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
January 27. My brain has been sluggish lately, so until it picks up, my posts will be mostly links. Yesterday John Robb made a nice post about Carroll Quigley's book The Evolution of Civilizations, which predicted American decline and a shift to a decentralized economy almost 50 years ago.
James sends a link to a blog that some of you will like, Veter(A)narchy!
And on one of my favorite subjects, the unintended consequences of technologies, here's a Reddit comment about how light bulbs increased deforestation in Nepal.
January 26. A few stray links. Ugo Bardi notices peak fat, that American obesity has stopped increasing. Now, the reason Americans are so fat, especially poor Americans, is that giant corporations run the government, and big systems get the best efficiency with highly processed food, so they've commanded the government to subsidize highly processed food, so it's cheaper to buy than less processed food, so poor people buy it and have to eat too many calories trying to get all the other nutrients. Bardi speculates that poor Americans are now so poor that they can't even afford junk food. And I'm thinking, if they're not even getting enough calories, then they're going to be dangerously malnourished in everything else, and we're going to see a lot more sickness, which the medical industry will exploit for massive profits -- except that the poor can't pay, and the only way the government can pay is by inflating the currency.
Next, one of the happiest articles I've ever seen: cats improve the lives of prison inmates.
And off the usual subjects, a very smart analysis of why hardcore gamers are afraid of easy mode -- because it undermines their ability to signal their status.
January 25. Last week Dmitry Orlov emerged from a long silence with two posts. On the 17th he wrote a 4000 word analysis of the rising oceans, with this great bit:
Our worst-case scenario is that our worst-case scenario is going to continue getting worse and worse... The success of Noah's mission did not depend on having an accurate estimate of how high the waters would rise, because his ark floated.
Then on the 18th he commented on the comments of other collapsists about community, and I tend to agree: Communities will form effortlessly where they're needed, if they're not being violently suppressed; the reason we see community-building only among the higher classes, is that lower-class communities are either hidden or violently suppressed; and it's much too late for us to organize to change the big systems.
Here's a related comment on Reddit: Brian Boyko on why Americans don't protest, because we understand that it just doesn't work. Try this thought experiment: the simplest reform that would do the most good would be total cancellation of debts. There is plenty of historical precedent, including the Jubilee tradition. It would reboot the economy and go a long way toward equalizing wealth without taxes. Because a majority of Americans are in debt, a majority of us would support it. (I couldn't find any authoritative numbers, but this site estimates that 80% of Americans are in debt, counting just credit cards and house and car loans.) Imagine if 100 million Americans, less than half of those in debt, took to the streets and shut down the whole country, demanding forgiveness of all debts. Would it work? Of course not! Maybe the military would test new high-tech weapons on the crowds, or maybe the elite would take helicopters to their fortified compounds and let the country implode. But the last thing that would happen would be for congress to pass a law canceling all debts. And if they won't make that reform, they certainly won't make a reform less popular, harder to understand, and equally radical, like single-payer health care or a corporate death penalty.
But what will happen is that more and more people will be unable to feed the giant blocks of money, will be cut off from benefits distributed through the giant blocks of money, and will organize to take care of each other.
January 25. Since I mentioned the 2012 movie yesterday, I suppose I'd better clarify my position on the Mayan calendar. I pretty much follow John Major Jenkins: the Maya did have a calendar based on sophisticated astronomy, the winter solstice of 2012 is the end of a 5125 year cycle, but there is no evidence that the Maya predicted a global catastrophe.
I'm also familiar with Terence McKenna's novelty theory. Basically he took the I Ching, ran it through a bunch of mathematical transformations, and came up with a graph that, if you squint your eyes just right, appears to match history, and predicts something big in 2012. I consider it an insult to my intelligence that he used the I Ching. "Oooooo, ancient Chinese wisdom! It must be truuuue!" I think you could do the same thing with Spider Man comics -- and not because it's all meaningless, but because it's all meaningful: Reality has the structure of a dream, all parts contain the whole, and you can tap into this interconnectedness to produce results that seem magical to materialists, but that are ultimately not that useful. You don't have to know anything about the Mayan calendar to see that big changes are coming in the next few years, and the calendar might even hold you back if you think it's going to do the work for you.
