Saved comments from June and July 2015
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neonvincentNow, I'm done with saving comments -- at least until I fix the laptop.
My comment on "The Dream of the Machine"
Happy Canada Day to all your Canadian readers and for all the American ones, an early happy 4th of July!
"René Descartes, for example, proposed a theory of gravity in which little corkscrew-shaped particles went zooming up from the earth to screw themselves into pieces of matter and yank them down."
I find that hysterically funny, not only for the inherent ludicrousness, but also because it ties into a conversation over at your other blog that you imported into your previous post here about the troubles of String Theory. That's one form of unified theory of everything in physics that postulates that gravity is like all the other three fundamental forces of the universe that physicists recognize, which means it's mediated by particles. Now I can't get that image of how gravitons might behave out of my head.
"People in western Europe and a few of its colonies dreamed of machines, and then created them. They dreamed of a universe reduced to the status of a machine, a universe made totally transparent to the human mind and totally subservient to the human will, and then set out to create it."
That also ties together this blog with your others. You define magic as a change in consciousness caused by will. In this case, the change of consciousness came first, and then it was made manifest in the world by science and technology. So the change we need to survive in the world to come will be another act of magic, whether the people doing the conjuring realize it or not.
The idea of magic expressed through religion seems to be a subject even the science fiction on television is exploring. Two shows I follow, Defiance and Falling Skies, both looked at the power of religion to control people through changing their consciousness. Both also compared it to the power of totalitarian ideology and tactics and found religion to be more effective. Must be something in the ether.
Greer: Pinku-sensei, very good indeed; that gets you tonight's gold star. Exactly; change in consciousness comes first, and leads to changes in technologies and the like -- and that, of course, is precisely what I've been trying to kickstart into motion on this blog and elsewhere for the last nine years.
My response to a comment by George on Systemic Turmoil, Structural Reform.
"Some should be advised to refrain from celebrating too vigorously a recent Supreme Court decision others consider controversial."
Which one? Not that it matters to me, I'm celebrating both as good news from the Supreme Court this week. I also marked what Pope Francis wrote about the environment in an encyclical. As someone who would be called a "cafeteria Catholic" if I were practicing, I felt a thrill of Schadenfreude at watching the people who would do so being even pickier at the serving line of doctrine than me!
One of these days the electorate (or maybe Trump's lawyers) will tell him that he's fired from the presidential campaign, but that's not happening soon. First, he combed in second in New Hampshire behind Jeb Bush. He also was in second behind Bush in a national poll. Just a few days ago, he was behind Walker by a hair in Michigan. Looks like the "Trump Bump" is still working for him.
My comment on Darwin's Casino
"An example that I’ve satirized in an earlier post here is the bizarre way that so many people on the rightward end of the US political landscape these days claim to be, at one and the same time, devout Christians and fervid adherents of Ayn Rand’s violently atheist and anti-Christian ideology."
I remember that post of yours. I could recycle all of my comments about it from a year-and-a-half ago here, but I don't think I'd get a gold star a second time for the same material. I will say that the only way that combination works is if one is working for a bunch of religious fanatics in service to a kleptocracy. That's definitely Satanic.
"I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons why human beings haven’t yet figured out how to carry on a conversation with bottlenosed porpoises, African gray parrots, et al. in their own language is quite simply that we’re terrified of what they might say to us—not least because it’s entirely possible that they’d be right."
The best response that I've run into comes from Douglas Adams--"So long and thanks for all the fish." Given what we're doing to the biosphere, that might actually be appropriate. The next best comes from Larry Niven, filing a class-action lawsuit against humanity as a species for our whaling practices. Since dolphins can't do that, we've had to settle for PETA suing to set orcas free from Sea World. That got thrown out, as cetaceans do not count as persons. Too bad.
As for the randomness of evolution, that's the main theme of Stephen Gould's "Wonderful Life," how utterly contingent the history of life is. Run it all over again and entirely different results would happen because of the random and chaotic nature of, well, nature.
JMG: Pinku-Sensei, "Wonderful Life" is one of my favorite books about evolution, precisely because it stresses the contingent, nondeterministic nature of the process.
My comment on “Welcome to Blackswansville”
B is definitely more productive. As for me, I think I'll drink. Fortunately, I have lots of choices, from the red, white, and blue layered concoctions in Drink recipes for July 4th from Tipsy Bartender to recipes in honor of the kind of tacky movies that the obese and tattooed would approve of like "Insidious, Chapter 3" and "Fifty Shades of Grey," along with a vodka watermelon that gets shot with a .50 caliber sniper rifle in the spirit of R. Lee Ermey in Mail Call. Booze, babes, and guns--bottoms up!
