Everyone Poops Debunked

Humanity moves forward through the progress of ideas. The more dynamic societies are those that are willing to adopt good new ideas and to test and discard faulty ideas, old or new. Stagnant societies are those that refuse to question old ideas and refuse to consider new ones, be it through entrenched conservatism, or a deficit of intellectual development, or some other developmental issue.

The United States was once a dynamic land, full of new ideas which were widely emulated around the world, but now it has become stagnant and mired in conservatism and internal contradiction, unable to discard faulty ideas or to embrace new ones, while other countries race ahead. National dialogue in the US has become not so much about ideas as about a mysterious substance called bunk: a deliberate sort of nonsense produced for the sake of public posturing. This profusion of bunk in turn attracts much effort to the cause of debunking it. However, unlike the bunk (or, more accurately bunkum) of yesteryear, which could be made to disappear when debunked, this new variety of American bunk only grows stronger and more rampant.

To better understand this magical ability of our contemporary bunk to withstand debunking, I decided to do an experiment. I deliberately chose what should be a very hard target: the little chidren's book by Tarō Gomi Everyone Poops. It tries to set the minds of the little anal retentive prats at ease by showing them that everybody but everybody poops: elephants make gigantic poops, mice little ones, little boys slightly smaller than grown men. Debunking such a powerful conjecture is a tall order, you might think. Not so! It turns out that, like beauty, bunk is in the eye of the beholder, and that it is possible to debunk anything (or fail trying; it doesn't matter which it is because the results are all but indistinguishable).

So what is this mysterious mental substance, bunk? It seems to me that bunk can be defined as pretense of knowledge. In turn, knowledge, for purposes of defining bunk, is a set of ideas (facts, theories, views) held in common. This is not to say that they are common knowledge. In fact, they might be virtually unknown outside of a select group of specialists, but in theory anyone who is sufficiently well-schooled, talented, diligent and has a library card could gain that same understanding given unlimited time and effort.

Human progress has to a large extent been mental progress. We have progressed from widespread reliance on mystification, where we ascribed great magic powers to ethereal, unobservable entities, and postulated a great many “facts” about the world which could be neither proved nor disproved. Now we require that our facts have a basis in observable, measurable reality, that our hypotheses be testable by experiment, and that our conclusions about causality be based on evidence (even if it is the iffy statistical evidence that is considered acceptable in medicine, economics and the social sciences). Say what you will about progress in politics or economics (or lack thereof) but humanity's progress in acquiring ever more powerful and detailed knowledge has been nothing short of astounding. This is especially apparent in the sciences, but even in the humanities it is possible to point to profound new insights. Many things are still unknown to us—we still don't know why aspirin works, and are continually astonished by the behavior of melting glaciers—but overall the realm of what is rationally understood expands continually.

Let us try to be slightly more rigorous in defining common knowledge. In terms of epistemic logic, given some piece of knowledge S, one could have private knowledge: K_AS expresses that A knows S. (K is called the knowledge operator.) Now A walks up to B, and asks him whether he knows S. There are just two possibilities: either B knows S (K_BS) or he doesn't (~K_BS). If he doesn't, then A imparts S to B, and the realm of common knowledge expands: K_AS and K_BS. Not only that, but A knows that B knows S (K_AK_BS) and vice versa (K_BK_AS). Plus, each knows that the other knows that he knows, giving us K_AK_BK_AS and K_BK_AK_BS. There are situations in life when knowing whether someone knows that you know is strategically important, and it is even possible to think of a situation in which your knowledge of whether someone knows whether you know that he knows is somehow pregnant with the possibility of hilarious shenanigans, but under less contrived circumstances it all short-circuits to common knowledge: K_A,BS.

In order for the above scenario to lead to common knowledge, at the outset our B must know that he doesn't know S: K_B~K_BS. There are just two valid states of B's mind: either he knows that he knows S (K_BK_BS), or he knows that he doesn't (K_B~K_BS). If B doesn't know what he knows (~K_BK_Bx) or if he doesn't know that he doesn't know (~K_B~K_Bx) then B must be a mentally challenged individual who is incapable of participating in common knowledge. But B can still remain socially acceptable provided he humbly accepts his ignorance and agrees to defer to A's superior knowledge of S: K_BK_AS. Thus the realm of common knowledge may have many adjuncts: people who are aware of the existence of a certain domain without actually knowing it, or even pretending to. This is typically how we relate to all kinds of specialists, from brain surgeons to auto mechanics to financial advisors.

I italicized the word “imparts” two paragraphs ago because it is important: common knowledge presupposes that the piece of knowledge is communicated accurately and entirely. But suppose that a mentally defective B receives, through some accident, a damaged copy of S (which we will call S'). Perhaps a word got substituted, such as “flat” for “round” in the statement “The Earth is round.” Or perhaps S' came to include a string of gibberish: “...because the Bible says that blah blah blah etc.” Now B thinks that he knows S, but in fact he knows S' (K_BS'). Epistemically speaking, B now inhabits an alternate universe in which S=S'. Our epistemically savvy and knowledgeable friend A realizes this (K_A~K_BS, K_AK_BS') but, being tactful, all he can do is cough politely and look for somebody else to talk to, while B goes off and tells other mental defectives all about S', blithely calling it S, which, by the way, he just discussed with an expert. You see what a travesty this is?

This is the general mechanism by which a piece of knowledge S generates its faulty, incomplete, mangled copy S' within the public imagination. If S is the statement “Humans and other primates share a common genetic ancestor” then S' might be a piece of bunk such as “You are descended from a monkey!” Often the very next move is to generate a piece of counter-bunk ~S' —something like “No, we were pooped out by a Giant Pixie near the end of a seven-day Poopathon!” And now we have two pieces of bunk—S' and ~S', both of which require debunking.

The very first thing that you should do when debunking something is to state matter-of-factly that something is bunk; i.e., “Everybody Poops is bunk.” This is to indicate that you are not looking for a debate on the issue. You are not going to engage in a Socratic dialogue to discover the truth, or to create a new synthesis from a thesis and an antithesis through the application of Hegelian dialectic. Instead, you are looking for a hostile co-dependent relationship with somebody who wants to perpetually uphold the diametrically opposed piece of bunk: “Of course everybody poops, don't be ridiculous!” Such co-dependent relationships are to be found everywhere in the US, but perhaps the prime example is the Republicans and the Democrats, who are always looking for a new piece of bunk about which they could profitably disagree. Somehow we have managed to generate the expectation that where there is bunk there must be anti-bunk, and that they should be served up as “alternative viewpoints” rather than as diametrically opposed ways to exclude a common truth. And so, whenever a climate scientist appears on television and tries to explain global warming to the masses (being forced to dumb down the science, to make it fit for television, until it becomes bunk) there must also appear a climate anti-scientist and serve up some climate anti-bunk: “It's been a cold, snowy winter; therefore, the climate science is wrong.”

