Political Post 2012: Party of Disaster

 
Location: Desk, gloating a bit about George Allen's defeat

Image rights (share with attribution) by futureatlas.com


I can sum up my attitude toward today's Republican Party with some comments left in response to a column by David Brooks of the New York Times. Brooks  critiqued the "hyperindividualist" ethos on display at the Tampa GOP convention, but he also critiqued today's Democrats as lacking an agenda. My remarks follow.

My NYT Response

I thought, at one time, that Governor Romney might have offered disenfranchised moderates like me a way back to voting GOP, as I did faithfully for John Warner and other men and women not beholden to the extremists and corporate money.

With the rise of the anti-logic, anti-science, and and anti-everything Tea Party and American Taliban that make up the GOP base today, I suppose it only natural that they'd consume an ambitious man like Romney.

For those like me, who favor both a strong military and strong environmental laws, who consider climate change to be the greatest threat to civilization since the rise of Nazism and the Soviet Bloc, who would confront the Islamists forcefully while fearing any mingling of church and state, what's left?

Certainly not today's GOP. Today's Democrats look, however, more like the GOP I once respected: an agenda to fix our environmental problems, invest in education and research, be forceful but pragmatic in geopolitics.

Where's the lack of agenda there? If Obama has failed--and I fear he has--it has been through the Limbaugh/Rove strategy of blocking everything, even what were once GOP ideas.

The President should have cracked heads, but instead he played the historic role of the nice black man. Pity. We need a head-cracker in such times.

The Way Back to GOP Relevance

So much for what I said in answer to David Brooks. The GOP took a modest pounding, not so much in terms of the popular vote as in their failure to capture increasingly important slices of the voting public: the young, the female, the non-white, the educated, the urban. Today, in USA Today, a disappointed fellow Virginian who is a "prepper" says he plans to stock up on ammunition before Obama outlaws all the guns.

As a fellow firearms owner, I find this laughable. But these same aging white rednecks ran out in 2008 to scoop up so much ammo that stocks ran low.

If the GOP wishes to survive in  a changing America, they need to, in no particular order past point one:

• Recognize the existential threat of human-influenced climate change and propose a response, with lots of free-market focuses, on curbing it. Denial is no longer an option.
• Work to enact a Constitutional amendment to undo the People United decision. I have some bitter, better feelings about that one. If I could, I would amend the Constitution to permit only publicly financed campaigns for all national offices. They would begin in October of an election year. Candidates would either be chosen by party-member votes in a nominating convention or in state primaries with a one-month campaign, again publicly financed, before the vote.
• Apply a Libertarian philosophy to social issues that are matters of individual religious beliefs, such as gay marriage or the nutty idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old.
• Champion government support for R&D in new industries and high technology while fighting for on-shore manufacturing that will empower those without college degrees. Modern manufacturing requires advanced skills such as computer programming, so support for our community colleges and vocational schools becomes essential.
• Recognize that fossil-fuel-based "Energy Independence" is a myth that both parties embrace. Wind and solar will never replace dirty fuels in our lifetime. Investment in energy conservation, building a reliable and speedy, if not high-speed, rail net powered by electricity will be a start. Natural gas, produced by the dubious practice of fracking, may buy us 30 years to make a transition to new sources of energy: both candidates talked about 100 years of gas, but clearly they don't read the geologists who write for The Oil Drum.
• Return to principles of small government that empowers small business, not major corporations who reduce payrolls by outsourcing.
• Ramp down the military-industrial complex by mothballing half of the Nimitz-class carriers to replace those that retire after 2020. Aggressively develop AI for unmanned combat aircraft and reserve military force to protect only our most vital interests. 
• Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, to put a firewall once again between consumer and investment banking.
• Turn away the racists. A tragedy of Virginia politics is that George Allen, the former governor whose racist "Macaca" remark, leading to a revealing YouTube video that cost him his Senate seat in 2006, could once again be nominated to run. He lost, but that Allen would even be considered today shows how bankrupt modern conservative thinking has become.

If Conservatives wish to survive, they should read more David Frum and David Brooks and James Fallows. Leave Limbaugh, Coulter, Donald Trump, and their ilk behind in the cave, and move ahead.  Will they? I doubt it, and as James Howard Kunstler has often noted, the GOP seems destined to join the Whig Party in the dustbin of history. I differ with him only in his prognosis that "[Hurricane] Sandy was a kind of preview of coming attractions for a different sort of wreckage to come." We still have time, and we may end up poorer and humbled from changes to our economy and climate, but Tuesday's results show that a plurality of Americans still want what Obama, and not the GOP, offers.

James Howard Kunstler Talks Back to My Class

This week, in Duncan Crary's and James Howard Kunstler's weekly Kunstlercast, Jim responded to questions from my Eng. 216 "Invented Worlds" students about his novel World Made by Hand.

