I finished with school about two weeks ago. At first, my family and I spent our time in a mad rush to get the house clean before Sara got home from Europe, which she did monday before last. We got to a point where at least everyone had a place to sleep (I have not had a bed when I came home all school year). Sara spent a few days here decompressing from her travels before heading to her family's house for a week. So I've been busy with having Sara home, after having been apart for a very long (and very short at the same time) four months. Which is just an excellent use of time in my opinion.
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Wednesday, May 24
Wednesday, May 10
On covering my ass
It might just be because rebuttals have slowed down lately that I feel inclined to address this subject, but basically, I find myself covering my ass way too much in my writing. So to address this concern, I am just going to say what I mean without any attention paid to how or who it might offend. So, a list (some of these I have said, but very anxiously. Things I have not said before will be marked with an asterisk):
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I guess I do allow myself to say most things, but I so often end up covering my ass later (even immediately following a statement sometimes). I'm just tired of it. I don't like confrontation, but almost everything I am involved in now is countercultural. That's probably why my method for resolution to all of the problems I see involve walking away instead of fighting against. I don't like covering my ass, and I want to stop doing so as much as possible in the future.
(*restraining...to...not...cover...ass...aahhhh!*)
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- I do not believe in a god
- I do not value chastity or purity (what I do value is honesty and trust - in one word, integrity)*
- I am not ashamed of nudity
- Not only the government, but this entire culture, called civilization, needs to end, and will indeed crumble under its own weight soon
- I like to use "cuss" words like fuck and shit
- I am dropping out of school
- Everyone in this global culture is a fucking drone and their lives suck. When people can't acknowledge it, they're just too numb, dissociatied, and drugged up on affluence or entertainment or religion or pot or booze to notice. Anyone who is not numb to the reality of this culture is, by default, depressed or otherwise mentally ill.*
- I happen to enjoy beer myself (that's not my drug though. Entertainment and receiving approval are my drugs of choice. I've only enjoyed beer in moderation so far).*
- I can't get mad anymore when people try to escape this reality through vices like cigarettes or other drugs or anything else. I try to escape all the time too. It's part of surviving. I just wish (as I do for myself) that they would work to actually escape from this system, drop out, and begin to build a world that we can actually live in. That's certainly what I want to do with my life. I'm tired of choosing between suffering through bullshit or being numb.*
I guess I do allow myself to say most things, but I so often end up covering my ass later (even immediately following a statement sometimes). I'm just tired of it. I don't like confrontation, but almost everything I am involved in now is countercultural. That's probably why my method for resolution to all of the problems I see involve walking away instead of fighting against. I don't like covering my ass, and I want to stop doing so as much as possible in the future.
(*restraining...to...not...cover...ass...aahhhh!*)
Tuesday, May 9
The myth of progress
I just turned in a paper for my American Urban Crisis class. I kind of took a broader view of the "urban" crisis and basically wrote more of a manifesto than a research paper. I put in references to links that vaguely fit the context - after I had finished writing in most cases. There's not much of anything new that I'm saying here (not to you at least). My only motive really is to introduce my thoughts to one more person (the teacher, Jody). I'm tiring of my redundancy, and I'm sure you are too. I won't be posting any more essays from classes because I'm one exam away from being finished with those. I'm going to slow down and try to stew for a bit so I can find what I actually have to contribute. I am finished with "rearranging abstractions." I can continue to tell my own story but there is not much new there for the moment. I look forward to sinking my teeth into some practical application in the near future - gardening, dumpstering, cooking, foodnotbombsing, working/playing/living/learning at Dancing Rabbit for three weeks, travelling, unschooling. I'm excited.
Onto the essay...
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As a culture, we perceive ourselves to be progressing over time, evolving in a linear fashion towards some preordained ultimate goal (presumably of perfection). This meme of progress manifests itself in the form of civilization. Civilization is characterized, according to the documentary Yu Koyo Peya, by these five things: “1. settlement of cities of 5000 or more people, 2. full-time division of labor, 3. concentration of surplus, 4. hierarchical class structure, 5. state-level political organization. And all of these depend on agriculture.”[1] Indeed, civilization was only made possible by the domestication and intense production of a few grains in only a handful of locations throughout the world, starting about 10,000 years ago. This Agricultural Revolution allowed (or maybe forced, rather) people to settle down, once they had taken control over their food supply, ensuring a surplus that would not require constant migration. This sedentary lifestyle gave rise to villages that eventually expanded into cities. In these cities, there is already an emerging ruling minority. Agriculture is very hard work (much much harder than the work required in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle), and people would not do it willingly unless they had to. The production of a surplus of food necessitates the storage of that surplus and its eventual redistribution. Storage of a surplus necessitates guarding of that wealth. Keeping food locked up allowed those in power to create a peasant class of farmers who they could control through having control over the food supply. Already, at the dawn of civilization, we have the making of the underclass, separated from the ruling class, which profits from and lives off of their labor.[2]
