There's no "Economy of Scale"

The creek that runs through our property changed course a couple weeks ago after a short rainstorm. The creek bed is in a deep ravine and drops 100' over about 1100 feet. Usually there's just a trickle of water in it, and in a typical rainstorm it gets to be about ankle deep. A couple weeks ago, it must have gotten dammed up for a while by a log, which finally gave way and sent a lot of water down the creek at once. The water scrubbed out the creek bed and ended up rerouting the creek by cutting a trench through what people in this area call a "hogback", which is a narrow ridge that extends out from a hill down to a river or creek. The creek only has to erode about 10' deeper until it hits sandstone. (I wonder if we'll still be alive to witness that.)

Over the course of years creeks and rivers wander all over as they erode new paths and silt up old ones. When there is man made infrastructure nearby, people will build walls and erosion control structures (like piles of rocks) to forestall the encroachment of water. In more extreme cases, people build dams and reroute rivers for cities' water supplies. 

When you divide the big costs of big infrastructure projects over many people and compare the cost to install a huge pipe versus a bunch of small ones, or one giant dam versus a bunch of individual's flood control measures you can say there is an "economy of scale". Of course there's an inverse massive loss of a resource, (e.g. California Water Wars) and "perpetual" maintenance cost to maintain some structure or system that's fighting nature everyday over a huge area and a wide range of conditions that can't ever be anticipated by engineers.

The "need" for flood control or similar civil engineering projects stems from how people own land in the United States. We generally own a chunk of land that's defined by a survey and ultimately related to its position on the globe, rather than a right to a use of land in some region. (in some cases, property rights are actually deliniated along resource use lines rather than geographical lines). And it seems lilke such property rights are really tied to the concept of work making the land more organized and valuable, e.g. building a barn or a house.

Why Normie World Freaks Out All The Time

Some people thought "social media" was a new thing, even though people had been engaging in the same type of shit posting and discussions since dial up modem days. I used to participate in a philosophy forum in the early 1990s. I talked with a woman from what was formerly called Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) for a long time about some philosophy topic and then found out she was a hardcore anti-black sort of comic book charicature white nationalist. I tried my best to argue that identity politics is for losers, but my arguments were pretty feeble in the face of her family being dispossed.

If you're a theory-person and are more analytically minded, extreme points of view are "interesting" and worth investigation or study even if you totally disagree and you can even have empathy for someone who holds a point of view that the mainstream thinks is abhorrent. Most people, though, aren't analytically minded and form opinions based on aesthetic and political considerations. For whatever reason they think even hearing a contrary opinion threatens their politics. The ideas you find out in the wild of the Internet are threatening to them the same way some people are afraid of coyotes or wolves.

It is appalling to see how quickly rank and file democrats knee-jerked to Internet censorship as a reaction to a lifeling influence peddlar shitbag politician losing an election. I guess it's no surprise though, since people similarly allowed more government interference in their lives after 9/11.

Regulating Social Media = Dead Social Media

Faceberg was already in decline since the cool-kid people were bored of it, and now grifter politicians and establishment cretins want it to be "regulated" since the election. In the old days, regulation sort of cemented an industry status quo in place, at least temporarily, as it stifled competition, but networking techniques and technology are so ephemeral that whatever lawyers and politicians dream up will be inapplicable to whatever iteration of "social media" or whatever it will be called comes next. The Internet might be the home of a permanent couonterculture. It will always be the wild west. Yippeee kai yay.

Deals With the Devil

We're watching "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" on Netflix, which promotes satanism to 'tween girls. I think my interpretation of the moderns religious belief is on track (The Christian Luciferians). By now, I can even sum it up in a few words: the world is fallen and literally godless (abandoned by god) and only through work can it be redeemed, i.e. made amenable to human needs and wants. (This religious view is depicted on shows like Supernatural.) The belief in linear history and progress is really an inversion of the Christian worldview where the world was fallen, but was redeemed already by Jesus.

