The Sludge Report - SET TO SELF DESTRUCT. END

Domination - we are all one in the same boat

One theme of human history is domination. Humans want to dominate each other, they want to dominate themselves, and they want to dominate the world itself. If humans had the power to dominate the weather they would. But until that happens, we have domesticated a lot of animals for our benefit, and invented agriculture.

This is why wars and slavery have always been prevalent throughout human history. Each human being wants the world to be a certain way, and if you have one single person who has not a drop of compassion, they will resort to dominating others and forcing them to do whatever work forwards that dream. Pharaohs, in essence, weren't much different from some of the CEOs and world leaders we have today. Their goal is simply to manipulate and enslave people in order for them to achieve the lifestyle they want and acquire the things want in their life.

Resorting to domination and manipulation is such a part of human history that it’s hard to imagine life without having human beings dominating one another. Peak Oil, or the depletion of the world’s most precious resource, will likely make it difficult for world domination. Things like Capitalism, global trade and industrialization will eventually enter reverse. If you don’t have the energy (literally) to expand your business in other continents, then you don’t have the power to dominate other parts of the world; at best you can dominate people locally. Peak Oil is good news, as I always say. A world filled with local economies where each restaurant is unique is a much more exciting world than one filled with Mc Donald’s in every area of the planet.

So local economies are becoming and will be the trend, and yet I am reluctant to become completely local and independent. Why? It isn’t that being independent by growing your own food, building your own house and living without money isn’t pleasant and healthy. My reluctance comes from knowing some history. If you live simply, you are likely to have a longer natural life (no stress, healthier diet, and close contact with nature). However, you also make yourself more vulnerable. Think of the native Indians in North and South America. While they still had wars and violent disputes, their lifestyle is something we can only admire at this point in our so prevalent “civilization”. The American Indians never claimed to own nature or land. They simply lived in it, and they understood the responsibility they had as stewards. I.e., if they destroyed nature, they destroyed their habitat, which would cause their demise. So they lived in harmony with nature. Sounds like a sustainable way to live that will prolong your species for billions of years, doesn’t it? Well, history teaches us that their way of life did not last for very long. When the Europeans arrived the majority of Indians were quickly slaughtered. Some were enslaved, and “the luckiest ones” were simply stripped of everything they had, including their culture.


My conclusion here is that one cannot create their reality by designing their life a certain way – sustainable, as far as we’re concerned – while ignoring the rest of the world. For us to go back to the Garden of Eden, we first must face all our demons. If not, the Garden of Eden will certainly get invaded, and its habitants will likely be slaughtered just like the American Indians were. And in this day and age, building a fence or wall to protect a newly-made Garden of Eden that is self-sustaining would be futile. Not only are the weapons of war far too advanced, but even a nuclear weapon that explodes outside will wipe out everything in a very large area. You cannot live harmoniously in the Garden of Eden if your air is contaminated with radiation, or even if the rain that falls on your land is polluted from activities that are happening on other parts of the planet. History is filled with horrific examples of domination, by the way, and the one I present here is just a good example that illustrates my point.

The fact is we are all in the same boat, that is, we live on the same planet which has become very small right now. We cannot build our own haven and pretend there’s nothing else happening outside. Whether we like it or not, to face all problems and issues together and as one. The whole world needs to; everyone. Nothing else will allows us to get away with not facing the whole truth. We are one. The longer we pretend we are not, and that we can live independently, the longer we avoid this inevitable realization.

The post-oil novel revisited!

by Frank Kaminski

Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason’s novel Ill Wind (Tor Books, 1995) is a masterfully wrought science fiction epic depicting a world after oil—and, in the process, touching on a number of peak oil-related themes.

However, unlike the other post-oil novels published so far, Ill Wind isn’t about peak oil. In those other novels, oil has gradually dribbled away while we’ve steadfastly ignored the warning signs. But in Ill Wind, the world’s oil vanishes suddenly after some bizarre, experimental oil-eating microbe is unleashed on a massive tanker spill, and then runs amok. What Ill Wind and those other novels do have in common, however, is that they imagine a future world without oil.

Ill Wind opens ominously, with an albatross of a supertanker known as the Oilstar Zoroaster plying twenty-foot waves in the dead of night during the final leg of its journey from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, into San Francisco Bay. Carrying upwards of 1 million barrels of crude, the supertanker is about to make the delicate passage through the narrow channel beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, a procedure so fraught with peril that captains routinely refer to it as “threading the needle.”

Distracted by a disruption on another part of the ship, Captain Miles Uma returns to the helm moments too late, and can only watch in helpless horror as a collision between the ship’s starboard bow and an unyielding bridge support frees a rush of dire black bile into the Bay. Uma will eventually prove to be among the book’s truly heroic and moving characters; but for now, he retreats into a shamed hiding, even changing his name and physical appearance.