Jim Kunstler

Set in Washington County, New York several years after an economic collapse in America, the novel upended my students' notions of continual technological progress.

They cannot imagine a world where the screens go dark and stay dark, where chatting to friends involves talking over a fence, and where getting a meal means a trip to the garden or root-cellar.  While I tend to agree with them that Jim might underestimate human ingenuity in the face of a prolonged energy crisis or economic downturn, I likewise think my Millennial students and their Boomer and Xer parents are a bit naive about progress. They don't see clearly, or often enough, how every technological innovation brings with it unintended consequences, even as it fails to deliver every miracle we might expect (I'll shine your flying car if I'm wrong).

World Made By Hand and its sequel, The Witch of Hebron, are bracing speculative fiction, and I'm glad Jim found time, between gigs as far afield as Sweden and Australia, to be a gracious and receptive respondent.

The podcast can be found at iTunes podcast listing (search for "Kunstlercast") or from the Kunstlercast site.

Now, if the reader will excuse me, it's time to get some wood I split and fire up the wood-stove. I'm not kidding. For now, at least, blogging and wood-splitting exist side by side. In 20 years, I suspect our world is going to look more like Kunstler's and less like William Gibson's or even the banal utopia of the sofa-bound YouTube addict.

Peak Oil: Should I Be Glad?

One of the most interesting of invented worlds is that of America's auto-utopia of continuous driving. We redesigned...well, ruined...our cities to make them safer for driving and parking cars. What would we do if it cost hundreds of dollars to fill up? Already, filling up my full-sized pickup truck runs $100, the first time I have ever spent that much on fuel. A tank of gas will last over a month, however, given how infrequently I use the vehicle for farm work. I purchased a locking gas-cap, too.

Others drive similar vehicles daily, and they are suffering, often casting about for easy targets to blame. What if geology were the culprit?

It seems that even Exxon-Mobil has come around to seeing that the days of cheap oil are over permanently. I follow Bloomberg's energy-price listing fanatically, given my belief that the data about Peak Oil are correct and we're a year or two from this issue becoming part of the popular lexicon.

As with Climate Change, the transition to public consciousness took a while to realize.  There are a few doubters who believe in an infinitely renewable supply of "abiotic" oil, but the science is just not there.

The next time some guy wishing for $1.00 gasoline to fill the fat tank in his Chevy Suburban blames the President or even OPEC for high gas prices, try this. Hand out a little card with this URL from Energy & Captial:

http://www.energyandcapital.com/aqx_p/26311

When investors start recommending Peak-Oil portfolios, one realizes that the transition to a "new normal" is well underway. I've know "it's over" for a long time, and my proof came in a Guardian story based on a Wikileaks report.  Though the Saudi official who warned US diplomats later denied making alarming remarks about his nation's supply of oil, everything said seconded Matthew Simmons geological evidence for a permanent decline in the Saudi oil reserves.

Meanwhile, Jim Kunstler keeps up his own litany of doom about an America unable "to make other arrangements" than what his loves to call "happy motoring." Jim's prognosis is gloomier than mine, but neither of us know the timing of the disruptions that a permanent decline in the global supply of oil might cause. I suspect, unlike Kunstler, that many Americans will still own cars, but they won't define our lives and places of living as they have done.

Gas prices are dipping, for now. I doubt that will last, given global demand for oil.  And whether global supply permanently peaked in 2006 or whether it will in 2016 (my bet is somewhere in that range) we'll enter a new era of human history. The automobile age, barely a century old, will become a short aberration in a longer story, as driving returns to being an expensive luxury.

Anti-Neuromancer: Norman Rockwell's Comeback

Location: Waiting for my apple pie

image credit: public-domain image from Wikipedia

The BBC carries this story today about the "curious resurgence" of Norman Rockwell's artwork.

Disclaimer: Rockwell is a guilty pleasure for me. I love the man's gentle sense of humor.  But back to the Gibsonian connection: there's not a thing curious at all about the renewed interest in Rockwell's art.

In a present that looks so difficult, and a future that appears bleak if you ask most any SF writer, why not return to an invented world that was a pastiche of actual pre-Counterculture events but framed so that it looked typical?

Rockwell does grate on me at times. In none of his works do I see my Arabic-speaking grandmother and my dad, both hungry enough in the early 1930s to rely on an urban waste-spot for picking dandelion greens. I don't see dad's daily onion sandwich (to his death, he really hated onions).

But I have to put aside my Cybperpunk preference for dark visions and say, "many folks need this stuff and I enjoy it, too."

Or are such delusions dangerous?  As a Peak Oiler who thinks the current downturn is a symptom of longer-term hardships to come, and that technology will not solve but merely mitigate the worst effects of oil depletion and climate change, I wonder if visions of a past-that-never-really-was don't lull us into thinking we could somehow remake it.

