Annie Lussenburg writes: A lot of parenting is about common sense. Deep down as parents, we realize that if a child gets showered with gifts, they become unappreciative. If they receive things because they stamp their feet and scream, that behavior will continue because it has been rewarded.

In the last few decades however, common sense seems to be on the decline and its commonality is certainly fading. Let me give you an example. When I was growing up, my parents would have a birthday party for me with perhaps five or six friends at maximum. There would be sandwiches, cake, balloons and a big back yard in which to play. There might be a treasure hunt or a simple game if my mother was feeling energetic. For the large part though, I was instructed to entertain my friends on my own, hardly an onerous task. The end result was an enjoyable afternoon and a few small gifts for me to play with, once everyone else had gone home.

Fast forward a few decades and you see something very different. The birthday party has been organized by an outside company bought in to make the birthday wishes of the ‘Fairy Queen,’ a reality. The house is decorated in an inspired fairyland design and the mothers arrive at the house with their very own princess darlings who clutch enormous presents. You watch the numbers, two, four, six and it just keeps going. “How many are coming?” you ask mom innocently. “The whole class,” she answers, removing her fairy wings before deftly maneuvering a pile of brownies through the door. The party lasts for an insane three hours ofÖfun, punctuated by the occasional melt down amongst the clearly overwhelmed kids. At last the party goers waddle out the door, stuffed with cake and brownies and clutching a goody bag equal in value to the GDP of Montenegro. The fairy queen instead of extolling the party’s virtues, lies in a heap exhausted, ripping off her wings and yelling “How come I didn’t get the pirate party!”

If this sounds like something only those with big fat purses would think of doing for a child’s birthday, I would urge you to think again. In my experience as a parent educator, this scenario or ones like it are played out all over North America on a daily basis. It’s not that people don’t know good sense, it’s that they can’t seem to put it in to practice.

It’s an abundance of energy that makes possible the kinds of excess that many parents practice with their children. It is also energy that elevates and continuously upgrades our expectations, which then in turn become the new societal norm. Our common sense tells us these expectations as to what is normal, have little basis in reality and in many ways are harmful to our children. So why then do parents that know all the reasons that they shouldn’t do something, do it anyway? Whatever force it is that encourages moms and dad to throw away the parental rulebook must be effective indeed and the only way that rulebook can be ignored, is if a definitive effort has been made to render it obsolete. (07/30/08)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: Everywhere you turn in this nation, you see a society primed for implosion. We seem unaware how extraordinary the American experience has been, especially in the last hundred years. By this, I don’t mean that we are a better people than any other society — these days, ordinary people in the USA make an effort to appear thuggish and act surly, as though we were a nation of convicts — but for decade-upon-decade, we were very fortunate. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s may seem like a relatively peaceful and gentle “time out” from a frantic era of hypertrophic growth, compared to the storm we’re sailing into now.

We were fortunate to inhabit a New World filled with productive land, lots of minerals, and plenty of coal, oil, and gas; and the land itself was insulated physically from the great theaters of 20th century conflict, though we fought in wars “over there.” That experience itself, especially our victory over manifest evil in the Second World War, left us with a dangerous mentality of triumphal exceptionalism. Even now, we think we are immune to the epochal hazards of history. The notion that nothing really bad can happen to us is reflected in the blind cluelessness of our current news media and their simple failure to report what is now happening.

I drove up along an obscure stretch of the upper Hudson river on Sunday, starting in the old factory town of Cohoes, north of Albany, where the Mohawk River runs into the Hudson. There is a powerful waterfall there, and along the high bank the massive old red-brick Harmony Mill still stands with its Victorian towers and mansard roofs, like a vision from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Behind them are streets of red-brick, three-story worker row-housing from the same period. Today they are inhabited by a different kind of poor people, not necessarily working, and probably suffering from a sheer lack of structure in their lives as well as plain poverty of means. These are people who probably don’t follow the Bloomberg financial bulletins, and their experience of a cratering economy may only be the rising cost of cigarettes and beer. … (07/30/08)
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Timothy Wilken, MD writes: I am pleased to announce the formation of  a new synergic organization, BIAS systems,
which will offer consultations, training and support on
a  continuing basis to those individuals seeking to
optimize the  efficiency and productivity within their own
organizations. Our primary tool will be the ORTEGRITY.

