The State of our Afflicted Union

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This is not your granddaddy’s Dust Bowl. This is the other day, in the Texas Panhandle.

On Tuesday, the leader of the free world will mount the dais in the U.S. House of Representatives to describe the state of the Union. He will speak of a country recovering from a pandemic, an economy roaring back from near-recession, and he will assure us all that it will soon be 1950 again in America.

Meanwhile, more and more thinkers and writers — and fewer and fewer political “leaders” — are pointing out, often with barely restrained panic, the multitude of growing existential threats rising against not only this country, but the industrialized world. Continue reading →

Now I Lie Until You Sleep

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A harmless lie? That might be an oxymoron.

One of the reasons our society is on its last shaky legs might be that when our children are very young, we start lying to them. All of us do.

First we fill their little brains with nonsense about Santa Claus, the fat little dude in a red suit who, using flying reindeers pulling a sled, delivers Christmas presents to 124 million households (that’s just in the US) in a few hours on Christmas Eve. He lands his sled on the roof, we tell the little cherubs, and brings the presents down the chimney. 

“Really?” they ask, a tiny sliver of skepticism appearing. “Really,” we assure them, “See? He ate the cookies we left him.” Continue reading →

Customer Service: A Cookbook

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Another victim of “customer service.”

Just about every large organization in this country, from retail companies to medical practices, has constructed an elaborate automated procedure that they call customer service. It is misnamed. Almost without exception, “customer service” is in reality  corporate service, designed to enhance the convenience of the business, not the customer, and to make sure no corporate employee has to actually talk with a customer, let alone a pissed-off customer. 

No organization hires enough people to handle the easily predictable volume of customer calls, so the first thing that happens when you finally have to call is, you get put on hold. Tinny, upbeat digital music blasts in your ear, and every 30 seconds a very enthusiastic recording reminds you that “we care about your call.” Just not enough to answer it. It will be answered, says the voice that sounds like it is on some spectacular controlled substance, “In the order in which it was received,” Years have passed since I first heard that formulation, and I still do not know what it means. Are some calls in disorder when received? Continue reading →

A Unified Field Theory of Crapification

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I have developed a unified field theory that explains everything that is rancid in the industrial world. Excess wealth, I propose, is the ultimate source of the steady crapification of our political, economic, social and private lives. 

Modern sovereign states have adopted MMT — Modern Monetary Theory — which tells them, as I understand it, that if you have your own currency you can never go broke, so laissez les bon temps rouler!  I much prefer my own TMM Hypothesis, which is, there’s Too Much Money out there, in the hands of too few people. Continue reading →

Electricity: A State of Emergency, Ignored.

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3D Electric powerlines over sunrise

On Christmas Eve, the operator of the Eastern US power grid, one of the three grids in the country, declared a system-wide emergency as a savage winter storm brought high winds and sub-zero temperatures to much of the country. Demand for electricity, especially for heat, was threatening to overwhelm the system, as it did last year in Texas.

A system-wide Stage 2 emergency, which is what PJM, the company that operates the grid, declared, is quite rare in the Eastern grid, the previous one having occurred eight years ago. In such an emergency, power companies in the network are required to plead with their customers to voluntarily reduce power consumption by turning down thermostats (not something you want to hear in a blizzard) and forgoing the use of major appliances. In addition, businesses enrolled in “demand response” programs, by prior agreement with electric utilities, reduce their consumption and are compensated later for doing so. Continue reading →

“What Are We Es-Posed to Do?”

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She wailed the question to a passing TV helicopter as she struggled down a street in New Orleans, chest-deep in the filthy floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. The memory has stuck to my conscience like a burr to a saddle blanket for all these seventeen years, not only because of the depth of human misery and desperation the question expressed, but because of the assumption behind it: that someone, somewhere, knows what we are supposed to do, and if we could only find out what it is, and do it, or have done it, everything would be all right again.  Continue reading →

Party Like There’s No Tomorrow. There Probably Isn’t.

