Neal Grout

Sil and the Psycologist

2009-11-25T09:30:52Z

We took Sil to his first apointment with the psycologist yesterday. Before this we had to fill in several forms (along with his teacher and pre school carers) about his behaviour. One of the questions being;

"In what way do you want help?"

Well lets find out whats wrong with him first before discussing help because, as I'm not a psycologist meself, I dont know what help is available to his condition (what ever that is).

So we went in for the interview. Sil was quite relaxed and played with me or on the floor with some toys. They asked a lot of questions including;

"So what do you think is wrong with him?"

FFS, isnt that their job to make that assessment or should I go and look all this up on the internet first! Yes Mum has ADHD and its genetic so highly likely Sil has it but he also has some other quirks. Franciens brother and nephew have been diagnosed with Aspergers and the other nephew has his own problems. Not quite sure whats wrong with him but maybe the best description is he is half savant. If the psycologists want me to do their job for them though they can pay me the 25 Euros per hour they get.

ADHD

2009-11-10T20:02:17Z

Its official now, Francien has been diagnosed with ADHD. It took plenty of visits to the psychologist including one visit for me, a chat with her parents by phone and a look through her school records.

So now she is looking fowards to getting some treatment and I'm looking fowards to being able to make a cup of tea the mornings without having to go searching for the tea bags, milk or sugar.

Sil is next up. After his general 4 year check up he acted up in the Doctors office and she saw everything that we had been saying about his behaviour but no one else had seen. This is because when he goes to school he is not as comfortable with his surroundings and so supresses it. He is comfortable at home though which is where he lets it all out. He has an appointment with a child psychologist comming up soon.

Swine Flu

2009-11-01T20:00:59Z

Were pretty sure now that the flu Francien had was swine flu. Its been going round the city for some time now. One of Franciens friends had it and so did a work friend of mine.

She was laid up on the sofa for at least a week and even two weeks later is unsure if she can work tommorow because she still coughs and gets very tired. I thought I was going to catch it too. I felt very bad the first morning Francien fell ill but suddenly recovered! Francien told me at first she felt sick then fine and so on, so I expected it to come back at anytime but it never did.

Nina said that she felt sick sometimes but never got that bad and Sil was completly fine.

How is it that a new flu virus terns up that suposedly none of us have immunity to and yet only 1 in 4 of us catches it?

A Quiet Evening

2009-10-20T09:29:02Z

I cooked the dinner yesterday evening, vegetarian fajetas. Just after the meal I went outside to pick up the dog food, which was in the boot of the car, so I could feed Elmo. I walked outside and immediatly realised Francien's and my bikes were missing.

I went back in and told her. She got very upset and went out for a drive to look for them. I was consigned to the fact they were gone and made us both a cup of tea for when she came back.

Amber, who this week is staying with her father, came back to pick up her boxing equipment to go training. I told her the situation and she left. I just sat down to drink my tea when I got a phone call from Amber;

"Get outside Now! They are there."

I didnt know what was going on but jumped up and ran for the door. Call me paranoid but we have always kept an assortment of weopons/tools near the door in case of emergency. I grabbed the first thing that came to hand, an immitation flail that Francien bought at a castle when she was a kid, and ran out.

I was just in time to see a group of cyclists go past but not fast enough to catch them. I ran out onto the path as Francien came down the road in the car. I ran after the cyclists but realised I could not catch them.

I walked on in the dark to the bridge but from there could not see them, either further towards the border and Smeermass, or back under the bridge which heads back to Maastricht. I did not check up onto the railway line though, which later we find out is where they went.

I walked back to the boat but saw a cyclist comming towards me. I suspected that maybe they had hid from me and were trying to get away again so hung the flail over my shoulder for a quick swing and reached out to grab the rider.

"Its me." said Amber, just in time.

We went back to the boat and Francien and I got into the car. I ditched the flail for a club, decorated with Lonsdale logos, that one of Francien's old gabber mates had given me a few years back. We rode ove the border and at the crossroads in Smeermaas spotted 3 kids on bikes. Not entirely sure if it was them we chased them into a parking lot where they went through a fence.

I jumped out of the car and chased them a short way, screaming;

"WHEN I CATCH YOU IK MAAK JOU DOOD MOTHERFUCKERS"

There were two riding on the last bike and as they came to a small hill, panicked and fell off. I chased them a bit further but was out of breath from my 100 meter sprint and they had fear and youth on their side.

I picked up the droped bike, which wasnt ours, and put it in the car. Attached to the bike were Francien's bike keys. We suspected that they had ditched Franciens bike because with the child seat attached it was very obvious as they rode around. We went back and got a torch and searched along the canal.

We didnt find anything except that the farmhouse between us and Smeermaas is now squated and probably by junkies. If thats the new neighbours we are going to have to bolt everything down.

Then Francien remembered that she saw the thieves aproach the Smeermaas crossing from a different direction so I said its possible they used the railway line to escape. We drove and checked where the railway and road cross and, sure enough, there was Francien bike behind a fence.

We loaded the bike into the back of the car and sat down to go home.

Francien looked at me with a smile on her face and said;

"Victory"

The Fragile Web

2009-10-16T06:55:53Z

Clearly, the web of supply, demand, and interconnected services is beyond the scope of a single post - or, for that matter, a single thick volume. And yet, sometimes one can glimpse the greater problem by considering a much smaller issue. Let us consider one such example.

On the NBC evening news tonight, the status of the nation's hospitals with regard to H1N1 was discussed. According to the piece, hospitals run a lean operation, with much of the equipment used by intensive care units at 95% of capacity. The discussion pointed out that this could be problematic if large numbers of people contracted H1N1 and needed care.

This tells us something else. Should there be any interruption of the normal flow of goods, the hospitals could face rapid degradation of their ability. If a piece of equipment fails, there are few (or no) reserves to stand in its place. A lean operation also suggests a dearth of spare parts. Thus, any crisis which causes health problems may overwhelm the health care system, thus exacerbating the other problems. Parenthetically, almost any crisis will include health issues.

Add in the financial aspects of societal disruption, which must surely affect the health care system, and we may discern a possible channel for some part of a future dieoff. The elderly, the weak, and the very young will not get the care that maintains their lives presently. Those who are injured may face similar effects.

If our society cannot handle an outbreak of flu today, what capability will remain in a post-peak world?

by Jack on Fri Oct 16, 2009 2:31 am http://malthusia.com

Supply Side Jesus

2009-10-14T07:54:22Z

funny cartoon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK7gI5lMB7M

Feel Like Going on a Shopping Spree?

2009-10-04T19:27:49Z

"It will crash (Society). We saw the same thing happen with World War I, World War II. It happens, it’s supported by history. When we placed an oil embargo on the Japanese, they didn’t say ‘OK, we understand your point. We’ll go along with that.’ They didn’t go back to rickshaws or whatever they had before. People can’t do that. It doesn’t run in reverse. It only goes one way – up. And the reason for that is that the act of getting stuff makes us feel good. It’s not having it, it’s getting it. That’s why it can’t run in reverse, because it’s getting it that feels good, not having it. That’s why we never feel we have enough. We never get enough, because it is the act of getting it that feels good. That’s biology."

