Intensive agriculture the least efficient

Not got the datas with me but if you measure the total energy in and energy out then the simplest agricultural systems in the semi nomadic tribes produce about 2ce the energy that is put in through human labour. This declines rapidly until you have the American intensive agriculture system using 4 times as much energy as it gets off the land. The reason why it is so cheap is because oil is cheaper than human labour - but by diminishing returns the marginal cost of extracting that extra yield from the land is always increasing. Amazingly Adam Smith and Marx and others seem to my eyes to have missed this fundamental factor our of their economic models!

Two important features of this. The cost of fuel and the cost of intensive agriculture are linked- as we saw recently in the commodity markets and mysteriously no-one ws able to explain! It also means that creating bio-fuel intensively is a big blunder.

American feeds 40% of the world with the produce from its grain belts. This is only feasable at current fuel prices. The money spent in Iraq might not be so random if we consider the food implications of Opec power. At the same time the red flag should be waving for all those countries who are in the process of dismantling their subsistence/traditional farming communities and traditions. What the hazy eyes western school boys call "development" is actually the building of "dependency" and what lies ahead is huge aid debt and starvation. It has been seen throughout Africa for decades but still the aid agencies blame it on bad-government, civil war and climate. Everything except cash crops and western economic intervention.

Its another obvious fact that if humans were as incapable as the "top" of the pile say the bottom of the pile are then the human race would have gone to extinction millions of years ago. Like so much in this topsy turvey world it is actually the bottom of the pile who support the top and it is the top of any trophic system which goes extinct when times change.

Its sad for UK (where I live) that we have no traditional agriculture any more and no workforce who could farm the land were oil and petrol machines and fertiliser to run out or become too expensive. Agriculture is certainly somewhere I may look to be employed if only because food is something I actually do need. I've certainly no faith in the smoke and mirrors of current economic theory and management.

The Employment Machine Stops

Following from E.M.Forsters short I'm beginning to see the nature of the employment machine having made a stand against it in June. It is particular revealing at the moment because the machine is in big trouble anyway. I've been "unemployed" before (like when I was born ;-) ) but this time it's a full study in contrast to having been employed for almost 10 years and is being backed by a lot of research which I aim to compose into some form of book/novel.

What is emerging to my mind is that it really is a kind of "God delusion" of its own. You only need to hear the pronouncements of politicians to see that they are the most deluded on this subject.

Apparent as the economy slows we need to spend more to make more jobs so that we can work more. What if we don't want to work more? Can't we use the same logic to say that if we spend less we won't need to work so much?

But we got a society hooked on credit and over spending so clearly we do want all this stuff. But we have all the credit because our pay cheques aren't in yet and that is because we don't work hard enough. So depends how you look at it - we like spending, but we don't like working 20hrs a day to pay for it all.

It shows up other absurdities. Each year the economy becomes 4% more efficient (stats I got from some European government annual employment publication). That is what gave my last boss such a headache - each year we just got better at what we did. Normally they promote you to keep you bad at what you do, but the company only had 8 people so they were stuck. Instead the bosses had to outlaw efficiencies to keep the work rate down using the ISO9001 to fix inefficient work practices. Layers of management were also introduced to slow down communicated and increase paperwork, checking and delays. It was straight out of Parkinson's criticism of the UK civil service. It reminds me also of the economist Thorstein Veblen who argued that economy is the process by which human productivity and creativity is stifled to maintain the possibility of class. It sounds absurd until you actually see it happening.

Reading Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" I can further believe it. In something like Smiths own words (but I've not the quote with me at the moment) the division of labour will reduce labourers to the very lowest that they can possibly be. Meaning that the reduction of labour to small repetitive tasks will atrophy people to the state of vegetable existence. He thought the resulting wealth would stimulate the arts and compensate in leisure time for this unfortunate side effect.

