316: Peak Blame
KMO welcomes Mark Robinowitz of OilEmpire.us back to the C-Realm Podcast to discuss why both the mainstream political left as well as the right in the United States cannot address the demands of Peak Oil in a realistic way. Republicans have rebuked Navy Secretary Ray Mabus for attempting to ween the Navy off of fossil fuels because they see finding alternatives to petroleum as a Democratic partisan issue. Established environmental and social justice organizations are still holding onto unrealistic Green Technology and Green Capitalism paradigms and have yet to come to terms with the fact that the project of the 21st Century will be figuring out how to equitably distribute a shrinking pie. One thing unlikely to be in short supply as the realities of diminishing fossil fuel reserves make themselves unmistakable: blame. Mark hopes that we can achieve Peak Blame sooner rather than later and get on with the grown-up work of figuring out how best to deploy our remaining energy resources.315: Restoring the Trivium
KMO welcomes Jan Irvan, host of the Gnostic Media Podcast, and Jarett Sanchez, host of The Next Step Podcast, back to the C-Realm to discuss the Trivium, the bedrock of classical liberal arts education which prepares young minds to be effective critical thinkers and self-directed learners. Jarett helps KMO summarize an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers about how the Trivium mirrors and takes advantage of the stages of childhood cognitive development, and Jan describes why the Trivium is now reserved for elites and systematically denied to the children of the proletariat in compulsory public schooling as a means of social control.314: Peak Atheism
313: Peak Oil & the White “We”
KMO welcomes Jay Smith and Jeff Wilburn to the C-Realm to reflect upon the Age of Limits conference. Jay and Jeff, along with their girlfriends, accounted for most of the African-American conference-goers, and this leads to a discussion of how the on-going Peak Oil conversation is one carried out primarily by whites and, to some extent, aims to preserve white privilege and assumes that whites must take the leadership role in deciding how best to address the challenges of the coming long emergency. Both Jay and Jeff initially found the work of James Howard Kunstler to be valuable but later came to chafe at Jim’s seemingly dismissive attitude about black culture and the supposed failure of African-Americans to assimilate into mainstream society.
Music by Monstah Black.
312- Tools of Adulthood
KMO talks with Jonathan Moll about the spread of ideas, religion, the potential benefits and pitfalls of psychedelic plants and chemicals and the harms that the Drug War does to civil society and to the ability of people raised on prohibitionist propaganda to think clearly and behave like adults. The show begins and ends with reference to the irresponsible and opportunistic comments made to the news media by Armando Aguilar, president of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, in which he conflates MDPV (sometimes sold legally as “Bath Salts”) with LSD and asserts that the assailant in the recent cannibalistic assault there acted under the influence of “a new form of LSD.” Music by Andrew Woods.