Below are two replies that I posted to Raise taxes? On gasoline? How about mothers’ milk?. In general, I supported the acerbic tenor of the article, which reported on two events: the first being the suggestion by a federal commission of a 12 cent levy on gas taxes, and the second being Georgia’s decision to reduce gas taxes by 4 cents per gallon. In the first reply, I attempted abet the idea that long term investment in highway infrastructure is foolhardy, and in the second, I grow a little testy at the “DRILL BABY DRILL” variety of no-nothing rejectionism being uttered by the more clueless ranks of the Republican party during the campaign for the 2008 presidential election.

RE: Raise taxes? On gasoline? How about mothers’ milk?

Discoveries of oil peaked in the US in the 1930s and US production peaked in 1971. Global oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s. You can’t produce what you haven’t found. Athabascan tar sands break even at about $50 US a barrel; it costs about $4-5/barrel to get Iraq oil out of the ground (hence the giant aircraft carrier named the USS Iraq). The US’ 3rd largest supplier (after Saudi Arabia and Canada) — Mexico — saw nearly a 30% decline in production from their largest field in 2008 (Cantarell). Exports from Mexico to the US have fallen from a peak of about 1.9 million barrels/day to about 900,000 last year. The US imports about 2/3rds of its oil, and in 2008 (7?) the US and the EU spent $700 billion on oil — that’s *one year’s* worth of oil. The equivalent of 10,000 1000 MW nuclear power plants would be needed by 2030 to cover the energy shortfall that will occur due to oil and natural gas depletion; 30,000 such plants will be needed for the world. The US is about 4% of the world’s population, and consumes about 25% of its oil. A solar relector the size of a house can produce about as much energy as a moped. So, what do you think? Should the suburban nation continue to sleepwalk in to the future, or is it time to come up with a coherent plan to deal with reality?

Posted by: perchecreek Posted on: 01/02/09

The commenter I reply to (also in the thread discussing the above article) in my next post opened by saying:

Global Warming Hoax and Global Gulag Obama: Get ready for Soviet style economics that do NOT work, Obama is going to put a tax on Coal burning powerplants however he is against building any new nuclear powerplants. His solution is to put up a windmill and run the country.

He then included this factoid amongst his hysterical rhetoric:

USA runs on Oil and $5 a gallon gas has bankrupted the country, WE are not running out of oil, we have oil wells capped all over this country but LIBERALS will not allow it to come out of the ground!

This was just the sort of ignorance that the McCain/Palin presidential ticket preyed upon in their jingoistic and incredibly disingenuous promises that construction of a natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the lower 48 would “place the US on the road to energy independence.” My reply shows my growing irritation with the whole fatuous turn of rhetoric:

No more blue-light specials in jesusland

It’s difficult to know where to begin in replying to this moronic drivel. Is it really true that a significant swath of the American populus believes this swill? Here’s a reality bytch-slap for you: the amount of ‘Oil’ left in the ‘USA’ — and ultimately, its price — is dictated by geology, not by ‘LIBERALS,’ as you have intimated.

The US produces about 6 million barrels a day from more than 500,000 wells, whereas Saudi Arabia can produce more than 9 million barrels a day from 1500 wells. In some single years over the past three decades 30,000 wells were drilled in the US. What explains the disparity in the numbers of wells drilled? It’s simple: one finds the biggest fields first. Super-giant fields such as Ghawar, Burgan, West Texas, and Cantarell often account for 40% or more of total production, and are found and exploited first. Not only will North America never replace declines in production since 1971, but no amount of drilling will stop continued exponential decline in its production.

Got that? Geology, my friend, not ‘LIBERALS’ or ‘CAPITALISTS’ or ‘CORRUPT CEOS’ or any other bogeyman is responsible for oil scarcity. Oh, and, given that it was known several decades that production would decline, only a colossal act of collective hubris, stupidity, and denial could have produced a nation as energy intense (read: suburban) as the US.

