Macrobiotic Life

I’ve been increasingly angry about the bigoted Greek-bashing attitude by people that have no idea.

So here’s some myth-bashing:
1. Greeks are lazy and live in luxury. After the introduction of the Euro, multinational and domestic cartels started increasing the prices for basic goods and services. The local producers were blackmailed into giving up their produce for pittance while the final prices at the supermarkets were sky-rocketing. Thus Athens became more expensive than London for basic goods, in just a few years. Because the salaries were about half of what an average Londoner makes, this drove the public sector pay up and a very small proportion of the private sector pay. However, especially in the case of the private sector most of salaries are still survival-only or less, especially for young people. While most people had to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, large corporations were making millions selling the same product in Greece for double the price as other European countries. In fact, with the exception of public-sector workers, for the last decade Greeks are in the top 5 most overworked people in EU27, but amongst the least well paid. Of course, basic goods are not luxury but the few that had anything to do with the big companies did actually share in some of the profits, but that’s the same in every country in the world.

2. Greeks are sneaky tax-evaders and should be punished. Corruption is rampant in Greece, that’s a fact. Greeks just adapted to a situation perpetrated by the political elite which was supported by EU members since they could use the corruption to make multi-million Euro deals – see Siemens scandal. The state of play at the moment is that the ordinary Greek doesn’t trust any politician and immediately assumes that he or she has got their hand in the “pot of honey”. This, in conjunction with corrupt public services (a misnomer as they are neither services nor public), which require thousands of extra cash to function (imagine an UK-style NHS where you need to pay to get the doctor’s “attention”) has made Greeks extremely sceptical about where their tax money is going and where it should be going instead. So, instead of paying taxes to have a decent health service you end up evading your taxes to pay the doctors under the table to look after you. It’s not right but people everywhere adapt to the status quo to survive.

3. Greeks get 14 monthly salaries for 12 months work! No, they don’t. They get a yearly salary in 14 instalments. This is not as good as it sounds for two reasons. Firstly, instead of getting more every month you get lump sums at Christmas, Easter and for your holidays, which mostly go to repaying credit cards. Secondly, now that the 13th and 14th salary is about to be stopped, you lose one seventh of your yearly salary. And it’s not as if it was that big a salary in the first place. This is almost the same as if the UK government asked people to work March and September without pay, but it sounds more acceptable.

3. Greece fudged their statistics to get into the Euro. This is a perfect example of a lie that is repeated by the media so often that it becomes the “truth”. The real truth is that Greece got into the Euro as all other countries (except Germany – perhaps) by getting some help from the Goldman-Sachs-type American financial behemoths. This was not illegal at the time, the fact is that everybody was dumping other currencies and getting Euros. Then a new government came into power and wanted to buy some F16s from the US (a deal that I am sure included some hefty bribes) and changed the rules of accounting (payment on order instead of delivery) retrospectively so that it had the money to do so. What was bizarre was that the rest of the EU didn’t object to that, perhaps there was something in it for them too. Then they changed the rules again to what they were before. The same government is mostly responsible for today’s mess and was ousted from power last October. Strangely, most of the problems started after that.

4. It’s the Greeks’ fault for electing corrupt politicians. The fact is that, as in the rest of Europe, there is a two-party political system that has entrenched itself so well into power that only a revolution would change things. Unfortunately, that’s not allowed in the EU, as such a revolution would probably be either a far-right or far-left affair. So political leaders change and keep promising to battle corruption while they end up doing the same things as before. The rest of the EU is happy to co-operate with whatever Muppet is elected as long as they are nice and quiet.

5. Why should the Germans or any other European pay? There are two good reasons for that, a moral and an economic one. The moral reason is that most of the money Greeks owe were diverted to the big European corporations like Siemens, J&J, and others too numerous to mention, and hence paid for some European jobs. These companies used the Greek status quo to charge extortionate prices for their products and services. In a country with honest politicians they would have been told where to put their products, but a few millions here and there sealed the deals. The economic reason is that if Greece defaults it’s mostly German, French and British banks that would lose their money. Instead, Europeans will get loans at 1.5-3% and give loans to Greece at 5% and make a nice little profit, while they keep selling their “superior quality” products to the Greeks at extortionate prices and keep some jobs going.

