Signs of the End Times.

Here is one of an increasing number of accounts of the first hard signs of what is to come worldwide with the end of the age of oil.

Disarray by James Howard Kunstler

http://www.kunstler.com/index.html
James Howard Kunstler
January 14, 2008
Disarray

The dark tunnel that the US economy has entered began to look more and more like a black hole last week, sucking in lives, fortunes, and prospects behind a Potemkin facade of orderly retreat put up by anyone in authority with a story to tell or an interest to protect -- Fed chairman Bernanke, CNBC, The New York Times, the Bank of America.... Events are now moving ahead of anything that personalities can do to control them.
(One of JHK's best.)
http://www.kunstler.com/index.html

Religion and Science

Reprinted below is an excerpt from a short essay by Clay Shirky originally posted here in the edge.org.

The works that changed my mind about compatibility were Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained, and Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, which lay out the ways religious belief is a special kind of thought, incompatible with the kind of skepticism that makes science work. In Boyer and Atran's views, religious thought doesn't simply happen to be false -- being false is the point, the thing that makes belief both memorable and effective. Psychologically, we overcommit to the ascription of agency, even when dealing with random events (confirmation can be had in any casino.) Belief in God rides in on that mental eagerness, in the same way optical illusions ride in on our tendency to overinterpret ambiguous visual cues. Sociologically, the adherence to what Atran diplomatically calls 'counter-factual beliefs' serves both to create and advertise in-group commitment among adherents. Anybody can believe in things that are true, but it takes a lot of coordinated effort to get people to believe in virgin birth or resurrection of the dead.

Why Is this Apocalypse Different than All Other Apocalypses: Making the Case for Peak Oil and Climate Change Now

Outstanding post by Sharon Astyk re peak oil and global warming. The best summary I have found so far.
LP

How to Think and Why Change Your Mind?

Check out this amazing blog; a collection of essays by a wide range of intelligent and educated people who have changed their minds on one topic or another and and why. This collection of essays should be published as a graduate course on how to think.

Leaders or Followers

A comment by one Kiashu in the Oil Drum: "As to our elected representatives, the thing to remember is that they're not actually leaders - they're followers. They follow public opinion. Even the unelected ones have limits, Hitler could not have converted Germany to Islam, nor Stalin made everyone speak French. But in a democracy they follow the public, not the other way around. So if we want change we must change ourselves - and the elected guys will follow along reluctantly."
Worth keeping in mind. Part of the frustration I feel about the US government is that so-called political leaders aren't, in my humble opinion, leading effectively. Like many people, I suspect, I find it much easier to carp about how poorly they are doing than to accept, as Kiashu points out, that they are not really leaders, but followers, and they are following what they sense is the prevailing public opinion, or at least the prevailing opinion of their constituents.
"So if we want change, we just change ourselves." I kinda wish Kiashu hadn't put it that way. It really is easier to criticize the politicians, or the people who elected them, than to turn
the lens inward. And really, what the hell can I do about Guantanamo and the torture monkeys who want more Guantanamos, except to rant and rave? Changing ourselves sounds very new age to me. Meditate? Chant? Pray? Dialog? Blog? Eat less and exercise more?
And what exactly is it about me (or you) that needs to change? Maybe this is the time for a New Year's resolution: Think deeply on this.
LP

Nature Bats Last

This is an outstanding essay, a commencement address given earlier in 2007. I love this end of the world, extinction stuff.

Waterboarding Rommel

If German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox”, had been captured during WII, would President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vice-President Harry Truman and Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower have ordered him to be waterboarded (tortured) to extract information about German troop movements, etc., intelligence that might have saved the lives of thousands of Allied and American fighting men?
When WWII torpedo bomber pilot George Herbert Walker Bush was shot down by Japanese anti aircraft fire, did he pray to God that if he was captured the Japanese would honor and respect the Geneva Conventions, a treaty expressly forbidding signatory nations from employing tortures such as waterboarding against captives?
What a difference a generation makes.
The shame that the Cheney-Bush Republican/Christian administration has brought on this nation will take generations to erase, if ever it can. And Americans wonder why they hate us.

