Imperial Symbol Blender

I hadn't ever heard of Nikki Haley before the Trump administration. Based on her speeches and the media coverage of her, I assumed she is a zionist evangelicon from the south. She's from the South, and she's a politician so she's done the obligatory posing with guns and crosses thing, but her parents are actually from India, and they're Sikh.

Is her adoption of the symbols of people who live in the South genuine, or is she a calculating political opportunist? Nobody can know what's in her head and heart, so I wouldn't guess. Also, it's not uncommon for immigrants or converts to a new religion, by marriage for example, to dive in whole heartedly and adopt a new persona, so maybe she's as zealous about guns, the confederacy, and evangelical Christianity as someone with multi-generational family roots in the South. Conversely, what does it say about the long term stability of symbols like the cross or second amendment gun toting if they're merely political props?

If every symbol and religious notion becomes a kind of political currency is it possible to keep any fixed reference for categorizing people or groups? Probably not. What's the consequence of that? Interesting question to ponder.

Financial System as a Replacement for Neighbors, Friends, and Family

I'm in my mid forties. The United States of today is significantly different than the United States of my childhood in the 1970s. That world was not an ideal world--in a lot of significant ways it was worse. A lot of statistics, e.g. the per-capita murder rate, were worse for example. Pollution was worse. Viewing that world through rose colored glasses is a mistake.

It was significantly easier for regular people to make a living back then, though, and the financial system was structured to prevent the large scale fraud, crime, and systematic grifting that are a daily feature of life today. The con-men of Wall Street had been put in a box after the great depression--which was the era of my grandfather's youth, and my great grandfather's adulthood--and were only just being let out little by little. One round of post-depression banking deregulation happened under Jimmy Carter, which led to the Savings and Loan crime wave of the 80s, which  involved people like John McCain and the Clintons. Banks in my home town were shutdown and the mom and pops in my town were bailed out by the depression era FDIC.

Over the years, the financial "markets" have been a mechanism for many average people to get conned out of life savings, while at the same time pretending to be a secure and controlled environment where money can be managed to produce guaranteed returns and a stable income for old age. Indeed, without that costume of respectability and support by media, everyone on Wall Street would probably periodically be murdered.

Money's a dead thing. Financial assets are even deader than money. They need to drain people and living things to get a toe hold in the material plane. Many believe financial assets, probably because of their inert/symbolic nature, are more reliable and permanent than community, neighbors, friends and family. At the same time, the rules of the games that make financial assets "valuable" create systems like the stock market which systematically wrecks their communities. Their resources get sucked into the trash heap of Wall Street and the work that their neighbors once did ends up being done by Asian slaves.

People believe the hoarde of digits will preserve them in their dotage better than neighbors or family. It's led to a fairly shitty world.

Migration and Moralism

Median Age Map

The median age of the populations of different countries around the world is shown at the left. There's a fairly consistent inverse relationship with per capita GDP and the median age of the population of a country. That probably indicates that organizing for work and production eventually causes people to avoid having children for the sake of economic goals.

People in the poorest countries sometimes believe they can seek "opportunity" (a life of acquiring luxury goods) in the wealthy countries, rather than improve the lot of their own nation. When they all decide that at once, migration happens en masse.

The problem with that is the economic systems within the wealthy countries are integrated into their culture. People's beliefs and expectations and training from birth results in the overall patterns of behavior that result in millions of people spending their time on work and "career". Two cultural and economic systems have a hard time co-existing in the same geography. It's a lot like the native tribes in the americas and the anglo/american settlers trying to share the same lands. Pastoralists and farmers couldn't coexist.

Building physical walls or virtual walls of moralism and attempting to stem the tide of millions of people deciding to walk across borders is not going to "preserve" a given way of life in a world of constant change. Seeking refuge in ideologies, and fantasies like "Trad" life or fantasies about the crusades is a sad response. The physiological and psychological stress caused by two nations and systems clashing can force people into a more rigid and limited way of perceiving the world.

When anglo/american settlers encountered native tribes in the United States, and vice versa, they all really did miss out on the opportunity to learn from one another, probably because both nations of people were organized in fairly rigid hierarchies that served to benefit the upper echelons of their societies. A better response is to do something completely unexpected and novel. Maybe migration is an opportunity to collapse the hierarchy and bin the oligarchy instead of a way to ravage the common people of two nations.

"Trad" Trap

White Women are Known to Enjoy Frolicking in Wheat Fields

All the "trad" values in the world and $5 will get you a cup of coffee. "Values" and "Virtue" won't save you, because they never have. Panic about virtue is a good sign that your society is in a crisis. Machiavelli's distinction between virtue and virtu is a pretty good one to think about when somebody is promoting cultural virtue as an antidote to what ails. (But his concept proved to be every bit as flawed in practice.)

A few years ago, simultaneously and  seemingly ex nihilo a bunch of alt-media "personalities" started promoting "white nationalism". This was an apparent grass roots (though certainly planned and staged) reaction to muslim migration into Europe, which was  almost certainly planned as a follow on to the non-stop wars in the middle east. The same themes are promoted  in the United States via latin immigration. Every social media personality promoting this is a fraud.

One of the themes for the nationalist promoters is "trad" life, which apparently involves white women walking in golden wheat fields and also venerating dead and dusty medieval christianity the same way some religions venerate the bits and pieces of their dead saints.

Ideological themes are seeded out into the public by promoted alt/social media personalities. The "trad" theme is one such theme that took off, probably because it tugs at the heartstrings by playing on shared dreams of a golden age--a never ending harvest time, and a just social order in the face of a world of chaos, and malignant, corrupt leadership.

"Society" is really incapable of doing anything; it's essentially passive. Ideologies, like trad life, are a hall of mirrors or a box canyon. As those themes gain popularity, though, the ideology becomes a platform for a phony leadership to make proposals on behalf of their real masters who lurk in the shadows.

There are certainly significant culture differences that make mass migration untenable and prone to cause the worst kinds of violence. Also the economic causes of mass migration are  generally pretty stupid and easily solvable. In spite of  cultural differences, the typical person within any given group shares many of the same goals.

