...the greatest album ever made.

Mark Knopfler’s guitar solos are engrained in my subconscience. Listening to this two-disc set (I had the original double LP) again after 20 years made my hair stand up. It was like feeling a ghost pass through me.

I finished Jim Kunstler’s The Long Emergency a few days ago and I’m feeling much better today, thank you very much. Kunstler cracks me up on occasion. His critical writing on American urban design and its afflictions in The Geography of Nowhere was sublime. His humorous “Eyesore of the Month” is required viewing. His further exposition on the maladies of American culture have been illuminating. But I must say that his current obsession with Peak Oil has gone too far.

The not-so-subtle subtitle of his latest work of “non-fiction” is Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. In the book he predicts a bleak future for the planet and mankind. Either today, tomorrow, or the next day the world will reach its peak production of oil and, thus, begin a rapid and rapturous decent into chaos and ruin. The global economy, fueled by cheap and plentiful oil, will cease operation. The “drive-in utopia” of the American landscape will erode rapidly. Many businesses will close up shop, jobs will be lost, and an entire way of life will vanish. Civil unrest combined with rampant epidemic disease and malnutrition will severely cull the world’s population. It’s gonna get ugly, and fast.

In its place will rise a society much like pre-industrial Europe. Agriculture will be the principle industry, and it will be small-scale and intensely local. Those with useful skills, like farming, carpentry, and bread-making, will prosper. Working animals will be of great value. Materials with intrinsic value, like gold, will be used as currency. Feudalism isn’t out of the question.

Or not.

Predicting the future is hard. Really hard. Most of us like to think that we know what the future will bring. It makes us feel warm and fuzzy, and sometimes fearful and depressed. But most of the time we’re really bad at predicting the future of really big things, like the fate of mankind. Kunstler isn’t any better than the rest of us in making predictions, he just has a lot to say about it, and he’s exceptionally good at saying it. The trouble is, he takes it too far. The Long Emergency includes a fair number of footnotes citing sources. Unfortunately, a lot of his sources tend to be fellow “peakers” who long ago sealed our fates when they saw how soon the oil will run out. (Aside: yes, the oil is going to run out sooner-or-later. Kunstler believes it to be sooner than we think and sooner than we’re prepared for it to happen, thus, the gloom and doom. Some believe we will hit peak production this decade or the next, others believe we’ve already peaked. No one knows for sure.) His other sources often include magazine articles written by journalists. He rarely goes after the primary studies glossed over in these articles. It weakens his argument to not dig deeper. And he’s prone to exaggeration. In the chapter titled “Nature Bites Back: Climate Change, Epidemic Disease, Water Scarcity, Habitat Destruction, and the Dark Side of the Industrial Age,” he really reaches the extent of his knowledge when he discuses the unusually cool summer of 2003 in the Northeast:

For instance, while Europe broiled in the summer of 2003, the northeast United States breezed through an eerily cool summer, with few days over 90 degrees all season. An altered jet stream pattern prevented southerly air from penetrating the Northeast. In fact, on one of the very few torrid days that whole summer, August 14, a surge in demand for air conditioning took down the electric grid in the Northeast.

In fact, the conditions of the blackout of August 14, 2003, were a lot more complex than a few people cranking up their air conditioners. You can find a great deal of information regarding the blackout on the Dept. of Energy’s website, where even a casual glance gives you ample reason to distrust Kunstler. And this is but one small example of the type of jumping-to-conclusions that Kunstler is given to. The net effect of all these little simplifications is the overall dismantling of his thesis. His persuasiveness loses its power.

The final blow for me, which led me to dismiss most of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that had been boiling up inside me as I read The Long Emergency, was near the end of the book (p. 296) where he describes, in gross detail, what living in the long emergency will be like. It would seem the only part of the continental U.S. that stands a chance of a near-term positive outcome is The Pacific Northwest, which happens to be the part of the country in which I live. He considers the climate “very favorable” and rich in agricultural land. We have lots of water. Large urban areas, such as Seattle and Vancouver, will suffer the vicissitudes of scarcity, but otherwise things are looking up for rural and small town Cascadia. Except for one thing, pirates! Aaarrr, that’s right me hearties, our vast unprotected coastline is simply asking for molestation “by military or paramilitary seaborne adventurers originating from the far side of the Pacific rim.” It’s the plank for us, for sure.

I’ll tell you, the day I see Asian pirates attacking Alki Beach is the day I eat this book.

Infosec, cyberwar goodness.

In the years between the two world wars, the future held more promise than peril, but there was evidence of things unseen that would transfigure our unquestioned trust in a safe future.

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula. It made me shiver, repeatedly.

In a networked world, anything can change in an instant, and sometimes everything does.

This is the low-down for hacks such as myself.

I love Gladwell in The New Yorker doing his short-form thing. Blink seems to suffer from a lack of long-form depth. He repeats and repeats and repeats his case.

Now back in the first sentence, we learned that I really like Gladwell when he does his…. ;-)

Anyway, now that the “tipping point” meme has reached epidemic preportions, I wonder if “thin-slicing” will be the new hot buzzword among marketers, business managers, and the chattering classes? Will it penetrate the vernacular to the degree “tip” has? Example:

“I got the impression that Bob had already thin-sliced Alice and wasn’t going to change his opinion one way or the other.”

It could happen.