Living under the aspect of eternity

It is not often that I tend the low hanging fruits of the tree of philosophy. These include the tough existential questions like, "what is the point of life?", "is there an afterlife?", "is there a God?" and so on. I do not because I have done that already in extremis and I have developed few firm convictions on these matters. What's more, I don't think reason is capable of arriving at detailed trustworthy answers to these questions. But I will today mention a thought as a cat who has recently lost her mate sits on my lap. I will mention the thought which has time and again occurred to me in points of crisis and confusion about the purpose of life. That is that life should be lived as though each minute is a precious gift given from eternity to have for a moment. When I see the world this way I am brought to an awareness of the intrinsic good of all living beings that trouble to be. All living things whose origin and end are without time glimpse for a moment a brief sliver of eternity, in this time, in this hour. And we are all equal in this, brother. God knows no favorites here.

But I notice that when I am in that state of awareness, which is a solemn state of mind, that I suddenly see the world as it is and I am gladdened by it--or is it saddened by it--or perhaps it is at once gladdened and saddened by it. I find that I care about people more and about the quality of the interaction. For we are always free to improve the quality of our interactions and so to invest the world with the great gladness and compassion that we have for it when we see it as the precious, knotted, temporal fidgety fragment of reality that it is. Sub specie aeternitatis is how life, when properly understood, is to be lived.

cigarette ice cake 

Alcohol Burning Stove or White Gas?

I put two stoves to a test to determine approximate boil times on each unit. The first unit was a trangia alcohol burning stove which comes with a Swedish army surplus aluminum 1.5 liter pot and wind barrier. It is very easy to find these through army surplus stores for about 5 to 10 dollars. There are a number of websites that teach you how to build your own out of a tuna can or a pop can. I got mine through an army surplus dealer because I wanted the windscreen and the proper trangia stove. Admittedly, newer trangia models may have substantial performance improvements over this old-school military issue stove. And I suppose a more tricked out stove--more and larger holes, for instance--might speed up the boil time as well. The second unit was an MSR whisperlite running on white gas that cost me about 60 dollars in the late 1980's. The trangia is definitely easier to set up and you can have this stove burning within seconds. The MSR is a little more labor intensive and there is some flamework that must be contended with when priming the stove. I was surprised at how quickly I could get my old MSR stove up and running. The test times are recorded below. The MSR boiled the water in just under 9 minutes. The Trangia boiled the water in about 25 minutes. Obviously the MSR is a better choice for serious alpinism, but the Trangia is nice to use when I want to leave the stove on next to the car and have a lap on my skis before I have a cup of cocoa or if there is a long time to be had. The biggest disincentive is the cost of the fuel. Presently a bottle of blue HEET which is alcohol suitable for the trangia, a small bottle sells for about four to five dollars for a very small bottle. On the other hand, a gallon of coleman fuel costs (ten?) dollars. The trangia sucks up that methylated spirit, too. About as fast--maybe even faster than you would use white gas full blast on an MSR whisperlite. So, I think that the viability of the alcohol stove is at present limited by fuel costs and its relative inefficiency as compared with its white gas competitors. But this statement is relative only to my upper midwest retail pool. Check out these examples of globally available "meths" from a sports retailer in England: http://www.mark-ju.net/juliette/meths.htm

If boiling a pot of water on ethanol or methanol or methylated spirits is so dramatically different than boiling a pot of water on white gas," naptha" , kerosene, etc., we have pause to wonder about the viability of alcohol as a fuel source in other domains as well. This speaks to ethanol insofar as it is widely touted as a potential solution to our future hydrocarbon shortage. We may be able to run a city on gas and diesel generators, but there is no way that ethanol can be produced in the volume and with the cost benefit of petroleum.

But let's get a better picture of the efficiency--or rather, inefficiency-- of the spirits in question. In the first place one must consider that ethanol does not come into being without significant petroleum inputs. Whether registered in the natural gas in the fertilizer used to grow the crops (corn or grain) or in the diesel for the machinery to harvest the crop, the petroleum base is present both in the physical as well as the efficient uses of agronomy insofar as it is directed towards the production of spirits. Perhaps this "entropic outer ring", that is to say, this farming way of life that produces the spirit is desirable as a thing in itself. Prior to considering any of these details it is worth noting its energy per pound ratio.

