Place yer bets

They're really pushing electric cars, even though lithium batteries are still pretty crappy. Electric cars have advantages over internal combustion vehicles, but they also have many problems, like long charge times, poor performance in cold weather, and lack of infrastructure (including the national grid). Some of those problems will have engineering solutions, and some might not.

In spite of the limitations of electric cars, central planners want to replace fossil fuel liquid transportation with electric vehicles. They'll have to force the change via rules and regulations. The state of California is pushing that process along by switching their state vehicles to an all electric fleet, for example, even though they don't have a sufficiently reliable electric grid to keep the power on when it's windy.

Central planning has killed more people than disease and war. It'll be interesting to see how the central planning electric car game plays out. I think the idea dates to the 1960's and 70's and is only now being pushed forward since lithium batteries made them more plausible. Electric vehicles facilitate more central planning and control rather than "eliminating greehouse emissions", which is just a lie.

If it stays at the state level, it'll be obvious that the advantage of liquid fuel vehicles is significant, at least for now. A central planning corporation like Tesla is a large scale speculative bet that the battery problems can be sorted out by throwing money at them. Central planning and innovation don't really go together, though.

The Iron Age and the Plastic Age

It's pretty crazy that the Democrat front runner who's been a national politician for decades has a crackhead son, and they were both caught with their hand in the corruption cookie jar. None of that has been enough to force him to throw the towel in, even though he's an elderly weirdo who seems to be falling apart physically and mentally.

Both parties are similarly corrupt. I think the Dems corruption is just more obvious because they're controlled by a bunch of elderly figures who have so many skeletons in their closets the bones have fallen out several times. Unfortunately, it seems like every wealthy public figure is really just a front man for some version of organized crime.

If the industrial era was our iron age, we're in the plastic age.

Living with Animals

We've been living on a wooded lot that adjoins a forest park for a few years. Consequently, there are lots of animals around all the time. Also, I feed the birds, plus critters are attracted to the food. All the mammal and bird species that are in Northeast Ohio hang around our yard day and night.

Over time the animals get used to us walking around the property. It's setup a scenario that gives an advantage to the least people-averse animals. Consequently some of them are significantly tamer than others and will walk right by me in the early morning twilight, or will hang out within a few feet of me without being overly alert. Also some of the animals, like the turkeys and the squirrels, have seen us around since they were very young. I'm guessing they'll get more and more tame as the generations go by. My hypothesis is they'll also transform the property and boost the soil fertility in a positive feedback loop but that process will probably be too slow to perceive year to year.

Anyway, the point of this post is that those animals aren't just transforming the property, they're also working on us. A great example of human and animal co-evolution is offered by lactase persistence. Another example, and less obviously beneficial example, is the transmission of diseases from animal and human populations. Diseases can mutate and jump from species to species. I'm pretty regularly in contact with objects the animals have been on/around. It's not too hard to imagine transmission of a disease from them to me and vice versa. I'm sure the same mechanism is in operation all the time among people who are working with domestic and wild animals on a daily basis.

When people are in constant contact with animals, there's a much higher chance of viruses jumping from one population to the other. I've wondered if that's one mechanism of rapid genetic change and, to put it bluntly, human population replacement by disease. That is, a group that's been living in one disease-environment can move in a displace another group with no immunity.

The Cost of the Financial System, Patents, Legal System, etc...

I usually keep YouTube on as  background noise, and mostly watcher maker and builder channels. I'm pretty tired of the culture war and culture critic talk. From the culture "war" point-of-view, it's interesting to compare YouTube's suggestions versus the garbage dump that's on the "trending" (i.e. Promoted by YouTube) page. I wonder if people are really watching any of that stuff, or if it's all astroturf stuff that's grown in the plugged up sewer pipes of cosmopolitan culture.

One of the things that's interesting about the maker/builder videos is it's really obvious that when people are unleashed from the corporate and financial world, they're much more creative and productive than they are in the beast system.

The cost of the beast system is enormous, just in boring economic terms. The patent system, for example is almost pure overhead and is an organ of the usury based financial system. It's several thousands of dollars per patent issued, and then a bottomless pit of expense to litigate and enforce patents. The legal system and enforcement of business agreements is another bottomless pit of expense. It seems pretty likely that the administrative aspects of the beast system consume the lion's share of the wealth it produces.

It seems pretty likely that people could make due without all that overhead. All that overhead is in place to make financial/paper wealth valuable. Ostensibly it protects people from cheating, but it's by far the largest cheater.

