The Original Street Artist
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Detroit Publishing Co. In The Ghetto 1909 “The ghetto, Lower East Side, New York” In the 1990s, speleologists discovered an etching made by a s
[See the full post at: The Original Street Artist]I watch my five young adult children struggling to build their lives and I fear the future. The oldest a professional, married to a professional spend their entire generous saleries for a mortgage on an upside down property and for student loans. My second daughter works to finish a degree to get her teaching certificate to support to children whose father has been only able to find part time construction work for the past four years. My oldest son is in the military and barely makes enough for he and his wife to pay for a car and rent. My next to youngest refuses to run up student loan debts. He works full time, actually more than full time, and has miserable health coverage and does not earn enough to rent even a studio flat in our overpriced city. My youngest, who had sigificant learning disabilities is two years out of high school, works, attends junior college and lives with us saving his money. There are no “plans, no attainable goals that he can see on the horizon.
Sorry. operator error. Hit submit with out getting to the point.
I see their difficulties and I wonder how this generation is going to build lives for themselves. At least our kids have our emotional and financial support but still have great difficulty “getting ahead” or for that matter “breaking even.” I worry about the millions of young people who don’t even have that support from family and friends.
Ash,
“Thirty-thousand years ago, we are obviously talking about a very simple society that could not afford to use its scarce time, labor and resources to develop more complex arrangements and specialized functions. There were no merchants, professional guides/transporters, accountants, bankers, lawyers, military officers, politicians or civil servants.”
No bankers, lawyers, military officers, politicians or civil servants? T.O.S.A and his/her fellows were in some ways better off than us. I do however take issue with the notion that time and resources were scarce for these folks. While the lives of hunter-gatherers were precarious and lacking in modern “creature comforts”, in many parts of the world life for these folks involved an easier work schedule than your average suburbanite professional (especially ones with kids). Once again, I don’t mean to suggest that life was a cakewalk for these folks, but in many parts of the world the abundance of flora and fauna made survival a part-time project- leaving more time than we might imagine for social, recreational and cultural pursuits.
Aside from that nitpicking, I am largely in agreement with everything else. Another good one!
Ash,
Without disputing your main point, you’re seriously misrepresenting our distant ancestors. (Indo-European. I expect we’re kin at a nearer time than that.)
The dawn to dusk work thing is an artifact of agriculture. Hunter-gatherers had a lot more free time. The pravda is that the few remaining hunter gatherers, mostly on marginal land, work about 25 hours/week.
Also that kind of part time specialization was not limited to TOSA. There was someone who taught the kids who were better trackers than their own dad. There was someone who made a spearpoint faster and better than anyone else. Someone who knew which mushrooms were delicious, which ones made reindeer fly, and which ones killed you.
Ash, I totally agree with the last line of your post, young people, but not just, need more beauty in their lives.
JT,
My wife and I are in our 30’s, college graduates, with two kids. We live a work/home lifestyle that is rather un-traditional, in that my wife and I both only work part-time. We are doing the lifeboat homestead thing, and live a very no-frills life, and yet we are still ridiculously busy. We have noticed lately that all our friends, literally everyone we know is SO BUSY just trying to make ends meet while taking care of their children and/or other family members- nobody has time to socialize. I can’t help but think that the grueling demands placed on adults today, especially parents are increasing, leaving little time, energy and resources for actually living. I can only imagine that so long as the economy continues to function in a way that resembles Business As Usual, these people will continue to run on that working class hamster wheel until they collapse. However, when the economy does collapse, these people are going to be completely cast adrift.
What an article. Magical, entrancing, sheer poetry. Cannot stop looking at that cave art and wondering and conjecturing about the artist and so many other related topics. Ashvin’s deep concern for the downtrodden came through loud and clear, and lent a poetic feel to the work.
Don’t forget yourself Ash. The Bloggers also are painting their pictures and exposing the hypocrisy of a cultural meme gone so horribly wrong now.
