Archaeologica.org

JR Lowell:"He who is firmly seated in authority soon comes to think that security, and not progress, is the highest form of statecraft." While its obvious that Bush does not know what progress is, it seems he does not know what security is either.

There have already been disease outbreaks from illegals who were not properly immunized. And as the food prices rise with the rise in the price of oil, nutrition will decline, which will impair immune systems, which will spread pathogens, and even more new bugs will be coming across uncontrolled borders.

Part of the problem is hominid evolution, which was never as a mass herd animal. DNA reveals Native Europeans evolved over the course of the last 10,000 years in villages of 150-300, Africans in tribes of 75-150, with other gene pools in this range. Hominid immune systems never evolved to cope with so many different pathogens, and now we realize that autism and other neurological development problems are triggered by infections.

There's a case to be made, that as a civilization become increasingly urban, it becomes increasingly corrupt and short sighted. Athens flourished for a long time with the "demes", which were groups of urbanites who owned rural land and went out to it from time to time to help work and manage it. Xanthippus was a notorious nag cause she thot Socrates should have spent more time on the farm, and she was right.

But after Athenian success in battle, they started using POWs as slave workers and the Athenians became entirely urbanized, and thereby lost the lessons from agrarian life that sustained their democracy. They became fat and lazy. And now we know, that because exercise improves mental functioning, stupid, replacing a competent leader, Pericles, with a demagogue, Alcibiades.

The Chinese, of all people, show us a solution. They've been constructing apartment buildings out in the boondox, then tearing the village down after the folks move into modern flats with all the standard urban conveniences. The one building frees up a few more acres of cropland as well.

But psychologically, its still a village. Psychological tests show that most of us can only remember about 300 people. After that, unless you are a politician, you need to rely on status symbols to know how to relate to any given individual. And we all know the problem with status symbols in terms of needless consumption and faster landfills.

Another part of that is the lesson of honesty to kids. Everyone knows which kid owns which pair of shoes, jacket, Ipod, or whatever. There is no place a thief can go to enjoy what is stolen. This has a lot to do with the common expression by the ancient sages that the country people (paganus) were hardworking and honest, and the urbanites were thieves and rabble. Its the same gene pool.

New York city has long been a magnet for young black men who grew up in obscure villages in Caribbean islands, and we see that they dont have nearly the crime rate. The villages dont have enuf peers to really form dangerous street gangs. Nor are there any cracks for kids to fall thru.

But as we see with the Chinese model, the modern village can still have broadband and the dish for all the same video and to help with education by experts in a wide variety of fields.

Then too, my eldest granddaughter just graduated from a state sponsored residential prep school in Little Rock, which doesnt take kids until their critical years of neurological development has passed. It likewise forms its own kind of village life, where the teens get exposed to a wide variety of modern technologies and career paths. And- dont have the parents there to rebel against.

While in China, we see the villages are still supported by agriculture, we also know that small business is the most efficient form of economic organization- again because everyone knows everyone, and dont need status symbols to know how to relate.

Tripolye, on the Dneiper, 5500 years ago, shows us a kind of diffuse city, which is to say a collection of villages strung out along the river, each with a particular craft- pottery, metal forging, slaughter house, tannery, weaving, and so on. But yet, each village had agrarian land that grew most of the food it needed, and with a number of people on hand at critical times like harvest.

But- in the event of a pathogen outbreak, each able to go into quaranteen until the disease ran out of new victims. And, since everyone lived within walking distance of work, there were no traffic jams. Add modern telecommunications, and the whole system is able to operate efficiently, yet have no attractive targets of WMD.

Rather than having people driving to shop, if they shopped online, such a network could offer daily UPS/FED-X type delivery of whatever was wanted, and do it without the high overhead of retail display outlets. Yet, with a web presence, each village industry could market to the local, regional, and global economy.

And- by growing their own food, be sure of the wholesomeness of what they fed their kids. If adults want to live in a city, that's their choice, but we should not be exposing our kids to the urban hazards of drug abuse, streetgangs, and pathogens.

You sound more like a sociologist than an archaeologist DB, but I strongly suspect that you are dead right. Apart from 7yrs in a city I have always lived in small communities and living in a city is a corrosive experience.
Unlike city dwellers I don't even have keys for my house!

well, isnt archeology basically ancient sociology?
Anthro reports on stone age tribes show a varied diet of wild plants and animals. The bone middens of villages and the bog body stomachs show us the same diversity. But urban life shows us how the power elite always goes in for monoculture, to feed the slave class as cheaply as possible.