As I've pointed out numerous times on my blog, this period resembles the reformation rather than antebellum America or some other time. Since the Internet has become the most  important channel of information, new ideas and approaches to organizing work and people has begun to supplant the old ways of doing things.

Nigger and Bear

Some scholars have speculated, by investigating the words for bear in European languages (article), that ancient europeans had a superstition about using the "true name" of the bear. The english word bear is from the old german word baer. It means, "the brown one". In Russian, the word "medved" means honey eater, and so on. The name is a kenning or like cockney rhyming slang, where there's at least one layer of indirection from the words and the actual subject, like "apple and pears" meaning "stairs", or "2x4" meaning "jew". The scholars think the true name for bear was something like "arktos", like ursus in Latin or "arctic".

I think the word "Nigger" today is a good analogy to that scenario. It's a taboo magic word. There's always some priesthood mind-fucking people whether they're babylonians, germans, jews, or whatever. Today the word "nigger" is like a magic spell. The mainstream media searched in vain for Trump uttering the word "nigger" to destroy him. Actually the very quest for the secret nigger tape was meant to discredit him as a "racist".

Today's priesthood is academics and media jews. They have their own set of superstitions and beliefs. They glommed onto the "establishment" and its institutions. There's such a  huge schism with the rest of the population that grows wider everyday. The implosion of the mass media is a huge turn in US politics, and the new destination of the nation is yet to be revealed.

Runes and How Language Gets in The Way

I was reading about the origin and history of the letter "K" yesterday. It's interesting to meditate on the meaning of the letters rather than words, because the letters used to have quite a lot of significance themselves. I was reading about it, because I want to put some decorative trim on my work shop roof facade and I thought I'd form it into a rune.

I have a bunch of posts about language as form of lossy compression. The gist of that is language is a low bit rate form of information transmission about a shared dictionary of concepts.

The letters themselves are raw information, at least to us today. They're a 2 dimensional encoding mechanism. Morse code is another 2D encoding mechanism. An underlying idea with letters and Morse code is that the form of the character should be sufficiently distinct from the other forms so they're easy to distinguish.

Typically, of course, letters are formed into words, and there's only a handful of words, relative to the possible combination of letters, so human beings can readily reject incorrect letters within an otherwise correct word or phrase. (aka the shared language dictionary) In fact, now that people are writing little messages all the time with crappy keyboards, only elderly people care about grammar and spelling. 

The information contained in the letters individually, apart from the shared dictionary of concepts of words and phrases, is more fundamental and in touch with realms of metaphysics because it's outside concepts that are arrived at through cultural accretion where there's an authoritative or agreed upon understanding of what a word like "cow" means.

It's something of a paradox that the letters "c" "o" "w" really don't have any culturally agreed upon concept. In an ancient era, the letters had their own meanings. There's a rune for Aurochs for example, which is the precursor of "u" (uruz), which maybe was onomatopoeic "mooooooo", and the letter "F" is the descendant of the letter that represented wealth and cattle--Fehu. 

In a very weird way, there's more knowledge and meaning present in the letter "k" than in the word "kick" and weirdly, contrary to what a grammar teacher tells you, there's more meaning in the phonetically spelled word "kik" than the word "kick".

A man who promoted the concept of phonetic spelling of English influenced the naming of some institutions in the Adirondak (phonetically spelled) Mountains. One institution is the Adirondak Loj. It really stuck me that seeing that word spelled phonetically on a sign was sort of magical. It kind of slaps your brain when you see it. There's more information present in that word "Loj" than in "Lodge". It somehow unlocks the word and concept from the culturally agreed upon meanings and is more direct.

A Tale of Two Conductors

I was in the band in high school. The arts program funding propaganda is actually true. It was one of the more valuable experiences I had growing up. It was much better adult life preparation than most (all) of the classes I took. It ended up paying off literally, because I had a music scholarship in college. I wasn't even a person who was passionate about music as a career. In fact, I never imagined pursuing it as a career. I barely ever play anymore and don't really miss it.

The man who led the high school band program at the time (he's now retired) was a really good instructor and helped foster an esprit de corps that I haven't really experienced since then in any organization--certainly not in my profession. I didn't even experience it in any other music program. I think I subconsciously adopted that as a model for how organizations should be, and ended up somewhat jaded as a result because it's very rare. I think that model really fits my personality too.

The typical "conductor" persona is egotistical, even if as an individual they aren't especially overbearing. They're the one who's listening to everyone play, and so they can provide feedback and help individuals make adjustments. If it's a person who gets frustrated easily, or who gets angry easily, they'll make the experience really unpleasant and end up being disliked and disrespected.

