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Apocalypsopolis, book one
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Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
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"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
crashwatch (retired)
search this site
April 22. Three good news links: Online cash Bitcoin could challenge governments, banks, Police alerted to 'superheroes' patrolling Seattle, and Repelling bugs with the essence of grapefruit.
April 21. (permalink) Tangential to the food subject, why does it seem like the most wonderful things are bad for us? Maple syrup, video games, even daydreaming! This is what makes me think life is not meaningless, but has a precise and strongly enforced meaning: if you live as if you're here to learn, everything falls into place, but if you live for pleasure, you get repeatedly hammered down. At least I do.
But Yiedyie suggests an amazing metaphor: "the Universe does not want us to have a monopleasure like a monocrop." Here's an image of a polycrop, the seven levels of a forest garden, from the tops of trees down to the roots. And each vertical level has horizontal variety, many plants with different functions.
Maybe we can live purely to have a good time, if we have a good time in a variety of ways, on every level from the shallowest to the deepest. Or maybe a true emotional polyculture must also include pain...
April 20. A reminder. Elliot writes:
Man, I wish you had a forum. Your site is really active, full of likeminded people, I feel like it would be a perfect place to ask questions like "What the fuck do you guys do with yourselves?" and such. It's really easy, and free. Get a forum! Please!
I do have a forum -- or more precisely, there is a forum focused on this site. It's under the "communities" link on the left. Hardly anyone goes there because I don't go there myself, and apparently more of you are interested in talking to me than talking to each other, which troubles me. I also have a subreddit, equally neglected. If anyone out there wants to start a forum about what I write, and moderate it, that would be great! Moderating is the great unsolved problem of the internet, because nobody who understands it will do it for free.
April 20. Another reversal on cocoa and gout: I posted this stuff in this gout thread on permies.com, and Jonathan Byron wrote this:
I think the reference [in the table] to 'theobromine' means cocoa (Theobroma). Theobromine is not a food but cocoa is. Theobromine is by definition 100% a purine, but the tables that list theobromine as a food to avoid say it has 2300 mg/100 g (ie, it is 2.3% purine) - which is obviously wrong for pure theobromine but could be right for cocoa.
This fits with Brendan's email: "According to Wikipedia, cocoa has 20.3 mg/g of theobromine, or roughly 2%." So chocolate really is a big contributor to gout. Now it's my turn to do math. A typical Endangered Species chocolate bar is 72% cocoa, and 85 grams. If that cocoa is 2% purine, that comes out to more than 1200mg, and going back to the purine chart on this page, that's as much purine as five 100g doses of chicken liver. So, in English units, a good chocolate bar causes more gout than a pound of chicken liver!
Then again, the table doesn't actually list purine content, but uric acid production. So it's possible that "theobromine" does mean theobromine, that the 2% figure is a coincidence, and that you have to eat 50 chocolate bars to equal a pound of chicken liver. I consider the issue unresolved, and will not post on it again, or archive it, unless I see some really good science.
I also want to move on from the sugar subject, but for anyone who wants to continue, there are a lot of paleo and high-fat diet blogs out there. Whole Health Source is one that has links to some others, and another good one is Archevore (thanks Judy). Personally I would love to try full paleo but it's just too difficult and expensive in my present circumstances, which is why I appreciate the Weston Price perspective that grains and legumes are good if you prepare them right.
April 19. Wow, I think it's been several years since I've had more emails on one post. I won't answer them all, but some can be answered by carefully reading the sugar article. If you don't have NY Times access, I've put up a copy here. Anne comments:
There's a public health joke that goes like this: "Q: Table sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose bound into a disaccharide. HFCS is 45% glucose and 55% fructose as free monosaccharides. Which is worse and why?" "A: HFCS - because its cheaper."
Brendan has done some research on other concentrated sweeteners:
Agave nectar: 92% fructose / 8% glucose or 74% fructose / 26% glucose
Honey: 47% fructose / 38% glucose / 9% maltose / 2% sucrose
Maple: Almost entirely sucrose
Brown Rice: 94% maltose / 6% glucose
Cane Molasses: 74% sucrose / 12% fructose / 5% glucose
So it looks like agave is worst of all. I didn't watch Lustig's whole 90 minute video, but I get the idea that glucose is harmless (other than being empty calories) and the damage comes when the liver has to break down excessive fructose into glucose, without being moderated by fiber.
