The Real History of the Settlement of Ohio is Intensely Interesting

The story of the settlement of Ohio is riveting. I was born and raised in Ohio, but this story is barely told, which is a real shame because it's got lesson after lesson on politics and intrigue and includes some really interesting characters. It probably wasn't told in great and gory detail to high school students because it's got too much Realpolitik and violence and makes the nascent United States look like any other nation: antinomian, scheming, feckless and greedy. It also doesn't fit the SJW narrative about the native tribes being blameless victims.

Ohio was the western frontier of the colonies, and then the frontier of the nascent United States. It was the cross roads of the interests of the British and the French and colonists. The indian tribes in the Ohio territories, and to the west of there were divided in their support of these different factions. The Lenape indians in south-east Ohio played a very interesting role. They attempted to form a state within the United States... and they probably almost could have done it.

One of their leaders was assassinated by an American militia man. It seems possible the assassination was to prevent the state from being formed so Ohio could be sold off by the east coast establishment who had already formed a land company to do so.... there had even been a prior attempt to do a real estate deal on Ohio while the US was still a British Colony, and that's one of the events that might have sparked the revolutionary war.

Cainite Agriculture versus Abelite Agriculture

Agriculture is the basis of our civilization. Once people started farming, then storing grain, they were able to monetize goods and have money based trade. Their life became structured around seasons and time based planning became important. People organized as larger groups with hierarchies. In the pastoralist mode of life, time is important too, but the clock is kept by herds of animals and the flow of those herds north and south. In the farmer's life, the clock controls the activities of man.

The pastoralist's reality is reality. They are in it all the time. Their time orientation is more immediate. There's no concept of investment, just barter--value for value.

The agriculture city's reality is really an internal, toy-model version of reality that's based on measurement. A certain amount of land will produce a certain amount of grain and feed a certain number of people for a year. The model drives the activity of the people. The people beseech the gods to make reality conform to their hopes for the model. The people's time-orientation is forward looking and wait-and-see. It's credit/debt based. It is risk/gambling based.

The empire parasite emerges from the risk and gambling aspect of this type of agriculture. To reduce risk of catastrophe, agriculture needs to be practiced over a large area. The inner-world toy-model starts to spill into the outer world too in the form of infrastructure, like grain storage.

The problem with agriculture is that the inner-world toy model is simply incorrect and is fundamentally paradoxical. People like Masanabu Fukuoka  started to point this out in recent decades. The productivity of a given area, when left alone will be higher overall than when it's managed for agriculture. That is, the amount of solar energy that's converted to life will be higher when it's left alone.

I can see this in the forest that's on our property, and is connected to about 1000 acres of park woods. This forest supports a fairly large deer herd, turkeys, and countless small mammals like squirrels. When it was first settled it supported even more animals and huge stands of trees. This area used to support elephant sized mammals and giant bears.

Fukuoka tried to come up with a type of agriculture that was between pastoralism and traditional agriculture and it appears to be at least as productive as the traditional mode of agriculture. Fukuoka attempted to duplicate natural processes of planting by randomly throwing seeds around rather than planting in rows, for example.

Much of traditional agricultural practice is oriented around maximizing the time and energy efficiency of planting and harvesting. This is really because our time-orientation and the domination of our consciousness by the toy-model of reality that's described above.

It's possible that the risk and gambling associated with traditional agricultural practice is just a side effect of this low-fidelity inner world model.

One of the current attempt to solve this problem is to make the toy model more accurate. That is, by collecting more data and using a computer to run the toy model, it can be made to "work better", that is, to reduce risk and energy inputs. The yield per acre can be higher.

The permaculture method to solve this problem is to shift the practice of agriculture into a more nature based mode. For example, no-till methods of farming corn in Ohio actually improve soil year over year. The difference in the way of thinking is illustrated by how Fukuoka came up with his methods. He "saw" them after a long illness. They really came to him in a vision, rather than through research projects. Then he went out and attempted to practice them and learned through experience and observation. 

