by Yitzhak Maplebury
Box me on a warm bright day — youthful, though not, not ever again, useful — hands crossed neatly over shirt and tie. Let young things on grass plan parties, raves, getaways with only ethical narcotics and strong beer.
Indulge them in coquetry and intrigue, tasty gossip, bawdy, thunder-bumping-sex-beat rhythms and Romantically doomed dreams.
Let them be ignorant of death, and miffed by the gross solemnities of entropy, eternity and quantum creep.
Grant me peace in this, my first and only suit. Close the plain pine lid and lower me down.
Let them be curious, perhaps fearful –
Gather them over me to wonder: what is rite and why?
Let it -– all of it -– be alien to them, distant as violence, truth, sorrow. Let nothing be heavy and the sky so clear.
Blast them with aromas of Spring and skin; befuddle them with magic, laughter, pheromones and song.
Celebration of lips and hair; lusty minds a-flirt with promises –
I’m done with all that. I wish them well.
_____________
This essay first appeared at Dissident Voice. It is posted here with permission of the author.
March 15th, 2013 at 10:43 am
Wow. What a beautiful poem/essay. Thank you.
March 15th, 2013 at 11:00 am
And once it dawns on you, there’s no going back Yitzhak.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvylMnCe3k&feature=player_embedded
Laughing
David Crosby
I thought I met a man
Who said he knew a man
Who knew what was going on
I was mistaken
Only another stranger
That I knew
And I thought I had found a light
To guide me through
My night and all this darkness
I was mistaken
Only reflections of a shadow
That I saw
And I thought I’d seen someone
Who seemed at last
To know the truth
I was mistaken
Only a child laughing
In the sun
Ah, ah, ah …
In the sun
March 15th, 2013 at 11:10 am
From the previous thread: @wildwoman “I’ve seen this before. ‘Relax and enjoy it.’ Right.”
Ah, denial. You see it all the time in the cancer wards, where patients vow to give it their all in the good fight. Of course, by the time their puny efforts come to naught, they’ve already been removed from public view as nature takes its inevitable course.
WW, you seem to be operating under some kind of belief that traditional modes of behavior will allow you to still exert some level of personal control. Sigh. Seriously, grow up and get a clue.
Perhaps you should review the closing months of WWII, when invading Russian troops were operating under the ’8 to 80′ rape rule. Or, more recently, how rape was used very effectively as tactical psy-ops in the former Yugoslavia.
Of course, my favorite example is the Great Kahn himself. When his hordes showed up at the gates, they provided two options:
Option 1: all adult males will be put to death; juvenile males will be slaves; we will spare mothers; of course, daughters will be auctioned off as wives, but will not be raped.
Option 2: all adult males will be put to death; juvenile males will be first tortured, then put to death; mothers will be repeated raped, then put to death; daughters will be gang raped, but rather than be put to death, will be put out to service as ‘comfort women’, to be raped repeatedly each day until they die.
How many cities chose option 1? If you really understand what is actually goin’ down, then you’ll come to realize that human history is nothing but a prologue to where we’re going once again.
March 15th, 2013 at 11:42 am
A man who has decided to live all alone in an abandoned town near Fukushima reactor despite the high levels of radiation
http://youtu.be/llM9MIM_9U4
March 15th, 2013 at 12:11 pm
wow ulvfugl, great video that really tells it like it’s going to be. Sad, scary, the descent . . .
Here’s one from a different perspective:
http://vimeo.com/26854560
March 15th, 2013 at 12:12 pm
Another
HERE a pretty baby lies
Sung asleep with lullabies:
Pray be silent and not stir
Th’ easy earth that covers her.
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
March 15th, 2013 at 12:19 pm
Amen. Beautiful…
March 15th, 2013 at 12:31 pm
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/25-years-solitary-confinement-prisoner-explains-181056924.html
After 25 years in solitary confinement, a prisoner explains what it’s like
A prisoner who has spent 25 years in solitary confinement wrote about what it’s like to spend a quarter of a century cut off from human contact.
William R. Blake’s essay appeared on Solitary Watch, a prisoner advocacy group. Blake was also given an honorable mention in the Yale Law Journal’s Prison Law Writing Contest.
In 1987, Blake, 23 at the time, shot two law enforcement officials, killing one. He had been on his way to appear in court for drug and robbery charges. Though handcuffed, he grabbed a gun from Deputy Bernie Meleski and began shooting. Deputy David Clark, who was married with two children, died. Maleski was gravely wounded, but survived.
The judge, Blake said, told him he deserved “an eternity in hell” for the shootings. “Apparently he had the idea that God was not the only one justified to make such judgment calls.”
The essay begins by acknowledging the gravity of his crime:
Even by the standards of my own belief system, such as it was back then, I deserved to die for what I had done. I took the life of a man without just cause, committing an act so monumentally wrong that I could not have argued that it was unfair had I been required to pay with my own life.
However, Blake has found that life in solitary is far worse than any death sentence:
On July 10, 2012, I finished my 25th consecutive year in solitary confinement, where at the time of this writing I remain. Though it is true that I’ve never died and so don’t know exactly what the experience would entail, for the life of me I cannot fathom how dying any death could be harder or more terrible than living through all that I have been forced to endure for the last quarter-century.
Blake goes on to describe the intense boredom:
You probably think that you understand boredom, know its feel, but really you don’t. What you call boredom would seem a whirlwind of activity to me, choices so many that I’d likely be befuddled in trying to pick one over all the others.
Boredom leads to intense loneliness, which Blake describes in grave detail:
I’ve experienced times so difficult and felt broken and loneliness to such a degree that it seemed to be a physical thing inside so thick it felt like it was choking me, trying to squeeze the sanity from my mind, the spirit from my soul, and the life from my body.
His conclusion is devastating:
Had I known in 1987 that I would spend the next quarter-century in solitary confinement, I would have certainly killed myself. If I took a month to die and spent every minute of it in severe pain, it seems to me that on a balance that fate would still be far easier to endure than the last twenty-five years have been. If I try to imagine what kind of death, even a slow one, would be worse than twenty-five years in the box—and I have tried to imagine it—I can come up with nothing. Set me afire, pummel and bludgeon me, cut me to bits, stab me, shoot me, do what you will in the worst of ways, but none of it could come close to making me feel thing as cumulatively horrifying as what I’ve experienced through my years in solitary. Dying couldn’t take but a short time if you or the State were to kill me; in SHU I have died a thousand internal deaths. The sum of my quarter-century’s worth of suffering has been that bad.
March 15th, 2013 at 1:04 pm
Personally, I find it very difficult to reconcile the horrors of the world with the beauty of the world.
I could not live in prison, I definitely would rather die.
There was this strange movie on tv one night called “White Lightnin’” (not to be confused with “White Lightning” with Burt Reynolds!) about some hillbilly famous for his dancing – but, he was a complete addict and ruined his life. He would have these crazy fantasies about brutally torturing people – it was very disturbing. Also, the horrible movie “Hostel” where rich guys paid to torture people that had been abducted. These are just movies. Sad to think that even at the extremes depicted in these movies, the world has actually seen much much worse.
Is it all a question of degree? Is it okay to just “rough up” a prisoner to get him to talk – but not okay to waterboard him?
The prisons in America, for all their horrors, are probably better than the impoverished but FREE living conditions in many places (think India, North Korea, Somalia). And, would you rather be in solitary confinement for 25 years in America or survive in a death camp in Siberia for 25 years?
As long as there is competition, there will be conflict, and questions of degree in the execution of that conflict.
It’s all so confusing. The pure ideology does exist – as an abstraction. We can say “love thy neighbor” and “love thy enemy” and know that it is good. But, the practical application of the pure ideology seems all but impossible.
I think I read somewhere that Socrates said something to the effect that “it is not so important that we practice virtue as we discuss it.”
March 15th, 2013 at 1:05 pm
Another indication of decay:
http://wariscrime.com/new/nyc-80-of-high-school-grads-cant-read-or-write/
NYC a staggering 80% of high school grads entering the City’s community college system can’t perform well enough to take college courses. The failure applies across the board: reading, writing, and math.
March 15th, 2013 at 1:14 pm
STRAY birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away.
And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.
O TROUPE of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words.
THE world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover.
It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.
IT is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom.
THE mystery of creation is like the darkness of night–it is great. Delusions of knowledge are like the fog of the morning.
THE infant flower opens its bud and cries, “Dear World, please do not fade.”
WRONG cannot afford defeat but Right can.
LET life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.
HE who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open.
IN death the many becomes one; in life the one becomes many.
Religion will be one when God is dead.
- Rabindranath Tagore: “Stray Birds”, translated from the original Bengali by the author.
March 15th, 2013 at 1:17 pm
Depressed much, Guy?
March 15th, 2013 at 2:59 pm
Brunswickian: yes, i read that, but they admit them anyway and sign them up for remedial courses that the student pays full price for, have no credit, don’t count toward graduation and don’t transfer. If the student fails, (s)he can take it only once more (usually) for an additional charge, of course. What’s really sick is still promoting the “college grads get better jobs” meme – when all the good jobs have been off-shored and i mean in a dying world the entire curriculum of the college (save how to grow food in inhospitable conditions – wherever that’s taught) is irrelevant! i’m surprised it’s gone on this long, frankly.
March 15th, 2013 at 3:43 pm
Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon;
daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the
phosphorescence of the shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off
New Year’s Point or off Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the
sea’s night-purple; he points and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal
and drifts out her seine-net. They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.
I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the
crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the
other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted
with flame, like a live rocket
A comet’s tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the
narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch,
sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night
Stand erect to the stars.
Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could
I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful
the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they
shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we and our
children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers
-or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls- or anarchy,
the mass-disasters.
These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splin-
tered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that
cultures decay, and life’s end is death.
~ Robinson Jeffers, 1937
March 15th, 2013 at 3:47 pm
In some strange way I have simiar sentiments to the witer of the poem.
Altough its debatable, I’m not in the pine box yet, but having 5 youngish children, 13 -21 years old, I feel more and more their time of all that ‘hair and music and love-dreamy beauty’, is quite ok, and I hope they get to have it for as long as they can.
I don’t however, see aging or death in a dreary way, just another state of being.
This reminds me of a series of lectures or interviews I listened to years back.
Bill moyers interviewed Joseph Campbell, and the series was after his book, ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’.
In one segment they mention a tribe of south Americans, and the mock war game they ‘played’ with a neighbouring tribe, which was once evey year to determine which group would get the prime hunting and gathering ranges that coming year.
So it was and wasn’t a game.
The game was to carry a heavy stone to a hoop and drop it in the hoop. The first group to accomplish the task won the game, and thier tribe had the rights to the range the following year.
The rules were just get it there, and other team mates could block, etc. I think there was a prohabition on blooding, but that maybe a faulty memory on my part.
When the actual worrior who accomplished the act came back to home base he was honoured in a feast and allowed to marry that day a (?…somehow)’chosen’ bride. The feasting and celebration went on for a time and then the yonng couple retired in a large ceremonial house. After all were asleep the house was set alight, and the two die inside.
The challenging thing for us is how the young worrior is reported to be feeling when accomplishing the task, and returning to the home camp.
he is described as being exstatic, and filled with joy.
He knows he will die that evening, after marriage and some intimacy, but he is utterly fulfilled.
The knowledge that he has given his family and kin the best chance of surviving for another year is enough to fulfill his life.
Another other noteworthy thing is that the competition within the warriors on the same team is extrememly intense. It is not , teamwork-and-Joey-will-get-it-in-because-he-is-tallest.
They all want the honour!
Although nothing in the interview was said about the woman who marries the warrior, I can only assume there would have been an equally auspicious selection process there, just maybe male anthropologists didn’t ask, or weren’t privy. Was ‘she’ just property there, or bargained? I can’t say. mabe someone else knows.
I find it fascinating to know this stuff is how some groups resolved issues of competition and resources, or life for the coming year.
I am guessing the actual worrior who dies, his family would get great honour and privelage for his accomplishment and sacrifice.
A quiet and beautiful poem/essay above, revealing a mutual understanding and appreciation of youth, life and death, and wanting it all to have a place in the way of things.
Nice choice Guy.
March 15th, 2013 at 4:37 pm
@ infanttyrone
re Tom and hitting guitars in previous thread, I’m not against percussion, just seems silly to slap an acoustic guitar, like banging a piano keyboard with fists, not what the thing was designed for, takes a lot more time and skill to play with fingers, I know Michael Hedges started it, suppose he was a sort of genius, now there’s loads of emulators, I don’t find it a very interesting style, soon gets boring, and I was winding Tom up, expecting me to listen to an hour of it
http://youtu.be/JYuhyRx7FiE
March 15th, 2013 at 5:19 pm
Bald Eagle’s Nest webcam
March 15th, 2013 at 6:06 pm
ulv: i understand.
http://enenews.com/japan-researchers-93-billion-becquerels-day-be-leaking-pacific-fukushima-plant-cesium-levels-havent-dropped-last-year
Japan Experts: Up to 93 billion becquerels a day may still be leaking into Pacific from Fukushima plant
The density of radioactive cesium in the seawater inside the harbor at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant has stopped going down for some time. According to the estimate by a group of researchers at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, it is possible that radioactive cesium in the amount 73 times as large as the discharge limit before the accident may have leaked into the water in one year since June 2011, when the leak of contaminated water is supposed to have stopped. The group says the detailed research is necessary.
The research group at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology did its own calculation in order to figure out why the density of cesium-137 in the seawater inside the Fukushima I Nuke Plant harbor has remained at about 100 becquerels/liter since spring of 2012, higher than the government standard.
According to the calculation, 44% of seawater inside the harbor is replaced by the current and the tides in one day. In order for the cesium-137 density to be what is published, 8 to 93 billion becquerels [of cesium-137] per day must be flowing into the harbor.
As the result, in one year from June 2011 when the leak of contaminated water is supposed to have stopped, 16.1 terabecquerels [of radioactive cesium], or 73 times as much as the discharge limit set by the safety regulation before the accident, may have leaked into the harbor.
TEPCO says, “We don’t think radioactive materials is leaking from the plant compound to the ocean, based on the various surveys done. However, we don’t know the reason yet as to why the density of radioactive cesium in the seawater inside the harbor is not decreasing, so we want to continue the investigation.”
To put these numbers in perspective in post-Fukushima Japan, Yomiuri Shinbun and other media reported in November 2011 that 52.5 billion becquerels of radioactive cesium were being discharged into the ocean every day by Abukuma River that flows through Fukushima Prefecture.
The estimated amount of radioactive cesium discharged/leaked from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant into the ocean from March 26 to September 30, 2011 (TEPCO’s estimate):
•Cesium 134: Approx. 3.5×10^15 Bq (or 3,500 terabequerels, or 3,500,000 billion becquerels)
•Cesium 137: Approx. 3.6×10^15 Bq (or 3,600 terabequerels, or 3,600,000 billion becquerels)
A greenling caught inside the harbor of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant on February 17, 2013 was found with 510,000 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium, highest ever tested in fish since the start of the nuclear accident.
Aside from probable bioconcentration / bioaccumulation, strontium-90 in the water inside the plant harbor hasn’t dropped down much either.
March 15th, 2013 at 6:44 pm
The same day everyone was ecstatic about a new pope being elected, I read that 28 more elephants were slaugtered in Camaroon for their tusks.
March 15th, 2013 at 9:02 pm
CS&N: Helplessly Hoping (about says it all for me)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGtFRsCXRcc
Maybe Hopelessly Helping would be a better title in these time.
March 15th, 2013 at 9:39 pm
The Kahn’s empire was finished in less than 100 years, and started to majorly fall apart after 54 years.
Julius Caesar, had a different battlefield motto which went something like “We grow strong through pity and generosity.” He didn’t behead or humiliate the conquered. He co-opted and integrated them. Caesar’s empire predated The Khans by millenia and didn’t end until the fall of Byzantium, a century after the Mongols kicked it.
I’m just sayin’ scorched earth, total terror and domination are not always the wisest, most effective or best long term strategies for conducting human affairs.
March 16th, 2013 at 1:05 am
Wester
You wrote:
“I’m just sayin’ scorched earth, total terror and domination are not always the wisest, most effective or best long term strategies for conducting human affairs”
Some useful advice there.
However, I have to add, one of the saddest days of my adult life was when, after learning about ‘Collapse’ and ‘Peak Oil’ ideas from the work of Matt Savinar, and having done a fair bit of checking by way of research, I realised that Capitalism has been built on slavery and violence and oppression for a very very long time. It was so difficult to come to terms with, the fact that this way of life enjoyed and even rebelled against, but still accepted, only comes about by exploitation, still now, of hundreds of thousands, and millions of thers.
Your sentiments would seeem to be obvious to any rational, compassionate person, and it is a testament to the efficiency and tenacity of the barbaric machine – our Industrial Civilisation – that most people are not aware of the violence, and world class filth and oppression of so many, just for our comfort. Feeling guilty wont help(not for long anyway)as it brings inaction and childlike complacency.
Your quote:
“Julius Caesar, had a different battlefield motto which went something like “We grow strong through pity and generosity.” He didn’t behead or humiliate the conquered. He co-opted and integrated them. Caesar’s empire predated The Khans by millenia and didn’t end until the fall of Byzantium, a century after the Mongols kicked it.”
When you combine this sentiment with the thorough lesson the French Revolution taught other wealthy classes and elites watching on, what we do have here now is a type of compromise that your example of Julius Caesar shows can work.
In short, let ‘them’ eat a bit of cake. Some comforts and gadgets, will assuage the craving for complete freedom. That will stave off another French Revolution event.
But TPTB are pretty smart so we just do not know who they are now. Once itt was the Monarchy, now who are they?
I don’t personally care, but the rebellion that has come many many many times in the short end ties of sivilisations is having real trouble finding the sctual target, and it will end up. perhaps TPTB watching it all unfold in glorious colour on their wide screens somewhere.
Maybe the Polar regions will be a good place to beging looking?
March 16th, 2013 at 1:08 am
Sorry for typos…
March 16th, 2013 at 2:14 am
Yes, OzMan, the polar regions are a good place to look. Earth is about to release one very big methane fart…in our faces, including TPTB.
March 16th, 2013 at 2:37 am
@ Wester, Ozman
I think you have fallen for Julius Caesar’s self-serving bullshit propaganda, which was no different to Bush, Rumsfeld, et al, you seem to have a peculiar picture of the Romans. Pity and generosity ? They were just like the Nazis ! Goebbels came up with slogans like that. Ask the Carthaginians about Roman pity and generosity. You think Julius Caesar was into pity and generosity ?
But Caesar issued orders that nothing should be done for these civilians and the women and children were left to starve in the no man’s land between the city walls and the circumvallation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia
March 16th, 2013 at 3:16 am
ulvfugl
Of course you are right in the detail there.
I was talking loosly abot te Roman tendency to leave the power structures as tey stood, and superimpose one on top of it, so as to destroy as little as possible and reep as much continual bboty, or ‘tribute’ as the lands would provide. The existings elites in their acquired territoty kept a place better than the slaves and peasant/workers/farmers etc. My comparison with today was on that basis, and I agree, how could one characterise the Roman occupations as lenient. i was merely pointing to the ‘cold efficiency’ as compared to the slash and burn Wester mentioned.