COINTELPRO Social Media and Dumb Ass Violent People

A few years ago Rolling Stone did an article on FBI duping people into attempted terrorist attacks. Something like 95% of the terrorist plots the FBI foiled had been planned and prompted by FBI informants. In the social media and alt media era, I think the tactics have changed so the stupid and violent people are prompted and nudged by social media personalities on the "left" and the "right". Some of those are agents of the government or NGOs. Unlike the 1960s intelligence operations which often involved direct infiltration of groups, the social media campaigns are multiple degrees removed from the people who they're inciting, which seems irresponsible at best.

What's the purpose of all this? It's probably meant to justify bigger budgets and power grabs.

Good ancient internet article on the subject.

Hours Worked in US and Real Wages

The quality of life for many people in the USA has been steadily declining since I was a kid in the late 1970s. Today, if you're not a professional worker, or a skilled tradesman life is pretty hard in spite of all the improvements in productivity, etc... over the time period. It's made even worse by predatory behavior of many institutions and also, seemingly, a loss of organizations to support average people and even a loss of familial knowledge about how to protect their own interests.

When I was a kid it was really common for local stores to have more of a 9-5 schedule, for example, so people who worked in retail or service jobs could have a life. Basically every store in my home town was closed on Sunday, too and had shorter weekend hours.

In the early 1970s, the United States started deregulating the banking system. Previously, banks were restricted geographically and were kept out of certain financial activities (like underwriting corporate securities) as a result of the Great Depression.

It seems, subsequently, the United States has been organized to reduce the share of the average person in the economy by bankers, corporations, and their politicians.

Desire as Root of Delusion 2

The role of a shaman is not unlike the role of a therapist. Emotion, or desire, is necessarily particular to an individual. A therapist is trained to see thoughts and behaviors as an instance of broader categories, which have been deliniated by study of many people. "Muh feels" tend to prevent the feeler from rationalizing what they're doing and seeing how their particular circumstances fit into the "whole", which for most people means their friends and family or loved ones. A 100% rational person is like an android and is cold and incapable of functioning as a complete human being, likewise a 100% emotional person is incapable of functioning as a complete human.

The shaman's role is similar to the therapist in that he relates his people to a larger whole, however, the whole in his case extends into unseen worlds. The human world is in the middle.

"Cosmopolitan" Culture is Parochial Now

The Internet formed its own distinct culture and also allowed people in niche cultures and places around the world to reach a worldwide audience. This makes the "cosmopolitan" hollywood culture seem pretty narrow and parochial.

"Desire" As The Root of Delusion

The recent posts about the Goa'uld as fictional depictions of dark egregore pointed out that the "true" philosophy is to work at the balance between light and dark. The philosophical man sort of becomes nature by matching his understanding of the world with nature's way.

What causes the delusions that prevent such an understanding in the first place? One traditional answer is "desire" so you get philosophical schools like stoicism. Desire significantly distorts that "true" view of nature and limits the scope to the needs and wants of one person or a few rather than the whole.

A pretty good rejoinder to this school of thought is: "aren't such desires, even immoderate ones, natural?"

The Difference Between Natural Information and Codes

This is a reprise of an old post: "Why Code is a Bad Analogy for the World".

Our nervous system and brain actually work in parallel. Information flows in all the time and is processed all the time. Our visual system works in parallel too, though our eyes seem to be structured to focus on specific things since the density of cells on our retina varies from most dense at the center to less dense at the periphery. Our language using brain works serially, however, and even formal languages, like computer languages have only cumbersome and stupid methodsd of representing parallelism and simultaneity.

Codes, i.e. formal languages, actually can't represent how the world stores information. Natural information always connects to and reflects the whole. For example, if a fallen leaf is sitting on a pond where a stream flows in so it spins and spins around a little circle, it is actually encoding information. For creatures living in the water, the leaf creates an alternating light/dark cycle as it passes around and around. For a human observer, the leaf traces a circle in the water current and makes it into a visible pattern that can get a name, but obviously the name is not the thing.

The natural information of mass, or moving water, or rotational motion is built into us at the bone level in nature's terms. If it is possible to make models of the world that match those notions and put them in a computer, then those concepts will be similarly irreducible to language terms for us as they are now.

