Don Sanderson: A Madness…

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Don and Becky

From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”  – Robert F. Kennedy, 1966

Like a Viking berserker, we swing our clubs wildly, determinedly destroying our natural Earth, wracking extinctions beyond the worst recognized to this point, killing the ocean, disrupting the climate, exhausting vital resources, and spreading human poverty and cruelty into every corner without, it appears, a dollop of guilt. This strikes me as symptomatic of madness. So, I went digging for verification beginning with a definition of “mad”, which I summarize from Miriam-Webster:

1 disordered in mind : Crazy, Insane

2 a : completely unrestrained by reason and judgment : utterly foolish : Senseless b : incapable of being explained, interpreted, or accounted for : Illogical

3 carried away by intense anger : Enraged, Furious  b : keenly displeased : Angry, Irked

4 carried away by enthusiasm, infatuation, or desire

5 intensely excited, distraught, or frantic

6 marked by intense and often chaotic activity : Wild, Furious

To which, I compared that for “Sane”:

1 : mentally sound : possessing a rational mind : having the mental faculties in such condition as to anticipate and judge of the effect of one’s actions

2 : proceeding from a sound mind : being without delusions or prejudice

Don Sanderson: Notes on two recent Diet articles posted here on Ukiah Blog…

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

[Don's article is well worth the time invested in reading it... -DS]

Re: Is Modern Medicine the biggest swindle of them all? and Red meat, mortality, and the usual bad science….

A problem I have with most articles appearing on the internet is they give little evidence of serious investigation, even when I agree with their premises. Of course, the issues are so complex and we mostly have so little time and background that we must defer. So, it isn’t surprising that telling counter arguments can be presented in response. In fact, I agree with the conclusions of both of these specific articles, but have reached them by what surely most would regard as heroic investigations by a layman. I’m a bulldog when an issue is important to me and won’t let loose until I understand at least how difficult the topic really is. Ok, I have a doctorate in mathematics and physics, so I’m unafraid of science. I’ve also had a longstanding interest in the biological sciences, much deeper it turns out than in my majors, which I chose for the job prospects.

I have Addison’s Disease

Don Sanderson: Transition Redux…

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”  – Aldo Leopold

I was born and raised on make-do Depression and WWII farms, the tail end of a long family tradition extending far back, in one case to sixteenth century Yorkshire peasantry. I’d always expected to continue the tradition, but by the time I was ready the industrial age had surged over Midwestern agriculture and equipment and land were far beyond my reach. I have ever since sought return to the land, but modern day lords of the land always demanded more blood than I had to give. By the mid-sixties, I was reading Aldo Leopold’s “Sand County Almanac” and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, singing old union and Woody Guthrie songs, subscribing to and collecting Mother Earth News, gardening in every spare corner I could find, and escaping into the wilds at every opportunity. It was clear to me that civilization was sick to death, I ever sought a way out, but found every avenue had been bought by “them”, or so I thought – in retrospect, I realize I could have taken more risks, but I stupidly acquired a family while too young to know better. Transition early had become a constant drumbeat in the background. As a result, I’ve long explored options in considerable depth.

Don Sanderson: Scylla

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

We cannot resolve the problems of our existence at the same level of thinking that created them. – Albert Einstein

As blind Homer told us so long ago, after a series of torturous adventures in which most of his men are lost, Odysseus is swept up into the whirlpool Charybdis guarded by the six-headed monster Scylla. He only just survives to undergo still more challenges before finally years later returning to his home to slay his last adversaries and end his Odyssey.

The oil-guzzling Scylla we confront is a bizarre creature of many clashing colors and shapes. Its most prominent three heads, on coiled necks entangled nearly in strangleholds, are continually quarreling, each attempting to use the others for its own purposes. Those protuberances are that grossly bloated wealth symbolized by Wall Street, a Zionism that fantasizes rebuilding Solomonic empires on Islamic bones, the original of which archeologists can find no trace, and an apocalyptic Christianity determined to see a new Jerusalem constructed on the smoking remains of the present damned world. Scylla’s spoor is seen everywhere in smoking remains of villages, of starving urban homeless, of thousands of dying species, of degradation of arable land, rainforests, fresh water, and the oceans, all the excesses of climate change, and the increasingly likely demise of the human species. The U.S. military is the blaze with which it is attempting to use to enflame the world into submission. Units are buzzing everywhere, notably in equipping and training others, both foreign militaries and American police, to attempt to control popular movements that embarrass Scylla, reminding it that it is actually powerless to succeed without the hearts of those it seeks to overbear.

Don Sanderson: Harvest Time

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

The year’s harvest is all in and put away for the winter, except for the sauerkraut that is in the making. There were many pluses and a few negatives, but all in all a good year here in our little slice of paradise, much to be thankful for. We celebrated with friends and family around one of Adam’s and Paula’s turkey with all the trimmings. In the following, it may seem I’m bragging, which sometimes I may be, but primarily I intend this as an example of sharing ideas locally and much look forward to your reports.

Thanks to the rains, about which I will not complain, the gardening season started late and many of the fruit trees –pears, peaches, apricots, plums, and most of the apples – didn’t set fruit. But, the subsequent tomato, pepper, bean, and corn crops were quite remarkable with eggplant and cucumbers thrown in. Because we tended to these first, the squash were planted late and weren’t much; I was distracted and the gophers got many of our potatoes and the sweet potatoes vined nicely, but didn’t set worthwhile roots. Our winter brassica have all been planted and are thriving as are some winter potatoes, so next year’s harvest is hopefully on the way. Our last harvest for this year was the first weekend in December. Out of it, we had our last meal of fresh green beans. But, the big deals were the tomatoes.

In earlier years, at the end of session just before the first frost, we brought tomatoes still attached to the vines into the garage to sort of ripen. Most got tossed. Then, last year, I had an insight that green tomatoes are much like tomatillos and chile verde came to mind. So, we invented green tomato salsa. In this year’s version, after we, actually Marlene, had harvested

Don Sanderson: Depression? What Depression?

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

After growing at an annual rate of 1 percent two quarters ago, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reportedly grew at a 2 percent rate last quarter. This is projected to continue and increase throughout the next two years. All our problems will be solved by a growing economy. Well, maybe not.

This week, beginning November 27, 2011, has seen a number of bombshell explosions. To begin the week, Bloomberg (the business news organization) announced, as a result of a two year investigation and the winning of a hard-fought court case, that the Federal Reserves System (the Fed), beginning in 2008 and continuing through March 2009, parceled out $7.77 trillion to many dozens of American banks to save them from failure. “Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses,” so we shouldn’t be troubled. Apparently the Fed was concerned as to how this would be viewed, since “The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret.”

Don Sanderson: Modern Civilization vs. Climate Change

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

Maybe not ninety nine percent, but most of us can’t help but support those demonstrating on Wall Street and elsewhere around the world. Never before has humankind seen greed so out of control. Copious availability of fossil fuels has loosened energy restraints and democratic movements have loosened social constraints. I’ve argued elsewhere that the OWS movement is likely to fail because of our modern civilization’s dependence upon fossil fuels and other natural resources that become economically available thanks to fossil fuels. These resources are only sufficiently cheap if they are harvested and utilized under vast economies of scale, which requires capital and naturally results in wealth accumulation. I conclude that OWS should be targeting the root of our problems, our lifestyles, if it has any hopes of being successful. If we insist in living in a fossil fuel based economy, we can expect to pay. But inequality and wealth accumulation aren’t the only consequences, nor even the major ones; fossil fuel usage-caused global warming is.

Don Sanderson: Thoughts on Building Community [Local]

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

This set out to be a comment on How to Create an Occupy Tribe, but the important issues as I see them must be addressed with more than a couple paragraphs.

It appears clear to many that survival in the coming days will require the formation of self-reliant and self-sufficient communities. How to do this seemingly remains a mystery with successes, except in narrow senses, being almost nonexistent. John Robb proposes that we form tribes and that this is happening on Wall Street without apparently recognizing the nature of successful tribes, which in fact hardly exist today.

A handful of cultural anthropologists managed to capture at least rudiments of the nature of wild tribes prior to their over-exposure by civilization. Some of their characteristics, as I recall:

1. tribal units seldom were larger than a few dozen members;
2. individuals were in close physical contact with all other tribal members 24 hours a day, nearly every day, throughout their lives; as a result, they closely identified with others in the tribe and shared resources and skills without question; care and protection of others was unquestioned;
3. tribal units were closely tied to place and had been for many generations; they were self-reliant and self-sufficient in all ways, food, clothing, housing, medicinal herbs, and etc.; typically, some trade with others did occur, such as for salt;
4. individuals acquired their culture by largely unconscious emulation of others as well as from often hearing the tribe’s myths told around the fire in the evening; shared cognitive and behavioral formulas and their meanings just naturally happened, rules did not need to be otherwise taught or enforced.

Not long after cracks formed in these structures, typically with the invasion by more dominant cultures, tribes collapsed.

Something like those tribes did form or survive in Europe in the peasant villages even until recently, especially in remote areas of little interest to the dominant culture. I had a friend who grew up in a small German village

Don Sanderson: Some random thoughts

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

Our modern society appears to be saturated with fear, which is quite reasonable it seems to me. On the far right, the Tea Party and its wealthy supporters are attempting to build barriers to keep the world out. On the left, we are more inclusive, but are also searching for ways to shield ourselves. Yet, on both ends and in the middle, we are attempting to escape while taking at least the rudiments of our lifestyles with us. I reflect on so-called transition towns. Can you think of such a community, say a possible Ukiah, without electricity and or natural gas? We can’t live long without water, but without electricity the city’s wells would cease to function – as would its sewer system. Would we carry our water from Mendocino Lake or the river? How would we cook our food, if we can find any, with fire wood? How would we cut it without a chainsaw? How would we burn it in our houses as mostly are presently constructed? How would we haul it out of the woods? From where will we get our clothing and shoes when they wear out? If you think these would be difficult, think of attempting to survive in San Jose.

So, we depend upon high tech engineers to develop solar, wind power, and biofuel solutions.  But, the development and maintenance of such depends upon cheap, available fossil fuels and electricity in so many aspects. We, our modern lifestyles, are so locked into such expectations. Even the most radical of us can only dream of returning to earlier times maybe only a century past in much of the country when human and animal labor were preeminent and most communities

Don Sanderson: Only Dreaming

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

‘It’s very good jam,’ said the Queen.
‘Well, I don’t want any TO-DAY, at any rate.’
‘You couldn’t have it if you DID want it,’ the Queen said. ‘The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.’
‘It MUST come sometimes to “jam to-day,”‘ Alice objected.
‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every OTHER day: to-day isn’t any OTHER day, you know.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Alice. ‘It’s dreadfully confusing!’
‘That’s the effect of living backwards,’ the Queen said kindly: ‘it always makes one a little giddy at first–’
‘Living backwards!’ Alice repeated in great astonishment. ‘I never heard of such a thing!’
‘— but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.’
‘I’m sure MINE only works one way,’ Alice remarked. ‘I can’t remember things before they happen.’
‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked. ~ “Through the Looking Glass”, Lewis Carroll

Don Sanderson: A Non-Electric Future, A Non-Electric Past

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

The recent article by Sharon Astyk on life without electricity brought back memories. Until I was nearly in high school, each home in which I had lived was without electricity. This was during the later depression and WWII. My first school house had maybe twenty students. It was lighted by the windows and kerosene lamps and heated by a pot belly stove. It had outside two holer toilets and a water pump. The desks were wrought iron and wood heavily carved with names, initials, and comments, two students per with ink wells. This was in Iowa where winters could be very cold. I walked a couple miles to school, much of it over a dirt road that in the spring turned to a deep sticky mud over which no car could drive. Along the way, I passed a simple old house where John L. Lewis had been born, the one attraction of the area.

Our home, in fact the entire farm, had three modern conveniences in addition to the lamps, a kerosene space heater, a washing machine powered by a two-cycle Maytag kerosene motor, and a battery powered radio. One December 7, 1941, I was home with the measles

So that we can live our safe and self-important lives, many meaningless others must die cruel deaths

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From BRIAN BECKER
Answer Coalition
Thanks to Don Sanderson

U.S. surge in Afghanistan launches reign of terror

“You can’t just convince them through projects and goodwill,” another Marine officer said. “You have to show up at their door with two companies of Marines and start killing people. That’s how you start convincing them.”

This was the comment made by a Marine officer to the Washington Post for its April 16 story about “signs of progress” for President Obama’s surge strategy in southern Afghanistan.

The officer was discussing how the U.S. strategy succeeded in the signing of a security pact between elders of the Alikozai area in southern Afghanistan and the U.S.-backed Karzai government.

Many hundreds of young men from the Alikozai area were killed in an onslaught by U.S./NATO troops in months leading up the agreement, according to the Washington Post account.

“We started stacking bodies like cordwood,” said an officer in Sangin, who like other Marines asked for anonymity to speak frankly. “And they came to a point where they said, ‘Holy [expletive], there aren’t that many of us left.’”

The Washington Post is an enthusiastic supporter of the expanding war in Afghanistan. The newspaper editorial policy insists that the war is necessary for an improvement

Don Sanderson: We Shall Overcome

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” – John Steinbeck

The winds of disaffection and dissent are blowing everywhere and those in charge are bringing out their big guns to finally put us in our place. What must we do? It appears this question has an enormous multiplicity of answers, many conflicting. Most of these we Americans fear because they challenge our hopes of ever achieving our ideal lifestyles as depicted on television, in movies, in magazines, and in advertisements everywhere, even if this means kowtowing to those who assert they are our masters. Still, unease has become the rule, perhaps because we really know that these hopes are mirages that are beginning to lose their substance. Here, I shall explore an answer, actually a collection of conjoined answers that have actually been under consideration for centuries, surviving and even thriving in spite of continual attacks by authorities.

I awoke the other morning from a dream, actually a series of dreams of which I shall tell you later, when the word “retrenchment” came to mind for unknown reasons. I’m unaware that I’d ever personally previously used it. Retrenchment is of French origination likely from WWI – re-trench-ment: return to the trenches after a failed foray. This in turn reminded me of the lost battalion. You all undoubtedly know this story and others I shall tell and I likely will make mistakes in their telling; please forgive me, for that is peripheral to the big story I shall relate.

It is summer 1918 and the Germans have surrounded an American battalion. For weeks they attacked with all the forces they could marshal without overcoming American resistance, which was becoming increasingly demoralizing. What finally broke

Don Sanderson: Freedom

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

Since modern society ascribes no “reality” to inner experience, transcendent values have no power and materialist values prevail. Thus it seems reasonable for society to be characterized by economic rationalization of an ever-increasing fraction of social behavior and organization. Industrialization of the production of goods and services gradually extends to more and more of human activities; increasingly they become included in the economy. One result is monetization and commercialization (all things coming to be measurable by and purchasable in units of currency). The economic rationalization of knowledge leads to the “knowledge industry”; to science justified by the technologies it produces, and to education justified by the jobs it prepares for. Economic rationality become predominant in social political decision-making, even when the decisions it leads to are unwise by other standards (such as the wellbeing of future generations). Technological solutions are attempted for problems that are basically socio-political in nature. The worth of persons (to say nothing on non-human fellow creatures on Earth) is assessed by their value in the economy. Humankind’s relationship to the Earth is essentially an exploitive one. – Willis Harmon, “Global Mind Change: The Promise of the 21st Century”

We have watched and cheered as Egyptian youths threw out their repressive government and celebrated the possibility of freedom. They had found themselves without jobs, with failing schools, with rotten medical care, and without opportunities for a better future while a wealthy few milked the economy and government. Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Iraq, Iran? It is fascinating that those supposedly backward Moslems are leading the way. Where next? England? Greece? Spain? Israel? the US? Or, will they all fizzle and only another reappearance of the same gang take charge in each case simply because of economic, monetary realities that dominate a predominantly urban life? If we survey history, we find meager successful examples.

Don Sanderson: The Best of All Possible Worlds

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire

“Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul’s words, Mohammed’s words, Marx’s words, Hitler’s words – people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history – sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending to the victims of their own church’s inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.” — Aldous Huxley, “Island”

Voltaire wrote his “Candide” in 1759, a book one reviewer has described as full of laughter, wisdom, comment, satire and bite, an attack on all rigid thinking, on all isms that is still worthwhile reading. In 1956, Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” adaptation was released on Broadway and flopped. He had taken Voltaire’s story and converted it into a musical, or so the public expected, but it was actually a deeply satirical comic opera, which they didn’t understand. Once they did get it, it has been successfully resurrected time after time, the last recently in the Hollywood Bowl. As Bernstein described it, “Voltaire’s satire is international. It throws light on all the dark places, whether European or American. Of course, it’s not an American book, but the matters with which it is concerned are as valid for us as any –  and sometimes I think they are especially valid for us in America. Puritanical snobbery, phony moralism,

Don Sanderson: Honey from a Weed

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

They [the Tarahumara] know that every step forward, every convenience acquired through the mastery of a purely physical civilization, also implies a loss, a regression. – Antonin Artaud, “The Peyote Dance”

Patience Gray, the author of “Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades, and Apulia”, 1986, writes that Artaud’s saying had graced her workshop for many years. For twenty years, she followed her sculptor companion searching for the next perfect block of marble in wilder regions of the Mediterranean that were yet hardly touched by modern conveniences. The foods and lifestyles about which she reminisces were very conservative, according to the old meaning of that term, hardly changed over hundreds of years but now nearing their last gasp. These people were closely tied to the land, the olive groves, the vineyards, the vegetable gardens, and fruit orchards chopped out of rocky soils yet thriving. Goats, sheep, and pigs were commonly raised and cheese produced. We would think of these peoples as very poor, yet they were nearly self-sufficient and life was often a communal celebration.

Gray characterized foods in each of these areas as being of wondrous complexity that had been developed over generations stretching beyond memory. The recipes she records and meals she describes are quite wonderful. Every aspect was made from scratch with the simplest equipment, especially with no electricity. A typical stove was a grill raised across a wood fire that had originated from gathered brush or chopped branches. Often there was a hook above the fire on which a covered pot could be hung. A domed earthen oven was also usually available for baking bread and various dishes. Water was typically hand carried from a not necessarily nearby cistern.

Don Sanderson: Ye Who are Without Sin Cast the First Stone

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

If there were only evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

The twentieth century was a bloody gore scattered all over the globe and this century promises to continue the pattern. While all other predatory animals guard their territories potentially to the death, this extremity is seldom necessary. Not so we humans. We not only now have weapons deadly almost beyond imagination, but little compunction about using them. Worse, while other predatory animals are satisfied with sufficient for their immediate needs, we humans seemingly have an inexhaustible hunger for more and more and more, given the opportunities, and little constraining wisdom. We, seemingly without exception, are so certain that our beliefs are true, our causes are just, and that we’re especially deserving that we’re willing to fight, kill, and die beyond all bounds to sustain our lifestyles.

In 2004, several American soldiers were ambushed outside Fallujah during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In response, the U.S. destroyed the town of maybe a half million inhabitants, reportedly killing 1,500 insurgents or so. Around 36,000 of the city’s 50,000 homes were destroyed – who counted how many bodies were inside? White phosphorus was used against the civilian population, which is against international law. There is more. The U.S. uses artillery shells and rockets containing depleted uranium, leftovers from nuclear plants and still highly radioactive, because they are more powerful in penetrating defenses. When they explode, uranium dust is spread all around. Such munitions were used throughout Fallujah

Don Sanderson: Mining the Earth

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

I found the October 11 blog article Soils and Souls: The Promise of the Land by Robert Jensen on target, as could be expected. Still, this stimulated some thoughts that have long been at the back of my mind on related topics that seldom seem to be mentioned by any of these individuals, yet appear to me to be as crucial for our consideration, likely our human survival, as theirs.

Wendell Berry speaks elsewhere about the soil of his home farm as having been wrung of its fertility in the nineteenth century by tobacco cropping, even though this was surely done prior to cheap oil, without chemical fertilizers or artificial pesticides, and with horse and human power. When tobacco was harvested, the entire plants were cut off and removed from the field together with all the mineral nutrients they contained. In effect, since none of these minerals were returned nor the rotting organic matter required for the soil’s tilth, the land was in effect mined to death. Unlike the coal miners, mountains may not have been removed, but this had similar economic effects on surrounding communities.

When the pioneers first encountered the several feet deep soils of the Great Plains in the middle nineteenth century, they couldn’t have imagined that in only a few decades, mostly using oxen and horse power and those big plows, it would be mined until only a few inches remained. Much of that blew away in the early thirties. This was a replay of what happened thousands of years earlier in what was then the Fertile Crescent,

Don Sanderson: Notice to Democrats

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

I get a stream of fundraising mailers and requests for support from Democrats. In each return envelope, I’m enclosing the following and only that…

To those Democratic Party organizations seeking my support:
I’m a registered Democrat, mostly it seems because I’m surely not a Republican. However, in the last election, I voted for Ralph Nader. Obama had already demonstrated the way his presidency would behave by selecting a corporate hack for vice president, a Zionist for chief of staff, and an advocate of American power for secretary of state. I’m fed up. I don’t expect to ever, ever, vote for a Democrat again, nor certainly a Republican, until the following steps are taken:

• Give EPA and NOAA strict “clean air act” and other environmental clubs over those industries generating greenhouse gasses. Don’t waste time with cap and trade, which is another way to say bait and switch. Global warming is real and the latest climate statistics are horrendous. There is no time to waste.

• Give EPA and NOAA strict environmental control over oil drilling, coal mining, and the excessive use of agricultural fertilizers. Put a stop this irremediable wasting of the irreplaceable Earth.

As the Oil Spreads

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

As the oil spreads through the Gulf of Mexico, Obama tells us that we must focus on clean energy and get off the fossil fuel diet. Such is apparently a result of political pressure – as the spill was beginning, he was advocating drilling along all our coasts. We seem to be wandering around in a carnival of fools, attempting to find our way to something solid and failing time and time again. As I hope to enlighten you, clean energy technologies as Obama and probably most of the rest of us are thinking about are just other such hawkers’ distractions. Understand, I’ve been fed so much bullshit while working in the industrial and academic worlds that almost all the stuff “they” are pushing must be held up to a bright light and turned every which way before I will consider it. Warning: I shall use our pet “clean” energy technology solar power, specifically solar cells, as a metaphor for the hidden difficulties with “clean” energy technologies in general. I realize an earlier reference I made to this caused some consternation, so I’ll be more explicit this time.

The prototypical final solar cell manufacturing process is an assembly line that uses quite a lot of electricity. Still, it is possible to imagine this all originates from solar cells that have been produced earlier, so the entire line is solar powered – but, probably not. If so, however, the last step in the manufacturing process of the solar cells would indeed be energetically free of fossil fuel expense. Thus, the energy they would eventually generate would seemingly be clean. Aw, but the assembly line doesn’t stand alone. Behind the scene is a warehouse in which raw materials, packaging, and components manufactured elsewhere are received and inventoried. As the cells exit the assembly line, they are forwarded to another warehouse where they are temporarily stored and prepared for shipment. But, wait, these warehouses require energy to operate as well, which must be added to each cell’s energy production budget.

Those items received at the first warehouse likely have been produced elsewhere, perhaps even mined and refined. The crates sent from the second travel via various transport pathways perhaps to a series of other somewhat automated warehouses until they are finally delivered to retailers and sold.

Don Sanderson: Climate Change Modeling Defended

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

I generally find Alexander Cockburn’s prejudices agree with mine. Several of his columns recently [in the AVA] essentially hawking the fossil fuel corporations’ line on global warming, however, deserve an answer.

Mathematical modeling seems to be his pet peeve: “These quack science models are … skewed by the modelers’ doctrinaire anti-carbon passion…” driven by “dependence of their salaries on the expectations of the funding agencies.” Wow, we have a new religion, it seems.

El Niño has recently dampened the Southwest and the present sunspot cycle has cooled solar radiation, but these are temporary though may be expected to periodically and unpredictably recur. As astrophysicists have explained in detail, on the average the sun is surely warming, has been for the entire life of our planet, and the Earth will surely eventually burn up. It has been conjectured that the ice ages are the Gaia’s, that is the living Earth’s, way to stay cool. Those who have studied the periods between ice ages have noted they typically have both rapidly began and ended, but why so isn’t understood. Given the durations of earlier ones, this one likely should be ending – the so-called little ice age beginning in the fifteenth century may have portended this. But, the fossil-fueled industrial age appears to have interrupted it. Atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements have been made by various methods trailing back to the beginning of the industrial age and before; the growth of fossil fuel usage, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the rise of global temperatures over this period positively correlate, which of course doesn’t prove relationships, but ….Also, in spite of determined searching, no one has found any driver for the rapidity at which global warming is occurring other than human-generated greenhouse gasses. Two and two make four in my book, yet even the best correlations only suggest causal relationships. We need to dig deeper.

But, wait. Many thousands of pages of research articles have been published reporting what many scientists are finding by collecting data on the melting ice caps, about mostly retreating glaciers, about the warming, increasingly acidic, and expanding ocean and the effects these are having, about the melting tundra, about expanding deserts and declining forests, rain and otherwise, and so on.

Don Sanderson: And, My Choice Is ….

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

The Mendocino County supervisor campaign is hot, campaign literature (interviews, blogs, mailings, affairs, sample ballots, …) is beginning to flood upon us, and voters are excitedly choosing sides in that two hundred and more year old celebration of American representative democracy. The affair is becoming so entrancing that we have nearly forgotten the mistaken choices we made in the last election, and the time before, and the time before that, and onward into dim memories of just how disordered and decrepit the whole process is. Not that we ever had real choices, only us humans with all our many pratfalls. Oh, we are told the system is better than any other, so smile and cast your dice. Does it really matter who wins? Oh, yes, you say; we can’t let “them” win this time. Well, maybe, but ….

We hear rumblings that the world economy is failing, especially that of the U.S., especially that of California. But, as perhaps the most in-your-face example, Goldman-Sachs is reporting amazing profits playing with mortgage securities, the stock market, and the petroleum commodities market among others with that bailout money and government guarantees awarded them by our elected representatives; massive employee bonuses are being rewarded. So, we’re told by our representatives that, though it may not have touched Mendocino County yet, the economy is improving and you should thank them in the next election. Social Darwinist survival of the fittest or greediest, as so well promoted by Ayn Rand, is a, perhaps the, dominant force in this country, this culture, as epitomized by Goldman-Sachs and associates; I read that Rand’s still best-selling books have been found in surveys to be only somewhat less influential than the Bible. When will this bubble, which is being funded by Fed funny money, crash? Like the last, this is not all smoke and mirrors? What might you conclude this can this portend for us here in Mendocino County? I’d say, run for cover.

Seeing

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

There are two ways to live your life:

One is as though nothing is a miracle;

The other is as if everything is.

I believe in the latter.

— Albert Einstein

Wondrous tales about the Australian Aborigines’ Dreamtime are often related. While I can provide no names or dates, I’ve been assured the following true. A certain anthropologist specialized in Aborigine culture. Some time ago, he went on a long walkabout with an Aborigine guide. Several years later, he heard unbelievable stories about an Aborigine tracker. When the anthropologist later met the man, he asked whether the tracker could follow the walkabout track he had earlier followed. The tracker said that he could and in fact did with great exactness. The amazed anthropologist asked how this was possible. It was easy, the tracker explained, he had simply walked beside the two men as they made their original traverse.

Australian Zoltan Torey “replaced the entire roof guttering of [his] multi-gabled home single-handed”. What alarmed his neighbors was that he did so in the middle of a dark night and he was and is blind. As he describes in his “Out of Darkness”, in 1951 when he was 21, he loosening the plug in a vat of acid at the chemical factory where he worked. In a moment, a flood of acid engulfed his face and he saw his last sparkle of light. Rather than lose memory of his sight, he determined to maintain a vivid imagination of the world about and constantly reinforce it with his remaining senses. Since, he understood that the imagination can run away with itself, Torey took pains to check the accuracy of his images by every means available. “I learned,” he writes, “to hold the image in a tentative way, conferring credibility and status on it only when some information would tip the balance in its favor.” Torey’s successes extended far beyond what sight would have provided. He became able “to imagine, to visualize, for example, the inside of a differential gearbox in action as if from inside its casing.”

Dreams

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

A few years ago, I was associated with the Ukiah Community Center and had a reason to write an essay explaining the complexity of homeless issues. I’ve been bringing it up to date and intended to blog it shortly. It is filled with negative comments about community involvement in the causes of homelessness and behavior toward those so trapped, very often through no fault of their own. This is related to our community’s contributions to a long list of other issues in unhealthy, unhealing, ways. I’m thinking of our wasting culture: we throw away packaging, wrapping, cans, and bottles, our children, our elderly, our health, the frogs, song birds, polar bears, and blue whales, the oceans, the Earth with hardly a notice ….. who cares?  I like to leave every essay on a positive helpful note, but could find none here. This situation left me very dissatisfied, depressed.

Then, the other night, I had a dream. The setting was a large playing court, open to the sky and with high stone walls. I and my opponent were on opposite ends. The apparent rules were that one would serve the ball and the other would attempt to return it by hitting it with one of their hands before it hit the ground or wall. The ball was about the size of a softball and black. The first serve to me was over my head. Though I jumped high, not high enough. The second serve was almost straight up and was coming down directly at my head. I stepped aside and waited for it to fall to me before hitting it, and again missed. At this point, an older man, maybe my coach, stopped the game and came out to discuss the situation with me – at which point I awoke. As I did so, I was greeted with a buzzing in my chest, which those of you who know about chakras are familiar with.

Most of my dreams have the character of theater, absorbing but not worth remembering. However, a few have carried important messages. This seemed to be one such. My usual response is to later write the dream down and immediately notice the feelings generated. My feeling was that my opponent was the world, that is the human-related world filled with one catastrophe after another. It was tossing balls at me and I was not successfully fielding them. I then spent an hour wondering why so and how I might do better, how I might return each ball of the many coming my way.

The Bounty

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

We had a most marvelous time this past Thanksgiving. Our daughter, three grandchildren and their spouses, and five great grandchildren, three under a year old, visited, some for two nights. We had a Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, followed by another on Saturday, because we hadn’t agreed on a schedule, and another shorter farewell inning on Sunday.

The center of the meal was, naturally, a turkey, but what a turkey. Adam and Paula had raised it. When they asked what size we wanted, we said the largest they had. We were thinking of maybe 12 pounds or so, not the more than 28 pounder we received!

Good Calories, Bad Calories

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. ~ Plato

This is a review of a book that Michael Pollen has described as “A vitally important book, destined to change the way we think about food.” Alternative medicine guru Andrew Weil, M.D., called it “A very important book.” Yet, it is an investigated report of intimidating depth, 609 pages including the index, that sadly I doubt most of you will ever read. I only try below to give you a softer tour of a few of the high points to tempt you. The book is Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, Anchor Books, 2007. Taubes not only describes the expected results of various diets, but at least as importantly I believe, recounts a pertinent allegory of our times, of how easily we can be manipulated to our and the Earth’s detriment.

Nearly thirty years ago, I was experiencing a variety of seemingly unrelated symptoms that became more worrisome over time. So began a wandering from physician to physician, specialist to specialist, seeking relief. One night, after ten years or so and a dozen physicians, I was in terrible distress and Marlene somehow or another got me to an emergency facility.

Greetings from the Farm

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

Well, in truth, far from being a farm. Maybe a third to half acre depending upon what we’re counting. Our home is under a grove of maybe two hundred year old valley oaks between a stream, which is dry two thirds of the year, and a red oaked ridge to the west that finally stretches wildly up a couple of thousand feet. It’s very quiet, except for the bird “clamor,” and nights are starry. Our water originates from a spring that is shared by others; in spite of the drought, it so far continues to flow – with wonderful water.

Wow, it rained, thanks apparently to El Niño and a warming ocean. The plants look so thrilled. The winter garden is being planted: beets and carrots, peas, lettuce and broccoli, cabbage, spinach, chard, and kale, Asian greens, and onions, garlic, and leeks. We’ve planted a thousand onion and garlic bulbs, or so it seemed. We learned from Peaceful Valley’s fall catalog that we can also plant potatoes. Wow, and no watering. Of  course we can’t grow tomatoes, corn, beans, and squash, but winter is otherwise a wonderful time to garden in our climate. But, lest we forget, the cooler summer and rain are vagaries of ever-changeable weather and solar sunspot cycles and not indicative of climate trends – greenhouse gases continue to accumulate.

I was born and raised on a Great Depression/WWII Iowa farm and would likely be there still, if I could have found a way to afford to stay. When I graduated from high school, the industrialization of agriculture was well on the way, beginning with heavy mechanized equipment expenses. I always wanted to return, as Wendell Berry did, but could never find the means. I sometimes tell Marlene of my continued wishes for a real farm, to which she laughs and asks me how I would have the energy to operate it. OK, I’m almost 74 years old and, since I insist in “farming” without power tools, I have about enough to keep me busy. This is especially true since time is wasted reading and writing and walking and just poking around.

Both the problem and the fascination with this place is that it is like no other in which I’ve gardened: Iowa, the Northwest, the old cooler, wetter Bay Area, or Kauai. Wendell Berry’s old farmers insist that one can’t learn farming from books;

Chemical Jigsaw Puzzles

From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

I’ve followed the chemical pollution conundrum for, what, fifty years and thought I understood all the risks to which we are exposed. The day before I began composing this, I stumbled upon an explanation of one alarming aspect of which I was somehow unaware: monoclonal antibodies as described by Stuart Kaufmann in his “Investigations”. This appears to be one of those critical patterns that connect of which most of us haven’t noticed, but which seem to me vital for us to understand. Can I not tell you? First, a bit of cellular biochemistry that has been cooked, I hope, to tender digestibility:

Every living cell has a cell wall consisting of fatty molecules that separate its interior chemistry from the world. The cell, however, must get nutrients from outside and otherwise sense what is going on out there in order to find that food and otherwise adapt to its living and non-living environment. In order to do this, certain molecular protuberances known as receptors poke from the inside through the cell wall to the outside. When a wandering molecule on the outside, referred to as a ligand, binds to a receptor, many things can happen depending upon the nature of the receptor.

