Don't mind the gap.

I have been on other projects and learning what is going on in competing online venues. Let's resume with what I have read today.

Here is a good one:

Oil: the Lifeblood of Small-Town America

This excellent post brings to our attention that small town America was disrupted in the last century by the loss of its railroads and the emergence of highways and cheap petroleum. Now, the dislocations in the petroleum industry threaten to cause new disruptions in the remnants of that small town existence.

I grew up in a small town in central Kentucky. I lived on the edge of town, on the main highway that connected the commercial interests in my town with the distributors in the industrial center 60 miles away. I spent a good deal of my summer days lounging in a tree, reading and noting the trucks that went by that supplied my town. That commerce was fueled by 25 cent gasoline and diesel. When I was very young, I went to the train depot every night with my father to pick up the Red Flash Edition (final) of the evening newspaper. I watched the coal powered locomotives disappear and be replaced by diesel electrics. I rode those trains to the industrial center occasionally. Then the passenger service ended and finally the local freight service disappeared after I left for military service. Gasoline remained cheap and the cars and trucks doubled in number. By the mid-60s, it was near a sacramental requirement that ones automobile be a muscle car and burn gasoline at prodigious rates in the energetic consumption of tires turned into white smoke.


I had been out of the country for most of the 60s and I was treated to mild culture shock on my return.

Other things I have read today.

God and Evolution

Coming Soon: Nontrepreneur Nation

Please, be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.

"You have no business to believe me.

I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself. . .

If you have not a critical mind, your visit here is useless."

G.I. Gurdjieff