How E-Cigarettes and E-Joints Can Save the World

Lately, I hear a lot about e-cigarettes in the news. I’ve also noticed them popping up for sale in our local gas stations and grocery stores. Even though I’m not a cigarette smoker, anything involving both electronics and drugs, naturally arouses my interest.

I’ve only seen a couple of people using e-cigarettes, but I find them much less unpleasant to endure than regular cigarettes. I can see how e-cigarettes could do a lot to improve relations between smokers and non-smokers. E-cigarettes might even make the exiled smoker, the lone individual standing outside, under the eves, a thing of the past.

The price of e-cigarettes seems like the sticking point for most smokers. I haven’t done the math, but the device costs more than a couple of packs of smokes, and the refills for it don’t come cheap either. It already costs a lot to smoke cigarettes these days, and most of my friends who smoke, hand roll, with the cheapest tobacco they can get, if they don’t pick up cigarette butts they find on the sidewalk. There’s another problem e-cigarettes might solve; no more cigarette butts on the sidewalk, at least if they can bring the price of e-cigarettes down to a price more smokers can afford.

E-cigarettes look kind of cool too. The one I saw close up, had a blue LED that glowed bright whenever the smoker took a drag from it. I love blue LEDs.

I’ll bet you can get them with color-changing LEDs. I’m sure you could bling them out in a million different ways. You could get them made out of 24K gold or platinum. They’ll have pink ones for girls,

..and black, or camo-colored ones for guys.

They’ll even have ones that look just like a classic Marlboro for old geezers who still remember what real cigarettes looked like.

Even so, I’m not about to take them up. First, I’m too cheap. Second, there’s really no “cool” way to announce that you have a drug problem, and third, I don’t need another drug problem. Nicotine and I never saw eye to eye. I tried it back when I was a teenager. I gave it a chance, and it didn’t do anything for me. If only these e-cigs had something I liked in them…

Now I understand that that you can get e-joints. That is, an e-cigarette loaded with THC instead of nicotine. A new shop just opened up on the plaza in Arcata that specializes in just such devices. I love good old-fashioned marijuana buds, but I think these new e-joints, or “vaporizer pens” as I’ve heard them called, generically, could be a real game-changer in the marijuana industry, as we move inexorably towards legalization.

Right now, the biggest bottleneck to scaling up the whole marijuana industry, is trimming. Currently, the market demands manicured sinsemilla buds, which require a lot of manual labor. It takes about an hour to trim an ounce of buds, a really proficient trimmer might be able to trim an ounce and a quarter per hour, either way, there’s at least 12 hours of excruciatingly dull, manual labor in every pound of marijuana bud, just in trimming alone.

Several companies make automated trimming machines, but thus far, none of them produce a product that can compare to hand trimmed buds. With the high prices of black-market marijuana, every gram has to be marketable, and a poor trim job can break the deal, so trimming machines have not become very popular with growers.

Sinsemilla buds also have a very limited shelf life, and must be handled with care. Like potato chips they can become stale, or get crunched down to worthless powder. The way I see it, e-joints can solve all of these problems, and more.

Back in the early “90s in Boston, when I worked for the Mass. Cannabis Reform Coalition, I met a guy, I can’t remember his name, who owns a patent for a method of extracting pure THC from raw cannabis herb.

He described a future world in which he was a multimillionaire, and everyone “smoked” these little electronic devices that would deliver a precise dosage of pure THC, along with whatever flavor you might enjoy.

At the time, I thought “Fuck that! I don’t want some corporation getting between me and my marijuana. I want to smoke the marijuana that I grow in my own back-yard, not some soulless corporate cannabis extract.” Today, I feel differently. Today, I think that guy is a genius. Think about it.

On the production side, the difference between e-joints and sinsemilla buds is like the difference between Heinz 57 Ketchup and fresh heirloom tomatoes. E-joints offer these advantages:
1. You can make extract from the whole plant, male or female, mature or immature. Growers wouldn’t lose the THC contained in shake, trim, leaf or stem. I’ll bet they could even extract clean THC from moldy bud. All cannabis contains some THC, so probably any cannabis could be made into “fuel” for e-joints.
2. Extraction would completely bypass the need for trimming, and greatly reduce the cost of production. A single industrial extraction facility could replace an army of trimmers.
3. Subjective qualities like aroma and flavor, as well as aesthetic flaws, like spindly buds or brown leaves make no difference in an extract. Manufacturers could produce a very consistent e-joint product, as consistent as a Budweiser or a Big Mac.
4. Cannabis extract for e-joints would be easy to store and transport, vastly simplifying national distribution.

