I started exchanging physical labor for fiat currency when I was about 12 years old. Nine-month stints spent within indoctrination facilities were interrupted by summers spent clearing fields of woody debris: Small landowners converted forests to fields and other youngsters and I tossed sticks onto a “low-boy” trailer pulled by a slow-moving tractor. At the end of the day, my mom wouldn’t let me into the house until she sprayed off the first few layers of dirt with a hose. My first job was called, “picking sticks.” It was miserable work for little pay.
A couple years later, when I was stronger, I moved up the small-town ladder. Former forests had become fields of alfalfa, and I bucked bales onto a trailer pulled by a slow-moving tractor. A short ride later, we stacked the bales in the barn. The per-hour pay of $2.50 represented a modest improvement over my previous employment. Equally importantly, I felt more like a man and less like a boy when I took responsibility for my own shower at the end of the work day.
Beyond sticks and bales
A few odd jobs later I landed the premier employment opportunity for an 18-year-old athlete living in a small town in the interior western United States. On 1 July 1978 I secured the title of Fire Control Aide I for the Idaho Department of Lands. I wore the uniform of the era: leather work boots, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, blue jeans and a Bowie knife on my belt (the latter for easy access to cut a fire hose).
Naturally, this gig was strictly for summer. I was headed for college and, unlike the majority of today’s youngsters, I was prepared for college, at least with respect to knowledge and work ethic. I was, of course, socially, emotionally, and psychologically naive. But I was certain the ticket out of a life of labor in Nowhereburg went through college.
Along with another neophyte smokechaser, I was driven by our supervisor to the remote field camp where we were stationed. Neither of us possessed a vehicle — I bought my own first car a few years later, a thought anathema to today’s generation of entitled teens — so we were relegated to bumming a ride with anybody headed in the right direction. Since that direction included only the barest semblance of civilization, there wasn’t much traffic. On that first day of employment, the supervisor spent considerable time teaching us how to read a map along the route while he hammered into us the importance of introducing ourselves to our few neighbors as we completed the “make-work” tasks befitting young men employed for their ability to conduct strenuous manual labor for many hours at a stretch between weeks spent warding off boredom (at the time, all Fire Control Aides working for the Idaho Department of Lands were men).
It was cloudy and cool as Bill and I were driven more than two hours onto the wild Joseph Plains (named for the famous chief of the Nez Perce tribe). By the time we arrived, rain was falling. Three days into an uninterrupted downpour, we were called back to town and ordered to drive the WWII-vintage Willys jeep. Bill hailed from the city and he seemed even more inept than me so, assuming control as a control freak would, I took the wheel. The seat belts were buried beneath the recalcitrant only seat, so we didn’t bother with them.
The wipers swept the windshield erratic only when I decelerated. The defroster didn’t defrost. And every puddle in the pock-marked gravel road shot through the floor boards. Trying to cure these three ills simultaneously with a roll of paper towels led to the expected conclusion. Right before the lights went out, I recall the road coming up to meet my face.
So much for assuming control of the situation.
Now what?
Thrown from the vehicle, I awoke flat on my back and opened my eyes to utter darkness. “That’s not right,” I thought. I closed my eyes, rubbed them with my fingers, and opened them again. Cleared of the blood that had pooled in the sockets, my eyes found the clouds. I blinked into the falling rain. Problem solved.
Turning my head allowed me to see a swath of detritus between me and the jeep, now firmly lodged against a pine tree, albeit surprisingly resting on four wheels. Two shovels, two canteens, a hose reel, and two Pulaskis — the famous fire-fighting tool wielded by my grandfather and father before me — comprised a 10-foot-wide strip about a hundred feet from me to the tree.
Bringing myself to a standing position proved challenging. I had no feeling in my left leg below my hip. Yet again I thought, “that’s not right.” My two-sizes-too-small brain was stuck on obvious, with only three words at my disposal.
I remembered my traveling companion, and shouted his name a few times. Bill finally responded, and seemed no worse for wear. He wasn’t limping, and his head was bleeding slightly less than mine. Next up: find a ride to town.
Within a matter of minutes, a pickup truck appeared on the scene. The rancher rolled down his window and silently looked us over. I asked for a ride to the nearest hospital, and he invited us onto the bench seat.
Bill propped up his head — now I noticed it wasn’t staying upright unless he held it up — and introduced us: “I’m Bill, and this is Guy. We’re Fire Control Aides with the Idaho Department of Lands.” The uppercase letters in our shared title were obvious. I was proud of the title, too.
The man behind the wheel responded, “I’m Jack Green.”
Rinse and repeat
Lacking feeling in my left leg, I asked Jack to take us to the nearest hospital. He pointed out that the nearest hospital was run by nuns in Cottonwood. I said that’d be fine. He recommended spending the extra half hour to drive to the hospital in Grangeville. I insisted to the contrary, my leg causing concern I was unable or unwilling to articulate while Bill and I passed the roll of paper towels back and forth to swab our bleeding foreheads.
Yet again, Bill pushed his head upright on his neck and introduced us, his voice tinged with pride: “I’m Bill, and this is Guy. We’re Fire Control Aides with the Idaho Department of Lands.”
Jack responded, “I’m Jack Green.”
Immersed in self-pity, I stared out the passenger-side window at the rain-soaked countryside. Every few minutes I’d wrest the roll of paper towels from Bill, peel off the outer layer or two, and apply it with all the pressure I could muster to my lacerated forehead. His own head unsupported by his hands and the roll of paper towels, Bill’s head would then fall onto his shoulder. As if for the first time, he’d push his head upright on his neck and introduce us, his voice tinged with pride: “I’m Bill, and this is Guy. We’re Fire Control Aides with the Idaho Department of Lands.”
Ever the gentleman, Jack would respond, “I’m Jack Green.”
A few dozen repetitions of this routine left me with one remaining nerve, and it was raw and exposed. Every time Bill introduced us, I yelled at him to shut up. The rancher, cool as the falling rain, never failed to introduce himself in the same level tone.
There’s no way I was riding an extra 30 minutes with these two fools. I didn’t know many Catholics, but I wasn’t afraid of nuns. We’ll take the first stop, please.
About my leg
Covered with blankets but still shivering from shock shortly after landing bottom-side up on a gurney, I was congratulating myself for making it this far. I was still worried about my numb left leg, but I could no longer hear Bill’s endless identical introductions, and the hospital didn’t seem so bad. It probably helped that I’d had no prior experience with hospitals. Not as a patient, in any event.
Had I been fully cognizant, the veritable absence of activity would have served as a warning beyond the one offered by Jack Green. Not only was I not fully cognizant, I was self-absorbed, as usual, and also busily bargaining with the Christian god I thought I’d abandoned a few years earlier. Blood was pouring out my forehead, I was shaking like a hummingbird in hailstorm, and my left leg was dead.
Enter the nun. She came in behind me, removed the blankets to expose my naked backside, and promptly removed the blade of the Bowie knife previously embedded into my left cheek. The one characterized by the large muscle known as gluteus maximus. The feeling returned in my left leg quite abruptly. My leg afire in pain, the nun waves the broken blade before my eyes and asks, “Is this yours?”
My immediate thought: Please put it back.
My second thought: I should’ve listened to Jack Green about the hospitals.
The latter thought was reinforced several times during the subsequent 24 hours. For example, the ER doctor was stitching up my forehead while the nun was pouring Novocaine into the new hole in my left cheek. Each burning drop of Novocaine caused my head to jerk into the man with the needle, thus assisting the mostly incompetent doc with the suturing process. Far more importantly was Bill’s broken neck, which the hospital failed to diagnose. I can only imagine how much money I cost the Idaho Department of Lands when Bill and his family sued the organization. Then, as now, I had the good fortune of having nothing for which to sue.
Silver lining
As always, I’m Mr. Silver Lining. Shortly after the voluminous reports were complete, every vehicle under the care of the Idaho Department of Lands sported a roll-bar. In this most litigious of societies, my actions induced the organization to protect against idiocy by protecting idiots. We progressives call this progress.
And there’s a bit more, although it’s as personal as this self-indulgent essay. If you’ve made it this far, there’s still time to avert the worst.
I learned a lesson about immortality. I don’t have it.
I learned a lesson about control. I don’t have it, either.
I learned a lesson about hubris. Suddenly, I had less. By now, I have considerably less than I did in 1978.
________________
Big thanks to Brad Phillips for creating an online forum for further discussion. You can sign up for Near Term Extinction here (nice wordplay, if I do say so myself).
________________
As regular readers know, I’m a fan of Occupy and any other activity beyond the mainstream. I’m making a personal plea to join me in supporting the Blazing Kat Productions, which creates OWS television and is in the midst of creating a documentary film about the movement. If you’d like to learn more, tune into to Holistic Truth Radio tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
February 14th, 2013 at 6:24 am
Guy,
not so self indulgent, IMO.
Entertaining too.
One of the close to last sentences is to me unclear:
“I learned a lesson about mortality. I don’t have it”
Does this mean you felt more mortal than before the accident, or that you you felt immortal, or some less mortal equivalent?
Any clarification there would be helpful and perhaps equally puzzling, too, I don’t know?
One observation from this and a few other anecdotes you put in your book, ‘Walking Away From Empire’, is that you appear to have had some kind of early life around some farm work, even if your actual family were educated, is that so?
And my observation is that you have chosen to go back to farm work, of a different kind, but hard physical ‘farm work’ nevertheless,( along with runnning a website and lecturing at times too ).
Also did the headaches start after this event, or some other head injury?
Thanks for you work in these important times Guy.
Going around and coming around, it seems.
February 14th, 2013 at 6:43 am
Thanks for the follow-up questions, Ozman. My original paragraph was unclear, and I’m revised it.
Until I was 18, I believed I was immortal. I knew everybody else would die, but youth is filled with irrationality. Well, mine was.
My agricultural experience is largely described in this essay. I picked sticks and bucked bales. I spent a lot of time with farmers, though.
February 14th, 2013 at 7:36 am
Wow Guy. I was transfixed. You have a gift for writing clear and clean narrative, with a minimum of embellishment that makes the story and the lessons all the more compelling for it.
February 14th, 2013 at 8:08 am
Thank you Guy, a few of us learn that we are mortals at a young age. I learned it volunteering at a nursing home. Luckily your brush with death at an early age was a lesson about mortality to you and not a lesson in mortality to others, in other words I am glad you survived in order to learn something rather than died in order to teach something to others.
Humanity as a whole has those same lessons ahead, but given NTE there will be no learning or teaching……….
February 14th, 2013 at 8:27 am
Good story, Guy, thanks. I don’t understand the ‘narcissism’ warning. We are story-telling animals, what we do, what we are. We swap stories, that’s how we learn, how we relate.
Former IPCC head, Prepare for 5deg.C.
http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/2013/02/ex-ipcc-head-prepare-for-5c-warmer-world/
February 14th, 2013 at 8:29 am
The Most Influential Climate Science Paper ?
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20140213/climate-change-science-carbon-budget-nature-global-warming-2-degrees-bill-mckibben-fossil-fuels-keystone-xl-oil
February 14th, 2013 at 8:32 am
Great narrative. I think my mortality dawned on me when I was about three hours into the two foot hole I was digging on that rock pile known as the “mud hut.”
February 14th, 2013 at 8:54 am
But I was certain the ticket out of a life of labor in Nowhereburg went through college.
A man came into my life, years ago, highly intelligent, strong fellow. At that point, he knew he could never sit in a class room listening to lectures. He decided the ticket out was to rob a bank. He spent 12 years in jail as a reward. He bequeathed me several boxes of artwork he’d done there to keep himself slightly sane. I still have some. The tales of violence he’d encountered in his life were horribly shocking. Sensitive, tender drawings from ‘a brutal criminal gangster’.
February 14th, 2013 at 10:27 am
What happened to Bill?
February 14th, 2013 at 11:25 am
The Gulf Stream Stalled and New England Flooded in November, 2012
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/13/1183669/-The-Gulf-Stream-Stalled-Sea-Level-Rose-the-East-Coast-Flooded-in-November-2012#comments
February 14th, 2013 at 11:31 am
How Law Enforcement and Media Covered Up the Plan to Burn Christopher Dorner Alive
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-law-enforcement-and-media-covered-plan-burn-christopher-dorner-alive?paging=off
February 14th, 2013 at 11:36 am
Guy – thanks for sharing the story of your youth with all its bumps and bruises. i too had an encounter that changed the way i felt regarding life and what happens after (or even before). i borrowed a friends two-wheeler when i was about 7 and tore up the street as fast as i could. At the stop sign on the corner, which i assumed was just for cars, i blew through it in order to u – turn around and head back to my friend. Instead a car going too fast perpendicular to my line of travel jammed on his brakes but hit me anyway. i woke up in the hospital (and thought i was dead and that this was “heaven”). After that i was much more careful with vehicles.
u: Isn’t it peculiar that it’s perfectly “legal” for banks to rob us with usurious interest rates (among many other financial tools at their disposal) but if we try taking anything from them it’s a crime? On another note, i’ve read of at least two accounts of people who walked up to a teller, said they had a gun on them and to hand over some cash. Then, instead of escaping they just stood there waiting for the police to come and apprehend them (and neither person actually possessed a gun). All this to be provided for – either due to poverty-driven hunger or in need of unaffordable medical care!
Great links too, thanks!
Here’s yet another sign the collapse is happening all around us but simply hasn’t reached ‘critical mass’ yet (like with the Pope). sorry
(This one’s for Dr. House because i miss his comments)
http://crooksandliars.com/natasha-chart/antibiotic-apocalypse
Every time your doctor has prescribed you an antibiotic to treat an existing bacterial infection is a time you could have died of that infection. Maybe much less likely in some cases, more likely in others; but the risk is there. Now imagine that antibiotics stop working, especially for the really dangerous cases, and you and everyone you know has to face future infections with nothing better than hope, rest and tea.
Welcome to the antibiotics apocalypse.
Since it could actually happen, I’m going to rate an antibiotic apocalypse, worried over by the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, as well as World Health Organisation head, Margaret Chan, as much scarier than a zombie apocalypse.
(watch the short video and read the rest)
This and other important medical sera and other ingredients (such as heparin, for which there is only one manufacturer) are becoming as scarce, expensive, overused, ineffective and problematic as is oil, rare earth minerals, clean water and now trees (thanks Gail).
If one but pays attention, the signs of collapse abound. It’s absolutely frightening – like sinking slowly into quicksand (upon which we’re all standing, but you realize it and very few others do).
February 14th, 2013 at 11:43 am
Nice story, Guy. I knew many of the details, of course, but not all. What I most remember about that event was that for the first time that summer I had the same day off as my girlfriend. But the folks were out of town, so they called me to go check on you in the hospital. (Maybe they knew something about nuns and/or that facility.)
By the time I got there, you were sitting upright in bed talking to two girls (I think; maybe my bitter memory has embellished things), and neither you nor I wanted me to be there. I may have wanted to kick your ass, but it already had an extra hole in it.
February 14th, 2013 at 12:07 pm
HAA-HAAA – enter: BROTHER with yet more inside information! Thanks James! my brother would have done nothing less (and i’m glad he’s who he is).
To be filed under: oh, NOW they tell us
http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2013/02/14/red-brain-blue-brain-again/
Liberals and conservatives exhibit different cognitive styles and converging lines of evidence suggest that biology influences differences in their political attitudes and beliefs. In particular, a recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and conservatives have significantly different brain structure, with liberals showing increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, and conservatives showing increased gray matter volume in the in the amygdala. Here, we explore differences in brain function in liberals and conservatives by matching publicly-available voter records to 82 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging. Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did. Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization of party identification long thought to be one of the core findings of political science. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli.
