]]>Famine is a demographic event. The definition of famine is significant excess mortality associated with a decline in the availability of food, regardless of cause of death. If you and your family starve to death, it's not famine because there aren't that many of you. If everyone in your town runs out of food, breaks into Costco, and are mowed down by machine-gun wielding rent-a-cops, that is actually famine.
Infectious disease (often related to diarrhea and respiratory illness) kills more people than actual starvation.
The indicators of famine are weird. Colonial India developed a set of famine codes that watched for, among other things, sudden increases in prices of food, or sudden increases in petty crime, or sudden decreases in the cost of commercial sex.
Stockpiles and famine foods aren't as helpful as you think. I always assumed that if you had a year's food in your basement, or knew which weeds and bugs were edible, you'd make it through a famine. Turns out, everybody figures this stuff out at about the same time, and the dying doesn't start until the stockpiles and rabbit warrens are exhausted.
The best survival technique is to leave the area. Usually the first to go are the middle class professionals whose assets are their credentials and experience. The poor may lack the means to relocate, and the wealthy tend to have significant investments in non-mobile assets (land, businesses, factories).
Famines in industrial market economies are political or conflict-related. In general, the world has a robust and finely-tuned famine relief industry. The notorious famines of the 20th century (Leningrad, Ethiopia, Sudan) have all been war famines. You are unlikely to ever experience a famine unless you are trapped behind armed fighters.
Opportunistic cannibalism (eating dead people) is common. Predatory cannibalism (killing people to eat them) is really, really rare.
Grover Norquist and others put together a strategy wherein business would back social conservative candidates, while single-issue groups (pro-life groups, NRA) would support low taxes and deregulation. The idea was that business would supply the money to win elections, while the single-issue folks would supply the energy needed to get people out to the polls. This is how the GOP is able to stay viable in elections even as the percentage of rank-and-file Republicans decreases.
Another reddit comment in which a German argues that American culture is compassionless, impulsive, and authoritarian:
If I say "you're authoritarian", what I mean is that you strongly remind me of Germany in the past. No, not the Nazis. Of Germany leading up to World War One. A society that held its military in high regard, where someone in a uniform was seen as intrinsically better than a civilian, no matter if it was a military or a police uniform. A time when orders were to be followed, not questioned.
Why America's essentials are getting more expensive while its toys are getting cheap. The reason is that manufacturing is being off-shored or automated, while local services are losing public subsidies. The result is that "prices are rising on the very things that are essential for climbing out of poverty." The deeper story is that we're in a feedback loop in which more power gets concentrated in the center, leading to political changes that make it easier for more power to be concentrated in the center. If we continue on this path, most people will be locked in poverty and desperately competing to sell personalized services to the rich.
And a possible solution, from an article where the finger-pointing tone is not at center stage, but is called up to support an argument for a precise set of policies: Radical Centrism: Uniting the Radical Left and the Radical Right.
]]>The essence of a radical centrist approach is government provision of essential goods and services and a minimal-intervention, free enterprise environment for everything else... The principle of radical centrism aims to build a firewall that protects the common man from the worst impact of economic disturbances while simultaneously increasing the threat of failure at firm level. The presence of the public option and a robust safety net is precisely what empowers us to allow incumbent firms to fail.
The day that robot armies become more cost-effective than human infantry is the day when People Power becomes obsolete. With robot armies, the few will be able to do whatever they want to the many. And unlike the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, robot-enforced tyranny will be robust to shifts in popular opinion. The rabble may think whatever they please, but the Robot Lords will have the guns... Imagine a world where gated communities have become self-contained cantonments, inside of which live the beautiful, rich, Robot Lords, served by cheap robot employees, guarded by cheap robot armies. Outside the gates, a teeming, ragged mass of lumpen humanity teeters on the edge of starvation.
I don't expect it to be this bad. The elite don't want to be evil. They actually want to help the masses -- but without giving up a shred of political power. There will be war and starvation as we pass through the bottleneck of converting from nonrenewable to renewable resources. But on the other side, we will all be guaranteed comfortable survival, and the elite will manipulate us not by locking up the food, but by shaping a culture in which our lives have more meaning if we do what they say. They're already doing this now, which is why young people in no danger of starvation still feel worthless if they don't have a job.
]]>Modern culture seems to think that all of reality can be reduced to number and measure, and beauty is just an imprecise way of thinking about it. Plato thought that all the muddy stuff in our world is just imperfect reflections of perfect geometry in a deeper world. I think he had it backwards. There is a Platonic form for beauty but nothing else. The deeper world is more muddy, and geometry and logic are powerful shortcuts for thinking about reality, but there are only certain places you can go with them.
A reader has been making lots of posts to the subreddit, and it's decent stuff, but for some reason it's not appearing on the subreddit page. You might want to check out his user page.
And more music. The space rock I mentioned the other day is closely related to Krautrock bands of the early 1970's, and a contemporary band called Camera plays prettier Krautrock than the original bands. Here's a YouTube playlist of their 2012 debut album, Radiate! And here's a review.
Holy Fuck has a similar sound but they're more varied and inventive. That link goes to a playlist of one of their albums, and my favorite track is Lovely Allen.
Finally, thanks to an anonymous donor in my own state for some cannabis of the Jack Herer and Flo varieties. I look forward to trying them out, and to more people being able to do this legally.
Even statements that appear, at first glance, to address musical issues are often lifestyle statements in disguise. I've learned this the hard way, by getting into detailed discussions over musical tastes, and discovering that if you force pop culture insiders to be as precise as possible in articulating the reasons why they favor a band or a singer, it almost always boils down to: "I like [fill in the name] because they make me feel good about my lifestyle."
This might explain why [mediocre hipster band] is so popular, but I think he's exaggerating the problem. We have more freedom to choose what we listen to, and a wider range to choose from, than anyone in history, but it's like any new power: people use it badly before they learn to use it well. Also I think he's being unfair in asking people to say precisely why they like something, as if reductionism can reach the heart of beauty.
This reminds me of a parable I came up with last weekend when I tried out the vaporizer: A civilization sends out a space probe filled with recordings of its most beautiful music; another civilization receives it, and they try to decode it as a message in symbolic language. What do they not understand?
I'm going straight into music links early this week. My new favorite band is Electric Moon. That goes to a playlist starting with a typical example of their sound -- the word "song" doesn't really apply. Musical innovations begin with someone, in the context of the old style of music, doing something new for a few seconds. Then someone else notices and stretches the sound out longer. Eventually someone says, "Why can't we play like that all the time?"
Electric Moon, almost all the time, plays improvised space rock jams. I would define "space rock" as steady hypnotic rhythm, optional analog synth, and lead guitar with distortion and phase effects. Here's a textbook example of the space rock guitar sound from the last three minutes of Hawkwind's Space Ritual live version of Space is Deep.
A more interesting example of Electric Moon is their 40 minute Live At Epplehaus version of Doomsday Machine, because the bass is trying to be as deep and sludgy as good stoner doom metal. Here's my favorite example of that, Mind Transferral by Electric Wizard. Unlike most stoner metal, it's not ruined by vocals, but notice how the lead guitar is totally metal, not space. Now check out a great contemporary space guitarist, Ripley Johnson of Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo, playing the song Escape. But the backing music is nowhere near sludge, and the jamming doesn't really start until halfway through. Coincidentally, Electric Moon combines what I like most about Electric Wizard and Moon Duo, but there's room to do it better, and more of the time. As for why I like that particular sound, that's in the realm of the ineffable.