o
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deconstruction..
.:: older Phlog posts ::.
(TXT) phlog-2021-02-21.txt
Great Propaganda / Poor Decisions
Looking to add some human interaction, however socially distanced,
to my mostly cloistered life during the COVID-19 pandemic, I
registered for a series of foreign policy focused group discussions
(conducted via Zoom) through the local library. The series is
titled 'Great Decisions' and
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(TXT) phlog-2021-01-19.txt
Happy New Year? 2021 hasn't really gotten off to a great start but
perhaps it will improve, at least for a while. A still-raging
pandemic, record levels of debt and the winding down of that 'shale
revolution' may dampen an economic recovery for much of the world.
Books
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(TXT) phlog-2020-12-12.txt
Review of: Living in the Time of Dying - a 2020 documentary film
by Michael Shaw - run-time 53:51 - free on YouTube [0]
https://www.livinginthetimeofdying.com
Synopsis (from film's homepage): If we accepted the climate science
was true, how would we choose to
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(TXT) phlog-2020-12-06.txt
Review of: Transition Engineering: Building a Sustainable Future
[0]
by Susan Krumdieck - (c) 2020 Routledge / CRC Press ;
254 pages ISBN 9780367341268
I first learned of Susan Krumdieck a few months ago when I came
across
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(TXT) phlog-2020-09-15.txt
Review of: LIVING in the LONG EMERGENCY: Global Crisis, the Failure
of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing
Us the Way Forward [0]
James H. Kunstler - (c) 2020 BenBella Books - Dallas, TX
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(TXT) phlog-2020-09-07.txt
Happy Labor Day 2020. The Labor movement is largely dead in the US
but everyone still likes to cap off the Summer with the Labor Day
weekend. Any Wobblies are most likely due to over-imbibing.
Just finished James Kunstler's 'Living in the Long Emergency', a
followup of sorts to a previous book of his with a similar title.
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(TXT) phlog-2020-07-18.txt
Business As Usual (BAU) Porn - or Why We Need a New Porn Story
The heading is a play on Chris Smaje's recent essay posted on his
blog Small Farm Futures [0] which creatively weaves together some
of the vibes wafting about in the COVID-tainted summer breeze.
Smaje is a 50-something hobby(?) farmer in the UK with what sounds
like a
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(TXT) phlog-2020-06-11.txt
Book review: The Collapse of 2020 - Kirkpatrick Sale - (c) 2020 [0]
Gonna blame the drop-off in postings on "summertime lull" which is
at least partially true as I've been busy with the usual house
maintenance tasks and trying to find places to hike that aren't
teaming with stressed out Denver urbanites; regional parks are
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(TXT) phlog-2020-04-24.txt
Review: Planet of the Humans (film), dir. Jeff Gibbs - (c) 2019
[0]
Seems I haven't posted in a while. Was taking a break from the
Doom, reading things like Chris Ryan's "Civilized to Death"[1],
rather upbeat despite the title. Then COVID-19 happened and the
world collectively lost its shit. The response coupled with the
Russian-Saudi oil price
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(TXT) phlog-2020-02-13.txt
Review: The words and works of historian/novelist Ronald Wright
Ronald Wright [0] is a particularly gifted writer and historian who
happens to have a background in archaeology, something he has amply
put to use. Perhaps best known for his 2004 Massey lecture "A
Short History of Progress" [1] (was delivered as 5 separate
lectures at various
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(TXT) phlog-2020-01-31.txt
Just finished reading Ronald Wright's 1997 novel 'A Scientific
Romance' which I picked up after listening to his 2004 Massey
lecture 'A Short History of Progress'. Will post something about
Wright sometime soon.
Got a somewhat belated reply from the National Renewable Energy Lab
tour guide today. I'd pretty much written off hearing anything
from
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(TXT) phlog-2019-12-30.txt
film review: Living in the Future's Past / Vision Films - 2018
directed by Susan Kucera
https://www.livinginthefuturespastfilm.com
I've forgotten how I came upon reference to this film. Also I'm
pretty sure I've come across it previously on Kanopy [0] and,
seeing
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(TXT) phlog-2019-12-01.txt
Of Gopherspace and Spacemen
Since starting this phlog a bit over a year ago I've been wondering
just how much attention it might be garnering. Gopherspace has
certainly grown in recent years, itself a minor miracle, but it's
still kind of nerdy niche. Since this phlog is hosted on servers
run by others I generally
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(TXT) phlog-2019-11-23.txt
Tour of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO
We currently live near Golden Colorado, home to the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) [0]. They have some other
facilities, the National Wind Technology Center near Boulder
Colorado for example, but their main campus is in Golden on the
south slope
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(TXT) phlog-2019-10-20.txt
Book review: Humans: A Brief History Of How We F*cked It All Up
by Tom Phillips, (c) 2018
This was an amusing read I came across at the local library's New
Releases section (new in the US; 2018 in the UK). Phillips [0] is
a journalist and the editor of Full Fact [1] , an independent
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(TXT) phlog-2019-10-15.txt
Book review: Can Science Fix Climate Change?
by Mike Hulme, (c) 2014; Polity Press
This was a rather thin volume come across at a local thrift shop
that I frequent, largely for its book section. I'd not heard of
Mike Hulme [0] before; he is currently a professor of Geography at
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(TXT) phlog-2019-09-18.txt
I've had the Grist.org RSS feed in my news reader for some years.
