A petition I signed and what I wrote

Petition against the addition of hydroponically grown food to what constitutes and is deserving of the Organic label. Here’s the petition if you would like to take the time to sign for a fairly important cause. Dubious what effect this and other people-led democratic efforts have anymore.

https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/keep-organic-in-the-soil

What I wrote – The Human caused Sixth Mass Extinction Event should make it clear that we are not adept at engineering our way to a healthy planet. I will not here debate whether or not hydroponics can actually provide healthy nutrient-rich food, but I will say that because it is humans toying around with chemistry and how to grow food, it does not deserve to be added to the official category of “organic”. Adding hydroponics and other novel techniques for growing produce would be a dilution of the term organic.

 

 

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without its own food, your movement will cease to move

#growlocally #eatlocally #livelocally

Series of Aphorism Posts:

My Thoughts Inexactly (Primero)
Lternate Lphabet Lliteration
L is for Lamenting
Z is for Zeroing
G is for Gathering
E is for Escalating
W is for Willing
W is for Willing (ov)
V is for Vanquishing
J is for Jousting
M is for Masquerading
Q is for Quelling
R is for Resisting
R is for Recurring
F is For
F is for Facing
F is Forcing (ov)
N is for Nothing
N is for No things
N Other Lphabet: A pequeño LteratioÑ
Y is for Yearning
Y is for Youthanizing
An Asymmetry
A is Against
T is for Titrating

His and Her Paleo Water (Sole)

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                   HIS                       &                 HERS

Sole water—which I am rebranding here as paleo water—is purported to have wide ranging health benefits. This is due to its balanced offering of all (or most) of the natural minerals that historically would accompany basic sodium chloride (table salt), and be balanced in all animals (including humans) eating a proper pre-agricultural diet. There is a recipe for making sole in the link above and many similar methods can be found on the web and youtube.

The purpose of this post is to point to two of the most popular types of sea salt used to constitute the sole water: Celtic and Himalayan. The most noticeable difference between the two being the color difference between the Celtic (grey) and Himalayan (pink). The reason is that the Himalayan salt is much higher in iron content, which would make it much more appealing to those who are lower or deficient in iron (generally menstruating women) than those who might have adequate or even too much iron (men).

I could add a larger theory of cultural whereby cultural norms like women wearing pink is a function of natural necessity, and the reason that pink is feminine is because of their need for naturally occurring pinkness (namely iron constituency) because of a particular mineralogical need, but I don’t want to flesh that tangent out any farther here.

For those of you interested in cleanses and the flushing phase of a detox, you can drink a higher dose of sole to naturally flush your system and restore some balance.

the future milking down of the human milk industry

A news article this morning regarding the booming for-profit human milk market has prompted me to write an anticipation of future—and probably current—scandalous behavior on the part of the milking mothers and/more the milk banks. For mothers it might be an occasionality to get a bit of extra profit, but for the milk banks it might be more systematized: adding a bit of cow’s milk to the human milk to stretch out their profits, on non-milk screening days (I’m assuming and would hope they screen the milk initially for any harmful substances that the babies might be ingesting). To some this might seem unimaginable, but it takes a particularly naïve imagination to overlook similar and worse current and historical practices such as organ trafficking and slave trafficking.

The Mental Collapsing into the Detrimental: Civilization’s Abuse of Memory

I want to focus this post around what is happening (and what is not happening) for your brain a la civilization, to tease out the profound subtle effects on the human experience of the world. To be sure, it would be wrong to equate subtle effects with small effects when discussing the human experience of the world. Noticeably large effects/complaints of modern society, such as too much pavement, too much time being demanded by employment, too many advanced weapons, not enough sleep, too many diploma mills, too many abbreviations, “etc.”, are arguably less detri-mental than what is happening inside our craniums. As normal as these noticeable (and bland) phenomena have become, it’s the subtle structures of our brain that are more fragile to the totality of civilization—or civilization’s lack of a totality—that need consideration.