Those were of course broard charaterisations, and that is probably not always true in some times or locations, as you point to.
Point taken.
March 16th, 2013 at 3:18 am
I can smell the methan ‘fart’ already.
March 16th, 2013 at 3:33 am
“Julius Caesar, had a different battlefield motto which went something like “We grow strong through pity and generosity.”
He sounds like a Christian.
http://caesarsmessiah.com/blog/2011/06/flavian-signature-overview/
March 16th, 2013 at 3:37 am
“While man is growing, life is in decrease;
And cradles rock us nearer to the tomb.
Our birth is nothing but our death begun.”
Edward Young
March 16th, 2013 at 3:41 am
On 3/4/2013, Fukushima Diary reported “Fallout level in Fukushima city is in the increasing trend since last December”. [URL]
On 3/13/2013, the fallout level in Fukushima city became the highest since 4/15/2012. (162.5 MBq/Km2)
It keeps increasing for some reason.
http://fukushima-diary.com/2013/03/fallout-level-keeps-on-increasing-the-highest-level-since-last-april/
When the grid goes out 439 Fukushimas, over 100 here in the US – BUT no remediation, no thousands of workers and piles of equipment to keep it contained. The nukes and the spent fuel pools just go. Add that to methane farts, forest fires that no one can put out and I think we don’t have to worry what the way down will look like much any more. It will be nasty, but short.
March 16th, 2013 at 3:44 am
http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/record-methane-in-arctic-early-march-2013.html
March 16th, 2013 at 3:49 am
@ Ozman
Jeez, yes, you’ve bought the propaganda PR alright, it’s always the same, the empire spreading civilisation to enlighten the benighted savages for their own good, right down to Vietnam, and ‘we had to destroy the village to save the village’….
When the TRUTH is, we are into stealing as much of those people’s stuff as we can get away with, and if anybody tries to stop us we kill them, but we can’t say that out loud…
This relates to what dmd said about ‘all farmers wanting more land, not true, they only want the adjoining land’. Imperial expansion is about adjoining land, which is different to piratical raiding, pillaging, robbery, where you don’t expect you’ll be coming back.
It all started with the sorceror John Dee, who told Elizabeth the First that she should make an Empire. That was the germ.
Thing is, the British elite of 17th and 18th C. read about the Roman and Greek history at school, that’s how they learned their imperial administration, how to sell the message, how to trick the natives, how to outwit the local rulers, etc, it’s all there in the ancient classical texts.
This piddling little island with a tiny population of sea faring pirates, conquered most of the planet and built the biggest empire there’s ever been. They defeated the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the Russians, and then they pissed it all away trying to defeat the Germans twice, and then the Americans took it and screwed up the whole thing…
March 16th, 2013 at 3:56 am
@ Sadie
Wow, that’s an oddity I never heard of before, can I try and trump it with something even more bizarre ? the story of how the Vatican invented Islam !
http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2006/04apr/catholicislam.html
March 16th, 2013 at 4:21 am
Hahaha, this story tickles the wicked troll that cohabits with me under my crumbling, rotting bridge, nothing like stirring up the embers… pay attention all you prospective slaves, as the past becomes the future and the future becomes the past…
….when one audience member suggested slaves should have been thankful to their masters for “feeding… and housing” them, earning scattered applause…
http://gawker.com/5990863/conservative-panel-on-the-race-card-turns-to-chaos-after-audience-member-defends-slavery
March 16th, 2013 at 4:36 am
Arctic ice:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/arctic-storm-fractures-sea-ice-130316.htm
March 16th, 2013 at 4:56 am
ulvfugl
Your history is obviously more scholarly than any of mine.
I do recall putting in the phrase, “… reep as much continual booty, or ‘tribute’ as the lands would provide.” That might indicate a wide birth for all that stripping and taking, would it not?
However, I don’t considder this a competition, and do my best to keep it that way.
March 16th, 2013 at 5:10 am
@ Ozman
I would like as many people as possible to be educated, to understand, so that they do not get fooled, so that they do not fall for the lies and the tricks and the propaganda and psyops, but alas, my desire is mostly futile.
Monsanto sells deadly poison and people happily buy it, the banks enslave people with debt, and people happily opt for slavery, people are told that they must lose their freedom, or else they’ll be victims of imaginary terrorists, and they give up their freedom.
” ‘Can you describe this?’
“And I said: ‘I can.’
“Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Akhmatova
March 16th, 2013 at 5:33 am
U It all started with the sorceror John Dee, who told Elizabeth the First that she should make an Empire. That was the germ
Of course, TPTB would never think of having an Empire. Empires never existed without the interventions of specific people planting ideas in their heads. Come on U, the forming of empires is systemic from the beginning of civilization.
March 16th, 2013 at 5:53 am
@ Kathy C.
Yes, like the natural dynamic, from villages, to towns, to cities, or if there’s a good site for a port on a river, or a trade route, all that stuff develops, of course.
But, politically, in terms of the power structure of Britain at the time, when the Spanish and Portuguese were exploring the world, and so forth, Elizabeth 1 had power and control over what happened, over policy. She could say yes or no. Just like Bush could say yes or no. John Dee told her a story that she was the rightful heiress to the ( mythical ) King Arthur, who had once been ruler of the entire world, and she was very taken by the idea, and Dee told her that it gave her the kind of legal and God-given right to re-assert dominion over what was in any case rightfully hers.
Yes, you could argue, hypothetically, she might have got the idea on her own or from somewhere else, or whatever… but that’s what actually happened that set the ball rolling.
I had never heard of this guy Roger Williams :
I had always admired Roger Williams for his belief in religious toleration, which was realized in his Rhode Island colony, a place where all the dissenters and the dissenters from the dissenters could find a home to worship the way they wanted. And I’d admired him for standing as a reminder to certain contemporary zealots that America was a refuge for people who believed there should be a separation between church and state—and that both church and state were better off for it, sentiments that entered into the First Amendment.
But in Bailyn’s account, Williams becomes a great American character as well. Not only was he close to the original inhabitants, he could speak some of their languages and had the humility to recognize he could learn from them.
I told Bailyn what an admirable character his Williams came across as.
“Well, the people at the time didn’t think he was. He was a perfectionist. And no form of Christianity was good enough for him. He started out in the Church of England. He was a very strange man. He was a zealot.
” “But didn’t his zealotry lead to tolerance?”
“It did, but this was not the big issue for him. He was trying to find out the proper form of Christianity. He started with the Church of England and that was full of trouble. Then he became a Baptist and that was no good. He kept taking off all the clothes of organized Christianity till nothing was left. And he ended up in a church of his own with his wife and a few Indians. He’s a zealot who went all the way!”
“But he wasn’t a zealot who persecuted others.”
“No, he was not. That’s why they hated him…he was complicated. He was well educated, he was a gentleman—but he was a nut case! They didn’t know what to do with him. Among his views, first of all, was that you do not seize Indian land. You don’t own it, you don’t take it. And you treat people civilly and there is no purity in any stage of Christianity, hence toleration.”
“What’s nutty about that?” I asked
“You don’t live in the 17th century.”
“So you’re not saying he’s a nut case from the perspective of the 21st century?”
“No, certainly not. He became properly famous for all this—later. At the time people hated him. Because he was breaking up the unity of Christianity. One of his contemporaries had a wonderful phrase for him. Namely, he is ‘unlamb-like.’ No lamb, this guy. He sure wasn’t. But he got close to the Indians, knew them well, lived with them.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Shocking-Savagery-of-Americas-Early-History-192122641.html?c=y&story=fullstory
March 16th, 2013 at 6:16 am
@ Kathy C.
Although there may be the general tendency historically, towards empire, or complexity, other patterns that we can discern, they are not inevitable are they, they can be over-ridden.
At the same time that the British and other Europeans were thinking about their hegemonic ambitions, the Chinese made a policy decision NOT to have an empire.
They could easily have done what the Spanish or Dutch or Portuguese did. I suppose you could argue they already had a vast land empire, so they didn’t need to extend themselves to overseas colonies, perhaps. But look at their superior technology.
http://www.slightlywarped.com/crapfactory/curiosities/2013/january/images/20-History.jpg
March 16th, 2013 at 6:23 am
B9K9 Says:
March 15th, 2013 at 8:56 am
@Ripley “Why was there no evidence of this energy growth or of any significant population growth until the beginning of agriculture 6000yrs ago rather than earlier? Big brained humans have been around for at least 100,000yrs. Homo Erectus was around for nearly 1 million yrs, yet no sign of energy growth/entropy, why not?”
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Al Bartlett
Ripley, I am positive you well understand exponential growth. The thing is, it applies to ALL physical manifestations, whether energy or matter.
The reason we don’t have any evidence of emerging entropy/energy usage until only a very short time ago is because we hairless apes were still on the flat (starting) side of the curve.
This curve is how I govern my life’s expectations.
Look, these discussions are all fine & dandy, but ultimately a waste of time.
—————–
B9K9, if you put your curve on an axis that begins 200,000 to 100,000 years ago when big brained Homo Sapiens began, it starts to look like a wall about a mile long rather than any normal exponential curve. This means that some interesting things must have been going on during all that flat time to prevent the curve from starting. That is something any truly curious person would want to look into. As are the questions of what caused agriculture and industrialism to start, since they are the factors that caused the curve. This is especially interesting when we consider the fact that Homo Erectus and countless other human and nonhuman species failed to govern their life expectations according to your plan, and did not go exponential and destroy their environments. Human history also starts to look interestingly exceptional with so many other species failing to show any respect for the universal imperatives of the energy/entropy usage curve. Sorry, but one of truly enjoyable ways I like to spend my time is questioning people who believe they have all the answers.
March 16th, 2013 at 6:36 am
@ Ripley
Sorry, but one of truly enjoyable ways I like to spend my time is questioning people who believe they have all the answers.
There was a whole continent, Sondaland, that was never effected by the last glaciation, inhabited by folk at least as intelligent as us for tens of thousands of years, and then the sea rose and most of it is now submerged. One wacky idea is that some of those people had advanced civilisation of some sort and some of them left and founded Sumeria. The origin story of Sumer tells of such people, Oannes, etc. It’s possible there’s still a lot we do not know.
March 16th, 2013 at 6:45 am
Sorry, typo, Sundaland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland
March 16th, 2013 at 7:54 am
It’s possible there’s still a lot we do not know.
Wow, really? Ya think? I thought you guys had it all figured out.
March 16th, 2013 at 7:59 am
@ wildwoman
At least some of us try. You argue for ignorance as a virtue, insisting that the only priority is to bring down civilisation but you never explain how that can be done.
March 16th, 2013 at 8:04 am
Ripley “That is something any truly curious person would want to look into. As are the questions of what caused agriculture and industrialism to start, since they are the factors that caused the curve…B9K9, if you put your curve on an axis that begins 200,000 to 100,000 years ago when big brained Homo Sapiens began, it starts to look like a wall about a mile long rather than any normal exponential curve. ”
Craig Dilworth in Too Smart for our Own Good, proposes the theory of the vicious circle as a process that got started when we got language and tools. Each round goes one step higher.
While the rise of industrialism looks quite steep, so does the rise of computing power and what uses computers can be put too. It would seem that certain critial inventions have the power to ramp “Progress” up exponentially and beyond. Of course remember that when using the exponential doubling on something like filling a stadium with water by doubling each hour. The second last hour is 1/2 full, the last hour is full. The last part of an exponential rise does in fact can look like a straight wall depending on how you set your scale. I think we are in the last hour of human exponential growth.
At any rate the change in climate with the onset of the Holocene and its stable weather certainly is a factor in why agriculture took off when it did. The invention of the steam engine combined with the discovery of large oil deposits is the main factor in the industrial revolution, and the invention of the first computer to where we are today in the “information revolution” took off even faster.
A short explanation of Dilworth’s theory here http://candobetter.net/node/2755 for those who don’t want to plow through his tediously documented book.
I dabble in alien theories etc from time to time for entertainment, but I think you don’t need those to explain where we are at today
March 16th, 2013 at 8:06 am
On a Richter Scale of Fascism, USA about 7 or 8 ?
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/james-steele-americas-point-man-in-fomenting-sectarian-violence-and-torture-in-iraq.html#comments
March 16th, 2013 at 8:13 am
The term empire derives from the Latin imperium (power, authority). Politically, an empire is a geographically extensive group of states and peoples (ethnic groups) united and ruled either by a monarch (emperor, empress) or an oligarchy.
U – looks to me like they never stopped having an empire once they started.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#Imperial_era
3 Imperial China
3.1 Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC)
3.2 Han Dynasty (202 BC–AD 220)
3.2.1 Western Han
3.2.2 Xin Dynasty
3.2.3 Eastern Han
3.3 Wei and Jin Period (AD 265–420)
3.4 Wu Hu Period (AD 304–439)
3.5 Southern and Northern Dynasties (AD 420–589)
3.6 Sui Dynasty (AD 589–618)
3.7 Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907)
3.8 Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (AD 907–960)
3.9 Song, Liao, Jin, and Western Xia Dynasties (AD 960–1234)
3.10 Yuan Dynasty (AD 1271–1368)
3.11 Ming Dynasty (AD 1368–1644)
3.12 Qing Dynasty (AD 1644–1911)
March 16th, 2013 at 8:18 am
@ Kathy C.
I have never dabbled in the alien theories, but the Oannes story is very curious and suggestive of somethingalthough I don’t know what… a bit like the Aztecs were expecting white people in ships, when the Spaniards arrived, weren’t they, because they had a story that foretold such an event ?
“At first they led a somewhat wretched existence and lived without rule after the manner of beasts. But, in the first year appeared an animal endowed with human reason, named Oannes, who rose from out of the Erythian Sea, at the point where it borders Babylonia. He had the whole body of a fish, but above his fish’s head he had another head which was that of a man, and human feet emerged from beneath his fish’s tail. He had a human voice, and an image of him is preserved unto this day. He passed the day in the midst of men without taking food; he taught them the use of letters, sciences and arts of all kinds. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed them how to collect the fruits; in short he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften human manners and humanize their laws. From that time nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. And when the sun set, this being Oannes, retired again into the sea, for he was amphibious. After this there appeared other animals like Oannes.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adapa
If that was all somebody’s imaginary invention, then it’s a good tale, but then you look at Gobekli Tepe, which is REAL, and even weirder than anybody could ever imagine !
And that’s, as of what we know now, the key axial point, between the ending of what Ripley calls ‘the wall a mile long’, and where the curve starts slowly upwards.
March 16th, 2013 at 8:38 am
@ Kathy C.
I did say, they already had a land based empire. What i meant, as distinct from the kind of empire stretched around the globe, like the British established, using ships.
The Chinese had the ships, set out on a voyage of exploration, just like the Dutch, the Spanish, the French, the British, the Portuguese, and others, but they made a political decision, that they did not want to establish overseas colonies. It’s obvious that they could have done, if they had made a different decision, they were very advanced in their technology.
Remember, in those days, it was something similar to travelling to the Moon or Mars is now. Most of the planet was blank, unmapped, unknown, nobody really knew what was out there.
I don’t know the reasoning why China didn’t become a naval maritime power. It probably was because they already had a huge land empire, whereas the only way for the British to expand was by colonies. They took over India. At the start, when they arrived, Britain was very poor, India very rich. After two centuries, that situation was reversed. The mechanism used was the first corporation, the East India Company.
The same trick that America has used to exploit most of the planet, the power of the corporation. Trouble is, they grew up and ate their parent. They became trans-national. Instead of serving the interests of the country, the country is now controlled by the corporations, which have no interest in caring what happens to any country, anymore than the East India Co cared what happened to India.
March 16th, 2013 at 8:56 am
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2013/03/people-arent-smart-enough-for-democracy.html
March 16th, 2013 at 9:12 am
“Ah, denial. You see it all the time in the cancer wards, where patients vow to give it their all in the good fight. Of course, by the time their puny efforts come to naught, they’ve already been removed from public view as nature takes its inevitable course.”
B9K9 (you smug-sounding #$%^&*!),
Do you have a better idea for those of us trying to deal with cancer? If you’ve ever been intimately involoved in the process, you would know that patients are rarely offered good/pleasant/easy choices. I would’t wish the horror of cancer on anyone…hopefully you can find an better, less “puny” way to cultivate compassion and true wisdom.
March 16th, 2013 at 9:22 am
Couple of questions about the thesis that humans ‘inevitably destroy their environment and kill off the easy meat’…
Killing off all the mammoths would be the palaeolithic version of burning all the oil, according to LMEP theory
But, in Africa, humans have coexisted with large megafauna longer than anywhere else, and they are still there…
And, if the ending of the Ice Age was the trigger for civilisation, but, Sundaland always had its Holocene, so to speak, it never stopped being Holocene… why didn’t they wreck their ecology / develop civilisation – or perhaps they did, and we just don’t know because it’s all far beneath the waves…
March 16th, 2013 at 9:48 am
Well, see, here we are again trying to figure out where we went wrong when, as we discovered in the last post – it’s hardwired into our make-up via physics. It seems that “civilization” was a long series of mistakes (we took to be progress at the time) with little to no thought for consequences (except by the few thinkers who were shouted down or ignored) all along our “evolution” into tribes, small groups, clans, larger families, trading posts, city-states, colonies, countries and finally empires (which many ethnic groups took a crack at but nobody could sustain).
i always learn a lot in the conversations though.
March 16th, 2013 at 9:56 am
…large megafauna still there…??
The whales are still there, too. So are buffalo. The question is, what percentage of the original percentage remains? And the answer is, only a very, very tiny fraction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction#Ongoing_Holocene_extinction
Modern extinctions are more directly attributable to human influences. Extinction rates are minimized in the popular imagination by the survival of captive populations of animals that are extinct in the wild (Père David’s Deer, etc.), by marginal survivals of highly publicized megafauna that are ecologically extinct (the Giant Panda, Sumatran Rhinoceros, North American Black-Footed Ferret, etc.) and by extinctions among arthropods. Some examples of modern extinctions of “charismatic” mammal fauna include:
Aurochs, Europe
Tarpan, Europe
Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger, Thylacinus cynocephalus, Tasmania
Quagga, a zebra subspecies, Southeast Africa
Steller’s Sea Cow
Bluebuck
Pyrenean Ibex
Falkland Islands Wolf
Atlas Bear
Caribbean Monk Seal
The closely related Bali Tiger and Javan Tiger
Eastern Cougar[9]
Western Black Rhinoceros
March 16th, 2013 at 10:06 am
Kathy C-
Craig Dilworth in Too Smart for our Own Good, proposes the theory of the vicious circle as a process that got started when we got language and tools. Each round goes one step higher.
Yes, that book sounds interesting and certainly seems more relevant than entropy curves. I wonder what he said about H Erectus who had tools, fire and probably language but never went to the next step–agriculture. The agricultural stage and how and why it happened is incredibly interesting. Climate stability is thought to be a major cause, but after all that time, the question is–why bother with agriculture at all? Another interesting thing to look at is the way the industrial way of life essentially started in a single place and then conquered other ways of life as a force from outside. Could this have been the way agriculture also spread, through conquest? As you can tell, I like to play around with all this, and should probably start taking some classes, even though I know even the so called experts don’t have all the answers.
