Vote Harder!

The people in my county habitually vote for republicans in every election. When there was a "tea party" branch of the republican party they voted for politicians who preached about a small government. Since then, a little after 2008, though, the county government grew larger and more intrusive which is exactly what would happen if people voted for democrats. The state government is republican dominated, but they're also pushing democrat-esque policies. One of the very annoying issues is the county will implement some type of septic system monitoring program, which is happening at the behest of the state government, I believe.

The pretext for the program is poorly maintained septic systems are contributing nitrogen runoff into lake erie. This monitoring system was initially proposed maybe ten years ago. I was skeptical about that claim then. Maybe in some worst case scenario a house with a totally failed waste treatment system could generate runoff directly into a ditch and thereby into a waterway, but that might only be a 1/1000 case.

In almost every other case, even an inefficient, poorly maintained system would still drain through a leech field and might be several feet away from any type of waterway. Human waste isn't any different in nitrogen content than animal waste, so evidence that septic systems are contributing to nitrogen in rivers might be hard to come by in a low population density county like mine. I think there are as many deer in Geauga County as people, for example and I don't see deer using public restrooms. I looked for any research papers on the topic.

For example, there should be elevated nitrogen levels in the various rivers originating in Geauga county, or a lake like Bass Lake which is surrounded by homes with such waste disposal systems should have elevated nitrogen levels or high bacteria counts, but at the time I didn't find any information suggesting that was happening. It doesn't even look like the state or local agencies monitor that, or if they do the results aren't published in a way that's easy to find online.

The main culprits in lake erie nitrogen pollution are cities with sub-standard waste water treatment and farms in western Ohio. This is fairly obvious and well known. I think the idea that septic systems contribute to this issue is mainly a guess. They probably do, but if their contribution goes to zero it might not result in some measurable change in lake erie water quality.

So why are the small-government state and county officials pushing this scheme instead of fighting it tooth and nail?

Well, people will get paid to implement this testing program, septic installers will have a few years making lots of extra money, and land developers need centralized sewer and water systems to build higher density housing, and testing the septic systems is a first step in that scam. Smacking homeowners with $20,000 septic repair bills will get them clamoring for centralized solutions because they're retards.

This is really a great example of how the government actually "works". The blah blah of ideological talking points from politicians is all nonsense for dumb ass voters. The only thing that pushes government to act is groups with sufficient money to be organized year after year and also to bribe or blackmail the government employees and politicians.

Individual citizens have a hard time lobbying the government in a similar way because they don't have a lot of time or money to waste on it, so even moderately organized groups or entities like a business with a "budget" to spend strategically are much more influential.

Competent People in Human Housecat World

I know many habitually competent people, and I know lots of people I'd label "human housecats". For the human housecats, most of the world is a black box. The habitually competent people live in a no-black-box world.

Over the years of working in corporate environments I noticed there's a paradoxical situation that arises from this split in the population. The housecats like to manage and be managed and love to create policies and procedures and laws, but as a group they're entirely ineffectual. The policies and procedures can't make up for inexperience, lack of knowledge, or just general tendencies associated with competency, so it's all kind of a pointless make-work exercise. Paradoxically this is what most people do all day at "work".

The habitually competent people tend to "just go do things" which obviates management, policies, procedures and the like--they negate the human housecat world. One of my neighbors, for example, took down a huge ash tree in his front yard yesterday rather than hire a tree company. He rented a lift, then chopped the tree down bit by bit with a chainsaw. I don't think it even took an hour for him to do the whole project. His neighbor is another high competence person who heats his home with firewood, so he helped buck the tree.

Another paradoxical situation is the housecat people, who are incapable, often tend toward control freakery, meaning they love to extend their policy/procedure making into any sphere of activity often under the guise of concerns about "safety". For example, in recent months, housecats decided they were afraid of e-bikes or other new e-vehicles and passed various laws in rando jurisdictions around the world. This is just one example of myriad similar scenarios. People who have no idea what they're doing in general make "policy" on random topics, typically in response to serial panics. The current-day panic in various jurisdictions is "e-bikes". Next year it will be some other random thing.