Learned helplessness? “It’s not like it hurts,” is what a teacher might say to reason with a student who is refusing to read a textbook, or write down some notes. Such mental “activities” as reading and writing, computing math problems, searching analytically for patterns using the tools of human reason and logic, might be painful to the youth who haven’t yet numbed their instincts in favor of the platitudinal thinking heralded by civilization; pain can perhaps be translated as depression, a phenomenon occurring at an alarming rate for youth. Small pains are always manifesting themselves, but are we ever learning from the pain, or just learning to ignore it? The pain of the daily annoyances, the daily headaches (literally), and the daily drudgery—whether at the student level, the cubicle level, or the factory level—can point us to a much deeper issue: what is the purpose of memory, and are we using memory in the way it was evolved to be used? Is memory a repository for factoids, a static hard drive to park hoards of separate data bits? Based on the function (and dysfunction) of memory in the modern age, I would argue in earnest it is not. The fact that we require hard drives external from our brains is not only evidence that we have too many particulates in our world, but also that we are using our memory in a way (to track and categorize particulates) that it was never evolved to do.

We have come to a situation where we have simultaneously overburdened and underburdened the memory regions of our brain, just as we have analogously done with our digestive systems—we are eating far too many vegetable fats and grain based products soaked in pesticides and far too few game meats and pre-agricultural vegetable and fruit. Homo sapiens and our cousins in the homo genus have historically most always been migratory wanderers, and so it would make sense that our memories would be optimized for and crave such adventurous, changing circumstances that would beset a prehistorical nomad. Nowadays, our brains are not being fed the stimuli they evolved to be fed. They still work of course, but not in the optimum, which is why we never quite feel at our best. The exception being those fleeting moments when something—like a fragrance on the breeze—hits us and grounds us in a place where we feel so much more alive.

In memory of muscles. Our bodies are built to migrate through a constantly renewing cycle of different fauna at different seasons that brings us truly into the present, where there is no anxiety to escape, no anxiety to doubt whether or not we are supposed to be there. Our brain is merely one of many essential body parts in the conscious travel of our bodies through the diverse landscapes. These days, we so frequently turn/sprain our ankles not because of a random poorly placed hole on the landscape, but because there are so few bumps in a road, paved smooth for the benefit of machines, not necessarily to the benefit of the human body. New technologies aren’t progressing us, they are being applied to keep the context exactly the same, which is why our bodies atrophy. Even though it might serve as a remedy, think about how dire the situation is that treadmills exist—machines that keep you keep you moving but not going anywhere. That’s not wind you feel when you are on the conveyor belt, it’s Sisyphus trying to smack you for your unwitting mockery.

The ideas of stagnant property—of staying put, of living within a limited range—have become so normalized, so disablingly comfortable, that roaming is both impractical and dangerous. We are so far from following the seasons, of maneuvering to stay in the spring and summer, and instead are stuck in a place of just accepting and enduring the fall and winter. We have taken the passive role, of letting change happen to us and then reacting, rather than being the agents of our own change.

I want to here postulate the following statement that seems intuitively possible, but I cannot find a rationale—maybe its lack of rationality that makes it true for life—to fully ground it:

Memory is typically viewed as existing for recalling the past, but its real potency is when it is fully activated in the present through activation of the senses available to the (human) animal.

In other words, memory is fully existing in the present without distracting/taking-us-away from the present. An example of this might be when a fresh breeze hits your nose through an ascending grove, and the smell and degree of moisture hints at a new fauna’s choosing to flower; you make your way through the brush towards the flower, avoiding the thorny bushes without looking at them, none of this activity requiring a pause to ponder questions like “where did I feel this before?” Memory in its full form asks and answers for you, not serving to distract the larger body in which it’s embedded.