The battle for the hearts and minds of the Sheeple through the medium of ideas has only just begun. To date, mostly they are still inundated by the art and slogans of Madison Avenue, but that stuff is losing its meaning as more and more people fall off the economic cliff.
What will be left in the end is the world of ideas. It reamins unlikely that the quintillions of bits of information currently residing on the Google Servers will have quite the staying power of TOSA. While it is up and running though, what you write can make it out into the zeitgeist, and hopefully be retained in the collective consciousnous of those who make it through the dark days ahead.
See you on the Other Side.
What’s most interesting about our cave-artist is that 30,000 years ago there were rhinoceros in France. This was during a glacial period in Europe at the time.
There are also images of lions, hyenas and bears along with bones.
To see lions or hyenas in Europe now one would have to go to the zoo.
Lovely article Ash. Impressive the way you wove your ideas in and out of the narrative. I do agree with a couple of comments about the working hours of hunter-gatherers though. Case in point the Pygmies in equatorial (?) Africa live a hunter-gatherer life but have plenty of time for play and social activities. They are reportedly a pretty happy bunch.
I’m reminded of how in the 60s the Popular Mechanics view of our future is that technology would have taken over the drudgery and we’d be spending half or more of our time in leisure activities. I even remember a magazine article worrying that people might not be imaginative enough to fill all their leisure time. No worries there, mate!
Yeah, I feel a bit too busy busy busy myself, workin’ on the doomstead thing with the hot breath of the dragon of potential bank runs and all the rest breathing heavy on my back. Today I burnt half an internal wall down in my strawbale house while trying to smoke out some rats that got in there to stay warm (we are in a forest), then I had to rebuild it, and look after my 2 year old and try and earn a few bucks etc etc.
It’s not like people never used to work but I seem to remember all the adults having 4 weeks camping holidays in the 70’s and 35 hour weeks and barbecues and beer. Not a lot of that happening for my crew nowadays.
My wife and I recently decided we are just gonna break the law to try and get ahead. Not like Bonnie and Clyde, but live in our house without power or water or anything connected as if we are camping (gas bottles and tank water etc) so we don’t have to pay rent on another house. Getting our certificate of occupancy means getting more into debt so we’ll keep ours low and rough it till we make it our can’t take it.
What else are you gunna do but dig in the heels and try and make it.I certainly didn’t mean to imply that I agreed with the simplistic Hobbesian notion that their lives were “nasty, brutish and short”. Actually, I was aiming for the opposite in some ways. OTOH, I wouldn’t necessarily compare modern tribes, who constantly face the threat of environmental destruction and systematic genocide, to those roaming around 30,000 years ago.
It’s also hard to make a one-for-one comparison between us and them in terms of “leisure time”. There are disputes over what the average life expectancy was back then, but most agree that it was significantly lower than the average person in the developed world now. And can we really know what level of awareness and effort was required of them even when they were not strictly performing activities that were required to make it through the day/week?
One thing is for sure – many people will have to find ways of adapting to and being satisfied with much more simplified societies, and “primitive” cultures do have a big leg up in that sense.
Those no-good punks 30,000 years ago. Fist it was the cave paintings, then the run-by shootings with an atlatl.
The mastodons didn’t stand a chance.
There is a certain amount of hubris involved when you try to compare the level of “awareness” of “primitive” people with the current version of Homo Industrialis. Just the term primitive by itself makes a comparison indicating that we know more than they did and thus are more aware of more things.
We can’t know much more about what people 30,000 years ago thought about or spoke about other than looking at a few bits of remaining artworks. We can however know quite a bit more about people who lived 5000 years ago, since their stories got passed on through oral tradition and eventually got written down. What this does tell us is that for as long as we have some record of it, people have concerned themselves with understanding their lives and developing belief structures to explain them. Are these more or less correct than our current meme of “scientific” explanation of the world through physics, chemistry and biology? From our own reference point you would say we understand the world better, but the beief structures certainly have their own complexities to them so they took a lot of thinking to create as well.
