Canadian Tar Sands Mining/Keystone Pipeline

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

consider this:

the oil we consume from barren terrain is condonable because there is little ecology to destroy in the process.

The possibility that depleting oil reserves could impact the ecology is too real to ignore. regardless of the surface devistation, we do not know the long term impact of extracting oil from in the earth.


We do not know how the earth uses its resources naturally, yet have the audacity to presume we know?!


Civilization is apparently synonymous with ignorant stupidity. and yet the civilians would sooner embrace that than correct it?!


and people wonder why i am always so indignant?

[voidisyinyang]

consider this:

 

the oil we consume from barren terrain is condonable because there is little ecology to destroy in the process.

 

The possibility that depleting oil reserves could impact the ecology is too real to ignore. regardless of the surface devistation, we do not know the long term impact of extracting oil from in the earth.

 

 

We do not know how the earth uses its resources naturally, yet have the audacity to presume we know?!

 

 

Civilization is apparently synonymous with ignorant stupidity. and yet the civilians would sooner embrace that than correct it?!

 

 

and people wonder why i am always so indignant?

 

Yeah and who is this "we" anyway?

 

haha.

 

I biked 365 days for 10 years in Minne-snowda.

 

If we run out of oil that means more jobs -- less automation.

 

Less snow plows and more shoveling.

 

More horses less cadium and benzene.

 

 

Now check out this video about the "we" in the U.S.

 

People have no idea just how skewed the "we" really is. haha.

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

i'm being deliberately broad and inclusive....

[ralis]

My OP was from the standpoint of ecology and systems which completely escapes the denier junk science crowd. I was expressing grave concern about the destruction of old growth arboreal forest. A species habitat that will never be replaced. Hardly one sided.

[ralis]

JB,

 

 

 

climate scientists dont understand the sun well enough to have predicted the sunspot funk in 09-10, hansen declared sc24 was going to be a roaring rocket that would help send our thermometers through the stratosphere - so how do you model with a climate model what the sun did to the jetstream this past couple years since that low magnetism perturbation?

 

This is a preposterous statement and you know it! What you claim is that you have some vast understanding of the suns dynamics and climate scientists don't? You have claimed this in your emails to Dr. Hansen. You have absolutely no research to even validate such a claim except hearsay. In dynamic systems such as the biosphere, the suns energy is taken into account.

Edited March 5, 2013 by ralis

[voidisyinyang]

JB,

 

 

 

 

This is a preposterous statement and you know it! What you claim is that you have some vast understanding of the suns dynamics and climate scientists don't? You have claimed this in your emails to Dr. Hansen. You have absolutely no research to even validate such a claim except hearsay. In dynamic systems such as the biosphere, the suns energy is taken into account.

 

http://www.progressorcollapse.com/merchants-of-doubt-and-why-the-sun-cannot-be-the-cause-of-recent-global-warming/

[ralis]

http://www.progressorcollapse.com/merchants-of-doubt-and-why-the-sun-cannot-be-the-cause-of-recent-global-warming/

 

 

Thanks for posting that.

[JustARandomPanda]

If Canada plans to develop the tar sand oil even if the keystone pipeline is stopped why is no one focusing on this? If one is concerned about the environment isn't that the real lynchpin that should be focused on?

[ralis]

If Canada plans to develop the tar sand oil even if the keystone pipeline is stopped why is no one focusing on this? If one is concerned about the environment isn't that the real lynchpin that should be focused on?

 

 

I believe there are many groups protesting this. I just can't believe the Canadian's are not saying anything. Unless of course the media is not reporting it. I have been in forests of that nature and the experience is awesome.

Edited March 6, 2013 by ralis

[voidisyinyang]

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/03/05/climate_change_played_role_in_arab_spring_report_suggests.html

 

Climate change played role in Arab Spring, report suggests

Drought in eastern China. A wheat shortage. An uprising in Egypt. Could the link be climate change?

[joeblast]

Thanks SB for some very rational musing.

 

NAJA...so by extrapolation, there is an issue with humans settling anywhere and clearing anything for their use? (unless its a barren wasteland?)

 

My OP was from the standpoint of ecology and systems which completely escapes the denier junk science crowd. I was expressing grave concern about the destruction of old growth arboreal forest. A species habitat that will never be replaced. Hardly one sided.

Was your assertion in the OP that the destruction of a single old growth forest (let's just extrapolate wildly and say they're going to chop down the entire thing,) is going to significantly and irrevocably contribute to global warming?

 

JB,

 

 

 

 

This is a preposterous statement and you know it! What you claim is that you have some vast understanding of the suns dynamics and climate scientists don't? You have claimed this in your emails to Dr. Hansen. You have absolutely no research to even validate such a claim except hearsay. In dynamic systems such as the biosphere, the suns energy is taken into account.

Yeah see what I said about TSI...you cant quite seem to get your head around that one. instead, attack the person - I'm curious why that's your default-programmed action, default reactions usually come from the heart. Are you trying to assert that the magnetic dynamos are fully represented? hey look, they just discovered another piece of the van allen belt. I also didnt know that the climate models took into effect the other planets and how that winds up effecting the sun's periodicites, which affects the earth's - something that definitely has a significant long term impact on how a model would play out. but hey, let's ignore all this other stuff and call what's in front of our nose the whole ball of wax.

 

 

 

http://www.progressorcollapse.com/merchants-of-doubt-and-why-the-sun-cannot-be-the-cause-of-recent-global-warming/

and what's the main argument in here that oh, the sun's output hasnt changed? see, look at what TSI is doing! if I have to I'll finishing putting shotgun holes through the door of that one, but I really dont need to go any further than pointing out the TSI fallacy. seriously, you can reduce it all to a simple 1,368 watts per sq meter and that's a comprehensive representation of the sun's effects?

 

(edit: GISS is skewed, btw. why? because we dont need to see what's in hansen's black box meat grinder for numbers, its esoteric fluff and needs no corrections, its how hansen's been able to make all of those oh-so-accurate predictions anyway...I really only have an issue with "total" in TSI, because having that word in there people assume total complete comprehensive not leaving anything whatsoever out, and that is patently false.)