In many ways our time, as a result of years and years of stability in the western world, starts to have characteristics of unstable times. Much better models for what to do in response to the instability are to be found through study of colonial north america and the actions of "the people" versus the corporate entities that sought to control them than in appeals to a phony traditionalism.

The Christian Luciferians

One big theme of the Bible is that the world is fallen, tainted with original sin and in need of repair. If you've got a positive view of the natural world or of the universe to start with, you can shelve the bible with other fables. There's really nothing in it for you.

It seems like many of the Enlightenment era political thinkers and scientific thinkers were obsessed with the idea of the fallen world in need of repair, but thought of it as a philosophically materialistic DIY project rather than a spiritual exercise. They moved the focus of all thinking to the material world. (Redemption via the technological singularity)

Their mode of thinking is well illustrated by how biologists today think of animals, especially domestic animals like dogs and cats and horses. They eschew the commonsense daily experience of millions of people who have companion animals and favor variations on the theme of animals being some type of animated meat, and by extension people being some type of animated meat.

The anti-Masonic era in the US was a sort of moral panic about free masons around 1830. (This movement probably gave rise to Mormonism.) There's similar moralism about masons in alt-media attitudes about masonry, today. One of the common criticism is that masonry is Satanism in disguise.

I think it is Promethean (which is identical to saying its luciferian) and sees man as his own messiah. It is a sort of upside-down Christianity. God is missing, like an absentee landlord, and it's up to man to take what they imagine his rightful place to be, that is, managing the material world for the sake of man. I would not be surprised if the ostensibly Christian congregations in the Washington DC area consciously preach this materialistic teaching.

Enlightenment Civilization Sclerosis

During the colonial era, the New World was exploited by joint-stock companies like the Hudson's Bay Company or variations on the theme of the East India Company. In a lot of ways, the American Revolution looks a lot like a hostile take-over by the local management from the parent company, rather than an organic movement of the people for freedom's sake. It's really interesting that the Russians didn't get in on the joint-stock company game until it was almost over (around 1799). By then the Industrial Revolution was underway and the colonial natural resources exploitation game was tapped out.

The New World was sort of like an anvil upon which the old one broke-up or was mangled beyond repair. Those joint-stock companies became the basis for new methods of organization and production. They're really the basis of our entire social order today, while older institutions like religious cults are still around, corporate society organizes almost everything. In the United States, for example, marriages are registered at the county/state level and ceremonies are administered by licensed officials. While there are religious "laws" that govern marriages/divorces by individuals within specific religions, the state's laws almost completely trump whatever claims they make.

The new order feels pretty tapped out and sclerotic. Oligarchy from Europe eventually infected the United States. Similarly the goals of this society, e.g. building the Star Trek civilization seem vapid at best, and just like stupid cons at worst. Lots of people are scratching their heads about what to do next.

Mass Movements versus Corporate Entities

When the native tribes of the Ohio territory sought to counter the advance of the colonials, they tried to organize a pan-indian resistance that was based on new spiritual ideas and notions of racial purity and religious practices that sought to purge (in some cases literally by ceremonially puking) the influence of the white man.

Their plight isn't unlike the plight of white working class people today who look across their street at Mexicans moving into their neighborhood and think, "there is my enemy". For whatever reason, it's much easier for the people on the bottom rung of the social hierarchy to see one another as enemies than it is for them to see those in the top levels of the hierarchy prey on them.

The white man's society the Indians faced was a corporate entity. The people inside it made systems work and followed laws and procedures rather than doing almost anything directly. Corporate entities are severely centralized and hierarchical and decision making is generally closely held and secretive. Consequently, there's huge asymmetry in the "importance" of the individuals within the structure that make it function. That's their real, potentially debilitating vulnerability. The Indians raided forts and outposts and settlements. A better approach would have been for the Indians to create highly trained special forces teams who would disrupt commerce and attack the leadership of the colonists.

It will be interesting to see if a "distributed" approach to attacking corporates, like the US banks, can work. My guess is it is a type of mass movement, so it probably won't fare well. The inability to concentrate resources strategically, or to create the equivalent of special forces is a severe limitation.

Instinct for Preservation of the Whole

A video of a guy saving a rabbit from fires in California is circulating on Twitter now. There are lots of similar, even more extreme examples on YouTube of people saving animals and even risking their own lives to do it. There are even a few examples of animals trying to help other animals in distress in similar circumstances.

Obviously we have to have a built in desire and instinct to attempt to preserve the whole in addition to preservation of ourselves. Without cooperation and preservation of the whole, the individual dies. Quite a bit of cultural teaching emphasizes self preservation above all else and implies helping any other is a suckers game. Enlightenment political theory is based on observations made by psychopaths about the nature of the world.

Corporatism Sucks Balls

The owner and proprietor of a local business that sells wild bird and animal food just passed away. She was a kind woman who genuinely cared about what she was doing. Through her business, she helped many people enjoy a hobby and also took care of local wildlife.

When I was a kid in the 70s in my home town, there were still lots of small businesses on main street and several hardware stores in town. Aspects of that version of America were better than the current version. It had flaws, but was definitely more livable for the average person.

The main model for running a business, now, is to form a corporation and hope that it grows into a primarily financial entity. That is, the owners and managers hope to become idle rich living off of interest and dividends. The mad scramble to escape the necessity of life seems to make the pit of necessity ever deeper.

Even in their early days, those types of businesses are really adjuncts of the banking system and the government. The administration of those entities usually revolves around managing debt and paying taxes and meeting regulations.

Corporatism has made people dumber, meaner, and a weird combination of parsimonious money grubbers and wild eyed conspicuous consumers. It sucks.

Could Classical Civilization do anything But Die?

What would have happened if the classical civilization continued? Some SciFi writers conjectured the dark ages and the Church set civilization back 1000 years, and if classical civilization continued, we'd now have space ships and humanoid robots like in Star Trek.

