CommUnity of Minds
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 James Howard Kunstler writes: As the West's industrial regime sputters toward a
cheap-energy-crackup conclusion, there have been attempts to recast
what our economy is actually about, how to account for whatever wealth
we manage to produce, and project what our society will actually be
organized to do in the years ahead.
For a while in the 1990s,
the idea was a "service economy," kind of like the old fable of the
town whose inhabitants made a living by taking in each other's laundry
-- only in our case it was selling hamburgers to tourists on vacation
from their jobs making hamburgers elsewhere, or something like that.
Then came the idea of the "information economy" in which making
things of value would no longer matter, only the processing and
deployment of information (sometimes misidentified as "knowledge").
This model seemed to suggest a yin-yang of software engineers who made
up games like "Grand Theft Auto" serving the opposite cohort of people
who bought and played the game. If nothing else, it certainly explained
how lifetimes could be frittered away on stupid activities.
That illusion yielded to the housing bubble economy, which
actually did produce a lot of things, but not necessarily of value --
for instance, houses made of particle board and vinyl 38 miles outside
of Sacramento. It was a tragic and manifold waste of resources, as well
as an insult to the landscape. But the darker side of the housing
bubble lay in the world of finance, where a vast empire of swindles was
constructed to support the Potemkin facade of production homebuilding.
Now we are in a strange period when those swindles are unwinding.
The people who run the finance sector -- the Wall Street investment
banks, hedge funds and ratings agencies, the Federal Reserve, and the
US Dept of the Treasury -- in desperately trying to prevent the unwind,
have rapidly ramped up another new economy based entirely on the buying
and selling of risk. Risk, as a pure abstraction unconnected to any
real capital activity, is all that's left to buy and sell after all
other plausibly practical vehicles for finance have failed. (05/06/08) |
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 Dan Bednarz, PhD, speaking to Nurses and other health professionals, explains: My intent is to give you a
realistic take on the future of your profession by explaining why
healthcare and nursing will be transformed by rising energy costs.
Is
there danger ahead? You bet. It’s going to be difficult, probably
life-changing for all Americans. Here’s why: the scale of our energy
predicament is enormous, unprecedented and grossly misunderstood by
institutional leaders and most of the media.
I know some of you may be wondering, Energy scarcity? That’s someone
else’s problem; put this guy in touch with geologists and politicians.
So let’s step back for the big picture:
The amount of crude oil
pumped out of the ground has been on a bumpy plateau since May of 2005.
Until then oil production was steadily increasing about 2% a year –with
periodic declines - and the world had a daily surplus, or emergency
cushion. That surplus is gone, everything produced, supply, is
immediately purchased, demand. Whether or not the world has reached
“peak oil” –the point at which yearly total worldwide extraction cannot
be increased - this 3 year plateau indicates that the era of cheap
energy is over.
Oil is now over $100.00 a barrel. It was $10.00 a barrel in November 1998.
Oil powers 90% of all transportation and it is essential
to food production and distribution; it is the primary ingredient in
many products –think plastics, petrochemicals, and clothing. It is fair
to say that all our institutions, especially medicine, are dependent
upon oil, the lynchpin resource that keeps the economy humming and
allows it to grow.
And it’s not just oil that’s getting scarce. Natural gas in Pittsburgh went up 30% on April 1st,
to $12.50 per MCF (thousand cubic feet); it was $2.50 in 2001.
Typically, the cost of natural gas drops after the winter but here we
are facing higher prices during the summer.
Coal is becoming scarce in many countries and more expensive
here; its price has about doubled in the past year. It is our main
source of electricity. In about 15 years the world may hit a peak in
its production, and this combined with the fact that natural gas –the
secondary source of electricity generation - simultaneously will be at
or past its peak, poses a threat to our supply of electricity.
To put a human face on this, a polling agency found in
December 2007 that 12% of Americans planned to put their winter energy
bills on their credit card –no wonder Christmas spending was down. An
article in this past Saturday’s New York Times details the rising
number of people unable to pay their winter utility bills and now
facing service cutoffs.
