Author Archives: Tom Lewis

Stupid Engineer Tricks

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hydrogen-bomb

Ask an engineer to reverse global warming, he’ll do it. Just don’t ask about thwe side effects. (Photo by Pixabay)

Saudi Arabia is a desert, with oil under it. There’s nothing you can do with oil in a desert, so the Saudis sell it, for money. That makes them filthy-rich nomads who crave big cities, with palaces for them to live in, slums for foreign workers and lots of fountains, you know, like in Las Vegas. But there’s no water in a desert. Call in the engineers.

(In Vegas, another oxymoronic desert city, their engineers’ solution was to build one of the world’s biggest dams to create one of the world’s biggest reservoirs, which worked for a while but is now drying up and is likely to make Las Vegas uninhabitable. Soon.) Continue reading →

Global Cooling Threatens Life on Earth

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ice-age

I know. Not what you were expecting. (Photo by Serendigity/Flickr)

While the planet’s air, water and land are heating to dangerous levels because of human pollution, the world’s trade is cooling off, slowing down and coagulating in the deepening chill, threatening the well-being of every country and virtually every person. I remember very well in 2008 watching the most powerful members of Congress emerge from a come-to Jesus meeting conducted by the Treasury Secretary on what was about to happen to the world’s financial institutions and America’s economy. They had the pale faces and staring eyes of people who had just been introduced to the angel of death.

The world of trade and finance is confronting such a moment now, and is every bit as much in denial as it was in 2008. This time it’s not America’s Lehman Brothers tottering into an early grave and pulling half the world in with it; it’s Deutsche Bank. Continue reading →

RIP Bruce Charles “Bill” Mollison: 1928-2016

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mollison-credo

I never knew Bill Mollison. I have known of him for only a few years. But his vision has touched — in fact, transformed — the core of my being. As long as I live I will honor him for a vision that has vastly improved the way I understand and react to the world, a vision that could have vastly improved the world itself, had we listened to him in time.

Mollison, along with David Holmgren and others, was a principal founder of the  Permaculture movement, a way of looking at agriculture with emphasis on symbiosis among plants, including trees and other perennials; the soil, with its myriad components and organisms; and the climate with its gifts of rain, wind and sunshine. This contemplative way of farming — permanent agriculture — has since its advent in Australia in 1968 morphed into a way of looking at life itself — permanent culture. Continue reading →

We Must be Mushrooms

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mushrooms

When you’re a mushroom, you don’t expect anybody to tell you the truth.

We must be mushrooms, because they keep us in the dark and feed us nothing but crap. The dominant media, the government, needless to say the politicians — they all lie to us, all the time, when it matters and when it doesn’t, in big things and small.

Take a small thing. The other day, all the websites and channels were vibrating to a version of the headline: “Driverless Uber Cars Debut in Pittsburgh.” It was, to read the headlines and the first two-thirds of the articles, the dawning of the age of the driverless. That’s the “narrative” right now, that a day after tomorrow the highways will be gorged with cars driving themselves while happy commuters take drugs and watch movies, or whatever. Continue reading →

Dystopia for the Rich and Famous

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The reason there aren’t many people on the beach on Margarita Island is that it’s hard to enjoy the beach when you have no food or water. But welcome to Venezuela. (Wikipedia Photo)

The reason there aren’t many people on the beach on Margarita Island is that it’s hard to enjoy the beach when you have no food or water. But welcome to Venezuela. (Wikipedia Photo)

Every New Year’s Eve, there are people who travel to the easternmost promontory of whatever rock they live on, in order to be the first of their flock to experience the arrival of the New Year. I suspect a serious party deficiency in the upbringing of these people, but in every unmet need there is an opportunity for obscene profit. Thus: Now you can be among the first to experience  Armageddon, aka the collapse of the industrial age, up close and personal, from the vantage point of a five star resort hotel. Hurry, this opportunity is available for a limited time only — until the mobs burn down the hotels.

The place is Margarita Island — I swear I am not making this up — a sub-Caribbean island perch for jet-setters just off the northern coast of South America. It has a population of 600,000 people who have learned to take great care of a few thousand visiting, sun-bathing, hard-drinking  millionaires at a time. Its great misfortune is to be a part of Venezuela.

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Oil Company Carnage Continues

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deepwater-horizon

When an oil well like Deepwater Horizon explodes, the images are unforgettable. When the entire industry starts to collapse, it’s hard to see and to remember.

