Monday, November 23, 2020

History's Next Rhyme

 Creating Our World,


  "Reset" wasn't previously a bad word, but now it's getting that way. I liked it because it was neutral and without a lot of baggage.
I want to use it neutrally at first, if I may.
We are a very effective species at getting our needs met. We communicate with each other, use tools, use tools and energy to make tools and harvest energy to make tools and energy and food.
And we communicate over vast stretches of time and distance now.
  Nothing can stand in our way but success, and the class of special humans that has arisen in the millennia preceding our births, the class of kings and nobles (and bankers, and the CIA, and so on). This special class of people swings into action to get rid of entire populations of humans when the population outgrows the food supply.
This helps our species continue living, moving, solving problems, growing food, finding water and fuel, and living.
  It is technically possible to work things out without these specialists in population reduction, but we are not used to it, and we have not really come to grips with the issue, itself. Each of us sees a small part of the great world, and few can grasp that all the people in a region have surpassed the ability of the region to feed them.
  This is a very unpopular topic, and strictly forbidden in most polite circles.
For me to suggest that the kings, lords, rulers and powerful functionaries have the useful purpose of killing a lot of people from time to time, without being seen to have done so, is not just unusual, and rude, but weird.
  Everybody knows that wars happen accidentally, or from bad guys, or religion, racism, misunderstandings, and things like that.
My thesis is simpler, that the cold hearted power elites use wars to kill off a bunch of people when the economy fails, and to induce the surviving people to work hard, doing what they are told to do for the good of their whole clan. 
Through this crisis response, a new economy is worked out. It is our way.

  I see this cycle of history as being different from the recent cycles we have studied in history, because the food supply we are now outpacing is more intricate, as it is driven by vast cheap energy to do almost all of the work, transport food thousands of miles to us, and to spend 10 calories of diesel energy equivalent for every calorie of food we eat. When diesel (and electricity, etc.) declines, we get poor, and when it declines more, we may break the economy that supports our lives, go through desperate hardship for indefinite periods of time, and even behave badly along the way. 
  Wars are already being imposed upon people who live on top of oil, forcing their economies into failure to support them. That keep their economies sitting on the oil, not using it. The kings and owners will need it. Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Venezuela all have a moderately good grasp of this dynamic. There is really no limit to the populations who have to do with less oil, through economic destruction, so the owners can keep the overall structure , their power structure, intact. That is of primary importance to them, and they make all the decisions. 
Glenn Greenwald points out his observation that the ruling coalition is composed of all those power figures who oppose withdrawing from the war in Afghanistan (which was justified only by lies, and was done for geopolitical reasons). https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-ruling-coalition-opposition
  Nuclear weapons change the old model, but the same tools of fear, panic, blaming the "enemy", and blind obedience because the family will die if you stop to ask questions, still apply. 
Joseph Mercola DO has this good article about "The Great Reset" leveraged off COVID-19. It's not a fake virus, but the fear factor is amplified 100 times over what would be promoted to society if "a great reset" were not at hand for structural reasons like finite oil being unable to catch up to infinitely leveraged debt bubbles, built on debt bubbles. People will have to give up property, privacy, freedom of speech and association, in order to fully submit to the new technocratic system (a high tech fascism, and China is ahead). I'm not a follower of Dr Mercola, but this article is right on, especially since he cuts and pastes long excerpts from "The Great Reset For Dummies" by Tessa (fights robots) Lena.

  I am certain this techno-fascism approach cannot work at the goal I see, which is to maximize the rich complexity of life on earth through enhancing complex ecosystems, not simplifying them. That's my view, and it is the opposite of the techno-fascists who seek to simplify life to monoculture systems which they control through genetic engineering, factory farms, and chemical inputs made in factories on the Texas gulf coast. For the ruling elites, all permission must come from them, from the top, otherwise they are losing power, "melting, melting..."
  My advocacy of the antithesis of this, maximizing the richness and complexity of life, which is typified by the Amazon rain forest, arose from my meditations and thoughts on "the meaning/purpose of life". My simplest and broadest take was that a sterile ball of metals , dirt and water receiving solar energy is the antithesis of life's goals. We all inherently understand that life is better, and more life is better-er. In the Amazon, the photosynthetic energy of 1 photon may click through a dozen life forms as that energy clicks down a tiny bit each time in the cascade of organisms giving to and feeding off other organisms and their left-overs. Using factory farming techniques, poisons like roundUp and DDT kill all life except the monorop, and it dies and is harvested, feeding only humans or cattle or pigs, then being processed into "food" to be bought and consumed one time by one person, whose waste goes into a landfill and a treatment plant. That reduces the dozen steps of the photon supporting life down to maybe 3, but you have to average that with the time the field sits bare and poisoned, with dead soil, just awaiting fertilizer and irrigation water.

  Self organizing complex living systems are way smarter and more adaptive than our tunnel vision narcissistic and sociopathic class of kings, spooks and bankers. 
My highest purpose in this value system is to be a steward of life. 
My approach to "The Great Reset" is to foster life in every nook and cranny, life that feeds me and helps me feed other life and keep feeding living cycles like compost heaps and worms and bees and birds (and , disappointingly, squirrels, raccoons, possums, and bucks who antler-shred my fruit trees in rutting season). I am just working this out as I go, seeking tricks that don't use poison and bullets. 
  I still drive. I still have lots of fossil fuel inputs to my vegetable gardens, but I am trying to limit them to initial investments, and find ways to move forward with complex life supporting me and an increasingly well balanced food growing ecosystem.
  I'm learning. I'm passing it on. I hope I am only beginning a process that will become wiser and more complex with passing generations, a renaissance of life, and orchestra and ballet of life, dancing life, complex and vivid and resilient.

Planting Bananas



4 comments:

  1. In the ten thousand year experiment gone awry that is civilization, it has always been that populations have outstripped their needs and local ability to meet those needs. Initially the uninhabited frontiers provided an escape valve, then when those were not readily available came conquest. Too much success and the end of frontier has quickly, in chronological terms, brought us to this juncture which is simply more conquest, administrated as usual by the controlling interests skewed in their favor.

    The grand error of this is simply that there is always a better way and that that is never how it ever gets played out. At the root is a universal failure of limited beings to recognize themselves as such. To act out of that knowledge rather than the transference of those limitations to the physical and emotional environments would serve to make a true success instead of an seemingly unavoidable abject failure. The collective delusions spawned of those first civilizations have evolved an entropy of chaos now only noticed in the main as it’s foundations begin to crack.

    Death comes to all regardless. The proxy extrapersonal concept survivals embedded in our psyches don’t change that fact. Life has been served and its continuation assured regardless of the disposition of any single organism. If one is to assign individul value as in wanting to live a good life, is it not then certain that that includes a good death, not defined by its comfort but rather by full acceptance and awareness? Do not go gentle into that good night. Fight, fight at the raging of the might.

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    1. I'll die with fewest regrets if I keep doing my best.
      A person has to figure out what that is, and toward what purpose(s).
      I keep taking shots at it.
      You might, too...

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  2. That soil looks like chocolate - wow!

    In case anyone is getting excited about these new vaccines, just calm down.
    Here's the BMJ (British Medical Journal).

    "None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus."

    https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4037.full.pdf

    These new RNA vaccines are currently still all "trial of concept" - albeit trials that may now involve 100s of millions of people. Oh dear.
    Proceed with great caution.

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    Replies
    1. It's composted-municipal-waste. Flies hover over it. It's not chocolate, but it's kid-joke "chocolate".
      Take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D to support the normal function of your immune system, your biggest protection from this novel coronavirus.

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