Round Up #2

Learning

I finished Infinite Jest.  Now I am back to reading War and Peace, giving myself a quota of at least 10 pages a day.  Also, I have been reading a collegiate dictionary.  By "reading" I mean mining for interesting etymologies, perhaps a few new words and the years of birth for historical people -- I put the things I want to learn into Anki.  I have finished the letter A, which was about 100 pages.  I am trying for a quota of 5 pages a day, though my priority is War and Peace, so I can get it done by end of the year, so my prediction is right.  

Published on Medium

• My Walden Years
• Go Into the Silence
• My Nifty Answer to "So You'd Feel Sorry for Hitler?"
• How to Respond When the Leftist You Love Accuses You of Policing Them
• 100 Day Bland Food Challenge: Day 10

Scott Alexander

I've also been noodling around in Scott Alexander's older writings, including his old Live Journal.

From Scott Alexander

If I may expand upon Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, and the only thing worse than not being talked about is being talked about by your parents.

From a different post:

Within the Zone of the Clearest Confusion, always try to be more body and less person.

That one is from a pamphlet he saw in Japan when he was twenty.  I include it because I think Scott "Alexander" is one of the greatest interesting engines in the world.  The title for this often goes to Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, but I like Scott and Scott's eco-system of commentators better.

Scott has done a piece for those jealous of his talent and output.  It's really good.  I'm jealous.

Reddit

I think I did good work on this thread, although it was the odd request of someone with a very high recorded IQ not feeling like they were living up to his potential. (The comment thread breaks down in a lot of places because there are few things more ridiculous than high IQ people taking about IQ-- it's even less enjoyable than stoner's talking about weed).

A thread on inequality in the U.S. vis a vis meritocracy.

I was in a really dark mood, so I made a lot of comments on this thread about tying universal basic income to sterilization.

The comment of the month gets to be someone else's.

Twitter

Trying to get on it a lot less, but here are some gems.

Becoming really informed about news over which you have literally no power is just another fun way the state keeps you contained.

— holly wood phd 🌹🔪 (@girlziplocked) July 21, 2017

Media is a drug more powerful than stimulants. Works on the premise of amygdala by-pass - supercedes your rational functions.

— Sindre (@Triquetrea) July 20, 2017

Back to my theme for the year: healing is a social process, not a privatized arrangement between the ill and a middle class therapist.

— holly wood phd 🌹🔪 (@girlziplocked) July 18, 2017

Join the funding club, because China also intends to become an AI leader by 2025. Actual money committed: $60B/year. Game over. 3/3

— Sami Mäkeläinen (@smakelainen) July 20, 2017

"Policing" is a highly sticky meme that prevents tribe-D (or tribe-S) from self-examination. Thought-stopper.

— Keith Huddleston (@KeithHudd) July 21, 2017

I Debate a Millenial

I try to keep a pretty strict information diet going, but we all mess up a diet from time to time, eh? The news-cycle really brought this on.

Kindness in Regards to the Ill and Dying. . . A Debate?

100 Day Bland Food Challenge

I have on three occasions lost over 20 pounds, only to gain them back.

The real problem I have had with diets has not been a  lack of information on diet.  I knew how to lose weight.  I just didn’t know how to keep it off.

Enter Stephan Guyenet and this review of his work by Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex.

A key quote

Modern food isn’t just unusually rewarding, it’s also unusually bad at making us full. The brain has some pretty sophisticated mechanisms to determine when we’ve eaten enough; these usually involve estimating food’s calorie load from its mass and fiber level. But modern food is calorically dense – it contains many more calories than predicted per unit mass – and fiber-poor. This fools the brain into thinking that we’re eating less than we really are, and shuts down the system that would normally make us feel full once we’ve had enough. Simultaneously, the extremely high level of food reward tricks the brain into thinking that this food is especially nutritionally valuable and that it should relax its normal constraints.

The kind of super tasty -- at least super addictive food -- we have available to us change our brain, which in turn changes our internal perception (or “set point”) of what we should weigh.  

So to change my perception of hunger itself, I have set up a challenge to go 100 days eating bland food (the set of rules are below).

To try to engineer adherence I took two steps 1) I  joined beeminder. 2) I have also set up a bet with my best friend with the following rules:

• We are betting to lose 5 pounds by August 1st, $20 a pound.
• In September, another 5 pounds (or 10 pounds total), for another $20 a pound.
• In October, we have to keep the 10 pounds off -- you guessed it, $20 a pound.

