The trapdoor into the future.

Posted by Fr. John on January 21, 2008, 08:23 PM | #

What is wrong with ‘reversalists’? Christendom was told to ‘guard the traditions’ in the Church, and she did so for 1800 years. Now, if Rome, in departing from conciliar tradition, got lost along the way, and called Gallileo a heretic, at least we had the Renaissance, Opera, Giotto, Dante, at the same time.

IF one were to go back to a smaller style/scale of living, crime would surely decrease, for criminals would not have free access to areas outside their ghettos, family groups would not be scattered to the four winds, you would know your butcher, your baker, and candlestick maker, and thus, the mega-corporation could not give you the shaft for higher prices, for your tradesmen would have to meet you face to face at the local altar of the Christian church. Short of the storage capabilities of the modern computer, I see nothing of merit in movies made since 1967- that frankly goes for all forms of popular culture, including Rap, VH-1, MTV, Paris, Brittany, Madonna, Michael Jackson, etc.

Local musicians were at least able to be THE focus of culture in their area, and they were paid for their services, unlike today, when Joshua Bell can undertake a one-hour experiment in the London Underground, and only come away with $13.47 in pocket change. All western forms of self-expression have devolved to the level of the pervert, the anarchist, or the merely Jewish.

The Ladder is ALWAYS there. We were MADE to climb back down it at Babel, and again, when Rome Fell. That God in His mercy allowed us to do so, was done with the hope that we might do it better the next time around. But if we miscegenate ourselves into a multicultural hell-hole, then I guess you’re right.  But this time, we are not going up… except maybe in smoke, when the Parousia hits, and the world ends.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 21, 2008, 08:38 PM | #

Soren, so fusion is nowhere on the radar screen?  I know it’s been stalled for fifty years but they don’t think it’ll be unstalled in time?  That’s a sobering thought, sort of like physical-world analogues to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem:  are there engineering, biological/medical, AI, and genetic engineering goals it is intrinsically impossible to reach?  Fusion power for example, or curing cancer completely, curing viruses, radical genetic engineering such as making “designer babies,” and so on?  You’d think there would have to be, since clearly we can’t cope with complexity above a certain level, neither can we build machines that can, and sooner or later we’re bound to bump up against that level first in one domain then others.  There may be undiscovered laws governing this stuff, such as the one perhaps implicit in the observation that computer software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 22, 2008, 12:37 AM | #

Also, what about JJR’s claims that ethanol from sugar cane grown in the tropics can supply a huge part of the need? (Not so much from corn grown in the temperate zones, which he said was a much less efficient way to go about it — but there’s that too.) Will ethanol count for zip, then?  But aren’t they running a good proportion of Brazil’s cars on the stuff already?  (Forgive my ignorance, I don’t keep abreast of this.)

When you add up ethanol, fission, wind, solar, hydroelectric, ocean-tidal, geothermal, odds and ends like ocean-floor methane and stuff, there still won’t be enough to keep us from going back to sailing ships and horse-and-buggies?

Posted by anon on January 22, 2008, 12:42 AM | #

Well I certainly wouldnt advocate reversalism especially from a medical point of view, but sadly it certainly ‘could’ happen, #1 ofcourse is an asteroid strike, that would do it.  But there are other ways too, the modern world is based on very cheap transport over long distances, if that comes to an end either by the oil running out or someone intentionally disrupting supplies there would have to be big changes.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 22, 2008, 12:47 AM | #

“also wants railways,” (—from the entry)

Kunstler sees those, presumably, as steam-driven, and burning what?  Wood?  With diesel and coal out, what else will there be?  If they build fission-fueled locomotives presumably there’ll also be lots of fission-powered electricity-generating plants, implying affordable battery-powered cars, cars that won’t go fast but at least faster than a horse-and-buggy.

Posted by Charlie Prince on January 22, 2008, 04:29 AM | #

Check out global stock markets. This could get very interesting.

Fullblown Panic

January 21, 2008

Knees knocked last week from sea to shining sea as the shape-shifting monster of economic reality cut a swathe of destruction through the markets and financial ranks. The exact nature of this giant beast still remained largely concealed in a fog of accounting gambits, policy blusters, and reporting dodges, but a few intrepid scouts who glimpsed the behemoth up close said it looked like Godzilla with Herbert Hoover’s face.