 

Like I said, if your equations simply assume that TSI is an all inclusive, comprehensive representation of the sun, then your equations are oversimplified enough so as to have some serious predictability issues. (and we all know the entire usefulness of a model is in its prediction, so that's taking a fundamental input and oversimplifying it...ya just might be getting garbage out the other end of that one.)

 

"Solar energy per unit time over a unit area perpendicular to the Sun's rays at the top of Earth's atmosphere.." can fully be represented in watts per sq meter? There's not even space in there to represent the sun's field orientation flipping, but surely that cant impact the climate, right?

 

climate change and arab spring...haha...seriously??? where's that pic of the drunk guy saying dude, I'm not saying it was aliens...but maaan, it was aliens!!! duuuude, I'm not saying correlation is causation....but....correlation is causation!

 

The essays were jointly produced by the Centre for American Progress and the Centre for Climate and Security in Washington.

 

nvm, say no more, the arms of fascism and the arms of government have spoken! what a joke.

Edited March 6, 2013 by joeblast

[ralis]

JB,

 

"Was your assertion in the OP that the destruction of a single old growth forest (let's just extrapolate wildly and say they're going to chop down the entire thing,) is going to significantly and irrevocably contribute to global warming?"

 

If you read the link and the photos in the OP, you will see massive clear cutting. I did not say that would contribute to AGW but the tar sands oil will. I doubt you have ever seen clear cut forest like I have.

[joeblast]

ok, just wanted to see if the inconsistency was consistent

 

given that its going to be extracted either way, would you rather the US bought it, or would you rather it go elsewhere?

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

NAJA...so by extrapolation, there is an issue with humans settling anywhere and clearing anything for their use? (unless its a barren wasteland?)

 

 

 

Settling is one thing. Minimal involvement is harmonious.

 

 

We're a booming population, Earth's caretakers are slacking off and doing anything but their job, instead more intent on defying the description.

 

One hundred generations may well enough be insufficient to see the effects of our "clearing anything for our use" as a whole.

 

To be expected, honestly, that we would never see the effects of one hundred generations during... but after... why have we continued making the same mistakes? GRANTED "history is written by the victor" AND we have lost over 75% of our civil-world history records, HOWEVER...

 

The core logic behind the civil-progress-agenda is inherently and blatantly flawed, presuming to occupy separate reality from the whole of the world itself... as if the careless pursuit of technological advancements will not cost the progress of billions of years of evolution!

 

 

Those who demand progress the most, in the name of civilization and its advancements, are the most likely to harm it. Both progress and the populations that compose the "body" of "civilization"

 

Harmony lends more to progress than mechanical/digital technology ever can, has, or will. WE are not mechanical, digital, technological animations. we are biological.

 

 

Anything harmful of biological function is inherently and immediately harmful to us until we know proper ritual to give thanks and cherish the life we've extinguished.

 

A single tree felled will negatively affect the whole world a million times deeper, a million times longer... than the most powerful technology can ever positively affect anything.

 

Almost every creation story has a world tree big enough to cover Pangaea supercontinent with its branches... but civilization will never allow such a beautiful and beneficial life to be cultivated...

 

Why?

 

 

Because civilization seeks unnatural, artificial, violent-if-"necessary", no-questions-asked control over the entire whole sum total of reality. "they" think the world belongs to civilians, and that organizations of nationalized persons have authority over nature.

 

That is a mind of a much lesser evolved being than Human.

 

(possibly robot/computer)

 

 

 

 

 

Edit: add ly in honestly

Edit, edit: add "Both progress and the populations that compose the "body" of "civilization""

Edit, edit, edit: added "ever" to 'positively affect anything'

redundant edits: Almost every creation > not > every story.

Edited March 6, 2013 by Northern Avid Judo Ant

[ralis]

This is why I made the statement about clear cutting the tar sands forest. This might be the worst environmental disaster in North America. Although Leadville Co. is horrific.

 

 

 

[voidisyinyang]

http://truth-out.org/news/item/14958-us-climate-bomb-is-ticking-what-the-gas-industry-doesnt-want-you-to-know

 

more of the same -- ecoapocalypse

 

http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-can-civilization-survive-capitalism?page=0%2C0&akid=10148.236800.rzSAJn&rd=1&src=newsletter804872&t=5

 

Chomsky's latest - all on ecoapocalypse and promoting indigenous cultures.

Edited March 6, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

the worst that can happen in an apocalypse is that nature reasserts herself as prime authority over nature.



In other words, the worst that can happen is the annihilation of all but the tribal and aboriginal cultures and lifeways...


I cant say good bye mechanical world fast enough, and it isnt dying off fast enough either.

[JustARandomPanda]

Another good read...especially relevant to this discussion.

 

Personal note: I've always liked JMG's emphasis on changing one's own personal daily life habits as being the first and most important step of any hope for lasting change in society...

 

 

 

The Twilight of Protest

 

 

Over the last four months or so, as this blog has sketched out the trajectory of empires in general, and then traced the intricate history of America’s empire in particular, I’ve been avoiding a specific issue. That avoidance hasn’t come from any lack of awareness on my part, and if it had been, comments and emails from readers asking when I was going to get around to discussing the issue would have taken care of that in short order. No, it’s simply a natural reluctance to bring up a subject that has to be discussed sooner or later, but is guaranteed to generate far more heat than light.

The subject? The role of protest movements in the decline and fall of the American empire.

That’s an issue sufficiently burdened with tangled emotions and unstated agendas that even finding a good starting place for the discussion is a challenge. Fortunately I have some assistance, courtesy of Owen Lloyd, who is involved with an organization called Deep Green Resistance and recently wrote a review of my book The Blood of the Earth. It’s by no means a bad review. Quite the contrary, Lloyd made a serious effort to grapple with the issues that book tried to raise, and by and large succeeded; where he failed, the misunderstandings were all but inevitable, given the differences between his views and mine. Thus it’s all the more striking that his review points up so precisely the reasons why protest movements have by and large been spinning their wheels in empty air for thirty years, and will almost certainly continue to do so while America’s empire crashes and burns around them.