Sucrose is glucose-fructose, maltose is double glucose, and "dextrose", which appears on long ingredients lists, is another word for glucose. I don't know if Lustig ignores maltose because it's harmless, or because it's uncommon, but while trying to find out, I stumbled on this great site, The Healthy Skeptic. Via Google, here's a single page with links to his 9 Steps to Perfect Health.
Also, I can't blame chocolate for gout: Brendan points out that cocoa is only 2% theobromine, while ox liver is 100% ox liver, so even raw cocoa would not make the chart. Probably I'm getting gout symptoms because my sugar-damaged body can't metabolize purines. Now I'm wondering about recovery. They say that even heavy smokers can fully recover if they quit, but I haven't seen evidence one way or the other about full recovery from fructose poisoning.
April 18. Three health warnings. First, an important article in the NY Times, Is Sugar Toxic? Of course, the human digestive system can deal with some toxicity. But there is evidence that the quantity of sugar in the industrial diet has overwhelmed us, causing diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and possibly cancer. The article mentions that high fructose corn syrup was originally marketed as a healthy alternative to sugar, and now they're marketing sugar as a healthy alternative to HFCS! There's no evidence that one is worse than the other, but they're both much worse than refined grains. I'd like to know where to put agave syrup, maple syrup, honey, brown rice sweetener, molasses, and so on. I fear that they're just as bad as sugar with some extra vitamins, and that we shouldn't eat any sweetener other than whole fruit.
Also from the NY Times, Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? Because the Times now has a 20 article per month limit, I'll link to alternate sources if I can find them, and this one is a repost at Atheist Universe. Anyway, the good news is that if you get up and move throughout the day, you can escape sitting's deadly effects. It also mentions a fascinating study where fidgety people could eat extra calories without gaining weight.
Finally, yesterday I stumbled on this page about natural food toxins, with this bit about purines:
When the body metabolizes purines -- an aromatic organic compound whose derivatives are naturally occurring in foods as DNA/RNA constituents -- inefficient enzyme action can result in the build up of their end metabolite, uric acid. It then crystallizes in joints, causing gout. Foods highest in purines are meats, and particularly organ meats.
But then there's a chart, and at the top, far above the levels of ox liver and pig's heart, are brewer's yeast and theobromine, the alkaloid in chocolate! Sometimes I get a sharp pain in the middle joint of my big toe, a typical symptom of gout, which I treat by eating tart cherries. So now I have to give up nutritional yeast and raw cocoa nibs. I suppose in a few years the issue will be moot, because there won't be anything to eat except thistles and ants.
April 16. Edge of Grace has two good recent posts, one reflecting on a year in the woods, and one on war and meaning.
April 15. Two links that are not for me but maybe for you. If you have a lawn, and for some reason you can't use it to grow food, Paul Wheaton has made a great page, Organic Lawn Care For the Cheap and Lazy.
And I just discovered David Rothscum Reports, an anti-civilization and fringe politics blog out of the Netherlands. Remember what I said yesterday, that you should focus on the path and not the obstacles? Rothscum focuses almost completely on the obstacles, but I appreciate his enthusiasm.
April 14. Random links: John Robb has a fascinating post on the "Jasmine Revolution" in China. The whole thing is a hoax from outside China, and yet the Chinese government is so terrified that they're blocking vast amounts of legitimate internet traffic, "with real-world social, political and economic consequences."
Good chart, What is really rising/falling in price? "YoY" means that a given period, usually a month or a quarter, is compared to the same period one year previously. Anyway, you can guess the results. The stuff rising most in price is energy and food, and the stuff falling most is information processing. To hammer a point: if we can stop using information processing to amuse ourselves, and start using it to share practical skills, then we can replace the collapsing centralized energy/food systems with distributed systems that... oh, never mind. Here's a funny video of a guy being hit by a train.
Inspiring article, Your bike - the coolest part of your disaster kit. That reminds me: I'm reading the book The Art of Cycling, which I highly recommend, and there's a great bit about how you should focus your attention on the path you want to take, rather than focusing on obstacles. This is a good way to judge a website, or for that matter, any communication: is it focusing on the obstacles, or the path?