George W. Bush, tried to appease the beast by offering each American adult the dollar equivalent of half a month’s mortgage payment—with the exhortation to drive forthwith to the nearest WalMart and blow it on salad shooters and plasma TV’s—but Hooverzilla just laughed at the offering and pounded the equity markets further into the dust of loss, while the “bank-like” guardians of wealth lay in the drainage ditches bleeding from their ears and eyes. . . .

Posted by onetwothree on January 22, 2008, 05:19 AM | #

Even in the worst case, combines and similar equipment would get first dibs on rationed oil products. Nothing to see here…

Posted by James Bowery on January 22, 2008, 09:48 AM | #

The first supercomputer company, Control Data Corporation, was founded by a Nebraska farm boy, Bill Norris, who wanted to decentralize population structure, not by reversing but by disintermediating.  He was rather “up front” about the whole thing—going so far as to put an old style farm windmill-water pump up in front of the CDC corporate towers.

I was there when it was happening and even took an earth sheltered house/passive solar heating architecture class or two while working in the BTC office building where food was grown for the cafeteria and the entire complex was earth sheltered.  We were turning the PLATO system into an early version of what people think of now as the WWW, in part to assist high value farmers to bypass the trade route bottle necks.

Wall Street, and the Merc, went on a rampage against Norris, PLATO and CDC.  Norris, PLATO and CDC were destroyed and, to the best of my knowledge, the record of what Norris accomplished during this era is buried beneath a lot of propaganda about how what he was supposedly doing was limited to helping inner city kids.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 22, 2008, 01:07 PM | #

“The first supercomputer company, Control Data Corporation, was founded by a Nebraska farm boy, Bill Norris” (—James B)

Where did Cray fit into all this?

“Nebraska farm boy, Bill Norris”

Another one who came off a mid-western farm somewhere was Claude Shannon, one of the world’s most brilliant “theoretical engineers” (a theoretical physicist, actually) of the XXth Century, the guy who came up with the first rigorous thermodynamic treatments of what we all know and love as “information.” I’ll never forget first coming across those entropy equations for “information” in college chemistry.  I couldn’t believe it.  I said to my roommate, “Ya know, they know what “information” is — have got it all precisely defined in terms of thermodynamics.” He looked at the equations and couldn’t get over it — in my mind I can see his broad, astonished smile.  I still haven’t gotten over it to this day.  An absolutely incredible feat Shannon pulled off.  I love that guy.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 22, 2008, 02:36 PM | #

Oops!  Sorry, I just looked up Claude Shannon on Wikipedia and it says nothing about his growing up on a farm; on the contrary it seems he lived in town growing up; at any rate his parents weren’t farmers.  I don’t know which other mid-western genius I was thinking of who came from a farming family.  It’ll come to me.  (It just goes to show, “If not certain, Google before posting!")

Posted by James Bowery on January 22, 2008, 04:13 PM | #

Here’s more than you may want to know about Seymour Cray’s role.  Suffice to say, Cray and Norris talked a lot about things like surviving nuclear war, and the military vulnerability of cities compared to yeoman farms which were, at that time, fast disappearing from the landscape due to forces Norris, at least, was trying to counter-act:

[flash forward]

Word of the team’s success buzzed through the computer industry with extraordinary speed.  Within days the Business Week article found its way to the highest office in IBM, prompting a scathing memo from company president Thomas Watson:

Last week Control Data had a press conference during which they officially announced their 6600 system.  I understand that in the laboratory developing this system there are only 34 people, including the janitor.  Of these 14 are engineers and 4 are programmers, and only one person has a Ph.D., a relatively junior programmer.  Constrasting this modest effort with our own vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the world’s most powerful computer.

[flash back]

As soon as they arrived at the new facility, the crew began to realize just how detached they were.  After ambling through the building’s tiny lobby and sitting down in their labs every morning, they suddenly realized that they had no interruptions.  It was a strange sensation, somewhat like sitting next to a piece of humming machinery for days on end, then having someone turn it off.  The newfound peace was striking.