My responses to "Greek Pudding."
And a Happy Monday the 13th to you, too! After reading the entry at the link, I'm responding with my own take on the connection between urbanity and sustainability--cities are like stars; the larger they get, the faster and brighter they burn. Of course, if a city really is like a star, being large will doom it to a short life if it can't be continually have its fuel replenished. On that, you and I might agree.
As for the subject of today's essay, Grexit could be the disaster for the European project that our host forecasts, but right now its main effect in the U.S. is, along with the crash of the Shanghai stock market and the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, to depress oil prices. The response by Americans is to drive more as gas prices fall during summer driving season. Happy Motoring for now!
Also, our host's remark about the origin of "Ring Around the Rosie" is the same one I tell my students when I lecture about the history of the human population. In fact, I'm planning on telling it to them tonight. It never fails to freak them out.
My comment on "The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part One: Civilization and Barbarism"
Since you appear to be dabbling in the Cthulhu Mythos, you might find it amusing to learn that the features on Pluto are being informally named after underworld beings, including Cthulhu. Let's see if they survive the vetting of the International Astronomical Union, which demoted Pluto to the status of dwarf planet a decade ago . I hope they are better remembered than the movement added to Holst's "The Planets" earlier this century for Pluto. Holst himself couldn't be bothered during the last years of his life, as Pluto had no astrological significance then.
As for science fiction being a literature of ideas, Robert Heinlein himself said are really only three premises in science fiction: what if, if only, and if this goes on. A problem might arise What if humans are like Moties, fated to crash their civilizations over and over again. My experience this past decade has made me fear that the answer is yes. Now the important questions are so what and what do I do now. That's why I am keeping a blog and reading yours.
@Mister Roboto "Pinku-sensei: This has always been Pluto's theme for me."
Thanks for that video. Now I know what to use for next year's Music for the Revenge of the Sixth!
P.S. If you're from Milwaukee, do you read escapefromwisconsin's blog, The Hipcrime Vocab? He's also from your area and he sometimes comments here.
@JMG "I don't happen to know of a barbarian people who were primarily hunter-gatherers, but that may simply be a function of the absence of records from more than five thousand years ago."
Actually, you might and not realize it. Anthropologists use another classification scheme based on sociopolitical organization--band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. Mapping this classification onto "primitive," barbarian, and civilized has "primitive" peoples in bands, barbarians in tribes and chiefdoms, and civilized people in states. Cabrillo College has a good page on the subject that gives examples of Native American peoples at each stage. The examples used for chiefdom are the indiginous people of the Pacific Northwest, where you grew up. They were able to sustain large, complex settled communities by fishing supplemented by hunting and gathering, not agriculture. They're a special case, but they would be a "barbarian people" eating primarily wild food instead of plants and animals that they raised.
My comment on Trump Hits a Bump
As I mentioned last week, I'm lecturing about on human population. My students were a little less freaked out by the Black Death origin story for "Ring Around The Rosie" than usual, but other things caught their attention. One of my students asked "are we [the U.S.] ever going to do what China does and restrict people to one child each?" I told her no, we don't do that here in the U.S. Our reaction to population issues is to go after immigrants first. Your comment and our host's post attest to that. I also told her that many of the same people who go after illegal immigrants are also against birth control and abortion and to think about what that means in terms of population and who gets to be an American. Besides, if any U.S. government tried restricting births, they'd suffer the same fate as Indira Gandhi's government in the 1970s--get tossed out in the next election.
The irony of all this is that population growth in the U.S. is at record low levels. Looks like Americans are responding to feedback from the environment as we reach carrying capacity. Here's to hoping that we don't overshoot, if we haven't already, and that carrying capacity doesn't start falling below our current population.
Our host pointed out that his "peeps in the old Democrat fold are the worst" when it comes to immigration. That's because they're beholden to their interest groups and ideology. The Democratic Party won't support strong restrictions on immigration; they're having enough trouble on illegal immigration. Restrictions on immigration would be considered an expression of racism, and the Democrats include racial and ethnic minorities in their coalition, some of whom would be most displeased by an anti-immigrant stance.