Far as what the typical lifespan was, again we make the tacit assumption that it is an “improvement” to have people living longer than they used to. However, much more important than that is the quality of life you have while you do walk the earth. Is it better to live to 90 as a slave in chains, or die at 40 a Free Man who has always lived his life in Freedom?
All the “advances” we have made, all the “improvements” we have made all carried with them Blowback. One thing we do know is that for some 60,000 years or so before the development of agriculture, the few people who walked the earth didn’t do so much damage that it imperilled their own survival. They probably were responsible for the extinction of other mega fauna, the disappearance of Mammoths on the NA continent roughly coincides with the arrival of Homo Sapiens to these shore, but overall they did not so disrupt the ecosystem that they could not continue to survive for 1000s of years after that.
Since the invention of Agriculture and then Industrialization since, we have been involved in accelerating depletion of the resources we need to live, faster than they can be replenished by natural processes. In some places by the magic of modern medicine a few people live longer now, but the planet we live on is dieing. Species extinction is proceeding along at an astonishing rate. What does this say about our “awareness”? Is it really better to sit in the rec room of your McMansion watching the flickering lights of your Plasma TV than it is to tell stories around the flickering light of a campfire? Does having high resolution pictures of the Stars taken from the Hubble Telescope tell you that much more about the Universe than you can deduce lying on your back on a moonless night watching the constellations move across the night sky?
In any event, the Hubble Telescope will come crashing down from Orbit and the Plasma TVs will flicker no more here in due time. One can only hope here that the flickering light of Human Sentience will not also be extiguished in the misguided attempts at “improving” our lives, living into decrepitude in Nursing Homes across the land. We are at a crossroads now, and we either shrink ourselves back into some form of harmony with the world we live on, or we will go the way of the Dinosaur here, and take with us on the way to the Great Beyond many other species living on the planet as well, in the 6th Mass Extinction.
ashvin post=904 wrote: I certainly didn’t mean to imply that I agreed with the simplistic Hobbesian notion that their lives were “nasty, brutish and short”. Actually, I was aiming for the opposite in some ways. OTOH, I wouldn’t necessarily compare modern tribes, who constantly face the threat of environmental destruction and systematic genocide, to those roaming around 30,000 years ago.
It’s also hard to make a one-for-one comparison between us and them in terms of “leisure time”. There are disputes over what the average life expectancy was back then, but most agree that it was significantly lower than the average person in the developed world now. And can we really know what level of awareness and effort was required of them even when they were not strictly performing activities that were required to make it through the day/week?
One thing is for sure – many people will have to find ways of adapting to and being satisfied with much more simplified societies, and “primitive” cultures do have a big leg up in that sense.
yeah, HG people had to sleep with one eye open — :blink: (:lol:) — but really because they were so understimulated. not only must we lower that lid now we fall asleep to television but we now require eye masks and ear plugs. and we crash our carz in the morning before the ambien wears off. and half of us live longer on less than $2/day.
good idea for a piece, ash. must admit it would’ve been nice to see those paintings in 3D at the movies.
@Reverse Engineer – If my family and friends are any indication, no one is going to voluntarily shrink any manner of their lifestyles. For them, it’s all about spending more, and buying more stuff using credit cards. Even spouse, who is 65 and sees that this economy cannot be sustained, does nothing to shrink his lifestyle. Just the opposite, he’s going to enjoy himself racing gokarts and eating fast-food. Besides, he tells me, there is nothing to worry about, we’re not going to implode during his lifetime.
bluebird post=914 wrote: @Reverse Engineer – If my family and friends are any indication, no one is going to voluntarily shrink any manner of their lifestyles. For them, it’s all about spending more, and buying more stuff using credit cards. Even spouse, who is 65 and sees that this economy cannot be sustained, does nothing to shrink his lifestyle. Just the opposite, he’s going to enjoy himself racing gokarts and eating fast-food. Besides, he tells me, there is nothing to worry about, we’re not going to implode during his lifetime.