BIAS systems will be a research based company.  Synergy means working together and synergic science is the study of working together.
Our products were developed during twenty years of intensive
research on human intelligence, human behavior, human relationships and
human wellness working with hundreds of real people in high stress
environments and situations.

Our research revealed “that whenever humans experience conflict they lose access to their full intelligence“. 
When humans are confronted with conflict, their mind-brains shift to a
very primitive and highly reactive way of thinking called the survive mode. 
The survive mode evolved in the jungle to insure physical
survival.  Its primary skills are fighting and fleeing.  Its
extremes are rage and terror. 

All humans thinking in the survive mode will find their
intelligence to be severely limited.  Access is lost to the
faculties of reason and intuition.  In severe conflict, many of us
lose even our ability to speak.  Unfortunately, the survive mode
turns on with the slightest conflict, and instantly our intelligence
begins to decrease.  It is not simply on or off.  It is more
like the rheostat dimmer switch controlling a dining room light. 
A little conflict will produce a little loss of intelligence, while a
large conflict will produce a large loss of intelligence.  If we
remain in conflict for weeks, then we will operate at limited
intelligence for weeks.  And in full rage of terror, we humans
access only a tiny fraction of our potential intelligence.

Since human efficiency and productivity are derivatives of
human intelligence, conflict is to organizations as friction is to
machinery.

Our intial product is a “system of human organization that
creates a conflict-free environment for decision making and action
implementation”.  This BIAS environment will be based on the synergic organizing pattern called ORTEGRITY. This is an environment ergometrically engineered to best fit the human mind-brain.

The power of the BIAS environment results
from its conflict-free state.  It is this conflict-free state that
optimizes human intelligence and creativity.  It is this
conflict-free state that maximizes efficiency and productivity. 
It is this conflict-free state that increases the quality of
work-life.  It is the conflict-free state that allows all
relationships between all members to become win-win.

The  BIAS  environment will offer great advantage to all organizations both large and small.

The BIAS environment
is installed top down—a  complete installation would begin with
the CEO, and move down echelon by echelon to the rest of the
organization.  If the environment is elected for only part of an
organization i.e. the research and development laboratory, installation
would begin with the Director of Research and again move down to rest
of the staff.

Installation time could vary from a few weeks for a
small organization to several months for a larger organization. 
Once installed the BIAS consultant would withdraw leaving the environment under the full control of the client organization. (07/28/08)
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Bryan Appleyard writes: The greatest getting-and-spending spree in the history of the world
is about to end. The 200-year boom that gave citizens of the industrial
world levels of wealth, health and longevity beyond anything previously
known to humanity is threatened on every side. Oil is running out; the
climate is changing at a potentially catastrophic rate; wars over
scarce resources are brewing; finally, most shocking of all, we don’t
seem to be having enough ideas about how to fix any of these things.

It’s
been said before, of course: people are always saying the world will
end and it never does.

Maybe it won’t this time, either. But, frankly,
it’s not looking good. Almost daily, new evidence is emerging that
progress can no longer be taken for granted, that a new Dark Age is
lying in wait for ourselves and our children.

To understand how
this could happen, it is necessary to grasp just how extraordinary, how
utterly unprecedented are the privileges we in the developed world
enjoy now. Born today, you could expect to live 25 to 30 years longer
than your Victorian forebears, up to 45 years longer than your medieval
ancestors and at least 55 years longer than your Stone Age precursors.
It is highly unlikely that your birth will kill you or your mother or
that, in later life, you will suffer typhoid, plague, smallpox,
dysentery, polio, or dentistry without anaesthetic.