I quote here some information on alcohol, note specifically its btu per pound:
"Alcohol: Although Alcohol is one of the only renewable liquid fuels commercially available to backpackers it suffers from having the lowest fuel economy. However, alcohol stoves are among both the lightest and cheapest stoves on the market and simple alcohol burners can be constructed for next to nothing (See below). Alcohol is the fuel with the lowest efficiency, 8419- 12960 BTU/Lb." Cf. the numbers for white gas: "White fuel: Also known by it’s proper name, Naphtha, White fuel is a chemically clean petroleum. While it shares the same chemistry as auto-fuel, it contains none of the additives and burns much cleaner. It is sold as Coleman fuel, or other specialty brands like MSR or Camplite and is infrequently available as cleaning gasoline in hardware and paint stores. The most volatile of liquid camp fuels, it is still very safe if used with caution. And is often the most recommended fuel for camp stoves. @18200 BTU/lb" Cf. with Kerosene: "Kerosene: Available almost everywhere around the world. Avoid using lantern or charcoal lighter fluid, as these are often dirtier and can clog jets. While being the next most reliable alternative to whitefuel, kerosene is very susceptible to the cold, taking longer to prime than white fuel and gelling in extreme weather, making stoves that only burn kerosene impractical for year round use. Kerosene is also a very sooty fuel, and you can expect to blacken your stove and pots quickly, with frequent of clogging. @18540 BTU/lb." Many thanks to Guerrilanews.com, from whom these quotes were taken.

So we can see that alcohol, while depending on hydrocarbons as inputs in its production process, gives back through its product such as "methylated spirits", anhydrous alcohol, denatured alcohol, etc., about half the btu's per pound of the petroleums such as kerosene, "paraffin", white gas, etc. This difference can be felt, especially on cold days when you need to get warm liquid fast or when you are melting snow for water in sub-freezing temperatures. And it certainly makes you pause when you realize how seriously ethanol is bandied about as a potential solution to the coming petroleum shortages.

Keep posted as I test a primus kerosene stove against the MSR Whisperlite.

Two pots, approximately 1.4 liters of cool tapwater a piece.

Both stoves have just been lit. Time: 3:39 p.m. 

Air temperature: 35 degrees; Time : 3:41 p.m. 

Boilage on the MSR Whisperlite 8 minutes in 

Boilage on the trangia 17 minutes after the msr

a little left over spirit 

primus stove belonging to F. Nansen 

The Significance of the Kelo Decision in the Age of Peak Oil

In a recent supreme court ruling of June 23, 2005 the Supreme Court held against the petitioner, Kelo, the claim that the taking of her property by New London Towship violated the takings clause of the Fifth ammendment. She had argued that economic interests were not public goods. Justive Stevens gave the opionion, Souter, Ginsburg, Kennedy all concurred. It said, in effect that economic interests were definitely public goods. (More) ....This decision is a landmark to be sure. And I wanted to open the question of what it might mean in an age of economic catastrophes such as are associated with some of the extreme models of an age of peak-post peak oil. There are some good things that seem to emerge in the wake of this decision. First, what it seems to suggest is that land ownership and its use is here being understood as subject to democratic control through the mechanisms of the state. Private Tyrranies and Monarchies would be strictly forbidden. Instead the common good, that humble and undecorous creature of generalities, would here guide the redistribution of the public sphere.

Berlin's positive and negative liberty, liberty as interference, and introduction to the idea of libertas as civitas

"I am free to the degree to which no human being interferes with my activity'." Berlin, 1958:7.

This is Berlin's statement on the meaning of negative liberty. He also commends a concept of positive liberty which states that I am free to the extent that I achieve "self-mastery with its suggestion of a man divided against himself." (Berlin, 1958:19)

So, both positive and negative liberty involve interference but not necessarily anything concerning the quality of that interference. All infringements, whether good or bad, are seen as interference and therefore as contrary to liberty. But this version of liberty based as it is solely on the concept of interference without reference to the larger set of values within which interference is both possible and necessary. This is the realm of the rational and democratic use of force, through the law, to impart regularity and stability. A rule of law, an enforcement capability, the place for commerce to grow, etc...