Irony of "Globalism" and the Internet

It's striking that opposition to "globalism" primarily takes place on the Internet and is a worldwide phenomenon. It's a no-borders completely free society. While the "globalists", i.e. corporate socialists who are the benficiaries of the particular policies of governments called "globalism" are a parochial little clique who are surrounded by patronage networks and hierarchies of minions.

The Internet Trumps Credentials and Institutions

The Internet as a collective entity is smarter than anyone and has more expertise on every subject than any individual or institution does. Credentials, e.g. academic credentials like a "degree", are like membership in the guild system in the middle ages. You pay your dues, then partake in a political role in a society that's constructed in a certain way.

The Internet is acting like a solvent for credentials and institutions. Even the most expert, expert on a given topic will only remember or be thinking about some narrow band of details about the stuff they're into and many institutions that actually do things (like build products) tend to be really narrowly focused. The Internet's like the ultimate jack of all trades with breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge that exceeds.

The Internet already chewed up newspapers and is in the process of chewing up broadcast TV because its technology easily mimicked the core technologies of those industries. Pretty soon it will start to dissolve academic institutions. It's pretty crazy for people to assume a mortgage worth of debt to get a degree when all the same information, even in classroom format, is already on the Internet for free. It's very likely that in certain fields, like many engineering disciplines, an autodidact student will have more practical hands on experience and knowledge after studying YouTubes and doing home projects than an undergrad or maybe even people with masters degrees.

Medieval Catholic Church was Like the Mainstream Media of the Day

The catholic church held sway over western europe for a long ass time. It was never really totally hegemonic in its control of the population and was torn apart multiple times since it didn't really have any significant military power of its own and was typically a proxy for the miscellaneous empires that rose and fell in europe at warp speed.

In a lot of ways it was like the mainstream media is today. It was a representative of various corporate powers against localism and the older shamanic traditions of european people.

What's Darth Vader?

Once Anakin Skywalker gets roasted, he's sealed up in an artificial body and becomes Darth Vader. He becomes a servant, the chief servant, of the dark side.

What's the dark side? The universe we inhabit exists because it can support us as it is. In other universes, we couldn't exist and live. The basic primal forces make our existence possible. A basic element: information is a change in state, or a relationship between two or more things. The very basic conceptual elements of nature, like linear restoring forces, rotational motion, or more complex concepts like love or pain and life and death have a quasi independent existence from matter and energy.

The world of man, the human world is an attempt to escape natural necessity and the balance of forces and inevitable cyclicality of the natural world. The world of man is a partial, attenuated existence and a parody of nature. Physical violence and psychological manipulation (false gods) replace nature and natural law.

Anakin Skywalker becomes a false man--a part robot--and lives within an entire false and perverse world which uses the forces of nature to destroy and kill. A "Death Star" is the ultimate perversion of the natural world.

The dark side is where the lies of men and the lies of the city blot out the stars.

The Slipperiest Concept There Is

There's a book by a guy named Masanobu Fukuoka called The One Straw Revolution which elaborates one of slipperiest concepts there is: "not do". In his book, the concept applies to gardening and farming. Basically the farmer in that mode attempts to follow the pattern of nature by not interfering with it. I think this concept is akin to the aim of philosophy.

A purely rationalistic inquiry into the nature of the universe epitomized by the moderns' obsession with science and math is a dead end. Even worse it traps people in a low fidelity model of reality, and then even worse than that is the technocratic totalitarian world where man is forced to live according to the models of sophists like economists.

The prior post about the Goa'uld hints at what philosophy can be. It can allow man to re-integrate with the natural world and be whole and complete, that is, he can adopt an understanding from nature in nature's terms. The forces that seem to oppose his desires, such as death and decay or the inertia of matter are, in fact, what define the universe and makes his life possible in the first place. With a mind that comprehends the truth of nature, a man in a sense is nature. He is as just, good, and prosperous as can be.

The model of the "city on the hill" is a fundamentally flawed model compared to the garden of eden. Man is not fallen because nature is not fallen.

What are the Goa'uld In Stargate?

Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, like the various Star Treks and other Sci-Fi shows seem like the gnostic gospels of some American writers. (One of the really interesting things to me about Stargate and a show like Supernatural is an apparent antipathy to the CIA but that's probably worth a whole separate post.)

The nemesis of SG-1 is a parasitic wormlike race of beings called the Goa'uld that inhabit a human body and integrate with and completely take over the host's consciousness. The goa'uld have technology but are not creative; they're pure authoritarians, destroyers and stealers. They're identical to the Borg on Star Trek and The Empire in Star Wars or the Matrix and maybe the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica.

At some point in the Stargate series the main character Daniel Jackson "ascends" and becomes a being who can assume solid form and teleport around at will. (Off the top of my head, I forget what these people are called.) Helena Blavatsky wrote about "ascended masters", which is probably the same concept that's being portrayed in Stargate.

What is all this stuff really about?

The fictional conceptualization of egregore or goa'uld is a way to speculate about the nature of the universe, and really speculate about its inhospitibility to boundless human desires.

The goa'uld et al are third things or egregore and in the scheme of stargate and the other fictional works listed above there's a duality of egregore. The egregore are creatures with independent existence but no manifestation except through man. (cf The Upside Down in Stranger Things or platonic forms.) In this scheme certain aspects and elements of man and the natural world create the basis for the dark and destructive egregore that speaks and acts through human beings who are its agents in the real world. The ascended masters are like the light egregore who have a "hands off" policy with respect to the human world. (In Dungeons and Dragons terms Nature is Neutral Good and the light egregore are really the embodiment of the benevolent aspect of nature)

The transformation of these forces into fictional characters is a way for an author to cross over from the human reality world into their world. Science and engineering are ways for the world of forms and concepts to have manifestation in our world. Indeed modernity was in a very real sense kicked off with a message from their side to John Dee which initiated a willful attempt at engineering the world. (This is actually parodied in a Stargate Atlantis epsiode)

Facebook = Normietown

The people who are still watching the mainstream media will be the same as the people who remain on Facebook.

How to Encode Trade Routes in Stories

I've wondered if some of the weirder stories in the Bible are really an old map for trade routes. A celestial map was necessary for blue-water navigation prior to GPS and accurate mechanical clocks (GPS is really just a super accurate electronic clock) or maybe even before any navigational instruments like sextants. How would that work?

North-South position determination can be made by observation of the height of the sun above the horizon at noon, which can be made with pretty simple tools--a stick and a compass. It can also be determined by observation of the constellations at sunrise (or sunset) on a given day.

So if you were sailing back in the olden days and you left port on the same day people always did, if you made an observation every morning or evening the appearance of the constellations over the course of time would provide some crude feedback for your north south position. Maybe eventually that turns into a story with all the weird characters and events of some mythological stories being a replay of the appearance of the sky along a particular route.

Is the USA Under Propaganda Attack?

I'm pretty baffled by the "left" team, especially by people like the Clintons and the apparatchiks at the blue party. They seem out of touch to the extreme, so much so that one fairly plausible explanation is they're playing a scripted part. Similarly Donald Trump is an actor playing the boffo clown dancing bear, or some version of Hamlet--who's literally the subject of the book Hamlet's Mill. I often wonder if it's all a play and a propaganda war on the US of A.

However, I think there are much simpler explanations than that. Clinton and the blue squad are super out of touch and live in a little patronage bubble in New York. For several years that patronage bubble effectively extended across the United States by way of the media, but it doesn't anymore. Corporate socialism and it's associated propaganda via corporations like Nike or ESPN or late night TV personalities looks like a big fail. It's the "They Live" ending in real life.

When corporate socialist minions like Clinton or Eric Holder advocate for violence or "intolerance", it's probably a dumb calculation to fire up their base, even though it probably has the opposite effect. I think they completely misintrpret Trump and the 2016 election and they're keep on doing it! It's amazing to see them turn into lilliputian hoardes.

I think Trump's persona is the result of a lifetime of cultivating a media role and it was like camoflauge during the election. What's left of the mainstream media audience is the reality TV idiocracy citizen. Trump's boffo act plays to them. Meanwhile his campaign tapped into the niches and tribes where all the other people in the US actually spend their time.