I don't think so. Classical civilization probably did all it could ever do. To me, cultures look a whole lot like ecosystems and all the elements therein co-evolve to a stable form within an unstable dynamic environment.

There might not be a path from classical Rome or Greece to the sort of technological society we have now just as a bird is on a different evolutionary path than a mammal.

Our civilization also seems to be stuck in a rut of developing technology as the means of transformation, or seeing technology as the only meaningful product of work or human life.

Choosing Between Two Sides When Reality is Fractal

History classes in primary and secondary education, and even in college, seek to present a clear concise narrative of cause and effect. If you zoom in on any era, though, especially when primary source materials are available, that simplistic story fades away almost immediately.

In real life, even the smartest, most "logical" person is rife with contradictions. Human beings are a composite animal. Our very brains are layered in construction. Our languages are limited in vocabulary, speed of expression and by the design of our mouth, we can only say things in a serial fashion, while the world of sensation streams into our minds all at once. There's really no such thing as cognitive dissonance. Our understanding of the world is not axiomatic or logical. It's perfectly normal for people two hold completely contradictory concepts in their head at the same time.

When you read about the relationships between the native tribespeople of the Americas and the European Settlers, you'll find every possible permutation of relationship. Some white Europeans admired the Indians and went to live with them and adopted their ways. Some Indians joined the communities of the Europeans.

The Gnadenhutten Massacre is a sort of set piece of this complexity. Settlers sought retribution against a group of people who had nothing to do with violence against their "side" in conflict. To their credit some settlers refused to partake in the injustice.

Stress--probably the physiological response to stress--tends to force people to simplify concepts. Complexity and alternatives to taking sides are often cast as crimes or traitorous. It seems the defining characteristic of the good, or of the good man is to refuse to abandon reality for the sake of politics and safety from his fellow men.

The Settlement of Ohio and the Oligarchy Problem

Most of the history of Europe has been punctuated by horror show incidents on various scales. Rapacious, murderous thugs, i.e. "the aristocracy" fought non stop for control of land and people for centuries. From the point of view of an average person, the aristocrats were at best domineering control freaks, and at worst lunatic mafiosi of the worst kind. Their behavior is paralleled today by the action of Mexican drug cartels.

The violent behavior of the aristocracy was only possible because it was supported by cooperation, productive pursuits, and productive people. This is one of the great paradoxes of the human condition--small bands of the worst can take from large numbers of the best. It's as if the productive and cooperative people do not have any immunity to a virus in their midst.

Two events in the history of Ohio show how this "works". In recent years, a small coalition of people tried to pass a referendum to "legalize" marijuana in the state. The legalization was to create an oligopoly in the currently "illegal" $2B/year marijuana business so a few hands would control the market. People voted the referendum down. Pot is only illegal in Ohio since it can't be controlled by the "right" families and their cronies.

During the founding of Ohio, the United States government prevented settlers from starting farms in the state in an ad hoc fashion. Instead, once it had claim to the land from the British, and then from Indian "tribes" (i.e. the tribal leaders that agreed and were paid to make treaties), it sold the land first to Companies (which were organized by Freemasons for what it's worth) at wholesale prices, and then to individuals. The sales helped finance the United States revolutionary war debts.

It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would have happened had individuals struck deals with Indian Tribes rather than through the US government. The tribes could have worked with the European powers toward that end, however the European powers were too greedy to make that work, or the settlers and the Indians could have worked that out on their own to create a truly "free country".

There's little doubt the United States deal with the common man was a huge improvement with the deal European aristocrats cut with the common man, but the oligarchs were active in the US basically from day one, and the country has been getting more and more European-ish since.

Making Deals with the Great Satan

Battle of Fallen Timbers

It's hard to read about the settlement of the United States and not feel a lot of sympathy for the native American population. A rule of thumb you can deduce from their deals with the United States or European powers is one should never enter into a collective agreement. Entrusting the livelihood of a mass of people, like an Indian Tribe, to a handful of people--their chiefs--is always going to look like a class action lawsuit--the attorneys get rich, and the group gets a Hardees Discount coupon for their trouble.

The white people who were settling the frontier, for the most part, lost their collective battles with the Great Satan maybe hundreds or a thousand years prior. The citizen labors under piles of treaties struck by sociopaths and psychopaths long ago.

Northeast Ohio History as a Microcosm of Civilization

Indians in the Old Northwest were stuck in the classic rock & hardplace scenario. Their way of life couldn't work with the agricultural methods and methods of organizing society that new settlers engaged in, but they had no chance of military victory against the new United States. In spite of that, they repeatedly sought relief through alliances with European "allies".

The European powers couldn't actually help them, and would only use them as pawns the same way dumb religious zealot mercenaries are used in the Middle East today. In retrospect, it's obvious that engaging with the United States as collectives (tribes) rather than as individuals--citizens--made it much easier to undermine and destroy them as a people. (Black people in the United States have followed the same flawed strategy since emancipation.)

The problem the Indians faced in the Ohio Territory is similar to the problem everyone in the Western World faces today. The Indians confronted a system but could only see people. Lashing out at individual families brought the Indians more grief and hastened their demise and expulsion from their lands.

Likewise, today, we might see "the problem" as Oligarchy, but Oligarchs are really just cogs in the system the same way some poor bastard working in an Amazon warehouse is.

Indians and Pioneers in Northeast Ohio around 1800; Clash of Systems

Northeast Ohio was once known as "The Connecticut Western Reserve". The area was opened to settlers from the east coast around 1800. While the United States was a brand new country then, European settlements in North America were long established. The first white settlers moved into Northeast Ohio 171 years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded.

The stories that are recorded about the pioneers of Northeast Ohio were captured on paper one or two generations after the fact through interviews with the families who still remained in the area. A number of compilations of the stories were made over the years. One is Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve.

The book recounts the stories of the handful of local families that moved to the new counties of Northeast Ohio when the area was first opened for settlement after the Revolutionary War (but before the War of 1812). The people who moved to the area were from New England. Many of those who did make the move were from well established families in well established towns and cities in New England. When they moved to Ohio, they set out immediately to recreate their old way of life.

