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
September 2. Still very busy. Another little tidbit from Ivan, the Iron law of oligarchy: "...that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies."
September 1. I'm wiped out from overworking myself on the land. Kate sends this article, Does your language shape how you think? I had seen the headline before and didn't read it, because of course language shapes how we think. But one of the examples is fascinating. There are cultures that never give directions with right or left or forward or back, but always use north, south, east, west. And people raised in these cultures have an infallible sense of direction! They can be blindfolded and spun around and still find north. How do they do this?? I'm also wondering how this skill would carry over into dungeons in video games.
August 27. This is the kind of thing I love to think about. Reddit reports that its parent company Conde Nast refuses to run ads supporting Proposition 19 in California, which would legalize cannabis and regulate it like alcohol. The official statement was, "As a corporation, Conde Nast does not want to benefit financially from this particular issue." The comments all think this is stupid or hypocritical or nonsensical. But instead of wagging my finger, I'd like to try to figure it out. Clearly it's the nature of a corporation to benefit financially wherever it can. Did a particular executive overrule the interests of Conde Nast? I think it's more interesting to make a hypothetical assumption: suppose this was a smart evil decision by the corporate hive mind, that it makes sense in some way that we do not yet understand.
Here's my guess: Humans are engaged in an epic struggle between power-with and power-over. These could also be called bottom-up and top-down, or distributed and centralized power. Marijuana legalization is a double victory for power-with: on a practical level, it dissolves one of the excuses for the police state; and on a symbolic level, the hippies are sticking it to the man. Proposition 19 threatens to change the culture, the human climate, to one in which it's more difficult for corporations to thrive.
August 27. Just discovered a smart blogger, Gonzalo Lira. His latest two posts are about hyperinflation, how it will happen and what it will look like. I don't understand economics well enough to know if he's right, but even if he's wrong, he's a good thinker and writer, and worth reading.
August 26. Adam sends a great blog I hadn't seen before: squattercity.
August 26. Now that almost everyone has broadband, more and more of the words on the internet are not in the form of text, but videos of people giving speeches. Doesn't anyone know how to read? Now this is how you use the technology of video: The Biggest Company You've Never Heard Of.
August 26. Apparently yesterday's landblog post came off as more discouraging than I intended. My point is that we shouldn't romanticize homesteading or natural building, but that they're still worth doing. A deeper point is that motivational writers have given people the wrong idea that life should be fun all the time. Sometimes you have to slog through difficult and painful stuff for a reward later. There is no escape from this. There is no magical lifestyle that does not require self-discipline. Living outside the system actually requires more self-discipline than living inside it -- but the rewards are greater.
August 25. New post on landblog, an analysis of cobwood with a bit of a rant on natural building.
August 25. Back in Spokane. Last night I upgraded to Puppy 5.1. The older Puppies use the Seamonkey browser by default, but 5.1 makes it equally easy to use Firefox. So I switched to Firefox, and this page looked terrible! I traced the problem to my CSS page, which listed Helvetica ahead of default sans-serif. So I removed Helvetica, and now the page looks much better on my browser, and it might look different on yours. I'm also considering raising the font size to 100%, but I'll test that another time.
August 20. Up at the land until probably Tuesday. In the last landblog post I wrote:
I like to think we're at the beginning of a renaissance, a conjunction between modern consciousness and ecological values. More now than at any time in human history, the people not mired in tradition, and the people trying to live in balance with other life, are the same.
Since then I've been thinking more about that word, tradition. It's one of those words that carries not only meaning, but command. Just as the word "terrorism" commands us to build a police state, "tradition" commands us to follow the old ways. No respectable person will stand up and say, "I am against tradition" -- but I will!
To be more clear, there are many particular old ways of doing things that are better than the new ways. But the habit of favoring a way of doing something, just because it's old, is a cognitive shortcut, and a dangerous one. If people like to follow "tradition", then you can make the most insane and dysfunctional society in history, keep it going for a few generations, and the traditionalists will fanatically defend it. Obviously, we are now living in that society.
Now, to counter this, you might say "I'm all for following tradition, but those are fake traditions, and here are the real traditions." I think this would be a tactical mistake. We should be taking apart the propaganda word "tradition", not stacking it with the propaganda word "real". Sometimes the old ways happen to be better, sometimes the new ways happen to be better, and we have a responsibility to actually look at the world and figure it out.
August 20. Fascinating Early Warning post, City Crippler Car Worms. It's already known that the most complex cars can be hacked into with wireless signals. Staniford speculates that where these cars are dense enough, a very well designed internet worm could spread through smart phones and infect enough cars to stop automobile traffic in a city for days.
August 20. Via recommendations from two different readers, many of you will like Guy McPherson's blog, Nature Bats Last.
August 18. Double post on landblog about all the stuff Chuck and I did last weekend on the mysterious structure. I'm two months behind schedule, so for the next two months, or three if it goes badly, I expect to be super-busy trying to get this thing done before winter.
August 13. Last week Dmitry Orlov made one of his best posts ever, about wealth and poverty in America. Summary: Americans have been brainwashed with the puritan work ethic, and instead we should be idle and happy and poor -- but don't let on that you're happy or you'll get in trouble, because "if the poor can't be made miserable, then what exactly is the point of being rich?" Meanwhile, the rich are truly miserable -- until they lose all their money and get their heads straight. Related: the NY Times writes about people becoming happier by adapting to the economic collapse.
