Alien Transplants

Most of the places I've visited in the United States and around the world don't have any connection or association with the geographical location they are. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is Ottawa, Canada, which seemed like it genuinely grew out of its riverine location.

That lack of association with geography applies to almost every house I've ever seen also; it definitely applies to our current home, which is a generic post WW2 house that was built on a unique parcel of land.

The lack of association with geography applies even more to the way people live, which is almost entirely devoid of any connection to where they live. We're all mostly plugged into some generic corporate culture.

When European people settled this area they must have had some blueprint in mind for what they were trying to create, and that thing had nothing at all to do with where they settled. The thing that's maybe more difficult to believe is that it seems their ancient ancestors did a similar thing in Europe.

Twitter and Faceberg Woes

The tech "boom" starting in the 1990s was all financed by devaluing the USD. The newly printed money was used to give an incentive to people like me to work in "tech".

Tech bubble 1 popped in the early 2000s. I switched careers back then to chase the Greenspan Monopoly Money.

It sort of looks like tech bubble 2 is popping now, and as an interesting coincidence, I got tired of Faceberg a few years ago, and twitter a few months ago. Once I quit those, I realized I wasn't missing much. Now, I'm eyeing my android spyphone device as a useless and expensive gizmo that's not adding much to my day to day life.

A lot of the investment and development in tech bubble 2 produced derivative trivial "new tech", like Fuckface. The replacement cost of Faceberg's servers and software development is a fraction of the "market cap" of the company, same deal with Twitter.

The whole scheme of data mining people and selling it is the fucktarded echo of google's original good idea of targeted internet ads, which seems almost totally tapped out after a couple decades thanks to ad blocking. Similarly, data mining is a non-value added activity that every company is doing now in a sort of Jonestown style koolaid binge.

It looks like tech bubble 2 is wrapping up.

Non Agricultural Organization of People

There are lots of first hand reports of European people living among Native Americans before and around 1800. They're really interesting reading. It seems like every permutation of relationship happened between the european settlers and the natives. Some were best of friends. Some were adversarial. There were many types of commercial relationships, familial relationships, etc...

I think about William Atherton's account from time to time. He ended up as a captive during the war of 1812, and was really a sort of slave. He lived with a band of hunter gatherers for about 1 year and he witnessed what as basically the remnants of that lifestyle. By then, the settlers were already rapidly depleting the wilderness, and in only a couple of decades that way of life was impossible.

In the Ohio Country, tribes were organized geographically around drainage basins of lakes and rivers. That makes a lot of sense for a couple of reasons. For one, as hunter gatherers, that geographical organization roughly corresponds to the way animals migrate and move around throughout a year. Also, the native peoples used waterways as a primary means of transportation for many centuries prior to European settlement and the introduction of the horse.

Rather than being an idyllic edens filled with tranquil people, the tribes made war on each other for control over these areas and their resources.

When people are really totally dependent on the land to provide the idea that any man or woman could add some value, and hence have value as an individual might really be attenuated. In fact, other people are sort of natural impediments. This idea is something we see some environmentalists espousing.

"Financial Collapse"/"System Collapse" Meme and Peasant Revolts

I got sucked into the collapse-ism ideas after the financial crisis. I even pissed away some money on gold and silver--at least I bought those shiny pieces of metal on the (everlasting) "dip". I was really peasant-ish in my thinking. The "collapse" meme treats the "system" as a thing, rather than a political arrangement. Watch the videos of Hank Paulson yucking it up with that Facebook lady about conning the United States to get a taste of what I mean.

Anyway, the idea of a "system" is a really great one for the people who arrange the game for others to play and waste their life on. "It's not me, it's the system".

Artificial Storage of Calories

In the previous post I was writing about the difference between the nature's version of productivity and the human one. A garden is usually arranged to maximize the labor efforts of people. For example, the beds are straight and scaled to the reach of a person and are arranged so tools and wheelbarrows can be moved throughout. Deer and other browsing animals move over a range and forage for food. They eat what's available and store surplus calories on their body as fat and muscle.

Almost all the work that goes into gardening is involved in arranging it so its human-labor-oriented structure is maintained throughout a season. That arrangement of plants and soil is "unstable" within the natural environment. Having a bunch of the same type of plants in one spot, for example, is an invitation for insects that feed on that plant so over the course of a season it would be necessary to try to control pests. Likewise, almost all the bare dirt in some area will sprout with weeds.

Perhaps a more important aspect of the human-oriented arrangement of plants in a garden or a field is their proximity to agricultural infrastructure, like grain silos or barns that store equipment. While a deer might move over 1000 acres of landscape with only a mouth and body fat to process plant matter into fuel, a farm and a farmer are structured so store all that production in their specialized  infrastructure, which is ultimately designed to facilitate trade with even more concentrated groups of people in cities.

Agriculture: Trading Productivity for Predictability

I've been wrestling with the topic of agriculture for the past couple of years. The idea that agriculture is fundamentally destructive is oddly compelling to me. I've touched on this in several posts, like this one.

In the last ice age, glaciers basically reached just past our current property to practically just my old address in the small town of Chardon, Ohio. Elephant sized animals--mammoths and mastodons lived just south of there. In spite of a wall of ice being just to their north, huge mammals lived in abundance and people lived nearby, also.

Fast forward millenia and the european people who migrated to the same area found it teeming with holocene plants and animals in overflowing abundance.Within a few decades (by 1850), more or less, they'd razed all that to the ground in favor of agricultural fields and grasslands. (It's probably what happened in Europe thousands of years prior.)

