Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 2:53 pm Post subject: Re: You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, cur.
I've been thinking a lot about a term that comes up in a lot of the ancient texts I read (Greek and Latin, but also Old English and other early Germanic lit, Sanskrit...).
The term is "compelled by necessity" (nyde gebaded in OE). It is a condition that heroes and peoples find themselves in. It is not a good position to be in in any of the texts. Basically it deprives you of all agency and you are merely driven by circumstances. This is the condition we seem to be entering.
Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 1:50 pm Post subject: Lundberg: "You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food"
Quote:
You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food. Need this be spelled out any more plainly? It is time to consider that the stage has been set for petroleum-induced famine.
We have "innocently" accommodated rising population with greater and greater food production via technology and the profit motive. But now we have run out of room to grow, as biotechnology, for example, has severe limitations -- major ones being petroleum dependence and topsoil loss. The biggest wild card for our existence is climate change, as we see with floods and other extreme weather affecting our food supply.
We are headed for massive shortages of food and other essentials, mainly brought about by the depletion of geological fossil reserves of cheap energy and water. The situation is demonstrated regularly with easy arithmetic based on statistical indicators from the United Nations, Worldwatch Institute, World Resources Institute, Earth Policy Institute, and numerous governments. Usually the full force of the message is offset by predictions of huge rises in future human population growth that are simple extrapolations of historical trends.
No one can say with certainty that the worst effects of today's crisis will occur tomorrow or by any particular date. But it is irrational to assume there will only be gradual tightening of supplies until some solutions miraculously come to our aid. One ought to at least admit that one year ago few people thought we'd be going in the direction we're going in, this fast, today.
Three days is our average food supply around the modernized world, i.e., for cities and their supermarkets. Long-term food stocks have plummeted: "Cereal stocks that are at their lowest level in 30 years," according to Worldwatch institute in its most recent Vital Signs. This is exacerbated by increasingly weirder weather, compounded by the oil price/supply pressure on food. What can interfere with the three-day situation are truckers on strike (as in Europe), extended/repeated power outages, and the inability of the work force to commute to work.
I asked Chris Flavin, Worldwatch Institute president, about the escalating crisis that I assumed he was quite worried about. He told me on Wednesday,
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 7:10 am Post subject: Re: You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food.
It would help if everyone made a concious choice of not eating meat or eating less meat. The U.S. will have a big problem when they can't use oil for production on their big farms. I just saw a CNN program where they said in Thailand the farmers are giving up their tractors and going back to buffalo to plow the fields. On one farm that trains the buffalo's to plow the waiting list to get a buffalo is three years. You can train an ox or buffalo to plow in a couple of months so it must be a shortage of buffalo. So if the U.S. and other countries needed to switch back to say oxen or horses it won't be a smooth transition from the way they are farming now. That time may come sooner or later, but it will come. The people have been mislead and I think it is too late already.
Yes, some will have to do as Fukiyoko did. Because they won't have cows and bulls.
But the cow has milk, ghee, curds to help in the diet. To have cows you need bulls. You can use them for plowing the fields. I don't know where you came up with oxen plowing is not beneficial. The compost from them is number one. The urine from the cow is antiseptic, can be used to purify. Also it is medicinal, used for many ayurvedic medicines. Esp. it is good for the liver. I have met people who had cirrosis of the liver and were cured by cow's urine and ayurvedic herbs. That was when they were told they only had 24 hours to live. Milk is actually beneficial for the brain.
Joined: Dec 25, 2005 Posts: 577 Location: Hillsboro, West Virginia
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 8:47 am Post subject: Re: You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food.
wisconsin_cur wrote:
dohboi wrote:
wcur, you seem to be advocating a lot of gripping of reality lately. There are a number of kinds of reality--the reality that the sun will eventually die, the reality that resources have limits, the reality that gw is beginning to pass crucial tipping points... Compared to these hard realities, any statement about human behavior as "reality" is comparatively soft.