Consider how some simple aspect of day-to-day life gets solved: like "Where do I get some bread for toast?" For us today, hundreds, maybe thousands of people participate in solving that problem. In the pioneer days, fewer people were involved, but they set out to solve that problem in a similar way--by building a whole system to do it, rather than solving the problem directly. They cleared land to grow wheat, set up mills to grind flour, and built the roads and transportation networks to move the flour around, and built shops to sell the flour.

All this severely clashed with the way of life of the native peoples, of course. In spite of that clash, and in spite of the fear the pioneers had of the Indians, most of the stories recorded in the Memorial are about positive, happy interactions. For example:

The Memorial also records a number of murders of white settlers by Indians and vice versa. During that time, the native people were allied with the British Empire against the new country of the USA. The resulting conflicts often included horrific violence between Indians and settlers of "The Old Northwest".

Within a given society cooperation among neighbors is possible and common, but when two different peoples clash, competition and violence seems to be common. In a lot of ways, the poor relations between the natives and the white settlers was a huge missed opportunity by both sides.

For example, the haste with which the land in Northeast Ohio was developed was very unfortunate and resulted in degraded farm soil and obliterated wildlife populations. In only 30 years, every mammal bigger than a squirrel was eradicated and nearly every single tree was cut down. Similarly, obviously, the Indians could have benefited from the technology and methods of organizing society that the Europeans enjoyed.

Social Media as a Mechanism for Fracturing People

Human beings live a significant amount of their life in isolation. Our inner thoughts are only sometimes shared with some people. For most, sexuality is a private matter. The public face of a man is generally a part that is played within a given context. The man who works in an office might hide his peculiar political or religious beliefs, for example.

Social media is a mechanism for taking some element of a person's being and making a space for it online. It's a community of shadows.

What's the end result of people teleporting that element of their self into another hidden dimension?

Growth Society/Totally Managed Society

Industrial society is about 200 years old, and technological society is only about 70 years old. After all that time, nobody has devised good substitutes for fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas that can scale up rapidly to replace the fossil fuel infrastructure. If fossil fuels are really limited, then the debt/growth and central banking oligarchy model stops working. The central bank model enables oligarchs to extract wealth from nations through money creation and usury. In a shrinking economy, that stops working. The new debt is less than worthless.

Instead, you go back to either direct robbery, confiscation and slavery scheme like in the middle ages, or a per-transaction fee. Additionally, it's necessary to totally manage the society in an attempt to prioritize projects and to determine who gets a piece of the pie.

Why is There Only One Transportation Network?

Ohio Erie Canal

European people have been living in Northeast Ohio since 1800 (give or take a few years). That era of life in the United States has been one of non-stop technological and industrial change. The past is piled up around the area like many carelessly discarded toys. The remnants of the Ohio Erie Canal, which was in operation from about 1830-1913 (though it massively declined after it began to compete with railroads) are still apparent as ruins, or are preserved in the local park systems.

Similarly, the leftovers of the rail systems in our area are scattered all over the region. Most notably, bridges and bridge abutments from the interurban railways from the early 20th century are visible from the roadside, or from trails around the area and the former railbeds are bike paths.

In Ohio, it wasn't possible to maintain multiple transportation networks. The canal system is particularly interesting. In its heyday, the canals were operated by the State. In its decline it was maintained by private companies. It limped along for three decades or so until a flood finally destroyed much of the infrastructure of the canal system. None of the operators were able to repair it, so it finally officially "closed".

It's interesting that these different modes of transportation couldn't really coexist in any significant way, especially as passenger systems. I have no idea if it's an issue of "cost" per passenger/mile. The road system today, and the person per car commuting that we all do all the time today is hella expensive. It might be many more times the expense per mile compared to the Interurbans, which covered the same geographical area that people commute through today.

The dominance of any one system might arise from human behavior patterns rather than economic explanations about resources or money. That is, there's only one dominant way of life possible within a given region at a time. People only have so much time in a day to think about how to get from point A to point B. If there's a solution that works they'll use it.

Back to the Campfire

The current widely accepted guess is humans lived a pastoral, hunter gatherer life for most of the time humans have been on earth. Agriculture and settled life are relatively recent inventions, and industrial civilization is a blink of an eye in proportional terms.

"Civilization" is the set of solutions for a group of human beings to get what they need to live on earth. A point made in several previous posts is you can look at civilization as a meta-animal. As a meta-animal it has several of the characteristics of an actual animal. One key function is storage, transmission, and operation on information.

Over time, information has flowed through and been stored by civilization in a variety of ways. The very oldest way is campfire stories. Human beings spent much of their existence sitting around campfires shooting the shit.

The Internet is really like a new campfire. It allows for informal interchange of news and opinions and dispenses with channeling, checking, or editing them.

Religious Concept of Linear History and Interpretation of Europe's Conversion to Christianity

Lots of historians have tried to describe how and why the pagan people of Europe converted to Christianity in the early middle ages. I think the question is generally framed in Christian Linear History terms, which views the arrival of the messiah on Earth as a epoch making event where everything changed.

A more worldly interpretation is that Christianity was political useful for would be Empire builders. The tribal, traditional religions of local people was supplanted with a new tradition. We tend to think of Christianity in its contemporary role, confined almost totally to the realm of the spiritual. For the Europeans, religion was tied into every aspect of life.

The confrontation between the native Indians in the new United States was probably similar. Their whole way of life could not be harmonized with the way of life of the European settlers; a pastoral lifestyle, for example, can't really coexist (easily) with a farming lifestyle based on property, contracts, laws, and debts. It seems pretty likely that the tribal lives of European people couldn't coexist with the attempts to create kingdoms in the early middle ages, either.

Break With Oligarchy

The United States break with the British Empire might be the only time a group of European people successfully broke away from inbred aristocrats and greasy oligarchs, and even that break was a short lived and mixed experiment. The free US existed about 100 years until it was pulled back into the Empire game (around 1900).