It seems almost impossible to believe, but nature unmolested is probably more productive than when managed by people. "Productive" in this sense means the conversion of solar energy into potential food and fuel (e.g. firewood) calories is as efficient as possible over a large area. However, in its natural state, it generally takes more work (energy) to harvest the energy and store it in any given season than in an agriculture system. Mainly just because the distribution of human-useful plants and animals aren't confined to an easily walkable/workable area.

The deer example discussed in an earlier post highlights this. When you raise a herd of cows in my area, it takes a relatively large amount of land and effort to manage them, but in my county much larger numbers of deer than cows just walk around all over the place and require no management and no waste treatment, etc...

The advantage that agriculture seems to have for people is that their plans can succeed. That is, they can attempt to impose a predictable scheme for raising food on a given area of land and can work to make it happen. They have a more or less predictable outcome for their time invested.

Star Trek: The Atlantis Myth set in the Future

We've been watching old Star Trek series lately, like Voyager and DS9. I didn't watch any of them back when they aired originally and holy shit it makes me feel old to watch them now. I was in my 20s when they first were on.

Anyway, it's pretty interesting to watch them now. They're a sort of TV version of 1930s comic books and sci-fi short story collections, which makes them seem more dated than the crappy special effects do. Most of the sci-fi series today are aimed at niche audiences and actually abandoned the fetters imposed on them by the need to be mass-media friendly when people still watched broadcast and cable TV. For the most part, sci fi series today have long involved, multi-layered stories that unfold over many episodes and seasons. The producers of those series apparently don't have to worry about courting the "average person" demographics like the producers of Star Trek did.

It's also a lot more obvious to me today that the stories are cultural propaganda and I wouldn't be surprised if the series were crafted by a group that was aiming to steer civilization. The show is a version of the Atlantis Myth, although crucially, it's set in the future rather than the distant past. That's really the only point I wanted to make in this post.

The ancient atlantis myth portrays a fallen/lost world along the Golden Age/Silver Age/Bronze Age line of thinking. The star trek series portrays a technologically redeemed world where the golden age is everyday.

Agriculture, Cults, and Knowledge

From here

A habit of the founders of "modernity" was to do thought experiments about primitive man to provide a basis of understanding the circumstances of life today. One recent dime-store version of this thinking is the "paleo" diet whose advocates claim is the oldest, hence "natural", i.e. true diet of human beings.

This approach was an antidote to religious and cultural authority, which was a much bigger deal in the 16th and 17th century than it is today. (You can find examples of this in older books too, like Plato's works.)

I'm indulging in some of this today to imagine how social intelligence (see the previous few posts) could sound, like a lot of people, to the voice of god. It's a sort of disembodied intelligence because it seems to function between individuals almost like they're connected through an invisible network.

Imagine a pre-city era where a certain population density of people lived in the same region and some people began experimenting with agriculture. The initial farmers would learn through observation of nature and hands on trial and error. Their rate of success could be multiplied by a number of people doing trial and error experiments and providing feedback to eachother. The feedback could be through speech or through social intelligence and monkey-see-monkey-doo-ism.

That type of "knowledge" seems to seep out of the ground or arrive ex nihilo. Is it even really knowledge?

"Evolution" as Moralism

One of the enduring concepts in science fiction is that "evolution" or transformation is the only morality there is. Arthur C. Clark's "Childhood's End" is a 60s vintage example of this; The Borg on Star Trek Voyager elaborate this concept over the course of many episodes. Two new series "The Expanse" and "The Crossing" are based almost entirely on this concept as were the 2000s vintage "Battlestar Galactica" series BSG and Caprica. There are too many series based on this concept to even begin to elaborate in depth.

This concept is sort of an inversion of the idea of the "scorn for matter", where the "spirit", that is, the symbolic version of man, is trapped in a weak body and that the entire human race is ultimately "limited" by our physical body.

I think this point-of-view could only arise in cities where there are no natural counter examples, like the humble possum.

Cult-O-Rama

I wrote about the topic I'm writing about again today about a year and a half ago. "Cults are the Norm" to expand on an idea that's in the last sentence or two of that post. I'm writing about this now after realizing how many gardening YouTube channels are really cult-like. (Interestingly enough "cultus" is the root of the word cultivate.) The concepts of the gardening cults are promoted with religious zeal and are cast as panacea, and cure alls with no possible downsides.

Is it safe? It's safe as long as we all think it is.

Humans, like a lot of other animals, seem to have multiple completely distinct forms of evaluating what they experience. "Social intelligence" is a common way people evaluate things. Our ducks do the very same thing. In fact, after living with ducks for a few months, I've started to think human beings more closely resemble flock and herd animals than we resemble predatory social species like wolves or lions. I'm not even sure you could have civilization like ours without social intelligence being the basis for most judgments people make.

The widespread prevalence of cult-like organizations and pop-culture, or more media driven cult behavior (sports fandom is one example) seems to be founded on the primacy of the social intelligence mode of evaluating information. This is really the basis of the moral panic phenomenon or the bizarro puritanism of the shitlibs we see today.

In the pre-christian world, cults were much more overt and front and center. Where today you might be a part of a club, like a cycling club, in the classical world you would be in a cycling cult. It's really pretty mind boggling that the monotheist cults of the middle east totally monopolized people's cult memberships for  ~1000 years, which gave overt cults a tinge of evil--to this day, people are still suspicious of competing religious cults like Scientology or Mormonism.