[The following article was written by Synthesis Weekly columnist Julia Murphy. She can be reached at ninjatreehugger@gmail.com. She likes it when you ride a bike.]

Land Of The Gun

A gun is a tool, a tool of extraction. It is made to extract life from the body. Whether or not you use it for this purpose, this is what it has been engineered for. There are other tools of similar purpose, simpler and less remote, with a reliance on the inherent physical strength of the tool’s user. However, none of these other tools inspire the same cult or cultural worship that the gun does.
The ability to kill something, a very specific something, from a great distance is a manifestation of power. It also allows the luxury of ignorance. If you choose, you can cap something from 500 yards (theoretically, if you’re an ace shooter) and ignore it completely. “That’s good enough for me,” you might say. “I don’t need to walk up on that shit and see the whole Faces of Death routine.”
I sort of like guns, but it’s not an amicable friendship; it’s unwholesome. I don’t want to kill shit, I surely don’t. But I have to say, I’d love to be able to stop something that was about to eat or otherwise harm me.
However, this is sort of where it falls apart. I’ve made it through 38 years without packin’. Shit happens. If you have guns — if you carry and use and love the shit out of guns — how does that change how you act? Does it make you just a little more cocky knowing you get to play, in the words of PC Danny Butterman, “Judge Judy and executioner”? Does it make you a little less willing to negotiate?

Recently an article on Yahoo Green featured interviews with some folks who are lucky enough to have homes to homestead about their preparations for what they see as the societal effects of peak oil. The article cites stockpiling weapons as one of the actions these folks are taking “to defend their supplies against desperate crowds of people who didn’t prepare.”
We’re used to thinking in scarcity and fear. It’s what our society requires in order for us to keep our heads down and keep working. The option, as presented by the Man: “Anarchy, which would mean chaos and mob rules,” when the anarchists I know are some of the most responsible and respectful people I’ve ever met. Interestingly, Ammon Hennacy, anarchist homeboy of the late great Utah Phillips, had a jailhouse conversion with the Jeebus and, follow the logic: True Christianity means pacifism, and governments constantly make war, so to be a real Christian you have to be an anarchist. Interesting.

More leftist rhetoric after the jump. (more…)

[The following, written by Synthesis weekly columnist Julia Murphy, appeared in the Synthesis Weekly on Monday, May 19th, 2008. Julia can be reached at ninjatreehugger@gmail.com]

Peak Oil Losing That Ugly 3,000 Pounds

The brilliant and sexy Robert Murphy was the one who originally pointed out to me the correlation between summer vacation season and spikes in gas prices. Now, for true we’ve been tracking some crazy gas price increases ever since…well, about the same time the phrase “peak oil” entered the popular lexicon. Some of us have been hearing that phrase for a little longer, but it’s probably safe to say that at least five out of every 10 people have heard of it; the concept that consumption has outstripped supply and it’s just a matter of time before that fact becomes unavoidably apparent.

For the other five, from Wikipedia:

“Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum production is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, an energy crisis may develop because the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically. M. King Hubbert first used the theory in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. His model, now called Hubbert peak theory, has since been used to predict the peak petroleum production of many other countries, and has also proved useful in other limited-resource production-domains. According to the Hubbert model, the production rate of a limited resource will follow a roughly symmetrical bell-shaped curve based on the limits of exploitability and market pressures.”

Yes, my friends, the age of finity will make many scenarios possible, even likely. Civilian air travel? Not sure how that’ll pan out. To postpone the inevitable, here is an online remedy titled “Six Stupidly Simple Steps to Save Billions of Gallons of Gas”

1. Lose weight. (900 million gallons).

2. Synchronized (intelligent) traffic lights (1,000 million gallons)

3. More expensive gas (450 million gallons)

4. Drive slower (600 million gallons just for semis)

5. More people per car (1,500 million gallons)

6. Increase fuel efficiency to 35 MPG (55,000 million gallons by 2015)

So freakin’ simple! I’m going to save the losing weight one for last, though, cause bikes get (doing the math from the caloric — which is heat — value of a gallon of gas) an astounding 1,035 miles to the gallon. Or, what, about 57 miles for 2,000 calories.
So it occurred to me that as we head into the summer vacation season that the thing to do would be to lose that ugly 3000-plus pounds (i.e., your car) and trip the light fantastic, vacaying on yer bike.

More after the jump: (more…)

The Fermi Paradox is defined as the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. In other words, in a universe as big, and as old as ours seems to be, the fact that we have yet to be contacted by a civilization advanced enough to reach us seems pretty improbable. It has been speculated previously that there must be some sort of Great Filter which prevents such life from arising, or reaching the technological level necessary to achieve interstellar communications. A recent article by Nick Bostrom in the Technology Review explores the possibility that this Great Filter is technology itself: that all civilizations eventually seal their own doom by way of technology, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or the Unabomber’s favorite, Gray Goo. To this list, Tim O’Reilly (aka the guy who coined the term Web 2.0) has added a far more tangible possibility: Peak Oil:

I’ve been thinking of Fermi’s Paradox since I saw the documentary film A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, with its dire predictions of the wars and disruptions that could occur on the downward slope of the Hubbert curve. While I remain an optimist about the power of human ingenuity to surmount enormous challenges, I have enough sense of history to know that catastrophes do happen, that societies fail to make the right choices, and that civilizations fail. What if the answer to Fermi’s paradox is not the absence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but merely the absence of high technology? The movie makes the case that the extraordinary flowering of our society has been driven by our profligate use of oil as an incredibly cheap energy resource — and one that won’t last. With haunting images of once vibrant oil fields that are now ghost towns, the movie is a thought-provoking counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth. If the movie’s contentions are correct, we’re truly caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Either global warming or peak oil will lead to an urgent transformation of civilization as we know it, or our failure to transform quickly enough might well lead to the end of civilization as we know it. And if indeed cheap oil is a prerequisite to the first flowering of technological civilization, might a Roman-Empire-style collapse due to some future disaster make it difficult to rebuild to spaceflight-capable levels due to lack of said resource the next time around? Many of the large scale energy technologies that we imagine replacing oil are energy intensive to build. They are, in a sense, themselves dependent on oil.

Those longing desperately to find prove of ancient civilizations on planets like Mars might want to think twice, since, as O’Reilly puts it “once we find evidence of primitive life elsewhere, we’ve narrowed the likelihood that the Great Filter is behind us, and increased the likelihood that it is still ahead of us, in some unknown disaster to come.” FUCKKKKKKKK