Or perhaps we can still enjoy Rockwell for what the work is: comforting eye candy. Perhaps it is a brand of eye-candy with something more substantial inside. I find hope in a statement made by David Kamp, quoted in the Beeb's story:

"To go back to Rockwell's vision of the more community-based, and modest, American Dream has the appeal it might not have held five or six years ago."

That would be welcome news after a time with bloated Hummers with single-digit fuel economy and outsized, land-gobbling McMansions defined US life.

Rockwell's vision might have been middlebrow and whitebread, but it was modest.  That's not been a signature trait in our self-invention of American identity for a while. Like thrift and economy, it may make a comeback.

I believe that identity is invented, in real life as well as in virtual worlds, so Rockwell's return offers some hope.

Have a look at the online gallery at The Norman Rockwell Museum and see how his work moves you.

How Much Energy Do Avatars Consume?

Location: Air-Conditioned Room

It's HOT and sweaty here at my latitude, so even an early morning bike ride to the farmer's market meant lots of sweat. That type of climate means staying indoors more, and that means more time online.

There's long been a meme transmitted online about how much energy Second Life's servers and client computers use. While doing some other work, I stumbled upon this article written by Daniel Pargman on Feb. 10 and republished at The Post Carbon Institute's Energy Bulletin.

For a Peak-Oil guy like me, this was the best of all possible worlds! Pargman did some decent mathematical analysis. A few findings follow:

• A computer at work uses 120-150 watts, but a computer that runs Second Life (or World of Warcraft or any other computer games) can use up to twice as much power as these applications make use of your computer's capabilities to the max. Data center use a lot of power, but you home computer that utilizes these services draw a lot more and get less work (computer cycles) done per unit of energy used.
• It is difficult to determine the usefulness (or damage) of using virtual worlds. On the one hand, you use a lot less energy (and generate considerably less pollution) if you cancel a trip and instead meet in a virtual world. But a computer uses a lot of electricity - if the option is an electricity-free activity (take a walk, talk to a neighbor, help your children do their homework).
• (Based on 30K concurrency in SL and 240,000 kWh to run 2000 servers) In total, [this figure] divided into 30 000 avatars becomes 6.8 kWh per day. That is equivalent to 2 500 kWh per year and the home computer accounts for almost 90% of the total power consumption. Latvia, Romania and Argentina are a few countries that had a power consumption in the neighborhood of 2 500 kWh per capita in 2005. In Sweden, we used more than 15 000 kWh per person in 2005.

Pargman published his analysis in part to update Nick Carr's often cited claim that a Second Life avatar uses as much energy annually as does a typical Brazilian. Carr made his claim when concurrency was at 15,000 and the calculation, later corrected, that Linden Lab ran 4,000 servers.

The best shot by Pargman at this weak claim follows, "

no real person is connected to Second Life 24 hours a day and that Second Life actually had 700 000 "active user" (whatever that means) at the time. So the power consumption of each person who used Second Life would have been just a 50th of Nick’s original calculation. Furthermore, any computer that is used for 24 hours a day 365 days per year uses more energy than the average Brazilians whatever that computer is used for (playing Second Life or doing something entirely different). 

"

As for this Second Lifer, I'd be reading a book or doing some writing, like this blog, if not logged into a virtual world. And today the AC would be on full-blast.

So the environmental impact of our fun may be moot, as long as the population using processor-intensive applications like virtual-world clients remains small.

Kunstlerism of the Week + Biblical Loonies

Location: Between Resignation and Ennui

I changed my Google password to make it stronger. Christian apocalyptic fundamentalists, the American version of the Taliban who believe that gays, secularists, and anyone not like them are servants of the Evil One, somehow redirected this site's URLs to a hate-screed site with all sorts of idiocy about their twisted version of Christ's gentle message.

Try getting help from Google: this they have in common with Apple. You go to a forum. There's no way to report the haters, so I just changed my password.

Kunstler is right, friends. We are seeing the rise of rampant anti-science and illogic. It makes me almost brothers-in-arms of the Transhumanists I just critiqued. At least they understand that the earth is more than 6000 years old and that the scientific method can make the world smarter and more reasonable.

Amid this, I waltzed over to Kunstler's blog, as if that would help. But he puts a mere blogjacking into perspective in his article "Fierce Urgency":

The future attempts to regulate undersea oil drilling will send many companies to do their thing in other parts of the world where nobody gives a shit what you do offshore as long as you pony up the royalties to the grifters in charge onshore. America is going to lose a whole lot more of its own oil production. Smaller companies may shut down altogether from the cost of complying with new safety rules and an inability to get insurance. The oil from deep water in the Gulf of Mexico was how we hoped we would offset the ongoing depletions in Alaska. We're going to have to import even more oil than the two-thirds-plus we already depend on. One thing President Obama -- nor anyone else with an audience or a constituency -- will speak a word about is our massive, incessant purposeless motoring.