Dilworth—Humans’ development of technology distinguishes us from other life forms. It is what has made us the only species whose population has constantly grown from its inception. Not only has our population constantly grown, the rate at which it has grown has constantly increased: human population growth has always been accelerating.
The technological toolkit and population of pre-agricultural humans was fairly stable from what I have read, and it was only after agriculture and especially industrialism that we had the enormous acceleration in population, so I would like to see his evidence. The first 190,000 years of human population growth could hardly be described with the term “accelerating”, though that term certainly applies to the last 100-200 years. The term “constant growth” seems to fit well with the agriculture of period 6000-200 years ago. It’s that pesky period before agriculture, along with the persistence of hunter-gathers cultures with stable populations even to the present day, that continues to defy easy explanation.
ulvfugl Says:
March 16th, 2013 at 9:22 am
Couple of questions about the thesis that humans ‘inevitably destroy their environment and kill off the easy meat’…
Killing off all the mammoths would be the palaeolithic version of burning all the oil, according to LMEP theory
But, in Africa, humans have coexisted with large mega-fauna longer than anywhere else, and they are still there…
And, if the ending of the Ice Age was the trigger for civilization, but, Sundaland always had its Holocene, so to speak, it never stopped being Holocene… why didn’t they wreck their ecology / develop civilization – or perhaps they did, and we just don’t know because it’s all far beneath the waves…
———————
More excellent questions, that don’t fit the theories of total and inevitable destruction.
March 16th, 2013 at 10:13 am
@ Gail
You don’t get it. I mean AFRICA. Where humans evolved. Last 2 million years or so, depending how you want to define human, but they had stone weapons even longer than that, right up to historical times. Humans and megafauna. And the megafauna are STILL THERE.
I’m not talking about anywhere else.
March 16th, 2013 at 10:29 am
That link includes Africa.
Ripley, exponential growth looks like no growth for a very, very long time before the lines diverge and it takes off straight up.
March 16th, 2013 at 10:34 am
@ Ripley
…should probably start taking some classes, even though I know even the so called experts don’t have all the answers.
Far more likely to get good up to date info online, I’d say. Ask on the anthropology forums and blogs. Most books and most academics who got their education years ago are out of date, unless they are really top notch, and where are you going to get a class like that unless you are lucky and rich and in the right location ?
There’s a whole lot of theories, but they can’t be tested, that’s the trouble.
March 16th, 2013 at 10:35 am
Can anybody please explain if/how, as a practical matter, the new worldview from revised thermodynamics differs from hard determism? TIA.
March 16th, 2013 at 10:38 am
@ Gail
Exactly ! That link includes Africa where there have not BEEN any extinctions over the last 2 million years because of the humans, have there, so your thesis must be WRONG, or else you have to explain that anomaly somehow.
March 16th, 2013 at 10:42 am
@ Gail
…exponential growth looks like no growth for a very, very long time before the lines diverge and it takes off straight up.
Or it may not be exponential growth, it may be that there is no growth, and then some factor impinges upon the situation which causes it to change and then growth occurs.
You may be mistaking the flat period for what you think is the early part of your exponential growth, when in fact it is something different.
March 16th, 2013 at 12:10 pm
@Tom, @wildwoman
Sorry for the delay in responding to your posts regarding Ponty, Di Meola and Clarke in the last thread. I’ve been outside tending to my wood pile and enjoying the thirty degree temperatures. I found some Snow Drops – Galanthus nivalis poking up through the ground in the woody plant section of my garden. The fresh air has been great man. Y’all ought to get out there and enjoy it.
March 16th, 2013 at 12:34 pm
http://shar.es/e6Rx7
The Arctic region of our planet acts as a climatic air conditioner, and the air conditioner is conking out.
We have a problem, Houston.
Over the last several weeks, massive cracks have appeared in the ice that connects the Beaufort Gyre region to Alaska. As a result of last summer’s record sea ice-loss, the winter ‘refreezing’ process went dismally and the surface area and thickness never recovered. The situation is frightening with the beginning of the 2013 melt season only a few weeks away.
Turns out those cracks are appearing 51 days earlier than they did last year. That’s a staggering revelation and a game-changer (not a good one) as we approach the 2013 melt season.
March 16th, 2013 at 12:44 pm
Winter wheat conditions at the end of February 2013 are not as favorable as they were last year for the Plains states that provide data about current crop conditions.
Nebraska’s winter wheat crop, for example, has 50 percent rated poor to very poor and only 12 percent rated good to excellent. A year ago, only 6 percent of the State’s crop rated poor to very poor and 65 percent was rated good to excellent.
Winter wheat conditions are also worse this year than last in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Kansas, and Texas at the end of February 2013. In Oklahoma, 54 percent of the winter wheat is rated poor to very poor while only 9 percent is rated good to excellent
rest at http://www.cattlenetwork.com/cattle-news/USDA-Winter-wheat-conditions-mixed-197469261.html?ref=261
March 16th, 2013 at 12:45 pm
ogarndener – 30 degrees hmmm – 78 here in Alabama. Getting ready to plant yellow squash.
March 16th, 2013 at 12:56 pm
Here is the difference in Africa re mega fauna “Biologists note that comparable extinctions have not occurred in Africa and South or Southeast Asia, where the fauna evolved with hominids. ” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event
The megafauna of Europe, Australia, the New World evolved before weapon bearing humans arrived. The megafauna of Africa co-evolved with humans as they began to hunt with weapons. Thus they were not blindsided by these puny little animals with big pointy sticks.
Whenever a species with an edge moves into a new environ it doesn’t have population controls at least at first. Called invasive species they often take over for a while. Think of Kudzu here in the south. Sometimes they bring themselves back in control after doing damage to their environs – the first Australians did just that.
March 16th, 2013 at 12:57 pm
ogardner: on the days (in the roller coaster of late) that it’s in the 50′s (yes in January and February) i’ve begun the spring clean-up of raking out the beds, finding all my gardening stuff (we moved my son out to CA and stored stuff in our garage til Craig’s list disposed of them for a little $ toward the move – so all my g-stuff got moved all over) and i’ve already planted kale. Lucky you! Thanks for gettin’ back but i never expect anything when i post – it’s just my opinion and i don’t expect anyone to give a shit.
Brunswickian: funny you should use that term (We have a problem, Houston.) i was doing the dishes while my son was glued to the tv (March madness) and he said he had to leave. i was tired of the droning on of the college sports cast and flipped the channel to put something else on while i was cleanin’ up and i hit Apollo 13. i sat down and watched the whole thing. Now, granted it’s Hollywood and glamorized, but the problems and solutions were well depicted.
Now, of course, we have the Artic ice loss and results like this blooming all over:
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/new-zealand-suffers-through-worst-drought-in-30-years/
New Zealand suffers through worst drought in 30 years; more locust swarms reported in Middle East
March 16, 2013 – NEW ZEALAND – Authorities in Wellington, New Zealand, have issued an outright ban on outdoor water use as a worsening drought has siphoned the available supply to less than half of normal level and prompted the government to declare the worst water shortage in 30 years. New Zealand’s capital, home to more than 200,000 people, has just 19 days’ supply of water left in its reservoirs, the APNZ news service reported. “The water supply situation is now approaching extreme,” the Greater Wellington Regional Council said in a statement on its website, adding that it is also asking residents to cut indoor water use “to help us avoid a crisis.” Wellington hasn’t seen a significant rain since Feb. 4, and while a storm is forecast for this weekend, it will have no real impact on the water supply, authorities said. All of the North Island, which holds most of the country’s population, has been declared a drought zone.
(and a little further down)
Locust swarms continue to plague Middle East:
The Ministry of Agriculture is tracking another locust swarm arriving at Israel from the Sinai Peninsula. In addition, a small swarm was spotted at Nahal Lavan in the Negev. The Agriculture Ministry said in a statement, “We will be seeing locust on a daily basis in the foreseeable future but gladly we have the situation under control due to readiness and hard work.” [Sounds confident, doesn't he?]
March 16th, 2013 at 1:01 pm
Denise, yes that is why I did Hospice Volunteering for many years – to give those people who aren’t in denial a way to make it through their last days with as much ease as possible. Sometimes the family makes it hard because they stay in denial even when the one who is dying is not.
March 16th, 2013 at 1:09 pm
of course extinction could come all at once outta left field:
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/03/warnind-possible-killshot-incoming-very-large-cme-blast-headed-this-way-now-nasa-warnings-in-effect-friday-15th-march-2013-2594044.html
Warning Possible Kill Shot Incoming?! Very Large CME Blast Headed This Way Now! NASA Warnings In Effect! Friday 15th March 2013
Warning Possible Killshot Incoming! That’s a headline that might be troublesome to the world one day. Fortunately that is not the case today. There is a large CME blast headed our way. And it will affect satellites and space telescopes, possibly even radio and TV broadcast but it should not be a problem for those of us here on Earth. The flare is only an M class flare, not the more powerful X class flare that could cause power problems on Earth beyond interfering with radio and TV broadcasts as some M class flares can. So while we are not likely to experience power outages, it is a reminder of the power of the Sun and to be prepared.
(Get it? Be prepared?! HA! How do you prepare for extinction?)
March 16th, 2013 at 1:11 pm
U did say, they already had a land based empire. What i meant, as distinct from the kind of empire stretched around the globe, like the British established, using ships.
Well of course the fact that England went round the globe might have more to do with the fact that they were and island than the words of a sorcerer. The US spent quite a while moving inland before they started going to spread their empire over the ocean, because they had a rather big inland.
March 16th, 2013 at 1:55 pm
Phoenix and the 5 horsemen -
http://truth-out.org/news/item/15126-phoenix-in-the-climate-crosshairs-we-are-long-past-coal-mine-canaries
March 16th, 2013 at 2:38 pm
@Ripley Why was there no evidence of this energy growth or of any significant population growth until the beginning of agriculture 6000yrs ago rather than earlier?
Ripley et al., I think what you might be overlooking as an resource input is the mining of the soil. While—with very careful husbandry—soil resources can be replenished and maintained (China’s “Farmers of Forty Centuries”) that has not generally been how they’ve been handled (see the recent book, “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations”).
H/G culture remained in equilibrium as long as H/Gs took from among the plants and animals available on the earth’s surface. Once agricultural techniques were developed, they really weren’t that different from those of fossil-fuel exploitation: you’re robbing past deposits of resources. Worse, you are robbing precisely those which are most needed for future survival of your ag. civ.
A huge amount of the organic matter is robbed from topsoil every single time a farmer plows a field, not just through erosion but through oxidation. Like the burning of fossil fuels, this releases carbon into the air, if I’m not mistaken.
So really we’ve been carbon-mining (inefficiently) both through agriculture AND fossil-fuel use. That’s why the human population exponential growth curve starts w/agriculture, not before, and not at the initial point of fossil-fuel exploitation on a large scale.
That’s how I see it, anyway…
March 16th, 2013 at 2:59 pm
I don’t know where everyone gets the idea that global population growth is on an exponential trend. It’s been linear for the last 40 years (~77 million/year). The growth rate has dropped by half – from 2.1% to 1.1% – in that time.
It’s as though our population curve is trying to top out a sigmoid curve, as population curves tend to do. Our intelligence has caused other environmental problems in the meantime though, and Mother Nature has arrived a bit too late with the sigmoidoscope.
March 16th, 2013 at 3:03 pm
@Lidia
I date the beginning of the exponential where you do as well. Humanity has been unsustainable essentially since the end of the last glacial period – i.e. since about the moment global climate conditions permitted.
March 16th, 2013 at 3:47 pm
@Kathy said: “When the grid goes out 439 Fukushimas, over 100 here in the US – BUT no remediation, no thousands of workers and piles of equipment to keep it contained. The nukes and the spent fuel pools just go. Add that to methane farts, forest fires that no one can put out and I think we don’t have to worry what the way down will look like much any more. It will be nasty, but short.”
What, if anything, will survive? Bacteria? And what’s the probability of this happening in the next 30 years?
March 16th, 2013 at 3:48 pm
@ Gail, Kathy C.
Here is the difference in Africa re mega fauna “Biologists note that comparable extinctions have not occurred in Africa and South or Southeast Asia, where the fauna evolved with hominids. ” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event
The megafauna of Europe, Australia, the New World evolved before weapon bearing humans arrived. The megafauna of Africa co-evolved with humans as they began to hunt with weapons. Thus they were not blindsided by these puny little animals with big pointy sticks.
Whenever a species with an edge moves into a new environ it doesn’t have population controls at least at first. Called invasive species they often take over for a while. Think of Kudzu here in the south. Sometimes they bring themselves back in control after doing damage to their environs – the first Australians did just that.
Gail’s hypothesis is that humans invariably destroy their environment and kill all the animals. Hominids have been in Africa longer than anywhere else on Earth. They did not destroy their environment or eradicate the megafauna.
This argument, that co-evolution is the explanation, is a possible explanation, as is the invasive species argument. Not very convincing. The megafauna on the other continents were so dumb, they didn’t notice and learn, over thousands of years and thousands of generations, that the animals with pointy sticks hunted and killed them ?
Still leaves the question as to why the megafauna in Africa survived. What does ‘co-evolved’ mean ? Everything on the planet has co-evolved, Africa is a vast continent with immense diversity. Why didn’t the people hunt the big lumps of meat they found until there were none left ? That’s what Gail’s hypothesis says should have happened, with a corresponding increase in human population, as I understand it.
March 16th, 2013 at 4:04 pm
I said…exponential growth looks like no growth for a very, very long time before the lines diverge and it takes off straight up.
U said: Or it may not be exponential growth, it may be that there is no growth, and then some factor impinges upon the situation which causes it to change and then growth occurs.
You may be mistaking the flat period for what you think is the early part of your exponential growth, when in fact it is something different.
I’m not mistaking anything for anything. I simply stated a fact which explains why it seems that growth wasn’t happening for a long time and then took off seemingly suddenly. Please look at the chart on this page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth
and you will plainly see that the exponential line (green) looks flat for a longer time than the linear (red) line or the cubic growth (blue) line.
March 16th, 2013 at 4:12 pm
@ Gail
I know what exponential growth looks like.
For hundreds of thousands of years, as Ripley said, human population is a flat line.
Then it starts to climb. That climb may not have anything to do with an inherent ‘exponential growth’.
March 16th, 2013 at 4:21 pm
In Origin Of Species, The Struggle For Existence, Darwin introduces his views on exponential growth, subsequently demonstrated to apply to all organisms on Earth (pages 117-119):
“There is no exception to the rule that every organic being increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny. Linnaeus has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds — and there is no plant so unproductive as this — and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there would be a million plants. The elephant is reckoned to be the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase: it will be under the mark to assume that it breeds when thirty years old, and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth three pairs of young in this interval; if this be so, at the end of the fifth century there would be alive fifteen million elephants, descended from the first pair.”
March 16th, 2013 at 4:45 pm
Okay, thanks, Guy. Albert Bartlett.
http://youtu.be/e_VpyoAXpA8
March 16th, 2013 at 4:51 pm
The climb begins, as I understand it, with the retreat of the glaciers, with the beginnings of agriculture and domestication of animals, with the first cities, the first hierarchical soceities. Doesn’t mean those are the cause, there may be only a correlation. And then keeps on climbing. Afaik, the main factor is decreased infant and maternal mortality during childbirth, and decreased infant mortality during the first few years.
March 16th, 2013 at 6:10 pm
Eustace Conway, 51, has been called “The Last American Man.” He left his suburban upbringing and literally walked out into the Appalachian Mountains, where he has lived for 30 years. In that time, he’s faced down wild animals and entitled children. But the proprietor of Turtle Island may have finally met his match in the form of red tape.
That’s because, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the Watauga County planning department has created a 78-page report detailing the various health and sanitary violations at Conway’s nature paradise.
“These buildings aren’t fit for public use,” Joseph A. Furman, county planning director, tells the WSJ, describing toilets made of sawdust and open-air kitchen facilities.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/last-american-man-facing-shutdown-north-carolina-government-220152568.html
March 16th, 2013 at 6:45 pm
Permafrost: The Tipping Time Bomb
http://youtu.be/FLCgybStZ4g
March 16th, 2013 at 6:56 pm
U What does ‘co-evolved’ mean ? Everything on the planet has co-evolved,
No everything has not co-evolved – co-evolution is about evolving together in time and space. Kangaroos did not co-evolve with Buffalo – they evolved on different continents. Dinosaurs did not co-evolve with humans, they died out before humans evolved. Here is some reading on what co-evolution means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coevolution
The lack of co-evolution between species can mean in the case of game animals that they never developed a fear of a certain predator, or behavior or characteristics needed to avoid that predator.
From wiki on the Dodo “Like many animals that evolved in isolation from significant predators, the Dodo was entirely fearless of humans.”
In other words the dodo did NOT co-evolve with humans and thus when they arrived as an invasive species, the dodos became extinct.
Or this, people in Africa co-evolved with malaria and thus many carry the sickle cell anemia gene, which protects them. Europeans didn’t have this mutation and thus were far more susceptible to malaria.
March 16th, 2013 at 7:02 pm
cuntagious I don’t know the probability of the grid collapsing in the next 30 years. Richard Duncan in his Olduvai theory puts it at about 2030 from effects of Peak Oil (lack of fuel, infrastructure decay) http://www.hubbertpeak.com/duncan/olduvaitheorysocialcontract.pdf
A solar flare like the 1859 Carrington Event could also do the job as could an EMP attack as part of a war. Well of course a full out nuclear war would bring down the grid and everything. An EMP detonation in the atmosphere would leave structures intact but wipe out the grid and electronics including most cars.
March 16th, 2013 at 9:56 pm
Re Population increase…
Virtually no one has looked at the prospect that humans may have wanted an increase in numbers.
Some here write of humans back then as barely sentient, like rabbits(sorry bunnys) who have no breeding decision making.
Or like locusts, boom and bust.
The clear good question is why would Hunter Gatherers want to change things so as to increase their population?
I have a few questions and points.
Can we now say with any certainty that H/G life was not all we may have wanted? Was it enough? Did someone wize enough come along and reason that the way it was was too dicey, too unstable, and to increasenumbers was just about the only way to be certain they would not go under? (Now we have the reverse problem, too many makes it pretty certain we will go under, or near abouts.)
Had not the African diaspora changed the status quo regarding speciation(trended toward but never quite achieved by us), or divergent phenotypes. Was this enough to get the ball rolling to call some group ‘them’ or ‘other’.
I find it difficult to accept on face value that during the African diaspora H/G groups did not originally have successful kinship relations and customs for getting on. If that is so, something must have changed that.
The classic archaeological and anthropological argument for aggriculture is the groups between the Tigris and Euphraties rivers enjoyed so much abundant rains for a long period they ‘stayed put’, and all came from there.
This has some clear merit as an explaination, but if one also considers that population levels may have also steadily climed in the region such that there were fewer vacated ranges where groups may have previously moved.
