Nearly every time someone mentions Eclipse Day (which I always imagine with capital letters), I think of this from Neil Gaiman.
Nearly every time someone mentions Eclipse Day (which I always imagine with capital letters), I think of this from Neil Gaiman.
In episode 103 of the Weird Studies podcast, J.F. and Phil consider the Tower card of the Tarot. As they have throughout the series, they especially refer to the anonymously written Meditations on the Tarot.
As with virtually every other episode, the whole thing is worth your time. But here I just want to note their discussion of gardening as an act of co-creation. Organic gardening, that is. As they note, modern chemical gardening and farming is, in fact, a stubborn imposition of human will on the natural world. But organic methods are a cooperation between human intention and nature’s ability.
Gardening in such a way is an act of trust, or faith. The human sows a seed according to their intention, but the fruition is a matter of hope based in the prior demonstrated vitality of the soil. The fruition may not come—but that is often because the human has made some error in judgment. The co-creative relationship may need to be adjusted on the human side, but faith in the living Earth is never misplaced.
Can you believe that Rachel used to say she had a black thumb?
Lower Cascades Park. Bloomington, IN.
New staff member started yesterday. I think he’s going to be great.
You know what’s not great? The fact that I’m back in the office for a few weeks to train him. The commute. Merciful heavens, the commute. 90 minutes per day of the worst of humanity, which brings out the worst in me.
Pete Larson: “Why I Farm.” This is different from Pete’s usual videos, which are typically recordings of him working on his farm. This is almost like a manifesto for small, community-centered farms—and a damn fine manifesto at that.
Door is done! Now everything around it needs new paint.
Two things that prompted the memory of quitting social media I just posted:
In the process of breaking my years-long addiction to social media, it was the internalized self-limiting framing of writing with which I struggled most. This kind of reduction and flattening are seen best in the formulaic way in which the algorithms train us to write, the repetition of meaningless phrases like “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but;” “Unpopular opinion, but”, “Okay, sooo,” or the meme-derived rephrasing of opinions in the form of conversational comparisons between “literally nobody ever” and the target of the post.
Becoming trained to read and write by computers, we begin also to think like computers. Our writing becomes as processed as the food available in supermarkets and our thinking as standardized and as unremarkable as its flavors.
The clearest and most disturbing realization I had after quitting Big Tech/algorithmic social media was that my mind had been colonized by the timeline. I thought about what it told me to think about, to the exclusion of what I may have pursued on my own, synchronistically and independently.
New video: Screen door, before painting.
I published my blogroll as a page using Manton’s plugin.
During this sacred month of Ramadan, World Central Kitchen is working to provide 92,000 food boxes—4.7 million meals—to Palestinians in need. Support from around the world fuels our efforts and 100% of donations from our Ramadan campaign go directly towards feeding families in Gaza.
I have a new staff member starting next Monday. I’m excited to have him join, not least because it’s a totally new position that will bring in some skills we’ve needed for a while. BUT, because of an HR rule that new staff must be trained in person, it means I will have to be in the office five days a week for several weeks. I’m trying my best not to get overly gloomy about this. It doesn’t help that I’m already in a very busy, high-pressure time as we enter the last two months of a two-year long re-write of our endowment management system. And we’ve just started budget construction for our next fiscal year–and it’s a new process. And we’ve reorganized the department. And we’re adding four new staff members. And we’ll go straight from deploying the new endowment management system straight into audit. And … and … whew, it’s a lot. I have no point to make here; just complaining.
Good post from DC: our energy “needs” are skyrocketing due to the demands of cloud computing, AI, EVs, and bitcoin mining. All this at a time of rolling environmental crises. Yet the growth-obsessed powers-that-be never talk about reducing our energy usage.
EFF: “Congress Should Give Up on Unconstitutional TikTok Bans.” This bit is particularly worrying to me:
[The bill] would also give the President the power to designate other applications under the control of a country considered adversarial to the U.S. to be a national security threat.
And the following seems obviously true. If they’re worried about our data being misused, why not ban the collection of such data altogether? Because such data collection profits those who really matter to the politicians.
The only solution to this pervasive ecosystem is prohibiting the collection of our data in the first place. Ultimately, foreign adversaries will still be able to obtain our data from social media companies unless those companies are forbidden from collecting, retaining, and selling it, full stop. And to be clear, under our current data privacy laws, there are many domestic adversaries engaged in manipulative and invasive data collection as well.