January 24. Yesterday I went to see 2012 at the discount theater. The first action sequence, where John Cusack is driving through the earthquake, is the most amazing and ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Three hours of that would have made it the greatest dumb film of all time. But as it goes on, every action scene is less inspired than the last, until the "climax" finds Cusack underwater tugging at a cable. Also, the more Roland Emmerich moves from things to people, the more he embarrasses himself. But I was very happy to see one of my favorite bits of fringe science, Charles Hapgood's cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis.
January 22. Something I forgot to mention: When I was in Portland, I was invited to an exotic perennial root vegetable tasting, including scorzonera, skirret, oca, jerusalem artichoke, dahlia, yacon, daylily, mashua, and wapato. To me, the wapato tasted like dirty socks, but I loved the raw mashua, because of its spiciness, and the yacon, which is sweet and crunchy like an apple. Neither of those grow in my climate, but my other two favorites do: Jerusalem artichokes, aka sunchokes, are not great, but good enough that everyone should grow them because they're so easy and productive. And the big winner was skirret. The root looks like a bunch of pencil-thin white carrots, and tastes like a carrot but sweeter, and when it's cooked it gets soft like a potato. Eric Toensmeier's Perennial Vegetables says that you should not buy seeds, but living plants of a variety that does not have a woody center, and one source is Perennial Pleasures.
January 21. I'm sick of politics, but I might as well cover the big news that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have the same speech rights as people, and can now spend without limit on political campaigns. First, Erik analyzes the new law, predicting that the best return on investment will be to use the government to drive competitors out of business. But more generally, I'm thinking that buying ads is not the same as buying votes. Have any of you ever had your vote changed by an advertisement? Political ads only work on voters who are passive and not paying attention.
It's funny when lefties, who understand why corporations should not be legal persons, still think of them as ethical persons. A corporation is no more good or evil than a fire or flood. It's simply a machine for making profits. It was human failure to create corporations in the first place, to make ourselves dependent on them, and now, to be fooled by their their ads. But none of these are ethical mistakes, only mistakes of understanding.
January 21. New Naomi Klein essay on how corporate branding has taken over politics. I got the link from this post by John Robb, who connects it to the decline of the nation state: as nation states lose physical power, they will gain power as brands.
Connecting it to yesterday's post, the Democrats are in trouble because they branded themselves as progressives, but the system is too ossified to make any progressive reforms. Meanwhile the Republicans have branded themselves as the party of anger, so now they are getting votes even from angry liberals.
Of course, whatever the branding, the job of both parties is to throw scraps to the people while protecting the giant pool of money that wants to keep growing by lending money that nobody can pay. The people are stronger than the giant pool of money, in that money only exists if we believe in it. But it's stronger than us in that our whole way of life depends on it. But that way of life is already falling apart.
January 20. The big news in American politics is that the Republicans just won a senate race in liberal Massachusetts. Here's an article, Why Martha Lost, arguing that the Democrats have alienated voters by acting like they're entitled to votes, and by ceding populist anger to the right. On Reddit someone made a post, Can we stop referring to Democrats and Republicans as liberal and conservative, and I made the comment: "Democrats = business as usual, Republicans = zombie apocalypse". If the Massachusetts trend continues, it means Americans will vote for anyone who promises to tear the whole rotten system down and start over.
January 19. Slow week. Here are a couple links that are a bit over my head. Tim Boucher has just written a long, thoughtful, and well-illustrated article on the history of trade, counting systems, and games. And this physics article suggests that in a holographic universe, gravity is created by information.
January 18. A couple weeks ago John set up an archive of this page, for people who want more than what I save in my own archives. I've added the link permanently to the bottom of this page. The reason I edit my archives is not to stop people from reading stuff, but because I want the experience of reading my archives to not be boring.
January 17. I was originally planning to continue my trip south until the end of the month, but I didn't get a lot of invitations, my truck burns a lot of gas, and eastern Washington is super-warm right now. So I'm driving back to Spokane today.
January 15. Portland now has three tool libraries.
And here's a smart technology article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? It goes through the whole history of how information technology has affected human consciousness, from writing to the clock to the internet, which is changing us from deep thinkers to skimmers.