You will enjoy a
standard of living that would have glazed the eyes of the Emperor Nero,
thanks to the 2% annual economic growth rate sustained by the developed
world since the industrial revolution.

You will have access to greater
knowledge than Aristotle could begin to imagine, and to technical
resources that would stupefy Leonardo da Vinci.

You will know a world
whose scale and variety would induce agoraphobia in Alexander the
Great. You should experience relative peace thanks to the absolute
technological superiority of the industrialised world over its enemies
and, with luck and within reason, you should be able to write and say
anything you like, a luxury denied to almost all other human beings,
dead or alive.

Finally, as this artificially extended sojourn in
paradise comes to a close, you will attain oblivion in the certain
knowledge that, for your children, things can only get better. Such
staggering developments have convinced us that progress is a new law of
nature, something that happens to everything all the time. Microsoft is
always working on a better version of Windows. Today’s Nokia renders
yesterday’s obsolete, as does today’s Apple, Nike or Gillette.

Life
expectancy continues to rise. Cars go faster, planes fly further, and
one day, we are assured, cancer must yield. Whatever goes wrong in our
lives or the world, the march of progress continues regardless. Doesn’t
it? (07/28/08
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Frank Rich writes: It almost seems like a gag worthy of “Borat”: A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners. But to dismiss Barack Obama’s magical mystery tour through old Europe and two war zones as a media-made fairy tale would be to underestimate the ingenious politics of the moment. History was on the march well before Mr. Obama boarded his plane, and his trip was perfectly timed to reap the whirlwind.

He never would have been treated as a president-in-waiting by heads of state or network talking heads if all he offered were charisma, slick rhetoric and stunning visuals. What drew them instead was the raw power Mr. Obama has amassed: the power to start shaping events and the power to move markets, including TV ratings. (Even “Access Hollywood” mustered a 20 percent audience jump by hosting the Obama family.) Power begets more power, absolutely.

The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”

Never mind. This election remains about the present and the future, where Iraq’s $10 billion a month drain on American pocketbooks and military readiness is just one moving part in a matrix of national crises stretching from the gas pump to Pakistan. That’s the high-rolling political casino where Mr. Obama amassed the chips he cashed in last week. The “change” that he can at times wield like a glib marketing gimmick is increasingly becoming a substantive reality - sometimes through Mr. Obama’s instigation, sometimes by luck. Obama-branded change is snowballing, whether it’s change you happen to believe in or not.

Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidate’s flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago. …

The election remains Mr. Obama’s to lose, and he could lose it, whether
through unexpected events, his own vanity or a vice-presidential
misfire. But what we’ve learned this month is that America, our allies
and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obama’s
post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or
not. That’s some small comfort as we contemplate the strange
alternative offered by the Republicans: a candidate so oblivious to our
nation’s big challenges ahead that he is doubling down in his campaign
against both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Obama to be elected commander in chief
of the surge. (07/28/08)
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Danny Schechter writes: It isn’t looking good—and, even now, the two presumptive major party
presidential candidates are talking about everything but this deepening
crisis. They are debating terrorists and Afghanistan and how to meander
out of Iraq but not the reality that so many Americans are living with:
a squeeze that is leaving so many of us broke, in deeper and deeper
debt and disgusted.

Until now, the doom and gloomsters were mostly to be found in the
margins, in financial blogs or in the campaigns of Ron Paul, Ralph
Nader or the Greens. The mainstream media has been looking the other
way and mostly downplaying the unfolding disaster. Even as foreclosures
double, and the price of gas and food rises sharply, it’s been business
as usual on the business pages, and among the liberal political pundits
who would rather debate the cover of the New Yorker than the growing
desperation of so many Americans.

The Congress finally passed a housing bill a year into the crisis with
most of the money allocated to try to shore up two housing agencies
with more than a half a trillion in housing assets.  The markets are
melting down with more major stocks tanking, banks writing off still
more billions. and unemployment rising.