I think the ‘explaination’ has to be a combination of critical factors, one of which has to be our intellegence in the field, or ‘situational awareness’ to borrow from ‘war talk’.
We may have just got to a stage where it was obvious we could not go on moving around and getting too close to the range of neighboring groups.
If this is so, the success of our breeding dynamics is responsible, for as the population tide slowly rises in a region, and the diaspora from Africa takes effect, the ‘racial’ speciation dynamics creates less kinship, and intensive living challenges us to modify our ‘being’ human.
I wont attempt a complete answer here, but several of the major inputs IMO are sexual success in conception all year round, (not very usual in the remainder of animal life), giving rise to either intentional or unintentional higher birth rate which even if still very low, over long periods of time can increase overall numbers.
The African diaspora may have been forced on a robust grouping which responded to searching for food. So climate change could account for the movement to other ranges, and the beginning of speciation.
In closing I suspect the fertility cults were specifically designed to bring an increase in numbers of adults, or at the very least to produce more babies so a few more could get to adulthood.
We may never know, but I do not really get much out of saying we are a failed lifeform – that is putting too much Anthropocentric baggage on any lifeform. We have some HUGE problems to deal with, some VERY huge ones coming down the pipeline, but we are not failed until we cannot breed to the next generation.
See if that comes on board soon with kathy C’s 439 Fukes going Nova after an EMP from the Sun, (‘Giver of Life’ to many ancients).
March 16th, 2013 at 10:06 pm
Ripley, Could this have been the way agriculture also spread, through conquest?
Quite some time ago I referenced in this space a book that offered an opinion as to why agriculture sprung up around the globe, seemingly at the same time and all at higher elevations. The book, titled “When the Sky Fell” by Rose and Rand Flem-Ath, uses the myths of flood and deluge common to almost all ancient religions, as well as the legends surrounding the city of Atlantis, to explore the concept of Earth crust displacement.
The authors posit that Atlantis was a real place which existed on the continent that we now call Antarctica. Prior to the Earth’s most recent crust shift roughly 10,000-12,000 years ago, they explain that continent was in a more temperate region. When the crust shifted and thrust the continent to the south pole, the people who lived there spread outward from Antarctica to the lands closest to them: the tip of South America and the southern tip of Africa.
The Flem-Aths propose that the Atlantans were quite advanced compared to the rest of the humans on Earth at the time and possessed the knowledge of monolithic building techniques, sailing ships which could travel long distances over the sea, and were the first ones to use agriculture. When their world was turned upside down, the survivors took their knowledge with them to the all corners of the world. They feel that explains why agriculture appears at the same time in so many different places, but all at high elevations: the Atlantans were afraid of dying in the floods that happened “when the sky fell” so they kept to the high ground.
I have no idea how the Flem-Ath’s work holds up against scholarly evidence, but they make a compelling argument. Unfortunately, this doesn’t explain the origin of agriculture, but it does narrow the scope to one ancient, advanced culture and explains rather neatly how agriculture appeared so quickly in multiple areas separated by thousands of miles of ocean.
March 16th, 2013 at 10:50 pm
@Paul re. linear pop. growth: I suspect the 40-year mark might be the point that exploited per-capita energy stopped growing. I know that it was the point of US peak oil. Otherwise, just an instinctual WAG.
OzMan’s propositions are too complex for my tastes. Too much agency, and I think too much anthropocentrism although he is commendably trying to steer clear of that. The talk of the failure of the human species is somewhat loaded; haven’t most species failed? It’s not clear what the collective prize is for winning the species longevity game since there can never be a winner who comes out alive, can there? Hence I think we should consider abandoning value-laden teleologies, difficult as that may be.
Thermodynamic determinism makes a huge amount of sense, as I can watch it taking place in my own life despite attempts to get things to go otherwise. I think I mentioned having noted years ago how human organizing activity actually created a huge amount of disorder at a material level: using oil molecules from Saudi Arabia to move banana molecules to NYC, etc.
March 16th, 2013 at 11:43 pm
@ TRDH
I have no idea how the Flem-Ath’s work holds up against scholarly evidence,
I think they would treat it with derision, the Antarctic ice is very much older than 10 – 12,000 years, the continent has been where it is very much longer than that…
But it could have been Sundaland ? There are stories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumari_Kandam
March 17th, 2013 at 1:31 am
In Origin Of Species, The Struggle For Existence, Darwin introduces his views on exponential growth, subsequently demonstrated to apply to all organisms on Earth:
“There is no exception to the rule that every organic being increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny.
——-
I feel like the cowardly lion confronting the Wizard of Oz, but I could not find any evidence for that 25 year doubling rate. Britain was doubling at about a 50 year rate at that time (1860), and it was certainly one of the few places that was growing that fast. World pop was about 1.2 billion at the time, if you double that every 25 years you get 80 billion today. And did Darwin even know that the human fossil record extends back 200k yrs for H. Sap and 2-5 million for other human types? H-Gatherers certainly couldn’t have been doubling like that for all those years. This cannot explain the very slow pre-agricultural rate of growth. What would world population look like today if there had been no agricultural or industrial revolutions?
March 17th, 2013 at 2:05 am
@ Ripley
It’s a POTENTIAL. It’s Platonic Idealism. It works in a piece of paper, with numbers.
What happens on the ground, in reality, is something completely different. That’s because there are constraints.
If all the progeny from one pair of house flies survived, at the end of one summer, the entire planet would be covered in house flies to a depth of 45ft.
It isn’t. So the question is, why not ? Because lots of things like to eat house flies. Birds, for instance. That’s one constraint on the fly population. But as Guy, and Darwin, and Bartlett, pointed out, the potential, the pressure, is always there, hiding in the arithmetic.
So, something seems to have taken away a limiting factor on human numbers, around 12000 BCE, in the Middle East, very roughly. There’s a lot of different suggestions. And then there’s been other more recent removals of limiting factors, that we can understand much more easily.
Is that right ?
March 17th, 2013 at 2:33 am
Yes, that sounds right. I realize Darwin is talking about a petri dish situation in the first sentence, and term “if not destroyed” means without limiting factors. Yes, I see how it applies to out situation. So far I haven’t found much help on the question of why agriculture began at all, esp from people like Jared Diamond who make a convincing case that it was really dumb idea. Life was worse for early farmers than it was for H-Gaths.
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
March 17th, 2013 at 2:40 am
@ Benjamin the Donkey
Can anybody please explain if/how, as a practical matter, the new worldview from revised thermodynamics differs from hard determism? TIA.
That’s a very hard question. Perhaps it redefines our circumstance as the hardest determinism so far. Not even a deity to intercede. Basically, I can’t answer your clever question
I think there’s still lots of wiggle room. We don’t know enough about the Universe to say, conclusively, that the Laws of Thermodynamics are the final answers, even though they are about as solid as science gets.
And we don’t know how the recent application of the ideas of LMEP and evolution work out, because there’s only been Swenson and a few others thinking in that area, and this recent discussion here, that I’m aware of, there’s maybe other relevant work, there’s maybe stuff we’ve missed, I’d say plenty of wiggle room left…
March 17th, 2013 at 3:06 am
@ Ripley
Yes, exactly right. He’s talking about fruitflies in a laboratory with no diseases, no predators, no food shortage, an idealised theoretical situation. Which, of course, we do need to know, and bear in mind.
Agriculture began in several different places, independently, China, Middle East, S. America. Often authors don’t even define what they mean. Lots of H/Gs plant stuff, and interfere with vegetation, make clearings, make gardens, which is a step towards farming.
There isn’t a single H/G lifestyle, there are/were very, very many.
There’s been loads of work done on this, masses of research. It’s hard to get one’s head around it all, I’m hardly competent. Apologies to his fans, I have little confidence in J. Diamond anymore.
I think Lidia was onto something when she mentioned mining the soil. If the H/G were mobile by necessity, following the herds, whatever, and the slash and burn farmers likewise, because they soon deplete the fertility… but there’s another option isn’t there.
Tigris-Euphrates estuary where it began, you don’t deplete the fertility by planting and harvesting, do you, because every year the annual flood brings down a new load of rich silt, laden with minerals and organic nutrients. So you can’t exhaust the soil. You can stay put. You have to stay put, that’s where the good easy farming is, also the good marshland hunting and fishing.
The only problem is that the annual flood washes away all your fields and boundaries and canals and so forth, so you have to have an organised labour force to do all the digging and supervisors and overseers… and then you have the first city state.
Agriculture and urban living and civilisation and religion, and an army, all arrive hand in hand, more or less simultaneously at Sumer, it seems.
But prior to that was Gobekli Tepe, which nobody understands.
And in S. America it was different, the first city seems to have arrived because of trade, a trading centre where people met to exchange cotton and other goods from inland for fish and other stuff from the coast, and for a thousand years, no army.
March 17th, 2013 at 3:40 am
Mesopotamian agriculture failed because of salt
http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/45/traditional-irrigation-in-mesopotamia/
March 17th, 2013 at 3:42 am
And failed because of cutting trees
http://books.google.com/books?id=9veK7E2JwkUC&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=mesopotamia+erosion+trees&source=bl&ots=B7AL-iOYq-&sig=_xDAHrVgFw5oUII3pEORP-vP3Z0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=w51FUb25OYT72QXbw4Fw&sqi=2&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mesopotamia%20erosion%20trees&f=false
March 17th, 2013 at 3:44 am
Mesopotamia died from complexity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
And the vicious circle that creates the complexity
March 17th, 2013 at 4:46 am
@ Lidia
I think what you might be overlooking as an resource input is the mining of the soil. While—with very careful husbandry—soil resources can be replenished and maintained (China’s “Farmers of Forty Centuries”) that has not generally been how they’ve been handled (see the recent book, “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations”).
H/G culture remained in equilibrium as long as H/Gs took from among the plants and animals available on the earth’s surface. Once agricultural techniques were developed, they really weren’t that different from those of fossil-fuel exploitation: you’re robbing past deposits of resources. Worse, you are robbing precisely those which are most needed for future survival of your ag. civ.
A huge amount of the organic matter is robbed from topsoil every single time a farmer plows a field, not just through erosion but through oxidation. Like the burning of fossil fuels, this releases carbon into the air, if I’m not mistaken.
So really we’ve been carbon-mining (inefficiently) both through agriculture AND fossil-fuel use. That’s why the human population exponential growth curve starts w/agriculture, not before, and not at the initial point of fossil-fuel exploitation on a large scale.
Suggest you check out terra preta and bio char, almost the opposite of that portrayal.
http://youtu.be/pX3zhZ6ETWI
March 17th, 2013 at 5:13 am
“You think this is bad, go ask those gas-fracking-idiots what they’re doing with the millions – or maybe billions by now – of gallons of radioactive toxic chemical waste that’s left over from fracking those wells. They’ve been dumping this stuff right into the very rivers and streams that supply drinking water to millions of people. In some places right up-stream from the water intake plants that process our water. And they refused to do testing on the water. But those intake plants reported their equipment was being eaten away very high salt levels. The real problem is the radiation. State and gas company reports found radiation levels hundreds to thousands of times higher than anything that would be considered legal. These psychos are going to leave behind a disaster that’s never been seen before. Those corporate politicians in Washington have gotten to the point where profits are more important than people’s lives.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/links-31713.html#comment-1148286
March 17th, 2013 at 5:47 am
Every biological creature sooner or later ends up on some menu: it’s just so much sooner for everyone with Near Term Extinction :-Q
March 17th, 2013 at 7:24 am
@U re. terra preta: well, of course that’s included in the minority of good husbandry practices. My main point stands. You’re back to lifting your leg on everyone’s comments again.
Good NC find, though. “corp. pols have gotten to the point” where they value profits over human life? I would invite folks to consider when/whether this has ever not been the case. Corporations are antithetical to human life by definition, by the same inexorable sort of math that drives the debt-based money scheme. It is no exaggeration to say that they are our mortal enemies.
March 17th, 2013 at 8:10 am
Hey Lidia – No doubt dehumanization is more complete now that corporations are people too, and the state can murder using drones…but long before capitalism, human life had no value to the overlords, especially if it belonged to another tribe/race/nation/sex.
I don’t like a society where profits rule over every other consideration and workers are debt slaves, and sophisticated brain-washing/advertising turns people into mindless idiots, but it seems that we have to dig a beyond Anglo/Western culture to find the root cause for organizing hierarchically and its attendant corrupting power.
March 17th, 2013 at 8:37 am
Ulvfugl, I think they would treat it with derision, the Antarctic ice is very much older than 10 – 12,000 years, the continent has been where it is very much longer than that…
From what I understand the Antarctic ice has different ages based on where it’s located. The Flem-Aths maintain that the South pole was located off the “south” coast of Antarctica (what is now the east coast) prior to the earth’s crust shifting. Consequently, north Antarctica (now west) was more temperate, say about like southern Canada is today and “south” Antarctica (now east) was already snow and ice covered and received regular precipitation even then, thus accounting for the much older age of the ice. They contend that this explains also why the ice and snow is so much thicker over the south pole now than can be accounted for given current and historical weather conditions as the south pole receives less precipitation than the Mojave desert.
The rocky north shore of West Antarctica is usually ice free in the summer and has lichen growing on the rocks. Clearly, it wouldn’t take much of a shift back to their proposed previous location for that area to have been capable of being quite a bit more hospitable for humans.
West Antarctica has received far less study than the vast ice sheet to the south and east. The WAIS Divide Ice Core Project is studying ice cores much closer to the current South Pole than the Flem-Aths propose is the area where human life once flourished, so even that study isn’t going to shed much light on the Flem-Aths’ theory.
Aside: all that talk of east, south, etc. is very confusing when referring to things moving with respect to the pole.
Anyway, I can’t speak to the soundness of Flem-Aths’ theories as I have no training in that area, but they do seem to go against conventional scientific wisdom and I admire anyone willing to go out on a limb in that way.
I am always amazed at the way official practitioners of the historical sciences make incredibly confident pronouncements as to how things happened when they are making little more than guesses sometimes based on nothing more than one or two pieces of data. Frequently, as more information is uncovered, those earlier claims are shown to be completely wrong. Yet, prior to that, those same scientists will deride anyone who approaches the problem from a way that is considered non-traditional.
The Flem-Aths’ work is scholarly and well referenced. It solves quite a few problems that often are simply ignored by conventional scientists by challenging some of the sacred cow assumptions of that conventional science. That brands them as crackpots, I suppose.
I might add that they published a scholarly article on this topic in the Spring of 1981 in The Anthropological Journal of Canada titled: “A Global Climatic Model for the Origins of Agriculture and the Sequence of Pristine Civilizations”. So, they aren’t completely derided by the establishment.
Obviously, they do a much better job of conveying their theories than I can – hence their book. For anyone interested in discovering some of the alternatives to the traditional models of ice ages, climate change, and ancient human history, it’s a must-read.
Here’s the Amazon link (apparently there’s a new edition out with a new title):
http://www.amazon.com/Atlantis-beneath-Ice-Fate-Continent/dp/1591431379/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363533582&sr=8-1&keywords=when+the+sky+fell
March 17th, 2013 at 8:51 am
@ Ripley,
I suspect no one will ever be able to answer your question about why agriculture first started (notwithstanding the totally confident pronouncements of the aforementioned scientists).
But, for what it’s worth, here are my thoughts on the subject:
Some population of humans found themselves, for whatever reason, limited in their ability to migrate and follow the great herds. Thus, they were forced to rely on plants that grew in their region. Assuming at least a similar level of intelligence at that time to what we have now, if not more, it wouldn’t take a genius to solve the problem of food in winter, only powers of observation. Even a child notes that seeds dropped on the ground sprout new plants. And, when more seeds are spread, more plants grow. It’s a very easy step from there to formalized agriculture.
March 17th, 2013 at 8:57 am
There is a problem with terra preta – if it really increases yeilds then it means more people can be fed on less land, which concentrates populations and removes population control. This is part of the vicious circle principle. Anything that humans use to increase resources available to them, spears, nets, farming techniques, bypasses population control, and humans increase until they can’t and keep finding the next solution so they can increase again until they can’t until things collapse. Humans have solved themselves into extinction.
I remember reading about Farmer’s of 40 Centuries, the book that helped inspire the permaculture movement. It was absolutely amazing how fine tuned Chinese farmers were in using every available scrap of land, waste, etc to feed a large population. While the author was amazed as was natural, all I could think of is that they have been too damn good at farming and thus have an increasing population that at some point they will not be able to feed.
If we could, we should aim not for maximum production or even good production, but rather for the bare minimum of production from the land, not only to rest the land, but to keep our population in line. But we can’t choose that (not having free will), we keep choosing to produce more even tho it leads to destruction. And we are too good at it to be controlled by other species – although antibiotic resistant super bugs might bring us down, but more likely we will be brought low by disrespect for limits.
Our species is fated to end
It’s no good to whine or pretend
We were too damn good
At growing our food
Now destruction is just round the bend
March 17th, 2013 at 11:02 am
Kathy C Says:
Our species is fated to end
It’s no good to whine or pretend
We were too damn good
At growing our food
Now destruction is just round the bend
Fate’s something we can’t wish away:
Atoms bounce as they must and don’t stray;
We protest or accept
While we’re getting prepped,
But we don’t get to have any say.
March 17th, 2013 at 11:23 am
We need to dig deeper than asking questions as to why ‘humans go this and that’. The reason is because we are nothing but a composite of the same characteristics found in nature. Whether it be slavery, agriculture, maximum use of energy, cruelty, anger..you name it, and you can find it.
For example, there are ants that make slaves of other ants, and there are even ants that maintain colonies of aphids for the production of honey dew. In fact, we are very ‘ant like’ when you consider it from a macro perspective.
Anyhow, the traits found in humans are almost never entirely unique, it’s just that we have more agency to do what we do.
March 17th, 2013 at 11:28 am
@BenjaminTheDonkey,
You ask Can anybody please explain if/how, as a practical matter, the new worldview from revised thermodynamics differs from hard determinism?
Here’s my take so far,
First you have to answer the question, “What is being determined?” There are plenty of things that are deterministic in this world, from the direction you travel if you jump off a cliff, to deterministic death from hypothermia or dehydration. I think the question you’re asking is, “How much of human behavior is deterministic?” I have two thoughts. The first is that it depends on how much of what we interpret as free will is actually an illusion, and how much of our behavior is really driven by genetic ore even deeper natural principles. That can be hard to tell. We can get some clues if we look for invariant behavior in unexpected places – like people always acting against their own best interests on some issue, regardless of the degree of education that takes place. I see precisely this clue in the human attitude about “growth”. If it’s not obviously damaging in the short term (e.g. population growth in H-G cultures), we seem to keep growing in some manner or other until further growth becomes a clear and present danger – and even beyond that point. I see the “Infrastructural Determinism” principle in Marvin Harris’s anthropological framework called “Cultural “Materialism” as an observation of the deeper levels of human psychology working according to this growth imperative.