On the consumer side the advantages are obvious:
1. No joints to roll
2. No lighter to burn yourself with
3. No smoke, which means no carcinogenic combustion products
4. No smell
5. No ashes
6. No roaches
7. No gooey sticky resin clogged pipes
8. No bongwater
9. No coughing
10. No raw throat
11. Most importantly, e-joints should bring down the cost of getting high. Around here I hear a lot of talk about “boutique growers” serving “marijuana connoisseurs,” but in the open market, a lot of consumers want a product of reliable quality at a reasonable price. Marijuana consumers have been denied that for far too long, and these e-joints just might be the ticket to a mass-produced, nationally distributed, recreational cannabis product with a price based on the economy of scale.

I might still prefer to smoke my own home-grown marijuana rather than the soulless corporate substitute, but e-joints, complicated little gadgets though they are, might simplify the process of getting high for everyone.

My younger, hipper friends are all down with e-joints. They all have vaporizers already. They see e-joints as a major advance in stoner technology, the wave of the future. They say vaporizing is cleaner and healthier than smoking, and that it gets you just as stoned. I’m sure they’d all embrace e-joints, at the right price point, even here in Humboldt County.

Yes, I think these “vaporizer pens” could change the world. For one thing, it won’t be long before no one knows how to roll a cigarette anymore. Imagine it. People will have to go to The Haight in San Fransisco, which by then, (because nobody could afford the rent to live there anymore) will have been turned into a theme park for Hippie nostalgia,. It will be like Colonial Williamsburg, except that instead of having people in period costumes making tallow candles and shoeing horses, they’ll have actors wearing wigs, grannie glasses and tie-dye t-shirts, show people how they used to roll joints in the old days.

By that time everyone will have an e-cig of one form or another. They’ll have e-crack, e-meth, and e-heroin. They’ll have e-MDMA and e-LSD. They’ll have e-Prozac for mom and e-Adderall for the kids. They’ll even have drug-free e-flavor for people who don’t take drugs but want to enjoy a refreshing calorie-free vapor-snack.

Thanks to e-cigarettes the future will look like Humphrey Bogart meets Obi Wan Kenobe.

We’ll all have our own little rechargeable, chrome plated, illuminated pacifiers to fondle endlessly, and no one will have to stand outside to get their fix anymore. Doesn’t that sound like brighter e-tomorrow? Now I think I’ll just unplug my e-joint and enjoy a celebratory e-toke.

On The Money; Why Does Money Smell Like Bounce

On The Money; Economics for the 99%
(soon to be a new book)
Why Does Money Smell Like Bounce Brand Dryer Sheets

Take a whiff of any US legal tender. Go ahead, take a bill out of your wallet and hold it under your nose. Do you recognize that smell? That’s the smell of “Bounce”, the famous, often imitated, brand of anti-static-cling dryer sheets. Why, do you suppose, does every single bill, of every denomination, of US currency, smell like dryer sheets? Does money acquire that smell when it gets laundered?

Some of you are probably saying “What smell?”. Those people are all wearing clothes that smell like Bounce, in buildings that smell like Bounce, around other people who smell like Bounce. Bounce has become the olfactory “ground zero” for them, and they no longer distinguish the smell of the bills from the background stench. The truth is, a lot of you smell like money. I’m afraid it’s not a very pleasant smell, and it’s not very good for you.

When people use dryer sheets, they are coating their cloths with a thin film of artificial chemical perfumes. Just like other perfumes, a person’s sensitivity to these perfumes decreases over time to the point where they don’t even notice how potent these artificial fragrance chemicals are. None of this would be interesting if it weren’t for the fact that these fragrance chemicals are extremely toxic. They are known carcinogens. They cause liver damage and cancer in mammals.” Mike Adams

Now I have no idea who Mike Adams is, but around here, one hotly debated issue is a proposed ordinance to prohibit medical marijuana patients from growing their own medicine outdoors, if they live, like most of us do, on lots of one-half-acre or less. Apparently many neighbors of medical marijuana patients have complained about the smell of growing marijuana. I wonder how many people, who live on less than half-an-acre, blast their neighbors with toxic, carcinogenic Bounce smell from their dryer vent. Do you think we could get an ordinance prohibiting clothes-dryers on parcels of one-half-acre or less?

