Modernity and Culture

A person with an extremely high "IQ" as measured by tests about geometry puzzles and order of numbers is a retard compared to the complexity of the natural world, or even human world complexity. Central planning is always an exercise in reducing the complexity of the real world to match the retarded plans of narcissists and megalomaniacs.

Central planning and authoritarian tendencies have been a component of human life since at least people settled in cities. The christian church is a good example--the authoritarian religious zealots of "the church" were manical authoritarians.

Modernity seems to be an application of the engineering mindset to creating religions and engaging in psychological warfare. The people who seek to engineer the people seem to have their own religion. The idea of "transformation" or evolution of people is succinctly expressed in something like the Chinese Cultural Revolution or in the commie ethnic cleansing of South Africa under the guise of  racial justice.

Commie Frauds

Communism is almost certainly a propaganda destabilization weapon that the evil English created in the ailing days of the British Empire. Once it was in the wild long enough, it mutated into another shitty british con religion.

It's a religion whose books are just a bunch of technocratic gobbledigook that hide the holy of holies of murder and theft. It's hard not to think of the kulaks while the South African government prepares to steal from farmers, this time with the dime store excuse of "racism" of white farmers.

A million useful idiot professors in shitty colleges and universities preach to their blue haired retarded students about the justice of theft and murder.

It's a pretty good bet that the "redistributed" land will end up being exchanged for central banker monopoly money credits pulled from New York or London.

The Corporate Culture is a Garbage Pille

I stopped watching the NFL around 2011 and stopped paying attention to the local teams and all the pseudo "news" around the sport. After a few months of doing that, any sports programming I accidentally saw-at a bar for example--seemed really alien. Why do people care? (because other people care)

I'm having a very similar experience with "the news", aka corporate propaganda. The feed of news gathered by google or other corporate aggregators seems like the worst tabloid swill about personalities, and communist opinions masquerading as analysis.

I can really appreciate the cats who went out in the mountains and wrote the Book of Revelations--those dudes were already in their new age while the parade of retarded Roman life- stumbled by.

Julius Caesar Still has a PR Department

I always enjoyed my history classes in school and ended up reading as much as I could about it on my own. I had a copy of the Penguin Atlas of World History that ended up falling apart because I read it so much. The semi-worshipful tone of scholarly works on figures like Caesar or Churchill didn't strike me as odd until I was an adult.

I read the pop biography of Winston Churchill The Last Lion when I was in college and that one sort of opened my eyes. World War I was one of the dumbest things that ever happened, and Churchill was front row/center in the retardation.

Caesar isn't even dust anymore he's been dead such a long time, but he's stil a superhero that's dutifully worshipped by quite a lot of people.

Hands on Experiment In Right Brain Gardening

Alas, the summer is winding down. Even though the heat and humidity this week is going to be as high as it's been all summer, the halmarks of autumn are everywhere. The goldenrod and ironweed, which were just starting to show a few weeks ago, are in full flower. Grasses are turning to golden straw and some nights it's actually pretty cold.

This year I'm almost in sync with the seasons and planting cover crops at the appropriate time. One of the garden beds that has been nutured along this way for almost two full years has totally transformed. It was a patch of lawn in relatively packed silt/clay soil but now it's friable soil. The surface layer is crumbly and structured. It is also teeming with insects and worms.

I prepped it for fall/winter cover crops yesterday, mostly with just my hands and with a japanese sickle tool. It's not very big--maybe 15x15 feet--but it still took a relatively long time and was good, hard work. A task like that, which is repetetive and pretty boring, puts you into a sort of meditative state where you can observe without forming an abstract-language-based thought about what you are seeing. Rather than "think", that is mentally talk to yourself, about what you're experiencing, it just sort of soaks in. Also, you get more of an emotional reaction to what you're experiencing; upsetting the insects' world, for example, which you can easily ignore if you're rushing or using a mechanical tool like a rototiller, is maybe a little more poigniant when you're eye to eyes with them.

One thing I noticed, which is actually fairly subtle, is the sphere of influence of this bed actually expanded into the rest of the yard, rather than the other way around, which is the more usual thing. That is, the "garden" started to invade the "yard" rather than weeds invading the garden. The patch of improved soil grew without me really doing anything. Another thing that was less subtle is that the cover crop grasses, like sudangrass, seem to be the best at transforming an area. When they get 3 or 4 feet tall they really stifle the weed competition.