Posted by: perchecreek Posted on: 01/06/09

I’ve always had a sense that the age graded, normal school, with its central ritual, the test, was an odd creature — insights given to me by Michel Foucault’s book Disciplinir et Punir. The author of the journal Question Everything, George Mobus, in his essay Learning and Teaching: Do we have these right?, trenchantly summed up one of its flaws:

Which brings me to the other side of this issue of education: teaching. We have made a fundamental mistake in how we conceive of teaching as a power relation between one who knows (the teacher) and therefore has the power and the one who needs to learn and is there for in an almost subservient role. Rather than the dynamic being one of student approaching the teacher with a definite learning objective in mind and asking for guidance, the teacher in our system tells the student what they should learn and then rewards of punishes them for succeeding or failing (according to the teacher’s criteria). This might sound efficient and gets the job done but it completely subverts the natural tendency for people to want to learn that which they have found to be missing from their understanding.

Our system is based on regimenting subjects, packaging them in modules for efficient consumption, dictating when, where, and how they are to be mastered. Starting with the so-called basics, reading, writing, and arithmetic, we push our children into training regimens rather than let them discover a desire to acquire the needed skills and then helping them construct those skills at their own pace. It has been known for many years that young children are far more receptive to learning math facts when they perceive they need those facts in order to accomplish some other goal. It has been shown that retention of facts and skills is much greater when learned in the context of achieving a desired goal than when presented as something to be learned for its own sake. For example, children learning something of the history of their own families (genealogies) remembered historical facts that played into the context of what their ancestors were doing at the time better than a group of children simply trying to memorize those same historical facts.

I do also see the value in breadth of education, and the dangers of pure auto-didacticism; surely between the two there must lie a balance. It’s also interesting to note that Thomas Jefferson’s original plan for the University of Virginia was for students to come and go as they pleased, and to study what they chose to study — a very different model from what prevails today.

I definitely can relate to this statement (from the same essay):

I will never forget my own experience of struggling with calculus (I did OK but it was hard) studied in an essential vacuum of purpose (you can’t call the silly little isolated word problems as motivators) and then taking calculus-based physics where, as if by magic, I found myself ‘learning’ calculus. It was magical. All that math made so much more sense in the context of real dynamics.

The compartmentalized nature of the Aristotelian University drives me crazy, and I often wonder how anyone learns anything in it. Extreme specialization is also externally driven, brought into being by the dictates of the society in which it operates, and Mobus suggests that the myopia of the specialist is a cause of the crises which afflict that society:

In the end, our education system, our concepts about learning, and about teaching, have all been shaped by the belief that education’s primary role is getting people ready for their working life. It used to be that higher education was about getting people ready to be thoughtful citizens. But these days the idea of a citizen is someone who does a good job, spends money on stuff, and occasionally votes for someone they assume knows more than they do. This shift in our purposes for education, this shift in our thinking about the value of education is partly the reason we are in the particular jam we are in now.

This reminds me of Max Weber’s description the new, industrial society, and its attendant bureaucratic institutions: “For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well truly be said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’”

AT&T mailed to me a new “AT&T Residential Service Agreement.” A pamphlet enclosed with the new agreement states:

The terms and conditions in the enclosed Residential Service Agreeent (RSA) govern most local and long distance services provided by AT&T. Some services, however, such as basic residential service, 911 service, the California LifeLine program, and your choice of long distance provider are not governed by the RSA but instead are governed by tariffs on file with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). This Agreement will be effective on July 15, 2009, and replaces any previous RSA or other agreement for local or long distance services you may have received from us.

The “Agreement” states: “You also understand and agree that the Services are to be used for residential household purposes and not for business purposes.”

What exactly is the difference between a “Residential” and a “Business” “purpose”? Does the fact that AT&T is deciding the validity of my contract on the basis of the content of my traffic, rather than, for example, its volume, mean that they are no longer a common carrier?

Photos from a late March 2009 trip to Point Reyes National Seashore.

Photos from the SFSU Geology 115 and Merced College 14-15 March 2009 field trip to the Kettleman Hills near Coalinga.

