prairiemary: wealth

Showing posts with label wealth. Show all posts

Monday, February 20, 2017

IF YOU'RE HAPPY, YOU'RE NOT CRAZY

We are reminded that Trump is “white” (though the evidence is that he is a victim of fake tanning and some suggest it is to hide jaundice), heterosexual (though evidently not mainstream since most men don’t go around grabbing women between their legs), wealthy (though many experts insist he has only converted his inherited fortune into a legal tangle that is impenetrable in terms of profit and never reported publicly), and Christian. There is no evidence that he is Christian. Except that he is an enemy of Islam in a medieval sense.

He does not attend church, speak of God, pray in public, pledge to the support of a church, or show values and practices praised by Jesus. Trump’s father’s middle name was “Christ” (not “Christian”), but it doesn’t seem to have any more significance than the fact that one of Obama’s names was Hussein. The Billy Graham dynasty has avoided Trump.

Trump’s true god is Mammon, and it appears that it is also the true god of America. This is not a subsistence culture, except for those who can’t help it. In a subsistence or hardship culture Christianity is meant to be a counterweight to despair , a brake and limit on those who pursue Mammon at the expense of others. When the going gets good, the Christians get corrupt, selfish, and sequestered in enclaves. Their sacred cow is the Golden Calf.

Remnant Christianity in America supports “simple living,” small houses, “slow food,” and closet cleaning. But the last of the Shakers is gone. People who value these life-ways are likely to turn to Buddhism if they can figure out what it is.

America is very clever at converting the simple into the profitable. For instance, plain food — uncontaminated as it would be naturally — is now labeled “organic” at a steep markup. “Writing” is such a swamp of promises that a whole class of writing teachers, marketers, ghosts, and mock-publications that only print online for no pay, that writers have been converted from a class of wealth makers for the bourgeois into a class of parasites and panderers. Saddest of all is the descent of universities from places of learning to corporate dependents and athletic gladiators. What is a co-ed dorm but another way to grab people between their legs?

Accusations of wickedness (not convictions as our laws require) allow those in power to incarcerate without evidence or conviction, seize assets, and delay trials in the way we used to reserve for our enemies when at war. We herd together poor people and “detain” them in camps, even when they are children. Adult poor people must sleep in the streets as they always have done in subsistence countries. If the “Christians” try to feed these people, they are arrested for making a mess and too much noise.

It has always been true that those in power can claim that up is down and black is white and in is out, but it has never been so blatantly unprovable now that video records exist and the means of broadcasting are literally in everyone’s pockets. (That’s hyperbole — not everyone has a smart phone with which to monitor cops and presidents.) But plainly obvious evidence doesn't seem to matter. If you have a clever and powerful lawyer, as all the zombies called corporations do, then the contradictions can be suppressed — at least removed from Google, Facebook, et al.

But now that Big Data is cleverly used as a marketing tool, there’s no use in trying to hide in the crowd. The claim is that the number crunchers only deal in anonymous totals, but the truth is that identities can be discovered by reverse engineering. Also, by face recognition, though Google image presents every old woman with big glasses and frizzy hair as “Mary Scriver.” She buys books instead of shoes, very suspicious behavior. She is not on Facebook or Medium, cancelled both, though Medium failed to take down one post because it was about sex and religion, and thus pulls readers.

People who read my blog are generally not aware that I can see their location and the moment they are reading by consulting monitors on my computer. The problem is that there are at least three sources of statistics I can read without having to pay (paying means accuracy and detail) and none of them agree. On any given day (which is an interval that can be challenged on a turning planet) the number of “hits” range from 80 to several thousand. I’ve never made an attempt to reconcile them in terms of whether they at least go up and down in tandem.

They say that if numbers are consistently high, one can turn them into profit, but I haven’t tried. Once I signed up for ads, but after my careful efforts at accuracy and integrity, the ads would be for crackpot stuff that directly contradicted what I wrote. Since I often write about “religion,” I suddenly discovered how much fake “religion” is actively pushed at people.

