essays etc.
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Talk to each other.
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"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
essays etc.
latest: Beyond Civilized and Primitive, February 15
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
forums
Talk to each other.
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
August 8. Great news! Via Cryptogon, here's a Washington Post article that is highly sympathetic to the Weston Price diet, which is pretty much the diet I try to follow: lots of fermented food, organic butter, grass fed beef, raw milk if I can get it, and grains either sprouted or soured. Here's the Weston Price Foundation site map. They do recommend a lot of meat, which is not right for everyone. A good test is how much you like the smell of cooking meat.
August 8. I knew it! You know that bit in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, where he argues that Giuliani's policy of cracking down on trivial crimes like graffiti and fare-jumping led to a huge decrease in serious crime? It's totally bogus! Here's a comment in the Guardian, This nudging stuff is nothing new - and it's all a bit shaky:
In an exhaustive survey of the evidence for a 2006 article in the University of Chicago Law Review, the academics Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig concluded that there "appears to be no good evidence that broken windows policing reduces crime, nor evidence that changing the desired intermediate output of broken windows policing - disorder itself - is sufficient to affect changes in criminal behaviour".
The reason for the drop in crime, the pair found, was much more likely to stem from something called "mean reversion" - those areas of New York which suffered the greatest hikes in crime in the 1980s were bound to experience declines at some point - what goes up must eventually come down.
August 7. Thanks Larry for pulling up the name of that super-homesteader in Alaska. It's Dick Proenneke, and I've just edited the info into the landblog post.
August 7. Paula comments on McCain's The One ad:
There are actually two layers of whistling going on -- one aimed at nominal Evangelicals, and one aimed at folks who are absolutely hard core. The gist of the deeper layer is not merely that Obama MAY be the Antichrist, but that he KNOWS he is the Antichrist and is consciously in league with Satan.
"...a nation healed, a world repaired..."
In Millenarianist doctrine, Christ will return at the end of days to heal the nation of Israel, usher in the New Jerusalem and repair the world. Fundamentalists will interpret this clip as Obama claiming for himself the place of Christ in history, in effect, declaring himself to be greater than God. This is of course what the Antichrist is supposed to do during the Great Tribulation, just before Christ's return.
"Do you have any doubts?" "Never."
One of the longstanding traditions in Christianity is that God anoints leaders who have something about them to keep them humble... Moses couldn't speak well, Jeremiah was too young, Bush is a total idiot, etc. God does this so that the leaders will be too humble to lean on their own strengths and will instead lean on God to make all the decisions. Obama's self-assurance means that he will not lean on God.
"A light will shine down from somewhere..."
In end-times mythology, Satan exercises power over all the world to make them bow down and worship the Antichrist as God. Millenarianists will interpret Obama's statement as being an acknowledgement that he knows he is the Antichrist and is fully expecting Satan to shine a light down from "somewhere" -- that is, anywhere but Heaven.
The long-term implications of this association are really horrible. In end-times mythology, there comes a point when everyone who can be "saved" is saved, there's no more evangelism to be done, and this moment signals the start of Armageddon -- the final war of good against evil, when the armies of Satan face off against the armies of God. It is a clear groundwork for future civil violence within the United States, to the degree that end-times kooks decide Obama supporters can no longer be "saved."
August 6. Rob comments that McCain's Antichrist ad might backfire, if evangelical Christians vote for Obama to hasten the rapture. But I don't think it works that way. For example, many of us anarchists thought the Bush presidency would be a good thing by hastening the collapse of the American Empire. But not one of us voted for him. Rapturists see their role as opposing the Antichrist but watching him rise anyway. And the TV news people feel the same way about Obama! They expect him to win, but they're going easy on McCain to keep it a close race and hold their audience.
August 6. I've had a few responses to my request for squatters on my land. It looks like all of us have the same core problem: the land is so remote that it's not realistic to stay there without a car, but there's almost nobody in America who has the freedom to just go camp out somewhere for a few months, and the income to own a car. And they can all have a better time at Burning Man.
August 5. Cycling Back Around is the best article I've seen yet about the resurgence of bicycling, full of information and beautifully written.
August 5. So most of us have heard by now that McCain is running a "dog whistle" ad that seems innocent to general audiences but tells evangelical Christians that Obama is the Antichrist. Last night via this post, I watched the ad, and holy crap! That's not a dog whistle -- it's a fucking train whistle! If you're remotely familiar with the concept of the Antichrist, it has all the subtlety of a Superbowl halftime show, with only a brief awkward bit at the end to pretend the ad is really about Obama's inexperience. It reminds me of that Far Side cartoon where a bunch of penguins are standing on an iceberg wondering why they keep disappearing, and in the middle of them sits a giant polar bear with a penguin mask. Yet the big media will respect the penguin mask. I do have to admire the McCain campaign for their ruthlessness. They know they're getting a free pass and they're milking it.
It occurs to me, this is why the neocons failed in Iraq. They thought they could go in half-assed, unprepared, blind and corrupt, and have their way like gods... because that's what they've been doing inside America for years.
August 4. I've rewritten and combined my cluster of posts ten days ago about the so-called "right." To avoid semantic distractions, I've excised most of the politically loaded words from the discussion and replaced them with blanks. The post is archived here.