The advantages were even greater for Cray. He had a beautiful Praire-style home built on the sixty-five-acre site, only a couple hundred yards from the new facility.  Cray design the home himself, and it was an extraordinary piece of construction—no one in Chippewa had ever seen anything quite like it.  From the outset Cray had considered what he would need in the event of a nuclear blast, and had designed the lower level of the home as a fallout shelter.  Joists in the spacious first floor were made from cold rolled steel, then topped with four-inch-thick concrete slab.  Block walls in the basement were also filled with concrete; doors between lower level rooms were fireproof.  A six-foot-deep pool in the basement doubled as a potential source of potable water and ten-thousand-gallon underground tank held enough oil to last through four winters.  Construction workers were in awe of the building, saying that the basement contained more steel reinforcing than the new bank that was being built downtown.  Cray also added his own inventive touch, designing an air-conditioning system that would spray water on the roof and cool the house through an evaporative process.

The best part for Cray, however, was the new home’s proximity to the Chippewa lab.  With the lab only about eight hundred feet away, he could work any hours he wanted.  He simply shuttled back and forth by walking through the forest that separated the two buildings.

After Cray and the other engineers moved into the new facility, management intervention ground to a halt.  Most of the corporate directors felt that it was too far to drive.  Long-distance calling was considered more trouble than it was worth in 1962 because it required operator assistance…

To maintain privacy Cray set up strict rules regarding visitors:  no sales calls, no management meetings, no visits of any kind without his permission.  In the Wisconsin woods, the engineers had a pure, blissful, bare-bones isolation.  No one—not even Bill Norris—could walk in without an appointment…

Despite the isolation, word of their impending success began to trickle out of Chippewa Falls.  Something unusual was happening up there in the north woods of Wisconsin, and the rest of the industry wanted to know what it was.  At the time—mid-1963—the computer industry was so small that it was nearly impossible to keep secrets.  Cray’s self-imposed isolation slowed the normal buzz of information, but word still traveled quickly.  Programmers at the Livermore lab were already anxious to buy the Chippewa crew’s first machine.  Word quickly spread to Los Alamos and to the National Security Agency in Washington.  Everyone in the community, it seemed, had a problem that needed the speed of a CDC 6600.

In August 1963 Control Data opened the lab to selected members of the press, including the Wall Street Journal and Business Week magazine.  At the unveiling, Cray sat in front of the machine’s television like console, describing its processor, memories and cooling system.  He quietly explained the marketing strategies and the logic behind the move to Chippewa Falls.  The press was stunned, not by the computer itself, but by the apparent incongruity of this high-tech machine emerging from such a low-tech setting.  A Business Week article prominently mentioned the fact that there was “salt lick for the deer” outside the Chippewa Falls lab, then it followed by saying that the 6600 “is several times as fast and powerful as any other computing machine in existence.  In fact, nothing quite like it has ever appeared on the market before.” But the article saved its highest praise for the small-team effort, saying that “Cray’s staff numbers 34, including the night janitor.”

Source: The Supermen by Charles J. Murray

I posted the following book review to Barnes and Noble’s web site on August 17, 2000 after purchasing the book from them and reading it. It is now November 19, 2000, the book is no longer in stock at B&N and there is only one copy left in the B&N “Rare, Secondhand & Out of Print” database:

The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputer
ISBN: 0471048852

A review by Jim Bowery
August 17, 2000,

The Rise and Fall of Midwest Computing Sans PLATO

This is a great book. It conveys much of the flavor of what it was like to be in the Midwest’s computing culture in its heyday of the 60’s through the 70’s. What it failed to do was tell the real story of the Midwest’s demise as computing leader of the world—which isn’t the story of Seymour’s obsession with packaging over on-chip integration, as implied by this book. Rather it is the story of the failure to deploy the network revolution, now embodied in the Internet, to the mass-market 20 years early on Seymour’s matured hardware via the PLATO networking project at Control Data Corporation. PLATO was a $1 billion ‘bet the company’ investment by Bill Norris, the farmer/CEO of CDC who put a windmill pump from his Nebraska farm in front of CDC’s corporate towers to remind people where they came from. That is the story of epic proportions only grazed on by this book. PLATO was ready to go to mass market, but Wall Street combined with classic middle mismanagement killed the mass market version of PLATO before it could even be test marketed—for which it was ready. Had it gone otherwise, Seymour probably would never have left the Midwest, and his supercomputer architecture would have focused more on the directions now being taken by Sun and Hewlett Packard—except with Seymour’s inimitable qualities.