The marketing of wealth is rather subtle but always based on the European competitive notion of cultures against each other. Until the wave of books explaining historical climaxes and their subsequent collapses, I had not understood — for instance — about the long bloody confrontation between England and Holland when great sailing ships were plying the seas to bring home "wealth", like blue and white porcelain, silk or tulip bulbs — none of them necessary for a full and comfortable life.

More blatant was the capture of other people, who DID provide ease and comfort for their owners — not just wealth. They even provided descendants as in the case of Thomas Jefferson. If we don’t criticize him for that particular aspect of wealth, are we justified in frowning at Trump et al for paying subsistence wages for menial work? How else would we define “menial”? What is sufficient compensation for scrubbing public toilets? At least we’ve given up — for the most part — pay toilets, because they are an incentive for shoppers who have to drive long distances to big box shopping centers, which causes them to fortify themselves with all sorts of beverages to occupy the cup-holders built into the better cars, though the holders have nothing to do with making the car operate better.

The capture of cars is a heavy penalty for those dependent on them in a place like Montana. My principle is that if the vehicle is sufficiently old and moldy, it becomes invisible. This is a heresy when the most dedicated American ceremony is washing the car.

My greatest wealth is my education. Even if I were slammed into solitary confinement, even if I had barely enough money to eat, even if all my books were seized (Why would they be? They’re not worth anything anymore.), I would still know what I know. And it would make me happy.

Those who have been asked to decide whether Trump is insane or simply a bad man, (formal associations of psychiatrists) say that insanity is defined ultimately by how happy the person is. Otherwise, why would they employ a shrink. This is a monetary definition.

If you’re happy, you’re not crazy, the shrinks say. So there. I’m as sane as Trump — just not as greedy. I’m white (do freckles count?), “het“ (does celibacy count?), and poor. The issue of Christian is open since I eschew institutions and am rather indiscriminate about practice. I mean, I don’t pray, but I smudge. (Incense is Catholic.)

Sunday, November 27, 2016

WHO YOU GONNA CALL WHITE TRASH THIS TIME?

When I checked out from the library “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” by Nancy Isenberg, I was thinking about the forces behind the presidential election, but it turned out to be yet another revision of US history in search of why people are losers. The main guiding principle this time is NOT that stigma oppresses people, so it’s a political problem; nor that poverty is inescapable which is an economic problem; nor that people are wicked (drug takers, sexual renegades) which is a moral/religious problem; nxor that the particular resources of a place are a lid on prosperity which is what Jared Diamond suggests. This time Isenberg points to the European serf system, as carried to the new continent by the British Empire Builders. A subjugated class does all the work; a privileged class counts the money.

It’s an assumption that people can be sorted into a hierarchy. Forget whether it’s assumed that people from noble families are better or that people who own land (landed gentry) are better or that people with a lot of money from profiteering (industrialism, exploitation of war, government subsidized advantages) are higher. Forget whether college-educated people (NOT just people who got diplomas but those who actually learned) are better than high school level people. I made a list of possible causes — which I’ll spare you because it would be better if you made your own list, or if a little group sat down to brainstorm a list — of all the ways a person could move higher up the hierarchy. Or fall. It’s likely to be very long once you get a grip on the concept.

What’s surprising is that it changes over the decades and centuries when new technologies (computers) or new natural conditions (rising sea level) or some new cultural valuing (ostentatious wealth, sexual revolution) enter the scene. Sometimes it’s an obvious loss of wealth (freeing the slaves) and sometimes it’s something mysterious (the most recent Depression, which was a matter of book-keeping and gambling of intangible assets). But the basic assumption is always that people sort out into layers and it’s better to be in one of the higher layers.