Is this period of US history particularly "divisive" and is there a cold civil war (no lol)? The issue of slavery hung over the united states for nearly a century before the Civil War broke out, and the meta-issue of economic relations with british oligarchs (slave plantations provided cheap raw material for textile mills) is something that plagued the United States almost from day one. Compared to the issue of slavery globalism is a non-issue.

Corporate socialism/globalism is physically feeble in the extreme. "Corporate" interests are really the interests of a handful of people--a few thousand maybe--rather than an expression of some first principle economic rules. The phony wedge issues of campaigns are all a smoke screen to keep the general public from getting a clue. 

Commander Data Savior

My old house had a rubble foundation made from a bunch of hewn sandstone that was quarried on site. The builders just stacked up the rocks without mortar, then built the house on top of it. It's counter intuitive that a rubble foundation is more stable and long lasting (over some range of circumstances) than a cinder block foundation or a poured foundation, but it almost certainly is. For the same reasons it's more stable long term, it's also much easier to repair and patch than other foundation types. It's a pile of rocks and it has no single points of failure. The oldest surviving man made structures on earth are similarly constructed. Cultural evolution of building infrastructure might have been a much more durable mode of survival than engineering.

"Modernity" is founded on the conceit that we're consciously doing things in a better way than earlier epochs because of science. Culture and tradition are either raw materials, or are constraints and enemies. Religion, especially christianity, is anathema for this reason. Jesus transformed the fallen world, but science and modernity need a fallen world as raw material to keep doing their "work" as matter's redeemer, i.e. transforming it into luxury goods or making the world amenable to human wants and needs.

One of the heavy handed depictions of this concept is the Commander Data character in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Data ultimately (spoiler alert) sacrifices himself for the good of mankind. (The comically stoic, or non-human who wants to get in touch with their emotions, character is a sci-fi trope.) Data is a portrayal of consciousness as an aspect of the universe, and really is a depiction of God. Data is conscious, a conscious machine, and ultimately a complete human, i.e. God.

The spiritual side of modernity is via religion creation through fiction like Star Trek. Playing with religion expands consciousness in the same vein as the gnostic gospels.

Nuclear Power and Linear History

One of the underlying themes of modernity is linear history. The concept of linear history is one of the guiding stars of scientists and engineers who feel their work is holy and beyond all reproach. (My next post is going to be on Commander Data as the savior and Jesus)

Is there any group of people who are so ostensibly "smart" in the Leopold and Loeb kind of way who have also been so reckless? Nuclear power is the prime example. Like most new tech that requires a lot of investment it had to be sold hard to the general public since we don't live in a totally fascict command and control economy. The sales pitch on nuclear energy was that it would be "too cheap to meter". The chief problem with it is radioactive waste can be dangerous many times longer than any nation, empire, or civilization persisted.

The moderns belief in linear history makes it possible for them to blithely make plans for building storage facilities that will last multiple thousand years, even though the oldest stone buildings of the western world are crumbled ruins and are only about 2000 years old. More pointedly, government labs and storage facilities that are just decades old cold war relics already failed multiple times.

The United States is Too Big For Patronage Systems

The dissolution of the mainstream media is an awesome thing to watch. On a daily basis, the audience of mass market TV shows shrinks as people wander off to do their own thing, at least as far as passive consumption of entertainment is concerned. The audience for news and opinion programs shrinks too and more people turn to the Internet for news and opinion because it's more immediate, interactive, and more interesting and edgy.

The parochial opinions of oligarchs and corporate heads find a limited audience outside their immediate circle of minions. It's even more apparent that their opinions are parochial when they attempt to enforce them via corporations, which are really feeble physical entities. Even a billion monies doesn't go very far compared to the scale of a country like the United States. Corporations like Apple that have many stock market monies are pretty unimportant and could disappear without affecting anybody too much.

The patronage glad handing political networks of oligarchy people tend to be centralized. In the United States they're really in New York and DC and now in the "tech" cities. The opinions and political ideas of the oligarchs and their minions are really particular to those areas and don't really seem to have much traction outside their geographical limits.

