The Sons of Cain Had Their Chance

Enoch (Hermes) was Cain's son in the Bible. The sons of Cain were cursed by god and sought to escape their bondage through technological means and man made systems that mock nature, like usury and finance.

The man made world is a prison world. More technology is more prison.

Technology Doesn't Make the US More Energy Efficient

The chart above (data series from here) shows annual per capita energy use of the USA from 1960 through 2015. The data rely on macro statistics of oil imports, exports, and storage. In spite of improvements in technology: high efficiency furnaces, appliances, better tires, slightly improved fuel economy in cars, the average energy use of every man, woman, and child in the US is basically the same year to year for the past several decades. It's almost constant from 1988-2008. It declined starting in 2005 through the end of the series. Notably, oil production peaked in 2005 along with oil prices.

GDP statistics show a 350% increase from 1988 through 2015. Energy use actually declined per capita over the same period (See crapflation). The GDP in 1988 was $5.2T. In 2015 it was $18T.

Each person in the US has the equivalent of a 10 kWatt (13 horsepower) generator running 24/7/365.

Escaping the Symbol Prison

The lossy compression algorithms of image formats like JPEG or video codecs like H.264 discards redundant information from images and also reduces the fidelity of the representation.

The lossy compression of language is different. If language rises from an internal simplified model of reality that all humans share, then it's more like a form of compression based on a shared dictionary of underlying information. For example, when an early human scratched a map on the ground with a stick, the simplistic short hand representation of the local environment could be shared with his fellows because they all had the same wire-frame representation of their local environment in their brains. It's not hard to imagine the sounds and character based languages coming from that internal comic book of reality.

Our brain and our being seem to also have a much more complex connection to reality apart from the wireframe/comic book representation. Our dreams, for example, can seem totally real--full fidelity in all the senses. Similarly, when we're just out in the world, just being, we see things with detail that can't be put into language. For us, those experiences, and that sense of the world can be unique to an individual. Perhaps that's the way all animals experience the world.

So.... what if we flip the relationship of language and try to tie it to that animal mind? Is it even possible? How would that work? I'm trying to come up with a way to do planning and analysis within a natural context.

Cows and Deer

From here

There's a hobby farmer who lives along the road I sometimes take on my commute to work. He raises cows in his back yard, which is a couple of acres that are fenced in. He feeds them hay and they live in a muddy former pasture. This area receives a lot of rain, and most of the fields around are wet at least part of the year. The cows are heavy, so they kill the root systems of the grasses if they're left in any one place for too long and turn their pasture into mud.

Cows are descended from wild Aurochs, which were animals that survived from the Pleistocene mammoth steppe era. The steppe plants were able to survive heavy browsing and foot traffic of huge animals. The animals were able to mow the foliage down to the ground and move on.

In this area, deer are abundant. (They were actually hunted to extirpation in the 19th century) I have no idea what the population of deer is in this county. Based on statewide estimates, there's probably somewhere around 75,000. The county is 256,000 acres, so that's 3-4 acres per deer. My guess, based on observation, is that there are more deer in the county than the statewide estimates suggest, but I have no idea how many.

We have a herd of deer that live in our woods. Contrary to the stories I've read and heard, the deer wreak very little havoc on the landscape, which makes a lot of sense. They're native to this area. If they wreaked havoc, they would have died out thousands of years ago. At least a dozen deer traverse our property day in and day out, using the same paths much of the time. If they make a path muddy, they switch to a new one. The muddy foot prints collect leaves and moisture and seeds. They're sort of aerating the woods and mixing the top layer of soil, plus their waste is fertilizer that readily breaks down and scatters nutrients and seeds.

So here's the main point: nobody raises or tends to the deer. In fact, people pretend they need to be "culled" so they have an excuse to hunt them, either for food, or because they like to kill animals. If the deer were not hunted or "managed", there would probably be way more of them.

A sort of corollary to that is the selective breeding and management of beef or dairy cows for specific traits, e.g. high milk production, makes them need more human "management". If cows went feral, they'd probably adapt to the local environment. Another one is that the subdivision of land into private parcels might lower the overall productivity of an area.

Nobody Knows Anything

In a recent post, I wrote about the paradox of ice-age abundance. 30,000+ years ago in the cold, dry conditions of the ice age, human beings lived in a landscape that was populated with massive herds of megafauna like woolly mammoths and a range of equally enormous predators.

R. Dale Guthrie has been investigating the question for decades. (This paper presents a summary.) He provides a partial explanation based on the evidence he and others have collected over many years.

I've long wondered if the Ice Age is encoded in mythology. The "giants" of our lore might be those creatures like mammoths that our ancestors shared the planet with. Ironically, unexpectedly, maybe that was the garden of eden time, too. We collectively remember a time of abundance when we were pastoralists and just another animal.