The point that matters here is the review’s denunciation of one of the central points of the book, which is that those who want to change the world need to start by changing their own lives. According to Lloyd, we don’t have time for that, since the biosphere is in dire peril; what’s needed instead are the standard tools of contemporary activism—"direct action, community building, and outreach," in his convenient summary. His reasoning is logical enough, as far as it goes; if your house is on fire, after all, it’s a little late to install sprinklers and smoke alarms. If the situation is as urgent as Lloyd claims, all other considerations have to take a back seat to an all-out effort to deal with the immediate crisis with the most effective means available.

It’s a common enough claim in the contemporary activist community; Derrick Jensen had an article in Orion Magazine a few years back making essentially the same argument. Still, there’s a problem with that argument, because the responses Lloyd, Jensen, and other activists are promoting here have been standard across the spectrum of activist groups for more than three decades now, and that’s more than enough time to see how well they work. The answer? Well, let’s be charitable and say "not very well."

For years now, leading environmentalists have been bemoaning how much ground is being lost year after year, and how little the environmental movement has been able to do even to slow that down. They are quite correct in that assessment, of course. It’s standard these days to insist that this simply shows the power differential between the corporate interests that profit from environmental destruction and the citizen groups that are trying to fight them. That argument seems convincing, too, so long as you do what most people these days are taught to do, and ignore the lessons of history.

Glance back to a slightly earlier period and at least one of those lessons stands out in bold relief. In the 1970s, environmental activists facing equally powerful and well-funded corporate interests built a mass movement and forced through landmark legislation. In the United States, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a bevy of less famous but equally important environmental bills crashed through a wall of corporate opposition and became the law of the land. That sort of success is something that today’s environmental activists can only daydream about, and it was accomplished using the same tools that activists use today—with one important addition: the environmental activists of that time recognized that the most effective way to advocate any given change was to make that change in their own lives first. That awareness was not limited to the environmental movement; it was pioneered by the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, who turned it into a core principle of their movement—"the personal is political"—and leveraged it efficiently to bring about dramatic if still incomplete gains in women’s rights. They recognized, as did many other activists in those years, that if your lifestyle supports a system, and depends on that system, any efforts you may think you’re making to force significant change on that system will be wasted breath.

It will be wasted breath because most people, reasonably enough, want to see that there’s a life worth living on the other side of the changes your activist movement wants to make, and the best way to give them a glimpse of that life is to enact it yourself. It will also be wasted breath because most people have a tolerably good nose for hypocrisy, and are highly familiar with the kind of demagogy that calls on everybody else to make sacrifices and get by with less so the demagogue doesn’t have to do so. Talk to Americans who didn’t support either the climate change movement or its corporate opposition, and you’ll find that for a good many of them, it was when word of Al Gore’s air-conditioned mansion and frequent-flyer miles got around that they decided that global warming was yet another manufactured threat, meant to stampede people into acquiescing with somebody’s political agenda.

Finally, it will be wasted breath because if the system you think you want to change is also the system that supplies you with a comfortable middle class lifestyle, with all the comforts and conveniences that such a lifestyle supplies, the changes you will push the system to make will pretty reliably be limited to those that will not affect your continued access to the lifestyle, comforts and conveniences in question. The Breton peak oil blogger Damien Perrotin has commented amusingly on the influence of what, in France, are called bobos—that is, bourgeois bohemians (the acronym works equally well in both languages), members of the liberal upper middle classes. Bobos are terribly eager to see themselves as the saviors of the world—that’s the bohemian side—and will do absolutely anything to fulfill this role, so long as it doesn’t require them to give up any of the benefits of their privileged status—that’s the bourgeois side.

I hope the term catches on in this country, because we have a lot of bobos over here, too. Last week’s discussion of captive constituencies has a special relevance in any discussion of the species Bobo americanus, because being active in the captive constituency of some otherwise mainstream political faction is a very popular way to play the role of saving the world without risking disruption to the system that gives bobos their privileged status. There are also substantial personal rewards available for those who take leadership positions in captive constituencies, and help keep them captive. It’s a role bobos are well qualified to fill, especially those who come from the upper end of the class hierarchy and so have the connections and skills for the job. That’s where you get the executives of mainstream environmental groups who draw six-figure salaries, maintain cordial relationships with corporate sponsors, and show an obvious willingness to settle for whatever scraps may fall from the tables of wealth and power onto their corner of America’s unwashed kitchen floor.

Still, the bobo-ization of American radicalism is not limited to such obvious cases. When you hear activists loudly insisting that it’s possible to save the world without being an ascetic—and I’m sorry to say that, yes, that well-worn trope turned up in the Owen Lloyd book review cited above—you’re hearing the echoes of bobo influence, in the form of the popular but profoundly wrong notion that it must somehow be possible to maintain today’s unsustainable lifestyles on a sustainable basis. That’s not going to happen, for reasons that reach right down into the laws of thermodynamics; no amount of handwaving is going to make it happen; and the sooner we get used to living with a lot less, the less damage we will do to ourselves, each other, and the Earth as the industrial economy sputters to a halt.

Now of course that suggestion is anathema to the existing order of things, in America and elsewhere. It’s usually anathema in a declining imperial society. James Francis’ useful study Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World chronicles how the imperial Roman government came to treat the asceticism of Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophers as an unendurable threat to its authority. They were quite correct to do so; a system that maintains itself in power by bribing the lower classes with panem et circenses and the middle and upper classes with the more lavish entertainments chronicled in Petronius’ Satyricon has no convenient lever with which to control those who have no interest in these things.

