Sep 7, 2006

flintys birthday bash small vids 4

this is Karl, showing us how he can dance! hahaha! GO SON!! ... (more)

posted by golly at 11:45 PM

1 Comments:

Blogger Joe @ Joe.com said...

Some food for thought:

Growth had been the fundamental pattern of the culture of civilization long before Alexander conquered the "known world." The difference now is that the growth is approaching its outer limits and soon will have nothing left to feed on. We have come to the final cycle in which civilization will fall into entropy because it cannot any longer be sustained. There are no more virgin continents to exploit. There are few remaining forests to cut down so that new soils can be exploited and exhausted. In addition to this, the world population is now counted in the billions. The world has never before known this kind of exponentially increasing volume of flow and consumption of food, resources and industrial poisons.

Because of these interactive forces world society is trapped within a system of cultural assumptions and patterns of behavior from which it cannot extricate itself. There is no way out. There will be a collapse of civilization. There is no question that there will be future famines in the ecologically devastated and desertified region of Ethiopia with its exploding human population, just as there is no question that civilization which eats up its resources and poisons the earth, will collapse. We are examining the process now in order to gain knowledge, because we are the people who will be attempting to live through the climax.

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Pundits and propagandists of the Chamber of Commerce and the "boomers" of the industrial system are fond of claiming the great productivity of industrial agriculture by pointing out how few farmers there are in ratio to the population. In reality, the most efficient systems are the most "primitive." Industrial agriculture is by far the most energy inefficient system of food production.

Hundreds of industrial workers participate with each industrial farmer. There are the oil field workers, oil refinery workers, the truck drivers, the plastics plant workers, the workers who create the packaging of farm produce, the packagers, distributors, wholesalers, delivery people and retail clerks. An enormous amount of machinery is required for this process. All machinery is produced by factories somewhere, by people who must be counted in the food production network. All the seed is dependent upon years of development by cadres of technical workers. The drying, freezing, canning, distribution and other processes rely upon an infrastructure of transportation and industry. If the food is from irrigated fields the input of effort stretches back through the digging of canals, the building of dams, laying out of the electrical systems to run the pumps, the planning of these systems and often the disruption of many lives that formerly occupied the space where the dam and its accouterments now exist. The industrial agriculturist does not simply go out to the swidden plot by his village and eat a fruit from the tree. Industrial agriculture is not just a planting of seed; it is a vast complex, expensive, energy intensive, destructive system that will ultimately collapse without possibility of recovery.

From The Final Empire: The Collapse Of Civilization and The Seed For The Future

11:47 PM  

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