The tricky part is that what works in one set of circumstances, does not in another. If a person in an immigrant group that still has clear borders were an elder, a leader, that person would be “up,” but as soon as enough of the next generation gets assimilated, educated and making money from outside the group, that leader will be pushed aside. We see this even in the indigenous world of the reservation, but surprisingly often the next generation — the children of the assimilated people — will turn back to their grandparents and try to recapture their roots. Suddenly the epithet “blanket-ass Indian” — meaning someone too poor and culturally backward to dress properly— is gutted when the practice of recognizing leaders and achievements becomes gifting them with “Indian” blankets from Pendleton or Hudson’s Bay. (Quite expensive, actually.)

Recently an attempt by a religious group (Unitarian Universalists) which prides itself on being open-minded, progressive, and educated, was blocked by a neighborhood from acquiring a building because those folks assumed that religious people are low-class rabble-rousers who would attract unwanted attention. We are in a time of social earthquake when the bottom becomes the top and no one is quite sure how to map the terrain.

Part of this dynamic is increased “empathy,” that is, awareness that there are suffering, barely surviving people, who can’t be ignored because they show up in National Geographic all the time. They risk their lives to come over here, climbing our walls and slipping in under disguises. They dress funny and their food is different. But then those who are doing very well imitate their ethnic clothes and eat in their trendy restaurants — as though the people left to survive at home weren’t scraping by on our discarded t-shirts and NGO bulk food.

Our own people just die in our streets, a pile of rags.

I try to remember that “all comparisons are odious” because it means someone has to be on the down side, often unfairly, but I blunder out of haste or insensitivity or just dumbness. We are not all equal because we are not all alike. But simple difference should not be an imposed burden. Yet it is and much of our story-telling is about how to bear life, how to rise above challenges, and how to give a hand to others. How to be loved because we are ourselves, which means stepping outside the hierarchy labels into actual relationship.

My ancestors on one side (Pinkerton) were stiff-necked Irish, prone to anger and violence. (Yeah, those “detectives.”) My grandfather on that side married a Cochran. They were a wealthy family (woolen mills) and he was not considered good enough, which made him defiant at the same time that he used poor judgment out of wrath. He had no sons, which could have been a source of rising, but resourcefully depended on education to raise the status of his daughters. A nurse, a teacher, and one was meant to be a lawyer. She wasn’t but her sons-in-law were because her daughters (she had no sons) married them. “It’s as easy to love a rich man as a poor man,” she said.

My father’s family, Strachan, was not rich, but they were honorable in the conservative Scots way, which is also a source of social status. They were homesteaders and then WWII raised up my uncles: a pilot, a draftsman, and a real estate broker. But my father stuck to agriculture, even though he was the oldest and the only one with a college degree. His failure in life came as a result of an automobile crash resulting in a concussion because he smashed the windshield with his forehead. He accumulated a lot of books which gave him neighborhood status, but didn’t help him rise at work where he could never quite grasp what he was doing. He never read the books or the piles of subscribed magazines. (I did.)

Doubling back to the Pinkertons, with the educated daughters, they all married Hatfields who were landowners. When I watch “Masterpiece Theatre”, I see their English faces. Not French enough to be gentry. Their land at the southern tip of Oregon's Willamette Valley is very much like English fields and forests. The family lore is that the old original crafty Hatfield advised his sons to marry the Pinkerton girls because they were smart and smart is a resource. (They mocked Old Pinkerton and saw him as deserving to lose his daughters.) It was good advice but my mother chose a Strachan with a degree who had brothers. No one could have predicted his trauma.

Temperament comes into it. And always the gender-roles. My mother was determined that I would have a bachelor’s degree and wanted it to be teaching, like hers. When I went back to seminary, she became angry and belittling, because she didn’t want me to be “better than her.” To her it was a betrayal of the social solidarity that proved her own value as a teacher. She believed in the higher prestige of religion, but only for men and only Christian — I was moving “up,” which was such a source of her family’s quarrelling. Ironically, I was UU, where my father attended as an atheist. (If he ever attended.)

