine? If someone found the Comstock Lode under his house you could be damn certain he'd keep quiet about it. That is until his snoopy neighbor found out and the rush was on. Hold on to commodities or buy in because we've got a long way to go. And get some earplugs unless you want to go deaf from the howling.

We've got a long ways to go down this curve of dissipating energy and everyone will expect a bailout. As I look out the window I see U.S. military garrisons around the world. I see six lane freeways packed full of cars and trucks. I see outwardly rational people believing that we are in a little dip and things will soon get better. I see a delusional fantasy of the world's sole remaining superpower running F-16s and Abrams tanks on solar panels. I see glassy eyed suburbanites believing they're going to go buy a nice little hydrogen powered antigravity pod to zip around in once gas gets too expensive. No, I don't think it's time to sell commodities. I think it's about time to get ready to duck when these people wake up.

Tower of Babel

How clear that single note sounds from the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ that is the mainstream media. If your information source is Cable News you quickly realize there is only one correct way to view the world. No matter where you turn, CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, the song is the same. Only the tempo and pitch vary. If, on the other hand, your information source is the internet you find a fractured, kaleidoscope of alternate views. A lot of truth can be found on Democratic websites such as buzzflash.com that tell you Democrats are good and guns are bad. But if you're like me you think having a gun around the house is about like having a hammer, and almost as useful. Democrats and Republicans look like two sides of the same coin. Many good websites will tell you about the evils of central banking. I certainly think fractional reserve banking, up to and including the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, is part of the problem. But they lose me with the argument that peak oil and climate change are smokescreens for conspiracy. One good site that I read often is obsessed with Israel. No doubt it's a thorn in the side of a sensitive part of the world. I can wade through that to find bits and pieces of news hard to find elsewhere. It loses credibility, though, by taking the position that global warming is part of a plan to raise taxes. Climate change is one place where I think we should stick to the data and models. Contrarian views should be examined, of course, but scientifically where hypotheses must be testable and falsifiable.

Contrast this Tower of Babel to the clarity of greed and ambition. No wonder those whose sole motivation is accumulation of wealth and power can submerse their differences in unity of purpose. That's why the course of the nation will not change no matter who is elected in November. The only discussion will be about methods, not objectives. The real discussions go on in private and the objectives are drowned out by all that organ music.

Conflicting Reports

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

Yogi Berra

That's why I tend to cut the pundits some slack in their endless prognosticating. Maybe we are on the brink of recession, maybe the next boom is about to begin. We are either at death's door, the doorstep of Heaven, or both. But it seems at first glance that the present and recent past should be easier to call, at least until one looks at the conflicting reports coming in. Then the present and recent past appear as cloudy as the future. This has been the character of American life for my entire existence. For example, why did John's head jerk backwards in the first Kennedy assassination if the bullet hit him from behind? I was five years old and even then I knew that if you hit a ball with a stick it went away, not towards you. Anyone who paid attention in the later part of September, 2001 knows the facts can be muddled. And I couldn't possibly hope to chronicle all the bizarre statements that have issued forth hence from the almighty authorities. Now here we have the so-called "DC Madame", Deborah Jeane Palfrey hanging herself in her mother's garage. She did indeed have dirt on the high and mighty. How convenient. I wouldn't think so much about this, after all. Let the investigation take it's course. But almost before she could be pronounced dead the media found someone to quote that she'd been planning it all along while a radio clip posted on the web had her saying she'd never kill herself and if she was found dead it would look like a suicide. Then it all goes down the memory hole. That was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's novel, 1984. Winston Smith was a petty bureaucrat with the job of rewriting history as it happened. Now we see that this wasn't a novel so much as it was either a prediction or a plan. First we smell the bullshit then we get used to it. What's next?

The Main Points

Let's go over the main points one more time.

The long predicted crisis of peak oil is finally upon us. From here on out production will diminish. We are less prepared for this now than we were when Jimmy Carter was president. That means we get to experience the consequences with a greater sense of angst.

Under the forcing of human greenhouse gas emissions the climate is set to display some behavior that humanity hasn't experienced yet in the Holocene.

Against this backdrop a mostly young human population with tremendous reproductive capacity is exponentially expanding.

