P.S. The Brooklyn Museum is often ignored, but definitely worth a visit in my opinion.

There’s a nice discussion thread going for this episode over on the Friends of the C-Realm group on Facebook. I don’t know how to link to a specific thread, but you can find the group here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/137746311776/ 

The discussion was started by Ladybug Farm. If you go there today, it should be near the top.

Thank you for posting your comments.

Stay well.

 -KMO

I enjoy hearing other peoples ideas and found this interview interesting and thought provoking. KMO also did a good job of facilitating the discussion and expressing himself without being condescending.

My future fantasies tend to be more permaculture like, and have wild full moon parties incorporated into them.

Can artificial intelligence creations ever know the pleasure us mere humans can derive from dancing? Do transhumanists even dance? I’ve never met an intellectual that liked to dance.

I “cheated” and frolicked in that same neighborhood in the mid to late 80s. Psychedelic narcissism seems to be a real danger. I won’t mention any names.

For those who are not sure what this comment thread has to do with episode 295, it’s actually in response to a video that was at the top of the C-Realm homepage in January and February of 2012. Hopefully that video can still be found on YouTube:

http://youtu.be/xwf9rNvxSvs

Peace and pandas.

 -KMO

Thank you for listening to the podcast. In my experience, time and energy spent championing a political reality tunnel in an online text environment is not time well spent, but if you’re looking for a C-Realm listener who will take up the challenge with vim, I think that Febo on the C-Realm section of the Grow Report forums is your man:

http://www.thegrowreport.com/showthread.php?11205-294-Fans-Vs-Fanatics 

Stay well.

 -KMO

KMO, I spent one very long year in KC MO after leaving NYC. Lived by the Art Institute for awhile as well. I would “cheat” and go into the Museum, go straight to the impressionist gallery (carefully avoiding looking at that crazy Van Gogh) and spend some time looking at the Monet Water Lilly painting. From there it was up to the Chinese and Japanese section to sit in front of the weathered wooden sculpture of a zen monk with fierce glass eyes. I experienced some intense hostility from a tour guide and her entourage one time while doing it.
It was 1968/69. Anti hippy sentiment was strong and Kansas City was a dangerous place, but I met the most talented artist I have ever encountered in that wild and crazy year.

Your use of the word “cheating” rang a bell with me, having once found myself in a place where I felt that I was the uninvited guest at the wedding feast. I had not earned the right to be there and so withdrew.

Uncontrolled rides in the wrong set and the wrong setting, but I somehow survived without becoming a psychedelic narcissist and so did you it seems.

P.S. Nice rant on NPR. Used to listen to them, but it was clear that they dare not say anything that would offend their corporate sponsors. I would still listen if I were in the States though.

The problem isn’t government, it’s who’s interests the government serves. Reality is we have the best plutocracy money can buy and that sure ain’t governing of the people for the people

I’m sorry that I missed your comment when you first posted it. For nearly a year now I’ve been on the Fast Five Diet (though I think I’ve progressed from the diet to the Fast Five Lifestyle now that I’ve reached my target weight) which has me eating within a five hour window each day. Usually I eat between 1 and 6 pm. When I first started on the diet, I ate almost continuously during the five hour window. These days, I pretty much just eat one meal a day. About 90 minutes before the window opens each day, I start looking forward to the food I know that I will soon enjoy, but I rarely feel hungry. It astonishes me now how much food I used to put away and how hard my body must have been working to deal with it all. Corporations spent a lot of money after WWII figuring out how to overcome the “fixed stomach problem” and get Americans used to eating a lot more than they need to. Their efforts have certainly succeeded.

Thank you for letting me know that the podcast has been relevant to your life. 

Stay well.

 -KMO

That’s a fair question, and one that I wouldn’t presume to answer on Tony Wright’s behalf. There is a contact link that you can use to contact him on his website:

http://leftinthedark.org.uk/ 

Thank you for listening and stay well.

 -KMO

My
opinions which follow (very much of an “old hat” character to
many C-Realm fans, I’m sure), represent both my direct personal
experience (long past) and my conjecture that the use of psychedelics
in the ’60s, ’70s, and beyond into the present, has been at least
partly a culture-wide attempt at self-medicating. Specifically, this
activity has frequently been an unconscious or partly conscious
attempt to allow and facilitate the healing of our society’s very
wounded and damaged mechanisms of awareness–this primarily by means
of, or towards the ends of, understanding their real manner of
operation.

We
needed something as powerful, radical–and, it must be acknowledged,
as dangerous–as LSD and similar hallucinogens if there was to be any
hope for building new and more healthy sets of perceptual lenses
through which to see the world.

I have
yet to learn much about the thinking of Niall Murphy, but I very much
admire his choice of online moniker for the Shamanic Freedom podcast,
“Opaquelens”. Opaque lens. Murphy gets it. Those two innocent
words are like a fertilized ovum in that they encapsulate and permit
the seemingly improbable unfolding of the entire story. I think
anyone who understands the import of choosing that moniker, those two
words, comprehends it all.

An
opaque lens is necessarily the only tool of perception any of us ever
really has. When you understand that, you can understand how all
psychedelics, all vivid hallucinations, all perceptions actually
work–and also what their potential might hold. Or might not hold.

For
example. A person looks at their surroundings and sees the trees,
the clouds, and blue sky above. That person then ingests some
powerful hallucinogenic substance like, say, psilocybin. Later she
lies on her bed and observes the night sky with its clouds and bright
stars above–that is, she sees all of this quite clearly while
looking straight through the ceiling and roof of her house. Then our
observer subsequently finds herself struck by the fact that both
experiences seem equally lucid, valid, and real.

And
indeed they are. Because both are merely instances of the
perceiver’s internal experience. Both are unavoidably indirect
recreations; they are both second-order approximations and
representations (re
presentations, i.e. making-present-again s)
of external circumstances. That is, consciousness does not consist
of the things to which it refers; consciousness is not existence
itself. Consciousness is an artifact of existence.
Consciousness is only a likeness, an image–a product of
imagination.

Well,
at least that is my conviction. At least right now. I think.

Anyway,
which of our tripper’s perceptions had the more direct and meaningful
connection to “truth”? Probably, if we are to be completely
honest with ourselves about the nature of the question, neither.
Maybe it depends on context. Who knows. But if either experience
caused her to have a little less certainty about the complete
veracity of the other, then I’d say that was a good outcome, probably
as beneficent as could be hoped for in either case.

All
of our perceptions are illusions. All of our perceptions are
hallucinations. All our perceptions are essentially arbitrary
approximations, educated guesses, culturally and experientially
conditioned, randomly acquired half-truths about how the underlying
realities of our existence actually operate and function.

But
these very imperfect societal and personal conceptual models of the
world, these products of our imaginations, are the best kind of
contact, the best kind of understanding of reality we can possibly
ever have. Therefore all of it, everything we think we know, is
subject to–and frequently impacted by–the ever present possibility
of simple error.

The
clearest, most well-informed, and most well-intentioned visions and
understandings are at best, in the end, only further instances of
illusion and hallucination–imagination. We never “know”
anything. In this sense, we are all always, necessarily, and
inherently “wrong.”

We only
make educated guesses. Guesses of varying quality and integrity.
That is the best we can hope to do. That is what the nature,
the fundamental character of perception is; that is all it can be.

I
believe that this notion is fundamental, that it is the single most
hopeful and helpful antidote to arrogance, narcissism, and error
that is possible.

Being
inherently and unavoidably subject to the dictates of illusion–and
therefore also to the ever present possibility of destructive
delusion–is a condition we all share. Always; the possibility of
delusion is ever present. Illusion/imagination is the only ground we
can possibly have on which to stand, and this unavoidable
circumstance comes with its inevitable attendant failings.

At some
level, I think all of us are aware that this is the case. But short
of compulsion by some traumatic or extreme experience or circumstance
like, say, a large dose of LSD or a 2×4 to the side of the head, I
think few of us have learned to “wake up”, and stay awake, to our
predicament. That is, few have developed the habit of allowing this
awareness to become reified in a such way that will guide a
preponderance of our thoughts, choices, and actions.

All
these clarities and certainties that most of us feel we experience as
distinct entities and realities in our everyday lives–these are all
only illusions. Illusions upon illusions with greater or lesser
degrees of utility.

We
maintain these perceived clarities and certainties because for most
of our purposes they serve well enough, because they are true enough.
But in reality, of course, there is no certainty, there is no
security, there is no digital black and white. There never was. All
is continuum, all is in flux.

The
bottom line? Just this: While some form of “true” learning and
progress is almost always possible, the trust we place in our own
knowledge should always remain provisional. Always. To move forward
we must always be willing to hold our minds open. This necessarily
implies that in almost all of our activities we should strive to
observe patiently and thoroughly, and to hold judgment in abeyance
while doing so.

At
different times, some of us will do better or worse than others in
this. No surprises there. The point is, we must always be prepared
to be–and to accept the consequences for being–wrong.

C-Realm
episode #292 and Mark Rabinowitz deals a bit with the subject of
Martin Luther King. I write all of the above here in this comment
partly to acknowledge, and partly to use as an example of the kind of
thing I am trying to describe, the circumstance that I, and the
relatively privileged white people I happen to have been born to in
Alabama, were, during the period of King’s political life and
subsequent prominence, very often quite thoroughly oblivious to
reality, and seriously wrong, in our comprehension of the subjects of
racism and Martin Luther King.

We had
a distorted view of reality, and we simply didn’t know it. And I
think very much of this had to do with the fact that we thought it
was possible, and necessary, to comprehend the world
“correctly”–that there was clearly a right way, and a wrong way
to think. That is, we thought
we thought correctly, and that if the rest of the world
appeared not to agree, well, then something was wrong with it
. And that was as far as we went. We were quite certain that
our shit didn’t stink.

But the
world suffered, and continues to do so, because of our poverty
of imagination. Because we couldn’t admit, or couldn’t comprehend,
the possibility that we might be wrong. We just didn’t want to hear
it.

Fish
don’t see water, it seems. Again, no surprise, and so it goes.

At any
rate, I think many readers will agree that it is certainly true that
here in the US in general, and in significant contrast with many
other countries, we tend to be thoroughly conditioned to not know or
seek awareness of certain facts. Once more, no surprise. But
because C-Realm attract lots of people who wish for such things not
to be so much the case, I list below what I have found to be some
interesting links and references of which some readers may not be
aware:

Paul
Wheaton reads MLK’s letter from the Birmingham Jail

http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/631-podcast-101-letter-from-a-birmingham-jail/

TUC
Radio podcasts produced by Maria Gilardin

http://www.tucradio.org

C-Realm
fans who don’t know and support the work of Maria Gilardin probably
should:

The
Execution of Martin Luther King

http://www.tucradio.org/10_01_20_MartinKingOne.mp3

http://www.tucradio.org/10_01_27_MartinKingTwo.mp3

Who
Killed Martin Luther King

Dr.
William Pepper at the Memphis, TN, King Assassination Trial

http://www.tucradio.org/2008_03_19MLKtrial.mp3

http://www.tucradio.org/2008_03_26MLKtrial.mp3

Book

An Act
of State, The Execution of Martin Luther King

by
William F. Pepper, copyright 2003

published
by Verso

I
purchased a copy from a reseller that acquired the apparently
unwanted copy from a library–how bleak is that?

I close
with Sturgeon’s laws:

1.
Ninety percent of everything is bullshit.

2.
Nothing is always absolutely so.

Excellent talk with Stoneleigh. Thank you for covering the more global questions I couldn’t cover at VAL. Hope all is well for you.

Douglas Clements

Thank
you for your dedication and continuing efforts with C-Realm. If
there is to be meaningful hope for a livable future, I think it will
be largely due to the calm demeanor and reasoned insistence of people
like you and the people on whom you focus.

In your
podcasts you often mention the work of Clay Shirky. For this reason,
and because Amy Goodman spoke of him in yesterday’s reporting on SOPA
and PIPA by DemocracyNow!, I viewed Shirky’s recent TED talk on the
subject. I thought it was the most cogent presentation I had seen
thus far. If you have not yet seen it I think that perhaps you
should. You might want to check out Larry Lessig’s talk too.

Keep on
keepin’ on,

Tom A.,
Albuquerque

http://thetruthserumblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/city-of-london-loves-infinite.html 

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/where_do_we_go_from_here/ 

http://www.dietsoap.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/c-realm_comix_18_aug_2002.jpg

 I suspected that was Duncan singing at the start of his show, and to hear it in it’s entirety was..well, nice! What a lovely, sweet fellow he is through and through, and a perfect foil for our prickly JMK. Well, I think I best write to them now directly and bestow my love.

1000 thankyou’s KMO for the outstanding work you are doing.

I don’t think the Hard Talk interviewer was particularly confrontational by the standards of mainstream media, but what astounded me was that the first few minutes of the interview gave me the impression that the interviewer was actually comprehending much of what Professor Keen was saying. Given that, she could have taken the conversation to a much deeper level than is normally possible in that sort of forum. So, when she declined to do so and aimed the conversation back towards the shallow end, I was irritated at the missed opportunities. That said, I think Professor Keen gave admirable replies to her, “What makes you so smart?”

The conversation on being an
interviewer was interesting. KMO does us a service by letting people
talk.

I would like to hear an interview of
some hippy hating, psychopathic, elitist sometime just so I can get a
feel for how they think.

David Graeber 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber

Cornelia Wunsch

http://soas.academia.edu/CorneliaWunsch/Papers/753050/Neo-Babylonian_Entrepreneurs

http://www.cafepress.com/c_realm

If you’d like the C-Realm Radiant Sun icon on a t-shirt, let me know what style of shirt you prefer and I’ll put one in the C-Realm Cafe Press store. 

And Michael is often a guest on a couple of other radio/podcast shows (I prefer over G+B). Found here: At Stephen Lendman’s blog, current radio show on Progressive Radio Network, as well as his previous radio shows with Globalresearch.ca republicbroadcasting.org/Lendman/, sjlendman.blogspot.com – most archived shows can be accessed through his blog. Michael is also featured on: Reform the Money podcast, as well as been featured over 3 times by Unwelcome guests in archived shows available either through their direct site, or via radio4all.net.

To M. I would just do searches for David’s work as I’ve not yet found a personal w/s. And Steve’s website to learn about their publications and appearances or interviews. Here: debtdeflation.com/blogs/

I’m not familiar with Cornelia Wunsch but, here’s the book she did with Michael: Creating Economic Order: Record-Keeping, Standardization and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Cornelia Wunsch), (CDL Press, Baltimore, 2004). michael-hudson.com/books/; and here’s her acedemic website: islet-verlag.de/AutorBand2.html

Thanks so much for this interview!!!!!!!

