June 2010
2 posts
The Fall (Part I: Origins)
So I suppose I should discuss exactly why and how I see our society coming apart around us in the near future. I guess I should note that I used to be a far more pessimistic doomer than I am now, but I’m still pretty worried about how this whole thing will unfold. I should also note that I believe that our society has already entered this period of decline, which brings me to a good jumping...
Red Families v. Blue Families
I’ve just finished reading (well, partially skimming) the excellently researched Red Families v. Blue Familes. An excellent summary is provided here. The conclusions it comes to are these:
The biggest factor dividing red and blue families is age at family formation.
Red families form early.
Historically this was fine (and was true for most Americans), but the effects of economic...
January 2010
2 posts
Comment on Metafilter, December 9:
For those of us who want to work as little as possible, office work works. Well, to an extent I agree. But something I’ve come to realize is that stuff (“watch YouTube, share music, play Flash games, and kill time”) is ultimately not really fulfilling (and although I only speak for myself, I know it’s true of many other people I...
I’m wondering if peak oil will ever be recognized as the root of our economic problems. To most people, it’s always something else. We’ll continue to hear about how bankers, political turmoil, global warming legislation, or other small speed bumps are preventing oil production from carrying on at an ever increasing rate. People in 50 years will all still be clinging to their...
October 2009
2 posts
A reasonable painting of the future from Sorry Comics by John Kinhart.
“Consider, for example, the process of running a small, informal brew pub or restaurant out of your home, under a genuine free market regime. Buying a brewing vat and a few small fermenters for your basement, using a few tables in a remodeled spare room as a public restaurant area, etc., would require a small bank loan for at most a few thousand dollars. And with that capital outlay, you...
September 2009
1 post
The metaphor of alcoholism to our society’s addiction to oil is unbelievably rich, as apparently withdrawal from alcohol can kill you (Alcohol Withdrawal Syndrome):
“Some organs are rapidly swelling while others do just the opposite, restricting blood flow in both directions. At the same time, body cavities are filling with fluids- a normal, 175-180 pound man can swell to 250, 275,...
August 2009
1 post
Impromptu Curry (Aloo Mattar)
Ingredients:
5-7 Red Potatoes (less if using brown regular potatoes)
1-2 Onions
1 15oz Can Peas
1 15oz Can Cut Green Beans
1 15oz Can Diced Tomatoes
1 15oz Can Sliced Carrots
1-2 Tbsp Butter
1-2 Tbsp Oil
Some Water
1 Tbsp Curry Powder
1-2 Tsp Garam Masala
1-2 Tsp Ground Coriander
1-2 Tsp Cumin
.5 - 1 Tsp Chili Powder
.5 - 1 Tsp Turmeric
Salt to taste (I...
June 2009
3 posts
Brandon Darby is an FBI informant.
Brandon Darby was a victim of the same game he played with the activists he turned in. The activists he was spying on didn’t have the guts to carry through with their plans, but he himself was too cowardly to simply let it go, to not follow through on the awful obligations he had made to the FBI to catch some crazy kids. Now he is $12,000 richer and the...
From a post on the Ran Prieur forums:
Can we have a quick-check on “corporate farming”? Its a rarity. Seriously. Corporations do not want to own farms because farms fail too often. There’s a complicated sequence of operations in which corporations effectively own and control farms, but the big players are more than happy to let the guy-with-the-land-mortgage suck up the...
25 Random Things About Me
I’m neither an optimist or a pessimist. Regarding the half glass of water example: It’s water in a glass. Based on your perspective you can choose whether to view the glass as half-empty or half-full. Neither of these are “true” in the same sense that we know there is water in a glass. I’m observant enough to see these are both valid...
May 2009
3 posts
”[…]Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan makes a distinction between people who think in a complex systems way (we could call this ecothinking) and those who think classically based on what is known and categorised about the world. The latter is why we have arrived at this situation and the former is a way to understand the future as we progress through socio-economic-ecological...
[…] I have lost all interest in arguments that something can’t be done. I’ve made those arguments myself, but now I’m going to quit, because when they’re right they’re a waste of time, and when they’re wrong they are actively harmful. To argue for the impossibility of something you like is despair, and to argue for the impossibility of something you...
April 2009
1 post
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the...