Thus it’s probably safe to assume that there will be no effective opposition to the status quo in this country until some movement arises that in practice—not just in theory—embraces an essentially ascetic approach. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that the first movement to do so will be a revived Marxism. I’m no fan of Karl Marx, and even less a fan of the various ideologues who filled out the framework of his system, but Marxism has features that will give it powerful appeal in the decades ahead. It gives the poor someone to blame for their misfortunes, and does so in a far more detailed manner than (say) the vague rhetoric of the Occupy movement; it is among the few ideologies that manage to fuse a rigorous intellectual tradition with a utopian future vision of religious intensity; and it has a strong ascetic element—the figure of the Marxist revolutionary, lean, passionate, doctrinaire, and contemptuous of material goods except insofar as they might help further the cause, was a common social type in Europe for close to a century.

Marxism also has an advantage just now that no amount of money could buy it: the extraordinary campaign of unintended propaganda that the Republican party is currently carrying out on its behalf. Right now, even the most moderate and revenue-neutral attempts to use the powers of government for the benefit of American citizens are being lambasted by the GOP as communism. It’s an embarrassing admission of intellectual poverty—one gathers that the American right spent so long belaboring the Red Peril that it really has no idea what to say now that communism isn’t around any more—but it also guarantees a familiar kind of backlash. Fundamentalist churches that spend too much time denouncing Satanism, complete with lurid descriptions of Satanic living replete with wild parties and orgiastic sex, get that kind of backlash; that’s why they so often find that they’ve merely succeeded in making devil worship popular among local teens.

In the same way, if the Republicans succeed in rebranding, say, public assistance and food safety laws as Marxist, the most likely result of that campaign will be to convince a great many Americans of otherwise moderate political views that Marx might have had something going for him after all. As suggested above, I don’t consider this a good thing; in theory, Marxist revolution leads to the glorious worker’s paradise of the future via the inevitable workings of the historical dialectic, but in practice the dictatorship of the proletariat reliably turns into just another dictatorship, with the usual quota of gulags and unmarked mass graves. Still, in a country where most people are frighteningly ignorant of history, and are being driven to the wall by a corrupt and spectacularly mismanaged imperial economy in headlong decline, it’s unpleasantly unlikely that this point will be remembered.

Still, other forces are pushing American society toward a crisis that its existing political and economic arrangements are unlikely to survive, and the rehabilitation of Marxism is unlikely to proceed fast enough to reach any sort of critical mass before that crisis hits in earnest. It’s probably a safe bet that the more mainstream groups will increasingly side with the established order of things—I’ve long suspected that before all this is over with, the Sierra Club will come out in favor of strip mining the national park system so long as it’s done in, ahem, an environmentally sensitive way. Outside the bobosphere, things are much less clear, for the twilight years of a disintegrating political system tolerably often create a fiercely Darwinian environment for ideologies and political movements, in which the only thing that matters is which set of beliefs and personalities can build the strongest coalition at the right time, absorb or marginalize the largest fraction of opposing groups, and make the most successful bid for power. As that bubbling cauldron of competing belief systems boils over in violence and systemic disruption, it’s anyone’s guess who or what will come out on top.

Whoever ends up more or less in charge of what’s left of the United States of America when the flames die down and the rubble stops bouncing, though, will have to face a predicament far more difficult than the ones encountered by the winners in 1932, or 1860, or for that matter 1776. All three of these past crises happened when the United States was still a rising power, with vast and largely untapped natural resources, and social and economic systems not yet burdened with the aftermath of a failed empire; the winning side could safely assume that once the immediate crisis was resolved, the nation would return to relative prosperity, pay off its debts, and proceed from there.

That won’t be happening this time around. When the crisis is over, whatever form it takes, the United States—or whatever assortment of successor nations end up dividing its territory between them—will be a shattered, bankrupt, resource-poor Third World failed state (or collection of failed states) that will likely have to struggle hard even to regain basic levels of political and economic stability. That struggle will be pursued in a world in which energy and other resources are getting scarcer each year, energy- and resource-intensive technologies are being abandoned by all but a very few rich and powerful nations, and unpredictable swings in temperature, rainfall, and other climatic and ecological factors make life a good deal more difficult for everyone. In that not-so-far-future America, the comforts and conveniences most of us now take for granted will be available only to the rich and powerful, if they can be had by anyone at all.

That’s the world our choices over the last three decades or so have been preparing for us, and for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. In such a world, the people who will have the most to offer their communities, their societies, and the biosphere that supports all our lives will be those who have the courage, now, to walk away from the consumer economy and its smorgasbord of dubious pleasures, and learn, now, how to get by with less, use their own capacities of body and mind, and work with the patterns and processes of nature. For the time being—specifically, until we get close enough to the crisis period that even the most nonviolent challenge to the existing order calls down massive violence in response—protest can still accomplish goals worth pursuing, especially if activists wake up once again to the power of personal example; over the longer run, though, it’s the change on the individual, family, and community level that so many of today’s activists reject as pointless that have the most to offer the world.

[JustARandomPanda]

JMG's follow up to the prior post

 

 

 

 

Last week's post here on The Archdruid Report attempted to raise a question that, as I see it, deserves much more discussion than it gets these days. Most currently popular ways of trying to put pressure on the American political system presuppose that the politicians will pay attention if the people, or the activists who claim to speak in their name, simply make enough noise. The difficulty is that the activists, or for that matter the people, aren’t actually giving the politicians any reason to pay attention; they’re simply making noise, and the politicians have gotten increasingly confident that the noise can be ignored with impunity.

That’s what’s implied by saying that protest marches, petitions, letter-writing campaigns, and the like consume democracy. These standard modes of activism only work if the officials who make decisions have some reason to think that the activists can follow through with some more effective action, such as a serious challenge in the next election, if they’re ignored. It’s those other actions that produce democracy or, in less metaphoric terms, convince elected officials that ignoring the activists could put their careers at risk.

