10/30/2007
10/26/2007
10/17/2007
What and Who Are the Middle Class?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21272238/page/3/
I often wonder this nowadays. While I don't necessarily agree with everything the writer talks about (the benefits of globalization, etc) but I think it's an interesting perspective on a widespread phenomenon... the blurring of the middle class and the widening gap between the fabulously wealthy and dirt poor.
I often wonder this nowadays. While I don't necessarily agree with everything the writer talks about (the benefits of globalization, etc) but I think it's an interesting perspective on a widespread phenomenon... the blurring of the middle class and the widening gap between the fabulously wealthy and dirt poor.
10/11/2007
"The Odyssey Years"
a work in progress.. thought I'd post it anyways.... a review and critique of a New York Times editorial
The Odyssey Years
It always feels like a slap in the face when the older generations take a hard look at us, like David Brooks does in this New York Times editorial. They like to generalize us as value-less, spirit-less, deluded brats because we're reluctant to take the same brainwashing they took, reluctant to accept corporate wage-slavery, and reluctant to have the same soap shoved in our mouths they did after the failure of their "cultural revolution." We are seen as apathetic and lazy in the eyes of the aging workforce, but perhaps that is because we feel like we actually can defeat the conformity that they fell into after Reagan convinced them that greed was good again.
What these articles critiquing the Millennium Generation have most in common is that they always relate everything (they almost center around) our position in the workforce, as a reluctant source of labor. Sure, girls are getting more college degrees than boys these days and nobody's shoveling shit now that computers allow us more intelligent pursuits, but we're still treated as something of a passive proletariat. Now that everyone has a college degree, the market is flooded with qualified applicants, and as Brooks points out in his article, there is in fact increasing competition for an ever-decreasing market of good opportunities. In direct correlation with the widening rich-poor gap in this country, job opportunities too are following this trend, with the few cushy opportunities out there going to the few well-connected shining stars out there, while the rest of us are relegated to entry-level temp jobs in the "information" industry--which in reality is more of a data-entry industry (as anyone familiar with Excel knows).
Consumption
Just as the growth of the commodity-culture of last century directly correlated with the growth of a proletariat of commodity-producers, today we can see a relationship between the veritable tsunami of information that exploded in the last decade and the increase of mundane, repetitive information-industry jobs that provide, at once, the producers and consumers of useless streams of information. Because every book in the Library of Congress is now online and every event that happens on the surface of the earth is recorded and posted on You-Tube, there is a huge industry in place that attempts to manage that information. The management of this information--and the subsequent editorializing, promoting, and publishing of this information--is the new assembly-line culture of the American workforce. We are freed from the strains of hard manual labor and instead placed at the foot of an enormous cascade of information.
The incredible boom in commodity production of the 20th century is continuing in the 21st as consumable information. Whereas before the model was a five-day work-week producing commodities and a two-day weekend of consuming them as entertainment (buying an Airstream, taking a weekend trip to the car-show, and gulping Big-Macs), now we have entire industries popping up that produce fresh digital content 24 hours a day, and are consumed during the times when workers are not producing them.
For example, a you-tube video of a horribe bike-accident is posted online, copied onto a blog, where it is discovered by "culture monitors" for a major ad-sponsored website who editorializes it, increasing it's popularity to the point where it is further editorialized by numerous ad-sponsored publications, picked up as a spot on VH1's "Best Week Ever," lampooned in sketches on comedy programs, adapted as a screenplay, and turned into a star-studded feature comedy. An entire economy based around an intangible digital object--employing thousands who produce quick, meaningless "entertainment"--all hoping to profit from the temporary relevance of their content. All of it thrown away days later to make way for new meaningless content in the name of generating the cultural capital advertisers are willing to pay for.
Whereas the paradigm of the 20th century was of an ever-increasing materialism, what Marx predicted as Commodity Fetishism--in which the growth of capital depended on the idea that people needed to consume more and more commodities in order to "survive" in modern society--the 21st century paradigm will be one of an ever-increasing consumption of abstract ideas, a "Cultural"* Fetishism, if you will, in which people will need to consume more and more cultural texts (tv shows, websites, new books, etc) in order to survive in the new economy--to stay relevant in modern society. We can already see this in the exploding DVD collections of any of our friends: the accumulation of cultural texts gives their owner an increased cultural capital (a knowledge of what's current, cool, and relevant). Thus: whereas previous generations succumbed to the fetishism of the commodity--allowing their possessions to define their identity--contemporary society is allowing a fetishism of "culture" to permeate our perceptions of who people are, depending less on their material possessions and more on what forms of culture they consume.
