She said yes it is.
We have discussed education before and I was lucky to get a public education of unusual quality.
But we have also, and this applies to all Diner members, improved ourselves online. Through the years here and elsewhere we have written comments and read extensively. I am under the delusion that I can write halfway decently, and I know I was not as good as I am the first time I sat in front of a keyboard.
Not everyone has had the same interaction we have had. I'll guess most people don't read a damn thing anymore since the local newspaper which kept the mass of people somewhat literate is gone. Video replaced the cognitive brain. Everyone is bedazzled.
We bifurcated. Split off and went our own way.
But why are there not more of us? There are millions of people in America. How can so much ignorance persist for so long? With the wisdom of the ages at our fingertips, why does ignorance persist? Why do TikTok videos hijack billions of brains. Why in a city of millions, with all the problems the world has, is there no protest. Not a whimper that things might be amiss.
M. King Hubbert did not have trouble finding like minded people (the book arrived). Technocracy was once a thing. Imagine the Diner with a staff of 100 people doing research and writing articles. We would be a thing too!
QuoteThe technocrats made a believable case for a kind of technological utopia, but their asking price was too high. The idea of political democracy still represented a stronger ideal than technological elitism. In the end, critics believed that the socially desirable goals that technology made possible could be achieved without the sacrifice of existing institutions and values and without incurring the apocalypse that technocracy predicted. (<-- incorrect assumptions of the new deal )
That was not from the book, I had to stop and google the technocracy movement. The movement was M. Kings 'Diner'. The FBI file on Hubbert must be as thick as a brick. In wartime intellectuals are always a target.
QuoteOn October 7, 1940, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested members of Technocracy Incorporated, charging them with belonging to an illegal organization. One of the arrested was Joshua Norman Haldeman, a Regina chiropractor, former director of Technocracy Incorporated, and the grandfather of * Elon Musk.
It was later determined that technocrats supported the war effort.
M. King and his fellow 'doomers' flew close to the sun. Their wings melted. Now their story is forgotten, but if he were alive M. King might be here with us in the Diner. Perhaps asking why there are not more of us here. Perhaps asking why has everything else gone hockey stick but smarts. Could smarts not have at least grown proportional to population? To the contrary, there is no increase, and smarts has declined in a mass homogenization.
As if the entire population is pasteurized.
It is disappointing the * old school of Peak Oilers which some of us have roots in, did not know more about M. King. Hubbert and his involvement with the Technocrats. The new school (this is it) is aware of the technocrats and will be finding out more.
Will this be noticed.
I want my carbon dividends.
* Musk might know more about M. King than we do.
* Old school peak oil was embarrassed by the deployment of tight oil technology. Now with the Biden administration using the Hail Mary Pass of American Tight Oil to finance their personal war in Ukraine, that embarrassment may be reversed. Time will tell.