A receptor may recognize a ligand as food and initiate a chemical process to move it through the cell wall. Alternately, when a binding occurs, the part of the receptor exposed within the cell may initiate a chemical reaction therein. For instance, if the ligand is the hormone cortisol, depending upon the nature of the receptor, a binding can result permitting fat storage, adjusting blood sodium levels, or cooling down an inflammation among others. That is, cortisol receptors may share an external molecular appearance while activating quite different functions inside. This is likely true for nearly all types of receptors.

Finally, there are those curious receptors known as antibodies that float around outside cells. When one end binds to a ligand, say a virus, the other becomes an active ligand for other receptors presented by immune system cells. This second binding results, hopefully, in the inactivation or death of the infecting agent.

Cells of all types, human, other animal, plant, and bacteria, have receptor/ligand pairs of multitudes of different types, many more of which are being regularly discovered. Thus, for us humans, there are those related to nerves (serotonin, dopamine, …), hormones (thyroid, female and male, cortisol, …), immune system (many, many), alertness (endorphins, …), wound and bone healing (interferon, …), food utilization (insulin, …), and so on.

Community Building in a World of Shrinking Energy Resources

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better … and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed – the ecological, social, demographic, or general breakdown of civilization – will be unavoidable.
–Václav Havel, then president of Czechoslovakia, in a speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, February, 1990

The American political establishment and press were ecstatic that playwright Havel, the president of a recently communist country, should come the U.S. and praise freedom. But, they entirely overlooked what he was saying.

Earlier in the century, phenomenologist philosopher Edmund Husserl was contending that theoretical knowledge had lost contact with living human experience. In 1936, Husserl wrote a powerful treatise on the subject, “The Crisis of European Sciences” (in German), in which he asserted that the morally ordered world of our prereflective lived experience is inseparable from Nature, what he described as the common life-world. Lebenswelt. Havel wrote that Husserl’s understanding of “the natural world” and “the world of lived experience” are reliable vectors through which to approach “the spiritual framework of modern civilization and the source of the present crisis.” He identified children, working people, and peasants as “far more rooted in what some philosophers call the natural world… than most modern adults.” “They have not grown alienated from the world of their actual personal experience,” he wrote, “the world which has its morning and its evening, its down (the earth) and its up (the heavens), where the sun rises daily in the east, traverses the sky and sets in the west …”

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 3)

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

Parts |1|2|3|

August 28, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

In the East, Gandhi was assassinated, as was his dream for India. Vandana Shiva has described so poignantly what is happening there at this moment, but not just there. I don’t believe that we have any hope in reversing this in our own present governmental context. Is it not evident that we need a revolution. But, how so? As Thoreau finished his essay, “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. … All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. … But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.” I urge you to read “slaves” as “illegal immigrants, many working for slave wages”. Who but Thoreau can say it better? Thoreau scared people – and still does.

Those in power in this country and increasingly in the world have no respect for hard physical labor; accordingly, following our leaders, neither do Americans at large. So, we depend upon the mostly illegal Latinos to do the physical work to feed us. A distant acquaintance from this group, who has lived here many years, has a fine family, and has a responsible job running field machinery for a farmer that is a far distant giant global corporation, had to return south because of this mother’s illness.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 2)

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

Parts |1|2|3|

August 18, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Soon after it was published in the early seventies, I grabbed Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals off the shelf. Every few years since, I’ve reread it and continue to find jewels. Alinsky was firm that if we are to succeed in community organizing, we must be cognizant of history, have a sense that our actions fit into a larger context, that we aren’t alone. As you have seen in Part 1, we are not the first who have confronted these problems, though ours have become more threatening in very broad Earth-wide terms. Allow me to take you back further.

Not long ago the great majority of Americans lived on farms or in small villages supporting those farmers. Almost all of them had personal gardens and fruit trees and raised chickens. Even within the villages, not a few owned a few goats and the yearly pig. I recall it well when the first “supermarket” came to my home town in the fifties. My farmer parents never raised another garden except for a couple of tomatoes. Instead, they concentrated on modernizing their farming methods beginning with buying expensive equipment, which required Mom to work in town, as Dad did as well in the winter repairing tractors. My ancestors’ sustainable family farms became shrouded in tales recounted at increasingly rare family gatherings. Because of soaring farming costs, children scattered and the old mutually supportive extended families withered.

So, I’m a romantic. In my first decade, I lived on the place that my great, great grandparents (one set) had settled. My great, great grandfather was an expert carpenter, likely apprenticed as a fishing boat builder on the Isle of Jersey and the Gaspè Peninsula. He had also learned blacksmithing from his father. Though the farm was wasting away in my time,

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 1)

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Peter Kropotkin

From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

Parts |1|2|3|

August 12, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

They hang the man, and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.

— seventeenth century anonymous

The Grand Inquisitor, in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”, challenges Christ: humanity is “weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious … in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘make us your slaves, but feed us.’” Christ remains silent.

As Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, Gary Paul Nabhan, Gary Taubes, and others have chronicled in great detail, we Americans and increasingly those living elsewhere are enslaved by a food production system that is notorious for the waste of natural resources, destruction of environment, social decay, and damaging to health. This is only one symptom, although a major one, pinpointing that our society is sick both emotionally and physically. We are sliding toward a chasm edge beyond which these food sources and all the other goodies of our modern society will slip from our grasp. I won’t beat this drum any further and assume it is a given. If you can’t agree or at least imagine so, if you aren’t mad as hell and unwilling to stand it any longer, if you don’t care, don’t bother to read further.

Our overriding questions: how did we get in the fix and how do we escape? Southwestern writer Edward Abbey captured the answers in a nutshell:

“Money means power, not merely wealth. Money gives us power over others – to command their labor, their minds, even their souls. Even their behavior, conduct, attitudes.

Reading between the lines (with video)

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County
(video at end of article)

July 30, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

My, my, so many angry and insistent letters to editors, angry and insistent blogs. I say I don’t read or listen to the commercial media stuff anymore because it is all fluff. But, sometimes I can’t seem to stop myself. We stopped for some coffee on the way to an appointment the other day and there was a New York Times, July 22, laying waiting to fill my time. I flip through it; nothing; nothing. Then, I reach the editorial, which glares at me “Climate Loopholes.” I also subscribe to email news notifications from Mother Jones. Shortly after reading the article, that magazine pointed me to Rachel Morris’s “It’s 3 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Climate Bill Is?”.