In the first two weeks of January we paid a visit to the mid-Pacific hot spot island kingdom, Hawaii. Probably the most spectacular, were I forced to choose, was our hike across Kilauea Iki, a pit crater adjacent to Kilauea’s main caldera. Most of what I know of the area is drawn from the excellent Geological Field Guide: Kiluaea Volcano (1981, revised 2002, Hawai’i Natural History Association), by Richard W. Hazlett. Hazlett is listed on the cover as being on the faculty of Pomona College’s Geology Department.

Kilauea Iki formed some time after the mid-15th century. A November 1959 eruption filled the crater to a depth of 120 meters with picritic tholeiite (a form of basalt that has abundant olivine phenocrysts). At one point during that eruption a fissure on the side of the crater fountained 550 meters high. Looking down into the crater, one can see the now frozen surface of what 50 years ago was a molten lake of lava.

Photos from our trip are below. Clicking on any of the photos will bring you to a photo contact sheet for that day.

Olivine phenocrysts:

As the 1959 lava lake cooled, it settled some 20 meters, leaving a “bath tub ring” above the current level of the crater floor, and draping over structures within the lava lake:

Offering for Pele:

The San Francisco Chronicle / AP in a story titled Obama signs order to close Guantanamo in a year reports that President Obama has signed an executive order ending many of the questionable practices of the Bush Adminstration. Obama stated, according to the article:

“The message that we are sending the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism and we are going to do so vigilantly and we are going to do so effectively and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals,” the president said.

The President also ended the CIA’s practice of extraordinary rendition, a practice for which Bush administration officials may eventually face extradition and trial for war crimes.

The article concludes:

“We intend to win this fight. We’re going to win it on our terms,” Obama said as he signed three executive orders and a presidential directive.

The administration official said Obama’s government will not transfer detainees to countries that will mistreat them, including their own home country.

In his first Oval Office signing ceremony, Obama was surrounded by retired senior military leaders. He described them as outstanding Americans who have defended the country — and its ideals.

Obama is so competent that it is a little jarring, given what we’ve just been through. It almost makes me weep.

Citigroup is being broken into a more traditional banking unit and an investment house, according to an sfgate.com article, Citigroup posts loss, splits up the bank

According to the article:

Citigroup’s new structure is practically a reversal back to 1998, when John Reed’s Citicorp merged with Sandy Weill’s financial services conglomerate Travelers Group. Travelers Group at the time had an insurance business, an asset management business, the retail brokerage Smith Barney, and the investment bank and bond trader Salomon Brothers.

The 1998 combination was Weill’s idea, and was made possible by the partial repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 — which prohibited banks from also getting involved in investing and insurance. Reed agreed to the deal, saying that average people did not want to have to shop around for financial products.

The culture and technology over the past decade, however, seem to have shot down that forecast.

Right. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act is why I’ve not been in the stock market since 1998. There is a helpful acronym: FIRE, as in “Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.” I’ve held that one more enterprise should be included: Gambling. Apparently the managers of the US economy (and by using the term “managers” I mean to include just about every citizen) believed that these were viable economic — and national — enterprises, as opposed, for example, to China’s aggressively mercantilist strategy, or the intensively state managed industrial sectors of nearly every industrial nation.

Unfortunately it turns out not to have been a very wise strategy, and now the US faces the double burden of a bankrupt, de-industrialized economy and an energy intensive, massively suburban and automobile dependent infrastructure just as energy becomes radically more scarce.

Obama has been elected President! What a tremendous relief. We have gone from this (remember the mass apology US citizens offered to the world upon the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004?):

To this:

Hopefully the neo-fascist overtones of the sort of campaign that McCain and Palin ran have been repudiated. ‘Country First’? (McCain’s campaign slogan): as if opponents’ patriotism was suspect. How completely anti-democratic of the Republicans, to suggest that dissent to the war, or dissent to hyper-patriotism is “un-American.”

Hopefully, also, the sort of Carl Rove-esque, will-stoop-to-anything-to-win sort of campaigning of the variety that McCain, Palin, and sadly Hilary Clinton engaged in has also been delivered a small rebuke. It’s so very sad: Clinton would have made a fine Vice-president, and in eight years perhaps president, but now she will probably never get a shot at the top slot.