Jay Hanson

US Unemplyment

2009-10-04T01:10:02Z

http://market-ticker.org/archives/1485-September-Unemployment-ACTUAL-LOSS-995k.html

I said these numbers were going to ramp up. Its October again and it looks like were on the next leg down. Good bye to the suckers rally.

Open University

2009-10-01T09:11:56Z

I signed up for a an Enviromental Science degree course with the Open University. I checked out what Maastricht was offering and the nearest they had in English were European or International studies, which were to far removed from what I had in mind.

I was having my doubts on wether the old grey matter was going to be up to the task what with my stint with ketamine and possible Olney's lessions but I've had a quick look over the 1st years course work and its not as difficult as some of the peak oil concepts I've been dealing with over the last few years.

Anyway this month is my birthday. I usualy try to keep quiet over this event and not make a big fuss but this year I'm going to push for presents, specificly books. There are a couple of books which would be handy for my course so if anyone wants to help out (DAD) I'll let you know what I was looking for.

I Kidney You Not

2009-09-30T10:03:11Z

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6850879.ece

I've got one eye (right side), a kidney and a fine specimen of a testicle up for offer.

The first peak oil recession: Interview with Steven Kopits

2009-09-23T07:25:33Z

Published Mon, 09/14/2009 - 07:00

by ASPO-USA

From ASPO-USA:
Steven Kopits, who runs the New York office of Douglas Westwood, was in Denver last week. He talked about his latest paper on peak oil and the economy with Steve Andrews and will share related remarks at the ASPO-USA conference next month. Steve popped a few questions:

Question: Tell us about your background.

Kopits: I’ve spent most of my career and as a strategic management consultant and investment banker. I’ve focused on the energy business for the last several years, and now I manage the New York office of Douglas-Westwood, a UK-based energy-business consultancy. We’re well known for our market research in the upstream oil and gas business. In the industry, we are considered the consultancy of record for our forecasts of offshore drilling and production, as well as for marine renewables like offshore wind. I am personally interested in macro oil markets and write frequently on issues related to peak oil.

Question: When did you learn about the peak oil story?

Kopits: I was preparing investor documentation—a prospectus for a public offering. As part of my work, I was looking at oil supply and demand issues, in particular as they related to China. When I ran the numbers, I found that projected demand turned out to be considerably greater than what the EIA was stating. Just for the sake of completeness, I thought to confirm that the oil supply was adequate to meet Chinese demand growth. Now you should keep in mind that, at the time, I thought peak oil was pure fantasy. But when I checked, supply growth promised to be much less than the EIA was indicating. I became concerned because I couldn’t find the resources on paper.

Question: Would it be fair to say that Douglas-Westwood has had a sober view of the long-term oil supply picture?

Kopits: That’s absolutely true. In fact, my views evolved as part of my relationship with the firm before I joined the company. In the past, we’ve also worked with Simmons & Co., for example, and consider them to be friends; philosophically speaking, we are in that camp. Our firm’s formal view is that we expect peak oil in the middle of the next decade. My personal view is that peak oil—at least in the sense of “practical peak oil”—is probably behind us already.

Question: Has the firm’s view of peak oil evolved much over the last three-to-five years?

Kopits: I think the supply story is proceeding more or less the way the firm had anticipated. There were no black swans in our forecast, at least in terms of the oil supply. Douglas-Westwood has been reasonably good at forecasting volumes going forward, and has been for some time. That’s part of the reason I joined the firm: they are good at what they do. The other reason, by the way, is because they’re great people. I am privileged to work for the company.

Question: What kind of feedback do you get when writing about the peak oil story?

Kopits: In general, the feedback has been very positive. I would point out, however, that we’re not vested in peak oil; we’re simply technical analysts. We analyze markets, and we report what the numbers say. When I write about peak oil, I just present charts and graphs and interpret them. Incidentally, what is interesting is the difference in feedback between Washington DC, New York and Houston regarding peak oil. When I’m on the east coast, I tend to use “peak oil” in quotes, and I am usually somewhat cautious speaking about the topic. In Houston, there’s no need to be shy. When I have mentioned peak oil to the managers for oil field services companies, they don’t flinch. They may qualify the phrase with “affordable peak oil” or “practical peak oil”, but our friends in Texas are the ones who have to find and produce oil on a daily basis, and they know it’s getting harder and harder all the time. Peak oil is not a theoretical concept in Houston; it’s a daily operating reality.

Question: But Daniel Yergin and Michael Lynch don’t seem to believe in peak oil.

Kopits: Douglas-Westwood’s perspective has differed from CERA’s for many years. Our firm’s view has held up; to date, CERA’s has not. Back in 2005, CERA predicted 101 million barrels a day of capacity by 2010; we’ll be lucky to see 90, maybe 89. On the other hand, we can’t discount the possibility that either technology will improve or that we will find oil that we did not anticipate. Look at how radically the natural gas picture has changed in the last two years—the outlook can change materially. Still, over the last five years, an investor or energy company would have received a more accurate view of the market using Douglas-Westwood forecasts.

Question: Your recent paper makes it sound as if we’ve been on an oil production plateau since late 2004.

Kopits: That’s correct. If I dispassionately just look at the numbers, the oil supply has not improved that much since the 4th quarter of 2004. And I don’t see anything on the horizon that makes it appear that we’re going to break out into a really new level of production that’s far different than what we have today. So if we’re talking about practical peak oil, my view is that it started in late 2004.

Question: What’s your sense of when we slip into decline on the back side of this plateau?

Kopits: It’s hard to say. From my perspective, the inception of decline is less important than the gap between supply and demand. If China weren’t growing so fast, peak oil could come and go without us noticing for some time. Now, even if the oil supply grows, it will not likely catch up with demand. So we can suffer the economic impacts of peak oil even with a modestly growing oil supply. Essentially, that’s the story of oil from late 2004 until mid 2008.

Question: What sort of decline rate to you anticipate, in 2012 or whenever it occurs?

Kopits: I don’t have an independent view on that. The IEA has pointed out that decline rates appear to have increased to 6-7%, and PFC has a very interesting chart on the increase in decline rates from offshore wells over time. By the way, these sorts of developments—secular increases in decline rates, for example—are one reason that I think peak oil is upon us already. Are they proof? No, but they are suggestive. And if you work in the industry, you keep running across similar charts, indicative of a system in trouble even if they are not conclusive. At the same time, you have to keep in mind that there are above-ground constraints on production which could influence aggregate decline rates. You have to consider, for example, whether the Saudis will increase production or if Iraq will get better at administrating its oil industry. There are a lot of things we don’t know at this point that will determine decline rates.