There is so much to write I could keep going and do the book - so I'll stop here. Anyway back to 4%: if things are becoming more efficient why do we still do basically the same hours work per week as we did 10,000 years ago? This is a very hard statistic to calculate (this one is crudely based upon work on foraging communities I've a lot more work in this direction). But, if you think about it there are only so many hours in a day and we would be hard pressed to work much harder than we do!

One answer is that we consume so much more. There's a limit to how much we can eat (altho in America they are pushing that one!). So it must be the gadgets we own. There are only so many clothes we can own, tables, cars, houses, TVs, phones ... Some people do try and earn and spend as much as they can. And when you can't buy any more you can start buying designer stuff which is made in the same factories just sold much more expensive. Society really has reached about the limit of consumerism I think. I'm sure it can be pushed further. What we need is another indispensible gadget like the mobile phone that we simply can't live without and we can start a new industry and put ourselves back to work - for a bit until efficiency makes us redundant again. I wonder how far this can go.

Maybe we've found out since the "unbelievable" economic growth experienced in the last 10 years has been just that unbelievable - it was all a lie. The growth in UK has been 80% in the public sector. I don't know if that is true in US. That is The government made the jobs! Easy credit has created a bubble that has enabled us to keep making jobs for ourselves without having to actually pay. The money in our pockets has been flowing from the bottomless pit of banks via credit cards into shops and into our wages. It's all an illusion.

What the world needs is an economic system that actually factors in freedom from the economic machine because it simply can't keep creating jobs forever, while at the same time becoming more efficient at 4% a year.

And ignoring all this said, it is personally much more obvious. Why do we spend so much time at "work". Can't we do all the things we do at "work" in our free time? We spend huge amounts of time outside the machine but we probably are so deluded that we don't notice.

Sleep is non-economic. Yet the alarm is set by the economy.
The toilet is non-economic.
Sex is non economic. Except for those who want to pay for what is free to everyone else.
Eating and digestion are non-economic.
Breathing is non-economic.
Love for our parents and family is non-economic.
Love for our fellow people is non-economic.
DIY is non-economic. Except for the things we get from the shops - unless our mate can get them for us.
Gardening is non-economic. ditto.
Playing a musical instrument ...

I can go on endlessly. Yet despite it's small involvement in life we are dominated by money, the work we do to get it, and the things we can buy with it. The politicians talk like the economy was an important part of our lives - its almost irrelevant!

It can never happen - this is just an exercise to escape the delusion - but everything that everyone does as part of the "economy" could be done in our free time. We would not have any money from looking after the old person for a day, or attending an accident in the street, or teaching a kid to count, or planting a row of potatoes so we wouldn't know if some people were just sitting around doing nothing while we did all the hard work - but actually that isn't the point of work it is! The point of work is the looking after the old person, the attending the accident, ... All this could be done as part of our lives, as the things we do as members of our communities and for our fellow people for no other reason than what else is there to do but hang out with our fellow people and live together? This is life.

Put the specks of economy on and you become a politician and suddenly it all changes. You get absurd claims like we need to spend more to make jobs and you won't even realise what a clown you look. Problem is most of us don't see what clowns the politicians and economists look because we too are under the veil of economy. Down the job centre believing that we need a "job" to get "money" before we can "live" as though they handed out "life" at the job centre or over the counter of the high street.

It is a very long and complicated story how we got into this Alice in Wonderland topsy turvey world here in the west. There is no way back now, we have got to learn to live with the machine we built. The sad thing is that the rest of the world is slowly being drawn into it. Enclosure acts in India forcing farmers off the land they've occupied quite sustainably for hundreds is not tens of thousands of years onto the dole queues is the start of the upside down world where we look to politicians and economies to give us life - when the blood pumps through my veins not theirs!