April 12. Slow week. On the human potential subject, here's a nice article about a 30 year old guy who has never played golf, who is attempting to become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice:
People, of course, have become world-class after practicing 10,000 hours, in golf and tennis and violin or anything else. But never, not in anything, according to Ericsson, has anyone done it like this: to start at this age, with no experience, and to keep statistics from the beginning, and to be so self-reflective about it, and to last even this long. Dan, Ericsson says, is "like Columbus here, sailing out in new territory."
April 11. Kurt Cobb review, The coolest book I've ever read on energy. The whole review is worth reading, and possibly the whole book, but the big idea is that life and entropy are not opposed but allied. This reminds me of my own post on entropy from four years ago, quoting some scientists who say that entropy will never cause universal extinction, and that it's more about unpredictability than disorder.
Anyway, the book is called Into The Cool, and check out the Amazon reviews at that link. The one and two star ratings are saying "This book is based on obscure scientific papers that I've been reading since 1988, and now someone has ruined the ideas by dumbing them down for a large audience." I didn't know there were science hipsters!
April 8. Two links about preserving information: Storing Bits Isn't the Same as Preserving Them, because digital files cannot be viewed without highly complex technologies, all of which, so far, have been short-lived. Consider how hard it is already to get data off of 5¼ inch floppies, and that was less than 20 years ago, and there hasn't even been a collapse. I think we are now living in a dark age, in the sense that people looking back in 1000 years will know very little about us. Another issue is that we are creating so much junk data that it's going to be hard to sort through it and find the good stuff. On that subject...
Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors. Along the Japanese coastline are hundreds of stone markers, hundreds of years old, warning about the dangers of tsunamis. The people who made them understood that carving in stone is a great way to send a message into the future. But they could not have guessed that their descendants would be so overwhelmed with information that they would see the warnings and ignore them.
April 7. Random links: The Matchmaker is about economist Alvin Roth. He was a leader in experimental economics, and helped disprove the assumption that everyone behaves rationally. And he specializes in economics without money, which will become important as the money economy collapses.
How Slavery Really Ended in America. When the Civil War broke out, some slaves escaped to a Union fort, and one general made a strategic decision to not send them back to their owners. This led to a flood of escaping slaves, which eventually forced Lincoln (or gave Lincoln the leverage) to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. It would be nice if a similar mass movement would force (or enable) Obama to do something good.
And a new Ribbonfarm post about Extroverts and Introverts, with a great economic model for their different ways of putting energy into relationships.
April 6. Three ecology links. From Ugo Bardi, The Cuckoo that won't sing. He argues that Japan, during the Edo period, managed to have a complex society with a steady state economy for 200 years.
Bug munches plastic trash, possibly cleaning oceans. Or, the article points out, it might also be liberating toxins into the food chain.
And a pretty good article on the open source ecology movement, A Mad Scientist's 50 Tools for Sustainable Communities.
April 5. Two energy links. In Fukushima and the Future of Nuclear Power, Sharon Astyk argues that nuclear power will not solve energy decline, and not because of dangers or fears, but because of its huge up-front costs.
And Erik sends this important article, Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all. The details are all about wind. It's renewable on a small scale, but if we were to expand it to the point that it could replace oil, it would throw off the energy balance of the atmosphere. In a computer model, "the magnitude of the changes was comparable to the changes to the climate caused by doubling atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide." I wonder how far we could go with photovoltaic before the same kind of thing happened.
April 4. Major new post from Anne, The Tarot and the Atkins Diet, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Structural Anthropology. The big idea is that even western industrial medicine is based more on mind than matter: only 13% of treatments have been clearly proven more beneficial than placebos, placebos are merely a subset of healing based on meaning, and the magical beliefs of primitive people are no more unquantifiable than our beliefs in will power and stress. So instead of resisting meaning-based healing, we should try to integrate it.
April 4. Last night I finished going through the archives. I seem to write better in the spring. My favorite archive might be March-April 2009, in which I write that we have to tax the rich as long as our system awards money for the wrong reasons, that there's no need to worry about government control of agriculture, that the techno-elite fail to understand technology because they're insulated from the downsides, that post-crash "chaos" is a myth and the real danger is brutal new orders, that humans always have and always will go back and forth between peaceful-cooperative and violent-repressive systems, that the end of perpetual growth will weaken the repressive systems, that the film Gattaca got it backwards, and that we should define "property" in terms of sustaining vs extractive relationships.