Faced with an oil spill unimaginably worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster, Oilstar executives gather the next morning in quiet despair. But the pall of gloom lifts when two mysterious visitors from somewhere within the company’s obscure “bioremediation research” department stride into the conference room. Microbiologist Dr. Alex Kramer and his assistant Mitch Stone have come to tout their so-called Prometheus microbe, an organism with an insatiable appetite for crude oil. They claim that Prometheus could reduce the amount of oil at the Zoroaster site by as much as two-thirds in just a few days. (It won’t eliminate all of the oil, however, since it breaks down only the octane component.) Its only byproducts would be water and carbon dioxide. It would also promptly die off once its food source was depleted—and it wouldn’t spread beyond the Bay, since it can’t become airborne. Utterly elated, Oilstar’s CEO is sold on Prometheus.

As the novel is laying this groundwork, it is also introducing us to an epic cast of characters. One of my favorites is cowboy Todd Severyn, a take-charge petroleum engineer from rural Wyoming who leads one of the cleanup crews at the spill site. Then there’s the woman with whom Severyn strikes up an unlikely but touching romance, a sharp-tongued, classic rock-loving Asian-American microbiologist from Stanford University named Dr. Iris Shikozu. She’s the scientist who’s been appointed to oversee the spraying of Dr. Kramer’s Prometheus microbe.

Also rather touching is Heather Dixon, a young woman with an inferiority complex who works as an insurance company office drone. When the world begins to come apart all around her, she sees it as her chance to make a fresh start.

Part of this fresh start is a passionate romance with a dangerous troublemaker named Connor Brooks. A former deckhand onboard the Zoroaster, Brooks is largely (if not wholly) to blame for the ship’s crash and the subsequent spill. But Heather knows nothing about Connor’s shady past, and the two quickly become inseparable companions in a cross-country journey in search of civilization.

Another crucial character is the rebellious, hot-shot lead scientist on an ambitious solar energy research project that takes on entirely new significance once all of the world’s oil is gone. And back in Washington, D.C., there’s the slimy, scandal-dogged speaker of the house who, rather against his will, becomes a singularly un-heroic president-by-death.

After a brief hullabaloo of public outcry and interference from environmentalists and government agencies, Oilstar sprays Prometheus on the spill. Almost immediately afterward, high-flying NASA planes confirm that the spill has in fact begun to shrink. But there’s also been a sudden epidemic of stalled-out cars that has snarled freeways throughout the Bay Area. And gasoline samples taken from these cars have tested positive for the Prometheus microbe.

It quickly becomes obvious that Prometheus is traveling by air, and that it is devouring not just oil but everything made out of oil. Within only a day, the “petroplague,” as it comes to be called, has spread across the nation, turning all manner of plastic objects into useless goop and rendering appliances utterly worthless. (One is reminded of the late Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain, an extraterrestrial microbe—featured in the book by the same name—that comes to Earth on a downed military satellite and eventually begins breaking down our polymer plastics.) Electrical grids flicker on and off, the airline industry shuts down after a dozen major crashes, and news from other parts of the world becomes intermittent. The microbe is also gobbling up the world’s major oil fields, stoking intense anti-American feelings across the Middle East. (This is bad news for a president stranded there after heading off on a diplomatic tour to Qatar.) A force of destruction as awesome as a hydrogen bomb, the petroplague devastates our manmade landscape. And we have no more power to resist it than a hapless insect has to blunt the impact of an oncoming windshield.

Amid this insanity, our main characters manage to preserve some semblance of civilized life. Todd Severyn sets out on horseback from the Marin County countryside to help get Dr. Shikozu out of a riot-plagued Stanford. The solar scientists enlist the help of local ranchers in an effort to get their equipment back up and running by swapping out existing components with plague-resistant fiberglass and ceramic counterparts. (They also undertake the Herculean task of hauling twenty 300-pound satellites a distance of 800 miles using nothing but old-fashioned railway handcars!) The former Zoroaster captain takes the lead in revamping an antique, museum-piece locomotive for the delivery of food to the starving people of Los Angeles. The new president takes office and begins ruling with an iron fist, at a time when states are threatening to secede from the union. And Heather and Connor press on with their cross-country trek, Connor becoming increasingly violent and unpredictable; Heather, increasingly firm in her resolve to somehow slip away from him.

The authors skillfully weave these and several other plot strands into a suspenseful, intellectually stimulating, and emotionally satisfying story. Their writing is so visceral that you can feel the fumes of spilled crude oil burning your eyes and nose, or the spongy surface of a disintegrating asphalt road giving way beneath your feet. Some descriptions, however, are admittedly a bit overwrought. The pathos of tortured, oil-soaked sea animals, for example, takes no time at all to veer into blatant bathos.