This is not to say that the age of American materialism is over. The commodity culture that began with the assembly lines of the last century is still as powerful as ever, if not more powerful (as evidenced by massive consumer-goods outlet stores and the explosion of the Amazons and Ebays), but the actual production of these goods is no longer an element of American life. The production of commodities--for Americans at least--has been automated or sent to the proletariats of third-world societies, leaving an entire American workforce to fend in the world of information--thus consuming more of it to validate their position.
Because of the distinct lack of production jobs available to the masses (one look at the dying city of Detroit illustrates this phenomenon), an entire population of people is now forced into a much more competitive world of information jobs that require a college education and a fairly advanced knowledge of technology--thereby reducing the undergraduate diploma to a status once reserved for a high-school diploma, and making post-graduate education an absolute necessity for anyone who wishes to advance beyond the mindless pseudo-creativity of the entry and mid-level information jobs.
One factor that does remain, despite the paradigm shift from material commodities to info-modities, is the fact that ratio of the amounts of commodities produced and consumed by the vast majority of workers, favors not the actual producers of commodities, but the gatekeepers of media. For example, I spend five days a week producing recyclable ad-copy for my corporate media company (who makes a profit off of my "creativity" and pays me the lowest possible competitive wage) and only have two days a week to consume such recyclable information myself. The time and effort I contributed to the information economy is not fully returned by my consumption. Thus I have been exploited. Given this deficit of effort and reward, I as a worker am left to validate my existence (as a member of the new proletariat creative class) by consuming more temporal creative goods. I am forced to stay current by consuming news and culture publications. It is a cycle that keeps me from pursuing more fulfilling directions...
This deficit--the need to validate existence through consumption of culture--is the illusion that we are leading fulfilling, productive existences. This illusion is easily discovered when you look at how genuinely unsatisfying the work, and the products are--how nothing stands up to the test of time, how humor is now so intrinsically tied to current events (rather than the human condition) that we can barely understand the referents of many jokes, how blockbuster movies once praised are viewed as dated and corny just months after their release.
Of course, the information we create is not owned by us, just as the commodities of the past were not owned by their producers. The commodities we produce fall into the hands of the media gatekeepers that control and manipulate the "free" flow of information.
Career managers and conservative political theorists seem confounded by the fact that few of us want to dig-in for years of working our way up to cozy positions--instead favoring instant gratification or no gratification at all...
okay, so that's just the start of something that will eventually become clear in my head. please PLEASE comment on this article because i need all the dialog i can get!!!!!
The Odyssey Years
It always feels like a slap in the face when the older generations take a hard look at us, like David Brooks does in this New York Times editorial. They like to generalize us as value-less, spirit-less, deluded brats because we're reluctant to take the same brainwashing they took, reluctant to accept corporate wage-slavery, and reluctant to have the same soap shoved in our mouths they did after the failure of their "cultural revolution." We are seen as apathetic and lazy in the eyes of the aging workforce, but perhaps that is because we feel like we actually can defeat the conformity that they fell into after Reagan convinced them that greed was good again.
What these articles critiquing the Millennium Generation have most in common is that they always relate everything (they almost center around) our position in the workforce, as a reluctant source of labor. Sure, girls are getting more college degrees than boys these days and nobody's shoveling shit now that computers allow us more intelligent pursuits, but we're still treated as something of a passive proletariat. Now that everyone has a college degree, the market is flooded with qualified applicants, and as Brooks points out in his article, there is in fact increasing competition for an ever-decreasing market of good opportunities. In direct correlation with the widening rich-poor gap in this country, job opportunities too are following this trend, with the few cushy opportunities out there going to the few well-connected shining stars out there, while the rest of us are relegated to entry-level temp jobs in the "information" industry--which in reality is more of a data-entry industry (as anyone familiar with Excel knows).
Consumption
"When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society. Clark Kerr, one of the foremost ideologues of this tendency, has calculated that the complex process of production, distribution and consumption of knowledge already gets 29% of the yearly national product in the United States; and he predicts that in the second half of this century culture will be the driving force in the development of the economy, a role played by the automobile in the first half of this century, and by railroads in the second half of the previous century."