I personally worked with the PLATO project and tested a version of it that would have leased a network computer with Macintosh-like interface, including network service, for a flat rate of $40/month with capital payback in 3 years. It had everything—email, conferencing, user-programmable electronic commerce, multiuser real-time graphics games not to mention thousands of hours of computer based education courseware for which the PLATO system was originally designed. We could get this performance because the culture surrounding the land grant colleges of the Midwest, such as the University of Illinois where PLATO originated, combined with Seymour’s astounding performance levels created the right tradeoffs between hardware/software. Some of us were looking forward to incorporating Seymour’s newly marketed Cray-1 as the foundation for the next generation of mass-market PLATO system. Initial benchmarks looked to provide an outstanding bang for the buck as an information utility hub—even without some of the more obvious architectural optimizations that would help in this new kind of application of his systems. This would have shielded Seymour from the vagaries of the government-dominated supercomputer market and driven his architectures into higher levels of silicon integration faster. This, in turn possibly providing the kind of capital in the kind of organization that could have delivered on gallium arsenide’s potential, unlike the disaster that occurred when Seymour left his farm and went cheek-to-cheek with the military in Colorado Springs, CO.

If you look at your Internet Explorer Help menu and select About Internet Explorer, you’ll notice it is based on the NCSA Mosaic web browser and that it was developed at the University of Illinois—right across the street from where PLATO was invented. This was no fluke. PLATO had a profound impact on the culture of the University of Illinois particularly its young students who wanted to push the envelope in networking. The NCSA also gave rise the most widely used web server, Apache, and the the founders of Netscape. The loss of possibly 20 years of ‘new economy’ is incalculable, but suffice to say, comparable losses have been suffered as the result of open war.

There are a lot of anecdotes this book doesn’t tell that will probably die with the people who lived the tale. Just one, to capture a bit of what will be lost to history:

People looking for Cray Research’s facility in the fields of Wisconsin could drive up to a farm house and ask where ‘Cray Research’ was located and friendly neighbor would say, ‘Oh, you mean Seymour’s place...’ and then give directions to an area surrounded by an almost invisible network of intelligence agency surveillance equipment—protecting what was seen as a national treasure from potential espionage. In a speech to one of these agencies, Seymour told them they could come out and protect his folks but only if they never got in the way, and that meant not even letting anyone know they were around. Well, you could tell they were around, but at least they didn’t get in the way!

Posted by James Bowery on January 22, 2008, 04:47 PM | #

The following links are to the towns where the pioneers of the computer revolution were raised.

Lee DeForest, inventor of the first electronic device (the triode).

John Atanasoff, coinventor of the first electronic computer.

Clifford Berry, coinventor of the first electronic computer.

Walter Brattain, coinventor of the transistor.

John Bardeen, coinventor of the transistor.

William Shockley, coinventor of the transistor.

William Norris, founder of the first supercomputer company.

Seymour Cray, architect of the first supercomputer.

Jack Kilby, coinventor of the first integrated circuit and electronic hand-held calculator.

Robert Noyce, coinventor of the first planar integrated circuit, founder of Intel Corporation (which then developed the microprocessor).

These environments are being destroyed—particularly in the agricultural areas as many formerly agrarian families with children are now fleeing from their small towns due to the heavy influx of Mexican farm laborers brought by the centralization of land ownership by faceless corporations. This cultural shift is similar to the decimation of Virginia’s yeoman farmers by slavery that destroyed the rural south’s ability to produce technology (the big difference being those yeoman farmers could at least flee to the Appalachians or frontier for new lands). This rural white flight is enough of a problem that for example State authorities in Iowa are considering busing white children from the counties to which their families have fled, to public schools where more Hispanic children are attending, so those schools can qualify for more Federal assistance.

* deForest was born to an Iowan—the Council Bluffs Congregationalist Minister. His father moved the family to Talladega but, as president of the college, operated in an authority position over blacks.  Further he sent his son away to a New England prep school which, in those days, was as insular white bread as Iowa. Then, after entering Yale, deForest was passed over by the Yale elites for membership in the Yale scientific honor society of which he said “I shall show them day what a mistake they made.” He apparently didn’t quite fit in with the developing new US aristocracy that would later find H-1b visa serfs so appealing.