What sets democracy apart from most other systems of government is that it gives citizens a peaceful way to make good on such threats. This is a huge advantage, for the most pragmatic of reasons. In autocratic societies, where the populace has no way to get rid of inept officials short of revolution, a vast amount of administrative idiocy and incompetence goes unpunished. The notion that autocracies are by definition more competent than democracies is quite simply untrue; the annals of autocratic states such as ancien régime France and Communist Russia are packed with examples of the most egregious incompetence—and no, despite the slogans, Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time, either. It’s simply easier to cover up governmental stupidity in an autocracy, since there aren’t media independent of government control to spread the word and embarrass the powers that be.

Yet that advantage, again, depends on the ability of citizens to vote the rascals out when they deserve it. In today’s America, that ability is little more than theoretical these days. I’ve discussed in a number of posts already how what was once one of the world’s liveliest and most robust democratic systems has lapsed into a sham democracy uncomfortably reminiscent of the old Eastern Bloc states, where everyone had the right to vote for a preselected list of candidates who all support the same things. The reasons for that decay are complex, and again, I’ve talked about them in detail already. What I want to address this week is what might be done about it—and that requires a second look at the countervailing forces that were once hardwired into the grassroots level of the American system.

A thought experiment might help clarify the issues here. Imagine, dear reader, that early next year you hear that a couple of legislators and popular media figures in your state are talking about forming a new political party that will offer a meaningful alternative to the stalemate in Washington DC. The two major parties ignore them, but by early 2014 the new party is more or less in existence, and candidates under its banner are running for Congress and a range of state offices. The morning after the 2014 election, Republicans and Democrats across the nation wake up to discover that they are going to have to deal with a significant third-party presence in Congress and a handful of state governments controlled lock, stock and barrel by the new party.

The two years leading up to the 2016 election pass by in a flurry of political activity as the old parties struggle to regain their joint monopoly over the political process and the new party scrambles to build a national presence. In 2016, the new party nominates its first presidential candidate, a longtime activist and public figure. The campaign faces an uphill fight, and loses heavily; some of the new party’s people in Congress and state governments are ousted as well. Pundits insist that it was all a flash in the pan, but they’re discomfited in the midterm elections in 2018 when the new party scores a major upset, winning a majority in the House of Representatives and nearly doubling its Senate presence.

The new party’s gains strain the existing structure of American partisan politics to the breaking point. As the 2020 election nears, the Democratic Party, outflanked and marginalized by the rising new party, disintegrates in internecine feuding and fails to field a presidential candidate at all. The Republican Party breaks in two, with Tea Party and country-club Republicans holding competing conventions and nominating separate presidential tickets. Yet another new party springs up, composed mostly of old guard politicians from what used to be the middle of the road, and nominates its own candidate. Under US law, whatever party gets the most votes in any state wins that state’s votes in the electoral college—and so the new party, by winning a plurality of the popular vote in just enough states to matter, sees its candidate raising his hand on January 20, 2021 to take the oath of office as the nation’s next president.

Suggest a scenario of that kind to most Americans today and they’ll dismiss it as impossible. That’s all the more curious, in that every detail of the thought experiment I’ve just sketched out is drawn from an earlier period in American history. The years in question ran from 1854 to 1860, and the new party was the Republican Party; the Whigs were the party that imploded, the Democrats the party that split in two, the short-lived fourth party was the Constitutional Union Party and, of course, the tall figure standing up there taking the oath of office in 1861 was Abraham Lincoln.

Yet it’s true that an upset of the same kind would be much more difficult to pull off today. Several different factors combine to make that the case, but to my mind, the most important of them is the simple and awkward fact that the skills that would be needed to make it happen are no longer to be found among activists or, for that matter, American citizens in general. Organizing a new political party, building up a constituency on a national level, and making the machinery of democracy turn over in response, requires the pragmatic application of certain learned and learnable skill sets, which most people in America today do not know and are by and large uninterested in learning. There are, broadly speaking, three such skill sets, and we’ll take them one at a time

The first can’t be discussed without opening an industrial sized can of worms, one that will take the rest of this post and still leave ends wriggling in all directions, but that can’t be helped. I’d like to start the can opener going with one of the odder conversations that spun off from last week’s post. My regular readers will remember that one of the core themes of that post was the suggestion that, though democratic systems are routinely corrupt and suffer from a galaxy of other pervasive problems, they generally provide more civil rights and more consistent access to due process to their citizens than do autocratic systems, and that this is true even in a nonindustrial setting.

One of my readers took heated exception to this claim, and insisted that preindustrial America was no better than any other country of the time. It’s the debate that followed, though, that brought out the detail I want to emphasize. To defend his counterclaim, my reader talked about the current US prison system, the evils of intellectual property rights, and a flurry of other issues irrelevant to the point at hand, ending up with a claim that since Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Nazi Germany was a democracy and democracy was therefore bad. None of his arguments had any bearing on whether citizens of the United States in its preindustrial days—not, please note, all its residents, much less people outside its borders; democracies abuse noncitizens more or less as often as other forms of government do, which is why I specified citizens in my distinctly lukewarm words of praise—had more civil rights and more reliable access to due process than citizens of autocratic countries during the same period.

It’s a matter of historical record that in 1800, say, when the United States was still almost wholly agrarian, an American citizen could stand up in a public meeting anywhere in the country, say that President Adams was a liar, a thief, and a scoundrel who should be hounded out of office at the first opportunity, and suffer no civil or criminal penalty whatever for that utterance—and could go on with equal impunity to make good on his words by doing his best to hound Adams out of office and put Tom Jefferson in his place. It’s equally a matter of historical record that making a similar comment in the same year about First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, Tsar Pavel I, Sultan Selim III, the Jiaqing Emperor, or Shogun Tokugawa Ienari in the respective domains of these autocrats would have resulted in a painful death, or at best a long stay in prison under ghastly conditions, and let’s not even talk about what happened to people who showed any sign of trying to replace these heads of state with some other candidate. That’s a significant difference in civil rights, and it’s what I was talking about, but my attempts to suggest to my reader that he was not addressing my point got answered by increasingly irritable comments insisting that yes, he was.