January 14. I've just added John Robb's Global Guerrillas to my daily links (and removed AlterNet, after they ran an unfair hit piece on kombucha). I should have done it a long time ago. Just scroll down Robb's page and look at all the great ideas. For example, yesterday he pointed out that the present economy, where workers and employers have zero loyalty to each other, is an ideal environment for forming new tribes. The day before that he wrote about resilient communities, and the two previous days he posted a bunch of good links. And he's even more concise than I am. An entire comment from January 4: "Drone porn hits YouTube. DIY drone porn is next."
January 14. Since I'm still talking about space and ecology, I want to go back to Avatar. Maybe my disagreement with the lefty critics boils down to ethics vs tactics. It's disrespectful to indigenous people to show them being saved by a leader from the invading culture -- but the result is that hundreds of millions of viewers in exploitative systems are learning the story of shifting their allegiance to nature-based cultures.
But on another level, Avatar is both inaccurate and tactically misleading. The inaccuracy is that the Indians win. In The Holocaust We Will Not See, George Monbiot writes:
...engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.
Then he goes through a great summary of the atrocities of the European invaders... and fails to answer the fascinating questions he raises: What if Avatar had followed history? And why didn't history happen like Avatar? To answer the first, I would love to see a movie where the Na'vi get crushed, Pandora is developed to near extinction, the resources are wasted on space suburbs, and as the whole system collapses, the avatar population finally learns to appreciate the ways of the Na'vi. That movie would have sold about 17 tickets.
It's the second question that reveals the tactical mistake: no ecological society has ever won a violent war against an extractive society, because an extractive society is inherently more ruthless, and if there are resources to burn, more physically powerful. The Seminoles held out for decades in the swamps of Florida. Now Disney World is there. In a hundred years, squid and jellyfish will swim through its ruins. You cannot defeat the Empire with force -- you can only outlast it.
But then, as any given empire declines, it is defeated with force... by the next empire. I'm not sure how that story will play out in the future, with so many resources used up.
January 13. Yesterday I mentioned the idea of expanding the extractive economy into space. I've just finished reading Gaiome, a book about expanding a sustaining economy into space. Here's the Gaiome introduction from the author's site. I think this is the most unpopular book I've ever read, because there is so little overlap between the audiences for ecology and space travel. The author, Kevin Scott Polk, is both a permaculturist and an astrophysicist. In the first chapter he sets up and knocks down all the usual stories about going into space: to extend exponential growth, to escape the dying Earth, to bring back resources, and to shift our consciousness from biology into machines. His argument against the first is one I've never seen before: he does the math and shows that even if we could expand civilization at light speed out into the galaxy, even a very low rate of exponential growth would quickly overwhelm the geometric growth of our sphere of expansion.
He concludes that we first have to learn to live sustainably on Earth, which is relatively easy, before we learn the much more difficult skill of living sustainably in small constructed environments in space. Then he lays out his plan. First, a space tourism rocket with the same safety standards and flight frequency as a large airliner. Meanwhile, much more research into tiny cycling ecologies like Biosphere 2. Then, technologies for extracting materials from asteroids and turning those materials into gaiomes, and into bigger asteroid extractors and space fabricators, and so on. His eventual utopian vision is 700 trillion people living in 80 billion gaiomes all over the solar system, all of them self-sufficient but grouped into cultures and nations, and by then new technologies will make it easier to expand this model to other star systems.
In terms of current knowledge, Polk doesn't miss anything. He cites Richard Heinberg, Chellis Glendinning, Jared Diamond, and loads of hard science. But I'm thinking, how much have our scientific paradigms changed in the last 500 years? And why shouldn't they change just as much in the next 500? Maybe when our first space probe reaches Alpha Centauri, it will be picked up by someone who just walked there.
January 12. Some links I've been saving up: George Monbiot on Consumer Hell:
That we might hop, like the aliens in Independence Day, from one planet to another, consuming their resources then moving on, is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect than changing the way in which we measure wealth.
The Americanization of Mental Illness, with fascinating details about how illness (both mental and physical) varies across cultures.
The Caveman Lifestyle in New York City.
Ancient Hominids May Have Been Seafarers.
And Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant, with genes to make chlorophyll and get energy from sunlight. Humans next?
January 1, 2010. New policy for the new year. I will no longer answer hard thinking questions over email. Lately I've been swamped with them and it's beginning to get stressful and exhausting. You're still welcome to ask non-thinking questions, and to contribute your own deep thoughts, but if you'd "love to hear what I think", you might be out of luck. If you're not sure what category your question is in, you can always ask it and find out.