boscohorowitz
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All they said you have to do is drive the car
I didn’t realize that this trip would take me so far
They killed two guards and wounded four
Now I’m running from the law
Runnin’ scared, and I ain’t gonna drive no moreAll the gang’s down here, and the weather is clear
But you always can count on the weather
I’m with every traitor south of the equator
And we’re all living happy together
So please tell Shirley when you see her
I’m alive and well in Argentina
With Adolf Hitler, and ???
Alive and well in ArgentinaVerse 2
So I found myself down by the riverside
No place to run, jump inside, or hide
I signed aboard a Norwegian freighter
They needed a rating as a second-mater
Gonna sail away, baby, gonna see you sooner or laterChorus
All the gang’s down here, and the weather is clear
But you always can count on the weather
I’m with every traitor south of the equator
And we’re all living happy togetherSo please tell Shirley when you see her
I’m alive and well in Argentina
With Adolf Hitler, paper hanger and cleaner
Alive and well in ArgentinaVerse 3
When I got there, imagine my surprise
Awaiting on the dock was the gang and more beside
They was throwing frisbees, hula-hooping
Heil-ing hitler, und Betty Boopin
Waving flags, und preisen Gott
Und salutingChorus
All the gang’s down here, and the weather is clear
But you always can count on the weather
I’m with every traitor south of the equator
And we’re all living happy togetherSo please tell Shirley when you see her
I’m alive and well in Argentina
With Adolf Hitler, paper hanger and cleaner
Alive and well in ArgentinaThis is totally petty and snarky, but nonetheless: I note that Germ fits inside German just fine. Whether that’s germane to the subject or I’m just being socially degerminate, is hard for me to degermine.
Here’s to life south of the border:
“boscohorowitz
I wonder how you and chatbot would relate?”I avoid AI as much as possible. I don’t watch TV. Youtube is 99% of my audiovideo intake, and 90+% of that is musical. I have played video games for maybe, at most, 1 hour of my life, and 95% of that was ancient late 70s/early 80s lo-fi arcade game Space Invaders. I see maybe 2-3 Hollywood movies a year.
But I relate indirectly with AI quite a bit online of course, and I carry consciousness of this fact like a cybernetic marionette perched on my shoulder. I “use” AI a lot insomuch as view almost all my youtube selections as a smorgasbord driven by AI analyzing moi. The search-engine driven internet is my shrink, probation officer, stalking door-to-door salesman, pedagogue, manipulating indoctrinator<>dogma destroyer, and I Ching.
The internet has formed a ghost in my head, a loyal Tonto who works for Big Brother. This internet thing is weird.
***
“Make your own dirty electricity filters for your house.
I set this to about 4:12, where the nice fellow shows the circuit”This is how loony I am, JD (which is the only apt nickname in Texas for someone with your initials):
Having lived 67 years in this ever-growing web of EM radiation, I kinda like it. My entire life has been accompanied by 60hertz AC, which is about a b flat. When I was a vagrant, back in the days of electron-gun TVs that irradiated one and the house in literally hair-raising ways if you got too close to the screen, I would enter with fear the house of someone taking me in for dinner. I didn’t fear them; I feared the TV. I could literally feel it grab me at the base of the neck, a tingly sensation one imagines one would feel if a Heinlein “The Puppet Masters” mind-control slug latched onto you. Accompanied by an
ultra high pitch dog whistle I could only half hear. Ghost frequency feeling.Compared to that, today’s ubiquitous microwaves and shitty-shielded house wiring is almost fun. Kinda tickles.
***
“Bottom line: Trump won’t be on the ballot! Neither will Kennedy.
Maybe in 2024 many Americans won’t bother to vote since the outcome is rigged like 2020 was.”I don’t think Trump will see prison but I don’t see him winning the election either.
I don’t see them assassinating RFK, Jr., either, although I can see them taking out Old Joe, overtly or covertly. No one will miss him.
I think we’ll see major populism arise in the wake of Trump/RFK,Jr’s demonstration that the Old Guard is all shriveled up.