And April-May 2010 has the best one-liners: "What we call 'self-discipline' is the radical notion that your future self is you." "We have forgotten how to produce or create anything, except as part of a giant machine that eats the Earth to generate garbage and control." "Entropy is matter turning back into mind." And this makes sense in context: "If your kids are starving, you're going to wear the hypnotic pants."
April 1. I'm nowhere near done cleaning up the broken links, but here are some fresh links: from Acres USA magazine, a pdf interview of Michael Potter of Eden Foods, which has kept its integrity for 42 years while most other organic food companies have been assimilated by industrial agribusiness. There's a good story about how he persisted to get cans that were not lined with bisphenol-A, years before it was widely known to be harmful.
A smart reddit comment about patents and authority, pointing out that military officers are told "they should never issue an order they don't expect to be followed", because this weakens their authority, and that many laws, including patent and drug laws, are becoming so senseless that it's destroying our faith in government.
And a study shows that ceiling height influences thinking. Basically, under a high ceiling you see the forest, and under a low ceiling you see the trees. The difference should be even greater between being under a ceiling and being outdoors.
March 30, late. It's a slow week, so I'm taking a few days off to go through my archives and fix broken links. There are way too many. Something written on toilet paper and thrown in the landfill will last longer than the average blog post on the internet. I've also noticed, the farther on the fringe something is, the more likely it is to disappear completely. Big thanks to Charles for helping me recover "The Making of Child Assassins."
March 29. Thanks Aaron for pointing out that Paula Hay, who wrote the Cognitive Archeology of the West piece that I linked to on the 18th, has a new blog, Mythodrome. Her latest, Who Is God?, looks at ancient language and argues that the "God" of the book of Genesis was not intended to be a sky father, but was an attempt to preserve animism through the age of polytheism. She links to another piece that says the name YHWH refers to "existence in its broadest sense, yet unlike any regular human perspective; a blessing to the wise, but the undoing of the wicked." To me, that sounds exactly like Lao Tzu's concept of the Tao.
March 29. A reader comments that the following paragraph, in "Escape from the Zombie Food Court", reminds him of Harry Harlow and the wire mother:
We believe that we dare not let corporations die. Corporations feed us. They entertain us. Corporations occupy one full half of our waking hours of our lives, through employment, either directly or indirectly. They heal us when we are sick. So it's easy to see why the corporations feel like a friendly benevolent entity in the larger American consciousness. Corporations are, of course, deathless and faceless machines, and have no soul or human emotions.
March 28. Joe Bageant has died. Here's my favorite of his writings, Escape from the Zombie Food Court.
March 27. Chuck picks up yesterday's metaphor and runs with it:
When the levees break, and the water rushes through the town, you don't run for the hills; you get in your ark. Where did Noah build the ark? On the future floodplain. How did Noah build the ark? With materials and resources from that place. And when did Noah build the ark? Before the flood.
March 26, 19:30 PDT. I've just edited the post below to include a key fact that I missed: it's not always a case of big bad systems vs ordinary folks; in many cases, they're on the same side. For example, American health care cannot be made affordable without eliminating millions of jobs in the predatory billing industry, and we can't phase out coal and nuclear without most of us giving up our cars.
March 26. (permalink) I have more to say on yesterday's subject of unwise world-views that drive human political action. Sometimes I feel like I'm in the middle of a war. There are bullets flying and explosions all around, and I'm trying to organize people on my side to fight effectively, and instead they're just standing around saying, "Look, they're shooting at us! I can't believe they're actually shooting at us! Look at those bad, bad people doing that bad, bad thing! Shame on th- (takes bullet in head)"
There's only one place for morality in this world, and that is that your actions must serve the greatest, widest good that you can perceive. Beyond that, it's all strategy and tactics. Applying morality to the actions of other people is a strategic error. I think this error goes back to our tribal ancestors. If one person does something to harm the tribe, the others will use shaming to bring this person into line. If this feels to us like a moral action, it's because it was easier for our ancestors to mindlessly throw righteous indignation at the wrongdoer, than to carefully discern why a behavior is harmful and how shaming will correct it.
