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By Thurman, on September 1st, 20102010-09-01T23:02:19ZF jS, Y
 This week, The Witch of Hebron, sequel to James Howard Kunstler’s post petroleum novel, World Made By Hand, began shipping to booksellers worldwide. I wrote the following brief review in January of 2009.
To this day, World Made By Hand remains one of my favorite pieces of fiction and with this week’s release of the sequel, I thought perhaps it might be fitting to republish my original reflections here.
If you haven’t read World Made By Hand, I encourage you to do so, and I hope that if you enjoy it, like me, you’ll look forward to acquiring a copy of The Witch of Hebron very soon.
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World Made By Hand is a first person narrative told by Robert Earle, a former corporate executive turned carpenter, living in a small town in upstate New York a few years into the future and his telling of the events he has lived through from now until then. James Howard Kunstler weaves an interesting and believable tale of the world we may find ourselves living in as oil, the one natural resource that our technology dependent world cannot exist without, becomes harder and harder to acquire.
Kunstler’s characters travel on foot or by horseback, cook and heat their homes with wood, and grow most of their own food. Those who do not possess much needed basic skills such as carpentry, masonry, or medical knowledge, or who do not own large tracts of tillable land find themselves living as peasants, hiring themselves out by day for their manual labor or otherwise indenturing themselves to more powerful land owners. In many ways, society has returned to a form of feudalism. Scavenging has become a lucrative business and bands of robbers and pirates make travel and trade risky endeavors in Kunstler’s vision of the future. Continue reading Book Review: World Made By Hand
By Thurman, on August 27th, 20102010-08-28T02:59:07ZF jS, Y
A few weeks ago my mother received the hateful little piece propaganda you’ll find at bottom of this post, in her email. I have reproduced it here verbatim, only reformatting the fonts for the sake of visual clarity, but first I have a few words for the hateful, ignorant morons in the world who keep spreading this manure.
I find it disturbing that so many otherwise decent people can so easily be duped into believing such nonsense and conned into participating in so much hate and bigotry. Yes, the 19 hijackers who flew planes into the Pentagon, World Trade Center, and who failed to reach their intended third target happened to all be Muslims. Fundamentalist Muslims under the influence of a charismatic sociopath named Osama bin Laden. Think of him as the Charlie Manson of the Middle East. They did not represent the vast majority of Muslims.
Tim McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, Eric Rudolph blew up legal abortion clinics, gay bars, and the Atlanta Olympic Games, Scott Roeder gunned down a doctor, at church, on Sunday morning. As far as I know each of them claimed at one time or another to be a Christian of one denomination or another. Do those American terrorists and murderers reflect the beliefs and actions of all American Christians? I sure hope not, but that’s the intent of the anti-Islam propaganda many God-fearing people who claim to follow Jesus Christ seem determined to spread when they send out junk like what you’ll see below. Continue reading So Much Bullshit, So Little Time
By Thurman, on August 27th, 20102010-08-27T21:11:55ZF jS, Y
Who or what is a sociopath?
Author and psychologist Martha Stout knows and in her book, The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Vs. The Rest Of Us, she explains that a sociopath is an individual devoid of conscience; a person completely lacking the ability to love or otherwise emotionally connect with other living beings.
Some sociopaths become world leaders, a few more become corporate executives, but most are otherwise nondescript individuals living out their lives while manipulating everyone and everything around them to their own selfish ends. Almost all sociopaths end up broken derelicts, adrift in a sea of humanity that they can never understand or truly relate to in any meaningful way.
According to Doctor Stout, one in twenty-five Americans have antisocial personality disorder, the clinical name for sociopathy, and possess at least three of the following characteristics: (1) failure to conform to social norms; (2) deceitfulness, manipulativeness; (3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead; (4) irritability, aggressiveness; (5) reckless disregard for the safety of self or others; (6) consistent irresponsibility; (7) lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person.