Voluntary shrinkage on the part of current “Haves” in the society does seem unlikely to occur on a statistically significant basis. The number of “Haves” in the society is however shrinking rapidly here, so they automatically begin to conserve once they no longer can afford to buy gas for the SUV.
It will be interesting to see how the Pensioners and SS recipients react as their pensions and SS are cut, and their personal Portfolios dissappear into MF Global style Black Holes.
Is Hubby right that it won’t happen in his lifetime? Perhaps, but I sure wouldn’t count on it. Its sure going down mighty quick for the Greeks.
It can’t happen here though, right? Amerikan Exceptionalism. Rubbish of course. Lotta people going to get a very abrupt wake up call in the not to distant future methinks.
Bluebird,
I can relate – my spouse knows things are “messed up” but has no interest in preparing for what will come. It can be frustrating.
Reverse Engineer said “It will be interesting to see how the Pensioners and SS recipients react as their pensions and SS are cut”
Oh, hubby does realize his pension cannot continue and will be cut. What will he do? He says “I won’t be able to spend like I used to”
So I ask him, how will we pay the bills? Hubby says “Social Security will pay the bills”
And everyone I know, is just like him. They pay no attention to Greece’s financial problems because Greece is ‘over there’. My family and friends believe that in America we have rules and laws and the government always does whatever is in our best interests They truly believe there is nothing to worry about.
@JoeP – Yes, it is very frustrating, but we do what we can preparing. I figure with what we are learning, we can help others when the Ponzi implodes.
Reverse Engineer post=912 wrote: We are at a crossroads now, and we either shrink ourselves back into some form of harmony with the world we live on, or we will go the way of the Dinosaur here, and take with us on the way to the Great Beyond many other species living on the planet as well, in the 6th Mass Extinction.
Or perhaps we extinct ourselves, voluntarily and with dignity.
“May we live long and die out,” says The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. http://www.vhemt.org
Tonite I made the monumentally wrong decision of explaining my new thoughts to my spouse on what may have happened on 9/11 and what side of the fence I was on. My new thoughts were not received very well.
@JoeP – I understand. There are some topics that are best left un-discussed.
chesnok post=921 wrote: [quote=Reverse Engineer post=912]We are at a crossroads now, and we either shrink ourselves back into some form of harmony with the world we live on, or we will go the way of the Dinosaur here, and take with us on the way to the Great Beyond many other species living on the planet as well, in the 6th Mass Extinction.
Or perhaps we extinct ourselves, voluntarily and with dignity.
“May we live long and die out,” says The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. http://www.vhemt.org
There’s a novel perspective I hadn’t considered before 🙂The problem I have with this is that for all the rotten no-good stuff Homo Sapiens has done here, I still think Human Beings are of value with the gift we have of Sentience. I’d rather not see ALL the people wiped off the face of the earth, but rather just shrink down to a population size that can be in balance with all the rest of them out there.
Top of the Food Chain orgnaisms don’t necessarily have to eat themselves into oblivion, Sharks don’t kill off ALL the little Fishies they eat. Predator numbers rise and fall along with the Prey in most ecosystems until they get disturbed in a critical fashion.
So, I am not in favor of auto-extinction. A mssive population reduction yes, extinction no. The main issue here is the manner in which such a Die off occurs. Ideally it would come fairly and naturally with decreasing Birth rates and increasing Death rates, spread over a century or two, but this seems unlikely. Next best thing on a Fast Crash level would be a disease Vector with high infection rates and high mortality rates, incurable by any Modern medicine. If its curable, only the Illuminati would get the Vaccine of course. The disease should strike all populations equally, through all economic classes.
In any event, the choice will be made here in the end by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine, Pestilence, War and Death will take down the population as they always have. In this iteration of the cycle though, it seems unlikely that Biblical Numbers of 25% will do the trick. Looks more like it will take 99.9999%.