Beyond that, there is a nearly unconscious product of hierarchical aspiration that says “Don’t get too smart. Don’t think you’re better than us. If you fly too high, you’ll crash.” (The old Icarus Complex.) Ask an American Indian about that, or anyone else who escapes a stigmatized category but loses his feathers. A fat person who tries to lose weight is often sabotaged by friends and family, because they don’t like change; they are afraid that the social marker of slimness will mean that person is above them now. The movie “Working Girl” is all very well as movie fantasy, but in real life all those applauding secretaries will desert their achieving friend and resent her behind her back.

This presidential election, when interpreted in these terms, is fascinating. Markers of class, entitlement to dominate, debts incurred and claimed, and the simple factor of appearance are all in play. Republicans who are convinced they are wealthy because they are virtuous, have their “feet” cut out from under them when their secret lives are revealed. Democrats who are convinced they are virtuous because they reach out to the poor, likewise turn out to be hypocrites. Crime, or at least law-breaking, appears to have become a source of status. Mafia rules apply, as they always do in chaos.

Saturday, November 12, 2016

GRABBING AMERICA BY THE KITTY

“Long ago Bertram Gross warned of the dangers of “friendly fascism” coming to America – “a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership.” It is now arriving – and may not be friendly. It must be confronted and challenged. But unless we are able to offer real alternatives based on shared community and new economic institutions to challenge the nightmares of fear, hatred, and isolation that have seized our politics, we will not succeed.” (From the Next System Project)

http://www.thenextsystem.org/dark-times-call-brighter-new-visions-world-want-see/?mc_cid=bf3c05f13d&mc_eid=5bc124c3e1

This is from Berkeley prof Charles Henry’s blog: “Donald Trump’s entrance into the presidential sweepstakes and substantial lead in the polls reminds me of the warnings issued 35 years ago in Bertram Gross’s widely read Friendly Fascism. Gross was concerned that the ever-closer integration of Big Business and Big Government could well lead to a new, kinder, gentler form of fascism — a fascism that promised citizens cheap and plentiful material goods in exchange for civil and political rights.

“Gross’s warning extended well beyond Eisenhower’s concern about the rising military-industrial complex to include the nuclear power complex, the technology-science complex, the energy-auto-highway complex, the banking-investment-housing complex, the city-planning-development-land-speculation complex, the agribusiness complex, the communications complex, and the enormous tangle of public bureaucracies and universities whose overt and secret services provide the foregoing with financial sustenance and a nurturing environment. Coming from a social scientist deeply involved the the New Deal, Gross’s warnings bear attention.”

I love this list of complexes and would add quite a few: the police-prison-judiciary complex, the professor-adjunct-publishing-research complex, the denomination-seminary-congregation complex for starters. Follow the money.

But, ironically enough, the two main political parties are no longer coherent, are former complexes and coalitions that are now blasted apart into internal warfare. The question is whether a third party should begin to form, or whether the two could be “parted out” like old jalopies and recombined to create something functional. Or maybe we should really go deep to the ultimate question: what is a “party” and why have one? Isn’t it just a lot of hoopla and unnecessary expense in campaigns?

The world has changed drastically. We’ve been talking about the possibility of dumping the electoral college and going directly to individual votes, maybe from home by computers. Very nice. Eliminate the possibility of votes from all those people sleeping in the streets. (You can’t vote without an address anyway.) Get rid of computer illiterates. How many of them vote anyway? (This is sarcasm — I find I have to label it or be misunderstood.)

A Missoula electoral college representative is already pledging to vote according to the popular vote. We don’t have to wait for the next election. The next major move may be to eliminate more “middle men,” intermediaries, translators. Of course, that means that Facebook will be drilling down into who you are and keeping you from access to what you might want to know.

Why not just announce that money can be pledged to whatever political/tribal ends (grouped according to assumptions about the right thing to do) or those new ends (some group based on different assumptions) and the group that will pay out the most money wins. The Supreme Court has somehow approved that idea, and even approved of outsiders (we used to call them carpet-baggers) coming in with their checkbooks and wire transfers from lenient island countries. (Why are we worried about the Supreme Court selling out, when that’s already done and dusted?)