Turning the Democrats (and Greens, for that matter) around on immigration will take disentangling immigration and race and getting the racial and ethnic minorities in the Democratic coalition on board with restricting immigration as a matter of economic survival. Until that happens, no dice. Besides, as long as Trump is making his anti-Mexican comments and getting fired by his business partners as a result, it pays Democrats to maintain their current stance on immigration, just as it's paying dividends to Trump in the Republican primary at the expense of his party.
"Especially if those “strong restrictions” translated into the U.S. only welcoming the “smartest” immigrants to help with the tech, medical industries etc."
Not necessarily. Those criteria would favor Asian immigrants--what, you think the quota would be filled by Europeans and Canadians? India and China produce the most applicants for immigration. Asian Americans now vote heavily Democratic, switching from being a Republican constituency 20 years ago, as Menzie Chinn has pointed out. It doesn't help the Republican Party that Republicans have run explicitly anti-Asian ads, which has alienated Asian-Americans even more.
Comments on Guide to entries that contain answers to 'The End of Suburbia'
I've just answered all four of the questions I mentioned above in "We eat a lot of oil". The entry comes well-illustrated with updates and corrections to the information in the movie.
The next updates will probably be more explicit answers to 21 and 22, which I quoted above, and a commentary on how fracking, tar sands, and deep sea drilling have affected the fossil fuel picture since the movie came out 11 years ago. My students this semester were having trouble with the former and have been asking about the latter. I'll see if I can get those done before I show the movie again in November.
I'm sharing the following updates about this entry's readership and comment history to begin another comment thread. This entry became the 13th most read entry of the third year of the blog with 321 page views as of March 20, 2014. Over the next year, it continued to add page views, reaching 836 by March 20, 2015. It also received eight comments during that time, placing it in a three-way tie for most commented on entry during the fourth year of the blog. It finally broke into the all-time top ten during April 2015 with 741 total page views according to the default counter. It has since fallen out of the top ten, being replaced by A conversation with The Archdruid about Objectivism, Satanism, and the GOP, which had fallen out and managed to climb back in. Sic transit gloria.
My comment on The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Two: A Landscape of Hallucinations
So it seems that what Richard Louv calls Nature Deficit Disorder is not just a developmental problem for children, but potentially an existential threat to society, especially when combined with the diversion of thought to the demands of civilization. It makes me thankful that my parents took me to Yosemite every summer and sent me on hikes with the Boy Scouts when I was young. That way I could get a good dose of nature when it would still do me some good.
One of the apparent ironies of your pointing out that nature is more information-rich than human-built environments is that one of your recipes for "collapsing now and avoiding the rush" is LESS, with the final S standing for stimulation. It looks like the problem isn't stimulation per se, but the artificial stimulation of entertainment delivered by modern technology. Nature by itself can be very stimulating.
On the other hand, you're being perfectly self-consistent when you point out that everything humans encounter in their built environment was concept first. It fits with your disagreement with Platonism and Neoplatonism that you've expressed on your other blog. There may be an ideal form of every man-made object, but there certainly is no such thing for features of nature.
I plan on incorporating both of those points when I take my classes on field trips in the future, even when my students and I tour a farm. Everything may have been planted by humans, but it's certainly a more natural environment than a city.
My comments on Potemkin Party
I just showed my students "The End of Suburbia" last week, in which our host in 2003 addressed nearly all of the points about what kind of country the U.S. needs to be that he described today, plus a few more. One of them is that we eat a lot of oil, something that can't go on forever. Relocalizing agriculture was something he predicted then. People have been making steps at the margin with gardening, organic farming, and the Eat Local movement, but the tide flowing in to consolidation hasn't quite turned yet. Give it time. Students appreciated the movie, but were divided about the message. Some of them appreciated its bluntness and especially our host's sense of humor. They particularly got a chuckle out of his swearing. Others were frightened by the doominess of the film. They didn't care for it, but I don't think they were supposed to. Fortunately for the effectiveness of the lesson, no one mentioned that oil prices were falling to the lowest levels since March. If they had, I would have told them it's only temporary and we should be using the time of relatively cheap oil to prepare for the next price rise and shortage.
K-Dog: Has anyone ever mentioned that the doomsday scenario suggested in ‘The End of Suburbia’ never happened on the schedule implied by the documentary only because fracking kept our gas flowing and the wolf from the door? That when fracking stops it is going to get very cold because we chose Peter to pay Paul?
Me: I tell my students that every semester. I mention that even the most optimistic estimates forecasting increased oil production from fracking lasting only until 2020 at which time we'll be heading down the slope of the Hubbert curve again. I also show them the CNN video at the link and describe the earthquake and contamination problems caused by fracking. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, indeed!