* It was ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer), not Zuse, that created the prior art—as recognized in court—for electronic computers we actually use.  Of course we all know computers were really invented by Von Neumann right?  The first computer couldn’t have been developed by some hicks at Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts!

* Brattain grew up on a ranch in rural Washington State, to which he attributes his knack for countering the flow. Back then the ranches in Washington hired the sons of “insular white-bread” relatives, not illegal Mexicans. He then returned to teach at Walla Walla because that’s the place with which he most identified.

* Shockley was accused by Bardeen, in a speech given at Altgeld Hall of the University of Illinois of having attempted to suppress the work Bardeen and Brattain had been doing to the point that they had to put their work on a roller cart to put it in a closet during the day and roll it out at night. How do I know this? Because I worked at the PLATO lab on the same block as Altgeld Hall back in 1978 when Bardeen thought he might be dying and decided to put on a rather short-notice lecture recapping his life. Shockley is often touted as a white supremacist for his eugenics fertility clinic but he was no such thing: He was a “cognitive elitist” of the H-1b visa mongering variety.

Posted by Don on January 22, 2008, 05:12 PM | #

“Further he sent his son away to a New England prep school which, in those days, was as insular white bread as Iowa.”

It’s a little hard to tell if this slander is by the poster just above or simply a quote by someone else, but it is Talmudic to the core to use language like “insular white bread” which is, of course, one of the memes (or an application therreof) that regards European Americans as undistinguised & undifferentiated blobs of whiteness. And the use of a food name (white bread) is an explicit way to smother our diversity, and to preach to us about our need for diversity well beyond that provided to us by the exotic variety of national origin peoples from Europe, as well as the vibrant ethnicities from Europe. All that white diversity falls before the unremarked slander quoted above.

If readers can swallow this formulation (insular white bread) without comment or objection, then the sky is the limit for Jewish control of our names and our ideas about ourselves.

Posted by James Bowery on January 22, 2008, 05:26 PM | #

“Insular white bread” is used precisely to denounce the slanderous language used against the environments that produce the most revolutionary technologies.

Sorry if my irony was too thick.

Posted by onlooker on January 22, 2008, 05:49 PM | #

“If readers can swallow this formulation (insular white bread) without comment or objection, then the sky is the limit for Jewish control of our names and our ideas about ourselves.”

It’s not just Jewish control, but the entire white-hating-left that seeks to control our ideas about ourselves.

http://www.resistingdefamation.org/

click on slurs for more examples.

>>>white bread (a food-based hate caricature often seen in connection with “mayonnaise”; a showing of contempt; an attempt to smother European American diversity)

Posted by GT on January 22, 2008, 08:23 PM | #

I side with Staniford against the (Kunstler) reversalists.

What a charade:  Oil vs. Ethanol.  Mercedes vs. Horse ‘n Buggy.  Combines vs. Rakes.

This is nothing more than a staged confrontation, a distraction pitting duped suburban Smurfs against duped kinsmen in the mud-bathing, granola-chewing brigade!

Both industries are corporate, collaborating, heavily subsidized by the regime, and opposed to White independence.  Neither industry has anything to do with “localism” except in a historically feudalistic sense.

Take a look at Wendell, Idaho’s year 2000 demographics:

http://www.wendellidaho.com/

I have stopped in Wendell twice during the past year.  Mestizos, Amerindian, Africans, etc., comprise >30% of the town’s population.  They are succored by at least one local church, are employed in corporate agriculture doing the work Whites refuse to do (wink, wink), and exchange food stamps for junk food like it’s going out of style at the local convenience sto.. er, market.

The ladder we climbed is not there for us to climb back down.

What ladder would that be?  The ladder of continued economic and political dependency or the ladder of White independence?  We gotta move from one to the other.

Posted by zusammen on January 22, 2008, 08:42 PM | #

Reversal, or any type of regress is not what anyone is talking about. Present society is bloatware needing patches, like when a new version of Windows is released. Patching software riddled with little errors and open security holes is not reversalism. Much of the software code could be trimmed down, likewise for the volume and frequency of our overwhelmingly gluttony-driven aracialist, cultureless industrialized civilization.