It finally dawned on me that from his perspective, he was, because the point he thought I was making was something like “democracy is good,” or more exactly that the verbal noise “democracy” ought to be linked with warm fuzzy feelings. He was insisting in response, more or less, that the verbal noise “democracy” ought to be linked to cold prickly feelings, and his rhetorical strategy—a very common one on the internet these days, as it happens—was simply to attempt to associate various cold prickly feelings with the verbal noise in question, in the hope that enough of the cold prickly feelings would stick to the verbal noise to make his point. The fact that I might be trying to do something other than linking a verbal noise to an emotional state seemingly did not occur to him.

It’s only fair to point out that he was far from the only person whose response to that post amounted to some equally simplistic emotional linkage. On the other side of the political spectrum, for instance, was a reader who insisted that the United States was not an empire, because empires are bad and the United States is good. To him, the verbal noise “empire” was linked to cold prickly feelings, and those clashed unbearably with the warm fuzzy feelings he linked to the word “America.” It’s a fine example of the lumpen-Aristotelianism against which Alfred Korzybski contended in vain: A is A and therefore A cannot be not-A, even if A is a poorly chosen hypergeneralization that relates primarily to an emotional state and embraces an assortment of vaguely defined abstractions with no connection between them other than a nearly arbitrary assignment to the same verbal noise.

I don’t bring up these examples because they’re in any way unusual; they’re not. I bring them up because they quite adequately represent most of what passes for political discussion in America today. Examples abound; for one, think of the way the right uses the word “socialist” to mean exactly what the left means by the word “fascist.” In plain English, either one translates out as “I hate you,” but both can be far more adequately represented by the snarl a baboon makes when it’s baring its teeth in threat. Now of course both words, like “democracy” and “empire,” actually mean something specific, but you won’t find that out by watching their usage these days.

For another—well, I wonder how many of my readers have had, as I have, the experience of attempting to talk about the policies and behavior of a politician when the other person in the conversation insists on reducing everything to personalities. I think of an email exchange I endured a while back, in which my correspondent was trying to convince me that I was wrong to criticize Barack Obama, since he was a nice man, a man of integrity, and so on. Every issue got dragged back to the man’s personality—or, more precisely, to my correspondent’s impressions of his personality, garnered at third hand from the media. When I brought up the extent to which the Obama administration’s policies copied those of his predecessor, for example, I got a frosty response about how wrong it was to equate Obama and Bush, since they were such different people. One was, after all, linked with warm fuzzy feelings in my correspondent’s mind, while the other was linked with cold prickly feelings, and A cannot equal not-A.

One way to talk about the point I’m trying to make here is that the great majority of Americans have never learned how to think. I stress the word “learned” here; thinking is a learned skill, not an innate ability. The sort of mental activity that’s natural to human beings is exactly the sort of linkage of verbal noises to emotional states and vague abstractions I’ve outlined above. To get beyond that—to figure out whether the verbal noises mean anything, to recognize that an emotional state is not an objective description of the thing that triggers it, and to replace the vague abstractions with clearly defined concepts that illuminate more than they obscure—takes education.

Now of course we have an educational system in the United States. More precisely, we have two of them, a public school system that reliably provides some of the worst education in the industrial world, and a higher education industry that provides little more than job training—and these days, by and large, it’s training for jobs that don’t exist. You can quite easily pass through both systems with good grades, and never learn how to work through an argument to see if it makes sense or check the credentials of a purported fact. That’s a problem for a galaxy of reasons, but one of them bears directly on the theme of this post, for it’s a matter of historical record, again, that democratic politics work only when the people who have the right to vote—however large or small that class happens to be—also get an education in the basic skills of thinking.

That’s why the first-draft versions of Western democracy emerged in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially but not only in the city-states of Greece, at a time when the replacement of hieroglyphs with alphabets had made literacy a common skill among urban citizens and one of history’s great intellectual revolutions was inventing logic and formal mathematics. It’s why democratic ideas began to spread explosively through western Europe once education stopped being a monopoly of religious institutions and refocused on the same logical and mathematical principles that sparked an equivalent shift in the ancient Mediterranean, courtesy of the Renaissance and its aftermath. It’s why the extension of democracy to previously excluded groups in the United States followed, after varying lag times, the extension of public education to these same groups—and it’s also why the collapse of American education in recent decades has been promptly followed by the collapse of American democracy.

It’s common enough to hear claims that American voters of previous generations must have been as poorly equipped in the skills of thinking as their equivalents today. I would encourage any of my readers who want to make such a claim, or who like to think that the inhabitants of our self-styled information society must inevitably be better at thinking than people of an earlier age, to take the time to read the Lincoln-Douglas debates in their entirety, and then compare them to this year’s presidential debates. Lincoln and Douglas, remember, were not speaking to a roomful of Ph.D.s; they were in a hotly contested Congressional election, in front of audiences of farmers, millworkers, shopkeepers, and craftsmen, the ordinary voters of 1858 Illinois, few of whom had more than an eighth grade education and many of whom had much less. It does not speak well for the pretensions of today’s America that its presidential candidates this year pursued their debates on a level that a crowd of Chicago feedlot workers in 1858 would have found embarrassingly simplistic.

That’s among the many reasons why devising a framework for adult education outside the grip of the current American education industry is one of the most pressing needs of the decade or two right ahead of us. That huge topic, though, is going to require a series of posts all to itself. What I want to stress here is that teaching the electorate to think is not the only challenge here; those of my readers who may be involved in trying to change the direction of contemporary American society on any scale, and for any reason, might find it useful to turn a cold and beady eye upon their own mental processes, and on those of the movements they happen to support.

As extraordinary amount of what passes for argument in today’s activist scene, after all, is exactly the sort of linking of verbal noises with simple emotional reactions, warm and fuzzy or cold and prickly as needed. Some of this may be coldly cynical manipulation on the part of canny operators pushing the emotional buttons of their intended targets, to be sure, but a cold and cynical manipulator who sees his manipulations failing normally changes tack, and tries to find something that will work better. That isn’t what we see among activists, though. Consider the way that the climate change movement went from an apparently unstoppable juggernaut a decade ago to nearly total failure today. The strategy chosen by the great majority of climate change activists could be adequately described as the mass production of cold pricklies; when the other side in the debate figured out how to counteract that, the activists’ sole response was to shout "Cold prickly! Cold prickly! COLD PRICKLY!!!" as loud as they could, and then wonder why people weren’t listening.