My comment on "The Dream of the Machine"
Happy Canada Day to all your Canadian readers and for all the American ones, an early happy 4th of July!
"René Descartes, for example, proposed a theory of gravity in which little corkscrew-shaped particles went zooming up from the earth to screw themselves into pieces of matter and yank them down."
I find that hysterically funny, not only for the inherent ludicrousness, but also because it ties into a conversation over at your other blog that you imported into your previous post here about the troubles of String Theory. That's one form of unified theory of everything in physics that postulates that gravity is like all the other three fundamental forces of the universe that physicists recognize, which means it's mediated by particles. Now I can't get that image of how gravitons might behave out of my head.
"People in western Europe and a few of its colonies dreamed of machines, and then created them. They dreamed of a universe reduced to the status of a machine, a universe made totally transparent to the human mind and totally subservient to the human will, and then set out to create it."
That also ties together this blog with your others. You define magic as a change in consciousness caused by will. In this case, the change of consciousness came first, and then it was made manifest in the world by science and technology. So the change we need to survive in the world to come will be another act of magic, whether the people doing the conjuring realize it or not.
The idea of magic expressed through religion seems to be a subject even the science fiction on television is exploring. Two shows I follow, Defiance and Falling Skies, both looked at the power of religion to control people through changing their consciousness. Both also compared it to the power of totalitarian ideology and tactics and found religion to be more effective. Must be something in the ether.
Greer: Pinku-sensei, very good indeed; that gets you tonight's gold star. Exactly; change in consciousness comes first, and leads to changes in technologies and the like -- and that, of course, is precisely what I've been trying to kickstart into motion on this blog and elsewhere for the last nine years.
My response to a comment by George on Systemic Turmoil, Structural Reform.
"Some should be advised to refrain from celebrating too vigorously a recent Supreme Court decision others consider controversial."
Which one? Not that it matters to me, I'm celebrating both as good news from the Supreme Court this week. I also marked what Pope Francis wrote about the environment in an encyclical. As someone who would be called a "cafeteria Catholic" if I were practicing, I felt a thrill of Schadenfreude at watching the people who would do so being even pickier at the serving line of doctrine than me!
One of these days the electorate (or maybe Trump's lawyers) will tell him that he's fired from the presidential campaign, but that's not happening soon. First, he combed in second in New Hampshire behind Jeb Bush. He also was in second behind Bush in a national poll. Just a few days ago, he was behind Walker by a hair in Michigan. Looks like the "Trump Bump" is still working for him.
My comment on Darwin's Casino
"An example that I’ve satirized in an earlier post here is the bizarre way that so many people on the rightward end of the US political landscape these days claim to be, at one and the same time, devout Christians and fervid adherents of Ayn Rand’s violently atheist and anti-Christian ideology."
I remember that post of yours. I could recycle all of my comments about it from a year-and-a-half ago here, but I don't think I'd get a gold star a second time for the same material. I will say that the only way that combination works is if one is working for a bunch of religious fanatics in service to a kleptocracy. That's definitely Satanic.
"I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons why human beings haven’t yet figured out how to carry on a conversation with bottlenosed porpoises, African gray parrots, et al. in their own language is quite simply that we’re terrified of what they might say to us—not least because it’s entirely possible that they’d be right."
The best response that I've run into comes from Douglas Adams--"So long and thanks for all the fish." Given what we're doing to the biosphere, that might actually be appropriate. The next best comes from Larry Niven, filing a class-action lawsuit against humanity as a species for our whaling practices. Since dolphins can't do that, we've had to settle for PETA suing to set orcas free from Sea World. That got thrown out, as cetaceans do not count as persons. Too bad.
As for the randomness of evolution, that's the main theme of Stephen Gould's "Wonderful Life," how utterly contingent the history of life is. Run it all over again and entirely different results would happen because of the random and chaotic nature of, well, nature.
JMG: Pinku-Sensei, "Wonderful Life" is one of my favorite books about evolution, precisely because it stresses the contingent, nondeterministic nature of the process.
My comment on “Welcome to Blackswansville”
B is definitely more productive. As for me, I think I'll drink. Fortunately, I have lots of choices, from the red, white, and blue layered concoctions in Drink recipes for July 4th from Tipsy Bartender to recipes in honor of the kind of tacky movies that the obese and tattooed would approve of like "Insidious, Chapter 3" and "Fifty Shades of Grey," along with a vodka watermelon that gets shot with a .50 caliber sniper rifle in the spirit of R. Lee Ermey in Mail Call. Booze, babes, and guns--bottoms up!