The people of the 19th century US were conscious of their special status. In William Atherton's memoir he contrasts the haughty hard hearted British Officers with the enlisted men, for example. He was quite conscious that Empire Britain was the enemy not only of himself but of everyone who wished to be free.

By the entry of the United States into WWI, the institutions of the country had been compromised, and by 1947 and the creation of the CIA, the United States had been totally swamped by oligarchs.

Modern corporate nations are by their very nature easy to corrupt and control via the mechanisms that were meant to keep them to task and limit their authority. It's easy to corrupt and blackmail the officials that are supposed to represent the interests of the people and for the public resources to be put in service of private gain.

The main problem seems to be that the common people easily forget their own interests, and get lazy about guarding their liberty. Their liberty really isn't that dear to them in all its constituent parts. Consider the TSA as an example of how this works. A couple swindlers stood to make millions or billions of shekels on the creation of that agency, while it only costs the average person a few hours of standing in line over their lifetime.

Poverty Will Kill You Too

I'm not a fan of fear porn. As the alt-media grew in the mid 2000's, I spent a couple of years reading about economic collapse scenarios and watched youtube videos about the vicous plans of the elite to cull humanity. However, I came to the conclusion that the biggest enemy of man is man. It is unfortunate that we participate in systems where a few psychopaths can exploit millions, but if we did manage to eliminate that scourge we'd have countless other issues to contend with.

Poverty is one major problem. Lots of people in the world live in absolute squalor on the periphery of developed areas. Cheerleaders of western civilization often see poverty as a genetic problem--for example they offer up population IQ tests that show those poor people are no good. Critics of western civilization tend to see poverty as a result of exploitation.My take is poor people are "poor" mainly because they lack methods of organizing their people to create an order that leads to the type of wealth that causes clean streets and clean water.

Dirty conditions are a reliable breeding ground for new diseases. The good hearted people who attempt to help alleviate poverty by providing medical care could actually be helping to create the "perfect storm" scenario. By providing inadequate treatment of diseases with antibiotics in really terrible living conditions, health care workers could actually be breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria.

The United States is a Corrupt Shithole

It seems like the scumbags of Hollywood have enough reach to hassle Rose McGowan in Virginia. So there's enough corruption in Virginia to make that happen.

The Reformation Was Extremely Complicated

Martin Luther Throwing Gang Signs

The 500th anniversary of Luther's 95 Theses was yesterday. There are countless articles on it. So I'll throw one more into the  mix.

People like to have a nice tidy comic book story to explain huge events like the Reformation. Reality, of course, isn't really even amenable to condensing into a narrative with characters and cause-and-effect explanations. The christian's religion is this type of story. "The world used to be evil, Jesus was born, now it's cool."

First off, Christianity is not native to Europe. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europeans belonged to a bunch of different tribal societies and each had a  shamanic religion with roots that were possibly thousands of years old. Christianity was imposed on them in an attempt to form the next Empire. (Islam is identical in this regard.) Tribal religions persisted in Europe until at least 900 AD.

Catholic Christianity was never the sole brand of Christianity even in Western Europe. The Arians and the Catholics had "how many angels can fit on a pin" debates at the very beginning, then throughout the history of the Catholic Church there were "heresies". There was a proto reformation around 1100 AD. There were various strains of gnostic Christianity (e.g. the Bogomils or the Cathars).

By the 1500s, the western European medieval system was pretty long in the tooth and its entrenched political and religious institutions were holding people back. The Catholic Church was embedded in every aspect of life, and the institutions of life, e.g. the Guild System, relied on the Catholic Church. A good parallel today is how Hollywood--what looks to be a bunch of Jewish Mobsters--are connected to the government, the democratic party, and east coast finance. There's really no rational reason for it, but there it is.

The Renaissance and the re-emergence of classical learning in the West is the start of the fracture and breakup of the medieval world (which persisted into the 20th century!).

In retrospect Martin Luther looks like a Deray figure, that is, an agent of corporate forces with really banal goals, rather than an organic revolutionary. Entities like Henry VIII's  England were at odds with the Catholic Church for a long list of reasons, e.g. a desire to get in on the Age of Sail games (games like Rape Murder Pillage for Opium, Coffee, Tobacco, or Spices). Rival Banking families were pinched by the Church's cronies.

Just as it was expedient for Clovis I to be baptized as a Catholic, and for the Catholic Church to  baptize Clovis, it was expedient for the emerging powers of Europe to support the Reformation.

Squirrel Life

That's a picture of "White  Spot" a  squirrel with a recognizable white  mark on his (?) back who visits our yard in the spring and fall. The squirrels all vanish into the woods in late  summer and show up again now around November. He's been around here as long as we've lived in the house (about 1 year). I have no idea if the white spot is indicative of his age or is just a marking. Squirrels can live up to 30 years, though in the wild life's pretty tough for them. The big predator in our area is a Cooper's Hawk. There  are also lots of  owls around, but I don't think  their hunting schedule matches  up with the fox squirrel's daily activities.

Problem Proliferation

Much of human misery and angst flows from the self regulating aspect of nature. The physical world mechanisms that make "self regulation" work are many of civilization's ancient foes. The same forces, e.g. fungus ("the teeth of the soil"), that help a forest grow also rot wooden buildings. Much of our civilization is an attempt to break free of these forces. (The concept of "the singularity" sums this up nicely.) Maybe one of the necessary components of nature is the idea that one can break free?

Many engineered systems aim to counteract the restoring forces of nature. For example, for life on Earth to be possible, large uniformly impermeable surfaces must break up into soil. Consequently, roads and parking lots require numerous workarounds to contain, direct, and lessen the impact of those forces.

"Natural" farming methods attempt to function in phase with those forces. The solutions to the day to day problems that arise in that context generally carry along their own set of problems. For example, if your garden has slugs, then you can add ducks to your farm to eat the slugs and keep their population in check. But once you have ducks, then you will need to worry about hawks and other predators killing them, so then you might add geese to help repel predators, or build an enclosure for them, and so on.

