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
June 6. I'm sure many of you would like to read more discussion of human subspecies. If you think breeding between Neanderthal and Cro Magnon is interesting, wait until we start genetically engineering ourselves. Anyway, I'm heading up to the land for a while, maybe as long as a week, depending on the weather. If you miss the blog, there's plenty of stuff you might enjoy in the archives at the bottom of this page.
Also, readers send this nice NY Times article about squatters in Buffalo, and another one about peak oil and transition towns. Don't read it -- the only important information is that a bunch of stuff you already know is now being revealed to readers of the NY Times.
June 5, late. If anyone is curious about Stan Gooch's view of Neanderthals, that link goes to a short article he wrote in 2000, which also happens to be on a good fringe science site. (Thanks Danny.) I don't endorse Gooch's ideas, but they're fascinating. Basically he makes a bunch of "two kinds of people" observations, and lines them all up so it looks like humans are torn between our Neanderthal and Cro Magnon natures. He also thinks that the big explosion of creativity 35,000 years ago was from the "hybrid vigour" of the crossbreeding.
June 4. On Kelly's recommendation, I just finished a famous book that I hadn't read before: The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel. The idea is, during the last ice age, an orphaned girl from our human subspecies gets adopted by Neanderthals. On one level, it's a wonderful vision of what it might be like to live in a forager-hunter tribe. But on another level, it's not about that at all. We know almost nothing about Neanderthal culture, and Auel chooses to make them patriarchal and authoritarian: women can't even speak to men without bowing down and asking permission first, and the clan has rigid rules which again and again come into conflict with their human instincts. Now, I'm sure this happens sometimes with primitive people, but it's much more typical of civilized people. And when a freethinking young person challenges a dying orthodoxy, we're not seeing eastern Europe in the ice age, but America in the 1960's, or any fundamentalist culture shifting to one that's more free and open. I wonder if the book is popular in Iran right now.
It also reminded me of Harry Potter: an extremely talented orphan joins an exotic community, learns amazing skills, endures terrible hardships, and repeatedly defeats a jealous villain. And last year when I read The Color of Distance, I didn't realize it was Clan of the Cave Bear on another planet.
For a different and equally interesting view of Neanderthals, look for Cities of Dreams by Stan Gooch.
June 3. Sharon Astyk writes about when you should not adapt in place. This is all common sense, but people don't think about it enough.
Also, here's a bandwidth-heavy article about self-control, related to my post last week on the same subject. It turns out that self-control literally tires you out, and if you're already tired, it's harder to change your habits. It's easy to see how this leads to a feedback loop, where your bad habits make you tired, and your tiredness stops you from changing your habits. This feedback loop stacks with many other feedback loops, which include being too poor to pay off debts because of interest and fees, and being too tired to make your own food from scratch because you're eating such crappy food. I don't have any answers, except that people who get out of this loop should help others get out, instead of exploiting them.
June 3. As expected, I got a bunch of dental tips, although none of them were a direct source of calcium sodium phosphosilicate. One reader recommends Standard Process Bio-Dent, another recommends clay, and a third recommends "oil-pulling", where you swish around oil in your mouth until it turns foamy.
June 2. This morning I went to the dentist to get two new fillings. It looks like I'm going to have to start rinsing my mouth with baking soda water every time I eat or drink something acidic, if I don't want to keep shelling out hundreds of dollars a year. Also they showed me a tooth remineralization product called Oravive, but I decided not to get it because I don't trust some of the ingredients. I don't want to get any deeper into that, except to say that when you want to find out whether a common ingredient is toxic or not, every site on the internet has already made up its mind and then picks out the evidence it likes, even Snopes.
Anyway, I did some research, and the active ingredient in Oravive is NovaMin, a brand name for calcium sodium phosphosilicate. That link goes to the Wikipedia page which explains how it works and links to a few studies. Because we live in an evil world, you can't buy NovaMin, only products that mix it with other crap. But from the Wikipedia page, I found out that Burt's Bees toothpaste has it. Of course, Burt's Bees is now owned by Clorox, and when I poked around on their site, I discovered that their "multicare" formula and "whitening" formula have identical ingredients lists. We are surrounded by systems that use human unawareness as an energy source, and cultivate it like a crop.
Anyway, Burt's Bees does have less bad stuff, at a better price, than other toothpastes with calcium sodium phosphosilicate, so I'm going to try some.
June 1. I've just added the permaculture forums at permies.com to the top of the land links page, and I've also created an account there. I'll be checking it daily and posting after I've lurked for a while, when I have time.
Also, I've done another short landblog post.
May 28. Quick landblog post on why you should get your straw the previous summer for cob building in spring. Hey, if anyone is interested in a free cobwood "workshop", drop me an email. I put "workshop" in quotes because I don't know what I'm doing either. You'll have to drive yourself and bring your own food and camping gear, but there's already water and an outhouse, and this is a beautiful time of year up there. I expect to accelerate the project to a slow crawl around June 6.
May 28. (permalink) I've been thinking more about language. Last week someone asked me if the reason I don't like to get drunk is that I like to stay in "control". Among modern liberals, "control" is a dirty word; we're supposed to not control others or control ourselves, but let everything be free. But again, we're confused by a language that uses one word to point to different things. One of them I would call domination. But consider a pitcher who controls the ball, or a pilot who controls an airplane. This is what you might call precision. The reason I don't like to be drunk, is not that I want to dominate myself, or even that I want to follow logic and not emotion. It's that I want to maintain agility and precision in my thoughts and feelings and actions. (For the same reason, I don't like to be stoned in social situations, although it's nice if I'm alone and staring at the ceiling.)