You can’t craft an effective strategy if your mental processes are limited to linking up verbal noises, simple emotional reactions, and vague abstractions. It really is as simple as that. Until those who hope to have an influence on any level recognize this, they’re not going to have the influence they seek, and America is going to continue stumbling on autopilot toward a wretched end. Once that hurdle is past, the remaining steps are a good deal easier; we’ll get to them next week.

 

[voidisyinyang]

Yeah I find JMG to be too Western and therefore too limiting. I read his book on alchemy and was shocked at how little information it had.... what was it?

 

http://www.amazon.com/Between-Gates-Dreaming-Projection-Esotericism/product-reviews/1578633966/ref=sr_1_13_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

 

I think this was it - although he's coauthor.

 

Also he writes alot but what has he done politically? I spent 20 years working for non-profit activist organizations and I launched a couple successful activist campaigns that achieved real results -- public record results.

 

So anyway -- I remember when he was on C2C -- and George Noory didn't even let JMG finish the show! Why? Because JMG was not pushing the ETH model of aliens and then JMG was arguing with Noory. So I was glad to hear JMG go against the C2C propaganda -- but he got censored!

 

But the thing is that popularity is based on the least common demoninator -- so the more watered-down people are then the more popular they are.

[JustARandomPanda]

Yeah I find JMG to be too Western and therefore too limiting.

 

Whom then do you find to be not "too Western" these days? I'd say inspiring most of the people who follow his blog posts to actually ween themselves off of petroleum-reliant lifestyles to be at least equal to political activism in importance. If their lifestyles don't change it won't be signaled with their wallets either because their money will actively support what they claim to be trying to prevent too much of.

 

And I don't think he's ever maintained activism is not important. Only that it has become predominantly ineffectual in the last 30 years in the wider culture because too few activists do what you did - walk their talk about getting away from constant consumerist consumption. In fact, I don't know any activists except you who lived for 10 years sans car and existed off of dumpster diving daily for their food.

 

If more people followed his Green Wizard step by step program petroleum corporations would find a lot fewer buyers of their products - and the earth might be healthier for it. His Systems Thinking explanations using the Tao te Ching is pretty good imo.

 

And is there such a thing as being "too Eastern" in someone's PoV and lifestyle?

[joeblast]

http://truth-out.org/news/item/14958-us-climate-bomb-is-ticking-what-the-gas-industry-doesnt-want-you-to-know

 

more of the same -- ecoapocalypse

"commit to a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy"

 

in other words, commit to a return to the dark ages? it doesnt seem like these people know what a carbon free, nuclear free "energy economy" would even look like, have no concern whatsoever that it would mean all of a sudden having to rely on 3-5% of your energy resource budget to somehow cover 100% of your energy needs. we will of course get there in time, but yes, we'll need to perfect fusion before we get there. technology will cover that, but only if we can put the resources into dev, and we wont be if we're just lining the pockets of the politically connected instead.

 

how does rabid ecological activism jive with helping the poor, I wonder? it would appear that it is entirely opposed to helping the poor - most of the policies have the end result of making everything consumed more expensive, which hurts the poor far more than anyone else - and even for lower middle class folks, now instead of being able to go out to eat a few times a month, they're able to simply put enough gas in the tank to get to work.

 

oh wait a minute - I just saw the article started out by referencing some steaming pile that James Hansen wrote. Say no more, its biased drivel.

 

so they worry about benzene and crap - yeah that's some nasty stuff - but of course undercut their entire argument in talking about "the carbon balance."

 

I am superlatively unconcerned about co2 - it will only be a matter of time before enough data is collected that the alarmists will have no recourse but to give up the carbon crusade. its gone on far longer than it should have already, if we werent subjected to a perverted pal-review process that crowded out dissenting voices, then turned around claiming that those were the voices with "all this money" behind 'em - completely ignoring how much subsidy etc is raped from the system by the government.

 

same as the OWS mindset - correct in that we have a banker problem - but dead freakin wrong is somehow thinking the government isnt complicit if not an active participant in the fraud. might as well be accusing Diocletian here, you're not going to change The Emperor's mind.

[voidisyinyang]

"commit to a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy"

 

in other words, commit to a return to the dark ages? it doesnt seem like these people know what a carbon free, nuclear free "energy economy" would even look like, have no concern whatsoever that it would mean all of a sudden having to rely on 3-5% of your energy resource budget to somehow cover 100% of your energy needs. we will of course get there in time, but yes, we'll need to perfect fusion before we get there. technology will cover that, but only if we can put the resources into dev, and we wont be if we're just lining the pockets of the politically connected instead.

 

how does rabid ecological activism jive with helping the poor, I wonder? it would appear that it is entirely opposed to helping the poor - most of the policies have the end result of making everything consumed more expensive, which hurts the poor far more than anyone else - and even for lower middle class folks, now instead of being able to go out to eat a few times a month, they're able to simply put enough gas in the tank to get to work.

 

oh wait a minute - I just saw the article started out by referencing some steaming pile that James Hansen wrote. Say no more, its biased drivel.

 

so they worry about benzene and crap - yeah that's some nasty stuff - but of course undercut their entire argument in talking about "the carbon balance."

 

I am superlatively unconcerned about co2 - it will only be a matter of time before enough data is collected that the alarmists will have no recourse but to give up the carbon crusade. its gone on far longer than it should have already, if we werent subjected to a perverted pal-review process that crowded out dissenting voices, then turned around claiming that those were the voices with "all this money" behind 'em - completely ignoring how much subsidy etc is raped from the system by the government.

 

same as the OWS mindset - correct in that we have a banker problem - but dead freakin wrong is somehow thinking the government isnt complicit if not an active participant in the fraud. might as well be accusing Diocletian here, you're not going to change The Emperor's mind.