(And there’s always the prospect of a major national emergency dealie vis a vis war rendering the election more irrelevant than not. I don’t see how our frail flaccid northern hemisphere power grid will avoid some major meltdowns via terrorism or weather or… but that’s tangential speculation, of course.)
***
***
A snapshot of censorship in action:
people dying from vaccine complications
With censorship like that, the average bloke is indeed bound to be “fucked”, to cite Germ’s favorite term of discourse. But it’s fun to whip victims for being victims of a dead end media-imprisoned technoculture raised like rats in various institutional cages. Being brain-washed to believe that anti-vaxxers are deadly bad people is just part of the mass formation hypnosis in which they were raised.
Also, I know ample vaccinated people who totally respected the prerogative of antivaxxers to remain unvaxxed. Some of those vaccinated are also in the profile filed under “fucked”.
““If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
― Malcolm X”In today’s metamedia where alt<>mainstream incestuously steal each others’ legitimacy, what Malcolm X described swings both ways.
So: who IS being oppressed? Who is doing the oppressing? And then, the Important Question: how do you fit into that profile? Whom are you perhaps oppressing if only by using language fundamentally identical to that by which 1930s Germans went nuts blaming “das Juden!” for everything from impotence to hair loss.
TJASSF! Never forget, never forgive!
***
Weird scenes inside the gold mines.
“Inspired by Theosophical lore and several visiting Mongol lamas, Gleb Bokii, the chief Bolshevik cryptographer and one of the bosses of the Soviet secret police, along with his writer friend Alexander Barchenko, embarked on a quest for Shambhala, in an attempt to merge Kalachakra-tantra and ideas of Communism in the 1920s. Among other things, in a secret laboratory affiliated with the secret police, Bokii and Barchenko experimented with Buddhist spiritual techniques to try to find a key for engineering perfect communist human beings.[15] They contemplated a special expedition to Inner Asia to retrieve the wisdom of Shambhala – the project fell through as a result of intrigues within the Soviet intelligence service, as well as rival efforts of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat that sent its own expedition to Tibet in 1924.
“Hitler sent several expeditions to Tibet in the 1930s “to contact the Agartha and Shambala”, supposedly part of Nazi esotericism.[18]”
Filtered through post-WWII late-stage industrio-capital metaconsumerism for 70 years or so, and it blossoms into whatever this is:
I’m minded of an old Steely Dan lyric from a song about LSD and such:
“All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint the face,
They’ve joined the human race: some things will never change.”Behold an example of what they call “power ballad yoga”:
Karl Popper: the Open Society and Its Enemies
Some might find this interesting. Maybe useful. Perhaps so useful as to be entertaining.
***
This guy is a relatively non-hysterical proponent of the notion that electro-magnetic fields from our ubiquitous electrical wires and gizmos, are seriously hazardous to our health. He explins his beliefs with humor and sans the seemingly obligatory references to blood-srinking satanists, etc:
***
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I want to thank everyone who spoke with, or at, or about me or the ideas I expressed. Very few will have much if any clue regarding what I was going on about, if only because it is stated so plainly and frankly that it must of course be hiding my true meaning in invisible ink.
I come here periodically to do a number of things:
a) share relevant info
b) reaffirm my lack of faith in humanity
c) indulge my lifelong Pollyannaic addiction to believing that “this time it will work”
d) reaffirm that there is always one or three in the crowd who reaffirm my faith in humanity despite our mutually glaring lack thereof (I would name them but that would exclude others, and they might know whom they are anyway)
e) say nice things to people when I think I can get away with it (few good intentions go unpunished in the human realm)
f) watch my own ego do the same thing I see those of others do, in order to
g) later analyze what it all means to me as I experience my very socially bruised feelings (which are my concern and nothing folks here need consider any more than I need consider theirs except an it please me)
h) so that I may become a happier person and perhaps, dare I say, even a better person.
It is a sad harvest but ALL harvests are sad. Just ask the animals whose meat we adore and probably can’t live without. But everything must be harvested including us, if only by impatient microbes, if only our most cherished delusions, and it is those delusions that I ultimately seek to harvest here: mine, yours, anyone’s, to separate within myself the cognitive good seeds from the bad seeds.