Question: Could you tell us about your views on the US oil price threshold for recessions?

Kopits: The US has experienced six recessions since 1972. At least five of these were associated with oil prices. In every case, when oil consumption in the US reached 4% percent of GDP, the US went into recession. Right now, 4% of GDP is $80 oil. So that’s my current view: If the oil price exceeds $80, then expect the US to fall back into recession.

Question: Can you comment on why, during an economic recovery, you see oil consumption growing faster in developing economies than in the OECD countries?

Kopits: Consumption will tend to grow faster in developing economies for two reasons. First, by their nature, developing economies should grow faster than mature ones, and this has been generally true of east Asia and strikingly so in the case of China. So faster economic growth means faster growth in demand for oil. Further, oil consumption growth follows an “S”-curve. At low levels of GDP, oil demand growth is quite slow. Once a country has reached middle class income levels, per capita oil consumption stabilizes. However, in the middle, as a country becomes middle class, oil demand growth can be explosive. Take South Korea, for example. South Korean per capita oil consumption peaked in 1996; however, in the previous 12 years, the country’s consumption increased nearly fourfold. China is now firmly on the S-curve. Based on South Korean experience, we would expect Chinese oil demand to stabilize at around 50 mbpd around 2032-2035.

But where is the oil going to come from? If you have a flat—or heaven help us, declining—supply of oil, then the emerging and fast-growing economies will have no choice but to start bidding away the oil from the advanced or slow-growing economies. That is consistent with what we’ve seen in the data starting in about 2006. For China to grow, it will have to take away the oil of Japan, the US and Europe, just as it has in the last three years.

If I run out the projections, this implies that US consumption is likely to drop by about one-third, from its peak at 21 mb/day before the recession, to about 14 mb/day in 2030. That will potentially be a long and painful adjustment.

Question: In the world of oil analytics, what rules does peak oil break?

Kopits: The primary thing that we have learned—or more precisely, re-learned—in the last year is that the global economy will not tolerate oil at any price. In the first half of last year, we had some prognostications of oil at $150, $200, even $500, and they were understandable because of the supply and demand dynamics at the time. But as we’ve seen since, once our oil consumption exceeds 4% of GDP in the US, we go into recession and we cut our oil consumption. The global economy cannot sustain oil at any price. Beyond a certain threshold, the result is likely to be stagflation or recession rather than perpetually increasing oil prices.

Question: Can Humpty-Dumpty put it together again, or are we in brand new terrain because of the peak oil plateau?

Kopits: I’m a supply pessimist because I think that’s what the data best supports right now. No, for oil, I don’t think we can put it back together. That means we have to look to next closest fuel supply, and that’s natural gas. I think we’ll see the migration of natural gas into traditional oil uses such as transportation. We’re not going to solve this overnight, but we need to progressively take pressure off the oil supply. If the price of oil is high, as I believe it will be, the market will drive buyers in the direction of natural gas.

Last question: Anything on your mind that I should have asked about?

Kopits: From a policy perspective, I think it’s important to understand that we are all in this together. Peak oil is not a U.S. problem, but a global problem. It is a problem for both the consumer and producer nations. Did Saudi Arabia enjoy this recession? Did Iran or Venezuela? What about China or Japan? Peak oil recessions—and I argue in an upcoming article that this is the first peak oil recession—are painful for everyone, and are worth avoiding or minimizing. To do so, we need to think about the issues together, constructively. Also, on the policy side, there are limits to what we can do with conservation; an over-aggressive conservation program is called a recession. So, we need to think about improving the transportation energy supply, and we need to act now. Time is short. Electric cars may be fine in 2020, but we need solutions that can be brought on line within the next 2-3 years, and from my perspective, that’s natural gas.

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Source URL: http://energybulletin.net/node/50109

Links:
[1] http://www.aspo-usa.org

I did think that the price of oil was now tied directly to perceived economic performance. That is, as it looks like we are comming out of ressesion the price would head back up but would dip back down as things got worse. I based this on the fact that after the price spike and then dip the price began to rise at the same time the equities markets began their rally.
But if Kopits is correct, that 4% or more in fuel costs will send the economy into ressesion and that at the current cost that 4% is 80 dollars per barrel, then other factors might be at play.
Just before the end of the price spike last year the Saudi King called a meeting. The results of that meeting were not spectacular according to the press as all we received was a fairly bland statement but soon after the price dropped. But surely they had plenty to discuss and not all of it was for our ears. Is this drop after the meeting then an indicator of government oil market manipulation?
If anyone is capable of manipulating the oil price then as the largest producer, the Saudis, and the largest consumer, the US, have the best capability to pull it off.
It would also explain why the oil price now bobs along at 70$ per barrel. This is just enough to keep us out of ressesion but high enough for the oil producers to keep their profits up and make the nessesary investments needed for future production.
Assuming this is correct, and I have no way of proving this other than governments will do what they need to do, then we wont see another oil price spike until world oil production drops off of the plateau that it has been sitting on since the 4th quarter 2004. When this happens they will have absolutly no control over the price and we will seesaw with price spikes, drop in demand, resession ad infinitum.

Discoveries Will Shallow the Decline Rather than Move the Peak.

2009-09-18T11:38:39Z

and back into the oily shit;

http://money.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=864696

We're No 37

2009-09-18T10:55:45Z

Another funny for the day;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVgOl3cETb4

George Carlin Tells it as it is.

2009-09-18T08:13:09Z

http://dailybail.com/home/george-carlin-video-the-truth-about-wall-street-and-washingt.html

Jevon's Paradox

2009-09-13T19:35:11Z

This is a well understood (by economists) theory that technological progress and an increase in efficiency do not decrease the rate of consumption but increase it and can be applied at all levels. So here are 3 examples;

Mr and Mrs Smith are worried about the environment and so decide to cut down on their electricity usage by getting rid of the tumble dryer and buying a more energy efficient fridge. This of course saves electricity and therfore money. But do they just leave the saved money in the bank? No. With the extra money they now have, they buy a new fish tank that they always wanted and eat out more in restaurants.

A company called Smith's DIY (no relation to the above) decides to insulate and provide the latest more efficient heating systems to all its stores. This cuts the energy costs down in each store by 16%. Concidering Smiths has 46 stores nationwide this is a substancial saving running into tens of thousands of dollars. The company then invests those dollar saved with some of last years profits into building a few more stores with all the related energy costs that come with.

A country, lets call it Australia, says that to help with the environment they are going to ban all of the old electric lightbulbs so that they will eventualy be replaced by the latest energy saving bulbs (I think they made this law last year). What happens to the energy saved? They plow it back into economic growth because all modern economies work on a growth model. The continuous growth means that eventualy more energy saving bulbs are bought, offsetting any savings made from the change over.