And the McCain handlers: what were they thinking? Had they selected Lieberman or someone similar they may have had a shot. By turning so crassly to Palin, they destroyed whatever credibility McCain may have had, and turned the election into a rout.

In other electoral news, it distresses me to see that proposition 8, which would ban gay marriage in California, is passing. How can so many be so unaware of the meaning of “equal protection under the law”? How can so many still be in the grips of religionist inspired hatred and bigotry?

Do dead cats bounce? They do:

Note the rather severe contradiction between the lead story and the two beneath.

An excellent post I found from a quite lucid journal entitled The Archdruid Report sets current events in the financial markets into a welcome context:

Most people who didn’t live through the opening years of the last Great Depression leave school with the notion that when the stock market crashed in the fall of 1929, the economy reached a full stop by the time investors stopped plummeting from Wall Street windows. In reality, it took more than three years for the economy to finish contracting, and scenery en route included a dramatic stock market rally in 1930 and some of the best days of rising prices, in percentage terms, that Wall Street has ever seen. At every point along the course of contraction, furthermore, financial pundits drew false conclusions from short-term changes. The resulting headlines have more than a little similarity to the ones that clutter the financial press today.

So, based on what I’m reading, do I think this little economic problem is over? No. Another quote from the author of the journal quoted above, John Michael Greer:

The US government may be in a position to loan Wall Street $700 billion it doesn’t have – in today’s economic world, money is so close to a mass hallucination that it’s not surprising to see it wished into being so casually – but actual resources such as fossil fuels, trained labor forces, and time are not so flexible.

I often rant about about the wholesale greed and theft that seems to permeate every board room and executive committee in the US, about how this endemic perversion of capitalist enterprise is so readily accepted, justified, and defended by so many. I was a bit stunned when I witnessed the Board of my former employer, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America, raise their CEO’s salary from about $100,000 in 1998 to $500,000 by 2003/4 or thereabout. The top executives in that organization were soon taking home a couple of million per year extra, an amount unfathomable to the 4 billion or so in the world who make less than $5 dollars a day. Frankly, I thought it was criminal. What’s worse, the LLS is a charity, and the newly inflated salaries are peanuts compared to executive compensation in most public companies.

What monster could have eaten up the brains of those in charge of our society so that they think theft on such a scale is justifiable? And now, the house of cards that was, to use William Grieder’s term, “the casino economy,” appears to be tumbling down. I think Noam Chomsky, as quoted in yesterday’s BBC News, has offered the best analysis I’ve seen, pointing as he did to the institutional, structural flaws that have made all of this imaginable:

The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.

I think that it is also useful to keep in mind that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act happened during, and with the encouragement of, the Clinton administration — so before we are too quick to run off and blame our favorite partisan punching bag, it is best to recall that both the aggressive militarism of the US as well as its irresponsible fiscal and economic policies of the past few decades have been very much a product of the two institutional ruling parties.

John McCain’s newly announced running-mate Vice-Presidential candidate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin proclaimed in her acceptance speech that a proposed natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the lower 48 would place the US “on the road to energy independence.”

It is a statement that is risably disingenuous, so crassly manipulative of an apparently ignorant populous as to be comedic were it not so tragic in its demonstration of absolute dereliction of leadership. Only President Carter of all of the Presidents of the last 50 years demonstrated a reasonable grasp of the US’ energy predicament, and he was nearly laughed out of office by the citizenry. While France moved towards 80% nuclear generation, Denmark and Spain moved radically into wind energy, and Germany began lining autobahns with solar panels, the US proceeded to build suburban landscapes ever more frenetically.

Our children will not look kindly on the nearly willful ignorance and rapaciousness of contemporary Americans. That this collective dereliction of responsibility has been wrapped in hyper-patriotism is repugnant. That the putative opposition, including Senator Obama and Speaker of the House Pelosi, have failed to counter the vacuous idea that drilling the continental shelf will have any effect whatsoever on price and the ultimate destiny of an overwhelmingly oil and gas dependent, hopelessly suburban nation; that they have failed to offer any credible, prudent plan is disheartening.