So, theoretically, we are betting $300 dollars on this.  With that said, we only have to pay up the difference between our goals.  In other words, if we my best friend loses 5 pounds the first month and I only lose 4, then I will pay the $20.  If we both lose the full amount, then we do not have to pay.  

This should be very much possible with the rules I have set up. But more than just losing weight, I believe that after 100 days my tastes and hungers will have changed down to the substrate of my brain itself.  

The Rules

[Update, I did not follow these rules for 100 days, more like 15.  Also, I abandoned beeminder.  In retrospect, this is probably the inevitable product of the incentive structure I put in place: the bet with my best friend was just so much of a bigger deal than beeminder.  With that said, I am over 15 pounds down from where I started the diet, 30 pounds from my highest.  I still follow these rules quite often, just not every day.]

I’ll admit that the rules I have set up for myself are too complex and that this is one problem with this diet.  I am not expecting anyone to follow what I am doing here.  Work on the problem of adherence.  

In reality, though, the core rule is to eat from a set of very simple meals at home, and then have other rules to do my best in other situations.

Home-cooked meals

Only the following meals:

• Lentils and rice -- here meaning the specific recipe below.
• Stir Fried vegetables 
• Salads, following the rules below
• Steamed Cabbage (curry, salt and/or chili powder is acceptable)
• CRON Anti-oxidant special

Lentils and rice-- either onion or garlic sauteed in olive oil.  Then lentils, rice and water are added.

CRON Anti-oxidant special -- Berries, with a maximum of five nuts.  Apple (but skin only) may be added.

Homemade Salad rules.

• Olive oil or vinegar only acceptable dressings
• So . . . No ranch dressing.
• A crumbling of a smelly cheese (ex feta or blue) is acceptable
• Salsa is acceptable

Restaurant Rules

I must order from this list, if available:

• Salad. 
• Veggie Sandwhich/pita/wrap.
• Low Calorie soup (under 400 calories a serving). 

These rules are very important in being able to live a flexible life in the modern world.  I want to be able to meet up with people and live a properly social life.  And one level, yes this lifestyle is absurdly privileged, and destined to go away (almost certainly in my lifetime) but it the social system I currently live in.  

Acceptable snacks

• Coleslaw with vinegar base
• Potato (boiled or baked only -- salt as only seasoning).
• Oatmeal 

The two oatmeal recipes:

1. Savory oatmeal.  Cook the oatmeal.  Add about a tablespoon of olive oil and salt.  Add herbs and/or green onions.  Or herbs.
2. Plum oatmeal.  Cook oatmeal.  Halfway through, add a frozen plum.  After that is done, mix the plum in.  Add cinnamon.

Acceptable drinks

• Water
• Mint Tea
• Tea, no additions
• Coffee, black

Visit mom/Festival Rules.

Eat a good deal of fiber before going.  

Keep any portion very small.  Think French people.

I see my mother about once a week, and she often cooks for us.  Also, around the holidays people gather to eat.  I really don’t want to be a pain to other people, telling them I need special dishes made.  A true modern pathology is making the exercise of freedom everyone else’s problem.

As you can see, if you read through what must have been a tedious list of all of my diet rules, you will see that I am basically going vegetarian home.  This means that I am a social meat eater.  

I am requiring the eating of fiber before I go so I don’t even risk making a mistake.  

Round Up #1

I have decided to use Medium as my platform for my essays.  I am porting over my best pieces from former blogs over there.  Here are the ones I have moved so far:

• Why I Write
• The Procrastination Chronicles: Weed Eater
• The Procrastination Chronicles: Dealing with a Bunch of Crap
• The Procrastination Chronicles: Reading Walden

I have also been engaging more with the reddit.  I highly recommend the r/collapse subreddit.

This thread on the paucity of high speed rail in the U.S. lead to some great discussion.

I wrote this comment, which I probably need to gather the evidence for it and expand it into an essay

Having taught these kids, I can assure you not to expect anything "glorious" out of them as a group. At least not the way you are describing.

The entitlement is only worse. Having screens since they were 5 gives them the highest mental health problems ever recorded. They themselves both know that and use their excuse for not doing anything.

I have no idea why they lean right, other than the fact that they are authoritarians because they are so damn impatient. Trump is the one candidate promising easy, quick fixes. If someone goes full commie, a bunch of them will go that way for "free stuff now."