What makes Ill Wind additionally believable, beyond its vivid descriptions, is the research that went into writing it. Anderson and Beason have done their homework on (among other subjects) microbiology, organic chemistry, solar satellite technology, jet fighter aircraft, and environmental activism—as well as on the daily lives of politicians, petroleum engineers, insurance adjustors, and government research scientists. They make their characters seem as real as your own acquaintances and neighbors, and the possibility of a microbe ravaging the planet’s hydrocarbons as plausible as the actual, indisputable fact of peak oil.

The book’s descriptions of government research laboratories are perhaps the most believable of all, owing to the fact that both authors have spent much of their lives actually working in these sorts of facilities. Indeed, it was at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that they met each other in the first place. (Anderson was working there as a technical writer and Beason as a physicist.1) They later incorporated their firsthand experiences into their fiction, coauthoring several smash-hit novels in which government labs are the sites of intrigue and high-tech suspense. Ill Wind, which came out roughly halfway into this fruitful collaborative pact, has its share of classified locations, including Livermore, Kirtland Air Force Base, and Sandia National Laboratories.

As befits a novel written by technothriller authors, Ill Wind is far more active and less reflective than most of the other post-oil novels published to date. And this unfortunately represents a missed opportunity. Simply put, the authors tell a good story, but that story is just too busy to really plumb the themes of a post-oil world to any great depth. What does it truly feel like to be an inhabitant of the post-oil world that Ill Wind depicts? How does it feel, for instance, to eat by the sweat of your brow and the fertility of the soil in your own front yard, or to adjust to the utter silence that pervades the air now that machines are gone? What is it like to contemplate all that our society has lost, and does it weigh heavily upon one’s soul to be among the survivors, when others weren’t so fortunate? Ill Wind—unlike John Seymour’s far-more-ruminative Retrieved from the Future and James Howard Kunstler’s breathtaking World Made by Hand—never breaks stride long enough to really meditate on these sorts of questions.

The book also never makes even a single veiled reference to peak oil. But peak oil is nonetheless part of what inspired Anderson and Beason to write it. The authors intended the book to be partly a comment on our society’s way of overreacting to disasters (would we embrace extreme, untried measures in trying to reverse the desolation of a major city coastline?), and partly an illustration of our utter dependence on petroleum. They wanted to stress that this dependence “isn't just tied to our need for fuel, but for the many other plastics, lubricants, synthetics all based on petroleum,” recalls Anderson. “Without petroleum, the whole world would fall apart. And, even back when we wrote the book, we were advocating innovative and alternative solutions to save our civilization—we find ourselves in a similar crisis now, and I hope we do come up with alternative solutions before the whole world falls apart.”2

Even though Ill Wind doesn’t deal directly with peak oil or probe the themes of a post-oil world as deeply as it could, it certainly does qualify as a post-oil novel, and a very good one at that. And if the miniseries or TV movie for which ABC has recently optioned Ill Wind3 actually gets made, it will be a rather timely one, coming when global oil production is dropping like a rock at several percent a year. Thus, it will have an immeasurably better chance than the book ever did of bringing the implications of peak oil into sharp relief for an as-yet-clueless public.

Notes
1 Kevin J. Anderson, “Kevin’s Biography,” Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, http://www.wordfire.com/bio-kev.html (accessed Nov. 13, 2008).
2 Kevin J. Anderson, personal communication with the author, Nov. 21, 2008.
3 “Kevin J. Anderson,” Macmillan Books, http://us.macmillan.com/author/kevinjanderson (accessed Nov. 13, 2008).

The post-oil novel revisited!

by Frank Kaminski

Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason’s novel Ill Wind (Tor Books, 1995) is a masterfully wrought science fiction epic depicting a world after oil—and, in the process, touching on a number of peak oil-related themes.

However, unlike the other post-oil novels published so far, Ill Wind isn’t about peak oil. In those other novels, oil has gradually dribbled away while we’ve steadfastly ignored the warning signs. But in Ill Wind, the world’s oil vanishes suddenly after some bizarre, experimental oil-eating microbe is unleashed on a massive tanker spill, and then runs amok. What Ill Wind and those other novels do have in common, however, is that they imagine a future world without oil.

Ill Wind opens ominously, with an albatross of a supertanker known as the Oilstar Zoroaster plying twenty-foot waves in the dead of night during the final leg of its journey from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, into San Francisco Bay. Carrying upwards of 1 million barrels of crude, the supertanker is about to make the delicate passage through the narrow channel beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, a procedure so fraught with peril that captains routinely refer to it as “threading the needle.”