Civilization is predicated on continual expansion and growth, behaving like a disease or a cancer, fabricating a need for resources, and starting a vicious cycle of increasing size and complexity with increasing consumption of resources. The above agriculture that I discussed caused an increase in population size. This increase in population size necessitated a corresponding increase in food production. And the cycle goes on and on and becomes more and more vicious. As such, civilization is not sustainable. All past civilizations have collapsed, and this one will too. The extent to which a civilization can expand is limited, primarily, by the amount and quality of energy available to it. When only human and animal muscle power was available to civilizations (through the course of most of civilized history), they were somewhat limited in how far they could develop their complexity. Today, we are in the end-stage of an age of very cheap energy – in the form of oil. The rate of production of oil peaked in the United States in the 1970s, and it is estimated to peak worldwide in the next few years. What Peak Oil means is that after that point is reached, supplies will start to decline – it will become less and less cost-efficient to pump the remaining reserves. It does not mean that we will run out of oil completely, only that it will become much more expensive. Our entire economy and way of life is based on oil. Oil is used in manufacturing processes, in the synthesizing of plastics, in our industrial food production (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, transportation), and, of course, most obviously in the cars that many drive. And demand for oil is increasing. China and India are beginning to enter the oil market as larger buyers. Demand is increasing even as supply is just about to start on a never-ending decline. People may look to alternative energy sources such as nuclear, solar, and wind, but none of these are sufficiently scalable, cheap or fast enough to solve this coming crisis. Our global economy will crash, and with it, our civilization. [3]
Even if Peak Oil were not to happen, our civilization would be threatened in other ways in the coming years. The biological world, on a global scale, is already largely dead as a result of the combination of widespread industrial agriculture and industrialization in general. Global warming, dying oceans, vanishing topsoil, desertification, deforestation, water exhaustion/pollution, species extinction, and the exponentially booming human population all are symptoms of an environmental collapse.[4] Civilization is very literally a disease that is killing our planet, our biosphere, upon which we depend to live. We, as a civilization, may aspire, or think of ourselves already, to be above such dependence on the web of biological life, but we certainly are not. Without food, you die. All of the symptoms I just listed are all collecting together to make it increasingly harder to feed every human on the planet. As I mentioned before, we are, in effect, eating oil, and when it becomes too expensive, food will become too expensive to produce as well. It seems that an involuntary powerdown is inevitable. Our way of life as we know it is about to end. Civilization, should it recover, will have to progress by using some other energy source, but I doubt that the complexity (or progress) that this civilization reached will be matched, again, as I can’t imagine an energy source as abundant, rich, and flexible as petroleum.
What we base our concept of progress on is largely the level of complexity of the technology that we have created. When you look to point to some example of progress, you would be apt to point to the car or the computer.[5] Note that these are also objects of consumption. Besides technology, progress is also measured in how much resources are consumed and how much profit is made upon them. These are the standards by which we judge the success of our society, our way of life.[6] The level of complexity of our technology has progressed, yes, but human quality of life has not (not to mention the quality of life for the rest of the biosphere, as I have already mentioned). Prior to civilization, hunter-gatherers lived in the original affluent society, existing in relative leisure without having to work much at all to provide for their sustenance, and their “work” was more like our play. By contrast, today, the majority of people in the world live in abject poverty, working long hours in horrible conditions to barely eek out survival. There is a minority at the “top” who live in relative luxury thanks to the progress of civilization, but the costs (to humanity and the rest of the biosphere) for supporting such a lifestyle for such a small minority far outweigh the supposed benefits of civilized life. But even such affluence among the minority does not necessarily provide them with happiness. Americans, on average, are some of the most mentally sick people on the planet, if not physically as well (physically, Americans are the sickest among developed nations[7]). We are also the richest nation on the planet. I think I can safely call that a correlation, if not a causality. Civilization makes us sick. We are culturally conditioned to believe that primitive people lived lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short.”[8] But this is simply not true. Modern healthcare is just beginning to return health standards among the rich minority to levels existing pre-agriculture.[9]
Progress is a meme, an idea in our culture, created and proliferated to make sure that everyone in civilization believes that civilization is the only way in which one can live in this world as a human. If it were not for this myth, people would feel free to abandon their miserable lives and adopt one of a myriad of different ways of living that are not predicated on continual growth, or progress. There is “no one right way” to live.[10] Humans have evolved to be adaptable to whatever environmental niche is open to them, but now we are so removed from even understanding our relationship with our environment, leading lives in artificial environments which we are very maladapted to, that instead of diversifying into a multitude of niches, we are culturally compelled to conform to a perceived one right way – civilization.
On the micro level, progress is perceived by the public in such areas as segregation in cities where none actually has occurred. This popular perception that we have evolved above such problems as racism masks the reality of the situation and prevents any action towards rectifying them. When the Kerner Commission report was released in 1968, stating that the country was moving steadily towards two societies – one black and one white, it surprised white society even though they were the ones who created and enforced policies of segregation all along.[11] But really, these are symptoms of much bigger problems that go all the way to the root of our culture, all the way to the root of our experience as humans on this planet. Ultimately, for us today, the problem of civilization and our acceptance of the myth of progress is not the result of some remote switch to agriculture thousands of years ago but rather stems from the trauma to our psyche that growing up in civilization causes. We need to deal with that psychological trauma, a split between mind and body, projecting itself in all of the dualities we see around us – white and black, left and right, citizen and foreigner, good and bad, civilized and primitive, progress and balance. We need to heal that split on a personal level in order to begin to heal the larger context of civilization.