Philip Petit in Republicanism describes the basis of a concept of freedom as non-domination, that is to say, a person enjoys liberty if she is free from another who dominates her. To dominate somebody is to "1. have the capacity to interfere 2. on an arbitrary basis 3. in certain choices that the other is in a position to make." Petit, Republicanism, p. 52. (Don't be fooled by the term "republican". This is pure political theory and not "party politics" which bear little resemblance to the nomenclature found in these texts.) So, liberty as non-domination focuses on the principles which underly non-arbitrary bases of interference as examples of restrictions, for instance, which may promote civic virtue and the common good and are therefore examples of a form of interference which, in fact, promotes Berlin's "positive liberty" and republican liberty as well. So, interference, should it be the necessary adjunct of a just basic structure which is subject to democratic decision making procedures and even moral persuasion may paradoxically promote the positive interests and liberty of the people to form civil society. Where interference is thought to be arbitrary and without basis and without democratic control there is a substantial truncation of the equality of the individual citizen. But where the political culture and civic culture and dominant legal space of the society is concerned, the citizen has possession of an identity which is not dominated by any thing other than laws for which she agrees to live under and are rational to her as a free and equal person. This is what Petit is getting at. Here below is an quote by him.

Philip Pettit on 'Liberty as Non-domination'

"Given that the fulfilment of the three original conditions (i.e., a person is said to dominate another to the extent that 1. they have the capacity to interfere 2. on an arbitrary basis 3. in certain choices that the other is in a position to make.) --their fulfilment in a noticeable degree--is generally going to be a matter of something approaching common knowledge, the domination to which the conditions bear testimony will have an important subjective and intersubjective significance. Domination is generally going to involve the awareness of control on the part of the powerful, the awareness of vulnerability on the part of the powerless, and the mutual awareness--indeed, common awareness among all the parties to the relationship--of this consciousness on each side. The powerless are not going to be able to look the powerful in the eye, conscious as each will be--and conscious as each will be of the other's consciousness--of this asymmetry. Both will share an awareness that the powerless can do nothing except by the leave of the powerful: that the powerless are at the mercy of the powerful and not on equal terms. The master-slave scenario will materialize, and th asymmetry between the two sides will be a communicative as an objective reality. Conscious of this problem, John Milton deplored 'the perpetual bowings and cringings of abject people' that he thought were inevitable in monarchies." Philip Petit, Republicanism A Theory of Freedom and Government, pp. 60-61.

Robert Kennedy on the state of the urban environment

Robert Kennedy speaks on the state of the urban environment in a one hour high speed broadcast from wgbh boston which you can access through http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=1759 Kennedy's talk is brilliant. You get the Kennedy Genius coming through him and his values for the environment make him a man with the right vision. First, his analysis of the Bush administrations silent attrition on the environmental protections of the last fifty years is first rate. Just scathing critique and on point all the way down the list. Second, his history of the concept of Nature as a public trust and a public good is a story of the presence of nature in the American character through its early writes such Hawthorne and Thoreau. Kennedy's account of the topic could bring you to tears how truthful and deep it is. maybe Kennedy will be a future Director of the Epa under an Democratic administration. It is for this that you should listen.

Cedar River, UP Michigan 

Tea-colored flow 

A late hen-king, Cedar River, UP

The second of the season's steelhead

Highsticking egg patterns, a peachish one with a red embryo,
and the other, a yellow with a peach embryo,
through the grey green choppy riffles into the dark black holes,
packed with two leads crimped to surgeons loop tailings,
about nine and a half feet of leader on 10 lb. tippet.
Rolling loops of weight, chucking the lead up into the flow.
Letting the lead sink the tippet with the egg patterns tied back to back
into the riffles and into the hole.
Strike indicator floating, mending the line,
throwing some mends,doing some fondue mojo.....
letting the float go through the hole

the line tugs and I set the hook,
a rock...
pull and undo,
let the float go,
pull up the line and
roll cast the whole lot
up into the throat of the hole
for another round

and the line stopped, I pulled
the line was set and the steelhead rolled.
blue red striped hull of the beast shimmered in the light
the bright sharp olive flecked back and proud line
Shaped mandible of arrowhead strength and precision
Running upstream right at my feet

pulled slack and held the tip of the rod high
keeping it taught when the
steelhead went for another run dowstream