The typical high school, or even college level musician is so tied up in the technical aspects of performing that they can never even glimpse the larger picture of how a performance comes together or how the whole thing sounds to the audience. If there's some passage of the music that's too difficult, they might never be able to play it no matter how much they practice.

If the conductor's mental model is he's a participant in making music with the group it's a much better experience. The band leader is in that Shaman/wizard role, trying to bring an object of imagination into this plane of existence. 

I think it can be difficult to convey that lesson to anyone, but it's especially challenging to convey it to young people who are new to this life and who are pulled in a million directions all the time.

Disney, World Wars and Mass Society

Grunge rock is older than the current iteration of the consumer/corporation world. The banks pumping out endless credits has made stuff like Disney owning every media company or WalMart building giant box stores everywhere possible.

The corporation/consumer culture is really an iteration of the WWI/WWII mass mobilization and propaganda. All that was probably possible because the populations of Western countries were homogeneous.

It's really pretty interesting that the attempt to sell corporate/consumer culture around the world takes place at the same time the Internet has already begun to erode and probably destroy the mass culture in Western countries. It'll be interesting to see if the new "global" facsimile of a culture really lasts very long at all. Will it really be possible to sell the same movies and TV shows to Chinese and American and Russian audiences, or will they be too stupid and bland to compete against native entertainment?

Another very interesting thing that's happening now is the cost of designing and manufacturing goods is getting much lower. The barrier to entry to design and manufacture products, especially electronics, and most of all pure digital stuff, is very low. The overhead of corporations is ridiculously high.

So maybe in a few years, the giant megacorporations will have a monopoly on a giant outmoded garbage pile while everyone else just moves on in a million directions all at the same time.

Is It Possible to Shrink the Beast and Keep The Good Parts?

I really like the idea of shrink the beast and grow the man, but I also have the nagging suspicion that you can't pick and choose which parts to shrink. It's like a big, precarious Jenga tower. If you like having reliable electricity or computers, for example, you also have to have crapflation and far left wing lunacy like trannies in the olympics competing against women.

It somehow all works together as a unified entity. It really wouldn't take much to collapse the whole thing. If a significant fraction of the population became more conscious, for example, via a religious movement, it'd all crumble and a new system would pop up in place of the old one.

The basis of the whole thing is people need to eat--the stomach is a bottomless pit--and people tend to build systems to satisfy their needs rather than just solve them. All of the complexity grows up out of that original system.

The break-away societies, like the Amish, or other small groups who are skeptical and pick and choose what they're going to accept seem to have a plausible method for shrinking the beast, but if a critical mass of the general public followed suit, the the system would implode. If it were a gradual change, though, the whole of the society could maybe change as well.

Bureaucracy and Technology are Rust

Imagine that happiness/contentment/fulfillment are Polaris, the north star. A person might set his course by that and follow a very short path there. However, people almost always move tangentially from that course. It actually seems impossible to set that course.

Rather than pursue contentment, people pursue "wealth". That's not even true. People don't know what wealth is. Instead of accumulating things they need, or things that will sustain them, they'll stack piles of paper certificates like stocks or bonds.

People will try to adapt their environment, or will make a "system" to achieve some original, simple goal, but the system itself or building a new environment will replace the simple original goal.

Technology and Bureaucracy are the best examples of this replacement phenomenon. "Tech" is an end in itself, now. Countless lifetimes have been spent typing and staring at a computer screen to expand tech. Meanwhile the products of technology kind of suck and only partly work. Bureaucracy expansion is an even worse phenomenon.

The "beast system" or the Matrix or whatever you want to call it is an illusory world. Life in service of the Beast is not really life. It's really a form of walking death. It looks real. It looks alive, but it's not.

Old Power Equipment: A Cipher For Corporate Culture World

We got our first heavy snow of the season over night. Our snowblower is an old rust-bucket MTD. It's a brand that used to be made in the United States, actually somewhere in Ohio, I think. I bought it through craigslist a few years ago.

I hit a big rock with it last year at the end of the season and the shear pin (the previous owner used Aluminum bolts) broke. I planned to fix it all year, but of course didn't worry about it until the last minute. It actually wasn't such a bad repair. I had to drill one of the bolts out because it broke, but the other one actually came off after I blasted it with a torch.