The Internet is even bigger, of course, and the monies and minions are even more diluted and less effectual.

Why Memes Scare Mainstream Media

I am pretty far out of the day to day news loop lately, but still I heard about the NPC meme and when I decided to look it up and read the gleeful summary articles about it, I laughed my ass off.

I often think how the sea of people who watch mass media shows gets smaller every single day. The mass media can't compete with some randos on 4chan for the attention of their former audience.

Storytelling and the Nature Egregore

The world of man is the world of lies mainly because language lies. Words, paragraphs, and entire books of words at best make a toy model world, or rather are illuminated by the toy model world in our brains.

Prior to the city and agriculture the inner toy model world WAS THE WORLD. The shared experience was the experience of nature and the world. Cro magnon man had a bigger brain than modern man.

The city expanded the world of man in terms of symbolic language and institutions and finally formal languages like mathematics, money, and computer languages allowed man to attempt to make a better toy model of the natural world, but it's still extremely low fidelity. Hierarchy and violence, especially institutional violence like Inquisitions or even the civil laws of the enlightenment world, are a mockery of natural law and the forces of nature like gravity or sunshine.

You can't get to that cro magnon understanding of the world via formal language models of reality, but that understanding is actually still in our minds. Is it possible to base language and culture on that type of understanding and have it expand in a similar vein as scientific knowledge? Alternatively, is it possible to remodulate scientific inquiry and the body of knowledge that method has accumulated into a mode of understanding that's based on nature rather than a symbolic version of nature?

Counterculture and a Parallel Economy

A theme that's emerged in this blog is that the credit finance economy is wasteful and unproductive in any way that matters. In a lot of ways it's a victim of its own success, which is a pretty common problem with large organizations like empires and nation states. The governing clique and bureaucracy detaches from the state and floats away inside a bubble. The concerns of the clique don't match the concerns of the people.

The counterculture that's popped up on the Internet over the past ten years or so is like a new frontier where people experiment with different ways to live to improve quality of life. The credit finance economy creates a corporate "frontier" of financed projects, which in recent years, has devolved into building the apparatus to spy  on people and send them ads.

Common virtues of decades past, like thriftiness, or yankee farmer ingenuity at keeping old rusty machinery running find a new home on the Internet, while mainstream corporate culture pushes decadence and a hyper nanny state where a "citizen" is a completely incompetent child-person whose only outlets of expression are work at a corporate job, sex, and consumption.

Arbitrage between finance shitworld and virtue world is probably a pretty good strategy. It's something the Amish have done for a long time, and various counterculture groups promote variations on the theme. (E.g. Living in the Waste Stream)

Why Doesn't Per Capita Energy Use Decline?

From "Our Finite World"

Carberutor engines in cars were phased out around 1980 and the average fleet fuel economy jumped from about 18 mpg to ~25 mpg and has increased each subsequent year as engineers eek more efficiency from engines. You can actually see that impact in the chart as transportation fuel consumption declined into the 80s (the oil crisis also killed off big cars and big engines) but it didn't really stick.

10 kWatt Generator

Supposedly industrial processes are more efficient now because of automation, and energy saving technologies, and various renewable energy technologies have seen wider adoption, but for the most part per-capita energy consumption hasn't dropped. In the US every man woman and child has the equivalent of around 10 kWatts (~13 horsepower) powering their lifestyle 24/7/365 even though industrial activity has been shipped overseas for decades and all the mom and pop farms and stores have been replaced by corporate entities that supposedly should use less energy because of their economies of scale, and perpetually increasing "productivity".

I've only really seen half assed explanations for this phenomenon.

Sunman and Moonman

There are dozens of movies and TV shows that include a Sunman/Moonman buddy pair. Star Wars has Luke and Han who are linked to the Sun and Moon via their wardrobes and spacecraft and their hair. Often in the movies and TV shows that have these characters, there will be a half-hearted attempt to make the sunman seem intelligent (which often doesn't work in the context of an action movie or Sci-Fi show) and make the moonman into a gruff military figure, often with close cropped hair. (Sam and Dean Winchester on Supernatural)

The sunman is supposed to represent the rational, intellectual part of man, and the moonman is a gruff military man (or a greedy smuggler) because he's supposed to be associated with handling the physical world and physical aspect of man.