As I said this is well known to economists and therfore governments. The next time you see a government sponsored advert on TV telling you to save this or recycle that remember this. Not only are you not helping prevent climate change as they claim but by making the process more efficient for them, for example by sorting out coloured bottles rather than letting them do it, not only are you not helping but in a very small way you are agrevating the problem. When this is scaled up to millions of people trying to recycle bottles the recycling company saves on processing which therfore cuts its cost. The recycling company being just that 'a company' needs to maximize profits for its shareholders and so invests the money it saves from your recycling into its own growth. And then when you look at the fine print for the recycling company you see that it is realy a subsiduary of Ford motors or some other mega corporation and you see where the savings realy went.

Quote of the Day

2009-09-13T07:43:10Z

"Ah, the exhilaration that comes from having the luck and fortitude to
be able to keep ones eyes open in disaster and appreciate the beauty
of it like it was a kinetic sculpture! If you were in a derailed
roller coaster car, accelerating into the ground, would you close your
eyes or decide to take the whole thing in till the last millisecond?
This is the sort of choice civilization is giving us, but no point
being grumpy about it."

Herb from Dieoff Q and A

Sustainablility

2009-09-12T06:55:52Z

When we try to look for historical societies that were sustainable they are hard to come by. More primitive peoples usualy got round the fact they degraded their immediate environment by moving to another spot to live and thus allowing the resources they used in the original place to replenish.
In more advanced static societies we have many examples of the boom and bust colapse of a population in overshoot including Rome, the Maya and the classic example, Easter Island. But we do have one example of a sustainable society that exsisted for hundreds of years with almost no population growth and that was medieval Europe. Unfortunatly this is not the sort of sustainable that many modern users of the word have in mind.

THE ETERNAL VILLAGE

Let us begin by looking at an ordinary European village in the seventeenth century. This village, Sennely, which has been carefully studied by Professor Bouchard, has a claim to being considered typical. 1 A population of some 500 to 700 persons is typical enough. The village’s reliance on grain for bread-making as its chief crop is more than typical—it is universal. The thatch-roofed, windowless farmhouses, with their two rooms, attic, barn, and cowshed, are certainly normal.

Sennely is relatively isolated, as are most villages. Not that the city is far away; it is close enough so that tenant farmers pay their rents to absentee landlords in the city of Orleans. But the outside world does not impinge on the daily life of the villagers. Like most villages in preindustrial Europe, Sennely was a community of subsistence farmers whose needs were supplied locally: the rye grain, for bread; the cattle and pigs; the orchards that supply apples, pears, plums, and chestnuts; the garden vegetables; the fish in the ponds and the bees kept for honey and wax. Sennely had a miller, an innkeeper, a smith. There were part-time shopkeepers and weavers in residence. A villager hardly ever needed to go abroad.

This small, self-sufficient world is typical in another respect. It is fragile. The balance between resources and population is an uneasy one. The land is poor in Sennely. Water drains poorly. Evaporation from stagnant pools and ponds creates permanent ground fogs. This is not good land for growing grain. The poor soils of Sennely may not be typical. What is typical is the constraint under which the farmers operated, inasmuch as they had to grow grain, even though they would have been better off if they had concentrated on raising cattle.

What Sennely had in common with practically all European villages before the mid-nineteenth century was the need to be self-sufficient. Underdeveloped transportation and commercial networks forced the rural population to grow all essential crops, even those for which the land or the climate were unsuitable. Sennely could not buy grain and sell livestock in exchange. It was condemned to make do with its sandy soil. Unable to grow wheat, the preferred grain crop, Sennely planted rye. Poor yields were compensated for by the vast size of the village land, a good deal of it wasteland, swamps, and heath. It took about two hours to walk across the village’s territory and half the farms were spread out at a considerable distance from the village center. This dispersed habitat, an adaptation to the poor soil, no doubt goes a long way toward explaining Sennely’s lack of social cohesion. Although the village did possess a clear center, a street of houses, a square, a church, and a cemetery, most of the farms lay hidden in the distance, each of them screened by rows of oak trees.

Not surprisingly, travelers described the chief personality trait of the peasants of Sennely as suspicion. They seemed suspicious of outsiders and of each other and not much given to talking freely. Their physical appearance was remarked upon as distinctive. They tended to be stunted, bent over, and of a yellowish complexion. They were not born that way. The little children were said to be good looking, but by the time they had reached the age of ten or twelve, they assumed the generally unpleasant appearance of their elders. They did not look healthy. Their bellies were distended. They moved slowly, they had poor teeth, their growth was retarded. Girls reached the age of 18 before first menstruation.

What we have here, then, is a group of people living on the edge of deprivation. Malnutrition was normal in Sennely in the late seventeenth century. There are hints of better times in the past, but by the time the records become abundant enough for a clear analysis of this society, Sennely appears as a fragile entity, vulnerable to disease and, somehow, just barely, kept going in spite of the constant, threatening presence of death.

One third of the babies born died in their first year. Only a third of the children born in Sennely reached adulthood. Most couples had only one or two children before their marriage was broken up by the death of one parent. Women married late, at about age 23, on the average. Any given 100 women in Sennely would bear about 350 children in the course of their lives. Of these, only 145 would reach adulthood and marry in turn, 75 of them female. Allowing for 5 girls who would not marry, only 70 adult women were available to replace the 100 women of the preceding generation. Yet the population remained more or less constant. The villagers probably made up the deficit by marrying the daughters of transient artisans and laborers. When death struck a household, no time was wasted; widows and widowers remarried right away. Most first marriages occurred in the wake of a parent’s death, so that the farm and the family could continue to function with a normal complement of hardworking men and women.

Fragile in the face of its poor harvests, constantly threatened by hunger and disease, Sennely just barely managed to reproduce itself, to hold on to life behind its hedges. Yet, for all that, Sennely was not badly off when compared to other villages. The peasants of the nearby Beauce plateau, a prime wheat-growing region, looked down with contempt on sullen, watery Sennely. But when harvests failed in the Beauce, there was nothing to fall back on, since all the land was plowed for wheat. A succession of bad harvests was enough to transform the peasants of the Beauce into starving beggars. Having put all their eggs in one basket, they were helpless when the wheat fields failed them. They took to the road, begging for food. And it is on such grim occasions, when the peasants of Sennely open their houses to starving vagrants and feed them generously, that we notice the hidden strength of Sennely’s economy. Although it lives on the margin of poverty, Sennely never faces an all-out famine. Its inhabitants must have learned long ago that their meager grain crops had to be compensated for by making full use of the heath and ponds. They depended on their pigs, their cattle and sheep, their vegetables, fruit orchards, and fishing. It is this diversity, together with a low population density, that kept catastrophic famines away.

Not that everyone in Sennely enjoyed an equal level of protection against hard times. This was not a society of equals. The better-off farmers owned a team of horses and a plow. They did not exactly own their farms. They leased them from absentee landlords, but their customary rights to the land were so ancient that they were not in danger of losing them. These leaseholders belonged to the European-wide category of rich peasants known as laboureurs in France and as yeomen in England. Their wealth, however, was entirely relative. Distinguished by their possession of the expensive team and plow, they nevertheless lived just this side of poverty. It is only when they are compared to less fortunate peasants that they appear rich.