6. The IMF is involved because EU cannot handle the crisis on its own. This is a half-truth, that doesn’t explain the situation adequately. The truth is, that the EU cannot tell Greece what to do when it comes to public services and welfare and cannot ask for privatizations. But the IMF doesn’t have such restrictions. The EU (and the US) see massive privatization as a way out of this hole mostly because it suits them. They will get to buy everything for peanuts.

7. Greece should live within its means and not borrow more than it can repay. A recent study in Greece revealed that corruption and mismanagement since 1980 has cost the Greek economy €600 billion. This is double the current debt. Enough said.

What should happen now? I personally think that Greece should default, tell the banks to stuff it, put most politicians in jail and confiscate their property, forcibly drive out the big financial institutions, go back to the countryside and live the simple life growing veggies and fishing. Unfortunately, they will never let them, there’s profit to be made.

Taken from the comments at – Greek debt crisis spreading ‘like Ebola’ and Europe must act now, OECD warns

For the last several years I have been addicted, yes addicted is the best description, to powering down, to down sizing, and simplifying. It is truly amazing to me to get to a level of existence that seems radically below where I once was, settle into it a while, then start seeing even more areas where I can simplify even further.

There is a wonderful feeling of liberation and freedom that comes with this activity that can be addictive.

My whole family, wife and two children, are actively participating in this process and share the feeling, although now and then my children talk about some of the “cool stuff” people have. My children have perhaps benefited most from this exercise because they no longer have the huge pressure that the “American Dream” represents, hanging over them. Consequently they have blossomed. They are both wonderful musicians, artisans, technicians, hard working craftsperson’s, highly social, and physically active. All of this on their own leisurely schedule (and we thought if we didn’t constantly ride them they would never do anything, ha!).

I don’t kid myself that it will be easy or that it is even going to happen but I am optimistic that a new way is possible.

My current passion is to create a labor movement where people can perform simple, useful tasks in return for food, shelter, clothing, etc. combinned with a central gathering location for fun and entertainment like music, reading/storytelling, plays and productions, games, and stuff.

Peaceful scenario of the peak oil crisis:

The only thing we need to transition to is a zero-growth economy, which is going to be forced upon us. Peak oil does not mean the collapse of modern agriculture, however, and population die-off. This mantra among peak oil theorists is flawed. Bear with me here. Here’s why:

Peak oil destroys oil demand. When the price gets too high non-essential industries collapse first (airlines, car manufacturers, etc.) We’ve seen what happens then. The price of oil drops. It starts rising again as there’s some economic recovery, but eventually the price gets too high again and more industries collapse. Each collapse make the subsequent recovery smaller. It’s a bumpy down slope.

But agriculture won’t collapse during these high price peaks, because people need to eat. They will spend their last dollar on food. They will stop flying. They will stop buying new cars. But they can’t stop eating. So even if food prices rise during these brief oil-price peaks, agriculture won’t collapse. Remember also that the world food crises in many countries in 2008 was not due to the rising cost of oil (or natural gas) needed to produce food. Those amounts are marginal. Rather, it was the result of biofuels diverting cropland, and the UN and other world organizations woke up to that danger. It’s doubtful that will happen again on the scale it did in 2008. It’s doubtful economic recovery will ever increase enough to produce oil prices that high again, making biofuels competitive. Remember demand destruction REDUCES oil prices. Peak oil will over time REDUCE oil prices by destroying demand. This is such an important point.

Some important stats:

All farm machinery combined (tractors, combines, etc.) uses less than 1% of world oil consumption.
Producing nitrogen fertilizer uses less than 5% of world natural gas consumption.

As long as supply remains greater than demand and the price remains low (which is virtually assured because peak oil = industrial collapse) there will be plenty of oil and natural gas around for agriculture for a very, very long time. Even the transportation of food, which clearly uses more oil than farm machinery, will not be affected by oil depletion for these same reasons. Transporting furniture around the world from IKEA might slow down, but nobody is going to stop buying food.

Only when people are completely broke without a penny to their name will they stop buying food. But when this happens the government starts buying it for them, because otherwise the result is food riots, and that is bad for the upper classes as well.

Hence there is no imperative to localize food production. Most locations around the world can’t live on locally produced food anyway. Most States in the US are net food importers. Most countries are also.

LeBlanc, was originally a believer in the peaceful nature of man. The evidence he found as an archeologist forced him to change his mind.