Many hospitals in California are on the verge of bankruptcy; rising
energy costs –in tandem with other increasing costs - could be a
breaking point for them. Further, we are merely at the beginning of
what some of you recognize as Jim Kunstler’s poetic phrase “The Long
Emergency.”
Now let’s look at energy use in hospitals and then use the issue of
record keeping, a biggie for nurses, as one small but significant
example of how energy scarcity will shape the future of healthcare.
Then we’ll close with some comments on where medicine is heading and my
claim that nursing stands to become a force in reforming the healthcare
system.
The EPA estimates that hospitals use twice as much energy per square
foot as do office buildings. Until recently hospital administrators
have not paid attention to the cost of energy because they think
–mistakenly - that it represents less than 2% of their operating
expenses. Therefore, they have considered rising energy costs a
nuisance, not a threat. However, a few weeks ago a former AMA (American
Medical Association) official told me hospital administrators are
getting worried about energy costs because sharp increases are eating
into profits. For example, all energy costs in the US rose 17% in 2007,
with the cost of oil climbing 57%. The first quarter of 2008 shows no
change in this trend. How many years can our society –and hospitals -
absorb these increases? (05/01/08) |
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 James Howard Kunstler writes: Barack Obama caught hell last week for daring to tell the truth
about the ragged thing that the American spirit has become. He said
that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic
circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who
aren’t like them” to work out their negative emotions. He might have
added that the Pope wears a funny hat (see for yourself this week), and
that bears shit in the woods (something rural Pennsylvanians probably
know). Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed for those who slip
up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to the reigning
delusions), Obama was pressured to apologize for his statements.
The evermore loathsome and odious Hillary Clinton, co-owner of a
$100 million personal wealth portfolio, seized the moment to remind
voters what a normal, everyday gal she is -- who would never look down
on the small-town folk of Pennsylvania the way her "elitist" opponent
had -- forgetting, apparently, that the Clinton family's consigliere,
James Carville, famously described the Keystone State as a kind of
redneck sandwich with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as the bread, and
Alabama as the lunch meat in between.
As I mull over all this,
I begin to think that Hillary is exactly what the USA deserves and,
that should she manage to winkle away the nomination and get elected
president, the outcome would be instructive and salutary. For one
thing, she will be buried under an avalanche of political woe,
beginning with the basic financial insolvency of everything in the
nation except the Clinton family. Then she would proceed straight into
an oil-and-gas clusterfuck that could take this society back to the
eighteenth century economically.
This would have the positive effect of forcing the American
public to look elsewhere for governance than the usual parties in
Washington, D.C. It's time for a national purgative, anyway. In fact,
it's way overdue. Are the Democratic and Republican parties anymore
necessary than the Whigs? Neither of them can really articulate the
problems we face (and when their honchos slip up and come close to the
truth, they're persecuted for it). (04/18/08) |
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 Timothy Wilken, MD
writes: Tensegrity is the pattern that results when push and pull have
a win-win relationship with each other.
The pull is continuous and the
push is discontinuous. The continuous pull is balanced by the
discontinuous push producing an integrity of tension and compression.
This creates a powerful self-stabilizing system.
The term tensegrity
comes from synergic science. It was coined by Buckminster Fuller.
The gifting tensegrity
is a newly invented mechanism for the exchange of human help. Let us
begin by describing how a GIFTegrity might be structured and how it
could work.
Every member of a synergic help tensegrity would
participate in two roles. That as a giftor and that as a giftee.
The
continuous pull of the giftees' needs are balanced by the discontinuous
push from the giftors' offers of help. Again we see as an
INTERdependent life form, there will be times when we will help others
and times when others will help us.
The GIFTegrity works on trust. I
give help to those in need and trust that when I am in need there will
be those who will give me help. (03/29/08) |
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 Barack Obama speaks: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands
across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple
words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers
and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean
to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration
of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the
spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately
unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a
question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a
stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue
for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to
future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded
within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the
ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised
its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should
be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from
bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full
rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be
needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do
their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the
courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great
risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the
reality of their time.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this
campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a
march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more
prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in
history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of
our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by
understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common
hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the
same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a
better future for our children and our grandchildren. (03/18/08) |
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This page was last updated: Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 12:26:28 AM
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