Open Thread

Is there ever recovery from a group mistake? Is there any way to dig out from the political hole created by pervasive corruption?

As the “collective west” lumbers toward WW3, the inability of governments or leaders recognize or correct any error at any level would puzzle me except for the ready explanation of pervasive corruption driving reckless irresponsibility and incompetence. No information or argument has to be engaged on substance, because no one in charge really cares about the substance. And we among the hoi polloi are helpless to influence even which lesser evil is to be judged lesser.

Part of an ability to flee from the city is having a non-city countryside eco-productive enough to be able to flee into and survive there. One would make oneself part of that eco-productivity system by having or getting enough countryside survival knowledge to be able to survive there while keeping it survival-viable enough for oneself and others to survive there.

Albert Bates has written some things about that. He was one of the original hippies who fled from San Francisco with Stephen Gaskin and wound up co-founding and operationalizing The Farm near Summertown, Tennessee. Here is an article he wrote about the Maya Food Forest concept. Mayas couuld realistically flee the city if they had a food forest to flee into.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-07-28/the-gift-of-the-maya-2/

How is this relevant for internal American refugees in flight from the city? Perhaps an Americacentric version of the ” food forest” might be the “food savannah”. Commercial scale permaculture farmer Mark Shepard has suggested that much of America before the age of European Colonial Settler States was an evershifting mosaic of savannah grasslands and savannah woodlands and shrublands with many foodbearing species of plant. He has modeled his farm on a Western Civ version of this foodbearing savannahform concept.
https://permacultureapprentice.com/new-forest-farm-mark-shepard-100-acre-15-years-of-establishment/

http://www.restorationag.com/team/mark-shepard/

https://www.forestag.com/pages/mark-shepard

How was savannah maintained over so much of mid-contintent America before the age of Indian managed-cultural burning? I have seen very supportable theories that the ever-shifting savannah in mid-continent America was maintained the same way that the ever-shifting savannah is still maintained in Africa . . . by herds of elephants and other huge animals numbering in the collective millions pushing and tearing down trees big enough to be worth the effort for eating the leaves off the torn-down trees. After the herds had trashed out a treescape, they moved on the the next treescape, and the next, and the next. The first trashed-out treescape had time to grown a whole new crop of trees worth trashing-out to eat the leaves by the time the elephants got back to it.
Here is a you tube video of an African elephant knocking down a tree it has decided is worth the effort to knock down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ800AoqpdQ
Now imagine 20-30 million of these animals roaming over America knocking down trees as they went. And remember that some of yesterday’s mammoths were bigger than today’s elephants.

( I have read lately that some clever scientists think they can tweak the genes of today’s Indian elephant to get it covered with woolly heat-retaining hair. It wouldn’t be a mammoth. It would be a woolly elephant. But it might be an interesting animal useful for re-savannahforming large areas of non-tropical tree/shrub covered land.)

How might some of this knowledge and approaches be relevant to survival in tomorrow’s America after the last long decline?

Mayan civilization in the Yucatán was (and is in a sense) a peculiar variation on “hydraulic” civilization. The local topography and climate necessitate a complex system for storing and distributing fresh water. “Simple country living” in that same vicinity without that complex system is not on offer, at least not for as large a population as the Yucatán could support when climate and political conditions permitted such a system to function well.

No prejudice to the investigations of historians and archaeologists intended.

The MAGA Messiah’s illustrated Bible:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/4/11/2234433/-Cartoon-Tom-the-Dancing-Bug-presents-Trump-s-Illustrated-Bible

Lots of theories about the Mayan decline.
Back in the 70’s as a twenty year old I took a deep dive into the subject, reading all the studies then extant.

Then I traveled Guatemala high and low, hiking to remote villages and traveling by bus. I stayed with families and ate their food and imbibed what I could of the culture. Met village elders. Started speaking Spanish with a cachiquel accent.

Not that it matters. I believe it was drought that brought them down just as it did with the Anazasi further north, but lacking credentials and factual details I’ll concede ignorance.

