Tecumseh's Proxy Army for the British Empire

The War of 1812 was the North American theater of the war between Napoleon's French Empire and the British Empire. The battles between the Americans, the British, and their Indian proxy armies were more like skirmishes between junion varsity football teams than the big league battles for old Europe.

It seems like the British spent many years cultivating a religious movement among the Indians in Ohio. Tecumseh's brother was a Prophet with a religious teaching that was suspiciously in line with British Empire goals along the United States frontier, which at that time was Ohio. Tecumseh's movement looks a whole lot like the proxy armies fighting in the middle east today--spurred on by religious teachings and financed by empires who are far removed.

The British had repeatedly betrayed the Indian tribes leading up to the War of 1812, and for several previous decades, also the Empire had very limited ability to deliver on any promises it would make to the Indians. It's really remarkable that they were able to persuade Tecumseh and his people to undertake a war against the Americans.

The Enduring Appeal of Primitivism

Today, September 26, is Johnny Appleseed Day. I've been reading a biography about him by Robert Price: Johnny Appleseed: Man & Myth. The book is really about the Old Northwest around 1800. John Chapman is one of the rare people who tried to actually live the life of a free and just man, which often takes the form of living as a "first man", or a primitive life.

Civilization is man made, obviously. Civilized man is really not a man. He doesn't have any existence of his own. He's a minion, or a cog in a vast machine. Richard Proenneke went to Alaska to escape that and live a whole life which he experienced in the context of living in the natural world. Christians return again and again to the roots of the church to redefine their religion as the institutions that build up around it turn into a sewer over and over again.

The civilization man, the corporate man, the empire man, is like the Agent Smith character in The Matrix or the Stormtrooper clones in Star Wars or Number 2 in The Prisoner. He's everyone and nobody. He's entirely a creature of the toy model version of reality and the symbol world.

Glyphosate Linked to Bee Death

Short version: glyphosate kills bees by affecting their gut bacteria.

https://news.utexas.edu/2018/09/24/common-weed-killer-linked-to-bee-deaths

Chief Black Hoof's Address to Jefferson

Here's a record of Chief Black Hoof's address to then President Thomas Jefferson in 1802.

Chief Black Hoof

The Shawnee chief Black Hoof tried the opposite tack from Tecumseh in the conflict between the Indians and the United States, and actually stayed in Ohio, but his people were expelled (illegally) in 1830. I need to research that more and this article provides a good starting point.

What Happened to the Native Americans in Ohio?

Ohio was the Northwest Frontier of the post revolutionary war United States. It opened to settlement to the new Americans around 1800, although people from the east coast had been moving through Ohio for decades and numerous settlements and camps popped up in the area long before it was parcelled up for sale by crony land companies.

"Military" conflict between the nascent United States and the tribe of the Delawares led to the treaty of Greenville in 1795. The local histories have many colorful stories about encounters between the Indians and the new settlers of Ohio in the aftermath. Some of the tales are brutal and stupid, some are comical and heartwarming. (Actually that period of history in Ohio is really interesting.) Then all of a sudden the Indians totally disappear.

What happened to them?

Well, as far as I can tell from what I've read, the Indians sided with Great Britain in the run up to the War of 1812, and they made a strategic move up to Canada as part of the war. Even though the British "won", the Indians were screwed by having supported the British. (See the treaty of Ghent) One of the individuals who embodies this history is Captain Pipe.

It's really unfortunate the settlers hadn't struck up friendly relations with the natives way before 1800.

Maker Movement: Counterculture to Corporate Culture

I've been watching several "maker" YouTube channels for the past few years. As the audience of some of the channels grew past a certain point, they turned into commercials for tool companies and material companies. The next iteration of that is a small wave of TV shows for the mass audience, which will probably flop. The "big" youtube maker channels are still really a narrow niche and what they do probably won't work well for the normie audience.

Based on the reports of the youtubers who turn down the offers to make commercial content or to partake in TV productions, the deals are, not surprisingly, heavily slanted toward the corporate TV entities or corporate sponsors. For example, the rights to the likeness and even name of the YouTuber becomes the intellectual property of corporatedom.

The Internet, microprocessors, mass storage, cameras, etc... are so cheap now that it's actually very difficult for corporations and all their management and bureaucracy to compete with small groups or individuals in almost any endeavor. For the truly creative and productive people, the world is theirs.

Reformation and Byzantine Beefs

Two "western" (Normans and Venetians) forces sacked and destroyed a couple of cities in the old Byzantine empire in the 12th and 13th century. The sack of Constantinople by "Latins" around 1204 was particularly bloody and destructive. One of the proto-reformers was the Englishman John Wycliffe. I wonder if there's any thread that relates him to scholarship from the east.