(read the rest when you have a minute)
u: yeah, right? THEEEE MOST IMPORTANT PAPER EVERRRRR!!!!!!! sure.
What gets me is that despite the preponderance of evidence NOBODY IS GONNA CHANGE A GODDAMN THING ABOUT THE WAY WE LIVE! Not the scientists, Bill McKibbon or anyone else.
“oh, the humanity . . .” (like when the Hinderburg went down – pilot error in this case too, eh?)
February 14th, 2013 at 12:31 pm
And what of Bill?
February 14th, 2013 at 1:05 pm
What happened to Bill?
February 14th, 2013 at 1:41 pm
Manager says safety issues are ignored at Hanford nuclear site – ‘Congress needs to take a hard look at the situation here and determine whether we can go forward’
(Los Angeles Times) – The long-troubled project to clean up radioactive waste in Hanford, Washington, has come under attack from another senior manager, the third to assert that top executives are ignoring serious problems in the plant’s design.
Donna Busche, the manager of environmental and nuclear safety for San Francisco-based URS Corp., alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that executives at the $13.4-billion project attempted to suppress her warnings and were working to fire her.
Busche, a nuclear engineer and health physicist, alleged that pressure to meet deadlines led the company to retaliate against her for insisting on stringent safety practices at the former nuclear weapons complex.
Hanford is the nation’s most contaminated piece of property, home to 56 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge in underground tanks that pose a long-term risk of leaking into the Columbia River. Dozens of the tanks are already leaking and threatening the largest river in the western U.S.
The Energy Department is in a race to pump out the waste, embed it into glass and ship it to a future dump, but so far not a single gallon has been treated and the project is more than 20 years behind the original schedule.
Construction has been stopped since last year over allegations that the plant’s design for mixing radioactive waste could allow explosive hydrogen gas to detonate inside the plant, or allow enough radioactive solids to accumulate in tanks to trigger nuclear fission.
The concerns, backed up by panels of outside experts, forced the plant’s construction contractors, URS and San Francisco-based Bechtel, to begin a full-scale test of the system to mix the sludge, but using nonradioactive surrogates.
The concerns about the Hanford waste treatment plant — which resembles a small industrial city with many individual processing plants, laboratories and ancillary buildings — have been voiced by senior officials on the project.
Walter Tamosaitis, a senior URS scientist and manager of a large research staff, has said his warnings about potential hydrogen gas explosions led to his being isolated at work, given no assignments and put in a basement office without furniture.
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2013/02/manager-says-safety-issues-are-ignored.html
February 14th, 2013 at 2:20 pm
@Guy:
That was beautifully written. Thanks for the ning mention. It exists because you had the courage to speak truth to doom. Unless you are a consummate actor, you are most obviously a man of integrity with a compassionate and skillfully crafted message. I am unable to detect an angle or gimmick or spin. Again, the ning site is there for people to spread out if they want to. Personal stories, photos, videos. I’m still trying to figure out how to add podcasts and music. Thanks again, for the story.
February 14th, 2013 at 2:24 pm
I have no idea what happened to Bill
February 14th, 2013 at 2:38 pm
CAIRO (Reuters) – Fathy Ali is beyond anger as he queues for hours in a line of 64 trucks and buses to fill his tank with scarce subsidized diesel fuel, known in Egypt as “Solar.”
“This has become part of my life. I come and wait for hours or days, depending on my luck,” the chain-smoking bus driver said at a besieged gas station on Cairo’s Suez High Road, wrapped in a scarf and thick coat for the long ordeal. “At the start it used to upset me a lot but now I’ve kind of given up.”
Diesel supplies are drying up as a cash-strapped government struggles to cap a mounting bill for subsidies it has promised the IMF it will reform to secure an elusive $4.8 billion loan desperately needed to keep a sagging economy afloat.
The situation appears near breakdown with growing shortages, unsustainable subsidies and foreign exchange reserves running out, raising the risk that fuel bottlenecks lead to food shortages and pose a risk to political stability.
Foreign reserves are down below $15 billion, less than three months’ imports, despite deposits from Qatar and Turkey. The Egyptian pound has lost 8 percent of its value this year and a black market has emerged for hard currency.
The nation’s strategic reserve of diesel fuel is down to three days’ supply, the official MENA news agency quoted a government official as saying last week. Bakeries that use diesel to make staple subsidized bread have been told to keep 10 days’ fuel supply but not all have the capacity.
rest at http://news.yahoo.com/diesel-shortage-pushes-egyptians-brink-123914366.html
February 14th, 2013 at 2:47 pm
http://cheezburger.com/3373692672
So we now have a date?
February 14th, 2013 at 3:36 pm
BC good a date as any.
BC Nurse says there’s a date
We don’t want to be late
Now we know when
We must die, it is then
Feb ’38 is the date of our fate
February 14th, 2013 at 4:37 pm
Tom
That research paper link into brain functioning and correlations to political views, is not unexpected by many, but nevertheless very significant.
Something indicates to me these studies will enable the reverse effects to be used on people to induce their political views. The significant advances in (the movie)’Brainstorm’ – like technology, of course powered by the online game industry research and military research funding in the wings, means that a system of silent technology deployed at polling booths say,(which in USA is already a machine), to either suppress the ‘right amygdala’, or stimulate it, or same for the ‘left insula’. This could be delivered by the ‘technology dispenser’, or unseen agency, to the political party of the highest bid.
Presto, no need for even passable candidates.
Damn, if I were ethically unhinged, I could have made a zillion planning Psy-op strategy, with this kind of skullduggery. Just kidding…very happy where I am.
Money only makes you forget your love relations.
I think, however, in retrospect I have grown far more with what I have been doing with this meandering life so far than I would have being in that racket.
I recall reading or listening to some research from the series here posted some threads back on the ‘Bomb in the Brain’, which concered emotional and neurological trauma in early life and the recent findings on long term health effects, where the researcher was saying that at a certain early stage of neurological development the ‘child’ brain configures itself to adapt to either a world of ‘pleasure’ or ‘pain’.
Now I did not quite know what that meant then, because there was not a great deal of explaination, but maybe the two bits of findings are related. It could be that resolving to exist in a world of pain means you are risk averse, and when you resolve to be living in a world of pleasure you take enormous risks to keep that situation going. I am not able to go much further with that speculation at present. I’ll see what the entire article yields.
BTW, these days when I go to the big city, Sydney, with some money I never seem to have any left when I return home …? Is that because these ‘white noise’ devices are deployed in metropolitan centres to stimulate risk taking spending?…I don’t know, it would not surprise me. I try not to go to the big smoke for a number of reasons, that being just one.
Great info Tom, thanks from me.
February 14th, 2013 at 4:48 pm
BC Nurse Prof
Re: your link to details of Nuclear coverups and punnishing whistleblowers at the facility at Hanford, Washington…
This is the sort of information one yust knows is endemic in this industry(and others)but just never heard about.
It is really very close to something I find hard to accept, that the green stuff will induce such activities in people, and risk all that contamination.
Can’t look away…
WTF do we do?
February 14th, 2013 at 4:54 pm
Bill became the 42nd POTUS.
February 14th, 2013 at 4:59 pm
Kathy C
The Diesel shortage in Egypt…
I have been tracking the price of Crude oil, both WTI and Brent, and they both have been rising steadily closer to US$100 and US$120 respectively over the past 2 weeks. I don’t know if North American winter demand on say heating oil effects the price on a cyclic basis, but it could be the Mayans just can’t count that accurately after all, and we are a few months late on TEOTWAWKI ?
But fron my viewing, those cars can still get to work, so what’s the big deal?
February 14th, 2013 at 5:19 pm
So Guy,
(tongue in cheek)…
let me get this right…?
Your brother has a blog…?
So after you lost face being kicked out of the Academy,
you had to get one too…?
Sibling blog envy..?
And to top it all off, how can anyone compete with NTE as a mainstay issue?
Brilliant!
Very competative sibling rivalry there in the McPherson house, the kind that keeps on going.
I suppose you both have differing memories of the size of the knife in your backside, along with his reported haze about how many girls you were talking to when he arrived at the hospital…?
My only question is, who is the older brother and who is the younger?
Don’t tell me you are twins!
Born on Feb 29th?
Crikey.
February 14th, 2013 at 5:27 pm
More…
‘Tar Sands: Muskeg Destruction is more than a methane GHG bomb’
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/13/1186374/-Tar-Sands-Muskeg-Destruction-is-more-than-a-methane-GHG-bomb
A quote:
“Peatbogs in Canada are known as Muskeg. Muskeg develops over thousands of years. Muskeg is formed by mostly decomposing sphagnum moss and other plants. Since decomposition doesnt occur during winter this process is slower than you might be used to seeing in a backyard compost pile, quite a bit slower. In permafrost, the layer of plant material my be thousands of years old.
To get to the tar sands oil companies have to remove the Muskeg, the clay and sand, typically removing 100 foot to 200 ft of material before exposing the tar sands. Once exposed to air, the Muskeg dries and decomposes, releasing Co2 and methane. The EPA tells us the Global Warming impact of methane is 20 times worse than Co2, pound for pound over a 100 year period.
My guess is that there may be 10 to 30 billion tons of GHG released by the destruction of the Muskeg over the planned 85 years of tar sands operations.”
February 14th, 2013 at 5:31 pm
And More…
‘Tar Sands to consume all conventional natural gas reserves in Canada and Alaska’
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/13/1186579/-Tar-Sands-to-consume-all-conventional-natural-gas-reserves-in-Canada-and-Alaska
Aquote:
“I think we’re looking at about 185 trillion cubic feet of natural gas between Alaska and Canada. If the Tar Sands uses nat gas at an annual rate of 2.16 tcf, then Alaska and Canada have enough to last about 85 years, at which point the Tar Sands should be depleted.”
It all seems so logical… to a bananna…
Going to the garden to be human for a while…
February 14th, 2013 at 5:45 pm
Oz, Guy is the younger, smarter brother. I’m bigger, older and slower (in pretty much every sense of the word). We’re both sometimes obnoxious, though for some reason I was in a lot more fights than he was (more evidence that he is smarter).
He was a football quarterback/defensive back and a basketball guard who walked on to a college basketball team; I was a football tight end/defensive end and forward who walked on to a college football team. We both bucked a lot of hay bales.
We’re both educated beyond our intelligence. We’ve both been married up for about thirty years to women we didn’t deserve. We both rolled vehicles without wearing seat belts while in college and survived with no serious injuries.
Both of us have been blogging for a long time, though he now works a little harder at it than I do. Of course he works harder at most things than I do. I’ve only written a couple of books.
February 14th, 2013 at 6:29 pm
OZ man, Egypt went from being a net exporter of oil to a net importer a few years before the time of the revolution. This is a key piece of information. As an exporter Egypt had money to keep food prices low and the people in line. As an importer they don’t have the money to buy food and they have to spend money for fuel supplies. It is a key crossover for any country that has little else to sell. IMO it had more to do with the revolution than anything else.
http://aspousa.org/2011/02/egypt-a-classic-case-of-rapid-net-export-decline-and-a-look-at-global-net-exports/
February 14th, 2013 at 6:45 pm
Anyone care to comment on this Arctic algae.
http://news.yahoo.com/arctic-thinning-ice-changing-ecosystem-193354731.html
February 14th, 2013 at 7:42 pm
i wonder why it is sheeple aren’t more inclined to share their most traumatic/ecstatic life altering experiences that teach the sort of valuable lessons not taught in formal classrooms operating under dogmas and ‘lesson plans’. given that ecstacy and trauma are nearly universal experiences, i wonder why so few sheeple acquire the sort of wisdom guy shares with us in this essay (not to mention it’s humor and clever word play/associations). thanks for sharing, guy. it was worth the read.
bcnp, thanks for the link to the alternet article on cops killing dorner and media complicity in deceit and repression. i particularly enjoyed reading some of the comments to that article, about the first 20, all had bad things to say about personal experiences with police and their families breaking laws with impunity and generally being assholes. isn’t ‘authority’ wonderful? and how about 3 cheers for ‘our’ ‘free’ corporate media, and it’s pathetic subservience to ‘authority’? if nothing else, reminders like this of why ‘authority’ and it’s supporters must be feared and distrusted illustrates how collapse might not be so bad. once all the dust settles and the blood stops flowing, any survivors shall at least be blessed by freedom from official oppression/violence/deceit, something we can now only fantasize about.
February 14th, 2013 at 9:12 pm
@dairyman
Anyone care to comment on this Arctic algae.
Well, for one thing, the algae is sequestering carbon from the water and mineralizing it to the seafloor, so that is a good thing. I’ve said before that nature has remarkable systems of trying to preserve balance (just as volcanic activity increases due to tectonic plate imbalances from warming oceans). It’s doubtful though that these balancing mechanisms can counteract the changes leading to ruin – and we may well be a target of its balancing attempts.
February 14th, 2013 at 10:26 pm
Interesting, Guy–having been gone for most of January and then starting a new semester, I hadn’t read your blog for a while. Imagine my surprise at having become a “longtime friend and colleague”–and especially hearing about my apparent sex change.
Perhaps it was simply a literary device, or an unnecessary attempt to “protect” me. But of course you do know that neither the “violence visited upon countries in the Middle East and northern Africa” nor the “current war criminal in the Oval Office” is “fully supported” by this “long-time friend.”
You also know that neither of my cars “sports the ‘Obama for Peace’ bumper sticker seemingly required for self-proclaimed liberals in this country” — and that, in fact, I didn’t vote for him (though unlike you I do believe in voting, especially in local elections. And you presumably know via Facebook and my own blog that I’ve been complaining about Obama’s drone wars since well before the election.
You and I disagree on much, which is fine, though I think you sometimes oversimplify your characterizatons of those with whom you disagree. But there’s no need to protect my identity.
February 14th, 2013 at 10:34 pm
Money only makes you forget your love relations.
“I believe a little incompatibility
is the spice of life,
particularly if
he has income
and she is pattable.”
– Ogden Nash
if nothing else, reminders like this of why ‘authority’ and it’s supporters must be feared and distrusted
Not feared, but addressed with appropriate care, as one would a mountain lion, rattlesnake or scorpion. Not distrusted, because that implies the possibility of trust. It is like humanure “enriched” with toxic heavy metals: it cannot even be put to use in composting.
February 14th, 2013 at 10:51 pm
GREAT story, and lesson, Guy! What did become of Bill?
Nothing quite as dramatic, but when i was 11, my family immigrated to the US (from Israel), traveling by ship to New York. This was late November/early December, not a good time to cross the Atlantic. About 4 days out from New York, our ship got hit by a huge wave which cracked the main propellor shaft, left us treading water till the shaft could be fixed enough to get us to port. No dishes for the rest of the trip, just paper plates. I slept though it. Realized over the next few days that the ship could have sunk, and we could have died. Passengers on the Triumph, the Carnival cruise ship which lost all power and just made it to port, got a glimpse of what will happen when society runs out of power and their own waste products overwhelm them while the food runs out.
February 14th, 2013 at 10:54 pm
the virgin terry
Surely ‘collapse’ will not affect the network of USA bunkers designed to allow TPTB to run their now operational drone army and keep the remnants of the population under surveilence? and maybe oppression too.
I am beginning to undrstand how financial debt keeps the balls in the air to the great benifit of TPTB. So in the event of a collapse, TPTB will have to come up with a new way to convince everyone they are in debt, and then it might work for them.
Seems Christianity had a great game going for a long while. The currency was your eternal soul and the debt was original sin…very hard to work off that debt, IMO.