Snowblowers are simple machines, so almost anyone who set out to fix or maintain one could do it. Also, they're on craigslist so frequently, and are so cheap in the used market that it's noteworthy anyone buys them new. A new snowblower for a driveway like ours is in the $1500 range. The equivalent used one that's just a couple of years old would probably be under $500. If you're handy, you can easily find equipment that is easy to fix, and close to free.

In corporate/consumer world many people see their free time as precious time, and their work time as valueless. For that reason, they'll trade their work hours for a dumb purchase that saves them free time. That is the whole trick to this current iteration of the system.

Once you get into value consciousness you dematerialize from the corporate consumer world of fresh paint on chinese steel, and credit purchaser at a big box store and rematerialize into the world of rusty old made in the US equipment in some interesting person's garage. It's really like traveling into a deeper historical layer of the United States.

Lucid Dreams and Cartoon Physics

Back in the late 1980's while I was a senior in high school and then in college I did some experiments with lucid dreaming. Unfortunately, I don't remember the details of the training. It really wasn't that difficult. After a few days, I had a couple of lucid dreams.

In that state of consciousness, the experience of the dream world is vivid. As a dreamer, I was able to exercise some degree of agency and choice, however, it was within the context of a nonsensical world.

One of the dreams I remember involved delivering musical instruments somewhere. In the dream world, it was possible to just stack the instruments all over and inside the car. All but one of the instrument cases stayed put. That final one just kept sliding off the hood of the car.

We seem to have some built-in understanding of physics, and that understanding informs the dream consciousness. However, that understanding is really the cartoon physics understanding. The experience of day-to-day life and motion of objects leads to a non-verbal sense of how the world works. This sense of things covers 99% of the cases we experience, however, it's a much less accurate model than Newtonian physics, of course. When people get their car stuck on an icy or snowy driveway and they only have the cartoon understanding, for example, they don't know what to do.

It's actually pretty interesting that the dream version of physics is cartoon physics rather than something more detailed. It's also pretty interesting that some intellectualized idea of physics doesn't inform the dream-state ideas. Maybe extensive physical training, like many hours of ice skating, would push more of those newtonian model of physics ideas deeper into the consciousness.

Animal Dreams

Cycles are the basis for everything we see and experience. The forces that drive the swing of the pendulum, the ripples in the pond, night and day, and the seasons of the year also define life.

The cycle of day and night leads to just a handful of daylight use strategies for animals (and even plants), and a corresponding sleep pattern. The period of rest and repair of damaged tissues seems necessary to every creature.

One of the more mysterious cycles is the day/night wake/sleep cycle of many animals. As far as I know, every other mammal sleeps and also dreams. Anyone with dogs know they dream. There are videos on YouTube of other mammals in an apparent dream state, like horses. Mammals, at least, must have a similar inner world to humans. I can't tell if our ducks dream or not. Ducks rest half their brain at a time. They sleep with one eye open, so any time I've seen them sleeping, they're very still and in a relaxed pose, but are also semi-alert.

The loss of consciousness and the periodic dream state is part of that cycle of rest and repair. I have had a number of waking life vivid dreams, and even a handful of "lucid" dreams where I was conscious while in the dream state, which is one of the weirder experiences a person can have. The rules of that world are strange and pliable, but still retain some cartoonish version of physics.

The Cosmopolitan Notion of Time Versus Tradition

The contempt the nations have for the neocons and the globalists (same people?) is overturning the mass culture, and mass propaganda. This is a really interesting phenomenon to witness.

The cosmopolitan/globalist notion of time as a perpetual unfolding present and a forever discredited past is getting mulched as well. The idea, for example, that WWI or the founding of the Federal Reserve was a "long time ago" is dwindling away. In the not too distant future, people will realize the 1900's is present in the current day.

The idols commies and bankers and academics think they smashed are rising up again Mount Rushmore size. It's pretty fascinating to see happen.

Contempt for the Neocons: Beatings are Coming

Lately, people have been showing up at neocon events and calling them out. The contempt that "the right" has for the neocons is total.

It's comical that some tool like Ben Shapiro will get a physical beating for promoting more war, while the previous generation of neocons his literal uncles and cousins who torched all their credibility with murder and lies, who have an ocean of blood on their hands, and who stole trillions of dollars, won't face any blow back... at least not initially.

I think the odds of a current generation YouTube neocon stooge war promoter getting a physical beating in the next couple of years is 1:1 and it'll be well deserved.

They promote realpolitik and murder and attack natural law every day, and mock its embodiment in religious beliefs, so they forfeited the protection of natural law. I think a good way to sum it up is by lying every day they became physical embodiments of untruth. That's the neocons. People like Ben Shapiro left civilization and went out into the windswept wild plains without really understanding what they were doing. The verbal attacks on them probably presage physical confrontations and violence.

