misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
December 21. Happy solstice! I don't expect to be doing anything for Christmas, so I might be posting all week. Here are two brainy links about the ongoing end of the world:
First, a new post from Anne, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and the End of Modernist Epistemology. Basically, thanks to the internet, authority has been eliminated as a basis for belief, and not just opinion beliefs but fact beliefs. Now you can go online and find an authority supporting any fact you want. The result is that our mental models are now determined by only two things: what we want to believe, and direct personal experience. Where I see this going is that global consciousness will continue to fragment into what Anne calls information tribes, and these tribes will go through a kind of natural selection: the ones that are the best at seeking out relevant personal experience and adapting to it, will thrive, and the ones that are the best at blocking personal experience that contradicts their beliefs, will suffer horribly.
This brings us to George Monbiot's piece about the battle to redefine humanity:
Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits.
He also makes a nice critique of economic growth, "the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved." But I don't agree with all his war language. This is not something we can solve through conflict, even intellectual conflict. I'm reminded of a Raiders of the Lost Ark review (link) that I saw this morning on Reddit, pointing out that if Indiana Jones had done nothing, the end of the movie would have been the same: the Nazis still would have got the Ark, opened it, and been cooked.
There is no stopping industrial civilization from playing the drama of perpetual growth all the way to its tragic end. The only thing that will change the minds of the expanders is personal experience of the most painful kind. Our task, as restrainers, is to restrain ourselves -- not so we can stay pure or save the world, but so we can begin learning to live in the coming age of limits. We're building another kind of Ark.
December 21. I got the same comment from two readers on yesterday's fire metaphor. I'm afraid, like most metaphors, it was not completely accurate. In nature, fires serve many useful ecological functions, and civilization as we know it is like a fire in many ways -- but there is no known function in any known ecology that is served by human systems that fall into feedback loops of increasing domination and exploitation and finally collapse.
December 20. I don't usually post on Sundays but I want to try to polish off this political crap so I can move on to something less frustrating. First, the reason health care reform is impossible goes deeper than corporate control of the government, and deeper than capitalism. The underlying problem is that civilization has never learned how to shrink. It can get larger in a smooth steady motion, but it can only get smaller in ugly collapses. I don't know why. I like to think we will someday learn how to build large complex systems where all the numbers move gently up and down like waves. The only alternative is to keep climbing and diving like suicide jumpers until we go extinct. (Or we could evolve out of our big brains that drive us to large complex systems, which is basically the same as extinction.)
Since American oil peaked in the early 1970's, continued real economic growth has been impossible, so we've been having fictional economic growth by increasing the amount of money flying around without increasing useful activity. Among the pillars of the fictional economy are the medical industry and the insurance industry. Collectively we can no longer afford to pay for them, but we also can't shrink them without economic collapse. You've probably seen this chart of worldwide life expectancy vs health care spending. Per capita, we spend 20 times as much as Cuba and live only a month longer. We spend five times as much as Singapore and live two years less. The problem is, all that wasted money is holding up the economy. It's being paid to people whose jobs are parasitic, who could serve society just as well by sitting home and doing nothing. But we have no mechanism to pay them for sitting home and doing nothing. And if we pay them less than they're now getting, they'll have less to spend, and more unnecessary jobs will be lost, and so on.
If I imagine myself as Utopian Dictator, I would eliminate the medical insurance industry, train all the unemployed in permaculture, and pay for it by slashing military spending and canceling entitlements for people who don't need them. Plus I would abolish intellectual property, cancel all debts, and ride a flying unicorn -- because I'm already in a world with no basis in reality.
The Archdruid covered the same general subject in his latest post, Weishaupt's Fallacy. Adam Weishaupt was the leader of the original Illuminati, who were basically a bunch of nice people who thought they could convert the existing power structure over to doing good. Of course the existing power structure crushed them, and they've been villified ever since. Greer thinks this was because they understimated the strength and intelligence of the ruling system, but I think it's because they failed to understand its very nature.
This is something that right wingers intuitively understand and left wingers don't: central control is fundamentally evil, and an evil system wants to do evil things: bomb foreign cities, build torture prisons, spy on citizens, and generally channel money/power from those who don't have it to those who do. Nature abhors a benevolent dictator. This is why Bush got everything he wanted and Obama is getting nothing (although he has to pretend to want what he gets to maintain the illusion that he is powerful). This is why everyone hates liberals, even other liberals.
I support left-wing politicians for the same reason you do a controlled burn to stop a fire. But as a long-term solution, the only way to stop fires is to make a non-combustible landscape. Or, the only way to build a good society is to start from the ground up, making every relationship one of equals, and every action completely voluntary. As I've said before, I think this is going to take us thousands of years, and it will require us to become aware of many kinds of domination more subtle and powerful than government.