Combining many "solutions" is one way life attains stability within a dynamic environment. Devising that type of solution, however, can be time consuming and almost necessarily dilutes the desired output. For example, by adding a menagerie of animals and other plants to make a strawberry field productive, a farmer also adds more mouths to feed and reduces the space for strawberry plants to grow.

House of Cards and a Pile of Cards

William Atherton was a Kentucky Rifleman who fought at the Battle of Frenchtown in the War of 1812. He wrote a memoir of defeat (Audio Version Here) and his subsequent capture and imprisonment first at the hands of native tribes people and then with the British.

The memoir has a detailed account of the time he spent as a captive of the Indians. The tribe he was with lived a hunter gatherer lifestyle. (According to Caesar, my ancestors did the same 2000-ish years ago.) Their lifestyle as described by Atherton lacked comfort and the quality of day to day life was largely a function of the availability of game to eat. The life was one of day to day drudgery--a nonstop quest for the next meal. According to Atherton, his captors had no calendar and no concept of weeks or months.

The most important characteristic of grains that makes agriculture and civilization possible is they can be stored--almost indefinitely--in the right conditions. A grain silo is essentially a version of solar storage. One ton of wheat (which you could get from one acre of land) yields roughly 2000 loaves of bread. Storing grain insulates people from the type of privation and drudgery that plagued Atherton's captors.

Agriculture and cities remove people's dependence on nature for sustenance and creates dependence on systems of their own design--engineered systems, e.g. grain silos. Natural systems of life evolve over ages to be stable, or to return to stability, over a huge range of conditions. Engineered systems, by contrast, only tend to be stable over the range of conditions people imagined, and when they fail, they typically have no ability to restore themselves.

The Dirtiest Animal

Way more people know who the fictional Jon Snow of Game of Thrones is than the John Snow who proved people shouldn't contaminate water and then drink that contaminated water--in 1854! That's really not long ago at all for what seems like the most basic bit of information that every human should know, but incredibly even this piece of foundational information is totally lacking.

The contemporary solutions to the problems of keeping people and cities clean and keeping drinking water clean are really pretty bad: they're extremely resource and energy intensive. As an example, some articles calculated that the cost of replacing Flint, Michigan's water supply lines was more than the appraised value of all the homes in the city. There are hundreds of communities in the United States in the same boat. Replacing just the water line to a single small house in the United States costs thousands of dollars. Replacing shared utility lines is proportionately more expensive.

Unfortunately in most places in the world, cities aren't capable of maintaining a high level of hygiene, hell, they can't maintain a low level of hygiene. Even the United States has outbreaks of disease caused by homeless populations in cities. I think it's a pretty safe bet that disease, not war, will wipe out a huge chunk of the human population in the next decades.

Think about how the problems attracting the most investment today are superfluous bullshit, e.g. self driving electric cars, while the bottom of the United States rots out. Incredible.

How to Be a Human

The Prisoner is a sci-fi TV series that's 50 years old. It's about the struggle of a man who is wrongly trapped in a weird electronic gulag that eerily resembles modern life. It's streaming on Amazon now, but you have to pay to watch. You can get the gist of it by watching a few episodes. Many of the themes of the show are present in a million other TV shows, movies, and books.

The show seems to really be about the struggle of a man to be fully human within the context of civilization, and the psychopaths and patsies that are its servants, who want to reduce him to a number.

The Borg from Star Trek: Next Generation is a fictional representation of a similar set of themes. The Borg and Data represent two sides of that problem. The Borg is all consuming, reducing humans to numbers who live in a hive. Data is a computer that wants to have a heart (the Vulcans represented the same concept in other iterations of the show). The Cylons of Battlestar Galactica are yet another version of this concept.

Why Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al Took Over

There are still a lot of active blogs, but social media dominate people's daily Internet use these days to the point that people like Faceberg think their web site for posting cat pictures will be around forever and is divinely ordained. Meanwhile new social media like Gab or Minds or a dozen others struggle to get traction.

Facebook isn't what I'd call a "tech" company. They integrate technology, they don't make any new stuff. I'm guessing most of the engineers at Facefuck are bored out of their minds on a daily basis and spend all week in meetings about the social justice of what color borders to use for their text boxes.

Facefuck, Twitter, et al replaced blogs by making posts shorter and consequently less filtered and less work to read. Twitter forced that to an extreme and it actually worked. Since the posts are unfiltered, it allows people to form an emotional connection with a community and is a platform for acting out and ranting. By getting rid of written language formalisms like paragraphs and punctuation and spelling, it makes the creation and experience of content more visceral.

Now those sites are adding commissars to patrol posts, which hopefully kills them all. 

I Quit Twitter

I liked using twitter. It reminded me of the very early days of the Internet when there were still weird forums and message boards. It was a pretty entertaining and informative way to spend free time. It could be constructive, too. I interacted with smart, curious, intellectually interesting people every day for a long time and it really broadened my horizons. Unfortunately, it's starting to look like social media is a big honeypot that was engineered over the course of a number of years using the "problem-reaction-solution" formula.

In recent years, alternative media provided a platform for genuine people with a wide range of interests to share their views. But it also provided a platform for actors who were reading a script and participating in staged events to create the appearance of a problem, e.g. nativism or white nationalism, and the corresponding clash with staged freak-outs by dumb college students. The phony extremists work as a pied piper for gullible people, and also radicalized centrist opposition and create the atmosphere of a crisis, even though the whole thing is a sham and less than a tempest in a teapot.

In response to staged events social media companies are now contracting with groups like the ADL to act as the social media equivalent of the TSA. It seems probable that those groups will end up working like an extortion racket and victim exploitation business rather than neutral observers or defenders of the downtrodden, so Twitter can go jump n a lake.