February 14th, 2013 at 11:42 pm
James,
is that last comment a McPhereson way of holding out an olive branch ?
Life is extraordinarily personal, and nowhere more so than family. But don’t you think you two should bury those hatchets and kinda get along ?
And haven’t those deserving wives of yours got you two together after 30 years?
I don’t understand the reference to the “longtime friend and colleague”, nor the sex change, but that just makes it all the more interesting…
C’mon guys, who else you got that knows you so well and cares too..?
Without betraying your rother, was there any obvious falling out between you two, over a girl perhaps, (sorry, too many American movies in my childhood) or is it adult political differecnes?
You know, Guy is just smart enough, and sneaky too I’ll bet, to pull off getting you to come out and engage here, by putting up that bit of personal history. It has worked so far, you must admitt.
February 15th, 2013 at 3:21 am
the virgin terry Says:
collapse might not be so bad. once all the dust settles and the blood stops flowing, any survivors shall at least be blessed by freedom from official oppression/violence/deceit, something we can now only fantasize about.
—————
Do you really think the people who today eat gold flaked desserts and control nuclear weapons will not be among the survivors? I think you can count on them to be there herding “any survivors.” It is a delusion to use collapse to harbor fantasies of a future of blessed freedom.
February 15th, 2013 at 3:43 am
As I watched this, I tried to imagine substituting NTE for “peak oil”. How many of these speakers are dealing honestly with NTE? These are the folks we trusted…
http://youtu.be/oVzJhlvtDms
February 15th, 2013 at 3:50 am
Ripley, Terry, THERE WILL BE NO SURVIVORS. As collapse progresses, the grid will fail, when the grid fails all the nuclear power reactors will go Chernobyl or Fukushima. Only this time there will not be the 600,000 sacrificial lambs that got Chernobyl under control, no robots, no heavy machinery, no sarcophagus, nothing. They will fail totally. In the movie posted on the last thread about the Battle of Chernobyl Gorbachev tells that they feared a 2nd explosion if the core melted through to water underneath – he said it would have destroyed Minsk, made all of Europe uninhabitable. I think that is the point at which they started dropping massive amounts of lead on the thing – pictures showed that they were scarfing up any lead they could find including bags of shot. Multiply that by 439 plants, about 700 reactors and we are done. Over. Kaput.
Everyone should watch this – I post the link again – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdMLFJJyWnM
I watched it before Fukushima. Watched it again knowing that power out means all the nuclear plants will go like this. Watched it again knowing that when the grid goes NOTHING will be done for each and every nuke reactor as they explode, and nothing will be done for all the spent fuel pools when they start burning. 1 week after grid collapse should mark the point at when anyone with self deliverance plans puts them into effect. The rest can watch the show until us humans are scoured from the face of the earth.
February 15th, 2013 at 4:27 am
That sounds about right to me Kathy C. My point was that during the few weeks, months or, years it takes for everyone to die from radiation sickness, or under any other collapse scenario, the “survivors” will enjoy no “freedom from official oppression/violence/deceit.”
February 15th, 2013 at 7:03 am
Ripley – I agree on that. For a brief period, in fact, we may be wishing for police again. While they are a problem, they do keep a certain level of order in society. I know people who want to keep their guns to protect themselves from government, who call the police when they think they are in danger or have been robbed, and then complain they don’t come fast enough.
Also people who have been oppressed by the police are not necessarily nice guys and can often turn into the next round of oppressors, worse than the current oppressors. And as you note we don’t know just who the temporary survivors will be – the nice gentle people may well not be among the survivors and the nasty bastards will likely have more opportunity to be nasty.
Also one of the things that people do when times get hard is turn on anyone who is different. Christians will blame atheists, Jews, etc for the troubles – let the persecutions begin. I wouldn’t be surprised if burning of heathens is again instituted – a “witch” was just burned to death in Papau New Guinea http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/kepari-leniata-young-mother-burned-alive-mob-sorcery-papua-new-guinea_n_2638431.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular anyone who thinks that can’t happen here hasn’t been listening – fringe preachers have been advocating stoning gays for instance. Collapse will give a boost up to the fringe
I have no illusions about collapse bringing on the good times – in fact NTE extinction is quite a comfort. However long the chaos is it will end when we go extinct.
I have said for years that they way down will be a reverse of the way up only faster. Now thankfully it seems it will be MUCH faster. Perhaps the Inquisition stage will only last a few days? My dog our torturers don’t compare in sadism to the church’s. One was to put a rat on someone’s belly and cover it with a metal bowl and then heap coals on the bowl. The rat to escape would eat into the person’s belly.
February 15th, 2013 at 7:18 am
James, I had no idea you’d changed your view on Obama. Last I checked, you were still promoting voting for him in swing states, to avoid the other side of the duopoly. And I have no idea what bumper stickers adorn your cars. My apologies for the literary device, intended as protection.
Simplify for the sake of a story? Yes, probably. But as your dad says, we shouldn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
February 15th, 2013 at 7:38 am
The Greatest Entire Half Story Never Told
In the video about peak oil, “Oil, Smoke and Mirrors”, Heinberg refers to oil as a “gift from nature”. This implies that what we have done with that oil is good, that the industrial economy is wonderful and good. I suppose from a very narrow point of view, we did do some marvelous things with that energy. We could say that splitting the atom was, from a strictly physics scientist narrow point of view, an achievement. But step back, widen your view and look at the results now.
The true gift from nature started a long time age and was the long and difficult job of getting that carbon from the air back into the ground stored as coal, oil, and gas. And the even greater gift was the delicate balancing act on a tight wire of keeping the carbon there, away from the atmosphere, with the majority of it frozen in ice as the heat from the sun relentlessly poured down on earth. This process allowed oxygen based life to happen, the kind of life we are used to. This kind of life survived how many ice ages. It’s been around a long time. It evolved humans who came along with their intelligence and cut the tight wire. We had a party. It was a good party.
Photosynthesis is the true gift from nature. It removed the carbon from the atmosphere. We, in our arrogance, put it back up there. Heinberg and the others are only telling us half of the story. We’re not only going to be out of oil, we will be out of oxygen based life.
The other entire half of the story isn’t being told.
February 15th, 2013 at 7:41 am
Thank you for the story Guy. I spent some time bucking bales myself many years ago. Low pay, free beer…life’s been good to me so far
February 15th, 2013 at 7:42 am
Guy, even though I’m sure it was a very painful experience, I enjoyed reading the story. Thanks for sharing!
February 15th, 2013 at 7:46 am
Tom, with respect to antibiotic resistance, we are definitely seeing an upsurge in that phenomenon. I am absolutely opposed to the administration of antibiotics to livestock in that way. If animals were given adequate room for range so that they could move into areas free of their own excrement, they would get sick far less often.
The good news is that bacterial DNA isn’t very large. It can “remember” only a small number of defense mechanisms. Consequently, old antibiotics that we thought were now useless suddenly become potent again as bacteria had to push out the DNA responsible for protection against the old drug in favor of DNA providing protection against a new drug. MRSA, for example, is fequently treated successfully with Bactrim (an old sulfa drug). It’s cheap and effective. (This is not my area of expertise and would welcome clarification from someone more knowledgeable if I’ve mischaracterized this.)
The bad news is that we are experiencing more and more shortages of common drugs. Doxycycline, another old antibiotic that is enjoying renewed effectiveness, has been in very short supply for several months now. Lidocaine which we use all the time for numbing prior to an in-office procedure or for making a joint injection less painful, has suddenly become difficult to get.
There are many, many more drugs that are on the shortage list. See the latest list here:
http://www.fda.gov/drugs/drugsafety/drugshortages/ucm050792.htm
Ultimately, I think that supply chain collapse will be more problematic than antibiotic resistance. After all, it doesn’t matter if a disease is resistant to an antibiotic if you can’t get any of them anyway.
February 15th, 2013 at 7:55 am
Guy, the denial of mortality is a powerful program. I’m 52 and I’m not sure I’ve completely accepted it yet. I remember my first lesson in it, though. I was about 10 or 11. It was the time before I discovered that, for me, guys were more interesting than girls. I had a little girlfriend – as much of one as a child that age can have. We spent our summers at the city pool. One day during the “time out” period that they had every hour. All of us climbed out of the water – except one. My little friend was lying face down on the bottom.
Later at the hospital as my father (the minister) tried to console her parents, I struggled through my tears to accept what had happened. Not with much success.
Over the years, I’ve lost more friends than I can remember. At the height of the AIDS epidemic I was attending a funeral a week, it seems.
After all that death, on an emotional level I still haven’t convinced myself fully that one day I, too, will join the ranks of the dead.
February 15th, 2013 at 8:00 am
Since I brought up joining the ranks of the dead, it seems like a good time to mention the undead – zombies.
We’ve been watching “Walking Dead”, the AMC show about the zombie apocalypse. The zombie portion is silly, but the rest of it is quite interesting and involves many of the topics which we discuss here. As is always the case with fiction on this topic, they leave out the nuclear power plant meltdown. There wouldn’t be much of a story, after all. Otherwise, they seem to portray life post-collapse fairly effectively (with quite a bit of literary license thrown in).
February 15th, 2013 at 8:54 am
TRDH – good to hear from you again; appreciate the link.
dmd – that was a really good documentary, despite your correct criticism (after all, they only have so much, and decided to concentrate on the half that eats).
KC – people are still arguing over whether it will be a decades/centuries long collapse (and don’t even get me started about “survivors”) while we believe it will be much quicker (maybe a decade). i guess we’ll see, but it sure isn’t going to be any fun saying “Told Ya!” this time.
Guy – i too had a serious problem with Obama once he took office and immediately dismissed any prospect of even looking at any kind of wrongdoing with respect to both the financial meltdown and especially the shenanigans of the Bush jr administration. i voted for Dr. Jill Stein this time around, though i knew it wouldn’t do any good (voter for Nader both times too). Now i’m officially out of the politics arena because i don’t believe it works any longer (if it ever really did) as an agent of progressive change or reform. Politicians by and large are only concerned with their own re-election/power/wealth creation now and it’s become increasingly apparent that most work mainly for the corporate sector. It’s painfully obvious that we’ve become a banana republic complete with a dictator who is outside the law backed by a repressive military/police state (also outside the law)and fiat currency. So much for “the land of the free and the home of the brave” nonsense.
February 15th, 2013 at 8:56 am
Look, Guy, the rest of the world is catching up to you:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/No-alternative-atmospheric-CO2-draw-down.html
February 15th, 2013 at 8:58 am
Hahaha, ‘ratings agency downgrades ratings agency’
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-14/s-p-parent-mcgraw-hill-s-rating-cut-two-steps-to-baa2-by-moody-s.html
February 15th, 2013 at 9:12 am
Buckin’ hay!
February 15th, 2013 at 9:27 am
“I had no idea you’d changed your view on Obama.”
Sorry; I assumed that you had read my blog and Facebook posts. And I’m not sure what “change” you’re refer to–I voted for him the first time, but have criticized him more than praised him (and never said I’d vote for him again) since then (though I still think Romney would have been a worse choice between those two). I’ve never been a supporter of the drone wars. For example, you can see me criticizing his war strategy in the first year of his presidency here:
http://jmcpherson.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/spitting-on-military-service-especially-by-women/
And like you, I’ve also supported the Occupy movement: http://jmcpherson.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/wall-street-protests-its-about-time/
“My apologies for the literary device, intended as protection.”
No harm done. And as noted, no protection necessary. You and I both have had much worse said about us. If we didn’t expect (and maybe in some way enjoy) it, we wouldn’t do what we do.
“But as your dad says, we shouldn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
Perhaps, as long as it’s clear that you’re telling stories. And I enjoyed the one above.
February 15th, 2013 at 10:35 am
Guy,
Thanks for the story in written form. It was nice to re-live it after you told the story to me last week.
cheers
Paul
February 15th, 2013 at 1:03 pm
Kathy C: The Chernobyl documentary was astounding and makes me question the sanity of using nuclear reactors. Thanks for finding that.
February 15th, 2013 at 1:14 pm
Tom, Ogardener posted it on the last thread. I had watched it some time back and was glad to be reminded of it so the hat tip goes to Ogardener.
February 15th, 2013 at 2:00 pm
“Gail Says:
February 15th, 2013 at 8:56 am
Look, Guy, the rest of the world is catching up to you:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/No-alternative-atmospheric-CO2-draw-down.html ”
Good info. But these “skeptical scientists” are calling for geo-engineering, an outer space sunshade, and a “planetary defense” effort on the scale of WWII, with no sense given as to who will do so, although implying that the Pentagon and other similar military-industrial institutions will. Oh really?
February 15th, 2013 at 3:27 pm
I am not sure exactly what the implied implications are, but this is interesting- and something I knew nothing about concerning carbon bacterial sequestration.
A War Without End, With Earth’s Carbon Cycle Held in the Balance
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130213132323.htm
February 15th, 2013 at 3:40 pm
Bailey; It has been said that wherever there is something to eat, there will be something eating it. That goes for you and me, too. Just another way to define the food cycle.
February 15th, 2013 at 4:40 pm
I understand that Dave, but it seems this bacteria is a major carbon sequestor and intermediary to oxygen production, and so I was wondering what impact our activities might have on it.
February 15th, 2013 at 9:06 pm
Anti-anxiety drug pollution makes fish fearless and antisocial
Hey Buddy, can you spare Oxazepam.
Another unexpected ‘positive feedback loop’ for the eco-system to process. This will accelerate species extinction.
Speaking of species extinction, the financial ‘industry’ (cough….racket) is awash in many drugs, maybe that will hasten it’s extinction.
Roughly 60-70% of traders and suits on Wall St take anti-anxiety drugs, you know, in addition to coke and high shelf booze. Be cool, your pension money is safe, well, not so much.
February 15th, 2013 at 9:33 pm
From This American Life, May 15, 2009
It’s about anxiety with a chimp and a van and a couple of cops.
Everything is under control, keep moving
Told by Shawn the Cop
Episode 380: No Map
This story is the first 10 minutes of the show.
February 15th, 2013 at 9:51 pm
i have a bad feeling about Bill…
February 15th, 2013 at 10:09 pm
Organisms with a short life cycle – twenty minutes or less in many microbes – evolve that much faster. Just as in horse racing, jockey flesh, and in bicycle racing hardware weight count adversely and pared down to a minimum, so too in the evolutionary race genetic burden is pared down. The energy and resources spent on the enzymes and other molecular machinery to protect a microbe against a particular antibiotic could otherwise be expended in making more of the microbes.
Sulphonamides were introduced in the 1940s and erythromycin was introduced in the 1950s. Counting in human life cycle terms, the elapsed time for microbes is the equivalent of ten to twelve million years. When an antibiotic fell out of favour on account of microbial resistance, the carriage of the resistance traits continued to burden the microbe, but the offsetting advantage of survival in an environment containing the antibiotic was no longer of consequence: as a result, the microbes that dropped that burden were at an advantage.
While I was still in practice, I noticed that the medication Pediazole (erythromycin and a sulphonamide) used to treat infections in children in decades past, but that had fallen out of favour on account of microbial resistance, had once again started having very good to excellent results.
February 16th, 2013 at 12:29 am
J & J overlook Near Term Extinction, but are otherwise quite entertaining in their discussion of a host of other issues, including the bezzle, the trust horizon, the twilight of illusion, etc.:
KunstlerCast #217: The God of Progress is Dead
February 16th, 2013 at 3:55 am
Bird flu on rise, farmers resist vets
ARJUN POUDEL
KATHMANDU, Feb 16: With the growing incidence of bird flu in the Valley, vet officials and technicians have been encountering intense resistance and threats from poultry farmers, the Directorate of Animal Health (DoAH) said. Due to the resistance and threats from farmers, efforts to control the disease have becoming a serious challenge for the officials.