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The Abuse (misuse) of Memory: Addendum

So I was originally going to title this whole post merely “the abuse of memory”, and I was going to have a secondary meaning to the title being related to the following picture, but then I changed the title, though I still feel that this is the right place for my commentary on the Armenian Genocide:

So, this post could have been framed in such a way to be critical of cultural efforts to use what happened in the past to mobilize people via guilt/anger to do some bidding in the present or future. Using and reminding people to access their cultural memory in order to squeeze funds out of them or their efforts, or even just their recognition in which they may bask. I’m not sure I want to fully levy these criticisms on this church’s efforts to raise awareness of the 100 year anniversary of the genocide, but I do feel there is something that smacks of marketing and propaganda, though I just can’t quite get at what it is.

The Perilous Game Of Consumer Multiple Choice: Don’t Trust The Apple Of Your Eye

Question: Which Apple Is Different From The Other Two?

The correct answer is choice “A”. “A” is the only apple that earned its letter, as it is the only one free of petroleum derivatives (if the organic label is worth the price). If ingested, the other two pseudo-apples would be harmful to your health. As far as toy safety, it’s safer to let your child play with apple B, as they might try (and succeed) eating apple C, mistaking it for food.

*Usually, revolutions are labeled by what results followed the watershed moment, so it’s odd how the green revolution is a title for how food was before pesticides revolutionized agriculture.

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“How do you like them apples?”

“I don’t!”

A Zone 4 Earth: A Permaculture Approach To Create Primitivists’ Utopian Paradeisos

From Propaganda of the Deed to Propagation of the Seed

A core principle of conduct embraced by many anarchists is the notion of direct action—humans engaging directly in political or social acts without seeking recourse through a diluted, indirect pathway. Indirect actions could be categorized as those commonplace processes most of us partake in daily in modern industrial society, where we employ cadres of “middle men” to get our needs met, even at the expense of living in an alienated and hierarchical world.

Where and how we get our food is a realm fertile for direct action that has far too often been overlooked, and the more human efforts are put directly into getting our food in nature—something an anarcho-primitivist strives for—the less need and the less desire we will have to separate ourselves from the natural processes by using modern machinery and agriculture techniques that keep us out of the loop, ultimately keeping nature out of the loop too. Permaculture offers the surest bridges to allow humanity to cross from a concrete and machine besieged existence back into a thriving symbiotic connection to the rest of the living world. The paradeisos—the plentiful, self-perpetuating lush groves of our dreams—can be realized as actual places that we can stumble upon for a filling meal in our recapturing of the nomadic way of life. Our nomadic sensibilities are not irretrievably lost, but we may need to piece together a different game trail to migrate forward, back in time.

Seven Billion Nomads?

An anarcho-primitivist professing the wonders (and wanders) of a nomadic lifestyle might from time to time encounter a stickler who responds: “but there wouldn’t be enough food to support the seven billion humans; do you really think we should allow a mass die-off?” This is an uncomfortable corner for such an anarchist to be painted into—especially if it’s by other anarchists—and it’s a corner where (mental) starvation will eventually occur and a primitivist may quit on the fertile, migratory utopia. Permaculture heroically shines light into the dark forest, growing multifarious roots out of such a trap, the wise path being a generally “zone 4” approach.

It would take far too long, in terms of human lives (and billions of human deaths), to wait for the succession of the modern monocultured forests back to the dynamic, efficient, high yielding places of yesteryear. Anyways, it’s doubtful the succession would privilege human’s food needs, i.e. humans, nor the bottleneck of species they have domesticated for food, could have had the evolutionary time or pressure to be fully equipped with all the appropriate digestive enzymes to enter into a diverse ecosystem and gain nourishment from thousands of different plants. The zone 5 mentality of letting nature do it’s thing must be dropped, and the zone 4 mentality of changing nature in analogous ways to fit human needs must be adopted. Here is a non-exhaustive list of permaculture ideas that primitivists can become familiar with and possibly implement in even a “guerilla gardening” fashion, depending on their accesses to land:

– Since forests are such masters of the hydrologic cycle, turning non-forested land—such as grasslands, deserts, and abused agriculture lands—into diverse food forests would prove the most immediately beneficial for producing a surge in available biomass fit for human consumption.

– Start figuring out foods that can be wildcrafted, “eating the weeds”, and introducing them to the palates of others as well as your own; once someone realizes they can eat lettuces growing wild in the forest, their lenses are changed and they start considering what else they can eat (bark? berries? bugs?).

