Just outside of Matador...
Friday, March 30, 2012
Matrix of Rackets
So, last Friday I think my doctor fired me.
I came in for a routine checkup of my cholesterol levels because
about six months ago I stopped taking the 40 milligrams of Crestor Dr.
X prescribed and he was concerned about where my numbers were going. I
kicked off the conversation, which took place, of course, in a
windowless, closet-like, steel-and-linoleum-lined examination room that
must be designed to induce maximum dread saturation in the human
psyche. I told Dr. X that I had embarked on a high-fat,
butter-meat-cheese-crème-fraîche diet and ditched the ultra-low-fat,
grains-and-tofu program that I followed for about five years. Dr. X
paused dramatically after I finished and then stated bloodlessly that
my cholesterol had gone up from 220 to 260 since my previous blood test
three months earlier. Yes, well... I told him I had started eating
shitloads of meat, butter, and eggs three days before my latest blood
test. Chagrin transformed his face like a mask.
I then
explained that I thought the combination of statin drugs and a low-fat,
high carb diet had damaged my system. The mask of chagrin on Dr. X's
face was transforming slowly into something you might see in the
Rite-Aid around Halloween. Apparently he thought I was blaming him,
since he had put me on the drug and approved of the Ornish/Essylsten
diet I'd put myself on. In point of fact, blame was not on my agenda. I
was simply trying to describe my version of reality in the interest of
improving my health. For about a year, I'd developed a range of
alarming symptoms: peripheral neuropathy (tingling and numbness in my
hands and feet), striking memory loss, poor balance, atrophying
muscles, intractable insomnia and I attributed it to side effects of
Crestor (yes, go fuck yourself Astra Zenica, makers of Crestor),
combined with a lack of vital nutrients that my body needed to make
routine repairs for five years.
Then I commenced a
discussion about a possible Vitamin B-12 deficiency, since this is a
not unusual outcome for someone who gets insufficient nutrition from
animal-based foods. Dr. X said they could run a simple blood test for
it. He had now turned his attention completely to the screen of the
laptop computer that had become a prosthetic extension of his persona.
I suspected he had lost interest in the conversation. I wondered out
loud if the results of the test might be skewed, since I had also
recently put myself on a dose of B-12 sub-lingual supplements. This is
where Dr. X lost it. He stood up abruptly and said, "I'm not a boutique
physician! Other people are waiting out there to see me!" Then he
pointed at me and said, "You are going to die of a heart attack or a
stroke!" That was possible, I thought, but then something was going to
get Dr. X, too, eventually, unless he managed to funnel himself into
Ray Kurzweil's cyborg singularity rapture.
I thought further: my doctor is a most intemperate fellow.
Then I trotted obediently down the hall to the phlebotomy parlor
(another windowless closet), and gave more blood for the B-12 test. Dr.
X appeared briefly in the doorway and handed me a slip of paper with
the name of a osteopath-naturopath in town who might better entertain
my particular health concerns. One thing I didn't mention to Dr. X
during this incident - nor did I mention it in last week's blog - was
the fact that my girlfriend (a professional librarian and crack
researcher) had discovered a website that disclosed payments from
pharmaceutical companies to doctors. Dr. X, evidently, had scored about
$200,000 total over a recent 18-month period, including about 20-K from
Astra Zenica. I didn't bring it up with Dr N in the exam room because I
did not want to turn the office visit into an adversarial event, and
there's no question he would have gone batshit. But there you have it,
now, like so much meat flopped out in the table.
This
personal anecdote is only a tiny sample of the quackery and corruption
at large in this segment of society. Of course it extends into the many
branches of the nutritional sector, too, including the matrix of
rackets in the food, farming, and policy realms that have left the
American public in a daze of metabolic syndrome from eating a diet
based almost entirely on processed corn byproducts.
I'm
five foot nine and a half and I weighed in on Friday at 164.5 After
about two weeks back on butter-meat-cheese-crème-fraîche, my hands are
still tingling. They seem even worse today after the first pretty good
night's sleep I've gotten in months. That kind of damage is sometimes
permanent. I'll have a pity-party for myself and then maybe I'll get on
with my day. But I'll let you know how I'm doing over time. And if you
know of a good physician in the Washington-Warren-Saratoga County
region of New York, drop me a line (jhkunstler at mac.com).