According to DoAH officials, poultry farmers have even stopped reporting the death of fowls to veterinary offices, which they said is a dangerous trend and a great threat to public health.
The office said that strains of H5N1 virus have been spreading rapidly in the poultry farms of the Valley and adjoining districts. This week alone, the capital witnessed four outbreaks of the virus, in which over 12,000 chickens were culled.
rest at http://www.myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=50051
My guess is that recompense for culled chickens is not very high. Estimates vary but it may take as much as 5 lbs of grain to produce 1 pound of chicken. Guessing each culled chicken at 4 lbs you throw away 20 lbs of grain for each chicken culled. So a cull of 12,000 chickens is 240,000 lbs of grain wasted. Given that we are going to be facing a grain shortage this year and higher prices, the resistance to culling will grow which the viruses will love.
February 16th, 2013 at 3:58 am
(Reuters) – U.S. farmers will plant crops this spring under the shadow of a persistent drought that grips prime farmland from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, with grain supplies already tight from drought losses in 2012.
In all, 56 percent of the contiguous United States is under moderate to exceptional drought, twice the usual amount, the Senate Agriculture Committee was told on Thursday.
Arid weather was expected to run until May in the wheat-growing Plains and in the western Corn Belt, where corn and soybeans are the major crops.
“In fact, we are forecasting drier conditions,” said Roger Pulwarty, director of the National Integrated Drought Information System, a federal agency. Above-normal rainfall benefited the southern Plains at the start of this year.
Wheat, corn and soybeans are the most widely grown U.S. crops and form the foundation of the U.S. food supply. They are used in livestock rations and as ingredients in food ranging from salad dressing to bread, breakfast cereal and cookies.
rest at http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/15/us-usa-agriculture-idUSBRE91E14E20130215
February 16th, 2013 at 4:09 am
On Friday, Washington Governor Jay Inslee confirmed that radioactive liquids are leaking from tanks at the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States at Hanford, further heightening concerns experts have shared about the integrity of other storage facilities which have not been investigated and may also be leaking.
rest at http://enformable.com/2013/02/washington-governor-confirms-radioactive-waste-leaking-from-underground-tanks-at-hanford-nuclear-reservation/
February 16th, 2013 at 4:29 am
KunstlerCast; My trust horizon continues to shrink also as I watch the Peak Oil group go on and on about “the systems we depend on”, (banking, mining and manufacturing of junk that runs on energy) while ignoring the “System we depend on”, the biosphere. Politics, culture, economy, money, energy supply (from fossil fuels) are all man made creations. What we have built since 1945 is itself la la land. Now we enter delusional la la land.
Our real energy supply is the sun and our manufacturing system for food, fiber, and fuel is photosynthesis. Our jobs and employment, excluding NTE, would have been in this field. The rich would have been the ones who knew this. The poor would have been the billionaires since they really have nothing of real value.
There is no precedent for what will be. So, as they point out, we don’t look. But maybe there is. People will migrate to areas where there is water and food. Oasises in the desert which shrink down to a watering hole. Watch Egypt.
February 16th, 2013 at 4:54 am
I don’t even trust my computer any more. It’s always “doing something”; importing, ads, videos, pop ups, exporting, scanning, downloading, uploading. Who knows what is going on? The last time I purchased a computer, I bought 2 of them. One is off line and is used for my farm programs such as nutrition and feeding programs. It works just like a light bulb; takes about 15 seconds to come on and does just what you want it to do immediately. It has nothing else to do. The other one is always busy and I don’t trust it. I don’t trust the people behind it.
February 16th, 2013 at 5:12 am
Bailey: thanks for that link. i think the next stage of inquiry will be something like “does continuing ocean acidification benefit the SAR11 virus, its predator, or neither.”
Kathy: great links. i’ve been watching the development of various diseases all over the world and noticed that India is having these problems. i’ve been trying to point out to a person on another blog (who believes in the supremacy of human intelligence) that our greed and ignorance will doom us to extinction. This is a great piece of evidence. As usual the nuclear contamination proceeds without any action (besides further delay) due to concerns that the parent company will lose money (at the expense of completely poisoning groundwater and release of radiation into the air from said leaks).
Lidia: yeah, if you break your neck you’ve got real problems. The least he’d have needed was major surgery to repair his upper vertebrae (perhaps with titanium rods and screws supporting bone implants?).
dmd: the powers that be have it all upside down and backwards because they are only looking out for their own place in the world and ignoring everything else – how ignorant and arrogant is that? Instead of being the “smartest guys in the room” they’re turning out to be psychopathic greedy idiots who get what they want by collusion, corruption, lies, pay-offs, hired hit-men, bullying, control of the media, and on and on.
February 16th, 2013 at 5:54 am
It seems we just refuse to learn:
http://www.platts.com/RSSFeedDetailedNews/RSSFeed/ElectricPower/6157988
i’ll put the second link below, so i don’t trip the automatic moderation device.
February 16th, 2013 at 5:54 am
http://www.ethanolproducer.com/articles/9546/usda-global-ethanol-production-to-grow-40-percent-through-2022
bio-fuels my ass . . .
February 16th, 2013 at 6:07 am
In all, 56 percent of the contiguous United States is under moderate to exceptional drought, twice the usual amount, the Senate Agriculture Committee was told on Thursday.
Arid weather was expected to run until May in the wheat-growing Plains and in the western Corn Belt, where corn and soybeans are the major crops.
If predictions that the interior of the continents in the Northern Hemisphere will be uninhabitable within 5 years and that all life in the NH will be extinct by 2031 are to come true, then the conditions described above must worsen and spread. It looks like they will. If the 2031 extinction prediction is to pan out, at least a couple hundred million people (or about 5% of NH population) a year need to start dying each year. This assumes a steady linear rate of death towards extinction. In any case, massive death must begin soon.
Since NTE is the most important idea of NBL (in fact, it looks like the only idea), a more specific definition is in order. Since the most important question is, what is near term, here’s some proposals for a more detailed and specific definition. Immediate NTE or INTE would be 5-20 years. I’m not sure, but I think this is what most people are talking about when they talk about NTE. The more optimistic subset of NTE I define as one where no one born in this century lives out a modern 1st world lifespan of 75 years. Call this, single lifespan NTE or SLNTE – 20-60 years. It doesn’t seem logical to define life still existing more that 60 years out, as near term, but others may disagree. So I’ve come up with two subdivisions of NTE:
INTE=-5-20 years.
SLNTE= 20-60 years.
I’m not beholden to these categories and I’m interested to see what other people can come up with. Anyway it’s all just a game now, right? Since we are all just spectators in this sport, I’ll admit to my own resentfulness and declare that I am rooting for INTE simply because I don’t want to see the older generation escape the suffering they played so big a role in causing.
February 16th, 2013 at 6:31 am
dairymandave – yeah even people who should get it don’t. I was listening to Thom Hartman this morning talking about debt. He said our present level of debt was OK because it was a lower percent of GDP than at the end of WWII. He should well know that GDP back then was mostly stuff we made and now GDP is based on a service economy that flips hamburgers, gives pedicures, does botox treatments, plumps up ear lobes, etc. I once had a vision of a circle of women – one did the hair of the woman in front of her, who was doing the hair of the woman in front of her till they came full circle – they would go on until they starve because without the most essential of energies, food, we are all dead.
I took an economics course once and after reflection I realized what bunk it was. The whole of the economy depends on how many extra people can one farmer feed, for only with people freed from obtaining their own food can we have people who do anything else.
February 16th, 2013 at 6:45 am
A friend sent me some pages from an older book, Botany for Gardeners by Harold William Rickett, published 1957
“Man intensifies the loss in many ways. He does not permit his own substance to return to the soil’ and most of what he takes from the earth he removes from that place, permanently”
February 16th, 2013 at 8:11 am
Kathy; Yea, and then they complain because we use fertilizer and sprays. It’s nearly spring now and the first thing I must do is grab a sack and walk my mile and a half road frontage and pick up the beer cans, plastic soda bottles, and McD. crap. Some bottles are still glass. I am strongly tempted to just stop farming next year and let the hay crop grow just for the deer…and the beer cans. Paying the taxes will force me to sell something, I suppose.
February 16th, 2013 at 8:14 am
Ice volume.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/02/15-6#.UR6DSAmNak4.facebook
February 16th, 2013 at 8:15 am
Notice how they use a straight line to define the average. Doesn’t look straight to me.
February 16th, 2013 at 8:17 am
Ripley; I sort of ashamed to say that I agree with you.
February 16th, 2013 at 8:24 am
Tom; Big Ag pushes and then milks the farmers just like we farmers push and milk the cows. Most farmers don’t even know it.
February 16th, 2013 at 8:55 am
News; Most contaminated nuke site in US leaking radiation..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/16/hanford-nuclear-tank-is-l_n_2701197.html
I have also read where just closed the nuke plant in Crystal River Fl because of a ‘breach’ that could not be repaired (hmmm, wonder what that means?). Just think of what we don’t know.
February 16th, 2013 at 9:07 am
Bailey
The Crystal River plant went offline in fall 2009 for a maintenance and upgrade project to replace old steam generators. During the project, workers found a crack in the 42-inch thick reactor containment building. An attempt to repair the crack and bring it back online led to more cracks.
A Duke report says it will cost $1.5 to $3.4 billion to repair the containment building plus $300 million a year to buy replacement power while the plant sits idle. Duke’s board has yet to make a decision whether to repair or retire the plant.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/rating-agency-thinks-nuclear-plant-will-be-closed/1270052
February 16th, 2013 at 9:09 am
And http://fairewinds.com/content/utilities-nationwide-could-share-financial-pain-idled-crystal-river-nuclear-plant
February 16th, 2013 at 9:28 am
Kathy C
I watched the Chernobyl u-tube link. From there I watched one with the same scientists and this had more info at the end where the scientists were showing great relief because they found the Plutonium-etc-lava-metal-melted-blobs in the structures below the reactor. They were showing relief for three main reasons, I heard from another sourse some years ago.
Firstly, this meant that the material, which they could not then find and account for, may have gone up into the atmosphere.
Secondly it may have been boring its way through the rock below the facility.
Thirdly, it may have been stolen, by organised crime.
What is so disturbing in that vid is not just the deaths of many of the scientists, (considder they knew the risks…what a sacrifice!!) but that the ‘bureaucracy’ was giving them so little help or resources.
Can’t help ruminating….
Money, as a means of exchange and an mechanism for human agency implicitly removes all feelings of reciprocation and obligation, and care. between participants, and it is for this reason that self regard is what comes to the surface in almost all uses of it. There is no better example of humans seeing the $$$ signs(US of course), losing thier feeling for others and lifes welfare, than the willfull and/or negligent release of Nuclear Material free to the biosphere, which means tens to hundreds of thousands of years of wreckage in the form of death, genetic mutilation, and the destruction of complex life-systems upon which every lifeform depends.
The only thing that comes from this logically is they, TPTB, must have somewhere else to run to …. already.
Were done, yea, but art they?
February 16th, 2013 at 9:31 am
Kathy C
From your last link:
“During the project, workers found a crack in the 42-inch thick reactor containment building. An attempt to repair the crack and bring it back online led to more cracks.”
Leaves me with images of a couple of guys with some trowels and some spackfiller doing a quick cosmetic job… Could be?
February 16th, 2013 at 9:33 am
Oops,
sorry folks, 3:30am here, that should have read:
“Were done, yeah, but are they?”
February 16th, 2013 at 9:44 am
dairymandave said: “In the video about peak oil, “Oil, Smoke and Mirrors”, Heinberg refers to oil as a “gift from nature”. This implies that what we have done with that oil is good, that the industrial economy is wonderful and good. ”
What you point out has always bothered me too. The other thing that is often said with it is “We are squandering our children’s inheritance” or “we are stealing from the future.”
While I understand the root of the sentiment,the implication is that if we stretched the remaining fossil fuel use out over many generations, all might be well. I believe that the atmosphere would tell us we were just as screwed if we unleashed it all at once or somewhat more slowly over the next century.
Ripley said: ” I’ll admit to my own resentfulness and declare that I am rooting for INTE simply because I don’t want to see the older generation escape the suffering they played so big a role in causing.”
I often feel that way. If NTE is coming anyway then I want people who reveled in the orgy of consumption to feel the hangover! My housemates parents often come to visit and the last time they were here the mother declared “I couldn’t live without my second refrigerator in my Florida house!” (she has 2 houses and 3 timeshares)
She inspired us to invent a superhero just for her and her ilk. The superhero has giant ears and roams the earth (flying of course) and when he hear someone say the words “I couldn’t live without …………….(fill in the blank) he swoops down and takes the apparently life sustaining item away and the person drops dead. The superhero’s name is TAKER-AWAYER-OF-LIFE-FROM-PEOPLE-WHO-CAN NOT LIVE WITHOUT STUFF MAN. Silly undertaking for adults,I know, but it helps keep us sane.
We were describing it to a friend and he used this program called Xtranormal and made a very short movie(1:30 minute) of the superhero. It’s silly but it makes us laugh everytime we see it so I will link it here.
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/11718287/super-hero-taker-awayer-of-life-from-those-who-cant-live-without-stuff-manalmost-foiled
KathyC said:”I took an economics course once and after reflection I realized what bunk it was. The whole of the economy depends on how many extra people can one farmer feed, for only with people freed from obtaining their own food can we have people who do anything else.”
We have a common saying in our house called TMF. it stands for “Too Much Food” When we hear about certain things that humans are up to because they are freed from the need to provide food for themselves we just say TMF and it pretty much sums it all up.
February 16th, 2013 at 9:58 am
thestormcrow – I have a sister who told me she didn’t want to live if she couldn’t have warm showers. Can you send the superhero there please….
February 16th, 2013 at 10:26 am
Please please please let me go by way of direct meteorite hit. I really don’t want to spend the rest of my days wading around in the toxic soup of nuclear waste that looks inevitable.
February 16th, 2013 at 11:13 am
Time is running out for farmers to buy seed for 2013. The bill runs into the 100s of thousands for mid west farmers. So they promote a hopeful weather forecast. Many farmers figure that there won’t be 3 bad years in a row. We’ll see. The fronts continue to drop very low, reaching the gulf many times.
February 16th, 2013 at 11:13 am
TSC: i know you only meant the conspicuos consumers of the older generation (since the vast majority of us are hanging on by our fingernails and can’t afford to retire), and i have to agree. The giant sacks of shit who think of themselves as “the smartest people in the room” because they make (or made) more money than everyone else disgust me. In fact i have a theory that normal people who suddenly come into a bunch of money (like winning the lottery) or those who by whatever set of circumstances find themselves in the cushiest jobs (other than the silver spoon set – which are inherently self-centered shallow and awful) change in personality, worldview, and or self-image as a result.
The smug sons of bitches actually think they’re “better than” most others and look down their noses at almost everyone else in some way or another (ie. either outwardly or in their own head). This may sound like over generalization but i haven’t yet seen one person who has escaped this dilemma/psychological effect. On the one hand you have the obvious ones like Leona Helmsley or that Banks woman who abuse the help and demean everyone around them routinely, but even people like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates have this trait to some degree or other, whether it’s in their decision-making process, a personality trait or an affected (in the psychological sense) behavior, it’s there. Hollywood people exude it. The rich just feel more entitled than most and the whole “i couldn’t live without” meme is so much a by-product of the soft, wealthy life, where adoring fans fawn all over them and their “staff” go out of their way to please or provide for their every whim. The only comfort i get out of the coming NTE is that these people have WAAAAY more to lose than most of us, and it will be interesting to see how they cope with NOTHING and basic survival. To be honest though, i’m gonna miss warm showers too.