I’m hoping to finish the screen door today. This morning I’ve been planing it to size. Maybe I’m sorta kinda almost maybe figuring out how to use planes? Also smoking pork spare ribs on the grill for the first time. And listening to a red-shouldered hawk make its way around the neighborhood.
One of the highlights of early spring for me is seeing the Italian coast while watching the Milan-Sanremo bike race. Definitely the most beautiful race route of the year.
David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology:
against policy (a tiny manifesto):
The notion of “policy” presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will on others. “Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.
If you ever take a notion to listen to some cowboy music, Don Edwards' album Saddle Songs is worth your time. I found it a few weeks ago at Half Price Books.
OFA has an article on what to add to your soil in the spring. Here’s what we do. Three of our five raised beds have no contact with the soil so they need a bit more help. For those, we:
For the areas where we plant directly in the ground, we first:
Once those areas are established, we simply add a fresh layer of compost every year. It seems to be working–there are worms active all over those areas, just beneath the surface.
I seem to have found myself in a terminological drift. Green Man’s Grotto originally referred to the notch behind the garage, bounded by the fence. This was the first area we planted outside the two original raised beds. While it’s not literally cave-like, the name made a certain sense. But now I find myself referring to the whole backyard as Green Man’s Grotto, which is nothing at all like a cave. This will have to be corrected.
New video: March 2024 in the Grotto. Two videos in one day! Will he keep up this breakneck pace? Assuredly, he will not.
New video: Nessie lives!. Wherein our killer bullfrog appears for the first time this season.
Rhyd Wildermuth has just published an excellent article on degrowth (paywalled).
Put as simply as possible, degrowth states that the relentless expansion (“growth”) that capitalist economies rely upon to survive (and to outrun the crises they create) has a limit. Once that limit is reached and can no longer be postponed, they will then contract in often violent and tragic ways.
And he uses an excellent analogy with credit cards:
Readers in the United States will already be familiar with the analogy I’m about to use for this, while European readers will no doubt struggle with some disbelief that such a thing is even possible. In America, it’s possible to get a credit card without sufficient funds or collateral to show you can pay back what you borrow. Wilder still, once you’ve spent the limit of that first card, you can then get another one from a different provider, max it out, and then get a third, fourth, and even more. You can even use the credit from one card to pay down the minimum balance on another or even transfer balances, constantly juggling your debt load until you’ve gotten yourself into a terrifying abyss.
What often happens for the person using this strategy is that each subsequent credit card comes with a higher interest rate than the previous ones, and there’s a system of debt tracking (a “credit score”) which determines what this rate will be and what the credit limit will be. The more in debt you get, the higher the interest rate you’ll have to pay back, and eventually it all catches up to you.
Degrowth asserts that this is precisely what capitalist societies have been doing since the very beginning: borrowing against a future moment in which they hope they’ll be able to pay it all back.
Fossil fuels are the best example of this problem. They function as a line of credit to allow increased production, consumption, and accelerated technological change, while their invisible consequences (atmospheric carbon release) accumulated the way compound interest on a credit card does. We’re now starting to max out this line of credit, and will soon need another line.
Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear are potential alternatives, but again as with the credit cards, they each come with their own hidden fees and variable interest penalties. For all those alternatives, you need a large initial input of energy just to build them. The minerals required to build solar panels and the batteries involved all require energy to mine, refine, and create, while uranium mining and refining also require large initial energy inputs.
Where does that initial energy come from? Currently, fossil fuels — from one line of credit to another — all to make sure we can keep increasing the amount of energy available for technological solutions to the other problems our technologies cause.
Degrowth looks at this problem the way most of us might view a friend constantly getting new loans to pay back other loans. Just as we might ask, “why not cut back on your spending?” degrowth proposes we question the core value of capitalist expansion. It then asks what life might be like if we tried to live within our limits, tried to pay down the debts we’ve accrued (in the form of environmental damage and resource depletion). What might it be like if we stopped borrowing against the future?
My first real introduction to degrowth was Jason Hickel’s book. And based on Rhyd’s article, looks like I need to read this book by Kohei Saito.
Trillium on a moss-covered rock