I know that you love your zomby meme. I just came from a right winger site and would like to inform you that they like it too.

“Kill the dirty zomby hippies” seems to be a pretty popular phrase.

Sigh

Thanks KMO

I’ve got more in handwritten first draft form, but I don’t have anything more ready to record right now, and I haven’t worked on it in months. I’d love to get back to it, and I hope to in the fullness of time.

Have you written the full story/book? Or are you still working on it?

And the kids’ thank you’s at the and were very sweet.

The honest and truthful fact of the matter of it all is that as much as we don’t want to admit to it, we actually need that 1 percent just like a positive magnet needs a negative, The rich need the poor, and Good needs evil.  

Otherwise nothing would exist…

http://www.youtube.com/user/kmoprime23?feature=mhee

Thank you for the reminder. There’s not much there yet, but I have lots of material to upload once I get the sound adjusted.

As for the demolition claims, yes, I am aware of the architect group and their claims.  But I’ve also read the testimony from the firefighters in New York who used transits to measure the towers — and WTC 7 — bulging before they fell down.  It is fortunate the towers stayed up as long as they did, since that allowed most of the people below the impacts to escape.

The towers did not fall into their footprints — every building around them had substantial damage.   Part of the towers gouged a huge hole into WTC 7, the first time a falling skyscraper has ever fallen onto another skyscraper.   WTC 6 was also wrecked by large parts of skyscraper falling onto them.   Some of the other buildings in the vicinity had expensive repair efforts and were returned to use.   

Every engineering institution on the planet has looked at the WTC collapses, the most dramatic collapses in building history.  Sorry that I don’t find the AE911 “truth” group credible.   Focusing on the towers is like focusing on the trajectories of bullets in Dealey Plaza while omitting the policy reasons why JFK was removed from office (the WHY is much more important than the HOW).

It was very revealing that the entire media chose to highlight the “Pentagon Missile” hoax and the demolition theories while ignoring the deliberately suppressed warnings and the overlapping wargames during the attacks.

http://www.oilempire.us/media-strategy.html
Media 9/11 Strategy:  highlight hoaxes, ignore best evidence

There is no need to have a contest to see who has the wildest theory.  Once you prove they suppressed the warnings and had full foreknowledge everything else is merely icing on the cake.

Regarding the discussion about “the Sixties” — what would the legacy of the 1960s have been if the Cold War, nuclear arms race and War on Viet Nam had ended in 1965?

President Kennedy called off the Cold War, signed the first treaty with the USSR, ordered the start of troop withdrawal from Viet Nam and even called for converting the Moon Race to a global cooperative effort.

We need to understand why we didn’t make these shifts in order to summon the effort to make the change now that we’re past Peak Everything.

– Mark Robinowitz

http://www.oilempire.us/moonrace.html
JFK’s speech calling off the Moon Race, September 20, 1963

Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations – President John F. KennedyNew York – September 20th 1963

”Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity–in the field of space–there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon.  Space offers no problems of sovereignty; by resolution of this Assembly, the members of the United Nations have foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply.  Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?  Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure?  Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries–indeed of all the world–cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries. ….”

“Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world–or to make it the last.”

– President John F. Kennedy, September 20, 1963 speech to the UN calling for an end to the Cold War and converting the Moon Race into an international cooperative effort, two months and two days before he was removed from office.

The riff about “teacher as an event” is a great one. It speaks to the context, participation, and experience vital to actual learning. Furthermore, it assists in pulling down some of the veils put in place for the convenience of administrative procedures and decision-making in general, and in the burgeoning industry of “academic achievements” with its attendant data-processing fixations and manipulations. A teacher could do much worse than to consider the guest’s perspicacious statement.

Concerning the “needs being met”-paradigm — apparently overlaid in ecological and social terms — it seems to me that one ought to be careful in the possible implication for yet another logic for prescription, whereby the act of healing, or learning, or growing, be discussed more as the nouns such as healthcare, or education, or what-have-you — to be “delivered” with the sort of mendacity that produces select profits for some, at considerable expense to other folks. I hope that hasn’t a straw man component, and I’d suggest anyone interested in this, read Ivan Illich. Particularly, his “Towards a History of Needs” addresses this well.

thanks

This is a general comment. 

First off, I don’t see any need for you to limit your podcast to 1 hour. In some cases it seems like the hour is up just as the conversation starts to get down to the nitty gritty.

I would like to thank you for acquainting me with the book Home Brew Industrial Revolution. I am reading it in PDF form.

I would also like to thank you for pointing out that psychedelics can also reinforce some peoples overblown sense of superiority. It is a lesson that I learned the hard way over 40 years ago. Not as a member of the hipster elite, but as freak on the street.

Although my comment concerning apocalyptic suppositions is late in terms of Mr. Greer’s appearance on your podcast, I thought I’d send along what I found to be missing from the discussion. And that is the remarkable and profound appropriation — strip mining, as others have put it — of the very essence of our humanity, by the industry of information capitalism. Perhaps we too are susceptible to having a veil incrementally placed upon our eyes, albeit while online with hope for transcendence of one kind or another. And lest we go with the idea that technology is neutral in its function or morality, we’d do well to admit that our computer systems are of a significantly different character than the previous tools with which we operated. As McLuhan observed some 50 years ago, the nature of electronic media is such that it demands that we be its servomechanism as the price of admission. This is quite different from say, a crescent wrench, or any of the tools that serve as extensions of our limbs and such. We are now willingly taking on the gadgetry that offer extensions of narrow slices of our nervous systems that, as consciousness transforming of a sort, might be rightly termed magic. Yet, we’d be remiss to not ponder the also extraordinary ways that these digital displays, and simulations of human interaction, are marketed so as to engender large-scale consumption, which of course results in equally huge profits. As a teacher for many years, I’ve come to see a disturbing equation whereby genuine (unplugged) human interaction is a threat to the said machinations of information capitalism, writ large in the contextless information clusterfuck that has displaced so much of how we have traditionally lived and learned. In the technophilic zeitgeist in which we live its hard to extrapolate future developments of media technology as anything other than yet more profoundly dehumanizing. Dang. Sorry for what seems a sort of bummer comment. Nonetheless, in talks of apocalypse — destruction by any other name — it seems that the elephant in the room is a distinctly dead one that somehow cajoles us to feed it peanuts. What do you think? Might human nervous systems clientised by the information industry not qualify as an apocalypse like never before? Thanks for your fine efforts and keep up the great work. Darren.

ps- As a sort of aside, I’ve always thought apocalyptic cats like John the Baptist or some survivalist nut somewhere, are mostly probably just projecting their immanent personal demise as a mortal, onto others. I might just go have a drink now. Cheers!

Best Regards to you & JM,
Kusulu

Max Keiser makes some good points and he makes them well, and with less zealot sounding bark than his style of a few years ago – maybe a tempering effect due to his Russia Today TV show. I think though he misunderstands the way high frequency trading impacts the financial markets. Yes it is possible only for those who can afford the access and infrastructure costs, and it probably plays a significant part in “flash crashes”. But the idea that those who use the black box trading methods have access to unlimited risk free money is just not so. The markets are like an eco system with species surviving/thriving in different niches. At one end we have retail banks borrowing money cheaply from savers and through interbank lending and profiting by charging higher costs to borrowers, then there are the deal makers in IPO’s and M&A’s, and the plethora of funds which are basically dependent on good sales and marketing pitches, then there are the trading desks where the so-called liquidity and price discover takes place. Traders profit from finding a niche where prices are, for whatever reason, out of balance. HF trading systems are just one way of gaining a dominant edge in very short term trading strategies. In a sense the black boxes are making the market in that time frame, but Goldman and whoever else has the means to use these systems are also competing with each other; it is not a risk free bet, forever. Just like in ecosystems strategies for survival have to evolve with the changing system or a species will die for lack of food. The main problem and where I think the real cheating goes on is in the way the too big to fail institutions value themselves. How they mark to market their balance sheets is the grey area where they gain massive leverage which clearly causes problems far beyond their own financial stature when it goes wrong; that’s what happened with Lehman’s and as far as I know can happen again with any of the banks. It’s the same with governments. How much they can borrow is based on how credit worthy they are, and that’s a measure of the future tax receipts from the citizens of that country. As to working that one out I’d say he who guesses last guesses best… A great show.

Here’s an example of what I mean. In the 1960 movie the Time Machine the far future presented can be read as a parable that attempts to explain how and why we live with injustice and exploitation today. On the surface are the beautiful but empty headed consumer people, blonde vixens and surfer dudes who just know when the dinner bell will sound, and care for nothing that isn’t immediately there to be enjoyed. It looks like utopia at first, just like a shopping mall looks like a kind of utopia, but the secret is that the under the surface there is a realm of production run by Morlocks. The Morlocks are cannibals who make the beautiful blondes work and then eat them or something. The Morlocks are inhuman monsters.

Now this is a great story because, on the one hand it reflects an aspect of how life really does work under Capitalism. The realm of stupid consumption is full of simple pleasures that turn us into mindless infants, but this realm is maintained because by a site of production where we are exploited. However, the story of the Morlocks ceases to be useful once you believe it. That is, if you think that there really is a class of people who are subhuman monsters then you’re reifying what is actually an idea. The problem is that we divide up our lives between production and consumption, that we rely on wage labor and exploitation in order to motivate distribution of the fruits of our own labor, and that we are material alienated from our work. But there is not evil group of monsters responsible for this. We are responsible for it collectively. The reality is that those who are in power are only there because, through time, we’ve created a space for such people. The system requires such people to exist. If it was Barack Obama it would be somebody else. If not Bernie Madoff then somebody else. And when it comes to the impending economic collapses and disarray, well its worth considering how we’re creating a space for that too. It’s not the illuminati that is creating the problem of economic crisis, but the economy that is bringing the illuminati into existence. The key to all of this is that the economy is just the way we agree to organize ourselves, and we have the power to change that.

There is no big Other, just us folks and the world we make to live in. You want a better world? Killing the bad guy ain’t gonna get it for you. You’ll have to kill that system out there that we let define everything for us.

Anyway:

Paraphrasing, you said ideologies are much more effective if you don’t believe them. This is not a not a fact, this is ridiculous nonsense masquerading as high thinking. I am sorry but what Zizek and I guess you both leave out is that a dominant ideology works whether people believe it or not only insofar as those subject to it have no ideology of their own. Which, given the documented dumbing-down of America and the outsourcing of technical competence, is exactly the mental landscape we are dealing with.

In terms of the technical:

I agree insofar as the ‘ego’ is propaganda or essentially illusion, lots of old school support for this. Where I veer (and call it a Faustian bargain if need be) is from the insinuation that there is some higher structure, for instance the Real, and that the subconscious is materialized. Call it whatever you want but we are living in a world with actual consequences and to push it off on some vague area of consciousness un-locatable by science or the common (wo)man is a cop out. It’s functions just like the priest-as-door-to-God. Ironically, I think this actually explains Zizek’s other great quandary: why do we know we are doomed but do nothing about it? Well because we are sitting around conjecturing about vagaries while actual consequences are playing out. And this is taking place on a scale heretofore never before seen across diverse fields of inquiry and production.

There is either one world or too many to number, who knows, but to divide the ego as a quasi-discreet entity even so much as to label it is the first mistake. “Am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?” Who gives a shit when the bear is charging? To go on, though perhaps valiantly, in subdividing the rest of the identity is continued folly. There is no proof and furthermore the continued academic attention paid to this subdivision serves perversely to justify the continued dilly dallying at the expense of a militated response. Which of course is Zizek’s passionate, and correct I might add, instinct toward our problems. My gut says it is all illusion and so a moral choice might be to accept that we have to work with the illusion. The ‘bargain’ arises when we consider the Zen proverb: to do nothing is the greatest virtue. I say, Who among us is perfect?

You said, “nothing but propaganda working to frame our world, and that the biggest lie we are taught is this idea that we sit outside of the world of propaganda, that we have some safe spot from which to observe it.”

I agree, there is no safe spot that is all set up for us to retreat to. My point is you have to make your own and walk the line of judgment and accept the consequences. Continuing to conjecture about this is precisely why we are doomed and yet do nothing about it. It’s why you are saying ‘we just need a better laugh track.’ Sir, I am sorry but we are well past that stage. If you don’t believe that then refer to Guy McPherson’s work on climate change, Mike Ruppert’s geopolitical analysis, and for Christ’s sake Max Keiser’s economic commentary. The Greeks are screwed not because of tax collection. The Greeks aren’t even the issue, we are in the midst of a predatory feeding frenzy led by the IMF and central banks. They might not have a coherent plan for reducing the population but you can bet your copy of ‘How To Read Lacan’ they have a coherent plan for legislating the world into slavery. And ain’t no laugh track that is gonna counter it, even if there was time and legal maneuverability to construct one. Which there are not.

I think perhaps the uncomfortable idea you are hung up on might be that in fact there are monsters in the world. That yes, despite so much academic hand wringing there is a big Other. It just depends on where you are standing who that other might be.

Anyway:

Paraphrasing, you said ideologies are much more effective if you don’t believe them. This is not a not a fact, this is ridiculous nonsense masquerading as high thinking. I am sorry but what Zizek and I guess you both leave out is that a dominant ideology works whether people believe it or not only insofar as those subject to it have no ideology of their own. Which, given the documented dumbing-down of America and the outsourcing of technical competence, is exactly the mental landscape we are dealing with.

In terms of the technical:

I agree insofar as the ‘ego’ is propaganda or essentially illusion, lots of old school support for this. Where I veer (and call it a Faustian bargain if need be) is from the insinuation that there is some higher structure, for instance the Real, and that the subconscious is materialized. Call it whatever you want but we are living in a world with actual consequences and to push it off on some vague area of consciousness un-locatable by science or the common (wo)man is a cop out. It’s functions just like the priest-as-door-to-God. Ironically, I think this actually explains Zizek’s other great quandary: why do we know we are doomed but do nothing about it? Well because we are sitting around conjecturing about vagaries while actual consequences are playing out. And this is taking place on a scale heretofore never before seen across diverse fields of inquiry and production.