-Guy Debord "Society of the Spectacle" # 193 (1967)
Just as the growth of the commodity-culture of last century directly correlated with the growth of a proletariat of commodity-producers, today we can see a relationship between the veritable tsunami of information that exploded in the last decade and the increase of mundane, repetitive information-industry jobs that provide, at once, the producers and consumers of useless streams of information. Because every book in the Library of Congress is now online and every event that happens on the surface of the earth is recorded and posted on You-Tube, there is a huge industry in place that attempts to manage that information. The management of this information--and the subsequent editorializing, promoting, and publishing of this information--is the new assembly-line culture of the American workforce. We are freed from the strains of hard manual labor and instead placed at the foot of an enormous cascade of information.
The incredible boom in commodity production of the 20th century is continuing in the 21st as consumable information. Whereas before the model was a five-day work-week producing commodities and a two-day weekend of consuming them as entertainment (buying an Airstream, taking a weekend trip to the car-show, and gulping Big-Macs), now we have entire industries popping up that produce fresh digital content 24 hours a day, and are consumed during the times when workers are not producing them.
For example, a you-tube video of a horribe bike-accident is posted online, copied onto a blog, where it is discovered by "culture monitors" for a major ad-sponsored website who editorializes it, increasing it's popularity to the point where it is further editorialized by numerous ad-sponsored publications, picked up as a spot on VH1's "Best Week Ever," lampooned in sketches on comedy programs, adapted as a screenplay, and turned into a star-studded feature comedy. An entire economy based around an intangible digital object--employing thousands who produce quick, meaningless "entertainment"--all hoping to profit from the temporary relevance of their content. All of it thrown away days later to make way for new meaningless content in the name of generating the cultural capital advertisers are willing to pay for.
Whereas the paradigm of the 20th century was of an ever-increasing materialism, what Marx predicted as Commodity Fetishism--in which the growth of capital depended on the idea that people needed to consume more and more commodities in order to "survive" in modern society--the 21st century paradigm will be one of an ever-increasing consumption of abstract ideas, a "Cultural"* Fetishism, if you will, in which people will need to consume more and more cultural texts (tv shows, websites, new books, etc) in order to survive in the new economy--to stay relevant in modern society. We can already see this in the exploding DVD collections of any of our friends: the accumulation of cultural texts gives their owner an increased cultural capital (a knowledge of what's current, cool, and relevant). Thus: whereas previous generations succumbed to the fetishism of the commodity--allowing their possessions to define their identity--contemporary society is allowing a fetishism of "culture" to permeate our perceptions of who people are, depending less on their material possessions and more on what forms of culture they consume.
This is not to say that the age of American materialism is over. The commodity culture that began with the assembly lines of the last century is still as powerful as ever, if not more powerful (as evidenced by massive consumer-goods outlet stores and the explosion of the Amazons and Ebays), but the actual production of these goods is no longer an element of American life. The production of commodities--for Americans at least--has been automated or sent to the proletariats of third-world societies, leaving an entire American workforce to fend in the world of information--thus consuming more of it to validate their position.
Because of the distinct lack of production jobs available to the masses (one look at the dying city of Detroit illustrates this phenomenon), an entire population of people is now forced into a much more competitive world of information jobs that require a college education and a fairly advanced knowledge of technology--thereby reducing the undergraduate diploma to a status once reserved for a high-school diploma, and making post-graduate education an absolute necessity for anyone who wishes to advance beyond the mindless pseudo-creativity of the entry and mid-level information jobs.
One factor that does remain, despite the paradigm shift from material commodities to info-modities, is the fact that ratio of the amounts of commodities produced and consumed by the vast majority of workers, favors not the actual producers of commodities, but the gatekeepers of media. For example, I spend five days a week producing recyclable ad-copy for my corporate media company (who makes a profit off of my "creativity" and pays me the lowest possible competitive wage) and only have two days a week to consume such recyclable information myself. The time and effort I contributed to the information economy is not fully returned by my consumption. Thus I have been exploited. Given this deficit of effort and reward, I as a worker am left to validate my existence (as a member of the new proletariat creative class) by consuming more temporal creative goods. I am forced to stay current by consuming news and culture publications. It is a cycle that keeps me from pursuing more fulfilling directions...