***
Whoever is addressing that ficus tree is one of the most naturally attractive persons I have seen. She seems completely at ease with herself, as if she were an old friend she’s known since infancy. She reminds me of my son, who is about the same apparent age as her. He has his demons and issues, but was raised to be what he is even if he doesn’t know what that is, and it shows.
I’ma send him that pic and say this is what you’d look like as a girl.
I just stepped in to peek and now I wanna thank VPoet for using me as a means to distract himself from the demands of his human ego by verbally stating in so many words that he is superior to me. That’s how ye tames the ego, yessir.
*smooch* Hope you’re feeling better these days, dudesicle.
People seem confused about my real gender despite my clarifications. It seems to please them to think that I’m twisted or confused that way. If anyone wants, I can send them a picture of my driver’s license replete with man-beard. For a small fee, I’ll ’em my dick too.
Anyway, Robin’s my name and brave I am at times, but I am nobody’s sir. That word is to be used with respect, and that is in sore supply.
***
“I don’t think what I say was all that out of line.”
What line? To what behavioral boundary do you refer? Or are you falling upon the mercy of the forumnal court and appealing to their sense of closer-than-not-to-mainstream decorum?
Step in line, y’all. Hold to the rod.
Now it’s my turn to tell you that you’re boring me, jb-hb. But most certainly we’re boring others, and there’s poor Dora’s hand top consider, so I’ll leave us be for now.
“You’re doing that boring thing again.
Yaaawwwwwn”
If you’re that bored, lonely, wanting attention, you might try something more than telling me how much I( bore you. It won’t inspire me to attempt entertaining you. Well, I know I have something better to do. Maybe you too?
typo fix: “So don’t fucking blame me for having those impressions or for your making those remarks.”
***
For Dora’s poor mouse-hand:
On this discourse thing, Bohm again:
“You may not even have known that you had an assumption. It was only because he came up with the opposite one that you find out that you have one. You may uncover other assumptions, but we are all suspending them and looking at them all, seeing what they mean.”
― David Bohm, On Dialogue“In the dialogue people should talk directly to one another, one to one, across the circle. Then the time would come, if we got to know each other a bit and could trust each other, when you could speak very directly to the whole group, or to anybody in it.”
― David Bohm, On DialogueThe latter is the opposite of the primary discursive pattern in virtually all online fora. It can be great fun and information (and frustrating and disinformational), but it isn’t serious dialog.
The former can still be observed and applied therapeutically to how folks chat at places like this.
Geezx, I gotta get some work done. As Rocinante and I hobble off into the evening haze, I invite y’all to stop taking yourself “seriously”. It will make you less protective/paranoid, which in turn promotes honesty with others and, most of all, yourself. And that, honesty, is the only true seriousness there is.
If that isn’t opinionated enough, here’s this:
“Let those with ears to hear, hear.”
“YOU keep starting shit up in response to MY posts.”
YOU don’t have to do shit about that. YOU don’t even have to see my remarks as “starting shit up”. YOU are not your words. Do as thou wilt, but don’t blame me. Engage or not, whatever. I didn’t ask for your impression of me (although you’re thoroughly entitled to give it) or my remarks on ANYthing. So don’t fucking blame me for having those impressions your making those remarks. I am neither your mother nor a voice in your head. (That I know of, anyway.)
““For millennia, we submitted to “an artificial intelligence system which has been granted legal “person-hood”. We called it God. (insert G.B.Shaw remark about humanity needing to invent God if none availed).
“Like I said, take a stand. Your cowardly duplicity is worse than wearisome, it’s a waste.”
It was a fucking metaphor, dipshit. FWIW, I’m all for those days when our culture submitted, even if only mostly superficially, to the belief in a great big good God. I said “artificial” to bounce off your remark, to use God as a comparison of something (that I personally think) would be better to submit to than some human cybernetic monstrosity, and also to note that belief is an artifice, that beliefs are artificial, that God is not necessarily constrained to be in fidelity with your belief about God.