Distracted by a disruption on another part of the ship, Captain Miles Uma returns to the helm moments too late, and can only watch in helpless horror as a collision between the ship’s starboard bow and an unyielding bridge support frees a rush of dire black bile into the Bay. Uma will eventually prove to be among the book’s truly heroic and moving characters; but for now, he retreats into a shamed hiding, even changing his name and physical appearance.

Faced with an oil spill unimaginably worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster, Oilstar executives gather the next morning in quiet despair. But the pall of gloom lifts when two mysterious visitors from somewhere within the company’s obscure “bioremediation research” department stride into the conference room. Microbiologist Dr. Alex Kramer and his assistant Mitch Stone have come to tout their so-called Prometheus microbe, an organism with an insatiable appetite for crude oil. They claim that Prometheus could reduce the amount of oil at the Zoroaster site by as much as two-thirds in just a few days. (It won’t eliminate all of the oil, however, since it breaks down only the octane component.) Its only byproducts would be water and carbon dioxide. It would also promptly die off once its food source was depleted—and it wouldn’t spread beyond the Bay, since it can’t become airborne. Utterly elated, Oilstar’s CEO is sold on Prometheus.

As the novel is laying this groundwork, it is also introducing us to an epic cast of characters. One of my favorites is cowboy Todd Severyn, a take-charge petroleum engineer from rural Wyoming who leads one of the cleanup crews at the spill site. Then there’s the woman with whom Severyn strikes up an unlikely but touching romance, a sharp-tongued, classic rock-loving Asian-American microbiologist from Stanford University named Dr. Iris Shikozu. She’s the scientist who’s been appointed to oversee the spraying of Dr. Kramer’s Prometheus microbe.

Also rather touching is Heather Dixon, a young woman with an inferiority complex who works as an insurance company office drone. When the world begins to come apart all around her, she sees it as her chance to make a fresh start.

Part of this fresh start is a passionate romance with a dangerous troublemaker named Connor Brooks. A former deckhand onboard the Zoroaster, Brooks is largely (if not wholly) to blame for the ship’s crash and the subsequent spill. But Heather knows nothing about Connor’s shady past, and the two quickly become inseparable companions in a cross-country journey in search of civilization.

Another crucial character is the rebellious, hot-shot lead scientist on an ambitious solar energy research project that takes on entirely new significance once all of the world’s oil is gone. And back in Washington, D.C., there’s the slimy, scandal-dogged speaker of the house who, rather against his will, becomes a singularly un-heroic president-by-death.

After a brief hullabaloo of public outcry and interference from environmentalists and government agencies, Oilstar sprays Prometheus on the spill. Almost immediately afterward, high-flying NASA planes confirm that the spill has in fact begun to shrink. But there’s also been a sudden epidemic of stalled-out cars that has snarled freeways throughout the Bay Area. And gasoline samples taken from these cars have tested positive for the Prometheus microbe.

It quickly becomes obvious that Prometheus is traveling by air, and that it is devouring not just oil but everything made out of oil. Within only a day, the “petroplague,” as it comes to be called, has spread across the nation, turning all manner of plastic objects into useless goop and rendering appliances utterly worthless. (One is reminded of the late Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain, an extraterrestrial microbe—featured in the book by the same name—that comes to Earth on a downed military satellite and eventually begins breaking down our polymer plastics.) Electrical grids flicker on and off, the airline industry shuts down after a dozen major crashes, and news from other parts of the world becomes intermittent. The microbe is also gobbling up the world’s major oil fields, stoking intense anti-American feelings across the Middle East. (This is bad news for a president stranded there after heading off on a diplomatic tour to Qatar.) A force of destruction as awesome as a hydrogen bomb, the petroplague devastates our manmade landscape. And we have no more power to resist it than a hapless insect has to blunt the impact of an oncoming windshield.

Amid this insanity, our main characters manage to preserve some semblance of civilized life. Todd Severyn sets out on horseback from the Marin County countryside to help get Dr. Shikozu out of a riot-plagued Stanford. The solar scientists enlist the help of local ranchers in an effort to get their equipment back up and running by swapping out existing components with plague-resistant fiberglass and ceramic counterparts. (They also undertake the Herculean task of hauling twenty 300-pound satellites a distance of 800 miles using nothing but old-fashioned railway handcars!) The former Zoroaster captain takes the lead in revamping an antique, museum-piece locomotive for the delivery of food to the starving people of Los Angeles. The new president takes office and begins ruling with an iron fist, at a time when states are threatening to secede from the union. And Heather and Connor press on with their cross-country trek, Connor becoming increasingly violent and unpredictable; Heather, increasingly firm in her resolve to somehow slip away from him.