There is either one world or too many to number, who knows, but to divide the ego as a quasi-discreet entity even so much as to label it is the first mistake. “Am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?” Who gives a shit when the bear is charging? To go on, though perhaps valiantly, in subdividing the rest of the identity is continued folly. There is no proof and furthermore the continued academic attention paid to this subdivision serves perversely to justify the continued dilly dallying at the expense of a militated response. Which of course is Zizek’s passionate, and correct I might add, instinct toward our problems. My gut says it is all illusion and so a moral choice might be to accept that we have to work with the illusion. The ‘bargain’ arises when we consider the Zen proverb: to do nothing is the greatest virtue. I say, Who among us is perfect?

You said, “nothing but propaganda working to frame our world, and that the biggest lie we are taught is this idea that we sit outside of the world of propaganda, that we have some safe spot from which to observe it.”

I agree, there is no safe spot that is all set up for us to retreat to. My point is you have to make your own and walk the line of judgment and accept the consequences. Continuing to conjecture about this is precisely why we are doomed and yet do nothing about it. It’s why you are saying ‘we just need a better laugh track.’ Sir, I am sorry but we are well past that stage. If you don’t believe that then refer to Guy McPherson’s work on climate change, Mike Ruppert’s geopolitical analysis, and for Christ’s sake Max Keiser’s economic commentary. The Greeks are screwed not because of tax collection. The Greeks aren’t even the issue, we are in the midst of a predatory feeding frenzy led by the IMF and central banks. They might not have a coherent plan for reducing the population but you can bet your copy of ‘How To Read Lacan’ they have a coherent plan for legislating the world into slavery. And ain’t no laugh track that is gonna counter it, even if there was time and legal maneuverability to construct one. Which there are not.

I think perhaps the uncomfortable idea you are hung up on might be that in fact there are monsters in the world. That yes, despite so much academic hand wringing there is a big Other. It just depends on where you are standing who that other might be.

Cmon bro, you were awesome in the Alex Jones discussion.

In this episode, at about the 46 minute mark, you mentioned an NPR segment by Dan Rodericks from a few years ago. You recalled that Rodericks had suggested that the power elite were well-aware that economic growth was not coming back, and, that they were quietly making their plans to survive the coming collapse. Perhaps mysteriously, that particular segment vanished from the NPR archives, and you were never able to retrieve it.

While I could not find the particular audio segment that you mentioned, I did find a 2009 Baltimore Sun article by Dan Rodericks, entitled, “Hoarding for apocalyptic luxury.” (http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-03-24/news/0903230101_1_hoarding-ric-and-poor-gap-between-rich). The article was probably the basis of the audio segment, as it seems on-point with your recollections.

In that article, Rodericks states:

“I have been watching the concentration of wealth in this country accelerate during the past 10 years in particular. The gap between middle class and rich has become wider and wider, and the gap between rich and poor has become so vast as to be immeasurable.
…
Knowing that it wasn’t always so, I’ve tried to figure out why so many millionaires of the corporate class do everything within their power to become multimillionaires and even billionaires, piling on layer after layer of wealth, beyond anything most people can imagine as necessary in a lifetime.
…
Hoarding for the apocalypse calls for belief that the end is coming and that wealth will insulate the wealthy from the misery that will befall the rest of us.
…
As the world’s population grows, as the recession expands and unemployment worsens, as the globe continues to warm and the oceans rise, as questions about the future of energy and natural resources become graver, as civil unrest becomes a greater concern, the masters of the universe grab all they can. It’s an Idaho panhandle mentality on Wall Street – hoard money and assets, and enough golf balls to ride out the coming cataclysm.
…
Of course, the cynics always existed among us, but they’ve grown in number in recent years, and they have more power and influence than ever. Those who work in financial markets and deal in commodities, those who watch global trends in energy and food production and population growth – those who have seen the numbers – I believe they have become gravely pessimistic about what life on Earth in the next quarter-century will become, and that’s what drives them.”

Incidentally, in the first week of May 2011, Roderick’s “midday show” on NPR hosted a week long “Power Ahead” series—with 10 hours programming: “devoted to one of the most urgent matters facing people of Maryland, the United States and planet Earth — our energy problems and solutions.” The series included many people familiar to c-realm listens, including Richard Heinberg, one the featured guests of this episode.

At least the “Power Ahead” series has not mysteriously vanished, and c-realm listeners can freely download it from wypr.org: http://www.wypr.org/stationprogram/midday-dan-rodricks?page=12

Be well,
C_W

Discovered your site just a few days ago, and I want to thank you: you bring really interesting people in to your show and discuss the coming breaking appart of our western “civilization” in a calm and intelligent manner. As I fully understood what’s going on in 2008, it took me a while to reach some calm and acceptation of what is likely to happen, and anybody talking about this in a non-apolyptical way is a blessing (we’ll get the panic and violence that follows through TV, I’m sure, although I don’t have one). That said, I am interested in hearing this podcast (3259) but there’s no link to hear it. Can you correct it?

Thanks a lot.

I’m tight this month but will consider a donation soon. Keep the good work!
Natalie

1) Ethics are not sufficiently explicated in most of the philosophical/political discussions that are attempting to address the sad state of society today. Yet, the lack of ethics in the leadership our political economies is quite obviously a root cause of most of what threatens our world.

Buddhism asserts that those who do not understand the primacy of ethical conduct lack wisdom and, even, plain common sense.

In response to Prof. Rosenthal’s discussion of the Sermon on the Mount’s injunction that holding ‘anger’ in one’s heart is the same as committing murder:

In translations of Buddhist texts, often one finds ‘hatred’ mistranslated as ‘anger’.

In the spectrum of aversion (from mild annoyance, irritation, anger, hatred), only hatred necessarily is accompanied by a desire to harm its object. The milder aversive emotions often can be satisfied by removing oneself from the presence of their object.

Perhaps a similar mistranslation has occurred here.

Refraining from 0 Non-Virtuous Actions (of Body, Speech and Mind) is the beginning practice of Buddhism. The non-virtue of wishing harm to any living being, i.e., Hatred, is one of those ten.

The Ten Non-Virtues include activities of Body (killing, stealing, sexual misconduct), Speech (lying, harsh speech, malicious gossip), and Mind (wishing someone harm [hatred], covetousness, wrong views [e.g., denying the law of cause and effect]).

According to Buddhist explanation of karma (the law of cause and effect interacting with consciousness, intention), the more we engage in mental/emotional states, the more habituated we become to those states and the more easily they can arise in the future. Generating the emotional fires of anger and hatred over and over is very dangerous because they can lead one to engage in verbal and physical acts to harm their objects; and then the harmer has set in motion the causes that will lead to the future fruit of experiencing pains similar to those inflicted.

However, the karmic result of a hatred that does not produce a homicide is not the same as murder per Buddhism. To produce the completely ripened fruit of any act requires more than the mental intention to commit the act. The full karmic result from virtuous and non-virtuous acts requires intention, successful completion of the act, followed by mental rejoicing (rather than regret) such that one may urge others to act similarly.

2) Living in India for ten years, as a student of Buddhist philosophy per the Tibetan tradition (received from Nalanda University), I enjoyed a great ‘Ah-ha’ response to the Vedic interpretation of Plato’s Republic!

I look forward to listening to the second mp3. Thank you KMO. I very much appreciate your productive search,

love,
nordron

The ETC Voices Podcast is mostly housed on Archive.org. I don’t think it is available through iTunes.

I’m still missing 2, 4, 5, 6. 9. 10, 11, and 14. There are one or two I can listen to on the web, but I can’t seem to get them to download. What am I doing wrong? Anybody? Thanks!

Madelyn Griffith-Haynie

Brace yourself.

I agree with everything you wrote in that last comment. (At least in the longer paragraph. Your first sentence is off. In the interview, I articulated something similar to what you’ve written, and Dave described that position as cynical.)

It’s something I think you and your guest on this episode refuse to acknowledge.

Government in this capitalist world is a tool to maintain the privileges of the wealthy elite, no matter what it’s pundits proclaim. It’s the tool by which the capitalist elite began back in England with land enclosures on peasants. And it’s the tool by which they maintain their privileges over the rest of us to this day. Central Command is not, and cannot be, concerned with the survival of the rest of us. In that it’s not “corrupt” or a “failure.” It’s working just as it’s supposed to.

You had mentioned libertarianism in your first comment, so I took you to be making some point about libertarianism. Coercive relationships are anathema to libertarian principles.

Just because you can find some instance of voluntary cooperation in an oppressive system doesn’t make that system an exemplar of libertarian principles. It seems really bizarre that you would need that very obvious point spelled out for you, so I’ll assume that you were attempting to articulate something more substantial than that spurious surface association with your first comment.

If you want to craft some new entry in this thread, I would encourage you to compose it but not post it. Then, you can re-visit it in a few hours and see if it really does what you want it to do.

I loathe the ideological mindset of left/right debate, and I want to minimize the amount of time I devote to that sort of thing. It is for this reason that I will only read one communication from you daily. Anything that you post here today I will read and possibly respond to tomorrow, so take your time with it, and don’t be in a hurry to click “Post Comment.”

Regarding the plutocrats, I’m referring to voluntary relationships *with themselves* against the rest of us. The agribusiness wing of the plutocracy pursues their interests and the raw milk consumers pursue theirs as well. Both are in conflict. What benefits the former group detracts from the later, and vise versa. It’s a political struggle.

If you think corporations and the ownership class achieved their dominant status via voluntary relationships, watch Food, inc.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/combined

Just to shine a light on what I think is a libertarian blind-spot: the plutocrats are entering into a voluntary relationship and pursuing their interests, as are the small farmers and their associates who want to consume the raw milk.

Another great episode KMO! And another slightly bent tangent on the curve of the ‘C’ … less of a direct tackling of the usual themes it seemed, but full of wonderful obscure golden-nuggets of the history of our ongoing global catastrofizzle!

Thanks very much for including our music in the episode! And of course — in context — you addition was spot-on.

If any of your listeners would like a copy of the mp3 (Under the Tent), it and the one featured in Episode 200 (What’s Got Into You) can be freely downloaded at http://www.neonbrown.com/AWDarchive.html . Additionally, the entire studio-catalog of the band ‘Neon Brown’ (featured in 148 and 149) is also freely available at http://www.neonbrown.com/nbarchive.html .

Thanks again for listening!

-andrew

Hi , I don’t see any previous comments from you, and if LJ has consigned your message to limbo, I don’t know how to liberate it. I certainly welcome your participation in the on-going discussion. If you’re willing to re-compose your message, you are welcome to send it to kmo@c-realm.com, and I’ll post it here. You can also post your comment to the discussion section of the Friends of the C-Realm group on Facebook.

I’d appreciate it if you’d release my comment which was submitted yesterday and seems to be embargoed by LJ as a “suspicious comment.”. I promise I’m not a spammer (or even a troll). Just trying to make a thoughtful contribution to the discussion.
Thanks

I’m with Simon and Ian. Although I enjoy and appreciate nearly all of your podcasts, I was so frustratrated with the direction of the conversation, that I had to turn it off. Please don’t weasel out of your moral responsibilities for future generations by saying you don’t understand enough about climate change. That’s worse than paralysis by analysis; it’s paralysis by willful ignorance. I know you’re not a scientist. Neither am I. But I trust the 97% of working climate scientists who say that it is real. And I tend to take it seriously when no national or major scientific institutions anywhere in the world disputes the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Not one! And if that’s not enough reason to be concerned about the world that we are leaving for our children and grandchildren, then take the time to educate yourself. Go to http://www.skepticalscience.com/ and look up the rebuttal to virtually every argument made by climate deniers. Do it for your children.

Well we know that he believed in anthropogenic global warming:

http://climatecrocks.com/2011/01/06/1989-isaac-asimov-on-climate-change/

I think the answer to what he would have thought about the “debate” lies in the Foundation and Robot series. Greed and self interest are reliable human traits that will shape the course of history.

Native Americans whose land was being stolen and Africans who were enslaved to work that land weren’t individuals in Thomas Jefferson’s view.

Maybe the analogy would be something like this:

Two cars are driving towards a cliff and one drivers yells there is a cliff and suggests both of you should change your course or at least slow down… the other driver wants to stay the course and keep the speed (maybe even accelrate a little bit) because he a) is blind, b) very short sighted, c) dont believe in cliffs, d) see the cliff, but likes the course to much to change it e) see the cliff but thinks we have to hit the cliff to be sure its really there f) believe Jesus (or somebody else) will make the cliff evaporate before you hit it…

Labeling people who you, for whatever reason, disagree with as “fanatical types” or “hard-liners,” etc. has been a common tactic with politically right-leaning folks. It’s a way of side-stepping what one’s opponent is actually saying.

Well… can you as an agnostic always tell if you chose not to know, dont want to know, simply dont know, or just dont give a damn?… I guess, as an approach to living your life, its a good thing to have en open mind and be willing to listen, but also to be on your toes and have a fine-tuned BS-alarm… I think your ability to be open-minded is part of the reason you make good interviews, and I remember you saying in an earlier episode that you try not to hold any particular belief-system. You should do an interview with somebody from the flat-earth-society – maybe that would put your agnosticism to a test

Simon

What happens if you modify your understanding of agnostic to mean “don’t know” rather than “can’t know?”

Hello again KMO

Thanks for the answer!

I read the definition of sceptisism and agnosticism on wikipedia – the definitions a quite close.

I guess originally agnosticism was confined to spiritual matters and that we can never be sure about the existence of god… I think the position have developed somewhat in the last century, so now it means that you can never be certain of anything…

Which means that it is, for a agnostic point of wiev, completly fair and respectable to dismiss the findings of a overwhelmingly large body of researh to any subject – for instance CC, or holes in the ozone layer, or evoulution or, plate-tectonics, or if smoking causes cancer, or the shape of the planet (maybe earth is banana-shaped, we can simply not know for sure)… Are politicians/energy companie CEO’s dedicated agnostics when they say that science know nothing about how the climate system works, that there are 300 years of natural gas in the US og that fracking is clean and safe aso. I guess you have to be fanatical agnostic (or a denialist, or ignorant or stupid) to dismiss some things. To me agnosticism sounds like a belief system that is well suited to spread doubt about anything.

I’m ranting again… quess you and Tom provoked my own belief-system.

Simon

It’s really interesting that you should say that. You heard broad straw man sorts of absolutist statements, while I recall Tom qualifying his remarks by saying things like, “Now, I’m not saying that everyone who believes X is a True Believer, but…”

But then I appreciate that sort of nuanced, fair-minded communication, so I may be more prone to notice it.