LOL!!!! How seriously everyone here takes this shit! Why, you’d almost think that their egos are involved rather than the fair and just and oh so logical and better informed rationale/rubric most people here claim to own a chunk of.
You’re not impressed with me? Fine. I’m not impressed by you, either. Not am I impressed by me although my senseless ego loves to preen.
But do I take it seriously? No. There are certainly less than a handful of people here I take seriously at their word. I tried to for several years but… I repeat a quote from David Bohm:
“On the whole, you could say that if you are defending your opinions, you are not serious. Likewise, if you are trying to avoid something unpleasant inside of yourself, that is also not being serious. A great deal of our whole life is not serious. And society teaches you that. It teaches you not to be very serious – that there are all sorts of incoherent things, and there is nothing that can be done about it, and that you will only stir yourself up uselessly by being serious. But in a dialogue you have to be serious. It is not a dialogue if you are not – not in the way I’m using the word. There is a story about Freud when he had cancer of the mouth. Somebody came up to him and wanted to talk to him about a point in psychology. The person said, “Perhaps I’d better not talk to you, because you’ve got this cancer which is very serious. You may not want to talk about this.” Freud’s answer was, “This cancer may be fatal, but it’s not serious.” And actually, of course, it was just a lot of cells growing. I think a great deal of what goes on in society could be described that way – that it may well be fatal, but it’s not serious.”
― David Bohm, On DialogueWhen a person’s commitment is primarily to proving themself right (which, ironically, is most popularly expressed , in the form of ‘you are wrong because I am right<>I am right because you are wrong’), there’s little left but their bias. I have a hard time taking dogma seriously. Dogma is property, and information needs to be beholden to no one to maintain its intellectual honesty, discursive rigor, rhetorical hygiene and, in a word, honor.
And why should I give a fuck what you think of my feelings about God or your beliefs about my honesty or lack thereof? I know of none, and so I don’t.
Major typo:
“For some reason, you’ve chosen to believe I’m an atheist. Well, at least speak as if that’s what you believe. ”
should be
‘For some reason, you’ve chosen to believe I’m an atheist — well, at least you speak as if that’s what you believe. ”
I wouldn’t want Doc Smith to think I want him talking to or about me.
jb-hb, I’ma do an even dirtier trick on you, something fundamentally like the logic of I know you are but what am I.
Because that is, alas, exactly how I feel about your remarks toward me.
For example: “Contrary to what you said 6/10 a theory is not a hypothesis. ”
I never said that. You projected a falsehood in my name. Here is what I said:
“All a theory is is a hypothesis/es that survive the first elimination round. ”
From there a theory grows forth. It may die or not on it’s second or third or whatever hypothesis/es, but until then, it is a theory (as opposed to a mere theorem).
Before that, I said: “but fwiw, theories become established as canonic dogma (albeit ever pending further review as needed) as they will”
Which is true. There’s abuncha politics and such in how theories come about. The logic path to a ‘canonic theory’ is strewn with petty ego squabbles and similar distraction. Give a roomful of scientists Occam’s razors, and they take to cutting each other up for spite and vanity and laziness and confusion just as much as for truth.Now, a theory that survives all that and survives the war of competing theories, becomes the last man standing and graduates into what we commonly call Proven Scientific Fact (but is still really just a theory with a whole buncha circumstantial evidence in its favor).
Look, you wanna criticize people here, go for it. But don’t follow me around to do it. I gave up on you long ago, jb-hb.
And furthermore:
I was a serious agnostic ages before Dr. SMith met me on this lousy film set
And furthermore yet, Doc Oc, I never shilled for phony religions run by evil megalomaniacs, unlike you. If you’re gonna wave your dick around in public, at least wash the thing for el_Ron’s sake.
Asshole. See? I take you seriously after all.
Ah, Dr. Smith. For some reason, you’ve chosen to believe I’m an atheist. Well, at least speak as if that’s what you believe. That’s an interesting extrapolation to infer and projection to imply. Upon consultation with my personal still small voice, God and I agree that whether I believe in God or God believes in me is none of your business although you’re free to ponder and chatter away on it all ye like.