Bounce-smell is one of the most ubiquitous pollutants in indoor air. That smell is everywhere, and it clings to everything, but why so strongly to money? I mean I, like most people, I think, keep my money in a leather wallet. Shouldn’t money smell like leather? I could deal with that. No, instead money turns my wallet into a Bouncy-smelling toxic waste dump.

I’ve heard people who raise cattle talk about the ever present odor of manure as “the smell of money”, but to me, it seems like the more money people have, the more they smell like Bounce. The fanciest cars generally smell the most like Bounce, and people wearing the newest clothes always smell the most like Bounce, and the more they smell like Bounce, the more they look like each other.

I also find that people who smell like Bounce seem insecure, about money, about how they look, and about how they think they should behave. They tend to take their cues from others, mimicking what they see around them. I suppose it is possible that people inclined towards conformity, choose to use dryer sheets more than society’s more eccentric and free-spirited, but, personally, I think the smell of Bounce effects people’s brains, and makes them more suggestible, gullible and vulnerable to the kinds of messages contained in advertizing. I think we should consider the possibility that we are being intentionally drugged, brainwashed, and poisoned through our money, and our dryer sheets.

If you have taken a bill out of your wallet, and failed to detect the odor of Bounce, you should be worried. I mean, Mike Adam’s says the smell alone will kill you. Just the perfume will give you cancer and destroy your liver, but what about the rest of the junk in dryer sheets? Have you ever wondered what they put in those dryer sheets, that then gets all over your clothes, rubs up against your skin all day, and that you inhale in every breath you take?

Here’s what you breathe in when you smell dryer sheets, or when you no longer smell dryer sheets. According to a new book, The Brain Wash, these are the seven most commonly found chemicals in dryer sheets:

1. Alpha-Terpineol causes central nervous system disorders. Can also cause loss of muscular coordination, central nervous system depression, and headache.
2. Benzyl Alcohol causes central nervous system disorders, headaches, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, central nervous system depression, and, in severe cases, death.
3. Camphor on the US EPA’s Hazardous Waste list. Central nervous system stimulant, causes dizziness, confusion, nausea, twitching muscles, and convulsions.
4. Chloroform on the EPA’s Hazardous Waste list. Neurotoxic and carcinogenic.
5. Ethyl Acetate on the EPA’s Hazardous Waste list. Narcotic. May cause headaches and narcosis (stupor).
6. Linalool causes central nervous system disorders. Narcotic. In studies of animals, it caused ataxic gait (loss of muscular coordination), reduced spontaneous motor activity, and depression.
7. Pentane causes headaches, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, drowsiness, and loss of consciousness. Repeated inhalation of vapours causes central nervous system depression.

That sounds like a brainfull! Doesn’t it? Before you write me off as a “conspiracy nut” think about this: How would you feel if a guy slipped that into your daughters drink at a party?

If you can’t smell Bounce on your money, you probably reek of it. Like the stench of alcohol on a drunk who no longer feels the bite of the whiskey, bounce smell follows you everywhere, rotting your brain, poisoning your liver, and mutating your cells, all day every day.

How does Bounce smell effect your behavior? I don’t know of any peer-reviewed studies on the matter, but I know people who pack all of their clothes into plastic bags, and then stuff a dryer sheet into every plastic bag, before they put their clothes into a suitcase to go on vacation. Then they go someplace like Disneyland. and come home wearing a tyvek beenie with plastic mouse ears, and talking about how many hours they waited in line.

That’s retarded. Right? I mean, if I see anyone over the age of 15 wearing mouse ears, I assume they’re retarded. If functional, educated adults drive themselves to Disneyland, spend their own money to get in, and return home wearing a yarmulke with training wheels, I think that we can safely assume that something’s wrong with their brains.

