060806 – the flavor of the day

A,

I’m reading a book just now called Crashing the Gate by two bloggers who were part of the on-line movement that boosted Dean into the national spotlight. Their analysis of why the mainstream Democratic Party in this country is so ineffectual makes riveting reading.

I think they are right about much of what they say but I can’t say that I see their movement carrying the day strongly enough in any future near enough to be significant. Indeed, the Republicans are using their time in control very wisely by seeding the semi-permanent judiciaries with ‘their men’ so that even after the wind swings back to the left, as it usually does after a time, they will have decades of control over the judicial branch well in hand.

I don’t see much else notable. All the revelations about various creeping global climate problems unroll so slowly that the sound-bite masses just adjust to them from week to week as their new baseline realities. The intellectuals yammer and the right wing neocons, theocons and etc. just press on – captured by their own visions. The word, Dominionist, has come into my vocabulary.

I have developed some doubts about the Peak Oil concepts. I’m beginning to think that it will unfold much more slowly that I originally thought. The rising prices of oil will make sources formerly unattractive viable and their production will prolong the oil economy – though at ever higher and higher prices. So, it will change slowly and we will adapt and adapt.

Another connection I hadn’t seen before was that the new biofuels will increase the pressure on food prices because now both people and automobiles will begin to compete for the product of those same fields which formerly only had to supply one consumer group; people.

Dennis

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Dennis,

I noticed that those who bought CTG also bought American Theocracy, an informative book I read this year. That’s an intriguing connection. As for Dominionism, that’s always a paranoia-making topic. Thanks for the wiki link to it.

After returning from Viet Nam but before the deaths of RFK and Jimmy Hendricks, I would eschew the street rhetoric as naive: “What do we want? Peace. When do we want it? Now” I knew that social movements don’t turn on a dime. So I consoled myself by considering that someday my generation would be in command. I wasn’t so smart after all. By the time my generation arrived, the political game was still the same as played by Clinton and Bush. No Gandhi nor MLK Jr. So I guess society really does move glacially slow most of the time. The thing is, glaciers aren’t as slow as they used to be. I watch more news outlets than ever, thanks to your RSS tutorial, waiting for something important or momentous to occur, but not really expecting too much.

A.

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