On the wrong day, given the right set of circumstances, I think far more than twenty-five percent of us might fit that criteria. The difference between most people and the sociopath involves the fact that the sociopath doesn’t regret being a controlling beast or a raging asshole to those around him, while the rest of us eventually do. Sociopaths cannot love. Continue reading Book Review – The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Vs. The Rest Of Us
By Thurman, on August 26th, 20102010-08-27T00:43:01ZF jS, Y
Sometimes I get a bit discouraged by the dominant American attitude, especially in the business world, that we can’t take what we know to be the right action or make the right decision because to do so would be unprofitable.
I spent a good portion of this week at work making and carrying out decisions that ran the gamut from slightly discomforting to morally reprehensible. I have bills to pay and a family to care for, so my options in this sorry economic time we’re living in were limited to say the least.
After a week spent having my soul ripped from the body I’m still living in, it was encouraging to discover others in the world who understand that putting profits before people and our natural world is neither practical nor expedient. One such opinion was expressed by a blogger named Ian Welch, who posted a piece earlier today called The Right Thing To Do.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about foreign affairs, where the money used on Iraq and Afghanistan could have rebuilt America and made it more prosperous. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about health care, where everyone knew that the right thing to do was single payer or some other form of comprehensive healthcare, which would have reduced bankruptcies massively, saved 6% of GDP and massive numbers of lives. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the financial crisis, where criminally prosecuting those who engaged in fraud (the entire executive class of virtually ever major financial firm) and nationalizing the major banks, wiping out the shareholders and making the bondholders eat their losses was the right thing to do, and didn’t happen. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about drug policy, where the “war on drugs” has accomplished nothing except destabilizing multiple countries and giving the US the largest prison population proportional to population in the entire world and where legalizing marijuana, soft opiates and coca leaves would save billions of dollars, reduce violence, help stabilize Mexico and would help tax receipts. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about food, where we subsidize the most unhealthy foods possible and engage in practices which have reduced the nutritional content of food by 40% in the last half century. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about environmental pollutants, which have contributed to a massive rise in chronic diseases so great it amounts to an epidemic.”
Continue reading Doing The Right Thing
By Thurman, on August 25th, 20102010-08-25T23:59:54ZF jS, Y
Apparently our Fourth Amendment protections against privacy violations by the government only count if we’re rich enough to afford fancy gates and tall fences, at least out west.
“Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.”
It used to be that the general area around one’s home, the “curtilage” was considered sacrosanct – protected space to be violated only through the due process of a valid search warrant. Not so according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Continue reading No Privacy In A GPS World
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Gardening Without Gas
I’m one of those nut jobs that believes there are limits to our natural resources, at least some of them. Solar energy is virtually infinite, but that’s an exception I can live with. I also believe in the fairy tale that is the greenhouse effect and the impact of human industrial activity on the global climate.
Call me crazy but some things just make sense, like the idea that if you spew tons and tons of carbon dioxide, methane, and a bunch of other chemicals into the atmosphere there’s a better than good chance that you’ll eventually upset the balance of nature and alter the cycles and structure of the biosphere.
Another of my favorite “myths” is peak oil, which suggests that there is a finite amount of fossil fuel (oil, natural gas, coal, etc.) in the world and that sooner or later we’ll use up most of it. The other side of this coin is that after we’ve sucked or stripped most of these naturally occurring substances from the subcutaneous layer of the planet’s skin, it will get too expensive too continue doing so while still banking a healthy profit.
Everybody knows profits are the only reason our best and brightest minds bother getting out of bed in the morning, so when the money stops flowing one of two things will be the likely result. Either the extracted petroleum products will be so expensive that most of us will get priced out of the market, or the profit mongers in charge of the operation will find better ways to make obscene amounts of money, the lights will go out, and trucks, trains, and jet planes will cease to deliver the lifestyle we’ve all come to depend on. Continue reading Gardening Without Gas