Quote from WORLD MADE BY HAND

In the wee hours of this morning I finished James Kunstler's post-oil book.
Here's a quote:

"...it was more possible that the human race possessed a spark of divinity that was worth cultivating that that a mysterious being was up there in the ether somewhere with anthropomorphic qualities of goodness and mercy running the whole show, and maybe it was the job of clergy to nurture that divine spark in us and make something of it."

I found it interesting that both Jim and I sold out...maybe that's too harsh a term...but in my austere novel THE HALF FULL MOON which is about the desert of the real, and the true nature of the original human being, about the threat of extinction to the human race (set in the Kalahari), I also flirted with divine inspiration and interference. Is it not (only) through the divine that we authorise radical change to ourselves and society? This is a peculiar subscription for us though, if you think about it, that we effectively endorse this view even in our fictions, while in our lives are chagrined by the washes of diffused 'religion'.

If you think about it, both Kunstler and myself have resisted the easy way out, which is escaping our worldly troubles through 'salvation and living forever' by simply declaring and committing to faith in a saviour. Yet in both our stories we certainly flirt with the idea of a divine presence, but one that is human in its divinity (and its source), not a sort of disparate alien power originating from elsewhere in the universe. I called my 'Jesus' Alcala, 'the desert dragon', and she was a supremely wise but feminine force, and appeared both fragile and able to circumvent some of the limits we take for granted. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I specified whether her origin was an Earth origin, or a product of the universe forming. I have an idea it is probably both, as divine consciousness is based on a omniscient consciousness and connection to everything. Interesting.

Doctor Doctor

Bisolvon Linctus. Now there's a name from the Land of Too-Sick-To-Go-To-School, or in this case, work. Ja I've been off sick today, and went to the doctor at about 4pm. Nice chat. We spoke - of all things - about the impact America has had on Asia, especially Korea and Japan. He's from the platteland, and also a big swimmer.

He says I have the sort of growth in my air canal that only people who have done A LOT of swimming get. They're sort of minute warts - and he says nobody knows why they develop. My theory is that the ears don't like getting water in them, and the prolonged exposure causes a reaction that is an attempt to seal off the vulnerable membranes against the damaging impact of salt or chlorine. Just a theory.

I told the doctor about my experience at Changi airport in Singapore. Where I was standing at a free internet terminal and suddenly felt like I was in an elevator. Just felt my legs buckle slightly a few times. I didn't mention how I almost threw up in the plane when I was given something to eat (a small dinner snack at around 3am).

The doc diagnosed an impressive infection that has spread even to my ears, and on my doctor's note cited 'exhaustion'. He recommended bed rest, and specifrically that I stay away from keyboards and computers for a few days. IN ORDER TO REST.

I have 4 sets of medications to work through, among them, Bisolvon Linctus. It even tastes like childhood. Transparent, semi-sweet, semi salty. A syrup that's supposed to make you feel better by dissolving the sicky green mucous of life. The mucous is doing well - I'm feeling worse than I did this morning which means I need to not be doing what I'm doing right now for a while. Brent Crude is going to have to go its merry way to $125 without 'I told you so's' and 'why we can't be a throwaway society any more' and other running commentaries.

From my sickbed I have to say I can see how the world is starting to unravel; the pace I mean, is picking up. The difference is, when I am overwhelmed with stress, I get sick, stay home a few days, take something, and a few days later I'm back to normal. Unfortunately, and this isn't doomsday at all, it's reality: our oil addictions have taken society down a path that is terminal. You don't come back to work feeling better. This stuff doesn't get better, it gets more difficult by the day. We're in that zone now. Even I can't tell you whether the human organism in its entirety is going to survive this. And right now, those serpents are beginning to writhe.

The best prescription I can recommend for you who want to know what to think about the world and where it is going, is to do what I am doing: read Jim Kunstler's World Made By Hand. And take some time to honestly think about your life, where it is going and collectively, where everything is going.

Kunstler: ..."kindergarten ethos of entitled happy endings"...

Things are getting very weird very fast -- and will probably get even weirder, faster, as the train wreck of bad debt meets the Saint Paddy's Day Parade of bacchanalian excess at the grade-crossing of destiny. The train is carrying America's financial system, but the engine driving it is peak oil, because declining energy resources necessarily means declining capital wealth -- and declining value of all the institutions, instruments, and markers that denote that wealth or hope to profit by trading in it. The fiasco leads straight to the necessary reinvention of American life on other terms and by other means.

I've maintained for a long time that, even among those who recognize we have a big problem, there are many impediments to imagining a credible outcome. One thing I've noticed is that in any given public meeting (or lecture hall) you can divide participants into two groups: those who believe we will 'high-tech' our way out of this predicament; and those who believe we'll organize our way out.