The estates of the laboureurs of Sennely can be evaluated at somewhere in the 2,000 livres range. By comparison, the social category just below, that of the renters (locataires) who do not own horses and plows, was made up of families whose worth was only in the 600 livres range. These tenant farmers were constantly in danger of losing the land they rented and of being reduced to the level of hired hands. Hired hands (journaliers) in Sennely owned nothing except, perhaps, the roof over their heads, a garden, a pig.

There was another category of villagers, that of the artisans who lived in the village center and owned no land. Their level of fortune lay somewhere in between that of the renters and hired hands. About half the peasant families in Sennely belonged to the better-off categories of leaseholders and renters, who had some property. The other half of the village’s population was made up of the families of hired hands and artisans who had no land at all.

A little to the side of these ordinary peasants, living on the main street of the village, their houses marked with painted signs indicative of their profession, we find three successful entrepreneurs: the smith, the miller, and the innkeeper. These families were among the most prosperous and influential in the village community. Barely involved in working the land, they dealt in goods and money. The innkeeper was also a contractor and a moneylender. There were horses and cows in his barn, his sheep grazed in the pastures, but he also bought up the grain owed to the Church and sold it on the open market. A handful of part-time shopkeepers of lesser wealth and stature completed the picture. They had a shop, a house, and a garden on the main street, but they could not live from trade alone. They also farmed and they dealt in cattle, hides, and wool.

On the fringes of village society, linked to it only in the sense that they owned property here, were rich outsiders who constituted the local elite. The priest, to begin with, whose house was the most imposing in the village. The priest had a comfortable income from rents and tithes assigned to the Church. He had a garden and an orchard. His house was a mansion of sorts, complete with salon, parlor, library, chapel, butler’s room, stable, bakery, barn, and servants’ quarters.

Side by side with the priest who presided over the Church’s real estate interests in Sennely, there were three or four other outsiders, substantial men of property: a notary, a business agent, and an estate manager. They represented absentee landlords, but they also had property of their own. The estate manager had two farms which he leased out, rents from a number of tenants, and a large herd of sheep. He lived in a six-room house and he had a servant.

On the outer fringes of Sennely’s territory, there were three small châteaux, belonging to wealthy gentlemen who were seen only occasionally, as they lived in the city and resided in their country châteaux only in summer or in the hunting season. The wealthiest of these gentlemen owned six farms locally, the others had three farms each.

Leaving the priest, the gentlemen, and their managers aside, we are still left with a village community marked by sharp contrasts of wealth and power. The landless peasants and artisans live in grim poverty. Their cottages are small, dark, and cold, they cannot afford firewood, they own only the clothes on their back and a pair of wooden clogs, their larders are often empty.

The more substantial farmers, meanwhile, are likely to possess reserves of bacon and cheese, wardrobes full of warm clothes, and much bedding to ward off the cold at night. In spite of these differences, there is no sign of strife in the village. This requires some explanation, especially since Sennely lacks most of the social controls one may find elsewhere. No resident lord provides leadership here, the priest’s influence is thin. At most, he visits a family once in three years. As for family ties, they are too weak to provide cohesion.

Family relations, as revealed in the parish registers where births, marriages, and deaths are recorded, confirm the casual observer’s view of the peasants of Sennely. Each family is on its own here. It is a bare-minimum family, consisting of a couple and one or two young children. For those who look back to the rural past with nostalgia, expecting to find large, noisy, heart-warming throngs of adults and children all living merrily under one roof, the evidence in Sennely is bound to prove a disappointment. These seventeenth-century peasant families are as isolated and as unstable as are modern families of wage earners living in impersonal housing projects on the periphery of industrial cities.

Grandparents are hard to find in Sennely, and so are aunts, uncles, or cousins living under one roof. The bread and bacon wrung out of each homestead cannot stretch to feed more than two adults and their babies. Bitter experience taught the peasants of Sennely to be calculating. They did not marry until death had cleared the way for the formation of a new family. Most young men and women waited until one of their parents had died before marrying and raising a new generation. As long as both parents were alive, the addition of another mouth to feed would have put a strain on the family’s resources. As soon as one of the parents falls ill, however, the grown son or daughter must contemplate marriage to a partner who will replace the dying parent on the farm. There probably is not much sentiment involved in such matches. If the priest is to be believed, his parishioners marry only out of calculation. They do not worry about the bride’s pretty face, they ask only how many sheep she will bring into the family. Sexual need probably does not influence the decision very much either, since promiscuity at an early age is a trademark of Sennely’s young. Outsiders comment on this, some expressing shock. The boys and girls of Sennely, it seems, do not need to wait for marriage. They pet and kiss and fondle each other freely. Marriage, in this perspective, is business rather than pleasure.

The new family, founded in the shadow of death, is a partnership established for the purpose of continuing the timeless battle against hunger and solitude. It is not a very solid partnership. It will be broken up by the death of one of the partners within ten years or so. Just time enough to have a baby in the first year and several others, at two year intervals—four or five children in all. One or two of these will die of a contagious disease, aided by chronic malnutrition and unsanitary surroundings. When the mother herself dies, often in her early thirties, and usually from complications following childbirth, the widower is left with two or three orphaned children in his care. Almost instantly he finds a new wife. Half the recorded marriages in Sennely are second marriages of this kind. Should both parents fall victim to one of the recurring waves of murderous food shortages accompanied by illness, the children will be taken care of by the village. Orphaned children are not so much absorbed by relatives as by legal guardians appointed by the community. Unless the orphaned children are very young, they may not experience their parents’ death as a profound dislocation, since it was the custom, anyway, especially among the landless families, to hand children over to more prosperous neighbors when they reached the age of seven or eight. They were old enough, by then, to become servants, apprentices, or shepherds. By the time they were 14, they were able to give a full day’s work to their masters, so that caring for an orphaned child was not necessarily a losing proposition.

Few could afford the luxury of sentiment in Sennely. This was a society on a perpetual war footing, mobilized against the inroads of death, closing ranks in the aftermath of catastrophe. The men and women of Sennely were too much concerned with making a bare living and burying their dead, to lavish feelings on each other. Parents were not in a position to care for their children beyond their early years, nor were children prepared to come to the aid of destitute or sickly parents. Orphans were taken care of, not so much out of pity, but because they were human capital. A reasonably healthy orphaned girl, after serving some years as a kitchen maid in her guardians’ household, could look forward to a marriage proposal from an older widower. Not Christian charity or family affection but labor shortages activated social welfare provisions.

Having observed how fragile family bonds seem to be in this village, we are naturally led to ask how the community functions when common action is called for. In what sense does one belong to Sennely? What are the sources of authority here, how are common standards of behavior agreed upon and enforced? To the extent that one can answer these questions one reaches the conviction that authority in Sennely does not have its source in kinship ties. There are no clans, no elders or patriarchs obeyed because of their position within a network of family relations. To the extent that there is a common identity in Sennely, it rests not on blood, birth, or lineage, but on artificial, man-made, deliberate solidarities.