Has Bounce smell effected your brain? To find out, see just how close a dollar has to get to your nose before you can smell it. If you smell Bounce as soon as you open your wallet, you still have a fighting chance in life. On the other hand, if you have that bill right up to your face, and still can’t detect the odor of Bounce, maybe you’d like to visit the lygsbtd store to purchase a t-shirt commemorating this remarkable post.

Is Cannibalism Right for You?

The Onion once ran a story about two men who killed and partially ate a coworker while the three of them were stuck in a malfunctioning elevator. The three had been trapped together, without food or water, for nearly half-an-hour. In the story, the men admitted, on reflection, that they may have resorted to cannibalism just a bit prematurely.

I know how they feel. I don’t really want to be known as the first person in the 21st Century to advocate cannibalism, and I really don’t want to lead a crusade for it. I just want for us to get to the day where eating another human being has become an accepted everyday thing.

I know that it’s bound to happen eventually. Whether I want it to happen or not, people have got to realize that the single most abundant source of protein and fat left on Earth is human flesh. I’m not enthusiastic about this fact. I don’t think it anything to celebrate. It’s simply a fact of life. Cannibalism seems inevitable to me at this point, and I think maybe the sooner we get to it, the better.

With over seven billion human beings on the planet, we’ve so outstripped the Earth’s carrying capacity that I just don’t see another way out of this mess. I suppose a global pandemic might do the trick, but it would have to be a doosie, and we shouldn’t just wait around for some hypothetical microbe to solve our problems for us. Like it or not, we humans will probably have to solve the human population problem ourselves, and cannibalism seems like an unavoidable part of the solution.

I realize that most people would rather eat practically anything else, before they would willingly sink their teeth into a “suburban pork” chop. Unfortunately, if we put off the cannibalism option until the last possible moment, we will have already wiped out all of the biodiversity necessary to support those of us who might otherwise survive this grisly phase of human history. It would be like raising a praying mantis, from an egg, in a jar.

If you start with a praying mantis egg case in a jar, soon, you will have a jar full of baby praying mantises.

The praying mantises then begin preying on each other.

Eventually, you have a jar with only one praying mantis left in it, and that praying mantis then slowly starves to death. The whole process takes about a semester, which makes it popular with science teachers.

My point is: if we wait to the last minute before resorting to cannibalism, the survivors have nothing to look forward to, except starving to death on a dead planet. Not much of a future there. You might prefer to become chopped sirloin.

The only thing worse than a world in which people hunt each other down for food, is a world where most people wish they were dead, and the rest, don’t have the appetite to eat them. No matter how bad things get, it’s important to have something to look forward to, and if we hold out too long on the cannibalism question, it might cost us the hope of a post-cannibalistic future.

On the other hand, if we get started eating each other now, while a few fish remain in the sea, before the caribou population collapses, and while some rainforest habitat remains unconverted to palm oil plantations, the few humans that survive these dark days of dietary depravity, might actually look forward to a bright future. As humans became more and more scarce, those few survivors may eventually find that deer, wild boar, and even endangered coho salmon have become more plentiful.

Having lived, for at least a few generations, on a diet high in human protein, these lucky descendents of ours might find the idea of eating these other species revolting and barbaric. However, as humans became more scarce and widely dispersed, and as they developed more successful strategies to avoid becoming someones lunch, people would, once again, however reluctantly, learn to eat these, newly replenished, wild game animals that once nourished our prehistoric ancestors, and eventually, I’m sure, they would reacquire a taste for them.

Still, despite the promise of a brighter future, the idea of a world in which cannibalism has become common, widespread, and “the new normal”, seems unthinkably ghastly, but consider the alternative:

For many years I ate a vegetarian diet. I had many reasons for becoming a vegetarian, but high among them was this argument: The world can support many more vegetarians than it can meat eaters. Basically, the argument goes that it is much more efficient for a person to eat grain directly, rather than feeding it to livestock first, and then eating the livestock.

I bought that argument. I wanted to shrink my carbon footprint and live a lower impact lifestyle, and I thought that eating a vegetarian diet would help me do that.

Today, I’m not so sure. I still want to minimize my carbon footprint, but I’m not so sure that vegetarianism is the answer.