Working For Your Car

If you make $40/hour, how many hours do you have to work to pay for a new $30,000 vehicle that depreciates 60% ($18,000) in 5 years?

In gross income terms that's 450 hours, or 11.25 weeks, but after you get worked over by the federal, state, and local tax men, you probably have to work more like 600-700 hours or 15 weeks. I wonder how many people would sign up to work for 15 straight weeks to get a car? If you spread it out over 5 years, 3 weeks a year devoted to paying for a car.

In 1860 a horse cost about $120. A worker made $1-2/day (0.12-0.25/hr), so they'd pay for a horse in 480-960 hours. I wonder if that cost is really true? It probably varied a lot from market to market and horse to horse.

Why Bureaucrats and Banks Won't Be Replaced By Computers

I wrote a few posts about cryptocurrency in the first few months of posting on this blog. I've gradually become a skeptic about it as a competitor to the financial system, which is really a imperialist system run out of New York and maybe London.

Banking is a trivial undertaking from a technological point of view. Computers, networks, and mass storage are so cheap these days that the infrastructure cost to do the equivalent operations a bank does--and what most gov't departmens do--would be next to nothing. However, if you wanted to start a bank, or even just transfer money around in "accounts", you have to jump through a thousand hoops under the guise of preventing money laundering, but the regulations are really there to keep transferring wealth to the empire.

Is it really possible to stand up a new system in parallel to the old one, and so avoid a confrontation with the man? 

I think the "system" isn't nearly as important as ushering in a new understanding of credit and to get people to think, at least a little bit, about what they're doing with their lives.

Chocolate Rain versus Lady Gaga

Chocolate Rain is a cultural artifact. It's been viewed 118,000,000 times.

Corporate culture icons are a smash hit if they sell 1 million "albums".

The Alt Bible Cult

The so called "non-canonical" old religious works like the book of Enoch or the Book of Giants seem like the basis of many works of science fiction and fantasy and maybe are the basis for modern relgions like Mormonism. John Dee's work seems to be like an extreme attempt at creating a new religion based on those stories, including Enochian which was maybe like his times' Klingon language.

Credit Consumer Way of Life

Even after years of thinking about the topics I'm covering in my blog, it can take a long time for these ideas to really gel in my own mind.

The credit consumer way of life is a complete fabrication of financial imperialists. Anything that competes with that way of life, e.g. Christianity, or the family, or other institutions has been attacked, ridiculed, subverted, or corrupted. Conversely the trappings of a corporate financial lifestyle--like plastic and electronics gizmos--are luxury items of "sophisticated" people whose ability to leverage up their income to buy shit is a mark of distinction.

Since the inflationary financial system extracts tolls per transaction, it needs to keep the hamster wheels churning.

Outside The Credit Economy

We took a trip out to the Grand River valley to get some manure from a farm and to test out my farm truck. The truck hauled the stuff with no problems, so that was good.

The owner has horses, cows and other animals. Their farm is actually pretty close to "self sufficient" in the sense that they're producing the hay and straw on site and feeding the animals with it. Farms with livestock that aren't actively cycling their manure back into the fields have to give it away to try to get rid of it.

I found the ad for the manure on craigslist. My typical craigslist experience has been really good. The people selling or giving stuff away through that site are usually pretty interesting--way outside the norm--and will be happy to talk about what they know

I was particularly interested in how she raised cows every year. She got calves "for free", really in a trade for one of the raised cows at the end of the season. It was a little glimpse of a very old system of barter and credit.

Corporate Leisure World

If you get a chance to go outside somewhere and just exist, once you return to the day to day, it becomes pretty apparent how structured the human world is. Most of the structure is built around money--even leisure and hobbies can be products.

Alt media People who I often think are Intelligence agency assets are the ones getting banned

The more I hear about the corporate censorship stories, the more inclined I am to believe it's all a staged event meant to divide people.