But in any population not everyone marches in step to the growth drummer, so it’s obviously not a universal determinism like gravity – it’s apparently being mediated by our psychology, and that imparts a “bell-curve” quality to the effect. Some people are more easily entrained than others. that’s where my hurricane analogy comes into play:
So what do we do when individuals like us perceive the dangers inherent in being a hurricane? How do we steer it from inside? Are we truly as helpless as molecules of water or nitrogen – as this assessment would seem to suggest? Or does our special grant of consciousness enable us to change the system’s behavior? To switch metaphorical horses in mid-stream, does it enable us not just to see the fire, but find and open the fire escape?
I don’t have the answer yet, but for now I’m working on the assumption that human behavior is locally indeterminate but globally deterministic. There is probably a sliding scale of trade-off between the two, that inflects sharply towards determinism when the aggregation size passes Dunbar’s Number.
March 17th, 2013 at 12:12 pm
@ Lidia
well, of course that’s included in the minority of good husbandry practices. My main point stands. You’re back to lifting your leg on everyone’s comments again.
No, the subject we were discussing was the origin of agriculture, why or how it began. It then got moved by Kathy C. and others onto how systems are not sustainable, and so forth. I was not commenting on good or bad husbandry practices or sustainability.
March 17th, 2013 at 12:29 pm
@ Kathy C.
You moved the discussion from the subject of why the population increase began to a what we ought to do if we want to save the planet and ourselves..type of conversation…
E.g. : ..If we could, we should aim not for maximum production or even good production, etc
Which, as you will agree that we have both concluded ‘saving the planet’ is futile and not going to happen, is a bit odd. But if we wanted to ‘save ourselves’ I’d suggest it would be a good idea to get the analysis as to ‘what went wrong’, so to speak, historically, first, so as not to make the same mistakes. And that we have not done…
March 17th, 2013 at 12:45 pm
@U You moved the discussion from the subject of why the population increase began to a what we ought to do if we want to save the planet and ourselves..type of conversation…
U you didn’t read far enough, after saying what we should do I said “But we can’t choose that (not having free will), we keep choosing to produce more even tho it leads to destruction.” I stated that poorly however – it should have read “But we can’t choose that (not having free will) thus we keep finding ways to produce even more tho it leads to destruction.”
It is hard to talk in a way
That says what you want to say
I’m really contrite
For try as I might
Shoulds into the discourse do stray
March 17th, 2013 at 12:50 pm
Joe Romm realizes Obama is going to let Keystone XL go through – bout time
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/16/1730621/guardian-white-house-officials-gave-strong-indications-the-president-is-inclined-to-approve-the-keystone-xl-pipeline/
March 17th, 2013 at 1:05 pm
@ Bailey
Anyhow, the traits found in humans are almost never entirely unique, it’s just that we have more agency to do what we do.
I think you are missing the one major difference. ( Lidia is already complaining, I’m trying to restrain myself from pissing on every comment, before Guy admonishes me, so i didn’t reply to Kathy C.’s comment about the American’s having a land mass so they didn’t need an empire for a while, etc, etc. )
Look, nobody is acknowledging the one thing that makes us different from all the other species, that is the power of the idea. It’s not agency, it’s ideas.
There would not have been any American colonies if it were not for the ships. Ships are not those wooden floaty things with masts and sails. They are an idea. That one, of course, is very ancient, going back deep into antiquity. Ships are not much use lost on the ocean. You need to know where you are to know where to go. That means a compass, and a watch, to navigate. More ideas. You have to be able to count and calculate. More ideas.
It doesn’t matter that John Dee was a sorceror, what mattered was the idea of an Empire. A computer isn’t the material gadget. It’s an idea.
Why we are different, in this incredibly complex soceity, from the hunter-gatherers of the palaeolithic, is because, unlike other species, we have an effective method for gathering up ideas and passing them from generation to generation. We don’t rely upon genetic mutations, like the ants. We have culture. That means far more rapid and flexible change is possible.
Dawkins tried to explain all this, and package it as memetic evolution, with memes as a parallel to genes, but that doesn’t work very well and is unsatisfactory in all kinds of ways.
But that’s the ONE big difference between humans and all other species, ideas and their transmission. It might be the reason why we were drawn to urban culture and away from hunting and pastoral life, because dense populations of cities foster fast transmission of ideas.
Why do people go to Silicon Valley or wherever ? It’s because of the buzz, stimulation, the cross-fertilisation of new ideas, new possibilities, excites us.
What is an idea ? Seems nobody actually knows, or has a good definition. Dates back to Aristotle. An idea is itself an idea. Where do they come from ? Nobody knows. Used to be from the gods. Now we call it the Unconscious, or the Subconscious.
March 17th, 2013 at 1:06 pm
In stating that the large creatures (megafauna) still exist in Africa is being a bit pre-mature. Lions are being driven to extinction, elephants (due to poaching for ivory), and other large species are having more and more trouble adapting to both humanity (encroachment) and climate change – each affecting their grazing areas, population, and health (ie ability to reproduce) – and thirdly, rampant pollution of the air, water and land (via human tech/civ and diseases from changing environmental conditions on them and what they eat).
There are so many fish, mammal and other “kills” all over the world (at a seemingly increasing rate) that it’s really starting to add up (here’s one):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294464/65-tonnes-DEAD-FISH-wash-Rio-Janeiro-Olympic-rowing-venue-oxygen-levels-plummet-torrential-rain.html
65 tonnes of DEAD FISH wash up at Rio de Janeiro Olympic rowing venue after oxygen levels plummet in torrential rain
March 17th, 2013 at 1:24 pm
@ Kathy C.
I am of the opinion that this ship, Titanic, is sinking fast and I agree with most of what you say, Kathy, on most subjects…
I don’t object to your ‘shoulds’ or ‘coulds’, because, if by chance you find yourself standing next to the Captain ( like Obama happens to pop in for supper, hahaha ) and asks for your advice, and it’s obvious he’s clueless, well, you pull a neatly rolled up piece of paper out of your sleeve, with a brisk flourish, and announce a precise and succinct action plan….
No.1 Sort the Fukes, No.2 Dissolve Monsanto, No. 3…. etcetera
No harm in it is there, something to pass the time here, on the Beach of Doom…
March 17th, 2013 at 1:27 pm
@ Tom
In stating that the large creatures (megafauna) still exist in Africa is being a bit pre-mature.
We were talking about the hundreds of thousands of years pre-agriculture, pre-civilisation.
Yes, NOW it won’t be long before most will be gone
March 17th, 2013 at 1:47 pm
@ U,
And we don’t know how the recent application of the ideas of LMEP and evolution work out, because there’s only been Swenson and a few others thinking in that area, and this recent discussion here, that I’m aware of, there’s maybe other relevant work, there’s maybe stuff we’ve missed, I’d say plenty of wiggle room left…
Yeah, and furthermore, as I have mentioned elsewhere, we do not know whether the laws of thermodynamics which are driving this thing are ancillary to biocentrism or the the other way around.
March 17th, 2013 at 1:53 pm
@Gail: “we have to dig a beyond Anglo/Western culture to find the root cause for organizing hierarchically and its attendant corrupting power.”
I wonder whether we haven’t found it in the lines of thinking that Paul is exploring…
I know what you mean, but what makes capitalism and debt-money seem different to me from your ‘average’ exploitation is the inexorable mathematics of it. Set it into motion and it chews up everything in sight like a deranged Energizer bunny. There’s no pleading for mercy, no political deal you can make, with our Modern System.
The larger thermodynamics context, I suppose, works in a similar inexorable way, but in a more complex fashion which gives the sense, even if illusory, of chance and personal agency factoring in.
Whereas the capitalist stuff is written right down in black and white and people still balk at understanding it. I had to deal with a couple of brokers and financial advisors to do with my mother’s affairs. I asked them point-blank where they thought interest comes from. I give you $100—where do you get the extra $5 to pay me $105 at the end of the year? They couldn’t answer this simple question; no-one can answer it in a way that doesn’t expose the “violence inherent in the system!”
March 17th, 2013 at 2:56 pm
By analyzing mitochondrial DNA, scientists now can make more accurate estimates of the numbers of individual species that existed centuries ago. What does it tell us about our impact on the natural world and about our own future?
http://www.countercurrents.org/klinkenborg170313.htm
@ Lidia
The additional $5 interest and the “violence inherent in the system!” – at least we both understand and agree about that !
March 17th, 2013 at 4:12 pm
Such a relief, there are still some sensible people in the world who do really sensible things, like being dragged along behind…
http://youtu.be/BfIBKc2X21s
March 17th, 2013 at 4:33 pm
The REAL Dr. House Says:
March 17th, 2013 at 8:51 am
@ Ripley,
I suspect no one will ever be able to answer your question about why agriculture first started (notwithstanding the totally confident pronouncements of the aforementioned scientists).
Unfortunately you’re probably right. To me the transformation of people living in small bands of 100 people or so, for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, into huge insectile agricultural societies like Ancient Egypt in just mind boggling. Is there a record of any other species changing its way of life so abruptly? If species were categorised by behavior rather than genetics, these huge mono-crop agricultural civilizations and certainly, industrial civilization would have to be categorized as some kind of strange new species. As far as way of life goes, an undiscovered human tribe in the Amazon has far more in common with the first humans of 5 million years ago that it does with, atom splitting, gene tampering, spaceship flying modern humans. Perhaps this is why we have found it so easy to hunt them down or destroy their ways of live, because in our minds they are just another inferior species that gets in our way. I’m surprised there hasn’t been any rethinking of human categories with the first 190,000 years of pre-ag humans being designated as something totally separate. And by separate I don’t mean inferior, although those who measure their superiority by their ability to destroy and exterminate would probably see them that way.
March 17th, 2013 at 5:10 pm
@ Ripley
The ants, bees, wasps, termites, all did it, from solitary insects to small groups, to huge colonies, there’s even spiders that live in colonies, and as Bailey pointed out, there’s almost nothing that we do that ants don’t do, they farm, go to war, have slaves, have language, and so forth. But they did it on a much more extended time scale, so that meant that they could, as Kathy C. said, co-evolve and fit in without wrecking the rest of the system.
You’re dead right about the ‘re-thinking of human categories’. We’re stuck in out dated 19thC paradigms wherever you look.
What happened, we got language. That means we got stories. That meant we could transmit information, ideas, across generations, far more efficiently than any other species ever had. The old slow genetic evolution gets left behind by the new rapid, flexible cultural evolution…
Then, coincident with agriculture, domestication of animals, first cities, religion, hierarchy, we got counting, numbers and writing, all of which probably came from accounting, keeping tabs on the storage of the grain and who was owed what, which meant we had a way to transmit information even more efficiently.
Then came ever more technology. Once you have the idea of a machine, a wheel, a smart mind thinks, aha !, how about… and away you go… and then the printing press and books, and its an exponential curve of accelerating cross-fertilisation and distribution of ideas…
And now we have the internet, the whole thing speeds up an order of magnitude…
Instead of trudging to the public library, two miles in the wind and rain, and asking them to order me a book, which arrives three months later, when i’ve forgotten why I wanted to read it, click, magic, here it is… The Laws of Form, G. Spencer-Brown…
Unfortunately doesn’t mean I can understand any of it, hahahaha, but somebody somewhere does…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form
In this regard, I have the resources and power only a few most privileged ancient scholars and professors, employed by the most powerful Czars and Emperors and Universities had. Access to knowledge and information. The evolution of ideas.
March 17th, 2013 at 5:23 pm
@ Ripley
Jared Diamond when asked what he thought happened to the Neanderthals he said flat out, with no qualifiers, that the Cro-Magnons had exterminated them when they (the Cro-Magnons) had a numerical/organizational advantage.
He didn’t use euphemisms like, they were ‘out competed’ by Cro-Magnons, he said they were murdered by Cro-Magnons, probably hunted down like mere game animals, with bow and arrows and trained hunting Dogs (neither of which the Neanderthals possessed).
If the racism of modern humans is about the supposed inferiority of other ‘races’, all ‘races’ being technically the exact same species of hominid, imagine for a moment the animus of modern human racists toward an actually different species of hominid like Neanderthals.
It would give a whole new twist on intolerance.
Had the ‘lethal mutation’ in the hominid line that produced h sapian sapian not occurred, I have no doubt whatsoever that the Neanderthals and the Earth’s eco-system would be humming along just fine right now, in Amazing Grace, compared to the Ecocidal Clusterfuck we have unleashed.
The ability to organize into more complex social units has taken the hominid species to the doorstep of total ruin, not to the doorstep of the Stars, like the nonsense of Sci-fi would have us fantasize about.
Humanity apparently didn’t need Darth Vader to show up on the collective doorstep of Earth in order to make a ‘Wish upon a Death Star’ and your Dreams Will Come True.
March 17th, 2013 at 5:32 pm
@ Ripley
I wouldn’t be nearly so pessimistic about the chances of understanding why H/G tribes became settled urban soceities. There’s masses of research and theory already. Given time, the archaeology would eventually tell the story, if we had the time.
For example, people settled and made a city if they had a good reason so to do. Here’s an example of one. The reason was salt. It could just as easily have been a rich natural rice field or some other convenient reliable food source. There’s a sedentary hunter gatherer soceity on the N. Siberian coast. They are there because that’s where the walrus colony is. They make regular excursions to go fishing etc, but they have a fixed base.
Along the Amazon, or the Harappan civilisation, the villages could just grow and merge and become a civilisation, if the resources are sufficient to support the population.
http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/claim-oldest-european-city-in-bulgaria.html
March 17th, 2013 at 5:36 pm
This is the best comment thread in Doomtown. Thank you all. I was spellbound by the Fukushima video that U posted and shared it on my Facebook page. Nobody commented. Later in the day I put up a photograph of my chicken and got 19 “likes”.
The part where this guy (the only person living in a Fukued out village) described witnessing a dying calf trying to suckle the tip of a rope when it’s mother, dried up and dying herself, kicked it away repeatedly, seemed a perfect scene to extrapolate into an indication of what is to come and it breaks my heart.
The spring peepers never sounded so sweet as now.
March 17th, 2013 at 5:59 pm
@ Speak Softly
Jared Diamond when asked what he thought happened…
But J D is full of shit over this stuff. He has no evidence. He just wants it to be that way to fit his ideology. There’s a massive war going on behind the scenes in academia.
When J D says that, it’s really no different to the Spanish Catholic Christian conquistadores declaring how evil and brutal the S. American Indian savages were, as a justification for slaughtering them and stealing their gold, all effing propaganda, not science.
@ Red Eft
Yes. I wonder why he didn’t let them all out of their pens ? How could he possibly just look and DO NOTHING ?
March 17th, 2013 at 6:14 pm
H sapian sapian are fatally flawed creatures. No amount of reflect or knowledge and ‘learning’ will ever change them.
The evidence for that is the dilemma we have today, now.
There is not enough time to turn this around. No amount of conscious deliberation, or mediation or skill or intellect or ‘understanding’ on the part of h sapian sapians to save themselves or the Earth.
H sapian sapians have not only painted themselves into extinction, they, as a particular sub-species of hominid, have doomed the majority of all present species too.
It was their hubris at their ‘cleverness’, their self awareness that brought them to this Moment.
Their Fate is sealed by their own hand. There are no other species to blame for it.
H sapian sapians are mutant monsters. Look at the world around you.
They probably will create an iPhone app soon that let’s them watch drone attacks in live time and make them into a Youtube channel.
Quite a Piece of Work those ‘humans’.
March 17th, 2013 at 7:57 pm
“Why do people go to Silicon Valley or wherever ? It’s because of the buzz, stimulation, the cross-fertilisation of new ideas, new possibilities, excites us.”
At least, that’s what they SAY.
It could just as easily be explained as 1. competition/status seeking and 2. making money.
I spent quite a while with braniacs in Silicon Valley (was married to one) and believe me, their behavior is exactly like KathyC’s roos.
March 17th, 2013 at 8:34 pm
@Gail, been there, done that (short of the marriage part).
“He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins!” amirite?
March 17th, 2013 at 8:56 pm
Lidia
Did you typo..?
““He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins!” Emirate”…?
Ha Ha.
March 17th, 2013 at 9:58 pm
Robin Datta
Great link.
Here is one also fitting.
‘The Obsolete Man’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbLFT9MbKmw
March 17th, 2013 at 10:08 pm
Speak Softly Says:
H sapien sapien are fatally flawed creatures. No amount of reflect or knowledge and ‘learning’ will ever change them. The evidence for that is the dilemma we have today, now.
There is not enough time to turn this around. No amount of conscious deliberation, or mediation or skill or intellect or ‘understanding’ will save them.
—-
That’s pretty cool. It’s almost exactly the same conclusion that St Augustine came to around AD 400. Original sin became Christian dogma around that time, and for the next 1000 years there was no desire to study man, because they knew all they needed to know about him. Then the writings of those pesky Greeks and Romans were rediscovered. For a thousand years people had stopped asking questions, then they started again. Strangely compelling isn’t it, if we had only listened to that Christian dogma and not revived inquiry and science, we might have been able to coast along until the now overdo ice age kicked in, and put an end to everything.
March 17th, 2013 at 10:46 pm
@ Speak Softly
I meant there’s no evidence for the Cro Magnons hunting the Neanderthals. J D is projecting his personal prejudice, just as he has upon the Papua New Guinea people. It’s propaganda, not science. I don’t have the reference, I seem to remember a cave site somewhere where modern and Neanderthal appear to have coexisted peacefully for millennia. Not saying the were not driven to extinction, saying science needs evidence.
Just because modern Americans are idiots and assholes doesn’t mean everyone everywhere always was
@ Ripley
‘The next 1000 years…’ was known as the Dark Ages, killing, plundering, looting, chaos. Scholarship and learning and knowledge only survived because a few monks hid it away in inaccessible islands off the Atlantic west coast and remote caves and hermitages in the deserts of Egypt and N. Africa… don’t think the Original Sin fix would have been any answer… I mean, it’s still with us today, for what it’s worth, not a lot, imo, those christians were no saints…
March 17th, 2013 at 11:11 pm
@ Gail, Lidia
It’s of no consequence at all what the men, or the women SAY is the reason why they go towards the bright lights… whether it’s the whores or the fancy clothes and parties or the money or the theatre or because they hope to make a fortune, none of that has any bearing on what I was saying, which was that, compared with the pastoral life, village life, or the hunter gatherer life, urban life meant a much more rapid and intense exchange of information, of ideas.
It only needs one little boy to see metal being smelted for the first time, through a shop doorway, and for that vision to stick in his imagination, as a whole new possibility, and then he thinks about the farm carts back home, and thinks, what if we made the wheels from metal, then they wouldn’t break so often… that kind of thing, is cultural evolution, technology… We’ve just seen it happening over the last 2 or 3 years with things like 3D printing and drones.
And that is the force that took off, and has been dragging us along behind it, ever since, faster in our lifetime than at any time in history, foolishly, we are its slaves, not its masters..
Yes, all the foolish little boys who like their toys and refuse to grow up and be responsible men, and the damn toys do change the course of history.
A man had an idea. He made a very big bronze cannon. He went to the most powerful people in the known world, the rulers of Byzantium, and asked if they wanted to buy it.
Secure in their power and hubris, they told him to go away.
