Crunchy Con

A northern Mississippi newspaper columnist ponders the presence among us of homeschooling mothers. Excerpt:

Young families must make the decision: Will junior go to day care and day school, or will mom stay home and raise him? The rationalizations begin. "A family just can't make it on one income." (Our parents did.) "It just costs so much to raise a child nowadays." (Yeah, if you buy brand-name clothing, pre-prepared food, join every club and activity, and spend half the cost of a house on the daughter's wedding, it does.) And so, the decision is made. We give up the bulk of our waking hours with our children, as well as the formation of their minds, philosophies, and attitudes, to strangers. We compensate by getting a boat to take them to the river, a van to carry them to Little League, a 2,800-square-foot house, an ATV, a zero-turn Cub Cadet, and a fund to finance a brand-name college education. And most significantly, we claim "our right" to pursue a career for our own "self-fulfillment."

Deep down, however, we know that our generation has eaten its seed corn. We lack the discipline and the vision to deny ourselves in the hope of something enduring and worthy for our posterity. We are tired from working extra jobs, and the looming depression threatens our 401k's. Credit cards are nearly maxed, and it costs a $100 to fuel the Suburban. Now the kid is raising hell again, demanding the latest Play Station as his price for doing his school work ... and there goes that modest young woman in the home-made dress with her four bright-eyed, well-behaved home-schooled children in tow. Wouldn't you just love to wipe that serene look right off her smug face?

Is it any wonder we hate her so?

Terry Mattingly, who saves everything, forwarded to me this e-mail I sent him on October 12, 2001, one month after the 9/11 attacks. I publish it here to let you know that I am married to the perfect woman for me. The perfect one. She told me this morning that I'm a cross between Mark Bittman and James Howard Kunstler, and therefore the perfect man for her. This actual real-life dialogue from the frightening days right after 9/11 shows you the kind of marriage we have (basically, an ongoing Seinfeld episode, except for the presence of Orthodoxy, and the absence of Kramer -- though Matthew is pretty tall for his age). I can't imagine going through life with anybody else.

Julie and I were talking in bed last night as we were trying to sleep. I mentioned that I shouldn't have had a coffee late in the day, and that coffee was probably a bit too entwined with my daily existence for my own good.

"Well, I got us some coffee for the survival stash," she said.

Huh?" said I.

"When we decided that we were going to stay here no matter what, I went to the store to buy some things to put in the closet, in case we had to bunker down in the apartment."

"I thought you just got water and tuna fish."

"No, I got some other stuff too."

"Why coffee? We have lots of coffee?"

"Yeah, but what if we can't use the grinder? I got instant."

"INSTANT!?!? Yuck! Why on earth would you do a thing like that?"

"Well, what if we don't have electricity?"

"We'd have to drink it cold!"

"Yeah, but I figured we could choke down cold instant coffee if we had to?"

"But why would anybody want to?"

"To keep from getting a headache that interferes with our life-or-death decision-making."

"Let me get this straight: you bought vile instant coffee with the idea that we should have something we can mix with tap water to drink cold to keep from getting a caffeine headache in case of the apocalypse?"

"It's not vile. I bought Italian."

"Wait a minute! You're buying the nastiest and most deranged form of coffee known to man, and yet you still manage to be a snob about it! I'm not drinking that stuff."

"But what if your head hurts so bad that you can't think straight, and we die?"

"That's insane. Instant coffee isn't fit to drink. The only way I'd take that stuff into my body is with an enema bag."

"Well, I'm not going to squirt coffee up your butt in the event of crisis, so just deal with it."

"I'd sooner soak a brown crayon in water than drink instant coffee."

"Well, too bad, because we'll have pound cake to go with it."

"What?"

"I bought a hermetically sealed pound cake to go in the box. Some kind of Entenmann's thing."

"Don't you know that that thing will be stale by next week?"

"Not this one. We have till December to eat it. I also bought Triscuits."

"Lord, Julie, if the city is hit so hard that we have to turn our basement into a shelter, snack crackers are the last thing you'll be thinking about."

"Not true! I find Triscuits very comforting. And I didn't buy the lowfat kind either, because I figure I wouldn't care about that > sort of thing, and that I might need the fat."

"Next thing you're going to tell me is that you bought dehydrated goat cheese, just like the French astronauts eat."

"That's not a bad idea."

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, writing from the magazine's Aspen Ideas Festival, chaired a panel yesterday in which experts put the chances of a nuclear attack on US soil, probably on Washington or New York, in the next 10 years as fifty-fifty. Excerpt:

And the experts on the panel, John Holdren and Joe Cirincione among them, are not exactly attached to the Bush Administration worldview. After such an attack, we'll look back -- those of us still around, obviously -- on our efforts to combat al Qaeda and judge them inadequate to the task, just as we look back now on the Clinton Administration's pre-9/11 preparations (and the Bush Administration's, as well) as thoroughly inadequate.