What would be the goal of progress? What are we racing forward towards? What we call progress is the increase in control over our environment, shaping it to our liking. The desire for such control comes out of fear of uncertainty. If our goal is complete control of everything, of complete certainty, then we will have created the conditions of death (for that is the only certain thing in life). Civilization and progress go hand in hand, operating as a death-urge, ultimately desiring to eliminate all biological life, which is much too messy and chaotic to allow its continued existence. If you look deep enough, that is where we are heading, that is our “progress”. Progress as a positive, life-affirming process is a lie. The idea itself and its sinister effects are all too real, but the benevolent-looking mask it wears must be stripped off.[12]
--------------
Onto the essay...
expand to read full post
As a culture, we perceive ourselves to be progressing over time, evolving in a linear fashion towards some preordained ultimate goal (presumably of perfection). This meme of progress manifests itself in the form of civilization. Civilization is characterized, according to the documentary Yu Koyo Peya, by these five things: “1. settlement of cities of 5000 or more people, 2. full-time division of labor, 3. concentration of surplus, 4. hierarchical class structure, 5. state-level political organization. And all of these depend on agriculture.”[1] Indeed, civilization was only made possible by the domestication and intense production of a few grains in only a handful of locations throughout the world, starting about 10,000 years ago. This Agricultural Revolution allowed (or maybe forced, rather) people to settle down, once they had taken control over their food supply, ensuring a surplus that would not require constant migration. This sedentary lifestyle gave rise to villages that eventually expanded into cities. In these cities, there is already an emerging ruling minority. Agriculture is very hard work (much much harder than the work required in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle), and people would not do it willingly unless they had to. The production of a surplus of food necessitates the storage of that surplus and its eventual redistribution. Storage of a surplus necessitates guarding of that wealth. Keeping food locked up allowed those in power to create a peasant class of farmers who they could control through having control over the food supply. Already, at the dawn of civilization, we have the making of the underclass, separated from the ruling class, which profits from and lives off of their labor.[2]
Civilization is predicated on continual expansion and growth, behaving like a disease or a cancer, fabricating a need for resources, and starting a vicious cycle of increasing size and complexity with increasing consumption of resources. The above agriculture that I discussed caused an increase in population size. This increase in population size necessitated a corresponding increase in food production. And the cycle goes on and on and becomes more and more vicious. As such, civilization is not sustainable. All past civilizations have collapsed, and this one will too. The extent to which a civilization can expand is limited, primarily, by the amount and quality of energy available to it. When only human and animal muscle power was available to civilizations (through the course of most of civilized history), they were somewhat limited in how far they could develop their complexity. Today, we are in the end-stage of an age of very cheap energy – in the form of oil. The rate of production of oil peaked in the United States in the 1970s, and it is estimated to peak worldwide in the next few years. What Peak Oil means is that after that point is reached, supplies will start to decline – it will become less and less cost-efficient to pump the remaining reserves. It does not mean that we will run out of oil completely, only that it will become much more expensive. Our entire economy and way of life is based on oil. Oil is used in manufacturing processes, in the synthesizing of plastics, in our industrial food production (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, transportation), and, of course, most obviously in the cars that many drive. And demand for oil is increasing. China and India are beginning to enter the oil market as larger buyers. Demand is increasing even as supply is just about to start on a never-ending decline. People may look to alternative energy sources such as nuclear, solar, and wind, but none of these are sufficiently scalable, cheap or fast enough to solve this coming crisis. Our global economy will crash, and with it, our civilization. [3]
Even if Peak Oil were not to happen, our civilization would be threatened in other ways in the coming years. The biological world, on a global scale, is already largely dead as a result of the combination of widespread industrial agriculture and industrialization in general. Global warming, dying oceans, vanishing topsoil, desertification, deforestation, water exhaustion/pollution, species extinction, and the exponentially booming human population all are symptoms of an environmental collapse.[4] Civilization is very literally a disease that is killing our planet, our biosphere, upon which we depend to live. We, as a civilization, may aspire, or think of ourselves already, to be above such dependence on the web of biological life, but we certainly are not. Without food, you die. All of the symptoms I just listed are all collecting together to make it increasingly harder to feed every human on the planet. As I mentioned before, we are, in effect, eating oil, and when it becomes too expensive, food will become too expensive to produce as well. It seems that an involuntary powerdown is inevitable. Our way of life as we know it is about to end. Civilization, should it recover, will have to progress by using some other energy source, but I doubt that the complexity (or progress) that this civilization reached will be matched, again, as I can’t imagine an energy source as abundant, rich, and flexible as petroleum.
What we base our concept of progress on is largely the level of complexity of the technology that we have created. When you look to point to some example of progress, you would be apt to point to the car or the computer.[5] Note that these are also objects of consumption. Besides technology, progress is also measured in how much resources are consumed and how much profit is made upon them. These are the standards by which we judge the success of our society, our way of life.[6] The level of complexity of our technology has progressed, yes, but human quality of life has not (not to mention the quality of life for the rest of the biosphere, as I have already mentioned). Prior to civilization, hunter-gatherers lived in the original affluent society, existing in relative leisure without having to work much at all to provide for their sustenance, and their “work” was more like our play. By contrast, today, the majority of people in the world live in abject poverty, working long hours in horrible conditions to barely eek out survival. There is a minority at the “top” who live in relative luxury thanks to the progress of civilization, but the costs (to humanity and the rest of the biosphere) for supporting such a lifestyle for such a small minority far outweigh the supposed benefits of civilized life. But even such affluence among the minority does not necessarily provide them with happiness. Americans, on average, are some of the most mentally sick people on the planet, if not physically as well (physically, Americans are the sickest among developed nations[7]). We are also the richest nation on the planet. I think I can safely call that a correlation, if not a causality. Civilization makes us sick. We are culturally conditioned to believe that primitive people lived lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short.”[8] But this is simply not true. Modern healthcare is just beginning to return health standards among the rich minority to levels existing pre-agriculture.[9]
Progress is a meme, an idea in our culture, created and proliferated to make sure that everyone in civilization believes that civilization is the only way in which one can live in this world as a human. If it were not for this myth, people would feel free to abandon their miserable lives and adopt one of a myriad of different ways of living that are not predicated on continual growth, or progress. There is “no one right way” to live.[10] Humans have evolved to be adaptable to whatever environmental niche is open to them, but now we are so removed from even understanding our relationship with our environment, leading lives in artificial environments which we are very maladapted to, that instead of diversifying into a multitude of niches, we are culturally compelled to conform to a perceived one right way – civilization.