The number 1 problem society faces is that so few people understand the how the systems that exert ultimate control over their lives actually operate. For example, almost nobody understands that our monetary system is literally weaponized by the oligarchs in order to systematically and covertly asset strip the citizens of society.
NO.
IDEA.
Saying one wants change when one doesn’t know exactly what change is foundational to making society more fair for all people is rather pointless. It seems to me our number one goal out to be to identify the #1 issue that faces society today – the Debt Dollar Tyranny Federal Reserve Crime Syndicate.
Debt money has to go – it is a fraud.
The Fed has broken Section 2A of the Federal Reserve Act for 25 years running…
…and this is about when the eyes glaze over and nothing gets accomplished.
Debt Dollar Tyranny was **engineered** to bankrupt its host nation and hand its wealth over to the oligarchs who established Debt Dollar Tyranny.
The Fed’s criminal bubble / bust operation accelerated this national bankruptcy process.
Until we deal with the people who installed these criminal systems and run these criminal operations, change WILL NOT be forthcoming in any meaningful way.
I wish it was different, but I deal with reality.
TheTrivium4TW post=925 wrote: The number 1 problem society faces is that so few people understand the how the systems that exert ultimate control over their lives actually operate. For example, almost nobody understands that our monetary system is literally weaponized by the oligarchs in order to systematically and covertly asset strip the citizens of society.
NO.
IDEA.
Saying one wants change when one doesn’t know exactly what change is foundational to making society more fair for all people is rather pointless. It seems to me our number one goal out to be to identify the #1 issue that faces society today – the Debt Dollar Tyranny Federal Reserve Crime Syndicate.
Debt money has to go – it is a fraud.
The Central Banking Syndicate has been around a good deal longer than Da Federal Reserve, and just getting rid of Da Fed won’t kill the Beast. The problem of course is that the Cancer has so thoroughly metasticized here its tough to kill the cancer without killing the host also.
JoeP post=922 wrote: @bluebird,
Tonite I made the monumentally wrong decision of explaining my new thoughts to my spouse on what may have happened on 9/11 and what side of the fence I was on. My new thoughts were not received very well.
that made me laugh. good for you, joe. had to be done. i believe it’s best to be honest about important stuff. silence is a virtue, of fools.
maybe it’ll help if she realizes that yours is not a marginal view.
now you’re official you have the right to play guns and butter podcasts in the kitchen while you’re doing the dishes.
hey used (TheTriv), finally got around to listening to some Gnostic Media podcasts. great stuff. the gene odening and john taylor gatto interviews on the importance of classical education as opposed to the Hall Of Mirrors that is our education system were fascinating 🙂
Reverse Engineer post=927 wrote:
The Central Banking Syndicate has been around a good deal longer than Da Federal Reserve, and just getting rid of Da Fed won’t kill the Beast. The problem of course is that the Cancer has so thoroughly metasticized here its tough to kill the cancer without killing the host also.
RE, agreed – it is a system that needs to be exercised out of society. It does go beyond the Federal Reserve System, but NOTHING of substance will happen until you get rid of the *system* (not the name of the system to be replaced by the same systems under a different name). The poison that needs to be removed include:
1. Private cartel control of money and credit within a nation.
2. Money defined as debt – Debt Dollar Tyranny and, if you think about it a bit, you will conclude this system is merely a de-personalized form of debt-slavery where the slaves don’t know their masters. Think about it.
3. Endless usury and ultimate national bankruptcy.
4. 25 years of criminal bubble blowing operations that go unpunished.
5. Endless looting by the those favored in the eyes of those who control the Federal Reserve System
6. Government control via the principle that the borrower (government) is SERVANT to the lender (the private Federal Reserve Cartel).It isn’t about ending an institution, it is about ending systems and processes that are methodically and systematically destroying our nation and putting it under the heel of the criminals running the Federal Reserve System (and ultimately the BIS).
Perhaps William Jennings Bryan said it most eloquently…
“We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. We believe it. We believe it is a part of sovereignty….
“Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson rather than with them, and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business.