On the other side we have the philanthropists and people who have given it all away out of some inner sense of doing what’s right (in their own minds, of course) – and it’s noble. The trouble is that civilization is built on exploitation and they shouldn’t even have this vast wealth to sprinkle around as they see fit.
It just begs the question of how this vast wealth came about – and they’re all rather suspect, whether inherited (what crime did YOUR daddy get away with?) like the ol’ Robber Barons of the early 20th century, the stock market (which is basically a gambling casino and yields fictitious money), banking (usury central), or rising to the top of some corporation engaged in pilfering the resources of the earth (or it’s inhabitants) for the benefit of the sacred “shareholders.”
Greed, self-centeredness and our propensity for personal advantage are what drives the faulty human species and has lead us down this primrose path of fantasy “wealth” to our coming NTE experience.
Our vaunted “intellect” seems to be a fatal flaw or mutation (as it’s argued here):
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-evolution-of-anthropogenic.html
(about 1/2 way down)
Another evolutionist, Ernst Mayr, has stated that human intelligence is a fatal mutation dooming the species:
I’LL BEGIN with an interesting debate that took place some years ago between Carl Sagan, the well-known astrophysicist, and Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of American biology. They were debating the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And Sagan, speaking from the point of view of an astrophysicist, pointed out that there are innumerable planets just like ours. There is no reason they shouldn’t have developed intelligent life. Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it’s very unlikely that we’ll find any. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let’s take a look at Earth. And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation … you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation … With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.
(the entire post is a great read)
February 16th, 2013 at 12:04 pm
“Not long ago, I was taking a walk with an American friend in the woods near my house. As we walked, I was pointing to him the effects of climate change that could be seen all around us: stressed trees, damaged vegetation, signs of wildfires, and more. After a while, though, I noticed that my statements produced no reply. It was as he was not hearing what I was saying or, if he could hear me, he could make no sense of what I was saying.
The way we see the world, I think, is mostly as if it were a story. We absorb new information by comparing it to the concatenated elements of the plot of a long and complex story that we have in our mind. For some of us, it is a novel of progress and of increasingly sophisticated gadgetry. For others, it is a novel of initial greatness and subsequent failure. And, with my friend in the woods, it was like we were characters of different narratives, as if – say – Prince Hamlet were to meet Homer Simpson.”
Cassandra’s Legacy (blog):
Immoderate Greatness: the narrative of collapse
February 16th, 2013 at 12:39 pm
Oh, and we were talking about diseases spreading around -
This week’s headlines i could link to, but you can just look em up (WHO website, eg):
Bird Flu Reported In German Poultry Farm.
Sars-like virus in the U.K. (Coronavirus)
Yellow Fever in Chad
Polio in Niger
in fact, here’s a fun site to check out when you have a minute:
http://outbreaks.globalincidentmap.com/home.php
February 16th, 2013 at 1:33 pm
In a previous thread
http://guymcpherson.com/2012/12/into-the-heartland/#comment-56676
Kathy C says: Is the wonder worth the pain is my question.
EROEI
We’ll die when our world gets too hot,
Leaving nothing, nil, zilch, diddly squat;
What did we gain
For all of our pain?
Was it worth it? Maybe. Maybe not.
February 16th, 2013 at 2:23 pm
Emotional Return on Emotion Invested?
Thanks BtD
February 16th, 2013 at 2:24 pm
Thank you, Kathy.
February 16th, 2013 at 3:15 pm
Think on this.
In order for evolution to proceed we have something called selection. What that means is that some critters die before or without reproducing and other dies only after reproducing. Think of all the bacteria, protozoa, mammals and other hominids that had to die so that evolution could deliver homo sapiens. They all died so we could be. Is there anything about being human in the present day that makes all the deaths that got us here worth it? All those deaths just so we could suicide our species and most if not all of the rest of the species that also got to today…..
Think on it.
February 16th, 2013 at 4:17 pm
A life without examination
Isn’t worth it (Socrates citation);
But I’m not persuaded
It gets much upgraded
On closer investigation.
February 16th, 2013 at 5:01 pm
Upon closer investigation
Life isn’t worth examination
I have to conclude
In the end we are food
Which I suppose is reincarnation
February 16th, 2013 at 5:45 pm
Think on this;
If phytoplankton had evolved to be multicellular, then worms, then legs and so on, there may have been little green beings walking around and getting their energy by lying in the sun, rather than eating their neighbor. There might have been peace on earth.
February 16th, 2013 at 6:03 pm
More about arctic algae.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/story/2013/02/16/north-arctic-ice-ecosystem.html
February 16th, 2013 at 6:12 pm
Now, if some of those algae strings manage to get close to shore rather than die in deep water, and then come ashore, a new species colored green could be walking around. Might take some time.
At least man didn’t destroy time…well not yet anyway.
February 16th, 2013 at 6:29 pm
dairymandave, don’t they need a few minerals as well as energy from the sun? And don’t they need space to soak up the sun? And don’t they have any wastes?
What keeps their numbers down so they each have a place in the sun, a few minerals and a place for their wastes? They would fight for room, a few minerals and toilets.
February 16th, 2013 at 6:44 pm
dairymandave, I was listening to Paul Wheaton (a sometimes-annoying but generally informative and well-meaning permaculture promoter) on a podcast where he mentioned farmers in Montana or someplace like that spending $3000 on chemicals for a crop that brought them $3000. The only thing that made this madness seem to “work” was the fact that so much agribusiness is hugely subsidized.
My husband and I spent a nice evening at a local diversified organic farm. They seem to be having fun, although I don’t know how they are making out money-wise so far: http://eatstayfarm.com/
February 16th, 2013 at 6:53 pm
.
Dying’s a subject profound:
It’s about being stiff in the ground;
But it’s all good with me
If I could guarantee
When it happens, I’m nowhere around.
H/T: Woody Allen, of course
February 16th, 2013 at 7:14 pm
Now, if some of those algae strings manage to get close to shore rather than die in deep water, and then come ashore, a new species colored green could be walking around. Might take some time.
From the Wikipedia article on mitochondria:
“A mitochondrion contains DNA, which is organized as several copies of a single, circular chromosome. This mitochondrial chromosome contains genes for redox proteins such as those of the respiratory chain. The mitochondrial genome codes for some RNAs of ribosomes, and the twenty-two tRNAs necessary for the translation of messenger RNAs into protein. The circular structure is also found in prokaryotes, and the similarity is extended by the fact that mitochondrial DNA is organized with a variant genetic code similar to that of Proteobacteria. This suggests that their ancestor, the so-called proto-mitochondrion, was a member of the Proteobacteria. In particular, the proto-mitochondrion was probably closely related to the rickettsia. However, the exact relationship of the ancestor of mitochondria to the alpha-proteobacteria and whether the mitochondrion was formed at the same time or after the nucleus, remains controversial.”
From Moselio Schaechter’s blog, Small Thingd Considered:
How an Endosymbiont Earns Tenure
In the protozoan amoeba, Paulinella chromatophora, each cell contains two photosynthetic entities called chromatophores. When the cell divides, one is inherited by each daughter cell and promptly replicates.
Plastids and mitochondria are organelles in eukaryotic cells that originated from bacterial endosymbionts via invasion or enslavement or a synergistic amalgamation, depending on your viewpoint. Since these events occurred more than one billion years ago, it has not been possible to trace the evolutionary steps in the transition from endosymbiont to mature organelle, a process referred to as organellogenesis.
February 16th, 2013 at 7:24 pm
“The chromatophore of Paulinella tells a different story, making it truly unique in the sphere of organelles. Sequencing of its rDNA revealed that its ancestor was from a different group of cyanobacteria—the Prochlorococcus/Synechococcus clade, a cluster that happens to be the food for Paulinella’s phagotrophic close relatives.”
February 16th, 2013 at 7:25 pm
From Moselio Schaechter’s blog, Small Thingd Considered:
Caught in the Act
“In the year 2000, researchers discovered a new microbial eukaryote on a sandy, intertidal beach in Japan, a member of the recently described Katablepharids. The Katablepharids are yet one more group of single-celled eukaryotes, motile by means of their two flagella, heterotrophs that feed on algae. Interestingly, nearly all the cells of this new species contained a large green “chloroplast.”
Further investigation disclosed that when Hatena divides, one daughter cell inherits the whole “chloroplast” while the other daughter is colorless. The “chloroplast” is actually an endosymbiont derived from Nephroselmis, a kidney-shaped green alga abundant in Hatena’s habitat. Gone are its flagella, cytoskeleton, and endomembrane system; degraded are its mitochondria and Golgi apparatus. Its plastid has swollen to more than 10 times its original size and is engaged in very active photosynthesis. Since it is so highly modified compared to the free-living form, its identity had to be verified by analysis of its SSU rDNA sequence.
What about the other daughter cell, the colorless one? It develops a complex feeding apparatus at its apex and then dines on algae like other Katablepharids. Interestingly, cells lacking the endosymbiont were never seen to divide. Instead they ingest a Nephroselmis of the appropriate strain which then transforms into a new “chloroplast.”"
- That is like a human eating the right kind of green leafy vegetable, and then sprouting leaves!
February 16th, 2013 at 9:24 pm
From Nature Magazine..
Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere
http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/_pdfs/Barnoskyetal2012.pdf
Even this missing the mark with talk of a ‘few generations.’
February 17th, 2013 at 3:03 am
Kathy C
You wrote:
“Is there anything about being human in the present day that makes all the deaths that got us here worth it? All those deaths just so we could suicide our species and most if not all of the rest of the species that also got to today….”
I’m sure I posted this view somewhere a while back on a previous thread…
All the life alive today has a direct link to the first life form(S).(possible multiple forms), and has experienced no death!
There is only a series of division, conrtraction in size, then recombination after some genetic shuffling. But all the life has always been alive since then. Yours, mine Guys even ulvfugl, and the frog in my drain, the kangaroos whose poo I collect, the bacteria in our gut, all of it.
There is another way of thinking of it:
there has been no death in the chain of being in all present life. Remarkable !
No death! Not one!
Just smaller bigger, halving recombining.
The selection process, we usually call natural selection just manages to change the forms of life, not the fact that life exists, and cuts off all the rest.
The greater strategy of our carbon based life, our DNA replication is that to survive it/life/we/us organised to keep adapting to micro-environments, because the Earth is always changing, and there is so much diversity of environments.
It actually blows my mind when I considder these simple ‘hidden’ understandings which we are part of.
Such beauty in diversity.
We are playing with that now, with NTE.
Imagine the images and understanding of life on Earth that will depart when David Attenborough finally dies?
Wow.
February 17th, 2013 at 3:30 am
Well, forget that idea. Here on the farm we have about 400 acres of plants competing for the sun and the only thing keeping them from fighting is they are grounded by roots.
Pretty soon, humans will be grounded, too.
February 17th, 2013 at 3:38 am
Lidia; I have considered organic for many years and watched some neighbors go that way. There is a lot of dishonesty involved in the game. It boils down to simply getting more money for your milk sold. Our milk is probably just as “organic” as theirs is. Pasturization is also a problem. One farm I am aware of has two barns. One for the cows that didn’t need antibiotics and another for the ones that did. Another farm I am aware of just lets the sick cows die. My wife and I don’t want to operate that way.
February 17th, 2013 at 4:03 am
Ozman “there has been no death in the chain of being in all present life.” Obviously you don’t mean by death what I mean. I mean that event that we are programmed to avoid. I mean that event that makes the rabbit run from the fox and the human put locks on their doors. I mean that event that if it occurs before passing on genes, means that that particular combination of genes does not go on. I mean that event that causes soldiers to leave sperm in sperm banks so their gene line can go on even if they are never able to have sex with their wife again. I mean that event that is considered the ultimate punishment that humans give each other.
I find that the knowledge of the recycling of materials through living beings is beautiful, and I like the thought of my ashes becoming part of other life. I once told my sons to put my ashes under tomatoes, one said, aw mom how about a watermelons. However I don’t expect my ashes will care one way or another. Nor will the watermelons. My sons might think, ah mom you are better as a watermelon, but it will be their thought not mine.
Dairyman grasses are grounded but not their seeds – a few make it elsewhere to compete – and dandelions do a great job of moving, not them but their seeds. Then there is the strangler fig “per wiki “They all share a common “strangling” growth habit that is found in many tropical forest species, particularly of the genus Ficus.[1] This growth habit is an adaptation for growing in dark forests where the competition for light is intense. These plants begin life as epiphytes, when their seeds, often bird-dispersed, germinate in crevices atop other trees. These seedlings grow their roots downward and envelop the host tree while also growing upward to reach into the sunlight zone above the canopy.[2][3]”
Others spread under the ground. Bermuda grass rhizomes are always sneaking into my garden…..tough stuff
February 17th, 2013 at 4:19 am
Fuck Monsanto
“Farmers use less seeds, less water and less chemicals but they get more without having to invest more. This is revolutionary,” said Dr Surendra Chaurassa from Bihar’s agriculture ministry. “I did not believe it to start with, but now I think it can potentially change the way everyone farms. I would want every state to promote it. If we get 30-40% increase in yields, that is more than enough to recommend it.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/feb/16/india-rice-farmers-revolution
February 17th, 2013 at 5:45 am
The dinasours lasted a lot longer than we did, 200 million years, by being very good at eating each other. Guess that way works best. Absent that asteroid, they might still be around eating humans for dinner.
Turtles have been very successful by being very slow. Carrying their house around on their back really slows them down. Slow seems to work; who can they chase? Too bad they can’t do photosynthesis on their backs.
Maybe there was a time when little green beings evolved but they became so successful that they didn’t last very long. Same old story. Maybe they are hiding somewhere and come out in the night to make crop circles.
I think I’m getting cabin fever. Happens every year about this time.
February 17th, 2013 at 5:59 am
Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now Besso” (an old friend) “has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us…know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Immortality doesn’t mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.
http://www.robertlanza.com/does-death-exist-new-theory-says-no-2/
February 17th, 2013 at 6:45 am
My husband told me about Philosopher Charles Stevenson this morning as I discussed with him the use of a novel definition that is not the usual definition to try to prove something. Stevenson coined a term “Persuasive Definition”. Using the term differently than was obviously intended does not constitute winning an argument. Lets take mammals for instance, if they stop breathing and their brain and body separate into their minerals they can no longer breed and pass on their genetic material. If that happens before they have passed on their genetic material they are not represented in future lifeforms. Thus death in that sense is a crucial event along with mutation and other means of changing genetic code. Death in that sense also makes room for new ever changing creatures by giving up minerals and a space on the planet.
Can we agree that there is a moment in each person’s life in which their physical body stops functioning and the stuff within it begins to disintegrate and at that point they are no longer able to pass on any more genes. If they have already passed on genes it is only 1/2 their genetic code. As we realize from breeding chickens back and forth, after several generations the original genetic donors become irrelevant. Still some people think of that is a way of “living on”. Yet their body and their full set of genes breaks up and that pattern is lost.
I will refer to death from now on as physical death of the body, if others will find some adjectives to describe the kind of death they don’t think happens. I have killed roosters and eaten their bodies, I know physical death of the body is real. In fact Oz and U if you will accept that their is a physical death of the body, you need not comment on any post I make about death as they physical death of the body is all I am ever referring to.