Pretty soon, the oil missing from the Gulf will leave a message at the 7-Eleven stops in Dallas and Chattanooga, and before the year is out the cardboard signs that say "Out Of Gas" may hang on the pumps. A great hue and cry will rise out of the Nascar ovals and righteous lady politicians with decoupaged hair-doos will invoke the New World Order and the Book of Revelation in their rise to power. Reasonable men with moderate views will dither on the sidelines, afraid to offend one faction or another.

It's not just the Linden layoffs making me grim in this long hot summer.

Transhumanism Meets "Sleeper"

Location: New York Times Web Site

I recommend a June 11 feature story worthwhile for its treatment of Transhumanism, the Singularity, immortality, and other ideas I find ridiculous. As a Peak Oiler, I don't think we'll have the luxury of trying to build machines to upload our minds. We'll be busy enough trying to keep the lights on, keep the Internet running because we won't be able to travel much in person, and use electric trains and buses while we scrap our car-based suburbs for building materials and farmland.

The meat and all its demands, as William Gibson might have put it, will be our destiny in an age of permanent energy shortages.

And still the Transhumanists dream. I give you this image from the Times about the thinker's documentary film:

Throughout "Transcendent Man," Mr. Kurzweil is presented almost as a mystic, sitting in a chair with a shimmering, circular light floating around his head as he explains his philosophy’s basic tenets. During one scene at a beach, he is asked what he’s thinking as he stares out at a beautiful sunset with waves rolling in and wind tussling his hair.

Remember the dictator from Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper? He's depicted in a similar way.

Peter A. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and investor in Facebook, reflecting on the Singularity, feels that "there is no good future in which it doesn’t happen.”

I can think of any number of better futures, with or without Peak Oil. Kurzweil postulates that with human-computer symbiosis, our species will populate the universe. I, on the other hand, don't think we'll have the spare energy to go back to the Moon, let alone the stars.

And if we did find a wonder fuel to replace dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, the ineffably human will remain in our Transhuman selves. Like Gibson put it in Neuromancer, we'll spread our DNA out of Earth's gravity well like an oil slick: an image apt for our current stupidity in the Gulf of Mexico. Nowhere in Transhumanist statements have I encountered the human part of our intellect that can make one a Macbeth instead of a Mother Teresa.

Kurzweil's beliefs are more than optimism. They're anthrocentric hubris. How many humanists are among the Transhumanist ranks? I would send Kurzweil back to read more Shakespeare. As a respondent named Maureen pointed out in her comments about the article, there is already a way to connect to the infinite:

Guess what? The Consciousness is already here. And yogis and monks have been tapping into it for thousands of years. But the only way they have found it is by turning away from desires and wishes, and learning to still that hyperactive mind that we each have. Oh, and becoming humble and grateful doesn't hurt, either.

The hubris of the Transhumanists to escape what Time's Arrow does to their bodies is, in the end, rather sad, as sad as most attempts to live forever in fact or memory. In Sleeper, after an attempt on his life, the leader's nose is saved, at least until Woody Allen's character tosses it under a convenient steam roller.

So much for living forever.

Neo-Luddism & Virtual Worlds

Location: In a World and its Shadows

Okay, mine is an odd combination: organic gardening, beekeeping, environmental activism, resisting technology just because it's new, Peak Oil...and virtual worlds. I get asked a lot why my avatar's First Life tab includes the statement that I'm a Neo-Luddite.

It's been a while since I dedicated an entire post to why I use Second Life, a technology so often derided as an escape from "the real."

That I question "the real" is another matter, though it's worth using Edward Castronova's preferred adjective, "synthetic," to elucidate why I feel that American malls, chain-stores, theme-parks, even gentrified inner cities I love are as "synthetic" as anything in Second Life or its ilk.

I've used Second Life and, lately, OpenSim because of their creative potential. Embodied and immersive communication tools like these enable really amazing educational simulations, facilitate meeting in a manner more satisfying to me than video conferences, and they make entertainment interactive. That's a great step up from passive entertainment such as broadcast and cable TV, which I abandoned in 1979. I still watch DVDs, sometimes. When I do so, I watch content on my time and at my pace. That's not what broadcast or cable TV promise. So if I wish--as I'm now doing--to take 10 years to watch every episode of The Sopranos, it's fine. "Deal with it, HBO," as Tony's crew might say.

So What is Neo-Luddism?

For a "Neo" Luddite, as I understand the term, a crucial test for acceptance is whether a technology encourages environmentally and socially benign use.

