A Tale of Two Towns

25 June 2008

• teosinte @ 19:33 

  Dominion

  21 June 2008

  We were told early in our education that humans and other predators are at the "top of the food chain." Coyotes eat rabbits, hawks eat rodents, bigger fish eat smaller fish, but humans have "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" Some people are foolish enough to believe this late into life. Other people are foolish enough to move to the Mojave Desert and quickly learn that ants own this place. People are somewhere quite a lot farther down the food chain.
  
  For the second time since I moved to Newberry Springs in 2004 my water well went dead in the first half of June. The first time it was the pressure switch so I got suspicious, looked closely at it, and sure enough, a long column of tiny insect communists were trailing in and out of the pressure switch. I called up Eagle and ask them to come out. I said I thought I knew what the problem was and, oh by the way, can ants get into the pressure switch and short it out or something?
  
  "You bet, we must replace twenty of those a day this time of year." He said they pack them full of ant powder, which by back calculation I figured must last about two years. Eagle roared out in a big diesel truck and swapped out the part with a new one that was probably manufactured from pieces made all over the world and assembled in some place far away. Without them I would dry up and blow away. Now every year I'm sure to be out there waging chemical warfare at the wellhead right around the start of Varmint Moon.
  
  It seems that lately dominion hasn't been going so well. In fact it may become necessary in the near future to renegotiate our covenant. Research departments of Big Pharma can't seem to come up with new antibiotics as fast as microbial pathogens can evolve tolerance to the old ones. These days you can go to a hospital in an ambulance with a bug and leave in a hearse with a superbug. Even some of the certain victories of the past, such as tuberculosis, have turned into losses. Then we have the hydrological catastrophes, Iowa following Katrina. In this changing climate we might rebuild the levees to withstand a 500-year flood only to be hit in the next few years with a 1000-year flood.
  
  The question is, how do we rebuild cities with multibillion dollar damage using fewer, increasingly worthless dollars, replace grain shortages and ruined farmland using higher priced diesel and fertilizer, all the while growing the economy and fighting endless wars for oil? When do we either renegotiate the covenant or sign the surrender papers? I don't think the ants will even notice when we're gone.

  • teosinte @ 18:56 

    Varmint Moon

    14 June 2008

    June is the month when all of the difficult animals in the Mojave Desert come out. Round tailed ground squirrels annihilate every green plant. The houseflies get so thick you can't breath. Ants swarm through the house. I left a Ziploc bag of banana chips on the counter thinking it would be OK because it was sealed. Argentine ants chewed holes through the plastic bag. I opened a tool cabinet and reached in, stopping just short of grabbing a black widow spider. Sometimes I think the Mojave is about the second most difficult place to live in the world, second only to the dry valleys of Antarctica.
    
    The political varmints are out this season, too. John McNasty is campaigning as a war hero, as if war were something to be a hero about. We learn that he, with no surprise, is most concerned about being an elite. Rather than suffering with the grunts in a POW camp as he would like us to believe, he collaborated with the enemy for special favors.
    
    No wonder supporters of the horrid, power mad, and now finished, Hillary are lining up behind McCain. And what's to hope for in Obama but more of the same. Didn't he just go to the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and claim that Jerusalem was the undivided capital of Israel? If Dubya doesn't get Iran bombed before January he can count on Barry to get 'er done and then some. I truly sympathize with the downtrodden who sincerely believe that Barack will bring real change to this country. But Obama's change will be a few cents on the dollar. The sad fact is that the whole sordid business is a hollow façade and the only ones we can count on are ourselves. Whether it's floods and tornados in Iowa or high fuel prices in California  it's up to us to make do. Corporation America is concerned only with power, continuity of power, and projection of power
    
    I'd like to offer practical suggestions. I put up screens to keep the flies out, sprinkle chemicals to keep the ants at bay, fence the round tailed ground squirrels out of the garden (which takes a bad enough hit from the wind, heat, and grasshoppers), and I look cautiously for spiders. But what to do about the politicians? I wish ignoring them would make them go away. What kind of democracy is it when Edward Dowling wrote:
    
    "The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it."
    
     The third greatest obstacle to democracy is our survival, which is the focus of our future.