Meanwhile, please be assured that I will get back to commentary on
national and international issues. I will say it's ironic that the big
event of the week is the Supreme Court's review of the Obama Health
Care Reform Act, a cherry on one of the biggest clusterfuck cakes that
the world ever baked. Mark my words: health care in the USA is
unreformable. Like a lot of other things in Racket Nation, it simply
has to implode to transform itself into something better.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Juked by Medicine
This
still moment on the verge of spring equinox, industrial civilization is
taking a rest from its travails of finance and economy. The creaking
and groaning vehicle of world banking lurches forward with its latest
patch, the Greek fix, but the explosive resignation last week of a
Goldman Sachs executive director Greg Smith, posted as an op-ed essay
in no less than the New York Times, afforded a glimpse into the dark
place where American values crawled off to die, like turning over a
rock in a meadow to find the white slithering things that dwell there,
and asserting a broad and anguished truth at the heart of our culture:
all is swindle.
In the still moment, the nation is
digesting this discovery, and I think it will represent a turning point
in the arduous plotline of the crime story that banking has become.
It's also the moment of reawakening for the Occupy movement as it now
struggles with what it is to become. I doubt that it can avoid turning
angrily and maybe viciously political as it focuses its energies on
occupying this summer's looming political conventions.
But in this still moment I want to take a break from purely public
issues for a second week and discuss some personal things: nutrition
and medicine. I hope it will be of interest to some of you. Last week,
after a four year misadventure on an ultra low-fat vegan diet (no meat,
no cheese, no eggs), I turned around 180 degrees and resumed eating all
those verboten things again. I had been feeling shitty for a long time,
in particular with muscle pain, muscle weakness, penetrating fatigue,
and some weird neurological symptoms and I decided to take drastic
measures.
This personal misadventure started about four
and half years ago when my doctor read me the riot act on my
cholesterol numbers. The total was around 290. I forget exactly what
the LDL ("bad" cholesterol) was, but it wasn't good, and ditto the HDL
("good" cholesterol) and the triglycerides (oy vay). The upshot was
that my doctor put me on a whopping dose of the most powerful statin
drug, Crestor 40mg (made by AstraZenica). I left his office feeling
like my identity was transformed from a healthy normal person to a
prisoner on death row.
I thought I had been leading a
healthy life. Being self-employed, and master of my own schedule, I was
able to work in a lot of exercise. For twenty-five years I was a
runner. A hip replacement put an end to that. During that same period,
I also swam a mile a day in the local YMCA lap pool. After hip surgery,
I walked daily instead of running, kept swimming, and also did at least
four weekly sessions in the weight room (including the cardio machines
such as the elliptical trainer, easy on the joints). During the
temperate months, I also biked many days of the week. Because I got so
much exercise, I thought I could eat anything I wanted to, and did. I
was a capable cook, having worked in many restaurant jobs during my
starving bohemian years, and I could competently put together
everything from a butterflied leg of lamb to a flourless chocolate cake.
After receiving my "death sentence" from the doc, I went straight to
the cardio diet bookshelf and found works by two of the chief
authorities on the subject: Dr. Dean Ornish, the popular TV celebrity,
and Dr. Caldwell Essylsten, a less public but also renowned nutrition
guru from the Cleveland Clinic. Both of them promoted ultra low-fat
essentially vegan diets. I used them as a guide for learning how to
cook for myself in a new way. This largely revolved around vegetables
braised in stocks rather than oil-fried in a wok, lots of brown rice
and other whole grains (oats, especially), and the substitution of
plant (soy) based protein foods like tofu, tempeh, and the various
veggie "burger" products for actual meat. Plenty of salads, of course,
and fruit. Of the two diet docs, Essylsten was the most severe. You
were barely allowed to eat a nut. However, in defiance I ate the same
lunch every day for all those years: peanut butter on one slice of our
local Rock Hill 8-grain bread. Otherwise I was pretty strict with
myself.