Me and God, we’re gonna go downtown and get some tattoos.
***
I wonder if people like Germ even care if they’re fomenting a flavor of mass hypnosis yet to come, one called Lynch ’em and Burn ’em Alive. Oh well, whatever stokes one’s sense of personal justice, I guess.
***
Meanwhile, and seriously, sincerely, etc., I recommend this lecture/speech/sermon on being human and all that god stuff.
P.S. Thanx for talking about me citizenx. It’s almost like you’re doing my work for me. Badly, of course, but that’s your trademark around here since we wuz all knee-high to a chatbot.
Before I leave for Cheyenne, I’ll add another thing:
Blaming the vaxxed for being submissive fools is exactly the kind of self-“justification” that eased Nazi German soldiers hustling innocent Jews off to death camps. It serves them right to be wronged, right? Until it comes your turn to be served.
Seriously: repentance is SO much easier and rewarding although scary at first. Doubling-down on (what I will call) wrong in order to prove one is right is, (Elmer Fudd voice) oh so very very wrong.
“I remember 20 years ago when gayness was a disease according to many Xtians”
In fact, I remember when it was listed as a disease in the psych bureaucracy List of Approved Mental Disorders. Was a time when silly faggots or faggot wannabes didn’t want to be treated better than others, just not treated like disposable dog shit.
But, like you said, everyone has to fight to be free or even just get by. Somehow, people “like you” seem to think that, having won one’s (one won’s) freedom in difficult, often dangerous, struggles, one should stop now that one is no longer oppressed. But really (and I’m citing your logic yet again; I know: sue me, right?), one gets a little giddy when one sees justice happen, especially if one did it one’s own god damn self, bloody knuckles and all, and one tends to follow the logic of another dead singer:
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”I mean, after all, it’s a free country and justice is oh so Darwinian.
“The reason people get excited is they almost never see justice being meted out correctly down here.”
Oh my, Dr. D. That is an astounding bit of sophistry. Dr. D. speaks on behalf of God and all humanity (or something weird and absurd like that) to be the judge of what (let’s call it) Darwinian justice is. If this is your idea of improving yourself and hopefully inspiring a movement around you…. oy.
You steadfastly use your genius to measly-mouth your way into avoiding things that might disturb your self-justifying world view. The sad result is that you sound like you take yourself so very seriously. But saying this is pointless, of course. We both know this.
If it makes you feel better to continue this way, if it makes you happy, oh well.
But it just makes me feel like a kid trying to stay awake in church and desperately waiting for that almighty closing hymn so I can escape. Sorry. Nothing personal, i.e., I don’t feel any need to make you look bad or lesser as a way to make me feel good or greater. You like your expressions and apparently believe in them.
As for gayness and all that: I remember 20 years ago when gayness was a disease according to many Xtians, and kids were sent to de facto gender realignment camps to cure tehm of teh gayz. Back when even civil union marriages between consenting adults of the same sex were considered a profanity.against all decency.
Yeah. Life is tough. Like a dead rock singer (any still alive?) said:
It don’t really matter to me
Everybody’s had to fight to be free.I wanna cast judgment too. That’s one of the reasons I’m here. If I remain positive, people gonna throw stones at me. It’s a law of human nature or something. It’s how the game is, apparently, played. I happen to have a wristrocket and a bagfull of genyoowwine river rocks from Jordan. Bought ’em online:
“Clearly you identify as Vaxd and Boosted, pity you’re not.”
Clearly you’re taking some serious drugs. No vaccination in me.
But my ego appreciates the attention, citizenx. It’s bored and not ready to face anything more than making fools like you suffer for making others suffer exposure to your folly.
BTW, the death wish speaks poorly for the benevolence or even mere decency of your intentions.
It’s fun to pick on people, jah? C’mon. Let’s go find some suckers and say bad things about ’em.
***
I didn’t call you any name but Germ, Germ. If you don’t like your name, change it. It’s a free internet.