    • teosinte @ 21:05 

      Home to Olduvai

      12 June 2008

      In the broad sweep of history we are at a turning point. The daily slope of the long slide is given by the price of gasoline. At the station I commute past it ticked up another eight cents today to $4.599/gallon. It's all over the "news" but not a single source, none of the broadcasters, dare say that we stand on the brink of the Olduvai Cliff. Richard Duncan's leading indicator is rolling blackouts on the grid. But there are more demons lurking in the shadows beside electrical power outage. For no other reason than my own dark amusement I troll the daily headlines for other leading indicators and post them here.
      
      Climate models indicate extreme weather as a consequence of global warming.
      
      CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Flooding rivers across Iowa forced more residents to evacuate, with at least 10,000 people in Cedar Rapids among them as the rising Cedar River burst its banks Thursday
      
      Rescuers had to use boats to reach many stranded residents in the city of 120,000, and people could be seen dragging suitcases up closed highway exit ramps to escape the water. It wasn't clear just how high the river had risen because a flood gauge was swept away by the swirling water.
      
      It's not so good for agriculture and staple crops such as corn. So much for ethanol as a gasoline substitute.
      
      CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. corn futures soared more than 4 percent to a fresh record high for the fifth consecutive trading session on Wednesday as flooding expanded in the U.S. Midwest, harming the 2008 corn crop.
      
      
      

      An earlier leading indictor is society's response to fuel and food shortages. People aren't bonding well over this hardship.
      
      Worldwide protests over the rising price of fuel escalated today, with the Philippines presidential palace besieged by lorries, fishermen burning their boats in Thailand, and Spanish petrol stations running dry as hauliers blockade major roads.
      
      Violence has already claimed lives of lorry drivers on either side of the dispute, while one haulier was nearly burned to death in his cab by strikers.
      
      As store shelves go bare in Western Civliization.
      
      Spaniards fear a strike that has disrupted deliveries could cause shortages and they are stockpiling fuel and food. Traders at Madrid's main food wholesale market said supplies of fresh food would start to run out soon.
      
      This is not a happy world and this is not a happy blog. You have to pay for fantasy. Reality you get for free. Shortages will hit the U.S. like a 9/11 or a Katrina. FEMA will stand down while hired Blackwater Security goons target practice on the lower class. The last bit of emergency fuel will go for helicopter evacuations of elites to their fortresses. We're left with mostly psychological preparation. Of course timing is everything. "When" is the most important question. If it doesn't happen tomorrow, or next week, or before the November elections, and it probably won't, then you are welcome to go back to buying fantasies. Happy endings cost extra.

      • teosinte @ 19:43 

        Demand destruction

        8 June 2008

        If the price of gas doesn't go down soon we may see commodities traders tarred and feathered, riding down South Wacker street on rails. This is because a lot of people, looking for someone to blame, think speculators are behind the high prices. Pundits tell us that oil is in a "bubble" and will soon "regress to the mean" and become "normal" once again so that we can go back to driving our Hummers to the mall. They seem to have about three main arguments for this scenario. One is that the high prices will make a lot of marginal oilfields economic and will spur new exploration, which will bring new supplies to market. Two is that high prices will make alternative energy sources economically attractive. And three is that high prices will reduce demand. To me only the third argument makes sense.
        
        Oil discoveries peaked in the U.S. in the mid thirties. This was in the days before environmental regulations. Drillers turned every promising patch of geology into Swiss cheese looking for the black gold. Despite this effort oil production peaked in the U.S. in 1970. Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, came online in the eighties and, although production went up for a few years, decline prevailed and made Alaska oil production a small hump on a downward path. Worldwide, oil discoveries peaked in the sixties. Now worldwide oil production is peaking and four barrels are burned for every new barrel discovered. It doesn't matter what the price is.
        
        We are not looking for energy in general, we are looking for transportation fuel. Stuff to squirt in our Beamers to make them fly down the road at 80mph. So what if we have wind turbines. So what if we have solar panels, low grade coal, and steam on a stick. You can't put these in your tank. Sure your Beamer will run on moonshine but some poor schmuck farmer needs a lot of diesel to grow that corn, there's only so much farmland, and ethanol is really just a long-winded transformation of petroleum. So let the price go up, it doesn't matter. Your car still runs on gasoline.
        