Over the next several years I lost about 20
pounds (from 188 to 168 - I am 5' 10"). By 2011, my cholesterol was
down to 110 total (about equal LDLs and HDLs), but I was feeling shitty
all the time as described above: lack of stamina, muscle pains, cramps,
etc. I was aware that I was getting old, over 60, but I suspected that
these were not necessarily natural aging issues. I was having trouble
remembering things, names especially, and at times felt like my brain
was fogged. I developed neuropathies (tingling and numbness) in my
hands and feet. I grew suspicious that these things were connected with
the whopping dose of Crestor that I was on. There is, of course, a
body of anecdotal chat on the Web about the evils of Crestor and other
statin drugs, and in July of 2011 I decided to taper down and get off
the stuff. By September it was out of my system. My doctor was rather
cross with me. He assured me that an LDL level above 70 was a death
sentence, should I get back there.
Over the next six
months, the brain fog and the name-forgetting went away, but the muscle
issues and fatigue-and-stamina problems persisted. I was still on my
nearly fat-free vegan diet. My theory was to see how far up my
cholesterol would go on diet alone. In November it clocked in at 220
total and I forget the LDL number because my doctor was shaking his
head and making clucking sounds as he reported it, along with his
now-standard empirical warning that I was back in the death zone.
So, all winter I staggered on feeling shitty and eating low-fat
vegan. There is for sure a large body of counter-argument on the whole
cholesterol issue, led by the author-journalist Gary Taubes (a
supernaturally fit-looking dude). This argument states that fat is
actually a critical and essential component of human diet, and animal
fat in particular, which is crucial for the continual process of cell
renewal and the processing of many other nutrients, especially many
vitamins. There is also a range of amino acids, the building blocks of
proteins, that you can only get from animal foods. All of these things
have a bearing on muscle performance and the health of nerve tissue, in
which fats are an indispensible component.
Frankly, I
knew about these counter-arguments, but the authority of medicine these
days militates the opposite way, and in these nearly five years I
allowed the authority of my doctor to persuade me to drive down my
cholesterol by all means available. I now regard this as a mistake,
perhaps even a personal fiasco. I think I have done a lot of damage to
my system and that it will take a long time to repair. But I am back in
the realm of meat, cheese, and eggs. And, yes, I do eat a lot of
vegetables, especially green and leafy ones, and I am watching my
carbohydrates (but not eschewing them).
I've also come
to a conclusion about what started this whole long melodrama. At the
time I first got my high cholesterol "riot act" reading, I was also
eating a lot of sugar and refined white flour in a certain form. In the
evenings, after a day that included at least two episodes of strenuous
exercise, I allowed myself to eat Pepperidge Farm cookies and Ben and
Jerry's ice cream. I probably ran through a bag of cookies every two or
three days and ditto a pint of ice cream. I now believe that my
cholesterol numbers were high not so much because of the meat and
cheese that I was eating, but because I regularly consumed too much
sugar and refined flour. That is my current theory and narrative.
So, I'm back to an omnivore's diet. (The first time I had real eggs
scrambled in butter in nearly five years was quite a moment!) It's been
about ten days. I can't say that I've noticed any marked improvements.
As I said above, it will probably take a long time to undo the damage
done. I'll check in again on this theme after a while and let you know
how things are going. I'm scheduled to go in for another routine
physical on Friday. I imagine it will be a contentious session. But I
wonder if doctors are losing their legitimacy now in a way similar to
the other authority figures in our culture: the political leaders, the
bankers economists, the business executives. To get back to where I
started this blog, all is swindle these days. And medicine, being the
life-and-death racket that it is, may be the biggest swindle of them
all.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Intermezzo
Unless your mobile home was blown all over the county on opening
day of the tornado season, this must seem like an interlude of
reassuring normality in the world's convulsive wendings. The IED known
as Greece has not quite yet exploded, loud as all the graveyard
whistling that emanates from Europe might be. Even the invocation of a
"credit event" by the notorious ISDA has seen a first-stage payout of a
few mere billions - though you've got to believe that this is some kind
of stage-managed dumb-show designed to conceal the fact that the whole
credit default swap racket is a network of frauds.