Simonyi Professorship

This is truely a great year the stars are shifting and the constellations that have made up the abysmal last decade or dissipating. Along with the election of Obama which ends one of the Human races most depressing periods when so much potential was decimated and turned to so much futile ignorance, Richard Dawkins retires from the Simonyi chair at Oxford. I remember lamenting the day that chair was created and he instated, I can't believe it was 13 years ago!!! In my opinion he was not the guy to give it to, and he has wasted it. Negative arguments about God are neither the place of scientists, nor a constrructive use of either religion or science - they just dissipate energy pointlessly. Our new man Marcus du Sautoy is a much more practical and positive man and seems set to reinvigorate the public enthusiasms with actual science! I hope the same can be said for Obama and America. Really it is so depressing that there is so much power in the world and literally no-one who can utilise it... and worse as I've noted such an ocean of sheeps who will do the bidding of any idiot (most extraordinarily Zimbabwe). It really takes a brave man to stand his ground it seems and there are few brave men.

God is not great?

I see the Dick n Dan show (aka Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) has a new bum chum. I'm a bit behind the times but I finally see Christopher Hitchens book in the shops. I'm not being dragged into the cheap sensationalism of the title but I see that both Dick and Dan are having unreserved orgasms over the cover of this book and so i might just be bothered to get it from the library read it and then defaecate on it. How these idiots get so many trees taken down in their names astounds me. I got as far as actually reading some Dawkins (something I avoided all through my Zoology BSc) and I've read some Dennett and there is no doubt they are excellent minds .... with the added warning on the label that you don't exceed the stated dose and do not take them internally!

They suffer from the same error that the American government seem to suffer from. A bullet will kill the bad guy. [I can't argue with that]. And the bad guys are over there [ok if you say so]. So therefore lets strafe the area over there and we'll kill the bad guys ... [um no its not that simple.]

Problem with Dick n Dan and the new third man in the menage-a-trois Chris is that they don't even know what God is so how can they argue about it? As I've pointed out before Dick by his own (unintended) admission on a TV show in UK showed that he lacks the part of the brain that provides spiritual experience. Instead he concluded that spiritual experience is just brain activity - lets see how many more books he writes without brain activity. That is the level of the stupidity in their camp (pun?).

From what I've gathered already Chris's book isn't anything to do with God at all. Its an attack on Religion. I agree whole heartedly. I would extend his critique to all human groups! As I've done in this blog. The very notion of human society in any sense beyond the spontaneous co-operation and friendship of human's is a monster - it is no less than Aushwitz in disguise. The types of human society to treat with greatest suspicion are those arrogant enough to name themselves. I hope Chris can extend his analysis of the errors of group membership to the groups to which he belongs e.g. his intellectual bum chums n most notably Atheism.

Atheism is a nihilist group. It has no substance at all except the rejection of God. It is just another religion. The three bum-chums think there is a religion to be had in rationalism and scientific truth, but wasn't religion the problem? No human's are a profound problem to themselves - they love waving banners and calling themselves things and fighting the opposition. Our three antagonists here are just the same.

Its the 60 anniversary of the declaration of human rights. On radio a Burmese student recalled the day in 1968 when the junta began a terrible crack down on the protesting students. A girl, maybe only 14 or 15, climbed upon one of the tanks only to be blown back onto the street by the machine gun. What makes one man recall that moment with horror, and another presumably take his pay packet back to his own wife and daughter after a good days work? It is a question that has weighed on my own mind for years... especially after reading Barefoot Gen that is the moment I was finally changed forever. I walked into the library supposedly to find a job. The book caught my eye. I read the cartoon cover to cover and when I emerged from the library blinking in the sunlight, like an insect from its cocoon, the whole world was changed irrevocably. The buildings, the cities, our lives were like fragile paper that in a split second could all be vapourised by a falling bomb. There is no argument here just nihilation. There is nothing to say. That was 1996.