I don't subscribe to either point of view, strictly speaking. Both POV's assume that there will be an orderly transition between where we're at now and where we're headed. They're tainted by the kindergarten ethos of entitled happy endings and outcomes, which has been the chief operating system for the Baby Boomers, a therapeutic bias for placing 'good feelings' ahead of reality -- which also has obliterated the tragic sense of life that acts as the only brake on humanity's inherent hubris.

Ultimately, in my view, the issue of what happens next will be settled not by the fantasies of the algae-biodiesel geeks or the wishful thinking of the sustainable futures organizers, but by the natural, self-organizing properties of a society responding 'emergently' to new circumstances. One of the implications of destiny-as-emergence is the probability that we will try any damn fool thing besides the right things to keep the old game going for a while -- even in the face of obvious failure.

I'm sure our political leaders will mount a campaign to rescue the futureless infrastructure of suburbia. It will necessarily be an exercise in futility. But it has already started. That's what the swindle of ethanol has been all about. And the touting of hybrid cars, and the flimflam of "energy independence." Even the "environmental" crowd" squanders most of its attention these days on how to keep all the cars running on something other than gasoline. They don't question the assumption that we will remain a car-dependent society.

[We need to start thinking about a world that is not dependent on cars; walkable communities plugged into sustainable organic systems...]

As much as I loathe the suburbs in their grotesque late-stage efflorescence, I can understand why those stuck in them would wish to defend their misinvestments. I just hate to think of the political consequences when their disappointment catches up to the reality that the suburbs will not be rescued. And by that I mean not just the houses but the way-of-life associated with them and all its accessories, furnishings, and activities. Bewilderment will soon turn to rage out in the highway-strip-and-cul-de-sac empire.

Now, apparently, we'll also opt for a bail-out of all those who tried to become rich by getting something for nothing at both ends of the Ponzi scheme called the housing bubble -- the "little guys" who signed mortgage contracts they could never hope to pay off, and the Wall Street playerz who bundled these hopeless contracts into fraudulent securities (and their enablers in the ratings agencies, plus the hedge fund smoothies who tried to cash in by using recondite algorithms to dissolve the risk associated with imprudent lending.) The bail-out is likely to accomplish nothing except the more rapid bankruptcy of government at all levels and a second Great Depression at ground level (worse than the first one).

Over the weekend, the Federal Reserve engineered a $30-billion dollar Saint Paddy's day present for the JP Morgan bank by handing them the corpse of Bear Stearns. The object of the game is to prevent the "assets" of Bear Stearns from going to the auction block, on which they would be discovered to be nearly worthless, which would instantly render all similar assets held by the other big banks to be similarly worthless, and would result in a universal margin call that would pretty much unwind the hallucinated "wealth" acquired the past ten years.

Despite the heroics around the fate of Bear Stearns, it looks like the financial system is tottering anyway. Perhaps the last trick left in the rescue bag will be the 100-basis-point drop in the Fed rate rumored to be announced tomorrow. It won't help any of the big banks, since their problem is holding liabilities in excess of assets. Almost certainly it would crater the US Dollar.

The next thing in store for America, in my opinion, will be a rather new surprise: oil-and-gasoline shortages. While frightened money pours into the oil futures markets, driving the price up, strange behavior will start brewing in the actual physical allocation process. Imports of oil and gas to the US may not be as reliable as it had been when America seemed to be a solvent nation. The exporters may be changing their terms of doing business with us -- and that's nearly two-thirds of all the oil we need. The public would probably suck up oil price increases indefinitely, but shortages are going to be something else. A real freak out.

From www.kunstler.com. Also buy Jim's book, order here.

NVDL: We are stuck in a perception that somehow, somewhere (you know the song) someone out there will make everything all right and we can continue...well...with what exactly? The rat race? We are already off the tracks, we're just too silly to realise it. And when we wise up to the fact that suburbia is going to implode, and eating breakfast and going to work the way we do is going to change...well...what else will we be doing? Roll up your sleeves. Find the nearest tract of farmland and convince the farmer you're a laborer worth having around. For the rest, ball your fists. The neighbours are about to turn nasty. All this will happen when the next round of dry pumps start belching around the world, and commuters race again to get this season's last drops first* - meanwhile the world, northern and southern hemisphere, slips into The Next Winter For Mankind.

*Repeat this game ad homicidum.