This deficit--the need to validate existence through consumption of culture--is the illusion that we are leading fulfilling, productive existences. This illusion is easily discovered when you look at how genuinely unsatisfying the work, and the products are--how nothing stands up to the test of time, how humor is now so intrinsically tied to current events (rather than the human condition) that we can barely understand the referents of many jokes, how blockbuster movies once praised are viewed as dated and corny just months after their release.
Of course, the information we create is not owned by us, just as the commodities of the past were not owned by their producers. The commodities we produce fall into the hands of the media gatekeepers that control and manipulate the "free" flow of information.
Career managers and conservative political theorists seem confounded by the fact that few of us want to dig-in for years of working our way up to cozy positions--instead favoring instant gratification or no gratification at all...
okay, so that's just the start of something that will eventually become clear in my head. please PLEASE comment on this article because i need all the dialog i can get!!!!!
Human-Powered Trip Around the World
This guy traveled around the world by kayak, bike, rollerblades, and on foot. All the way around the world.
10/08/2007
Protecting Mountain Gorillas
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6983572.stm
A diary following the struggles of two park rangers attempting to protect mountain gorillas (and survive) in the midst of civil war in the DR Congo
I know we wanted to profile a gorilla conservationist... if memory serves me correctly
A diary following the struggles of two park rangers attempting to protect mountain gorillas (and survive) in the midst of civil war in the DR Congo
I know we wanted to profile a gorilla conservationist... if memory serves me correctly
10/05/2007
10/03/2007
Internationale Situationiste Online
All twelve issues of the Internationale Situationiste are now online.. in English!
"For us, surrealism has been only a beginning of a revolutionary experiment in culture, an experiment that almost immediately ground to a practical and theoretical halt. We have to go further. Why is becoming a surrealist no longer a meaningful option? Not because of the ruling class's constant encouragement of "avant-garde" movements to dissociate themselves from the scandalous aspects of surrealism. (This encouragement is not made in the name of promoting originality at all costs -- how could it be, when the ruling order has nothing really new to propose to us, nothing going beyond surrealism? On the contrary, the bourgeoisie stands ready to applaud any regressions we might lapse into.) If we are not surrealists, it is because surrealism has become a total bore.
Decrepit surrealism, raging and ill-informed youth, well-off adolescent rebels without perspectives (though certainly not without a cause) -- boredom is what they all have in common. The situationists will execute the judgment that contemporary leisure is pronouncing against itself." - from "The Sound and the Fury" issue #1
Read #7 and Despair, Young Men
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070622-000002.xml
7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
For nearly a quarter of a century, criminologists have known about the "age-crime curve." In every society at all historical times, the tendency to commit crimes and other risk-taking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off in middle age.
This curve is not limited to crime. The same age profile characterizes every quantifiable human behavior that is public (i.e., perceived by many potential mates) and costly (i.e., not affordable by all sexual competitors). The relationship between age and productivity among male jazz musicians, male painters, male writers, and male scientists—which might be called the "age-genius curve"—is essentially the same as the age-crime curve. Their productivity—the expressions of their genius—quickly peaks in early adulthood, and then equally quickly declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius curve among their female counterparts is much less pronounced; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.
Paul McCartney has not written a hit song in years, and now spends much of his time painting. Bill Gates is now a respectable businessman and philanthropist, and is no longer a computer whiz kid. J.D. Salinger now lives as a total recluse and has not published anything in more than three decades. Orson Welles was a mere 26 when he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane.
A single theory can explain the productivity of both creative geniuses and criminals over the life course: Both crime and genius are expressions of young men's competitive desires, whose ultimate function in the ancestral environment would have been to increase reproductive success.
In the physical competition for mates, those who are competitive may act violently toward their male rivals. Men who are less inclined toward crime and violence may express their competitiveness through their creative activities.
The cost of competition, however, rises dramatically when a man has children, when his energies and resources are put to better use protecting and investing in them. The birth of the first child usually occurs several years after puberty because men need some time to accumulate sufficient resources and attain sufficient status to attract their first mate. There is therefore a gap of several years between the rapid rise in the benefits of competition and similarly rapid rise in its costs. Productivity rapidly declines in late adulthood as the costs of competition rise and cancel its benefits.