So, he sold it to their enemies, who used it to smash the walls of said Byzantium, that had been impregnable for a thousand years. It was just a boy’s toy, but a big version, that destroyed an Empire and changed the history of the world.
March 18th, 2013 at 1:03 am
For Tom
( features instrument abuse, may be distressing to those of a sensitive disposition )
http://youtu.be/kK9hqQ-rKlU
March 18th, 2013 at 1:21 am
Around half of Cambodia’s tropical flooded grasslands have been lost in just 10 years
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130317221448.htm
March 18th, 2013 at 2:34 am
If we consider what humans do to each other now, it’s only reasonable to expect they have always done these things. Not only are we like ants, we are like spiders, weaving a web to try to catch the unsuspecting victim, then roll the victim up tight in more web. JD is projecting back what he sees going on now. That’s reasonable.
Cows are the most peaceful, gentle animal but they have horns to gore each other when the issue is food or water. Humans are much more clever than cows. Just watch, look and see.
March 18th, 2013 at 3:06 am
@ dmd
If we consider what humans do to each other now, it’s only reasonable to expect they have always done these things. Not only are we like ants, we are like spiders, weaving a web to try to catch the unsuspecting victim, then roll the victim up tight in more web. JD is projecting back what he sees going on now. That’s reasonable.
It’s nonsense. Have we learned nothing from a century of science, anthropology, archaeology, social sciences ? You can’t just ‘project back’ your own fantasy and make any claim that you imagine. If you are to be taken seriously, you have to provide evidence and provide a credible argument that can be supported.
SOME ants farm aphids. SOME ants farm fungi. SOME ants keep slaves. SOME ants form armies that travel and eat whatever they find en route. SOME ants do none of those things. SOME ants are still solitary.
So it is with human cultures. Immense variability. It’s been demonstrated, conclusively, time and time again, that this ‘projecting what you see’ thing is total bullshit.
A famous scientist in the 1950s studied the baboon colony in a zoo, where they were very overcrowded, highly stressed, constantly observed and taunted by humans, with no privacy, on concrete, with no natural features. Their behaviour, ( which was horrible ) was recorded in detail, as if it was typical baboon behaviour, and even worse, extrapolated to explain human behaviour.
Someone then went and researched the behaviour of a wild baboon colony, without intruding at all, and found it was absolutely totally different !
What was recorded in the zoo, was aberrant, psychotic behaviour, what you’d expect in a prison or a concentration camp, from severely damaged and dysfunctional individuals trying desperately to cope with intolerable circumstances.
March 18th, 2013 at 3:17 am
I’ve posted this a zillion times before, all over the place, I suppose people don’t bother to read it, it gives an insight into what people were really like before ‘modern’ ‘civilised’ values got forced onto them.
http://rewild.info/anthropik/vault/sorenson-preconquest/
March 18th, 2013 at 3:37 am
“E. Richard Sorenson, a protege of Margaret Mead” Ah yes, we know that Margaret Mead got everything right so surely her protege did too.
I think we humans would feel more “right” if we lived wild because we would be living the way we are programmed to live. Our behavior programs would be the ones that are adaptive to our environment. But that says nothing about what those behaviors would be. They would at times mean nurturing a new life and at times infanticide.
But at any rate it doesn’t matter – as I have posted a godzillion times we are going extinct in the near term future http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.html
March 18th, 2013 at 3:41 am
@ Kathy C.
Do we know anybody who got everything right ( excepting yourself ) ?
March 18th, 2013 at 3:56 am
I think someone on this blog recommended this film, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. Really a nice little gem http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1307068/ some great NTE humor, a tender quirky romance, and an exploration of what would happen if you knew the end of the world was 3 weeks away. While not entirely realistic on that last point, I do think a certain 3 week death sentence for the planet would have very different results for how people behave than a two decade uncertain death sentence with ever increasing problems. Send in the asteroids. Best source for near earth asteroids is at spaceweather dot com.
Ah well, given what this generation of humans have done I don’t suppose we deserve a quick end.
March 18th, 2013 at 4:08 am
ulv: thanks for the music link, always enjoyable. i’ve been following the conversation about the past and agree that it’s up for grabs when it comes to interpretations of the aberrations and anomalies (like Gobeki Tepli) – my comment was only to indicate that human history didn’t stop there and, in fact, continues as the rest of the species (including megafauna) are being devastated (as well as whales, sharks and the like in the worlds oceans). i understood what you were saying and where the conversation is and am enjoying it. It’s too bad that all our clever ideas weren’t thought about (re consequences, esp. beyond the short term). For example, some of America’s greatest idea people like Henry Ford, went ahead and did their thing to improve their own lot in life without considering the environmental, social, etc. problems that would result. One could even say the same about Salk, though his was a “good” idea that relieved suffering, but also allowed genetically defective people to continue along and have a (resource using) life and possibly passing on that defective gene. Removing all the natural constraints (via “progress” and “better ideas”) on our species population has led us to our current overpopulated state (as well as improvements in industrial ag – another bad idea and of course there are many others). i agree that we’re more the slaves of our ideas than their masters. Again, just another incomplete comment.
Robin: thanks for those old Twilight Zone links, brought back memories.
i remember Alcoa Presents and Outer Limits soon followed to jump on the bandwagon and, though they had some great episodes too (and a slightly different slant), Serling’s show was first and very well done imho. Another was the Alfred Hitchcock series that was super and led to classic movies.
Lidia: great comment regarding the banking idea of interest (which was formerly called USURY and BANNED by the Catholic church and still is by Islam, if i’m not mistaken). These ideas that come from individuals mainly to improve their own financial state are usually not explored except in a positive (“let’s DO it!”) light without even entertaining the thought that maybe someone could be hurt or adversely affected by them (bias). We (most of us, not all) seem to be extremely self-centered and short-sighted, and why this was selected for, rather than a more humane, cooperative and inclusive human can be argued to be a serious design flaw.
March 18th, 2013 at 4:20 am
Found this interesting (maybe our replacements, eventually):
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/thats-deep-life-found-11km-below-sea-level-in-deepest-known-point-on-the-surface-of-the-earth-8538107.html
That’s deep: life found 11km below sea level in deepest known point on the surface of the Earth
Bacteria discovered in Mariana Trench, a gigantic chasm in the seabed which is big enough to swallow Mount Everest entirely
Scientist have found a thriving community of microbes living at the deepest known point on the surface of the Earth – a massive underwater canyon in the Pacific Ocean 11km (6.8 miles) below sea level.
The bacteria were recovered from muddy sediments at a point underneath the central west Pacific called Challenger Deep in the huge Mariana Trench, a gigantic chasm in the seabed which is big enough and deep enough to swallow Mount Everest entirely.
Marine biologists said they were astonished to find such an abundance of microbial life-forms living off the dead and decaying matter that sinks to the deepest parts of the ocean where pressures are more than a thousand times greater than at sea level.
“These microbes may in fact be the ones that are the closest to the centre of the Earth, the deepest living organisms that we have seen. They are probably the deepest observed community of microbes below sea level,” said Professor Ronnie Glud of the University of Southern Denmark.
“We expected to see microbes there but we didn’t expect them to flourish and to be so efficient. What is really surprising is that we have seen bacteria that operate so efficiently at these depths,” Professor Glud said.
The microbes are feeding off the constant stream of organic matter that sinks to the seabed in the Pacific Ocean. In doing so, they play a crucial role in the global carbon cycle, which affects the amount of carbon dioxide circulating in the atmosphere, he said.
“We know very little about what is going on down there or what impact the deep-sea trenches have on the global carbon cycle as well as climate regulation,” he added
A deep-sea submersible robot that can analyse life-forms in situ discovered the microbial community in sediment samples taken in 2010 from the Mariana Trench. The sediment has built up over tens of thousands of years and is probably several hundreds of metres deep, Professor Glud said.
March 18th, 2013 at 4:35 am
Meanwhile, we have:
http://enenews.com/study-fukushima-fallout-detected-in-fish-from-atlantic-ocean
Study: Fukushima fallout detected in fish from Atlantic Ocean
Fillet samples of marine fish collected from the East/West Greenland current (GC) and from the Baltic Sea (BS), have been investigated by gamma-ray spectrometry within the regular German monitoring program. In samples of the second half of 2011 134Cs traces have been detected, suggested to originate from the Fukushima fallout being deposited in March/April 2011 over the northern North Atlantic and accumulated by fish. The radionuclide 134Cs (half-live 2 yr) was indeed detected with quite small activities at about 0.0036 Bq kg−1 w.w. [...] Model results confirmed the level of 134Cs measured in BS fish and showed its maximum to have occurred in winter 2011/2012 followed by a continuous decrease. It was also determined that 134Cs activity, but not that of 134Cs, showed a significant negative correlation with sampling depth (150–400 m) of GC fish; this strengthens our Fukushima fallout assumption. [...]
[...] the aims of our study were (i) to determine the activity concentration of caesium isotopes in cod and redfish as economically relevant fish species 5 in the North Atlantic Ocean and its marginal seas, (ii) separate the FD-NPP input from that from Chernobyl and Global Fallout, and (iii) validate the determinations and estimate the future behaviour of caesium isotopes in fish of the Baltic Sea [...]
‘Try the whitefish!’
March 18th, 2013 at 4:42 am
Lastly, some humor!
http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2013/03/17/weekend-funnies-for-the-depressed-collapsitarian-2/
March 18th, 2013 at 5:55 am
Tom, thanks for the humor!!!
March 18th, 2013 at 6:11 am
Tom “We (most of us, not all) seem to be extremely self-centered and short-sighted, and why this was selected for, rather than a more humane, cooperative and inclusive human can be argued to be a serious design flaw.”
Yes, but the thing is that evolution means that traits that allow one to procreate, and traits in the offspring that allow it to live long enough to procreate are the ones we find. How could traits good for the long term ever be the ones selected for, when the selection happens within a lifetime or two.
The sickle cell anemia gene seems like a design flaw but persists because one copy of the gene give you immunity from malaria and two copies does as well but doesn’t usually kill until after a person is old enough to reproduce. Per http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/why-we-get-sick-randolph-m-nesse/1111638292 Evolution could not forsee africans being moved as slaves to climes where malaria was not a problem, or a time when malaria could be treated or mosquitoes controlled (a very short time). So now the trait would seem to be a design flaw, however in the future as malaria mosquitoes move north it could once again be a design success.
The environment determines what is a flaw or a success and when the environment changes, so does the usefulness of a trait. Thus when humans moved out of Africa, hunting skills and technology seemed a success but since the megafauna elsewhere had not co-evolved with humans it became a flaw in terms of wiping out such wonderful big meat animals. When the Holocene stabilized climate making agriculture more feasible it seemed like our skills and tools were a success, but alas they turned out to be a flaw. We are too good at what we do and evolution has not had time to change our species. The dinosaurs didn’t have time to adapt to the asteroid caused changes in the world. We don’t have time to adapt to the changes we have wrought ourselves in the world. So it goes….just what happens.
March 18th, 2013 at 6:15 am
BTW in the book I just finished, Moment in the Sun by John Sayles, their is a group of soldier who fought in Cuba and the Philipines who were black. Sayles does his research. These were the Buffalo Soldiers. I was surprised, not knowing we used black soldiers in the Spanish American war. In the conversations the soldiers talk about being immunes.
“The army totaled little more than 26,000 men and 2,000 officers. And the mass of experienced combat troops were garrisoned at numerous forts throughout the west. It was no surprise, under the circumstances, that among the first units ordered to Cuba were the four black regiments. They were selected primarily on the basis of recent experience and their record on the Plains, but there was also the judgment of the War Department that blacks were immune to the diseases of the tropics and capable of more activity in high, humid temperatures. This erroneous thinking resulted in a concerted effort to recruit blacks for the formation of more “immune” troops. Whatever the motives for mobilizing black regulars, the soldiers themselves welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate their “soldierly qualities” and win respect for their race.” http://www.spanamwar.com/AfroAmericans.htm
Interesting piece of history at the end of the world when history dies
March 18th, 2013 at 6:20 am
When the Holocene stabilized climate making agriculture more feasible
This can’t be right. Agriculture was always feasible in the areas if the world not effected by the glaciation.
March 18th, 2013 at 6:38 am
I agree there is little evidence of Cro-Magnons actually going after Neanderthals like say, white settlers hunting down the natives like vermin in ‘you name the continent.’ (sounds like a new idea for a ‘reality’ TV show!)
This is because it has not been the subject of intense investigation. Few academic departments want to hang their hats on the premise that h s sapians are monsters and homicidal maniacs by nature. It’s a grant killer.
Never the less, it’s just not a big jump in imagination to view the current reigning world champion hominids, h s sapians, as Natural Born pathological killers to their core, once they assemble in groups bigger than a small city Rave.
The fact that a bloody smoking Cro-Magnon stone axe hasn’t turned up in skull of a Neanderthal during a CSI episode is a detail in my book. The fact JD endorses it doesn’t mean it’s not true and was not meant as endorsing his theories on human culture.
“Modern man’ is failure as a species, period. Look around. Despite iPhones and techno wizardry, h s sapians positively love rolling around in ‘winner take all’ strong man hierarchy mentality like pigs roll around it shit. Their enabling behavior towards this built in pathology has allow millenniums of despots to flourish and define ‘human’ culture.
H s sapian’s global brand slogan: Domination as Abomination
That’s it in a nutshell, same now as 30,000 years ago, despite those breath taking painting from the Cave of Dreams. The artist would have been burned to death as a witch for painting those images on that very same stomping ground millenniums later by his fellow h s sapians. Not a speck of doubt about it. Even Vincent van Gogh, painting in the very same country as the Cave of Dreams, was ignored and relegated to poverty and obscurity by his fellow travelers.
Brilliant.
In Duhmerkia, we are surrounded by dummies with guns.
A friend who gets PO and the NBL message was joking that when the Authorities eventually have to rationalize the Clusterfuck of Climate/PO/financial collapse to the Sheeple, they will probably try to stage a false flag ‘Carrington Event’ using a patterned web of neutron bomb detonations.
The Publick will assume that a ‘Carrington Event’ is John Forsythe being resurrected from the Dead for a grande finale of Dynasty and that’s what sucked all the electricity out of the Grid, all at once! OMG! Awesome!
March 18th, 2013 at 6:41 am
Hahaha, now I learn why all you insane Amerikans don’t spontaneously combust, as you should, according to Swenson’s interpretation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, ( according to D. Sagan ? )… probably partial explanation for the insanity too.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/06/bvo-flame-retardant-gatorade-sarah-kavanagh
March 18th, 2013 at 6:50 am
Put it this way: Given the primordial soup gave way to life – what a stroke of luck there were ores so rich they could be smelted in a lo-tek fire. Moreover the gas flares signaling concentrated energy were in plain view.
March 18th, 2013 at 7:00 am
@ Speak Softly
My point is, not that the masses of modern humans aren’t nutters, or that human history isn’t a blood soaked horror story, I’m happy to concur, both are true, my point is, that that JD claims to be a serious scholar, and as such he is not permitted to make ridiculous fabricated claims, about people hunting other people with dogs, 30,000 years ago, for which, afaik, there is not even the slightest shred of evidence. That’s fantasy, the job of the novelist, not the scientist.
Look, it may be true, that the Cro Magnons did kill off the Neanderthals. Or it may be completely wrong. Evidence, please.
Diamond, like many authors, benefits from controversy, gets him publicity, sells his books. Imo, his stories re Easter Island and Papua New Guinea have been fairly comprehensively shredded by other scholars, and in my eyes, he’s lost credibility. He’s a right wing idealogue selling an agenda. Others are free to disagree. It’s a fairly bitter and acrimonious debate. I gather legal action is being taken against him. I don’t want to bring it over here, I’d suggest anyone who is interested go to relevant blogs and forums to comment.
March 18th, 2013 at 7:02 am
Hey Gatorade is a same color as anti-freeze, nice call there.
That’s why a lot a people here in the Land of the Brave think it’s good for their cars too!
Hey mommy, the car is leaking Gatorade again, can I have some?
March 18th, 2013 at 7:08 am
Hahaha, flame retardant plus anti freeze, cocktail mix, what the heck, so long as it gets you off the ground, eh
March 18th, 2013 at 7:20 am
I read JD years ago, I had no idea of the current controversy swirling around him. I don’t follow the Kults of Personality which is about all the MSM has devolved into.
Hey, maybe he should adopt “It is better to look good than to feel good.”
March 18th, 2013 at 7:27 am
Uhoh, think maybe they need to put more BVO back into the booze…
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/21/oklahoma-man-dies-spontaneous-combustion/1937559/
March 18th, 2013 at 7:38 am
U, do you have MPD?
March 18th, 2013 at 7:51 am
to everyone:
When I hear stories about the calf trying to suckle on a piece of rope at Fukushima site it just makes me sick. I look around and I wonder why we are not all just breaking down in uncontrollable sobs.
March 18th, 2013 at 7:52 am
MPD = multiple personality disorder
March 18th, 2013 at 8:30 am
I wrote “When the Holocene stabilized climate making agriculture more feasible”
U you wrote “This can’t be right. Agriculture was always feasible in the areas if the world not effected by the glaciation.”
Note in my comment the word more. More implies that agriculture was feasible but became easier. Climate stability means that you can guess at the right time to plant – I am facing the difficulty already of not being able to guess when to plant. Last year I planted 1 month earlier than usual, which turned out to be a good guess. This year seems a bit more iffy about when to plant. This will get worse.
While it is just one theory, it makes sense to anyone who farms or gardens
“Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Robert Bettinger[16] make a case for the development of agriculture coinciding with an increasingly stable climate at the beginning of the Holocene. Ronald Wright’s book and Massey Lecture Series A Short History of Progress[17] popularized this hypothesis.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene
more
Adjective
A greater or additional amount or degree:
March 18th, 2013 at 8:35 am
@woofie
That was an informative hyperlink.
March 18th, 2013 at 8:40 am
I don’t know why certain posters have to be in a battle for who is the smartest or whatever – you look really foolish.
March 18th, 2013 at 8:43 am
Tipping Points:
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/03/tipping-points.html
March 18th, 2013 at 9:09 am
Kathy: thanks for the explanation re selection of traits. It’s mysterious and confusing what gets selected for and why – almost seems intentional, doesn’t it? Yet the very “cleverness” combined with short-term thinking in order to advance a single or few individuals at the expense of the entire species (and now, all the other species too) just doesn’t make a lot of sense. So we’re smart enough to invent (discover) science and math and what happens – they get co-opted by the military and the powers that be leading directly to the bottleneck/collapse scenario we’re in now. So much for “intelligent design” (or any kind of omniscient god i suppose) eh?
ulv: Though i laughed out loud at the humor of the example of spontaneous combustion after the gatorade statement, the guy who started the Jumping Jack Flash blog sees many examples that get attributed to this when (he contends) the steady increase of hydrogen sulfide and methane in the environment causes much more damage and will continue to do so more often as the environment continues to degrade.
http://jumpingjackflashhypothesis.blogspot.com/
Summary of hypothesis
The seas, lakes and oceans are now pluming deadly hydrogen sulfide and suffocating methane. Hydrogen sulfide is a highly toxic water-soluble heavier-than-air gas and will accumulate in low-lying areas. Methane is slightly more buoyant than normal air and so will be all around, but will tend to contaminate our atmosphere from the top down. These gases are sickening and killing oxygen-using life all around the world, including human life, as our atmosphere is increasingly poisoned. Because both gases are highly flammable and because our entire civilization is built around fire and flammable fuels, this is leading to more fires and explosions. This is an extinction level event and will likely decimate both the biosphere and human population and it is debatable whether humankind can survive this event.
pat: it’s best to refrain from name-calling though many will agree with your assessment. Simply read or ignore what you will here, comment where and when you like and let it go – time is much too short for the same ego-trip shit we’ve been doing all along. Just my two cents. i too was completely devastated by the farmer and his observation of the poor cattle and specifically the calf from the video. i agree, this is on the horizon.