The International Red Cross has delivered its report to the CIA stating categorically that the U.S. has conducted a program of torture and that torture is illegal. The following MSNBC commentary and interview with a legal scholar describes the implications:

During the weekend of June 21-22 8000 lightning strikes started 800 fires in Northern California from Big Sur to the Oregon border. According the the San Francisco Chronicle, “By contrast, 574 lightning-sparked fires blackened about 86 square miles in Northern California in all of 2007.”

The San Francisco Bay Region (and the rest of California) has had its driest late spring since records have been kept, beginning in 1850. Normally, about 5 inches of rain fall in March-May; this year about 1/2 an inch fell in those three months.

Air National Guard MAFFS units from Wyoming, North Carolina, and Colorado are being sent to the region. Firecrews from Oregon, Washington, Iowa and Alaska have arrived to help.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has high resolution images of the region that show plumes of smoke filling the northern 1/3rd of the state.

Photos below are from a hike we took today to Mount Tamalpais, which is located in Marin County, about 10 miles north of San Francisco proper.

I thought that I should elaborate on my earlier somewhat cryptic reference to Clayton (Contra Costa County, California) as “spooky.”

For the last couple of years I’ve been paralyzed, in a state of shock at the sheer hubris, the awful ugliness of post 9-11 America. The country has suffered a paroxysm of jingoistic fervor and of vile nationalism that has served to obfuscate not only why the US was attacked, but the road out of its dilemma.

      Suburban house, Pacifica, California

It is as if the vibrant dissent to the world’s biggest military apparatus prior to 9-11 was for naught. Forgotten was the ugly history of US foreign intervention, that Hussein of Iraq was merely one of an unseemly coterie that did the bidding of US corporate interests under veil of fighting “communists.” Even now, as evidenced by presidential candidate Barack Obama’s repudiation of his minister’s statement that the World Trade Center attacks were “chickens coming home to roost” (I prefer Chalmers Johnson’s term: blowback), the US polity has yet to fully come to grips with its culpability for 9-11. 9-11 was a fundamentally revolutionary act in nature, it was a repudiation of capitalism (that is, capitalism in its 20th century form: corporate-state militarism) and its adjunct, US military dominion. The US military had been cast by its supporters as the noble bulwark against “communism”, and though now the enemy has been magically transformed into “terrorism”, the true goal of such overwhelming military force remains global domination of resources. To wit: Iraq.

So I can’t help but pass through the seemingly bucolic landscapes of places like Clayton and not feel both the military cost of making them possible and the improbability of their future viability. And having some affection for the US Constitution of 1787, and for democracy in general, landscapes filled with security infrastructure, nationalistic icons, giant automobiles, and … well, dare I say? … copiously irrigated lawns … make me, to put it mildly, uneasy. (By using the phrase “security infrastructure”, I intend to refer broadly to the “gated community”, inward looking, profoundly anti-civic nature of Clayton and most suburban landscapes)

James Howard Kunstler is typically evocative of the American early 21st century zeitgeist in his recent description, which I’ll take the liberty of quoting at length:

Of course, one of the reasons that Americans are so anxious to get away on a holiday weekend from the places where they live is because we did such a perfect job the past fifty years turning our home-places into utterly unrewarding, graceless nowheres, where the private realm of the beige houses is saturated in monotony, and the public realm has been reduced to the berm between the WalMart and the strip mall. Now, we barely have the gasoline to run all this stuff, let alone escape from it for a weekend.

We’re at a dead end with all this and a lot of Americans are paralyzed with fear about what’s next. This may actually be a deeper fear than the anxiety about money and banking in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in and tried to reassure the nation. Back then, despite the grave problems of capital, we still had plenty of everything: plenty of good productive land, plenty of manpower earnestly eager for hard work, plenty of ore in the ground, shining cities equipped with excellent streetcar systems, a railroad network that was the envy of the world, sturdy small towns and small cities fully equipped with locally-owned business, and a vast number of small family farms that could re-absorb family members unable to get wages in the cities. Most of all, we had plenty of oil in the ground, and the world’s biggest industry for getting it out and selling it. What we didn’t have in 1933 was cash money.