People in the know like George Soros are saying this is the worst
financial crisis since the depression. Others fear another depression.
This pessimism has reached Newsweek, a guardian of conventional wisdom,
which now says “It’s Worse Than You Think, writingÖ “this downturn is
likely to last longer than the eight-month-long recession of 2001.
While the U.S. financial system processes popped stock bubbles quickly,
it has always taken longer to hack through the overhang of bad debt.
The head winds that drove the economy into this dead calm- a housing
and credit crisis, and rising energy and food prices-have strengthened
rather than let up in recent months. To aggravate matters, the twin
crises that dominate the financial news-a credit crunch and the global
commodity boom-are blunting the stimulus efforts.”

We have two challenges: understanding the gravity of what is
threatening us, and then discussing what could or should be done.  We
might also want to think about what the press should be reporting and
what policy makers should be proposing. …

Are we dealing with just another market mistake, the latest bubble
gone bust in a volatile business cycle or a straining system on the
verge of breakdown? Can we solve all this with an Alka-Seltzer-like
infusion of new taxes or regulations?

Or, is Gerry Gold, economics editor of the UK’s A World to Win,
right when he argues, “The urgency of building a movement to replace
capital, not to rescue it, cannot be overstated. This will mean a major
program extending social ownership to all sectors of the economy,
ending the distribution of profits to shareholders, and replacing the
system of selling labor for wages with collective decision-making about
the distribution of an organization’s income.”

Pie in the sky?  Or is the sky really falling, made worse by global
warming, wars without end, and resource depletion? If Obama or McCain
are to “fix” what’s broken, they better start talking about it. And
once they inevitably do, will either one of them, once elected, be able
to overcome Congressional inertia and the power of corporate/finance
industry lobbies?

If the rest of us see what’s coming, we better speak up too. Remember,
when you see something say something? It’s also time to do more than
talk. (07/28/08)

David Chernushenko writes: The town of Freiamt generates its entire electricity needs from
locally owned renewable sources, and then sells a 30 per cent surplus
to generate revenue.

Freiamt is a cluster of villages of 4,300 people in the Black
Forest. Its economy is dominated by farming, tourism and small-scale
forestry. For the burghers of Freiamt, questions of “the environment”
come down to how to ensure that the soil, forests, water, air and
natural beauty of the region are preserved and yet still harnessed to
maximize economic and social benefit.

The same converging forces threatening towns and cities globally
(shrinking natural resources, peaking supplies of oil and uranium,
climate change and tightening competition for all of these as a result
of population growth), make Freiamt as potentially vulnerable as any
other community. But vulnerable is not in the vocabulary of the people
of Freiamt.

For the last five years, Freiamt has been pursuing the goal of total
energy self-sufficiency. While the strategy is still young, it is
clearly working, in a way that defies conventional beliefs, not just in
Canada and the rest of the G8, but in parts of Germany as well. At
least those parts that still believe that energy security lies in big
generation stations, big energy companies and big investment.

Proving that “small is beautiful,” Freiamt generates so much power
from its small-scale renewable sources that it is turning an annual
profit. It did so by adding four wind turbines and 800 rooftop
photovoltaic systems to its existing small-scale hydro and biomass
installations. Freiamt now generates 13 million kilowatt hours of
power. Since it only consumes 10 million locally, the surplus three
million are sold to other parts of Germany via the national grid,
generating income for residents and businesses. (07/28/08)
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Jim Goodman writes: I decided years ago that I didn’t want my farming operation to get bigger. I liked milking 45 cows, raising their feed and doing a little direct marketing. I liked being small.

“Hopelessly behind the times,” I was told. Local cheese makers were giving up, local meat processing was a thing of the past. Small farming was dead. The developing world couldn’t feed itself and needed industrial farming systems.

Who could argue with the Green Revolution? Until the current food crisis. It’s not so much a shortage of food, but a shortage of cheap food. The poor can’t afford to eat and the middle class feels the pinch. Why wasn’t industrial agriculture, farming fence row to fence row, feeding the world?