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Protesters at an Amsterdam airport attempt to prevent the departure of a fleet of private jets bound for COP27, the annual UN meeting to discuss how to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

COP27 — the United Nations’ celebration of the 27th consecutive successful year in the war on climate change — is wrapping up its second successful week. Some one hundred heads of state and 45,000 delegates from 200 countries flocked (in, among other conveyances, 400 private jet aircraft) to the largest and most luxurious resort and conference center in all of Africa and the Middle East, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (where hotel rooms go for $300 a night and sandwiches for $15). There they lapped up cocktails, feasted, and carped about the wretched state of the world’s climate. 

 This COP has been quite different from the preceding 26. There are so far no ringing resolutions about reducing fossil fuel use, or meeting previously declared goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “The participants,” according to Perspective “are barely trying to give the impression that they are doing anything about the climate catastrophe.” They have apparently abandoned the goal set by the 2015 Paris Treaty on Climate Change — to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And they are reluctant to talk about the fallback position, a limit of 2 degrees C. 

Even Greta Thunberg has given up on the COP shindig, calling it a forum for “greenwashing”. Continue reading →

The Oil Bidness Just Went Code Blue

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A funny thing happened while we were watching the bright shiny objects being juggled for our entertainment by the contestants in the bewitching midterm elections: the U.S. oil industry went code blue.

Okay, maybe that’s overdramatizing a bit, but the emerging reality is a serious threat to our well-being. It appears to more and more expert observers that America’s largest oilfield — the Permian Basin in the Southwest — has peaked. U.S. drilling and fracking activity has flatlined since June, and the rig count in the Permian has fallen to its lowest number in four months. The Energy Information Administration has cut its forecast of next year’s increase in oil production by 21%. Continue reading →

Weapons of Mass Delusion

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We like to think of our leaders as all-powerful. Unfortunately, so do they.

Progressives are comfortable — and comforted by — ridiculing the delusions of the far right in America, from the Big Lie about the 2020 election to the various conspiracy theories incubated by Q Anon and Fox News. But these are only the latest delusions to take root in the public square and rupture the sidewalks. Some of the most enduring and toxic of these misguided notions are held as firmly by progressives as by people of other persuasions.

In America right now, the worst and most pervasive notion is that someone is in charge. The U.S. president, for example,  “manages” the economy, using his magical powers to “create” jobs, supercharge the stock market and set the prices of everything from gasoline to carrots. This hogwash has colored the attitude of people toward their leaders for a very long time. In antiquity, kings and emperors were often ushered to their thrones because they took credit for good weather and plentiful crops, then were tossed into the nearest volcano when the weather, as it always does, turned bad.  Continue reading →

In Hurricanes, Ignorance Kills

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Aerial photos show destruction from Hurricane Ian over Fort Myers, Florida

he aftermath of Hurricane Ian in Fort Myers, Florida.

Florida and Hurricane Ian offer yet another example of the truism that profound misunderstanding of how things work, a.k.a. ignorance, can be deadly. The same people who often complain after a hurricane that the forecasters hyped the danger while nothing much bad happened are now caterwauling that the forecasters and the media and the government did not warn them soon enough or strongly enough about Ian. 

Horsefeathers. The National Weather Service issued warnings five days before the storm hit that it posed severe danger to all of southern and central Florida. 

Now here’s the first thing one must understand if one is subject to weather: it is not possible to predict exactly where and when it will rain, or the wind will blow, or the tornado will spin up. When you are trying to predict what will happen in a global cauldron of hot and cold air, constantly rising and sinking, forming huge lateral currents, migrating poleward then toward the equator, absorbing and then shedding moisture, all on a spinning earth, what you get is not an accurate forecast of what is going to happen in any specific place, but an estimate. That is the best you are ever going to get, ever, no matter what new technology appears.  Continue reading →