Symbols and Actual Reality

Reality arose from the word. That is, a sensible world was partitioned from formless chaos by a symbolic representation. Creation emerged from formless waters that were personified by the Egyptians as the god(s) Nun. It was spoke into existence as the creator god.

Symbols are representations of information. Information emerges from the relationship of multiple distinct things and time. The information is something that's "alive" and in the world, while symbols are dead things that are outside of time. They're like footprints of an animal left in cement. They're the record of information. They're only brought back to "life" by being replayed.

Since there are so many distinct things, there's an infinity of information everywhere in the universe. However, for any animal, the ability to perceive and record via the senses is severely limited. Living creatures all seem to use some form of filtering, and lossy compression to experience external reality. We all seem to have some built in dictionary that's a form of representation of external reality. Indeed the forms of animals and plants are geometric and constructed from underlying molecular machinery that's coded in DNA in some way that is possibly analogous to physical algorithms.

There's a built-in gap between what we perceive and what is. There are a few different schools of belief on this fundamental problem of existence. The solipsistic perspective is there's no external reality at all, and that "the world" is really an expression of our belief, or our inner world. The scientism religion belief is the inner world can be made to exactly match the external world via science and the discovery of underlying mechanisms of nature--then this world can be transplanted into a computer. My personal belief is we can hop across that gap of experience by shifting our consciousness.

In simple terms, we can shift our consciousness from the left brain to be more right brain focused, leaving the realm of language and symbolic interpretation of reality into more of a direct experience... that is, we can think with the outside world and sort of be the outside world. A concrete example can serve to unfold this concept.

Imagine a vulture soaring on thermals. In his action, the bird feels and knows the lift from the rising air coming off a south facing hillside, for example. We can have a sort of similar experience when we do some all consuming physical task, like walking across a log, or carrying a heavy, awkward load over uneven terrain. That task displaces speech based consciousness. The experience of those moments is very complete. There's no model of reality that's being consulted, rather the body and the nervous system dance with reality, or inhabit the external world.

My general feeling is that sort of experience of the external world can be superior to the toy model version of reality for many tasks--specifically for agriculture. That will be the topic of the next post. 

DNA Learning

There are many physical objects that "record" information. For example, a pond that's fed by a stream will leave a record of sediment deposition over many thousand years that encode the pattern of seasonal change and rainfall.  Similarly, DNA is a molecule that records information as well. (I wrote about this in 2018)

Recording information is akin to learning. It is the passive component of learning, anyway--memory. DNA memory is the record of trial and error successes of living things in some environment. It seems likely that the information that's recorded in DNA isn't a simple code, like a binary code or alphabet. Rather it's combinations of molecular machinery rather than symbols or words.

Green Square Good!

You can spot a piece of man-made detritus in a forest from far away. For example if you see an old hubcap in a stream-bed, it is very out of place next to rocks and sand and old leaves and silt. The surface texture is uniform, and the shape is a composite of simple geometric forms. By contrast some rock that is in the stream will be irregular in every way.

Animals, insects, and flowers have more fixed geometric appearance. Birds are particularly colorful and marked. The visual systems of animals, including us, seem to be particularly tuned to regular geometric patterns. My dog, for example, will easily get freaked out by some out of place man-made object like an orange bucket that's out in the woods or an inflatable santa that's in front of somebody's house. Our ducks will freak out about a ball or a brightly colored plastic bag of food.

Faces have the most visual information around the eyes, nose and mouth. The image above fades away from the areas with the least visual information leaving those with the most behind.

Our visual system seems to use a similar scheme as our auditory and speech system. That is, it compresses and encodes information. The thing we see is a composite of simple shapes and outlines that's sort of lifted out of the background of more nuanced and muddled natural forms. Actually that's pretty interesting. It's pretty likely that we "see" those forms using these modes of understanding because DNA itself is encoding those shapes... somehow those codes that underlie our consciousness and understanding include their own recognition.