Our cumbersome fossil fuel industrialization may yet transition into a radically new form. Nanotechnology is yet in an embryonic state and from out of this, as some technocrats hope, will bloom both new materials and alternative means of energy production. Their vision, it seems, is a lower profile, a more elegant and a true on-demand product industry. Coupled with an environment inundated with various “helper systems” we would also have a true on-demand services industry. See Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer for more.

The non-technocrat types think more pragmatically, hoping for less industry, and that only to serve human necessity rather than wants while reasserting cultural pursuits in the vacancy once filled by want-driven consumerism. The non-technocrats are overwhelmingly neo-liberal egalitarians and I have found this is precisely why supposed Aryan racialist types are aligned with Jews, bourgoise liberal gentiles and all neocons against their own Aryan folk and tradition (i.e. fallacious Guilt by Association with “tree huggers"). In reality, this cultural/naturalist politcal ground with tangible group survival benefits has been foolishly capitulated, essentially like giving up, with no contest, a tactical position like a rugged hilltop having good cover and a wide view on the field of battle already being lost by the good guys.

Want-driven industrialization got us multiculturalism and a European mankind crowded out of his historic homelands. Proponents of heavy industry consumerism and its logical offshoots globalization and multiculturalism are no friend to their own people.

Posted by GT on January 22, 2008, 09:10 PM | #

The non-technocrats are overwhelmingly neo-liberal egalitarians and I have found this is precisely why supposed Aryan racialist types are aligned with Jews, bourgoise liberal gentiles and all neocons against their own Aryan folk and tradition (i.e. fallacious Guilt by Association with “tree huggers").

That was certainly true in my case, 10 years ago.  Very good, Z!

Posted by James Bowery on January 22, 2008, 09:27 PM | #

Regarding Fred Scooby’s query about fusion energy:

Yes there are many potential sources of energy fusion among them but you don’t need to get as speculative as fusion or even “squirt gun” Johnson’s thermoelectric generator to find lots of energy.

The problem isn’t energy technology—it is that capital sources nowadays are corrupted by capital welfare in the form of economic rents.  The use of the tax system to transfer wealth from producers to owners by protecting the property rights of owners, mostly free of charge, is driving yeomen into the welfare state themselves, depriving them not only of the capital required to see their inventions through to completion but also depriving them of the independent, non-compliant, character of the inventor.

Oh, there _is_ an exception to the absence of taxes on property rights:  Patent fees.  Patent fees are confiscatory and kill any attempt at independent invention by bankrupting inventors before they can acquire capital to build fully functional demonstrator prototypes.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 23, 2008, 01:41 AM | #

James, thanks for those explanations. 

Incidentally, regarding my questions about ethanol, there’s lots of discussion which I wasn’t aware of, in the comments thread underneath this log entry.  It’s a thread I hadn’t gotten into at all, but on reading it now I see the whole ethanol question extensively looked into there:  a good, intelligent, informative read.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 23, 2008, 01:52 AM | #

More here.

Posted by Maguire on January 23, 2008, 04:06 AM | #

“And it is this failure that I am calling the Fallacy of Reversibility. It is most pronounced in Kunstler, who in addition to believing we need a much higher level of involvement in agriculture also wants railways, canals, and sailing ships back, and is a strong proponent of nineteenth century urban forms.”

Jews like Kunstler do a great job of taking reasonable propositions and turning them into unrecognizable caricatures.  Mordecai Levy ("Karl Marx") provided an early example of this trait with his theory of a war between ‘labor’ and ‘capital’.  Taken to its extreme this would put a mechanic (labor) at odds with his tool box (capital).

I’d nominate Russia and the former USSR states as a widely ignored example of what actually happens in an industrial society during and after a Peak Oil event. 

http://www.eia.doe.gov:80/emeu/aer/txt/ptb1105.html

Former USSR oil production ‘peaked’ in 1987 at 12 million bbl/day.  It declined to 10 million bbl/day in the ultimate crisis year of 1991.  This production decline publicly manifested itself as spreading economic chaos.  Perception of this might have played a role in Sadam Hussein’s decision to attempt to annex Kuwait.