Note that competency is never suggested as a solution to these panics. That is, if people learned how to manage their own shit, nobody would even think to make these nonsense laws and policies. In fact, to me, the whole human housecat + manager world looks like an enormous "control fraud" situation which enables a lot of ineffectual people to be paid and to gain "power" over others. The lubricant for the movement of this group is incompetence. Someone who knows what he's doing prevents these awful people from getting theirs.

Big Dumb System

Now that I'm in my mid 50s, I am starting to have some brushes with the "end of life racket", which was thankfully out of sight and consequently out of mind for most of my prior life. That racket shows how bleak and regimented the middle class life is.

People march down a toll road over their whole life. They scrimp and save so they can give as much money as possible to hospitals, nursing homes, and finally funeral directors who collect the last fee. A careful person might manage to get a good pile of money to their heirs. A careless person will get worked over by this system entirely and go from a wealthy middle class person to a pauper in a handful of years of decrepitude.

Even body disposal is weirdly expensive. It must be a cartel situation, which is certainly aided by the government and regulation. You could empty out 150 pounds of meat from a freezer, put it in a garbage bag and chuck it in the trash, for example and nobody would bat an eye. Of course there are myriad taboos and legal versions of the same that ensure the funeral racket keeps collecting thousands of dollars per stiff.

I doubt it's legal to build a funeral pyre in most states, for example, but it is legal to incinerate a corpse at a funeral home. A well constructed and fueled wood fire will melt metals. Incinerating a body with a wood fires would be pretty cheap and was fit for kings and warriors for centuries. It's probably also illegal to dig a hole and bury a body like generations of settlers in the US did, although people bury dogs, horses, cows, etc... on their property all the time in rural and even suburban areas.

A few years ago, an unfortunate deer was hit by a car and died on my property. I put her under a large pile of wood chips in the woods, probably double the diameter of her body and three times as deep. I couldn't smell the decomposing body at all, nor did any scavengers disturb the pile. That much carbon rich material basically soaks up any nastiness. I used the wood chips in the garden a couple of years later. Of course there wasn't a trace of flesh left. Eventually even the bones break down.

One of the problems of the "highly organized" economy is the average person becomes a totally unskilled dope whose life is hemmed in by lies spun by douchebags and scammers who want their piece of the money pie. They can't even imagine there's an alternative to the set of cartel offered services and life rituals.

They also are maintained in a sort of fantasy land unreality existence because somebody else "does it" whatever it is. This type of person is the "urban/suburban housecat". They do their job, which is often some abstract nonsense, then pay skilled people to do absolutely everything else in their life. This has apparently led to an overall denial of the realities of life because everything can be managed by "experts" and everything can be "fixed".

Romanization

One of the core elements of the fantasy genre is it is set in the negative space of the current day world which is fully "Romanized" for lack of a better term. Like in the fantasy genre, there's no police officers giving parking tickets to the characters. Instead they are dealing directly with the forces of nature and creatures embodying the same. Also there's no churches and christianity.

Contemplating this topic got me thinking how absolutely weird officialdom is. It's loaded with cosplay and mandatory honorifics and titles and all that kind of nonsense. For example a "judge" wears a robe and people in a courtroom are forced to pay various honors to some rando dude or woman, like "all rise" and such. In England the judges still wear a white wig for some bizarre reason. Lawyers spend their whole professional life in that world of nonsense and procedures. Politicians who are basically the landfill of humanity spend all day citing their titles to each other. "The news" apes that behavior to anybody who cares to listen to their blah blah. Hospitals are another example. The employees wear color coded garments and different outfits that denote their status and rank. The police are a paramilitary organization with ranks and hats. Priests in the Catholic church wear a uniform. When they "perform" a mass they wear a fancy pants version of it. It goes on and on. In fact, almost every aspect of human life is enmeshed in some official structure in the current day world, especially if you live in a city. People believe, for example, professional care is required to die, even.