The next phase of a debunking onslaught is to declare your targeted piece of bunk “completely wrong” based on a bona fide counterexample. It turns out that evidence can be gathered to contradict any theory. Such evidence may accumulate over time, and eventually give rise to a new theory which either replaces or extends the previous theory, but mostly it's just a minor annoyance. Now, “everybody poops” is a conjecture based on the rather shallow theory that everybody eats, and since what goes in must come out, everybody poops. So, what about the male of the moth detailed in Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex by Olivia Judson? This moth lays its eggs in the ears of bats. When the eggs hatch, there is one male and several females. The male incestuously mates with his sisters, who then fly away to find bats of their own, while the male stays behind and dies. Most interestingly, the male is born without mouth parts, and therefore cannot eat. To paraphrase St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “If a moth will not eat, he shall not poop.” So much for the brave conjecture.

The next phase of a debunking onslaught is an ad hominem attack. What sort of an expert would be qualified to discuss this subject? A “poopologist,” perhaps? One immediately wonders whether the Poopology Department, where this supposed luminary learned his art, was the recipient of any public funding, funding that should perhaps have been better spent on a few widows and orphans or a teeny-tiny counterterrorism campaign. And one cannot help but wonder what his fraternity brothers called him; “the poopmeister,” perhaps? Our poopmeister must have known about the bat moth; why did he withhold such crucial anti-everybody-pooping evidence? Why should we listen to such a person? And so on and so forth.

You might think that my choice of debunking target is frivolous and without merit, but I believe that it fits right in with both the substance and the level of contemporary American public discourse. You may be blissfully unaware of this, but I regret to inform you that there is in certain dimly lit corners of the US a war going on: a war on masturbation. During the last congressional elections one Christine O'Donnell won the Republican nomination for Senator from Delaware. O'Donnell is notorious for her anti-masturbation campaign. Declaring masturbation to be a sin is a good way to warp the minds of the post-pubescent, so that they might grow into the sorts of sexually repressed adults who are fit to serve at the head of the Department of Defense or on the US Supreme Court; but what about the pre-pubescent? Why not go after other bodily functions? Gluttony is already a sin (a mortal one); let us declare defecation a sin as well and go after the anally retentive pre-pubescents? Are you pro-poop or anti-poop? Let's open up the phone lines! Or not.

With the nation's public discourse dominated by dueling bits of bunk, I suggest that you limit your public pronouncements to nonsensical utterances such as “Herp-derp-derp!” And if you feel like picking a side, then order a side of bacon, because it is tasty. It might clog your arteries, but at least it won't clog your mind with bunk.

The Empire Strikes Out

Ramon Tikaram in Gaddafi: A Living Myth

[Update, March 18. The UN Security Council finally passed a resolution to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, with Russia and China abstaining, too late for it to matter. Libya, as a UN member, promptly agreed to enforce it without any foreign help. Libya has undergone political fission, and now there is West Libya with the solid green flag, and East Libya with the stripey one. The Bengazi separatists have been granted their wish: their own internationally recognized state, plus all the sand they can eat. Elsewhere, revolutionary fervor has been tempered somewhat. The US and the EU saved face. Russia and China will get the contracts to rebuilt Libya. Gaddafi and his Jamahiriyyah remain.]

[Auf Deutsch. (Cached) Vielen Dank, Lukas!] 

Tunisia, Egypt, Libya... now, children, one of these things is not like the others. That's right, Libya wasn't, and to a considerable extent still isn't, run by a dictator who happens to be a Western stooge. Say what you want about him, Muammar Gaddafi is a phenomenon. Compared to his inimitable, flamboyant persona, Tunisia's unimpressive Zia El Abidine ben Ali and Egypt's viciously thick Hosni Mubarak are ciphers. Yes they are all dictators, but look at the region and ask yourself: Who isn't? Even the Roman Senate used to elect a dictator in times of trouble; when isn't it a time of trouble in this region?

Gaddafi eschews the notions of the nation state, of Arab nationalism, and of electoral democracy. He forbids political parties. He is tribal; he espouses Islamic socialism, and his idea of democracy is one where tribal elders bring requests and grievances to him, and he gets to dispense largesse and pass judgment. He fancies himself a sort of king: a “king of kings.” He likes all kinds of African tribes, not just Arab ones; he is all about African unity in the face of Western oppression. He probably wouldn't mind ruling them all. He is, unarguably, green.

Hiding in front of the flag?

While Western leaders were surprised by the Tunisian revolt, and weren't at all sure about the Egyptian one (only eventually settling on the idea that Mubarak must go), they absolutely knew from the outset that leaving Gaddafi in power would take the political and economic disaster that this revolutionary trend already portends and raise it to the Nth power. Gaddafi had to go, and so vague noises were made about automatic support for any sort of disrespect the tribes that are not completely aligned with him could muster. They seem to have miscalculated rather badly, and now we are witnessing a series of embarrassing vignettes such as the instantaneous leaking of Obama's “super-secret” request to the Saudis to help Libyan rebels, or the recent British diplomatic “mission” which invaded with weapons and explosives and was apprehended by the rebels, who are no doubt starting to feel that this particular revolutionary exercise is not going too well for them. It was a mistake to treat Libya as a country, where protesters have rights. Libya is special. You have to go very far back in history to find something similar. Perhaps Carthage, which came quite close to sacking Rome and redirecting the flow of world history, is something of a North African analogy.

Zia swears to stay in office forever

Gaddafi's niche in the pantheon of national leaders who dared oppose the US—where he stands alongside Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il and Mahmud Ahmadinejad—is enough to warrant his removal and conversion of Libya into a NATO-bombed defunct narco-state like Kosovo or Afghanistan, but on top of that his brand of political philosophy, which he termed jamāhīriyyah (translated as “state of the masses”) might actually stand a chance in many collapsing nation states beyond Libya. The revolutions now spreading around the world are essentially bread riots: the disastrous harvests due to heat waves and floods around the world, caused by the accelerating onset of global warming, have caused food prices to spike. It is rather unusual for democracy (of the legalistic Western kind) to succeed where stomachs are empty. One normally expects a beer putsch or two, a Kristallnacht and perhaps a Reichstag on fire. Gaddafi's socialist islamic tribalism may succeed as more and more nation states turn into failed states, as national borders dissolve, and inter-ethnic conflicts and makeshift allegiances erase all the nice straight lines so carefully drawn on maps by colonizing Westerners. For all these reasons, Gaddafi must be deposed. The question is, can the West still rise to the occasion, or is it too internally conflicted, senile and broke? A little bit of time will tell.

I don't think we are talking about an extended period of time. Just this slight Libyan kerfuffle has pushed oil prices over the threshold which the International Energy Agency has recently defined as the threshold beyond which Western economies crumble, which is when oil expenditure consumes over 5% of GDP. (The original idea, by the way, belongs to François Cellier, who used it to explain the financial crisis of 2008. The wheels of international agencies grind slowly.) This crumbling process will redirect all remaining energies (physical as well as mental) inward, to prevent or contain internal revolt, with precious little to spare for Libya or any other foreign adventure. For a little while yet we will get to watch the world burn on a variety of fashionably small electronic devices. But sooner than you might think the tweets and the video feeds will cease and the screen will go dark, as it already has in Libya. After that you'd have to go there yourself to find out what's happening. Yes, unimaginable horrors are afoot, and you can't do a damned thing about them. You might do better for yourself and your family by taking advice from Voltaire's Candide, and just cultivate your own garden. I am not a religious man, but I do sometimes like quoting the gospel (or in this case, two gospels—Matthew 8:22 and Luke 9:60): “...let the dead bury their own dead.”