        Which leaves demand destruction and therein lies the rub. Destruction of demand implies destruction of the economy as we know it. The first to go is the frivolous – the Sunday drives, cruising Main. Then come the electives, the family vacation in the big Road Slug. Local economies dependent upon tourism suffer accordingly. As each wealth class gives up an elective, a lower class gives up a necessity. Food that farmer is growing costs more because diesel costs more. So does trucking it to the store. The cost of energy pervades every consumer item until people are forced to triage. Do I give up medicine, food, or transportation this week? And where does that leave us? Do we have anything left for an alternative energy Manhattan Project ? Can we even repair the damage to irrigation and infrastructure left by the devastating weather? Or do we simply drop down to the next level and wait for depletion to up the ante?
        
        People need hope. But what does this mean when "getting ahead" becomes "not falling behind?" How will the daily mall cruiser cope when hope means staying alive? I see people somehow going on like we always have. Whether through the medieval Black Death in Europe or the earthquake last month in China, people continue on. Hope comes from the very act of continuing on.

        • teosinte @ 18:42 

          Dry wind

          6 June 2008

          The wind came up again today after taking a break for a few hours. Tornados are tearing up the Midwest. The stock market went down four hundred points and oil took a record two day jump to a new record high. All of the major trends are holding course. Unemployment also took a big jump. Israel has become exasperated with trying to goad Uncle Sammy into bombing Iran and so is fixing to drop U.S. bombs on Iran itself from U.S. planes flown by U.S trained Israeli pilots.
          
          Oh and last month there was a tipping point of sorts. More people now live in cities than the country for the first time. These new urban poor are the ones who are going to have the roughest time of it. Country people have always had it tough and we're used to it. But the new urban poor just moved to the city for a better life. They have hope. It's the dashing of hope that makes things worse.
          
          A few of the old reliable hands appear to becoming even more confused. Bill Bonner thinks oil is in a bubble and will soon "regress to the mean," that is it will become "normal" again. Even though Bonner read Taleb's book and talked him up, somehow it just didn't register. He hasn't come to grips with the notion that normal doesn't apply to oil anymore. It's a new normal just about every day now and Black Swans are flying in flocks.
          
          Trends to watch for. States don't have the money to pay all of these new unemployment claims. It's like the Boomers and entitlements. Too many people are hitting under funded, looted insurance all at once. Hunger is working it's way up the food chain. Just like peak oil is the ultimate constraint on greenhouse gas emissions, so is starvation a sure cure for the obesity epidemic. But the media would have you think there's not much more to worry about than Hillary and Barry making up.
          
          It's a dry wind that's blowing.

          • teosinte @ 21:48 

            Reality bites

            5 June 2008

            As I get older I'm able to remember less and less. And I've never been able to see into the future. So if I don't know what's going to happen and can't remember what just did happen, how can I even expect to know what's going on right now? At about age 12 or so I abandoned faith for reason and that looked for awhile like it might work. But then I started to see holes in that. There's all of this uncertainty. I got into statistics because it seemed to deal with uncertainty. Except, as Taleb shows, it only works with known uncertainty, like the variability in how tall people are. It doesn't work with unknown uncertainty, such as how rich people are. Suppose, for example, you have a bar full of beer drinkers and how tall they are is proportional to how much money they earn. A six foot guy earns $60,000 and a five foot guy earns $50,000. There's even a varsity basketball player pounding down stout who makes darn near $70,000. Then in walks Bill Gates and he's almost one hundred miles tall. You see normal probability distributions don't work with money.
            
            It's all chaos. Though all chaos theory can show you is why even fully determined systems are unpredictable yet self-organizing. Chaos theory can't tell you what's going to happen next or predict the probability that Bill Gates will walk into the local bar. Besides, you can't possibly know what's going on right now because all of the information you get is filtered and sterilized. Most of it is outright propaganda intended solely for the purpose of controlling your behavior. As we wallow in this sea of misinformation, disinformation, and pure propaganda, clutching for straws of truth, may I offer this one small solace. You will know reality because reality bites.
            
            Where is this leading? Us Baby Boomers lost our grip on reality in the sixties and never regained it. It's just been one fantasy after another: acid trips, disco, SUVs, dot.coms, house prices that only go up, no money down negative amortization loans. None of these things were real anymore than CNN is news. You can feel reality nibble at $4.50 per gallon gas. For most of us out here a trip into Barstow for groceries now costs at least ten or twenty bucks, and the cost of those groceries is directly related to oil. Oil has found new support at over one hundred dollars a barrel. Boomers are getting old and very few have saved for retirement. How could anyone save with real estate tanking and the dollar rapidly going south. So what's next? Debt slavery? Bring back the Sixties!