I know it doesn't sound like it, but I know and love many kids in that group, and so I can say they are radicalized. The reason they aren't dems is because they want socialism, not liberalism.

Also, in doing research for another piece I saw this Reddit "ask me anything" featuring memory champion Ed Cooke. I found it much more charming than the product his company distributes.

These two tweets tell a story that strongly compliments the point I was making in The Bright Side of Collapse #2: It Wards off Moloch:
1.)

The Rich manipulate politics to get richer. Politicians need money to stay in power. The Rich and politicians get what they want. You don't.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) July 2, 2017

2.)

“The Facts are True, the News is Fake” — @nntaleb https://t.co/AUglETlqRL pic.twitter.com/QKi8oWI2MC

— Keith Huddleston (@KeithHudd) July 5, 2017

Speaking of twitter, here is the most amusing moment from the wedding I attended.

Went out of state for a wedding. Someone asks me where I'm from. I say Oklahoma.

They say "where's that?"

Never got that one before.

— Keith Huddleston (@KeithHudd) July 10, 2017

Notes on Howl and Moloch . . . and Field of Dreams?

This is an appendix to The Bright Side of Collapse #2: It Wards off Moloch.

Notes on Moloch

Moloch is a term for a Canaanite god that demanded child sacrifices. The symbolism of this bargain seems to be what has drawn authors as diverse as Milton and Allen Ginsberg, and then Scott Alexander via Ginsberg.

Moloch shares similarities with, and is perhaps the ancestor of, the Carthaginian god Baʿal Hammon -- or Ba’al, for short -- which comes from the Hebrew for “lord.” And Ba’al of Carthage demanded child sacrifice.

This lecture series, by the archaeologist and Stanford professor Patrick Hunt, argues that the evidence shows these sacrifices to Ba’al continued into the time Hannibal was alive (a mere 2 centuries before Christ). Hunt paints the picture of Hannibal swearing an oath to always hate Romans surrounded by sacrifices to Ba'al (a point was to make the sacrifice when children were older to make sure they survived infancy). In this context Hannibal could see his life as forfeit to his culture.  This type of ceremony was an emotional forging, leading to Hannibal (the “bal” in his name in honor of  Ba’al) being reborn in service to his god, his people, and the word of his oath.  Such a ceremony really solves the problem of people not taking their faith and their oaths seriously.

This leads "Beelzebub", which is now used as one of the names for the devil (or another demon. . . the usage is very confused). "Beelzebub" comes from the Hebrew “ba'al-z'bub,” which means the lord of the flies (which is why the classic novel is so named).

And why was Beelzebub called the lord of the flies? Because the large scale human sacrifices he demanded tended to bring in the flies. Can you imagine. . . so many dead bodies around an idol that it is just covered in flies?

Beezlebub, Ba’al, Moloch. . . all can refer to anything power enough to make you do this kind of evil. . . and be trapped with no way out.

Notes on Howl.

The first time I looked at Howl was because a student was auditioning it as a piece to a speech contest.

To take a poem this long to contest, you have to cut out parts, which is a good deal of the educational point of the activity.  So it was in that context that I first came across the line

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down,

(If you haven’t read the poem before the “who” is still those mentioned in the poem’s famous opening “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. . . ;” this is one of many, many clauses elaborating on them, which makes up the entirety of the poem’s first section). The student who was working on the piece didn’t know what Los Alamos was and referring to and so was thinking of cutting that line out.  Instead, I had a talk about how the nuclear bomb and the Cold War lead to a permanent state of fear that would make radical social change impossible, that the line was a great chance to vary the a reading of poem from a mad rush to a moment of clarity turning to despair for that all the outward projects Ginsberg would have hoped for.

The triple shocks of the great depression, World War II left the United States philosophically-spiritually adrift, ready to be rebuilt completely as a society -- or to quote Field of Dreams, of all things, “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.” It’s a beautiful quote, but I think it was written lacking context for how much of this “army of steamrollers” was a post-World War II phenomenon.

"Field of Dreams" is pretty good at articulating the way change exploded in our country after World War II, how it constructed a mythos of innocence, and then of world-changing compassion, and ultimately left both myths exposed.

In my previous life, as an instructor of “film as literature” class, I would subject students "Field of Dreams", and then talk to them about Baby Boomers -- their moral confusion and how they will bankrupt the nation.

Well, Back to “Howl” . . .

