KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century

#317 Rob Gourdie is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech. He is also Director of the Center for Heart and Reparative Medicine Research at the same university. He writes under the pen name of Tom Therramus. In his “day job,” he works on the repeating waves of electrical signals that drive the heart beat. Over the last decade he has developed an interest in another repeating pattern - waves of price volatility in oil - that he speculates are a Peak Oil-related phenomenon. His writings as Tom Therramus on oil market instability, and its impacts on economics, politics and climate change, have been posted at OilPrice.net, Greentechmedia.com, Resilience.com, RealClearEnergy.org, Nouriel Roubini's Economonitor.com, and EuanMearns.com Energy Matters. His LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-therramus-602b3721/)  lists his SKILLS as including “Asperger's", "Mild Numeracy", "Vague Literacy” and "Being Kiwi”.

Jason Bradford has been affiliated with Post Carbon Institute since 2004, first as a Fellow and then as a Board Member. After earning his doctorate at Washington University in St Lous, he worked for the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at the Missouri Botanical Garden, was a Visiting Scholar at U.C. Davis, and co-founded the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG). He bailed out of academia to learn and practice sustainable agriculture, trained at the Ecology Action (aka GrowBiointensive) in Willits, California, and then founded Brookside School Farm. For four years he hosted The Reality Report radio show on KZYX in Mendocino County. In 2009 he moved to Corvallis, Oregon, as one of the founders of Farmland LP, a farmland management fund implementing organic and mixed crop and livestock systems, where he worked until early 2018. He sits on the Economic Development Advisory Board for Corvallis and Benton County, and serves as an advisor for the OregonFlora Project based at Oregon State University. He lives with his family outside of Corvallis on an organic farm. 

Blake Pagenkopf is the author of The Great Conflation; Why Left Versus Right Isn’t Right Versus Wrong, which asserts that a simple spatial model can be used to explain the political misunderstanding that now rages across America. (See the chart below  in these show notes.) He is also an architect and construction manager currently renovating mixed-use buildings on small town Main Streets in the Midwest. He lives in the Kansas City metro area.

#314 David Stockman is the Author of the new book, Peak Trump: the Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of Mega. David representing Michigan’s Fourth Congressional District for three terms and served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan — the youngest cabinet member in history. He was previously the author of The Great Deformation,a comprehensive history of crony capitalism. His excellent daily blog appears at www.davidstockmanscontracorner.com

Brent Bednarik is a former Army Officer with two deployments in Afghanistan. After that he worked at one of the Big Four accounting firms in Manhattan, and is currently an entrepreneur in the tech start up space. Brent and I have been corresponding about what I like to call the new religion of Wokesterism, which has emanated from the university campuses and is finding a beach-head in corporate life. Brent is interested in what he considers a consciousness shift happening in western societies, and speaks to business owners and c-suite executives about these impending changes and the challenges they’ll face.

#312 John Michael Greer, an old friend of the podcast, blogs at his Ecosophia Website, and is the author of a score of books ranging from the social and political commentary of The Wealth of Nature and Not the Future We Ordered, to a large body of science fiction and fantasy.

Bill Holter writes and is partnered with Jim Sinclair at the newly formed Holter/Sinclair collaboration. Prior, he wrote for Miles Franklin from 2012-15. Bill worked as a retail stockbroker for 23 years, including 12 as a branch manager at A.G. Edwards. He left Wall Street in late 2006 to avoid potential liabilities related to management of paper assets as he foresaw the Great Financial crisis coming. In retirement he and his family moved to Costa Rica where he lived until 2011 when he moved back to the United States. He was a well-known contributor to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) commentaries from 2007-present.     Bill has retained a working relationship with Miles Franklin and can help with any of your precious metals needs including transacting, shipping, storage and even safe deposit boxes in non bank vault facilities.  Feel free to contact him with any of your questions or needs.     He can be reached via email at bholter@hotmail.com

Shaun Chamberlin is an author, activist and the editor of both Lean Logic and the paperback Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy.  He has been involved with the Transition Network since its inception, cofounding Transition Town Kingston [UK] and authoring the movement’s second book, The Transition Timeline.  He worked closely with David Fleming until his death. His website is: www.darkoptimism.org  On Twitter, he is @DarkOptimism Dr. David Fleming (1940 – 2010) was a visionary thinker and writer who played significant roles in the genesis of the UK Green Party, the Transition Towns movement, and the New Economics Foundation, as well as chairing the Soil Association. He was also one of the early whistle-blowers on oil depletion and designer of the influential TEQs carbon/energy rationing system. He read Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford, and later earned an MBA and then an MSc and PhD in economics (in 1988). These enabled him to better engage with and confound the mainstream, in support of his true passion and genius: understanding that diverse and mysterious thing “community.” Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It was the work of over thirty years. www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk David Fleming's posthumous masterpiece of wit, whimsy and rebellion: Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It Shaun Chamberlain’s concise short version of David Fleming’s central ideas: Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy  

Raul Meijer runs The Automatic Earth Website. He puts out the Debt Rattle news aggregator there every day, and posts his own frequent commentaries on a broad range of current events, especially on subjects of finance and economy. He’s based in Europe,  dividing his time between Athens and the Netherlands. He lived in Canada for many years.

Jasun Horsley is an English cultural critic, metapsychologist, conspiracy researcher, and podcaster, and the author of several books, including Seen and Not Seen, Prisoner of Infinity, and the upcoming The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse. To earn a living, he currently runs a thrift store in Canada with his wife. This is the link to Jasun’s excellent podcast, The Liminalist. Here is the link to his Auticulture Blog.  And here is a link to Jasun’s fascinating essay series on the sexual confusions and hysterias of our time: The Age of Advanced Incoherence: Identity Politics & Identity Crisis, which is at the center of today’s conversion.