August 13. Michael has asked me to rejoin the forums, and I really don't have time, but they have become quieter lately, and maybe nicer. There's a thread about "elemental monies", picking up on my November 2008 post about fire economies and water economies, and speculating about earth and air economies. You can get to the forums through the communities page.
August 13. Yesterday's post was making a point about how technology has been distorted by the industrial age. But if anyone is actually looking for a solid-head hoe, Alex comments that Lee Valley sells a few on this page, and sells a real peasant hoe in their paper catalog.
August 12. Via Energy Bulletin, two new blog posts about two ways that "progress" has made things worse. Gene Logsdon writes about hoes: in a good hoe, the blade, neck, and collar are all forged out of one piece of metal, and the collar is designed so you can easily replace a wooden handle. These are hard to find now. Instead, hoes are made cheaply to be thrown away, just like every other manufactured item in this brief age. In the comments, someone recommends Rogue Hoes, which are not hand-forged, but welded out of "recycled agricultural disc blades". Yes, we are now entering the Age of Scrap. I like to think that in 100 years, we will be scavenging metal from junked cars and hand-forging again.
And (permalink) Sharon Astyk writes about livestock breeding. (At first I thought the title, "What are you breeding for?" meant "Why are you having kids?") Her point is that livestock breeding, in this brief age, has been for massive production using massive inputs. For example, after WWI, German villages replaced "unproductive" weed-fed goats with highly productive grain-fed goats, and the result was that rich people had too much milk while poor people had no milk at all. The same kind of thing happened all over, many local breeds were lost, and now we get to make new local breeds. I would phrase it like this: we need to stop breeding for quantity, and start breeding for various qualities.
For example, I'm growing a Court Pendu Plat apple tree, an 1800 year old variety that still fruits when the weather is erratic. Genetic engineering is said to make crops "more productive", but it's actually being used to make crops better adapted to large-scale high-energy industrial farming. Outside of that context, most GMO crops will be less productive than the old varieties, because they'll die! Of course, biotech doesn't have to be used this way. Michael Pollan has spoken in favor of open-source genetic modification, and I agree. It's dangerous, but it can also be used to very rapidly adapt to industrial collapse and climate change, by churning out new plants and animals that fit the new conditions.
August 11. Via Hacker News, a very smart 2008 article, The Traffic Guru, about a Dutch guy who figured out that if you control traffic by subtly changing the landscape, instead of using signs and lights, it flows much better. There's also some good stuff about how the automobile changes human consciousness. The whole thing is worth reading, but this is a good paragraph:
The results were striking. Without bumps or flashing warning signs, drivers slowed, so much so that Monderman's radar gun couldn't even register their speeds. Rather than clarity and segregation, he had created confusion and ambiguity. Unsure of what space belonged to them, drivers became more accommodating. Rather than give drivers a simple behavioral mandate -- say, a speed limit sign or a speed bump -- he had, through the new road design, subtly suggested the proper course of action. And he did something else. He used context to change behavior. He had made the main road look like a narrow lane in a village, not simply a traffic-way through some anonymous town.
August 11. I usually don't like to post stuff that makes you believe what you already believe even more strongly. But here's one with a clever angle: Tom Sawyer and today's children: Same behavior, different treatment. And here's one where the real news is the person writing it: lefty Glenn Greenwald is now a doomer. And this is just a great rant by Cory Doctorow from 2002: "That guy has too much spare time" is one of the most odious things a person can say.
August 7. The other day I wrote, "The poor don't need money -- they need to not need money." I should clarify that it's impossible to get all the way out of the money economy, so your goal should be to just get a little farther out, one step at a time. A big step is medical costs. Check out the medical line in this Early Warning graph of components of inflation. I've been on the "don't get sick" plan for 20 years, but that's not realistic for everyone, and the other options are extremely depressing, unless you're not afraid to die, or emigrate.
Another big step is debt. The American system has been so effective at producing debt serfs that you are now a majority, and if you could unite politically on that issue, you all could force a Jubilee and reboot the economy. Realistically this will not happen, because the media will keep everyone distracted by the cultural tribe war, and more and more people will find themselves in jail for debt, while the rest remain obedient out of fear. My best guess is that debtors will go through a few years of intense pressure, and then the survivors will have their debts wiped out by hyperinflation, which in turn will cause such a crisis that a charismatic leader will mess everything up even worse. Whether you should hold out for this hope, or try to pay your debts off now, is a decision you'll have to make on your own. Related: something Patricia and I wrote a few years ago, How to Consolidate Student Debt with the DOE.
Another big step is housing costs. What you save by growing radishes in the back yard is trivial compared to what you're probably paying in rent or mortgage. I would seriously consider squatting or living in a van. The less radical option is living more densely: moving in with family or friends, or moving others in with you to share the costs.
Of course, I wrote about this whole subject in How to Drop Out. You could also check out the Frugal subreddit, and the book Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin.
August 6. Blog post about pemmican, the superfood of American Indians, which supposedly keeps for decades and provides complete nutrition. There are links to recipes at the bottom. Basically you completely dry a bunch of red meat at below 120F, grind it to a powder, and mix it one to one with rendered fat, ideally grass-fed. The purists say to just use those two ingredients, but I see benefit and no harm in adding unrefined salt, and maybe honey.