My responses to "Greek Pudding."
And a Happy Monday the 13th to you, too! After reading the entry at the link, I'm responding with my own take on the connection between urbanity and sustainability--cities are like stars; the larger they get, the faster and brighter they burn. Of course, if a city really is like a star, being large will doom it to a short life if it can't be continually have its fuel replenished. On that, you and I might agree.
As for the subject of today's essay, Grexit could be the disaster for the European project that our host forecasts, but right now its main effect in the U.S. is, along with the crash of the Shanghai stock market and the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, to depress oil prices. The response by Americans is to drive more as gas prices fall during summer driving season. Happy Motoring for now!
Also, our host's remark about the origin of "Ring Around the Rosie" is the same one I tell my students when I lecture about the history of the human population. In fact, I'm planning on telling it to them tonight. It never fails to freak them out.
My comment on "The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part One: Civilization and Barbarism"
Since you appear to be dabbling in the Cthulhu Mythos, you might find it amusing to learn that the features on Pluto are being informally named after underworld beings, including Cthulhu. Let's see if they survive the vetting of the International Astronomical Union, which demoted Pluto to the status of dwarf planet a decade ago . I hope they are better remembered than the movement added to Holst's "The Planets" earlier this century for Pluto. Holst himself couldn't be bothered during the last years of his life, as Pluto had no astrological significance then.
As for science fiction being a literature of ideas, Robert Heinlein himself said are really only three premises in science fiction: what if, if only, and if this goes on. A problem might arise What if humans are like Moties, fated to crash their civilizations over and over again. My experience this past decade has made me fear that the answer is yes. Now the important questions are so what and what do I do now. That's why I am keeping a blog and reading yours.
@Mister Roboto "Pinku-sensei: This has always been Pluto's theme for me."
Thanks for that video. Now I know what to use for next year's Music for the Revenge of the Sixth!
P.S. If you're from Milwaukee, do you read escapefromwisconsin's blog, The Hipcrime Vocab? He's also from your area and he sometimes comments here.
@JMG "I don't happen to know of a barbarian people who were primarily hunter-gatherers, but that may simply be a function of the absence of records from more than five thousand years ago."
Actually, you might and not realize it. Anthropologists use another classification scheme based on sociopolitical organization--band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. Mapping this classification onto "primitive," barbarian, and civilized has "primitive" peoples in bands, barbarians in tribes and chiefdoms, and civilized people in states. Cabrillo College has a good page on the subject that gives examples of Native American peoples at each stage. The examples used for chiefdom are the indiginous people of the Pacific Northwest, where you grew up. They were able to sustain large, complex settled communities by fishing supplemented by hunting and gathering, not agriculture. They're a special case, but they would be a "barbarian people" eating primarily wild food instead of plants and animals that they raised.
My comment on Trump Hits a Bump
As I mentioned last week, I'm lecturing about on human population. My students were a little less freaked out by the Black Death origin story for "Ring Around The Rosie" than usual, but other things caught their attention. One of my students asked "are we [the U.S.] ever going to do what China does and restrict people to one child each?" I told her no, we don't do that here in the U.S. Our reaction to population issues is to go after immigrants first. Your comment and our host's post attest to that. I also told her that many of the same people who go after illegal immigrants are also against birth control and abortion and to think about what that means in terms of population and who gets to be an American. Besides, if any U.S. government tried restricting births, they'd suffer the same fate as Indira Gandhi's government in the 1970s--get tossed out in the next election.
The irony of all this is that population growth in the U.S. is at record low levels. Looks like Americans are responding to feedback from the environment as we reach carrying capacity. Here's to hoping that we don't overshoot, if we haven't already, and that carrying capacity doesn't start falling below our current population.
Our host pointed out that his "peeps in the old Democrat fold are the worst" when it comes to immigration. That's because they're beholden to their interest groups and ideology. The Democratic Party won't support strong restrictions on immigration; they're having enough trouble on illegal immigration. Restrictions on immigration would be considered an expression of racism, and the Democrats include racial and ethnic minorities in their coalition, some of whom would be most displeased by an anti-immigrant stance.
Turning the Democrats (and Greens, for that matter) around on immigration will take disentangling immigration and race and getting the racial and ethnic minorities in the Democratic coalition on board with restricting immigration as a matter of economic survival. Until that happens, no dice. Besides, as long as Trump is making his anti-Mexican comments and getting fired by his business partners as a result, it pays Democrats to maintain their current stance on immigration, just as it's paying dividends to Trump in the Republican primary at the expense of his party.