It took more than twenty-five years and a great deal of additional fieldwork for me finally to change my initial naïve view of the past, and humans in general. My take on warfare is now very different from what it was. Though these new ideas about conflict seem exceedingly obvious to me, I arrived at these conclusions not by means of abstract theory, but by being forced to look at warfare based on conclusive evidence found on the ground. The central importance of warfare throughout known history came to me slowly, prompted by archeological fieldwork in a number of different region and reinforced as I tried to reconcile theoretical positions that became increasingly impossible to accept.
Steven LeBlanc, “Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage” page 3

Way back in our hunter-gatherer days, a few tribes decided they were not going to arm themselves at all. They decided to be peaceful and not resist their neighbors should they try to take their territory, or their women, or anything else they possessed.

All those tribes went extinct. I wonder why?

But you can rest assured, the surviving tribes passed along their genes. And those folks who inherited their genes are your neighbors today.

Not only are human societies never alone, but regardless of how well they control their own population or act ecologically, they cannot control their neighbors’ behavior. Each society must confront the real possibility that its neighbors will not live in ecological balance but will grow its numbers and attempt to take the resources from nearby groups. Not only have societies always lived in a changing environment, but they always have neighbors. The best way to survive in such a milieu is not to live in ecological balance with slow growth, but to grow rapidly and be able to fend off competitors as well as take resources from others.
Steven LeBlanc, “Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage” page 73

That describes why human nature has evolved the way it has. We still have the exact human nature that we had during our hunter-gatherer evolution. It is totally irrational to deny that human nature will be any different in the near future than it was in the past.

“When law enforcement vanishes, all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing, and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias. This was obvious in the remnants of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and parts of Africa in the 1990s, but can also happen in countries with long tradition of civility. As young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).”
Steven Pinker, “The Blank Slate” page 331.

How to feed people in the near future:

Actually the most apt question is; ‘How are we going to feed all these people during the transition?’ It’s fine to consider how things might transition more peacefully, but people are anything but friendly when it comes to eating when there isn’t enough food. Survival instincts will kick in and chaos, mayhem, marauding gangs will ensue. Small towns will block entrance to strangers and martial law will become the law of the land. It will breakdown into the lowest common denominator until there is enough food to feed everyone that remains, and then, and only then will some semblence of order be re-established. It’s pure cornucopian dementia to think it can transition peacefully to a lower state of food production.

Part of Ecclesiastes 9, found in the Hebrew bible:

7 Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do.
8 Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil.
9 Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun— all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun.

Anyone remember the Mose Allison tune “Ever Since the World Ended”? The last line is:

“Ever since the world ended,
I face the future–
With a smile.”

Shiduri, in Gilgamesh: A New English Version

“… until the end comes, enjoy your life,
spend it in happiness, not despair.
Savor your food, make each of your days
a delight, bathe and anoint yourself,
wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean,
let music and dancing fill your house,
love the child who holds you by the hand,
and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.
That is the best way for a man to live.”

Here is the argument that novelist James Howard Kunstler presents in this most engaging narrative:

(1) We have a “one-time endowment of concentrated, stored solar energy”–i.e., oil.

(2) At this point in history, give or take a few years, most of that stored solar energy will be gone. (“Peak oil” is upon us.)

(3) The unprecedented growth of our society is predicated upon cheap energy and needs a continued supply of it to maintain itself.

(4) That growth consists largely of a gigantic highway and road superstructure with massive suburban developments in places that cannot sustain their populations without cheap oil (“nobody walks in L.A.”)

(5) This land use structure is particularly and exclusively designed for the machines of cheap oil, cars, 18-wheelers, SUVs, etc., which will become too expensive to run as the oil patch rapidly depletes.

(6) There is no substitute for oil–not coal, not nuclear power, not solar cells, not wind power, not hydroelectric power, not hydrogen fuel cells, not cold fusion, not corn oil–nothing will be adequate. The idea that human ingenuity will come up some sort of alternative fuel at the price we are paying today is just a pipe dream.

(7) Our government has its head in the sand.

Kunstler augments his argument with these major points:

One, regardless of what energy source we might dream will replace oil, we will have to build the structures–nuclear plants, hydrogen fuel “stations,” solar panels the size of New Mexico in the aggregate, massive forests of wind mills, etc.–from an oil platform, at least to begin with. Note that we now use energy from oil to mine coal and to build wind propellers. We use energy from oil to build nuclear reactors. Even solar panels require an investment of energy up front to build the panels. These are massive investments that nobody is really planning on. By the time we get our heads out of our wahzus it will be too late: there won’t be enough cheap oil left to build the infrastructures necessary for a transition to alternative energy.