March 18th, 2013 at 10:20 am
@ Kathy C.
Note in my comment the word more. More implies that agriculture was feasible but became easier. Climate stability means that you can guess at the right time to plant..etc
‘More’ has nothing to do with the point. For the previous hundred thousand years, the areas where people WERE living WERE stable, the people could have developed agriculture, so why didn’t they ?
March 18th, 2013 at 10:38 am
@ ogardener
Thanks. It’s one of the best papers I’ve ever read.
Kathy C. said :
I think we humans would feel more “right” if we lived wild because we would be living the way we are programmed to live. Our behavior programs would be the ones that are adaptive to our environment. But that says nothing about what those behaviors would be. They would at times mean nurturing a new life and at times infanticide.
But fortunately, because of guys like Sorenson, we’ve got a couple of centuries of data, and more, from all around the planet, so we don’t need to guess what ‘wild living’ might have been like, or project our fantasies, like Diamond, because we have detailed first hand descriptions that we can read.
March 18th, 2013 at 10:39 am
pat says: When I hear stories about the calf trying to suckle on a piece of rope at Fukushima site it just makes me sick. I look around and I wonder why we are not all just breaking down in uncontrollable sobs.
We feel the events we foresee
To only a tiny degree;
Beyond hard to believe,
We can’t even conceive
Of how bad it’s going to be.
March 18th, 2013 at 11:18 am
pat, I agree.
There are images that make me so sad that life just doesn’t seem worth the pain. It’s funny, but the ones that most hurt involve animals. EarthFirst! newswire carried a story about the BAU cruelty in the US wildlife “service” with a picture of a coyote being torn to pieces by dogs the “service” had let loose. The coyote was being held in a steel trap.
I’ll never forget that picture.
There just aren’t enough people that give enough of a shit to stop the killing this culture does every second of every day. Which only compounds the sadness.
March 18th, 2013 at 11:51 am
On real bad days, I love to sing: It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
http://www.submedia.tv/stimulator/2013/03/14/it-is-happening-again/
March 18th, 2013 at 11:56 am
@ww, pat etc.
Hakuna matata – the circle of life.
The lesson of apoptosis is that without death, there can be no life. I’m not sure why we get so emotionally bent out of shape when a molecule-thin skin of illusory human volition is painted over that basic feature of existence. Do we dream ourselves to be gods, and imagine that the force of our will can create one-sided coins out of thin air?
March 18th, 2013 at 12:21 pm
It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.
Sherwood Anderson
March 18th, 2013 at 12:25 pm
@ pat
Why should we expect anything ?
March 18th, 2013 at 12:30 pm
Paul, I’m okay with death – my own, my loved ones, even the human race. (I’m not looking forward to it, but it doesn’t strike me as odd or wrong in the grand scheme of things).
I tend to think I’m probably not alone in being far more disturbed by the horrible evil things that people do, to each other and other living beings.
March 18th, 2013 at 12:32 pm
It’s the Beach of Doom, the most awesome place to be in the whole Universe.
March 18th, 2013 at 1:05 pm
@Gail
Why more disturbed by the horrible things that people do than by the horrible things that nature does? It’s a learned conscience-response, yes? A healthy dose of “should” and “ought” that blinds us to “is”.
March 18th, 2013 at 1:08 pm
The Moral Outrage of Nuclear Power
The Truth About Radiation
Excerpt: “This primer on radiation should illustrate why the public should remain highly skeptical, if not outright hostile, to organizations that gloss over the effects of massive radiation leaks. It is not “safe.” Do not be fooled by well-oiled spin machines that have distorted and mangled science in the service of perhaps the most dangerous industry on planet earth today. The most reasonable response to a radiation leak is to run as far away from the source of the contamination as possible and to never return. These are uninhabitable zones, and the radiation sitting in the environment attacks the young, particularly unborn developing children, many times harsher than it does full grown adult males (the standard body type used in the old risk assessment model). Horrific birth defects are the norm in the radiation zones, and these, such as those seen in the two films cited above, will shock the viewer to his/her very core. This is not an academic discussion nor a scientific debate. This is a moral outrage. Nuclear power has poisoned millions.”
Embedded within the article:
CHERNOBYL HEART and CHILDREN OF CHERNOBYL
Also “Nuclear Controversies“.
March 18th, 2013 at 1:11 pm
I cannot avoid expectations.
I wake up, and the next thing that happens is either better than expected or worse than expected – however, sometimes, though quite boring, it happens as expected.
“All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die. ”
Blade Runner
March 18th, 2013 at 1:13 pm
Is it disturbing to see a small calf eaten by a crocodile? Sure it is.
Is it not MORE disturbing to see a dead pelican covered in human-caused oil spill goo? That is the question.
March 18th, 2013 at 1:39 pm
@ pat
I cannot avoid expectations.
But that is not my fault is it. I can. I don’t make any of these judgements ‘better’, ‘worse’.
What’s the point of that ? What are you measuring against ? What you feel entitled to ?
Re the calf, crocodile, pelican, nothing I could do about those, so I just have to accept the sadness of the suffering, but if that twat of a farmer had come into my house and told me that story, I’d have given him a kicking, because he had the power to do something about the suffering, and he did nothing, and that, to my way of seeing things, is inexcusable and unforgivable. When there is so MUCH horror and suffering, where we are utterly powerless, to do nothing when we could intervene, that makes a person less than human… like watching a person drown when you could extend a hand and save them. He could have shot the cattle, he could have fed them, he could have let them out, he could have called the authorities and made a fuss, it seemed he just watched over a long period and did absolutely nothing. Fucking zombie.
March 18th, 2013 at 1:54 pm
It may be semantics, but to not have expectations, IMO, is absurd.
You wake up, your Mom is there and has for you an ice cream cone. Okay, so this is not good or bad, it just is.
The next day, you wake up, your Mom is there with a cattle-prod and pokes it hard into your chest lighting you up like the Fourth of July. Okay, so this is not good or bad, it just is.
The next day, figuring “just is” might be a bit risky, you wake up early and you quietly jump out your bedroom window and make your way to school without breakfast (or the crazy hairdo).
Okay, so this not good or bad, it just is.
March 18th, 2013 at 1:59 pm
@ pat
You don’t understand, so you think it must be absurd. I can’t help that.
March 18th, 2013 at 2:08 pm
Why more disturbed by the horrible things that people do than by the horrible things that nature does? It’s a learned conscience-response, yes? A healthy dose of “should” and “ought” that blinds us to “is”.
NO – it is the product of our brain – of being able to anticipate into the future, to make comparisons of what is and what could be. As Pat says – we have expectations.
That is the paradox that humans are caught in – knowing the difference and not being able to do very much about it.
March 18th, 2013 at 2:28 pm
U; I think I read somewhere that the people were told they would return in 3 days. It was a lie. Maybe they weren’t allowed to return. Maybe now they are allowed so the farmer did return. We don’t know the whole story.
March 18th, 2013 at 2:44 pm
It’s true, I don’t understand how so many cannot separate the metaphysical from the physical.
We speak of right and wrong as concepts in the context of our being pure intellectual beings – and, I too can be way into that – of course, conceptually, the Andromeda Galaxy slamming into the Milky Way Galaxy is neither right nor wrong – the Andromeda Galaxy will not be judged “guilty” by the creator and cast into hell…
For me, I find it absurd to think I could separate myself from all things physical and there achieve a state of mind so pure that I had no expectations.
Ice cream cone good. Cattle-prod bad.
Homespun truism:
To be good is to be noble. But to teach others to be good is nobler, and alot less trouble.
March 18th, 2013 at 3:31 pm
Uh-ho…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/03/18/japan-daiichi-nuclear-plant-failure.html
Crucial system fails at Japan’s quake-damaged nuclear plant
“Workers at the tsunami-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan are trying to fix a crucial part of the plant that stopped working today.
The system that cools hundreds of spent fuel rods that are stored at the facility has stopped working, which could have dangerous consequences, CBC News producer Craig Dale has learned.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company confirmed that it had a partial power failure Monday evening and then discovered the problem with an electricity supply unit.
Currently the cooling systems in reactors one, three and four are not operational and representatives from TEPCO are unsure how to fix them.”
March 18th, 2013 at 3:39 pm
WTH don’t we just mine the moon for H3 already? 25 tons powers the US for a year based on current energy expenditure. Enough debating about whether or not we’ve already past a tipping point (which this does seem to be the case), let’s try to mitigate the damage in the most realistic way.
People won’t stop with industrialized civilization until they must, so you adapt industry towards new sources. Let’s behead whatever bastard stands in our way of getting off of fossil fuels, and mine the moon already. That should be the key focus. After that project is well into development, how about we start figuring out how to clean up the environment?
I think that permaculture and aquaponics are the way forward. Hell, we can desalinate the oceans, else suck out some of the humidity from the air if need be. If our climate is to change, so be it. Why not simply predict the outcomes, and become proactive to mitigate the damage. Talking about EOTWAWKI without actually proposing solutions is just stupid.
March 18th, 2013 at 3:50 pm
That’s the first time I’ve heaver seen the words “mine the moon for H3″ and “realistic” in the same paragraph. Thanks for the ironic chuckle, Commander.
March 18th, 2013 at 4:31 pm
@ pat
For me, I find it absurd to think I could separate myself from all things physical and there achieve a state of mind so pure that I had no expectations.
Ice cream cone good. Cattle-prod bad.
Homespun truism:
To be good is to be noble. But to teach others to be good is nobler, and alot less trouble.
Hahaha, there’s no way you’ll understand, because you’re trying some kind of intellectual analysis.
Who is this ‘I’ that finds things absurd and thinks it could separate itself and achieve a state of mind that it had no expectations ? Where is it ? What is it ?
Who gets to decide what’s ‘good’ ? Personally, I can’t stand ice cream, although I prefer not to be cattle prodded, and I certainly don’t attempt to teach others, goodness or anything else.
@ Gail
Being able to predict the result of an action, is nothing like having expectations.
March 18th, 2013 at 4:39 pm
“That’s the first time I’ve heaver seen the words “mine the moon for H3″ and “realistic” in the same paragraph. Thanks for the ironic chuckle, Commander”
So basically, you don’t have a decent reply, so resort to acting as if it’s an unrealistic proposal. Check.
You know what else is unrealistic? Going to the moon, crossing the atlantic, proving the earth is round, and relying on your puny opinions to limit my perceptions.
March 18th, 2013 at 4:42 pm
you must not have heard of this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwF6pDHxi_8
doomers are so very pathetic :puke:
If we be doomed, so be it. Until that existence is realized, we have a moral imperative to dream a way out.
March 18th, 2013 at 5:01 pm
Paul
“mine the moon for H3″
It’s a conceptual piece.
A la Andy Kaufman, if you believe they put a Man on the Moon
March 18th, 2013 at 5:02 pm
@ CommanderCraCra
It’s an unrealistic proposal. Please clean up Fukushima first, then we’ll talk about your moon dreams.
March 18th, 2013 at 5:11 pm
@Speak Softly
Okay, it exists today as a concept. Why can’t it exist in reality within 1,000 days? I’m waiting.
@ulvfugl
Fukushima won’t be “cleaned up” for too many years yet. We’ve got 7 billion people on this rock. I think we can do the best we can with Fuku, and still have some minds left to work on other projects.
Why is it unrealistic? Seriously, I want a damned good response before I consider it “unrealistic”. It’s technologically, and economically feasible. All that is lacking is the will. This is pathetic.
March 18th, 2013 at 5:13 pm
Sarcasm is the banana peel the irony challenged always slip on.
March 18th, 2013 at 5:33 pm
@ Commander
‘Not available to view in my country’, so I have no clear idea what you’re talking about, but I imagine it’s the typical techno-utopian bullshit, self-aggrandising nonsense that doesn’t really solve anyone’s real life problems. Like I said, if there’s resources to spare, send them to Fukushima, they don’t even pay the workers living wages.
March 18th, 2013 at 6:15 pm
CommanderCraCra,
Your proposal is ridiculous. Let’s see, since Apollo, humans have been no more than about 400 miles from the surface of the Earth. The Moon is about 250,000 miles from the surface of the Earth.
You can say the burden of proof is upon me, but I think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What’s the net energy, buddy?
March 18th, 2013 at 7:19 pm
haha!
so you’re all a bunch of whining losers!!
truth finally comes out.
oh let’s see…. the us consumes about 5/4 TRILLION in energy expenditures EVERY YEAR, yet we somehow don’t have enough to go to the moon to solve our energy crisis.
LOSERS!!!
March 18th, 2013 at 7:33 pm
not only could you supply our nation with energy, you could store reserves to back the fiat currency, and sell some of it to other nations.
thus, you create new industry…create more jobs…reduce carbon emissions, back the dollar by something tangible (nobody is certain all the gold in ft. knox still remains), and maybe extend civilization for .. oh I dunno, another generation or so in the process.
but NO, that is…. something which actually makes sense… something which would help to destroy your EOTWAWKI scenario which you all seem to have invested so much energies towards.
best to just label the idea as absurd, ridiculous, and whatever else. cool. you guys go on believing that. i’ll keep on telling people of viable solutions to the problems we face.
even if we’re all screwed due to inaction, I still WIN!!
March 18th, 2013 at 7:50 pm
Here I found a source that puts it into laymen’s terms for us all:
“The energy needed to get to the moon was 2.90652E11 joules. That’s about the same as that produced by Hoover Dam in 2.5 minutes.”
http://www.quora.com/The-Moon/How-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-travel-to-the-moon
2.5 minutes from Hoover Dam. You spend most of that fuel just to get into earth’s orbit. the distance is pretty well irrelevant. that’s because there is virtually zero gravity in outer space. you need some to get going, and some to break once you reach the moon.
again, this is carbon emission free fuel source. yes, it would take A LOT of resources and manpower to take on such a project, but it could be done.
March 18th, 2013 at 8:34 pm
Canadian Arctic Glacier Melt Accelerating, Irreversible, Projections Suggest
March 18th, 2013 at 9:24 pm
New from Arctic News:
http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/tipping-points.html
Tipping Points, Aaron Franklin, 3/16/13. This one discusses the mechanisms of permafrost melting and recent data regarding that. Pretty intense stuff, lots of charts, maps, diagrams.
This is pretty strange, though:
“The good news though is that we have all the knowledge now, just in time, and all the tools to stop it quickly and reletavely easily. Provided we act within the next few months.”
This is not about “tools,” as if this is a technology problem, but about a social system which is driving us towards extinction.
March 18th, 2013 at 10:14 pm
@ Commander
You’re like a teenage kid wanting to have a party.
Okay, but we’ve heard all these promises before.
Like how nuclear power was going to be too cheap to monitor, the safe, clean fuel of the future…
Like how plastics were so cheap and convenient and hygienic, to package all our food, bla bla…
You clean up the mess from the last party, like you promised you would, before you get to have another one. Get the dioxins and bisphenols and radionuclides and the rest of the crap sorted.
Get those floating plastic islands the size of France out of the oceans, clean up Fukushima.
Until that’s done, I don’t care about how cheap and easy it is to go to the Moon.
March 18th, 2013 at 10:45 pm
Cyborg Buddha
http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2013-03-13T16_46_49-07_00
I haven’t listened to it yet, but it’s got to be better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick…
“…The conversation around the use of technology to improve upon humanity needs an infusion of compassion and adulthood to counteract the adolescent, male, techno-libertarian mentality that has kept the discussion from reaching a wider and more diverse audience. Dr. Hughes, a former Buddhist monk, has recently added some high-tech enhancements to his long-standing meditation practice, and the discussion turns to the potential benefits and dangers of the widespread adoption of this technology now that prices have come down and the hardware has become more user-friendly….”
March 19th, 2013 at 1:48 am
ulvfugl,
Thank you for relentlessly presenting the evidence that a modern American does *not* represent all of humanity. So many people still assume that this is all there is to human cultures, despite the well documented archaeological and anthropological findings pointing to a wide diversity of ways of living and interacting with landbases.
And especially thanks for posting Sorenson’s extremely powerful “Preconquest Consciousness.” I’ve read and reread it several times over the years, and have suggested it to many other people who express any interest in anthropology. It’s a long read, but gripping, dense with information, and such an important translation of cultures. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Norris
March 19th, 2013 at 2:42 am
Thank you so much for that generous compliment, Norris Thomlinson, blessings be upon you !
Anglocentrism is just as pernicious.
I’d say the best scientific paper I ever read, for logic, clarity and simplicity, was Darwin’s, on the earthworm.
http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Chancellor_Earthworms.html
March 19th, 2013 at 3:17 am
Commander: Let’s say you’re correct about the fuel to the moon. Okay, we send a team, they get there and there is NOTHING. First they have to find the H3 (the former astronaut in the video is very glib about the details – estimating the cost, “we know how to do it”, etc), next they have to bring up machinery that works in zero atmosphere (ie. no oxygen; i haven’t seen any equipment on the scale needed that works on solar energy or batteries or the H3 we’re mining there). Then the H3 needs to be processed so it can be transported back – again, from scratch. So unless we’re talking about multiple trips up and back, carting up the equipment, setting up a base for workers, inventing, transporting and setting up the machinery needed (unless you want to transport an appropriate number of miners up there), keeping supply lines going for the needs of these humans (again, unless you want the whole enterprise to be robotic – which needs to be invented first) and then it needs to be returned to as yet non-existent terminals and distributed to an as yet undeveloped grid. It all would take time – probably more than we have.
i appreciate your idea (though the devil is in the details as always) and you should continue to look for more of them. Don’t feel alone in your desperation – NONE OF US WANTS (ourselves or) OUR PLANET TO DIE, and your observation that we’re all losers is correct – we are. Big time.
Everyone, thanks for the great links and posts – it takes a while to read, watch, listen to and digest all this information – but it’s appreciated.
March 19th, 2013 at 3:40 am
CommanderCraCra is that you Sean the Mystic aka The Cosmist? Your posts have a familiar sound to them…. http://seanthemystic.blogspot.com/
March 19th, 2013 at 4:00 am
@Commander
Talking about EOTWAWKI without actually proposing solutions is just stupid.
————
I sympathize. When you consider the $2 to $6 trillion the US spent on the Iraq war, there is actually plenty of money to attempt to do something like you suggest. Even though the consensus here is that it’s too late to do anything, I say why not try everything and anything.