This aspect of our visual system seems to strongly influence behavior and preferences. Cities, for example, tend toward stark geometric forms of squares and rectangles. They emulate deserts by omitting trees and meadows. A lawn is a green square. The simple forms are also a side effect of the tools and techniques used to manufacture building materials like doors and windows.

The down side of simple geometric forms is they aren't inherently stable. They require lots of energy to fabricate, and are subject to corrosion and weathering back into incoherent forms. A lawn, for example, requires constant inputs of energy to maintain, or it quickly reverts to a meadow and a forest.

Civilization as the Sum of the Parts of Men

Every animal is a composite creature. Humans are too. Our consciousness seems to be a unitary thing, but it's really multi-layered. Our brain and body consist of multiple systems that are distinct, but integrated. Consciousness, especially speech based consciousness is just one part of it.

It's very common to for the speech based consciousness to slip into the background. When a person dances, for example, or balances on a narrow beam, or performs a complex task like juggling, that lingual consciousness goes to sleep. In an emergency situation--like trying to avoid a car accident--the non-verbal consciousness can take over instantly. In most sports, the verbal consciousness plays no part when action is underway.

If man is composed of multiple parts, then groups of men are composed of multiples of multiple parts. Obviously, different circumstances or arrangements of people could emphasize different parts. The corporate consumer world emphasizes specific elements of that composite to emphasize. A world that's based on warfare would select other elements to emphasize. A world that's based on hunting and gathering would select yet other elements.

It's unlikely that those elements can be arbitrarily selected, though. The world of man is malleable and can be manipulated by those with wealth and power, but only to a degree. Self-directed "evolution" won't work, because there's no such thing as isolated evolution. All creatures co-evolve. This is probably why civilizations just collapse rather than change.

Civilization gets way out of balance with the pace of nature. It is inherently unstable. It loses the connection to the self-regulating aspects of nature and tends toward forms that are too structured and organized so it crumbles easily.

Right Brain/Nature Brain

I've wondered if the Cain and Abel story, like the fall of man story, in the bible is about the change in the way humans comprehended the world that was wrought by language and writing. Language fractured the comprehension of reality in multiple pieces. The apprehension of the whole is not lingual. If you do any drawing, you know that mode of consciousness. While you're engaged in depicting a form on paper, you don't think in words.

Symbolic/word based thinking is fairly limited by the mechanics of speech, and ultimately it's limited by the wavelength/frequency of the tones we use to communicate, and the serial nature of speech and hearing. In information theory terms, the bandwidth of our speech and word based thinking is only in the range of tens or hundreds of symbols per second.

Symbolic apprehension ultimate relies on an either algorithms or forms of compression that utilize pre-learned dictionaries of concepts. That is, it relies on toy models of reality rather than reality itself.

Planning and organizational activities are generally model based. When a farmer plants crops, for example, the planning of that activity is based on historical information, like soil temperature as a function of time of year, and demand for the crop that's really based on caloric needs of the people he'll be feeding.

Those models are really the basis of our civilization. They tie into the technology toolkit of our people, plus cultural traditions and behavioral expectations. Those models are really "the matrix".

Can we discard those models, at least in part and rely more on direct experience of the world that's generally thought to be the province of the right brain? I've been thinking about this for years... chances are it's not possible to write about it. It might be more of an image based form of thinking. 

Why Fear Death?

The vast majority of people don't want to die. I don't want to. However, it is nonsense to be afraid of the state of being dead. Nobody knows what happens after we die just like nobody knows what "we" were before our birth or conception.

Everyone's a Priest When There is a Personal God

I think 9/11 was the beginning of the end of the mass society. That change in the way people are organized might be reaching a crescendo with the corona bologna. Every institution looks rotten as an old log right now, and their supporters and adherents in the general public are displaying an elementary school level of consciousness.