Small Boat Ocean Voyaging for the Accident-Prone

The world is full of stories of success, mostly because successful people like to tell of their victories rather than expound on their defeats. This is self-serving of them and a loss to the rest of us, because we only learn from mistakes. The best kind are small, non-fatal mistakes; these are also the most common. Disastrous, fatal errors are rarely the first ones to be made, because it usually takes a compounding of errors to give rise to a fatal situation. And so here is a little object study of a series of small errors, the problems they caused, and the solutions they necessitated.

Giving credit where credit is due, let me say right at the outset that the problems I will examine here are not entirely of my own making: they were rather carefully set up for me by the person from whom we bought our boat. I do fault myself for my (initial) inexperience, my misplaced trust (I trusted that he knew what he was doing) and my inability to draw a conclusion and act on it (that the person in question was a dangerous incompetent and that everything on the boat that he had touched should be carefully examined, and, in some cases, cast overboard forthwith and replaced).

I have a plethora of examples to choose from, but, for the sake of keeping the story short and focused, I will zero in on just one problem: autohelm mounting. Autopilots (and other self-steering devices such as windvanes) are essential for people who make ocean passages single-handed or without much crew. My crew is my wife; if we were to steer by hand, we'd each have to steer for 12 hours out of every 24 (which we've done on occasion and did not enjoy). Needless to say, our tillerpilot is a favorite piece of equipment: with it, life is easy; without it, life is hard.

Our boat uses a Simrad Autohelm TP32, which is an amazing piece of equipment. Along with the GPS and the VHF radio, these are the only pieces of marine electronics on our boat, and are carefully chosen for being cheap, reliable, and indispensable. The boat came with a TP22 (TP32's smaller cousin) pre-installed by the boat's previous owner, which is where this story begins.

Simrad TP32 (highly recommended)

Tillerpilots are complicated on the inside (incorporating a fluxgate compass, a servo motor and a microcontroller) but simple on the outside. Clip them to a socket mounted in the cockpit and a pin mounted on the tiller, push the “Auto” button, and the boat will go in a straight line, for days. There are just three steps to the installation: mount the socket, mount the pin, and hook it up to 12 Volts. Now, what happens when one buys a boat where someone has screwed up all three? Answer: amazing adventure beyond your wildest dreams!

* * *

Having launched Hogfish, our boat, in Boston, our first voyage was north to Maine. The passage to Portland was uneventful. The wind was steady and the autohelm performed admirably. On July 27, 2007 we left Portland around 13:30 and headed across Casco Bay and up the coast. Around 17:30 the wind picked up considerably and I took in a reef. Around 18:00 I made a note in the log:

“18:00: Autohelm busted. Bracket farigued. No more autohelm.”

The broken bracket was a puny aluminum alloy stamping. It broke in half as I watched in dismay.

Pin bracket (not serviceable)

“18:16: Worked out a beam reach with tiller lashed.”

In the intervening 15 minutes, I put away the now useless tillerpilot and worked out a combination of sail trim and rudder angle to keep the boat sailing along without being actively steered. Now, Hogfish is a very good little boat that does something only some particularly well-designed boats do: it self-steers. That is, on most points of sail (anything from beam reach to close on the wind) it does not have to be steered at all to follow a course. It hunts around a bit, and sometimes a big wave or a big gust will knock it off course, but mostly it takes care of itself.

By 23:15 it was blowing half a gale in the direction of some jagged rocks, which I knew to be lurking ominously on the horizon. I logged: “At this point, need to avoid land... New course 124°M to avoid Manana Island.” I pointed the boat at the open ocean and played with the tiller lashings and sail trim to keep it on course. By midnight I was mostly napping in the cockpit. Every 7 minutes a periodic big wave would wake me up, and I would scan the dark horizon and adjust sail trim and tiller. By 3:21, based on dead reckoning, we were close-reaching safely south of Monhegan Island. Around 5:00 the wind died. I fired up the GPS and took a reading: 43°43.97'/69°09.35' which put us ESE of Monhegan and nowhere near any dirt or rocks.

I measured the drift: 1 kt to 50°M—a reasonable direction back toward mainland with sea room on all sides. Since the wind was dead, “heaving to” was not an option. The remaining option was “lying ahull,” so I took down the sails, turned on the anchor light, let the sea do what it will and and went to sleep for real. I had to sleep on the settee in the cabin, stiff-arming the centerboard trunk to avoid rollng off, because my wife and the cat took up all of the V-berth, spread out as far as possible, to avoid getting rolled over by the big 7-minute waves. The cat seemed particularly well-anchored to the bedspread, with her paws outstretched and her claws out.

By dawn we had only drifted a few miles. It was windless and foggy. We motored to the tiny and picturesque Isle Au Haut and by 16:00 were at a “rented” mooring (the rent being a $20 stuffed into a Coke bottle attached to the mooring buoy) in the island's snug and picture-perfect anchorage.

The next day I built a new bracket out of scrap using hand tools on board, and on the 29^th we sailed on, to Blue Hill Bay.

Replacement pin bracket (worked fine, eventually)

* * *

This repair stood us in good stead for quite a while, until the fateful morning of October 27, 2007, when the pin rocked loose while we were sailing down Long Island Sound at night, toward New York City. I hand-steered the rest of the way, a good 6 hours of hard work avoiding getting spun around by big following seas that congregated at the narrow end of the Sound. While at 79^th Street Marina I was able to fix the problem by stacking up some washers (which are rusted in the photo above because the hardware store on Broadway did not stock stainless steel hardware). But after that the pin, at least, held through all kinds of weather.

* * *

All was well with our autohelm hardware until July 10^th of 2008, when we were approaching Beaufort, North Carolina, having cast off at St. Augustine, Florida on the 6^th. Approaching Cape Hatteras (an evil spot from a sailing point of view if there ever was one) we were caught up in one of the outer arms of Hurricane Bertha, which whipped up gale force winds and 10-12 foot seas. In these conditions, the socket in the autohelm base worked loose and started rocking. I took all of this in and made a change of plan: we were going to make it to Beaufort Inlet running under bare poles and then get a tow through the inlet. This plan worked well enough, except for one thing: after the tow boat captain passed me the towing line and I tied it to the Samson post in the bow of the boat, a huge breaking wave swept through and tumbled the towing line under the boat, looping it around the rudder, so that when the tow boat captain throttled up, he put enough force on the rudder to snap our autopilot in half. Since he was a BoatUS captain, and I carried BoatUS insurance, BoatUS paid for a replacement autopilot, giving me a chance to upgrade to a TP32 from a TP22, so all was well. (While installing the TP32, I couldn't help but notice that the TP22 was wired up with the dinkiest of wires rather than the recommended 12-gauge, and this explained its sometimes erratic performance.)