On the micro level, progress is perceived by the public in such areas as segregation in cities where none actually has occurred. This popular perception that we have evolved above such problems as racism masks the reality of the situation and prevents any action towards rectifying them. When the Kerner Commission report was released in 1968, stating that the country was moving steadily towards two societies – one black and one white, it surprised white society even though they were the ones who created and enforced policies of segregation all along.[11] But really, these are symptoms of much bigger problems that go all the way to the root of our culture, all the way to the root of our experience as humans on this planet. Ultimately, for us today, the problem of civilization and our acceptance of the myth of progress is not the result of some remote switch to agriculture thousands of years ago but rather stems from the trauma to our psyche that growing up in civilization causes. We need to deal with that psychological trauma, a split between mind and body, projecting itself in all of the dualities we see around us – white and black, left and right, citizen and foreigner, good and bad, civilized and primitive, progress and balance. We need to heal that split on a personal level in order to begin to heal the larger context of civilization.
What would be the goal of progress? What are we racing forward towards? What we call progress is the increase in control over our environment, shaping it to our liking. The desire for such control comes out of fear of uncertainty. If our goal is complete control of everything, of complete certainty, then we will have created the conditions of death (for that is the only certain thing in life). Civilization and progress go hand in hand, operating as a death-urge, ultimately desiring to eliminate all biological life, which is much too messy and chaotic to allow its continued existence. If you look deep enough, that is where we are heading, that is our “progress”. Progress as a positive, life-affirming process is a lie. The idea itself and its sinister effects are all too real, but the benevolent-looking mask it wears must be stripped off.[12]
--------------
[1] Tyler Kimble, Yu Koyo Peya, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6579559693433526430
[2] Jason Godesky, The Thirty Theses, http://anthropik.com/2005/10/thesis-10-emergent-elites-led-the-agricultural-revolution/
[3] Matt Savinar, Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash, http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Index.html
[4] William H. Kotke, Garden Planet: The Present Phase Change of the Human Species, 15.
[5] Kirkpatrick Sale, The Myth of Progress, http://awok.org/myth_of_progress/
[6] Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness: A call for institutional revolution, 9.
[7] Carla K. Johnson and Mike Stobbe, Associated Press, http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/health/1500AP_Sick_America.html
[8] Thomas Hobbes, Levithan, Ch. 13.
[9] Jason Godesky, The Thirty Theses, http://anthropik.com/2006/01/thesis-22-civilization-has-no-monopoly-on-medicine/
[10] Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization, 97.
[11] Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass, 4.
[12] Ran Prieur, The Soul of Progress, http://ranprieur.com/essays/soulprog.html
Monday, May 8
more multimedia
There's some neat videos in Aftermath's multimedia page. The first one, Yu Koyo Peya, is a short documentary of the primitivist critique of civilization, featuring John Zerzan and Jared Diamond (sort of). The other one I have enjoyed is a silly video of the adventures of Urban Scout. You think I'm dirty now - wait until I start wearing camouflage! But that's a long way off still...
Sunday, May 7
Put the fun between your legs
I love riding my bicycle. I recently traded my old bike (which used to be my grandpa's and my aunt's) for one that is much better sized for my height. It's so much more efficient to ride now that I can extend my legs farther. It's a very pretty bike - the brand is Univega, and it's a very cool shade of blue. The handlebars are bare chrome and the wheels are shiny chrome too. It's even got a tiny rainbow flag decal on the vertical post! I traded for it at CAMP's bikeshop.
expand to read full post
Bicycles are basically the best transportation-related technology ever created in terms of energy efficiency, availability to the masses (i.e. cheapness), autonomy, and just general fun, whereas cars are basically the worst. Cars have their place, of course, when you need to travel long distances and bring a lot of cargo with you (why a train can't work for that, I don't know), but I would also question why we should set ourselves up to have to travel long distances on a regular basis (like, say, from the suburbs to the city). Our produce travels an average of 1,500 miles before reaching us. This was only possible because we had cheap energy available to us. When we no longer have that available to us, we need to get used to growing what we need to eat locally again (which means if it doesn't grow in your climate, you're not going to be eating it anymore. bye bye bananas...). Ran has a great excerpt from Ivan Illich up on his site about the effects of cars on a society, and the benefits of bicycle use.
One of my favorite things to do is ride bicycles with a group of people, or even one other person. I've only ridden in a Critical Mass ride once, but it was great fun, and I intend to participate in more in the future.
Some reasons to go by bicycle:
I realize that there is a lot of danger in riding a bicycle on these insane streets. I was just riding south on Grand during rush hour (on a Sunday afternoon!) a little bit ago and was nearly run down by a swerving speed-demon asshole. It was scary. I felt very much alive, basically having a near near-death experience. According to a bicylce safety site, "Around 44,000 people die in car crashes in the U.S. each year. About 1 in 54 is a bicyclist." I'll take those odds. Cars kill. I personally consider it more dangerous to ride a car on a highway than to ride my bike through a "shady" part of town.