But, he clearly showed himself to be a true believer, as well. His criticisms of people who oppose capitalism were text book ad hominin and straw man fallacies.

I would describe my own position as agnosticism rather than skepticism. The word ‘skepticism’ has been hijacked and abused to the point where it no longer means what it means.

Your computer analogy reminded me of this bit from Isaac Asimov:

“Consider. I drive a car, and you drive a car. I do not know exactly how an engine works. Perhaps you do not either. And it may be that our hazy and approximate ideas of the workings of an automobile are in conflict. Must we then conclude from this disagreement that an automobile does not run, or that it does not exist? Or, if our senses force us to conclude that an automobile does exist and run, does that mean it is pulled by an invisible horse, since our engine theory is imperfect?”

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/azimov_creationism.html

He was writing about the tension between the theory of evolution and creationism. I’d be curious to read or hear what old uncle Isaac would say about the climate change debate were he still around.

As to your closing comment, Tom will be on again next week.

I’ve been listening to the C-Realm for a few years now and am generally open to listening to many points of view. But that rubbish last night about climate change being unknowable just demonstrated Tom Naughtons willful ignorance of the subject.

At 43 years of age, I AM doing the science degree, so I can understand how to decipher the reams of evidence and data that has been collected and processed. Just because Naughton is too lazy to study the subject, he has decided that it is too hard so therefore must be not true. When was the last time you understood exactly what was going on inside your computer, yet the evidence suggests it works, so the technology must be true. Climate science is the same. Just because you don’t have have the intellectual capacity to grasp it does not mean that other more learned than you have discovered things too complex for you to understand. And just like complex electronics, nobody understands the whole, but many understand enough about the individual parts to be able to make it all come together. Climate science works the same way.

Any more of this sort of rubbish and I’ll just stop listening.

Tom has strongly held beliefs, but the immediate and obvious difference I see between him and crusading True Believers is that Tom can make and TAKE a joke. True Believers are humorless, quick to offend and boil with rage before breakfast.

This guy is exactly what he’s raving against!

Hello KMO

Thanks for a great show! Listened to episode 254 with Tom Naughton today, while gardening (thats the best way to take in the C-realm )

It truck me that the attitude of exstreme scepticism og anti-belief-systems is in itself a beleif system.

I have no doubts about Tom being a very clever fellow, and I would like to see his movie “Fathead”… What struck me was the segment about human-induced climate change… You said yourself (with a little nervous shiwer in your voice ) that you expected comments on that segment where you and Tom both expresses doubts about climate change (CC)…

well here is a comment:

Sceptisism is a good thing, to some degree. But isn’t sceptisim also very close to denialism when you can dismiss about anything, because science per definition is never 100% sure. Secptisim can become a sleeping pillow for doing nothing and meaning nothing in a consistant way.

I myself am very sceptical to a lot of the memes in current consumer culture and I guess, I am what you might call a doomer. But a somewhat happy doomer though – I enjoy the simple life, I have a job where i spend most of my time outside with students, I have a garden… But, what makes me a very gloomy doomer is the lack of will to take CC seriously… And it makes me tired to hear very smart guys like Tom and you express your sceptisim about CC being real. Yes, you are free to think what you want and say it out loud… Wasnt there a congresswoman resently saying that radioactivity is actually healty for you – well she might be right you know we can never know for sure – and she has all the right to utter such nonense.

I’m sure you know about the consequenses IF CC i real… I’m also sure that you know that what we do today will only have impact in 30-40 years – because of the inertia in the climate system… Well – if we want to be 100% sure before we take action, then we will never take action. There is no such thing as an exact science, its all about probabilities…

I’m sorry that my first comment on your show is a rant, I very much enjoy to have my mind blown week after week… But this short segment made my mind implode… I promise next time i write I will be the happy doomer again

Have a peak day

Simon

She literally made me want to clearcut an old-growth forest and plant Monsanto franken-corn just to piss her off, and — more importantly! — to show everyone else that I have nothing in common with her.

Ms. Keith does a disservice to every concept with which she might find worthy of attention and support. If she used the same presentation stylings displayed in KMO’s interview to describe a cure for cancer, I suspect most people would choose to die a horrible and painful death.

So what is the strategy to get there? Chestnut and hazelnut forests?
http://www.badgersett.com/
Is pastoralism better than agriculture? How many can it support? Gathering and hunting?
Is there time to get the population there without a die off? (Doubtful)
What about pasture cropping?
http://agroinnovations.com/index.php/en_us/multimedia/blogs/2010/07/episode-98-pasture-cropping/
http://www.pasturecropping.com/
Perennial polyculture?
http://www.landinstitute.org/
Does Lierre have buffalo in her backyard? Is she digging Apios americana tubers?

I must agree that episode 245 was pretty lame.
I haven’t seen any of the Zitgeist videos and probably won’t. The notion that a computer can design the most “efficient” production system is patently absurd. At the very least, someone must make decisions as to what will be produced and what lifestyle level will be supported. Are we going to eat corn and soybean gruel, corn chips and tofu, corn and soy fed beef, or caviar from corn and soy fed sturgeon? What inputs are in short supply and should be conserved? Is price a good measure of this? (probably not.) What is the value of anything? There are a large number of such questions that don’t have “an answer”.
Your last question got the ridiculous answer, that I paraphrase as “well it’s worked so far so obviously it’ll keep working.” Such a notion is patently absurd in times of changing circumstances. No doubt some Easter islanders said it until the end.
I was listening in the car and scribbled a few notes. I could listen again and make additional specific criticisms.
I put efficient above in quotes because I think the word is generally misused. To an engineer, (I am one) efficiency is a unitless measure of output/input. By that I mean that the numerator and denominator are measured in the same units. So energy efficiency is energy out/energy in. Material efficiency is lbs out/pounds in, etc. To my way of thinking, “productivity” is the word generally used when different units are used.. Take American agriculture. Not energy efficient (we put in a lot more total energy than we get out as food energy). Labor productive if you only include direct farm labor (a suspect method that excludes indirect labor inputs, like the guys who dig the coal, make the steel, build the tractors, etc.) Not very land productive compared to many other systems. (I’ll send you an interesting chart one of these days.)
As an engineer, I also object to using the unmodified word “technology” to mean “information technology” “computer technology” or however you want to more correctly describe it.
It is possible to include methods as well as “machines” in the definition of technology. “Software” and “hardware” in the lingo of “computer technology”. In such a definition, democracy could be included as an enlightenment social/political technology.
I’d like to contrast complex with complicated. An ecosystem is complex. A nuclear power plant is complicated. Complexity (including diversity) can increase resilience. Complicatedness is fragile, inviting failure and collapse. See:
http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_article/_a000010-001928.htm
To me hyperefficient has a negative connotation. As in efficiency for its own sake to the exclusion of other values. I don’t find this sense on the internet. Maybe it’s just mine.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hyper?show=1&t=1302439363
hyper-
prefix
Definition of HYPER-
1: above : beyond : super-
*2a : excessively y
*b : excessive

You can get the same effect with a much less expensive implement: a subsoiler with a liquid injector.

“The days where men were in charge and had all the power, is nothing more than a feminist fantasy concocted to excuse finger pointing at the entire male sex, justifying their own identity as victims and ironically enough their own pursuit of a lopsided power arrangement. Sure there has historically been the upper 2% of men who had allot of power and control, but as far as male power goes, thats where it ended. The other 98% of men were never powerful, never! Just the opposite in fact, they led powerless lives of sacrifice and expendability in order to take care of women and children and to serve the interest of the 2% of men that feminists always complain about, and very mistakenly confused for the way the rest of men actually lived. And that upper 2% held much more oppressive sway over the rest of men than they did women. It was the 98% of men who were conscripted to fight in the wars forced to take on the shitty back breaking jobs and did so generally with mouths closed and heads down so as not to jeopardize their ability to take care of their families. The idea that there was ever any privilege or power in that is so stupid it borders on deranged! But that is what feminists have convinced themselves of and allot of other people as well. ” – Paul Elam from A Voice For Men Radio Episode 1 (March 2nd 2011) [9]

Sources:

[1] http://www.unwomen.org/

[2] http://www.womenshealth.gov/

[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/31/60minutes/main527678.shtml

[4] http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/goldin/files/homecoming.pdf

[5] http://education-portal.com/articles/Leaving_Men_Behind:_Women_Go_to_College_in_Ever-Greater_Numbers.html

[6] http://www.mediaradar.org/research_on_false_rape_allegations.php

[7] http://www.tigweb.org/youth-media/panorama/article.html?ContentID=4309&start=

[8] http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn630spermed

[9] http://www.blogtalkradio.com/avoiceformen

[10] http://standyourground.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=4d7b9a846df1381b1402ccd744c9727f&topic=16416.0

[11] http://www.newswithviews.com/guest_opinion/guest68.htm

[12] http://www.falserape.net/false-rape.htm

[13] http://www.mediaradar.org/research_on_false_rape_allegations.php

[14] http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/who.html

[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproductive_rights

[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternity_fraud

[17] http://www.coeffic.demon.co.uk/descrim.htm

[18] http://www.rightsandwrongs.co.uk/asia/other/3873-men-family-courts-discrimination-against-men-for-being-men

[19] http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/42/15/31.2.full

[20] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/women-in-their-twenties-smash-glass-ceiling-to-reverse-pay-gap-2154836.html

[21] http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/05/08/19/guest_mark.htm

[22] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Commission_on_the_Status_of_Women

[23] http://www.ejfi.org/family/family-77.htm

[24] http://www.pellebilling.com/2009/04/misandry-in-the-media/

[25] http://www.fathersandhusbands.org/

[26] http://www.media4women.com/

[27] http://www.womensmediacenter.com/

Lierre Keith, interviewed on episode 252 had allot of information but I found her understanding somewhat confining and followed by some uncompromising sweeping judgements, such as agriculture being a war against nature. Finally she comes to mention that the cause of all problems is “The Patriarchy”. I find it offensive that she goes on to make women and children as victims while she insinuates and singles out men as the perpetrators and guilty. Thats when I decided I had to write in, and perhaps she would respond to this? (note comment is in two pieces as livejournal limits length)

Excuse Me, What Patriarchy?

• Men and Fathers face the harshest discrimination in family courts. [17] [18]
• Epidemic of false accusations are near half of all rape cases. False accusations on men from sexual harassment to rape to child molestation. [12] [13]
• Violence Against Women Act profiles men and demands that they be arrested in all domestic violence disputes. [11]
• 4 out of 5 Suicides are male (18 out of 23 more accurately) [10]
• Misandry and abuse and denigration of men is widespread across media, while at the same time media is extra sensitive to stay up to date with each and every feminist demand for favorable and correct portrayal of women in media. [23] [24] [25] [26] [27]
• College enrollment and gradation of males is declining and has been for decades. [5] [4] [3]
• Male fertility has been on the decline for at least a century. [8]
• No men’s shelters. [10]
• Men have no reproductive rights and are often victims of paternity fraud. [15] [16]
• Most homeless people are men. [14]
• Men’s unemployment rate is 3 times as high as female. [17]
• 80% of wealth is spent by women [10]
• Women handle 75 percent of family finances. 43 percent of those with assets over $500,000 are women. [10]
• 99% of combats deaths are male [10]
• 94% of industrial deaths male [10]
• 76% of homicides are male [10]
• Women receive custody in 84% of child custody cases. [10]
• 204 out of 205 people wrongly convicted exonerated by DNA (evidence have been men (via the innocence project) . [10]
• In America there are over 270 women’s commissions but only one for men in New Hampshire. [10]
• There are over 700 women studies programs in colleges and universities but but no one teaching mens or male studies from a masculinist perspective. [10]
• Men are over half the victims of domestic violence but in over 90% of domestic violence disputes men are the ones arrested. [19] [11]
• Breast cancer funding is a national icon of funding but Prostate cancer is totally ignored while the death rates are roughly equal. [10]
• The wage gap now favor’s women in their twenties. [20]
• Men die 5 years earlier than women but no compensation is made to them for this via social security or otherwise. [10]
• A entire branch of the UN is dedicated to women, nothing for men. [1]
• There is much discussion on the status of women in society, none for men. [22]
• There are billions of dollars of tax money going into women’s issues and none for men. [21] [22]
• There are branches of US Federal government dedicated to the interests of women such as health, but none for men. [2]
• Masculinity and male emotions are hardly tolerated in society.
• Global society is becoming more and more gynocentric.
• Gender warfare rages on with hardly any participation of men.
• Men are blamed for all social and world problems
• Most of civilization is but a shopping mall for women to go shopping.

Thanks, man.

Hey KMO,

Looks like your libsyn link to the podcast is directing to a copy of your episode art image.

TS

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/mind-vs-machine/8386/

Tokyo’s buildings may not have come tumbling down as a consequence of the 9.0 earthquake as the buildings of San Francisco did in 1906, but its water and a portion of its food supply are being steadily polluted with the radioactive material spewing out of the still out-of-control damaged reactors, and a significant portion of the Japanese economy (in the industrialized NE region) is being significantly and continuously eroded. In time, the region surrounding the crippled power plant may become a radioactive dead zone similar to that which currently surrounds Chernobyl.

Long term consequences both economic and, more importantly, environmental, both locally and globally, of what is essentially a catastrophic system design failure can not at this time be known. In short, it’s still too early to tell if this situation will somehow manage to become a shining example of the resilience of the system, and I wonder how many such “examples” we can afford.

And have we really “solved” the global credit crisis of 2007-09, or are we simply reliving the early part of the Great Depression, the part that seemed to indicate a recovery was underway when in fact the worst was yet to come? Looks to me as if we’ve just papered over the problems by turning on the government printing presses, hoping for a speedy recovery here and abroad, in much the same way the Japanese keep minimizing reports of the extent of damage from their reactor disaster. We saved the banks, but did we save the system? Or did we simply “design in” a hack that will fail with much more devastating consequences later on? Again, too soon to tell.

I share Eric’s feelings about Nikki’s Olson’s near-religious faith in the ability of our technological prowess to solve problems such as resource depletion, species extinction, population overshoot, and global climate change. She seems to utterly miss the point, that these are problems inherent in our technological prowess – doesn’t even consider them to be on the scale of the problem of what to do about rogue AI!? Perhaps the second part of this interview will offer a bit of nuance to her position, but I really felt that at this point, she and Larry were talking right past each other.

I too enjoyed Eric’s comments, though it seems to beg the question of whether the aliens/advanced beings have, in fact, failed in their objective.