I realise this week that actually the evil lies in taking sides, in particular it is: our ego grasping a side. Whenever we take sides egotistically (i.e. as they do in all American films), that is pick up a weapon to protect a side we are taken in by the devil. It is exactly what Luke was learning in "The Empire Strikes Back". That anger and hatred draws you closer to the other side, makes you become that which you are opposed and hate. Those who seek to be good will make themselves evil if they stand egotistically against it. This is what Jesus taught us. While he could have summoned all the powers of Creation to decimate the puny Roman persecutors instead he did not fight. He showed them love and compassion even through his mortal doubt and final moments. This way he died free from the weaknesses of mere mortals. He had defeated death. Whether you believe in actual physical rebirth is irrelevant - the victory was had on the cross. What value is a physical existence when you have faced persecution and death without anger or fear!

The problem with Dick, Dan and Chris is that they are just ordinary people stuck in the up and down world of careers and family. They publish a book or two, have a few arguments, join a few societies, make a few speeches, write a few papers, defend their positions, have a few students, get married, work on their income, get a reputation and a name and just do all the ordinary territorial/survival things - their achievement when the bomb drops is no different from the worms and the birds.

In this increasingly secular world that is all our existences are becoming. A glass of wine over the TV in the evening and life's fine enough and that will do. And then death will come... What-ever (said in that whiney teen America way).

Listening again to the radio last week I was struck by a dramatisation of Joseph Black (the Scottish scientist 1728-1799) but it was the last bit of him musing on his death bed whether God was a mouse that struck me. One day I too will be on my deathbed staring at the inevitability that I will be finally passing into that void, and the question "what lies beyond" will no longer be an interesting intellectual question - but a most pressing urgency for me for in an hour or so I will be facing it.

There is no answer. We cannot answer with any confidence in those moments. There is nothing to say. Be it God or Nothing that awaits it makes no difference for neither of these things can be said or grasped by our small and conditional minds. In either case there is only the profound silence and the waiting to be engulfed by the incomprehensible. It is the avoidance of this which "makes cowards of us all" to quote Hamlet. There is only silence.

OK so I don't like silence more than the next man .. look at me writing into space here. I've had my glass of wine, watched the X factor final and delay going to bed. But there is no real escaping the incomprehensible nature of death, and no real escaping the incomprehensible nature of God. That is why the 3 voices mentioned above singing into the darkness are so pitiful, the slow motion replay of their atoms being vaporised as the nuclear radiation over excites the orbital configurations of their mortal existences. Is this what materialism and atheism and a world without God means to them?

Maybe God really is just a bad idea and its time to think up some better ideas. Sadly God is not an idea. He is not empirical either so no data there. He can't be see. He does even have a material form. He is an enigma. It is true that the non-believers give him a name and give people an earthly membership - but this is the weakness of the bomb-makers not of God. Yes God did create the universe. Yes God is present at this moment throughout the universe. Quite a conumdrum isn't it. Simpler if we just dismiss it rather than accept that maybe our minds are not big enough to grasp it. Too humbling.

Well I don't know for sure either, but I don't give up so easy. Those who make it to the higher realms only get there through astounding feats of goodness and self-mastery - it is not for those who satisfy themselves in worldly gains. Not a criticism just a fact. I realise last week also that it really is a matter of the red pill or the blue pill (from the Matrix). You can't do both. If you take the red pill however it will be a path that takes you to your limits - it is not easy at times and many fail and end up worse than if they had not taken the pill at all. God is not an easy path! I sometimes feel in moments of weakness that even if Heaven is as great as they say it is, it was not worth the difficulty of the path!

We all know what is Good. Arguing about God doesn't get us off the hook. We all know deep down what purity is. We all know what we should do. These are facts. All that remains is to avoid these facts or the face them. All our lives (I known mine is) is a huge exercise in running from what I know is true. I am running from myself. I am running from God. Does it matter whether God is great or not? Does it matter whether I am great or not?

Back to Buddhism 4real

Finally got around to picking up Walpola Rahula's "What the Buddha Taught"... it had answers to most of my remaining questions on Buddhism and set me back on track...

A whole load of things coming together at the moment ... a "life" coming into perspective and I wonder if the difficulties (part expressed in this blog) but going back all my life are just random or have a direction and a fit together into a big jigsaw puzzle... it started to look that way last week.