The idea that public companies are fiduciaries or care about their bottom line above all seems to be refuted by Twitter, Google, and Facebook. By adopting any political posture, they drive a portion of their user base away. It's beyond weird that Twitter decided not to capitalize on its success in the 2016 Presidential election. Twitter provided a platform that kicked the ass of long established media companies with a new mode of communication. Instead of celebrating that, they called in the STASI to prevent it from happening again. Twitter doesn't even have sufficient political independence to be successful.

One of the most pressing problems we face is keeping the Internet free and open and out of the hands of the would be STASI. There's a group of people that seem intent on building an electronic gulag. If I had things my way, I'd keep noodling around with the big philosophical issues I kick around on this blog, but most of my technical expertise directly pertains to this issue, so I'll probably shift gears and work on that for a while.

Order and Economic Competition

I just finished a huge list of house repairs and improvements on my old home in preparation to sell it. When you're doing all that stuff yourself, and you've got an older home, you realize you're basically a caretaker in a community of caretakers. The work you do is establishing a little island of order in a sea of chaos. Along the way you can end up feeling some sympathy for future caretakers and feeling angry about sloppy work people in the past did.

"Order" is wealth. In the instance of real property, like a house or the soil of a farm, or clean streams and rivers that wealth transcends any individual's "ownership". However, in the system of the western world today, all those things are subordinated to money and accounting of profits and losses that only make sense within the context of a phony version of economic competition. (it's political domination masquerading as a neutral system)

Cultural Knowledge versus Science

Quite a whlie ago people figured out how to build stick frame homes and use wattle and daub and limewash for walls. They did all that way before the scientific method was invented or before chemistry was understood. They arrived at recipes for doing things via trial and error and intuitive guesses rather than via first princples and math based engineering.

Cultural knowledge such as methods of home constructions has some advantages versus the scientific method approach. For one--it's really slow. It's on pace with natural changes in the environment, so it's also regulated by the environment (more or less) and in theory could allow for the co-evolution of the plants and animals in a given region. (In practice that didn't happen.)

Maybe science could be remodulated to work at that pace. Science is at least as likely to kill off the human race as nature--maybe much more so. Also, since science made men much more dependent on the 10 kilowatt lifestyle, it also made us much more vulnerable to large stochastic events--like plagues or large natural disasters.

Civilization, Formal Languages and Coevolution

Ancient writers used the analogy of the beehive or the anthill to tie the city to the natural world. The action of man in civilization was like the action of bees to make their hive survive. Until very recently, most men lived outside civilization and outside the walls of the city. The principles that organize the city are alien to earth.

Formal languages, like mathematics or computer languages, or music, are also alien to earth and are possibly only a few thousand years old. Perhaps they come from concepts that are embedded in natural language, or from relationships that are embedded in the body, or in the physical world.

Animals, plants, microbes in a given area all evolved together over thousands of years. Man, too, evolved within the constraints of given environments. Where animals, plants, and man violate the constraints of those systems, they die off.

Human civilization (the Orc version) tries to remake the world into an artificial one--one that's motivated by the whims and convenience of citified man. A tremendous expenditure of energy is required for that. (See: Recreating the Steppe, and Technology Doesn't Make the US more Energy Efficient)

Coevolution and Simultinaeity

In a few recent posts, I touched on the concept of all animals in a given area evolving together. This concept seems straightforward, but in fact our language using brain has a great deal of difficulty grasping systems of things that happen simultaneously. Language and a concept like cause and effect are knitted together neatly. The concept of cause and effect fits the serial methods of transmitting information that we use all the time: the spoken and written word. "John tripped because the book was on the floor."

Our bodies and minds actually work as parallel systems all the time--we really can't even think about those functions verbally. The ostensibly simple act of walking involves the coordination of many muscles and sensory input from our eyes, ears, and inner ear orientation detection. Learning new physical skills--like rollerblading, ice skating, or riding a unicycle--"happens". Any instruction on those subjects is usually about how to structure the learning process. A verbal explanation is actually only valuable to an intermediate practitioner of those activities, because they can associate the language with the action their bodies perform, and the sensations they feel.

Similarly the written word flops when trying to describe simultaneous interactions of animals, plants, microbes, fungi in some environment. A mathematical model can be constructed with systems of equations, or algorithmically, but the model itself is created through language--formal language--and is computed serially.

White Flight From Corporate America

The Senior Software Engineer at google who penned this rather thoughtful email on some really well worn, pretty tired out culture war opinions got fired for expressing those opinions because they conflict with the orthodoxy of the day. The red guard in America will be a corporate version, and I think they're just getting started in making corporate jobs more ideological. The rhetoric of social science and derived identity politics bullshit is mostly aimed at whitey, really white (64%) men (53% x 64%) who are also the bulk of the corporate workforce in the United States. Clearly, that ideology can't be combined with that group of people, especially in the United States, where men aren't total pussies and aren't totally beat down by yapping commies.

What happens if corporate america does go full 'tard red guard and whitey leaves to do his own thing? It's happened again and again in various ways over the decades. White flight from city centers to the burbs is one great example. The cities left behind are disfunctional ruins.

If corporate america turns into a gulag seeking economic leverage to coerce some belief people will bail. There's nothing magic about corporations--they don't exist without their employees obviously, and many talented employees look for any excuse to ditch their jobs. The US financial system in its current form doesn't really exist without corporations. The federal government doesn't either.

Stoking racial animosity toward white people in the United States is a pretty good way to destroy most of the current institutions of the country.

Low Cost of Technology and High Overhead of Corporations

People can organize to do things with a lot of flexibility and with almost no overhead today. The countless layers of management in corporate organizations are incapable of competing with the decision making of a handful of people on any given project.

Technology, specifically telecommunications technology like the suite of hardware and software that makes the internet work, could more rapidly make corporate methods, management and executives obsolete than it might make fast food workers obsolete.

The economy of the US is based on corporate bodies organizing people on relatively large scales to do things. The larger scale organizing is convenient for financial bodies that can extract large amounts of wealth via interest.  It's also convenient for political bodies that can extract taxes through corporate tax farming bureaucracy.