Humans can and have changed very basic aspects of their behavior fairly consistently. In the fifties, the US was know throughout the world as a deeply racist society. Today, while deep institutional and individual racism continues of course, the leading candidate for president is what most would consider Black. Now fifty, even twenty, years ago, most people said that wanting a Black president was just not accepting political reality. Yet this type of "reality" did change, but it took a whole lot of people willing to imagine themselves past it.
But reality has many different meanings, and its meaning is shakiest when discussing human behavior.
The reality thing is something which core to who I am but yes I have made it more of a point to talk about it recently. On the question of race I have two observations that lead me to believe that we have not really changed in any meaningful sense. First, yes a black man will quite possibly be the next president of the United States, an idea that would amaze those living just 30 years ago. I would ask is this because Americans have become fundamentally less tribal or have the definitions and boundaries of the tribes changed?
30 years ago someone spewing racist speech would probably be allowed in common company, now they and not the black man are shunned. We can say that tribalism based on ideas and character is better than a tribalism based solely on race is an improvement (and I would concur) but it does not change the fact that there remains second class citizens. What about "white trash" or individuals who speak with a "hick" accent (white or black)? The white middle class tribe has allied itself with the educated black middle and upper class tribe against other tribes. The alliances have changed since 1968 but we are still tribal.
Secondly, our tribal nature has been... tamed by abundance. The tribe is most obvious when times are lean and when individuals fall back on "people like me." I have a (morbid) interest in watching how scapegoating and tribalism strengthen over the next few years. People are going to look for someone to blame, who will it be? The oil company tribe? The peak oil tribe? The arab tribe? The illegal immigrant tribe? I don't know but trust me on this... there will be a scapegoat and we will all soon be reminded of which tribe to which we belong. I don't like it, but it is the way things are.
I read ancient Roman, Jewish and Greek texts and it is a story about people. I recognize the emotions and the pain. I see the same crowd demanding circuses and bread. I hear the same mothers weep and father scream for the letting of vengeance's blood. I hear the same fundamentalists and the same calls for compromise. No, the story does not change, just the scenery and some minor details of dialogue.
Seldom do I read on this forum a post on race, written by anyone other than myself, that contains so much good sense as this by the cur. He's right: the story does not change. And the reason it does not change is because man has had a habit of trying to impose his values on Nature for thousands of years, instead of learning to live with the values that Nature always, in the end, imposes on men.
We shall go back to tribalism (and to racism) whether or not we want it, and the problem is not this, but rather that we do not want it and that, because we do not want it, we waste our energy in a futile resistance to natural laws and bend the knee only when our means of resistance has been exhausted--at which moment our capacity for doing much of anything has also been exhausted.
The repetition of history's mistakes occurs because man repeatedly confuses sentimental humanitarianism with morality, which happens in turn because man is not, quite, intelligent enough to distinguish between what is virtue and what makes him feel virtuous.
For example, consider the humanitarian drive to "feed the hungry," particularly, as prevailing politics demand, in some region where the hungry are not White. What is the intent? To end hunger. What is the result? To increase the numbers of hungry people. Has the result been well-documented? Certainly. Why do some men insist on the continuance of a policy that contains obvious flaws and has obviously always failed? Because it makes them feel virtuous. Real virtue would do as experience shows to be wise. But acting thus requires just a bit more intelligence than most men have.
Now, which form of government most effectively drowns the signal of wisdom in the noise of mediocrity? Mass democracy does. Which form of government do we, more or less, have? In official form, we have a representative republic, but in apparent political action, we have a mass democracy. However, things are even worse than they appear. Our mass democratic system is controlled by information management on the exchange of ideas - at least insofar as the large bandwidth media are concerned. A few men, most of them Jews, tell the rest of us what they believe we ought to know about the world, about the concerns of the day, and about the candidates who run for our public offices. "All the news that's fit to print" really means "All the news the Jews choose to print." And that's a big part of the problem with American and European politics.
wisconsin_cur wrote:
I have a (morbid) interest in watching how scapegoating and tribalism strengthen over the next few years.