August 4. I went up to the land yesterday and learned something interesting from talking to the neighbor. The bears are Cinnamon Bears, a red-furred subspecies of black bear. So they're black bears but not black bears! It's a good thing someone told me that before I saw one and mistook it for a young grizzly. That makes five "red" animals up there, the others being red squirrel, red-tailed chipmunk, red-tailed hawk, and red-naped sapsucker.
Anyway, I've done hardly anything up there this year because I've just lost interest in the whole homesteading thing. The land is now an emergency water source and bug-out location, and permaculture practice ground. But if anyone out there wants to play at primitive living and can't afford land, you're welcome to come squat. Here's a new landblog post about my changing vision of the project, and an appeal for squatters to give me the option of spending my summers doing something else.
August 2. I got a bunch of comments on my Dark Knight post last weekend. Some people love the film so much that they want to believe it has good politics, while others, like this reviewer (thanks David), become so obsessed with its bad politics that they want to believe it's not a good film.
I just want to say, it's OK to love films or TV shows or games or music with terrible messages, as long as you don't confuse them with reality. One thing I don't like about the militant left (or the right) is their urge to restrict play and entertainment based on the assumption that pretending to do something leads to doing it for real. Now, that did happen when the TV show 24 inspired neocon torture policy. But more often there's no connection, as in this study showing that violent crime is caused by family violence, not video games. Or sometimes the effect is the opposite of what everyone expected, as Naomi Wolf explains in this essay about how porn has killed real sex.
Anyway, enjoy Batman, but remember that in reality, beating up prisoners leads to false confessions, and great material wealth turns people into buffoons, and high speed chases kill bystanders, and the grinning supervillain who just wants to see the world burn is President, and we are not besieged by crime gangs outside the law, but held down by crime gangs above it.
Also, while I'm on the subject of film, here's a depressing piece about how film schools teach screenwriters to fail the Bechdel test:
1) there are at least two named female characters, who
2) talk to each other about
3) something other than a man.
August 1. There's been good stuff on Villageblog lately, especially this post on Free Will. The idea is that the only place we have free will is in our "self-creation," our choice about what kind of person we're going to be, and we make that choice through where we put our attention.
I said roughly the same thing in my July 6 post on hypermiling and self-discipline:
If you want to deeply change your behavior, it doesn't work to force yourself to constantly do what you hate. If possible, you need to change your internal "circuits" so that you love and hate different things.
August 1. Thanks Brian for a $25 donation.
July 31. On last night's subject, a couple readers send this site that compiles Tao translations in many languages, including 112 in English and one in Klingon! And Peter suggests a computer programming translation of the first line: "An object is an instance of a class, not the class itself."
Also, JR sends this quite good conversational translation that's not on any of the aggregators because it only covers the first 37 chapters.
July 30. So after my survival/Taoism post, I figured it's time for me to actually read the Tao Te Ching. I've flipped around in it but never read it closely because it seems pretty obvious. Adam recommends Stephen Mitchell's version. That link goes to the Amazon page, with 176 reviews that are polarized between reviewers who find it helpful and reviewers who attack it for being New Agey and based on other translations instead of the original Chinese. They make it sound like Mitchell is the only one who's ever done that, but it's quite common -- they're just picking on him for being popular. Here is an exceptionally fair review of Mitchell.
So I started looking at other translations. Here's a site that compares 15 Tao translations, and a site that compares 24 Tao translations. There's some overlap, but some of the best are only on one site. And here's a nice review of Tao translations, including some that have not been posted online.
I eventually noticed that Tao translations are just like Linux distros! Mitchell is Ubuntu, designed to be extremely accessible. The Tao equivalent of a stripped-down distro like Puppy or Damn Small Linux would be Jeff Rasmussen, whose book I cannot find, free or for sale, used or new, anywhere. And the equivalent of Gentoo, where you get down to the source code, would be a scholarly literal translation with lots of commentary. Jonathan Star gives every possible (simple) English meaning for every Chinese character, and the best seems to be Ellen Chen. Notice that all the reviews are five stars, and almost all of them say what almost none of the Mitchell reviews, positive or negative, say: "I have studied a whole bunch of translations."
If I were a hard-core programmer, I would probably write my own Linux distro. As a hard-core philosopher sympathetic to Taoism, I'm going to have to write my own Tao. It should take me about five years.
July 29. Some links:
Scientists find that licking your wounds greatly speeds healing. I've been doing it for years, and I've also found that saliva mostly stops my mosquito bites from itching if I rub it in right away.
This video, Bush or Batman, is a clever idea brilliantly executed. A guy collected a bunch of quotes from Bush, and from Batman in the 1960's TV show, and he reads them to people and has them guess who said it.
Here's a nice Kos post on Obama's VP pick, arguing that Obama should double his strength with another outsider, and that picking someone to patch his weaknesses will only draw attention to his weaknesses.
Finally, Ashley sends this NY Times piece, which might require registration, about a young musician who is touring by canoe.
July 27. A few weeks ago Holly sent me a beautiful handmade book of a novel she wrote, Crossing the Blue. The execution is rough at times, but the content is state of the art postapocalypse fiction, with an impressive range including crazed murderers, highway bandits, squatter camps, stifling communes, friendly locals, and ecotopia, plus some shamanic visions and debates about technologies. It goes well with Kunstler's novel, because his narrator's son took off traveling, and you can imagine that this is what he saw.