Where I live, in the uppermost Hudson Valley, the peace and
tranquility of the moment is overlaid by sweet spring zephyrs arriving
about a month early. I hope that doesn't portend weeks on end of
90-degree summer heat, but I have the consolation of not being in
Texas, where that would be more like three straight months of
100-degree-plus heat. It must get tedious running in and out of the a.c.
My gardening schemes which fermented all winter are finally going
into action. Yesterday, I banged together the first two of ten raised
beds arrayed geometrically in a forty-eight foot square foot formal
vegetable and herb garden. I've done it before on a smaller scale at a
different house in a different time when nobody except the clinically
paranoid expected the collapse of civilization. I'm going to put in a
not-so-formal patch of corn-squash-and beans outside of that in the
manner of the people who lived here a thousand years ago, really just
to see how it works, and I may also plant a monoculture patch of
potatoes elsewhere.
The "back forty" awaits the arrival
of twenty fruit trees - mixed apple, pear, cherry, plus blueberry,
raspberry and current shrubs - and two blight-resistant American
chestnuts (not absolutely guaranteed blight-free). A mighty effort has
been made over recent decades by valiant arborists to restore the
American chestnut. It was this tree (Castanea dentate) which
made the forests east of the Mississippi so prolific with game in the
time before clocks arrived in North America. My back forty used to be
huge lawn, with an above-the-ground pool decorating the middle of it.
The pool is gone, thank you Jeezus. I'll start with this set of fruit
and see how they take to the soil here, and if they get going well I'll
get twenty more next year. It could add up to a really immense amount
of fruit for one household. There's always cider....
Altogether I have about an acre-and-a-quarter of already clear land to
experiment with. The rest is woodlot. The woods will require a lot of
grooming and brush-hogging to get decades of "trash" out: rampant
honeysuckle, Virginia creeper, box elder. There's a lot of good
hardwood in there otherwise, and I built a saw-jack set up to cut stove
lengths. There's enough in there to be self-replenishing with careful
management. The house I bought last fall has a fireplace with a stove
insert. The builder insulated the shit out of the place. The chain saw
is off in the shop getting its battered old chain replaced. I have to
learn how to sharpen the damn thing now. Cutting firewood is where you
get a really vivid sense of the power embodied in gasoline. A couple of
gallons will get next season's supplementary supply laid in. In the
past, and probably, in the future, this is a job that would be nearly
impossible to do by yourself.
These days, except for
highway repair and oil-drilling, there are few outdoor activities that
require a gang of men working together. In the years ahead, household
composition is going to change hugely for many reasons. It's unusual
these days to have a lot of children - considering population
overshoot, it seems crazy to promote that - but people with something
to offer in the way of skills and labor may have to join forces just to
get the necessary day's work done together. I'm sure that will have its
consolations, even if it means you don't get to have a 3,500 square
foot house to yourself.
The deer-fence installer just
submitted his estimate. It was an eye-opener, but it has to be done and
it's a one-time thing. I could have done it myself in a half-assed way
with plastic netting but this is not a time for half-assed measures. My
place is like a petting zoo, there are so many deer on and around it.
Left open, they would ravage anything I grow like locusts. And they had
the easiest winter in memory - no snow on the ground all January and
February, something nobody around here has seen before. Here it is
March and they are still looking plump and ready to pop out lots of
healthy babies. So I have to put a fence up around the garden and
orchard part of the property, with gates into the woodlots. The fence
has to be eight feet high because the white-tailed deer is a mighty
leaper. It's going to look a little like Jurassic Park.
Of course, if the USA gets into really deep socio-political shit,
it's easy to imagine the entire deer-herd of Washington County getting
exterminated inside a couple of years by hungry, desperate jackers. The
people I play fiddle with on Tuesday night, many of them boomer-age
hippie homesteaders and master gardeners, remember thirty years ago
when you hardly ever saw a deer. We could easily get to that point
again when times get hard.
