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#1587

From: "emy8rq" <JayHanson@...>
Date: Wed Dec 9, 2009 6:55 pm
Subject: New discussion starts on January 4, 2010! Don't miss it!

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Reminder! Reminder! Reminder! Reminder! Reminder!

On January 4, 2010, the killer_ape-peak_oil@yahoogroups.com discussion group is
hosting a new seminar about AMERICA 2.0 and Technocracy which is expected to
last approximately two months.

Liberal democracies cannot survive 'peak oil' in their present form. Economists
cannot foresee this event because their models are both defective and
superficial, so we are exploring 'practical' responses to the inevitable
collapse of our present civilization.

This seminar will be tightly moderated. The basic format will be presentation
followed by a couple of days Q & A on each topic. We will be discussing the
following topics in the following order:

#1. AMERICA 2.0 is a plan to place corporations back under democratic control as
they were before 1860. See http://www.warsocialism.com/America.htm
#2. History of Technocracy http://www.technocracy.ca/
#3. The Unsustainable Nature of the Price System
#4. Solutions for Providing Food and Medical Care
#5. Housing Solutions
#6. Transportation Solutions
#7. Government Organization and Management of Production
#8. Energy Accounting
#9. Motivation, Human Behavior, and the Evolution of Society
#10. The Transition

If you are not already a member of the killer_ape-peak_oil@yahoogroups.com group
but wish to join, send me a message via this
http://www.warsocialism.com/contact.html form.

Jay Hanson

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#1586

From: "Timothy Wilken, MD" <twilken@...>
Date: Wed Nov 25, 2009 6:52 pm
Subject: New at SynEarth

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Will Aliens save us from Peak Oil?

Club Orlov � Dmitry Orlov writes: Perhaps you have heard of the Peak Oil theory? Most people have by now, even the people whose job used to involve denying the possibility that global crude oil production would peak any time soon. Now that everybody seems a bit more comfortable with the idea, perhaps it is time to reexamine it. Is the scenario Peak Oil theoreticians paint indeed realistic, or is it firmly grounded in wishful thinking? �

Peak Oil theorists base their calculations on data from the many oil-producing provinces that have already peaked, such as the United States, which peaked in 1970. The majority of oil-producing provinces and countries are past peak now, providing the theorists with a wealth of precise data. But they seem to have overlooked one little detail, which, I believe, is rather important. What do countries do when they reach their peak and can no longer supply themselves with sufficient quantities of oil from their depleting domestic sources? They turn to imports, of course. They can do so if their local peak comes before the global peak; they cannot do so if it comes after. This makes local peaks poor analogies for the global peak.

And what happens if a country cannot import oil to make up for the production deficit? It just so happens that we have a convenient example of just such a scenario unfolding: post-Soviet oil production after the collapse of the USSR. There, production declined 43% between 1987 and 1996. The decline was arrested and reversed by the introduction of foreign investment and technology from countries outside of the USSR. �

The global oil peak is different from all the little localized peaks in that the planet as a whole cannot import its way out of an oil shortage, resulting in a global economic collapse. The economic collapse will, in turn, cause global oil production to crash even faster, extinguishing the industrial economy. �

What, then, of our canonical Peak Oil scenario, which is that global crude oil (and natural gas condensate) production will rise to a lofty peak sometime soon, and then gently waft down, over several decades, until, by the year 2050 or some other distant date, less than half as much oil will be produced globally? Ever eager to present a hopeful vision, I will say here and now that I believe this scenario to be entirely plausible� but it requires alien intervention. As Russian oil production was saved by foreigners, so Earthling oil production must be be saved by aliens from outer space. (11-25-09)

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Beyond Market!

FuturePositive � Timothy Wilken writes: The Age of Conflict ended with Market. The Age of Market is ending now. This is the beginning of the Age of co-Operation. We are privileged to announce a new website based on GIFTegrity�The Gift Help Exchange.

Ilargi at The Automatic Earth advises that American unemployment is actually closer to 23% than 10.7%. He warns us that housing values in the U.S. have another 20% to fall.

Now Readers, It�s time to get serious.

eBay�s servers failed Saturday when over 200 million items were offered for sale

How many people need things, but are so low on cash that they are selling everything in their Garages? And, who is going to buy these 200 million items? Ilargi at The Automatic Earth reports Unemployment is America is closer to 23%. He predicts housing values will drop another 20%.

This is the right time. We are the right people. And, GiveGetShare.com is the right tool. It�s time for co-Operation.

