The spineless wing (Democratic Party) of the Corpocracy that currently controls both houses of our Congress is very likely to lose control of one or both chambers of the legislature to the rabid mix of fundamentalist Christionistas and Teabagger libertarians . . . → Read More: Unholy Ugly Truth]]> I fear for my country and the world, but most of all I fear for our children.

The spineless wing (Democratic Party) of the Corpocracy that currently controls both houses of our Congress is very likely to lose control of one or both chambers of the legislature to the rabid mix of fundamentalist Christionistas and Teabagger libertarians that are taking over the openly fascist wing (Republican Party) of our one party political process.

I’ve made no bones about the fact that I, like so many others, voted for Barack Obama and the Dems back in ’08 and have been sorely disappointed in the performances all of them have given during these last two years.

It seemed like the front door of the White House hadn’t even had time to hit him in the ass before President Obama was on his knees, felating the Republican minority and compromising away everything he campaigned upon. My theory is that as soon as the door was closed, some asshole from deep within the bowels of the invisible oligarchy that owns our government pulled Barack to the side and showed him the Zapruder film or threatened his children if he didn’t play ball.

Regardless of the reasons why, the outcome is the same, we were all duped. Obama is about as much a progressive as Gandhi was an axe murderer. The man put Slick Willie to shame he was so smooth, and we bought it. We in the progressive faction of the body politic wanted so badly to see someone come in and turn shit upside down we would have probably voted for anyone who looked remotely like he or she had a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting elected.

Then again, with the rigged two-party political machine we have masquerading as a representative democracy, what other choice did we have. Third parties are still so weak and hamstrung that voting for an outside candidate in a close race poses a very real risk of handing victory to the greater of two evils.

In 2008 our choices came down to Slick Barry and Foot-N-Mouth Joe or Warmonger Johnny and Sideshow Sarah; not much to think about there. In the other democratic republics around the world they allow more than two parties to present their ideas before the electorate, and have something that at least passes for a real debate, but that’s another subject entirely.

As stated above, I’m afraid – terrified really – that the conservative fascists  and the Christian Taliban will gain footing in this fall’s midterm elections and start setting the stage for Elder Beck and Sideshow Sarah to hasten the apocalypse and usher in a new American theocracy.

My friend Trey, publisher of  The Rambling Taoists blog has been writing an interesting series outlining what an American theocracy might look like. It’s a scary proposition indeed.

A few years ago I read a book called The Ominous Parallels, written, oddly enough, by Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand’s hand picked “intellectual heir.” Despite that dubious distinction, the book, which compared modern US civilization with Weimar Germany and the rise of Adolph Hitler made some interesting food for thought.

I admit I danced with the Randroids briefly a few years back (I didn’t like the Kool-Ade, made my head feel funny.), I can’t help seeing parallels between the culture that led to the rise of a powerful, sociopathic maniac in Weimar Germany with many facets of mainstream American culture today.

Like Germany of the 1920′s, the United States of 2010 is deep in the throes of a powerful economic recession that is only getting worse for those of us outside the upper class. People are being driven to despair; some are committing crimes of desperation while most distract themselves with bad behavior and cheap entertainment. Meanwhile a movement fueled by nationalism, religious intolerance, and barely veiled bigotry is growing around a handful of misguided, charismatic religious fanatics.

Friends, I fear we are in for a long ugly ride through Hell before this is over if we don’t stop them soon. If you thought the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and other twentieth century monsters were bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

There is still time to stop it, but it’s going to take more than just a few of us pecking at keyboards in cyberspace to get the job done. Step one happens between now and November when we show up at the polls and do everything in our power to stop the lunatics from destroying the asylum.

“Upon . . . → Read More: All Terrorists Are Not Muslims]]> Here’s a report from KFSN about a terrorist attack that happened in the town of Madera, California last week.  I haven’t been watching the news too closely this weekend, but I suspect this is the first you’re hearing about it too. Last Thursday, someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of a local medical clinic.

“Upon arrival responding officers discovered that Planned Parenthood had been attacked by an unknown person with an incendiary device.” said Madera Police Chief Michael Kime.

Madera Police do not have anyone in custody but a spokesperson with Planned Parenthood says she has a good idea of who it might be.

“I believe it’s extremists who are, want to make a statement.” said public affairs director Pasty Montgomery.

The extremists in question were most likely fundamentalist Christianists, delivering a violent message of hate and intolerance to those who work in and who avail themselves of the legal services of the medical clinic, in operation for more than twenty years without prior incident.

