In the News

I've always been a bit of an apocalypse fanatic. Even as a child my reading material was made up of the ancient Mayan prophecies, Nostradamus, and any sci-fi novel about apocalyptic events or the post-apocalyptic future. I'm still a sucker for disaster movies. I always just assumed that it was coming, usually I told people that I wanted to be a hermit when I grew up and live on a self-sustaining, apocalypse-ready homestead. I think I cherished the idea that a full world break down would get me out the 9-5 prison sentence, make life a little more interesting, take us all back to the basics of survival, make life more passionate and fulfilling. Even as I sort of outgrew that dream the belief that the apocalypse (or at least a significant melt-down of society as we know it) would occur during my lifetime has always persisted in the back of my head. I think I honestly subconsciously take it into account whenever considering a job or a geographical move. When global warming started gaining ground, it didn't surprise me. When the peak oil issue hit the main stream I read up on it voraciously and educated myself about the likely consequences (rising food prices, rising travel costs, increased localization of economy, migration back to city centers, the collapse of the housing market and some major stocks). And now that those things are coming to pass I want to laugh at people and say , ha ha you didn't know this was coming? But in reality other than reading about it, keeping a small veggie garden and buying a car that gets 30 mpg, I haven't done anything to prepapre for it at all.

But I am enjoying watching the news, they do love scare tactics after all. It's really interesting to see the effects of rising gas prices and the housing debacle. For instance, Portland has lifted it s ban on skateboards because of gas prices, employers are allowing people to work four 10 hour days instead of 5 and 8, and allowing more people to telecommute. The housing foreclosures are sadder. More pets are being abandoned and left at the pound, and consequently euthanized. It makes me cry. Also, there's an epidemic of potentially west nile virus carrying mosquitoes. This is due to all of the houses foreclosed on that have pools in the backyard. Apparently a large percentage. And people don't drain them when they leave, and the bank doesn't drain them, now they are full of dead animals, algae, and insect larvae. On the news they showed various govt employees going around to the pools, some pouring all kinds of chemicals, others adding fish and frogs and things to the pools to eat the larvae. Why not just drain the pools? wouldn't that solve the problem? Why do we need to turn them into a whole ecosystem? Or use thousands of gallons of poisonous chemicals? Cities were complaining about the cost of taking care of these messes, why is it the city's responsibility? Require the banks to drain the pools. Duh. Is that so unheard of? People complain about govt welfare to the poor, and not requiring enough from the poor to take responsibility for themselves, but the govt spends way more money making life easy and cheap for banks and corporations. Wake up and smell the chlorine.

Anyway, how about those bank closings? IndyMac makes the 5th major bank to fail this year. People are lined up on the sidewalk waiting to withdraw their savings. Which is mostly unnecessary since the govt insures each account up to $100,000 (how long will that last?). Of course, if you've got much more than that you stand to lose as much as 50 cents on the dollar from the rest of it. And of course now there's the Fannie Mae/ Freddie Mac debacle and govt bail out. And analysts predict at least 150 more banks will fail in the next 12 months. Let's all go back to keeping our cash in our mattresses, that way at least it will provide some padding while the dollar goes down the toilet. Buy gold. I love those late night commercials targeting the elderly, encouraging them to send in all their gold jewelry and turn it into cash. I'd probably pull all my money out of my bank, if there was more than a few hundred dollars in there. I really want to sell my car and get a diesel, I know how to convert it to run on veggie oil, and I could learn to brew biodiesel...

On the radio this morning they were interviewing this guy named John who claims he figured how to run his car on fumes. The tag line was 463 mpg. Sounds pretty awesome. It has been tested, but the test showed that the car ran14.8 miles on 4 oz of fuel. So under test conditions, if you ran a whole gallon thru it, theoretically you could go 463 miles. He says that he runs his geo and his motorcycle on it, and sometimes a generator. He's been interviewed by various news organizations, radio networks, and NBC tv, but says so far nothing has really come of it. When asked if anyone had offered to buy this miracle he said that a someone from a Saudi Arabian oil company offered him $4 million for it. But he turned them down because they wanted to buy the rights to keep it off the market, and he wants it to make it to the market. The radio host basically said that if his claims were in fact true, he'd probably be dead within the year. Unfortunately, I wouldn't doubt it. John said he got the idea while in vocational school for auto maintenance. He came across a book written by the inventor of the internal combustion engine. Apparently, at its inception, it was expected that the engine would run on fumes, that the fuel itself would be vapor by the time it reached the cylinder. So John figured, if that was the original idea there ought to be a way to make it work. He says now he's found it. I really wonder how many other people over the years have come up with similar ideas or other ways to increase gas mileage and been totally put down by car and oil companies. And I think it's pretty probable that if more than one person has come up with this stuff that the car or oil companies already know about it, but have been hiding it, hoping no one else figures it out. Which makes me wonder when exactly they'll be ready to bust it out. How low will oil supplies get, how high will gas prices get before it's lucrative to them to release the technology? This guy's phone number was 941-380-2183. I think that's right. He can fix up your car for you, so he says. I hope it's true, it would be good for the environment, and stick it to the car and oil companies, who really deserve to be driven into the ground. On the other hand it would really increase the evils of globalization, and people wouldn't have to start thinking about their lifestyles and the effects of how they live.

But I ramble. I can get off my soap box now. It's almost time for lunch.