I also include water shortages in this mix because it's the basis of life, it's increasingly hard to come by, and my education is as a hydrologist. But as I make the case in a book to be published next spring by the University of Nevada, Reno Press, I think energy will outstrip water as our primary crisis. There is as much water on the planet as there has every been so it's more a matter of quality rather than quantity and we have a lot of room for conservation. We squirt huge amounts up into the sky in fountains simply for decoration.

Each one of these crises in itself is essentially linear. Peak oil is described by a logistics curve as a function total volume. Although the climate is a tricky beast, the basic idea is that increasing greenhouse gases increases trapped heat and warms the globe. Population growth is exponential, which means that it is log-linear. There is plenty of literature on each one of these topics but nowhere is there a comprehensive discussion of their interactions coupled with possible societal responses. A few bloggers and authors are talking about the relationship between energy and climate. Recently Science and other journals are reporting the difficult to predict relationship between climate change and drought. Here, at this blog, I'm after the crux – how will humanity cope?

What does Newberry Springs have to do with this discussion? For one thing, we're a small rural community with lots of flat land and decent water for growing food. The community has proved itself by driving away the proposed sludge farm. We have probably the best location in the country for that free energy, sunshine, that hits the earth every day. The suburbs have never caught on here, thank God. Small rural communities like this are our hope for the future. I'm touched by a comment posted by a young person at Professor Guy McPherson's blog (Nature Bats Last link on the right),

"Even more difficult than the question of when to stop warning them of the coming crises is how to prepare oneself. I for one have no idea what to do, and little money to invest in property or foodstuffs."

How do we prepare? All of us?

Stop traveling.

Grow a garden,

Build local community. If you have land, like many of us here, you might need a gardener or two.

Later on I'm going to once again rail on the gurus of peak oil (e.g. James Kunstler and Richard Heinberg) and how they seem to spend all their time jetting around the countryside to lecture. There's no small amount of arrogance on display here. But in answer to Jeremy's question about not having land and food, the approach is in 3 and 2; community garden.

Parallel Worlds

Previous Front Page is at this Link

"We live in two different worlds, dear. My world is honest and true." Fred Rose (performed by Hank Williams)

Another week, another climate change conference. This time the left front wheel on the Jeep sheared off two bolts and was left wobbling on the remaining three loose nuts. It seems that Barstow Tired and Broke didn't tighten the lug nuts when they fixed the flat last Friday. We spent two quality hours at Big O in Wasco. At the workshop we wrung our hands about how bad things are then talked endlessly about planning the world to death. But the highlight for me came with a presentation of a short video to be shown to the public. It seems you can't motivate people with the truth, i.e. our situation is dire. Instead you have to tell them everything will be alright if we all indulge in hopeful thinking. Then, we were told, folks will have the positive can do state of mind to make the necessary changes. The short film was set in the year 2020. Happy people were interviewed about the great awakening that narrowly averted the climate crisis as antigravity cars zipped around in the background. It seems that folks had organized on the internet and forced the energy companies to provide "renewable" energy via their organized purchasing power. In the end the globe didn't warm after all since all that was coming out of our tailpipes was pure drinking water and we sped merrily on our way in our hydrogen powered hovercraft. Presumably, although the film didn't go into it, the human population continued to grow exponentially and the suburban carpet continued to roll out across the landscape. Or maybe positive thinking solved that, too.

Post modern America is narrated with multiple, mutually contradictory storylines. The loudest, most insistent story is narrated by the mainstream media as directed by the global elites. Mostly that story is the one the military-financial matrix wants you to believe. But contradictory facts keep leaking out. Usually it's too late and very few are paying attention. Then reality bites – at the gasoline pump, at the grocery store, at the bank. We need someone to blame. Oh, didn't you hear? It's Iran's fault. Iran is the biggest threat to world peace and prosperity. We simply must bomb them immediately. The U.S. public, secret, and top secret military budget will come to about $1.1 trillion taxed and borrowed dollars this year. What do you think all that money is going to do? Pay close attention because it's going to narrate the story.

Recent History

Come, 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, that leaves 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 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 stainless steel sign post twenty feet away and headed towards 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 in front of my nose, spraying debris, and ended up about fifty feet behind us with a dead driver inside. 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 looking 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 in 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?