Per wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_definition
A persuasive definition is a form of definition which purports to describe the ‘true’ or ‘commonly accepted’ meaning of a term, while in reality stipulating an uncommon or altered use, usually to support an argument for some view, or to create or alter rights, duties or crimes.[1][2] The terms thus defined will often involve emotionally charged but imprecise notions, such as “freedom”, “terrorism”, “democracy”, etc. In argumentation the use of a stipulative definition is an example of the definist fallacy.[3][4]
Examples of persuasive definitions include:
atheist – “someone who doesn’t yet realize that God exists”[4]
Democrat – “a leftist who desires to overtax the corporations and abolish freedom in the economic sphere”[4]
Republican – “an old white man who feels threatened by change.”
fetus – “an unborn person”[3]
Loyalty – “a tool to get people to do things they don’t want to do.”
Persuasive definitions commonly appear in controversial topics such as politics, sex, and religion, as participants in emotionally-charged exchanges will sometimes become more concerned about swaying people to one side or another than expressing the unbiased facts. A persuasive definition of a term is favorable to one argument or unfavorable to the other argument, but is presented as if it were neutral and well-accepted, and the listener is expected to accept such a definition without question.[1]
The term “persuasive definition” was introduced by philosopher C.L. Stevenson as part of his emotive theory of meaning.[5]
February 17th, 2013 at 8:24 am
Kurt has an opinion on extinction:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRlwtgaxO20
February 17th, 2013 at 8:29 am
@ Kathy C.
I think the problem lies with what the definition of ‘life’ is, not with the definition of death.
You want to talk about discrete individuals. There’s a clear distinction to be made be made, Life on Earth as discrete independent individuals, makes no sense because such things have never existed, it’s been a continuum, made possible by the contributions of all living things.
February 17th, 2013 at 8:32 am
Guy wrote “I learned a lesson about immortality. I don’t have it.”
Ozman wrote “There is another way of thinking of it:
there has been no death in the chain of being in all present life. Remarkable !
No death! Not one!”
U posted the quote “Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world.”
Question – I write about death and invaribly such responses from the two of you. Guy writes in the essay that leads this thread that one of the three lessons he learned is about his understanding that he was mortal, and that gets no response from either of you? Oz I do see that you corrected his wording so that he made it clear that he learned he was not immortal. As far as I know that must mean he learned he can die. Yet you don’t follow up with him that we can see it differently, that there is no death, nothing has died. U as far as I can see you did not tell Guy – don’t worry death doesn’t exist.
What is different about my mention the death in the context of selective deaths that move evolution forward from Guy’s expression of learning about his own mortality that elicits your responses??
February 17th, 2013 at 8:33 am
Ah U you posted while I was writing. AGain, Guy writes of experiencing the knowledge of his mortality as a discrete individual. Why did you not challenge that?
February 17th, 2013 at 9:44 am
Two comments from Bertrand Russell –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihaB8AFOhZo
February 17th, 2013 at 10:09 am
@ dmd
B. Russell :The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true.
http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/russell/russell.php?name=theory.of.knowledge
@ Kathy C.
It’s about how the words ‘life’ and ‘death’ are defined. They have multiple meanings.
February 17th, 2013 at 10:21 am
Isaac Asimov on life and death for individual humans (for those of us who believe in life, death, and individual humans): “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
February 17th, 2013 at 11:34 am
Fwiw, this guy, Ron Garrett, reckons he destroys the multiple universe interpretation of quantum mechanics, along with several others. But he’s a Google software engineer, not a physicist, so what does he know, eh. But if he’s right, then I suppose Lanza’s theory re the end of death is just another load of nonsense.
http://youtu.be/dEaecUuEqfc
February 17th, 2013 at 11:39 am
Guy, Asimov was quite a guy. Now I admire him one bit more! I first read his book on DNA in a high school microbiology class. It may have been the year that the book was published. I had no idea how relatively new the information was.
February 17th, 2013 at 11:40 am
The problem with Indian rice farmer’s new found dramatic harvest yield techniques is that it will just predictably promote have twice as many children. What a shock.
There has been NO longterm effective ‘governor’ to human reproduction since ‘agriculture.
The first steam engines routinely exploded because the idea of engine ‘governors’ had not been perfected. Limits, limits? We don’t need no stinking Limits!
‘Governors’ to human consumption of resources have NEVER been perfect on a wide global scale, hence the 7 billion plus we have now.
Sure, a few pitiful examples through history here and there, but the mental mindset of ‘to Infinity and Beyond’ is still the H sapian sapian Modus operandi. ‘Intelligence’ without Wisdom, quite a plan.
I recall hearing that a lot of New Guinea tribes would have a major pig hunt every 7 or so years to keep the pigs from totally destroying the island’s eco-system.
They were that enlightened, but it also coincided with the mark of a major cycle of tribal warfare, the pig meat being the ‘power’ for the increased level of ritual island wide violence. One of the general rules was that as a male, you could not have children with a woman until you had killed at least one man from another tribe, thus help to balancing out the total resource drag on the island.
Your adversary’s Head was your ‘proof’ you did the deed. Kind of half sovereign, half ticket stub to fatherhood. Your opponents death ‘made room’ for your offspring, a zero sum game in island ecology.
Stable population can be achieved in many ways.
In general though, the millions slaughtered in warfare has not proven a winning eco-strategy through out history. We have 7 billion and counting. A Big Fat Human Failure in self restraint.
An all out nuclear exchange coupled with bio-warfare and geo-warfare might do the trick globally now, finally.
A change in ‘reproductive aspiration mentality’ will Never happen in time with H sapian sapian and switching to organic crop methods that increase yield will just beget = = = = = more mouths to feed, Not ‘enlightened’ self interest or sustainable Anything.
Give a man a fish an he’s fed for the day, teach a man to fish and he’ll over populate the planet, kill the oceans and eat every living creature in it.
Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand job’ was based on the fatal assumption that H sapian sapians are rational beings, nothing could be further from the truth.
February 17th, 2013 at 11:45 am
Dave, actually there are animals that are green and use their green to make food – I was listening to a talk by Lynn Margulis recently in which she discussed it. Here is one example Most clams live in deep, fairly dark waters. Among one group of clams is a species whose ancestors ingested algae—a typical food—but failed to digest them and kept the algae under their shells. The shell, with time, became translucent, allowing sunlight in. The clams fed off their captive algae and their habitat expanded into sunlit waters. So there’s a discontinuity between the dark-dwelling, food-gathering ancestor and the descendants that feed themselves photosynthetically.
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/16-interview-lynn-margulis-not-controversial-right#.USEiZR3I7oI
Who knows, maybe the guys at Monsanto are working on green pigs and cows as we speak??? They have already made glow in the dark pigs
February 17th, 2013 at 11:46 am
glow in the dark pigs http://www.omg-facts.com/Technology/Taiwanese-Scientists-Have-Made-Glowing-G/44362
February 17th, 2013 at 12:00 pm
U It’s about how the words ‘life’ and ‘death’ are defined. They have multiple meanings.
Exactly what I was saying. Now you know what I mean when I say death and have no need in the future to tell me there is no death. You now know I am referring to the death in the usual sense of the word as used by most people. It is the event that among humans that triggers the production of a death certificate, among chickens makes them available for human food, among squash bugs makes them unable to eat my squash, among disease bacteria makes them unable to render me fit for a death certificate. If we humans didn’t die in the usual sense of that word, Social Security would really be in big trouble.
February 17th, 2013 at 12:03 pm
Bhutan plans to become the first country in the world to turn its agriculture completely organic, banning the sales of pesticides and herbicides and relying on its own animals and farm waste for fertilisers.
http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/blog/2013/feb/12/bhutan_set_to_plow_ahead_as_worlds_first_organic/
February 17th, 2013 at 12:04 pm
Kathy C: Others spread under the ground. Bermuda grass rhizomes are always sneaking into my garden…..tough stuff
Josh and I were just talking yesterday that if not for the bermuda’s aggressiveness, we would actually have a very easy time with gardening. That stuff is tough and spreads even into the most well mulched places!
February 17th, 2013 at 12:06 pm
@ Kathy C.
Why are you picking an argument ? When people say Life on Earth, as in the sense Ozman was using the word life, and as in the sense YOU first used the word, as all the lives that had ended to produce us, as on evolution, they are NOT using the word life in the sense that produces a death certificate when it ends, are they.
February 17th, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Kathy C asks: What is different about my mention the death in the context of selective deaths that move evolution forward from Guy’s expression of learning about his own mortality that elicits your responses??
C’mon, you must know that it is your absence of penis that guarantees your comments will be targeted! There is no mystery (or even quantum mysticism) in this….just your good old garden variety misogyny. As we are all aware, the big U has some problems in this area.
February 17th, 2013 at 12:26 pm
physical death of the body is all I am ever referring to.
In other words, death of the meat-robot. Those who grudgingly and half-heartedly acknowledge science while try to inject an extract of “spirituality” called “consciousness” into it and revel wallowing in the quagmire. The true separation of church and state lies before that quagmire, with spirituality in that paradigm restricted to Messrs. Jim Beam, Jose Cuervo, Jack Daniels, Johnnie Walker, Hennessey, and their ilk.
February 17th, 2013 at 12:27 pm
@ wildwoman
That’s a boring wind up.
Surely people here can distinguish between the meaning of the word ‘life’ when applied to the existence of an organism that contributes towards the overall evolution of life on Earth, and the meaning of the word ‘life’ when applied to an individual human’s span between birth and death. It’s not something that should need to be explained.
February 17th, 2013 at 12:56 pm
.
More Stage Three
Some bargain to cut down death’s dread
Thinking they’ll live forever instead;
I think they’re misled
About what lies ahead,
Because, as is said, dead is dead.
February 17th, 2013 at 1:05 pm
mortality as a discrete individual.
Intellectual recognition of that fact coupled with the desire for the “I” to persist is the source of the problems, including the problem of religion. The problems will not be solved until one recognises that there is no “I”, but only an meat-robot sans awareness.
Injecting awareness/consciousness into the material world or into the meat-robot does solve any problems.
February 17th, 2013 at 1:21 pm
.
Belatedly here comes the dawn:
Liar’s rules have been putting me on;
It’s not like before,
Ain’t playing games any more,
And I’ll feel better once I am gone.
H/T: The Byrds
February 17th, 2013 at 1:21 pm
.
Looking all the way back to my birth,
I wonder, what was it all worth?
It might not be bliss
Where I go after this,
But at least it won’t be the earth.
February 17th, 2013 at 2:07 pm
TRDH “That stuff is tough and spreads even into the most well mulched places!”
I would revise that to say “especially into the most well mulched places”. It comes upon mulch and says “Oh boy, easy passage here”. I thought nothing could kill it, but in the chicken yards the chickens managed it – they are persistent and relentless.
February 17th, 2013 at 2:09 pm
Regarding Bhutan going organic; I didn’t read success in that story. Some day before extinction, there will be no fertilizer or chemicals to buy. Then we will learn all about what we thought we knew. The entire earth has been organic for 4 billion years. It will be again. Won’t need any laws to make it happen.
February 17th, 2013 at 2:17 pm
Wildwoman, interesting theory – maybe I need a sex change operation.
Wonderful movie based on a true story about a young man who got a sex change operation
Beautiful Boxer (2004)
Based on the real life story of Parinya Charoenphol, a Muaythai boxer who underwent a sex change operation to become a woman. The movie chronicles her life from a young boy who likes to wear lipstick and wear flowers to her sensational career as kickboxer whose specialty is ancient Muaythai boxing moves which she can execute expertly with grace and finally her confrontation with her own sexual identity which led to her sex change op.
More on Parinya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parinya_Charoenphol
I don’t think it works as well female to male tho…..
February 17th, 2013 at 2:24 pm
U are you saying that any time you post something that disagrees with something I have said I must refrain from further comment or else I am picking an argument?
February 17th, 2013 at 2:47 pm
@ Kathy C.
You’re free to conduct yourself in whatever way you wish, it’s not for me to tell you what to do. You pick an argument with me on most threads and usually end up complaining, or insisting you’ll never discuss with me again, whatever.
I didn’t address any comment to you. I posted the Lanza quote because I thought it was interesting that an eminent scientist should claim that death has been ended, so to speak. You took it upon yourself to respond to me and to Ozman. You seem to want to continue haggling. Why ?
February 17th, 2013 at 3:06 pm
Kathy C says: Emotional Return on Emotion Invested?
Good one!
==
#1 best seller pop psychology sensation!
“Emotional Return on Emotion Invested”
Part I: EROEI
Extraction costs limit supply—
If you like, you can check it with Guy;
It’s too late to deny
Energy’s tie
To the notion we’re soon going to die.
Part II: Relationships
Sometimes, as much as you try,
Some people just pump you dry;
Take this and apply:
If you don’t say bye-bye,
Push it too much, you could die.
Part III: NTE
Analogy’s now explained why
Things in your life go awry;
But this book, with doom nigh,
Was not such a good buy,
Because soon we’re all going to die.
February 17th, 2013 at 3:24 pm
Kathy C
You ask a very important question, or nexus of questions.
I will answer without deflecting from what you ask.
“Death is utterly acceptable to consciousness and to life”
Those are the first words in an earlier edition of Adi Da Samraj’s spiritual Autobiography, ‘The Knee of Listening’. They challenge our base assumptions about mortal existance, and are supposed to be controversial, but nevertheless true, IMO.
I do put the emphasis on the whole of sentient and living biomass as the corpus of life, in my previous comments. Individual lives are very real and significant. I pointed out from an evolutionary POV the lifeform of our DNA is the way it is . so life will continue to exist, and for that priority to occur, the form of life must alter, but not the essence.
‘Chicken consciousness’(BTW, please anyone search engine that term for a whole new world of cinematic reading!)is different from dolphin and ant and human and dare I say plant and protozoa consciousness, but only in the extent the physical vehicle(the body) allows the whole of the conscious domain of existance to be experienced, or realised. There is a reason life wishes to persist, and IMO,(please contest) it is so consciousness can be fully realised.
Death has not occurred in the stream of existing living beings, which I wrote before. Individual death is ‘di rigur’ or inevitable because of an as yet ununknown genetic limit to living in this biosphere, and the integrity of DNA over many years of replication, or something like this. The net result is these physical carbon units have a shelf life, which varies with life experience(sugar, drugs, alcahol, radiation and UV exposure, heavy metals etc).
As humanswe are not just the meat body, we love and feel things, as you know full well. I don’t add that to the meat body if anything I add the meat body to that,(loosely, conceptually).
When a bay dies in your arms it is your heart that feels the love and lodss of the little child’s ife chances, and there is no saying much else, you just feel it.
My brother at the age of 14 died in my bed by my side, and I tried to revive him, not knowing to hold his nose closed when I blew into his mouth. How absurd and surreal now it seems some 35 years later. The truth was that his body had given up, it had been punctured so many times with experimental drugs to ‘cure’ Acute Lymphoblastic Lukemia, when the problem was nuclear testing but TPTB in some life or death rat race economic/political game. His body smelled like a disinfected hospital which still reeked of drugs, and when I blew into his lungs I could smell the death there.
I was sad he had died. My mother was sleeping in her easy chair, exhausted by the ordeal of trying to save her sons life, and getting few answers from doctors at the specialist level. At the time he passed, she was asleep, but was brought to him and me by a neighbour who was watching over things while she rested.
After the moments passd and we moved to the lounge room my mother disclosed that as she was sleepng she had a vision, or a dream of mybrother. He was standing on a mountainside, waving goodby, saying ‘By Mum, thanks so much, I love you goodby. Just waving, with a beaming smile.”
