Why is There Only One Transportation Network?

Ohio Erie Canal

European people have been living in Northeast Ohio since 1800 (give or take a few years). That era of life in the United States has been one of non-stop technological and industrial change. The past is piled up around the area like many carelessly discarded toys. The remnants of the Ohio Erie Canal, which was in operation from about 1830-1913 (though it massively declined after it began to compete with railroads) are still apparent as ruins, or are preserved in the local park systems.

Similarly, the leftovers of the rail systems in our area are scattered all over the region. Most notably, bridges and bridge abutments from the interurban railways from the early 20th century are visible from the roadside, or from trails around the area and the former railbeds are bike paths.

In Ohio, it wasn't possible to maintain multiple transportation networks. The canal system is particularly interesting. In its heyday, the canals were operated by the State. In its decline it was maintained by private companies. It limped along for three decades or so until a flood finally destroyed much of the infrastructure of the canal system. None of the operators were able to repair it, so it finally officially "closed".

It's interesting that these different modes of transportation couldn't really coexist in any significant way, especially as passenger systems. I have no idea if it's an issue of "cost" per passenger/mile. The road system today, and the person per car commuting that we all do all the time today is hella expensive. It might be many more times the expense per mile compared to the Interurbans, which covered the same geographical area that people commute through today.

The dominance of any one system might arise from human behavior patterns rather than economic explanations about resources or money. That is, there's only one dominant way of life possible within a given region at a time. People only have so much time in a day to think about how to get from point A to point B. If there's a solution that works they'll use it.

Back to the Campfire

The current widely accepted guess is humans lived a pastoral, hunter gatherer life for most of the time humans have been on earth. Agriculture and settled life are relatively recent inventions, and industrial civilization is a blink of an eye in proportional terms.

"Civilization" is the set of solutions for a group of human beings to get what they need to live on earth. A point made in several previous posts is you can look at civilization as a meta-animal. As a meta-animal it has several of the characteristics of an actual animal. One key function is storage, transmission, and operation on information.

Over time, information has flowed through and been stored by civilization in a variety of ways. The very oldest way is campfire stories. Human beings spent much of their existence sitting around campfires shooting the shit.

The Internet is really like a new campfire. It allows for informal interchange of news and opinions and dispenses with channeling, checking, or editing them.

Religious Concept of Linear History and Interpretation of Europe's Conversion to Christianity

Lots of historians have tried to describe how and why the pagan people of Europe converted to Christianity in the early middle ages. I think the question is generally framed in Christian Linear History terms, which views the arrival of the messiah on Earth as a epoch making event where everything changed.

A more worldly interpretation is that Christianity was political useful for would be Empire builders. The tribal, traditional religions of local people was supplanted with a new tradition. We tend to think of Christianity in its contemporary role, confined almost totally to the realm of the spiritual. For the Europeans, religion was tied into every aspect of life.

The confrontation between the native Indians in the new United States was probably similar. Their whole way of life could not be harmonized with the way of life of the European settlers; a pastoral lifestyle, for example, can't really coexist (easily) with a farming lifestyle based on property, contracts, laws, and debts. It seems pretty likely that the tribal lives of European people couldn't coexist with the attempts to create kingdoms in the early middle ages, either.

Break With Oligarchy

The United States break with the British Empire might be the only time a group of European people successfully broke away from inbred aristocrats and greasy oligarchs, and even that break was a short lived and mixed experiment. The free US existed about 100 years until it was pulled back into the Empire game (around 1900).

The people of the 19th century US were conscious of their special status. In William Atherton's memoir he contrasts the haughty hard hearted British Officers with the enlisted men, for example. He was quite conscious that Empire Britain was the enemy not only of himself but of everyone who wished to be free.

By the entry of the United States into WWI, the institutions of the country had been compromised, and by 1947 and the creation of the CIA, the United States had been totally swamped by oligarchs.