"Especially if those “strong restrictions” translated into the U.S. only welcoming the “smartest” immigrants to help with the tech, medical industries etc."
Not necessarily. Those criteria would favor Asian immigrants--what, you think the quota would be filled by Europeans and Canadians? India and China produce the most applicants for immigration. Asian Americans now vote heavily Democratic, switching from being a Republican constituency 20 years ago, as Menzie Chinn has pointed out. It doesn't help the Republican Party that Republicans have run explicitly anti-Asian ads, which has alienated Asian-Americans even more.
Comments on Guide to entries that contain answers to 'The End of Suburbia'
I've just answered all four of the questions I mentioned above in "We eat a lot of oil". The entry comes well-illustrated with updates and corrections to the information in the movie.
The next updates will probably be more explicit answers to 21 and 22, which I quoted above, and a commentary on how fracking, tar sands, and deep sea drilling have affected the fossil fuel picture since the movie came out 11 years ago. My students this semester were having trouble with the former and have been asking about the latter. I'll see if I can get those done before I show the movie again in November.
I'm sharing the following updates about this entry's readership and comment history to begin another comment thread. This entry became the 13th most read entry of the third year of the blog with 321 page views as of March 20, 2014. Over the next year, it continued to add page views, reaching 836 by March 20, 2015. It also received eight comments during that time, placing it in a three-way tie for most commented on entry during the fourth year of the blog. It finally broke into the all-time top ten during April 2015 with 741 total page views according to the default counter. It has since fallen out of the top ten, being replaced by A conversation with The Archdruid about Objectivism, Satanism, and the GOP, which had fallen out and managed to climb back in. Sic transit gloria.
My comment on The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Two: A Landscape of Hallucinations
So it seems that what Richard Louv calls Nature Deficit Disorder is not just a developmental problem for children, but potentially an existential threat to society, especially when combined with the diversion of thought to the demands of civilization. It makes me thankful that my parents took me to Yosemite every summer and sent me on hikes with the Boy Scouts when I was young. That way I could get a good dose of nature when it would still do me some good.
One of the apparent ironies of your pointing out that nature is more information-rich than human-built environments is that one of your recipes for "collapsing now and avoiding the rush" is LESS, with the final S standing for stimulation. It looks like the problem isn't stimulation per se, but the artificial stimulation of entertainment delivered by modern technology. Nature by itself can be very stimulating.
On the other hand, you're being perfectly self-consistent when you point out that everything humans encounter in their built environment was concept first. It fits with your disagreement with Platonism and Neoplatonism that you've expressed on your other blog. There may be an ideal form of every man-made object, but there certainly is no such thing for features of nature.
I plan on incorporating both of those points when I take my classes on field trips in the future, even when my students and I tour a farm. Everything may have been planted by humans, but it's certainly a more natural environment than a city.
My comments on Potemkin Party
I just showed my students "The End of Suburbia" last week, in which our host in 2003 addressed nearly all of the points about what kind of country the U.S. needs to be that he described today, plus a few more. One of them is that we eat a lot of oil, something that can't go on forever. Relocalizing agriculture was something he predicted then. People have been making steps at the margin with gardening, organic farming, and the Eat Local movement, but the tide flowing in to consolidation hasn't quite turned yet. Give it time. Students appreciated the movie, but were divided about the message. Some of them appreciated its bluntness and especially our host's sense of humor. They particularly got a chuckle out of his swearing. Others were frightened by the doominess of the film. They didn't care for it, but I don't think they were supposed to. Fortunately for the effectiveness of the lesson, no one mentioned that oil prices were falling to the lowest levels since March. If they had, I would have told them it's only temporary and we should be using the time of relatively cheap oil to prepare for the next price rise and shortage.
K-Dog: Has anyone ever mentioned that the doomsday scenario suggested in ‘The End of Suburbia’ never happened on the schedule implied by the documentary only because fracking kept our gas flowing and the wolf from the door? That when fracking stops it is going to get very cold because we chose Peter to pay Paul?
Me: I tell my students that every semester. I mention that even the most optimistic estimates forecasting increased oil production from fracking lasting only until 2020 at which time we'll be heading down the slope of the Hubbert curve again. I also show them the CNN video at the link and describe the earthquake and contamination problems caused by fracking. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, indeed!