December 18. The other day I posted a link about white skin being an adaptation to vitamin D deficiency in high-latitude grain eaters. Then Emily suggested something similar and mind-blowing: suppose malnutrition causes greed. It makes sense that malnutrition would make us greedy about food, and that greedy feeling could carry over to other things. I'm sure we can find exceptions, but there could still be a strong correlation, and as far as I know it's never been investigated. Also it's important to remember that neither wealth nor obesity necessarily means a person is getting the right nutrients. In a culture where unhealthful food is fashionable, rich people will be malnourished, and if the government subsidizes food with high calories and low nutrients, poor people will be both fat and malnourished.
Now we're coming back around to yesterday's subject, the tracing of responsibility. How did it happen that the job of the president is to escalate war and use the power of the state to force citizens to feed giant blocks of money? Why has the American political center moved steadily rightward for 30 years? Why do Americans, compared to other affluent nations, have so much fear and rage and so little compassion? If it's because our diet is so bad, how did our diet get so bad? If it's because we watch more television, why do we watch more television? If it's because of right wing think tanks in the 1970's, why did they succeed here so much more than other places?
I think it goes back hundreds of years. See how much you recognize in this Wikipedia summary of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
December 17. Back to politics: Of course, Obama is fully responsible for every bit of policy that he channels in his role as president, just as we are all fully responsible for what we do in the course of our jobs. But fully responsible does not mean solely responsible. I covered this eight years ago in my first internet essay, The Mathematics of Responsibility. "Blame" is what we call it when we stop tracing the lines of responsibility, and simply declare it all stuck in one place -- usually because if we kept looking, we would see something we didn't like.
Every attack on Obama's character is a defense of the character of the whole system. When we say that America is going to hell because Obama is a bad person, we are saying that the system is so flexible and well-designed that it can be turned around merely by plugging a person of good character into the role of president. We can no longer afford to believe that shit. I should have stopped believing it back in 1993, but instead I blamed the Clintons. If Hillary were president now, I would be saying that Obama would not be doing the same things, and I would be wrong. So I have to assume that I would also be wrong now, to say that if Howard Dean or Alan Grayson were president, they would not be doing the same things. The Obama bashers think they're being cynical, when really they're being much too hopeful.
Obama's moral failure was running for president in the first place. He should have known he was not going to be able to keep his campaign promises, and knowing that, he should not have made them, and then there's no point in running. But you know who also runs for president? Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul. They are all feeding the lie, and they probably believe it themselves, that the Emperor rules the Empire, and not the other way around.
Maybe this is why I've never had a job higher than office boy: because I understand that as you rise in the pyramid, you have less autonomy, not more. The political spectacle draws our eye to the top, when our strength is at the bottom.
December 16. Excellent article about why Europeans are white. Basically, northern Europe is the only place in the world where the sun is so dim that a dark-skinned person will die from vitamin D deficiency, and where it's warm enough for a population to subsist on grains, which don't have vitamin D. And that high-latitude warmth comes from the gulf stream.
And three more unrelated links: Loneliness may be contagious, although when you read it closely, what they're talking about is more like social paranoia than loneliness.
An excerpt from a Noam Chomsky interview, arguing that lefties should be organizing the right instead of ridiculing them.
And something I've been wondering about for years: What's the difference between a disc and a disk? Answer: a disc is optical and a disk is magnetic.
December 15. Yesterday's post was something I have in my writer's toolbox but seldom use: the angry rant. The most perceptive comment was from Anne, who said all that stuff has been happening for a while, and that something about me must have just changed. Maybe the massage I got last week released some bound-up energy or some toxins, or maybe the health care bill has finally made the collapse personal, by threatening to force me to give half my income to some insurance company.
I expected Obama and the Democrats to keep things reasonably stable through the ongoing collapse, and make some half-assed moves in the right direction. I never expected them to push hard in the wrong direction, but in hindsight it makes sense: the medical bubble and the war bubble are holding up the illusory economy. The government, as a fully owned subsidiary of the illusory economy, must use its monopoly on violence to force you and me to blow even more air into those bubbles.
So what exactly is going to happen? It's anyone's guess, and I'm going to hold off my guess until the new year.
December 14. (permalink for this post) Just over the last few weeks, it seems like America has turned a corner... a vertical corner. Our daily actions are the same, but on the level of mind, or spirit, we've dropped off a cliff. You can see it on the left, where the attitude toward Obama has flipped from excitement to disgust. You can see it on the right, where only a few elderly people still look like they're making arguments, and everyone else looks like they're having a seizure. And you can see it in the conspiracy crowd, who are telling increasingly ridiculous stories that this is all part of a plan, because the alternative is too troubling.