Modern corporate nations are by their very nature easy to corrupt and control via the mechanisms that were meant to keep them to task and limit their authority. It's easy to corrupt and blackmail the officials that are supposed to represent the interests of the people and for the public resources to be put in service of private gain.

The main problem seems to be that the common people easily forget their own interests, and get lazy about guarding their liberty. Their liberty really isn't that dear to them in all its constituent parts. Consider the TSA as an example of how this works. A couple swindlers stood to make millions or billions of shekels on the creation of that agency, while it only costs the average person a few hours of standing in line over their lifetime.

Poverty Will Kill You Too

I'm not a fan of fear porn. As the alt-media grew in the mid 2000's, I spent a couple of years reading about economic collapse scenarios and watched youtube videos about the vicous plans of the elite to cull humanity. However, I came to the conclusion that the biggest enemy of man is man. It is unfortunate that we participate in systems where a few psychopaths can exploit millions, but if we did manage to eliminate that scourge we'd have countless other issues to contend with.

Poverty is one major problem. Lots of people in the world live in absolute squalor on the periphery of developed areas. Cheerleaders of western civilization often see poverty as a genetic problem--for example they offer up population IQ tests that show those poor people are no good. Critics of western civilization tend to see poverty as a result of exploitation.My take is poor people are "poor" mainly because they lack methods of organizing their people to create an order that leads to the type of wealth that causes clean streets and clean water.

Dirty conditions are a reliable breeding ground for new diseases. The good hearted people who attempt to help alleviate poverty by providing medical care could actually be helping to create the "perfect storm" scenario. By providing inadequate treatment of diseases with antibiotics in really terrible living conditions, health care workers could actually be breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria.

The United States is a Corrupt Shithole

It seems like the scumbags of Hollywood have enough reach to hassle Rose McGowan in Virginia. So there's enough corruption in Virginia to make that happen.

The Reformation Was Extremely Complicated

Martin Luther Throwing Gang Signs

The 500th anniversary of Luther's 95 Theses was yesterday. There are countless articles on it. So I'll throw one more into the  mix.

People like to have a nice tidy comic book story to explain huge events like the Reformation. Reality, of course, isn't really even amenable to condensing into a narrative with characters and cause-and-effect explanations. The christian's religion is this type of story. "The world used to be evil, Jesus was born, now it's cool."

First off, Christianity is not native to Europe. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europeans belonged to a bunch of different tribal societies and each had a  shamanic religion with roots that were possibly thousands of years old. Christianity was imposed on them in an attempt to form the next Empire. (Islam is identical in this regard.) Tribal religions persisted in Europe until at least 900 AD.

Catholic Christianity was never the sole brand of Christianity even in Western Europe. The Arians and the Catholics had "how many angels can fit on a pin" debates at the very beginning, then throughout the history of the Catholic Church there were "heresies". There was a proto reformation around 1100 AD. There were various strains of gnostic Christianity (e.g. the Bogomils or the Cathars).

By the 1500s, the western European medieval system was pretty long in the tooth and its entrenched political and religious institutions were holding people back. The Catholic Church was embedded in every aspect of life, and the institutions of life, e.g. the Guild System, relied on the Catholic Church. A good parallel today is how Hollywood--what looks to be a bunch of Jewish Mobsters--are connected to the government, the democratic party, and east coast finance. There's really no rational reason for it, but there it is.

The Renaissance and the re-emergence of classical learning in the West is the start of the fracture and breakup of the medieval world (which persisted into the 20th century!).

In retrospect Martin Luther looks like a Deray figure, that is, an agent of corporate forces with really banal goals, rather than an organic revolutionary. Entities like Henry VIII's  England were at odds with the Catholic Church for a long list of reasons, e.g. a desire to get in on the Age of Sail games (games like Rape Murder Pillage for Opium, Coffee, Tobacco, or Spices). Rival Banking families were pinched by the Church's cronies.

Just as it was expedient for Clovis I to be baptized as a Catholic, and for the Catholic Church to  baptize Clovis, it was expedient for the emerging powers of Europe to support the Reformation.