Grist does a pretty good job of presenting a range of perspectives
on the unfolding ecological globe-spanning crisis, though they
largely focused on climate change. Occasionally I try to provide
feedback in the Comments section. Like so many sites these days,
Grist has opted to farm out managing the ocean of reader comments
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(TXT) phlog-2019-09-15.txt
Seems I've not posted in a while. Partly it's that I've been doing
more stuff outside in the Summer. But there's another reason; it
seems the taboo of discussing the dire yet increasingly more
probable outcomes of humanity's failure to address our planetary
overshoot has been lifted. More and more articles are appearing in
major media outlets exploring the myriad of ways things could go
sideways. They still for the most
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(TXT) phlog-2019-08-12.txt
Review of: Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
by Alan Weisman -- (c) 2013
Actually heard about this book on the Collapse Chronicles [0]
Youtube channel. At 513 pages it was a bit of a brick and took
several library renewals to get through. But what a great,
well-researched book Alan
..
(TXT) phlog-2019-07-03.txt
Finished up reading my latest review book a week ago but a recent
round with the dentist has left me with a distracting amount of
pain such that I've barely wanted to do anything that requires even
moderate attention.
Conversations on Collapse [0] is a selection of transcripts from
the C-realm [1] podcast, the brain child of one KMO, real name
Keven
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(TXT) phlog-2019-06-23.txt
It's Summer so I'm reading less and spending more time out of doors
hiking, biking, and trying to grow okra. Probably I've picked the
wrong year for okra here in Colorado where it snowed on the first
day of Summer at various locales above 7,000 feet. The okra will
be in containers so I may get lucky if I find ways to keep it warm
and in the sun. Given the that parts of India and Pakistan have
recently experienced sustained
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(TXT) phlog-2019-06-02.txt
Review of Losing Earth: A Recent History
by Nathaniel Rich (c) 2019
This was another book I happened across at the public library. I
think I was drawn to it in part by how it looks, which is very much
like a 1970s book, complete with two-color cover design and
vertically
..
(TXT) phlog-2019-05-26.txt
It's looking likely I'll be abandoning the notion of hosting this
phlog at devio.us ; shell access has been unavailable - again - for
more than a week and the system administrators are apparently too
busy with other things to keep things running properly. I've
created yet another mirror on tilde.institute, a free Unix shell
server which hopefully will prove more reliable:
..
(TXT) phlog-2019-05-08.txt
The Moneyless Man - the works and writing of Mark Boyle
Wanting something a bit more forward-looking I recently stumbled
across the work of an Irish fellow named Mark Boyle [0]. Boyle is
essentially a modern day Thoreau but unlike his predecessor his
time in the woods is ongoing and has taken several turns, starting
with a year without
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(TXT) phlog-2019-04-18.txt
Something that's not all gloom and doom: Low-Tech Magazine [0] is
publishing selections of their back catalog of articles in two
volumes via Lulu.com, a print-on-demand service that caters to
self-publishers. Volume I is currently available and arrived in
the mailbox a few days ago, approximately 10 days after placing the
order. It's a hefty paperback, clocking in at 710 pages. Article
one outlines how they went %100 solar
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(TXT) phlog-2019-03-27.txt
Right after the previous post devio.us suffered a hardware failure
-- NIC went bad -- and was off-line until yesterday. To thwart
future unscheduled downtime I've created a mirror on SDF.org:
gopher://sdf.org/users/mmeta4 - m(irror)meta4
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(TXT) phlog-2019-03-16.txt
Book review: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells, (c) 2019.
Finally finished this very engaging not-too-long book (300 pages,
including notes and index). As previously mentioned, the book is an
expansion on the author's 2017 New York Magazine article [1] by the
..
(TXT) phlog-2019-03-08.txt
Just some randomness while I finish reading 'The Uninhabitable
Earth', David Wallace-Wells recent book, an expansion on his 2017
New York Magazine article [1]. Quite an engaging read so far.
Alex Smith of EcoShock radio interviewed Wallace-Wells [2]
recently.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uninhabitable_Earth
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(TXT) phlog-2019-02-22.txt
Book review: A Bright Future by J. Goldstein and S. Qvist, (c) 2019
Came across this book at our public library and, despite the overly
optimist title, figured I'd give it a chance and checked it out.