Crazy

I liked Jim Kunstler's Dec. 24, 2007, blog entry, A Christmas Eve Story, here, where an old friend had told him, "You know, you've been predicting all these catastrophes for years now, but we're still here, the cars are all rolling down Broadway out there, and life is going on. You're beginning to sound like a crazy person." Kunstler's reaction, "It didn't bother me especially that G thought my my ideas were outlandish so much as being comprehensively written off by an old friend as a crazy person, someone who... I dunno... rummages through dumpsters and talks to himself on the street without any sign of a cell phone in hand."
I related because I remember calling up an old friend a couple years ago when the peak oil demon first possessed me. It took me a while to assure M that I wasn't selling anything, that I just called to pass the word that there was a dark line on the horizon that might develop into a major storm in the next few years. He said I sounded like an alarmist. I had to admit that yeah, I was kind of sounding an alarm. I gave him a few web sites to check out and hung up. It kind of bothered me because, being psychic, I could picture him picturing me on the other end of the line, wearing a tinfoil hat and rolling a pair of large ball bearings around in my hand.
Its not easy being a prophet in your own land. Especially when you're not even a prophet, just a guy who happens onto writings and research reports bearing on our economy, civilization and world that bear a second, third and more look, and passes the word on. Kunstler is not a scientist, he's a writer, a reporter. But he is a hell of a good writer and a hell of a good reporter. And he is not bad as a prognosticator either, having foreseen the housing meltdown several years back.
It is puzzling to me that so many Americans, or at least so many Republicans who call themselves Americans can fully support plunging a coerced coalition of nations into two wars, spending billions upon billions upon billions of dollars and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives in an effort to thwart a handful of scruffy religious fanatics who might be plotting to swim across the Atlantic Ocean and blow up an appliance store in Newark, yet indignantly oppose as liberal (they really need that liberal label) hysteria a great body of sober, credible scientific literature warning of imminent geological developments that will make concern about those scruffy fanatics fade into utter insignificance.
But I understand the fear of crazy people and alarmists. It's natural. I remember reading a letter in a newsblog from a reader who complained about the peak oil/global warming types who said things that frankly scared him and suggested that they could be so much more effective if they would just stop upsetting people. Indeed. Hush little baby, don't you cry, momma's gonna sing you a lullaby....

$100 Oil

Now hold off on the celebration there all you lunatic fringe, peak-oil
wackos. Just because oil tipped $100 a barrel does not mean the world has come to an end. Last I heard the planets were still circling the sun. (No, Mr. Whoever you are in the 3d row wearing the tinfoil hat, Pluto's demotion to planetoid had nothing to do with peak oil.)
This is not the end of civilization. Okay, prices have jumped up a bit, but there is still plenty of good farmland we can convert over to corn for ethanol production. What is it with you people? We are Americans goddammit and the American way of life is not negotiable!

Kunstler's 2008 Predictions

As a kinder, gentler, more compassionate version of myself now managing Wuz Zappnin, I will let others, here, better informed and more eloquent, weigh in on the coming year. There's nothing like a little, "There's a hell of a depression coming." to start the New Year off on the right foot. But then again, in fairness to the opposition, "Don't worry, be happy, every little thing is gonna be all right."
But sincerely, and truly, I do wish all of you, and myself too, happiness in the coming year.
Z

Imperial Sunset

The Archdruid Report: Politics: Imperial Sunset
Another astoundingly insightful essay by John Michael Greer.

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra's street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under the the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on...

By Archibald MacLeish

Problems and Predicaments

I have written elsewhere about John Michael Greer's writings on our culture, civilization and the predicament we are in in this, the beginning of the 21st Century. I am rereading Greer's commentary from his earliest posts in 2006. I recommend them to all. If I were a college dean, I would have Greer's writings as part of the undergraduate core curriculum. While each of his essays stands on its own, reading them in chronological order is immensely helpful.
Click on the title to this post for a link to Greer's August 31, 2006, essay Problems and Predicaments.

EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY

Once in Persia reigned a king,
Who upon a signet ring
Carved a maxim strange and wise,
When held before his eyes,
Gave him counsel at a glance,
Fit for every change and chance:
Solemn words, and these were they:
'EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Trains, of camel through the sand
Brought him gems from Samarcand;
Fleets of galleys over the seas
Brought him pearls to rival these,
But he counted little gain,
Treasures of the mine or main;
'What is wealth?' the king would say
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

'Mid the pleasures of his court
At the zenith of their sport,
When the palms of all his guests
Burned with clapping at his jests,
Seated midst the figs and wine,
Said the king: 'Ah, friends of mine,'
Pleasure comes but not to stay,
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Woman, fairest ever seen
Was the bride he crowned as queen,
Pillowed on the marriage-bed
Whispering to his soul, he said
"Though no monarch ever pressed
Fairer bosom to his breast,
Mortal flesh is only clay!
'EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Fighting on the furious field,
Once a javelin pierced his shield,
Soldiers with a loud lament
Bore him bleeding to his tortured side,
'Pain is hard to bear," he cried,
But with patience, day by day,
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY.'

Towering in a public square
Forty cubits in the air,
And the king disguised, unknown,
Gazed upon his sculptured name,
And he pondered, "What is fame?'
Fame is but a slow decay!
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Struck with palsy, sore and old,
Waiting at the gates of gold,
Said he with his dying breath
'Life is done, but what is Death?"
Then as answer to the king
Fell a sunbeam on his ring;
Showing by a heavenly ray,
"EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."

Theodore Tilten