In a recent essay I proposed the existence of a new human subspecies – homo sapiens ephemera — that is smart (thus sapiens) but severely afflicted by attention deficit disorder and long-term memory loss. Thus ephemera may understand, for example, the connection between a burning fuse at his feet and an imminent explosion, but almost immediately forgets it, goes on to something else, and is surprised by the blast. Nowhere is this behavior more evident than in the U.S. oil patch, whose collapse, predicted here and elsewhere for years, is now described by none other than Moody’s Investors Service, quoted in Bloomberg News as “catastrophic” and perhaps “the worst bust of any industry this century.”

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World Trade Lost at Sea

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container-ship

Containers crammed with electronics, clothing and other potential Christmas presents are stranded at sea by the bankruptcy of one of the world’s largest shipping lines. Theres more to come. (Phot by NASA)

It’s hard to describe globalization to a mayfly in a manner that will hold his interest. It takes a gifted storyteller to interest a creature with a 24-hour lifespan in anything that’s out of sight, or takes longer than a couple of hours to play out. In this he is much like the modern American, who has little appetite for any story that takes more than 140 characters to tell, about an event that takes more than a few hours to unfold. (As to why the American consumer of news acts and thinks more like a mayfly (Ephemeroptera) than a homo sapiens, well, that’s another question, for another time.)

But the fact is that homo sapiens ephemera simply cannot grasp the fact that a long, slow-burning fuse, however boring it is to watch, almost always leads to a terrible explosion. By that time, ephemera has forgotten the fuse and is always surprised. (“Wow, no one could have seen that coming,” he says.)

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Let Them Eat Twinkies

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let them eat twinkies

A change in food stamp benefits for up to a million people such as this one is affecting WalMart’s profits. Something must be done. (Photo by FaceMePLS/Flickr)

In this, the eighth successful year of our Glorious Recovery from the Great Recession, things are really looking up for the American Lower Class, formerly known as Middle. The unemployment rate as calculated by the U.S. Government (adjusted for inflation, seasonally adjusted, smoothed, combed and curried) is down to a piddling five per cent, which is regarded by the country-club set as better-than-full employment, because, they suspect, thousands of people are working against their will. Moreover, the number of able-bodied adults capable of working, but not working, classified as “not in the labor pool” and therefore not unemployed (and thus not included in the calculation of the unemployment rate) is only up to 95 million people.

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The Luxury Cruise to the End of the World

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crystal serenity

This is how you watch the end of the world — aboard the Crystal Serenity, marinating in luxury.

Sorry, you missed it. But if you had known about it — I don’t know why you didn’t get the memo — and if you had $120,000 lying around ($22,000 for steerage) you could have joined 1,000-plus passengers served by 700 crew on the first luxury cruise from Seward, Alaska to New York City via the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean. Once solid ice, the Northwest Passage became navigable in theory in 2007 because of climate change.

According to the brochure, the good ship Crystal Serenity is “an abomination—a massive, diesel-burning, waste-dumping, ice-destroying, golf-ball-smacking middle finger to what remains of the planet, courtesy of precisely 1,089 of its richest and most destructive inhabitants. And it’s all made possible by runaway climate change, the existential global crisis that these same people and their ilk have disproportionately helped to create.”

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The Last, Best Metaphor: Black Slime Covers All

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“Blue slime cover’s girl’s hand.” This headline is true. And this is what slime looks like. “Black slime covers Washington Monuments” is not a true headline. And that’s not what slime looks like. (Photo by Kelly Taylor/Flickr)

“Blue slime cover’s girl’s hand.” This headline is true. And this is what slime looks like. “Black slime covers Washington Monuments” is not a true headline. And that’s not what slime looks like. (Photo by Kelly Taylor/Flickr)

The headline was arresting. Or to be more contemporary about it, it was excellent clickbait. “Black Slime Creeps Over Washington DC’s Most Famous Monuments.” What a fabulous metaphor for everything that’s wrong with Washington, with the Empire, with the Industrial Age (no doubt the source of the slime), hell, with everything! I couldn’t click fast enough. (Anticipation made me forget, momentarily, a hard-won and oft-won lesson: anytime a quote is so perfect for your purposes that you can’t believe it’s real — it isn’t real. No exceptions.)

“A mysterious black slime has been steadily oozing over Washington DC’s most famous monuments,” said the Daily Mail version of the story, one of hundreds to appear worldwide. How perfect! Whether your pet peeve is gridlock, or the campaigns, or inaction, or transgender marriage, this is what happens to the source of the evil! It gets slimed! The stuff writes itself! Continue reading →