After reading the piece and giving my comments on what to do with the cutting, I was left intrigued by the poem. And so by the coincidences only I had read Howl before seeing it in Meditations on Moloch.

Trying to relocate the Los Alamos bit in order to quote it here, I ended up re-reading the poem -- exactly the kind of distraction I like to allow myself in my time as a man of letters (as opposed to social media feeds, where regret or dread is the usual cost of such distractability). After the famous first clause, section I continues on with the adventures of those in Ginsberg’s circle, making something like a 2,000 word breathless sentence, showing a kind of interesting and dangerous, if not mad, underworld that you would not have thought possible if the television of the time was your only look at the world.

Section I turns on this line:

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task,

This line really captures for me the difficulty in locating an American culture that isn’t some kind of gimmick --  or a hustle, to use Morris Berman’s terminology. (Compare this with another iconoclastic American, Thoreau, and his exhortation, “Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.”) After establishing this "hopeless task," the poem moves quickly to the bit about Los Alamos and then drifts back into the flow of adventures -- redoubling on obscenities, homosexuality, and other things that would offend 1950s sensibilities.

Part II is about Moloch, which is the reason for this appendix, the piece it is the appendix to, and the original piece that inspired it turn.

And part III is more tightly focused on giving Carl Solomon, to whom the poem is dedicated, solidarity, and a hope for the future

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Writing About the Dark on the Longest Day

I published The Bright Side of Collapse #1: The Return of the Dark on a Medium, partly because of formatting issues, partly as an experiment.

Times the Archdruid Report was Radiant

When John Michael Greer decided to pull down the Archdruid Report, but gave permission for his fans to copy the posts, I choose to create an archive because I found the Archdruid Report to be the most intelligent, best-written analysis of the collapse/peak-oil thesis I had seen online.

When thinking about the pieces I liked best from the ADR, however, they are the ones that dealt with the spirit -- often the ones that showed the most heart. Here are three series that I feel best showcase that spirit and heart.

#1 The Holiday Cycle

In a series of stories I’ll call The Holiday Cycle, Greer follows a family for holidays through a hundred years. In the first holiday depicted, Christmas Eve 2050, two civil wars have already ravaged the family's part of the U.S.

One thing I like about the stories is that while it does not shy away from the fact that people will die in collapse scenarios, there will be survivors, who will muddle through, find love, and maybe, just maybe, relocate the real meaning of gifts.

So much of what Greer writes is analytical and abstract. The Holiday Cycle brings these issues home and is able to reliably move me to tears.

#2 The Next Ten Billion Years 

This piece sets up a kind of long-game sense of spirituality, looking at, or even beyond, geological time. It is a kind of thought experiment -- or, really, a spirit experiment -- that challenges the power of the dominate (yet often hidden) belief in progress. He explores the intellectual side of his experiment in A Sense of Homecoming.

#3 Adam's Story

Lastly, there is Adam’s Story, which keeps it’s focus sharply on one young man who becomes the last survivor of a town who must migrate to an uncertain future.

I find that the courage to face the truth, while maintaining the ability to act and survive to be the Archdruid Report at it’s best.

Topic: Modularity

As I have begun to dip my feet in the waters gridbeam, I have began to think more about why it is so cool.   Three things stick out: 1) modularity 2) ability to stack components super efficiently and 3) open source.

I have had a lot of fun with my first few projects, and I am convinced it is a great technology.  I am going to stock up on some more metal gridbeam. nuts, bolts and washers.  I believe, in a very literal way, that this will be better than money in the bank.

I started researching other designs in the "nomadic furniture" school of thought (here's an insanely good example) and saw that joints could be made just out of the material itself, such as a mortise and tenon joint.

Post-apocalyse bonus.  You can make mortise and tenon joints just hand-tools.



So there is no need for nuts, bolts etc to make the joints work.  And so it seems to simply be a design problem to make it modular.  So here are three examples of the kind of "wow, it just clicks into place" brilliance of modularity.

1.



2.



3.




It's too bad these projects aren't presented as open-source and free.