As an aside, sailing in a hurricane is probably not everyone's cup of tea. Frankly, I don't care for it very much myself. It is unsettling to look up at your mast and see water directly behind it, and it is strange to look at the horizon and see an ant's eye view of a broccoli patch. Also, I don't much like it when the wind is strong enough to pick up a neat coil of heavy dock line right off the deck and string it out into the sea, or when, while clambering around the deck in a harness, I have to pinch my nose shut and breathe through pursed lips because otherwise the wind is strong enough to explode my lungs. At some point we declared the cabin unsafe because of all the loose cutlery flying around down there and boarded it off, and my wife sat in the cockpit with me, holding the cat wrapped in a towel. We were all relatively calm and self-assured, but after it was all over and we were safely tied up at Beaufort Docks, the cat gave me the weirdest look I ever got from a cat; a look that said something like “What in the wild world of sports was all that about?” Enough said; sailing through a hurricane is not a recommended procedure as far as I am concerned.

While at Beaufort Docks I drilled a new hole for the autohelm socket and epoxied it it in place. 

Socket base (with socket relocated)

In the process, I discovered two things: first, the original socket position was misaligned, causing the autohelm to “hunt around” to compensate for being rotated left while trying to turn right and vice versa, indicating that whosoever installed it was geometrically challenged. Secondly, what looked like a solid piece of wood used to mount the socket turned out to be masonite, which is an environmentally friendly product invented by one Mr. Mason and made by pressing together wood chips without any sort of glue. (The autohelm manufacturer's instructions specified hardwood.) I compensated for the weakness of this material by oversizing the hole and slathering it with epoxy. It held for as long as it had to.

While hauled out for repairs in East Boston during the winter of 2009-2010 I finally had a chance to address the problem of autohelm mounting once and for all. The base now consists of two pieces of oak lag-bolted and glued together, mounted to the cockpit seat using through-bolts. 

The final version (no issues at all)

The pin is now pounded into a carved piece of oak that is secured to the tiller by a U-bolt bolted through the rudder to a backing plate. 

The final version (no issues at all)

 All of the above are coated with epoxy and painted with two-part polyurethane primer, and a couple of coats of two-part polyurethane paint. I suspect that this combination will outlast many things, including me and the boat.

Ron Paul joins the Collapse Party

US Congressman Ron Paul is sounding like quite the shoo-in for a leadership position within the Collapse Party, which I proposed over three years ago (and which is fast becoming a great success: without fielding a single candidate in any election, it is well on its way to successfully implementing the entire collapse agenda).

Lately, Ron has been heard saying things like this:

[The US] government is in the process of failing, and they can't deliver on the goods, just as the Soviets couldn't deliver the goods and maintain their own power... We will have those same problems domestically. We face serious economic problems as this dollar crisis evolves. ... We don't need to just change political parties. We need to change our philosophy about what this country is all about.

So, Ron, what is the Soviet Union all about these days, other than staying dead?

Announcing: Reinventing Collapse 2.0

The Soviet Experience and American Prospects – Revised & Updated

Pre-order this book direct from the publisher and get a 20% pre-publication discount, valid through April 15th, 2011.

While updating the text for the second edition, I have been careful not to add any new predictions, but I did take a few out because, as I now realize, energy and financial trends are too volatile to call over as short a term as the publication cycle of a book. But the longer-term trends, which I identified in the first edition over 3 years ago, are unmistakable. Global oil production has peaked for good, but is yet to start seriously declining, and this has produced a slow-motion crash rather than an outright collapse. Financially, the high volume of debts going bad has so far outpaced the government’s printing presses, keeping inflation out of the picture, while creative accounting at the Federal Reserve has so far prevented a run on the US dollar, though how long this can continue is anyone’s guess. Washington continues to set new records for political dysfunction, while the American empire is unraveling at an ever-increasing rate. We are in uncharted territory; all we know is that there is a cliff up ahead.

Here is what Michael Ruppert said about this book:

Reinventing Collapse in its original version has more than stood the test of time and events as a propphetic vision of the challenges that are being so clearly defined for us as a civilization today. The new and revised edition is priceless because it incorporates current events and emerging trends and views them through the eyes of this terrific writer and thinker. And Orlov's sense of humor always plants a minefield full of laugh bombs in the right places.

Video Interview: The Nation

 

Dmitry Orlov: Peak Oil Lessons From The Soviet Union

[Resumen de la entrevista en español]

The Nation and On The Earth Productions

Dmitry Orlov, engineer and author, warns that the US's reliance on diminishing fuel supplies might be sending it down the same path the Soviet Union took before it collapsed.

In this fifth video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, Orlov, who was an eyewitness to the collapse of the Soviet Union, asserts that as oil becomes more expensive and scarcer, the US will no longer be able to finance its oil addiction and the economy will hit a wall.

“Sixty percent of all of our transportation fuels are imported—a lot of that is on credit. A large chunk of the trade deficit is actually in transportation fuels. When those stop arriving because of our inability to borrow more money, then the economy is at a standstill,” he says.

Go here to learn more about “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate,” and to see the other videos in the series.

Transcript

I witnessed the Soviet collapse, and then later on I couldn’t help but notice that something very similar is happening to the United States. So, as a matter of public service, I’ve tried to warn people of what to expect. But I would just like to point out that I’m not any sort of policy wonk, or a wannabe politician or an activist. All of those things are very tangential to what I’m interested in, which is basically to warn people and to equip them for what’s coming up.

The way collapse unfolds is actually very interesting, because a lot of it has to do with people’s faith in the status quo. As long as people think that there’s something in it for them, they will cooperate. As soon as they decide that there is nothing in it for them, they will cease to cooperate and the system starts to crumble, cave in on itself. So what we saw in the Soviet Union was political dysfunction where basically the communist regime was so endemically corrupt, and so out to steal as much as they could at the very end, that they really didn’t even bother paying attention to whether they kept the system going. The system was basically on autopilot until it crashed. Something similar is happening here where we have people in all branches of government, both political parties trying to prop up the financial industry, which has become completely irrelevant to most people in the United States, who don’t have savings and are not creditworthy. They’re basically trying to use up people’s savings and use up people’s retirement to prop up this set of institutions that only help the very rich people, and these very rich people are only rich on paper, they are "long paper," all of them. What they own is pieces of paper with letters and numbers on them, which will turn out to be worthless. So this is all just basically musical chairs, and something very similar was happening in the Soviet Union, and something like that is happening here.

The reason I started talking about this is because I was, frankly, very worried about the United States because I saw the United States as not nearly as well prepared for collapse as the Soviet Union. You see, the Russian people never had a great deal of faith in their government or in the system, so they grew and gathered a lot of their own food, they relied on private, personal connections, there was a very large gray or black economy that provided most of what people needed. So when the system went away, people had something to hold onto, they had their personal relationships. Also the country was set up in a way that was much more stable, with public transportation and with public housing. People were not stranded and people were not dispossessed and put out on the street and evicted. So all of those things allowed the Russians to survive collapse, and all of those things are pretty much missing in this country. Most people in this country would pretty much just be out on the street starving unless they have an income, unless they have credit cards or a bank account. They’re just woefully unprepared.

