Here it is. New Year's Eve. Again.
Here's a short podcast greeting for the good people of the C-Realm. Thank you all, and Happy New Year!
CRV241
When you're done freaking out, there is work to be done.
KMO has been listening to people talk about the impending collapse of industrial civilization for the past decade. The Peak Oil story, while still of major importance, isn't as all-encompassing an analysis as we need to navigate our way into the future. Christopher Harrison kindly steps in to help KMO keep his eyes on the prize in terms of the unsustainability of industrial civilization and the limited shelf-life of our current way of living.
525: Challenging Corruption
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:03 — 37.8MB)
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KMO talks with Dr. Dan Freilich, a Navy veteran and VA doctor who hopes to defeat Vermont's incumbent Representative, Peter Welch, in the upcoming primary election. For Dr. Dan, every problem and every issue that progressives care about comes back to campaign finance reform. He has vowed not to accept campaign contributions from corporations or from special interests of any kind. He says he'll drop out of the race if Representative Welch will make the same pledge. The conversation ranges over many topics, including the F-35 fighter, the opiate addiction crisis, the role of lobbyists and the unworkability of throwing up one's hands and declaring the entire system to be hopelessly corrupt.
524: Big Data Little Privacy
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:04 — 38.1MB)
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KMO talks with B. J. Mendelson, the author of Social Media is Bullshit and Privacy: And How to Get It Back. Is privacy a lost cause? Is there any way to swim against the current of big tech companies collecting, collating and profiting off of the enormous amount of personal data that we generate with the use of our handy electronic gizmos? Is there any point in even trying? If corporations do things that are creepy-yet-legal, do we have a leg to stand on? What role does artificial intelligence play in the future of privacy? Should Facebook pay us for the use of our data? If so, how much could we reasonably expect to get for it? Could this serve as an alternative to UBI? All this plus jokes in this week's C-Realm Podcast.
523: Stet
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:25 — 30.1MB)
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The profession of writing books has changed in recent decades, and now James Howard Kunstler, the author of many books both fiction and non-fiction, published by mainstream publishers, is relying increasingly on blogging and reader support through Patreon to pay the bills. Jim talks about his days at Rolling Stone and the lofty expectations he had for his first novel and what it was like to have 8 published novels under his belt and still be waiting tables. Later, Jim and KMO compare notes on their disillusionment with the behavior of the Blue Tribe in the Trump years. Jim is a registered Democrat, and KMO is a recovering libertarian, and neither of them was in a position to be disappointed by the Red Tribe's failure to ride the reality bus. Not so with the Blue Tribe.
The new weekly comic strip that KMO mentioned at the end of the episode can be found here:
https://www.cfpup.org/comic/probing-questions/