The authors skillfully weave these and several other plot strands into a suspenseful, intellectually stimulating, and emotionally satisfying story. Their writing is so visceral that you can feel the fumes of spilled crude oil burning your eyes and nose, or the spongy surface of a disintegrating asphalt road giving way beneath your feet. Some descriptions, however, are admittedly a bit overwrought. The pathos of tortured, oil-soaked sea animals, for example, takes no time at all to veer into blatant bathos.

What makes Ill Wind additionally believable, beyond its vivid descriptions, is the research that went into writing it. Anderson and Beason have done their homework on (among other subjects) microbiology, organic chemistry, solar satellite technology, jet fighter aircraft, and environmental activism—as well as on the daily lives of politicians, petroleum engineers, insurance adjustors, and government research scientists. They make their characters seem as real as your own acquaintances and neighbors, and the possibility of a microbe ravaging the planet’s hydrocarbons as plausible as the actual, indisputable fact of peak oil.

The book’s descriptions of government research laboratories are perhaps the most believable of all, owing to the fact that both authors have spent much of their lives actually working in these sorts of facilities. Indeed, it was at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that they met each other in the first place. (Anderson was working there as a technical writer and Beason as a physicist.1) They later incorporated their firsthand experiences into their fiction, coauthoring several smash-hit novels in which government labs are the sites of intrigue and high-tech suspense. Ill Wind, which came out roughly halfway into this fruitful collaborative pact, has its share of classified locations, including Livermore, Kirtland Air Force Base, and Sandia National Laboratories.

As befits a novel written by technothriller authors, Ill Wind is far more active and less reflective than most of the other post-oil novels published to date. And this unfortunately represents a missed opportunity. Simply put, the authors tell a good story, but that story is just too busy to really plumb the themes of a post-oil world to any great depth. What does it truly feel like to be an inhabitant of the post-oil world that Ill Wind depicts? How does it feel, for instance, to eat by the sweat of your brow and the fertility of the soil in your own front yard, or to adjust to the utter silence that pervades the air now that machines are gone? What is it like to contemplate all that our society has lost, and does it weigh heavily upon one’s soul to be among the survivors, when others weren’t so fortunate? Ill Wind—unlike John Seymour’s far-more-ruminative Retrieved from the Future and James Howard Kunstler’s breathtaking World Made by Hand—never breaks stride long enough to really meditate on these sorts of questions.

The book also never makes even a single veiled reference to peak oil. But peak oil is nonetheless part of what inspired Anderson and Beason to write it. The authors intended the book to be partly a comment on our society’s way of overreacting to disasters (would we embrace extreme, untried measures in trying to reverse the desolation of a major city coastline?), and partly an illustration of our utter dependence on petroleum. They wanted to stress that this dependence “isn't just tied to our need for fuel, but for the many other plastics, lubricants, synthetics all based on petroleum,” recalls Anderson. “Without petroleum, the whole world would fall apart. And, even back when we wrote the book, we were advocating innovative and alternative solutions to save our civilization—we find ourselves in a similar crisis now, and I hope we do come up with alternative solutions before the whole world falls apart.”2

Even though Ill Wind doesn’t deal directly with peak oil or probe the themes of a post-oil world as deeply as it could, it certainly does qualify as a post-oil novel, and a very good one at that. And if the miniseries or TV movie for which ABC has recently optioned Ill Wind3 actually gets made, it will be a rather timely one, coming when global oil production is dropping like a rock at several percent a year. Thus, it will have an immeasurably better chance than the book ever did of bringing the implications of peak oil into sharp relief for an as-yet-clueless public.

Notes
1 Kevin J. Anderson, “Kevin’s Biography,” Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, http://www.wordfire.com/bio-kev.html (accessed Nov. 13, 2008).
2 Kevin J. Anderson, personal communication with the author, Nov. 21, 2008.
3 “Kevin J. Anderson,” Macmillan Books, http://us.macmillan.com/author/kevinjanderson (accessed Nov. 13, 2008).

"Wanting to divorce, but unable to afford it" - article

An article came out on MSNBC today titled Wanting to divorce, but unable to afford it, which also has a comments section.

Having grown up in Brazil, I remember reading and learning that the United States had the highest rate of divorce in the world. Hollywood actors and actresses, that is, the people with the most amount of wealth and fame in the world, and whose lives are often shown to the public, were often seen as people whose marriage was already set up to be temporary: these people were likely to get divorced again so they could remarry someone else. Having multiple partners through life is fun to some, and in a society that still carries the tradition of marriage, one has have a partner through marriage in order to get approval and be able to maintain the lifestyle and great wealth Hollywood actors seem to enjoy.