It was an extraordinarily well disciplined and choreographed run.
As if he had done this routine before, a regular song-and-dance man
"C'mon boss, pull me into shore and unhook me for more."
That I did, admiring the form and
let him loose, drifting back into the hole.

On Kunstler's "They Lied to Us!"

I have reprinted James Howard Kunstler's "They Lied to Us!" below. Kunstler argues that we should not be so surprised that they lied to us about wmd for we ourselves are to blame for this. Although I do agree with him, I also think that the belated interest by the media in the Plame debacle, the recent closed door senate session by Harry Reid, and the call (by some) to begin fact finding proceedings towards impeachment all should be undertaken. I even think that we were not deceived by this, but let ourselves be "deceived" because we figured that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal would work things out, however strange it may seem, in our best interest. On an unconscious level we sort of struck a bargain within ourselves that went something like this: "yeah, I know the intelligence on wmd that they are presenting looks a little bit contrived and it happens to coincide with our deployment of troops in Afghanistan and yes we are pissed off about 9/11 so, well yes, this is probably a strategem to forward our resource interests in the middle east and our aims of global hegemony, SO Therefore I'll go along with this and WISH that it were true and maybe it IS true.....because indirectly it will benefit me as I am a citizen on the side of the hegemon (bully)" I think that deep in our heart we knew--all of us knew--that this war was unjustified and yet we wanted to see the shock and awe from our darkened rooms watching CSPAN knowing that our gas habit would be further secured by our military. I think we knew, you know, in our hearts we knew. And it was like Hume said, "Reason is the slave of the passions". All of our critical faculties were surrendered upon that hideous passion of ours to keep the addiction alive, to keep "globalization" moving forward, to believe that our American way of life had finally risen above the limits of nature. But I should mention that despite this, I think we should let ourselves go ahead and pretend we were "mislead" and go through with the proceedings and special hearings and so on and see how far we can go towards correcting our selves, just to see how bad it really was. Perhaps we will even get to watch an impeachment! Wouldn't that be grand!