This was the second hate crime to occur within Madera in the last week. A few days earlier, someone attacked a Muslim mosque across town.

Investigators found a brick thrown through the window and anti-Muslim signs posted on the walls.Local Muslim leaders on Thursday night held a news conference to denounce the hate crimes against them.
“And this is a message to those bigots, that anytime you attack a community we all come together united as one.” said Basim Elkarra from the council on Islamic American relations.

Where is the outcry against this fundamentalist extremism? Why aren’t Christianist terrorists arrested and held as enemy combatants, the way we treat Islamist terror suspects? Why do we quietly accept violence and terror perpetrated by Christians, but call for the death penalty when these same or similar acts are committed by Muslims?

Is hate and intolerance in the name of Jesus any different from that committed in the name of Muhammad?

Am I the only one who sees the hypocrisy running rampant in the US today?

To this day, World Made By Hand remains one of my favorite pieces of fiction and with this week’s release of the sequel, . . . → Read More: Book Review: World Made By Hand]]> 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.

–

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.

Over the course of a several months, Robert Earle finds himself thrust into many unforeseen circumstances and traveling to places he hadn’t planned on going, all for the greater good of his community. His is a world populated by gangs of outlaws, peculiar religious sects, and ordinary people striving to make the best of the situation they find themselves in. This is a world of stark contrasts; of peaceful, pastoral communities and horribly unsettling depravities – animal brutality and lawlessness set against the innate common decency of average citizens. Kunstler has masterfully depicted the best and worst of human behavior and realistically set both in a world devoid of the conveniences and institutions most people take for granted today.

In a few years, if Mr. Kunstler’s story turns out to have been prophetic, I hope I’ll still be able to identify with the sentiment attributed to a tertiary character in the book, an elderly woman who died at 97 years old, having lived through many fantastic social and technological changes in her near century of life. Before she died she was asked how she could maintain any faith in humanity given the tragedy she had witnessed in her lifetime. She was said to have much preferred the slower pace and greater community spirit of a World Made By Hand to the mechanized world we know today.

I really enjoyed this book, and I hope you do too.

An earlier version of this review was originally published at Unorthodox Homestead Journal, January 25, 2009

Call . . . → Read More: 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.

In other words – Welcome to the Eighteenth Century!

While some in the peak oil movement would have us believe the big shutdown is still a few decades out, I’m more inclined to hope they’re right while continuing to plan for a worst case scenario that plays out on a much shorter time table.

Imagine that everything in your life that is derived from or fueled by petroleum has ceased to function.We’ll ignore coal for now, bearing in mind that it’s extraction is today entirely petroleum driven.

If it’s made of plastic, it’s derived from petrochemicals, so that stuff is done – once it’s broke, you can’t fix it. Same with all the prescription drugs you’ve been taking and are likely addicted to. Most modern medicines are either derived from or utilize petroleum in their manufacture.That’s going to be a fun detox process for a lot of people when it happens.

Obviously your car no longer runs, nor does your lawnmower, weed whacker, back up generator, jet ski, etc. The trucks that bring groceries, tools, toilet paper, tampons, and clothing to the stores you shop in won’t be running either, but if you live close to the warehouse maybe you can get in on the looting party early enough to find something in your size and a few extras to barter later on. In short, if you can’t grow it, fix it, make it yourself, or barter with a neighbor who can, you’re screwed.

I’m nowhere near ready to manage a lifestyle that close to the bone, and neither are most people, but I’m learning every day, and I hope you’re picking up a few basic skills too.

Human beings need three essential things to live: water, food, and shelter. Water is the most important and the most self evident. People are composed of between 55% and 78% water; without it we die within three to five days in otherwise ideal conditions. A world without air conditioning or artificial heat would definitely be less than ideal most of the year, so the window is probably much smaller.

Shelter can be anything from a sheet to create shade in the desert or a warm coat and heavy boots in colder climates to a house or other weatherproof structure. Like water, shelter is pretty self evident and most of us could find somewhere to hide from the rain, snow, or sun in our existing built environment, at least temporarily.

That leaves food, a broad category by anyone’s standard. People have hunted animals for meat for millions of years, but I dare say that in our modern world – especially in North American urban environments, meat animals are not in great abundance, so fruit, nuts, and vegetables are a more accessible source of sustenance for most of us.

Modern agribusiness and automobile oriented civilization has removed most of us from substantial food sources for most of the year. Though most cities have farmer’s markets and many people grow a few tomatoes every summer, most of us would be hard pressed to actually grow and preserve enough food to stay alive for more than a few weeks or months at best. I’ve been gardening for most of the last ten years and I’m still not there.