I'm researching a book as a vehicle for all these issues and finally they're coming together.... its called officially "Human Ecology". It encompasses the whole range of difficulties I face accepting the Western lifestyle of what for me is pointless "labour and production". It becomes even more absurd when you hear politicians saying that we must "shop" to save the economy! What if we don't need anything? The economy drives our lives, its a machine that we have come to serve and it no longer serves us.

But people are too afraid to challenge the dogma of the last 250 years, and the dogmas of growth and progress.

The reading I have been doing is actually pointing to the unbelieveable conclusion that there really has been no progress ever in human existence. But to get this conclusion you need to step outside the box which measures everything in techonology and profit.

Western society fits into what you might call a "slave society" but the slaves have been replaced with machines running on fossil fuel. In theory then like all slave societies we should be getting a large educated leisure class. This is what I have been championing myself. Oddly despite the economy becoming 4% more efficient year on year there are not 4% more people not needing a job. Why is this? On the surface it is growth - the belief in endless progress. In the machine it is because there is no accepted distribution system to people without a job (unless they have capital and can sponge off the economy through interest charges and dividends). This is why the capitalists hate "the work shy" because that is what characterises capitalists - the ability to get an income without doing any work. Not a criticism just a fact of the system. Someone somewhere has to stop working because there are not enough jobs to go around! And the dogma has it that the rich can stop working, but the poor "should" work.

This feeds into the ancient social heirachy view of mankind. That people form "classes". Not necessarily economic, there are blood-line classes (the Kennedy's, Bush's etc) and social classes like the Indian Vedic system. But however you look at people they form into groups and but distance between one another. Good to be in a gang because you get that feeling of society, but it labels you and puts you against other gangs: humans sadly look to form society not realising that at the same time they are excluding other people and creating division and anti-society.

What has been totally missed out of the view so far is the actual corner stone of human "life" and also the root question of this blog: what is all this really about and trying to achieve. Well thanks to Buddhism I've a way into that question once and for all!

The straight answer is that the meaning of life is "nothing".

That sounds like b**ls**t but it conceals a very profound truth. The problem with the human mind is that it tends to give far too much importace to itself - to its faculties of thought, imagination, dreaming, emotion, memory etc. Well we can dream all day, and think all day, and feel fantastic or rubbish all day but actually it makes not a blindest bit of difference to the "world". All this is just one side of human experience.

The other side is "reality". Now that is a truely hard thing to grasp because we "think" how can I grasp reality without my "mind". See the mind really hates the thought that maybe it is not really all that important. It will fight this point forever so I won't take it up here... (I'm in a hurry).

Buddha decalres on enlightenment that "there is now no longer survival". Noone seems to make a big deal out of that... but its the key. Human life (like it or not) is characterised by survival - be that finding food, medicine, a job, education, family, being "cool", carrying a gun or credit card: its all about surviving or maintaining ourselves.

Buddha points out that there is nothing which lasts forever. If it did it would always be here, and it would never go. In such a world we wouldn't need to work for starters. There is no thought, emotion, thing that we have always had and losing it makes us want it back - this is the root of survival.

We have some imagination of things that live forever - God, the soul, myself (maybe if we believe in life after death). But these are exactly that: imaginations. They are fine and just as good as the thoughts and imaginations of people who don't believe these. But we must be clear there is nothing in reality that leads us to this belief. That's just plain and simple.

But the point is not to fill our imagination with lots of things that we "think" do inhabit reality. That makes us the same as the people who fill their imaginations with things that are not in reality. That doesn't escape the mind. The point is to be sensitive to reality as an ongoing process. It is in that sensitivity that we find "life" - not the thoughts, theories, books and science that issues in vast array from experiences of reality.