All the families of Sennely, rich or poor, are members of the formal village community. This is a legal entity, capable of borrowing money and raising taxes. Its will is expressed by means of periodic assemblies. Major decisions are made by formal or informal polls of all the heads of household present. Although everyone has the right to speak at village meetings, in practice most assemblies are attended only by the more substantial taxpayers. The village assembly also manages and audits the financial affairs of the local church. It prevents disputes from arising, takes measures to protect the village against marauders, vagrants, and wolves, appoints shepherds for the common herd and a schoolmaster if the village can afford one.

The assembly’s functions are important, but the villagers are more deeply, more emotionally involved in other formal organizations. Although the priest may not be important to the villagers, they view the church as theirs. They feel at home in this building their ancestors built and they maintain. The church and the adjoining cemetery constitute the heart of the community. From the priest’s perspective, the peasants may appear indifferent to religion. Although they do come to hear mass on Sundays, both morning and afternoon, they refuse to come to confession. Neither penitence nor communion interest them. They are baptized at birth, they confess on their deathbed. This is the extent of their participation in the sacraments.

But they do come to church with pleasure. Unlike the village assemblies, which suffer from absenteeism, religious ceremonies bring out the whole village, rich and poor, men, women, and children. Sunday mass is a community event. Everyone is talking while the children chase each other in the aisles. Gossip is exchanged, business deals are made, young men and women eye each other. The peasants of Sennely come together at their church as often as possible, not only on Sundays but on Saturday afternoons too and on all possible holidays. Their social life revolves around the church, spills over into the village square in front of it, and fills the village inn.

Festivities of a private kind, the drinking and eating that punctuate family occasions such as christenings, weddings, and funerals, do keep the inn busy, but they are dwarfed by the banquets and parades organized by the religious brotherhoods. These are clubs, essentially male clubs, whose religious functions are not particularly well defined but whose social purpose is quite clear: the brotherhoods provide solidarities beyond the level of the family. Within a brotherhood, distinctions of wealth and status are forgotten. Laboureur and journalier sit side by side at the banquets and they march together in the parades of which there can be as many as 100 in a given year. The priest opposes these frequent festivities, but he has no choice in the matter. He is an outsider. His stay in the village is of limited duration. He cannot oppose traditions that are centuries old and much dearer to his parishioners than are the teachings of the Church. Not that the villagers were lacking in religious feeling. They had a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary and they offered up prayers to saints of whom they expected something in return. Their devotions were not quite orthodox in character. They venerated a particular saint as long as he proved effective in warding off illness and other disasters. If the saint failed to keep up his side of the bargain, they switched to another. The priest who lived in Sennely from 1676 to 1710—and whose diary is the source of much that we know about this village—did not care for the villagers’ attitude toward religion. They used the church as a community hall, they showed little respect for the priest and little interest in the sacraments. Even though St. John was the official patron saint of Sennely, the villagers chose to pray to St. Sebastian instead. Presumably St. John had disappointed their expectations at some time in the past. While the priest Sauvageon was in residence, the villagers favored St. Sebastian who was reputed to be effective in curing illness. The most popular social organization in Sennely was the brotherhood of St. Sebastian, to which the villagers were willing to pay dues, although they contributed almost nothing to Sunday collections at church.

Religion played a large part in the lives of the peasants, but it was a religion of their own, designed to satisfy local needs. The priest Sauvageon was constantly irritated and frustrated. Had he wished to play a more active part in the village’s religious life, he probably would not have been allowed to do so. His sense of appropriate piety and observances was too much at odds with local tradition. The difference between the priest’s views and those of the villagers was not necessarily the difference between a rigorous and a lax interpretation of Church customs. During Lent, for instance, the villagers did fast. It is just that they went on fasting past the required number of days. They had their own unshakeable sense of what was right. Their favorite social and religious activities were the processions and banquets sponsored by the brotherhoods. The parades involved the whole village. The biggest of these was on Corpus Christi day, when the village street was covered with hay and straw, the church bells rang, and everyone came out dressed in his finery. The parade proceeded to the neighboring village. On this annual occasion, the public festivities served not only to unite the villagers of Sennely, but also to touch base with outsiders. When the procession reached the neighboring village, all the people of both communities attended mass together, after which they visited the cemetery. No religious procession was complete without the banquets and drinking bouts that wound up the big event as darkness fell.

Having spent some time observing a single village, we should now proceed to ask how representative Sennely may be of rural society in Western Europe. In the Kingdom of France alone, at the time when the records allow a reasonably close glimpse of Sennely, there were about 40,000 villages. In the regions of Western Europe as a whole—those, at least, that we are best informed about, including France, England, Spain, Italy, the Low Countries (modern Holland and Belgium), and parts of western Germany—we may be talking about something like 160,000 rural parishes. Each of these surely had its own character. Even so, we should be able to identify some fundamental traits common to most, if not all, of these communities. We will have to proceed cautiously, in later chapters, moving from the watery Sologne, where Sennely lies, to water-poor Hampshire, glancing at villages in the plains of Lorraine and in the high mountains of the Spanish sierras, including Mediterranean settings filled with permanent sunshine as well as Atlantic seashore villages drenched in rain and flavored by the smell of mussel beds and herring catches. Closing our eyes, momentarily, to sharp variations of soil, climate, language, and religion, we shall listen only to the constants, to the invariable realities that should make generalization possible.

As a starting point, I propose two categories that might serve to make sense of the mass of information we shall encounter. Let us call the first of these categories constraints, the second autonomies.

Approaching the scene from the vantage point of a North American or European society in the twentieth century, any seventeenth-century peasant community must give the impression of being hemmed in on all sides by brutal necessity. We see only the constraints in operation. The historian Gerard Bouchard indicates this in his choice of title: Sennely appears to him as an immobile village, where nothing changes and nothing can change. This may be an acceptable summation, not only for one village but for most, if we restrict our analysis to a few basic aspects of material life.

The population of Sennely does not grow. It cannot grow. If we examine the constraints which keep the population in check here, we will find that they are the very same constraints in effect everywhere else in Western Europe. The obstacle to population growth is an invisible barrier constructed out of the ratio between the land available for cultivation and the hunger of human beings.