The great wealth, comfort and luxury provided by an abundance of fossil fuels has made life easy for a lot of people in the first world. As a result, people have become more reliant on material goods for their "happiness and well-being", which makes them less resilient to whatever challenges they face. In the case of marriages in the US, people are known for wanting a divorce as soon as the relationship becomes challenging. If it's no longer the "sea of roses marriage is meant to be, then the solution is divorce". After all, when you live in a society of abundance where everyone can be independent while have income that provide them with a decent lifestyle, there's no reason for staying in a marriage whose maintenance requires work. Not to mention that after a person gets divorced they are free to marry someone else - hopefully someone who can provide the sea of roses they are looking for that marriage is supposed to be. The problem, of course, is that that other person is also looking for you to be the one providing the sea of roses they feel they are entitled to find in a marriage. So the result is a high rate of divorce in any affluent society where people don't have to "tolerate being married" because getting divorced occurs as such a wonderful option knowing that if you end up by yourself (man or woman) you will still have a decent lifestyle - let's not even mention the alimony and palimony laws that favor women in the US.

I'm trying to be neutral and make no judgment on whether divorce is good or bad, and the same of staying unhappily married. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure how much work should go into a marriage in order to make it work. All I know is that relationships do take work, and no long-lasting marriage is always a sea of roses. Two people are always going to have their individual desires and needs, but when the two are indeed one body you can only go in one direction. Two go in different directions you'd have to necessarily split which makes it a marriage at that point irrelevant - "Why get married if you're still going to live as if you were single".

Now, the other side of the spectrum can be seen in other countries where people don't have the luxury, comfort and independence that can be found in developed countries. In poor countries, many women stay with their partner in situations they are not always happy with, because they could not be financially independent on their own. Again, I'm attempting to make no judgment on whether such marriages are good or bad. In most cases (speaking from personal experience as I grew up in Brazil) these women who chose to stay in marriages that are tough because the husband is the provider, these women are not in so-called abusive relationships. They are simply in marriages that are not enlivening to them, through unions that took place through their own choice.

The article addresses a likely decline of the standard of living of Americans, which will likely reduce the divorce rate in the US because women (and perhaps men) through less prospects of being independent on their own, will chose to stay in their marriage either by tolerating whatever marriage aspect they don't like, or by trying to work it out - since the other option of getting divorced and having a decent lifestyle being independent seems to become less and less attainable.

I have never been married, so I am far from having much to say on this subject. I do wish people wouldn't get divorced so easily and as soon as they find an obstacle that is unpleasant to them. I also don't wish for anyone - man or woman - to be forced to stay in a relationship that is doomed to be unhappy because they don't have the finances to have a decent life on their own. I am trying to find out what other think since marriage is a goal of mine eventually, and I'm trying to acquire the skills to have a marriage that constantly enlivens myself and my future partner, so that the topic of divorce fades for us as something that we don't even think about because the benefits of our marriage (for both of us) are so great.

"Wanting to divorce, but unable to afford it" - article

An article came out on MSNBC today titled Wanting to divorce, but unable to afford it, which also has a comments section.

Having grown up in Brazil, I remember reading and learning that the United States had the highest rate of divorce in the world. Hollywood actors and actresses, that is, the people with the most amount of wealth and fame in the world, and whose lives are often shown to the public, were often seen as people whose marriage was already set up to be temporary: these people were likely to get divorced again so they could remarry someone else. Having multiple partners through life is fun to some, and in a society that still carries the tradition of marriage, one has have a partner through marriage in order to get approval and be able to maintain the lifestyle and great wealth Hollywood actors seem to enjoy.

The great wealth, comfort and luxury provided by an abundance of fossil fuels has made life easy for a lot of people in the first world. As a result, people have become more reliant on material goods for their "happiness and well-being", which makes them less resilient to whatever challenges they face. In the case of marriages in the US, people are known for wanting a divorce as soon as the relationship becomes challenging. If it's no longer the "sea of roses marriage is meant to be, then the solution is divorce". After all, when you live in a society of abundance where everyone can be independent while have income that provide them with a decent lifestyle, there's no reason for staying in a marriage whose maintenance requires work. Not to mention that after a person gets divorced they are free to marry someone else - hopefully someone who can provide the sea of roses they are looking for that marriage is supposed to be. The problem, of course, is that that other person is also looking for you to be the one providing the sea of roses they feel they are entitled to find in a marriage. So the result is a high rate of divorce in any affluent society where people don't have to "tolerate being married" because getting divorced occurs as such a wonderful option knowing that if you end up by yourself (man or woman) you will still have a decent lifestyle - let's not even mention the alimony and palimony laws that favor women in the US.