Last week as I was in both Washington and New York, I reflected on how different both places feel from the days and weeks immediately after 9/11. The conviction that it was bound to happen again, and probably in New York, and quite possibly involving a nuclear device, was one of the minor reasons we decided to move from NYC. I can remember talking to a journalist colleague in Washington in the fall of 2001, and her telling me that everybody she knew was thinking about the fallout patterns from a dirty bomb, if one were to go off on Capitol Hill. I also remember having coffee with a friend in midtown Manhattan one afternoon that awful fall, and both of us discussing with no irony at all what our plans for escaping with our families would be if a small nuclear device were to go off in Times Square -- if we survived it, that is.

How very far away all of that seems now. Do you ever think about it? I mean, really think about it? If Joe Cirincione et alia really do believe that chances are as high as 50 percent that terrorists will set off a suitcase nuke in DC or NYC, then why do they still live there?

If you thought the odds were that high, would you leave NYC or DC? Or would you take your chances? Why or why not?

It's been a couple of weeks since I checked in with James Howard Kunstler's site. He's got some new stuff up. Here's an excerpt of an interview he did with the Russell Kirk Center's University Bookman:

3. What is your opinion of the legacy of the baby boomers? Will they be remembered as a generation that brought idealism to public life again, or a generation that could not see beyond its own interests in light of the looming oil problem?

The boomers managed to degrade all the standards and norms of behavior necessary to keep our civilization going, and to respond to changing circumstances effectively. A simple example is Boomer finance. Boomer lending practices, especially in the realm of mortgages, has led to a credit fiasco so exorbitant that it may destroy the legitimacy of capital as a general proposition far into the future (the way the "Mississippi Bubble" discredited banking in France for more than a century). Boomer greed and narcissism has led us into an economy based on the expectation of unearned riches. I agree with the authors Strauss and Howe who say, in their excellent book, The Fourth Turning, that Boomers will be harshly punished in their old age by their children and grandchildren by the withdrawal of support. I hasten to add that the pre-Boomer generation (my parents' generation) was just as bad, though in a different way--they thought they deserved to live in a technological heaven-on-earth as a reward for having fought and survived the Second World War.

4. Is there any political figure you see who recognizes or is addressing the natural resource problem?

Well, Al Gore is an obvious choice, but more for his very public campaign about climate change, which is the flip side of the resource problem. The rest of the scene is sort of like the 1850s--you have two major parties (back then, the Whigs and Democrats) losing legitimacy and credibility, and the whole nation paralyzed over the issue of slavery. Today it's a paralysis over looming fossil fuel scarcities and the flip side of climate change. Both the Republicans and Democrats are preoccupied with idiotic distractions like the issues arising out of gender confusion. I'm a dissatisfied registered Democrat. I would like to see my party become less preoccupied with homosexual issues and more active on restoring the U.S. passenger rail system. The time has come for those suffering from gender confusion to take their problems out of the political arena and work them out in private. The Republicans, on the other hand, face even more acute problems regarding loss-of-legitimacy as a result of the Iraq war fiasco and the impressive body of scandal generated by its members the past decade. We're in for some big political changes, in my opinion, but my crystal ball is pretty cloudy for the moment.

And, as ever, his "Cluster**ck Nation Chronicle" available on his site's main page is a real rip. Excerpt from the latest:

What's happening is that American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we're gripped by inflation or deflation. It's certainly deceptive. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, GMC Yukons and pre-owned Hummel figurines are cratering as America turns into Yard Sale Nation.

We're a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.

... Our debt problems today are of a magnitude so extreme that astronomers would be hard pressed to calculate them.

For people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.

Via The Oil Drum, the International Energy Agency is once again saying that there's simply not enough supply of oil to meet international demand.

The report also said that current oil prices were "justified by fundamentals."

The IEA said that despite billions of dollars of investment, the challenge of pumping ever more oil out of their aging fields is proving so great that non-Opec countries will in the next five years have to rely on biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol, for 50 per cent of their growth in overall fuels.

The fast decline of fields - especially in the North Sea and Mexico where production is shrinking by more than 20 per cent each year - means that 14.8m of the 16m barrels of new supply from non-Opec countries over the next five years will go to making up for losses from old fields producing less and less each year.

But Opec is also struggling, with project delays impacting its ability to add new capacity. The IEA substantially downgraded its expectations for Opec crude capacity from 2008-2013, cutting earlier forecasts by 1.2m b/d.

And:

But the IEA warned governments not to blame speculators. It said: "Like alchemists looking for a way to turn basic elements into gold, everyone wants a simplistic explanation for high prices," bluntly adding: "Often it is a case of political expediency to find a scapegoat for higher prices rather than undertake serious analysis or perhaps confront difficult decisions."

Jerome a Paris, on the Oil Drum, adds:

I have been told by a reliable source that the IEA has been forbidden by the US administration from updating their absurdly cornucopian oil supply and demand scenarios until the report that comes out late this year (after the election); that report, which will publish the result of a "bottom-up" analysis (ie a summary of all existing oil fields, their production and/or prospects) is expected to show that oil production is unlikely to reach the levels that so many have blithely assumed - notably on the basis of previous optimistic IEA reports. The IEA, which was deeply unhappy about the current lies to was supposed to present and support, has been leaking word of the expected content of that new report for many weeks now, including an increasingly alarmist tone in its official reports...

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