It seems that if we are to pronounce the ET/AB program a failure that we would have to know what it was that they had hoped to achieve and the time frame in which they hoped to achieve it.

Also, Eric’s “Why have the aliens failed?” rant was brilliant.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/peter-joseph/2011/02/09/2911–peter-joseph-weekly-zm-radio-show

Hey… your 3 minute clip of Peter Joseph got me very interested in what he had to say. I dont see a link to that? would you be willing to provide that? Thanks for the GREAT podcast!

I agree that the lines are not clear. Dmitry Orlov, the self-described kolapsnik, mentioned the network of FEMA camps under construction in my very first conversation with him back in 2007.

I’ve mentioned on the show that several of the guests I’ve interviewed who had nothing to say about psychedelics in their public rap confided in me privately that their psychedelic experiences have been extremely important to them and an invaluable ingredient in their personal development.

Similarly, people who have nothing to say about chemtrails, UFOs, or 9-11 in their public presentations have spoken about these subjects to me in private.

Great podcast as usual Kmo. In particular I found what the lady doomer had to say to be quite moving and hope she finds a way to give her life some purpose. I haven’t managed to as yet and maybe need to check out Carolyn’s books for inspiration.

I wanted to say that I think that it’s not helpful, even if it is understandable, to pigeon hole people as either/or in the way you did with Collapsnics versus Truthers. Yes, many of us who do believe there are covert agendas at play can be somewhat dogmatic and a little too quick to adopt the beliefs of truther convention, but there are also many of us who don’t conform to such tidy paradigms. For instance, I think there’s plenty of good evidence to suggest peak oil has come and gone, but I’m not at all convinced by weak, climate science (frantically sold as robust by the MSM) or that the co2 alarmists are necessarily the good guys as they like to portray themselves.

It’s all very well preparing for a post-collapse world, but without observing, interpreting and responding to political trends is naive at best. What I see playing out in America (it’s less stark in Europe) could perhaps suggest that peak democracy has come and gone and a more severe, authoritarian rule is now in it’s place. And I very much doubt the world collapsnics are preparing for the same world as those in power are preparing for.

I drove into town to download the podcast you recommended. I’m at the wifi hotspot now, but I don’t see a download link on the page, and I can’t sit here for an hour and 45 minutes and stream the thing. If you have an .mp3 audio file for the program, please send it to kmo@c-realm.com. Stay well.

Just thought I’d let you know that Peter has addressed these things here … http://www.blogtalkradio.com/peter-joseph/2011/02/09/2911–peter-joseph-weekly-zm-radio-show

Not only are the adult children of those middle class Americans born between 1939 and 1959 facing ever-worsening economic conditions, we have also been “raised” by this hyper-fortunate generation. It’s a case of the blind leading the blind into a dark cave. How fucked is that?

Thank you, Core. That sort of thing is a lot of fun for me, though it is time-consuming, so I don’t do as much of it as I’d like.

The music element of your intro to “Facebook jesus” (particularly the editing of the music) made me laugh out loud… Thanks.

Check out this essay by Joel Salatin, and read his entire book of the same title, “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal”
http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp03.htm

Or the abbreviated version: Bureaucrats don’t know farming, small farmers do, and with the federal/state/local governments hurting for cash, they can’t afford to round everyone up. Use up their resources by doing it anyway! You have a better chance of contracting E Coli from bagged spinach than from grandma’s canned soups.

Check out this for places to find raw milk:
http://www.realmilk.com/where1.html

Visit our blog to post your ideas about Fresh Food!!
http://ctfreshfood.org/

Raw milk is inherently dangerous and it should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose. [emphasis mine]

But from the same FAQ:

In promulgating this regulation in 1987, FDA made a number of findings relative to raw milk, including that “raw milk, no matter how carefully produced, may be unsafe.” [...]

Raw milk may contain many pathogens, including but not limited to [list omitted, but includes some nasty bugs]. Illnesses caused by these bacteria can be especially problematic for infants, young children, the elderly, and the immunocompromised. [emphasis still mine]

So drinking raw milk may get you sick in a way that could be especially dangerous to the young, the old, and the immunocompromised (like riding the subway in winter) and there’s no way to assure that it’s 100% safe, no matter how it was prepared (like FDA-approved spinach, evidently).

Raw milk appears to be the only food product they describe on their site as “inherently dangerous” under normal conditions. (Also described using that phrase: Tobacco, in argument that the FDA shouldn’t regulate it.) “Should not be consumed” is said of raw milk, some sketchy dietary supplements, raw juice (but only in the context of the young, old, or immunocompromised), alcohol (but only in some contexts), and animals too weak to stand/walk at time of slaughter. The phrase “should not be consumed by anyone” is only used by the FDA in the context of raw milk. The FDA also regulates blowfish (a toxic-if-improperly-prepared delicacy), there are a few briefs about import regulation and so on but no “should not be consumed by anyone for any reason”. Evidently, “it’s delicious” is a perfectly good reason for someone to eat something that if improperly prepared might well kill you, so long as it’s been inspected properly on import and the consumer knows what they’re getting into.

But I still don’t get why the FDA position on raw milk is so intense. Here’s my best guess:

In the FDA’s view, the proponents of raw milk are anti-science hippies. The benefits of raw milk are imagined, the harms are ignored through ideological blindness. The consumer is misled about a dangerous (but relatively widely available) product with no benefits that, in addition to consuming it themselves, they might feed to their children.

Actually, now that I’ve said that, I can see why the FDA might have a hair-trigger about that sort of thing. Maybe if raw milk was marketed on the basis of “it’s delicious and will probably kill you”, it would just be a footnote for the FDA.

Exaggerating claims in defense of a policy can also be a vicious cycle. The stronger your claim, the more embarrassing it will be to admit error (or to have the sky not fall when the policy is overturned over your strenuous objection). The more embarrassing it will be to have a policy overturned, the more motivation you have to exaggerate your claims in defense of the policy. That may explain how the FDA got from “may be unsafe” to “inherently dangerous… should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose”.

Have you read Brightsided? Ehrenreich goes into great detail about how the Be Rich Now!!! movement has infiltrated evangelism, to the point of ignoring stuff actually mentioned by Christ.

Well put.

This podcast — and, importantly, your reply to it — inspired me to write my own take. I quoted you, and hope you don’t mind.

User referenced to your post from Quantitative Easing: Misunderstood by Popular Demand saying: [...] about the current failings our economy is suffering [...]

A idea for you KMO: If you value oil in money, and you go out and just print money, as is happening now, then you essentially have the oil for nothing, or for free, and free energy doesn’t exist in nature. Therefore…….??

In case you haven’t seen it, check out the info on the documentary “Gasland” here: http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/about-the-film

It’s frackin’ frightening.

Another great interview, KMO. Thank you. In this interview, Prof. Hall says, “…the most important part of our economy is the proper functioning of the hydrological cycle.” “That’s not included in economics. Why don’t they? Prices aren’t involved.” “The hydrological cycle is THE most important aspects of our economy.”

I think some people have realized this and are ready to cash in on it. This clip is a hyperbolic presentation of conspiracy, more fear mongering, but you get the point.

http://www.naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=6B6D8E76B41489ACA5C1C0BC0CBE28B7

I’d guess that if progressives coalesced around a platform of blanket legalization of gambling, then evangelicals would view it as the stuff of the devil. But if progressives generally decide that gambling prohibition is a sound policy, evangelicals will claim they “hate the free market” or don’t want people to be able to exercise their God-given luck.

JHK really is a fantastically lyrical and entertaining talker.

One thing have struck me about what Jim had to say on the financial folks. Of course just like everyone else they are supposed to follow the law of the land, and just like everyone else sometimes they won’t, but I don’t see this as the main problem.

The people at Goldman Sachs job is to make money, not make moral decisions for the betterment of society and it seems to me that those who give their money to that industry do so primarily because they expect a profit. The financial structure is similar in ways to the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages in western Europe; power, entwined inextricably with politics…it can only exist as long as the mass of people support it…in this case give them money to “invest”. People looked to the bishops to give them the experience of god; having money is the modern day equivalent of salvation.

I puzzled for years over one particular contradiction in the financial business, namely that when I bought something as an investment it stood to reason that someone had to be willing to sell it. Since the only reason I was buying it was was to make a profit from the price going higher, what was the thinking behind the person selling, who was the “professional”, surely they too were doing it to make money? How?

There are 2 sides to every transaction. This is just as true with buying a derivative (CDO/CDS/oil futures contract or whatever) as buying a car. “Buyer Beware” is a 2000 year old bit of wisdom we seem to have forgotten. (sellers have to be aware too!) We instinctively doubt the street seller, but trust the glossy brochure.

What a pity.

That musical interlude is priceless! It was better than “Cats.” I’ll listen to it again and again.

TS

“some people are very offended
it’s an inditement of their cultural values at a subconscious level
and they don’t like it
they don’t want their illusion interfered with”

…speaks volumes!

Thank you very much! I’m currently going through the back catalogue of your podcast and I’m enjoying it a great deal.

No need for woe. You can find the episode here:

http://crealm.libsyn.com/139_memes_more_much_more

I outgrew my PodOMatic account and had to move most of the back catalog over to Libsyn.

Why does it say “page not found” when I try to download this episode?

It’s too bad that you just discovered Men aren’t keeping you down because It’s rather overdue babe – by about forever. That perspective that men have or conspiring are keeping you and all women down in turn is in fact very much oppressive on men FYI. Have you ever thought of that???
Also even if men were the only one saying that girls in their 20′s have power over men – WERE only men (which they are NOT including the friend of Eric Boyd’s) – that doesn’t discredit the idea or argument – because men aren’t some kind of put down FYI. Furthermore weather you are personally attracted to men and the idea of having sex with them appeals to you the point of the statement that ” That kind of power has very little real value” or that it won’t “make you feel better about yourself” seems like anything but another victimization statement and another put down on men – are you saying that we are valueless? The point nonetheless that if one has the ability to get any man to sleep with you at the drop of a hat – your influence over them is complete and you can pull their strings like a puppet master to your fulfillment to use and take advantage of everything they are and have to offer.
Perhaps you are wise enough to know that that kind of power isn’t satisfactory and perhaps that is what you meant by saying it won’t help you feel better, or that it has no value. But to me to say that that power has no value whatsoever is a total disrespect for that power and those effected by it – and a license to therefore abuse it – consciously or not.
The unconscious bias against men is very strong in our society – we’ve never been worth a damn to anyone except for our slave productive abilities. There is very real oppression going on against men (in fact the only oppression in my view) and it has frankly always been that way. Feminism appears to be just the latest software version of this very old if not ancient form of hegemony. Finally I don’t think you or any girl is better off being able allowed or encouraged to oppress men. In fact I think you are only oppressing yourselves by doing so. Men have ever been for women from the dawn of time. It’s very sad to see such a coldness and constant guilt trip and “guilty till proven innocent” attitude laid down on us men in a such sassy confrontative if not violent and hateful manner that has been going on for the past few generations in almost every way public sphere. Very sad.

I wish you and all you ladies well.

I’ve done all the explaining that I plan to do for the time being. If you feel like connecting some implicit dots, you can read this essay by David Brin:

http://www.davidbrin.com/climate3.htm

It doesn’t mention 9/11. That’s where the connecting of dots comes in.

The Molé piece is messenger-killing.

The message:
The power structure we live under is guilty of hideous atrocities against us (our fellow Americans pushed out of sky-high burning buildings or blown up inside demolitions, etc.) and people abroad — who are suffering ongoing atrocities in the name of lies sold as truth and bought by the corporate media-controlled masses.
We’ve been fucked! We are fucked! We need to do something about it. And that’s going to be difficult.

Here’s my beef:

1.) 9-11 was obviously an inside job. Every aspect of the official story has been proven false and impossible. All the evidence we can see points to an inside job — it can’t be more blatant than the collapse of the 3 WTC towers, but there are plenty more entry points to this realization. “If it looks like a duck, acts like a duck, etc. it must be a duck.”

2.) The false 9-11 story is still being used for the ongoing genocidal, child-killing, illegally invading, immoral occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. (i.e. our country, the government we live under). Hundreds of billions of our tax dollars are being sucked out to fund genocide, torture, invasion, occupation.

Okay, how can any moral, intelligent person under this circumstance deem this topic unworthy of attention? How can any moral person not cry foul and demand justice in this instance?

KMO, this is really the only thing I disagree with you on. Or maybe I’m just misunderstanding you. Can you please explain your position? What am I not understanding? Thanks.

1. Parents who sex-select may be a biased sample of all parents. Why would such a bias favor girls? I can think of one hypothesis that has to do with the existence of X-linked genetic disorders. If mom’s a carrier, only sons have a 50% chance of getting the disorder. So a large part of that trend could be more awareness of X-linked genetic disorders and more genetic testing.

2. There’s also the belief that daughters are easier to raise (don’t remember if you referenced that in the podcast. (Putting aside arguments on whether that belief is true, false, or technically true but self-perpetuating.)

The time-cost of raising a child is more significant if both parents have to work, as is the case when necessities are expensive and debt is high. (Alternately, the time-cost of raising a child is more significant if both parents have other meaningful and fulfilling things they can do, as is the case when the standard of living is very high and credit is easily available.)

Tara’s response to Eric’s response continues as follows:

I am totally perplexed though as to how women have benefited the most from corporate consumerism. I fail to see how being saddled with more work and more debt and more shit on your plate, when it comes down to it, is a benefit. I remember reading an article when I was a kid about how the modern woman just keeps going and going- she’s such a good multitasker that she gets all her work done at her job plus picks up the slack from everyone else (which I frequently see women doing in all the places I have worked), then she dashes to the dry cleaner, and picks up the kids from soccer practice, and brings them home and cooks dinner, and cleans up the house, and entertains her husband, and gets the kids to bed- all while she is suffering from the flu or something. Of course this is to a large extent a fantasy, but it is the fantasy of the modern woman. There is a commercial for some kind of juice box that I think demonstrates this exact scenario, maybe minus the flu. But there is this new stereotype that women are just supposed to get it all done, and you do see it in advertising, and maybe some people would call that power, but I would call it abuse- to expect women to be responsible for everything, and to be thrilled about it in the process.