Muh Farm Truck Update

I bought a 1997 F-250 rear wheel drive truck for $1600. License and registration were another $200. Repairs total $2800 so far. I think there are a few more things I'd like to do so it's acceptably reliable, so all in, I'm at $4600 now, and will probably end up at about $5500.

Presuming the truck lasts at least a few years without any major repairs, cost per mile and per load of stuff moved should be pretty low--even a new engine or transmission wouldn't push it over an acceptable limit versus the use I'll get from it. One unanswerable question I have: had I spent $5000 up front would I have a more reliable/better vehicle, or would it also have $2000 worth of repairs to do? I presumed that was the case, but now I'm not sure.

Another strategy would be to do no repairs up front and just do them as they're needed--or just replace the truck--which is probably the more usual farm truck strategy.

As cars age components start to fail one by one, which is the reason an older car can be such a headache. That said it's trivially easy to get a broken car towed (at least over a short distance) and have it repaired compared to suffering new car depreciation and expense. For whatever reason, we tend to think of the car breakdown as a traumatic stressful event, while working hundreds of hours to pay for a new car is not traumatic.

Media in Decline Stories

I was looking through a bunch of articles on the media decline topic. It seems like a lot of them are from 2014/15.

2014 Audience declines 9%
50% decline in TV audience since 2002

Is the Media Attack on Infowars Racketeering?

Assuming the attack on Infowars isn't a staged farce meant to pull people into two camps, it looks like collusion between a few groups to destroy the livelihood of a business competitor. It's like they're running a racket.

A Concrete Thought Experiment Example

One of the assertions that's made about abstract symbolic thinking is it allowed man to predict and hence shape the future.

When we throw or catch a ball or a stick, our brain and body predicts the future non-symbolically with relatively high fidelity in a way that's not at all symbolic or abstracted. On a windy day or other adverse conditions our brain and body can adapt to put even some weirdly shaped object--like a peanut--on a relatively narrow set of trajectories.

When the Shared Representation of Nature was Nature

Following up to the previous post... Chauvet Cave is the product of ice age men in France.

The shared experience of men in that world was nature. Maybe the abstractions and simplifications of the language using brain didn't really exist at that time.

Cults Embellish Language

BSG President Swearing In making the Triad Claw Hand Sign

Cities and civilization were ways for humans to simplify nature so it is amenable to our low bandwidth representations of nature. Small groups of people who establish a common embellishment of language can communicate "more" by investing time in building a larger shared dictionary of symbols.

Cities and Simplified Nature as an Outgrowth of Lossy Compression Language

Holocene civilization is really the agriculture/city civilization. Language is often celebrated as the necessary pre-requisite for humans to create civilization. What if, instead, language is a really low bandwidth/low fidelity way to communicate ideas, and cities popped out of it as a sort of crutch, or maybe a better analogy is a set of leg braces? Rather than being a pinnacle of evolution and the height of creation, it's really a sort of evolutionary cul de sac.

Maybe our brains are capable of dealing with natural complexity and even working with natural complexity but language--as a form of dictionary based lossy compression--is not. Maybe analytical thinking is possible within a natural context without math or grammar.

Symbolic Reasoning as an Outgrowth of the Natural World

This blog keeps orbiting around the relationship between nature and symbolic reasoning and language in general, and formal language like math or computer software. Here's one of my older posts on this topic.

Symbolic language is an outgrowth of the natural world. It's a form of lossy compression. The word and concept "tree", for example, is a generic stand-in for all trees and is devoid of information on any particular tree in all its specifics and its relationship to its place.

Cities and civilization seem to be an attempt to simplify the landscape so the stunted representational version of nature comports with external man made reality. That is, the limited mind of man gets projected onto the natural landscape--making map lines into streets and paving over all. The riot of a natural setting gets replaced with empty voids.

Internet Powered Decline of Mass Culture

The mass market/mass culture is the corporate culture. In its final incarnation, it was really a creature of the media distribution networks of the 80s and 90s--FM radio, broadcast TV and cable TV--all of those technologies are ancient. They rely on a  broadcast medium and fixed format that allows for the mass production of receivers and players.

As a side effect of that, any program that was made for broadcast, or any song that was made for broadcast was aimed at a "mass audience" and had to cater to the lowest common denominator. National and international sports events are still properties of "broadcast" and cable outlets. In the United States the NFL still partners with owners of physical broadcast media like cable or satellite TV, for example.