A Longer Article About Johnny Appleseed

When the United States was young and the frontier was being opened, there was pervasive experimentation in different ways to live and "new" religions like Mormonism and myriad versions of protestantism that sought perfection in a basic way of life, or in primitive Christianity. John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) was a pretty good example of a person who lived that way. I didn't know that he was a figure who was so associated with Ohio. There are a number of good articles on him online. This one is pretty good.

Interesting Ohio History Book

This is a great collection of secondary source information about Ohio counties.

Historical Collections of Ohio: An Encyclopedia of the State

Worshipping the Worst

If you ever eat a "wild" edible plant, you can start to appreciate the effort undertaken by some ancient person to breed a domestic plant like peas or corn, or apples or cherries. It's pretty rare for such a person to be remembered. Johnny Appleseed is one case. (His life is remarkable and it's a snapshot of how people thought about the new United States at the time.)

It's not rare at all, on the other hand, for people to worship politicians, tyrants, and emperors who are almost always the bane of life on earth. When they are fondly remembered it's for vague, grandiose claims about what they did by sitting in a throne even though their subjects and vassals actually did it all. It's really pretty weird.

Post Election Moralism

Hillary Clinton was probably the worst candidate for el presidente in my lifetime. She had all the baggage from their time in the whitehouse and baggage from all the Clinton's shady dealings prior to their time in Washington. She was probably the only candidate for president that could lose to Trump.

In spite of that, her supporters can't fathom how she lost. Russian medddling, nazi countrymen, etc... are the only possible explanations--not her support for the Iraq war, similarity to Bush/Romney, or shady associates.

Much of the ire is from declining corporate media, which stands to lose a lot of money in the next few election cycles as TV advertising becomes less important. Corporate media faces a long period of decline and restructuring on par with what American manufacturing endured as corporate heads and politicians sold out american citizens for 30 pieces of silver. Unlike the american blue collar workforce, corporate media people can scream into cameras and microphones as the darkness closes in.

In the face of that pressure, they've turned moralist and accuse their nebulous political opposition of various sins, which is weird. The nihilists and degenerates claim an imagined moral high ground. I think this type of tantrum can only last 1-2 years until the dopamine receptors of the "resist!" crowd start to get clogged up.

International socialism and Freemasonry

The modern world popped out of the struggle between the English and its burgeoning trade empire and the catholic nations of old europe. Freemasonry started around the same time and seemed to copy methods of the early Christian church--rapidly building lodges on trade routes throughout the world and repackaging doctrines and dogmas and mysteries from the old world.

"International socialism" almost certainly has the same roots and follows a similar approach. Many people have pointed this out.

Coevolution of Language and Cities

Coevolution is a better concept than evolution when thinking about how the living things in the world arrived at their current state of being.

Living things don't evolve in isolation, they live in a world populated with many other living things, obviously. All the living things in a given area evolve together. Some mammals, for example, evolved with the plants and animals of the ice age climate world, and when the climate changed and the plants from the cooler, less humid winter world died off, many of the mammals did as well.

It seems pretty likely that most of the time that humans have been on earth they lived outside cities, however it's pretty likely that most the time humans have been on earth they lived in some form of pack or flock or tribe. I don't really know if every social animal has a form of language, but I can't think of any exceptions to that off the top of my head.

Language using man was also corporate man (corporate in the most general sense of that word). The relative effectiveness of cooperation versus competition would be one mechanism for building the shared mental model of the outside world that makes language work. If someone lacked the concept of a "map" in their brain, for example, it'd be much harder for that person to coordinate with other people on an agricultural project.

Why "Tech" (aka computer stuff) is Ideal for Absorbing Credit

My parents gave us a Commodore Vic 20 when I was about 10 years old. For whatever reason that really clicked with me. I was writing 6502 assembly language programs before I got to middle school. Eventually my dad got an IBM PC and I got my hands on all the reference manuals associated with it. IBM even provided the source code of the BIOS (which was like the linux kernel back then), which was written in 8086 assembly language.

The first big wave of "automation",that is, slapping a microprocessor and electronics on manual or analog control systems, was in the 70s. By the time I was in the workforce in the early 90s, basically every business had a computer and everything that was profitable to automate was already automated. Those systems were refined a couple of times in the 90s and most of the value that could be added to the productive economy was already added.

Tech bubble 2.0 is mostly a manifestation of money printing. It's like an absorber for all the credit that's been issued by central banks. Data centers and data mining are ideal makework activities for government and corporate managerial bureaucracy.