The needs of plot and character development of TV shows, though, tends to make the distinction between these characters hard to recognize. It's really difficult, for example, to depict intellectualism in a TV show, similarly, it's difficult to have one of the characters be dumb all the time, yet be heroic, or able to move a plot forward.

Storytelling versus Dogmatism

A dry recitation of facts or analysis is a flat, or even one dimensional way to describe reality. A reader or listener of such a production will only engage it with a small part of their being--their reason or intellect. The portion of reality that such a discourse can illuminate is small. It's like taking a red LED penlight out into the forest on a dark moonless night.

Fiction, or even better, a play or a movie can engage a person more completely, and can elucidate complex concepts in multiple dimensions of understanding--evoking emotions for example. Fiction is also significantly better at evading dogmatic authorities than a dry recitation of how reality works.

Stargate SG-1/Atlantis -- What's It About?

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

Stargate SG-1 is the TV series version of the movie Stargate, which is almost identical to The Man Who Would Be King. (See Sunman Moonman) ( In Stargate the Luke character is Daniel Jackson and the Han Solo character is Colonel Jack O'Neil. ) As in The Man Who Would be King one of the characters (Daniel) wears Masonic Symbols as a gift given by an old wise friend. (square and compass and eye of horus)

The story arc of SG-1 is about Jack and Daniel and the Stargate team battle against a parasitic race called the Goa'uld that take over human beings and pretend to be gods.

What's the story about? What's a Star-Gate?

In an old post I wrote "the Stars Taught Men Math". That's what a star-gate really is--navigators used celestial geometry to discover their location on Earth. They also figured out that many religious stories are symbolic encodings of celestial events. (e.g. Eye of Horus = Eclipse--Odin Obtaining Wisdom by Losing an Eye)

Stargate's about securing a rational understanding of the world while being opposed by parasitic overlords who use technology and religion to dupe and control masses of ignorant men.

Remade in America: When Used is Better Than New

"Assembled in USA"

I did a tune up of my snowblower to get ready for the winter. I replaced the gummed up old carburetor with a new one. As an experiment I bought an OEM "made in the USA" carb for about 8x the cost (~$80) of the equivalent chinesium knock-off. Unfortunately the carb was just assembled in the USA, probably from the same parts as the chinese ones. Oh well.

Credit finance inexorably drives the value out of every single thing it touches whether it's cars, consumer goods, jobs, or building materials, or even food. An inevitable outcome of that is "used" products end up being more valuable than their new counterpart. An old lawn tractor, car, or an old chainsaw, etc... ends up being more useful and long lasting than a value engineered (planned obsolescence or more prone to fail) sweatshop made product.

It will be really interesting to see what happens in the car market over the next decade. Auto makers are attempting to convert automobiles into giant consumer electronics devices that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now that many components of a car are "smart" and include sensors and electronic gizmos, simple repairs, like replacing a cracked windshield, can now cost over $1000 instead of $200, and its all but impossible for owners to service them, and in some cases corporate auto makers are blocking independent auto mechanics from servicing their products.

By contrast, cars from the 1990s and 2000s were engineered for value in many cases, and car makers were competing on quality and durability.

What happens when the aggregate pile of already produced consumer goods is worth as much or more than future production?

The City Egregore and Private Property and Enterprise

"Money" is an aspect of a system of political organization of large numbers of men, which binds them into a hierarchy that's mostly defined by the needs of war, i.e. fighting with other similarly organized groups. Terms like "efficiency" in the economic sense are typically measures of how that system functions. A private farm (see Enclosure Movement) is more efficient at transferring wealth to a centtral hierarchy than a bunch of small farms, or to no "farms" at all. It seems more and more likely to me that no "farms" at all is the most productive way to produce food, especially over the longer term, even if it's not efficient in the sense of paying more taxes to a war monger psychopathic oligarch.