About a week ago, I stopped
on a country road to take a leak. I stepped into the woods for a minute
and then, stepping out, was horrified to see dozens of ticks crawling
on my pants legs. I took the otherwise unused snow-brush to them. The
really weird part is that it was only thirty degrees that day. Yet they
were already active and right lively. This place is now the epicenter
of the eastern Lyme Disease epidemic. I went to a party not long ago
where at least fifteen people were currently in treatment, or had been
more than once before, for Lyme. Some just couldn't get rid of it. It
is a wicked-ass illness, very difficult to get out of your system, and
debilitating in myriad ways. It, too, was unknown around here thirty
years ago.
I honestly don't know if my own little
homesteading experiment at the edge of this sweet-but-beat little
village is going to work out. I'm pretty confident about growing
vegetables because I've done it successfully before, even in recent
years when I was a renter sitting out the housing bubble. But it gives
you something psychologically nourishing to do while the
turbo-industrial world wends its way into the long emergency. Pictures
to come on my website as the season wends where it will.
Apologies for late posting today...time change and all....
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Reality Check
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 5, 2012 8:37 AM
America is starting to remind me of Bette Davis in the horror movie classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? America is losing its grip on reality. America is acting like an elderly strumpet in too much pancake makeup performing a song-and-dance on the beach while its kinfolk lie dying in the sand.
History is taking us in a certain direction and we don't want to hear about it. We've got our hands clapped over our ears and we're shouting "Kittens and puppies! Kittens and puppies!" Here are some of the things that we're confused about:
We tell ourselves we're in an economic recovery, meaning we expect to return to a prior economic state, namely, a turbo-charged "consumer" economy fueled by easy credit and cheap energy. Fuggeddabowdit. That part of our history is over. We've entered a contraction that will seem permanent until we reach an economic re-set point that comports with what the planet can actually provide for us. That re-set point is lower than we would like to imagine. Our reality-based assignment is the intelligent management of contraction. We don't want this assignment. We'd prefer to think that things are still going in the other direction, the direction of more, more, more. But they're not. Whether we like it or not, they're going in the direction of less, less, less. Granted, this is not an easy thing to contend with, but it is the hand that circumstance has dealt us. Nobody else is to blame for it.
A particular set of economic behaviors are over. The housing sector will never come back to what it was because that whole living arrangement is over. We built too many houses in the wrong places in no particular civic disposition and it only worked for a few decades because of cheap oil, cars purchased on credit, and foreigners lending us their money. We're done building suburbia, and after while, when we can no longer stand the dysfunction and inconvenience, we'll be done living in the stuff that's already there. To complicate matters, we have no idea how over all this is. That's why one of the main themes in this presidential election - not even stated explicitly - is the defense of the entitlement to a suburban lifestyle; in other words, a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. As the suburban dynamic increasingly fails, disappointment may turn to fury. It will be the result of leaders not telling the public the truth for many many years. This public fury may be very destructive. It could bring down the government, provoke civil war, or lead us into foreign military adventures - the result of blaming other people for our own bad choices. If we put our effort and spirit into inhabiting our piece of the planet differently, this might turn out differently and better. By this I mean returning to traditional development patterns of civic places (towns) embedded in productive rural places (the agricultural landscape).
More higher education is not going bring back the turbo-charged consumer economy. We will not need more office gerbils, bond salesmen, regional deputy managers, or Gender Studies PhDs. That's going in the opposite direction too. Though corporations and giant institutions seem to rule our lives these days, they will soon go extinct. Anything organized at the giant scale is going to wobble and fall: national chain retail, trans-national companies, colossal banks, big universities, you name it. The center of economic life in America will be food production and other agricultural activities, not computer gaming, big box bargain shopping, and hybrid car sales. We will need more farmers, more people competent in agricultural management, and more human laborers working in the fields. There will be a lot of other practical, "hands-on" kinds of jobs, but not so many positions in air-conditioned cubicles. You might want to check the "no" box on those things, but reality will have her way with you anyway.
