…WORRY ABOUT GLOBAL DEPRESSION

I reiterate, “Am I the only one who’s noticed that the world’s bastard-twin little monster problems, i.e. global warming and oil depletion, seem to be somewhat self-canceling, i.e. the depletion of oil will reduce global warming, hopefully just-in-time?” This is not a rhetorical question. I’d really like to know. Maybe I’m just naïve, simplistic, or an idiot, or maybe this is an honest approach to a complex problem. It’s not like a want a free-fore-all forum here or something, but I’d really like to know. Believe it or not, I’ve actually researched all this quite a bit, gracias a la Internet. But nowhere have I seen anyone mention this. Naturally you don’t want people to get complacent and buy multiple SUV’s, but then you don’t want them to commit suicide, either. My main concern right here right now is honesty and articulation, straightforward discussion without smokescreens and pretexts. It’s like all the rap and America-bashing over the budget deficit, exchange rates, and foreign debt. It can all be solved, more or less, by the simple two words that no one wants to say: raise taxes. How many times have they predicted the collapse of Social Security, and how do they resolve the problem every time? Raise taxes. Again, you don’t want to get carried away and watch your precious democracy become reduced to bureaucracy, but you don’t want it to become an unhealthy and uneducated, but lowly taxed, land of slums and slumlords, the few filthy rich lording it over the remaining filthy poor. It’s government’s responsibility to take responsibility where individuals are unwilling or unable to do so, while consciously maintaining a level playing field for all. Government should take from the rich and give to the poor, especially when that means taking from windfall oil profits to encourage alternative energies. For those who cry foul, I assure you it’s usually the other way around, tax breaks for unearned wealth and bailouts for predatory and irresponsible corporations. Considering that our next best energy hope, hydrogen fuel cell technology, is at least forty years away, best guess, this could get really hairy.

But that’s not the real problem. After all we’ll probably survive as a species, but as a technologically advanced culture I’m not so sure. The Dark Ages happened before, and could happen again, Western civilization and its accumulated knowledge stagnant or misplaced for a millennium. Fortunately, last time other cultures transmitted the knowledge onward, Islamic Aristotelians, Syrian Christians and Spanish Jews, so all was not lost. Now, though, who would be up to the task? Internet heads? Yeah, right. Cultures are so intertwined these days that they would probably all fall together, if they fall at all. Who then would transmit nuclear technology on to the next generations? Hmmm, maybe better not… Or what about advanced weaponry? Hmmm once again… Okay, well what about rocket science? I haven’t seen the complete movie about Billy Bob Thornton building his own space rocket, but the prospect is pretty unlikely. A break in a mere generation since the Apollo spaceships to the moon meant that scientists basically had to start over for the next round, presumably to include Mars. All the German scientists who developed the Saturn rockets are long gone and nobody thought to save the plans. Can you believe that? This may be more essential to survival of the species than surviving global warming. After all we may be able to curb auto emissions, but we’ll never control volcanoes. This has been the cause of most major climate changes on the Earth, that and continental drift, and maybe a meteor strike or two. The climate has previously surged far higher than anything imagined from global warming, all within the period of biological florescence, including dinosaurs. What killed the dinosaurs may very well have been post-impact cooling, in fact, not warming.

On the other hand it’s now generally thought that the Earth was a snowball not long before the Cambrian ‘explosion’ of Earth’s first large-scale biological diversity, a period which cyanobacteria apparently survived handily, despite extreme conditions. In short there is no normal Earth temperature, only an average. The fact that we are here having this conversation is a miracle beyond anything that could be imagined given the improbable starting point. Intelligent design? Probably more like brilliant mistake(s). The possibility of intelligent life forming on this or any other planet is infinitesimally low, somewhat supported by the evidence that this planet has itself seen billions of species, but few of them smart enough to induce global warming, much less smart enough to cure it. That remains to be seen. Life out there, yeah, they’ll find that sooner or later, probably not so much different from non-life. Computers and rockets, even stick shifts and turntables, are another thing. Simple single-cell life existed on this planet before the advent of complex organisms longer than the non-life period preceding. We don’t need rocket science to find the others ‘out there,’ we need it to survive the next extinction event, whenever that comes, something like Noah’s ark, maybe Barack’s Boat. Global warming? What a joke! Global warming probably couldn’t extinguish even half the current species extant in the world, about the same as a healthy super volcano like Yellowstone in a good year, no big deal.

