[-empyre-] survival

[Barrie <barriec@optusnet.com.au>]

Dear Alan,

A number of things are occurring and converging that will force, I believe,
some kind of hopefully positive reaction toward sanity in your country and
the rest of the world.

The Greenback is slowly declining as a reserve currency because of the huge
deficit in the US. This can't go on forever because your economy will
collapse and other countries will desert you. You have to consider the rise
of China and India as economic giants. The European union is 450 million
people, all these people need oil, heat, food and economic stability.

Global warming is finally being viewed as a very real threat to the lives
and economies of most nations because, amongst other things, of the
uncertainty of food supplies and the dangers of an altered environment -
floods, drought. 10 years is seen as the time frame in which we have a
chance to do something, pretty difficult really. Water resources will become
critical. The oceans could become toxic/acidic for fish stocks.

Fossil fuel resources are going to bottom out this century, peak oil is
probably going to occur in the next 10 years, it's already expensive, after
peak it will become rarer and impossibly expensive. Very few countries are
planning and doing something about changing their energy economy, Iceland is
an exception, they are working toward a hydrogen, hydro, geothermal energy
economy.

Put all this together and you have a pretty formidable 'force for change' to
deal with, it can't be ignored, it simply can't be ignored. Currency,
climate change and energy, all are out of balance.

We need to work toward ecologically sustainable living, energy and water
self sufficient housing, renewable energy transport etc and of course this
is happening, but much too slowly. You could say that the planet will sort
us out in the end, like it did with the dinosaurs. But we have a choice.

I have four kids and two grandchildren, I would like to think they will have
a viable future.

Meanwhile there's archiving. I believe its extremely valuable to archive
media and other materials because we are archiving ideas and ideas are what
its all about. Ideas and expressions of the spirit of being human. A kind of
oral tradition only with the web it becomes a continuum that will grow and
grow and evolve.

As much as we hate it artists have always existed on the fringe, I've been
on $A25,000 per annum for the last 7 years, and that with semi dependant
kids.

Don't build enclaves, build connections between people, like this list.

Barrie, on 8.2.05 05:00 PM, Alan Sondheim at sondheim@panix.com wrote:

> 
> 
> I don't know if you have seen the new Bush proposed budget. Military
> wildly goes up, everything else - funding for school programs, medicaid,
> farm aid, amtrak, on and on, either goes down or is eliminated altogether.
> 
> What does this has to do with anything here? The United States is heading
> towards a new kind of fascism, with Democrats effectively rendered
> meaningless, and with the poor increasingly unable to survive - at all.
> Bush has already opened up the Alaska wilderness for drilling and the
> National Forests for exploitation by local groups.
> 
> BBC predicts a catastrophic US economy within 4-5 years. The point is that
> we have been living, as best we can - I'm surviving in NYC on around $15k
> a year - on the margins, which are increasingly shrinking. It's not going
> to be a question of archiving, but a question of our very survival.
> 
> Make no mistake about it - it's fascism, dictatorial, of a different sort;
> the lumpenproletariat, to borrow an old-fashioned phrase, can scream all
> it wants, even publish; the same for the proletariat: the difference is
> that none of this will have any efficacy, any voting power, any say in a
> world increasinglydefined by the Republican planetary slaughterhouse of
> nations, women, gay, animals, plants, any religion other than ugly
> Christian fundamentalism, and so forth and so on. This is a war, and we
> are unarmed and disorganized. There will be nothing left if something
> isn't done.
> 
> And archiving of art? No matter what side you're on, it's a privilege, and
> I doubt that, say, my work will survive - after all there's nudity and
> crisp political vulgarity among other things.
> 
> Who will decide what to preserve ultimately? At least in the US, it won't
> be you and me.
> 
> Useless protesting has knocked the hell out of us. We ran around like
> idiots screaming against Bush during the Republican National Convention
> here. We were half a million strong. And Bush's ratings went up, way up.
> 
> We should be talking war at this point. People are dying world-wide; where
> are we? What are we doing with ourselves? Why are we so fucking passive?
> What is to be done?
> 
> - Alan
> 
> 
>