Of stars and grasses

The other night I stepped out the trailer. It was clear and I could see lots of stars, a hint of the milky way and the lights of an airplane far above and I wondered, can I see the flicker of light from the dual star system that supposedly has a Tatooine like planet in their orbit?

Then I thought, “this is crazy”. I know enough to wonder about a distant planet but not enough to identify the plants at my feet. It’s kind of strange when you think about it. We know so much that we know almost nothing.

In contrast, for most of human existence my counterpart would have had no idea of a Tatooine-like planet but would have know most every plant at his feet and what uses it has. His wonder and amazement at the beauty of the night sky would have been truly complete and in stark contrast to the in depth knowledge of his everyday world.

I’m jealous of that contrast.

Ethnographical studies have shown that a hunter-gather society will know every plant and animal in their range and what it can be used for, if anything. They live in a world they truly know and understand through common knowledge. I think this must be very grounding for the individual, the combination of of a sense of belonging but also the confidence that comes with knowing what you are dealing with on a day to day basis.

We live in a world of selective knowledge where there is so much known the individual has to pick and choose what they will know and most of us don’t seem to, we get lost in the array of choice. We end up knowing very little about a lot of subjects and maybe enough to fake expertise in a few areas. Thanks to a few real experts we all benefit but most of us seem spend our whole lives adrift in a sea choice and questioning? The right partner? Right career? Right shoes? A world where even what is real is unsure and ultimately unknowable. (A solid table is actually mostly empty space and little bits flying about? Really?)

For most people the benefits of our world are hard to question, who wouldn’t want to complete a three day journey in an hour? (Forget the wider consequences) We’ve made survival easy but there seems to be an undefined cost we’ve yet to figure out.

The truckness of the truck

“Because the last thing you need is a truck that doesn’t have the stones to get the job done.”

Marketing can be funny, and evil. These commercials do not target people who need a truck. They are going to buy a truck anyway. And use it like a truck. To do stuff the Sierra Club wouldn’t approve of.

These commercials are for the posers. They used to drive SUVs to feel like a big man (yes even the womyn) but now that the mini-van crowd has been shamed into a new class of vehicle (the SUV) the posers have moved to the truck market. (Yeah, in my reality driving a luxury SUV is an embarrassing display of self loathing). I do appreciate the commercial with the two mountain bikers trying to revive the mini van as practical not dorky dad but it isn't enough.

The ultimate thing I’ve been seeing lately around the GTA are these weird abominations where someone buys a giant pick-up truck, like an F350 or a Ram 3500 and then rices it up to look like a miniature transport truck. The killer is that these things are ALWAYS pristine. No dirt, no scratches. The only appropriate aftermarket modes on your pick up are scratches, dents and dirt. A winch if you actually use it.

In cottage country I see a lot of pick-ups with huge tires and risers and giant stickers proclaiming their badassedness and 4x4ness. These are sad too but not as sad, at least they are usually dirty.

I say the last thing a truck needs is an owner who doesn’t have the stones to do the job. A truck needs an owner who will live the truckness of the truck.

Response to anonymous

You are making an assumption that a lower birth mortality rate is a good thing. In the short and medium term its an easy sell, parents don't want their child to die in the short term (thanks in art to contraception and abortion) and anyone currently making their living/fortune off an excess of cheap labour loves the medium term outlook of extra babies. But long term there is a reason why all animals have a high mortality rate in their juvenile stage. I guess one could argue that soon we'll be genetically engineering super babies to make even that point moot but realistically that will only be available to the wealthy and wealthy people don't have a lot of kids. So rather than stay strong our gene pool will continue to be watered down with defective genes for lack of a better word.

Secondly I would argue that a life expectancy of 45 is an artificial number. A life expectancy of 45 is achieved in one of two ways - Dickensian slums (represented today by third world tin shack slums) or by adding all he dead babies into the average. For example Amish people have the same life expectancy as the rest of the United States without the need for global markets and industrialized consumption.

At the end of the day homo sapiens is just another animal and no amount of science will change that. We will learn to live in harmony with our environment and all the incumbent horrors, sacrifices and limitations it imposes or we will lose.

Is bigger better?

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'” - Ronald Reagan

I wonder if this still holds true along the East coast this week? Hurricane Irene killed 44 people and caused massive flooding. The United States has suffered $55,000,000,000 in damages from natural disasters this year.

I suspect the victims of these disasters won’t be on Fox news complaining that the government did too much to help them. I expect they’ll just complain that what help they recived wasn’t the help that they needed. The positive stories won’t be about FEMA coming to the rescue it will be about neighbors helping neighbors.

They always are.

The issue at work here is that government has become too big, too impersonal. Our populations are too big. No one can efficiently manage the needs of 30 million diverse people (much less 300 million) in diverse situations. No one can even understand the needs of most of the people in a group that size in so many different situations. While some praise the economy of scale for it’s efficiencies those efficiencies don’t seem to apply when diversity is involved.

It's the same type of problems created with mega farms. Mega farms give us cheap food but at a price not measured in dollars. That price is the natural security provided by biological diversity - the system that has allowed life to flourish on earth for about 2 billion years. Monoculture creates it's own problems. Most of which we try to solve with science but those "solutions" just create new problems. I suppose if you are one of the few who make your living profiting from these "solutions" to the inefficiency of nature that's great. But what about the rest of us?

For most of us the short term costs associated with smaller, more local, everything are more than likely worth the long term benefits. Unfortunately we live in a system that focuses on the short term (4-5 years) and the grand scale (national) and the people running it don't seem keen on change. The Alpha's want the Deltas to just eat their corn and like it.

Small and local can work, it did for a long time. It's only real enemy is greed.