This barrier was gradually erected over a period of some three hundred years. It was fully in place by the beginning of the fourteenth century. Before that time, no such constraint had existed. People had been scarce, unclaimed lands plentiful. Immense stretches of forest invited clearing. In this happy situation, the population had quadrupled in size, increasing most dramatically in those regions favored by fertile soil, a temperate climate, and easy access. In Christian Europe as a whole, there may have been as many as 65 million people making a living in the early fourteenth century. This was a high-water mark beyond which growth became impossible. This was especially the case in the most densely settled zones, the heartland of medieval Europe. Some 43 million people, out of a total of 65 million, lived in these favored regions which had been part of the Roman empire: Italy, France, the Low Countries, England, and western Germany. Within this preferred region there were clusters of particularly dense settlement in northern Italy, the Paris basin, and Flanders, where the ratio of people to land reached the level of 40, 50, even 80 to the square kilometer. Forests almost vanished. Churches were separated by no more than half an hour’s walk from each other. This pattern of settlement, established by 1300, was not substantially altered before the eighteenth century. 2

Throughout the four centuries we are concerned with in this book, European peasants lived in a straightjacket of their own making. They had multiplied freely and reached limits that could be breached only at the cost of the gravest perils. When vacant land suitable for homesteading was no longer to be had and every village’s wheat fields and vineyards bordered upon another village’s territory, the margin between survival and disaster narrowed dangerously. With too many mouths to feed and no further expansion possible beyond the customary limits of village lands, efforts were made to increase the grain crop within each village’s boundaries. Timber was felled, swamps were drained, meadows were plowed under. Even poor stretches of gravelly soil and rock-strewn hillsides difficult for the plow to handle were requisitioned when the need for bread demanded desperate measures.

Such tactics merely delayed the inevitable catastrophe. Every one of these expedients was shown to be imprudent in the long run. With the forests gone, timber and firewood disappeared. Every acre of meadowland put under the plow reduced opportunities for grazing. Livestock herds shrank in size. Manure, essential for use as fertilizer, became scarce and the yields of the grain fields, already low in normal times, became even lower. Marginal land put under cultivation barely repaid the investment in seed. Unless new farming techniques could be introduced, to increase productivity, there was only one possible solution to the impasse—and that would have been to reduce the population. Increasing productivity proved impossible. Now the slightest frost, an invasion of locusts, a fever carrying off a few cows sufficed to upset the balance. Chronic malnutrition weakened resistance to disease. Small waves of famine and local epidemics prepared the way for the catastrophic epidemic of bubonic plague which broke out in the summer of 1347, racing northward from the Mediterranean faster than a forest fire. The Black Death, as it came to be known, destroyed perhaps as much as one third of the population within months.

For the survivors, land was plentiful again. Labor shortages were acute. Cattle went untended. Forests grew again. Several generations would be born, would reproduce, would die, before the murderous damages of 1347-48 were repaired. One hundred and fifty years later the population had not yet regained its medieval level. In the course of the sixteenth century, at last, the 60 million mark was passed and growth continued cautiously, shying away from dramatic increases. The pattern set in the fourteenth century was to remain in effect. Population could grow only so much without inviting famine and disease. The most fundamental constraint was now securely in place.

In some measure, the brakes were applied by impersonal forces: viruses, bacteria, rodents, insects, bad weather, the ravages of war. The plague remained endemic until 1721. Other diseases took their threatening turn: syphilis, smallpox, typhus, influenza. But there never was a catastrophe again to approach the scale of the holocaust of 1347. Famine, the great scourge, continued to hover near enough, inspiring fear, a wolf at the door baring its teeth in the dead season. But famines became less threatening in time. After 1700, its pressures became less frequent, less severe, pushed back into pockets of badlands. One cannot escape the suspicion that Europeans had learned to live within the constraints imposed by inflexible harvests. The evidence in Sennely and elsewhere confirms this suspicion.

Sennely, even though cursed with poor grain lands, managed to avoid major famines and epidemics. How? By keeping a low profile, by making sure that its population was not allowed to exceed its resources. The number of families making a living within the confines of Sennely’s territory was not subject to variation. The land could support only about 50 farms. These farms could not be subdivided. Each of them constituted a balanced portfolio of securities, of separate lines of defense: grain, vegetables, orchards, grazing, ponds. Some properties were more profitable than others, but none was abundant enough to overcome the peasants’ caution: the farms had to be kept whole. Any diminution of these units of production was an invitation to catastrophe.

Having more than two or three children would upset the balance. Each generation’s goal was to replace itself without adding to the number of mouths to feed. This goal was achieved by delaying marriage until there was room on the farm for a new couple and their eventual children. The death of a parent activated the son’s or daughter’s marriage. If the new couple proved too fertile, if Fate showed too much kindness to their infant children, so that more than two or three survived infancy, then the parents might well arrange to hire the surplus children out to more prosperous farmers who could use extra help. The larger farms could feed more people than the bare minimum of two adults and two children. It was only because of these larger farms that Sennely could support the landless half of its population, the hired hands, the servant girls, the shepherds who worked for little more than their daily bread.

What we are looking at is an artfully balanced social organization. The men and women of Sennely understood and accepted the limits of their resources and learned to live within these limits. Long ago, when land was plentiful and people scarce, there had been no need for such cautious ways. No doubt the girls had married earlier then and families had been larger. But since the fourteenth century, grim lessons had been learned. Sennely had accepted the new way of dealing with scarcity. Like all the other peasant communities in Western Europe—at least those whose records have been studied so far—Sennely had declared its independence from worldwide, instinctive patterns of behavior. Instead of bearing children as soon as they were nubile, the girls of Sennely accepted the constraint imposed by need. They delayed marriage and childbearing for as long as might be necessary to insure their future children’s subsistence. For some girls that time might never come. They were prepared to conceive only when an offer of marriage was made. Such offers were contingent upon the inheritance of the family land.

Delayed marriage may have been the most important element within the social system created by European peasants after the fourteenth century. It is, in any case, the most readily identifiable one. By delaying marriage, European peasants set a course that separated them from the rest of the world’s inhabitants. As early as 1377, in a very large sample from England, the trend is visible. Of all the girls over the age of 14—and therefore presumably capable of conceiving—only 67 percent were married and bearing children. That proportion would be down to 55 percent in the seventeenth century. Outside of Western Europe, so far as such calculations can be made, the proportion of nubile girls who actually married and conceived would be close to 90 percent. 3 A rough summation of the discoveries made by historical demographers would be to say that European peasants adapted to scarce resources by limiting potential births by as much as 50 percent through unnaturally late marriage and conception. In so doing they bowed to constraints, but they also achieved a degree of autonomy.

AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, by George Huppert; Indiana Univ. Pr., 1998. <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0253211808>

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AMERICA 2.0

2009-09-10T07:03:26Z

The idea behind AMERICA 2.0

What is required here in America is a moderate, "doable" retooling of our political system. It can be done legally and without deliberate violence. All that is lacking is the political will.

The idea is to separate and isolate our political system from our economic system. At that point, our unencumbered political system could jettison â€œthe economyâ€ and begin delivering goods and services directly. This could reduce natural resource consumption by up to 90%.

The way it works now is our government gives money to banks â€“ so bankers can operate a business (buildings, computers, furniture, lights, air conditioning, employees, commuting, etc.) to lend money to OTHER businesses (with buildings, computers, commuters, etc) â€“ so their employees can buy a car and drive to the store (with buildings, computers, commuters, etc) to buy a loaf of bread.