There’s an element to market economics that is very hard edged, and when it fails it hurts people whether they can afford to pay their way out of it or not. If they can afford to pay their way out of it, it basically hurts their soul because they’re just leaving everybody else behind, and there’s a lot of fear with it because your umbilical is connected to your bank account. Once that goes away you’re just completely lost. Now a lot of the dislocation that went on in the Soviet Union really had to do with people being sort of set adrift in the official economy, and all they could fall back on was people they knew, people they could trust who would help them. The whole mindset of what’s mine and is mine and I get it by paying for it is really not very survival-oriented. One of the shocking things about Americans is that they have this innate faith that the rich people will abide, that there will always be rich people. And the rich people have bought into this dream, this idea that the various symbols that they have that tell them they’re rich—pieces of paper and things—will actually be meaningful moving forward, but it seems like the further you have to fall, the harder you will fall. So I think that the wealthy people in the United States are in for a much ruder awakening than the people who are poor already. Really the most important thing to consider is, who do you know and how will they help you even if you don’t give them any money for it. It’s as basic as that. In the case of the Russians it turned out that money was borderline irrelevant for a lot of things that people needed to survive. That’s what allowed them to survive. That’s not the case here, and its time to get very worried about that.

The five stages of collapse is an essay that I published two and a half years ago when nobody was really talking about a financial collapse, people were talking about a financial crisis. I decided to try to think of how this proceeds in identifiable stages and I thought that basically it’s sort of like the kubler-ross hierarchy relating to grief and here it has to do with something similar which is psychological thresholds that are breached. Various bits of faith that we have in the status quo and in society and the people around us, when they’re invalidated the change can be rather sudden whereas changes in the physical world take time to work out. So the stages were: financial collapse where our assumptions about risk in the future are invalidated and political collapse, which is basically our assumptions that there is a political system that functions and can serve the interest of the people at some level, that is invalidated. Then there is commercial collapse, which is the idea that you can get whatever you need by paying for it is invalidated because your money is worthless or you don’t have any anymore. Then there is social and cultural collapse which I got by reading some cultural anthropology. Basically social collapse is when the social infrastructure that people have be it charities or social organizations or community based groups cease to function because they’re overwhelmed, they run out of resources and people can no longer rely on them. Then cultural collapse, I got the idea from reading Colin Turnbull who described a completely failed African society of dispossessed hunter-gatherers where basically family structure fell apart. Parents no longer brought up their children, they didn’t take care of the old people, families didn’t even share food. They basically got food and ate it by themselves and hid it from each other and that was the level at which humans stopped resembling humans and people no longer recognized each other. At that point you’re almost talking about a different animal. Not what we have evolved as, but something that we might devolve into.

I’m always asked this question, where are we in the collapse scenario, the question is who are we? I know a lot of people who are pretty far along in the collapse scenario. I like to tell people that social and cultural collapse has, in some places in this country, already run its course. Financial collapse, well it depends on whether you’ve been bankrupted or foreclosed yet, it’s a bit of, you could say that for a lot of people collapse has already arrived. It just hasn’t been widely distributed and people don’t actually share stories about it unless they actually know each other personally. So I would say this is something that is proceeding, you could say that the United States is already bankrupt as a country. I don’t think that you could actually get a cogent argument against that from anyone who knows what they’re talking about. It’s just that the aftermath of that hasn’t really completely arrived. We’re not yet completely immersed in the consequences of that. Now, in terms of what could be done to salvage the situation, well a lot of things would have to change rather dramatically. Right now there’s basically a stranglehold on political power in this country by an elite that divides itself into two camps Republicans and Democrats and what have you, maybe even more, but its really the same bunch of people. This same bunch of people is almost militant in refusing to look at reality and it’s almost a question of them at some point being wheeled out of their offices along with the office furniture. Its not like they can be really spoken to without it being one’s complete waste of time. So I see that quite similar to what the old communists went through. Basically they went from being in charge to being crazy, to being insane and being disregarded. I see something very similar happening here.

The question for why there’s so much denial is a really interesting one. Denial is a large question in itself. There are certainly a few aspects to it that are interesting. One is that it makes it possible for people to lead what amounts to a meaningless dead end existence because the moment they realize that its meaningless and its dead-end then they’re forced to do something about it and if they can’t think of anything useful to do about it then they’re stuck, they’re stuck with a mental difficulty. So denial is a way of avoiding mental difficulties. Another part of it is that if you actually have a long-term perspective on the future that makes you very unpopular in any given group of people because the future, as it stands in a market economy, is a faulty product. It cannot be sold for any price. No sane person would pay for it. So if we live in an environment where we sell ourselves by putting things on our resumes and promoting ourselves in various ways and thinking what we’re worth in a market economy, actually being honest about what we’re looking forward to, all of us, makes us less successful as individuals and so this is something that we avoid doing.

I think what’s going to happen is the dissolution of the United States as a political and economic entity. It will more or less fade from the world scene in the same way that the Soviet Union faded from the world scene. Parts of it will later be reborn as something that we might have a lot more trouble imagining because there isn’t something called Russia that part of the Soviet Union. There isn’t something similar to that in the United States. It’s really a bunch of territories, very disjointed territories held together by Washington. So if Washington fails then it’s not clear what is going to hold these territories together.

The reason Washington is likely to fail is really the same reason that Moscow failed which is runaway debt and national bankruptcy. It was not even the level of debt it was the fact that the debt could not be expanded or taken on at an ever-increasing rate with never any reason for anyone to expect that the gap can ever be closed. So what happened in Moscow was that Moscow could no longer finance the periphery and the periphery decided to go its own way. We’re something similar in this country where California could do quite well if they stop paying the federal tax. So if they left the union their finances would be much better and this is what happened in the Soviet Union. This is what we’re witnessing right now in the United States. There are other similarities as well. One of the largest ones is, in the Soviet Union the armed forces more or less took on a life of their own, they ate the national budget, about a quarter of it, and also they couldn’t deliver any results. So it’s a striking similarity that the mighty Soviet army lost in Afghanistan and now the mighty American army is doing exactly the same thing. It amazes me that dying empires shoot straight for Afghanistan to have Afghanis deliver the coup de grace and this is what’s happening to the United States as well.

Well the power vacuum that was left when the Soviet Empire collapsed was not a complete vacuum. There was a lot of black market economics active within the Soviet Union, there was a lot of what would be called corruption, but really they were workable ways of circumventing an unworkable system. There is some of that in this country as well. Strangely enough, the people who are the best positioned to start a full-blown black market economy in the United States are the narco-cartels. So they’re the next aristocracy as far as the Americans are concerned. They will be the ones moving in and replacing the power vacuum. You already see it happening in certain parts of the country close to the Mexican border. You can see that the local police and law enforcement are in no position to oppose them. They’re much better organized and armed. So this is what we can look forward to. A lot of that happened in Russia as well there were a lot of ethnic mafias that moved in. The Chechens controlled a lot of the trade for quite a while, even in produce and things like that. So we can look forward to quite a bit of that here as well.