For one, it now seems to me that the biggest problem we face is overpopulation. There are twice as many human beings on the planet now than there were when I was10 years old. 35% of the Earth’s total landmass has been converted to agriculture. The oceans have been mostly fished out and polluted. Even on a vegetarian diet, the Earth’s human population is not sustainable, and agriculture, far more than hunting or other forces, is wiping out wild animal populations by destroying and fragmenting their habitat.

As a result of converting ever larger tracts of land from habitat to agriculture, we get a world populated by more and more humans, and fewer and fewer of every other species.

Not far down the line in the vegetarian scenario we end up with 30 billion humans on planet Earth, and every square inch of the planet not occupied by human habitation, devoted to agriculture. That just leaves everyone one crop failure away from that whole cannibalistic praying mantis scenario. So, when it comes to eating meat, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, it seems to me.

My partner Amy finally got me off of the vegetarian bandwagon.

She tried to join me in my vegetarian lifestyle, but by about the 600th time we had hummus and corn chips for dinner, she decided she couldn’t take it anymore.

We started adding some animal protein to our diet. Amy took more of an interest in food and nutrition, and we started eating better. Every time she read a new book, I’d find some strange new food on my dinner plate, but most of it turned out OK.

Last year, for her birthday, Amy asked me if I would go on the Paleo diet with her. That was all she wanted for her birthday, and she agreed to do all of the cooking. I thought, “I can afford that!” So, ever since last May, we’ve eaten Paleo. It took a little getting used to, but now, I really like it.

Paleo meals are amazingly delicious, satisfying and easy to make, or so it seems, since I never make them, but Amy makes it look easy. We have meat with almost every meal, and meals are simple. Usually, meals have two ingredients, some kind of meat, and some kind of vegetable, usually cooked up in a skillet or dutch oven, maybe with some garlic or ginger. Chicken thighs and carrots, pork chops and beets, ground beef and cabbage, are a few examples of meals I’ve enjoyed over the past year.

I know it doesn’t sound like much, but cooked up together, meat and vegetables taste great together. I’ve never cared much for steamed vegetables, but cooked up in a little bit of pork fat or chicken schmaltz, vegetables taste great. The diet seems to agree with me too. I’ve lost a little weight, without even trying, and my HDL/LDL cholesterol ratio has improved since I started on the so-called “Caveman Diet”.

So, I feel better, my girlfriend is happy, and we both enjoy eating this way. The Paleo diet now feels very natural, like this is how humans were meant to eat. Eating Paleo for a year has convinced me that cavemen lived pretty well.

Then I think about all of those poor battery chickens, and the factory farms, and the suffering and the cruelty that goes along with them. It’s horrible, I know. I feel awful about it.

I’d prefer to hunt wild animals, but precious few of them remain, and those that persist need all the help they can get. I don’t want to hunt anything to extinction.

Really, I can only think of one animal that has become so common that killing them wholesale would actually make the world a better place. Besides their abundance, human beings rate pretty low on the “cute scale”, which would make them even easier to kill.

Besides that, even though I’ve never hunted wild game before, I know human beings and their behavior patterns well enough that I think I could hunt them effectively.

A lot of the humans I see these days look tender and well-marbled. I bet they would taste delicious, and I wouldn’t feel nearly as guilty about eating them, as I do about those poor chickens who never even had a chance to turn around, or see the light of day. Not only that, eating human beings would be a strong positive step in the right direction towards addressing the global overpopulation problem. The cannibalism question seems like a no-brainer to me.

No, I don’t want to be the first, but I do look forward to the day, soon, hopefully, very soon, when we can move beyond our cultural revulsion at the idea of cannibalism, and that cannibalism will become just another accepted dietary choice, and culinary phenomena. The time has come to let go of our outdated ideas about food. We should accept the fact that cannibalism is good for your health, and good for the planet, and the sooner we learn to accept it, the better the future will be for all of us.

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Agribusiness, Genetic Engineering, and Where to Draw the Line

When Eric Kirk introduced his most recent talk show on KMUD, he said his goal was to take listeners “outside of their comfort zone”. I have to say that he succeeded in that. Listening to his show made me uncomfortable in the same way that watching a dull-witted kid beat a dog with a stick would make you uncomfortable.