I like the idea of the peasantry saying screw you to their overlords and heading into the veldt to cultivate their corn and beans and live happily ever after, but I’m skeptical. It’s usually the water.

Just as an afterthought, there was so much wrong with The Farm from its inception that I don’t know where to begin, so I’ll leave it here.

Since the wet season in the Yucatan coincides with the primary growing season, abandoning cities could have been seen as a hardship preferrable to the urban slumlife. Or maybe, the average Joetzel saw fresh new starts at the bottom within neighboring Mexica cultures as preferable. BTW, Cahokia underwent a similar rise and fall. What’s up with that?

I say we need more and better KomKom vases.
https://news.web.baylor.edu/news/story/2019/discovery-painted-hieroglyphic-vase-gives-clues-about-breakdown-ancient-maya

@ Willy

A civilization typically collapses for a variety of interconnected reasons. I read some research detailing about how the Mayan’s began using mercury based pain on all their dwellings and buildings. The conclusions were that a part of the reason the Mayan’s collapsed was that all their people were being intellectually and physically impaired by heavy metals.
The Romans used lead in their water system and poisoned themselves as well.
In a testament to how everything changes but nothing does, current society injects every child 70+ times with Aluminum and/or mercury. That’s on top of dumping all kinds of chemicals, hormones and pesticides in and on our water, food and air.

This is a true story. Back when I was a kid I used to shoot Pigeons in my Grandfather’s barn with a BB gun. The Pigeons would sit on the rafters of the barn making stationary targets for me to shoot at.
The behavior of the Pigeons was really quite bizzare. I would take aim and fire. Sometimes I would miss some times I would hit a bird in the butt or the wing. The thing that was funny if I hit the bird in the butt or the wing. That bird would not fly away. It would shake itself a bit but continue to sit there on its perch high above the barn floor. But eventually when I hit one it would simply fall to the barn floor, dead.
When I examined these birds I would find that they usually had been hit with BBs three or four times before they fell off of their perch.
At the time I figured that these birds needed 3 or 4 superficial hits with a bb gun to die.
But yesterday I learned something that gave me an ephany. The BB hits that the birds suffered in the wing or butt or breast were not relevant at all to their deaths. What was relevent was the head shots. But the head shots were not directly responsible for their deaths either. What I realize now is that the head shots just knocked the birds out. The birds lost consciousness. They then fell to the barn floor and broke their necks when they landed. Well it was a long time ago. Maybe they were injured and I finished them off with a blow to the head.
If you are wondering, no I did not clean them, to eat them My grandfather or uncle cleaned them.
The really interesting thing about these pigeons is that they were really smart compared to the creatures that sit on high perches in our societies now.

Just imagine if a group of pilots were flying their aircraft towards a target to release thier payloads and their planes were hit by a directed magnetic pulse sent out by a 40 foot seized trailer that could direct this magnetic pulse over an effective 80 kilometer range with a 10,000 foot effective altitude area. and the electric pulse would have a 200 or 250 miie range.
My imagination tells me that not only would the electronics on the planes hit by this electromaagnetic pulse have their electronics fried the pilots would lose consciousness for somewhere between 5 and 30 seconds. This causes me to wonder if any of the planes would hit the ground before the pilot woke up.
Surprise surprise.
Infotainment is from Art ( )

What is the story behind the story about the USDA funding research at a Chinese Faciiltiy?? And how did the story come to light? Did a Congressional Critter bring it to light?
I have a thought about why this story, true or not, might have been diliberately leaked.
Truth is stranger than even the most manufactured friction.

The end is in site. I doubt if anyone will see anyone else when we get therre. But who knows for sure.

Just recently this pro Palestinian Conference being held in Germany was shut down by the police. A speaker at the confernece a major pro Palestinian Greek Politiician was banned from Germany. And told that charges would be made against him if he tried to have his banned speech broadcast on the internet in Germany.
i can not with a straight face complain about these actions taken by the German Government. Becuase if I had the power to, I would throw anyone who uttered a pro NATO or pro Israeli sentiment in to a deep freezing place, without 8 pints of blood to help keep them warm or proctect them from worms.

I woulld call that the Godzilla Curtse