Going back to my preoccupation with the town of Valier, we’re finding that the biggest expenses are not the ones arising from practicalities like the 100-year old water and sewer pipes disintegrating or even the fact that our tax rolls keep shrinking, but rather the requirements imposed by state and federal rules about what we must do, usually involving very well-paid engineering companies. For instance, we’re now told that our outflow sludge build-up must be removed at an estimated cost of $100,000. And we have an employee who was caught in a trench collapse after the council refused to buy a trench box, a protection. Aside from what OSHA thinks, it sounds like a juicy case for a lawyer. The box purchase had been turned down because it was too expensive. I don’t recall any public discussion. I hear vengeful glee that this man was hurt, as though he denied his own safety.

Car insurance is now obligatory, like seat belts. More and more things become obligatory or else penalty-taxed into oblivion, even trivialities like smoking or drinking pop. It’s beyond “nudge.” We go by the aggregated cost to society, which we want to avoid, but the individuals who wish to be soothed and sweetened don’t receive any aggregated national cost nor benefit either — they just get sick and die, whether or not they get insurance. The tax money doesn’t go to hospital bills.

But this is only in America. Must I move away to a Third World country to assume my own risks? Or will I get there just in time to discover that the US has decided to force something on THAT government and is sending predator drones next door to make it happen. I’ve never forgotten MOVE in Philadelphia. http://newsone.com/3433351/11-things-you-didnt-know-about-move-philadelphia-bombing/

High school level thinkers have the idea that they can control people by writing laws and regulations, even though there are always high school people who refuse to do what they’re told. Meanwhile the population ignores the laws or doesn’t even know they exist. It takes money to enforce laws by hiring monitors and punishers; even then people go right on ignoring them. If you try to control poor people by imposing fines, they just get poorer and more defiant. Then if they are thrown into jail, they become a cost and teach each other have to evade laws. Confined in significant numbers, they develop a culture of their own, maybe more effective and eventually powerful than the law-makers. They are pretty much undetectable and not necessarily criminal, but sometimes — like now — they break through, becoming visible. Some are welcome; some are not. Most are about money, the kitty.

Sunday, February 07, 2016

HG WELLS ALL OVER AGAIN

One of the first sci-fi stories I ever read was H.G. Wells' story about the evolution of humans played against the economic gap in English society. It was represented by the rich becoming more and more “elfin,” meaning effete and ineffective but surviving by the magic of belonging to an upper land-owning class. The desirability of the upper class life was signed by a beautiful blonde emotional woman. (With pet dragons?) Like many of the descendants of this plot plan, the “lower” working classes were underground, based on the reality of coal mining, tough and physical. In the Ring films, the real brutes roll out of the mud in the walls of excavations, like grubs. The big strong tough miner wins the girl, right?

One of the echoes of this wrestling with evolution was knowing that the early hominids — the ones that weren’t even first-draft moderns — were as sexually dimorphic as many four-footed species. That is, the males were big, heavily muscled, with jaws that had teeth (as some anthropologist said) like pegs, fit to tear raw meat off bones. The women were half that size and more lightly built. Change came about when fire allowed cooking so that big teeth weren’t needed and hunting and gathering began to rely on knowing things, planning, cooperating as a group with clever strategies, and sharing food.

Nevertheless, constant concern remains over what is male or female in behavior, body conformation, dominance, and economic opportunity when the forced roles of reproduction are blunted by contraception. That's saying nothing about the ability to change genders convincingly. How much is genetic and what does the new shift from industrial to technology mean? (For some reason penises are getting smaller. Auugh!) Even war is changed by technology, since it is now much more of a video game with predator drones managed at consoles in middle America.