If people were incentivized to help nature recover her productivity rather than to obtain money tokens sold by New York bankers with more money tokens sold by New York bankers the structure of property "ownership" and farming would be totally different than it is today.

There Were More Bison in the USA Than There are Cows Today

This touches on the same point as my cows and deer post.

There are about 30M beef cattle and 9M dairy cows today in the United States. Estimates of the number of bison in the US in pre-colonial times are between 30-70M.

Very Early Triad Claw Painting

Link to article on Deodato Orlandi (13th century)

Maybe it's "M" for Mary, kind of a complimentary gesture to the baby Jesus gesture shown in the picture?

Triad Claw Artists

A good way to find a bunch of triad claw paintings is to look at the portraits painted by artists who painted one. I guess they were like the Reuters photographers of their day. One example is this dude.

What does it actually signify? In the Italian Renaissance case is it "M" for de Medici?

The Perpetual Enclosure Movement and Soil Depletion

Agriculture is the basis for civilization and the method of agriculture establishes patterns that shape human activity and the relationship with the natural world. The places where people lived in agricultural settlements for the most time are generally the most depleted. In many cases, agriculture is more like a mining operation and method of resource extraction than an activity that takes place as a circular system. In some places, the natural world doesn't even recover after thousands of years. Even worse, today industrial agriculture is really more like a factory operation that uses plant DNA to convert petrochemicals into food instead of plastic chinese consumer doodads. The soil ends up being an inert medium for carrying chemical fertilizer to roots.

Modernity and the consumer/finance world is based on a delusion of infinite resources and infinite malleability of forms that bend to the whim of scientists, engineers, and oligarchs while nature really has her own plan and we're just a part of it. It might be a "long time" in human terms until the resources of North America are consumed, but without making a pretty radical change in how people live, the agricultural resources of north america actually will be.

A sustainable way of life means credit finance is totally unecessary and the hamster wheel of makework job activities comes to a screeching halt. Similarly, the whole structure of maximum extraction can't work, e.g. parceled up lots (enclosures) take on a different meaning.

Christopher Wren and The "Great Fire"

Another one flashing the gang signs. Christopher Wren was an architect who designed several churches in the wake of the great fire of 1666. Got to wonder if that's like 9/11 in the United States.

"Glorious Revolution" Triad Claw Guy

Charles Talbot is one of the people who invited William of Orange to invade England.

His wife's Father.

Basically everyone involved in the Glorious Revolution is flashing a gang sign, even James II!

List of Triad Claw Guys and Gals

I'll keep a list and update it periodically.

Henry Oldenburg (scholar 1619-1677)
Johan De Witt (1653-1672)
Cornelis De Witt (1623-1672)
Alexander Hamilton
Martin Luther
Michael Severtus
Jan Pieterszoon Coen
Rijcklof van Goens
Dirk Hartog
William Cavendish 3rd Duke of Devonshire

George Churchill

James II Duke of York
Johnathon Trelawny
de Medici Portraits (1550s)

Portrait of Maria Salviati de' Medici and Giulia de' Medici (ca 1539)

Global Corporate Slave State

The "dutch" had a global corporate slave state in the 17th century, complete with actual slaves, and psychopaths commissioning proxy armies to murder women and children. Is that the prototype world for todays corporate shit people? Go look through portraits of those people and see how many of them are flashing the triad claw.

There are interesting parallels between the decline of the Dutch empire and the rise of the British Empire and the decline of the British Empire and the rise of the American empire.

Monetization of the Beaver Pelt and Extirpation by Indians

One example of the Indians wreaking every bit as much havoc on the natural world as white settlers did circa 1800 was the extirpation of beavers in the Hudson river valley around 1640.

The Indians Couldn't Have it Both Ways

In the aftermath of the war of 1812, the United States made treaties with the Indians in the Ohio territory that rapidly whittled away the holdings of the tribes down to nothing. The way of life of the Indians was incompatible with the American settlers and their individual land holdings and the money based economy. The Indians regretted the loss of their way of life, however, they also participated in the money economy and sought after luxury goods and manufactured items, which is really what prompted them to sell off all their land.