I love being able to service my bike myself as well. Part of the bikeshop at CAMP is being able to learn from others how to become a bike mechanic. I definitely want to get more involved there this summer. My friend AnDIY helped me get my bike into riding condition (I believe the back wheel is actually from one of his old bikes actually). I want to be able to do the same in the future.
(I saw the title of this post on another friend's patch featuring a bicycle prominently. It's very true. So, please, do so!)
expand to read full post
Bicycles are basically the best transportation-related technology ever created in terms of energy efficiency, availability to the masses (i.e. cheapness), autonomy, and just general fun, whereas cars are basically the worst. Cars have their place, of course, when you need to travel long distances and bring a lot of cargo with you (why a train can't work for that, I don't know), but I would also question why we should set ourselves up to have to travel long distances on a regular basis (like, say, from the suburbs to the city). Our produce travels an average of 1,500 miles before reaching us. This was only possible because we had cheap energy available to us. When we no longer have that available to us, we need to get used to growing what we need to eat locally again (which means if it doesn't grow in your climate, you're not going to be eating it anymore. bye bye bananas...). Ran has a great excerpt from Ivan Illich up on his site about the effects of cars on a society, and the benefits of bicycle use.
One of my favorite things to do is ride bicycles with a group of people, or even one other person. I've only ridden in a Critical Mass ride once, but it was great fun, and I intend to participate in more in the future.
Some reasons to go by bicycle:
1. Remember when you first learned to ride a bike? Think back for a second. It's just as much fun now as it was then.
2. The bicycle is the most efficient form of transportation ever invented.
3. Half of all transit in the United States is six miles or less round trip, a distance easily made on a bicycle.
4. If you see someone you know while riding, it's easy to stop and say hello. Bicycles create public space, enhance street life and build a sense of community.
5. Ever go for a nice evening stroll down a busy street? Nope, too noisy. The occasional bicycle bell is nothing compared to the constant cacophony of car traffic.
6. There are no parking problems for bicyclists, nor are there parking fees or tickets. Lock your bike to parking meters rather than putting quarters in them. In the space one car takes up, twelve or more bicycles can be parked, which solves parking problems in densely-populated areas.
7. Americans spend 15 to 20 percent of their income on cars. If you ride a bike, not only can you skip car payments, but you can also skip insurance payments, maintenance, dmv stuff and stopping to pay for gas. Carsharing for occasional driving is becoming a more and more reasonable alternative. (A good new bicycle can cost as low as $250. No dmv, no insurance, no gas, very little maintenance.)
8. Millions of Americans want to lose weight, and yet they step into cars everyday, passing up the opportunity to exercise. In addition to weight loss, bicycling reduces the risk of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and high blood pressure. Given the abysmal state of health care in the United States (which is partially due to the cost of treating well over 2 million car accident victims each year), self-prescribed preventative activity is a wise decision.
9. If you stand in a closed garage with a running car, you will die in a matter of minutes. Hundreds of thousands of cars in our cities create dirty, unhealthy air.
10. Terrorist organizations use our gas money. In order to protect political and corporate interests, the United States supports dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, which is the number one producer of oil in the world. 15 of the 19 September hijackers were Saudi. Iraq is the second largest producer of oil, and Kuwait the third. Do those countries sound familiar? The government supported Saddam through his worst atrocities, then Saddam began to disobey U.S. orders. That is precisely when he became our enemy.
11. In 2001, more than 3,000 Americans died of terrorism on our own home soil. In 2001, more than 43,000 Americans died in car crashes on our own home soil, and about 2,200,000 suffered disabling injuries. The American death toll of the Vietnam War, which lasted several years, is about 50,000.
12. States, counties and cities spend billions of dollars fixing roads that cars damage. A Honda Civic, a compact car, weighs about 2,500 pounds. That's about 100 times more than the average bicycle. A typical SUV weighs much more than a Civic, and does more damage to roads. Wear and tear on roads from bicycles is almost nonexistent.
13. Experts estimate that easily accessible oil (in other words, cheap oil) will run out around the year 2010. After cheap oil runs out, the price of gas will shoot up. The economic ramifications of this suggest that the sooner we accommodate oil free transportation into our daily lives the better.
14. Watch any tv show, listen to any radio program, look through any magazine or newspaper and you will come across ads showing how cars will make you cool, sexy, popular, respected, at one with nature, safe, etc. The car and oil industries spend billions of dollars each year to promote a benign image of driving, but the function of all this is to assure profits and manipulate consumers, and nothing more.
15. Staying closer to home to shop and do errands builds communication among residents, which promotes autonomy. This in turn leads to political, social and economic self-determination within communities. City hall ends up truly serving the needs of the residents because residents can tell city hall exactly what they want rather than city hall guessing at what they think would be best for the residents. Besides all this, if you factor in all the costs of driving to mega-warehouses, you end up paying more anyway.
I realize that there is a lot of danger in riding a bicycle on these insane streets. I was just riding south on Grand during rush hour (on a Sunday afternoon!) a little bit ago and was nearly run down by a swerving speed-demon asshole. It was scary. I felt very much alive, basically having a near near-death experience. According to a bicylce safety site, "Around 44,000 people die in car crashes in the U.S. each year. About 1 in 54 is a bicyclist." I'll take those odds. Cars kill. I personally consider it more dangerous to ride a car on a highway than to ride my bike through a "shady" part of town.
I love being able to service my bike myself as well. Part of the bikeshop at CAMP is being able to learn from others how to become a bike mechanic. I definitely want to get more involved there this summer. My friend AnDIY helped me get my bike into riding condition (I believe the back wheel is actually from one of his old bikes actually). I want to be able to do the same in the future.
