Today we feature the great Lyle Lovett, who I have neglected on the Saturday remedy heretofore. Lyle made his first albums in the 1980s, which is when I first started listening to him. I lived in Austin, Texas in the early 1980s, so I was familiar with the music scene down there. Lyle's written so many wonderful songs over the years that it's pretty damn tough to choose just four. I was going through this exercise in futility when I finally gave up. So here's one playlist from the hundreds I could have assembled. Lyle's music helped me get through some pretty rough times. So Thank You, Mr. Lovett.
If I Had A Boat (live with John Hiatt and Joe Ely , from the 1988 album Pontiac)
Pontiac (title song of that album, studio version)
North Dakota (live, from the 1992 album Joshua, Judges, Ruth)
Step Into This House (written by Guy Clark, live, playing solo, from the album 1998 album of the same name)
Reader Wanooski requested that I post on Newt Gingrich's plans for colonizing the Solar System. I am happy to oblige.
A colony on the moon? Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich floated the idea before a massive audience on Florida's space coast. Thousands lost jobs there when the space shuttle quit flying, so what he told them was music to their ears — the promise of jobs once again, another space race.
Gingrich offered his vision of an ambitious new space program. "By the end of my second term," Gingrich said, "we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American." The crowd erupted in applause.
OK, which part of this is funniest?
floated the idea before a massive audience on Florida's space coast (incredible pandering)
by the end of my second term (psychosis, grandiosity)
the crowd erupted in applause (there's a sucker born every minute)
And then there are America's intrepid journalists, those with a real Nose For News, asking Newt about the Moon Base and the Mars Shuttle, as though any of this were real. It is fitting that this took place in Florida, the home of Disney's Magic Kingdom, the Fantasy Capital of the World.
My colleague Bill Hicks of the Downward Spiral recently wrote a post about Newt which is worth reading. In December I wrote a post about Newt called Equal Time Bashing — Little Neuter. The main conclusion of that post, which Wanooski and everyone else should bear in mind, is that when little Newt talks, he's simply making it up as he goes along. Anything he says need not bear any relationship to Reality. The Moon Base is a case in point.
In short, Newt is The Quintessential American Politician, A Man For Our Times. If we can't fix our problems here on Earth, and here in America, and it's becoming increasingly obvious that we can not, we'll simply colonize the Solar System and create some new unsolvable problems elsewhere. But of course there will never be a Moon Base or a shuttle to Mars for reasons too numerous to list here.
Thus Newt's Moon Base is the perfect microcosm exemplifying the entire 2012 presidential campaign.
Bonus Video — The Best Moon Base Simulator. Although everything I said in this post is true, all of the above was merely an elaborate excuse which allowed me to play this video, which sums up the Moon Base idea very nicely.
When Joe Bageant wrote Lost On The Fearless Plain in May, 2010, subtitled Big Brother's got that ju-ju, Gaia's got the blues, — hologram, carry me home, he only had about 10 months to live. Joe died on March 26, 2011. The other day the question why get out of bed? arose, for if all the news is as bad as I document here on DOTE everyday, there seems little point to doing anything.
Here in the United States we live in the Age of Decay. The glory days of the Empire in the decades after World War II are over. That much is clear to most of those who do not benefit directly from the Empire's decline, with only the most delusional of optimists clinging to the hope that those glory days can return.
Joe Bageant was living in Ajijic, Mexico when he wrote Lost On The Fearless Plain. His health was deteriorating and he must of have known the end was near. Joe had no illusions about the world he was leaving. Most of the essay discusses what he called "the (media) hologram" which creates an alternate universe where none of the world's problems exist. I urge you to read the entire essay, but here's a sample in which Joe talks about the hologram.
I've spent most of this week watching American television and movies. I leave the TV on all night long. I toss and turn with my bad back, and bad lungs, catch a rerun episode of Two and a Half Men, or CSI, and conk out again. Then I awaken to the U.S. morning talk shows. It's a grueling regimen, only for the strong. Or the lonely. For periodic relief, I switch to Mexican television (be patient, I really am going somewhere with this). Mexican TV is not one iota better than US television, but is veeerrry heavy on the booty. More than heavy. Astronomical...
Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world's a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state's 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.
This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it...
There's a lot more where that came from. Joe provides a clear-eyed view of the American world he was leaving behind. You can read it yourself. Joe's "answer" to the question why get out of bed? can be found in this text near the end of Lost.
Again, what will be left after the big collapse? Perhaps after a period of terror, violence and chaos, when the undeniable on-the-ground truth becomes apparent, through ecological disaster, war and other events, a more positive national cathexis will occur. If it does, it probably will not resemble anything we can conceive of in these times. If we can get past the terror involved from our present apprehensive vantage point, it is easy to see why positive national, even global cathexis may be unavoidable.
Cause for well-reasoned optimism exists. Its way the fuck out there, but it's there. Not that it is something to cling to, or even pursue. Clinging and desire are the cause of all suffering in the first place. Doing so only prolongs suffering, personal, national or planetary. The Buddhists are right about that one. So are the Baptists when they say "The world gets right when the people get right."
The big problem at the moment though, for us as sentient beings, is:
What to do when I get out of bed each day? Give money to the Democrats? Move out of the country? Stay and fight the bastards?
Throwing money at frauds and fools doesn't work. Moving to Mexico or Canada takes money in a time when money and jobs are scarce everywhere. As for staying and fighting, really fighting, there is not one person reading this who is going to go strangle the sleazy fucks having martinis on Wall Street with their pet Senator. Nobody reading this is going to instill genuine physical fear, which is the only thing such lizards might respond to. We are left to work within the system, as per the hologram's directive. Their system. Ha!
The answer, to me at least, is to do the most obvious thing first. And I do mean obvious in the most mundane sense. Like fixing breakfast with all the contemplative awareness possible. Seriously. The tiniest right action, the action in complete unself-conscious natural awareness, connects to all the rightness in the universe. And the universe is always right. Because it owns all of our asses, plus black holes, and those teensy pinholes in time that physicist say make you an immediate neighbor of Shakespeare and mastodons -- only you don't know it. It owns the molecules of the ages. Everything.
This proposition is unappealing to Americans and just about everyone else in the western world. To be perfectly honest, a big screen TV, the Internet, and tickets to a Rams game are more accessible and immediately gratifying. Right action in the moment does not light up your neural pleasure centers like cheap sex or jalapeno Doritos. However, I am trying to do it anyway, at least until the opportunity for cheap sex presents itself. When it does, it will most likely be the right action for that moment. Funny how things work.
In any case, by the mundane right action of breakfast, I mean fixing breakfast to locate one's heart in that particular day. Then proceeding toward the least harm one can discern to do, with full knowledge that we always do harm, whether we intend to or not (the world is full of subtle unintended violence). Eliminate whatever suffering in sentient beings one encounters, whether it be in bums, dogs, kids, plants, or the rich fucker next door moaning over his enormous tax bill. To him that is suffering. There's no sliding scale about this shit. I once worked for a guy who bawled when some kid keyed his Porsche. Misery is relative. Compassion is sublime...
Bageant's answer may not be your answer. It's not even my answer, although I share much in common with him (living alone, being lonely, a lack of opportunities for cheap sex, not having much money, though my health is OK so far.) We also shared in common that writing was the best, most appropriate response to a world this fucked-up. But I will never be a Buddhist, although I occasionally have Buddhist-like tendencies, like making my breakfast or playing music mindfully. Compassion may be sublime as Joe says but its not my strong suit, at least most of the time. Somewhere along the way I lost patience with people who don't get what I'm up to, what I'm telling them, and I sometimes tell them to get lost in overly strong terms or banish them. Mea culpa.
Oh, by the way, that reminds me of something. A person criticized me the other day, saying "it's all Dave, all the time" on DOTE. That's funny, it is my blog, is it not? What does he think? That DOTE is a Democracy? Where every vote counts? Ha!