I don't really know the motives of the people who are perpetrating this mega hoax. It's probably a collection of motives, anyway. Some perpetrators will get rich. Some perpetrators are getting positive recognition right now, though that can turn on a dime. Perhaps the intent is something darker like mass sterilization, though I am skeptical their goal is so ham fisted. I think the over-arching goal is to force people into the e-gulag.

The e-gulag collectivism is a last ditch attempt to save the beast system from changing consciousness. It's an attempt to use the dark-side of the Internet to inflict mass control on people. The internet, though, and computer technology in general should have the opposite effect. We should get decentralization and distributed decision making instead of central planning.

God is going to move out of churches and cults into the hearts of all men. When god is in the heart of each man, what happens to the priesthoods? What happens to the state?

The Series "Britannia" as a Model for How the World Really Works

 I'm watching the first season of Britannia for a second time. It's on Amazon Prime. It's an entertaining show that depicts the invasion of the world by Rome as a spiritual war. It does a good job dramatizing that conflict and shows how the mechanics of that conflict might actually work. 

One side of the conflict is the druid priesthood. The series shows how they lord over the aristocracy and rulers of the british tribes through psychological manipulation and also through supernatural means. It depicts them as mercenary and self-seeking. The other side of the conflict is the Roman Empire's general who is overseeing the invasion. He is not just a military man, but is a philosophical seeker and practitioner of the dark arts himself.

The role of the priesthood, whether it's the Catholic Church in the middle ages, or the NWO Religious cult they are pushing now, is probably more important than the "elites". They frame the longer term movements of people and the conflicts like war. To destroy a people, you destroy its gods. This old formula is all but forgotten today.

New Way of Life

I've been pecking away at this blog since November 2015. It's really an attempt to figure out what to do next in my life. My corporate tech guy career ended, maybe permanently, in November 2020. I worked as a software engineer in satellite telecommunications since 2001. In mythology terms, the work I was doing was building the messenger layer of networks, doing the work of Mercury/Hermes. In an almost unbelievable coincidence, both my father and my grandfather had similar jobs when both served in the military, in WWII and in Vietnam and as far as I know we all sort of randomly ended up doing that type of work.

I actually enjoy the problem solving aspect of that work, but I really dislike corporations. Over the years the corporate form of organization has adopted the nanny-state/school marm aspect of the Empire. I disliked school since Kindergarten, and that dull form of organizing people so they're all sort of bumbling along en masse like a herd is foul and oppressive to me.

It's taken many years to realize how our world and how our own personalities are related to the world of archetypes that arise from nature. We're able to see how we relate to and fit in to the whole with those archetypes as a reference.

The Empire in the United States seems to be dying, or more likely, it's being killed. The crime scene is loaded with evidence of the murder. We have the corona hoax and a population that's so degraded that they're hysterically afraid of the flu. We have a failed, fraudulent election and completely rotted out institutions. Joe Biden seems to be a corrupt, addled, old fraud who was purposely nominated so neocons and neoliberal apparatchiks could run the government into the ground completely. Trump is like a sedative for actual America who keeps believing he'll save them.

The Empire seems to think it's going to formalize global rule down to the individual level via electronic means, but I doubt that's going to happen. The Empire is a sort of amalgamation of the Jupiter and Mercury archetypes. The exact meaning of those archetypes is malleable, though. At the end of the Roman Empire, a hundred different cults and pretenders attempted to conjure new versions of the gods into existence. I think that is a really good sign of the end of an Empire; it signals a lack of cohesion of vision of the people and a loss of connection to the moorings that connected ideas to the population and to the soil.

What's the future for the US? More importantly, how do I fit into that future? The global corporate empire, electronic gulag is not for me. There's probably no chance of "fighting" it solo. Maybe if there's a mass uprising against it, I'd partake, but I don't see that happening any time soon. That said, I don't think the corporate  empire is going to function at all. The sci-fi technocracy isn't going to happen. I really doubt the transportation system is really going to change over to all electric cars.