March 2009
6 posts
You know one thing the battle between democrats and republicans politics is about? It’s about being able to claim cultural control over those who are unable to define their own politics and those who do not know how to define their own politics.
Should we be doing that? Should we simply be trying to get people on a ‘side’?
The only way we’re going to fix any of this...
One of the things that makes depression really hard to deal with is simply the overwhelming nature of negative emotions. If you can’t distinguish anxiety from sadness from despair how can you deal with any of those things individually? You can’t. You see them all as just one big ball, as one problem, when in fact that ball is a big knot of smaller problems. The problems are probably...
I think that the ideology of the press is not so much liberal or conservative. They think themselves the keepers of realism, of savviness. I think the real religion of the American press is savviness. And in their view, it isn’t savvy to say you’re going to mobilize the anger and frustration of the American people and bring that power to Washington to change it. […] And it’s those eternal...
Using future tax dollars to give banks more money to lend out at interest is robbing from the poor to pay the rich to rob from the poor.
- Douglas Rushkoff
[…] It never occurred to them that there’s a hell of a lot more jobs that are sheer drudgery than are a thrill a minute.
In the almost seven years since I graduated from college, I’ve never been sent overseas for work. I have been sent exciting places like Indianapolis.
- Slashdot Commenter
Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem...
February 2009
3 posts
“If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me,...
So, among other things, I’ve let my neglected developing my edge in the past couple months. My edge is the set of tools that I use to challenge myself and others. It’s more than being simply contrarian, although that is one of my methods (it’s hardly suitable for every job, just too brutal for most people outside of myself). I’ve been working on learning to use the tools...
Ahh, the last month or so has been great. Just old-fashioned feel good antics. Every once and a while it’s great to unwind and just throw all of your responsibilities out the window. True, the important things always come crawling back, but it’s one way of getting rid of the clutter. It’s clarifying. I’ll have to have a week or so of this before I leave on my trip in May....
January 2009
4 posts
A lot of older people ask: What is the point of texting? Why not just call?
Ahh, texting. I have a love/hate relationship with texting. Texting seems to be the most popular form of communication among members of my generation. The problem is that texting is the absolute most horrible way of communicating. It’s like email, except with a maximum of only 160 letters in each message. Enough...
Great article: Student Debt and The Spirit of Indenture
The article argues that student debt is a form of indentured servitude. This is a half truth though, because it’s not just student debt. It’s all debt.
With that in mind think about the stock market and people talking about buying and selling debt. The implication is obvious: they’re buying and selling indentured...
First half of an essay I’m writing:
Evangelical Christians often make the mistake of framing their “salvation” as a “leap of faith” which is just a vague way of saying “a leap beyond reason”. This gets criticized by most “scientific” thinkers as being an appeal to authority, a fallacious argument by itself. And it’s true, most...
I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
- William Blake
December 2008
16 posts
Two literary projects that I have been kicking around in my head recently:
A novel for guys. - Because no recent fiction by guys for guys speaks to me. Because publishers fail to represent us. Because there are things I want to say to guys as a whole. Etc. Etc.
Children’s books for new adults. - Simple illustrated books covering topics glossed over in childhood. Topics? Sex, drugs, rock...
Last week I was in a store doing some christmas shopping when someone knocked an item off a shelf which then shattered on the floor. A sales representative was sent to the scene of the accident and said out loud in a tired voice “Who did this? Come on now, all we wanted you to do was apologize. It’s ok, accidents happen.” Even now I can’t help but think that was an attempt...
People ask me a lot: Do you condone the use of violence? or Are you a pacifist?
Violence is a loaded word that I do my best not to use, so I refuse to answer the first question. The meaning of the word pacifism is something along the lines of “an opposition to violence”. Because the word pacifism is tied directly to the word violence I refuse to answer the second question. Be more...
People ask me a lot: Why books?
So I thought and thought and thought, and here’s what I came up with: I’m searching for meaning. All that means is that I want more than a “good” “education”, a “good” career, financial “security”, “nice” things, etc. etc. I could start whole arguments about all of those things I put in scare...
Tonight I’m going to going to be hanging out with my art school friend and another friend who are both interested in making films. I’ve talked film with them before, but I have a problem with the way we go about trying to come up with ideas. We always try to come up with a story first, which is pretty difficult to do, at least for good stories, and it often results in us just puzzling...