Even if you don’t like dogs or kids, a scene like that makes you squirm. You wish you had never seen it. The whole pathetic situation makes you sick to your stomach, but you know that you have to say something.

In this little metaphor, The show’s host, Eric Kirk, is the kid, our local liberals are the dog, and appearing as the stick, we had Eric’s guest, Saul of Hearts, a young Portland hipster, self-described liberal, and cultivator of a ponytail. I don’t know why these count as credentials in Eric’s book, but apparently they do.

The crux of this guy’s biscuit, was that genetic engineering really doesn’t seem that scary to him, at least compared to some of the diabolical things that scientists have been doing to plants for decades, such as using ionizing radiation and chemicals to induce genetic mutations.

The show’s engineer, and local liberal, Michael McKaskil immediately snatched that stick and broke it to pieces, pointing out that genetic engineering was, in fact, qualitatively different than induced mutation. Michael pointed out that because genetic engineering involves adding DNA from completely different organisms, it alters the genetics of plants in ways that mutation never would or could, and of course Michael was right about that.

Eric’s guest then turned the argument into one of “where do you draw the line?”, pointing out that between mono-cropping, pesticide use, aquifer depletion, chemical fertilizers, habitat loss, global climate change etc, etc, we have bigger problems with agribusiness than genetic engineering. Of course, Eric’s guest is not an agriculture reform activist. In fact, he only mentioned about half of the above, no where near exhaustive, list of ag related crises. Eric’s guest didn’t call for us to get up off of our sofas to do anything about any of these issues. Instead, he simply suggested that liberals are making too big of a fuss about GMOs.

No, he’s not an activist. He’s a liberal blogger, much more concerned with his own career as a writer, than anything else. In other words, he’s a conservative, with a ponytail. Not that I have any great love of liberals, or political activists for that matter, quite the opposite.

I feel the same way about our political system as I do about professional wrestling. It’s obviously fake. It’s embarrassingly stupid to watch, and you know that as long as it remains popular, humanity’s future looks bleak. Still, unless you’ve worked on a citizen’s campaign, you have no idea how much time, money and effort it takes to bring an issue like GMOs to the attention of the general public, not to mention the difficulty of explaining a high-tech problem to a poorly educated populace. That’s part of the reason that democracy has failed.

One caller to the show accused him of being an industry shill. I don’t think so. I just think him an opportunist. Right now, a lot of unpaid, volunteer activists are putting in a lot of time and energy to raise the issue of genetic engineering in the eye of the general public. By taking advantage of the fact that most people don’t know very much about big agribusiness, Saul of Hearts found an angle that allowed him to capitalize on the hard work of real activists.

So much for the stick, but I must agree with him on one point, and that is: Agriculture is fucked! Agriculture is destroying the world. Even without GMOs, the single biggest reason that this planet is going down the shitter is agriculture. Agriculture is the leading cause of habitat destruction, both world wide, and locally. Agricultural runoff has created “dead zones” in parts of the ocean that once teemed with life, and agriculture fuels the human population explosion. Agriculture doesn’t make life better; agriculture merely insures that there will be more of us to share the misery of an increasingly impoverished world.

Agriculture is bad news! It now covers a third of the Earth’s total land mass, and it continues to grow! Agriculture was undoubtedly the biggest mistake in the history of humanity, and people have known this since the beginning. If you were wondering where to “draw the line”, I think the authors of The Old Testament got it right.

Agriculture is the “original sin” in the biblical story of Adam and Eve. If you recall the story, God provided everything for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, until they ate the “forbidden fruit”. After that, Adam had to spend the rest of his days toiling in the fields, while Eve had to repeatedly endure the pain of childbirth. In other words, whatever that “forbidden fruit” was, Adam and Eve’s punishment was to live like farmers.

The writers of the Old Testament make it abundantly clear that God does not like farmers. In the story of Cain and Abel, God shows favoritism towards Abel, the herder, over his brother, Cain, the farmer. This so enraged Cain, that he killed Abel, and watered his fields with his brother’s blood.