Makework activities are ideal for central planning and banking. Since they don't require much real-world resources (apart from electrical power) all the money can be used for adding order to magnetically stored data in various permutations.

Commie Cities of America

The 2016 election in the United States showed a sharp division between the cities, which voted for shitty Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the country, which voted for less shitty Trump. Cities = poor people + government and in the money drains of the country like New York, and San Francisco, they're where the super monied people live.

The cities and the government employees desperately need the real productivity of the rest of the country, which seems to be very tired of them. Lots of propaganda is directed against the people who don't live in cities and aren't tied into the patronage systems of their ruling cliques, similarly various central planning schemes aimed at expanding the taxing power of shitty cities are floated all the time. In areas like Northeast Ohio where the political power of central cities like Cleveland is minimal, the schemes of such planners mostly fall on deaf ears. In a handful of places in the country, central planners managed to get control of large regions and extract rent from a large population.

It's really interesting that the corporate media is losing influence at the same time.

Reformation Parallels Again

I've written about the end of the middle ages a few times in this blog. Today, many of the institutions of the western world are in an eerily similar state. While the medieval world was bound together by catholicism incorporated, the modern world is bound together by the money printing business. In the middle ages, universities were appendages of the church and learned men of the day spent their time expanding its doctrines and building the apparatus to funnel income to the clergy and the vatican. In our time, university professors advocate central planning schemes and various identity politics religious dogmas that are similarly inexplicably tied to banker world.

Human corporate institutions are a simulacrum. They are a model of a physical body, and like a body they have an inside and an outside. The claim of universality by institutions like a communist party or the catholic church are bogus. By creating a body, a corporate institution creates its own competition and its own eventual downfall.

Ongoing Mutation of the Two Major Political Parties

Most of my life, both the major political parties in the United States were corporate socialists. There's barely a difference between Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton--big government that's corporate owned and operated. It seems like the wars and financial "crisis"of 2008 started cracking that up. It seems like those shitbirds finally lost credibility with a big chunk of the united states population.

Rather than reject their university social science faculty picnic platform, the democrats seem to be doubling down on it. It seems like the democrats are trying to decide which version of Communism to embrace, while the GOP turned into some version of Eisenhower's republican party. (who is reputed to be Trump's "favorite" President.)

The split between cities in the United States and the rest of the country is pretty stark. Productive people with the means to move avoid the high tax environments. That'll be an ongoing structural issue with the country for some time to come.

The "Economy" as a Mechanism for Absorbing Credit

The new "tech economy" is a mechanism for absorbing credit from banks--or more specifically--it's an excuse for banks to issue credit. Data mining, cloud computing and similar operations are a fertile field for credit creation.

Comprehensive Article on Native Americans' Management of Resources and Private Property

This article covers a lot of detail about private property and how lands were managed.

Why Didn't Native Americans Wreck the Americas?

There were settlements of tribes in the Ohio country for a long time before european setttlers moved here in the early 1800s. The serpent mound in southern Ohio dates to hundreds of years BC at least and there were settlements all up and down the rivers of what's currently Ohio. When Europeans arrived in the Americas they were amazed at the abundance of trees and wildlife, but then basically stripped the land as fast as they could when they moved in.

Did the native americans "manage" the land in a way that was more sustainable, or were their cultural practices just not as destructive since they didn't have horses or all of the tools european farmers and settlers did? The only book I read on this topic that seemed to be thought out in a non-political way was Guns Germs and Steel.

My question is--could the "Europeans" (a loaded bullshit collectivist term) have adapted to the americas if they had spent more time integrating with the native tribes rather than confronting them as minions of a system? It's a loaded bullshit term because the settlers from Europe had varied experience and relations with the natives of the continent.

It seems like the main cause of the depletion of the north american continent was its monetization. (A really good depiction of that is in the Netflix series Frontier about the Hudson's Bay Company.) It's pretty instructive to read about the land deals of the time, which were basically financial schemes to enrich east coast establishment families. The monetization of millions of acres of land were based on claims of ownership by this or that group based on paper thin frauds.

One example of Indian tribes did wreck the environment the way the settlers did is provided by the extirpation of beavers in the Hudson Valley by 1640.

Astroturf Counterculture

There's probably a clip of Alex Jones confronting some former Clinton Administration official about Bohemian Grove on youtube. I can't think of the guy's name off the top of my head. I always thought that scene seemed fake--like professional wrestling.

What's the point of astroturf counterculture, like the hippies in the 60s?

I guess it's a portrayal of the actual experimental ways of living in an exaggerated, dramatized way to cordon it off for the average person in the United States. 

Is the "New York Times" Influential?