– Sabotaging trees that are low in what they provide the ecosystem, and favoring and seeding trees that are much more beneficial to human needs and the ecosystem as a whole; this is especially relevant to our monocultured forests that are daily wasting the energy potential granted from the sun.

– I had other ideas when I conceived of this post, but they are currently unavailable; when they occur to me, I will edit them in.

Strikes r Out

As the happenings from May Day get more vague, I thought it was a good idea to skip church (for me personally, it’s ‘most always a good idea to skip church) and type up a couple of thoughts.

My position that I voiced on Friday was that we radicals need to leave New York City and start communal villages where land is currently—though not indefinitely—much more affordable and much more valuable from a human perspective: “where land is not a concrete desert upheld by massive petroleum inputs”. I encountered some who were open to this idea, but many too—Trotskyists in particular were a strong presence at the gathering, distributing their own literature—who believed we need global revolution coming from a uniting of the workers of the world. I wanted to focus this post now to worker’s power, and talk more about global revolution in an upcoming post.

Workers under capitalism have historically been deemed—rightly so—to be the true power of capitalism, with one of the most obvious ways of displaying that power to themselves, and to the naïve, unlearned capitalists, being the strike. Striking is very effective when workers do indeed hold the real power and can bring their masters to heel. Work has evolved into “work” in many places, and there are many unproductive underlings that could just as easily go on strike and be dismissed without so much as a reaction from their employers. On this point, it seems to me that corporations like Walmart feign a need for employees, but truly it’s a facade to further their on the ground presence. There would be no need for a scab when the limb is already dead, being propped up by invisible strings.

But maybe if ALL employees globally agreed to strike indefinitely and were able to prevent scabbing, they could shake the foundations a bit, but I am uncertain how much this would hurt the supposedly existing capitalists at the top. Important to note is when it comes to important employment such as food production, wouldn’t striking probably lash those workers at the bottom of the scale the worst? It’s difficult for the workers of the world to unite behind striking when there are such vast differences in what they would be sacrificing by putting their livelihoods on the line. Would employees who are much higher on the pay scale ever agree to identify with those at the bottom, when they are so close (at least in their minds) to the top? Further, why would people who work in some societally positive industry (it seems so hard to come up with an example) want to ally with, for example, workers in a bullet factory, when those workers being paid at all for such a ghastly profession is itself a primary question in their mind? Another difference separating workers from one another is that some have the choice of where they are employed—even if they don’t have much say over the amount of pay—while others have no choice, and so the efforts to bring coherency and a sense of fairness for a global program is multiplied immensely.

I believe striking isn’t the answer for widespread change, moreso today than ever before, largely because it is ineffective, but so too because demanding more pay (or workplace changes) for a job that ethically or practically doesn’t really warrant it, is not a justifiable arena to put efforts into. On the other hand, leaving your job to build up practical, important skills related to growing food (such as adopting the low impact permaculture philosophy), is much more in sync with creating a radical and beautiful future; a future where slaves won’t require masters, nor other slaves, and they will lose their chains…

Stressed Out? It’s Because You Have Too Much Shit On Your Plate

If you live in the United States where the topsoil is quickly eroding and the topsoil that does remain is severely mineral depleted—low zinc and magnesium, to mention two of the most important—you are more susceptible to the negative effects of stress. This current phase of civilization we are suffering through is also particularly stressful, I’d argue, as we all have to endure the certain sense that comes with this slow wither; it’s pulling us all down, even if we aren’t fully sure why or from where it’s coming.

The societal decadence is realized in humans most directly by a function of our awful (SAD) diets. The food that you are (not) eating has a very big impact on your body. Take a lesson from animals, and think about any animal besides humans and how getting food is what their lives revolve around, and how they will drop everything for a chance at food. We are not prioritizing food enough—especially quality food—and we need to each change when we are healthy enough that a few years of proper eating can heal us without the need for debilitating western medical interventions. As for our relation to animals, we need training from them because the domestication of humans has pulled us so far from our olde animalistic patterns.