These calculations have been performed by natural and sexual selection, so to speak, which then equips male brains with a psychological mechanism to incline them to be increasingly competitive immediately after puberty and make them less competitive right after the birth of their first child. Men simply do not feel like acting violently, stealing, or conducting additional scientific experiments, or they just want to settle down after the birth of their child but they do not know exactly why.
The similarity between Bill Gates, Paul McCartney, and criminals—in fact, among all men throughout evolutionary history—points to an important concept in evolutionary biology: female choice.
Women often say no to men. Men have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them. Men have built (and destroyed) civilization in order to impress women, so that they might say yes.
7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
For nearly a quarter of a century, criminologists have known about the "age-crime curve." In every society at all historical times, the tendency to commit crimes and other risk-taking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off in middle age.
This curve is not limited to crime. The same age profile characterizes every quantifiable human behavior that is public (i.e., perceived by many potential mates) and costly (i.e., not affordable by all sexual competitors). The relationship between age and productivity among male jazz musicians, male painters, male writers, and male scientists—which might be called the "age-genius curve"—is essentially the same as the age-crime curve. Their productivity—the expressions of their genius—quickly peaks in early adulthood, and then equally quickly declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius curve among their female counterparts is much less pronounced; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.
Paul McCartney has not written a hit song in years, and now spends much of his time painting. Bill Gates is now a respectable businessman and philanthropist, and is no longer a computer whiz kid. J.D. Salinger now lives as a total recluse and has not published anything in more than three decades. Orson Welles was a mere 26 when he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane.
A single theory can explain the productivity of both creative geniuses and criminals over the life course: Both crime and genius are expressions of young men's competitive desires, whose ultimate function in the ancestral environment would have been to increase reproductive success.
In the physical competition for mates, those who are competitive may act violently toward their male rivals. Men who are less inclined toward crime and violence may express their competitiveness through their creative activities.
The cost of competition, however, rises dramatically when a man has children, when his energies and resources are put to better use protecting and investing in them. The birth of the first child usually occurs several years after puberty because men need some time to accumulate sufficient resources and attain sufficient status to attract their first mate. There is therefore a gap of several years between the rapid rise in the benefits of competition and similarly rapid rise in its costs. Productivity rapidly declines in late adulthood as the costs of competition rise and cancel its benefits.
These calculations have been performed by natural and sexual selection, so to speak, which then equips male brains with a psychological mechanism to incline them to be increasingly competitive immediately after puberty and make them less competitive right after the birth of their first child. Men simply do not feel like acting violently, stealing, or conducting additional scientific experiments, or they just want to settle down after the birth of their child but they do not know exactly why.
The similarity between Bill Gates, Paul McCartney, and criminals—in fact, among all men throughout evolutionary history—points to an important concept in evolutionary biology: female choice.
Women often say no to men. Men have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them. Men have built (and destroyed) civilization in order to impress women, so that they might say yes.
10/02/2007
"everything and nothing" by J.L. Borges translation
No one was in him; behind his countenance (that even through the bad paintings of the epoch resembled no other) and behind his words, which were copious, fantastic, and agitated, there was not more than a bit of cold, a dream not dreamt by anyone. At first, he believed that everyone was like him, but the subtle alienation of a companion to whom he had started to explain that emptiness revealed to him his error and left him feeling, forever, that an individual should not differ from the species. One time he thought that in books he would find remedy for his illness and so he learned the "little bit of Latin and less Greek" that a contemporary would speak of. Afterwards he considered that in the exercise of an elemental rite of humanity he could well find what he was looking for and he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway during a long June siesta. At twentysomething he went to London. Instinctively, he had already exercised the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that his condition of no one would not be discovered; in London he finds his destined profession, that of the actor, that in a scene, he plays at being another, before a congregation of people that play at taking him for that other. Histrionic tasks taught him a singular happiness, perhaps the first that he knew; but once the last verse had been applauded and the last corpse retired from the stage, the hateful taste of unreality fell over him again. He stopped being Ferrex or Tamburlaine and returned to being no one. Vexed, he took to imagining other heros and other tragic fables. Thus, while the body fulfilled its bodily destiny in London bawdyhouses and taverns, the soul that inhabited it was Caesar, who did not heed the augur's warning, and Juliet, who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the paramo with the witches who are also the Fates. No one was so many men like that man, who in likeness to the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the appearances of being. Sometimes, he left a confession in some corner of his work, certain that they would not decipher it; Richard affirms that in his one person, he plays the part of many, and Iago says with curious words "I am not what I am." The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and representing inspired in him famous passages.