Now, I’m not a Christian, or a Jew, and I don’t “believe in” the Bible, but this is what the witnesses of “the agricultural revolution” thought of the world’s first farmers. Thousands of years before the first written language, those ancient people would have known nothing about DNA, germ theory or the scientific method, but they weren’t stupid. Thousands of years ago they recognized farmers as vicious murderous people who were damned by God.

They watched those vicious, murderous, damned farmers turn the “Fertile Crescent” into a desert. They watched those damned farmers spread all over the world, systematically wiping out or assimilating every other culture they encountered, claiming new territories, replacing natural habitat with farmland and watering their crops with the blood of their brothers.

Those damned farmers gave us overpopulation, genocide, slavery, and the environmental crisis. They replaced our natural love of nature, and all living things, with “the work ethic”, and lives of endless toil. Farmers have transformed the “Garden of Eden” into hell on Earth, and the destruction continues to this day. Farming destroys the natural environment, and replaces it with an abundance of dull-witted, mean-spirited people who don’t know any other way to live.

Farming is also addictive. The more habitat you destroy, the fewer game animals you leave. The more crops you grow, the faster your population grows. The more we do it, the harder it is to stop. Unless we stop, farming will kill us all. On the other hand if we stopped all agriculture right now, that would kill almost all of us. These are not biblical prophesies. That’s what science tells us, should we ever decide to listen.

The Bible tells us that God punished those damned farmers by sending plagues. Today, we call them pests, and we understand why they continue to plague us. In nature, there is no such thing as a pest species, but when you disturb the natural environment, plow it under, and plant crops, you disrupt the natural balance of life. As a result, populations of some species, like locusts, frogs, vermin and disease causing microbes, explode, while others, like wild game animals, become extinct. What those ancient people saw as “God’s punishment”, we now see as the natural consequences of converting habitat to farmland.

These “plagues” continue to vex farmers to this day, but we still don’t get the message. We still think we can outsmart “God”. We believe the world belongs to us, to remake in our own image. We think we rule the world, and we’re hellbent to prove it. That’s why scientists created GMOs in the first place, but even they know that today’s GMOs won’t be able to suppress God’s wrath for more than a few years, because organisms adapt. Bugs learn to tolerate BT, and weeds learn to drink Round-Up.

We don’t trust science when it tells us that sacrificing the natural environment for farmland causes insoluble problems. Instead, science has become the false religion of the damned, and genetic engineering, its latest assault on nature. Genetic engineering, like the high-tech organochlorine pesticides of the plastic age that proceeded it, is bound to fail spectacularly, and profitably. So, yes, agriculture is a goddamned sin, and no, genetic engineering is not going to fix it, or make the world a better place to live.

If you’re going to draw a line, you might as well draw it at the place where we made the wrong turn in the first place. It can be very helpful to know where we first went wrong. There’s an old Turkish saying: “If you realize that you’ve made a wrong turn, no matter how far you’ve traveled down the wrong road, turn back.” I realize that this whole discussion is a long way from the current political debate, but unless you look at the big picture, you’ll never make sense of the puzzle.

“Back to the Land” Mythbusting Pt. 2

Last week’s post inspired more comments than usual, both here and on facebook. Since my audience gave me so much to think about, I thought I might double-dip on the subject of the mythology of the “back to the landers” I realize that my perspective seems blasphemous, and many of you have never heard such heresy before. No surprise there.

Boomers, no matter what they do, have always been infatuated with themselves, The local merchants, who overcharge them for everything, just tell them what they want to hear. The non-profits around here are loath to criticize them, dependent as they are on dope yuppies’ donations, likewise with the sharecroppers, trimmers, and working stiffs. These people are so polite that they won’t even ask anyone around here what they do for a living.

Even the homeless people around here kiss dope yuppie ass. I can’t believe how many homeless or marginally housed people volunteer lots of hours and devote a tremendous amount of energy to help local organizations that mostly serve dope yuppies. That just seems ass backwards to me. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that the well-to-do should volunteer to help the less fortunate, rather than vice versa.

So, we’ve got dope yuppies, who celebrate themselves shamelessly and relentlessly. Around them, a small army of sycophantic merchants, politicians, administrators, working people and hangers-on compete with each other for the crumbs that fall from the dope yuppies’ table.

