Tom,
May I post excerpts of this wonderful post to the NEA site for the NYTimes? I
will list your name or not. It's up to you. Or I will not post it if you wish.
But I would find it very useful in channeling that discussion away from the
nonsense posed by the radical conservatives. They call themselves Libertarians
down here and they are grabbing 50% of the media commentary on the "blow job" even
though their platform is 100% in support of total privacy which speaks tons for
their integrity. As a party they have dropped behind the greens but they control
some of the biggest names in the news media. Their platform is at
http://www.lp.org/lp-docs.html
and I would highly recommend that the list read it. That platform has more than a
little to do with the future of work in the American world anyway. As Ronald
Reagan pointed out, he who controls the media, will ultimately control the
population. Clothed in the cliches of their platform are some very un-democratic
notions.
Also there has been little said about the educational/cultural/religious background
of the prosecutor Ken Starr. What I do not understand is how members of other
religious groups whose sexual practices do not conform to the hyper-fundamentalist
views of the Special Prosecutor's camp do not realize how dangerous that mentality
is for the survival of their groups. The President, VP, Senate Majority Leader,
and the Speaker of the House are all fundamentalists. If they will treat their own
in the fashion they are treating the President, as a result of an alleged
indiscretion, how will look upon the sexual proclivities of people that the U.S. is
sending a billion dollars in foriegn aid to? And once it is looked at in that
light. What are the possibilities of schism in the U.S. itself. It scares me to
death.
regards
REH
Tom Walker wrote:
> Jay Hanson wrote,
>
> >Robert L. Hickerson wrote an interesting piece about M. King Hubbert.
>
> Thanks to Jay for bringing up Robert Hickerson's essay on King Hubbert. In
> connection with my own cause celebre, the reduction of work time, I would be
> remiss if I failed to point out Hickerson's penultimate paragraph, before
> his personal conclusions and recommendations:
>
> "Hubbert goes on to state that following a transition, the work required of
> each individual, need be no longer than about 4 hours per day, 164 days per
> year, from the ages of 25 to 45. Income will continue until death.
> 'Insecurity of old age is abolished and both saving and insurance become
> unnecessary and impossible.'"
>
> It's also worth noting that Hubbert's analysis comes from his 1936 article
> "Man Hours -- A Declining Quantity". For those who are familiar with
> Hubbert's prescient estimates of oil extraction peaks -- obviously a major
> influence on Jay -- it's interesting to find a very similar analysis applied
> in the 1936 article on hours as work.
>
> In 1948, Hubbert made his first public prediction that U.S. domestic oil
> production would peak in the late 1960s/early 1970s. But, as quoted by
> Robert Clark in 1983 interview, "I first worked this out in the middle 1930s
> but the first time I really wrote it down was for the AAAS convention in 1948."
>
> That "middle 1930s" sounds remarkably close to the 1936 publication date of
> the Man Hours article. I suspect that what Hubbert did was apply the same
> concept to two facets of the economy -- hours of work and energy supply. I
> don't want to take anything away from Hubbert's scientific achievements, but
> it is my contention that Hubbert essentially confirmed ancient traditional
> wisdom about the perniciousness of compound interest.
>
> Hubbert's arc of petroleum depletion is, after all, constructed to
> illustrate the interaction of two principles: the boundless exponential
> growth of compound interest and the finite quantity of extractable resources.
>
> But, as Hickerson notes in one of his personal conclusions: "Increasingly
> desperate means will be used by those who think we can continue to have
> business as usual."
>
> An odd thought occurred to me about the 1970 peak of U.S. domestic
> production. The oil crisis didn't register on the political map and prices
> of oil didn't go up relatively until the OPEC embargo in October 1973, a
> full three years after the peak. Meanwhile what emerged as a major political
> scandal was a "third rate burglary" at the Watergate. Once again, as we
> approach an even more auspicious global peak, the energy crisis is not on
> the political map. This time, the headline issue is a blow job. Talk about
> Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
>
> I hear they just named the CIA headquarters after George Bush.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tom Walker
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