“When we have restored the money of the Constitution, all other necessary reforms will be possible, and that until that is done there is no reform that can be accomplished.”
It does not logically follow that because the Federal Reserve System isn’t the only problem that it shouldn’t be the first item on the list to address.
We need to address the ice berg situation we just hit instead of worry about how the chairs on the look on the deck.
As for the history of the “Money Power” in the United States (and some previous history), Bill Still’s The Secret of Oz provides a pretty good introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swkq2E8mswI
If you are a glutton for punishment, The Money Masters is the 3.5 hour version that is free on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXt1cayx0hs
BTW, Bill Still is running for President…
He promotes debt free money with a logical cap system to keep inflation in check and ending the looting and starting the prosecuting.
ben post=931 wrote: hey used (TheTriv), finally got around to listening to some Gnostic Media podcasts. great stuff. the gene odening and john taylor gatto interviews on the importance of classical education as opposed to the Hall Of Mirrors that is our education system were fascinating 🙂
Hi ben,
I’m glad you liked it. A system to critically think and to challenge TPTB is great stuff – which is those in power don’t want us to understand it.
Spread the word.
TheTrivium4TW post=940 wrote: [quote=Reverse Engineer post=927]
The Central Banking Syndicate has been around a good deal longer than Da Federal Reserve, and just getting rid of Da Fed won’t kill the Beast. The problem of course is that the Cancer has so thoroughly metasticized here its tough to kill the cancer without killing the host also.
RE, agreed – it is a system that needs to be exercised out of society. It does go beyond the Federal Reserve System, but NOTHING of substance will happen until you get rid of the *system* (not the name of the system to be replaced by the same systems under a different name). The poison that needs to be removed include:
1. Private cartel control of money and credit within a nation.
2. Money defined as debt – Debt Dollar Tyranny and, if you think about it a bit, you will conclude this system is merely a de-personalized form of debt-slavery where the slaves don’t know their masters. Think about it.
3. Endless usury and ultimate national bankruptcy.
4. 25 years of criminal bubble blowing operations that go unpunished.
5. Endless looting by the those favored in the eyes of those who control the Federal Reserve System
6. Government control via the principle that the borrower (government) is SERVANT to the lender (the private Federal Reserve Cartel).It isn’t about ending an institution, it is about ending systems and processes that are methodically and systematically destroying our nation and putting it under the heel of the criminals running the Federal Reserve System (and ultimately the BIS).
You won’t get an argument from me that Da Fed needs to be abolished, however replacement isn’t quite as straightforward as Bill Still makes it out to be. You should read my article on Central Banking and Da Fed on DD.https://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/02/24/da-fed-central-banking-according-to-re/
RE
Don’t know about longer lives. People don’t necessarily accomplish more or better. Look (for those who know who I’m talking about these days) at all Chopin accomplished in 39 years, and the enduring nature of what he did. What benefit will the average software engineer bestow upon anyone three generations hence other than his part in causing the great machine to blow to kingdom come?
Will say just this much, until the tsunami of GMO monster food found its way onto Mexican tables here, we met a lot of very happy subsistance farmers. Their urban relatives of course were ashamed of them for not pining for “a better way of life” replete with television, cars on debt and other glories of urban culture, but at least in our tiny little view of life on this earth I can say there are exceptions to the industrialized conceit that all the planet just drools to become like the Jetsons.
I’ll go with Kunstler this time who wrote that the advent of industrialized England brought about the worst quality of (urban) life ever witnessed on the planet.
The international (now global) industrial capitalist system, a.k.a. the wage slave system, and its associated complexity made increasingly specialized work into a chore more than anything else. It alienates the laborer from the fruits of his/her labor, “skilled” or otherwise, and necessitates the divide between “work” and the rest of what it means to be alive. Most workers within the system have no sense of ownership over the greater portion of the hours in a day. That’s really why we find it so easy to differentiate between “work” and “leisure”. I’d say the very concept of “work” does not have a constant meaning over time and across populations, but evolves with the system.
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