Maybe "the fruit of the tree of knowledge" was agriculture an original sin, devil-deal if there ever was one... Maybe it was literally apples--fruit domesticated in what's now Kazakhstan. This lore all mixed with the star/solar mythology over time. Hell, maybe even the flood was real.. the end of the ice age. Water and humidity levels rising, maybe sometimes catastrophically.

Anyway, it becomes clearer to me every single day that human knowledge is exceedingly limited. It's cyclopean. The scientific method might be inherently flawed. The reductive approach forces isolated, serial answers to questions, while nature and the universe is totally interrelated and takes place all at once.

Nobody knows what caused the ice age. Nobody knows why it ended. Scientific explanations are not orders of magnitude better than mythological lore or speculative philosophy. They look quite a bit like a formalized version of the latter.

People are Retarded

Shredded Tire Ground Cover

People actually pay money for shredded tires and then dump them on their property instead of in a landfill.

Tires don't break down. Wood mulch breaks down, which is actually the point. It's really food for the ground.

People obsess about weird things--get in personal battles with weeds, imagine that the ground should be like the floor in their house. The kids track mud into the house--makes them suicidal.

Anyway, piling shredded tires on the ground is pretty dumb--terminally dumb.

Crapflation: The Goal of Consumer Society

I replaced an old cast iron clawfoot tub with a new acrylic/fiberglass tub at my old house. It was a project that took several days of work. Rather than tiling the alcove for the tub, I used an acrylic surround and aluminum glass door. The tub and the enclosure and the door are all highly engineered consumer products. They're as light and flimsy as possible while retaining sufficient strength not to break during the installation when some care is used in handling them. They're light so they can be more easily shipped from China and distributed around the world. There's a sort of annoying cheapness that's very obvious when installing them--it's probably not as noticeable in daily use, which is sort of the point of that approach.

I don't wax nostalgic about how things were done in "the old days". The cast iron tub, for example, is just a primitive version of the acrylic tub. It's a consumer product that was cranked out of a factory in the early 1900s. Fuel costs were way cheaper and a more extensive railway network connected the whole country, so shipping a heavy durable item from place to place was relatively easy, even from Kentucky to my small town in northeast Ohio. There's no inherent philosophy of durability or repairability that informs the design of the old products. Lightweight, strong materials, like plastic composites, didn't exist.

With the old house, I'm on the same treadmill as everyone else in the consumer society. I want to get it done with the highest quality, at the lowest cost I can get away with. I'm renovating the whole place to sell it as quickly as possible. I don't cut any corners like a house flipper or a contractor might, but still, I'll choose cheaper materials or fixtures when I can.

Crapflation is built into the consumer/finance society. It's all just a crappy game.

Do Agriculture and Cities Impair Nature?

Cave Paintings from Chauvet Cave

I watched Werner Herzog's documentary on Chauvet Cave yesterday. The paintings in the cave depict a zoo of extinct animals: woolly mammoths, rhinos, cave lions. When ice covered much of Europe, the remaining forests and grasslands were able to feed a diversity of species of large mammals--including huge elephants and rhinos. That means the entire food chain had to be really productive.

Those animals were present in southern Europe during the last ice age, up until about 10,000 years ago. A few of them, like the Aurochs, straggled into the human era. (The last Aurochs died around 1600.)

The Aurochs went extinct because humans hunted it and destroyed its habitat. Nobody really knows what happened to the mammoths and the others. One theory is they died out as the climate warmed. Another is humans hunted them to extinction.

When humans introduced agriculture and cities, it's possible they severely curtailed the productivity of nature--totally the opposite of what we're taught in history classes. Rather than freeing themselves from want and deprivation, they starved everything else and ruined their own home.

Did Agriculture Wreck the Middle East and North Africa?

There is archaeological and geological evidence that the Middle East and North Africa were once green. There are two basic theories for why it's now a giant sand pit--one is that the climate changes periodically. The change might be driven by solar cycles or Earth's orbital mechanics. It could also be driven by other large scale phenomena, like geological changes that influence weather patterns. The other main theory is that agriculture wrecked it. Irrigation, tilling soil, and overgrazing might have been enough to destroy the landscape.

Once the groundcover was lost, the land became arid and dry. Without trees or grasses, there's nothing to catch and hold water and the cycle of rain and evaporation breaks.

Did all the carbon topsoil cover just blow away or turn to dust? It seems like that process would take longer than a few thousand years... but I don't really know.

Anyway, the answer to this question seems really fundamental. Is "Western" civilization really just completely untenable? Is the basis for western civilization fatally flawed? The West is a combination of things, but at its base are some ideas about agriculture and nature that might just be fatally incorrect.

Babylon just gets built again and again until it collapses into a shitshow of greed, death, and destruction.