(I saw the title of this post on another friend's patch featuring a bicycle prominently. It's very true. So, please, do so!)
Friday, May 5
Genes, Peoples, and Languages
Another book report for the same class (same score too). I ended up pulling together a lot of things I've already written about here. So you might find it interesting to read.
This book explores the topic of human diversity on both the genetic and cultural level. Diversity, especially human diversity, is a very interesting topic to me because I hold diversity to be a primary good. The forces of this universe all generate diversity. It is the variation inherent in diversity that made evolution possible. Diversity creates more diversity. That which promotes diversity is a good because diversity builds integrity and strength into systems. Diversity is stabilizing but not static. That which hinders or eliminates diversity, conversely, is not good. In the realm of human culture, globalization (which could alternately be called Americanization) is creating a monoculture, destroying the rich traditions of indigenous peoples in every corner of the world and replacing them with one set of values, one worldview. It is a worldview in which the natural order of things is flipped and diversity is seen as a hindrance instead of a treasure. This worldview seeks to make all conform to single “right” way of living in this world, and this way is greatly deleterious to both the biological world and to humanity.
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While diversity is the primary good, humans are social animals and must relate to each other and cooperate to survive. Their strength as a species is found in their shared cultural traditions – the wisdom of ancestors. As such, it is commonality within such social groups that allows them to function. The important thing here to realize is that while a group may be homogenous within themselves, that group is distinct from every other group around it, and therein lies the strength of diversity. Each distinct human social group can fill a specific niche in the environment. The problem today is that our social groups have expanded to be so large that when we attempt to become homogenous, we are no longer able to fit into any niche that might promote a healthy relationship with the rest of the biological world. The solution is to promote diversity without and commonality within (and to greatly reduce the size of human social groups). Anthropologists have shown that there is an upper limit on human social network complexity based on the size of the human brain. The number of other people that humans are neurologically capable of treating as other human beings (and so would be members of their tribe) is about 150.[1] Instead of identifying with groups of this size, modern humans attempt to belong to such unwieldy groups as “the United States” or “the Democratic Party” or “the Catholic Church”, but such identification and homogenization within such humungous groups causes a lot of problems socially among humans. The most basic (i.e. smallest) unit of social organization in today’s society is the nuclear family, spawned from the industrial revolution and normalized after World War II in order to increase the efficiency of production among society’s members. This unit of social organization is greatly dysfunctional for the opposite reason that fictitious monolithic superorganizations are dysfunctional – there are too few people involved in sharing the burdens of daily life (not to mention how much the stresses of daily life have increased in spite of (or because of) all of the technological advances that have taken place. For children to be raised in a healthy manner, parents need the ever-present support of extended family. People evolved to thrive in tribes – households governed by extended kin networks, not a solitary mother and father.
Regarding my own experience of the nuclear family, I would consider myself to have been raised in a relatively functional family (as functional as a nuclear family can be). My parents are married and love each other. My dad works full time to provide for us and my mom retired partway through my childhood, becoming a stay-at-home mom, focusing on volunteering at my brother’s and my schools and at our church. My mom especially made sure that my brother and I knew we are loved no matter what we do. Nevertheless, I developed an addiction to praise, and I gained that praise through pleasing other people, especially authority figures. This addiction to praise allowed me to do very well in school and to appear on the surface as a very good kid. I took what was expected of me by all the authority figures in my life and excelled at it. In doing so, I unknowingly built up identifying labels that facilitated my receiving praise. I adopted the religion of my parents wholeheartedly and also their independent, but liberal, politics. This is an example of cultural transmission, but it is also an example of me not maturing appropriately. While assuming a common culture with my family and community is beneficial to prolonging the existence of that community, what if that community should not necessarily be prolonged? In my process of maturing, I have grown to realize that I was not being myself by wearing the specific masks (really well) that people wanted me to wear. My religion has changed, and so has my politics. It has taken some getting used to, but I am still in very good terms with my parents. I need to work with my extended family a bit on that yet. While the tribe is what needs to be built back up to promote healthy human culture, complete with internal commonality, such tribes should be open, allowing people to freely move from one to another based on where they fit best. I do not pretend that tribes prior to civilization were “noble savages.” They certainly had their own faults, but the basic structure of human organization found there is still sound, but the meme of extracultural intolerance could go by the wayside.
Language is the foundation of such an expansive human culture. With a species that uses culture so much to shape the environment to their own likings, language could be said to shape reality itself. It is a very powerful force and should therefore be used with caution. Words used as labels are capable of masking all sorts of hidden complexity. They are efficient in communicating things quickly, but they are not necessarily effective. I have personally been trying to not apply labels so easily to myself so that I give other people less of a chance to pass me off without needing to think because they think they understand my complexity because they hear a label applied to me. There are other things that bother me about dominant languages, especially English. For example, the use of the word “to be” in the identifying sense makes a huge unsubstantiated claim that one thing “is” another thing, often without needing to provide any proof that such a relationship actually exists. The possessive form of nouns should be done away with in my opinion. “Property by right” instead of property by use is theft, and the language including built in markers for such theft only promotes its continued existence. Language is very powerful in allowing humans to shape their environment through culture, but it can be so easily misunderstood, which can lead to dire consequences for the culture and environment both.
Cavalli-Sforza’s book looks into mostly how genes affect human diversity, but it also dips into a broader look at cultural diversity and its evolution, especially through language. It is an important work for the new perspective it provides in the relationship between genes and culture. My closing thought is that humans were genetically and culturally shaped to live in certain conditions over millions of years. Those conditions no longer exist as we have started to build civilizations, only 10,000 years ago. We are not adapted to live in the conditions created by civilization. Why not resume the diverse ways of life we were shaped to thrive in?