Technologies like DVDs started to whittle away at the broadcast/mass audience before Internet streaming was really feasible. The mass market probably started to crack at the periphery in the 2000s, now it looks like its just about dissolved completely.

Corporate media is really corporations' PR firms that seek to shape the choices and opinions that people have. You can still see this today on the "start" pages of web browsers--even the really niche ones like Opera provide RSS feeds of corporate propaganda, like daily stories about Tesla even though that company produces a tiny fraction of the cars sold in the US.

The phenomenon of corporate media attacking alt media figures like Alex Jones to garner some clickbait views for their own web sites is more a sign of their precarious position than a sign the alt media (and the million-niche-market) is going to be destroyed. Who cares about CNN or for fuck's sake, who cares about a fucking newspaper from New York?

No mass media means no mass market. The "mass media" is now just another niche--one that caters to the middle-of-the-road average person.

The Final Stop for Neoliberal/cons

Neoliberal/con figures began directing policy in the Reagan/Bush years. The US transitioned away from an industrial economy to a tech/finance economy, which displaced a lot of workers, and shifted power to "tech" businesses. In the foreign policy arena, the US become more overtly imperialist in a sequence of crappy wars that cost taxpayers a lot of money, but didn't accomplish anything constructive.

This all culminated in the post 9/11 wars and bullshit like the PATRIOT act and the bank "bailouts". People like the Clintons, Bushes and McCains and Romneys and the allies on wall street and elsewhere were demonstrated to not only be evil and corrupt, but just incompetent, and opposed to the United States people.

This conflict between the aging and grossly corrupt New York financial/media establishment and a large number of people in the United States culminated in the Trump election. It seems to still be ongoing as the corporate media maintains some influence.

Muh Farm Truck

1997 Ford F-250

After looking for a truck for a couple of years, I finally bought an old beater Ford F-250 for $1500.

The truck market in the US is a microcosm of how fucked up and insane the economy is.  (See Ann Rhefn's recent post on Laborism versus Capitalism) Truck prices are wildly inflated. New trucks cost as much as you'd pay for an exotic sports car not many years ago. As a consequence, many older truck sellers are asking around $10,000 for vehicles from the 80s and early 90s.

In my opinion, used truck prices are half driven by supply and demand (market forces) and the availability of financing. It's "easy" to sign up to flush away multiple years of your income on financing a truck.

I noticed, lately, that the market shows some signs of distress--at least based on my prowling craigslist on a daily basis for at least a year if not two. The spread on prices seems to have recently exploded, so the low end of the market detached from the "high" end and older/historic trucks aren't selling at all.

I realized I don't need a lot of the "capabilities" that expensive used trucks have, which are sort of like the features of smart phones or new cars. I don't need 4 wheel drive, or a diesel engine. I don't want any infotainment electronics, so I ended up with an old, decent frame truck with high miles and lots of wear and tear issues.

The cash and real asset economy is like a parallel universe from the credit driven economy. In the cash economy, people are happy and think about what they're doing and live within their limitations. In the credit economy, people are in a bubble of consumer delusion about what will make them happy then miserable when they're stuck with the bill. I served some time in that world and I'll never go back.

Alex Jones Martyr

It seems like all the "tech" firms banned Infowars and Alex Jones from their platforms. Jones has a large audience and makes millions of dollars from his alternative media companies while MSNBC et al have a small declining audience and lose millions of dollars.

Media and "tech" appear to be "run" by the same people---who don't do any work or don't know any actual "tech". How does this come to pass?

American Bogeyman

Banning Alex Jones from various platforms is a nice, neat way to manufacture two phony "sides" and make mutual bogeymen out of them.

The Pitiful Mind of Man

The Leopold and Loeb story is such a great one because it so elegantly summarizes the severe limitations of symbolic reasoning and thinking. The symbol using/math model creating mind is severely stunted and deformed. On it's own, it's a stupid childish monster.

Is it possible to simply reverse the roles of the symbol using mind and its relationship with the external world and nature? Where the oafish symbol using mind attempts to impose simplistic plans and order on the natural world, can it instead follow hints from nature?