In the fantasy genre, the characters typically exist in a frontier type world; if officialdom exists in the story, it's typically entirely corrupt. For example, the soldiers guarding some castle or outpost are typically expendable cannon fodder. In movies that's signaled partially by their uniforms which generally contrast with the main character's outfits. The main villain guy might wear some elaborate outfit, sit on a throne, etc...

It's maybe not such a surprise the northern europeans "remember" their heritage via the fantasy genre, especially if it's encoded in their DNA, even after 1000+ years of romanization and absolutism of the catholic church. Romanization basically ends where the pavement does, which is also quite a fascinating pattern to think about.

More of The Fantasy Genre

 

There's a band named Heilung who according to the wikipedia

...describe their music as "amplified history from early medieval northern Europe". Their music is usually about Germanic deities, the Jǫtnar, and valkyries. "Heilung" is a German noun meaning "healing"

Maybe there's a core set of feelings and ideas associated with genetics that the fantasy genre expresses. Perhaps that used to be the religion of the northern europeans.

Metal Popularity and Hunter Gatherer DNA

This is a follow up to the "what is the fantasy genre" post.

It's pretty common for metal bands to borrow or embody tropes from the fantasy genre. The band "Castle Rat" is a case in point.

If you look at a map of "hunter gatherer" DNA in western europe and a map of metal band popularity they seem to overlap well.

Metal Bands per Million People by Country

WHG Admixture Map

The different color schemes in the maps make the correlation hard to see clearly, but it seems pretty good. There are some outliers, like Greece has a really high number of metal bands per capita compared to the WHG admixture, but the overall scheme lines up.

A Problem with a Life Based on Utilitarianism

The thing I really wanted to get to in the previous post is many of the activities people engage in out of apparent "utility" are really cult rituals: high school band or football are two great examples. The average family when I was in school thought those activities were valuable and heavily censured many non-sanctioned activities which were only for weirdos, like a kid who might continue playing dungeons and dragons into their senior year in high school, or who played with matchbox cars or whatever age inappropriate thing would be seen as a total freak or "loser", which was the ultimate bogeyman when I was a kid.

It turned out that "band" was significantly more useful than football in my high school than any of the organized sports. A weirdly high number of kids in my band program went on to be professional musicians in some capacity. Some became successful professional musicians. Others went on to be music educators. AFAIK, none of the people who played football went onto be a professional athlete of any kind and those who went onto earn high incomes in their adult life were in professions that had nothing to do with organized sports and are lawyers or dentists or whatever, which is really the norm for the "successful" band people too. Thankfully, I don't think any of the kids in our school suffered CTE or other chronic injuries from football, but that does happen of course. Some kids did get their knees wrecked and a few were chronic 'roid abusers, but I don't think they continued that after high school, but even a few years of heavy steroid use can cause long term physical damage to key organs and tissue.

I think the typical lesson an adult would draw, in retrospect, from their time in various organized activities like sports or band or school plays would be: "I learned to train and prepare and get better at something." That is, even though what they did was boring, maybe high pressure, or even painful and physically demanding, they were able to plow through and maybe even win, or perform perfectly and get applause or whatever. 

A kid could learn the same lessons, maybe in a significantly better way, from self directed ad hoc activities and games. I can cite several examples of kids, including myself, who became proficient at a hobby well outside the official activities of a school. For example, one of my good friends in high school went onto be a professional race car driver for a few seasons and ended up making car racing his vocation. I raced bicycles through college and into my adult life and always did that in a self-directed trial and error way and managed to at least win some races over my amateur career. I even helped organize a handful of amateur races over the years through the early 2000s. The people I know who do self-directed endurance sports, like running, triathlon, road bike racing, or similar sports are, as adults, even adults in their 70s, significantly healthier than their peers. I know a guy who in his early 70s completed a grueling gravel bike race with several thousand feet of elevation gain for example. 

In retrospect, the claims of utility made by the "organized" sports or activities in high school, that is, it would eventually "pay off" while the self-directed ad hoc activities were seen as second or third tier by comparison were severely overstated, at least for me and the people I grew up with.