Add to this problem the fact that without petroleum, the tractors, rototillers, and other powered tools most gardeners and farmers now depend on little more than rusting piles of junk with very little practical value.

The number one skill every human being ought to learn is how to grow food by hand, without mechanized tools and chemical inputs. Our ancestors did so for hundreds of thousands of years so there’s no reason why you and I sholdn’t be able to learn this basic set of skills.

Four years ago, when my family and I moved to our little slice of earth in the woods; a small plot of sloping land with a house, a well, a few trees, and a flat spot where a garden had once grown, I thought we had it made. Boy was I wrong.

Like many properties in this part of the world, the soil here was nearly worthless. Most of the topsoil here had been sold off and trucked away decades ago, leaving behind a yard fit for growing only Bermuda grass and noxious weeds.

The garden area was little better than the rest of the yard and was in bad shape from years of plowing, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers. I tried conventional methods, minus chemicals, for the first two years we were here, adding compost and any other organic matter I could get my hands on to no avail. The weeds ran roughshod over my efforts and with the exception of a few green beans, nearly every crop I tried to grow failed. Even squash!

In addition to the problems mentioned above, the original garden area sits in the shadow of two enormous black walnut trees, which any gardener worth her pitchfork knows produce a chemical in their roots which inhibits the growth of most vegetable crops. The garden had to be relocated!

The second season we began expanding the garden area, up the hill and away from the walnut trees. Family members familiar with the land scoffed, telling us that nothing could ever be grown in the spot we wanted to cultivate. That dirt, they said, was worthless (this was when I learned about the topsoil selloff). They were doubly sure we’d fail without regular injections of 10-10-10, Sevin Dust, and Malathion, but I’m a stubborn asshole if I’m nothing else, so these comments only hardened my resolve.

That first year gardening in the new space we covered the entire area (6′x30′) with black plastic and planted melons in amended hills cut into the plastic, and they thrived. After years of trying to grow melons with no success, I finally got a decent harvest.

The next year I removed the plastic, added a thin layer of composted chicken poop, kitchen scraps, and wood chips, and used a potato fork to loosen the soil down about six inches – no tilling – and planted garlic, onions, and shallots in the bed. Again we got a decent harvest.

The third season we followed the same cultivation process, but planted lettuce, cabbage, and collard greens, this time covering the area with a thick much of straw (probably fescue) to suppress weeds. We also expanded the area that year, widening it  from six feet to about eighteen feet wide.

For this expansion we covered the existing grass, cut first, with cardboard and thick fabrics which were in turn buried under wood chips, compost, and a truck load of rabbit manure. The expansion bed did fairly well the first year, but lost ground this season due to weeds. My job duties expanded this year and as a result the garden got less attention than it deserved.

The original expansion bed, where I started with melons, was left fallow this season, covered by a deep layer of straw (six inches thick or more). Despite our lack of attention, that bed sprouted very few weeds compared to the other areas.

This weekend we decided to build upon the lessons we’ve learned from all of the above experience.

The synthetic fabric layers, virtually unscathed after nearly two years in the dirt, were removed. The weeds, mostly Crab and Bermuda grasses were stripped away, and the entire expansion area covered in a layer of compost, collected grass clippings (not Bermuda grass), pine shavings ,and chicken manure, topped with a thick layer of fresh straw. By next spring nature should have worked Her magic and we should have a nice, fertile planting area ready for our spring crops.

Today we planted several cool season crops – direct seeded – in the original bed, including carrots, lettuce, collards, and bok choy, again using only the potato fork to loosen the already soft soil; raking it smooth and reapplying a thin layer of straw until after the seeds sprout and colder weather arrives.

The point of all this is that I have now proven to myself and some of my extended family (many who still think I’m crazy to work this hard when I have a perfectly good tiller and other gas powered tools available) that it is possible to produce plenty of food without the use of fossil fuel and harsh petrochemicals. It just takes a bit of planning, effort, and patience.

If I had to recommend one book to those interested in learning to produce food this way, it would have to be How To Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, by John Jeavons. I can’t honestly claim to follow or to have read every word in this well researched document, but I can tell you that if you practice even a few of the processes described within, you will indeed be able to produce more food than you can eat in a smaller space than you’d believe possible.

Besides, after the oil runs out and the lights go off, you’re gonna have plenty of time for digging in the dirt. I may be crazy, but I’d rather be crazy and able to feed my family than sane and starving.