 

Dark Ages?

 

My mom was just in Guatemala City and she took a photo of the slums -- vast corrugated metal shacks on steep hills.

 

2 billion people live in the dark ages because of modern civilization.

 

I don't think it's possible to remove the trajectory of modern civilization.

 

A good book is Ecological Imperialism by professor Alfred Crosby.

 

Basically the white European cattle culture has spread around the world -- destroying the local ecological hunter-gatherer cultures.

 

Don't worry Joe - the only return to the Dark Ages will be through the continued "progress" of civilization.

 

Children of the Sun:

A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy

 

http://www.amazon.com/Children-Sun-Humanitys-Unappeasable-Appetite/dp/0393931536

 

Oh I have not read Crosby's latest book.

 

Looks good.

 

 

But humans again took a revolutionary turn in the last two centuries with the systematic burning of fossilized biomass. Fossil fuels have powered our industrial civilization and in turn multiplied our demand for sun energy. Here we are then, on the verge of exceeding what the available sources of sun energy can conventionally afford us, and suffering the ill effects of our seemingly insatiable energy appetite.

 

Ah he says civilization will have to go nuclear.

 

Yeah Fukushima proved that wrong.

 

I first got arrested in 1994 protesting against storage of nuke wastes in casks on the Mississippi river at a Dakota Indian reservation.

 

Environmental racism.

 

The nonwhite poor people get the pollution shaft.

 

White middle class rave about how great civilization is.

 

 

 

Edited March 7, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus

[joeblast]

I only said 'dark ages' because the radical approach wants to remove as many sources of energy as possible. and access to energy has been THE main thing that has lifted various societies out of poverty and sickness. 2 billion people currently live "in the dark ages" because for whatever reason they have been prevented from upgrading their standards, political, technical, or otherwise. so you cant really say because modern lifestyle exists, it simply does not logically follow. if you want to say because of mismanagement and corruption, etc, then you have a solid logical progression.

 

regardless, hunter-gatherer culture is only able to support a small population - so in the end, staying hunter-gatherer forever also meets that same dead end when the sun runs out of fuel. at least the technological advances would allow humans to propagate beyond the planet and survive that event - but its all moot anyway because from what I gather the end of the universe is something one gets by on an individual scale, having gone beyond time and death. the great barrier is there for all, and there is no spiritual welfare to carry everyone along.

 

perhaps I simply have more faith in mother nature's resiliency (and I dont doubt a very real path to the dark ages is via the Progress of civilization, but that has more to do with the survival of graft and corruption.)

[voidisyinyang]

Whom then do you find to be not "too Western" these days? I'd say inspiring most of the people who follow his blog posts to actually ween themselves off of petroleum-reliant lifestyles to be at least equal to political activism in importance. If their lifestyles don't change it won't be signaled with their wallets either because their money will actively support what they claim to be trying to prevent too much of.

 

And I don't think he's ever maintained activism is not important. Only that it has become predominantly ineffectual in the last 30 years in the wider culture because too few activists do what you did - walk their talk about getting away from constant consumerist consumption. In fact, I don't know any activists except you who lived for 10 years sans car and existed off of dumpster diving daily for their food.

 

If more people followed his Green Wizard step by step program petroleum corporations would find a lot fewer buyers of their products - and the earth might be healthier for it. His Systems Thinking explanations using the Tao te Ching is pretty good imo.

 

And is there such a thing as being "too Eastern" in someone's PoV and lifestyle?

 

I'm glad to hear he has a Green Wizard step by step program.

 

I hope it is easily accessible on his website -- do you have a link for it?

 

Anyway without digging for it -- my research in activism -- my masters degree in activism -- well....

 

the real kicker is that environmental destruction is concentrated via corporate power.

 

Seriously there are half a dozen corporations that control each sector of the economy and those half a dozen corporations for each sector do some 90% of the environmental damage.

 

So the great mind control operation has to promote enviromentalism as the onus of individuals taking action.

 

So corporations now mainly get to do "voluntary" regulation while at the same time increasingly promote destruction.

 

I did activism with a friend who trained through GreenCorps back in the early 1990s and then he moved to Minneapolis to organize a boycott of Mittsubishi. We did an End Corporate Rule series of protests in Minneapolis against Peabody Coal and against McDonalds and against sweatshops at Mall of America and against Cargill.

 

So we did research based on David Korten's book -- how Wall Street had turned into mainly a speculative business since the 1970s.

 

I said to my friend - that was the biggest scam going and it proves the economy will collapse.

 

So then he went on to become the activist director of Rainforest Action Network in S.F. and then he was the main activist organizer at the WTO shutdown in Seattle -- I was there but I could not get arrested as I had to be on trial for another arrest in Minneapolis. Anyway the NY Times interviewed him as a spokesperson for those protests - I was dodging the rubber bullets -- that was a great success -as we had the surprise factor going.

 

Anyway so then he quit RAN because they were not radical enough for him -- or something - he created his own activist training nonprofit that is still going today.

 

Anyway so when the economy collapsed -- I was reminded of our research....

 

But basically my first full time job was a Citizens for a Better Environment -- and the local office director was a female attorney and she sued 3M for the largest pollution fine in Minnesota history. So that was when the activism had a good focus against corporation pollution. 3M is still being outed for polluting the Mississippi river, etc. with carcinogens.

 

Yeah sure individuals can do alot but too bad the courts are so corrupt. The whole system is so corrupt.

 

I have a friend who dumpster dives veggie oil and then he runs his car on veggie gas that he makes himself.

 

But if you research biofuels they are actually making the problem worse -- the huge palm oil plantations destroying the rainforest in SE Asia, for example.

 

The fact is there is not enough solar energy to replace the oil from hundreds of millions of years of solar energy.

 

People think we need to "save the world" but basically the reason people should try to do environmentalism is because they don't have a choice -- Nature is in charge and so Nature will take revenge if people don't obey Nature. haha.