I do not feel death was anything other than a release for my brother, and one where he learnt a powerful spiritual lesson, which is not really appropriate to go into here, because it relates to family issues, mostly between him and my mum. His spirit moves on!
The family grieved for several years. Altogether death may not come to the majority with such clarity or ‘positive’ overtones, I’ll admit. A ot of individual death is horrific, as you point out, being chased by a fox, the chicken runs.
To conclude I am saying that feeling the depth of the heart response to an individual’s death is human, and ust so, not in conflict with acceptance of ‘death’ as a passing moment which is both necessary and inevitable. However, I do not accept that that is the end of the matter(pun intended). My experience is otherwise, not just my reasoned belief.
Your compassion for those you nurse, and indeed all beings you defend is something I admire, and understand comes to you very fast and very strong. I will say that others are perhaps more detached.
So to me, death in itself is nothing to be overly troubled by. Losing loved ones, or even becoming aware of others unfamiliar but in threat of death, or dying, or dead is something to grieve and be motivated to stop if it is caused by our problem making way of living.
I was fortunate to be with my mother in hospice when she died, and it was educational to say the least, but her and I had made our peace, and she ‘thirsted’ to go at the end. Her’s was an easy death.
Much more could be said, ut better just leave it at that.
February 17th, 2013 at 4:46 pm
OZ, thanks for sharing. I find joy and comfort in the hope that I am right and after death is nothingness. Even if I am part of some whole that is continuing from when the first self replication started or the planet was formed or even farther back, it means nothing to me if I was not aware of it. Likewise if I join that somethingness after death but lose self awareness it is the same as nothingness. I like the idea that after I die I might be incorporated into the flesh of a tomato that someone eats with the juice running down their chin, but I sure don’t want to be aware of that. I think awareness is really not all it is cracked up to be, even living as a privileged first worlder. The painful awareness of those of us of privilege are compensated by joyful awareness. For many I doubt there is enough joy to compensate for the pain. I am quite sure growing up on a dump in Brazil and being hunted for sport by rich kids is a situation in which the joy of life is far out weighed by the fear and pain.
Given that we are about to extinguish most if not all self replication it seems that all the self replication and selective death before replication that went on to result in humans, is well, wasted. Death in the stream of living things may soon be upon us. Only the thermopiles perhaps can save this stream of living from death. Given the endless bodies ripped apart to feed other bodies over millions of years I think (most days) it is best for this stream of living things to end.
I was already comfortable with my own mortality, I am becoming comfortable with NTE, the mortality of the stream of life….
I had a vision once as well of someone who was close to me and died too early (leaving a wife and 3 young children). He smiled and looked happy. I decided that my brain gave me that picture to help me deal with his death – and that is enough comfort – nice to have my brain comfort me than nag at me as it sometimes does). I no longer seem to need such visions to comfort me when someone dies. I am comfortable with the sweet nothingness….
Not sure if that responds – Again thanks for sharing pieces of your story. Sometimes pain makes people hard, it did the opposite with you, made you more caring and thoughtful…..
February 17th, 2013 at 5:04 pm
‘Chicken consciousness’(BTW, please anyone search engine that term for a whole new world of cinematic reading!)is different from dolphin and ant and human and dare I say plant and protozoa consciousness,
None of these “have” consciousness. It is consciousness that illuminates one’s awareness of them – and of one”self”. Sunlight illuminates a sunny day, but none of the myriad objects that one can see on a sunny day “has” light.
As humanswe are not just the meat body, we love and feel things, as you know full well. I don’t add that to the meat body if anything I add the meat body to that,(loosely, conceptually).
A meat-robot neither “loves” or “feels”. Those aspects attest to the complexity of its programming. The awareness of the “loving” or the “feeling” is conflated with “loving” and “feeling”. Awareness Itself is without characteristics or content, the Void. One cannot carry any baggage into it. Hence, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God”.
February 17th, 2013 at 7:21 pm
Arctic death spiral leaves scientists shocked and worried
February 17th, 2013 at 8:27 pm
Thanks for the link Guy. Yes, the “arctic death spiral” is deeply troubling. I think within a year or so most of us will have awakened to the fact that the biosphere (and thus we humans) are in deep, deep trouble.
February 17th, 2013 at 10:52 pm
Bob Conway Says:
Thanks for the link Guy. Yes, the “arctic death spiral” is deeply troubling. I think within a year or so most of us will have awakened to the fact that the biosphere (and thus we humans) are in deep, deep trouble.
—————————–
Unfortunately, what should viewed as life-changing or even civilization-changing data will continue to get less emphasis than what Kim Kardashian is wearing thanks to the owners of the MSM, our main organs of information dissemination. This shouldn’t come as any surprise considering that much of their money comes from advertising sold to oil and car companies.
It’s even more sobering to think that for every one of us discussing the latest scientific data, there’s probably a million people discussing 2000 years old biblical writings and how they are the only source of data anyone needs. People in that group would include our most recent ex-president.
February 18th, 2013 at 12:32 am
Gail
Watched the ‘Four Horsemen’ video linked by you at the end of the previous thread. Some good info there, with a lot of emphasis on our power as individuals…eyes wide open ..sort of thing.
The Brittish productions always seem to have a backgrounding that we can figure this complex situation out, and ‘by gingos we can fix it’. Of course it can be fixed, but the money is on it not being fixed(mixed metaphore and deep irony together there, Ha).
As if good old Brittish know how can get the job done.
I mean, these smart people are almost all saying it is a simple con.
Wow, so all the higher economic and political education is not needed to understand this con, just to keep it going, one step ahead.
Good general intro to those financial issues though, thanks from me.
February 18th, 2013 at 5:06 am
CO2 at Mauna Loa is up 3.5 ppm y.o.y.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
February 18th, 2013 at 6:35 am
http://fukushima-diary.com/2013/02/contaminated-water-overflowed-from-the-tank-of-reactor5-and-6-in-the-end/
The tanks of retained contaminated water are getting full, Tepco is planning to discharge it to the sea due to the lack of capacity. [URL]
At 19:36 of 2/16/2013, a subcontract worker found the contaminated water overflowing from the desalination system installed outside of reactor5 and 6.
The volume of overflowed water is nearly 20 m3. Tepco discribes it as “leakage” but it was actually an “overflow”.
February 18th, 2013 at 6:51 am
Guy, Thanks for the link to the article about the Arctic Death Spiral
Of particular note is this paragraph Climate scientists and ice experts are now using phrases like “unprecedented”, “amazing”, “extreme”, “hard to exaggerate”, “incredibly fast”, “death spiral” and “heading for oblivion”.
I suggest we start charting the various expressions of climate scientists that convey surprise. I would suggest that it has gone from linear to exponential and that that chart is the only one we need to evaluate how bad things are. Just as economists keep data on consumer confidence we can start a record of climate scientist confidence in previous models
February 18th, 2013 at 7:32 am
How about starting a list of new feedbacks. There are many more than 8. However, that list won’t accelerate…I think.
February 18th, 2013 at 8:09 am
Dave, yes I think there are more than 8 but not a big enough number more to make it go exponential. However the rate at which many of them contribute to the feedback is probably exponential or has the capacity to go exponential.
Again if we add in Peak Oil giving us less ability to respond to climate change, such things as forest fires may take a sharp upward curve in both number and area burned.
February 18th, 2013 at 8:38 am
High Mowing Seeds
February 18th, 2013 at 10:19 am
Thank goodness I grew up with a family (way back in the old days when grandma and grandpa lived in the same household) that endowed in my brothers and me the value of nature. This is a shocking article:
12/29/2012
If You See A Turtle In The Road, Run It Over!
Requires no explanation. The more interesting question, which is unanswerable, is what percentage of drivers who noticed the turtle in the road tried to run it over.
CLEMSON, S.C. (AP) — Clemson University student Nathan Weaver set out to determine how to help turtles cross the road. He ended up getting a glimpse into the dark souls of some humans.
Weaver put a realistic rubber turtle in the middle of a lane on a busy road near campus. Then he got out of the way and watched over the next hour as seven drivers swerved and deliberately ran over the animal. Several more apparently tried to hit it but missed.
“I’ve heard of people and from friends who knew people that ran over turtles. But to see it out here like this was a bit shocking,” said Weaver, a 22-year-old senior in Clemson’s School of Agricultural, Forest and Environmental Sciences.
To seasoned researchers, the practice wasn’t surprising.
The number of box turtles [image above] is in slow decline, and one big reason is that many wind up as roadkill while crossing the asphalt, a slow-and-steady trip that can take several minutes.
Sometimes humans feel a need to prove they are the dominant species on this planet by taking a two-ton metal vehicle and squishing a defenseless creature under the tires, said Hal Herzog, a Western Carolina University psychology professor.
“They aren’t thinking, really. It is not something people think about. It just seems fun at the time,” Herzog said. “It is the dark side of human nature.”
Herzog asked a class of about 110 students getting ready to take a final whether they had intentionally run over a turtle, or been in a car with someone who did. Thirty-four students raised their hands, about two-thirds of them male, said Herzog, author of a book about humans’ relationships with animals, called “Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat.”
The Obligatory Hope
Weaver, who became interested in animals and conservation through the Boy Scouts and TV’s “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, wants to figure out the best way to get turtles safely across the road and keep the population from dwindling further.
Among the possible solutions: turtle underpasses or an education campaign aimed at teenagers on why drivers shouldn’t mow turtles down.
The first time Weaver went out to collect data on turtles, he chose a spot down the road from a big apartment complex that caters to students. He counted 267 vehicles that passed by, seven of them intentionally hitting his rubber reptile.
He went back out about a week later, choosing a road in a more residential area. He followed the same procedure, putting the fake turtle in the middle of the lane, facing the far side of the road, as if it was early in its journey across. The second of the 50 cars to pass by that day swerved over the center line, its right tires pulverizing the plastic shell.
“Wow! That didn’t take long,” Weaver said.
Other cars during the hour missed the turtle. But right after his observation period was up, before Weaver could retrieve the model, another car moved to the right to hit the animal as he stood less than 20 feet away.
“One hit in 50 cars is pretty significant when you consider it might take a turtle 10 minutes to cross the road,” Weaver said.
Running over turtles even has a place in Southern lore.
In South Carolina author Pat Conroy’s semi-autobiographical novel “The Great Santini,” a fighter-pilot father squishes turtles during a late-night drive when he thinks his wife and kids are asleep. His wife confronts him, saying: “It takes a mighty brave man to run over turtles.”
The father denies it at first, then claims he hits them because they are a road hazard. “It’s my only sport when I’m traveling,” he says. “My only hobby.”
That hobby has been costly to turtles.
It takes a turtle seven or eight years to become mature enough to reproduce, and in that time, it might make several trips across the road to get from one pond to another, looking for food or a place to lay eggs. A female turtle that lives 50 years might lay over 100 eggs, but just two or three are likely to survive to reproduce, said Weaver’s professor, Rob Baldwin.
Snakes also get run over deliberately. Baldwin wishes that weren’t the case, but he understands, considering the widespread fear and loathing of snakes. But why anyone would want to run over turtles is a mystery to the professor.
“They seem so helpless and cute,” he said. “I want to stop and help them. My kids want to stop and help them. My wife will stop and help turtles no matter how much traffic there is on the road. I can’t understand the idea why you would swerve to hit something so helpless as a turtle.”
I hope you now fully understand my interest in exoplanets
February 18th, 2013 at 10:22 am
Greenland ice is melting … in winter
February 18th, 2013 at 10:36 am
Even in the midst of an economic depression, carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere is increasing. From 2003 to 2012 the average annual rise in CO2 was 1.79 ppm. From 2012 to 2013 the average annual rise in CO2 was 3.53 ppm. All those feedbacks, described here, are hitting home.
February 18th, 2013 at 10:36 am
Guy, Can I infer that this is a surprise to climate scientists and add it to my Climate Scientist Confidence index? So maybe the guys at AMEG were being optimistic.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.htmlTwenty estimates have been made of the times of the various extinction events in the northern and southern hemispheres and these are shown on Table 1 and summarised on Figure 7 with their ranges. The absolute mean extinction time for the northern hemisphere is 2031.8 and for the southern hemisphere 2047.6 with a final mean extinction time for 3/4 of the earth’s surface of 2039.6 which is similar to the extinction time suggested previously from correlations between planetary orbital mechanics and the frequency increase of Great and Normal earthquake activity on Earth (Light, 2011). Extinction in the southern hemisphere lags the northern hemisphere by 9 to 29 years.
February 18th, 2013 at 10:37 am
People hit turtles on purpose.
Melt, Greenland, melt, faster faster faster!
February 18th, 2013 at 10:38 am
Of course, Kathy: Mainstream scientists continued to be stunned with every new bit of data. I continue to be stunned that they are surprised.
February 18th, 2013 at 10:39 am
dairymandave, you could come over to the Ning forum (http://neartermextinction.ning.com/) and make a compilation of the feedbacks, if you have been keeping track of them.
–
As for your neighbor’s cows, organic and so forth, I think that you might be thinking at too large a scale. If half the cows need anti-biotics, then my tenderfoot/layperson’s opinion is that it sounds like there are too many cows for that operation or they are poorly treated.
I came to NBL via the Internet route of investigating permaculture, but I know other people came from other routes so I hope you aren’t offended if I post some basic permaculture material that you might’ve already considered:
Greening the Desert:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keQUqRg2qZ0
is a classic one.
This video talks, in part, about pastured cattle, which might interest you: A Farm for the Future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xShCEKL-mQ8
Sepp Holzer’s work is extraordinary:
http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/sepp_holzers_permaculture/
It’s not just organic vs. non-organic. Diversification is equally important in order to give all the plants and animals on your smallholding the best chance for good health.
While NTE would make this all go away, it seems like a worthwhile way to pass the time until then, better than working for the ag.chemical companies and Big Pharma, anyway (70-80% of all anitbiotics produced in the world are used in raising animals for human consumption).
Re. pasteurization, I don’t know what the NY laws are, but in Vermont you can sell raw milk from the farm, and under certain conditions you can even deliver raw milk directly to customers (http://www.ruralvermont.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Raw-Milk-Law-Reference-Sheet.pdf). Raw milk cheeses are a “value-added” product that dairies here have had success with. This organic operation is in my town: http://www.neighborlyfarms.com/ (warning, brief sound intro).
February 18th, 2013 at 10:42 am
@Frank, I saw that article when it came out and it shocked me, too. I think that our culture is so diseased that such attitudes are almost inevitable. When you look at what is done to human children and to women, it’s hard to hold out hope for turtles.
February 18th, 2013 at 12:07 pm
@Lidia
With my limited skills I’m trying to make the ning more efficient in carrying information. So far I’ve added 3 RSS feeds that seem relevant and I’ve added a twitter feed which I populate with links I find here and elsewhere on the net. Anyone who knows how to run a ning site or can give me ideas on how to provide more precise news feeds, please contact me. I really do want to add sections (probably within groups?)that can be more informational about things like sustainability (or as my brother calls it “Prolonging”). Thanks.
February 18th, 2013 at 12:10 pm
Frank,
I saw the turtle story too – really is sad. they should have made the fake turtles stink bombs…
February 18th, 2013 at 12:42 pm
I had a truck driver tell me once that it’s common practice for big rig drivers to run over animals intentionally, particularly dogs, with the idea of preventing some animal loving driver from causing an accident when they try to avoid it. God forbid that a human should be hurt if all it takes to avoid it is for an animal to die.
February 18th, 2013 at 12:43 pm
.
Thoreau’s famous quotation
Can prep us for expiration:
It helps us concede
That most of us lead
Lives of quiet desperation.