Thus, to me anyway and despite what Wikipedia says on the topic, Neo-Luddism is not "Back to the Pleistocene!", a motto of parts of the Earth First! movement in the 1980s. I left EF! precisely because of their hard-line stance against technology: leaders like Dave Foreman wanted to be rid of our technological lifestyles, in part so manly men like Dave could go into the wilderness with strong women. A thinker like James Howard Kunstler better fits my middle-aged perspective that technology, even harmful technologies like coal-powered electricity, provide great comfort and convenience. At the same time, these technologies both "bite back" and provide diminishing returns. That means that although Dominion VA Power does not raise fees that often, getting the coal to power my house involves ever riskier gambles with the human and environmental health. The same for oil, which is very much in the news now.

Though I split with the radical fringe of the ecology movement, my Kunstlerian suspicion of every "new and improved" gadget remained. For Amish communities, as Howard Rheingold discovered during a sojourn without his gadgets, the community evaluates it by a standard that an Amish man gave to Rheingold: "We're also concerned about what kind of person you become when you use it."

While I'm not ready to shave my mustache and trade in the F-150 for a buggy, I prefer the reality of the pastoral--a balanced approach to farming and living in the time of Peak Oil--to a gadget-filled, ever-connected life or, for that matter, to dragging a club and maybe my knuckles. And using the Internet is a way, relatively speaking, to reduce resource consumption in a time of increasing constraints.

How Do Neo-Luddites Doubt Virtual Worlds?

What I've just written provides my positive opinion of virtual worlds. At times, however, I grow concerned that virtual worlds fail some of my tests for appropriate technology. First, they rob us of time in the natural world as surely as television, or even books. Yet their interactive nature makes them even more appealing than those media, as surely as a blog like this or other online communication seems more seductive than talking over the back fence with my neighbor.

That seductiveness, figurative and even literal, is what bothers me. As Hamlet Au's informal survey reveals, a simple majority of respondents feel that infidelity is more likely in SL than in other online forms of engagement. Even if we don't shag online with another avatar, how much time do we spend at the expense of our first lives?

Second, enormous stocks of fossil fuels are burned to power the servers that cast the virtual shadows of our world of matter. What is the trade-off for Internet use in terms of how much energy we save with paper-minimal communication and reduced travel?

Where's the cost/benefit analysis?

My Neo-Luddite Response

Academics like me might be tempted to follow not the lead of Dave Foreman, but that of Sven Birkerts, author of the compelling jeremiad The Gutenberg Elegies, to "just refuse it." Birkerts, in fact, refused to use computers of any sort, though I do believe that he now types his work on a word processor and has participated in online debates about his ideas. But Birkerts' conclusion is no more my sort of Neo-Luddite than was Dave Foreman's. Though Birkerts might, for all I know, be an organic gardener and backpacker, he's also the sort of academic curmudgeon whose connection to nature appears more intellectual than visceral.

For all I know.

In fact, though poet and farmer Wendell Berry does not use computers or the Internet, I find more sympathy with his approach than with Birkerts' Ivy-covered-wall or Foreman's club-and-cavewoman brands of Neo-Luddism.

This is why I waited five years for a need to evolve in my life before I purchased an iPod. I have yet to yield to smartphone, iPad, or GPS. What is the need, and what will those technologies do to me?

For now, virtual worlds make sense to me as a way to connect to distant colleagues and build things. At the moment when they take too much of my time from my goal of retiring to be a small farmer and "sideline" beekeeper in a Community Supported Agriculture program, I'll be done.

And as you might guess, I don't play Farmville. I'd rather come to live it.

Kunstlerism of the Week: Famine?

Location: Farmer's Market

In his latest post, James Howard Kunstler, fresh from a meeting of New Urbanists in Atlanta, takes aim not merely at the doomed sprawl that is Atlanta but also what Peak Oil will mean for all of us:

Among other things, the most forward-looking leaders in the New Urbanist movement now recognize that we have to reorganize the landscape for local food production, because industrial agriculture will be one of the prime victims of our oil predicament. The successful places in the future will be places that have a meaningful relationship with growing food close to home. The crisis in agriculture is looming right now -- with world grain reserves at their lowest level ever recorded in modern times -- and when it really does hit, the harvestmen of famine and death will be in the front ranks of it.

Kunstler puts his apocalyptic spin on this story, but he's right about the effect if not the magnitude. It's time to support your local grower, or become one yourself, while we have enough margin in energy markets to learn how to do so.

Read the rest of "Out of Darkness" for more information. And, to reference a post I made last week, step out of Plato's Cave into the light.

Kunstlerism of the Week: Mass Delusions

Location: Enjoying Spring!