Why not simply have our government pay someone to pick up that loaf of bread at the bakery and deliver it to the end user? Eliminate the banks, most of the other businesses, and the stores. No car, no commuting for the end user!

Do it for everything the end user needs.

That's "simplify." That's "mitigation." Thatâ€™s THE SOCIETY OF SLOTH http://www.warsocia lism.com/ unnecessary. htm

A simple first step would be to initiate a federal unemployment program which pays every citizen who is unemployed after their state unemployment benefits expire -- and just keeps paying.

Jay Hanson

Second Quote of the Day!

2009-09-09T18:43:04Z

"I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others,"

Elizabeth Taylor wrote this on Twitter

LOLZ

Quote of the Day

2009-09-09T09:06:22Z

"Jay Hanson lives on the big isle (Hawaii), and tells me I will go out in a blaze of multiple mushroom clouds."

Greenish www.oildrum.com

Peak Everything

2009-09-08T09:22:48Z

Peak oil ultmatly means the peak in everything, including humanity. Because it is the basic fuel of our civilization, when it begins to decline so will the production of just about everything else.

Lets for example take a look at the metal copper. When the Americas were first discovered and prospectors went looking for it they found giant pure nuggets of copper laying on the surface. True this didnt happen very often but it did happen. They also found rich veins of copper, at or close to the surface that could be mined by hand (pre industralization there was no other way of doing things). As time wore on these rich finds began to decrease as they were used up and various qualities of copper ore were then found and mined.
Today the only copper ore left has only trace amounts in it. Whole mountain tops have to be removed to get at the stuff and giant vehicles are needed to dig and transport the ore. This doesnt take into account the energy needed to process these large amounts.

Copper is just one example of how resource depletion works. The easiest, richest sources are used first to achieve the greatest profit margins and this is not only true of metals but many other natural products including fossil fuels.

The latest oil find in the Gulf of Mexico by BP has been described as a giant. 10 years ago such a field wouldnt have recieved much of a mention in the press. Its 7 miles down and underwater. Thats as far up as most commercial aircraft cruise at if you reversed it. It has been calculated that this find, at current oil usage, will last for 2 or 3 months but oil fields take time to develop and maximum production rate could take 10 years to develop.

Oil like other natural resouces is being depleted. The easy to get at good quality oil like the initial US finds in Pensylvania are gone and we are left trying to make civilization work with the dredges.

At some point oil extraction will become an energy sink. It will cost us more energy to extract than we actualy get back from it and at that point we wont bother to do it anymore.

There will always be oil in the Saudi Arabian Ghawar field, the largest by far in the world, because when the water cut becomes so high it is no longer profitable to extract and therfore will be left in place.

ZPG2: zero population and zero oil growth

2009-09-02T08:50:02Z

"The non fossil energy, or Green Energy Revolution, rationalised by climate change if not peak oil, now generates new consumer goods and services, industrial output, and the employment, profits and taxes they produce. ZPG however only seems to imply lower tax receipts and declining sales of the latest eco-friendly baby carriage with disk brakes. The consumer public totally approves the spinoffs from climate change and peak oil activism, or are told to love them, but are conversely easy to rouse against demographic doomsters.
Climate change and peak oil activists, we can note, were treated as doomsters until their ideas were "reappraised" and they became assets in generating a hoped-for new consumer boom. Also, to be sure, this "reapparaisal" was helped by the simple fact that climate change and oil resource depletion are real."

Read more here;

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49996

Robot Dinosaurs

2009-08-21T23:55:29Z

I remember having a conversation with my nephew Alex when he was about 6 or 7 years old which went like this;

Alex: "Uncle Neal. What would it be like to meet a dinosaur?"

Neal: "Well I think it would be quite scary because some of them were quite big Alex."

Alex: "What about a robot dinosaur then?"

Neal: "Isnt meeting a dinosaur exciting enough for you!"

Then today we were watching an advert on National Geographic advertising next week as Dino week with plenty of apropriate programs. So I point this out to Sil.

Neal: "Hey look Sil. All next week there will be programs about dinosaurs on. We can sit and watch that eh?"

Sil: Is that robot dinosaurs too?"

British House Prices to Fall

2009-08-20T23:09:01Z

“The Prime Minister and Chancellor have publicly stated that they want banks this year to lend at 2007 levels,” it said. “We think this is a crazy policy, given that too much debt was one of the prime reasons why the economy has its current problems.”

What do you think they are going to do when the only understand Kenysian economics? Their only solution is to expand and create more debt, which was the problem in the first place.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/houseprices/4974499/House-prices-could-fall-by-further-55-per-cent.html

Sil 4 Years

2009-08-18T17:52:59Z

Sil has a good interest in animals, mostly large African creatures, insects and dinosaurs. He also is always asking questions about how the body works especialy bones. The present that he picked out for himself in the toyshop was a pretend doctors toolkit. But his language skills are still behind and we take him to a speech therapist once a week now. She said to me on our last visit that he quite often is not listening to her. I said I have noticed this too but at other times he is very attentive and when I see this in him I make the most of it. The last time we were at the therapist he was ok for most of the session but during the last 5 minutes he became restless and disruptive. This continued after the session as we rode home with him constantly moving and making noises. That he has some sort of attention defficiency is almost a certainty with Francien now going to get herself diagnosed for it too.

Nina is now 2 and a half. She is much quicker with speaking and better with puzzles. Everyone is always saying what a smart girl she is. Shes now in the process of being potty trained and will sometimes sit on it but often celebrates after a tinkle by throwing the pot in the air!

Amber is still at school but not doing well. A common complaint is she is often late. She has taken up Thai boxing and has been sticking at it. Her trainer said shes getting better and has more of a talent for it than her friend Lynn. Amber has also been working as a chamber maid in a hotel. Shes had a few problems with being late but she is still holding down the job. She also has a boyfriend now but we havnt yet seen him. We think she is embarassed by the fact we live on a houseboat.

Francien is going to get herself diagnosed for ADD or ADHD. I dont know which one it is but there is a problem. She is never satisfied, can rarely apply herself to anything, is always late, can never throw anything away and loosing things. She filled in an online test and one of the questions was do you have lots of pots about containing odds and ends. We had to laugh because it is a common complaint of mine that she is always leaving pots full of crap all over the boat. Most people have a kitchen draw for these things. Every available container in our home is like that even our fruit bowl.

Elmo had an iritation near his arse which he kept nibbling and got worse. So we went to the vet and he now has to wear one of those cone collars. Because he is so big though it looks like a satelite dish and everyone laughs at him.

Billy (King Billy is his full name) and Alfie our two kittens have now had a litter of kittens themselves. We have 4 and they are all a good size and healthy. Were going to keep the grey one who I want to call Mouser (after the Grey Mouser fantasy hero sidekick). The neighbours will take another two so that leaves one to get rid of.