Another kind of self-control is usually called "self-discipline", but in some circles "discipline" means flogging. What we're really talking about is more like self-awareness. If you're aware that you've had too much to drink, or that your anger is turning people against you, or that a toy you want to buy will use up your food money, you don't have to restrain yourself at all -- you just have to derive your actions from that awareness. What we call "self-discipline" is the radical notion that your future self is you, or it's the habit of being your big self and not your little self.
This is related to another tricky word: "lazy". I'm extremely lazy in the sense that I want to do as little work as possible. I only feel fully alive when there's nothing I'm supposed to be doing, and ideally I would do nothing but slack off and play for the next ten thousand years. But part of minimizing work is to invest work now in slack later, or to do little jobs before they become big jobs, or to do tasks as soon as they come up, to avoid the strain of having them hanging over me.
Why do some people have trouble with this? You've probably heard of the famous experiment where kids could get one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later, and the ability to hold out for the marshmallows later was strongly correlated with their future success. Is this genetic? Environmental? I'm guessing that it's epigenetic, and related to nutrition and stress. If your recent ancestors were malnourished, then you will be "soft-wired" to always grab the marshmallow now, because your body doesn't believe that there will be two marshmallows later. Or if they were stressed, you will grab the hour of idleness now because you don't believe there will be two hours of idleness later. And that's how poverty perpetuates itself across generations.
May 21. Two links. First, an excellent Sharon Astyk post about weeds. She covers which ones are so good that we should plant them, how we can use them to learn about the land, and how "invasives" are mostly symptoms of human mismanagement. On my land I've noticed that both spotted knapweed and hound's tongue produce lots of nectar for the wild bees, so I only pluck the knapweed if it's growing next to something important, and I kill the hound's tongue after it flowers but before it finishes making seeds, which are terrible burrs. I've also scattered seedballs and plain seeds of dandelion, lamb's quarters, and chickweed, but none of them like to grow up there.
This Oil Drum article on electric cars discovers that new electric cars have a shorter range than the electric cars made more than 100 years ago! All the advances in batteries have been used up and then more than used up in weight, speed, and acceleration. Or: the electric car's use value has been sacrificed for its toy value. Then the article gets into utopian speculations about how "we" can downsize the electric car. Sure, if you want to do it in your garage, and you have all the skills, it's simple. But to downsize and simplify on a large scale is not human nature. We will continue to do what we have always done: upsize incrementally, spend this upsizing on short-sighted pleasure, and then downsize through catastrophe. I'm serious: humans will learn teleportation before we learn smooth downsizing.
May 19. Three weeks ago Jerah recommended a new sci-fi novel called The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. That link goes to a nice review by Cory Doctorow. I got the book from the library and finished reading it a few days ago. It's very good! You know the kind of plot twist where the author has been carefully hiding something from you, and then suddenly reveals it? I hate that annoying fad, and The Windup Girl doesn't do it at all. Instead, it has the good kind of plot twist, where a character makes a crazy move that seems to surprise even the author. Also it has impressive moral complexity, leaving you totally on your own to decide what's wrong or right. And best of all, this is the first fiction I've seen about the medium-distant future that sees it the same way I do: Oil-based civilization will collapse, but large complex systems will survive and regrow using a different resource base; and biotech will be much more important than computers.
I have only one complaint. Why does so much "quality" science fiction take place in a cutthroat world where everyone is trying to fuck everyone else? Why are so many characters either hyperselfish or agonizing over their own inadequacy? I have a theory: this is the personality that develops in humans who are allied to powerful technology. Because the technology does the hard stuff for them, they never develop inner strength, or learn to cooperate with other people. And sci-fi authors are noticing this trend and exaggerating it.
Compare this with fantasy. In dumb fantasy, characters are intrinsically good or evil, and this determines whether they use magic for good or evil purposes. In smart fantasy, evil characters become evil because of magic, and they are opposed by good characters using inner strength, cooperation, and the power of nature. And when you think about the meaning of "the power of nature", biotech becomes extremely interesting...
May 18. Today is the 30th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption. I was 12 years old, living in Pullman, 250 miles east of the mountain. The ash cloud looked like a spooky giant thunderhead, and when it settled in, it got darker than night, and the ash fell like fast snowflakes. Volcanic "ash" is finely powdered rock. We got about an inch of it on the ground, and got the last few weeks of school off.
So here are some links on the latest disaster. A couple weeks ago Dmitry Orlov explained why the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an American Chernobyl. And here's a good Daily Kos piece about how the leaking methane is worse than the oil. "3000 times worse" is deceptive. There are 3000 cubic feet of gas for every barrel of oil, but the actual damage might be only 100 times worse. The worst part is that the methane is depleting the oxygen in the water. Here's a post I did last summer on the possible coming anoxic extinction: If the ocean has no oxygen, it fills up with anaerobic microbes, which produce hydrogen sulfide gas, which bubbles up and poisons life on land. And check it out: air tests from the Louisiana coast reveal that "hydrogen sulfide has been detected at concentrations more than 100 times greater than the level known to cause physical reactions in people."
So that's why I only wanted to spend one day writing about dating problems. But here's a link that ties the subjects together: Being Bad at Relationships Is Good for Survival. Researchers fed smoke into a room, and the people who are clingy in relationships were the first ones to notice the smoke, and the people who are aloof in relationships were the first ones to leave the room.