I'm trying to be neutral and make no judgment on whether divorce is good or bad, and the same of staying unhappily married. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure how much work should go into a marriage in order to make it work. All I know is that relationships do take work, and no long-lasting marriage is always a sea of roses. Two people are always going to have their individual desires and needs, but when the two are indeed one body you can only go in one direction. Two go in different directions you'd have to necessarily split which makes it a marriage at that point irrelevant - "Why get married if you're still going to live as if you were single".

Now, the other side of the spectrum can be seen in other countries where people don't have the luxury, comfort and independence that can be found in developed countries. In poor countries, many women stay with their partner in situations they are not always happy with, because they could not be financially independent on their own. Again, I'm attempting to make no judgment on whether such marriages are good or bad. In most cases (speaking from personal experience as I grew up in Brazil) these women who chose to stay in marriages that are tough because the husband is the provider, these women are not in so-called abusive relationships. They are simply in marriages that are not enlivening to them, through unions that took place through their own choice.

The article addresses a likely decline of the standard of living of Americans, which will likely reduce the divorce rate in the US because women (and perhaps men) through less prospects of being independent on their own, will chose to stay in their marriage either by tolerating whatever marriage aspect they don't like, or by trying to work it out - since the other option of getting divorced and having a decent lifestyle being independent seems to become less and less attainable.

I have never been married, so I am far from having much to say on this subject. I do wish people wouldn't get divorced so easily and as soon as they find an obstacle that is unpleasant to them. I also don't wish for anyone - man or woman - to be forced to stay in a relationship that is doomed to be unhappy because they don't have the finances to have a decent life on their own. I am trying to find out what other think since marriage is a goal of mine eventually, and I'm trying to acquire the skills to have a marriage that constantly enlivens myself and my future partner, so that the topic of divorce fades for us as something that we don't even think about because the benefits of our marriage (for both of us) are so great.

Building Sustainable Homes

Recently I had the great opportunity of meeting Ianto Evans who is the pioneer of cob house construction in the US.


He is also the author of the book The Hand-Sculpted House, which is an excellent book that can teach you the techniques to build a cob house. You can order this book directly from Cob Cottage Company, or you can get it through Amazon:

Being in the presence of Ianto Evans was awesome. His lifestyle represents the true definition of sustainability. The discussions we had were enlightening and thought-provoking. I recommend his workshop to anyone who is interested in sustainability.

If you are interested in what cob houses look like, you can see some of the photos I took here:

I can't emphasize how impressed I was with Ianto Evans and his wife Linda Smiley. His business, the Cob Cottage Company, organizes carpooling to make sure that every car that arrives for the workshop is full of people. Also, the cost of the workshop is proportional to the amount of fossil fuel you use to get there. So the cost of the workshop will be higher for you if you are flying fromt the Eastcoast than say, if you are driving from Seattle.

Ianto Evans is the real deal when it comes to sustainability. If you don't believe me, please check it out for yourself by taking one of his workshops. You can sign up here.

Building Sustainable Homes

Recently I had the great opportunity of meeting Ianto Evans who is the pioneer of cob house construction in the US.


He is also the author of the book The Hand-Sculpted House, which is an excellent book that can teach you the techniques to build a cob house. You can order this book directly from Cob Cottage Company, or you can get it through Amazon:

Being in the presence of Ianto Evans was awesome. His lifestyle represents the true definition of sustainability. The discussions we had were enlightening and thought-provoking. I recommend his workshop to anyone who is interested in sustainability.

If you are interested in what cob houses look like, you can see some of the photos I took here:

I can't emphasize how impressed I was with Ianto Evans and his wife Linda Smiley. His business, the Cob Cottage Company, organizes carpooling to make sure that every car that arrives for the workshop is full of people. Also, the cost of the workshop is proportional to the amount of fossil fuel you use to get there. So the cost of the workshop will be higher for you if you are flying fromt the Eastcoast than say, if you are driving from Seattle.

Ianto Evans is the real deal when it comes to sustainability. If you don't believe me, please check it out for yourself by taking one of his workshops. You can sign up here.

Is the issue of abortion connected to conservation?

This post is political and not directly related to energy. Well, today is election day and I figured discussing something political here would be appropriate.

I heard a woman say the other day that she’d be voting Republican because she’s anti-abortion. I suspect that many people will choose a presidential candidate solely on that issue. And this candidate will be the decision-maker in regards to the energy policies in the United States. He will determine whether we will meet our energy needs by reducing our consumption or by fighting wars to gain control of oil reserves.

Now, just for the record, I’m not in favor of war. I don’t have the question “why are those Arabs sitting on our oil?” in my head.

