Peak Oil, inc, of Nebraska

[hirez]

Um. You know what's, um, wrong with, um, you know, podcasting? Lack of professionalism. Broadcasters may only be the lackey-mouthpieces of the ruling elite, but they're trained to, um, like, construct, um, you know, sentences.

If this is the state of the average Guardian 'podcast' then they really need to stick to the duck-squeezing and hand-

Comments

[aidan_skinner]

Rob Newmans's History would have been dangerously hilarious had it not been depressingly accurate.

As I was wibbling to some poor and undeserving international politics student betwixt pints of grolsch last night, we so fucked! we burn up in man made oven long time!

[echo_echo]

The podcasts in this case seem to amount to putting a journalists dictaphone tapes online, for better or worse they are what they are

[aoakley]

This story about 6 former US generals queuing up to call the US Defence Secretary an arse, in fine detail seems to have been glossed over by the Murdoch press, and strangely also the BBC.

[echo_echo]

What I would give to hear, just once, somebody stand up and say, "Remove this man from office. He is AN ARSE. I could dress it in an overcoat of eloquence, reasoning and carefully chosen prose, but both you and I both know that what I really want to say is, THIS MAN IS A FUCKING ARSE".

[hirez]

Gosh. You don't say.

I read the Guardian piece when asw909 pointed at it. And then again when I scanned the print version because I wanted another laugh. It's also made Electrolite and with any luck many other similarly sensible weblogs.

[perlmonger]

There's a surprise.

Oddly enough, Auntie doesn't seem to have had much to say about this either.

[hirez]

Ooh. Fine stuff, ta!

If grimly depressing. I'll go back and read Flight's 'space special' from August 1960.

[jarkman]

I think the hard SF lot had the sequence the other way round:

(c) Living in space is cool!

(b) So rocketry will get cheap and asteroid mining will be profitable.

(a) We have no idea how this will ever get started, but let's launch some Apollos and find out what happens. After that, the inevitable forces of progress will make everything right.

I wonder if there's actually some kind of Peak Tech thing going on here ? I mean, fifty years ago, it would have been hard to believe that we would gain and then *give up* things like manned moon flight and supersonic passenger travel. Before then, the tech always got better and better, and if you could see how some amazing thing might be accomplished you just had to wait a few years for it to turn up in the real world.

[hirez]

The posts from Brad Hicks referenced above seem to cover it pretty well.

Basically, unless someone comes up with a pile of First Foundation-style tech and quite quickly, We Are Fucked.

[jarkman]

Right. But why didn't it look that way in the Great Days of Rocket Fiction ?

I mean, those authors expectations of the near future were pretty clear and widely-agreed, but from here it's hard to see how they could ever have thought that.

[hirez]

I guess that everywhere you looked there were Chesley Bonestell, there were plans or foundations for nukes that would provide 'Electricity too cheap to meter', TSR-2 was making its way off the drawing board, and the chaps at DeHavilland and the newly-formed NASA were smoking their pipes in a thoughtful and forward-looking manner.

Meanwhile, we'd about finished crawling from the wreckage of an ugly war, rationing was over and concrete and motorways meant Progress. (And the gummint were furiously building a radar network in nuke-proof bunkers in absolute secrecy)

You could forgive people for thinking that those bloody beatniks gibbering on about DDT and the Spies for Peace wallahs were probably all Soviet-backed fifth columnists. What's important about a bunch of starlings anyway? We didn't worry about that sort of thing in the war, we just jolly well got on with it.

We've not heard from Progress since Ronan Point.