I surely *insulted* you, indeed, oh unfucked one. I said you are an unrepentant asshole. (That’s kinda like ‘big fat poopy butthead’.) But, you know, I’ve never given my asshole a pet name, so why should you deserve one?
Oh, alright. How about this name. I’ma call my asshole Seriously Fucked.
But please, don’t let me stop you from glorying in the misfortune of others. Continue. I will continue to point out to people relatively new to this site that such sadistic politicization of a tragic unfolding does not represent this site accurately, to say the least. I want others to know that not ALL TAE commenters are unrepentant assholes.
phoenixvoice: thanx for the inspiration. btw. My prob is the opposite of Lady Butch Dyke. Various health issues, especially HHT, have taken most of my head voice; meanwhile, bad habits like smoking (mostly caused by stress from all that bad health jive), has given me more access to my chest voice.
I miss the high notes but maybe should learn to embrace my lower register. Like this guy does:
“She is in a gay women’s choir, and apparently many of her butch lesbian peers disdain all things feminine and refuse to sing high notes. ”
I avoid conformist groups. Solidarity generally desolidifies the persons who define themselves by it.
***
“Never forget, never forgive.”
And there you are, people.
Germ: you can’t handle the truth about yourself any more than the vaxxed in general can handle the truth about das vax. Let me make it simple for you: you’re being not just an asshole but an unrepentant asshole. Personally, I think that’s very unhealthy for you and those around you, but then, for all I know I’m an imagination of somebody’s figment. Maybe I’m just the voice in somebody’s head — maybe even my very own cranium.
My dogs like to roll in nasty smells too. I don’t judge them for it, but they nonetheless get The Bath. Don’t be so scared of a little soap and hot water, Germ. You too can stop smelling like shit every time you open your mouth. Repentance is a marvelous thing.
bargle-gargle-ciphernut-bypass code
“Suppose I told you where I put my penis. Where I put my penis is the most important thing in the world. Would you like to hear me talk more about my penis. My penis can be your personal lord and savior. Would you like to hear where I put my penis? Now? Why not? Why don’t you want to hear where I put my penis? …You’d think I was insane, mentally ill, and quite probably and accurately a danger to your kids.”
Despite being very masculine in all physical registers, I come across in person kinda… gay. Well, I hanged out with a lot of queers in my earlier years. (More fun than straights, back then.) While no sissy, I am not particularly large in physique, so big dudes loves to attempt scoring macho points by demeaning me via gay slurs.
My standard response to anti-gay slurs is Why are you so interested in what I do with my penis? Do you want to see it?
Reaching for the zipper was more effective than reaching for a gun.
” Do what you want. But leave me and underage people out of it. And that — wanting to be left alone — is an unforgivable crime.”
Gays have always had to fight or submit or hide to be left alone. What is happening with the current LGBT-whatever things is extreme liberal backlash against decades of extreme conservative oppression of all things gay. It has obviously peaked and is now collapsing. Wait until you see the conservative backlash. Poor gays. They’re still a minority, after all.
TlgbtASSF, or something.
“So, how willing ARE you to accept being ruled over, quite legally, by an artificial intelligence system which has been granted legal “person-hood” ?”
It had to be, it seems. For millennia, we submitted to “an artificial intelligence system which has been granted legal “person-hood”. We called it God. (insert G.B.Shaw remark about humanity needing to invent God if none availed)
“I’ve been teaching her to access her head voice as well. She says that it has been an eye-popping experience in femininity. ”
That’s the coolest thing I’ve encountered in awhile. Singing is so central to whomever/whatever we are.
Re: global climate understanding:
“Looking at all this evidence, the conclusion is, well, a little unsatisfying – there is still much uncertainty in the long-term trend. It’s hard when the short-term variability is nearly an order of magnitude greater than the long-term trend.”
But it gives us something to argue about and abuse each other with besides the traditionals like slavery etc. It helps keep us off the streets, you might say.
The problem of nothingness, of Where It All Started, ex nihilo, is a doozy. Follows is a (for me) refreshing look at it:
“Overall, the existence of “God” can be credited to the early universe being comparable to a brain, which imparted the abstractable quality of nothingness that makes everything else feasible.”