Seriously, though, the problem will be survival’s after-glow. Will technology die out for lack of fuel? Will capitalist economic expansion die out? Will we become de facto communists simply for lack of resources and better alternatives? Or will technology save the day and create new fuel sources without limits nor rings around the bathtub, nor artificially red sunsets? The initial phase, starting about right now, will be one of withdrawal, something like a gasoline maintenance program of increasingly smaller doses up to some indefinite vanishing point in the future, which will never be reached but will hopefully become meaningless. Tell that to the policy makers. Even those in countries touting their ‘greenness’ are building new airports as the fuel runs out. Welcome to Thailand (this is a Thai blog after all). A tentative shift to ‘bio-fuel’ will probably accomplish not much more than driving up the price of food. Considering their margins, it’s not likely they will ever come down again. Believe it or not, the price of oil actually could. Will high prices of oil and gas push us into economic depression? No way, though shortages could. They won’t. At that point, production will increase and prices will stabilize at least, maybe even fall. Oil-rich Arab states aren’t about to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They’ll play it for all it’s worth, insh’allah.

Don’t laugh; it all happened before. The sharp price hikes of the late 70’s and early 80’s gave way to dirt cheap oil again in the late 80’s and 90’s. The price of a barrel of oil ten years ago was twelve dollars. All it takes is the discovery of a major new source and stagnant demand. They’re looking deeper than ever in the oceans now, and looking to take a layer off Saskatchewan in Canada just like is happening to Alberta to process ‘oil sands.’ Remember ‘oil shale?’ Maybe the Russians are right and oil is a renewable resource if only you look deep enough. Don’t worry; one way or another they’ll find and use every last drop (that’s the conspiratorial ‘they’; read “us,” the editorial “we”). I’ll be glad; if there’s life beyond oil, then let’s get on with it while our elders can still remember life before oil. You don’t have to cut down the last redwood to realize they’re irreplaceable. Look for more nuclear power and more electric cars and charging stations and better battery technology, still pathetically inefficient. “Still won’t be enough,” you moan? You’re right. It’ll take changes in lifestyle, also. Got bio-fuel? Get a horse! That’s how we got here, on their backs. It’s in our genes. Take comfort in the fact that the Golden Ages of both Art and Science occurred in the early 1900’s, long before the Auto-Age of self-indulgence. Since then we’ve only done more more bigger bigger, dumbing ourselves down in the process with our fancy toys. Still depressed that the party may be over? Boredom’s tough to deal with. The depression will be more psychological than economic. Is meditation not your style? There’s always Second Life, the on-line alternative reality. I hear land’s cheap. Watch your back. Eventually the meek will inherit the earth. That’s the part I like.

Bhutto Assassination: Jihad for Dummies

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto was not about politics. It’s all about suppression of women. There I’ve said it, the nasty mean ugly truth. Religion, especially Islam, is about suppression of women, part and parcel. It’s no accident that most religions, especially the Semitic ones, have prominent father-figures, even when they have no face, as in Islam. Apparently this replaced the old dominant Alpha-male in animal societies as we made the transition from proto-human scavengers to a human society in which cooperation and sharing are essential to a successful hunt. Otherwise we would be very poor hunters, slow weak and defenseless as we are. Hence we experience the birth of collective ‘artificial’ intelligence, culture, belief systems, and ultimately, religion. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have the same God and the same histories, up to a point, that point being the branch of cultural evolution that each followed independently, the Christians branching off approximately the first century C.E., Muslims the seventh, Jews being the common stock that remains closest to the ancestral roots. Muslims knelt and prayed to Jerusalem, after all, long before they had any Mecca to turn to. Jews still do. Sibling rivalries are always the nastiest. In their zeal to ‘reform’ the original core beliefs, feelings are easily hurt. Jesus turned the old slash-and-bash war god into one of love. Muhammad accepted this while limiting it to the nuclear religious family and returning to YHWH’s annihilation of his enemies, sparing only Christians and Jews, ‘people of the book’, while subjecting them to higher taxes. He appealed to tribal instincts by denying individuality and stressing Islam, surrender, to God and to tradition. At the same time he expanded the belief system to include the state as well as the individual soul, and expanded the concept of society to include taking care of the poor. This included the obligation to take many wives, since war created many widows. Thus women were quickly put in their place, in spirit if not in the letter. Even Ibn Battutah, the ‘Islamic Marco Polo’ complained in the fourteenth century, that Muslims in the Maldives allowed their women too much freedom, and Ibn was no homie.