Scapegoats, ah yes. So much of the talk in which the words scapegoat or scapegoating appear seems to imply that the blame for causing a bad situation is merely an illusion, that in reality there is no blame, and that any attempt to assign blame is a misguided, if not an evil, thing to do. Nonsense. Hitler was not wrong when, in Mein Kampf, he blamed the Jews for what they actually were doing. Nor was he wrong when he surmised the harm arising from Jewish activities to the German people. No, rather he was right. And the reason for the incessant anti-Nazi propaganda, continuing now for its 63rd consecutive year past the end of World War Two, is precisely to keep the lid on the fact that Hitler was right. It is why instances of the mention of Hitler's name do not fade from common discourse with the passage of time in exponential decline as do mentions of Pol Pot, Stalin, and Napoleon. The harmful presence that Adolf Hitler tried to remove is still here, and it is still harmful.
Which group created the financial system that required unending exponential economic growth in order to meet the demands of bankers for loan interest payments?
Which group has controlled every mass media in the West, except the Internet, for the past hundred years?
Which group is most responsible for creating child pornography in various parts of the world, for uploading it to the internet for sale, and for using it thereafter as a pretext to impose a censorship over the internet, in which, it might be expected, text such as I'm writing now will be "by the way" eliminated?
You know what the truth is. If you refrain from mentioning it, it is not because you don't know that it is true. It is for fear of reprisal by those who serve the "powers that be who should not be powerful." Such is why I consider most references to "scapegoats" to be hypocrisy.
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 9:12 am Post subject: Re: You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food.
Jerry, what an eloquent crock of shayt! You seem to have had a lot of practice. How long have you been writing and re-writing this stuff? Where do you do it? Have a dank room with notes scrawled on the wall? What do you do by yourself there?
Question Jerry: is a little Jewish girl to blame for a big Jewish crime? Do you shove them all in the oven at the same time, or do you indoctrinate the little girl first under torture, to give her soul a chance to go to heaven? _________________ ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 9:39 am Post subject: Re: You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food.
Jenab6 wrote:
Seldom do I read on this forum a post on race, written by anyone other than myself, that contains so much good sense as this by the cur.
If I read you correctly I would diagnosis our two world views as agreed in that which they reject but very different in what they have embraced.
I was always suspicious of secular humanism but in recent years have found the arguments necessary to know why and reject it. If I read you correctly you also find secular humanism intellectually wanting.
As I recall from another post you have described yourself as an atheist and from those foundations you have built the world view that you write about on these pages.
I, myself, have replaced my rejection of humanism with a form of radical Christianity. I do not talk about it here much because religious talk just "gets in the way" so much of the time when we could be discussing things that this forum was designed to discuss.
Secular humanism does have long philosophical tentacles and I find myself at odds with many of my co-religionists when they voice opinions derived from a humanist root that radical theism does not support.
So, it seems (and correct me if I am wrong), you lean towards those things that divide humanity as the fundamental core of what we need to learn to embrace. (and so you seem to see look forward to the resurgence of the tribal in the forefront of identity).
I, however, take the same information and emphasize the manner in which we are all the same. I find the re-emergence of tribalism as a sad fact to be recognized. Many will effectively renounce my faith when they embrace tribalism. It is to be mourned but I do not think it can be avoided.
In many ways we agree on the way things are but disagree on how we believe things should be.
I must confess I am a little confused by the transition you make in your post. You seem to start with fundamentally agreeing with my position that we are all basically the same (as evidenced in our tribal-ness) yet you then pick one particular tribe for scorn. You seem to be saying it is wrong to speak of scapegoats because one group is particularly guilty.
If we are all tribal and basically act the same way, how can one group be singled out for scorn? They are us, we are them. Even if you accept the "tribes" as a permanent fixture (I do not but only because I have faith in the future acts of the divine) we are all guilty of tribal crimes. We cannot condemn without condemning ourselves also.