The increasingly infamous Waxman-Markey climate change bill was approved by the House and is on its way to the much tougher Senate. Half of the electricity used in this country is generated by extremely dirty coal-fired generators. Thanks to coal-state representatives, the bill imposes no standards on existing generators and, more amazingly, removes these plants from EPA Clean Air Act oversight.

A second problem with this bill involves carbon dioxide cap and trade. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, as you may have noticed, have recently been reporting immense profits. These profits didn’t come from loans, but by selling insurance in the form of hedge funds,

Why Are We Wasting Time?

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

July 24, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

I’ve nearly given up reading news and commentary of any kind. I hardly ever visit the usual widely read Internet commentary blogs or magazines of any stripe. There are only three notable exceptions: Ukiah Blog, the Ukiah Daily Journal letters to the editor, and the Anderson Valley Advertiser for Bruce Anderson’s commentaries and to get a laugh about the latest Supervisor foibles.

Surely, then, I’m not informed? I very much disagree. If you could see the stack of books surrounding us everywhere, you would see what nonsense that is.

Two of the latest books that have come my way are “Self Organization in Biological Systems,” edited by Camazine et al and published by Princeton, and “Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change,” edited by Berkes et al and published by Cambridge. Each includes reports of detailed studies and assume sophisticated understanding of ecology and other areas. They have much to say regarding our situation, but I’d bet no one in a policy making context will ever read them.

I don’t write these things to put you down in any way. My purpose is to buttress my feelings that almost everything that is dumped onto us by the media, Internet blogs, corporation marketing, and especially governments of all levels is superficial tripe. If we have a feeling for history, such as Howard Zinn documented so well

The coming great cook-out? Part 4 of 4

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

July 2, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

George Was Right!

On June 22, Sonja Sharp reported on Mother Jones that the far northern Siberian town Oymyakon was undergoing an unprecedented heat wave. The previous day temperatures were recorded at just under 32 C, or nearly 90 degrees F (32.6 C is the highest ever recorded temperature), with weekend temperatures in the high 80s. This past winter, temperatures twice dropped to -60.2 C, or nearly -86 F, marking one of the coldest winters the village of once-nomadic reindeer herders has suffered in nearly a century.

At the moment, we appear to be experiencing a duel between a cool sun and a warming atmosphere. The sun has been warming, with short respites, for millions of years, as astrophysicists assure us it will continue to do. So, I know how I’m betting.

I often wonder why I’m bothering to write these, especially given the doubts I have that we humans can get our heads out of pails filled with meaningless distractions. Oh, my, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died, as headlines informed us. I’m sure this caused distress for some. How many others died as they did? Do you know of any who haven’t or won’t? How many will die if we cook the Earth? How many will die if we exhaust the Earth’s productive soils and fresh water, as we are doing, and food production collapses.

Let’s not talk about such depressing things, it is too distressing. Let’s leave it to the experts to save us, those engineers who created all those wonderful electronic devices that we must have. Let’s go shopping, which is always fun.

Funny thing, I’m unafraid to look these concerns and the pending failure of the capitalist economy in the face, and I’m still the happiest I’ve ever been as I live in the moment. It is a astoundingly beautiful world, perpetually wondrous, perpetually changing. I don’t mean here the world of the big box stores, fast food outlets, and filling stations, indistinguishable wherever found in the country and increasingly the world. I’m speaking of, for example, a tree in my backyard.

Every leaf on that tree is unique as even a simple examination will discover; it never existed previously and shall never again. No two trees, no two blades of grass, no two sparrows are identical, even to themselves moment to moment. Everywhere in the natural world, I see such uniqueness, such amazing beauty and complexity, trillions of cells working cooperatively. Who could be bored, if they are aware? I am in such awe and so thankful of having had the opportunity to have such experiences.

My overwhelming concern is that we may destroy these gifts. In fact, all over the Earth we are doing so – in order to construct, duplicate, more cars, more televisions, more computers, more fashionable clothing, and more “educated” children who can plug into the corporate workplace. All of these soon become old and new better products are ever coming that we must have. I find this so sad, as I hope you do.

The coming great cook-out? Part 3 of 4

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

June 11, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

A Green Bubble?

But how can I explain, how can I explain to you?
You will understand less after I have explained it.
All that I can hope to make you understand
Is only events; not what has happened.
And people to whom nothing has ever happened
Cannot understand the unimportance of events.
~T.S. Eliot, “The Family Reunion”

Search for certainty as much as we can, and we’ll invariably fail. That’s the story told by the so-called new science of emergence that is infiltrating all the old sciences and taunting classical beliefs that humans and their sciences and technologies can overcome. Below is a five act tragedy or comedy – it’s difficult to say which, though I’m reminded of Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges – centered on our dilemma.

Global warming news
Record cold has been experienced in the past few weeks across the Southern Hemisphere, in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Our own spring has become cool. The sun is acting strangely and may be throwing a kink in the immediate prospects of rapid global warming. George W. Will and friends have been arguing for years that the climate is not warming, it is cooling. They are surely savoring the news, recognizing confirmation, and preparing to twist it. Here is my, more likely I believe, contrary twist.

The sun goes through roughly an 11-year cycle of activity, from stormy to quiet and back again. Solar activity often occurs near sunspots, dark regions on the sun caused by concentrated magnetic fields. It is much warmer during solar maximum, when sunspot cycle and solar activity is high, versus solar minimum, when the sun is quiet and there are usually no sunspots.

The coming great cook-out? Part 2 of 4

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From DON SANDERSON
Mendocino County

May 29, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

A View From Afar

Here I sit in outer space, occasionally intercepting so-called information broadcast by dying print media and internet blogs of unknown origins. Some are reporting that the recession will be over in a couple of months, but jobs and house prices will continue shrinking until sometime next year. Anyhow, though individual debt is at al all time high, consumer confidence is increasing – but, wait, their purchasing isn’t. A lot of this just doesn’t compute, but there is more.

The really big news that isn’t headlined by the popular media is that the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill is on the House floor. As with all such legislation, as far as I can tell from discussions, it is likely so convoluted that no one truly understands it. “Plenty of folks are horrified—for entirely opposite reasons.” Keith Johnson wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Even with all the compromises, conservatives are still aghast at the costs of what they call a giant ‘energy tax.’

Thanks to all the compromises, some environmentalists are aghast at what they see as a toothless bill. You could drive yourself insane plowing through the nearly 1,000 pages and try to work out how all the overlapping policies, regulators, giveaways, exemptions, and mandates actually affect U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions over the next four decades.”

Not to worry. The White House assures us, in a statement released May 22, 2009, “Coupled with the announcement about setting a new national policy to both increase fuel economy and reduce greenhouse gas pollution, the legislation that passed out of House Energy and Commerce Committee is a historic leap towards providing clean energy incentives that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create millions of new jobs all across America. The President has been clear that if there are disparate impacts on consumers and business during the transition period, they should be compensated. Make no mistake – this bill sets aggressive emissions reductions targets and provides for a program that invests in the technologies needed to bring about a clean energy future.”

