thoughts to mike

Dear Mike,

Great talking with you last night! I really want to move our conversations away from the collapse of civilization and on to the resiliance of cities, please help me with this.

I understand you want to have objective standards you can use to inform policy, for the benefit of all and not just because that state's senator is on the appropriations committee. You are doomed to failure with such an unrealistic attitute, you should know this by now. Wise up, bro!

Cities are incredibly resiliant. What kills them is when the resources which support them fail, but then civilization collapses. Anything else, and they just re-build. Can you name one city abandoned in the last 500 years because of a disaster? Heck, people still live in Rome two millenia after the barbarians sacked the place.

Phoenix will run out of water. The water problem is really really hard to solve. I think we will end up drinking Lake Superior, and water pipelines will be the next big business. Drink, baby, Drink!

Energy is not so hard. Like it or not, we are going to go nuclear, and build more efficient houses/buildings. Green architecture.

Food is an issue, read on vertical farming. Just as you can use a city as an energy souce (see efficient houses, above), so can you use it as a farm. Get the transport on non-(locally)-emitting technology (bikes or electric vehicles) and emmissions are not a problem, so the food is ok to eat.

Yes, you can and must think of cities as individuals, just as you think of people as individuals, but one must also realize that they form networks. The network rises or falls together.

Do not step on your brother! We do not step on your brother!!

The debt book: Read this interview. Have Cara preach a sermon on it. Have her send me her sermon notes, I would like to know what she thinks.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/what-is-debt-%E2%80%93-an-interview-with-economic-anthropologist-david-graeber.html

Tiger's thoughts on the next step in US politics:
Latest thoughts on the political process: Apparently there has been a sea change in public opinion in the last month, similar to 9/11 if not quite as intense, which the polls are only beginning to pick up. Due to the deficit extension circus, few people are able to take the US govt. seriously anymore. It's not a question of "throw the bums out," because the whole process is seen as broken. The political logic, it seems to me, is as follows: 9% projected unemployment essentially dooms the present administration. Perry & Romney cancel each other out, and both are seen as deeply complicit in the current political system, in which people have lost all faith. GOP strategists begin to realize neither has sufficient pull to prevail in what should be an easy win. They turn to Petraeus (if he's willing), as a new Eisenhower, now that he's being somewhat civilianized as CIA director (c.f. Eisenhower's brief stint as President of Columbia University), and the public goes along in the democratic equivalent of a military coup, in which "the politicians" as a whole are ousted. Not that logic, political or otherwise, always prevails, but this is how it looks to me at the present.

Oh, and collapse equals opportunity.

Cheers,

+glenn

--
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Here miracles become marvels, and
marvels recurring wonders.
-- William Beebe

Dr. Glenn Lawyer
+352 661 967 244
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics
Campus E1 4
66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
http://bioinf.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~lawyer