Instead of me regurgitating more cud for you to chew on, it’s better you go to the greener pastures to read what you have been missing:

• Zinc and Manganese Deficiencies and Psychological Disorders

• Standard American Diet in a (Pre)Historical Perspective

• Weston A Price Diet Guidelines

• Rebuilding Soil Using Permaculture Techniques

From a Lowly Culture to Permaculture

Where can a writing on something political begin? Surely not focused on great political leaders with the delusions that a few powerful people wield all the power and the story unfolds as their whims dart across the landscape where the lesser insects dwell. Nay, not the great man theory of history, for great men whom also wield power is dubious, and would anyways be next to impossible to identify, and fruitless nonetheless. Then what? The class theory of peoples who claim different degrees of property, from vast holdings to mere mass produced trinkets? Nay to this too—though such a neo-marxist undertaking would be venerable/applaudable—for it is too simple for our age, or perhaps rather, our age has become too simple for it.

We could say we are all too variable and on too many shifting paradigms, that a sociologist looking to analyze us would never be ADHD enough to keep up with our shifting technological society and the frequent off-shootings of cliques and resonances that come and go with an upgrade to a smart phone. This grasping for a post-modern explanation of the current political fogginess is a lazyman’s false idol. Why not just let Jesus bear the burden while we relax our guard and assume that events are part of some larger play of force, too big for any of us to make an impact upon because we are all just too different? “Our differences are different, and even our similarities are different.”

It is hard not to fall into this trap, and the only clear way I see is TO NOT ANALYZE THE POLITICAL PRESENT. Too much analysis and practices akin to analysis have weakened and particularized society from a once rich tapestry with harmonious strings, to a war fraught rag where there are neither allies nor foes, just confusion and non-microbial driven decay.

Perhaps I have already wasted too much text on the present, and in this paragraph I will here say that it is “the future”, but more accurately “a” future, that I would like to talk about. There is currently no good beginning from which to launch a political program. An end must be sought, and from this end we can let roots grow down into the present, vines from which we can swing ourselves out of this ObaMadofFacebooKremlin muck that isn’t worth a newspaper nor a future history tome to offer explanation.

So where to find this future? The best page to look at in such a worthy history book is the first. The first page, where we begin our tinkerings in agriculture and left behind our nomadic understudy of nature. It is back to these days we must ponder, when we stopped being a part of nature, and cut down a tree and made paper to write about nature. So followed our thinking that nature was no longer fit to seed itself, we were obviously chosen to do this (and questions of who chose us to do these tasks soon followed). Nature’s great child would now do the seeding, masturbating its various species, and picking mating partners for superficial qualities that blind vision and deaf hearing spoke to. Nature became the ignored parent, estranged at first, but the road has been long and darkening, the asphalt layers thicker and thicker. A helicopter ride reveals the varicose veins—the plaque, as ecosystems are actively marred. In this “post” industrial age it is to the point of nature being daily abused and systematical tortured and disfigured by a warped and deeply disturbed child. No child in the history of the earth has been so disturbed as the human species.

But lo! For I have strayed from a future and from a promise I made, something we all too often have done and will continue to do for it has become our second nature. We must accept this part of us for the present, and guard against its happening too frequently, as we seek to build a future, a future which includes us. Our agricultural beginnings were fraught with perils, most deeply that we put ourselves as master and nature as slave. Let’s this time change both the roles and the whole relationship, and put ourselves as student and nature as teacher. I am speaking of the permaculture future, where we as humans have small but important jobs as laying macro-landscapes to create microclimates where we let nature fruit to its fullest. We leave behind the follies of delving into depths smaller than our naked eyes can see, for these have brought great misery, as too have the extremes of macro-organization that went beyond our own bodies’ abilities to shape materials and required a machine to implement. The best way to dig ourselves out of our current problems—cultural, mental, environmental, and you fill in the rest—is to dig in to the world of permaculture that relieves us from the weight of the world we put on ourselves to manage.