When we accept reality as a thing separate of our "thoughts of reality" then we are on the way. I spent years of my life confused on this point because I argued (and can argue still here) that surely all knowledge is in the mind and so we can't experience reality directly - see Descartes and many, many dualists since. Whatever we conclude however we must ask: is that a knowledge or is that reality? How for example can we gain "knowledge" that knowledge is separate from reality? What is truth if we can't experience "reality". Its a mine field of twisted mirror imagies: don;t get bogged down in it that is my advice. Basic point: if you "experience" then just do it and do it properly and with commitment and worry about what you call your experience some other time.

So when we see reality we find that it isn't really "this way" or "that way" it is just its way. It is the mind which steps in and compares and measures things - this way, that way, right way, wrong way, good way, bad way. Actually silly mind - there is only ever "the way". When we see that it is, then we see that what was "survival" and the tight rope over the pit of sadness, loss, death and all the bad things we fear if we stop surviving: is actually just reality and not so fearful after all. There is no pit, all things that can happen are quite natural, none are good and none are bad in reality: only good/bad against our imaginations and our minds and our wishes and wants.

A life without wishes and wants than? Is it possible? I'm still trying at the moment but now I'm making some progress. Its odd that we fear not having the things we want because we imagine that "nothing" is depressing. The economists think that being poor and having no job are depressing. Actually its the "economy" that makes us think that. When asked on Radio 4 last week what made us happy, the woman who had been explaining the new research that showed that happiness does increase with wealth, said that "going on holiday with friends" would be a good way to spend your money rather than on all the new gadgets. In other words the new research has found nothing: that the things that are free - friends and a good time are what we should seek and not the things that are expensive and "new". My argument here has always been if its new and you've been happy before, then it means you don't need it. If you've never been happy before then maybe you are looking in the wrong place. "New = ignore" in my book. (I wondered who was paying her to do the research: just the usual "new" American rubbish.)

So "nothing" is the answer because the mind wasn't the right person to answer it! It is Reality that must answer the question of "life", and what is in our minds is just the dogmas of morality, religion, science, economics, politics ... that are vainly trying to compete with reality.

Waxwing Year :-)

Sighting a group of Waxwings on rowan berries outside work on 14th January 2005 reawakened my childhood love of nature... and they are back apparently this year.

Interesting that I dreamed in early October - and even asked a friend who was off to Norway to look out for them - that a low berry harvest was going to make this a waxwing year!

Thriller - Funk saves the world! - Happy Halloween

Whoseever shall be found

Without the soul for getting down

Must stand and face the hounds of hell

And rot inside a corpses shell...

The foulest stench is in the air

The funk of 40,000 years

And grizzly gouls from every tomb

Are closing in to seal your doom;

And tho you fight to stay alive

Your body starts to shiver

For no mear mortal can resist

The evil of the triller.

And here it is at 8:28 the inception of something that changed the face of popular American music forever ... roll forward 17 years and it animates Britney Spears or today any number of R&B acts and even perhaps further afield Bollywood. That is 508 seconds into an 821 second piece of art, or 1:1.616 the Golden Ratio: perfect proportions.

In true Romero style Jackson's funky bass awakes the dead slumbering in mass putrifaction to the sounds of souless commercial pop; animates a culture that was dying.

But is is wholly ironical. The walking dead hypnotised by a new tune join just another mass movement soon to become commercialised, the heart beat of that unforgettable bass now familiar as the highest grossing album of all time.

But deep down Jackson was dying. His hatred of the flesh, his hatred of sexuality, his hatred of himself driving him away from the living into the oblivion of the once living. Is it profound that the bass can animate these diseased dying bodies that we have, breath soul into skin and bones; or is it tragic that Jackson cannot face himself and allow himself to live as he is, rather trying to transform this skin to become someone else; rejecting sexual maturity and the body that he lives and dances through?

Maybe this is harder for me to discover because maybe I too suffer with this same issue. Awoken in this direction by the book "The Outsider" recommended to me 5 years ago and finally time to read. Undecided on this issue of the physical: is it noble or ignoble to be physical? Do we die when we identify with what will die, or do we live when we accept it and work with it? ... dunno yet...