The crisis at hand now goes way beyond a crisis of capital — though that is certainly part of it. Notice how many of the things we had in 1933 are gone now. Our cities, with a few exceptions, are imploded husks. Our small towns and small cities (Schenectady, home of G.E.!) are gutted, especially in terms of locally-owned business. Our passenger rail system is worse than anything a Soviet ministry might produce (while the airline industry that replaced it is dying of a kind of financial hemorrhagic fever). Our local transit hardly exists anymore. Family farms have all but disappeared.

This is why I find places like Clayton to be spooky. The very placidness of this landscape belies the violence which created it. Clayton is near to an ideal, fictive American landscape in its cartoon-like lush irrigation set amidst the parched, golden hills of the Coast Range. Nevertheless, it is, to me, a gravely flawed landscape.

I cringe at having to attempt to explain any of this to people who hang American flags on their privacy fences, and who have filled their carports with giant, gaudy gas guzzlers; but most of all, who have chosen, as evidenced by the landscape they’ve created for themselves, at some level reject civic life.

Humanity Lobotomy is a video short that attempts to explain in documentary fashion net neutrality and open source media and software.

The video and its sponsoring site can be found by clicking on the image below:

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

We hiked up to Eagle Peak on Mount Diablo yesterday — photos are in my contacts section. On the way in and out, we passed through Clayton.

Clayton is Stepford wives territory, the sort of surreal, exurban fringe where nature (and common sense) is subordinated to an ideal, English manor-based version of reality, albeit updated with “appropriate” (I love the euphemistic, neutered lexicon of contemporary “human resource” departments) security infrastructure: tasteful, discrete, hidden yet subtly visible, in perfect Panopticon style. The whole illusion is maintained with massive amounts of water, oil, and resources imported from … from somewhere.

Of course, rampant TV-news inspired paranoia is visible everywhere, for the bucolic town of Clayton presents itself to outsiders principally as the blank walls of the gated “communities” (sic) that presumably shelter innocent babes from burglars, rapists and pedophiles.

Occasionally, an American flag pokes over the tasteful wooden “privacy” fences. Giant SUVs prowl the streets, often driven by lone occupants.

Clayton is a fascinating and spooky place.

We recently revisited the Coast Range Ophiolite, which is found on Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County.

An ophiolite is a section of oceanic crustal rocks, a sequence that typifies ocean crust wherever it exists. One might be led, then, to ask what ocean crust is doing on Mount Diablo (40 km outside of San Francisco), 300 meters or so above sea level. Good question. It happens that when a terrane docks with a continent some of the ocean floor is often included in the suture. This particular parcel of ocean floor was formed about 165 million years ago, in the mid to late Jurassic. Subsequently it was buried under 10,000 meters of sediment, and then was faulted to the surface as the Franciscan subduction (~145 - 30 million years before present) of the Farallon plate came to a close, and the right lateral faulting associated with the San Andreas system began.

A cross section of sea floor is typically ordered like this, from top down: chert, pillow lavas, sheeted dikes, gabbro, peridotite. One can see in this set of photos chert, pillow lavas, a diabase (gabbro) quarry, and a manzanita ‘barrens’ (which usually grow on serpentine sourced soils; serpentinite being hydrothermally altered peridotite).

Clicking on any of the images below takes you to a set of images for that day, and away from this web log.

Chert:

Chert (closeup):

Chert (even closer):

Pillow lava:

Diabase (Gabbro) quarry (the next photo is from an earlier visit):

Manzanita barrens:

Over spring break we visited Point Reyes, and happened upon Drakes Beach just as a front was clearing. After Drakes Beach, we went to the light house, and we finished the day at Chimney Rock. Clicking on the photos below brings you to a contact sheet slide for that day.

I just wanted to point once more to iamalwayshungry.com, which is Nessim Higson’s baby. I love his work, and his use of Flash is brilliant. Yes, we like to poo-poo Flash’s web unfriendly nature, but one must admit it permits a creative latitude that is just not possible with html at this point.