February 18th, 2013 at 1:14 pm
.
Six degrees more will displease
Those who like an occasional freeze,
But there’s greater unease
For the one who foresees
When it’s shooting right past six degrees.
February 18th, 2013 at 1:14 pm
Dr House, aren’t we fantastic rational beings, we can rationalize any kind of behavior.
Btd, yes! or should I say yes
February 18th, 2013 at 2:35 pm
@ Brad Phillips
Can’t help with that stuff…
First time I’ve heard the notion ‘prolonging’… that’s an interesting idea. Are we going to have a split here, between the prolongers and the – what will the name be ? bring extinction on fasters ? – like wildwoman, above, who wants the ice to melt more quickly ?
Here’s something about biochar for the prolongers
http://www.carboncommentary.com/2013/02/10/2857
February 18th, 2013 at 2:40 pm
Send in the drones:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-domestic-drones-20130216,0,3374671.story
February 18th, 2013 at 2:46 pm
The typical middle of the road cheery green optimism from the informed environmentalists, full of hope and hand waving…
Stuart Staniford’s emissions and climate projections
http://earlywarn.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-human-response-function-to-climate.html
February 18th, 2013 at 2:50 pm
.
“A lot of lives could be saved if people had a few minutes.”
“On short notice, an alert to a big city would do more harm than good.
All you’d produce is panic.”
—Fail-Safe (1964)
==
There’s not any fix-it mechanic
Who can stop doom’s disaster titanic;
If dots being connected
Is too unexpected,
All you’d produce is panic.
February 18th, 2013 at 4:06 pm
Lidia, they sell raw milk at our farmer’s market here in NE Fl and I am surprised, as it is supposed to only be allowed marketed for pets (though many sell and buy it under that guise for human consumption also). I buy it and make grain milk kefir – I am careful to ask the vendor of the cleanliness conditions of the cows.
February 18th, 2013 at 7:01 pm
Lidia; I will try to explain our position as to farming. We have been here on this place nearly 40 years. I will be 70 this spring. The typical day is 16 hours but one must do something all day long and we like what we do – variety is the spice of life. So long days are OK. Fact is we need to figure how to get out of the business because we are tired of the burden and slowing down isn’t an option. Bank payments and taxes must be paid, labor costs more each year as well as everything else. It’s easier to just keep going than to try to change anything. It doesn’t make sense to use fuel and electricity to produce organic milk or cheese and then truck it refrigerated to a metropolitan area to sell it to the well to do. People around here aren’t interested in organic.
We plan to quit in one year but just how we don’t know. Would like to hold on to the land but taxes may not allow that. At least we will hold some of the land. It’s fair to say that the farm owns us.
February 18th, 2013 at 7:19 pm
‘Given the endless bodies ripped apart to feed other bodies over millions of years I think (most days) it is best for this stream of living things to end.’ -kathy
interesting p.o.v.. to a large extent i share it, including the assertion that gaian biological consciousness seems more of a curse than a blessing. it’s termination may indeed be compassionate /’virtuous’. (in this context the word ‘consciousness’ is applied most broadly to include all life species which interact with it’s environment as if it has some awareness of it and responsiveness to it (like a houseplant near a window will bend towards the sunlight)).
otoh it does seem a shame that the awesome beauty/pleasure part of this life must die along with the suffering.
i’m intuitively inclined to think that consciousness is a transcendent phenomenon. but ‘i’ will no longer be beyond death. good. hopefully there are other (sur)realms of consciousness that are less painful and more pleasurable.
‘ As Ken Caldeira so grippingly points out (and I tried to make graphically clear in my Stanford talk last year), each molecule of CO2 released thermal energy when it was formed “” that’s why we formed it. In the case of electricity generation, about 1/3 of its thermal energy went out a wire as electric power, the rest was released promptly as waste heat. But each molecule of CO2, during its subsequent lifetime in the atmosphere, traps 100,000 times more heat than was released during its formation.
A hundred thousand is a big number. It means that running a handheld electric hairdryer on US grid electricity delivers a planet-warming punch comparable to [the heat given off by] two Boeing 747s operating at full takeoff power for the same time period. The warming is delivered over time, not promptly, but that don’t matter; the planetary heating is accrued, the accountants would say, the moment you hit the switch.’ -from a link from a link from guy’s link above to an article written on the shockingly rapid rate of arctic ice melt.
dr. house, glad to see from your recent posts that u’re still with us.
February 18th, 2013 at 8:31 pm
the virgin terry Says:
February 18th, 2013 at 7:19 pm
‘Given the endless bodies ripped apart to feed other bodies over millions of years I think (most days) it is best for this stream of living things to end.’ -kathy
interesting p.o.v.. to a large extent i share it, including the assertion that gaian biological consciousness seems more of a curse than a blessing. it’s termination may indeed be compassionate /’virtuous’.
————
Does anyone else find this attitude more that a bit bizarre? It does sound that NTE of all life is something the two of you have been rooting for for a long time. Though I’ve never met anyone with this attitude, there must be more of you out there. Which leads to some interesting speculation. Would such people seek out positions where they could fulfill this desire for the extinction of life? I am specifically thinking of a position like missile launch officers on a nuclear sub or silo. Do you feel like you missed your calling here? I wonder if the military has a method of screening out such people. This is fascinating!
February 18th, 2013 at 8:42 pm
@ Ripley
Yes, I share your view, Ripley. It’s self-centred egotism, all about the person’s feelings, imo. ( And this coming from someone accused of egomania and narcissism, ahahaha.)
February 18th, 2013 at 9:12 pm
This is weird. A fuller explanation does seem to be in order, does it not? Maybe I’m missing something. But if a person feels the existence of all life is a crime, how does the person justify hanging around rather than committing suicide, since that person is such a major example of the crime?
February 18th, 2013 at 9:39 pm
Oh boy……I can almost hear the ramparts being built.
February 18th, 2013 at 10:11 pm
Dairymandave I can understand that you feel locked in to the existing systems. The one of debt is especially pernicious. I hope to buy land outright so that property taxes will be my only ongoing land-ownership expense, and those are pretty low in VT for land under “current use” appraisals for recreation, forestry or ag. Those rates could always go up, of course, as conventional RE development becomes less lucrative.
My husband & I are in our early 50s and have no children. What I hope to do is to find some younger folks, keen on small-scale diversified farming but who have no grub stake, and work with them toward their eventual full ownership. Maybe that is a pipedream, but I think we have just as good a shot picking our heirs as folks do who roll the genetic dice.
February 18th, 2013 at 11:15 pm
Guy, thanks for the Arctic death spiral article and the other items (Greenland melting, CO2 emissions) and trying to get this thread back on topic.
February 18th, 2013 at 11:20 pm
Fascinating interview with Lynn Margulis:
Link: http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/16-interview-lynn-margulis-not-controversial-right#.USMOxK79bct
Snip:
“I do think consciousness is a property of all living cells. All cells are bounded by a membrane of their own making. To sense chemicals—food or poisons—it takes a cell. To have a sense of smell takes a cell. To sense light, it takes a cell. You have to have a bounded entity with photoreceptors inside to sense light. Bacteria are conscious. These bacterial beings have been around since the origin of life and still are running the soil and the air and affecting water quality.”
and. . .
“When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum.”
Take Away: Reducing Nature to Math is Reductionism ad absurbum.
February 18th, 2013 at 11:23 pm
Another bit from the same article:
“Your perspective is rather humbling.
The species of some of the protoctists are 542 million years old. Mammal species have a mean lifetime in the fossil record of about 3 million years. And humans? You know what the index fossil of Homo sapiens in the recent fossil record is going to be? The squashed remains of the automobile. There will be a layer in the fossil record where you’re going to know people were here because of the automobiles. It will be a very thin layer.
Do we overrate ourselves as a species?
Yes, but we can’t help it. Look, there are nearly 7,000 million people on earth today and there are 10,000 chimps, and the numbers are getting fewer every day because we’re destroying their habitat. Reg Morrison, who wrote a wonderful book called The Spirit in the Gene, says that although we’re 99 percent genetically in common with chimps, that 1 percent makes a huge difference. Why? Because it makes us believe that we’re the best on earth. But there is lots of evidence that we are “mammalian weeds.” Like many mammals, we overgrow our habitats and that leads to poverty, misery, and wars.”
February 18th, 2013 at 11:46 pm
dairymandave Says:
February 18th, 2013 at 7:32 am
How about starting a list of new feedbacks. There are many more than 8. However, that list won’t accelerate…I think.
David Wasdell on feedbacks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQGDKSHhQxU
and. . . http://www.apollo-gaia.org/Climate%20Sensitivity.pdf
February 19th, 2013 at 12:49 am
The Diagram of Doom could use some updating.
February 19th, 2013 at 2:34 am
Advances in connecting (meat and hardware) robots
February 19th, 2013 at 3:21 am
When I was dating my wife, 49 years ago, we would turn into her driveway and see frogs sitting there doing whatever frogs do in the night. She made me stop, she got out and removed all the frogs before we drove up to the house. One reason she and I farm is to make life more pleasant for a few animals. Ours don’t get eaten alive or have 200,000 tics on them. They don’t freeze or starve and if they get sick, we treat them, even do surgery if necessary. They are fed a perfectly balanced ration, far, far superior to what most humans eat. (yes, that is the key to making milk which pays the bills). A term has been given to this: CCC, Constancy, Consistency, and Comfort.
Anyone who doesn’t know what goes on out there in the wild must live in the city. In fact, that’s why there are cities; a place to get away from wild nature, as far as possible, up 200 floors. Let the farmers deal with it. A place where you watch the sun rise and go to the park or the beach. Life if full of beauty (in the eyes of the beholder) but also full of horror. The evolutionary process depends on lots of suffering to make it work. Evolution seems to be the purpose of life; to see what emerges next. Variation and selection are polite terms for violence and death. Watch “Gladiator” to get the picture. They called it a spectacle, a picture of survival of the fittest. There is a DVD series named “Rome” which indicated that the romans were more honest about reality than we are. I thought it was an extremely high quality series, but rough. Life is rough and always has been until the industrial era. Even now it’s rough for most of the world. Look around and see. Why do we or any other species have eyes? Two reasons; first so we can chase food better and second so we can avoid being eaten better. Not so we can enjoy sunsets. That’s a fringe benefit. If this is too real, so be it. I have spent my life making life more pleasant for a few animals and my family, contrary to what the media tells everyone. The greatest crime I committed was using fossil fuels to do it.
February 19th, 2013 at 4:29 am
Ripley But if a person feels the existence of all life is a crime, how does the person justify hanging around rather than committing suicide, since that person is such a major example of the crime?
Actually it is up to the parents to justify having a child not the child to justify their existence. In the age of contraception they have to take the responsibility. That is why I have advocated people to get permanently fixed before contraception no longer is available (a position that appears to be very unpopular to some who think that their rights are more important than the possible child’s rights). Once born there are strong programs in our brains to stay alive – and….
Resumé
BY DOROTHY PARKER
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Meanwhile Indian farmers who are loaded with debt are killing themselves in large numbers – it seems that if they die their debt is erased so their death does a service to the family. They don’t die easy for the usually drink the pesticides they had to buy – the very thing that put them in debt.
Instead of asking folks who talk about the reality of life to go off themselves, why not help some Indian farmer get out of debt so he can care for his family without killing himself.
Kantibai’s husband died after drinking the chemicals he used to farm with. After his death Kantibai discovered her family was in debt.
This has become a familiar story in India where nearly 300,000 farmers killed themselves to get out of debt between 1995 and 2011. In the state of Maharashtra alone, 4,453 people committed suicide in 2006. That’s around one every eight hours. As I’m writing this, I hear of seven farmers who’ve died in the past three days. It’s like a swathe of desperate people trying to push the reset button.
http://newint.org/blog/2012/10/10/india-cotton-farmers/
I don’t try to justify my existence, but like Dave I have treated my critters to a good life, and I have spent most of my life helping other humans to have a better life.
February 19th, 2013 at 5:38 am
dmd: Just a thought on your condition. If you’re trying to “get out” of the business of farming, but own the productive land, why not try the co-op route, whereby people rent acreage/plots, grow their own, raise whatever and you “manage” it all (screen prospective clients, consult, determine money matters so that it all works for everyone, etc.)? i just noticed Lidia’s response and think that may be a good idea.
Robin: yeah, but as soon as it’s updated it’s obsolete!
Anthony: nice! i agree that mathematical modeling comes under the same criticism as “the map is not the territory.” Scientists that rely only on this (and/or statistics) miss the point, are biased in selectively cherry picking (or ignoring) data and when complete their “theory” or model only concerns numbers (or trends or patterns) and not the actual events/conditions in the real world. As for “overrating ourselves” – oh man, don’t get me started. It starts with that whole “image and likeness of God” bullshit and goes downhill from there. Yeah, we’re so effing special (clever) because we can figure out so many ways to kill everything around us (including each other and the very environment we depend on for our existence). i wonder what cancer cells call themselves – the crown of creation? Magnificent mitosis machines?
February 19th, 2013 at 6:04 am
500 comments behind, oh my!
And I haven’t even read your entries, Guy.
Haven’t managed my weekly blogentry for two weeks (although I did post about Emergency Interpreting for the Deaf, which is one of my passions).
Have you seen this?
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oekom/gaia/2012/00000021/00000002/art00010
“On the Cusp of Global Collapse?
Updated Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Historical Data”
February 19th, 2013 at 6:47 am
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9877604/Coronavirus-cases-may-be-tip-of-the-iceberg.html
Research on the new strain of coronavirus, which has killed almost half of those who have caught it, has found that it breeds in the human body faster than SARS and can evade the immune system as easily as the common cold.
February 19th, 2013 at 6:56 am
Dr Niman has several posts on it here http://www.recombinomics.com/whats_new.html
He is generally annoyed (to put it mildly) with the performance of the CDC and WHO.
February 19th, 2013 at 7:10 am
If I were to live my life over again and live it without fossil fuels, I would do it something like the Amish. We would use horses for power. Build everything from wood. Burn wood. Fuck like bunnies (assuming my wife was agreeable) and have 15 kids, 10 of whom would not live long enough to reproduce. Then we would soon die of war, famine, or disease before our kids were all grown up. They would take over the farm and do the same. Steady state population and economy. What’s to not like about it?
February 19th, 2013 at 7:36 am
Ripley, you ask an interesting question. Here we all are, on a board called Nature Bats Last. 200 species go extinct each and every day due to, as our host has said over and over again, “our omnicidal living arrangements.”
Then you’ve got people who hit turtles with cars on purpose. Loggers who tie girls to trees and burn them alive as a warning. One in three women/girls who will be battered and/or raped in their lifetimes. A billion or so people who don’t get enough to eat every day. I could go on and on and on and on and on.
These things happen because of industrial civilization. Our host has said repeatedly that industrial civilization must end. When that happens, billions of people die.
When I root for it to happen, I’m being emotional.
The dynamics on this board are just fascinating.
February 19th, 2013 at 7:38 am
Well, some of this is true: (an oldie)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16K6m3Ua2nw&feature=youtu.be
February 19th, 2013 at 7:44 am
I’ve posted a guest essay, courtesy of Brutus. It’s here.
February 19th, 2013 at 7:58 am
Guy, I thoroughly enjoyed your story. Perhaps you could write the NTE novel, maybe the content in art form would awaken people as did the concepts addressed in the Matrix.
February 19th, 2013 at 6:56 pm
@wildwoman: “When I root for it to happen, I’m being emotional.”
I knew you were on the rag when you wrote that!
February 20th, 2013 at 7:33 am
@Lidia :0