Kunstler Cast (AUDIO)

Kunstler: Blanket Psychology and why we have more to Fear than Fear itself

The maneuvers that the big banks are making nowadays, along with their enablers at the Federal Reserve and elsewhere in Washington, really amount to little more than the old Polish blanket joke -- in which (excuse my concision) the proverbial Polack wants to make his blanket longer, so he scissors twelve inches off the top and sews it onto the bottom. Only in this case, the banks are shearing x-billions of losses off the top of their blankets and re-attching x-billions of new debt onto the bottom. This new debt, of course, goes to cover the old losses and only represents further losses-to-be-reported-later, since the banks are basically insolvent. Borrowing more money when you're broke doesn't make you less insolvent.

The banks can probably keep this gag running a little longer, but not without consequences. My guess is that it spins out of control in March sometime when some more hedge funds blow up and at least one big bank, perhaps Citi, rolls belly up like a harpooned whale. The game is really over, and all the playerz know it. The consequence of continuing to pretend the meta-fiasco of Ponzi endgame is fixable will be an even more shattering depression than the one we're already in for.

We are a much poorer nation than we thought we were and the reality is just too hard to face. Nobody from the most august banker (Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson) to the lowliest wanker (the WalMart inventory clerk who "bought" a house outside Phoenix with a no-money-down, payment-option, adjustable rate mortgage) can believe that this is happening. The candidates for president are pretty much assuming that vast financial resources will exist to be deployed against a range of problems. Everybody is going to be hugely disappointed.

When you introduce perversities into an economic system, they invariably end up expressing themselves as distortions. The economy that evolved the past two decades, driven by the perverse securitization of wishes and frauds, will now express itself in a stark cratering of American living standards. Incomes and jobs will vanish, massive quantities of stuff will collect dust on the WalMart shelves, the fragile infrastructures of daily life will go to shit, and there will be political hell to pay. Every attempt to avoid a straight-up workout of our massive losses, will represent another layer of perversity and more consequent destructive distortions.

I feel sorry for the next president. Even as he takes the oath of office, the nation will be flying apart like a seized-up engine. Since the fiasco in finance is happening in lock-step with Peak Oil (and very likely because of it at a fundamental level) we can expect one of the distortions to take the form of oil shortages. These shortages will come not just from demand bottlenecks in a stressed-out world oil allocation system, but because exporting nations will start demanding payment in Euros or something besides the depreciating currency that reflects our disintegration, and we'll have a problem coming up with payments that amount to at least fifty percent more than we're used to shelling out.

Once the US gets into serious difficulties with our oil supplies, every other sector of the economy wobbles, including especially the food-growing sector, which cannot function without copious amounts of diesel fuel and hydrocarbon-based soil "inputs." Americans will go hungry, and not just the "underclasses."

Along in this process somewhere, there is huge potential for armed conflict with other nations. If the unraveling gets traction while George W. Bush remains in charge, the US may answer bellicosity from oil-exporting nations, or energy-hungry rivals, with truculence of our own. Things can get out of control very fast in such a situation. Nations that were happily selling us salad shooters six months earlier may be targeting our naval vessels with a different sort of shooter, say a Sunburn missile. In any case, we will be acting with a bankrupt, exhausted, and over-extended military, and the best case outcome would leave us merely isolated and marooned geopolitically on our own continent, with dwindling energy and mineral resources and an angry, demoralized population.

This time around we have more to fear than fear itself. The banking executives, government officials, and candidates for president are not doing the nation a service by concealing and ignoring our losses. Finance, as the driver of an economy, is finished, but the deployment of capital is still an indispensable arm of a real economy. Sooner or later we'll get back to money that stands for something and banks that function as credible repositories of wealth. But we haven't even started down the path to that place, and the longer we pretend that we don't have to go there, the worse the journey will be.

By James Kunstler

NVDL: And so ends the spectacular phase known as the generation that 'Wanted Something For Nothing', but instead took everything for themselves leaving Generation Next with Nothing For Something. They (we?) will break their (our?) backs laboring on farms to pay the piper for a chaotic climate and the eviscerations of long term stagflation. I don't think we will get back to a money system again. Money will be invisible after this, banking will be online, but it will be based on the value of real assets that exist in the real world. We will mortgage everything in future, houses, cars, the lot. And thus commerce will finally come to resemble what it always was: trading goods (not for money, but for goods you don't have). Just a theory.

Best Book Buy Right Now: World Made By Hand

James Howard Kunstler is as important a public intellectual as we have today. This work gives him an opportunity to imagine in fictional terms what life may be like during the permanent crisis he believes inevitable. It is every bit as gripping as the "Living in the Long Emergency" chapter from his previous book, but as a story the novel embodies a genuine narrative momentum unavailable to the essayist. Mr. Kunstler portrays skillfully the community of Union Grove, drawing on his own extensive knowledge of Washington County, New York. - Craig Monk

To order this book, or read more extensive reviews such as the one above, go here.