During this period the eastern European communist empire collapsed first, followed by the political collapse of the USSR itself.  Oil production decline in Russia continued through 1998 when another bond default and inflationary currency crisis swept the country.  I happened to be in Moscow the summer of 1998 when that bottoming crisis appeared.

“This encompasses people advocating a return to earlier food growing or distribution practices (the local food movement)”

Starting in the middle 1980s this became and has remained a common weekend and summer vacation activity at the family “dacha”.  It provides a vital economic supplement to the average Russian family’s annual food budget. 

“folks wanting to bring back the railways and tramcars”

Electricity was and remains a major source of motive power for mass transit in Russian cities and cross-country passenger and freight trains.  Had this infrastructure not existed the depths of the economic crisis would have been far worse.

“people believing that large scale corporations will all collapse”

It depends on the value to weight ratio of their major products.  Pharmaceutical and semi-conductor companies are in no danger. 

“that the Internet will fail”

The internet uses comparatively little energy.  And the vast bulk of that energy is electricity.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 24, 2008, 05:58 PM | #

File this in the “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t” folder and the “These Goddamned Assholes On The Other Side Are Complete Lunatics And You Can Never Please Them, Never” folder:

A quote from Der Spiegel, 23 January 2008:

The European Union has announced plans to increase the use of gas and diesel produced from plants. But the critique against biofuels is mounting. Many say they are even more harmful than conventional fossil fuels. […]

The evidence against biofuels marshalled by [Dr. Andrew] Boswell and other environmentalists appears quite damning. Advertised as a fuel that only emits the amount of carbon dioxide that the plants absorb while growing – making it carbon neutral – it actually has resulted in a profitable industrial sector attractive to countries around the world. Vast swaths of forest have been felled and burned in Argentina and elsewhere for soya plantations. Carbon-rich peat bogs are being drained and rain forests destroyed in Indonesia to make way for extensive palm oil farming.

Because the forests are often torched and the peat rapidly oxidizes, the result is huge amounts of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. Furthermore, healthy peat bogs and forests absorb CO2 – scientists refer to them as “carbon sinks” – making their disappearance doubly harmful. […]

Environmentalists say that emissions aren’t the only serious problem created by the biofuel boom. Even crops grown in northern countries, like corn in the United States or rapeseed in Germany and the rest of Europe, harbor major dangers to the climate. Both maize and rapeseed are voracious consumers of nitrogen, leading farmers to use large quantities of nitrous oxide fertilizers. But when nitrous oxide is released into the atmosphere, it reflects 300 times as much heat as carbon dioxide does. […]

Another issue receiving increasing attention recently is that of rising food prices as foodstuffs are turned into fuel. Price increases for soybeans and corn hit developing countries particularly hard. […]

Slowly, it appears that some governments are beginning to listen to the chorus of criticisms. Last autumn, the Canadian province of Quebec announced that it would cease building plants to produce the biofuel ethanol. And on Monday, the UK’s House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee called for a stop in the increase of biofuel use. “Biofuels can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from road transport. But at present, most biofuels have a detrimental impact on the environment overall,” committee chairman Tim Yeo said, according to Reuters.

The European Union has reacted with anger to the UK report. Andris Piebalgs, European Commissioner for Energy, told the Guardian that “the Commission strongly disagrees with the conclusion of the British House of Commons report.”

A quote from EUobserver, 24 January 2008

Corporate Europe Observatory, (CEO) a lobby watchdog group based in the Netherlands, is worried that the [European Commission] is taking into account the interests of the biofuel industry and ignoring the warnings of scientists, noting that the EU Joint Research Centre and the UK Parliament Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) have expressed strong doubts about biofuel sustainability, with the EAC calling for a moratorium on biofuel targets. […]

“Most biofuels now appear to be worse for the climate than oil,” said Friends of the Earth Europe’s Sonja Meister. “There is not enough good agriculture land to grow food, feed and biofuels. The JRC report said any expansion in Europe would mean ploughing grasslands, which will result in huge greenhouse gas emissions,” she added.

Posted by GT on January 24, 2008, 09:04 PM | #

The decision has been made:  Big Ag and Oil are heavily subsidized by the regime.  Feedstock generating a net energy balance upon conversion to ethanol will continue being produced in North and South America by Big Ag for sale to Big Oil as a gasoline additive.  Period.  Look for gradual increases in ethanol production.

