Briefly, for now
While I’m developing a post about the ongoing decline into negative territory beyond Hubbert’s Peak, today’s brief post satisfies two purposes: (1) shameless self-promotion, and (2) short-term prediction.
Politics and personal responsibility
I’ve long recognized the two-party, one-ideology basis of American politics, and I was calling Barack Obama a neoconservative long before it was popular to recognize him as the Teflon President 2.0. But even I can hardly believe this tidbit from a guy I thought was pretty damned smart: From the I-cannot-believe-this-is-happening camp, Obama is appointing a Monsanto man as food safety czar. Welcome to Farmageddon, land of the free.
The Service Trap
It is clear that some of us are committed to lives of service, and others are not. I'm sure social scientists have identified myriad patterns to justify our quirky lives, without actually explaining them, much less identifying mechanisms underlying them. And that's just as well, given the magnitude of the task. I'd rather we spend our considerable cognitive surplus on other issues. Consider, for example, how much time we spend tweeting. And then trying to determine if twittering counts at literature. (If you think twit lit is, well, literature, I think you're an idiot. But I digress.) Never mind who's drinking which brand of beer in the White House. We're so absorbed with television and the Internet and who's screwing whom in the world of celebrities, we can't bother to focus on the inordinate suffering we're causing, to humans and other animals. Sixth great extinction, including our own species? Whatev. Solving those problems will simply have to wait until after I get a tattoo proclaiming my independence from mainstream culture.
Truth and lies
Seems ex-politicians are so much better at telling the truth than current politicians. Peter Orszag, budget director in the Barack Obama/Goldman Sachs administration, finally admitted we came very close to full-scale economic collapse (as if that’s not obvious by now), but he simply can’t resist claiming economic growth is right around the corner.
One out of two ain’t bad, for somebody in the White House. Never mind that’s what he said two months ago, too.
Twilight of the Machines
“The crisis deepens. Everyday life is plundered as much as the physical environment. Our predicament points us toward a solution. The voluntary abandonment of the industrial mode of existence is not self-renunciation, but a healing return.”
Neocon nation, redux
I caught a lot of flak from readers on this blog when I pointed out, six months ago, that we have become a neocon nation. I even pointed out the apparent neoconservative tendencies of our newly elected president, much to the chagrin of readers across the political spectrum (meaning, I suppose, Democrats and Republicans, the spectrum for which is about as broad as that from indigo to violet on the electromagnetic spectrum).
Media alert
I spent much of my afternoon participating in an exercise in mental masturbation at the local offices of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. We discussed the latest projections for build-out of the suburban area around Tucson within 100 years, with significant construction activity to begin in 20 years. Fortunately, we’ll be well into the post-industrial stone age by that time. But it’s a little disappointing when even a majority of the “environmentalists” in the room think we’re stealing a huge victory from developers by limiting paved surfaces to merely half the Tucson basin. We just keep trying to sustain the unsustainable suburbanization of the desert southwest, long after it’s clearly failed as a viable living arrangement for the entire industrialized world.
I managed to tolerate the demoralizing intellectual clusterfuck only because I’d received a bit of good news immediately before the meeting began. The local morning daily declined to run my latest op-ed, but the local counter-culture weekly rag will be running it within the next few weeks. When they do, I’ll post a link to the piece at my “News” page. You get to see the latest draft before the masses. For regular visitors to this blog, there’s nothing new here. I’m just writing for one of the primary reasons Orwell wrote: sheer egoism. Hey, if it was good enough for him ….
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