Like Kunstler, however, I look over my shoulder from time to time. I've this feeling that our technotopian ideas for abundant alternative energy are as fallacious as Sarah Palin's fantasies of unlimited oil. As Kunstler puts it:

This far along in the tribulations of our time, most Americans still have not heard of peak oil, and the few who have regard it as some figment that Ralph Nader or Al Gore conjured up on an acid trip in a sweat lodge. The more sophisticated among the mentally unwashed are certain that the earth has a creamy nougat center of low-sulfer light crude oil, or they heard that the Bakken formation in Dakota holds more oil than Saudi Arabia, or that the whole US car and truck fleet will be electrified in a year or two, or that we can drill-baby-drill our way to permanent oil abundance, or just that the American can-do spirit will come up with something to keep Happy Motoring alive because we're the greatest!

Read the rest of "False Spring" here, but be wary of what it will do to your good mood.

Virtual Conferences: A Sense of Place?

Location: Back Home From CCCC

One thing a virtual conference lacks, when the event ends, is a sense of place. I don't get up from my laptop to find a new city outside my window. But universities don't pay conferees to enjoy a new town.

At the end of VWBPE, Linden Labs reclaimed the sims where we had met. It would be like Louisville rolling up the convention district as soon as we all left town. Fat chance of that: one conference after another rolls into town. There are even bars that remember writers like to drink (and Louisville has many bars). I really enjoyed seeing "Welcome National Council of Teachers of English!" in front of drinking-holes. I sampled a few very fine small-batch and single-barrel Bourbons that I cannot find in Virginia.

The weirdness of a typical convention-center district, however, never fails to strike me: it seems as artificial as any region of Second Life. I have to escape and find the "real town" after about a day of prowling a convention-center's habitrails and ficus jungles.

When I go to conventions alone, I drink less, however, and I tend to see more sessions. That still leaves a day or two with free time to explore. So seeking to avoid the drunken part of schmoozapalooza, I skipped the big publishers' parties to drive, with a Steve Earle / Del McCoury soundtrack blaring in my rented Pontiac, to Owensboro, KY, to the legendary Moonlite Barbecue Inn to once again taste the late Pappy Bosley's finest recipes: Burgoo, hickory-smoked mutton, pulled pork, and the "very hot sauce."

I won't digress any more about barbeque, but if someone named "Pappy" is involved, I tend to show up. Driving back, with XTC keeping me company, I got lost in the "hill-hopping" territory of Southern Indiana. Get a powerful car, drive fast, and you'll see what I mean.

It's lovely and un-ruined land, far different from the hideous suburban nowhere that has devoured everything around the Moonlite. Back in that part of the Hoosier State for the first time since 1991, I found myself making wrong turns, and not really worrying. I was near some old-stomping (and hunting and fishing) grounds of mine near the towns of Jasper, Paoli, and--my favorite--Santa Claus.

The small farms and woodlots were lovely, the little hamlets looking trim and sedate, just as I remembered them from 20 years ago. I took extra time to soak up a place that I've lost, albeit for some bittersweet reasons.



I also got time to see downtown Louisville beyond the bland convention district and its surreal mix of (this week) of writing faculty, National Guard Field Artillerymen, math teachers, and indoor-archery competitors carrying bows and arrows. Heading south on Fourth Street, I came to that human-scale, older Louisville that got bulldozed closer to the river, all to make room for the office blocks and crappy 1980s monoliths that will soon be unlivable as easy oil and convention travel dwindle. The image, "clear-cutting Louisville," is from the Old Louisville Web site. An ugly Hyatt hotel sits there now, with the sort of circular top-floor restaurant that looks like a disco-era flying saucer had landed and stayed past the decline of spandex pants.

In the surviving part of Old Louisville I found D. Nalley's, a 1950s type of diner that only takes cash and serves groaners of breakfasts for under $4. On the way back, I admired the sporadically gentrifying area of urban lofts, local shops, and more: the walkable, bikeable, infrastructure we'll use when the suburbs begin their terminal decline in a few years. Louisville, like downtown Richmond, has too many surface parking lots, but we can rip them up for urban farms to feed ourselves soon, as I suspect we'll need to do under the economic effects of global oil depletion.

I learned a great deal about the urban planning of a city very much like my own. But we call that a vacation, not work. I stopped to oggle the hideous new library, a 1970s stack of slabs that looks very much like the one that crash-landed in Richmond. At the same time, Louisville had the good sense not to tear down the marvelous Beaux-Arts building that was there before someone let "progress" loose on the area.

Sadly for my explorations, I had to get back to go to a morning session, so I trudged past the gutted Moorish-styled Falls City Theater Supply Company and the Modernist Kentucky Typewriter building. I was in paradise...and not just because I'd found a Lebanese deli. I was seeing a past that points the way to a humbler, locally made, and sustainable future. Louisville was clearly a raucous river city with lots of booze and theaters once. It will be a nexus for trade again on this big river, and without as much technological spectacle, future Kentuckians may be typing hand-bills for live shows to entertain those folks who "come to the big town."

Mixed-Reality Endnote:

This is the first CCCC where a participant looked at my name tag and said "you are Iggy."