Magic: The Gathering keeps rolling on. Magic (MTG) is a collectible card game that I used to play a lot in high school. I haven’t played much in years since because it is expensive! It doesn’t really matter how much the cards cost, any cost is too much. Money for cardboard? No thanks.
The MTG ruleset is extremely nuanced and works very well compared to most other card games, and the...
Still getting settled and moved in to the new place.
For the next couple months (at least) I’m going to focus quite a bit on food stuff. Nutrition, budgeting, cooking, the whole shebang. This is something I have been interested in, but haven’t had very much incentive for exploring much, mainly because I was living at my parents house and all my food needs were taken care of. But now...
Great comment is free article today. Now the party’s over, will the young really pick up the tab?: There is little fairness in expecting future workers to support the gilded pensions of a generation who had it so much easier.
Some of the comments are pretty neat, like this one (edited for clarity):
Thanks for the article (I’m young and poor so always appreciate the oldies...
One more rant on school (I hope):
School creates so much psychological distress for so many people, and I think this is mainly because teachers and parents use fear mongering tactics to encourage children to learn. This needs to stop. USING FEAR TO MOTIVATE PEOPLE CAN BE PSYCHOLOGICALLY DAMAGING, ESPECIALLY TO CHILDREN. Kids should never ever ever be told that because they got a [grade] in...
I’ve also discovered why a lot of people hate reading. It’s largely due to the approach that most schools take towards literacy:
As many before him, Huey missed entirely the brilliant Greek insight that reading and understanding are two different things. Good reading is the fluent and effortless cracking of the symbol-sound code which puts understanding within easy reach....
A comment I made on my Metafilter post:
I just can’t see how the ends could possibly justify the means. We need to send kids away to school so they can learn to tolerate boring shit? For 6-8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Plus homework? Why not just put them in solitary confinement for weeks on end, that’s surely a more efficient method for teaching that lesson.
The main problem with...
The rank smell of garbage mixed with dank wet air;
Combined with the warmth of the coat and long johns I wear;
As I walk through the streets turned white by November;
On this terribly gray winter day in December;
My shoe hits some ice and I take a dive;
It’s ok though, at least I know I’m alive.
-Me
This is an amalgamation of the many attitudes people have displayed towards me after hearing that I have chosen not to go to school anymore. Most people just give me a cocked eyebrow look, but some people are shitty as hell about it, but maybe not this much. But yeah, on with the show:
A: Young man, are you going to school? B: No. A: WHAT?! Well, then allow me to list my terrible assumptions...
There is a certain psychosis that comes from living with your parents after a certain age (or developmental stage). Something about it makes it easy to get into a mental rut where it seems impossible to change things about yourself. While there is indeed a lack of ritual and intiatory rites in our culture, one important ritual that remains (for those fortunate enough) is the multiple year vacation...
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening Church appals;
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in...
November 2008
12 posts
Because people ask me this or bring it up a lot:
I’m neither an idealist or a realist, but a pragmatist. Idealists know what they want but don’t know how to get there. Realists don’t know what they want but they know how to get somewhere (typically they just follow someone else). I’m a pragmatist: I have an idea of what I want, I know where I am, and I figure out where I...
This bears repeating, from The Archdruid Report:
Planning for the future becomes especially risky when, rather than starting from present realities and trying to figure out what can be done, it starts from a vision of a desirable future and tries to figure out how to get there.
Because the vision is not real. It just doesn’t have the complexity of reality. Solutions to any problem...
I wrote this one a long time ago, and it’s...
The Getting Free Resource List
I’ve made a distinction here between body and mind, but don’t trick yourself into thinking you can get your mind free without getting your body free too (and vice versa). These aren’t separate things. Mind is looking at you from inside yourself. Body is looking at you from outside yourself.
These are just the works that have influenced me. There is quite literally a sea of...
The Anti-Civ Resource List
I’m getting tired of having the same debates over and over and over again, especially when it comes to the critique of civilization. This is a resource page I have set up so that people who are actually interested in the ideas I present can get more information.
I’m tired of having arguments with people who don’t actually want to debate the subject and just want to tell me why...
“While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
- Eugene V. Debs