The greater point is that for every person, there is a way through the darkness. It may not be Joe's way, it may not be my way, but it's your way. (I may break into song here, Frank Sinatra comes to my mind.) You don't have to be a Buddhist or a Liberal Democrat or anything else. Or maybe that's your way. Who knows?
So that's what Joe Bageant would do, and did do, near the end of his life. You're probably a lot better off than Joe or me. Speaking for myself, you may have—well, I hope you do—a healthy loving relationship, or children who love you, or close friends who don't live a million miles away, or some money and the freedom of choice it buys, or something else that keeps you going. Writing this blog, and composing, arranging and playing music keep me going (and let's not forget the occasional self-medication, aka. drinking, which is also essential for the lonely guy).
Don't despair when I tell you how bad this world has become, which I'm going to keep doing. That's not the point of being alive. Not at all. Figuring out what's real and what's not, a problem I'm trying to help you with, and Joe was trying to help you with, and George Carlin was trying to help you with, is merely the gateway to something else.
This is it. Your Big Moment. Everything's riding on the choices you make. This is not the Scholastic Aptitude Test. You don't get to take this test over again in the future if you fuck it up the first time. The future is now. There are no "right" answers although I can assure you that there are wrong ones.
What would you do in a world as fucked-up as this one?
Again, this is not a test, this is as real as it gets. Good luck.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) has certainly changed its tune since I wrote a post with this same title on March 6, 2011. At that time the EIA predicted that domestic crude oil production would decline last year and this year, but a new forecast indicates that oil production will grow and grow until 2020.
Domestic crude oil production has increased over the past few years, reversing a decline that began in 1986. U.S. crude oil production increased from 5.1 million barrels per day in 2007 to 5.5 million barrels per day in 2010.
Over the next 10 years, continued development of tight oil, in combination with the ongoing development of offshore resources in the Gulf of Mexico, pushes domestic crude oil production in the Reference case to 6.7 million barrels per day in 2020, a level not seen since 1994. Even with a projected decline after 2020, U.S. crude oil production remains above 6.1 million barrels per day through 2035.
Source. October, 2011 crude oil production stood at 5.784 million barrels per day (b/d).
The EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2012 (AEO 2012) early release preview was designed to support Hopey-Changey's SOTU speech, which was laced with references to America's Bright Energy Future. Those references were meant to counter the "Drill, Baby, Drill" mantra of the Republicans. In fact, National Propaganda Radio is discussing this crucial issue even as I write this. Naturally, they have invited the wrong "experts" (idiots like Phil Verleger) to give us (the naive public) some insight into America's limitless energy supply. (Phil just said America is a bigger oil products exporter than Iran!)
So-called "tight" oil refers to oil from shale rock reservoirs like the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford in west Texas. (I describe it this way to distinguish this oil from imaginary "shale oil" from immature hydrocarbon formations in Colorado and Utah.)
How should we evaluate the EIA's forecast? One way to evaluate it is to look at this "all liquds" chart from the early AEO 2012 release. Although we are not out of January yet, I feel comfortable nominating this forecast for the Wildly Optimistic Future Estimate Prize (the WOFE, or "Woofy"), which is an award I just made up.
The term "all liquids" includes crude oil, natural gas liquids, biofuels and refinery gains. Looking at this chart, you can see the peak of liquid fuels production in the early 1970s. (That's also obvious in the first graph above, which covers only crude oil.) You can clearly see that the liquids fuels supply grows and grows after 2010, rising way beyond the 11-some million barrels-per-day we achieved in the early 1970s by 2035. Consumption remains flat, which means that our liquids imports drop to 36% of consumption by 2035. Woof, Woof, Woof!
In short, the EIA has postulated a miracle on the order of Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead, not to mention the resurrection of Jesus himself after the crucifixion. The EIA claims the U.S. will be producing 6.7 million b/d of crude oil by 2020. I will grant that this is possible, that there's an outside chance this could occur, given some very optimistic assumptions about the Bakken, the Eagle Ford and the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). After all, that's only some 900,000 barrels more than we produce right now.