Which leaves, basically, me, to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the so-called “back to the landers”

One reader of last week’s post lamented that I hadn’t actually met any “real” back to the landers. I’ve discovered that every dope yuppie in SoHum believes themselves to be a “real” back to the lander, and that they all think of their neighbors as greed-heads, fucked-up drug addicts or both.

Even the best of the back to the landers I know, the ones without the crazy collections of vehicles decaying in the yard, and piles of ridiculous useless stuff everywhere. The ones who have a little bit of imagination, build their own home, and do the whole harmonious, permaculture, native plant landscaping, composting toilet, solar electric, blah blah blah, even those people, don’t know when to stop.

As they get better at carpentry, their funky little cabins become elegant chalets, surrounded by effusive gardens. Peacocks roam the grounds, …along with servants. Sure, it’s lovely, but the scale is all wrong. Boomers do everything, too big.

They grew up driving big-block V8 muscle cars. They gave us gigantic concerts, like Woodstock and Altamont, where the musicians look like ants, and sound like shit, and the audience amuse themselves with nudity and drug abuse. They couldn’t just drink a “cup ‘o Joe” like their parents, they have to have a double-shot, decaf, low-fat, triple-foam machiato with squirt of hazelnut syrup, and, of course, they don’t make that themselves. Hell no! It’s enough trouble just to order it. They expect us to make it for them, so they can consume our lives, as well as our future. Even cheap Mexican marijuana wasn’t good enough for them. They had to turn it into an expensive luxury product, so that poor kids would turn to cocaine and meth for a high they could afford.

A reader suggested that the reason Boomers are so materialistic is that they were raised by depression-era parents, who never let them throw anything away. To make up for it, they gave us a world where everything is disposable, eating utensils, pens, lighters, flashlights, clothes, cameras, phones, furniture, stereos, TVs, computers. Nothing lasts, and nobody knows how to fix anything anymore. Kids today all know that the latest gadget won’t last half as long as a can of Spam, and that nothing in this world matters, except money. That’s the lesson the Boomers teach. It shouldn’t surprise them if the younger generation takes that lesson to heart.

One reader commented, “I don’t recall taking a vow of poverty”. Far from it! Boomers spend like there’s no tomorrow, and thanks to them, there isn’t. Now nobody has to take a vow of poverty. We have poverty thrust upon us. The oceans have been fished-out and thoroughly polluted. The oil’s gone. There’s still plenty of natural gas, but they’re fracking the fuck out of our freshwater aquifers to get it. The only resource left to exploit is the lives of the descendants of the Baby Boomers, and the suck is on!

We look forward to lives of wage slavery lived for the benefit of bloodsucking landlords, and anyone who refuses to to participate in their own oppression can expect to be punished. They can expect to be kicked in the ribs by cops whenever they try to get some sleep, moved along by merchants whenever they sit down, denied access to bathrooms, water, food or shelter, and then made into scapegoats to be reviled and punished further for their poverty, punished until they die in the streets. I hear entirely too many dope yuppies and their suck-ups complaining about “the transient problem”. I see it differently. I think we have a “greedy boomer” problem.

Another reader told of some back to the landers who were so poor that they could only afford the cheapest piece of land, but they managed to make it work for decades while keeping their “ethics intact”. Sure, …but they didn’t mind breaking a silly little law. They didn’t mind profiting from a really ugly policy. They didn’t mind converting forest to farmland. They didn’t mind moving on to land stolen through violence and genocide, and paying off the violent thugs who run this whole “private property” racket, namely, the county government. In the same sense, I could say that I survived the economic downturn with my investment portfolio “intact”.

I’m not saying that the back to the landers are bad people. People do the best that they can for themselves. I’m saying that poor people don’t have the option of buying any land any more.

Things are not the same.

When you leave the world, worse off than you found it, you can’t call yourself a “success”. Yes, things were already going downhill when the Boomers took over, but they didn’t have to press the accelerator so hard, and now that they’ve wrecked the car, no one wants to hear about how well they think they handled that next-to-last turn.

We all inherited a diabolical economic system, a looming environmental crisis, and a culture in collapse. The Baby Boomers were the first generation to realize that, and to know that it was true. They knew the truth about Viet Nam. They read Silent Spring. They saw the Earth from space. They knew. …and collectively, they said, “Let’s do it up!”