Balance is for Buddhists

Balance is a central tenet of Buddhism, foundational to the four noble truths and the eight-fold way. Balance is a superb notion and I strongly support, for individuals at least, balance, moderation, and many other principles of Buddhism. Indeed, had Buddhism found roots in this country a couple hundred years ago, we probably would have avoided, or at least delayed, the series of catastrophes we now face. But with fewer than one percent of the American population dedicated to Buddhism, it’s a little late for balance and moderation to work their magic at the scale of this country, much less planet Earth (as if even one percent of Americans give a damn about planet Earth).

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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.

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A Typical Reaction

Occasionally when people talk to me about my new life in and around the mud hut, their conclusions include one of the following statements: (1) You’re selfishly wasting your talent as an excellent and inspiring teacher. You should be teaching at the university, saving students, instead of preparing for economic collapse. (2) Don’t be silly. The United States cannot suffer economic collapse.
My responses go something like this:

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Theory and practice

I used to believe the bankruptcy of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation would have substantial implications. The FDIC officially ran out of money last Friday when they shuttered the usual handful of banks. When they close another handful this Friday — conveniently out of the media’s not-so-watchful eye — they’ll have exactly nothing with which to back up the deposits. Since backing up deposits in failed banks is the FDIC’s entire mission, this should cause the financial system to fail overnight. The FDIC claims to be working magic to solve this problem, but they’re simply trying to gloss over a monumental problem, as even the Wall Street Journal seems to notice.

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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.

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Time for a Revolution

Not so long ago, $60 oil represented a dire threat to the U.S. (hence, world) economy. Now that we’ve seen a price spike and a rapid decline down to half the current price and one-fifth last summer’s peak, Wall Street cheers expensive oil because it profits the oil companies.
You gotta love the media, loving Wall Street for loving the oil companies.

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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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