The EIA then claims we will still be producing 6.1 million b/d by 2035, which requires a very large stretch of the imagination. We simply don't know where all that crude oil is going to come from. We don't know what production profiles (as in chart 1 above) were assumed for oil from shale reservoirs or the GOM. We don't know what decline rates were assumed for current oil production. We don't know these things and a whole lot more because the EIA didn't tell us what their assumptions were. Imagine that!
But even granting the dubious assumption that the U.S. will be producing 6.1 million b/d of crude oil by 2035, we are still entitled to ask where the hell those other 6-plus million barrels per day are going to come from. Those will be natural gas liquids barrels or biofuels barrels. Here we have entered the realm of Pure Imagination, Disney World's Magic Kingdom. We are now in Cinderella Castle.
And so we can see how everything fits together—the President's SOTU speech, the EIA's rosy forecast, which is now a Woofie nominee, which was issued about 24 hours prior to the speech, the political need to counter the "Drill, Baby, Drill" mantra of the Republicans. Taken together, these elements posit a Bright Energy Future for the United States. Given who we are in America, which is without question the Greatest Country on Earth, could it really be any other way?
You know, yesterday's post The State Of The Union was actually an important post as far as I'm concerned. On Monday, I wrote a plain vanilla post about how fucked up our economy is, and that post got more hits than my SOTU post yesterday. Nobody re-printed yesterday's post, and nobody in general seem to notice it. The post got three (3!) comments altogether.
That is exactly what I would expect in a society that is falling apart, in a Declining Empire. Good for you, you're running true to form! Congratulations!
Does anybody care? What the fuck?
So I'll tell you what: there will be no post tomorrow (Wednesday the 25th). I will not put myself out to explain our grim sociopolitical/energy/trashing-the-Earth Reality to you as I do every other day of the week. Perhaps some of you "know-it-alls" out there are way past what I'm telling you. Good for you! I'm sure you're a lot smarter than me! For sure, the rest of the world is not listening, which makes me feel really good every day.
I just love it that typical human belief systems and Reality are completely incompatible. Love it, love it, love it!
Thursday I'll be back with a post concerning the Energy Information Administration's (EIA's) weirdly optimistic production projections concerning crude oil and all liquids, projections which are very politically convenient for the current President.
Until then, I am going to take 24 hours off and re-evaluate what I am doing writing this blog.
— Dave
Postscript — my comment on this post (from the comments section)
The questions become — why do any of us do what we do? Why get out of bed?
When I wrote this post, I was very frustrated. A writer writes to be read. When I make the strenuous effort required to write yesterday's post, just to be met with what certainly looks (from here) like who cares?, the silence is deafening.
But I was not only frustrated about poor put-upon me, but also for Moyers and Stockman. How many people watched that video? I wonder. Why did Moyers bother to make it if few are willing to watch it? No one commented on the Stockman interview. No one said a god damn thing about that video.
So it looks a lot like who cares? again.
Today I had a chance to read over the actual SOTU address. If it is possible to overdose on Hopium, I must have come really damn close. I was feeling a little woozy by the end, overwhelmed by just how many confusions, distortions, contradictions, lies and just general all-around bullshit there was to debunk and straighten out — if I made the effort to do so.
But why, I asked myself, would I make that great effort? Does anybody really care if I do? In this case (the SOTU) it really doesn't matter. That was just a political speech in an election year.
But what about when I talk about the oceans? The climate? The liquid fuels supply? The social inequality and lack of fairness in the human condition? Is there the same apparent apathy and ennui?
I also thought in writing DOTE that it might be helpful to many of you to point just how delusional most human beings are. At the very least, if you understood that, you wouldn't have to waste your time dealing with them.
So, as I think about all this, the question becomes why do you get out of bed?
I can see that some of you do give a damn about the world you were born into, and for that I'm grateful. The unexamined life is not worth living Socrates said. They were right. If people are not curious about life on this planet, what are they doing other than eating, breathing, breeding and taking up (ever-scarcer) resources and space?
And I didn't threaten to quit yesterday. I merely said I was taking today off. And I'm glad I did.