The coming great cook-out? Part 1 of 4

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From Don Sanderson

3/19/09 Ukiah, North California

That global warming is occurring has become obvious here in Northern California. As I am writing this paragraph, it is now the second week in December, we still have tomatoes and peppers ripening in our garden. Last year, some made it until Thanksgiving, a November first here in the experience of a 90 year old friend and native.

We are now entering a citrus climate, so what’s not to love? Avocados next? Mangos? Beginning last winter and continuing though this fall, except for a brief rainy spell, we have had a high pressure system above more typical of summer. When we have had frosts, the cold hasn’t come from the north, but from loss of ground heat to the empty sky typical of a desert. We now have had rainfall amounts characteristic of areas several hundred miles south and water shortages are becoming critical. The creek in front of our home, which typically still has had pools into July, emptied in May last year and early April this – fifteen years ago it was nearly perennial and hosted successfully spawning steelhead. Fires that burned all over the area early in the summer are forcing winemakers to filter the smoke chemicals out of their wine.

Funny, though I point out to others that these are likely effects of global warming and may be expected to get worse, it doesn’t appear to be changing anyone’s behavior. From discussions, many seem to feel that ‘they’ will fix it, whoever ‘they’ are. Besides, some of my friends are reading that some ‘authorities’ are saying that this will only increase land for agriculture in the north – if climate change is indeed happening, which these persons doubt.

A mid-January, 2009, addendum: we finally had a frost in mid-December followed by a couple inches of rain; the creek remains dry and warm sunny days are predicted for a week or more into the future. In late January, 2009, still no more rain, local lakes are at record lows, and we are reading the news of terrible droughts in Argentina and Australia. Perth is in danger of becoming uninhabitable.

Early March, 2009, addendum: we’ve had maybe 7 or 8 inches of light rain since the middle of February and the creek is running, though I can now step across at some places without getting wet; will that get us through the summer? It was just reported that Lake Mendocino’s water level is now at 55 percent, whereas it was at 96 percent at this time last year, so let’s not hold our breaths. I learned a week ago or so that the Colorado Plateau drought, which is now more than 11 years old, is threatening the water supplies of Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, San Diego, and so on. It appears we should be expecting this situation of confront us soon. Meanwhile, the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and the forecast is more of the same – well, maybe a sprinkle.

Sanderson update…

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From Don Sanderson

2/23/09 Ukiah, California I was incorrect about the value of bonds to be sold this week, but ….
From Bloomberg a few minutes ago:

The Treasury Department plans to auction $40 billion of two-year notes Tuesday, a record $32 billion of five-year securities Feb. 25 and a record $22 billion of seven-year debt Feb. 26.

“With all the supply coming, people are taking it as an opportunity to short the Treasury market,” said Charles Comiskey, head of U.S. Treasury trading in New York at HSBC Securities USA Inc., one of the 16 primary dealers that are required to bid in Treasury auctions. To short is to bet the price of a security will fall.

The U.S. will probably borrow $2.5 trillion during the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, according to primary dealer Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The figure is almost triple the $892 billion in notes and bonds the Treasury sold in the previous 12 months.

“We’re dealing with a huge boatload of supply,” said Kevin Flanagan, a Purchase, New York-based fixed-income strategist for Morgan Stanley’s individual-investor clients. “We feel it will continue to hover over the market for the entire year.”

U.S. yields indicate bets on inflation have been rising over the past three months.

Fed policy makers have debated whether to purchase longer-term U.S. debt to help lower consumer borrowing costs, an option raised by Bernanke late last year.

“Buying Treasuries is not on the Fed’s front burner,” said Thomas Roth, head of U.S. government bond trading in New York at Dresdner Kleinwort, another primary dealer. “It’s something that would be a last resort type of thing. People are still hoping.”

Elsewhere, Bloomberg reports that dividends have fallen far below bond yields, ao the stock market has become uninteresting to investors. Look for a big stock market drop and 401Ks and other pension funds to disappear.

And, away we go …

What shall we eat?

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From Don Sanderson

2/20/09 Ukiah, California At the beginning of the week of Feb. 14, George Wills loosed a column entitled “Dark Doom Sayers” informing us that global warming is a myth, disdaining Energy Secretary Stephan Chu’s comments on the effects resulting desertification would have on our food supplies, and mocking Science Advisor John Holdren who has similar concerns. Wills asserted he had scientific foundations for his conclusions, so who can dispute with him? We want to believe. Indeed, it doesn’t require much effort to find Wills is preaching nonsense.

Wills began by referring to a report from the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center (ACRC), global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979 and that Arctic sea ice had been rapidly increasing. The ACRC staff quickly replied on their web site: “We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.” Arctic sea ice expanded at near-record rates of October and November, which Wills’ claimed supported his points. In fact, the rate than slowed and present coverage is somewhat less than last year at this time, roughly 13 million sq. km.

He then quoted the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to the effect that global temperatures had not increased in the last twenty years. In fact, the WMO reported “The global mean surface temperature for 2007 was estimated at 0.41°C/0.74°F above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.20°F.” “In January and April 2007 it is likely that global land surface temperatures ranked warmest since records began in 1880, 1.89°C warmer than average for January and 1.37°C warmer than average for April.”

Next week could be really big – 2/21/09

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From Don Sanderson

2/21/09 Ukiah, Northern California Next week, some economically/financially important events are unfolding that well may portend a rapid economic dive off the cliff for the United States, much more quickly than anyone is predicting that I’ve seen reported in the usual media. But, the tracks are there. It concerns the U.S. Treasury bond market where Obama must go to get his stimulus funds and, increasingly, much of the rest of the money he needs to operate the government and fight his wars. Some background:

A good way to track the economy, given the amounts of money the U.S. government is spreading around, is to follow the yields of U.S. Treasury bonds. Whenever the U.S. spends money it hasn’t collected from taxes and fees, it must first get from the sales of bonds.

Some background: When one invests a certain amount of money in a bond, say $1,000, at an annual return of 15 percent, it is said that the bond has yielded 15 percent or $150. If the bond is then sold for, say, $800, the buyer still gets an annual return of $150, but that is a rate of return of 18.75 percent, the bond now yields 18.75 percent. So, if you read that U.S. Treasury bond yield has increased, this should tell you that the market for bonds has fallen, much as the stock market falls. Bond yields have been steadily growing.

The U.S. Treasury sells both short term, say 5 year, and long term, say 20 year, bonds. Those who invest in short term bonds may be uncertain with the future and don’t want to bet long term. So, the relative yields of the two types of bonds should give one an idea of how much faith investors have in America’s financial future. In fact, short term bond yields are low in historical terms relative to long term ones, indicating bond holders feel insecure.