There’s the rub — feeding the world was never the intention. Back in the ’70s well-meaning researchers and eager graduate students, myself included, were convinced we could eliminate hunger in our lifetime. We had good intentions, but the big picture was always about making a profit.

Farmers, using cheap fuel, fertilizer and plenty of chemicals, could plant more acres, produce enough volume and generally make a profit. This, of course, benefited the seed and chemical companies, which long ago figured out that small farmers saving their own seed and tending small acreages didn’t spend much money.

The big meat packers and dairy processors anticipated the end of local processing. Their market share increased and they grew larger. By breaking the labor unions, they could pay lower wages, bring in immigrant workers, increase profits and grow even larger.

It was a grand plan. Agribusiness corporations were increasing profit margins quarter after quarter. The bigger they grew, the better it worked. Prices paid for animals, milk and grain fell as farms grew larger and produced more. Small farmers couldn’t compete as per unit profit margins fell and only the larger producers could survive.

Oil prices went up and farmers were urged to grow more corn for ethanol. More land went into corn production, wheat acreage fell, speculation pushed prices up and food prices soared. The International Monetary Fund estimates that 50 percent of the increase in food price was due to ethanol production. Instead of feeding the world, industrial agriculture starves it.

While oil companies banked huge profits, people lost their homes, jobs and farms. We have become too dependent on globalization and the big corporations that control it.

Small is the future. We know indigenous farmers can produce more food using traditional farming methods. They have no need of genetically modified seed or chemicals. All they need is an end to wars and, as Frances Moore Lappe would say, “more democracy.” The World Bank and the G-8 need to let them make their own decisions and feed themselves. (07/28/08)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: The comprehensive bankruptcy of the United States, at every level,
in all corners, atop each hill and mole-hill, and down not a few
rat-holes, is preceding like some kind of hideous multi-media,
inter-dimensional cosmic grand opera as produced and directed by the
Devil. Every week, some bizarre new subplot is introduced by the stage
managers, each turn and twist geared to produce maximum pain and
carnage in the US economy, as if to foreclose any possibility of
redemption on the way down. Well, the absence of hope is, after all,
the essential nature of Hell (setting aside, for the moment, J.P.
Sartre’s quaint notion that Hell is other people).

Among
the many developments in the story last week was the solidifying
consensus that the nation is in really serious trouble, and the
noticeable slippage of legitimacy among those pretending to run
financial affairs. The howler of the week was the Securities and
Exchange Commission’s edict that Wall Street sportsters would be
prohibited from trafficking in so-called “naked short” sales against a
cherry-picked bunch of 19 banks and financial companies for the next
two weeks. A cute trick, naked shorting is done by pretending to borrow
a bunch of stocks, pretending to sell them high just before the
share-price falls, pretending to buy them back at a lower price when
the share price has fallen, and then pretending to return exactly the
same number of lower-priced shares to the lender, pocketing the
difference. Real shorting is cute enough, and involves “clearing” the
sales — i.e. proving that real stocks were really lent and really
returned. Shorting is helped along by generating rumors that a given
company is in trouble, thus nudging share prices down. This works
really well when a company already is known to be struggling, as many
now are. In fact, it usually works best when a struggle turns into a
feeding-frenzy — as when a bleeding mullet attracts the swarming
sharks. When this scam is run using odd-lots of millions and
tens-of-millions of shares sharked up at many dollars each, the profits
to be made in this sport is obviously huge.

With naked shorting, however, the stocks being shorted are
basically non-existent, imaginary, made-up, fictional, registered only
as pixels in a program. It’s a racket, pure and simple, run by both the
supposed borrower of the stocks and the supposed lender and, more to
the point, was wholly and absolutely against the law before the SEC
declared a selective holiday from it last week. So, what the SEC action
really demonstrates is the utter lawlessness reigning on Wall Street,
and the SEC’s singular unfitness as an enforcer of the laws, not to
mention the criminal irresponsibility of the clearing authorities who
only pretend to go through the motions of certifying the sales. What’s
more, the companies cherry-picked for immunity against shorting were
some of the very companies believed to be most active in profiting off
naked short sales against other companies.