There was a lot of what you could call “corporatocracy” in the Soviet Union as well. There were a lot of very large state-owned enterprises that went on existing because they didn’t really have a supply chain, they were empires onto themselves. A place like Norilsk Nickel for instance that makes a lot of the nickel in the world was pretty much a company town. That was a standard thing in Russia. It’s not just a factory but also cafeterias and kindergartens, and hospitals, retirement homes, and just about everything else. So these were economic empires onto themselves that continued to function. A lot of them, once there was no workable currency, they resorted to barter trade and they would trade food for something that they made or stock they had accumulated over the years. The American “corporatocracy” is very much into just in time delivery and everything is network based and that makes it extremely fragile and I don’t see that pattern holding. A while ago I thought that some large companies like Google for instance could take a lot of things in house and Google has been making forays into energy and private currencies and all sorts of things. They have money to throw at experiments like that but they’re not about to achieve any sort of sustainability so when the surrounding economy crumbles they will probably cease to function as well.

People look at the short term. Energy availability in the short term. Basically the fact that energy demand shrank because of the recession/depression. That bought us a little bit of time but its more or less inevitable that some kind of economic growth somewhere will resume at some point and then whatever part of the economy that tries to grow will hit a brick wall again and the harder economies try to grow from this point on, the worse they will fail. The more growth dependent and growth addicted they are the worse they will fail. Countries vary along a set of parameters between how well they can absorb lack of economic growth; some can do it pretty well, some not at all. So this is really what we’re looking at now. We could have a scenario where entire parts of the globe suddenly go dark. I think the United States is one of them because 60% of all of the transportation fuels are imported, a lot of that is on credit. A large chunk of the trade deficit is actually transportation fuels, so when those stop arriving because of inability to borrow more and more money then the economy is at a standstill and after a while the lights go out. Now, what that buys the rest of the world is about 1/3 of all the energy consumed in the United States. The United States consumes about a third of the global energy supply. That suddenly becomes available to the rest of the world. So you could theoretically have other countries grow for another decade or more while the United States goes dark and disappears, fades from the world scene much as the Soviet Union did after it collapsed.

The important thing to understand about collapse is that it’s brought on by overreach and overstretch and people being zealous and trying too hard. Its not brought on by people being laid back and doing the absolute minimum. Americans could very easily feed themselves and clothe themselves and have a place to live working maybe a hundred days a year. You know, it’s a rich country in terms of resources there’s really no reason to work maybe more than a third of your time and that’s sort of a standard pattern in the world. But if you want to build a huge empire and have endless economic growth and have the largest number of billionaires on the planet then you have to work over forty hours a week all the time and if you don’t then you’re in danger of going bankrupt. So that’s the predicament that people have ended up in. Now the cure of course is not to do the same thing even harder, so what people have to get used to is the idea that most things aren’t worth doing anyway and things really slow down when the economy goes away. The idea is to do the absolute bare minimum that is essential and just find interesting ways to while away the time because not much is going to be happening. So walking down the road is an all day affair whereas before it was a three-minute drive but now you don’t drive, you have to walk so it’s an all day affair. People just have to learn to slow way down and have a lot more patience, a lot more patience with each other. Those that don’t will probably end up killing each other in due course, that’s probably a period of time that most people will want to sit out, wait until the dust settles. A lot of people just don’t have the right character to deal with collapse. They’ll be running around trying to fix things. That’s the opposite of what they should be doing.

Peak oil is getting to be a really boring subject. Most people don’t realize that yet. It’s something that becomes obvious after the fact, its something that shows up in aggregate production statistics and those statistics tend to be retroactively adjusted as better numbers come in. So now we’re pretty sure that it was in 2005-2006 for conventional oil, that is oil that comes out in oil form out of the ground on dry land, out of conventional oil wells. All liquids, which includes tar sands and coal to liquid conversion and corn based ethanol and just any other muck that you could possibly get liquid fuels from, that peaked in 2008. So it’s all behind us.

The thing that’s worth discussing now is what post peak production looks like. A lot of people look at these charts that have a very smooth decline curve that always looked a little strange to me. So I did a lot of research into trying to figure out what that meant and it turned out that its just sheer nonsense there’s no reality behind it at all. I’ve identified many many factors that combine in various unpredictable ways, its really too complicated to predict, but the chance of this very smooth decline, I would say, is zero. Its going to be a step-wise decline and various parts of the planet will be cut off from transportation fuel permanently at various times. There will be disruptions and then it will be a permanent cut-off from that point on. So what people should be planning on is not slightly more expensive gasoline, or slightly less gasoline or heating oil or diesel fuel, but fuel that you might have for special occasions, so for ambulances you might have it longer than for taxis, things like that. What people should really be planning for is life without fossil fuels at all and that is actually a tall order. It takes a lot of thinking to prepare for that right now.

The whole question of die off produces very strong emotions in people, but to just lay it out in a non-emotional way. We had this thing called the green revolution, which is probably the worst misnomer we have because it was basically the fossil fuel food revolution. It's growing food with fossil fuels that allowed the earth’s population to go to 6 and a half billion and there’s no reason to think that it can be sustained through means other than fossil fuels inputs into industrial agriculture. So the question is what happens to all these people when they can no longer be fed. Now, people think that this is in the future but its not. Russia is back to importing grain after the disastrous harvest of this year. That’s a bad sign right there, Russia used to be a grain exporter until this year and so that is happening in more and more parts of the world. Now, die-offs, people have trouble imagining them. There was a bit of a die off in the Soviet Union after the Soviet Union collapsed. Life expectancy plummeted. The odd thing about it, I was there during that time, and it’s not really noticeable unless you happen to be dropping by the hospitals and the morgues all the time and going to a lot of funerals. You just don’t know that people are going away. Its more that people look at their school photos and realize that half their class is dead. And that’s a bit of a shock, but its more of a shock when you realize it than when its happening because you don’t really realize its happening. In fact human populations can shrink quite dramatically without anyone even within those populations really noticing. People just accept whatever is happening, tune it out, stop paying attention or cope with it some way. With that said, ok we have 6 and a half billion people without fossil fuel inputs into agriculture might sustain one billion but that’s without climate change. Now the reason we have agriculture is because we’ve had ten thousand years of stable climate, which seems to have ended. So that is something to take into consideration as well. As hunter/gatherers as opposed to farmers we would not be one billion without fossil fuel input, we would be a lot smaller population than that even. So this is one of those things that people try not to think about and the question that comes to my mind is why should we even think about it? I mean, whatever happens, happens. We don’t get to decide how many people survive all we get to do is you know, try to survive, and find ways to do it. Thinking about mind numbing billions of people that will no longer be around is not really a productive activity given that there is nothing we can do about it. So I try to limit discussion of that because I just don’t see it going anywhere useful.