Land availability in Europe is a non-problem for the Globalists. Why?  North America has nowhere near the population density of Europe.  There is LOTs of arable land – that is, land that can be cultivated for growing crops – remaining in the United States and Canada.  LOTS ‘n LOTS. 

Should an increase in food prices result from ethanol production the cost will be borne by the West’s urban Smurfs – at first with grumbling, but eventually with quiet helplessness once they realize that the food supply is controlled by Big Ag through its use of patented seeds and cloned livestock (harvested by squat, brown serfs of low intelligence imported from Mexico).

North America’s future consists of a subservient, multiracial assortment of technosmurfs in suburbia and a predominantly “Hispanic” group of agroserfs in flyover country.  Despite gradual White assimilation the first group will remain “ethnically” divided between the brown and yellow men.  Both groups will remain dependent upon the regime’s goodwill for a very long time.

Our greatest hope for survival as a people in North America, Europe, and elsewhere, resides in our ability to achieve White independence in North America’s rural “flyover” country. 

To third-position White nationalists the controversy over ethanol – which has divided the West’s suburban Smurfs and Burning Men of Caucasian persuasion – is a red-herring.

Posted by Maguire on January 24, 2008, 11:55 PM | #

GT,

“Land availability in Europe is a non-problem for the Globalists. Why?  North America has nowhere near the population density of Europe.  There is LOTs of arable land – that is, land that can be cultivated for growing crops – remaining in the United States and Canada.  LOTS ‘n LOTS.”

You can add Russia and the Ukraine to the list of available arable land for crops.  Huge tracts of arable land lie fallow in European Russia and the Ukraine.  Huge.  Increased utilization only needs a political stimulus.

Maguire

Posted by GT on January 25, 2008, 05:09 PM | #

We oppose the globalist conversion of food crops to ethanol.  Our gig is about converting inedible biomass from waste streams – primarily sawdust and wood chips – to power shops, small manufacturing facilities, and to electrify microcommunities - as one of several first steps toward achieving White economic independence in rural locations.  Nevertheless, the subsidized conversion of food crops to ethanol to fuel the judeoconomy is an established fact and will increase over time in accordance with the regime’s globalist mandate.  This means the Oil v. Ethanol “discussion” is over except for the echoes of those who think the “debate” is ongoing and that their opinion matters.  It is time for American conservatives – traditionally a day late and dollar short when it comes to social and political realities – to catch on and look to the future.

Posted by James Bowery on January 26, 2008, 10:06 PM | #

I’d appreciate it if one of you guys, or both, would write up an article critiquing the claims of a $1/gallon ethanol biomass converter from:

http://www.coskataenergy.com/

If you want I’ll publish here for you.

Posted by Maguire on January 26, 2008, 11:37 PM | #

James,

“would write up an article critiquing”

O.K.  I’ll work on it. 

“claims of a $1/gallon ethanol biomass converter”

The few pictures they show on their website are of lab scale apparatuses.  Given this and their mid-2006 start-up date it is virtually certain they don’t have a working production scale prototype plant.

Off-setting this is their strong backing by Jewish venture capitalists:

“Coskata was founded in July 2006 by Todd Kimmel and Rathin Datta with tremendous support from Khosla Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures and GreatPoint Ventures. Todd Kimmel and the GreatPoint Ventures team (Aaron Mandell, Andrew Perlman, Avi Goldberg) had collaborated previously on an energy investment.”

Coskata is exhibiting all the vaporware symptoms previously displayed by another neocon Jew operation.  This was Changing World Technologies and “thermal depolymerization”, which seems to be dead in the water now.  The symptoms include heavy funding, patented and/or proprietary processes and excellent media access. 

Maguire

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on February 07, 2008, 12:36 AM | #

Yes, and lots of the independent praise for the process is from the tribe, at least in the few articles I’ve read so far.

Posted by Berrytree on March 07, 2008, 01:33 PM | #

Kunstler sees those, presumably, as steam-driven, and burning what?  Wood?  With diesel and coal out, what else will there be?  If they build fission-fueled locomotives presumably there’ll also be lots of fission-powered electricity-generating plants, implying affordable battery-powered cars, cars that won’t go fast but at least faster than a horse-and-buggy.