The Great Gazoo has returned to Earth again. He’s too busy to bother with nonsense like TPM registration, so he has asked me to convey his heartfelt regrets:

Well, dum-dums, now you’ve gone and done it. Since my brief stay on Earth during your Stone Age, I have devoted a small amount of my valuable time on Zatox monitoring your transmissions to see if any of my incredibly useful advice would take hold. (I am always right, you know - it’s a curse, but it is true.) On Zatox, I am the acknowledged expert on human affairs. If I but had the time, I could solve all of your problems in the blink of an eye. But I’m hard at work on another invention, and anyway, it’s more fun seeing you Earthlings try to get something right.

So imagine my profound disappointment at the recent election. Faced with intractable war, environmental calamity, energy depletion, financial panic, do you take the intelligent course and fall into hopeless despair and pessimism? No! You elect an intelligent, hard-working leader. One bent on solving all your insoluble problems instead of enriching his cronies! What a colossal waste of time.

I’m not the only one who feels this way; everyone on Zatox is stunned. From my observations and lectures, all of us on Zatox have developed such an intimate knowledge of your situation, indeed of your puny Earthling souls, that any of us would assure you that your noble efforts are doomed to certain failure. If only your forebears had listened to me.

Thanksgiving, indeed.

P.S. I would gladly send you a smaller version of my universal doomsday device, if the authorities would only allow it. (Philistines!)

M: Ah. I’d like to have an argument, please.

R: Certainly sir. Have you been here before?

M: No, I haven’t, this is my first time.

We just got our copy of Depletion and Abundance. I assumed that Sharon Astyk was too busy making an Abundance of food for Thanksgiving to post about Depletion, but George Monbiot roused an article out of her. And a good one.

George Monbiot is Arguing with Me…That Has to be Good

In the Guardian, Monbiot writes:

The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich nations have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A survey by the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the US federal government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the total spending on the second world war when adjusted for inflation. Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world’s energy infrastructure involves “an enormous front-load of fossil fuels”, which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest. This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people “to make short term, radical sacrifices”, cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years.

There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale.

Astyk replies:

Read more »

Pop psychologists tell us we’d be happier without so much stuff. DJ and Dmitry Orlov try to make the case that we’d be better off with hardly any stuff at all.

The Case For Resilient Community

For 50 years, Ariyaratne has been describing a similar concept in terms of other benefits: a “no poverty - no affluence” society which promises political, emotional, and spiritual development at the individual, family, and community level. Ariyaratne argues that awakened communities can participate in an awakened central government for those needs that cannot be met at the community level. The central government depends on the communities of its membership, not the reverse. And an awakened central government can participate in global affairs without fear of losing its power, for its power comes from within.

Poverty an asset; assets a burden

Chris writes of a paradox: lack of assets may be the greatest asset of all. I don’t believe that this is a paradox: the higher you climb, the harder you fall. A place that is used to an artificially high standard of living inevitably develops artificially high standards. These standards cannot be undone overnight, as soon as the standard of living collapses, delaying commonsense adaptations until it is too late. Prosperous places have expensive infrastructure, and, once it can no longer be maintained, it becomes much worse than no infrastructure at all. Lastly, poverty takes practice, and a sudden lapse into poverty is far more traumatic than the habit of a stable but constrained existence.

Sorry for the early Xmas image, but I can’t resist Gahan Wilson.

Alan Colmes, Hannity’s liberal punching bag on Hannity & Colmes, is leaving the show.

A) Who should replace him?

B) Who will really replace him?

The Washington Post’s car guy, Warren Brown, slams the punditocracy, saying the fault is not in our auto industry, but in ourselves:

Pundits Peddle Revisionism in Attacking U.S. Automakers

Go ahead and look at (the Prius), preferably in Japan, where the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) has done a marvelous job of coordinating industrial and energy policy into a vehicle development and consumption strategy that makes sense. We have no such government-industry cooperation in the United States. We have no industrial policy, no energy policy, which largely is why we now have a core segment of our natively owned manufacturing infrastructure teetering on the brink of collapse.

Neither the Japanese, nor the Germans, nor the Chinese, nor the Koreans have been as stupid as we’ve been in this country in the management of the automobile industry.

Brown also defends union pay:

It is the rankest hypocrisy for well-paid journalists to decry the “high” pay of UAW-represented employees. I doubt that there is one UAW critic in the media, or on Capitol Hill, who would be willing to settle for a UAW paycheck. I’m almost certain there isn’t one who would be willing to trade his or her relatively cushy employment for a year on an auto plant assembly line.

Criticism of “improvident labor contracts” thus smacks of class bias. It reeks of the notion that some work, such as that involving manual labor, inherently deserves less compensation than others, such as expressing one’s opinion. It’s more baloney.

Update: AutoSavant has a brief history of the decline of Detroit:

Read more »

1949 Buick Roadmaster Sedanet

My Regal has been a real champ, and I’d love to replace it with the almost identical LaCrosse, but should I ever buy another Big 3 car? Business forecasting bastion Kiplinger considers the obvious question:

Kiplinger: Should You Buy a Detroit Car?

Loyalty to the American carmakers is low and getting lower. When it comes to cars, Americans have a long memory. We remember the Cadillac Cimarron (a Chevy Cavalier masquerading as a luxury car), the Ford Taurus (which languished as a rental lot staple while Detroit focused on trucks), the Hummer H2 (a symbol of Detroit’s myopia).

We remember the years of quality and reliability problems as well as the inept management decisions. We bristle because Detroit neglected fuel-efficient cars, gave expensive perks to the unions, and even paid workers while production lines were idled.

Detroit has made great strides fixing its problems and designing better cars, but it may be too late. As Americans have fled to foreign makes, many of which are made right here in the U.S.A., Detroit’s market share has dwindled to 482% (sic), compared with more than 60% five years ago.

Well, no:

I wish the U.S. carmakers, and the industrial Midwest, all the best. No one wants to see the pain associated with job losses. But although I’d love to play the patriot card and recommend that you support the American carmakers, why take the chance? You have enough problems with your retirement and college funds to risk another hit on your personal finances.