Well the whole climate change debate, it almost makes me laugh because people say things and the words, if you look at it what do they mean, they don’t mean anything and the most important question is “what do we do?” I have a problem with defining we and I have a problem with defining “do” just on a semantic level, I think that that particular question is completely meaningless. “We” includes melting tundra we don’t actually tell it what to do it does whatever it wants to. And “do” involves people who are completely beyond our control politically, economically, or otherwise. So it doesn’t really even matter what we decide. People have this inflated picture of what policy can achieve that is not based on what policy has achieved in the past. There is one example of a great policy issue that Al Gore talks about which is limitations on refrigerants that were destroying the ozone layer. Well that was a bit of a success but it only involved a few chemical manufacturers around the planet. So those could be individually talked to and replacements could be found. What they’ve achieved is that the ozone hole is now not growing anymore but its not shrinking either so it’s not really a complete success and that’s really the only success story that they have. In terms of global warming it seems like we’re in for a roller coaster ride. It’s not even that we can predict what’s happen, but we can certainly predict that there will be a lot of upheaval. We don’t need scientists to tell us that. I’ve been living in New England for decades now and I’m used to the ocean being cold. So if in the middle of the summer I jump in the ocean and its body temperature you don’t have to be a scientist to tell me that something is going very strangely here. You know, it’s really quite obvious. People who are a little bit more in tune with the elements, people who have spent a lot of time outdoors, you can talk to them. Very few of them will tell you that, oh this is nothing out of the ordinary, this is the usual thing. So we’re in for a great deal of climate upheaval. I would predict that when the industrial economies around the world start crashing there will be a huge amount of reforestation that will happen. So then we might have a mini ice age because of that and then that might run its course and something else will happen. The kind of goldilocks climate that has allowed human populations to swell to billions of individuals, that period of climatic history seems to have ended already. We’re in a different planet now; we’re in a different world.

The Fix is Off

[Update: John Robb has been providing some of the most lucid analysis on Egypt. Well worth a look.]

Protest is sweeping through the Arab world. One corrupt and repressive regime, in Tunisia, has already been toppled, and now Hosni Mubarak Washington's man in Egypt, has been forced to deploy the army in an attempt to quell violent protests that have set the ruling party headquarters ablaze. Egypt, which is home to half of the world's Arabs, is the fulcrum on which the Arab world turns. What happens now in Egypt is bound to resonate throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Are we about to see something similar to the heady days of 1989, when Eastern Europe cast off Moscow's yoke? Is the Middle East going to turn out to be Washington's Eastern Europe? Will Wikileaks turn out to be Washington's equivalent of Gorbachev's Glasnost, cutting right through all the empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and showing the imperial regime to be repressive, craven, corrupt, foolish, weak and, ultimately, self-defeating?

American leaders appear to be following the Soviet playbook for the imperial end-game quite faithfully: cringing behind high walls and locked doors, looting the treasury like there's no tomorrow, and, of course, lying their heads off. There are a few moments each century when status quo suddenly becomes status quo ante. We may be living through just such a moment now.

Exclusive: US empire will fall due to lack of faith, not finances or war, author warns

As many in the American empire longingly talk of "recovery" from the most devastating economic condition since the Great Depression, others have begun thinking in a very different direction, urging fellow citizens to prepare for the worst.

Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, is one of the latter.

Soon, he told Raw Story in an exclusive interview, Americans will "stop expecting anything of Washington," turning the US into more of a "banana republic" than a superpower.

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Lifeboats: A Memoir

[This is a guest post by Albert, whose amazing erudition and experience gives him the right to tell just about anyone to sit down, shut up and listen—although he is far too nice to actually say that. But I am not, so I will: sit down, shut up and listen.]

 

During the early days of The Farm, 1971-1973, we learned a number of lessons that will be useful again now that a rapid petrocollapse scenario is likely to come to pass. The Farm spiritual community emerged from a 50-bus caravan of 320 Haight-Ashbury refugees fleeing hard drugs, exploitation and counterculture tourism. After a year on the road the gypsy vagabonds pooled inheritances and purchased 1050 acres (450 hectares) of land 80 miles (130 km) from Nashville. It was US$70 per acre.

The Farm grew to a standing population of well over 1000, with 20 satellite centers, then, in the early 1980s, declined and decollectivized, bringing its population to under 200. Since then it has experienced something of a renaissance, finding new popularity amongst permaculturists, ecovillagers, and roving students. But let’s begin at the beginning, when our group landed in Tennessee.

Living in remodeled school buses was quite an adequate introduction to “roughing it,” especially for those of us who had never gone camping as children. The “honey pot” latrine bucket, mosquito-proof backpacker tents, canteens, flashlights, storm lanterns, and two-burner Coleman stoves were familiar to the pioneer settlers by the time they first stepped off the bus.

The land itself was barren of amenities save a small log cabin, a horse barn and a line shack, and so the first order of business was setting up facilities for bathing, sanitation, kitchen and sleeping. I’ll skip over the organizational aspects here because they would require a lengthier and more nuanced discussion; suffice it to say that circumnavigating North America in a 50-bus caravan required a degree of organization similar to running a rock-and-roll band tour. That’s enough organization to get you started in designing and constructing a settlement, although perhaps not enough to keep it intact for very long.

For pumped water, an engine was lifted from a Volkswagen Bug and set on blocks in a springhouse. A well-used and rusting 5700 liter (1500 gallon) water tower was purchased for scrap value, repaired and erected atop a hill above the springhouse. This required minor welding and auto mechanics, as well as a continuous supply of petrol. Some years later, when power lines came in, the VW engine and springhouse were replaced with a submersible pump and well. Today it would have been built with photovoltaics or wind power, but such technology, while already available in the 1970s, was well beyond the reach of a community that subsisted on average per capita cash income of US$1 per day for its first 13 years.

After the first winter, a second, larger water tower was erected near a 100 meter (300 foot) well with good aquifer recharge. The tower was salvaged from a railroad company for a purchase price of US$1, but moving and erecting the tower and tank required a crane. From the towers, water was delivered to homes in 20 liter (5 gallon) jugs by horse wagon.

While the buses provided initial shelter, with more than 6 residents per bus on average, after 8 to 12 months of living on the road most people wanted to get out into better housing, as quickly as possible. At the time, the government of the State of Tennessee held monthly auctions of surplus property, and Korean War vintage army tents could be bought for as little as US$15. These formed the basis of our first foray into home construction. With salvaged materials from construction sites and dumpsters, they morphed into “touses and hents.” Going into a partnership with a nearby sawmill allowed us to add some beautiful timber-frame buildings and D-frames. Common buildings such as the community kitchen, motor pool, canning & freezing, print shop, clinic and school sprang almost entirely from salvaged materials. Scraping mortar off cement blocks and straightening nails become well-practiced skills.

There was limited electricity to the site, and for an entire decade almost all of our electricity came from 12-volt DC systems powered by car batteries. Initially the batteries were charged by switching them through vehicles every day, but full discharge cycles make for short battery life, so after trying novel methods of pedal power, bamboo wind generators and other wacky ideas, most houses went to a “trickle charge” system — a long copper cable run through the trees to a central power center that took its electrons from Tennessee Valley Authority (although we always sent them back in the next nanosecond). 