But neither you and nor the people on the blog are going to get any movement towards what they want, there will be no serious attempt to find new clean energy sources, for the same reason there will be no reduction in the burning of fossil fuels–15 of the 25 biggest corporations on the planet are oil companies, several more are auto companies, so things look pretty good from their point of view, don’t you think? You, see, there is no problem and therefore no need for a solution. BTW, there’s an excellent movie about what you’re talking about called Moon, the actor Sam Rockwell is pretty amazing in it. Also read a good book on the Apollo astronauts that you might like, called Moon Dust. But, nothing is going to change because Wall St doesn’t need change and doesn’t want change.
March 19th, 2013 at 4:01 am
Drug Habits of Highly Effective People
March 19th, 2013 at 4:03 am
http://cironline.org/reports/who-owns-fish-4251
Who Owns the Fish?
Any commercial fisherman used to be able to fish in U.S. seas. Not anymore. Today, the right to fish belongs to a number of private individuals who have traded, bought and sold these rights in unregulated markets. This system, called “catch shares,” favors large fishing fleets and has cut out thousands of smaller-scale fishermen. How did this happen? (a short video explains)
March 19th, 2013 at 4:07 am
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/large-fireball-streaks-across-eastern-u-s-seen-in-7-states/
Large fireball streaks across eastern U.S. – seen in 7 states
March 18, 2013 HIGH POINT, NC – There are several reports from Saturday night of a meteor gliding across the Carolina skies. Eyewitnesses reported seeing a large bolide meteor that split into several pieces. First Warn Storm Spotter Stuart McDaniel caught it all on his sky camera. McDaniel lives in Northern Cleveland County. In his video, the fast moving meteor moved rapidly across the sky growing bigger and bigger then fading away. McDaniel isn’t the only one who saw the meteor; the American Meteorologist Society received 55 reports about this fireball seen over Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Nearly half of the reports were from Ohio. –WCNC
March 19th, 2013 at 4:07 am
@ Ripley
Yes, indeedee, about thirty years ago, everything was going to be fine and dandy, because we were going to have a shiny new eco-friendly economy based on nice clean hydrogen, which we wouldn’t even have to fetch from the Moon, because we could get it from, well, it was everywhere, in water, the ocean was full of the stuff, um, we’re still waiting, there were some snags….
March 19th, 2013 at 4:17 am
Right. Guy just posted another link about Arctic ice melt, he thinks everyone sees this as alarming, but when oil company executives see it, champagne corks start popping because it means easier access to Arctic oil resources. To them (oil corps and Wall St), anything we have to say sounds like dolphin clicks or whale song, we might just as well be another species.
March 19th, 2013 at 4:49 am
drowning in our own shit:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2013/03/its-not-just-overfloweveryday-leaks-sewer-systems-lead-alarming-amounts-sewage-our-waterways/5001/
It’s Not Just Overflow—Everyday Leaks From Sewer Systems Lead to Alarming Amounts of Sewage in Our Waterways
Sewage runoff into our waterways is both an environmental and a political problem when we can see and smell it. If you live in an older U.S. city with a combined sewer system – one where storm water and sewage share the same pipe network, overflowing through the same outlets – you’ve probably had the visceral experience after a big storm of approaching a river with a musty sheen.
We know, though, that city sewage in some form finds its way into our rivers and bays even in good weather (and without as much noxious evidence).
“We know that the sewers leak,” says Marion Divers, a Ph.D. candidate in geology and planetary science at the University of Pittsburgh. “But that’s the thing – we really don’t know how much they leak. That was our big unknown.”
Divers and coauthors Emily Elliott and Daniel Bain recently published research in the journal Environmental Science & Technology trying to answer this question. They studied water samples from Pittsburgh’s Nine Mile Run, one of two urban streams that still exist within the city limits (before we used such streams to dump our refuse, then piped them up and built over them, most cities were covered in small streams: “If you look at any maps with all the buildings and political boundaries taken off,” Divers says, “you can see where the streams should be”).
The researchers were particularly looking for a kind of nitrogen that can come from sewer systems, industrial sources, lawn fertilizer or any fossil fuels burned into the atmosphere eventually creating deposits on the landscape (fascinating side note: scientists can estimate runoff from lawn fertilizers by looking at the housing stock and financial stability of neighborhoods).
Until now, there’s been very little information about how much sewer systems in particular contribute to this mix simply through leaky pipes
“It’s quite a bit of leakage,” Divers says. She and her coauthors estimated that 10-20 tons of reactive nitrogen flow into Pittsburgh’s Monongahela River from the area around this one two-mile long stream. That would be the equivalent of about 12 percent of the sewage produced by people living there. “That’s just from one tiny little watershed in the city of Pittsburgh,” Divers adds. “The bigger unknown here is that it suggests that cities in general can have a significant impact on waterways.”
This nitrogen matters because it contributes to the overall poor quality of these habitats for the creatures that live there, as well as to dead zones in downstream waterways, like the Gulf of Mexico or the Chesapeake Bay.
The thought of trying to solve infinite small leaks – let alone the big storm overflows – is a little overwhelming. “Think of digging up every sewer line everywhere,” Divers says.
Cities like Pittsburgh have had a hard enough time dealing with overruns from combined sewer systems (for which many of them are currently under consent decrees with the EPA). Back in 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country a D-minus for its handling of wastewater, citing aging systems that discharge billions of gallons of untreated wastewater into waterways each year. The latest edition of that report card is expected this week, and it’s hard to imagine that our sewer systems are doing any better four years later, especially as researchers learn that they may be causing even more (less visible) harm than we thought.
“Even fixing the combined sewer system,” Divers says, “taking all the combined sewer overflow discharges out of the water here in the city will not solve the problem of sewage getting into our waterways.”
March 19th, 2013 at 5:12 am
and that ain’t all:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/-/world/16390970/dead-pigs-in-china-river-exceed-13-000/
Dead pigs in China river exceed 13,000
The number of dead pigs found in a river running through China’s commercial hub Shanghai had reached more than 13,000, the government and state media said Monday, as mystery deepened over the hogs’ precise origin.
The Shanghai government said workers pulled 335 pigs out of the Huangpu river, which supplies 22 percent of the city’s drinking water, on Monday, bringing the total to 9,795 since the infestation began earlier this month.
Shanghai has blamed farmers in Jiaxing in neighbouring Zhejiang province for dumping pigs which died of disease into the river upstream, where the official Xinhua news agency said another 3,601 dead animals had been recovered so far.
The Jiaxing government has said the area is not the sole source of the carcasses, adding it had found only one producer that could be held responsible.
Shanghai had checked farms in its southwestern district of Songjiang, where the pigs were first detected, but found they were not to blame, the Shanghai Daily newspaper said on Monday.
The scandal has spotlighted China’s troubles with food safety, adding the country’s most popular meat to a growing list of food items rocked by controversy.
Samples of the dead pigs have tested positive for porcine circovirus, a common swine disease that does not affect humans.
“Due to some farming households having a weak recognition of the law, bad habits, and lack of increased supervision and capability for treatment have led to the situation,” the national agriculture ministry’s chief veterinarian Yu Kangzhen said.
Yu attributed a higher mortality rate among pigs to colder weather this spring, though he ruled out an epidemic, the ministry said in statement posted on its website over the weekend.
The Shanghai government said in its statement that the quality of drinking water remained within national standards, despite widespread worries over water quality among the city’s 23 million residents.
The thousands of dead pigs have drawn attention to China’s poorly regulated farm production. Animals that die from disease can end up in the country’s food supply chain or improperly disposed of, despite laws against the practice.
In Wenling, also in Zhejiang, authorities announced last week that 46 people had been jailed for up to six-and-a-half years for processing and selling pork from more than 1,000 diseased pigs.
China faced one its biggest food-safety scandals in 2008 when the industrial chemical melamine was found to have been illegally added to dairy products, killing at least six babies and making 300,000 people ill.
In another recent incident, the American fast-food giant KFC faced controversy after revealing that some Chinese suppliers provided chicken with high levels of antibiotics, in what appeared to be an industry-wide practice.
March 19th, 2013 at 5:13 am
This had me laughing…. from
Writers No One Reads
The main reason no one reads him today is that he wrote everything, something like seven million words, in Latin. English translations are few and far between.
Another important reason: a general sense that so much of what he wrote was wrong. It is true that many of Kircher’s ideas — secret knots of cosmic influence, universal sperm, the hollowness of mountains — didn’t stand the test of time….
Oh dear, poor guy. Took himself so seriously, worked so hard, 7 million words is serious writing… but it was even …during his own lifetime that Kircher began to develop his reputation as an author who couldn’t always be trusted… hahaha
Descartes became quite vexed with Kircher’s insistence that a sunflower seed could drive a clock based on its innate sensitivity to the magnetic attraction of the Sun.
Perhaps it wasn’t all in vain as his work might be considered as a step in the direction towards modern science fiction… hahahaha
http://writersnoonereads.tumblr.com/post/44720698653/this-guest-post-by-john-glassie-is-partially
March 19th, 2013 at 5:19 am
Lastly (for a while), this:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2013/03/507283.html
Tuberculosis Outbreak U.S. Civil Detention Plan No Longer Secret
These government agencies have already budgeted funds since 2011 for ‘civil detention’ using ‘correctional facility housing units’ and ‘commandeered motels’ to ‘house and treat’ Tuberculosis infected people throughout southern California, but that’s not all.
Corporate America McDonald’s fast-food coupons are even budgeted by the government into Tuberculosis patient diets while being housed in these ‘correctional housing units’.
(read the whole article – this is some “sick” shit!)
March 19th, 2013 at 5:36 am
Beach of Doom, children, chickens, guitar picking…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JL2dybuAec&feature=share&list=UUieMgkNAvWRNE3CSxKSfKxQ
March 19th, 2013 at 5:38 am
A hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay prison has grown and now involves at least 21 men, a US military official has said, while denying reports trickling out from prisoners through lawyers that there is a more widespread protest and lives are in danger.
Read more: http://www.3news.co.nz/Guantanamo-hunger-strike-grows/tabid/417/articleID/290904/Default.aspx#ixzz2NzMbwTNV
March 19th, 2013 at 5:45 am
http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/huge-patches-of-warm-air-over-the-arctic.html
March 19th, 2013 at 6:16 am
Wow Kathy, note in that article that he mentions the Artic sea ice may disappear this summer. Meanwhile, the standard science and media folks sing a different tune.
March 19th, 2013 at 6:49 am
@Gail,
Why more disturbed by the horrible things that people do than by the horrible things that nature does? It’s a learned conscience-response, yes? A healthy dose of “should” and “ought” that blinds us to “is”.
That is along the lines of my earlier point that every characteristic which we see in humans, has some analogue in the natural world that formed us. It was pointed out that the exception is ideas and imagination. However, I don’t even buy that because I have been a keen observer of nature for a long time, and even these traits are there if you look for them. For example, a crow has been shown to fashion a wire into a hook, which it then inserts into a tube to pull out food. Or this bird discovering and object which it then uses to ski on the snow..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5NuBk5_Izc
So again, we have greater power of agency to do what we do. The important point here, is that we cannot solve human problems on the basis of thinking that we have departed from some previously ‘purest’ state of nature.
March 19th, 2013 at 6:51 am
..Nature (and ourselves) is both glorious and at the same time horrific.
March 19th, 2013 at 6:59 am
Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine
March 19th, 2013 at 7:03 am
With thanks to the folks at Blazing Kat, I’ve posted a new guest essay. It’s here
March 19th, 2013 at 7:07 am
@ Bailey
The difference between us and all the other species is not that we have agency, the crow has agency, lots of species can do amazing things, the prairie dogs have sophisticated language. The difference is that we have culture, we can store accumulated knowledge, ideas, and pass it on from one generation to the next.
That frees us up from waiting for genetic evolution. One guy learns how to make a rifle, coffee grinder, set of false teeth, whatever, draws the details on a piece of paper, prints a million copies, and sends them around the world… no other species has that trick.
Five centuries ago, it happened a few times a year. Now it happens thousands of times every day, more. I heard that to keep up with latest research, a medical doctor would need to read 800 new papers every morning.
This is the ‘thing’ that has been evolving for the last few thousand years. Physically we have hardly changed. Soon, I think this year ? 4 billion people will have cell phones and be talking to each other, texting, taking photos, nothing like this has ever happened before.
March 19th, 2013 at 7:31 am
@ U,
Well we may be arguing two different points. Mine is that there is no looking back to any ‘noble’ state of nature that we have strayed from, because ‘in measure’ there is nothing really unique about us that DID NOT STEM from nature. So what if we can do all of these things and carry ideas to the utmost extreme? What good has it done us (I guess I am missing your point if the point is that this attribute can free us from our plight somehow).
March 19th, 2013 at 7:32 am
..I have been down with a virus and have not kept up with the thread, so forgive me if you made the point elsewhere.
March 19th, 2013 at 7:52 am
@ Bailey
Yes, probably we are talking at cross purposes about something lost back up the thread…
My point is, there is very little that distinguishes us from the rest of the species on Earth, but what does distinguish us, is culture. Some other species have it, or have a sort of proto-culture, many can learn, but we have it to such a degree that we became freed from genetic evolution.
We found a way to transmit accumulated knowledge and ideas from one generation to the next, first with language and stories, then with writing and print, now with electronic technology and the internet.
As for doing us ‘any good’, that’s an entirely different matter. I was commenting upon the difference that makes a difference, so to speak.
March 19th, 2013 at 7:54 am
@ulv
when you talk about culture, I hear a description of something that sounds a lot like just another “broad-sense evolutionary” adaptation to the MEP imperative. This aspect of “culture” as a general human phenomenon may be exactly why we can’t fix the problems we’re creating. It’s kind of like asking a cheetah to stop running so fast in order to preserve the gazelle population. They can’t do it, it’s not in their nature. Nor can we. The communication of innovation is what we do as a species – it’s our fundamental evolutionary advantage. Give it up? Not on your life – or 7 billion other lives, for that matter.
March 19th, 2013 at 9:36 am
@ Paul
Lots of definitions, not an easy word to pin down.
Absolutely, as humans we can’t escape it, anymore than we can escape eating. It’s been with us before we were ‘us’.
Genes gave the advantage to pass on traits that served the species well to the next generations.
Dawkins tried to work the same idea for culture, by breaking it down into units, as memes.
I think there are memes, such as catchy songs that are infectious, that part of the hypothesis seems to be more or less valid, but otherwise I think his idea fails.
We don’t even need it. We’ve already got Aristotle’s word, idea, which everybody is familiar with.
You get one idea and mate it with another idea, and sometimes they produce a viable baby with hybrid vigour.
Like replacing the horse with an internal combustion engine.
March 19th, 2013 at 10:00 am
I’m with Paul on the human ‘culture’ thing.
Relentless ‘innovation’ is the hallmark of h s sapian ‘culture’.
With the emphasis on relentless, as in: knowing no limits
It was not that extreme with other hominid species, they loafed along for hundreds of thousands of years without atom bombs and concentration camps and melting the polar ice shield with their ‘cultural’ pollution.
I keep bringing up the different hominid species approach to their respective ecologies throughout time because, well , they’re all DEAD, and h s sapian ‘culture’ is NOT.
Hmmm What does that indicate????? Hmmm
They’re dead and gone, never to rise again, and We, the ‘smart’ cultural (large scale social organization) species that are still standing, in the toxic waste sludge of our collective global Kulture. We are Superior to mere ‘animals’.
Our Kulture makes us Masters of the Universe. Immortal, Untouchable, Dominant. We don’t need no stinkin’ Moby Dick.
Any other large scale culture on planet Earth, as we speak, will be every bit as bad as the current ‘Western’ paradigm. The Chinese and the Indians both lust for material goods every bit as destructively as the West, they just don’t have the ‘money’ yet to buy it (preferably on Credit from to Big to Fail transnational banking Mafia)
Car ownership in China is headed to Infinite and beyond. India too. Run Cheetah, Run!
This two ‘alternative’ cultures have a big population problem. No cultural grip on Limits.
The Chinese had the one child thing going pretty well through coercion by The State, but have in recent years ‘out sourced’ their population growth to Chinese settlements/beachheads around the world where the ‘one child’ rule does not apply outside their borders and the through an aggressive ‘expulsion via adoption’ of a staggering amounts of baby girls. That will be interesting in future generations to explain to billions of young unmarried men. I see a growth industry in professional legal prostitution.
India? Well, just open up a cultural big whoops can of Anarchy in population policy. Their electric grid when down recently and 600 million people lost their power for several days, quite a record in human creativity and sparkling human ingenuity.
No, the cultural ‘chops’ of h s sapian is not going to stop for Any Thing, No How, No Where.
Cause it’s not about logic or reason or the Kingdom of God or the Rights of Man.
It’s about More
Full speed cheetah right over the Event Horizon.
March 19th, 2013 at 10:21 am
Amen, Brother Softly!
March 19th, 2013 at 10:48 am
Interesting..
Neanderthal Brains Focused On Vision and Movement Leaving Less Room for Social Networking
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130319093639.htm
March 19th, 2013 at 11:16 am
@ Paul, Softly
I’m not arguing against any of that, what I’m attempting to do is trying to understand whether the development of human culture kind of matches up against the LMEP theory, or not.
Not that it matters much, just satisfying my own curiosity really.
What might be interesting, see, if there’s a limit on how large an ant colony can get, or a human tribe can get, before certain conflicting factors make it unstable, then it might be able to increase it’s energy/work/entropy by adding others from another species.
Hence slaves, agriculture. And now, robots.
March 19th, 2013 at 11:32 am
to Bailey
I was read an interesting book a couple of years ago called ‘Moon Walking with Einstein’.
It was about human memory and how it functions and how human cultures through the ages, especially before ‘the written word’ cultivated memory as a repository of collective knowledge and tradition and history.
More specifically, it focused on winning various national and international memory contests by various contestants and ultimately the author himself, who having been tested as having just an ordinary middle of the bell curve memory, when on to win a national memory contest.
An example of one of the contests: memorize a 1500 digit number, perfectly, in 5 minutes.
These ‘memory athletes’ are quite amazing.
What I remember most were the memory exercises the contestants did to prepare. Most were ancient techniques lost to humans and most ‘memory athletes’ said they were based on visual not mental exercises.
Oral tradition cultures rely on memorizing visual images of what is to be remembered, not names or concepts or thoughts.
The article you linked to on Neanderthals ties into the ‘Moon Walking with Einstein’
Hey, what do I know, I’m just an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer
March 19th, 2013 at 11:34 am
“…Hence slaves, agriculture. And now, robots..”
Cyborg Buddha ;>) hahaha
http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2013-03-13T16_46_49-07_00
Dig it
March 19th, 2013 at 10:56 pm
@ Speak Softly
Yeah, I listened, the first link, thanks for it, interesting what the guy said about The Farm, I’ve heard of other experience there. Kind of fits to my theory re people chasing stimulation of ideas. It was too bucolic for that guy. Therein lies the seed of our doom. Never satisfied. Always wanting more buzz, more bright shiny newness, which means more energy, means LMEP, means NTE.