Controls for a "Reaper" drone

This is another shift from dyadic systems of the past to more of a monoculture. Except that there is a new dyad operating — several, actually. I subscribe to The Guardian, an English newspaper, which turns its attention to America and sees the same Wellsian split between industrial labor and investment capitalists, the same split between haves and have-nots. It’s an irony that England should have to tell us what our own newspapers don’t because the papers are owned by our rich and control the news.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/07/suicide-rates-rise-butte-montana-princeton-study?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Version+A&utm_term=155449&subid=10790770&CMP=ema_565a

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/feb/07/issa-rae-fruit-fictional-podcast-explores-sexuality-hyper-masculinity?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Version+A&utm_term=155449&subid=10790770&CMP=ema_565a

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/12/beattyville-kentucky-and-americas-poorest-towns

I’ve lost the link to an article about free-lance writing that mentioned the national split that haunts us in Valier: it is that between the cultural evolution of the city and our ways in the rural or “flyover” middle continent. Both urban and rural are in the grip of media-enforced stereotypes, writers’ rooms where a certain kind of person sits developing by committee the stories the unwary accept as truth. Sometimes they are didactic and even progressive. They were the force that transformed the stigma against gays, so long as they were a certain “kind” of gay — respectable, loving, protective. They were the people who taught us blacks are like whites. (Cosby threw a hand grenade into that — or maybe he only turned out to be just like a white predator. And maybe blacks are NOT like whites.) The writers never have figured out what to do about Indians, or Chinese, for that matter. The editors who assign stories do not know the middle of the country exists.

When I am in Portland, my preference for wearing denim cowboy shirts, tails out, over bright print skirts and with big craft earrings, made people think I was lesbian, which was an advantage since the management was lesbian. (I'm not. I'm solitary and celibate -- much more shocking.)

In Valier my work shirts and sweats are seen as poverty. (I stopped bothering with earrings.) But there are lots of people around here in that category. In neither environment am I seen as a writer because there is a split in the stereotypes. Writers are either wise old weathered males in university towns or smart pretty young mothers on ranches.

Jim Harrison

Beyond that, cities suck profit out of the rural. Rural professionals are no longer the kind and principled lawyers of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” or doctors like “Marcus Welby.” They are third tier scramblers trying to pay off their grad school loans as soon as possible. Or sometimes they're escaping from the quasi-law of regulations, which are state-by-state. I include teachers. An insurance cartel is busy acquiring as many delinquent tax debts as they can, often because the owners either died alone or left for warmer weather, shorter distances, and better managed McDonalds -- abandoning their property. What was originally devised as protection is now predation.

Thin populations spread over great distances means more need for public infrastructure from bus lines to fiber-optics to water management. But here there are more tax cut-outs from the public body, from reservations to Hutterite colonies to giant corporate ranches to federal wilderness. Montana's statistics are always distorted because they don't include the many reservations. On purpose since they would drag down the evidence of prosperity to what would look a lot more like Butte.

Butte -- the M is for mining

As the article from the Guardian notes about Butte, the difficulties are resulting in what in biology is called “apoptosis,” simply stopping to exist, dying spontaneously. The medical news feeds are announcing a recent study that showed if mice have all their senile cells (those on the verge of apoptosis) removed from their systems (I still don’t understand how) they make a sudden gain in vitality and live longer. Consciously or unconsciously, there are people who would like to do the same thing in the human population: remove all the sick, depressed, hooked, unemployed, old and “foreign” people. I have no doubt this would mean a jump in prosperity. And a lot of empty houses to get people off the streets, though there probably ought to be a housing apoptosis to get rid of all the sub-code structures. The apoptosis of small towns with no profit-making source of "new blood" is already happening.

Landed gentry, as portrayed in movies.