Where's my adoring mob?

A Peak Oiler's Riposte to the Singularity Timeline

Location: Ruins of Azalea Mall, Richmond VA

I'm combining this post with my usual "Kunstlerism of the Week." I've been thinking about Transhumanism lately, and debating the topic in a friendly way with some proponents of the idea. In fact, one of the graduates of Dr. Raymond Kurzweil's Singularity University belongs to the Second Life Education List (SLED), and we've been posting our prognostications back and forth.

James Howard Kunstler's post this week notes:

We could conceivably take ourselves toward futures to be proud of, but they are not likely to be the kind of futures we are so busy projecting in our techno-grandiose fantasies about machine "singularities."

As a neo-luddite and organic gardener, my objections to transcending the body should be obvious: I don't consider it an appropriate technology for reasons of social justice and concern for the environment. As an ecologist, I fear that Transhumans and AIs would have so little regard for the found (as compared to remade) natural world that they'd make today's eco-rapists look like green angels.

Of course, as a believer that cheap oil will soon reach a global maximum of production and then begin a terminal decline, the ideas of the Transhumanist movement seem moot to me. We may not have a reliable enough power grid or transportation system to make the advances they predict, let alone distribute them in a way meaningful to the majority of humanity. I draw upon the thinking of Richard Heinberg (Power Down and The Party's Over), Michael Klare (Resource Wars), and Kunstler (The Long Emergency) for my futurist slant. I draw upon "The Hirsch Report" written for the US Dept. of Energy and Matthew Simmon's Twilight in the Desert for the science behind my ideas.

What sort of time line might I set against Dr. Kurzweil's? This is my optimistic projection, as compared to those of some Peak-Oil writers.

2010-2015:

• Modest economic recovery in US and Europe. Chinese and Indian growth continue, as Mexico's Cantarell oil field--a massive source of US crude--continues its steep decline.
• Saudi oil begins to decline, covered up at first by their state oil monopoly. Other Gulf states announce (as have Kuwait and Yemen) that their oil reserves are in permanent decline. New finds in western Iraq offset much of this.
  
• US consumption remains near 20 million barrels per day. Canada asserting its oil wealth.
  

2015-2020:

• World oil production begins a slow decline, amid increasing demand from China, India, and oil-producing nations as their consumer economies ramp up.
  
• Advanced virtual-world / VR applications a toy or a tool for research among a tiny minority of computer users. Social virtual worlds like Farmville remain popular but never engage all five senses.

2015-2025:

• US infrastructure at the crisis point as fiscal constraints, no-tax zealotry, a car-based lifestyle, past entitlements, and insufficiency of alternative fuels conspire to produce consumer rage, dispossession, and steady economic decline.
  
• Suburban life increasingly expensive, and in-flow to cities begins on the one hand, new "back to the land" movement on the other.
• Full-on collapse in Gulf and possible wars involving Saudis and their neighbors.
  
• US oil consumption drops as oil producers hold on to their supplies for domestic use or trading with preferred partners. Bankrupt public unable to replace vehicles on a large scale and begin using public transit or their feet to travel.
• Ongoing collapse in consumer economies and declining tax base reduces R&D spending to focus on defense and energy. Loss of polar ice-cap results in bonanza to explore for Arctic oil. Canada benefits from global climate change and begins to assert military power in a frontier called "The Far North."
  

2025-2040:

• US federal and state governments belatedly, despite rage from right-wing political groups, begin to adopt some aspects of European urban planning, green energy, and car-free lifestyles.
  
• Most freight moved by rail; most perishable food locally grown. Homesteading to farm the nation's biggest growth industry, along with production of alternative energy sources.
• National electric grid wobbly and failing; local power off the grid replaces semi-monopolies of power companies, but energy remains scarce.
  
• High technologies, car ownership, and access to health care increasingly an object of class warfare. VR remains a popular curiosity.
  
• A bankrupt US government, increasingly bereft of naval power as Nimitz-class carriers are retired one by one, cannot contest Russian, Chinese, Canadian, Indian and European wrangling in the Arctic Ocean over oil. Real chance of global war over remaining oil fields.

2020-2060:

• Europe, India, Russia, China, and America cope with climate and fossil-fuel refugees as Middle East, Central Asian, and Mexican economies collapse.
  
• US Medicare and Social Security "safety nets" collapse. High technology not a primary concern of most individuals.
  
• Human population begins to decline from disease, war, and famine in much of the world.

2060-:

• Barring massive burning of coal, simpler lifestyles and localism lead Carbon Dioxide levels in earth's atmosphere to stabilize, but rapid climate change remains under way for at least a century.

So, Transhumanists, let's hope you are correct in your optimism about humanity's inventiveness.