Source: James Howard Kunstler, kunstler.com
October 31, 2005 The cry across the land grows increasingly shrill: "THEY LIED TO US!" For going on three years, the American public, especially on the political left, has been complaining that the Iraq War was some kind of a shuck-and-jive. The Bush government pulled the wool over everybody's eyes. They ran a vicious propaganda operation. We were fooled by all those fairy tales about WMDs, Saddam and Osama, and African radioactive yellowcake. Now, through the fog of the Valerie Plame affair and the indictment of Scooter Libby, the cry is reaching a crescendo: "THEY LIED TO US!" Being a Democrat myself, and therefore nominally in opposition to Bush-and-Cheneyism, one has to contend with all sorts of embarrassing nonsense emanating from one's own side. In Sunday's New York Times op-ed section, for instance, Nicholas Kristoff wrote: "Mr. Cheney, we need a stiff dose of truth." I'm sorry to tell you this Nick (and the rest of my homies), but what Jack Nicholson's character said in that court martial movie some years back still applies: you can't stand the truth. If the American public could stand the truth, we would stop calling it the Iraq War and rename it the War to Save Suburbia. Of all the things that Bush and Cheney have said over the last six years, the one thing the Democratic opposition has not challenged is the statement that "the American way of life is not negotiable." They're just as invested in it as everybody else. The Democrats complain about the dark efforts by Bush and Cheney to cook up a rationale for the war. Guess what? The Democrats desperately need something to oppose besides the truth. If they would shut up about WMDs for five minutes and just take a good look around, they'd know exactly why this war started. When the American people, Democrat and Republican both, decided to build a drive-in utopia based on incessant easy motoring and massive oil dependency, who lied to them? When tens of millions of Americans bought McHouses thirty-four miles away from their jobs in Boston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Dallas, who lied to them? When American public officials adopted the madness of single-use zoning and turned the terrain of this land into a tragic crapscape of strip malls on six-lane highways, who lied to them? When American school officials decided to consolidate all the kids in gigantic centralized facilities serviced by fleets of yellow buses that ran an average of 150,000 miles per year per school, who lied to them? When Americans trashed their public transit and railroad system, who lied to them? When Americans let WalMart gut Main Street, who lied to them? When Bill and Hillary Clinton bought a suburban villa in farthest reaches of northern Westchester County, New York, who lied to them? You want truth, Progressive America? Here's the truth: the War to Save Suburbia entailed an unavoidable strategic military enterprise. Saving Suburbia required that the Middle East be pacified or at least stabilized, because two-thirds of the world's remaining oil is there (and in case you haven't figured this out by now, Suburbia runs on oil, and the oil has to be cheap or we couldn't afford to run it). The three main oil-producing countries in the Middle East, going from west-to-east are Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. We had serious relationship problems with all of them at various times, and they with each other, leading at frequent intervals to a lot of instability in that region, and consequently trouble for us trying to run Suburbia on cheap oil (which they sold us in large quantities). After nineteen religious maniacs from the Middle East, mostly Arabs (though unaffiliated officially with any state in their actions) flew planes into our skyscrapers and a big government building, we had to kick someone's ass. We decided to start by kicking the ass of Afghanistan, where one particular mischievous maniac, Mr. bin Laden, had set up operations connected with 9/11. It wasn't enough. We never could find Mr. bin Laden, Afghanistan wasn't really in the Middle East, and whatever else they were, the Afghans weren't Arabs. We had to find somebody else's ass to kick to reinforce the idea that religious maniacs unaffiliated with any particular state could not pull off lethal stunts like 9/11 without bringing substantial pain down on their own home places. To put it plainly, we had to kick some Arab ass. We picked Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Not because he had anything to do with 9/11-- which we couldn't pin on any Muslim nation -- but because Saddam's Baathist regime was Arab, and the same general religious brand as the guys who did 9/11, Sunni Muslim, and because Saddam had already proven to be a freelance mischievous maniac quite in his own right over the years, worth getting rid of, and most of all (from a strategic point-of-view) because Iraq was the perfect place geographically to open a US police station in the Middle East. It was right between those two other troublemakers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and setting up an American military presence between them, it was hoped, would moderate and influence their behavior, and discourage them from doing anything to interfere with the indispensable supplies of oil that we desperately required to run our beloved, non-negotiable Suburbia. It was even hoped, by a band of extreme idealists in the US Government, that in the process of setting up a military presence in Iraq, we could convert this troubled, fractious nation into a peaceful, cohesive, beneficent democracy, establishing a shining example, blah, blah. . . . But such is the nature of idealism. I apologize for taking two long paragraphs to tell you the true origins of the War to Save Suburbia, but it was, after all, only two paragraphs, and the truth is sometimes not so simple. The American people have gotten exactly the war that they bargained for. The outstanding obvious question is not by what wicked and recondite means the War to Save Suburbia got started, but how come once started, we did such a poor job of resolving it, specifically why, after nearly three years, our vaunted technological mastery couldn't get the electricity running more than a few hours a day in Baghdad, why we let squads of redneck moron enlisted personnel beat up on prisoners and videotape their own antics, and why we can't even get the oil equipment in good enough shape so the Iraqis can sell us the oil we still need to run our non-negotiable way of life? So, as a card-carrying Democrat and as a Progressive who would like to see his country successfully adapt to the changing realities of the world, I propose we stop making ourselves ridiculous by whining about being lied to, because we've only been lying to ourselves. We walked into the War to Save Suburbia with, as the old saying goes, our eyes wide shut.

Sweden to break oil dependency by 2020

Trust the far thinking Swedes to do what is right. Read the following plan by the Swedish government to eliminate oil dependency by 2020: http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/3212/a/51058