Or perhaps your tribe is vindicated because it is your tribe and the other is... villified because you perceive it to be a threat to your tribe? In other words are you stating a subjective experience as an objective fact? _________________ Nature is complete because it does not serve itself.
The sage places himself after and finds himself before,
Ignores his desire and finds himself content.
He is complete because he does not serve himself. -Lao Tze
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 12544 Location: zombie horde wonderland
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 9:51 am Post subject: Re: You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food.
manu wrote:
I don't know where you came up with oxen plowing is not beneficial. .
From years of studying farming.
Plowing tends to damage the soil.
Oxen are certainly useful for many tasks. My point was, plowing is not necessary. It is unnecessary labor. My purpose in posting these sorts of things is to try to save people work. If people want to plow, or enjoy plowing, that's fine and they should do that. But it is not necessary.
But this is off-topic. If you want to discuss it further, let's do it in the Planning Forum. _________________ No original ideas are contained in this post.
Joined: Dec 25, 2005 Posts: 577 Location: Hillsboro, West Virginia
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 7:33 pm Post subject: Re: You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food.
wisconsin_cur wrote:
If I read you correctly I would diagnosis our two world views as agreed in that which they reject but very different in what they have embraced. I was always suspicious of secular humanism but in recent years have found the arguments necessary to know why and reject it. If I read you correctly you also find secular humanism intellectually wanting.
Yes.
wisconsin_cur wrote:
As I recall from another post you have described yourself as an atheist and from those foundations you have built the world view that you write about on these pages.
Not precisely. I am an atheist. But I have also gained a spiritual regard for my race. It has a place in my esteem and regard that God might have in yours. I "worship," if that is the proper word, the molecular information that created me and the people who are most similar to myself.
wisconsin_cur wrote:
I, myself, have replaced my rejection of humanism with a form of radical Christianity. I do not talk about it here much because religious talk just "gets in the way" so much of the time when we could be discussing things that this forum was designed to discuss.
It might well be that you have no cause to mention your religious beliefs. However, the situation is different with me. The biggest problems with which mankind must contend are not the doing of all men, nor of all ethnic groups, equally. Rather, there is one ethnic group which has been quite disproportionately responsible for those problems, as I have gone to some length to demonstrate. Your God is not in peril as the result of those problems; however, my race certainly is.
wisconsin_cur wrote:
I must confess I am a little confused by the transition you make in your post. You seem to start with fundamentally agreeing with my position that we are all basically the same (as evidenced in our tribal-ness) yet you then pick one particular tribe for scorn. You seem to be saying it is wrong to speak of scapegoats because one group is particularly guilty.
It is possible, and perhaps likely, that we would not be here discussing the doom of humanity in forms ranging from global famine to nuclear war if National Socialism--which, essentially, was based on eugenics, the reconciliation of family and state, and environmentalism: a healthy people in a healthy world--had prevailed in 1945 instead of the consumerist sham-democracy of the US and the UK, along with the Marxist regime of the USSR, all of which were being manipulated by Jews in some way or other. The nature of the trouble, stemming from Peak Oil, leads naturally to a discussion of those who are significantly to blame. So marvel not that Jewish ambitions and conspiracies from 1850 forward occasionally enter into discussion here, since the marvelous thing is, rather, that they do not dominate nearly every Peak Oil discussion.
wisconsin_cur wrote:
Secular humanism does have long philosophical tentacles and I find myself at odds with many of my co-religionists when they voice opinions derived from a humanist root that radical theism does not support. So, it seems (and correct me if I am wrong), you lean towards those things that divide humanity as the fundamental core of what we need to learn to embrace, and so you seem to look forward to the resurgence of the tribal in the forefront of identity.