The empire will try to force that to happen with lots of regulation and by throwing money at cronies to try to build it out. The regulations will require an infinite number of loopholes so the system can keep functioning. That regulatory structure will strangle the technocracy in the cradle, I think, and it'll lead to a USSR style collapse. The insistence of using technology to build it will hasten its demise.

I am thinking distributed and small is the way to go, and shifting the technology base to simpler, redundant, and low tech is the overall theme. Similarly, rather than adopting the corporate hierarchy model, go with a flat, network model so there's no central target for regulation and control. From the financial/planning point of view, adopt a nature based model where plans are made in-situ and piecemeal rather than following the city planner and architect model. Also, rather than financing and then depreciating capital equipment refurbish old equipment to own and add value, and so reverse the time/value relationship of usury.

Evil Men Holding the Future Hostage with Covid Bullshit

 The election bullshit and the covid bullshit are preventing masses of people in the western world from thinking about their future. Their dreams are put on hold while a bunch of asshole governors and mayors lord over them on behalf of their oligarch masters.

The controlling oligarchy wants to replace our current economy with their electronic gulag slave grid. To them, it's more important to implement their slave system, than it is for the electronic system to work well.

We are very unlikely to have an all-electric transportation network unless there's a huge breakthrough in energy storage technology. If you live in the snow-belt, watch a snow plow rumble down the street and try to imagine that running on lithium ion batteries. How many tons of batteries would be required to plow the streets in your county? What happens when the power grid goes down during a storm?

The mass culture has been fed the Star Trek future mythology to lay out the course of technological progress and investment. There's almost no competing idea of the future. The Star Trek mythology is like the shiny wrapper on the shitty technocrat slave grid.

Is There any Transition to a Minimalist Industrial Society? (No)

We really do seem to be streaking along to a civilization level crisis. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, I never contemplated I'd be living through this. This is not a natural crisis, by the way. It all seems like stage-craft. All the world governments seem in on it, which suggests the way the world is organized is completely different than we think.

The controlling oligarchy seems to want to replace the current system with "technocracy". Technocracy seems like a total nightmare. It's authoritarian central planning and micromanagement of people's lives. The bullshit we're currently experiencing with the covid madness is a sneak preview. Imagine the scared retard hoard getting riled up non stop about various fright-topics by the plastic TV people so they surrender more and more control of their lives to the oligarchy. That's probably what the next few years is going to look like.

On top of being oppressive, technocracy just won't work. There's no way to combine authoritarianism with technological innovation. More importantly, the model-based control of the economy will just fail over and over again.

If technocracy won't work, and if we really are running into resource limitations, is it possible to scale back to a smaller footprint version of our industrial and technological economy? History says no. The main practical problem is the civilization technology toolkit and knowledge base is all inter-related. It doesn't seem possible to take it apart, or edit it down.

It also seems like it's peculiar to the mix of people who built it. The genetic and cultural history of the system's people probably can't translate to other random mixes of people. For example, even though the Romans and the Germanic people lived side by side and worked together for hundreds of years, classical civilization failed to be transplanted. Roman civilization couldn't withstand integration of the hodgepodge of weird cults and ideas from the eastern Mediterranean people either.

The YouTube channel "Pockets of the Future" presents the idea that we'll go back to a really basic agricultural society, but only after a sort of planet-level collapse of civilization. Then individual communities will reboot from scratch on a small scale. That's sort of what happened in the middle ages.

Failure as a Tutor

 I live in the Northeast Ohio snow belt. We get an average annual snowfall of 110". It really varies year to year, though. Last year we had a couple heavy snow accumulations, but barely enough to go cross country skiing.

Yesterday we got blasted with 24" of snow overnight. It was heavy wet snow that stuck to trees and broke limbs and snapped trunks and bowed saplings to the ground. The woods that surrounds our house is unrecognizable. The snow is knee deep and the younger trees are all bent over in large snowy arches.