Thus, the
credibility of all the authorities in American finance, including the
Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Paulson, the head of the Federal
Reserve, Mr. Bernanke, the director of the SEC, Mr. Cox, takes on the
aroma of week-old dead carp, while the affairs of American banking and
business as a general proposition look to the rest of the world like a
simple looting operation, reflecting poorly on the paper certificates
that we use as “money” in the land of the free. (07/25/08)
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Sharon Astyk writes: A student in my class asked me for a list of skills we need to get ready for peak oil, prioritized. I admit, it took me about a day after she asked to stop thinking “Holy Crap, how do I figure that all out!”  But it is an interesting question.  And while it isn’t all just about food preservation, I thought I’d take a shot at it. I will, of course, be relying on my fearless readership to point out gaps in my thinking.

Now I’m not going to get everything, but it did occur to me that we could break it down a bit, and then subcategorize.  So what the heck, here goes.  In order of priority - the main categories are numbered, and the skills in each category are lettered.  I’m going to do this in several posts, so that I don’t go mad.  But here’s the beginnings of my list.

1. How not to panic.

- This is probably the most important skill set - when stuff gets hard, you need to focus and do what needs doing.  In order to do this, you need:
a. To feel like you are able to handle things, because you have mental contigency plans and you have built trust in your own competence.  The best way to get this skill is to plan, to talk and think out scenarios so you would know what you would do, and to practice doing things until you are reasonably confident that not only can you do familiar things, but you can learn new ones as you go.

b. To have the skills to control your own reactions - these may be strong.  You need to be able to put your anger, or grief or fear to the side long enough to make everyone safe and to meet immediate needs.  Meditation, biofeedback or simple compartmentalizing may help with this.  It is also extremely useful to develop the ability to accept that sometimes you will make mistakes and fail at things, and that that isn’t the end of the world.

c.  To help other people remain calm, respond appropriately, and find a role for themselves. Some kind of leadership training, Community Reponse training or just practice organizing people. Some folks are not good at this - if you can’t be a leader, that’s ok - maybe your job is to find someone who is totally losing it and help them stabilize.  Certainly, knowing how to help your immediate family and neighbors, thinking about how they may respond and how to help them.  For children, it might be helpful to give them some training, or plan out specific jobs for them to do to help them feel powerful and useful.

2. How to learn things - and how to teach them

You are never going to learn every useful skill.  It won’t happen.  It is very helpful, though if you figure out how you and members of your family learn, and think about how you might make it easy for you and your family to learn more things as you need to - if you are a book person, get books.  If you need diagrams, get diagrams.  If you learn best from people, find out who knows what in your area.  But the basic skills of learning things are all pretty much the same - most of us can learn to do almost anything.  So learning how to learn - how to research an issue, how to pick up a physical skill, how to help another person do that, how to analyze a problem and find a solution, how to avoid major errors of logic, and what the necessary basic tools are will really help you expand your skill set.

3. How to get along with everyone else.

I sometimes get emails from people telling me that everyone around them is an asshole, and that they can’t possibly get along with their neighbors. Now once in a while that is actually true - there are horrible places and circumstances in the world.  But if someone tells me that there’s no one in their whole town who they can be friends with, that everyone is ignorant or mean or self-centered - the most likely scenario is that the person talking isn’t very good at getting along with others.  Now I don’t mean that people who are content without a large community are necessarily bad at this - some people are just introverts.  And some people who are bad at getting along in the course of things either can do better in a crisis, can find one role they can fit into, or can be protected by their families, who can get along with them.  But if you aren’t great at getting along, learning to be tolerant, learning to listen, learning to like other people even when they seem weird, and perhaps most importantly, learning to judge them gently (and I am not the natural master of any of these skills either) is really, really important.  Do it now.  This is especially important if you have trouble getting along with your relatives, and might end up with them. (07/25/08)
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