Consumerism, Authoritarianism . . . and Ferris Bueller

This country has had a lot of closet authoritarians for quite some time. Now they feel they can be loud and proud.  This came to my mind recently with Trump's "temporary" Muslim ban.  It was signed at the end of business hours on a Friday, so there was no time for clarifications, trainings, or orders of what to do with ambiguous cases or when potential checks and balances come into play.  Instead, we saw bottom-up authoritarianism to sync with the top-down:  

This is an important point. So many Customs agents obediently imposed this cruelty. Hope to see disobedience, resignations, resistance: https://t.co/YQtWpPaUzw

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 7, 2017

Attitudes toward democracy are in strong decline. (See this New York Times piece). I think one factor in this rise of authoritarianism is the flip-side of entitlement, consumerism, and the cult of progress.  We are conditioned so that each new advance immediately becomes the new baseline, and we must improve on that.  So many desires have already been fulfilled that our next set of desires are based on convenience, and we perceive that we need the speed of authority (ideally our own) to get to the new vista of desires.

Democracy, liberty, and decency all slow down immediate gratification, which is unacceptable for the induced-ADD and impulsivity that Americans are conditioned to have.  Under the cult of progress, infinite growth of infinite jest is seen as the key to the way of life.

This entitlement started with the boomers, and has been passed down each generation. At best one could argue that this entitlement has gotten worse, but really, I think that the only thing different with the current group of entitled Americans coming from up through our schools is their complete lack of meta-cognitive towards consumption.

Bypassing the increasingly tedious and overly-reductive Millennial vs Boomer debate (what the hell happened to Gen X?), it looks like this entitlement has cost us our constitutional democracy.

I hope Ferris Bueller's Day Off was worth it.

How To Go To Work When Collapse is Near

Alternate Title: A Doomer Reader

====


It started with a tweet.

I'm gonna write a self help book titled "How To Go To Work When Collapse Is Near"

— Vidal Santiago (@hahasobsob) January 31, 2017

Somewhat tongue in check, but willing to help if taken up on the offer, I replied saying "Well, then, welcome to the doomosphere.  I have some books and authors to help you research, if serious." Interestingly enough, he took me up on it.  My first thought was to do it as a "tweet-storm," but then I realized that it was going to go a bit long for that.  Collapse has been my main intellectual interest for over a year now.  I want to do justice to those who write about it.

First, I would like to recommend John Michael Greer.  I believe he has the best understanding of collapse.  Luckily enough, this week's post on his site The Archdruid Report is as good any to start with [Update.  He took site down.  Here is a back up.  He now blogs here].   (I would avoid his more political pieces -- he feels he's a little too amped by predicting the Trump win, and a little too eager to see the "salary class" burned).  He also has several books.  I have read and recommend Green Wizardry.

Next up, is Early Retirement Extreme, a systems-theory approach created by Jacob Lund Fisker.  I would start with the quick explanations of the philosophy and the goals, and then browse the web-site.  He shows the kind of tools and skills it will take to either 1) liberate yourself from the rat-race (assuming it continues) or 2) become a type of Renaissance person who can make in a collapsing economy.  Fisker came out of the doomer closet to say as much.  Here is an even better piece where he lays out some doomer predictions.

Thirdly, James Howard Kunstler has a solid grasp on many of the aspects of our decline and writes a weekly rant on his website.  He has a real "old man on a porch" feel, often getting repetitive with terminology and certainly politically incorrect.  He is particularly bad at making specific predictions, though he often in the right direction on trends.  He is just so pissed all the time.  He does have a twitter handle, but doesn't use it much.

Now we get to some people who use twitter often as well as having a body of work about collapse. . .

Vinay Gupta is the go-to for information on dealing with down-side risk.  He tweets and retweets stuff like a maniac as well.  His twitter "about me" really sums up his life's work:

What do you do after it all goes wrong? And what about the poor, for whom it's never yet been right?

The guy is a genius.  He is now trying to play the venture capital game.  His current thinking seems a bit on the optimistic side to me, the basic thesis being that robots and cheap solar panels will lead to a reasonable utopia, but I need someone bullish about the future in my studies. . .

Ian Welsh tweets a lot and writes a lot of longer pieces.  There is a lot of raw pain and disillusionment that comes through because of this, but he is open and responsive on twitter.

Charles Hughes Smith only uses twitter to promote his blog posts, but he writes a lot of them.  He has books for sale on his site about how to be able to more or less make it in a collapse future, but I have not read any of them, so cannot make a recommendation.

I hope of this makes for interesting and helpful reading.  Good luck in building the future.

[Update: I moved the Gridbeam content away because I realized it was a bit off-topic]

2017 Predictions

I) Slate Star Codex Predictions

I was inspired to make this list of predictions by the list from Slate Star Codex.  The first heuristic I am using is taking the predictions made there that I know enough about to agree with.  (Update: only fair that I link to this interactive tool that was put up for the Slate Star Codex community to rate and make predictions).