It is said that Obama is wearing a mask, being a deceiver, as if he carefully pretended to be a progressive activist for a quarter of a century because a time traveler from the future told him that would get him elected president in 2008 so he could pursue his secret right wing globalist agenda. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" -- but it's hard to imagine two presidents more different than Obama and Bush. The fact that the country is moving the same direction under each of them should tell us something else: the president is not the boss. Obama has never worn a mask -- Obama is the mask, and not a very good one. It has never been more obvious that America is an ossified dying empire with a suicidal inertia that no leader or movement can stop. If Sarah Palin, Dennis Kucinich, or Carrot Top were president, the system that the president pretends to run would still be bailing out banks and insurance companies, escalating wars, hiding atrocities, and generally chugging along to its ruin.
What would happen if you swapped out the bank executives, the generals, the billionaires? Nothing. It doesn't matter who you plug into the role of dog catcher -- the dog catcher still has to catch dogs, and every role in a domination system must channel domination. Ultimately there is no boss. At the top of the pyramid sits the logic of the pyramid itself. And that logic is basically a big fire that consumes everything and finally burns out.
It is said that the elite want a global government. They would also like to fart strawberries. If you think the elite get everything they want, stop pretending to oppose them and admit that you worship them as gods. Did the rulers of ancient Rome get a global government? The smart elites are already building their lifeboats, as you should be. Kunstler said it best: in a few years the government will be lucky if it can even answer the telephone.
It is said that climate change can enable a global government by uniting all of humanity against a common enemy. But climate change is not an enemy. If it were, right wingers would believe in it. An enemy is something that you get angry at and go violently destroy. Climate change calls for us to love strangers and animals and make sacrifices to help them. That's why our angry chimp tribe species cannot possibly stop it. Instead, we need to prepare to ride it out.
And then what? This will not be the final empire, because three of the things that empires feed on -- topsoil, forests, and human foolishness -- all regenerate, one of them very quickly. It is said that we are "evolving", and it's true that we have gained blue eyes and the ability to digest cow milk. But if we're evolving resistance to large repressive systems, not on the level of culture that blows away with the wind, but on a deeper level, then we're doing it so slowly that it's going to take us thousands of years to get anywhere.
A thousand years is not such a long time. Here's something to cheer you up, written about 2300 years ago in Ecclesiastes chapter 9:
7 Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.
8 Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment.
9 Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labor which thou takest under the sun.
10 Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
11 I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
12 For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
December 13. After a tip from David, I've just added Southmeadow Fruit Gardens to the landblog links page. They sell several rare apple varieties that I've been looking for, including Mother and Court Pendu Plat.
Also, a couple days ago I did a thorough rewrite of the How to Drop Out: criticism and response page.
December 11. The blog New Old Traditions has just published a couple good pieces that a long-time reader of this site wrote a few years ago. Part one is mostly about Unschooling, and part two about Unworking. In the context of the present political horror, I especially like this bit about health insurance:
Back when my husband had health insurance, we were appalled at how much we were spending on this "benefit." We could never afford to go to the doctor because we couldn't afford the deductible and co-payments. After keeping track of expenses, we realized we were spending thousands of dollars a year on insurance. We quickly canceled it and then were able to go to the doctor when we needed to see one.
This is why the health care "reform" bill is much worse than nothing. Go back a few years ago, when the housing bubble started to falter, and imagine if congress had passed a bill "reforming housing" by requiring everyone to buy a house, and also requiring banks to give a loan to anyone who applied. And imagine if the only opposition to the bill was from right wingers, not because of the mandate but because of a tiny expansion of housing provided directly by the government.
This is what congress and Obama are doing now, not because they are cowardly or sinister, but because they are helplessly spinning around the whirlpool of a declining empire. The latest Archdruid post, Failure Is The Only Option, talks about this in the context of carbon emissions, but the same principles apply to the medical industry, one of the few sputtering engines still driving the money economy.
If the bill passes, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Probably I'll just continue to go without insurance and pay the penalty, which will be cheaper than insurance and also will go to the half-evil government instead of the pure evil private insurance industry. Another option would be to put my land in some sort of trust and see if I could qualify for Medicaid. Or just ignore the whole thing and roll the dice that they wouldn't enforce it, since tens of millions of other people would be in the same boat.
For now I'm still doing great for money, and I continue to be surprised at how many people donate when I admit I don't need it. Thanks DL for the latest donation of $100, which I might use to buy an extra laptop battery for my small trip this winter, and some tart cherry juice.
December 10. Something I've been putting off: almost a year ago I did a post about the sounds of space, and I even considered buying the very expensive 10 CD set. Now Amazon is selling an mp3 download of the whole thing for only six bucks: Nasa Voyager Space Sounds. Also, if you know how to do bittorrent, here is a lossless version of an out of print CD series of the same stuff, but half as long and not separated into the different planets.
December 8. Destroyed US town a model of eco-living as it rebuilds. Greensburg Kansas was 95% destroyed by a tornado, and is rebuilding with rainwater harvesting, LED streetlights, and wind and geothermal energy. I know this is still industrial-green, but it's a big step in the right direction. Maybe in 20 years, some destroyed town will rebuild with rocket heating stoves and food forests.