A Bright Future [0] is basically a nuclear industry sales pitch
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(TXT) phlog-2019-02-21.txt
I recently watched a 2018 presentation by Nate Hagens [0] at the
King Abdulla University of Science and Technology titled "Energy,
Money and Technology - From the Lens of the Superorganism" [1]. It
contained quite a lot of information and, though a bit rushed at
times, was quite good, well worth the hour and 20 minutes (includes
a Q&A at the end).
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(TXT) phlog-2019-02-12.txt
Review of Retrotopia by John Michael Greer (c) 2016 ; Founders
House Publishing, LLC
After reading James Kunstler's very enjoyable 'World Made by Hand'
quadrilogy I was curious how other might spin a post-collapse
American tale of life after fossil fuels and climate change.
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(TXT) phlog-2019-01-31.txt
A review of two non-fiction books by James Howard Kunstler:
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and
Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (c) 2005
Grove Press, New York
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(TXT) phlog-2019-01-26.txt
I'm still working on a review of two of James Kunstler's
non-fiction books, The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic. I read
them back to back as the latter was written as a follow up to the
former.
Speaking of Kunstler, I discovered he does a regular podcast,
generally hour long interviews with various people in various
fields
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(TXT) phlog-2019-01-03.txt
A review of James Kunstler's 'World Made by Hand' [1] novels
I don't read a whole lot of fiction anymore but I was curious about
Kunstler's 'World Made by Hand' novels after listening to some of
his podcasts [2] and managed to borrow all four from the public
library which I read straight through.
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(TXT) phlog-2018-12-28.txt
DoomCity: will you save the world - or end it?
I was chatting with some folks online recently when the topic
turned to "gaming", aka video games. While I dabbled some with
video games back in the days of Zork and SimCity I never really
took to gaming, could never seem to muster the commitment necessary
to learn all the rules and master
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(TXT) phlog-2018-12-22.txt
Why Climate Mobilization as Currently Envisioned will Fail.
"If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a
capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of
the process or business won't work."
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(TXT) phlog-2018-12-09.txt
Recently came across a post by Albert Bates on his The Great
Change[1] blog referencing a 2018 Climate Emergency Plan[2] put out
by the Club of Rome. This paper is a good example of the drastic
measures that need to be taken and why humanity is more of less
fucked. One only needs to briefly scan the 10 point plan at the
beginning of the paper to see the degree of deviation from our
current reality and consider just how
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(TXT) phlog-2018-12-01.txt
Seems there is a growing list of "greens" coming out in favor of
nuclear energy these days. People are looking at Germany's
experience with trying to replace fossil fuels and nuclear in favor
of wind and photovoltaics, which has been rather costly, hasn't
actually reduced their CO2 emissions all that much, and has bumped
up electric utility bills, now the highest in the EU [0]. Over in
France something like 70% [1] of the electricity
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(TXT) phlog-2018-11-14.txt
Another book review. Recently finished reading Morris Berman's
2006 book 'Dark Ages America: Final Phase Empire'[1] which,
although it stands well enough alone, apparently was written as
part of a trilogy. Berman[2] is an American historian and social
critic, currently residing in Mexico. Unlike most of the stuff I've
been reading pertaining to civilizational decline Berman's book
does not
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(TXT) phlog-2018-11-11.txt
No book review this time.. It's snowing hard so a good day for
indoor endeavors. I've added a Resources section to the site,
mostly WWW links to various bloggers, news sites and radio/video
channels that I find informative. All are HTTP resources as there
seems scant offerings (that I'm aware of) on Gopher of similar
materials. Links to Gopher materials on the subjects of climate
..
(TXT) phlog-2018-10-31.txt
Recently finished 'America's Most Sustainable Cities and Regions:
Surviving the 21st Century Megatrends'[1] by John W. Day and
Charles Hall. Day is with the Department of Oceanography and
Coastal Sciences at Louisiana State University; Hall is a Systems
Ecologist with the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at
the State University of New York, and is best known for his
development of
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(TXT) phlog-2018-10-26.txt
Recently got through 'When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the
Future of Transportation'[1] by Alice Friedemann. Friedemann was a
systems analyst for a large global shipping corporation and has a
thorough understanding of the inner working of the freight industry
and it's critical support for today's Just-in-Time economy. She
also regularly writes about peak oil and related topics on her blog
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(TXT) phlog-2018-10-21.txt
Recently finished reading 'Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral
Wealth Is Plundering the Planet'[1] by Ugo Bardi. Bardi is an
Italian chemistry professor and one of the original 'Limits of
Growth'[2] researchers. He also blogs regularly about many of the
issues revolving around humanity's current predicament at Cassandra
Legacy[3].
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(TXT) phlog-2018-10-15.txt
Well - here we are, again.
Thought I was pretty much done with Gopher and phlogging after my
home server gave up the ghost some time back and I just let it be.
I had been reading about these waning days of the Age of Oil and
finding it hard to justify the vanity of a home server running
24/7/365 just so a handful
..