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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Aaron Newton writes: In his book, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, economist and former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, suggests that between 1966 and 1990, 80 million Soviet farmers urbanized stalling grain production and putting pressure on the government to use revenue from oil and natural gas production to buy grain from abroad. When fossil fuel production did not expand in such a way that provided increased profits for purchasing food the Soviets had to borrow foreign money to buy bread. Loans from the West came with strings attached. Those offering the credit demanded that the Soviets no longer use force to keep their states in line and political collapse, not famine, visited The USSR.

Interestingly Mr. Gaidar doesn’t seem to suggest that the collapse of his country happened because a large portion of the population moved from the countryside into the cities and stopped growing their own grain. Instead he seems to place the bulk of the blame for collapse on economics- on the inability of the Soviets to feed themselves not because there weren’t enough people growing grain in that country but because of their inability to buy enough grain from other people to feed themselves because of decreasing oil and natural gas revenues. The idea that the Soviet collapse was due in part to the fact that the Soviet Union gave up on its capacity for food self sufficiency (food sovereignty) in an effort to pursue industrialization seems absent from his theory. All of this has interesting implications for the United States regarding our own food sovereignty as the rising cost of food means more people are priced out of a healthy diet.

Here in the United States about 40% of our population farmed for a living around the turn of the 20th century. By 1950 that number had dropped to 12%. Today fewer than 2% do the work of growing food in America as we too have industrialized and urbanized our population. The other 98% of us work at a job which provides us money that allows us to buy food from a small number of domestic producers and from others who grow it abroad. We have given up our own food sovereignty as a people and instead rely almost entirely on an economic system to provide us with meals.

Should we be pleased that the USSR shifted from a rural population towards a more urban population and were then unable to feed themselves leaving their leaders no choice but to consent to revolution in the face of a starving population and no way to pay for food? Maybe. But that is an oversimplification of the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Countries don’t collapse for any single reason but because of a host of pressures. However the agricultural situation surrounding the Soviet collapse suggests that America should be asking herself some questions. If the economic system in the United States, an economic system based on growth, runs up against a depletion of resources that physically slows or stops our ability to grow economically, will we face a similar collapse? Could our nation, like the Soviet Union, come to regret our willingness to hand over our food sovereignty? Will fewer jobs mean less food? If the American economy of growth falters, how will the 98% of non-farmers be able to buy bread? Are we in for a revolution when a certain percentage of the American people are unable to buy food? (07/25/08)
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Aaron Newton writes: The notion of our standard work week here in America has remained
largely the same since 1938. That was the year the Fair Labor Standards
Act was passed, standardizing the eight hour work day and the 40 hour
work week.

Each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday workers
all over the country wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to
work. But the notion that the majority of the workforce should keep
these hours is based on nothing more than an idea put forth but the
Federal government almost 70 years ago.

To be sure it was an
improvement in the lives of many Americans who were at the time forced
to work 10+ hours a day, sometimes 6 days of the week. So a 40 hour
work week was seen as an upgrade in the lives of many of U.S. citizens.
8 is a nice round number; one third of each 24 hour day. In theory it
leaves 8 hours for sleep and 8 hours for other activities like eating,
bathing, raising children and enjoying life. But the notion that we
should work for 5 of these days in a row before taking 2 for ourselves
is, as best I can tell, rather arbitrary.

The idea of a shorter work week is not a new one to anyone old
enough to have lived through the energy shocks of the 1970’s. It should
be fairly obvious to anyone interested in conserving oil that reducing
the number of daily commutes per week would reduce the overall demand
for oil. There are about 133 million workers in America. Around 80% of
them get to work by driving alone in a car. The average commute covers
about 16 miles each way.

So let’s stop and do some math…and I’ll try to argue for 16 reasons why a four day work week is a good idea.

The math, as I see it, goes as thus (I welcome a discussion of these numbers, by the way…):
133,000,000 workers X 80% who drive alone = 106,400,000 single driver commuter cars each day.

106,400,000 X 32 miles round trip = 3,404,800,000 miles driven to work each day

3,404,800,000 / 21 mpg (average fuel efficiency) = 162,133,333 gallons of gasoline each day

Each barrel of crude oil produces, on average, 19.5 gallons of gas. (It is important to note that other products like kerosene and asphalt are produced from that same barrel.)

162,133,333 / 19.5 = 8,314,530 barrels of oil each day.

What this shows is Reason #1; the impact a 4 day work week could have on crude oil imports. I’m talking about a reduction (5-10%? and perhaps even more–ED by PG) in the amount of oil we need Monday through Friday simply by rearranging our work week. No wonder this idea was utilized in the 70’s.

But the clear fact that a 4 day work week would save such a precious non-renewable resource is just the first of 16 reasons why I think it’s time to revive the idea of reducing the numbers of days we work each week.  (07/25/08)
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BBC Technology – Hewlett Packard is up to two years away from starting to build a “central nervous system for the Earth”, known as CeNSE. The man leading this ambitious project is Dr Stan Williams, who runs HP’s Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory.

“The motivation for this work is realising and understanding the planet is sick and the disease is us,” he told BBC News. “As information technology people, we are not going to be the ones who proscribe and administer the cure but we should be the people who provide the information required to do proper diagnosis and treatment.”

And just as a doctor would use a barrage of tests to find out what ails a patient, so Dr Williams believes he and HP can do the same in finding out what is going wrong with our environment and offering solutions to problems before they turn into disasters. …

For HP’s central nervous system to become a reality, Dr Williams said the world had to be covered with sensors. “We can and should be able to make these sensors by the billions and eventually even trillions using these highly integrated manufacturing processes that have been developed for the computer chip industry and the electronics industry,” he said.  “This should drive the cost of the units very low and eventually down to pennies meaning you can afford to deploy very large numbers in a system.”

Once that happens, the technology becomes affordable for everyone from farms to grocery stores and from government agencies to environmental groups. Dr. Williams explains: “We can get into this whole stewardship process and many tools we develop for high end business customers could be used by groups to tell us what is the health of our environment. How are our lakes and streams doing? What about our forests? [The technology] would help us manage those assets for the good of society.”

HP is already courting companies to persuade them to be the first to use the technology. Field tests are due to start in the next 12-18 months. (07/25/08)
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