We're real confused about our energy predicament. Stories are flying all around the news media to the effect that the USA will soon be an oil exporter. That's utter nonsense, by the way. We still import more than two-thirds of the oil we use. Another story is that the Bakken shale oil fields will make us "energy independent." That is a complete misunderstanding of reality. Another widely-repeated untruth is the notion that we have "a hundred years of shale gas." These are stories generated by the particular stage of collective grief we have entered - the bargaining stage, where we attempt to negotiate a better contract with reality. Good luck with that. The truth is, we're nearly out of the good cheap oil and gas and what's left is so expensive and difficult to extract that we may not have the capital investment resources to get it. One byproduct of ignoring the disorders in our banking system is that we are also failing to pay attention to the absence of real capital formation. Meanwhile, the oil and gas companies are propagandizing tirelessly in TV commercials in order to get "other people's money" to sustain their Ponzi operations. (Translation: swindling retirees who cannot get yield from "safe" investments such as bonds.) Eventually we'll have to face it: the fossil fuel age is ending and there are no miracle rescue remedies waiting to come on-stage.
We're not going to "tech" our way through the array of mega-problems we face, in particular the energy predicament. The American mind-space today is clogged with cargo-cult fantasies about electric cars, nano-manufacturing, and "information" technology that would allow the trajectory of progress to continue just as we have known and loved it. This too, like the end of suburbia, will lead to vast disappointment. We're heading instead into a "time-out" from technological progress, duration unknown, which will probably also result in the loss of some tricks we've already learned. The leading wish-fulfillment fantasy, of course, is that we will change out all the gasoline and diesel cars for electric cars. This is not going to happen. We will be a far less affluent society. There will be much less capital available to devote to auto loans. Our towns, counties, and states are all going broke and will not be able to keep the stupendous roadway system in repair. That's a major reason why we have to return to living in walkable towns instead of disaggregated suburbs, and why we desperately need to repair the regular (not high-speed) rail system.
We pretend that if we ignore the problems in banking / money / capital formation they might just fade away like the morning dew. The failure to reintroduce the rule-of-law into these matters will destroy the system, and will probably even overtake the destabilizing potential of the peak oil problem - in fact, will accelerate it due to capital scarcity. President Obama is not doing America any favors by, for instance, allowing Jon Corzine to remain at large. If we continue this policy of pretending that nothing has gone wrong, reality will correct our money system for us, by sweeping away all our current arrangements and forcing us to begin over again from scratch. I mean literally from scratch.
It would be nice if we could correct the disorders in the collective conversion that we call "politics," but we are probably going to see ever greater divergence with reality. For the moment, all leadership in America has drunk too much Kool-aid, all of it lacks conviction and competence, none of it wants to enter the actual future.
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 5, 2012 8:37 AM
America is starting to remind me of Bette Davis in the horror movie classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? America is losing its grip on reality. America is acting like an elderly strumpet in too much pancake makeup performing a song-and-dance on the beach while its kinfolk lie dying in the sand.
History is taking us in a certain direction and we don't want to hear about it. We've got our hands clapped over our ears and we're shouting "Kittens and puppies! Kittens and puppies!" Here are some of the things that we're confused about:
We tell ourselves we're in an economic recovery, meaning we expect to return to a prior economic state, namely, a turbo-charged "consumer" economy fueled by easy credit and cheap energy. Fuggeddabowdit. That part of our history is over. We've entered a contraction that will seem permanent until we reach an economic re-set point that comports with what the planet can actually provide for us. That re-set point is lower than we would like to imagine. Our reality-based assignment is the intelligent management of contraction. We don't want this assignment. We'd prefer to think that things are still going in the other direction, the direction of more, more, more. But they're not. Whether we like it or not, they're going in the direction of less, less, less. Granted, this is not an easy thing to contend with, but it is the hand that circumstance has dealt us. Nobody else is to blame for it.