Wednesday, May 3
The Monkeysphere
(Via anticivilization longings) The rule of 150 played out in comical language. A funny and informative read.
What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam?Inside the Monkeysphere
You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go. . .
Some more cynicism
I'm feeling very cynical right now, so be forewarned that if you want to protect yourself from seeing reality, you should probably skip over this one.
I'm doing a lot of watching of movies lately, mostly to pass the time (a little over 7 days until "school's out forever"), but they are at least informative movies.
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Last night, I watched the documentary, Loose Change, which is a conspiracy theory about 9/11 and the role our government played in it. The Bush Administration inflicted this attack upon America themselves in order to gain the support of the very scared nation, opening the door to such things as the Patriot Act, the occupation of Afganistan, and the occupation of Iraq. We still have to wait and see if they invade Iran as well. It's not like they need anyone's support for anything at this point. Oh, and apparently there was billions of dollars worth of gold under the WTCs, and only a small portion of it was recovered (because the rest was hiested by the people who organized this). The movie is about 80 minutes long. You can watch it at the link above. The government - killing its own citizens to gain more wealth and power. This is not a democracy. This isn't even a republic. We are living under a tyranny, and as anyone who isn't wealthy enough already knows, we are living in a police state. It's not like I didn't already know all this; the documentary just helped me to start to feel the emotions that come with this knowledge for the first time in a long time.
Several weeks ago, I watched another documentary, Pickaxe. It was actually the second time I watched it, the first being a year and a half ago, right around the time that I first acknowledged that I was an anarchist. It tells the story of environmental activists blocking the road to an old growth forest marked for logging. This is public, protected land we're talking about, land that is not allowed to be logged. The government/logging companies (you can't distinguish one from the other in this case) get around this by first setting the forest on fire (as in arson), then openly "fighting" the forest fire by burning more of the forest, and then "salvaging" the damaged woods. Fires do not kill forests. Forests recover (and are actually strengthened) by natural fires all of the time. Logging kills forests. So the eco-activists camped out on the road leading to the forest for almost a year before police arrested them, but in that year, they were able to gain enough public attention that the logging of that forest was cancelled. I have the video, so just ask if you want to watch it. We can organize a screening if you want. That'd be cool.
Profit and control being put before life. I am angry, yes. I am rebelling. Not at the whole world. Just this one, solitary group of humans known as civilization. I allow myelf to experience the emotion. And then later, I'll let it go because Bush isn't trying to be evil. The police aren't trying to be assholes. They can't help it. They are just as trapped as I am (more so, actually) in this sick game called civilization.
But this is all abstracted. I wasn't anywhere near New York or DC on 9/11. I have not ever been to Washington to see where forests have been clearcut. Why does something so far away have such an emotional effect on me? I am projecting my anger on something far away so that I don't have to deal with its source in my own life. I'm not exactly sure what that source could be. My mom has reminded me that before I went to school, I could creatively play for hours on end by myself with whatever toys were available (well, they had to be stimulating toys, she said). I don't remember much from my early childhood. I remember seeing kids playing in the schoolyard across the street. I thought that is was school was - playing with other kids, so naturally I begged to go (as my mom reminds me). Thankfully, she kept me out for as long as possible until I was the oldest age allowed for preschool. Along with begging for school, I also begged for a little brother, which I got finally when I was 6. Could all of my anger just be coming from school messing me up? Or not having enough partners in play? (I know I'm introverted, but I was also obviously infatuated with the idea of having other kids to play with - if I was begging to go to school) I don't know. But I want to start to heal whatever traumatized my inner child. In turn, that will start to heal the trauma of civilization.
I'm doing a lot of watching of movies lately, mostly to pass the time (a little over 7 days until "school's out forever"), but they are at least informative movies.
expand to read full post
Last night, I watched the documentary, Loose Change, which is a conspiracy theory about 9/11 and the role our government played in it. The Bush Administration inflicted this attack upon America themselves in order to gain the support of the very scared nation, opening the door to such things as the Patriot Act, the occupation of Afganistan, and the occupation of Iraq. We still have to wait and see if they invade Iran as well. It's not like they need anyone's support for anything at this point. Oh, and apparently there was billions of dollars worth of gold under the WTCs, and only a small portion of it was recovered (because the rest was hiested by the people who organized this). The movie is about 80 minutes long. You can watch it at the link above. The government - killing its own citizens to gain more wealth and power. This is not a democracy. This isn't even a republic. We are living under a tyranny, and as anyone who isn't wealthy enough already knows, we are living in a police state. It's not like I didn't already know all this; the documentary just helped me to start to feel the emotions that come with this knowledge for the first time in a long time.
Several weeks ago, I watched another documentary, Pickaxe. It was actually the second time I watched it, the first being a year and a half ago, right around the time that I first acknowledged that I was an anarchist. It tells the story of environmental activists blocking the road to an old growth forest marked for logging. This is public, protected land we're talking about, land that is not allowed to be logged. The government/logging companies (you can't distinguish one from the other in this case) get around this by first setting the forest on fire (as in arson), then openly "fighting" the forest fire by burning more of the forest, and then "salvaging" the damaged woods. Fires do not kill forests. Forests recover (and are actually strengthened) by natural fires all of the time. Logging kills forests. So the eco-activists camped out on the road leading to the forest for almost a year before police arrested them, but in that year, they were able to gain enough public attention that the logging of that forest was cancelled. I have the video, so just ask if you want to watch it. We can organize a screening if you want. That'd be cool.