Maybe there are women who enjoy it. It is not a stretch to imagine that there are plenty of women out there who like the feeling of control. But I don’t think this is something you can blame on women. I think it’s just another example of- you guessed it- the abusive power structure! If you look at the women in the past few decades who have been reduced to nothing more than consumers- and I know many of these women, they are my friends’ mothers- they are so empty. They suffer depression and anxiety and have almost no self worth, because the only choice they have is to consume and then consume again- and they may not see this as the cause of their suffering, because they have been taught to go out and buy more things to make themselves feel better. That they will feel better if their house is more picture perfect. If they have the perfect place setting. The perfect curtains. The perfect high heel.

It’s not just women, either, but it is much more acceptable for women to go out and stress shop (comfort shopping, some people call it) than it is for men. It’s in fact encouraged and expected, in many ways. Women are expected to take care of their families. Women no longer know how to sew, or darn socks, or can food, or prepare food that didn’t come in a box, for that matter. How else are they supposed to make sure their families have their needs met other than to consume? And when you’re bombarded on all sides with the message that you aren’t taking care of your kids if they don’t have a playstation, what then? And how to afford all of this other than to go out and work?

This clearly is getting a little long. I will probably have to write a few blog posts on it.

I have to conclude with this observation though- even though I want a daughter, because I want to have the same kind of close relationship I had with my own mother, I will still worry always for her, because no matter how many women are in the workforce, I guarantee you almost every single one of them will be afraid to walk alone down a dark street at night.

looking forward to this installment.

Ha, if all that is true about the men I interact with looking down on me because they are awed by my beauty and don’t know how to react, that puts a whole new perspective on my daily interactions at work. Though I’d have to disagree if only because I see how the same men treat male students, and it’s very similar- in general I think the attitude is that youth has nothing worth saying, and it doesn’t help that I literally look like I’m barely 18. I’m sure being “attractive” doesn’t help.

I have heard this concept of young women, especially attractive young women, having all this power, and I have to say it has always baffled me. I feel that I have power in some respects- certainly I have long since puzzled out how to get men to buy me drinks. Someone once told me that attractive women have no consciousness of their own power because they could get ANY man to sleep with them. And I have to say that this a) is categorically untrue and b) why would you want them to? That kind of power has very little real value, and gracious, if the only way you can gain power in your life is to throw around your good looks and bat your eyelashes and get a man to literally pay for you, I don’t know how that’s supposed to make you feel better about yourself.

It’s an odd time to be a 25 year old girl because on the one hand I’ve always been told to disguise my brain, because this would turn men off- and I have hard evidence from college of men who would literally walk away from me if they found out my GPA. On the other hand I have been told that to do something traditionally feminine, like be a homemaker (my deepest desire), would be a complete waste of my intelligence. And at the same time I and many other females are still beset by men who don’t seem to think it is in any way detrimental to our self esteem to shamelessly tease, whistle, catcall, and otherwise make us feel as if we are nothing more than a pretty face- especially when in most cases it is vastly inappropriate for them to be giving that kind of attention.

I think it’s funny that the only people I ever hear saying that girls in their 20s have power are men. Except, apparently, this one friend of Eric Boyd’s.

I do feel that I was promised a lot, and told I could do a lot of things, and especially that I could use my looks to get a lot of those things. But when it comes down to it I still feel that my choices are wage slave on one hand and wage slave on the other- or, I suppose I could marry someone who would be willing to support me. But I’ve always hated being dependent on others. It doesn’t seem so great to be a girl when my only choices are to join the hierarchy or- well I don’t even know what the other choice would be. But as KMO expresses at the end of this podcast, it’s not men who are keeping me down. I have long since lost any illusions that this was the case. It is the abusive power structure of this society.

Religion and science are not from separate universes:

Thomas Campbell – The Monroe Institute Lecture

I bristled slightly when I heard “the Doomer’s Curse” mainly from having an aspect of the Doomer position laid bare in front of us. But also from a personally felt identification with the narrative. Growing up as a sensitive, imaginative, non-competitive kid surrounded by ballistic dickheads in a world that does not value my talents made me very susceptible to the Doomer script. There were times when I prayed for things to go down in flames. When the 911 bombings happened, I was giddy, feeling some sort of vindication through that tragedy. As I grew older, I slowly began to realize that this mentality was crippling me. That it was bringing me to a cognitive impasse that made me unable to pursue any endeavors. I now realize that there is a difference between predicting destruction and wishing for it. Hoping for destruction is a litmus test for insecurity, and everyone in this community should be vigilant of this red flag in their emotional health. I have children now and I am working to create a world for them, rather than wallowing in the destruction of the current one.

The could probably be arranged. Thank you for letting me know.

KMO -
I really appreciated your high school/college friend’s commentary! Much appreciated clarity on many points. Would love to hear another conversation between the 2 of you.

That is really interesting. Thanks!

Someone sent me this link in response to the podcast:

http://www.sudval.org

It’s a hard subject for me to grapple with, for some reason. Maybe it’s just the sinking suspicion that I sold my soul to the educational system. Maybe it’s that it feels like one of those too-hot-to-handle political issues, one where I doubt that there will ever be any real agreement, where even bringing it up almost seems counter-productive. It seems to me like we’ll never getting rid of grades, despite the mounds of evidence that they’re counter-productive. And people still, with apparent seriousness, defend forcing children to memorize the times tables on the basis that forcing children to do unpleasant things in general builds moral character.

Hi B,

Great observations. Thank you for posting them.

I did cringe with self-recognition when I first read Mickey Folley’s “The Doomer’s Curse,” and so I decided I really needed to look that position straight in the eye. Mickey, unlike the second guest, Randall Parker, did not say that the Doomers are wrong (and he doesn’t really seem to be a Prepper), only that they are attracted to the Doomer position because it vindicates their position as meek losers in this society based on cut-throat competitiveness.

Concerning the Judeo-Christian eschatology angle, you might check out my conversation with John Michael Greer in episode 120 of the C-Realm Podcast:

http://crealm.libsyn.com/120_the_long_descent

Thanks again for listening and providing feedback.

Live long and prosper.

-KMO

I enjoyed the application of a symbolic anthropological analysis of Doomer psychology and seeking an explanation in personal insecurities and relationships concerning status and hierarchy.

This is one of your shows that really made me uncomfortable as I reflected on what you read and what was being said by the bloggers. But, I’m not sure that I agree with the overall assessment, and I find it too reductionist to apply to the general Doomer mindset.

Although many of your listeners certainly cringed with some self-recognition at the example of seeing some disaster and saying “I told you so,” or “Well, there you go. We’re all teetering on the edge,” not to mention the identification of desiring for a collapse, there is more to the Doomer/Prepper/Survivalist mindset than identifying a modified version of the Thanatos Death-Wish.

I’m glad that your conversation showed that there was an optimistic approach to confronting a collapse, but I like to think that many Prepper types and those forecasting Doom are more sophisticated than those in love with Post-Apocalyptic fantasies of finally being in control and appreciated.

And, then again…

Coinciding with the identification of a deep seated evolutionary programing expressed in cultural institutions, there is the cultural programming many of us received concerning a Judeo-Christian eschatology. Won’t the Meek eventually inherit the Earth? Won’t the sinful (re: those nasty anti-environment captains of industry!) be judged, and some Kingdom of Heaven finally be revealed all around us? How many people that grew up with these ideas (and may have discarded their beliefs) are still influenced by these hopes?

To the best of my knowledge, Randall Parker has never been to the ETC. You’re probably thinking of Gregory Landua, and I don’t think he’s living in an intentional community. I think he’s just plugged into an informal network of informed folk.

I noticed in this podcast that Randall Parker mentioned he was away from the ETC at present, and was visiting a permaculture community upstate NY. I would love to know what, and where, that community is, as I’ll be moving upstate next month, and would love to learn about, and perhaps visit and contribute to, that community as well.

If anyone has an idea of the name and location of this permaculture community, I would love to know!

LP

Yes, I think as more and more people find themselves in diminished circumstances more and more people will become receptive to the collapse narrative.

Well if that’s the case then…
since more people are losing in the standards game then more will accept the doomer position and therefore focus on the crash, therefore lessening the crash and/or working on sustainable alternatives, etc. No?

If anything this lessens my “uncomfortable, squirmy feelings.” Or am I still misunderstanding? Thanks.

So far the comments don’t seem to reflect an understanding that Mickey Foley never once said in his essay that peak oil doomers are WRONG in their assessment of the likely catastrophic consequences of peak oil. He only said that people who are losers according to the standards of the prevailing narrative are the ones who are attracted to the doomer position.

…not because I’d then be a “drop-in,” but because my kids would have some kind of a future, etc.

I, myself, am a dropout because I’m a doomerist, not a doomerist becuase I’m a dropout (or a “failure” in terms of dominant culture standards). I would LOVE to be wrong in my analysis of where we’re headed. It wouldn’t threaten my ego or self-esteem one bit.

I think the blogger you quote in the introduction (Mickey Foley) might need to review a few of the logical fallacies sometimes mistakenly used in debates. Certainly straw man arguments and some kind of weird ad hominem (against oneself?) arguments feature prominently. Might even be able to work in red herrings, begging the question, sweeping generalizations, and slippery slope arguments as well. A potpourri of logical fallacies!

Perhaps this is meant as an introduction to philosophy primer? Might be a bit much to cover during a podcast!

See you there?

Great discussion that touches on some topics that are very near and dear to my heart.

Tara calls her ‘withdrawal’ from the political arena a selfish act, yet I am convinced that when we seek activities and interactions that cultivate our fullest self (i.e. I’m happiest when…) those actions will help restore the world far beyond the actions of her friends. Tara illuminated a truth in that the political arena (the marching, protesting, whatever) is just that…it is a stage. And those that participate on the stage are often just perpetuating the system. They might shift things slightly one way or the other, but at the end of the day most of us ‘activists’ are significant contributors to the economy that feeds the government and corporations that we are fighting against.

I have often thought that farms, sustainable food centers, urban food networks could be a potential place of real social change because by meeting basic needs, and using the system approaches like permaculture/lazy farming people could be free to pursue passion, set real, inspiring alternatives and it could even be the foundation of a powerful political change. By reducing the need for money, exchanging labor for food and cultivating an ecosystem of innovation and political action people could both step outside the existing arena and start to change the rules of the game.

But whatever, I digress. My main desire was to thank you and Tara for this episode and also provide a couple related resources for those interested:

In Santa Cruz there is the Homeless Garden Project http://www.homelessgardenproject.org/ which might be of interest to Tara if she doesn’t know about it already. I have long thought that farms could be a restorative place for those that have a more transient life…very exciting to hear that someone is actually trying to make that a reality.

Also, for those interested in pushing further into the topic of humans as active, beneficial participants in their ecosystems: there is a wonderful book by M. Kat Anderson called “Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources”

Just as you and Tara noted, humans are here to stay (at least for now) and as resources deplete and pollution rises, we will be forced to get back to more regenerative forms of living (which are much happier forms of living anyway!) The taboos that indigenous people have/had about things like net size, taking appropriate portions, avoiding excess…maybe it’s the cynic in me, but I doubt that those arose simply out of good will and a desire to be in harmony with nature. My guess is that many of them came from hard lessons. So I’m glad that folks like Tara are forging an alternative path and setting examples of different modes of being. When the hard lessons come, we will have options to choose from and inspirations to turn to thanks to the work of folks like you, Tara and so many others.

In support of what KMO is saying here about the Obama Administration’s new approach to enforcing federal drug-laws:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/19/new-medical-marijuana-pol_n_325426.html

(no promises that this is the best article on the topic, but I felt I had remembered something about this too, and this was the first hit in my search)

kmo, you display admirable attitudes of open acceptance and consideration, of patience, indeed of tranquility during your interviews I can only hope to one day emulate, if not nurture.

That was a grand night! Thanks again for your hospitality and generosity.

Here: http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2010/04apr/RIR-100425.php

Hearing Jesse’s music brought memories of the evening back. Good times.

An excellent episode. And congratulations!

Coincidentally, I’d just started working my way through the Diet Soap Podcast archives, so the content of this episode was well timed.

This Councilperson had just that day participated in voting down a rate hike for the local Department of Water and Power, after the DWP threatened to withhold $73 million dollars it owes the city unless the Council acquiesced to its demands. The City Council, suitably incensed by what they correctly viewed as extortion, told them to shove it and hand over the 73 mil – that was the “good” news. The bad news was that the city is broke (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars), and the mayor has threatened to shut down non-revenue producing activities and services (like, for example, libraries and parks) for two days out of every week to make up for the shortfall. Otherwise, after May 5th, nobody in city government will be getting paid. The situation, as I write, is still at a stalemate.

Someone asked, “Why don’t we just acknowledge the obvious, go bankrupt and wipe the slate clean? Recognize that this is the new normal and reorganize for a more appropriate scale of operation, instead of constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul and hoping things will be better next year?” The Councilman responded that this was all just a lot of political posturing on the part of the DWP (and, in the background, the mayor); that we’ve just hit a bit of a rough patch here, as has the rest of the world’s economy; and that if we all just band together, remain firm, and draw on the enormous voluntary creative energies of neighborhood councils – ordinary folks like ourselves – we can manage to squeak through this little bottleneck over the next couple of years and emerge stronger once the national economy recovers its former vitality.

Elsewhere, I read where a local group of Hollywood businessmen is looking for federal funding to put a cement cover over a mile or so of the Hollywood Freeway (essentially converting it into a tunnel) and plant a park on top, though I suppose if present budgetary conditions persist, we’d only be able to keep it open a couple of days a week. Ah, witness the awesome power of the psychology of previous investment!

In other news, on the same day, a report came out saying that the state of California is contractually on the hook for pension payments to the tune of $500 billion dollars. This is in addition to its current $20 billion dollar annual budget shortfall. That’s “billion”, not “million”. Looking forward to your next visit yet?

Congratulations on producing the 200th edition of the C-Realm Podcast, KMO. I especially appreciated the Tolkein lore.

I had a listener in Japan send me some music recently, but it’s all in .m4a format, which I can’t import into Audacity. If I forward it to you, could you convert to .mp3?

I say that mainly because the music on the c-realm is more often than not really really good.

Not the best music this episode, i must confess

http://www.mapquest.com/mq/4-sw21A1f1CX3L8f3GEO6E

Point A is where I lay my head most nights. Point B is where my children are and where I pay rent. It costs me about $150 in gasoline to drive from point A to point B. It would cost me between $300 – $500 to fly and then hire a car to take me from the nearest airport to my residence in rural Maryland. So I drive.

Travel at 4 MPH sounds lovely, but if there were canals rather than highways connecting points A and B (which of course there are not), it would take me 209 hours of continuous travel to make the journey.