The cold stresses all the infrastructure too. The coaxial cable for our internet service came down. Our house lost power, too, for about 24 hours. We have a backup generator, and that was the first time it was used, but we had no internet for most of the time, too. The cellular data network seems to be sensitive to power outages too.

Our duck pen roof failed, too. It became loaded with snow, which is extremely unusual. The roof is just some galvanized fencing that lays over a lattice of 2x4s that span between 2 main beams that are supported with posts.

The fence material has holes that are 2" wide and 4" long, so there's plenty of room for snow to fall through. One of the 2x4's in the middle cracked when I was trying to shake the snow off. The rest of the roof held, though, so it was actually pretty "easy" to repair. In the failure it became really easy to see how to improve the central portion of  the roof so it's much stronger.

Failure is more of a proof of Nature and God than success. It's really a chance to improve and learn, which seems to be why we are here.

The Brutal Reality of an Unsustainable Civilization

Nature is self-regulating so it always moves in cycles. Our agricultural and technological civilization imagines linear progress is possible, and even worse, the "leadership" of our civilization thinks planned linear progress is possible, so it's inherently opposed to nature or God. Now the priests of that civilization imagine they must replace nature with their own creation to move "forward".

One faction of the establishment--the "greens"--imagines a planned "sustainable" economy is possible. There's really no path there, though, and only a tiny fraction of the current population is moving toward a truly "sustainable" way of living.

The "elite" central planners' version of sustainable is just stupid and paradoxical. Their idea is the "smart city" and "sustainable city" where electric power and computer control make it possible to efficiently allocate resources from "renewable" resources. This future is just not possible. I think it really just won't happen beyond some potemkin village demonstration versions of "smart cities".

Similarly, I don't think a fully electric transportation system will ever happen without some drastic change in the technology of power production or energy storage. Try to imagine heavy equipment like combines and semi trucks running on batteries. I can't. Imagine trying to pave a road with battery power running the asphalt spreading machine. Nope. Take a look at the machines involved in paving a road. They guzzle diesel and/or propane. Take a look at a concrete plant sometime, or a concrete truck. None of that is going to run on electricity and batteries.

To have a "smart electric city", there's both a full scale petroleum industry and an electric transport infrastructure industry. History suggests that won't happen. The roads in our current transportation network are built by fossil fuels, so the entire transportation industry leverages the underlying fuel production industry. The whole suite of technology and infrastructure works together. The battery powered transportation is a competitor for the resources that go into the fossil fuel network. If we're really currently experiencing or about to experience oil shortages, I just don't think there's enough resources to convert the whole system over.

The central planners also imagine, for some reason, that everyone should live in cities with hugely centralized food production from monopolistic corporate/artificial systems, like Bill Gheytes Brand vat-meat. Cities and centralization require lots of heavy equipment and corresponding heavy infrastructure.

The infrastructure of that super urban techno-society will be extremely unstable and prone to failure. In recent years, outbreaks of disease in factory farms have sparked the culling and destruction of many poor animals. If the entire population relies on shitty factory food, the population will be extremely prone to starvation because the food system will be more failure prone.

The main problem with the "smart city" idea is that the central planning society is 100% incompatible with innovation. The automation and tech boom in the United States kicked off when computers became a consumer item. Garage shop and individual innovators drove the development of that entire industry. The USSR lagged way behind in developing computer technology even though it had a large science and engineering workforce. Central planning just sucks.

The truly "sustainable" communities will be small and spread out and have minimal infrastructure. It's more like the Sherp and bicycle world than the bulldozer and six lane road world. Those two worlds just don't co-exist. This seems very obvious to me, but eludes the central planners.

I think the next centuries will look more small scale and distributed as Babylon crumbles again. I don't know how much of the current suite of technologies can make it into that world. The microprocessor, for example, requires such an enormous amount of underlying technology and materials processing that it probably can't cross the bridge to that new world.