If you allow women total freedom, what would result, after all? If that was a problem in ancient societies, imagine how it might be made manifest in the modern world. Women would soon be selling themselves and their services on the Internet, wouldn’t they? Yes, they would. Peasant girls from remote locations, linked to the ‘real world’ only by power lines and air waves, would soon be chatting up he-males around the world, giving them false flattery, a flash of a thigh, and the urge to merge in real time in virtual space. Then she lures him into her virtual ‘private room’, where she proceeds to take off her clothes and whip him into a virtual frenzy, all for the small donation of a dollar a minute. It shouldn’t take long. What was worshipped before the male war gods anyway? The female principle, exhibited in birth, is certainly the original miracle and its recognition as such is possibly the first conscious achievement of human thought. Whereas the Alpha-male in animal societies hoarded the harem, as some humans still do, the concept was made abstract for the new whiter brighter ‘naked apes’ on the scene, killing like lions and reproducing like rabbits. They had fertility rites and carved Venus figurines. As agriculture ensued and religions evolved, so did female worship. Prostitutes had prominent roles in temple rites, best exemplified in the Lady of Kadesh, representing the fertility God Astarte, seated naked on a lion, arrows in hand. As hunters became herders and warriors, these agricultural rites of weak sedentary people were seen as repulsive. All Semites, whether Jew, Christian, or Muslim, idolized the herding hunting fighting and killing way of life. They needed a God fit for the task, and this embrace of an abstract monotheism occupies much of the Old Testament, especially in the Jews’ contacts with the culturally superior, but sedentary, Canaanites, founder of the alphabet which has been adapted and adopted almost worldwide. Sacred prostitutes wouldn’t be of much use on the battlefield, and are best left in the temple, where they remain to this day in some parts of southern India. Elsewhere they are rarely considered sacred, more often scared. They’re safer under cover of the Internet.

Hinduism and Buddhism have always been more sympathetic to the female principle, while progressing conceptually from the act of birth to a broader concept of ‘enlightenment’, as opposed to commandments, passive acknowledgement of the human condition as opposed to the active changing of it, conciliatory mediation between extremes rather than conquest and annihilation. This didn’t mean that no battles were fought, of course, only that the enemies were usually well known and the results fairly predictable. That was usually enough to satisfy the machismo cravings of a people with very little herding and hunting tradition. That is rice country, of course, densely populated and long settled, where conformity is prized above individuality, and the past and the family are co-equal with religion. The Buddhist reform of Hinduism was more a codification for export and a repudiation of its caste system than a repudiation of its essential feminine passivity. Though men may call the political shots in modern Buddhist SE Asia, women are the moral force that holds families and societies together. Not infrequently they handle the purse-strings also, deftly tucking bills away in nooks and crannies for future consumption. Control of the means of reproduction has always been the female’s original endowment and empowerment. It only runs into fierce opposition from the leaders of those religions who want to kill it by hiding it behind a veil of deceit. That’s not how evolution works. Evolution may be the survival of the fittest men, but it’s the survival of the prettiest women. I’d become a suicide bomber myself if I had to sleep with some of those Muslim women. Bring me a bigger veil, and a bottle of absinthe.

This blog post is dedicated to Benazir Bhutto, may she accomplish in death what she never accomplished in life. She was never a widely popular leader, and certainly never wildly successful. Muslim machismo would ensure that. Any corruption on her watch was probably no worse than the corruption on anyone else’s. She was lambasted for her ‘secularity’ even though her father was the one to institute Islamic law into the modern government, though certainly Islam ‘lite’ by today’s standards. Her problems were Pakistan’s, Islam’s, and increasingly, the world’s, problems: cultures in collision, intolerance, religious fanaticism, and ignorance. I personally thought she was a pretty hot babe until she went overseas and ate all that fatty food, becoming increasingly, uh… Muslim. The fact that she was G.W. Bush’s choice for Pakistan is a red herring. Given Bush’s scarce mental acuity and his oily politics, it’d be nice to think that the opposition must be the ‘good guys.’ They’re not. Islamic jihadis are a perversion of their religion and to humanity in general, trying to accomplish with religion what they are unable to accomplish with their lives and societies. This is the last gasp of an Islam that can only catch up by dragging everyone else down. Sound like someone you know? This is the last gasp of an Islam that has oil and not much else. Terrorism? Global warming? It seems like we could kill two birds with one stone if we could get that needle full of oil out of our arm. But that would take a big psychological adjustment now wouldn’t it? Change is possible, but religious sensitivities need to be taken into careful account. When Europe finally threw off the yoke of the Church a few years ago, they threw out the baby with the bath water. They are the Godless West of Islamic hatred, only recently emerged from the threat of Godless communists. Religion is better than that, better than politics. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam are the head, heart, and solar plexus of our collective soul. Only by balancing them can we advance as a people, as a person.