I do realize that I don’t experience the landscape as much more than an abstraction when traveling through it at 70 MPH, but there’s no way I could could get to know 836 miles of landscape in any meaningful detail anyway.

The fact that people can and do routinely spread the elements of their lives over a thousand miles or more is something that the techno-triumphalists would trumpet as a glorious achievement of our technologically-empowered society. I see it as profoundly fucked up but also as something that I have to deal with if I want my children in my life.

I’m painfully, acutely aware of how this mode of living impoverishes my experience of traversing the land. Even so, navigating the complex network of roads and highways between A and B without a little voice telling me, “After 800 yards take the exit on the right, then join the motorway,” requires a level of sustained attention, visualization, and problem solving that all goes fallow when I let my GPS techno-fairy take me by the hand and lead the way.

Fifteen years ago, Howard Rheingold was writing in glowing terms about how computers would be “machines to think with.” He saw them as means of empowerment and connection, and obviously they allow me to do things that I would not be able to do without them, but at the same time, without diligence and self awareness, they tend to think for me rather than with me, and in the process, make me stupid.

But of course, they don’t really think at all, so as we allow our competences to atrophy as machines take over tasks that used to require effort and skill, there’s really just less thinking going on per capita.

Now, I think that thinking is over-rated, but that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax.

I also extend kudos for politely withholding all but one “are you sure what you’re believing is true?” bitch-slapping to this particular guest. You have a saintly patience only an atheist can muster.

After hearing this podcast, the next thing I did was to open a book that randomly happened to be on my desk: “Combating Cult Mind Control by Steven Hassan” — a book by a notable cult-exit councilor I was reading back when a family member was in trouble — and read:

“Successfully connecting with a person’s core identity is what enables me to help someone walk away from a cult.” – top of page 123

The “cult” being the cult of civilization, the “core identity” being much of what psychedelics reveal, what yoga and meditation point to, etc.

Hey G,

We’ll get out your way when the weather is more agreeable.

Life is long.

Peace out.

-K

I don’t mean to be (too) pedantic, but the Vatican neither “believed” nor promulgated the view that the earth was flat in 1492. (Though of course you are aware of that, I assume.)

Enjoyable as always. (Too bad you couldn’t make it to the northeast – we are not as backwards as people out there seem to think, from what i gather.)

Great episode as always. Just wanted to point out that you guys meant the Stanford Prison Experiments not the Milgram Experiment on this episode. The Milgram Experiments involved measuring obedience to authority by administering what the test subject thought were lethal shocks as punishment. The Stanford Prison experiment was exactly as everyone described it though. Oddly enough, Stanley Milgram and Phil Zimbardo (of the Stanford Prison Experiment) both went to the same high school in the Bronx.

You raise a thoughtful point. Thank you for posting it.

If intelligent, caring people enmeshed in corporate structures are made to collectively act as cruel, amoral machines, why assume that super-intelligent machines would fare any better? There’s some reason to be doubtful. At the very least, it’s not clear that corporations are less able to use intelligent people in their amoral quest for profit, and it’s not clear that intelligent people are better able to steer corporations towards moral good.

Singularitarians seem to pay a fair amount of attention to the idea of “friendly AI”, but plenty of friendly people work as part of rather unfriendly power structures. Is that simply a matter of insufficient intelligence, or will early self-aware machines get desk jobs at Goldman Sachs just to pay the electricity bills?

Hey KMO,

I was really moved by your ending monologue. It sounds like you are heading for a significant amount of change in your life. We’re all pulling for you and know that you’ll bounce back just fine and be the better for it. As Michael Pollan pointed out in Omnivores dilemma, an animal’s (chicken for instance) “happiness” is achieved by allowing it to express its “chicken-ness.” I can imagine that your circumstances in MD were not very conducive to allowing you to express your “KMO-ness.” I was very encouraged to hear that you are making some changes. Change doesn’t come easy though, but I know you’ve got the fortitude to make it through and come out better than before. I hope you can bring chickens back into your life as well. They’ve made me a different man in the 6 months I’ve had them.

Keep us all updated as things unfold and let us know if you have any needs that we can help with.

Happy New Year! (Only two more left, right?) LOL

Toucan Sanctuary

I’ve not managed to make it through any of his other presentations in the past, and found this one much more accessible (maybe he’ll think that’s a bad thing).:-)

Especially liked the discussion of “surrender” at the end. Did you recognise the parallel to much of the Buddha’s teachings? Certainly sounded a lot like quite a few of the Western Theravadan teachers I’ve listened to.

Thanks again.

brilliant philosophy!

Dr. Stanley definitely has some good things to say. She has a lot in common with the more spiritual side of your much appreciated guest/topic range: Terrence McKenna, Neil Kramer et al. However, I can’t get with something I get from both her and your upcoming guest, Charles Eisenstein, that the suffering of the sufferers is “part of a plan,” etc. Given all that this culture has done and is presently doing to human beings and life on this planet I can’t get with the view that its all part of a purpose.
I’ll repost this to the grow report forum.

Frank replied with:

Hello,

KMO requested that I respond to your request for the 5 species of
mushrooms I recommended. Actually, as far as I can ascertain without going back and listening to the interview, I believe I recommended three species.

They are:

The elm oyster mushroom (Hypsizigus ulmaris)
The tree oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus)
The King Stropharia mushroom (Stropharia rugosoannulata)

You can get mycelium for all of these from Paul’s website at
http://www.fungi.com.

Good luck!

-Franklyn B. Aragona

Frank replied with:

Hello,

KMO requested that I respond to your request for the 5 species of
mushrooms I recommended. Actually, as far as I can ascertain without going back and listening to the interview, I believe I recommended three species.

They are:

The elm oyster mushroom (Hypsizigus ulmaris)
The tree oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus)
The King Stropharia mushroom (Stropharia rugosoannulata)

You can get mycelium for all of these from Paul’s website at
http://www.fungi.com.

Good luck!

-Franklyn B. Aragona

Will you be posting the top 5 mushroom varieties/species list that were recommended by Frank on this episode? Also wanted to remind you about putting Stametes’ book, “Mycelium Running”, on your Amazon list.

Will you be posting the top 5 mushroom varieties/species list that were recommended by Frank on this episode? Also wanted to remind you about putting Stametes’ book, “Mycelium Running”, on your Amazon list.

I wonder what the bad germans did in the 30s. Did they continually try to wake people up to the truth with evidence about the Reichstag Fire? What are bad Americans to do today?

I wonder what the bad germans did in the 30s. Did they continually try to wake people up to the truth with evidence about the Reichstag Fire? What are bad Americans to do today?

…I’d guide your inference in the following rant:
As you know, 9-11 is the justification for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and the on-going slaughter of the illegal “war on terror,” as well as the shredding of the constitution in a war on dissent here at home. Furthering the exposure of the blatant, proven lies of 9-11 is the only responsible/moral thing to do if you’ve allowed yourself to admit the emperor’s nudity. I’m sure it was a real avoidance-provoking drag for some “good Germans” to confront the status quo in Germany in the 30s. Most of your listeners, I would wager, can see the naked emperor of 9/11 as they do with all sorts of “hot topics” discussed on your podcast. I think you owe yourself and your audiance a better show on this topic. There are plenty of 9-11 truth folks who aren’t stereotypical loathed “conspiracy theory fanatic nut-jobs” who have a lot of credible things to say about this issue (and issues about this issue) who would willingly participate. Giving the folks featured on episode 170 a platform is unfortunate and not what I expected from the c-realm.

As a recovering Protestant and a true fan of you and your show, confrontation like this is very unpleasant for me. Hence I hid in my ellipse. Sorry.

…I’d guide your inference in the following rant:
As you know, 9-11 is the justification for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and the on-going slaughter of the illegal “war on terror,” as well as the shredding of the constitution in a war on dissent here at home. Furthering the exposure of the blatant, proven lies of 9-11 is the only responsible/moral thing to do if you’ve allowed yourself to admit the emperor’s nudity. I’m sure it was a real avoidance-provoking drag for some “good Germans” to confront the status quo in Germany in the 30s. Most of your listeners, I would wager, can see the naked emperor of 9/11 as they do with all sorts of “hot topics” discussed on your podcast. I think you owe yourself and your audiance a better show on this topic. There are plenty of 9-11 truth folks who aren’t stereotypical loathed “conspiracy theory fanatic nut-jobs” who have a lot of credible things to say about this issue (and issues about this issue) who would willingly participate. Giving the folks featured on episode 170 a platform is unfortunate and not what I expected from the c-realm.

As a recovering Protestant and a true fan of you and your show, confrontation like this is very unpleasant for me. Hence I hid in my ellipse. Sorry.

What comes after the ellipse, as far as I can make out, is that your crediblity is diminshed by your association with those who willfully ignore solid evidence of US complicity in the attacks of 9/11.

I’m just interpreting, not suggesting that your credibility is diminished.

What comes after the ellipse, as far as I can make out, is that your crediblity is diminshed by your association with those who willfully ignore solid evidence of US complicity in the attacks of 9/11.

I’m just interpreting, not suggesting that your credibility is diminished.

Man, I am worn out. If I’m supposed to know what comes after the ellipse then you’ve over-estimated my inferential powers.

Man, I am worn out. If I’m supposed to know what comes after the ellipse then you’ve over-estimated my inferential powers.

Stating “because I just don’t believe it” etc. in the face of the facts of the WTC 1,2 and 7 collapses does not a counter-argument make. Referring to a story, which has been proven to be false, just because it comes from the government and the mainstream corporate media doesn’t either.

Kuntsler’s straw-man arguments and 2nd-grade level denial regarding 9/11 is beyond pathetic. Perhaps it’s his dysfunctional way of dealing with the fact that there are folks who try to dismiss his (very credible) analysis of the suburban status-quo with equal childishness.

The real slippery slope, the real credibility problem you, KMO, have with this topic does not come from associating yourself with those who point out the overwhelming evidence that 9-11 was an inside job….

Stating “because I just don’t believe it” etc. in the face of the facts of the WTC 1,2 and 7 collapses does not a counter-argument make. Referring to a story, which has been proven to be false, just because it comes from the government and the mainstream corporate media doesn’t either.

Kuntsler’s straw-man arguments and 2nd-grade level denial regarding 9/11 is beyond pathetic. Perhaps it’s his dysfunctional way of dealing with the fact that there are folks who try to dismiss his (very credible) analysis of the suburban status-quo with equal childishness.

The real slippery slope, the real credibility problem you, KMO, have with this topic does not come from associating yourself with those who point out the overwhelming evidence that 9-11 was an inside job….

Sorry, , that Jensen guy sounded like a total tool, a slack-jawed starry-eyed dreamer who in college probably majored in Gross Definitional Conflation and did his thesis on “rendering words useless through horrible and sloppy application.” He’s the kind that make all the good works other do sound pitiable . . . just by endorsing them.

Examples? Okay, how about his take (a constant refrain) on saving the “planet.” Sorry, Derrick, the planet is just a spinning, wobbly rock made slightly less wobbly by another spinning rock nearby. Despite your insistence on the destructive power of “Western culture” (another term you so badly conflate that it is rendered all but meaningless) we don’t have the firepower to blow this planet to smithereens. It has seen extinctions on its biosphere before, and will again, all without threatening its mindless spinning and wobbling.

We do have to worry about preserving the exact existing parameters of the planet’s biosphere, but not to save the salmon or the toads — to save our sorry asses.

Oh, and it’s not “Western culture” (according to Derrick, anyone with a car and a tie) that should be regarded as the threat. I just finished reading Peter Ward’s The Call of Distant Mammoths. Those non-Western native friends Derrick claims dwelt peacefully in the N. American paradise for 12.5 millenia should be able to show him a wooly mammoth — oh, wait, no, they drove those beasts into extinction 9,000 years ago, along with every other mega-fauna species native to the continent!!! Oopsie-daisy.

Thanks, , for at least trying to steer him toward realizing that lashing out against corporate misdeeds (not “capitalist,” another gross conflation of his) is directly akin to gut-punching a greeter at WalMart. Those Nigerian “resistance” fighters he so greatly admired in the interview don’t mind that truth. Why should he?

I will cut him some slack, in that he was tired and an admitted introvert. Some people write well but speak appallingly. If I find more such non-sense in his books, though. . . .

In the meantime, he made my future LJ rant list. Don’t worry; he’s far from alone. Conflation is proving to be a ripe field practiced by many!

Sorry, , that Jensen guy sounded like a total tool, a slack-jawed starry-eyed dreamer who in college probably majored in Gross Definitional Conflation and did his thesis on “rendering words useless through horrible and sloppy application.” He’s the kind that make all the good works other do sound pitiable . . . just by endorsing them.

Examples? Okay, how about his take (a constant refrain) on saving the “planet.” Sorry, Derrick, the planet is just a spinning, wobbly rock made slightly less wobbly by another spinning rock nearby. Despite your insistence on the destructive power of “Western culture” (another term you so badly conflate that it is rendered all but meaningless) we don’t have the firepower to blow this planet to smithereens. It has seen extinctions on its biosphere before, and will again, all without threatening its mindless spinning and wobbling.

We do have to worry about preserving the exact existing parameters of the planet’s biosphere, but not to save the salmon or the toads — to save our sorry asses.

Oh, and it’s not “Western culture” (according to Derrick, anyone with a car and a tie) that should be regarded as the threat. I just finished reading Peter Ward’s The Call of Distant Mammoths. Those non-Western native friends Derrick claims dwelt peacefully in the N. American paradise for 12.5 millenia should be able to show him a wooly mammoth — oh, wait, no, they drove those beasts into extinction 9,000 years ago, along with every other mega-fauna species native to the continent!!! Oopsie-daisy.

Thanks, , for at least trying to steer him toward realizing that lashing out against corporate misdeeds (not “capitalist,” another gross conflation of his) is directly akin to gut-punching a greeter at WalMart. Those Nigerian “resistance” fighters he so greatly admired in the interview don’t mind that truth. Why should he?

I will cut him some slack, in that he was tired and an admitted introvert. Some people write well but speak appallingly. If I find more such non-sense in his books, though. . . .

In the meantime, he made my future LJ rant list. Don’t worry; he’s far from alone. Conflation is proving to be a ripe field practiced by many!

I’d greatly appreciate hearing at least a paraphrasing of what they had to say about their differences.

I’d greatly appreciate hearing at least a paraphrasing of what they had to say about their differences.