            • teosinte @ 21:47 

              Timing

              4 June 2008

              How long? It's the most important question. You may have been absolutely sure in 1980 that gas prices would go way up. But you would have had to wait almost 30 years to see it happen. About that time Howard J. Ruff wrote a book along the lines of 'Repent ye the End is Nigh' only to become a laughing stock for the next three decades. Though I see now that he has recently released a new version in time for our current oil related crisis. People who followed his advice in the seventies, and it was very good advice, would have missed out on the dot.com boom and the housing bubble. They're in their sixties or seventies now, hunkered down in their fallout shelters, eating stale MREs. If you bought gold in 1980 you would also have had to wait 30 years to get your money back. Timing is everything. If you bought in 2004 you would have doubled the cash value. Although, realistically, I think gold stayed even and the dollar lost by half.
              
              Now we have the Peak Oil crowd coming into their own. Some, like Colin Campbell, have been gloomy for a long time. Others are recent converts. As the curtain draws we see these actors caste in two roles. One has the wheels coming off the wagon this year while the other has us in Kunstler's "Long Emergency." By the way, after reading James Kunstler's latest screed, "We Were Lied To" posted June 2, 2008, I began to wonder if the poor fellow has finally lost his marbles. You see the timing of this peak oil question is of critical importance. If we have twenty years then be calm. If it's more or less now, which seems from the evidence to be the case, then batten down the hatches or run for the hills.
              
              The shape of the downward spiral is also important. For example, drought and water shortages are a serious problem in the Mojave River basin. Groundwater levels in Newberry Springs are dropping at a rate of about one foot per year. So you do a calculation of your probably life span, drill your well a little deeper, and you'll be fine. Climate change is a similar issue. I can't get really worked up about a few degrees by 2050 because death by that time will have interfered with my concern. But if the wind doesn’t stop blowing here in a day or two everyone I have to deal with will get a little irritable.
              
              We're coming up on one of our faux turnovers in the quadrennial election cycle and a lot of people, especially African Americans and perhaps recently disappointed feminists, are looking forward to a sea change. I wonder how hard the truth will hurt when they realize that Obama is more of a president for Israel than America. You don't have to look very hard or far to see whose interests our elites are serving.
              

              • teosinte @ 19:30 

                Desperation

                3 June 2008

                Madness on the cusp of desperation. I'm sure that's what a few million folks are feeling these days. You may not be able to squeeze blood out of a turnip but you sure can squeeze the piss out of poor people. Something like about 4.5 million poor people are getting ready to starve in Ethiopia, as usual. Just as long as it stays there on the teevee where it belongs, right?. Still we feel the squeeze as we squeeze the pump handle and watch those dollar signs spin. I drove by a sign yesterday advertising diesel for the low price of $5.04 a gallon. Then I came across this object lesson from the Pentagon. Don't even think about protesting.
                
                Colonel Kirk Hymes demonstrated the weapon by staging what CBS somewhat oddly called "a scenario soldiers might encounter in Iraq" -- a handful of military volunteers, dressed as civilian protesters, who carried signs saying "peace not war" and threw objects at a small group of soldiers. A series of raygun blasts from half a mile away disrupted their chants and finally sent them running.
                
                We're "into the Buck Rogers scenario," he gloated. Buck Rogers was the good guy, remember, and the good guys are the ones who want war, not peace as George Orwell foretold.
                
                Then Joe Bageant posts this great story about his neighbor that illustrates well the points I was trying to make in my own brief run in with the justice system on the flip side of the coin. Joe's buddy slipped up once and now he's an indentured servant forever in the prison profit industry. You might read this and then watch out for that banana peel in your own life.
                
                You don't have to look hard for bad news these days and I think the Pollyannas must be getting new extra thick prescription rose colored glasses. I wish I could tell you that life will be easier for those of us who have been expecting this now for several years. But the truth is that we'll suffer almost the same as those whose heads have been up their arses the whole time. It's like the difference between one who knows and anticipates the time of their death and one who lives for the moment. They both suffer the same fate, only the one who lives for the moment is happier while it lasts.

                • teosinte @ 19:34 
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