Corporations define the economy and economic terms of day to day life. To obsolete corporations, requires political changes and a shift in thinking by masses of people. The Internet is probably propelling that right now and we're in the very early stages of the changes that will come. As stated in earlier posts, this scale of change is on par with the Reformation. In fact, it's going to depose the order that the Reformation helped usher in.

Yale/British East India Company Connection

Elihu Yale

The British East India company seems to be, in many ways, the corner stone of modernity. Elihu Yale coughed up some in-kind donations from the wealth he diverted from his employer over his career to help found Yale University. If you follow the biographical links in that Wikipedia article, you'll rattle around the east coast establishment for a while.

We're pretty oblivious today of the role of for profit corporate entities played in founding the "colonies", which in retrospect look like modern property development deals. A couple of generations later, the east coast establishment colonized the interior of the country using similar schemes. (See Connecticut Western Reserve)

It's interesting to wonder if there's any corporate entity that continued from the BEIC and remains today, and if the corporate descendants of it are shaped by their ancestor. Most notably is the CIA epithet "The Company" a reference to it? Seems plausible as it uses similar methods for similar purposes.

Trees! Part Two

Just as certain groups of animals and plants co-evolved, people co-evolved with their environments. I started elaborating this idea in an old post. (Trees!) Are arbitrary belief systems compatible with any given environment? Similarly, are widely held beliefs really just an expression of genetics?

The map above is a micro-version of the physical geography/religion map in the first "Trees!" post. It shows Northeast Ohio household incomes and biomass. There are typically many more trees and plants in the areas where there are wealthier people. At least in the case, above, it seems to track household income more reliably than just population density.

There's not really data readily available to look at ethnicity on a small scale, except the phony racial categories of the US census. On the basis of that data, there's no obvious consistent relationship between biomass and genetics.

Anyway, it's an interesting thing to keep looking at.

Webster Tarpley--A Great Summary of Modernity

Tarpley points to the "Venetian Nobility" as the "they".

His analysis of modernity is great. Many of the topics I discuss in this blog come from a similar place.

What Happens When Propaganda Doesn't Work?

WWI must've been a tough sell in the parts of the United States which were dominated by German immigrants, plus the country still regarded foreign entanglements with great suspicion. A few years of heavy propaganda plus a false flag or two were required to drag the United States into the War.

Since that era, the mass societies of the western world have been shaped by mass media propaganda and public education/indoctrination to create a social order that's tied into methods of food production and industry and war. The methods of mass organization and tackling national level projects, like wars, space programs and various social causes are reflected in the microcosms of corporate endeavors.

The Internet is breaking down the effectiveness of propaganda, partly because there is so much of it spewing out all the time--all using the same ploys. The propaganda itself becomes an inoculation against propaganda.

So what happens when that all stops working and the shared delusions and dreams evaporate?

Two Competing Mythologies in the USA

detail from Apotheosis of Washington

This is a rehash of an old post on Jeffersonian Democracy and Empire. If you were raised in the United States prior to the 1980s or maybe even later, there's a pretty good chance you were brought up believing in the mythology of the founding of the United States. The United States was meant to be a break with a corrupt past where lizard people conmen--inbred European aristocrat freakazoid tyrants and their minions set the agenda for all--which meant war, war, war. The idea of America was that common people--the eternal yeomanry--could create a just society and kick ass.

Then commies and Bolsheviks, Fabian Socialists and German Intellectuals showed up with a competing ideology--various versions of Marxism. The current version of their con is they can create a technocratic society--some version of Plato's Republic--and manage every aspect of life toward some noble goal du jour. The commies are a new mask on the face of the aristocracy and their court. Same shit, different day. Inbred freakazoids trying to rob everyone and control everything.

The Commies grabbed the mainstream media and entertainment business and started propagandizing the entire population. They tried to kill off the founding mythology by saying it was racist, pointing out the hypocrisy of slave holders advocating freedom, etc... but the founding mythology is pretty strong, and so is hatred of communists, socialists and really any scam ideology. The mainstream media is dying; it's being burned away like pavement under the scorching tires of a classic muscle car.

I think the commies failed, thankfully, and pushback is just starting.

Mind Model and the Civilization Egregore

Civilizations come and go and the way the people of each solved the problem of life on Earth was reflected in their internal representation of the natural world. The way people lived in the western world just a few generations ago is quite different than today, obviously, so the way people lived prior to agriculture, or in the early days of cities is almost unimaginable.

One key factor that can provide context is energy storage and usage. For animals, and for animal man annual sunlight and its storage in the products of nature circumscribes almost all things a man would do. The highest density energy sources would be animals (as food or for work) and plants like trees, or their annual products, like seeds, fruits or vegetables. Minimal and easily available processing could convert those yet again to more potent forms of energy storage, like alcohol, or oils or rendered fats. A sophisticated, comfortable life could be built within the horizon of those energy sources. (See Primitive Technology blog and channel for examples)

All civilizations prior to ours scaled those energy sources to industrial levels and used agriculture to direct the flow of stored sunlight to human endeavors like war and monument building for psychopathic kings and pedo priests and their scam cults. Grain storage, for example, is an energy storage system. Several myth story arcs are entirely based on the agriculture cycle. The god Pluto (from which we get the word plutocracy) was a god of grain storage underground--where the dead are stored to rise again in the next season's planting.

Our civilization figured out how to use fossil fuels and nuclear power, electricity, magnetism, etc... The basis of our civilization is the idea that there's limitless power on tap 24/7. Fossil fuels are energy dense and allow relatively small machines to produce 10's or 100's of horsepower and lots of torque or force, consequently small numbers of men can do the work that hundreds of men or animals used to do.

So why the fuck do we work all year and do makework bullshit for most of our adult life? We retain the institutions of ancient Greece, Egypt or Babylon today. What if we did projects for a short part of the year instead of keeping corporate entities alive all the time? An incremental and ad hoc approach might allow people to evaluate their actions more clearly and see the unintended consequences, like pollution, more readily.

Imagining a new type of egregore can actually bring it and a new civilization into existence.