Profit and control being put before life. I am angry, yes. I am rebelling. Not at the whole world. Just this one, solitary group of humans known as civilization. I allow myelf to experience the emotion. And then later, I'll let it go because Bush isn't trying to be evil. The police aren't trying to be assholes. They can't help it. They are just as trapped as I am (more so, actually) in this sick game called civilization.
But this is all abstracted. I wasn't anywhere near New York or DC on 9/11. I have not ever been to Washington to see where forests have been clearcut. Why does something so far away have such an emotional effect on me? I am projecting my anger on something far away so that I don't have to deal with its source in my own life. I'm not exactly sure what that source could be. My mom has reminded me that before I went to school, I could creatively play for hours on end by myself with whatever toys were available (well, they had to be stimulating toys, she said). I don't remember much from my early childhood. I remember seeing kids playing in the schoolyard across the street. I thought that is was school was - playing with other kids, so naturally I begged to go (as my mom reminds me). Thankfully, she kept me out for as long as possible until I was the oldest age allowed for preschool. Along with begging for school, I also begged for a little brother, which I got finally when I was 6. Could all of my anger just be coming from school messing me up? Or not having enough partners in play? (I know I'm introverted, but I was also obviously infatuated with the idea of having other kids to play with - if I was begging to go to school) I don't know. But I want to start to heal whatever traumatized my inner child. In turn, that will start to heal the trauma of civilization.
Monday, May 1
In the rain
[my first shot at poetry independent from school ever. written earlier tonight in the margins of a notebook I was intent on brainstorming in. but the storming was not limited to my brain]
expand
artificial light
and panes of
glass
protect
me from
nature's fury
this night
bangs of thunder
pangs of conscience
what have we done
what the fuck
have we done
i want out
into the rain
and thunder
and danger
of it all
out of this shelter
this cocoon
this coffin
i want out
but I wait
and drink coffee
from a paper cup
with a plastic lid
who am I kidding
how could I
survive
let alone thrive?
I wait, yes
but it is purposeful
waiting for the right moment
to come back home
I wish that moment was
now
two weeks?
two months?
when will I be free?
I need to take a walk
in the rain
expand
artificial light
and panes of
glass
protect
me from
nature's fury
this night
bangs of thunder
pangs of conscience
what have we done
what the fuck
have we done
i want out
into the rain
and thunder
and danger
of it all
out of this shelter
this cocoon
this coffin
i want out
but I wait
and drink coffee
from a paper cup
with a plastic lid
who am I kidding
how could I
survive
let alone thrive?
I wait, yes
but it is purposeful
waiting for the right moment
to come back home
I wish that moment was
now
two weeks?
two months?
when will I be free?
I need to take a walk
in the rain
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Once she headed to her family a couple days ago, I finally started moving on some things I want to begin doing. I'm doing my best to recover from at least 5 or 6 years of sleep deprivation. I'm avoiding the ever-whistling television as much as possible and spending as much time as possible outside, enjoying my wonderfully unkempt backyard. I've watched another awesome movie, My Dinner with Andre, which my dad got for me from the library. I've also been bookshopping a lot, mostly at a small bookstore on south Grand called Dunaway, but also at Borders to get rid of graduation gift cards I still had. I picked up the screenplay of the above movie, which I know I'll enjoy reading in the future. I also got a field guide for wild edible plants. I've been occasionally snacking on little yellow flowers in my backyard, and now I know that they're clover sorrel. They have a nice sweet, but biting, taste. I also tried my first dandelion flower and greens sunday, and I also had a bunch of wild strawberries (which admittedly seemed to be simply crunchy packets of water).
I went grocery shopping both for the family and for myself a couple days ago. For my food, I'm trying out a lot of things that Ran suggests in his Advice page. I'm experimenting right now with catching wild yeast to make my own sourdough bread. I'd also like to learn to sprout grains. I went to a health food and supplement store called New Dawn (also near south Grand) where I spent too much money. To get an idea of what I bought, I'll say what I ate throughout the day yesterday. For breakfast, I had an orange and a banana with some Smuckers "natural" chunky peanut butter and some organic green tea. A couple hours later, I learned to make scrambled eggs (isn't that sad- that I have to learn to make scrambled eggs!), made with cage-free eggs (from Schnucks- so I would guess that they're still crowded in a warehouse, just not in cages). Then I had a peanut butter sandwich on Ezekiel brand (sprouted) wheat bread. And an apple. And then spaghetti and tomato sauce, both organic.
I want to try buying food in larger quantities from Jay's international grocery, but I've never been there and have no clue as to what the quality of the food is there. Since I'm not making any kind of income right now, I really feel entitled to nothing. So I'm trying to learn to live on as little money as possible. I went dumpstering for only the second time this past saturday, at Soulard farmer's market. That's another place to shop in the future instead of a huge supermarket. I want to start gardening in the backyard (I hope it's not too late for everything at this point), and I want to start composting. I'd really like to start filtering the tap water because I don't like what I've learned about it's quality. At this point I'm just setting my drinking water out in an open container for a day or so before I drink it to de-chlorinate it.
There's a lot I want to start doing but I'm prevented right now by the fact that I'm leaving for Dancing Rabbit in less than a week. I'll be leaving for that monday morning with Sara and Devin, and I'll be there for the next three weeks, without any contact with a computer if I can help it. So, basically I'll be back in july to tell you all about it.