At one of these power centers, where we did our canning and freezing, we erected walk-in coolers and freezers. Refrigeration was a necessity that is as difficult to avoid as it is to achieve. A few of the buses came with propane-powered fridges and they were a blessing. Most of the households relied on a system of 5-gallon (20 liter) buckets that rotated to the walk-in coolers and freezers near the cannery. Buckets with tight lids were obtained from dumpsters behind the McDonalds in town. The other essential item was a Flexible Flyer wooden wagon with slatted sides. If you couldn’t get your parents to give one of those to their grandchildren for Christmas, the next best thing was to weld a bike trailer or pushcart to get your buckets to the neighborhood cooler.

Buckets were also employed to carry diapers and laundry to a communal laundromat, which was set up near another trickle-charge node. Salvaged coin-op equipment was purchased in bulk, the coin slots replaced with toggle switches, and a large diaper rinse and centrifuge babe-manure extractor installed. The grey- and black-water flowed to a constructed wetlands and rainbird, creating what today, 40 years later, are some of the richest soils on the property.

Communal unisex showering facilities were constructed in places with good supplies of water and a way to heat it: downhill from the original water tower; beside Canning & Freezing and the Farm Store; at the Farm School and print shop.

A flour mill took over the tack room in the horse barn. Initially we used a small stone mill to grind corn meal. Later we bought a larger, 3-break steel feed mill and set it up in the line shack, connected to 3-phase AC power. Arrayed around the roller mill were Clipper seed cleaners, sifters, a coffee roaster, an oat huller, and bagging racks. Within a year the mill was churning out a ton per day of wheat, corn, soy and buckwheat flours, pastry flours, corn meal, grits, groats, mixed cereals and porridges, horse feed, soy nuts, popcorn, coffee, and peanut butter.

Transportation and communications were priorities, because our sustainability depended on commerce, and without good transportation and communications any attempts to create a business would have been hampered. Bear in mind that for the first 13 years the experiment was communal, meaning shared purse. Just as many societies throughout history, we have found that in times of difficulty a reversion to communal economics provides greater survival advantages than the exercise of individuated private property rights. After achieving stability, most drop the communal form in order to stimulate greater enterprise. This was the path taken by Amana, Oneida, many kibbutzim, The Farm, the People's Republic of China, and, now, Cuba.

Any group that can cross the country in 30-year-old school buses will learn something about automotive mechanics. Our motor pool and junkyard became one of the technology hubs for The Farm, a place where anything from a hay rake to a fire truck could be machined and rebuilt, nearly from scratch.

The first two teams of horses, black Belgians and white Percherons, were acquired from neighboring Old Order Amish. They laughed at our feeble attempts, as vegans, to replace leather harness with more hippy-kosher canvas and Naugahide. “How’d you raise that nauga?” they’d ask. Interesting koan!

Communication was accomplished through a rapid succession of home and business devices. The log cabin became the business center with two phone lines. On US$1 per person per day, personal long distance charges were unaffordable, but one of our caravaners was an Eagle Scout with a ham radio merit badge, and he made a radio shack in the horse barn and began training ham radio operators to staff an amateur band Farm Net. Before the Internet I was WB4LXJ.

A 12-volt telephone system was installed to link every bus, tent, home and business. The dial tone was replaced with a Grateful Dead or reggae melody or a public service announcement (1000 jars of catsup planned today, canners needed; line at the laundry is now 90 minutes; bean shucking and banjo at horse barn 7 pm). The dial itself was replaced with a pushbutton that you used for Morse code to signal where you were calling. Four shorts meant “all points.” It was a party line, but there was a second carrier band, the “Hot Line,” used for emergencies. A toggle switch flipped you over to that band where an operator was always on call, sitting at a phone console to summon fire, police and ambulance and to assume management of the emergency. This pre-dated most emergency telephone services.

Emergencies were taken seriously, and fire marshals, gate and patrol security, and emergency medical responders were treated as actual jobs from the very beginning. Each became more sophisticated as the body of experience grew. Naive hippies learned to adjust to the rigors of self-reliance, which could sometimes be terrifying, such as when a kerosene lamp tips over in a canvas tent, the Ku-Klux-Klan rides up to the front gate or a deputy sheriff wanders into the marijuana patch while hunting deer.

Finding additional uses for the copper wires we passed through the treetops, we sent a TV signal through the phone lines, and could download direct network feeds from a 12-foot (3.7 meter) dish made of pine 2x4s and chicken wire. We watched the Watergate hearings that way. We produced our own shows, too, sent from the Bandland Studio tent to 12-volt TVs in tents and buses. If you were within 30 feet of the phone line, you could pick up the signal on channel 3. We watched Greenpeace work out its chess moves with the Spanish Navy in real time, using a slo-scan ham TV transmitter installed on the bridge of the Rainbow Warrior, sort of a proto-Animal-Planet pilot.

Eventually, when CB radios became popular, we were able to install them in our vehicles and interface them with the ham radio and “Beatnik Bell” phone system. Free international calls became possible. Our “Extra Class” hams grew in proficiency and could link to satellites, monitor police, military and secret service sidebands, and bounce audio, digital and TV signals around the world to an expanding Farm Net.

A weekly newspaper, Amazing Tales of Real Life, began coming out of the print shop, along with a host of do-it-yourself books that turned into a brand. A brisk traffic in daily visitors, more than a hundred some days, required tour crews and a large hostel tent, but also supplied nearly free labor for the fields.

From the very first arrival of the buses and through the first 5 years a community dining facility was an essential efficiency, and one of the main reasons that living could be so cheap. Milk was made from soybeans, which became tofu, mayonnaise, yogurt, sour cream and ice cream. Soybeans were also made into coffee, tempeh, soysage (from okara), soyburgers and stroganoffs. A bushel of dry soybeans (35 liters) cost US$3 (US$7 today). The protein needs (with all 8 essential amino acids in good proportion) for a hard-laboring farm worker can be supplied on less than a pound (450 grams) per day, rehydrated and made into gourmet vegan cuisine. Thinking of storing food for emergencies? Include soybeans.

Tracing back down memory lane to my experience then: a young man of 25 arriving at The Farm in 1972 with just a backpack; being greeted by the Night Sentry and shown a place to sleep; going for a breakfast at the Community Kitchen, porridge and sorghum molasses, soysage and corn biscuits; then to the field in a horse wagon; harvesting sorghum cane with a machete and piling it into the wagon; at the end of the day returning to my assigned, dirt-floored army tent lit by candles; supper of bean soup and cornbread with pickled japapeños; guitars and song around a fire under the canopy of stars; abiding sense of harmony in the world; community.

The Nation: Peak Oil and the Changing Climate

Times are so bad that even an overtly political entity such as The Nation has been forced to start acknowledging reality. Thanks to Karen and Greg for rounding up the usual suspects (Richard Heinberg, Nicole Foss, Bill McKibben, James Kunstler and me) plus, for added gravitas, I suppose, Noam Chomsky. You might think that Peak Oil and climate change are liberal issues; that's like saying that death is a conservative issue. Here is the part of the series that's been released so far. All the speakers on the video are great, especially my two minutes of it (one at 4:00, the other at 14:00). The full interview with me will be up in February.