The trouble is that, like English landed gentry, evolution would take the remaining people and settlements towards not just cultural deadends, but towards that same cell-selecting apoptosis from the same causes. Technology doesn’t just mean that all the money rolls into one corner, but that money suffocates. And because of technology, we can all see it. We just haven’t figured out alternatives yet. Capitalism, communism, laissez faire and regulation have all contributed to the problem. And the REAL problem is that we’ve just about used up all the free profit from the environment, the ore and oil and even fertile soil, which erodes quickly when irrigated. And that exotic little trace element needed for Apple cell phones.

If one adds up information like the cultural shift away from grain-fed beef, the collapse of countries that once made deals to get our wheat, the growing allergies to gluten or to trace molecules of fertilizer and pesticides, antibiotics being worn out, erosion, climate change, and water shortages (which may only be distribution patterns changing), one is sharply and chillingly aware of the possibility of the whole grain industry collapsing. It’s beginning to happen with corn already. One fast-developing wheat virus would end Valier.

Small towns like this one have had imposed upon them by state and federal officials a host of infrastructure requirements: legitimate regulation of water, and sewer as well as profit-making provision for electricity, internet, gas and so on. Some communities have dwindled below the critical mass necessary to support schools, churches, libraries, grocery stores, service stations.

What that means is that a different kind of culture is unfolding in the country than in the city, but the city doesn’t know anything about it. They pass laws that don’t fit, make assumptions that aren’t true, and use their greater population density to become technologically more clever — and more expensive. One great vulnerability is the electrical transmission systems that power all the gizmos.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

When Eisenhower was president, he insisted on a transportation system that would support war of the WWII kind. It also exploded (increasing prosperity) the American automobile industry. We all hit the road. We still use the transportation systems to shift goods across the nation, though the bridges and railroads are decaying. But the electronic infrastructure is probably more vital and it could be shut down by a teenaged hacker. (Can you tell I’m now watching the series called “CSI:Cyber”?) It’s already happened. The intimacy of the computer screen beats even the intimacy of a parked car.

Worst than than, if cities collapse due to disaster or rot, the population will fall back on the country and they might not be welcome. I still remember a right-wing friend who expected atomic bombs to prompt a migration in this country like the ones across the Middle East. He had wrapped greased sem-automatics in plastic and buried them. I don't know where.

We could always go back to basics, like “knowing things, planning, cooperating as a group with clever strategies, and sharing food.” We're not quite to "apoptosis," but in many aspects we're suffering from "inanition," failure to thrive. We're not quite to class war, which will not be between rich and poor but between urban and rural.

What's your Precious?

In Saskatoon I developed a vigorous theological elaboration of the rural prairie. It triggered a passionate response from another female minister, defending skyscrapers and sidewalks. People who knew both of us would tell you the chances of reconciliation were nil.

Sunday, June 06, 2010

NASSIM TALEB'S WEALTH

Nassim Taleb made his reputation on his early insights about the big economic meltdown and now he appears in lots of places as our newest pundit-with-accent, replacing Kissinger’s teutonic opinions with slightly livelier and much sexier Mediterranean ideas about pretty much everything. I did not know until recently that he’s huge among the survivalist crowd, though his expertise is statistics rather than apocalypses. The reason is no doubt his interest in “robustness,” not just in monetary systems but as a concept. He points out that complexity introduces frailty, because of the exposure to so many risks -- too many to keep track of or even aware of existing. He challenges the reliance on statistical “likelihood” that underlies our commerce, military, and political systems.

Well, what a relief! I hate being dominated by algorithms, not least because I’m always way out there at the end of the long-tail. In practical terms, that means that the kind of things I like to buy never make it to the market except for some little test blip somewhere. Thank goodness for Internet shopping, where I’m far more likely to find what I want than I am at the local supermarket.