Replace "lean towards" with "recognize," and you are very nearly correct.
wisconsin_cur wrote:
I, however, take the same information and emphasize the manner in which we are all the same. I find the re-emergence of tribalism as a sad fact to be recognized. Many will effectively renounce my faith when they embrace tribalism. It is to be mourned but I do not think it can be avoided.
You are, then, not among those who delude themselves by thinking that any argument that begins, or that might as well begin, with the words "If people would..." can be sound. You know better, in that you recognize that people, in their masses, either do a thing or they do not. I do not find it "sad" that the moral thinking of mankind will soon be straightened out. Nature, really, is the author of moral laws as much as it is the author of physical laws. All man does is discover these laws and give them codification in words or in equations.
The forthcoming correction that saddens you is, in fact, a cause for celebration, just as much as the revision of erroneous scientific theories with the coming of new experimental evidence. You see the cost as regrettable. I see the correction as being well worth the cost, and, since it was unavoidable anyway, the pity is that the correction did not come sooner (e.g., in the 1940s), before man's moral mistakes had run up such a bill to pay in terms of reconciliation with natural laws.
wisconsin_cur wrote:
If we are all tribal and basically act the same way, how can one group be singled out for scorn? They are us, we are them. Even if you accept the "tribes" as a permanent fixture (I do not but only because I have faith in the future acts of the divine) we are all guilty of tribal crimes. We cannot condemn without condemning ourselves also. Or perhaps your tribe is vindicated because it is your tribe and the other is... villified because you perceive it to be a threat to your tribe? In other words are you stating a subjective experience as an objective fact?
Ah. Here is a good lesson, which took me a long while to learn. Fairness is not a moral imperative. It is a luxury that may be indulged when nothing more important requires that it not be. The highest imperative of a proper moral system is the survival of the group that practices it. And though you might start a club, a committee, or a country, you can also leave it again, and there is no evolutionary mechanism whereby you might feel compelled to remain in its service when it would be contrary to your interests.
Concerning your race, however, those things are not true. You keep the race you were born to, always; you may never change it for another. And evolution did provide a mechanism whereby you might feel compelled to remain in its service when it would be contrary to your individual interests: love.
Whereas the choices of two persons are necessary to argue, the will of only one is sufficient to begin a fight. Mortal combat has a winner and a loser. So does a war. In such activities, you do not do well if you, after being smitten upon one cheek, turn the other toward your enemy so that he may hit you once more at his convenience. Turning the other cheek works only when your foe has a sense of honor that can be shamed for striking an unresisting victim. In general, this will not be the case.
Beware the counterintuitive, when survival is at risk. Not all counterintuitive ideas are wrong--in physics, the theory of relativity is counterintuitive and correct--but what is intuitive is correct as a rule: more often than not. Counterintuitive ideas frequently have novelty value, or offer some people a way to pretend to wisdom by disagreement with common sense, but such attractions can be fatal when dangers abound.
Christians who encounter enemies cannot behave as Christians, lest they die. The enemy will strike them dead, take for himself their possessions, heap insults upon their memory, and that will be that. And so, in my opinion, Christianity has a very poor moral system, ill-suited to survival, and it is no surprise that the Knights of the medieval Church disregarded it left and right for a thousand years. To do otherwise might have been suicidal.
When judging what is good and what is bad, you ought not to assume a neutral, or a God's, point of view. Your proper standard in all such judgments is what is best for your race. Always. You are not the referee in the eternal struggle of life against life: you are a competitor. The divine point of view is not for such as us.
If another race kills us off, that would be the ultimate in badness, according to my moral judgment. However, if we kill off another race, the goodness or badness has to do with what longterm impact the deed will have upon our race, which can be only estimated beforehand. However, it is generally true that no race of hominids needs another in order to live in the manner to which it is adapted--unless that manner is that of parasite, in which case the victim is entitled to bite off its tics, if it can.
Jerry Abbott
Postscript. An excerpt from another forum, tangentially related to our dialog.