Recently, copies of the New York Times are dropped at the end of our driveway on Sunday... for free. It's litter that we have to walk to the recycle bin. Is it a promotion to get more subscribers, or is it a new version of the weekly penny saver newspaper that is pure ad space? I don't know.

Sunk Costs, Centralization and Citification

The old telephone network has been supplanted a number of times, but thousands--maybe millions of miles of copper phone line are hanging on telephone poles all over the USA. Chronically money losing corporations still operate many of the telephone networks around the country.

The corporate credit world is all about shiny new schemes to make money in the future.The shiny future makes today's credit worth something. However, en route to the shiny future, maintenance needing infrastructure and obligations like pensions or various insurance schemes accumulate rapidly. These obligations and costs tend to pile up where they were most centralized, so the biggest cities and largest states end up with the biggest burden.

Since people in a counry like the united states can move very easily, they leave places like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland for green field states and cities. The federal model of government in the USA allows municipalities in distress to shift some of their costs onto the next level up.

Now at the tail end of the neocon/lib corporatocracy era, it'll be interesting to see if the corporate entities in places like San Francisco or New York will attempt to formulate a new arrangement with more city state like governments that flip federalism around. If they do, it'll be extremely important to make sure they end up keeping all their obligations rather than try to pass them along to states or the federal level.

Cool Wiki Article With Links about Mormonism and Freemasonry

This is an interesting article on Mormonism and Freemasonry. I think they're all really "enochians", For them the alt-bible was sort of a key to not believing in the bible or seeing religion as a creative endeavor. Or they're people who believe in creating religions.

Here's one of the good papers on the subject.

The Corporate Delusion that Lefty Bullshit is Popular

It seems like a lot of corporate douchebags are "left wing". The corporations using slave labor to produce their plastic shit in countries with no environmental regulations are very concerned about "causes". Sure.

Battlestar Galactica's Gaius Baltar is Enoch

I think--or John Dee, who was playing at the same thing.

A New Basis of Language

Many people have looked at languge as the cornerstone of civilization, and a tool of control or cultural engineering: Commies invent new sins and sin-labels on a daily basis, for example. More importantly, language represents bindings of components of the brain. Our extremely analytical/economic civilization, for example, emphasizes communication about value of things in human-trade terms rather than their place in nature.

If language is a low-bandwidth dictionary-based lossy-compression medium of thought transfer from one brain to another, then the dictionary of symbols represents a map of the brains of the interlocutors, and maybe more importantly, is an expression of how they get on in the world--how they get their toast for breakfast.

Cities made modern men and formed how they think and which parts of their brain they use.

The Non-Anglo Non-American Empire

The shitty empire of our time is the Anglo-American one--although there are probably not many Angles and not many actual Americans involved in it.

The wikipedia article on the battle of the Teutoberg Forest is like a sonar ping for the existence of the invisible empire and its orthodoxy. "German nationalism" is scary and must be kept bottled up. The sort of tale of the wiki article is that the defeat of the romans was really no biggie, and in fact it was s pyrrhic victory for the germans, since they faced retaliation from roman legions.

Sclerosis of Empires

The heirarchy of a shitty hereditary aristocracy can't risk competition, especially in large scale human endeavors like farming or transportation. (Maybe the competition between YouTube and he shitty mainstream media, today, is a similar scenario.) In an old city, like Rome, the relationships between all the people were stuck and defined after living together for hundreds of years.

True innovation--large scale innovation, like devising new methods of motivating people, or a new religion, or a new method of farming--can completely wipe out the ruling clique of an era. Their grasping for control of resources and sunk cost in systems of control opens green fields elsewhere.

Signal to Noise Ratio of Mythology is Really Low

Several sci-fi series in recent years share a premise of artificial intelligence influencing human life, or even life on earth. The X-Files, The Expanse, Battlestar Galactica to name a few. One interesting aspect of BSG in particular is it depicts the religion of the human beings and their scriptures as quasi historical rememberings of the true history of their people. This is an allusion to the alt bible  and I think specifically to  Mormonism (which was the religion of the creators of the original series, which was a cryptic depiction of mormon religion {which is really another book of Enoch spin off}).

The idea that religions encoded a "true history", or are a reliable record of anything is suspect. Most of the big events of human pre-history are entirely missing from them. The last ice age, for example, is barely present at all--maybe in the Norse mythology. The transition from pastoral life to city life is barely alluded to in The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Mediterranean civilization mythology includes a bunch of  parochial city-founding mythology propaganda, i.e. Rome's founding, and claims of divinity of its ruling clique.

It's really unlikely there was any advanced, forgotten civilization.