Point two is that our gargantuan agribusiness is almost totally dependant on fossil fuels to (1) manufacture fertilizer; (2) to run the machines that plow the fields and harvest the crops; and (3) to fuel the pumps that pump irrigation water up from aquifers or from elsewhere.

Point three is that we are also running out of water. Desalination requires massive amounts of energy. The fossil aquifers are rapidly being depleted. Every year water must be pumped from greater depths until the aquifers run dry. Even aquifers that naturally replenish are being drained faster than they can replenish.

Point four is global warming. Suffice it to say that some places may go under water and other places may experience unpredictable climate change. The Gulf Stream may cease to run, throwing much of Europe into something close to an ice age while tropical conditions with topical diseases will move north.

Point five is that globalization, which is currently making us in the developed world rich–indeed richer than any peoples before in human history–is really a ponzi scheme in which we rob the future in order to pay for current prosperity. Additionally, we are exploiting the labor and resources of others to support our high standard of living. When oil runs out, our ability to benefit from globalization will be greatly diminished and consequently our standard of living will plummet.

The net result of all this, according to Kunstler, will be starvation, war, pestilence, and at best a reversion to a standard of living that prevailed before the oil window opened. Human populations will shrink until they reach an equilibrium with the natural resources of the planet.

This is the salient point behind Kunstler’s argument, namely that we have already, many times over, exceeded the natural carrying capacity of the planet, and are currently being artificially and temporarily subsisted by a one-time beneficence that cannot be replaced. When oil becomes too expensive for the masses, the result will be what he calls “The Long Emergency” which will be extremely painful at best and at worse catastrophic. Already he sees the wars for oil being fought, and further down the line, he predicts wars for water.

The most negative scenarios come about when you study actual human behavior. The reason societies collapse is because humans evolved to seek advantage. They do not cooperate for the common good. That’s why all these suggestions for one-child families, etc. just get ignored.

Here is a quote from THERMO/GENE COLLISION: On Human Nature, Energy, and Collapse

FALLING NET ENERGY, OVERPOPULATION, AND COLLAPSE
The “collapse” of a country is caused by “too many people competing for too few resources”[16]. When a country can not supply enough resources to satisfy its members, that country becomes unstable and subject to fundamental change.

The human mind serves “fitness” – not “truth.” Since every individual is programmed to pursue personal fitness and lie about intentions, no civilization has ever been able to convince its members to cooperate enough to survive the depletion of the energy resources which gave it birth. When confronted with ever-declining resources, the preservation of social order requires more-and-more cooperation, but individuals are genetically programmed to reduce cooperation and seek advantage. This genetic legacy sets up a positive feedback loop: declining common resources cause individuals to reduce cooperation even more, which reduces common resources even faster, which leads to collapse even faster.

LIE, CHEAT, STEAL, RAPE, AND KILL
Society only directs our behavior when we perceive that it is able to reward or punish us. A “collapsed” society has no influence over our behavior. That’s why cultures disappear and people revert to more violent ways of life. Our present society began to collapse years ago because of the rising energy costs of energy.[17]

We include others in our society when we feel that it increases our fitness to do so, but we invent excuses to kick minorities out of our society when resources are insufficient. Allies can become enemies almost overnight. The collapse of Yugoslavia is an example of neighbor slaughtering neighbor.

Jay Hanson gets derided as a hopeless doomer but his research has been backed up by the likes of Garrett Hardin and Jared Diamond and books like Constant Battles: Why We Fight. If we want to avoid the worst we had better take human nature into consideration.

Everything changes, but the Principles repeat!
Observe the history and her repeating periods – pinpoint the underlying Principle of each crisis and apply it to the contemporary civilization predicaments.
Historical books from Arnold Toynbee are perfect study material for this job – Kushi learned from them very much.

Here’s a peak oil informative material:

The agriculture of the future, like agriculture in any thickly populated society with few energy resources, will thus use land intensively rather than extensively, rely on human labor with hand tools rather than more energy-intensive methods, and produce bulk vegetable crops and relatively modest amounts of animal protein; the agricultural systems of medieval China and Japan, chronicled by F.H. King in Farmers of Forty Centuries, are as good a model as any. Such an agricultural system will not support seven billion people, but then neither will anything else, and a decline in population as malnutrition becomes common and public health collapses is a sure bet for the not too distant future.

The Archdruid Report – Riddles in the Dark

Worst drought in a millenium creates severe food shortages in China