Banff Transition

64-year-old tub of lard found in Germany, still edible

Swany — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:24:50 +0000

Calgary Herald: “A German pensioner who had kept a tub of lard in his cupboard for 64 years, took it to authorities who pronounced it very much fit for consumption – if a little tasteless.Retired chemist Hans Feldmeier, 87, told AFP he had received the pig fat as a student in 1948 near the northern city of Rostock as part of the post-war U.S. aid program…. Finally, after 64 years, he took it to food safety agents and was astonished at their appraisal.

“There is of course a slight lack of smell and taste,” sniffed Frerk Feldhusen, from the office of agriculture, food safety and fisheries in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Moreover, the lard was “of gritty consistency, difficult to dissolve and looked a bit old,” the officials added. However, “all in all, given its level of freshness and its material composition, the product is assessed as satisfactory,” Feldhusen said, adding it would stand up to today’s definition of being fit for the dinner table.

Swany — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:31:23 +0000

Season’s Greetings

Swany — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:05:29 +0000

There must be some coal left at Bankhead. Maybe not enough to run a railroad, but enough to keep a small town warm. We need a Banff School of Mines.

What Peak Oil Looks Like

Swany — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:37:17 +0000

The Archdruid Report: “The point that has to be grasped just now, it seems to me, is that this is what peak oil looks like. Get past the fantasies of sudden collapse on the one hand, and the fantasies of limitless progress on the other, and what you get is what we’re getting—a long ragged slope of rising energy prices, economic contraction, and political failure, punctuated with a crisis here, a local or regional catastrophe there, a war somewhere else—all against a backdrop of disintegrating infrastructure, declining living standards, decreasing access to health care and similar services, and the like,”

How to Eat Cheap

Swany — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:14:55 +0000

Casaubon’s Books: “So what do you eat when you are poor? Well, your friends are going to be beans, lentils and grains. They are nutritious, tasty, simple, accessible and store well. If there’s any way you can come up with the money, buy them in big bags in bulk – a minimum of 10 lbs, 50 is better – much cheaper per pound.”

The art of pathogenic warfare

Swany — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:15:25 +0000

Global Guerrillas: “Within human social and economic systems, pathogenic behavior is spreading. This is particularly true among powerful, successful, and wealthy people (finance, economics, politics, etc.) in the developed world. What specifically do I mean by pathogenic? An ever greater number of these people are adopting behaviors that are actively hostile to the human systems we rely upon. They actually think it is OK to put these systems at risk for personal benefit.”

Hubbert’s Third Prophecy

Swany — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 16:37:41 +0000

Club Orlov: “[I]t behooves us… to begin a serious examination of the… cultural adjustments necessary… before unmanageable crises arise….”

Hubbert said, "The third curve (on the left) is simply the mathematical curve for exponential growth. No physical quantity can follow this curve for more than a brief period of time. However, a sum of money, being of a nonphysical nature and growing according to the rules of compound interest at a fixed interest rate, can follow that curve indefinitely…Our principle constraints are cultural… we have evolved a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth…."

Modern capitalism has reached the end of its rope

Swany — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:06:26 +0000

‘Russian Times: “[W]hat we are seeing is the structural crisis of the system. The structural crisis goes on for a long time. It really started more or less in the 1970s and will go on for another 20, 30, 40 years. … [Capitalism] has worked in some ways marvelously well for 500 years. It has been an extremely successful system in what it was trying to do but it has undone itself as all systems do.”

Sorting Out Possible Scenarios for the Future

Swany — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:09:08 +0000

Casaubon’s Book “5. “Ordinary Human Poverty- The Great Depression, Plus Climate Change, Plus Peak Oil…” Seriously, this is my bet. And I don’t think I’m in the minority here – I think what we’re facing is a massive, probably worldwide economic depression, a very extended one from which the magic of fossil fuels will not lift us back into growth. I think we are facing using a lot less energy without the money and resources to make that easy on anyone. We are likely to see large scale unemployment, lots of poverty, people unable to meet very basic needs, and a very mixed level of response – some places doing better than others at helping people, some places essentially on their own, some places becoming very violent or unsafe, some places doing better – rather like the world we live in now, where some places are violent and some aren’t, hunger is increasing, access to basic necessities going down….”

Salvaging Resilience

Swany — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 04:53:49 +0000

The Archdruid Report: “It’s unquestionably inefficient in terms of your personal time and resources to dig up your back yard and turn it into a garden; that inefficiency, however, means that if anything happens to the hypercomplex system that provides you with your food – a process that reaches beyond growers, shippers and stores to the worlds of high finance, petroleum production, resource politics, and much more – you still get to eat”