My ancient ancestors and I agree:
NORMAL LIVES
Some 7m years ago, our human lineage began diverging from that of the chimpanzee, with
whom we still share 98% of our genome and thus a common ancestor[9]. For the majority
of the subsequent period, our basic biology gradually evolved, as our various direct ancestors
lived off the land, developing into tribally-based ‘hunter-gatherer-style’ communities. That
protracted period in our human evolution is stamped deep into our DNA as our genetic ‘normal’.
Such active ‘hunter-gatherer-style’ cultures, robustly refined by the rigours of natural selection,
are well adapted to our bi-pedal physiology, while our dentition, metabolism and digestive
system are likewise well suited to a diet of fresh fruit, vegetables, roots, nuts, berries,
meat and fish[10]. There have been many detailed studies of the benefits afforded by ‘ancestral’
diets, beginning with the pioneering approach taken by Weston Price[11], by Melvin
Konner and S. Boyd Eaton [12] and by Staffan Lindeberg[13], for example.
The human race is genetically adapted for a life of routine light to moderate activity essential
for survival (walking, lifting, carrying, bending, climbing), rather than for long sedentary
periods[14]. The actual tasks accomplished in a “normal” hunter-gatherer’s day depended on
the level of hunger, seasonality, weather or terrain. Nevertheless, it seems that the typical
daily distance covered by human locomotion would be in the range of three to ten miles. The
necessary daily activities would require an average energy expenditure of between 3,000 and
5,000 kj, up to five times greater than many modern sedentary adults[15]. For today’s city
dwellers, regular walking or cycling at least part of the way to and from work/school each day
would be a modest evolutionary-concordant compromise, given an encouraging townscape to
Academia Letters, July 2021
Corresponding Author: Gustav Milne, [email protected]
Citation: Milne, G. (2021). Post-Pandemic Urban Living: Back to the Stone Age? Academia Letters, Article
1717. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1717.
2
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
move within[16].
In addition, the lives of hunter-gatherers were lived outdoors within a natural environment.
Crucially, we are not born with a fully-functioning immune system, since this co-evolved with
us over the long as Professor Graham Rook’s ground breaking studies have shown[17]. It is
now clear that it is from direct contact with plants, animals and other humans that we obtain
the macro-organisms, microorganisms and microbiota that live and thrive on our skin and in
the gut, managing our immune system within our own personal ecosystem. We are not born
with these microbiota: initially, we derive them initially from our mother’s birth canal (but
not, alas, from a Caesarean section[18]). Subsequently we absorb these organisms, from the
soil, plants, trees and animals, or the air. Without them, we are increasingly susceptibility to
allergies, autoimmunity and inflammatory bowel disease. Consequently, reduced contact with
nature is bad for our physical health: we still need the microorganisms that only the natural
environment can provide. Living in sterile urban areas, however, decreases our exposure to
nature (and thus a less effective immune system) while urban life increases exposure to crowd
infections.
DISEASES OF URBANISATION
Culturally, the human race has seen dramatic and rapid transformations. Genetically, however,
our evolution has been much more gradual: anatomically we remain much as we were before
extensive agriculture and urbanisation were gradually developed in the Neolithic period, some
5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Although there are major benefits in city living, there are also
major costs, such as the seemingly unstoppable rise in obesity, coronary-related problems,
Type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s and various types of cancer. According to the World Health
Organisation, these are all listed in the ten most common causes of death in modern, urbanised
societies. Do these deaths represent that mismatch between human biology and urban culture,
or are they just an inevitable result of the ageing process?
There is, however, compelling research that challenges the inevitability of death by ‘the
diseases of urbanisation’. The major long-term study by Dr Staffan Lindeberg, has shown
that ALL those fatal conditions are rare or non-existent in un-urbanised communities still
maintaining an ‘ancestral’ life-style. His detailed research, included results from a long-term
study of a large community in Kitava, Papua New Guinea, where some of those people lived
well into old age[19].