Readers, we are going to need a lot of help if we want to handle a 100 million Gift exchanges. We need software engineers immediately, to help us get our system stabilized, and we may need artists and writers to help us get it looking the way we want it to look. We need to make the system easy to use and easy to connect to. We will be educating as much as we are serving.

Help Us to Help You

We will soon announce a call for volunteers to join GiveGetShare as Staff. A Staff Member would be like any other member, except that they would commit to the regular and spontaneous Gifting of periods of their time to help us solve GiveGetShare problems. There are no fees at GiftGetShare so the members will pay nothing to join. If they are qualified for the position we need. Their contributions of time will tracked and count on their GIFTing profiles.

We will soon be list the skill sets we need on the wish board at GiveGetShare.� These skilled staffing needs can be filled by GIFTors, and most likely most positions will be shared. This truely open source. Most Staff Members will not be able to Gift 40 hours a week, but they might manage 5 hours one week, and 2 the next. That is totally OK. All GIFTs are welcome, thank you very much.

Once we have filled our staff needs, and when our engineers tell us the system is ready for testing. We will begin the public test phase. Stay tuned! ( 11/24/09)

more�

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49 Million Hungry in America

Civil Eats � The USDA has released its data for hunger [pdf] in the United States, and the numbers aren�t good. In 2007, 36 million people were classified �food insecure�. In 2008, the figure was 49 million � an increase of 13 million.

Children were badly affected, though older children took the hit if they had younger siblings. Those in the front lines were, of course, women. The graph shows the differences in US hunger between 2007 and 2008: single mothers and women living alone were worst hit.

It�s no accident that women are hit harder than men. Food stamps and similar social services just aren�t enough to feed a family. When women are paid less than men for the same work, why should we be surprised at the differences in hunger?

The responses from government are mixed. Although sensible in the press release written for him by the USDA, Secretary for Agriculture Tom Vilsack showed his real pedigree in a briefing to reporters, quoted by The Washington Post where he offered that

�These numbers are a wake-up call . . . for us to get very serious about food security and hunger, about nutrition and food safety in this country.�

What have nutrition and food safety got to do with people going hungry? Very little, except that if you�re going to patch up the worst signs of hunger, you probably want what little food poor people get to be more nutritious than what industrial agriculture is normally ready to provide. But injecting flour with vitamins doesn�t get you very far in tackling the root causes of this hunger � poverty. (11/20/09)

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Humanicide

Graph of emissions BBC Environmental Science � Emissions rose by 29% between 2000 and 2008, says the Global Carbon Project. All of that growth came in developing countries, but a quarter of it came through production of goods for consumption in industrialised nations. �

According to lead scientist Corinne Le Quere, the new findings should add urgency to the political discussions. �Based on our knowledge of recent trends and the time it takes to change energy infrastructure, I think that the Copenhagen conference next month is our last chance to stabilise at 2C in a smooth and organised way,� she told BBC News.

�If the agreement is too weak or if the commitments are not respected, it�s not two and a half or three degrees that we will get, it�s five or six - that�s the path that we are on right now.�

Professor Le Quere, who holds posts at the UK�s University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, is lead author on the study that is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) is a network of scientists in academic institutions around the world. It uses just about every source of data available, from atmospheric observations to business inventories, to build up a detailed picture of carbon dioxide emissions, carbon sinks, and trends.

Before about 2002, global emissions grew by about 1% per year. Then the rate increased to about 3% per year, the change coming mainly from a ramping up in China�s economic output, before falling slightly in 2008 as the global economy dipped towards recession. Endorsing similar projections from the International Energy Agency, the GCP suggests emissions will fall by about 3% during 2009 before resuming their rise as the recession ends.

Concentrations in the atmosphere also show an upward trend - as monitored at stations such as Mauna Loa in Hawaii - but at a lower rate. (11/18/09)

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#1585

From: Bill Ellis <bill.ellis5@...>
Date: Wed Nov 18, 2009 10:56 pm
Subject: Re: Digest Number 1094

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The Fate of the Yeast People
[image: James Howard Kunstler]*Cluster F%#k
Nation*<http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/11/the-fate-of-the-yeast-people.html>
�
.... James Howard Kunstler writes: I�m fascinated by the dominion of moron
culture in the USA, in everything from the way we inhabit the landscape -
the fiasco of suburbia - to the way we feed ourselves - an endless
megatonnage of microwaved Velveeta and corn byproducts - along with the
popular entertainment offerings of Reality TV, the Nascar ovals, and the
gigantic evangelical church shows beloved in the Heartland. ... (snip}

�BE:

Kuntstler paint a true picture of the U.S. and world economy. �But ....

I'm not sure he recognizes that the problem is systematic and has been with us from the beginning of EuroAmerican cultures. �It was spreac world wide by the Age of Colonization. �And has been accepted as the only "truth" by us all. �That is, it is based on the values of self-interest, competition and materialism. �It is inherent in consumerism even more than corporate greed. Money is the root of this evil.

The solution seen by all the economists in power, corporate and government, is more money. � There is not thought on what we need to produce, nor how it should be distributed. �The call for more loans, more bailouts,�

more jobs never stops to think of food, clothing, shelter an the actual needs of people. �It doesn't reccognize that the is more than enough food grown in the world to give every one an adequate diet. � Starvation is not the lack of food but the lack of money. �The is certainly obvious in the Third World, and is threatened in in the industrial countries. �The cost of food and other necessities had paced the �production and distribution system the live support system. �Long fore the depression hit the banks and the economy it had out grown the one income family. � Now two incomes will not pay for the good life for many. ��

Its time to reread Kuntsler and analyze how we got into this dysfunctional mess.

IMHO

Bill Ellis

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#1584

From: "Timothy Wilken, MD" <twilken@...>
Date: Tue Nov 17, 2009 5:39 am
Subject: New at SynEARTH

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Instant Gratification

The Automatic Earth�� Ilarqi writes: The desire for instant gratification has apparently pervaded all aspects of the times we live in, including the collapse of our economies. Once you tell people that such an event is inevitable, they want it to happen as soon as possible, or they lose both their focus and their interest. Warhol�s 15 minutes of fame is a thing of the distant past, simply because it�s so boringly long.

In the past two years, nothing fundamental about our economies has changed in any structural way, and certainly nothing has improved. The damage has been done, whether you care to look or not. What has changed, though, are appearances. If you look at certain sets of numbers from a certain angle, you could swear the recession was over and recovery is here. However, if you�d step back and take some time and look again from another angle, and another, it�s obvious that no recovery is even remotely near. But most people are not patient enough, or just lack the focus, to take that step back, and take that extra bit of time to observe what happens around them. �

When in doubt, return to the long term basics. If you look beyond and underneath all the very tempting and persuasive make-up, there are two elements of the pig that will always remain the most essential, that decide whether it lives or dies: housing and jobs.

There is no such thing as a US housing market anymore, other than through government-run purchase and guarantee schemes. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have some $6 trillion in shaky loans on their books, and the shift away from them and towards the Federal Housing Administration and its finance arm Ginnie Mae has resulted in the FHA dropping way below its already insanely low 2% required reserves level (to 0.59%). These numbers, in all likelihood, represent only the mortgages involved. I for one would like to see what that does add up to in mortgage-backed securities issued. Not that I�m considering holding my breath.

And even with Washington (yes, that would be you) as the only player left in a market that has managed to draw in some 5 million �berlosers in 2009 (thanks, Barracks O.), there are scores of stories about towns where only 1 in every 4 or 5 empty properties are ever put up for sale. Madoff got 150 years for his scam. And his didn�t run into the trillions.

As for jobs, we�ve covered the topic more extensively here than should be necessary to make you grasp its reality. The bottom line is that close to 1 million Americans are added to the unemployed contingent every single month, with the most rapidly rising contingent being the most long-term jobless. For whom Congress last week extended bare benefits by 14 weeks. Just lovely. And what are we, and they, going to do then? �

When talking about finance and the economy, the Automatic Earth obviously can�t completely ignore what happens with stocks and options and shorts and what have you. But that doesn�t mean they are what we focus on. They�re nothing but a poor and highly volatile indicator for the situation those people find themselves in who do not participate or �play� in those markets.

The state of our economies, whether US or elsewhere, cannot be determined by looking at daily stock exchange data. For that matter, and as sad as that is, it can�t be determined using government data either. We have no choice but to read between the lines of a seemingly endless array of words and pages, and look for the spots where the lipstick and the rest of the make-up start cracking. And crack they do, and crack they will. All pretense does. Which is good, when you think about it. After all, as Leonard Cohen puts it:

There�s a crack, a crack in everything.�That�s how the light gets in. (11/16/09)

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The Fate of the Yeast People

Cluster F%#k Nation�� James Howard Kunstler writes: I�m fascinated by the dominion of moron culture in the USA, in everything from the way we inhabit the landscape - the fiasco of suburbia - to the way we feed ourselves - an endless megatonnage of microwaved Velveeta and corn byproducts - along with the popular entertainment offerings of Reality TV, the Nascar ovals, and the gigantic evangelical church shows beloved in the Heartland. To evangelize a bit myself, if such a concept as �an offense in the sight of God� has any meaning, then the way we conduct ourselves in this land is surely the epitome of it - though this is hardly an advertisement for competing religions, who are well-supplied with morons, too.

Moron culture in the USA really got full traction after the Second World War. Our victory over the other industrial powers�in that struggle�was so total and stupendous that the laboring orders here were raised up to economic levels unknown by any peasantry in human history. People who had been virtual serfs trailing cotton sacks in the sunstroke belt a generation back were suddenly living better than Renaissance dukes, laved in air-conditioning, banqueting on �TV dinners,� motoring on a whim to places that would have taken a three-day mule trek in their grandaddy�s day. �Soon, they were buying Buick dealerships and fried chicken franchises and opening banks and building leisure kingdoms of thrill rides and football. �It�s hard to overstate the fantastic wealth that a not-very-bright cohort of human beings was able to accumulate in post-war America.

And they were able to express themselves - as the great chronicler of these things, Tom Wolfe, has described so often and well - in exuberant �taste cultures� of material life, of which Las Vegas is probably the final summing-up, and every highway strip, of twenty-thousand strips from Maine to Oregon, is the democratic example. These days, I travel the road up the west shore of Lake George, in Warren County, New York, and see the sad, decomposing relics of that culture and that time in all the �playful� motels and leisure-time attractions, with their cracked plastic signs advertising the very things that they exterminated in the quest for adequate parking - the woodand vistas, the paddling Mohicans, the wolf, the moose, the catamount - and�I take a certain serene comfort in the knowledge that it is all over now for this stuff and the class of morons that produced it.

A very close friend of mine calls them �the yeast people.� They were the democratic masses who thrived in the great fermentation vat of the post World War Two economy. They are now meeting the fate that any yeast population faces when the fermentation process is complete. For the moment, they are only ceasing to thrive. �They are suffering and worrying horribly from the threat that there might be no further fermentation. �The brewers running the vat try to assure them that there�s more sugar left in the mix, and more beer can be made from it, and more yeasts can be brought into this world to enjoy the life of the sweet, moist mash. �In fact, one of the brewers did happen to dump about a trillion-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar into the vat during 2009, and that has produced an illusion of further fermentation. But we know all too well that this artificial stimulus has limits.

What will happen to the yeast people of the USA? �You can be sure that the outcome will not yield to �policies� and �protocols.� �The economy that produced all that amazing wealth is contracting, and pretty rapidly, too, and the numbers among the yeast will naturally follow the downward arc of the story. Entropy is a harsh mistress. In the immediate offing:�a contest for the table scraps of the �20th century. We�ve barely seen the beginning of this, just a little peevishness embodied by yeast shaman figures such as Sarah Palin and Glen Beck. As hardships mount and hardened emotions rise, we�ll see �the usual suspects� come into play:�starvation, disease, violence. �We may still be driving around in Ford F-150s, but the Pale Rider is just over the horizon beating a path to our parking-lot-of-the-soul. (11/16/09)

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http://synearth.net/

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#1583

From: "Kay Dayss" <kay@...>
Date: Fri Nov 13, 2009 9:36 pm
Subject: Re: Building the positive future

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Dear Bill,

So good to hear from you. I love the book; it has grown well. Now I would like to take your book and add a "Fun Exercises" section to each chapter to help people connect in fun and artful ways to Gaia and the ideas in your book. Basically, I'll be adding a lot of evocative questions that we in the Mystery School community are developing. I want folks to see first hand how EASY and FUN it is to LIVE an entirely different life. The NEW STORY is a whole system redesign. The more people start living it, the closer we get to the 100th Monkey result where suddenly BOOM the walls start tumbling down and we're all living an entirely NEW STORY. It is a GREAT time right now.

Is your book free for taking and modifying and distributing? That is, is the book FREE of the current economic system of copyrights and money? I want to modify it into a fun, exploratory:

Guide to the NEW STORY

And get it distributed all around the world through the U.N. Dr. Jean Houston, a best-selling author and Mystery School teacher, will help us get it out there. She is working with the U.N. and knows a lot of people including ex-presidents. We can get this important guide out to the world. My goal is to make a direct difference in the lives of at least 1 billion people.

Are you in? Is your book in the public domain? Are you gifting it to the world? Together we can get this to the people.

Love and Blessings,
Kay Dayss in the NW corner of the USA

Kay D. Dayss Educational Services
PO Box 2005
Maple Falls, WA 98266

Earth Creativity School
a magical art school in a yurt

kay@...
http://earthcreativity.org
360-543-5628

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