Being a Series of Ruminations upon the Collapse of the Global Empire and Our Life in the Ruins
If you’re not German, you likely have never seen this hilarious 11-minute program. If you are, you probably have it memorized, having seen it on every German TV channel at New Year’s Eve and even on Lufthansa New Year’s flights. It’s been a phenomenon in Germany since 1972.
One of my favorite observers, and caustic commentators, on our current society is James Kunstler and his website Clusterfuck Nation. Here are his thoughts on the present and future…
Dec 31, 2007
Forecast 2008
For the tiny fraction of people who actually pay attention to real events — those, for instance, who know the difference between Narnia and Kandahar — the final hours of 2007 leading into the fog-shrouded abyss of 2008 must induce great racking shudders of nausea. Has there ever been a society so exquisitely rigged for implosion? The whole listing, creaking, reeking edifice stands like one of those obsolete Las Vegas pleasure palaces awaiting a mere pulse of electrons to ignite a thousand explosive charges perfectly placed to blow away the structural supports.
The inertia holding everything together that I described in last year’s forecast finally melted away at mid-summer and events began spooling out of control. Specifically, the massive tonnage of debt-backed securities circulating through the financial sector stood revealed for the mostly worthless bales of paper they truly are, and the investment community was left suspended in mid-air, grinning unconvincingly, like Wile E. Coyote thirteen yards beyond the edge of the mesa, with a sputtering grenade in each hand and an anvil tied to his ankles.
Read the full article
Like countless other communities, this western German town lived for years with a miserable traffic problem. Each day, thousands of cars and big trucks barreled along the two-lane main street, forcing pedestrians and cyclists to scamper for their lives.
The usual remedies - from safety crossings to speed traps - did no good. So the citizens of Bohmte decided to take a big risk. Since September, they’ve been tearing up the sidewalks, removing curbs and erasing street markers as part of a radical plan to abandon nearly all traffic regulations and force people to rely on common sense and courtesy instead.
Europeans try to solve traffic woes by throwing out most road rules - Article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock.
This concept started in the Netherlands with similar techniques tried successfully in Australia. It’s a fascinating idea, totally counter-intuitive for most of us, and apparently extremely successful. It’s a way of making communities more people-friendly and drastically reducing public works costs to release funds for much more important uses, such as public transportation rather than empowering privately owned vehicles.
For more information, we recommend visiting www.mentalspeedbumps.com. David Engwicht’s website. Engwicht wrote the book “Mental Speed Bumps: The Smarter Way to Tame Traffic” which is a delightful, fascinating and informative view of the techniques now being used throughout Europe.
As the credit paralysis stretches through its fifth month, a chorus of economists has begun to warn that the world’s central banks are fighting the wrong war, and perhaps risk a policy error of epochal proportions.
Crisis may make 1929 look a walk in the park - from the Telegraph
In a little noticed news item, it was reported on November 11th (“Levitt and Sons files Chapter 11″) that Levitt and Sons, a builder in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, had filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 on November 9th.
According to the company’s SEC filing, the company had defaulted on more than $300 million in loans from Wachovia Bank and KeyBank.
Levitt and Sons (www.levittandsons.com) isn’t just any builder, of course. It happens to be the inventor of post-World War II suburbia, when it created Levittown on Long Island in 1949. It went on to build more than 200,000 homes in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and Europe.
In a related (kind of) item, the Levittown Tribune on November 30 reported “Suozzi Announces Public-Private Partnership to Turn Levittown ‘Green’” that Nassau County Executive Thomas R. Suozzi recently announced a public-private partnership to make Levittown, America’s first suburb, America’s first green suburb by reducing Levittown’s carbon footprint by 20 percent in 2008.
The partnership with local and national companies would “make it easy and affordable to install new boilers, make energy-efficient home renovations, utilize bio-fuels, solar heating and to purchase innovative, inexpensive products to quickly reduce home fuel consumption.” Suozzo said that he hoped his program “would provide a template for suburbs throughout America”.
In its December 6, 2007 issue, the Economist magazine devotes its cover to “The End of Cheap Food”. The cover article consists of 1280 words. Not one of those words is the word “oil” (“oilseeds” is used once).
That’s right. When pontificating on the “end of cheap food” not one mention of Peak Oil, stagnant oil production (particularly in relation to accelerating demand for oil and other fossil fuels), or the increasing costs of oil itself—and thus more expensive agriculture production, transportation of food, packaging and much more.
Who are the culprits responsible for the rising costs of food? According to the Economist: Government intervention through farm subsidies and trade barriers, U.S. subsidization of corn fields for biofuels rather than food, and the increasing appetites of everyone’s favorite scapegoat, the Chinese, who are this year eating 2.5 times as much meat as they ate in 1985.
The Economist, as always touched by the plight of the planet’s poor, sheds copious crocodile tears for the farmers of the undeveloped world, and endorses the pleas of that other legendary friend of the poor, the World Bank, in its call for wide-open agricultural trade.
In other words, get government out of the way and off the backs of multinational corporations, and business can feed the world.
Yeah, sure.
This was previously posted at DryDipstick but the movie is so good and, I think, so important that I want to post it here as well.
A DryDipstick Movie Review
Documentary - 123-minute DVD
www.whatawaytogomovie.com
A two-hour poem of great power and beauty. The story of a personal journey; yet a journey that is also deeply universal. As humanity rushes towards a nexus of catastrophe, is there a world beyond denial and despair? The film suggests the possibility.
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“What a Way to Go” is a 123-minute ode to life as it could be, as it should be, as it has been in a distant past, and in some way, as it is now, as rejective of reality as that may be. We, who should be stewards of the earth, have instead tragically become its dominators, bending the rest of life to our will. But there remains the hope that within us are the seeds of wiser people and a better world.
Continue reading ‘What a Way to Go - Life at the End of Empire’
There’s a train speeding toward me. Toward all of us, actually. I’m aware of the train. A number of people are. Far more people aren’t. But it is coming, regardless of awareness or non-awareness.
I can see it coming. So how do I deal with this approaching train? I have a comfortable chair and a computer and I sit in the middle of the tracks with a cup of coffee and I read about the speeding train.
There’s lots to read about the speeding train. I read reports from people who also know about the speeding train. They like to write about it. And go to meetings and conferences about it. They even write books about it that are purchased by other people who also know the train is coming.
I enjoy reading these reports. There are reports from people who see it speeding toward us and like to describe how the train looks, its size, its strength. Others conduct informed—and not so informed—discussions on the speed of the train and whether or not it’s accelerating, slowing down or simply going at a steady rate, and when it might be expected to arrive.
Continue reading ‘There’s a Choo-Choo Train A-Comin’’