The symbol using mind conflates its plans and models with "reality"--a very common outcome of this approach is abject failure and sometimes monstrous destruction as the symbol mind tries to obliterate all that is counter to its feeble schemes. Can language and symbolic representations flow from the complexity of nature instead of the mind of a man?

Terminal Mass Media Decline and Their Freakout

It took quite a while for the Internet to start to wipe out the "crown jewels" of the mass market media like the New York Times and the major broadcast and cable TV outlets, but it's happening at a rapid pace now. The 2016 presidential election was strong evidence for this ongoing trend.

Now, the people in the mass media are freaking out. Their livelihood is at stake after all, and it might be hard for them to make multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars outside in different professions.

Is this a tectonic change like the Reformation, or is it a smaller scale change, more like the shift in the US when railroads swept across the country and displaced canals and stagecoaches.

The Internet's created mass centralization in Amazon, Google, Apple, but a total obliteration of monopoly media companies.

Battlestar Galactica (2000s) and The Rise of Consciousness

The main characters of Battlestar Galactica are Gaius Baltar and the Cylon woman Six. For most of the episodes in the first seasons of the show, they're the same physical character--Baltar and Six is imaginary.

Baltar starts the show as a degenerate genius who uses his gifts for banal purposes. (A more extreme version of Baltar's type of intellectual depravity is offered by Leopold and Loeb.) He's an exemplar of Caprican society--which like ours is another Babylon/Rome. Caprican society peaked when it ~created~ a race of Metic slave machines called the Cylons. Dumb robots were bad slaves, so in the BSG mythology, Zoe Graystone created the technological means to make them conscious and to host human consciousness, which led to their sky-net like obsession with destroying humanity.

Baltar's degeneracy is his (and humanity's) undoing as Six dupes him into revealing all the secret codes and data of the Colonial defense forces. However, in the wake of the fall of their Babylon,
Six ends up instructing Baltar in the form of a vivid waking hallucination away from his degenerate and dissipative life toward being a Jesus type figure, who by the end of the show has undergone a total transformation.

Much like Thulsa Doom in the Conan movies, the cylons serve as a harsh teacher to humanity. Much of the transformation seems to be guided by an understanding of the nature of consciousness--if consciousness is an inherent property of the universe, man's consciousness is not distinct, so a man is not distinct from the universe.

The lack of sympathy or empathy for ~mere~ matter leads to the rise of the cylons. An attempt to escape natural necessity, i.e. death, by Zoe Graystone and to escape into the Symbol World (millions of posts in my blog about that) led to their rise also, and the demise of the race of humanity.

By the end of the series the crew of Galactica has come full circle. They destroy all their technology and return to the Earth (literally and figuratively) and the cylons and humans merge in the birth of a star child.

Corporate Data Mining is the Apotheosis of Neoliberalism

The world wars were the culmination of the transition from rural/agrarian life to industrial mass society. All people could think to do with themselves and their new means of organizing was to murder and die on a mass scale. The post war years seem like a transition to a saner time, at least a time where the insanity of mass warfare became impossible or totally irrational, thanks to nukes.

The past several decades of "neoliberalism", which really just means government run by corporations and banks, has culminated in server farms and data mining, which is just bureaucratic infrastructure. It effectually creates a giant echo chamber for corporate douchebags. It's like the MBA church.

Symbolic Reasoning and "Intelligence"

A couple of Jewish boys murdered a friend of theirs in the early 1900s in an orgy of psychopathic intellectualism. They believed they'd planned the perfect crime, but within a matter of days they were apprehended by the police.

Analytical, symbolic reasoning divorced from all other considerations is foul.

Electronic Consumer Goods Became "Luxury" Items

New cars incorporate aspects of cell phones these days, plus they incorporate many additional sensors and electronic systems. Each of the electronic features is sold as a luxury add on. Many people think of smart phones, laptops, and smart watches as luxury lifestyle items, even though smart phones, watches, and laptops are the most mundane mass produced consumer goods there are. Advertising and "social intelligence" have convinced a large chunk of the population that some glass and plastic gizmo that's owned by millions of people is a desirable luxury good that's worth nearly $1000 and a monthly subscription that amounts to $1000 per year.