A particular set of economic behaviors are over. The housing sector will never come back to what it was because that whole living arrangement is over. We built too many houses in the wrong places in no particular civic disposition and it only worked for a few decades because of cheap oil, cars purchased on credit, and foreigners lending us their money. We're done building suburbia, and after while, when we can no longer stand the dysfunction and inconvenience, we'll be done living in the stuff that's already there. To complicate matters, we have no idea how over all this is. That's why one of the main themes in this presidential election - not even stated explicitly - is the defense of the entitlement to a suburban lifestyle; in other words, a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. As the suburban dynamic increasingly fails, disappointment may turn to fury. It will be the result of leaders not telling the public the truth for many many years. This public fury may be very destructive. It could bring down the government, provoke civil war, or lead us into foreign military adventures - the result of blaming other people for our own bad choices. If we put our effort and spirit into inhabiting our piece of the planet differently, this might turn out differently and better. By this I mean returning to traditional development patterns of civic places (towns) embedded in productive rural places (the agricultural landscape).
More higher education is not going bring back the turbo-charged consumer economy. We will not need more office gerbils, bond salesmen, regional deputy managers, or Gender Studies PhDs. That's going in the opposite direction too. Though corporations and giant institutions seem to rule our lives these days, they will soon go extinct. Anything organized at the giant scale is going to wobble and fall: national chain retail, trans-national companies, colossal banks, big universities, you name it. The center of economic life in America will be food production and other agricultural activities, not computer gaming, big box bargain shopping, and hybrid car sales. We will need more farmers, more people competent in agricultural management, and more human laborers working in the fields. There will be a lot of other practical, "hands-on" kinds of jobs, but not so many positions in air-conditioned cubicles. You might want to check the "no" box on those things, but reality will have her way with you anyway.
We're real confused about our energy predicament. Stories are flying all around the news media to the effect that the USA will soon be an oil exporter. That's utter nonsense, by the way. We still import more than two-thirds of the oil we use. Another story is that the Bakken shale oil fields will make us "energy independent." That is a complete misunderstanding of reality. Another widely-repeated untruth is the notion that we have "a hundred years of shale gas." These are stories generated by the particular stage of collective grief we have entered - the bargaining stage, where we attempt to negotiate a better contract with reality. Good luck with that. The truth is, we're nearly out of the good cheap oil and gas and what's left is so expensive and difficult to extract that we may not have the capital investment resources to get it. One byproduct of ignoring the disorders in our banking system is that we are also failing to pay attention to the absence of real capital formation. Meanwhile, the oil and gas companies are propagandizing tirelessly in TV commercials in order to get "other people's money" to sustain their Ponzi operations. (Translation: swindling retirees who cannot get yield from "safe" investments such as bonds.) Eventually we'll have to face it: the fossil fuel age is ending and there are no miracle rescue remedies waiting to come on-stage.
We're not going to "tech" our way through the array of mega-problems we face, in particular the energy predicament. The American mind-space today is clogged with cargo-cult fantasies about electric cars, nano-manufacturing, and "information" technology that would allow the trajectory of progress to continue just as we have known and loved it. This too, like the end of suburbia, will lead to vast disappointment. We're heading instead into a "time-out" from technological progress, duration unknown, which will probably also result in the loss of some tricks we've already learned. The leading wish-fulfillment fantasy, of course, is that we will change out all the gasoline and diesel cars for electric cars. This is not going to happen. We will be a far less affluent society. There will be much less capital available to devote to auto loans. Our towns, counties, and states are all going broke and will not be able to keep the stupendous roadway system in repair. That's a major reason why we have to return to living in walkable towns instead of disaggregated suburbs, and why we desperately need to repair the regular (not high-speed) rail system.
We pretend that if we ignore the problems in banking / money / capital formation they might just fade away like the morning dew. The failure to reintroduce the rule-of-law into these matters will destroy the system, and will probably even overtake the destabilizing potential of the peak oil problem - in fact, will accelerate it due to capital scarcity. President Obama is not doing America any favors by, for instance, allowing Jon Corzine to remain at large. If we continue this policy of pretending that nothing has gone wrong, reality will correct our money system for us, by sweeping away all our current arrangements and forcing us to begin over again from scratch. I mean literally from scratch.
It would be nice if we could correct the disorders in the collective conversion that we call "politics," but we are probably going to see ever greater divergence with reality. For the moment, all leadership in America has drunk too much Kool-aid, all of it lacks conviction and competence, none of it wants to enter the actual future.
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