Now here we are in a world of high tech and giant systems, still reflexively following the habits of the tribe, possessing a magical tool that sends words and pictures around the world in seconds, and wasting it by pointing fingers at governments and corporations and their human servants, as if these unimaginably complex systems, berated by a shrill minority, will bow their heads and obey like little children pressured by everyone they've ever known.
But there were things in our ancestral environment that behaved very much like governments and corporations and banks and mass collective short-sightedness: storms, floods, avalanches, disease epidemics, fires. As Thaddeus Golas wrote in The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment: "When your consciousness is open, any action you take in reference to evil has no more significance than digging a ditch to channel floodwaters away from a house." If we think of modern "evils" as amoral forces of nature, and not as wayward family members, we begin to see how to deal with them.
The corporation can be influenced through the boycott, which modern lefties have tragically misunderstood as an individual action aimed at avoiding guilt. The correct way to do a boycott is to organize a block of customers of a business, large enough that without their money the business will fail. Then you make a precise demand, and you all withhold your money until the demand is met. Likewise, a government will not be influcenced if every one of its citizens shouts disagreement, but it will be influenced if you can make a precise demand, and organize enough people to stop the government from functioning until that demand is met.
But suppose the damage is being done by almost everyone, through popular behaviors that feel meaningful and have no clear alternative. Suppose the harmful systems are so bound up with perceived benefit and necessity that you cannot organize enough people to stop them. What do you do when a flood is too big to save the town with channels and sandbags? You evacuate. But now my metaphor is breaking down, because I'm not telling people to head for the hills, or to take their money out of the credit union, or even to stop voting. Go ahead and participate in the system, but your strategic goal is no longer to turn the system around and save everyone. Rather, it is to guide the system through its collapse, so that people who are determined to avoid industrial toxins, to grow their own food, to move outside the money economy, to take responsibility for their own health and safety and comfort, are able to do so.
March 25. The problems with Smart Grids. "Smart grids" are a new component of the ongoing American Cult Suicide, in which submissive consumers and tech worshippers consent to have their appliances communicate with the grid through electromagnetic radiation, which will make them physically sick, economically weak, and make the whole system more vulnerable to catastrophe.
It's a distraction to think about this morally, but if we think strategically, our first line of defense is to try to stop the system through local politics, and if that fails we can try to opt out of having "smart meters" and "smart appliances" in our homes, and if that fails we can open them up and disable them, and if that fails we can generate our own electricity with solar and wind, and if that fails we can live without electricity -- which we should be prepared to do anyway.
More generally, I want to do a little rant against liberals. Now, I'm left or left-of-left on most issues. But the mainstream left has a naive world view: "People are good, but passively ignorant. A few Bad People are hiding the Truth. If we point out the Bad People and reveal the Truth, the good people will Wake Up. Then we will be able to Change the System from within, to make a Better World for Everyone."
My view is more like this: People are well-intentioned but Actively Ignorant. We are masters of believing whatever makes our lives feel Meaningful, and then finding evidence to support it. If you threaten the stories that make people's lives feel Meaningful, they will kill you. But if you reinforce these stories, they will reward you, even if you exploit them. This leads to giant systems that feed on Active Ignorance, the way a fire feeds on dry sticks. Like a forest fire, the present system is fundamentally destructive and unstoppable. The best we can do is to channel the destruction so that people who are Paying Attention will have a good chance to survive.
January 30. I've changed my TechJudge system to measure efficiency in terms of time instead of distance. I added a paragraph to the intro to explain why, and cars gained a bit on airplanes. But now I'm thinking I'll kill the whole efficiency category. Contrary to popular belief, energy efficiency does not save energy. In practice, it just allows us to do more stuff while using all the energy we have available. (A gain in efficiency can even cause ecological destruction by making it profitable to exploit an energy resource -- see Jevons paradox.) So instead of asking how much stuff we can do with a given amount of energy, we should be asking whether the stuff we're doing is good or bad. And that is covered in all the other categories in my system.
So if I remove efficiency, I need to add a new rating category to keep a simple ten-by-ten system. I'm considering adding human health. I might also merge refusal and reversal, which would make room to add a second new category.