1. US will not get involved in any new major war with death toll of > 100 US soldiers: 80%
2. North Korea’s government will survive the year without large civil war/revolt: 95%
3. No terrorist attack in the USA will kill > 100 people: 90%
4. …in any First World country: 80%
5. Assad will remain President of Syria: 80%
6. Israel will not get in a large-scale war (ie >100 Israeli deaths) with any Arab state: 90%
7. ISIS will control less territory than it does right now: 90%
8. ISIS will not continue to exist as a state entity in Iraq/Syria: 60%
9. Libya to remain a mess: 80%

EUROPE

10. Theresa May remains PM of Britain: 90%
11. Fewer refugees admitted (to EU) 2017 than 2016: 95%

ECONOMICS
12. Oil will end the year higher than $50 a barrel: 60%
13. Dow Jones will not fall > 10% this year: 60%

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

14. Donald Trump remains President at the end of 2017: 80%
15. No serious impeachment proceedings are active against Trump: 70%
16. Construction on Mexican border wall (beyond existing barriers) begins: 80%
17. Trump administration does not initiate extra prosecution of Hillary Clinton: 90%
18. US GDP growth lower than in 2016: 60%
19. US unemployment to be higher at end of year than beginning: 60%
20. Donald Trump’s approval rating at the end of 2017 is lower than fifty percent: 80%
21. …lower than forty percent: 60%

II) My Own Predictions

22. Either James Harden or Russ Westbrook is NBA MVP.  90% (confirmed 6/26)

23. James Harden as MVP 60%(dis-confirmed 6/26)

24. Warriors win NBA title. 70% (538 has it at 44% as I write this). (confirmed 6/12)

I do not feel bound by 1-year predictions, so I add:

25.  US will experience recession within 5 years.  80%
If 25. . .
      25a. Multiple banks/big financial institutions will fail.  70%
      If 25a . . .
           25b.  Bankers will be punished more severally than after 2008. 90%

26.  Trump will not serve full term 60%
27. Dems will not re-take Senate in 2018.  80%
28. Dems will not gain net-seats in Senate 2018. 60%
(No prediction on the House 2018).

Personal Predictions -- 1 year

29.  I will weigh below 175 at year end.  80%
30.  At some point I will weigh below 170. 70%
31.  At some point I will weigh below 165. 60%
32.  I will not achieve 100 push ups in a set.  70%
33. I will finish War and Peace.  60%
34. I will finish my own book project (Working title: The Hope Book).  80%
35. I will build something with gridbeam.  90% (CONFIRMED 2/18)
36. I will have over 1,000 twitter followers 70% (you can be one @KeithHudd) (CONFIRMED 1/19)
37. I will put up at least the insulation in stored the garage. 90%
38. I will have my biggest vegetable harvest I've ever had.  90%  (We'll call it a push. . . )

Personal Predictions -- multi-year

39. I will do 100 push ups in a set by 2020. 70%
40. I will not work again as full-time teacher next 5 years. 60%

Of Mentors and Movements

I've been thinking about the actions I am taking and whether they can fit into a bigger movement.

John Michael Greer's latest piece [update site was taken down, here is a copy.] at the Archdruid Report is on the failure of the Peak Oil movement (maybe one could say the collapse of the collapse movement).

JMG is great about answering his commentators, so I asked

 Do you think there is any hope for a de-industrialization/retrotopian movement framed around quality of life issues? 

So much of modern life is ugly, noisy, and boring. Spaces can be made that are the opposite of all of those things and then be used by the home economy as a way to pay for the space and it's joy. 

Or do you think as long as there is a great fear of some competitor taking their status, most people really can't see that truth (after all, reading Walden shows that people have had the opportunity all along, eh?)

To which JMG replied

it would have to be handled very skillfully, to keep from going the way of the voluntary simplicity movement, and being turned into a sales pitch for "simple" products. It might well be worth trying, though

Then by coincidence I stumbled across Vinay Gupat's  fictional piece The Unplugged.  It's an excellent read.

So the real question is whether I am ready to stop being just an individual and be part of a movement?  Or is more correct to ask if I need to pick up the ideas of my mentors and put in the work to make them movements?

If the answer is yes in either case, then the best place to start is in making Norman weird, and, of course, in corrupting the youth.