All of the energy of murder and mayhem that they unleashed over the past couple of decades is coming back for them. I can smell it on the wind. When that first person lays hands on one of them, it'll uncork all that built up rage and contempt from tens of thousands of people.

The Shamans of Today

I usually write these posts in the early morning. I wake up before 5AM, typically, take care of all the critters then have some time over coffee. This morning, I even have a roaring fire to keep me warm. As an aside, we currently have a fireplace, which is typically less than 0.0 % efficient. I'll be replacing that with a wood stove and moving to heating 100% with wood in the next few months. The down side of writing in the morning is eventually I get interrupted and the crystal clear thoughts of the pre-dawn hours get muddled with the nonsense of the day-to-day.

I wanted to give a couple of concrete examples of the Shamans of today who have YouTube channels. One unlikely one is Emmy Made In Japan. She does homesteading and cooking videos, but she is not in the corporate/consumer mind set. As an example, she did a video on preserving eggs with a lime solution. She made an off hand comment about eggs being alchemical treasures, which really struck me.

Another Shaman of Today is Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen. He does Bushcraft/Viking Reenactment videos and culture critique videos.

The Internet can serve the purpose of fostering decentralization and cultural experimentation and make a more resilient, maybe more natural civilization. (However, the centralizing insane and inbred oligarchy seems to be pushing YouTube away from that model.)

These two channels are good examples of a point I was trying to get to in my previous post. The idea of Darwinian survival of the fittest evolution is imbued with the concept of linear history and progress. The reality of nature, however, is co-evolution. All the plants and animals and bacteria and fungi and maybe even the rocks and water and air evolve at the same time. There's no evolution in isolation. The idea of a directed, centrally planned civilization is fatally flawed.

The sort of experimentation you see by people like Emmy or Bjorn's playing around with historical garb (there are probably thousands of other examples) doesn't just mimic co-evolution, it is co-evolution. The cultural creation of knowledge versus a corporate science knowledge creation process takes place at an ostensibly "slower" pace, but it's more comprehensive and time tested.

The cultural knowledge seems dumb and mute because it's ingrained in people rather than learned as an intellectual exercise. One role of the Shaman is to know the actual bases of the cultural knowledge, as well as keep the experimentation going.

Manifold Nature, The Civilization Machine, and The Shaman/Wizard Archetype

If vehicle wheels and tires had followed a different path, our road system might be completely different than it is today. The model of a "wheel" as narrow, high pressure, and spoked was deeply embedded in people's thoughts by the dawn of the industrial era when the first trains and cars were being built. Roads were made of stone, and then asphalt and concrete to support heavy vehicles with high pressure tires--trains are the most extreme example--steel wheels and steel roads. A set of solutions to a really basic problem, like transportation, creates a sort of skeleton for the civilization beast, or is the framework of the civilization machine.

It's really common for people to argue that those frameworks are fundamental, or driven by first principles. That is, those frameworks represent a ruthless winnowing process that could only have one outcome. Implicit in that linear history argument is that those systems "won". An aspect of those frameworks that's peculiar to our time is they are part of a financial system, which reinforces their existence by creating a network of dependents and political interests.

Those solutions, though, are really arbitrary and accidental. The way of living that grows up around them is also arbitrary and accidental. The current system of consumer/corporate life and commuting by car replaced an earlier era of trains, which replaced an earlier era of canals and rivers and stagecoach roads and plank roads. The canal era created a whole culture that has long since faded away. Animal power has long since faded away, too, which is mostly a good thing.

Dog Carts used to carry milk and other goods to market, but
have mostly been banned because people abused their dogs horribly

The civilization egregore is a complex creature. It's not merely a creature of the mind--it really grows out of the whole, including things like the transportation network and food production system. I think the Amish are the only people who really consider the impact of engineering on their lives. It also seems like elements of the traditional Japanese culture have a similar skepticism of technological advancement for its own sake.

The manifold/fractal aspect of reality and nature suggests to me that monopolistic and monocultural systems, like the western system, are prone to catastrophic failure and collapse, rather than transformation and growth.

A decentralized weaving and creation of the fabric of culture is probably a more resilient approach. The people who are playing and experimenting with ostensibly stupid or childish things are really the civilization builders.

Electric Cars: The 20 Kilowatt Lifestyle?