Perhaps climate change and oil depletion will trigger the sort of innovation we saw during WWII or the Space Race, but I doubt it; the Transhumanist vision does not acknowledge Homo Sapiens' propensity for bloodshed, tribalism, and pure chaos that erupts when scarcity prevails. How do we avoid the worst of these changes? That would be lovely to know, but as Kunstler also notes, "We know we have to go somewhere. We know that something like history is leaving us behind. We have no idea how to get to a new place."

Kunstlerism of the Week: Doofus Smack Down

I bow before your snark, Mr. Kunstler. Virtual worlds never looked so good. I'm just going to stop calling these re-posts "Reality Checks" because that should be self-evident by now, even in the land of Doofus Americanus.

Read the rest at "Rehearsals for a Civil War":

The Tea Party appeals to the swelling numbers of the new former middle class angry at the sudden vanishing of their accustomed perqs and entitlements to a predictably comfortable suburban existence. They're mad at the government and hot for "liberty." But how do they propose to maintain the hyper-complexities of suburban life without taxes to pay for fixing the countless roads their lives depend on or to run the gold-plated central school districts that seem to exist solely to provide Friday night football? As for liberty, a handful of despotic corporations from McDonalds to WalMart have been granted the liberty to destroy the Tea-bagger's bodies and the economic fabric of their communities -- and they seem to want more of that kind of liberty, based on the recent decision of a "conservative" majority on the Supreme Court allowing corporations to buy elections. The Tea-baggers also apparently crave the liberty to push other people around, especially on questions of abortion and religion. That's an interesting kind of freedom.

Reality Check: Kunstlerism of the Week

Location: Clusterfuck Nation Blog

Jim's at it again, in some dizzying verbal pyrotechnics about the Greek economic crisis that has piled up worries larger than the Gyros in my favorite sandwich shop:

Europe is a sad case, really poignant, because it became such a darn nice corner of the world after the convulsions of the mid 20th century. Who, for instance, can spend two weeks walking the lovely ancient streets of Bruges or Orvieto, or Lisbon and not fall to their knees in overwhelming despair on return to the slum of Kennedy Airport? Europe rebuilt itself so beautifully after the war while America became a utopia of overfed clowns riding in clown cars around the plasticized cartoon outskirts of our ruined cities. Europe had wonderful public transit while America let its railroads rot away. European men went about their business in grown-up clothing while Americans men dressed like five-year-olds and got flames tattooed on their necks as though contemplating a barbarian invasion of Akron, Ohio.

As a Europhile who has often called Americans some variation of "blind, fat white people, racing toward the edge of an abyss in their SUVs," I agree. Should add "while chatting on their cell phones and watching action flicks on the car entertainment system."

Jim's only overstatements are as follows: 1) I happen to live in a nice, slowly reviving city, only hampered by a clownish city government and 2) Jim needs to go back to look at younger European men's clothing. Fashion crime has arrived, in the "I wear sports attire but don't play" variety we see in America, too, and baggy "doofus drawers" that threaten to fall down as soon as the cops begin foot pursuit of a thug.

That the Euro-zone is not immune to the stupidity and greed that led big finance to wreck the world economy, remains a profound disappointment to me. Maybe there exists no paradise beyond the warmth of family and friends in close community, the very localism that Kunstler champions and that will be the likely result of life after oil begins its terminal decline.

And for a while (here's the virtual world reference) we'll build fake paradises of code and pixels. Good luck with all that and may your power stay on.

Read the rest of "Euroland, The Horror Movie" here.

Reality Check: Kunstlerism of the Week

Location: James Howard Kunstler's Blog

I'm fond of Jim's turns of phrase, and I read his blog, "Clusterfuck Nation," every Monday as soon as I can.

Since he writes too about invented worlds--the American delusion that oil is infinite and suburbia is sustainable--I find a clear connection to the forever-young, forever-awake world of Second Life. Reality is, of course, a little harsher than SL, as Kunstler reminds us this week:

Do you really think that more suburban sprawl makes this a better nation? When our soldiers bleed out in the sands of Central Asia, will their last thoughts be of the curb cut between the Best Buy and the Burger King?

Read Jim's "Jive Economy" (seems that the Lindens DO copy reality in this, too) for more insights by one of our most acidic, and overlooked, social critics.

Maybe I'm just grumpy because my local bus-line reduced service and my employer must provide shuttle service to co-workers who might otherwise lose their jobs, even as many of the students on campus are so affluent that they'd never be seen dead on a public bus.

Even among my well educated colleagues, too few of us leave our cars parked and commute by bike or foot. Too few shop from local merchants, not on suburban strips that will become unworkable and boarded-up shells, with cheap oil's demise.

When that occurs, or when China stops subsidizing US debt, "Too Big to Fail" may become "Too Broke to Not Fail." Then, perhaps, we'll see how invented "reality" has been in our Strange Land.