Language and False Sense of Separation

A paradox laden theme that runs through this blog--since this is written--is symbolic thinking is a prison.

Symbolic thinking is the stuttering lame twin of the whole view of the world that you get by opening your eyes and having light pour into your retina.

This distorted, crippled view is like the accountant's gaze at an orchard in bloom. The accountant sees only future shekels per cherry blossom. Perhaps he even sees only "opportunity cost" of land that could be used for a casino or a mall that would bring in more shekels.

Language allows man to create a toy model representation of the world; maybe language arises from a toy representation that's in our heads. And from that toy model, perhaps, arises the idea that we're separate from it all. 

Another Permaculture Pioneer: Masanobu Fukuoka

I've been learning about Masanobu Fukuoka today.

Like Ruth Stout or Paul Gautschi, the idea of natural farming came to him in a flash of insight. In his case after a bought of pneumonia that almost killed him. He realized that agriculture was about not doing and he began experimenting with natural methods of planting and farming.

In an earlier post I wondered if these insights are really a side effect of brain duality and the actual weakness of our language/symbolic thinking.

The symbolic brain is deluded into thinking that our labor causes the plants to grow from soil that's been tilled into a simple geometric shape. It deletes the role of the soil and the unseen bacteria and fungi and the plants themselves.

Anyway, search YouTube for videos on him. He's an interesting guy. It's also interesting to compare and contrast him and the other permaculture, no till advocates.

The Barbarian Hoard: Superior Organizational Model?

In an old post I wondered if the modern world was the result of various tribes taking their turn at the helm. The systems we live in are an expression of the approach of one or two groups, and therefore don't make any fundamental sense to many of the people stuck in them. For example, if you sit through a meeting at a corporate job, you can see some of the people are completely bored and listless, maybe even pained, while others happily make spreadsheets of lists and lists of checklists. The Kafkaesque corporatocracy world is a joy for some and an existential crisis for others.

Maybe a good alternative to corporate organization is the barbarian hoard. The corporation is a perpetual ship's crew, a never ending "war", with a wartime organizational hierarchy that's created around making creamed corn, tires, or providing IT services, or whatever. Most of the people that spend the best part of their lives working in those places never intended to fine tune a creamed corn machine. It keeps running and doing the same thing because it has to, not because anyone cares if it does.

A different organization approach is the barbarian hoard--a group of people come together when they need to, or want to, to take care of some task and disband once it's complete. There might be a hierarchy, but one that only endures for the existence of the hoard. That type of organization might work for independent peoples.

It might be a good model to compete with corporate entities today, which are only capable of competing with other persistent corporate entities. We see the US military, for example, capable of wiping out another corporate nation's armed forces, but then incapable of stifling irregular troops.

We Know What Trump Is. Now What?

Trump's attack on Syria was Bubba Clinton style symbolism and posturing. It is indicative that it was pretty easy for the entrenched psychopaths in DC to push him around. If he ever had any intention of an "america first" presidency, it's obvious that was just relegated. Trump's the neocon's little bitch. Another president, yet another extension of the shitty wars of post 2001.

Now what?

Conan: Consciousness Rising Redux

I wrote another post about Conan The Barbarian (1982) a while ago. This one fleshes out more details.

The story draws on the seasonal, solar year myth that's at the heart of just about every movie or TV series. A recent example is Iron Fist on Netflix.

Conan represents the Sun man. In his first incarnation, he's spinning the Wheel of Pain. He wears that necklace through much of the movie. The wheel is the solar wheel--the 4 principle points of the solar journey--the equinoxes and the solstice, and the mid points.

The solar journey is a metaphor for the life of a man--the physical life and the more important spiritual life, when a man mentally ejects from the body and becomes a whole being, even as the body starts to crumble.

Thulsa Doom, the snake man (Seth in the Egyptian mythology) is time, limitation. The band of thieves--Conan, Subotai, and Valeria, seeks to overcome him, and only does so after Conan's crucifixion, side piercing, and resurrection.

Getting stabbed in the side is a common trope. Jesus on the cross, stabbed by the spear, Jon Snow stabbed and Conan sports similar wound on the tree of woe. I suppose this is along the same lines as the sun being bit by scorpio in November (Achilles heel)--stabbed in the side is some other constellation shooting the constellation Orion.

Anyway--Conan, like Iron Fist or other fictional depictions of the esoteric religion is a display of the perennial religion. It's shown again and again and again--really countless times. It seems sort of like a cult with severe OCD produces these stories. Maybe people don't tune into the significance of the imagery and themes unless they stumble into a good resource that explains it because, well, frankly it's not that significant.

It's a metaphorical language--the old science.

Man's a paradox--the animal that doesn't think he's an animal. The esoteric religion is maybe an immersion into a right brain world where symbols and numbers fall away and truth is felt.