Located to the left of your screen you will find the . . . → Read More: Featured Blog Of The Week]]> I’ve decided to add a new feature to the site, in part to keep folks coming back to take another peek at what’s got going on around here, but mostly because I keep finding really great blogs and I want you to know about them to.

Located to the left of your screen you will find the new Featured Blog of the Week section displaying the most recent eight or ten items posted at, you guessed it, the featured blog of the week. Only sites that I have spent a fair amount of time reading or following will be featured, and there is no litmus test for subject matter.

For the time being my choices will be drawn from the blogroll, found lower down the left sidebar, and will rotate near the end of each week, but don’t hold me to a fixed schedule. I get pretty busy sometimes so I might forget to flip the switch on time, but each featured site will get at least seven days in the upper feed.

To be fair, the first featured site is written by someone I don’t know, a blogger named Allison Kilkenny whose site is called Unreported. I’ve been following her posts for a few weeks now and really enjoy her perspective. Maybe you will too.

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 . . . → Read More: Book Review – The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Vs. The Rest Of Us]]> 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.

I started reading this book because my wife began to suspect that a person I am professionally associated with might be a sociopath. The further I dug into this book, the more I began to think that she may be right. Unfortunately, in the process I also found myself suspecting that quite a few people I know might have the sociopathic personality – including me!

My wife assures me that if I have it within myself to wonder, odds are I’m not a sociopath, and I trust her judgment more often than I trust my own, so it’s a pretty safe bet I’m not about to take over the world or swindle the elderly out of their life savings. Besides, I don’t fit the number one criteria – the inability to experience love.

Dr. Stout quite methodically, but in a very readable way, walks the reader through the various theories of the cause of antisocial personality disorder and offers several fictionalized examples of sociopaths before concluding that genetics, environment, and culture all contribute to the making of these antisocial beasts.

I found it quite interesting to note that incidence of sociopathic behavior are much higher (four percent) in Western cultures such as the US compared to cultures found in other parts of the world, specifically East Asia (0.03 to 0.14  of one percent). It would be interesting to study whether or not the number of sociopaths increase in those cultures as they adopt more and more of the ways of the Western world.

After thoroughly explaining what a sociopath is, how and why they are thought to develop, and how to deal with them (Run!), Dr. Stout proceeds with an interesting explanation of conscience and a discussion of the ways that humanity has even benefited at times throughout history from the presence of sociopaths among us and how antisocial personality types have influenced human evolution in both positive and negative ways.

The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Vs. The Rest Of Us offers a fascinating look inside the minds of those among us who know nothing of guilt, remorse, or love.

Eventually, we all find ourselves in positions where we must  do the unpleasant, even repulsive things; terminating incompetent employees, ending a marriage that no longer works, or punishing our children when they misbehave, for example,but as long as we feel remorse and discomfort during or following these actions, even if only a little while, we can rest assured that we are not the sociopath next door.

I spent a good portion of this week at work making and carrying out decisions that ran . . . → Read More: Doing The Right Thing]]> 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.”

All of these things and more are morally wrong decisions that we continue to tolerate despite incontrovertible proof that any “profit” these activities produce for a few, or even for us all, are short term at best, and ultimately lead to greater harm than good. Again, Mr. Welch.

“One of the great ironies of human society is that we create it ourselves, but as individuals and even groups we feel powerless to control what we created. We forged our own chains, and can’t get out of them.

But the first step to freeing ourselves from our chains is to stop telling ourselves that the moral thing to do isn’t the right thing to do in practical terms. The right thing to do… is the right thing to do. When we refuse to do the right thing, instead we impoverish ourselves and our loved ones, we make ourselves sick and we kill ourselves. When we do horrible things to other people, we make them hate us, and then they try and do horrible things to us.”

These are the reasons why I believe what I believe, think the thoughts I think, and do the things I do. This is why I spend so much time and effort ranting in this space and raging against a corporate, profit driven machine that is rapidly devouring our world.

“Doing the wrong thing, the immoral thing, is almost never the practical thing if you care about the well-being of yourself, your children, your friends and your family. It always blows back. If you’re lucky, you may die before the cost comes to bear, but that’s only if you’re lucky, and in the American context, if you aren’t dead yet, you probably aren’t going to get lucky.

So do the right thing. Not just because it is the right thing morally, but because it’s the right thing to do for you and your loved ones in a very practical way.”

In my personal life I don’t always succeed in doing what I know is right, but when I fail, I don’t give up, I simply move forward and try to do better the next time. In my professional capacity… well, those are circumstances beyond my control, at least until I win the lottery or become independently wealthy some other way, so I guess my soul will have to bear the torture a while longer.