Jenab wrote:
blue dog wrote:
Blue Dog: Do you think it all started to go wrong when we stopped being hunter/gatherers?
That's about right. Agriculture was not necessary to feed any group a subsistence diet. In fact, hunter-gatherers could get subsistence with less overall effort and in less time, as compared with agrarian folks. Hunter-gatherer bands usually numbered about 40 persons, of whom 30 were adults, of whom 10 were hunters. On any given day, one of the hunters would most likely make a kill, and the tribe would have meat that day.
Today, most of us are not aware of the wild edible plants that grow at our doorstep, in our yards, in the woods out back. You see dandelions, but you never think of eating them. You see a milkweed, and you don't know it's a form of wild asparagus. You see a basswood (or linden) tree, and you haven't the slightest clue that the leaves are edible. You grow violets in your flower garden and never find out that their leaves taste like okra. You could walk right over groundnuts, or wade through a patch of wapatos, and never know you were walking on food. Most people can't tell which mushrooms are edible and which are poisonous, or how to safely choose "poke salat" leaves. You probably don't even know what lambs quarter looks like, or how to recognize wild parsnip or wild rice. But the neolithic hunter-gatherers could spot these vegetables a mile away. They might could even smell them.
Agriculture was not necessary to feeding small human tribes. It was, however, necessary for generating large surplus stockpiles, to be used for sustaining large ruling classes who simply ordered other people around, had their subjects killed when they dared to disobey, and never did any of the farm work themselves.
To be sure, agriculture also freed labor for uses other than troublemaking (i.e. politics). It also allowed artisans and craftsmen to refine their skills and produce superior products. It allowed literature and, eventually, literacy. And it did another very signficant thing, the value of which is hard to determine, namely...
It set in motion a political-social evolution in which the family became ever-increasingly overshadowed by the state. Biological ties, or blood kinships, began to recede as political associations gained preeminence. Where you were born became more significant than whom you were born to.
Government and family have always been rivals, each seeking to claim the paramount loyalties of human beings. The positive value of a shift toward government allegiance is that it made human organization possible on a larger scale, which made it possible, in turn, for human activity to grow more larger, more complex, and more ambitious. The purposes to which these possibilities were put might be good or bad, but there's no denying that government is what brought the possibilities into existence, or that agricultural surpluses are what made governments possible.
On the other hand, the negative value in the shift from family to government authority arose because government institutions have no natural (evolution derived) feedback system that ensures that the people engaged in them will put the responsibilities of the institution above their individual interests. A politician will take a bribe to betray his trust far, far more readily than a father will agree to deprive his children of food in exchange for a gift. Political systems are for that reason generally much more internally corrupt, even in per capita measure, than families are.
Throughout all of history, from the agricultural revolution until today, well-meaning statesmen, from Hammurabi to Thomas Jefferson, have sought a legal framework that would make government as nearly corruption free as the family is. None of them has ever had any lasting success. The Romans were among the first to articulate the reason: "Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?" or "Who guards the guardians?" which expresses the fact that, sooner or later, evil ascends through politics to the top of a human hierarchy, which remains evil from that point in time until the government falls, either to conquest, or to revolution, or to some form of internal collapse.
Family (or tribal) authority is not nearly so susceptible to that kind of failure, and the reason is that the "law" that restrains the corruption of power is natural law, a hereditary predisposition to love one's own kinfolk, which is not subject to political fiddling. Only this kind of law can work, in the long run, to secure the well-being and happiness of people: the laws must be laws that favor harmony in the group to which they apply. Since these laws must not be politically corruptible, they likewise cannot be politically created.
If God exists, He could impose suitable divine laws on us to our benefit, if He so chose. But Man cannot impose them on men because what men can do, men can undo, nullify, or corrupt. And that's why all political attempts to build lastingly good societies have failed: of them all, only one has attempted to reconcile the family idea with that of government, thereby to put politics in accord with nature, and that one (National Socialist Germany) was crushed by outside forces before it could become well established.
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ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap 