It takes a civilization level infrastructure to produce the 10 kilowatt civilization. (see previous post for the chart). A large portion of the current infrastructure relies on petroleum and other fossil fuels. It's pretty likely that infrastructure is running flat out, or close to flat out. It seems unlikely we have the natural resources, or the new technology to jump to the 20 kilowatt civilization.

Electric cars probably need that 20 kilowatt lifestyle infrastructure to be a practical replacements for fossil fuel cars. The machine of civilization would have get bigger and consume more rather than get smaller and more energy efficient, which is the probably phony promise of electric vehicles.

I think you can't even shift that 10 kilowatts per person around to smaller populations and make it to 20 kilowatts among those sub-populations. (hunger games style) It takes the whole western world running flat out to keep the 10 kilowatts per person thing going. I think if the technocrats try to push a large portion of the western world into poverty to shift resources to cities and wealthy enclaves, the whole thing will just fall apart.... Unfortunately, that's probably where we are heading.

Coevolution Versus Linear History and Central Planning

The county I live in is semi-rural. It's at the boundary of the Northeast Ohio urban area and farm land. Over the years, the urban infrastructure has slowly worked its way into the county. When I was a kid, there were still many miles of gravel roads, but they've almost all been replaced with pavement as property developments took over farm lands and scrubby secondary growth woods.

Gravel roads are less expensive to build per mile, but the maintenance cost is actually "higher" when more people use them, so they tend to be replaced with pavement as populations grow in some area. That's really only true because cars use certain types of tires that run at relatively high pressure: 32 PSI for cars, 50's PSI for bigger trucks like an F-250. There are other vehicles with huge, low pressure tires that can drive around in woods or on wet sloppy fields without doing too much damage. The Russian made Sherp is one example (the tire pressure is less than 2 PSI):

From Here

Typically, engineering or civil engineering problems reflect a narrow range of conditions and assumptions. The cost per mile calculation really does depend on the type of vehicles people drive. The type of vehicles people drive is an arbitrary historical accident. If everyone was driving Sherps instead of cars with tires that developed from bicycles and wagons, there would probably be many fewer miles of paved roads.

For most real world problems, there's no way to compute a true global maximum or minimum. This is one of the fundamental reasons central planning is such a bad idea. It's also why technocracy will fail miserably. It's also why civilizations come and go.

Coevolution is the model of nature. Everything happens all at once all the time.

Energy Use Per Capita Chart

My mind is sort of blown by the energy use per capita chart for the early industrial era.

The inflation adjusted median income tracks that chart reasonably well, which is pretty interesting. Income equals energy use per time. To burn more energy per time, you need a bigger more controlling civilization machine. People need to spend more aggregate time maintaining and feeding it.

In theory, the early industrial era 1900-1950 was the least energy efficient consumer product time. Today's products and processes are all highly engineered to weed out cost, which is supposedly a proxy for energy.

It's clearly not, though. Use of a plastic part in an internal combustion engine instead of a metal part, for example, should "save" energy, since it saves money, supposedly. Obviously it doesn't in aggregate. The parts break faster, the engines have a shorter useful life and end up in the land fill more rapidly. Plus the supply chain for everything is more complex.

Even though a plastic replacement part looks like it takes less energy to make, it requires a whole different industry with all its capital investments and supply chain. The aggregate use of energy grows. It really is more like rust than advancement.

The way we live is totally nonsensical. Rather than organizing to achieve goals or objective, people organize to feed a system. The system just grows and grows and consumes the people.

Frozen Foods: The 10 Kilowatt Life

Every day when I drive into the office, I think how retarded life in the United States is.

Today people work so they can make money to pay other people to do all the things they need to do to live. In many families today both adults in the household work and they spend no time on meal preparation. Consequently, they buy prepared foods at the grocery store.

The prepared foods require a large expenditure of energy. They're made in a factory, shipped in climate controlled trucks, stored in freezers in grocery stores and in the home. The elaborate system and infrastructure requires constant maintenance and energy inputs. Each stage of handling and processing expands the "economy" and the energy required to run it. The "expansion" of the economy was necessary for more skimming by people in New York and London.

The life that many people consider "traditional" today, the 1930s,40s,50s life was more localized, so the supply chain was shorter and far more energy and resource efficient. It also required more human labor to run. Since it was local, multinational corporations were only involved in certain aspects. Banking was local too by law.

The 70's and 80's were when corporations took over the United States and transformed the way people live. They really went after the women and the family to break down localism and to push the population into make work corporate life. It was really a byproduct of mass media and brainwashing in public schools. It was also fueled by easy credit (for corporations).