So, for some people (and perhaps a large number of voters) the abortion issue is what matters to them the most. But the killing and slaughtering of children and adults are not? I don’t understand this. I think I am missing something, and perhaps someone who reads this post can shed some light. Why would people be against the voluntary killing of fetuses and yet pro-war? That position is totally contradictory the way I see it. You are either pro-life or not. But you are not pro-life if you support a candidate that is in favor of war and not discussing things to find solutions.

I would say I’m pro-life. I have never taken away human life physically (maybe through words, but that’s another discussion). I do want life to prevail over death. However, if I were forced to take away a human life and could only choose between killing a fetus or pulling the trigger of a gun pointed at another fully developed human being, I’d choose the former. If my choice had to be between giving my money to a doctor that would kill fetuses, or to a soldier that will pull the trigger of a machine gun, I’d chose the former.

Coincidentally, I am also a conservationist. I would prefer to stop the making of cars if we can increase the fuel efficiency with the ones that are already on our roads. I would prefer to turn off the lights in the empty rooms instead of building new power plants. I would prefer to eat all the food that is on my plate than to always throw some away and then have to use more land and resources to produce extra food.

In summary, I would prefer to reduce human mortality rate than to disregard it and compensate it with uncontrolled birth rate. I’d prefer to "preserve" and work with the adults we have in this world than to allow them to die and replace them with babies that will grow and become adults. These babies and new generations will inherit the same problems we have anyways. If we have war as a way of solving problems, then that’s what they’ll inherit and this cycle of war and carnage that has been a theme in human history will never end.

That is my take anyway. But maybe there’s something I’m missing in this picture and that’s why I don’t understand why some people will choose a candidate solely on their position on abortion while having complete disregard for their position on war and other issues.

And just for the record, whether or not I favor abortion is not the point here. I actually don't have a position: who am I to have an opinion on whether pregnant women should or not have the right to kill the fetus inside their womb? I don't feel qualified to have an opinion - after all, I am a man and men are not the decision-makers when it comes to the issue of abortion. The point here is that if I had to choose between one way of killing human life versus another, I'd choose abortion over having war.

Is the issue of abortion connected to conservation?

This post is political and not directly related to energy. Well, today is election day and I figured discussing something political here would be appropriate.

I heard a woman say the other day that she’d be voting Republican because she’s anti-abortion. I suspect that many people will choose a presidential candidate solely on that issue. And this candidate will be the decision-maker in regards to the energy policies in the United States. He will determine whether we will meet our energy needs by reducing our consumption or by fighting wars to gain control of oil reserves.

Now, just for the record, I’m not in favor of war. I don’t have the question “why are those Arabs sitting on our oil?” in my head.

So, for some people (and perhaps a large number of voters) the abortion issue is what matters to them the most. But the killing and slaughtering of children and adults are not? I don’t understand this. I think I am missing something, and perhaps someone who reads this post can shed some light. Why would people be against the voluntary killing of fetuses and yet pro-war? That position is totally contradictory the way I see it. You are either pro-life or not. But you are not pro-life if you support a candidate that is in favor of war and not discussing things to find solutions.

I would say I’m pro-life. I have never taken away human life physically (maybe through words, but that’s another discussion). I do want life to prevail over death. However, if I were forced to take away a human life and could only choose between killing a fetus or pulling the trigger of a gun pointed at another fully developed human being, I’d choose the former. If my choice had to be between giving my money to a doctor that would kill fetuses, or to a soldier that will pull the trigger of a machine gun, I’d chose the former.

Coincidentally, I am also a conservationist. I would prefer to stop the making of cars if we can increase the fuel efficiency with the ones that are already on our roads. I would prefer to turn off the lights in the empty rooms instead of building new power plants. I would prefer to eat all the food that is on my plate than to always throw some away and then have to use more land and resources to produce extra food.

In summary, I would prefer to reduce human mortality rate than to disregard it and compensate it with uncontrolled birth rate. I’d prefer to "preserve" and work with the adults we have in this world than to allow them to die and replace them with babies that will grow and become adults. These babies and new generations will inherit the same problems we have anyways. If we have war as a way of solving problems, then that’s what they’ll inherit and this cycle of war and carnage that has been a theme in human history will never end.

That is my take anyway. But maybe there’s something I’m missing in this picture and that’s why I don’t understand why some people will choose a candidate solely on their position on abortion while having complete disregard for their position on war and other issues.

And just for the record, whether or not I favor abortion is not the point here. I actually don't have a position: who am I to have an opinion on whether pregnant women should or not have the right to kill the fetus inside their womb? I don't feel qualified to have an opinion - after all, I am a man and men are not the decision-makers when it comes to the issue of abortion. The point here is that if I had to choose between one way of killing human life versus another, I'd choose abortion over having war.

Voting results

For myself and everyone else to see.

Voting results

For myself and everyone else to see.