While I enjoyed the interview and the impassioned author, I was left with an empty feeling afterward. I disagree that individuals cannot make a difference. It was Ghandi that advised people to “live the change they want to see.” Living simple is not about offsetting corporate demagoguery, it is about spreading a new meme that is not cluttered with the garbage of the consumer culture. It has taken many generations to reach the point where we are now and it will take many to get us where we need to be. We must uncluter our consciousness and tune into a reality that will take us were we want to be. I am not convinced that we cannot go on beyond peak oil. I disagree on the whole that a malthusian correction is in the making. I have seen myself what the land can provide if people are willing to work with it instead of against it. I have seen meat and milk made with grass, all provided for by the sun. I have seen vegetables spring from my garden with no chemicals what so ever. All it takes is effort. The green revolution did provide for an explosion in production, however production would have followed demand anyway. Who is to say if chemical fertilizers were not implemented that we would not have been able to keep up with population increases. Also why is this green revolution always linked with the population boom. What I would argue is that the efficiencies in agriculture only served to move people away from rural agrarian lifestyles to industrial serfdom. I would argue that the reverse could take place as well. We may be looking at a future of less imbedded energy to use in agricultural. Perhaps we will have a reverse industrial revolution in which people move back to the agrarian. Never the less I have seen what we can do with biodynamic and organic agriculture. If managed holistically we can support a lot of people. We just may not be able to blog and keep up with what the machine wants. We must begin to use the talisman that Ghandi gave. We must begin to think about what is good for others as well as out self. Implement positive mutual feedback loops. We must have hope, and stop staring at our reflection in the pool of oil. It is time to think of others.

Agapefarmer

While I enjoyed the interview and the impassioned author, I was left with an empty feeling afterward. I disagree that individuals cannot make a difference. It was Ghandi that advised people to “live the change they want to see.” Living simple is not about offsetting corporate demagoguery, it is about spreading a new meme that is not cluttered with the garbage of the consumer culture. It has taken many generations to reach the point where we are now and it will take many to get us where we need to be. We must uncluter our consciousness and tune into a reality that will take us were we want to be. I am not convinced that we cannot go on beyond peak oil. I disagree on the whole that a malthusian correction is in the making. I have seen myself what the land can provide if people are willing to work with it instead of against it. I have seen meat and milk made with grass, all provided for by the sun. I have seen vegetables spring from my garden with no chemicals what so ever. All it takes is effort. The green revolution did provide for an explosion in production, however production would have followed demand anyway. Who is to say if chemical fertilizers were not implemented that we would not have been able to keep up with population increases. Also why is this green revolution always linked with the population boom. What I would argue is that the efficiencies in agriculture only served to move people away from rural agrarian lifestyles to industrial serfdom. I would argue that the reverse could take place as well. We may be looking at a future of less imbedded energy to use in agricultural. Perhaps we will have a reverse industrial revolution in which people move back to the agrarian. Never the less I have seen what we can do with biodynamic and organic agriculture. If managed holistically we can support a lot of people. We just may not be able to blog and keep up with what the machine wants. We must begin to use the talisman that Ghandi gave. We must begin to think about what is good for others as well as out self. Implement positive mutual feedback loops. We must have hope, and stop staring at our reflection in the pool of oil. It is time to think of others.

Agapefarmer

Hey KMO
Finally got Derrick onto the c-realm! Yeah! Fantastic!

I’ve been listening to your pod-casts for a while, and some of your guests have been OK/interesting, but authors like Derrick take it into depth that I really want to hear on the C-Realm. Please get him back on, on a regular basis.

I guess I’ve done a lot of looking/searching for meaning as I grokked peak oil 12 years ago and have been an activist at both local and national level ever since.

The more I do this, the more I realise that ‘Peak Everything’ (peak oil, peak soil, peak food, peak water, resource depletion, the 6th Mass Extinction, climate change, etc) is only the powerful symptom of an underlying reality: we have a cultural crisis. Apart from a few remnant indigenous cultures, the rest of us are in a dominant culture that is insane (disconnected from physical reality), and is pathological and suicidal. “We” (so-called ‘civlised’) have a crisis of consciousness. “We” are afflicted with a spiritual illness with a physical vector: Wetiko
http://www.consumercide.com/cc/wetiko.html

I sense that delving into the conciousness of so-called ‘civilised’ humans at this time of the Great Unravelling could go off in all sorts of directions, mostly probably about polishing the brasswork and arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

If you wanted to do that and stay in denial, I’d be heading off elsewhere for deeper podcasts to download and listen to while I garden. The more you choose to dig deeper, the more I appreciate your endeavours and come back for more! Keep it up KMO!

Regards
Ted (Nelson, NZ)

Hey KMO
Finally got Derrick onto the c-realm! Yeah! Fantastic!

I’ve been listening to your pod-casts for a while, and some of your guests have been OK/interesting, but authors like Derrick take it into depth that I really want to hear on the C-Realm. Please get him back on, on a regular basis.

I guess I’ve done a lot of looking/searching for meaning as I grokked peak oil 12 years ago and have been an activist at both local and national level ever since.

The more I do this, the more I realise that ‘Peak Everything’ (peak oil, peak soil, peak food, peak water, resource depletion, the 6th Mass Extinction, climate change, etc) is only the powerful symptom of an underlying reality: we have a cultural crisis. Apart from a few remnant indigenous cultures, the rest of us are in a dominant culture that is insane (disconnected from physical reality), and is pathological and suicidal. “We” (so-called ‘civlised’) have a crisis of consciousness. “We” are afflicted with a spiritual illness with a physical vector: Wetiko
http://www.consumercide.com/cc/wetiko.html

I sense that delving into the conciousness of so-called ‘civilised’ humans at this time of the Great Unravelling could go off in all sorts of directions, mostly probably about polishing the brasswork and arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

If you wanted to do that and stay in denial, I’d be heading off elsewhere for deeper podcasts to download and listen to while I garden. The more you choose to dig deeper, the more I appreciate your endeavours and come back for more! Keep it up KMO!

Regards
Ted (Nelson, NZ)

Just went to the podcast site, and found a new interview with John Taylor Gatto (http://jari.podbean.com/2009/09/01/interview-with-john-taylor-gatto/)

I don’t know if you’ve read Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, but it’s very worthwhile, even if it leaves you fuming, as it did me.

I read it quite a while back, and it completely changed the way I looked at my education in American schools. The text is available online at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/ although I suggest checking a copy out of the library since it’s hard to read a long book online.

Just went to the podcast site, and found a new interview with John Taylor Gatto (http://jari.podbean.com/2009/09/01/interview-with-john-taylor-gatto/)

I don’t know if you’ve read Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, but it’s very worthwhile, even if it leaves you fuming, as it did me.

I read it quite a while back, and it completely changed the way I looked at my education in American schools. The text is available online at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/ although I suggest checking a copy out of the library since it’s hard to read a long book online.

I sent her an invite a year or more ago and never heard anything back.

I sent her an invite a year or more ago and never heard anything back.

On a related note, I’m currently in the middle of reading The Shock Doctrine, and I think you should try to interview Naomi Klein. In addition to the topics covered by that book, I think she might have some interesting things to say on some of the less mainstream C-Realm topics (drug tourism and regulation, corporate memes, peak oil, etc.).

On a related note, I’m currently in the middle of reading The Shock Doctrine, and I think you should try to interview Naomi Klein. In addition to the topics covered by that book, I think she might have some interesting things to say on some of the less mainstream C-Realm topics (drug tourism and regulation, corporate memes, peak oil, etc.).

http://jari.podbean.com/2008/06/17/interview-with-morris-berman/

http://jari.podbean.com/2008/06/17/interview-with-morris-berman/

Well, they both responded, and it started a bit of an exchange to which I just added:

Hi Derrick and Charles,

I told the person who asked the question that set this exchange in motion that I would post your answers to my blog, but after thinking it over for a few days, I’ve decided not to.

In our yet-to-be-aired discussion, Derrick, you talked about doing what your unique gifts have equipped you to do and about doing what gets you off. My gifts and proclivities involve mediating spoken word encounters, and I tend to get myself in trouble in a text-based medium, so I’m going to let that blog thread die a quiet and dignified death.

If either of you want to share the exchange with a wider audience via your blogs or forums I have no objections.

Thank you again for your participation on the program, and stay well.

-KMO

So, that’s as far as I plan to follow this thread. Thanks for listening, and stay well.

Well, they both responded, and it started a bit of an exchange to which I just added:

Hi Derrick and Charles,

I told the person who asked the question that set this exchange in motion that I would post your answers to my blog, but after thinking it over for a few days, I’ve decided not to.

In our yet-to-be-aired discussion, Derrick, you talked about doing what your unique gifts have equipped you to do and about doing what gets you off. My gifts and proclivities involve mediating spoken word encounters, and I tend to get myself in trouble in a text-based medium, so I’m going to let that blog thread die a quiet and dignified death.

If either of you want to share the exchange with a wider audience via your blogs or forums I have no objections.

Thank you again for your participation on the program, and stay well.

-KMO

So, that’s as far as I plan to follow this thread. Thanks for listening, and stay well.

Thanks, KMO. I couldn’t find the “Living Heroes: Morris Bermen” link. Could you post it again please? Thanks again.

Thanks, KMO. I couldn’t find the “Living Heroes: Morris Bermen” link. Could you post it again please? Thanks again.

I have not yet finished Ascent of Humanity, but I get the impression that Charles sees the unworkability and contradictions of our present cultural modus giving way in the near future to something more sustainable and friendly to human psychological needs while Derrick sees human civilization as irredeemably flawed with the only sustainable adjustment being a dramatic die back of the human population and a return to a hunter gather existence.

I’ll send your question and my answer to both Derrick and Charles, and if either of them respond I’ll post their comments in this space.

I have not yet finished Ascent of Humanity, but I get the impression that Charles sees the unworkability and contradictions of our present cultural modus giving way in the near future to something more sustainable and friendly to human psychological needs while Derrick sees human civilization as irredeemably flawed with the only sustainable adjustment being a dramatic die back of the human population and a return to a hunter gather existence.

I’ll send your question and my answer to both Derrick and Charles, and if either of them respond I’ll post their comments in this space.

Since both are part of this podcast I though I’d mention this.
I’m a fan of both authors. I mentioned Ascent of Humanity on Derrick’s web-forum with a link to the free on-line version of the book stating that it was on the same page with what Derrick wrote about. The response I got from fellow forum participants and Derrick himself was that the overall premise of the book was “highly anthropocentric.” I’ve asked for an explanation and as of yet haven’t really been given one. To me, Derrick’s books are awesome, as is Assent of Humanity. Can anyone clue me in to what I’m missing? Thanks.

Since both are part of this podcast I though I’d mention this.
I’m a fan of both authors. I mentioned Ascent of Humanity on Derrick’s web-forum with a link to the free on-line version of the book stating that it was on the same page with what Derrick wrote about. The response I got from fellow forum participants and Derrick himself was that the overall premise of the book was “highly anthropocentric.” I’ve asked for an explanation and as of yet haven’t really been given one. To me, Derrick’s books are awesome, as is Assent of Humanity. Can anyone clue me in to what I’m missing? Thanks.

I’ve been transcribing this episode for KMO. While checking the spelling of “Phil Beidler,” I happened to run across a discussion between Joe and two of his friends:

The Ghost In The Hologram at http://www.swans.com/library/art11/prjsjoeb.html.

It dates back to 2005, but you’ll see the relevance.

I’m going to check out the video to MP3 sites.

I don’t sit at my computer any more than necessary. I now use Spesoft Free Text to MP3 Speaker to convert text from blog postings, etc., to MP3s that I can walk around and listen to. It’s freeware, and seems to work pretty well. I’ve slowed the playback a bit, and I’m getting used to Microsoft Sam’s voice.

I think hearing is more powerful (more primordial?) than reading. Humans listened long before they had anything to read.

I’ve been transcribing this episode for KMO. While checking the spelling of “Phil Beidler,” I happened to run across a discussion between Joe and two of his friends:

The Ghost In The Hologram at http://www.swans.com/library/art11/prjsjoeb.html.

It dates back to 2005, but you’ll see the relevance.

I’m going to check out the video to MP3 sites.

I don’t sit at my computer any more than necessary. I now use Spesoft Free Text to MP3 Speaker to convert text from blog postings, etc., to MP3s that I can walk around and listen to. It’s freeware, and seems to work pretty well. I’ve slowed the playback a bit, and I’m getting used to Microsoft Sam’s voice.

I think hearing is more powerful (more primordial?) than reading. Humans listened long before they had anything to read.

The story is derivative (or maybe it’s a conscious homage to Phillip K. Dick, who knows?), but the odd relationship between Sam, the lone worker at an H3 mining operation on the dark side of the moon, and his solicitous companion GERTY (who flashes little emoticons on a tiny screen to indicate an approximation of mood) keeps the film interesting long after you’ve figured out what’s going on. Check it out.

The story is derivative (or maybe it’s a conscious homage to Phillip K. Dick, who knows?), but the odd relationship between Sam, the lone worker at an H3 mining operation on the dark side of the moon, and his solicitous companion GERTY (who flashes little emoticons on a tiny screen to indicate an approximation of mood) keeps the film interesting long after you’ve figured out what’s going on. Check it out.

One of the best topical shows I’ve heard in a while, bar none. A high caliber conversation between Gwynne Dyer and John Horgan is a rare treat, and what me and my media cohorts would term, “a Great Get.”

My only critique is that you should “ID” the Dwight D. Eisenhower speech within the show, or in the notes:
http://www.archive.org/details/defarewell

Mr. Horgan has a sporadic video blog appearance with a Santa Fe, NM Science writer named George Johnson (whom I admire) on Bloggingheads.tv

Thanks kmo.

One of the best topical shows I’ve heard in a while, bar none. A high caliber conversation between Gwynne Dyer and John Horgan is a rare treat, and what me and my media cohorts would term, “a Great Get.”

My only critique is that you should “ID” the Dwight D. Eisenhower speech within the show, or in the notes:
http://www.archive.org/details/defarewell

Mr. Horgan has a sporadic video blog appearance with a Santa Fe, NM Science writer named George Johnson (whom I admire) on Bloggingheads.tv

Thanks kmo.

In Regard to “The Long-Term Budget Outlook,” the Director of the Congressional Budget Office blogs that:

“Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run.”

http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=328

In Regard to “The Long-Term Budget Outlook,” the Director of the Congressional Budget Office blogs that:

“Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run.”

http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=328

http://guruphiliac.blogspot.com/

http://guruphiliac.blogspot.com/