20 years he persisted in that directed hallucination, but one morning he was overtaken by the surfeit and horror of being so many kings that die by the sword and so many ill-fated lovers that converge, diverge, and melodically agonize. That same day he resolved the sale of his theatre. Within a week he had returned to his native village, where he regained the trees and rivers of his childhood, and did not secure them to those other ones that his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions and Latin voices. He had to be someone; a retired impresario who had made his fortune and was now interested in loans, litigations, and interest payments. In that character he dictated the jejune testament that we know, from which he deliberately excluded all pathetic or literary strokes. His London friends used to visit his retreat, and he reprised for them the role of poet.
History adds that, before or after dying, he felt himself facing God and he told him: "I, who so many men have been in vain, want to be one man, and myself." The voice of God answered him from within a cyclone: "I too am not; I dreamt the world like you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms of my dreams was you, who like me are so many someones and no one."
Paris Hilton's Quarter-Life Crisis
After having a breakdown in her jail cell, Paris vowed to do something productive with her life and now apparently she's following through on her promise. She's traveling to Rwanda because she believes that wherever she goes, help will follow. Maybe not, but at least cameras will.
Arthur Rimbaud stopped writing when he was 19 years old and is revered as one of the most influential poets of the last century. F Scott Fitzgerald published "This Side of Paradise" at 22, right out of Princeton. What the fuck are we doing?
10/01/2007
Is something big on the horizon?
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/08/30/energy.debate/index.html#cnnSTCText?iref=werecommend
From: Zack Wheeler, Seattle, WADate: September 11, 2007
Your view: They should do... I feel that... We need to... I've stopped prefacing statements with these because the fact of the matter is... we won't. America will continue to do what it does best: consume and deplete. We have never learned from our mistakes and we never will. We never plan for a situation, only react to one. There is absolutely NO form of energy we can ramp up to match oil capacity by 2020. That's a fact, do your research. Hydrogen, solar, nuclear, methane, hydro, wind, new technology, n-o-t-h-i-n-g. There is no magic cure, either the cost is too great or the technology is too far behind. Make no mistage about it, we're in resource wars, indefinitely. Our troops will never leave Iraq. Why else would Russia be looking for oil in the Arctic? The concept of Peak Oil is by far the most frightening issue I have ever had the misfortune of researching. Industrialized society has allowed the Earth to balloon from less than 1 billion to over 7 billion in a single century. Non-industrialized Earth can handle 1, maybe 2 billion tops. When oil goes away (not if), guess what's following it. THAT is my concern. THAT is the scary part. At least it's an exciting time to be alive. I'm going to live to see the single greatest economic collapse and the most devastating depression in human history. And the best part, Mother Nature is in the driver's seat.
From: Zack Wheeler, Seattle, WADate: September 11, 2007
Your view: They should do... I feel that... We need to... I've stopped prefacing statements with these because the fact of the matter is... we won't. America will continue to do what it does best: consume and deplete. We have never learned from our mistakes and we never will. We never plan for a situation, only react to one. There is absolutely NO form of energy we can ramp up to match oil capacity by 2020. That's a fact, do your research. Hydrogen, solar, nuclear, methane, hydro, wind, new technology, n-o-t-h-i-n-g. There is no magic cure, either the cost is too great or the technology is too far behind. Make no mistage about it, we're in resource wars, indefinitely. Our troops will never leave Iraq. Why else would Russia be looking for oil in the Arctic? The concept of Peak Oil is by far the most frightening issue I have ever had the misfortune of researching. Industrialized society has allowed the Earth to balloon from less than 1 billion to over 7 billion in a single century. Non-industrialized Earth can handle 1, maybe 2 billion tops. When oil goes away (not if), guess what's following it. THAT is my concern. THAT is the scary part. At least it's an exciting time to be alive. I'm going to live to see the single greatest economic collapse and the most devastating depression in human history. And the best part, Mother Nature is in the driver's seat.
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