Archaeological research supports this assumption, following the many studies of ancient
cemeteries and related research graphically showing how the transformation from ancestral
practices to farming and urbanisation damaged our collective wellbeing. The domestication
Academia Letters, July 2021
Corresponding Author: Gustav Milne, [email protected]
Citation: Milne, G. (2021). Post-Pandemic Urban Living: Back to the Stone Age? Academia Letters, Article
1717. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1717.
3
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
of plants and animals during the Neolithic period, for example, heralded major changes in the
human diet and activity regimes (and thus in our wellbeing) with a noted increase in dental
caries, trauma, metabolic and joint disease, the first evidence of tumours, anaemia, diffuse
idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH, a proxy for obesity) and osteoporosis, as well as osteitis
and periostitis of sinuses, ribs and skull. The Romans not only introduced the civilising
concept of urbanisation to these islands, but also scurvy, osteomalacia (rickets), Reiter’s syndrome,
gout, ankylosing spondylitis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, septic arthritis,
tuberculosis, poliomyelitis and leprosy. Arguably, urbanisation was -and often remained- a
mixed blessing[20].
Certainly un-urbanised or pre-urbanised populations suffered from malaria, childbirth
complications, predators, seasonal food or water shortages and serious accidents. But what
they did NOT suffer from were many of the aliments straining our health services today: these
were arguably introduced by urbanisation through its culture and its townscapes.
We have to accept that our basic physiology, metabolism and mindset are all determined by
our long human evolution. This dictates what we were (and still are) genetically best adapted
for, and, just as crucially, what we were not best adapted for. We are well-adapted, for example,
to eat fresh food and take daily exercise. Our overburdened National Health Service is
all too well aware of the complications that arise from an urban population that ignores these
fundamental evolutionary determinants of health, as the incidence of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular
problems and several forms of cancer all too painfully prove. It is salutary to note
that some 50% of all hospitalised Covid 19 patients in England were classified as being overweight
or clinically obese, 21% were diagnosed with hypertension, 20% suffered from asthma
or had chronic respiratory disease and 7.6% had Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes. To repeat, all of
those diseases and conditions were rare or non-existent in the Kitava population following an
ancestral life-style in Steffan Lindeberg’s long-term study. Such an evolutionary concordant
life-style adopted by 21st-century urbanites would not cure Covid-19 but it could at least contain
or constrain its worst manifestations. Better urban wellbeing is a goal to be progressed in
the post-pandemic world: the New Normal could begin with an evolutionary-concordant very
old normalThe skinny on the Wagner thing:
Wagner boss refuses to allow his mercenaries to join Putin’s forces
From what I can tell, Wagner is being exiled to Ukraine. Wagner soldiers who miss Russia will dump Prigozhin, I assume. I suspect he will be fragged.
I have concluded that one can’t oppose evil, only promote good.
The more a person opposes evil with animosity, the more that person behaves evilly. Next thing you know, they’re gloating in the painful deaths of foolish victims as if that were somehow doing something good.
From some online article:
Schadenfreude, as Nietzsche said, really is “the revenge of the impotent.”
Schadenfreude is “felt when we stumble across another’s misfortune we have not caused ourselves”; it’s “furtive,” as people attempt to cover up their glee; yet it’s something the observer feels “entitled” to, usually because “the other person’s suffering can be construed as a comeuppance—a deserved punishment for being smug or hypocritical, or breaking the law”; it’s a “respite” that reassures the viewer of their own superiority; and it’s typically focused on “minor discomforts and gaffes rather than dire tragedies,” Watt Smith concludes, but “this rule isn’t hard and fast, and context matters.”
I think it’s a self-destructive habit like masturbating to sadistic porn. Keep it up and your heart will go blind, and grow hair on the palm of your heart.
“He already had 4 years to do it.”
I don’t give a shit about Trump but this isn’t a chess match with time limits on moves, and deep removal is not a small thing.
Few captured light like fellows like Rembrandt could. But no one captured that sense of grime in the urban sunlit air like Hopper.
Posted here maybe two years ago:
