in a life long long ago(mid 1970's), I fed many sheep and cattle with rectangular bales, and couldn't understand why the farmer next door had huge round bales that were difficult to handle. I could understand the speed of making them, but at the other end, it just didn't make sense.

but the rain comes, or so we hope.
All the best to you Don, tough times ahead, but it'll come.
A famous Australian poem.

Stories are appearing in the papers here about the Killer Drought in Texas. It seems to be much worse than the drought in California a few years ago, and there is some thought that global warming could be turning west Texas into more of a desert that cannot be reversed by sporadic rains. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

...it's Thursday.

Juxtaposition of time and space resultant from ridiculously high temperatures and ridiculously low precipitation. Who says us country boys don't understand relativity...

Distrust anyone who wants to teach you something.

the first predictor of peak oil.

I would note that this quote was in the 1970's but it just as well could have been yesterday:

"I was in New York in the 30's. I had a box seat at the depression. I can assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of monetary reasons. We had manpower and abundant raw materials. Yet we shut the country down. We're doing the same kind of thing now but with a different material outlook. We are not in the position we were in 1929-30 with regard to the future. Then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it's not. We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It's unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can't possibly happen again. You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered."

However, Hubbert was a supreme optimist and he saw a chance if the economy could transform itself. His prescription:

"We are not starting from zero," he emphasizes. "We have an enormous amount of existing technical knowledge. It's just a matter of putting it all together. We still have great flexibility but our maneuverability will diminish with time."

"Society must be made stable. This means abandoning two axioms of our culture . . . the work ethic and the idea that growth is the normal state of affairs. Growth is an aberration. For most of human history the population doubled only once every 32,000 years. Now it's down to 35 years. That is dangerous. No biologic population can double more than a few times without getting seriously out of bounds. I think the world is seriously overpopulated right now. There can be no possible solutions to the world's problems that do not involve stabilization of the world's population and as a corollary the worlds economies."

"Work is becoming increasingly unimportant. It is conceivable that the future work week might be on the order of 10 hours or less. Indeed, because production will have to be limited by increasingly limited mineral resources, a reduced workweek is inevitable. Most employment now is merely pushing paper around. The actual work needed to keep a stable society running has become a small fraction of available manpower."

"The key to making this cultural alteration is to come up with a limitless supply of cheap energy, solar power, and no more technological breakthroughs are needed before it can be made universally available."

I would note that the persuit of free energy is precisely becoming the policy of the United States.

Now I want that 10 hour work week.

I did extensive research on the Dust Bowl for my novel Plain Language, about a family struggling to survive on the Colorado Plains during the drought and biggest ecological disaster our country has faced. Your plight had eerie echoes of those hard times. I would like to send you a copy of the novel. You can contact me through www.barbarawrightbooks.com. There are also historical photos of the Dust Bowl you might find interesting. Best of luck.

After Dubya Dubya Two, America transformed from a largely agricultural economy to a raging industrial furnace. The stoppage of tank and airplane and bullet manufacturing took a couple of hard years to unwind, but it soon led to a very consciously constructed consumer/manufacturing society. All stops were removed.

The movers and shakers of that era purposely set out to hold up the Joneses as the American Dream, and whip everyone along to constantly try to keep up with them -- house in the suburbs, TV, car, kids in college, annual vacations, and all the latest and brightest products America could churn out. And jobs, jobs, jobs making all this stuff.

It went on for six decades, and then Dubya Dubya Bush (who cost us multiple times what Dubya Dubya Two ever did) presided over the burnout phase of that manic consumer economy that was actually based on debt-fueled growth.

Debt is a virus, you see, and it kills its host.

An economy that had originally provided good jobs for every man jack so he could buy all the shiny things America manufactured slowly morphed over the decades into the outsourcing of jobs to coolies overseas who would make the same product for a lot less. That eventually included everyone up the economic scale, including engineers, doctors, and rocket scientists.

All that money saved accrued to Wall Street, and moved into international circles. Offshore more and more. Interwoven and interconnected with debt-fueled money-making projects worldwide. If American taxes wanted a taste, well the whole scheme was moved offshore so no taxes needed to be paid.

The American economy increasingly became Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) after Reagan, and this increasingly became an international arena, not fundamentally connected to the day to day American economy.

During Dubya Dubya Bush's two terms, he presided over the looting of the Treasury and the earnings of the next generation or two as well. He took that treasure and firmly bet America's future -- it's economic survival -- overseas. He wagered everything on America winning at globalizing the world economy under its thumb, and winning some tasty resource wars over yonder, in lands where swarthy people live. Those wars were to be highly lucrative ventures from the get go.

After sixty years of chasing the Joneses, manufacturing is long gone, and mad consumption eventually burned itself out, burned right to the core about mid-2007, and it is never coming back. We have entered the post-consumption stage of empire's collapse. People are paying down debts, and saving about 7% on top of that, according to the recent news. They know its over. So does Wall Street.

So do the Feds.

At this point, the Federal Government has no reason to do much of anything for Americans except keep them in line, and keep them from costing Wall Street any progress on its international agenda, the agenda that America's survival depends on.

At this point, America's actual citizens, the point 3 billion of us walking around, are just a labor pool to Wall Street and the Government they own. And they need we, the people like they need a threesome with a pair of porcupines. Having taken our jobs, they now intend to take any equity we built up while we had jobs so they can use that equity on their globalization and war agenda.

They simply have to win that thing. The alternative . . .

At this point, there's no need for Americans to do any work except serve one another drinks and fast food and refinance one another's mortgages. Manufacturing is an overseas arena. Finance is an overseas arena. Empire is an overseas arena. America's future rides on what America accomplished overseas, not at home.

America's government is an overseas government, because that's where America's future has been wagered. The only measure of success for Wall Street and its Washington subsidiary is to push America's FIRE economy to the tippy top of a thoroughly globalized economy. They've got to win at that. Failing at that will be the most indescribable disaster of a financial collapse the human mind is capable of imagining.

So America's had its run, a good run, between the Dubya Dubyas. Sixty years of being the biggest, richest, baddest, mofo of an economy this planet has ever witnessed.

But it is really most seriously and sincerely over. The very forces set in motion back in the post-WWII decade proceeded to flourish, feed on themselves, and finally burn out, go up in credit-driven flames right down to the last phony mortgage-backed security. Since mid-2007, everyone's just standing around licking the icing bowl, but it's becoming very apparent that we had our cake, and we ate it, too.

Back in Dubya Dubya Two, there were a couple of popular phrases. One was, "He bet the farm . . ." meaning someone went all in on one direction, make or break, get there or bust. The other was, "He bought the farm . . ." a reference to being killed in combat, and the GI insurance that went to the folks back home paid off the family mortgage. It was a euphemism for death.

Dubya Dubya Bush 'bet the American farm' on winning at empire building. That has not worked out, and America has probably 'bought the farm' at this point.

Those 'green shoots' you keep hearing about - that's our representative Republic pushing up daisies.

"Any manifest error on the part of an enemy should make us suspect some stratagem."
~ Niccoló Machiavelli

I recently watched the latest version of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" with Keanu Reeves playing the alien who comes to earth to make the determination of whether humanity should be spared.

He has an interesting conversation with an earlier transplant the aliens sent to spend a full human lifetime in a human body for research purposes. He tells Reeves:

"It's funny. They seem to know what's happening to them. They sense it, yet they don't seem to be able to do anything about it."

That line really stuck in my craw.

Yep, the Oil Age is coming to an end, like the Bronze Age and the Stone age before it. Each time, the humans usurp their main resource, trash up their local environment (including decimating their food sources). But this time the local environment is the whole planet.

The other interesting line in the movie is when the heroine screams in exasperation at Reeves, "But you said you came to SAVE us!"

To which Reaves calmly replies, "I said - I came to save THE EARTH."

So there may be a redemption, not a redeemer, but a natural process similar to other mass-extinction events the earth has experienced.

Most likely such a process will save the earth.

As for us - we'll have to rebuild, just like after the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. So far, we have managed to repopulate and find new technologies to rebuild our social structures upon.

It will be interesting to see how well we manage this time.

I did inhale.

...what's the point? In the end, them's that can will and them's that can't won't. Them's that can are having the hardest time now; them's that can't are on easy street now. Things change; it's best to be able.

www.iauthorbooks.com
http://iauthorbooks.blogspot.com/

...so I offer this: we have arrived at a critical juncture where skills in making things; forming, machining, sawing, hammering, shaping, thinking/problem solving, etc. are no longer valued. This illusion of reality is crashing, albeit in slow motion, but crashing never the less. These "captains" of finance/corporature are no-nothings with no real skills in the real world. They are hollow vessels and will go the way of the nothing. Those of us with real skills will be the ones whose value will once again be discovered and valued. We are the ones who will make things of intrinsic value once again. Our world will never be the same again and we'll be the better for it. This is my positive view and still possible, but by no means guaranteed. And, I'd have no problem at all if we just disappeared along with the many species that preceded us.

www.iauthorbooks.com
http://iauthorbooks.blogspot.com/