All the interviewers try hard to get Taleb to give advice, but his advice is scary. In a weird way it pulls together a lot of things I’ve read over the years from mythology to organizational design to publishing to local politics. Maybe it starts with Paul Shepherd’s ideas about what happened to us when people shifted from a hunting base to an agriculture base, esp. the kind that depends on huge monocultures of corporate controlled seed stock (sterilized so that it cannot be used as seeds the next year) over huge areas planted, fertilized, poisoned (herbicides and pesticides), and harvested by machines in a way that gradually erodes and compacts the earth. This is the foundation of cities and, come to that, refugee camps and commodities for the poor, who would die of starvation if these grains did not create so much surplus nutrition. But what begins to emerge is the idea that the food supply is subtly contaminated in some way -- perhaps simply by being contained in plastics that leak poison. The animal food sources, esp. grain-fed, may be suffering the same way as well as from gratuitous hormones and antibiotics. Big Pharma may be imposing as well as maintaining chronic conditions that would in the past have been fatal -- thus skewing the evolution that would previously have culled all creatures that didn’t fit, so that our very genetic matrix is morphing to require what is bad for us.

Taleb is moving his expert methods from financial systems to far more essential systems, like agriculture, in part because he doesn’t think any of our present financial systems are robust enough to justify speculation or investment. Like a Great Depression survivor, he is advising the storage of wealth in mineral commodities and ag land. He is noting that the land will keep its value, but the way it is used is becoming less and less robust, especially when changing climate systems and diminishing water supplies are taken into account, which is almost the same thing when one realizes that water is stored in mountain snowpacks and deep underground aquifers created by the melting of the continental glaciers ten thousand years ago. Both are basically irreplaceable and known to be quickly diminishing.

Taleb puts emphasis on disease, with one of his favorite examples being the Irish potato famine. He is a fastidious man and rather removed from biology, but he does understand that many people starved. What he does not seem to grasp or consider is the underlying forces, like the clearance of crofters by absentee land owners and the Catholic opposition to female self-determination in matters of birth. (See Swift.) Way too many people were dependent on potatoes. Or maybe that is what he is referring to when he speaks of the turkey, who thinks life is great until Thanksgiving comes along, an event for which the poultry farmer planned.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/jun/01/religion-guardian-hay-festival

“Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan is religious – not in the sense of being able to summarise his metaphysical commitments on the back of an envelope, but in the sense of being committed to the religious practices of his native Greek Orthodoxy. Why? Because, he said, the interdicts of religion are the best way to deal with the exposure that results from living in "extremistan", a world in which uncertainties will catch you unawares.

“ . . .If we'd followed the ancient precept not to build up speculative debts, which is to say avoided usurious excesses, the world might be a better place today. Religious practices, Taleb suggested, are the wise product of thousands of years of accumulated wisdom that help us to live better in the face of what's unknown.”

I live a modest life so limited that relatives from the coastal cities find it uncomfortable even for short visits. Not enough heat, hot water, appliances, TV cable, garaging, lawn cutting, or space to conform to what they take entirely for granted. Not even enough towels. No recliner or sofa big enough to sleep on. All my furniture is second-hand, sometimes remnants from my childhood. Most of my assets are paper books. The electricity, which is always a little flukey in Valier, was off for three hours not long ago, which left me pondering how much I depend on it for food management: freezing, refrigeration, cooking. “Eating local“ in Valier would mean almost no vegetables, although one friend points out that I do not exploit the resources of the Hutterites who are far more self-sustaining than the rest of us and prosper from their religion-supported practices.

If I spent the rest of my life living on bread and cheese (which would destroy my diabetes II strategy), I would be perfectly content so long as I had the Internet. My “affinity groups” and co-writer are globally located. I cannot walk across the fields or through the woods to enjoy conversation with them or draw comfort from them. We do not join on Sunday mornings to sing well-loved songs. But our keyboards smoke.

Beyond that, I am totally dependent on virtual money systems: social security, medicare, and the Oregon public employee retirement system, all of which can be suddenly altered by politicians far away and responding to their own interests. I cannot, like Taleb, invest in gold. I must invest in ideas, which is also like him. A very useful and religious sort of thing to do. I’m glad he speaks of it so eloquently. It is a neglected kind of wealth. What remains is to fit our religions to our lives.