The more organized it gets, the more uniform the slave class diet, the more unstable they become until some shock, like a food shortage, refugee, or invasion, gets their attention, they riot, and the whole thing collapses.

Which means that only those in the villages who know how to grow their own food survive. This is what the bunker boys dont get- that there's been lotsa times a civilization collapsed, and its the villagers who cooperated with each other that survived; not the loner lurking in the boonies.

It'd be an interesting question to unravel the hominid instinctive reactions to village life, both in the crisis of economic panic, and in the interaction with global market. The Chinese video I saw showed young people that rode the bus to jobs in the city, but then came 'home' for the holidays, or even in some cases, left the kids with the grandparents.

The parents could handle sweatshop jobs and barracks style life in the city because they felt like they still had a home to go home to. This too is similar to the hunting & foraging that went on for days at a time in the bush or jungle, but then returning after a fortnite or whatever to the village where the elders and kids were.

I remember wheat harvest on the farm, where we first walked behind the reaper standing up the shocks of grain to dry properly. But then 5-10 days later, the threshing machine would show up with dozens of kin and neighbors to get it all hauled in and threshed in a single day. Then the machine would move on to the next place, and we'd follow it.

*nobody* hadda be told what to do. A no brainer to follow the wagon out to the field and fork the shocks, then load the next wagon as it showed up. It was all a very organic process. This is really the origin of the 'redneck', the irritation of the shirt collar as the wheat chaff blew in the wind and stuck on sweaty skin. But unlike a sweatshop, we joked with each other while we worked.

Why dont they permit that in sweatshops? Again, hominid instinct. Alpha male management innately thinks that if people are talking, they are plotting. Yeoman farmers do without alpha male management, dont have the problem.

The thing that I find that distinguishes my youth from today is the complete lack of practical knowledge amongst people. My son can repair most things and has learnt to keep his mouth shut about it to prevent being plagued by those whose normal excuse is, 'I'm not practically minded.'

Unlike city dwellers I don't even have keys for my house!

How do you get in?

We ask permission of the dogs Min!

Ah, yes....the true masters.

DB, you should be an internet blogger. However, the return to a more agrarian lifestyle in the US is not going to happen by choice. I just hope it doesn't happen by necessity.

So if I've got a grip on this the US uses a lot of its corn production to produce ethanol, this helps remove dependence on unstable mid east oil producers and also helps the US balance of trade figures.
This pushes up the price of corn thereby permitting third world poor to starve in a new greener world.
Am I correct?
Our lot are also barmy, they want our farmers to produce a total of 14 million tons of extra grain and follow the US lead. We don't have enough arable land to spare to produce and extra 14 million tons. Current production is 11 million tons!

There's no point in a lock on the door in the country. Anyone can smash their way in without the neighbors hearing a thing, so all you get is a busted window or door along with whatever was stolen.

BOTOH, We all know who lives down this road, and what they drive. If a strange cars shows up, we notice. Dirt roads leave tire tracks as well. That's the thing about village life. If someone new moves in, and then stuff starts to disappear, folks figure it out. Thieves vastly prefer the anonymity of cities.

As for the blogs, I dunno. Maybe I need higher speed bandwidth. I'm used to a faster interface. I remember when a list was a "list". That is, someone had a list of email addys, and sent out copies to everyone on the list whatever anyone else on the list had sent in. It just showed up with your email.

Mark Graffis sorta does this, but its all one way, from him to whoever gets on his list. He screwed up once, and the "cc" list was sent out with the postings, a couple hundred names. A strange mix of anti-Jewish crap with otherwise liberal sources and some knowledgeable interesting links.

This kind of thing is one reason why 911 wont go away like the JFK assassination did. It just keeps simmering, and if anything does happen to the economy, that pot will blow up. People will want scapegoats.

For some reason Fate has given me usenet's alt.community, which has copies of most of the stuff I've posted along with rebuttals. Unlike a blog, I dont have any control over what gets posted there.

Looking at the variety of sources we all can access now reminds me of the Greek idea that ideas were the gifts of the Muses, not personal property. I dont worry about where my ideas come from, and from time to time, see them posted from some other source, like a meme whose time has come.

It looks like Kharma determines what sources come to our attention. Like now, I stumbled across Sheldrake's "The Presence of the Past" at a friend's house. Sheldrake has a very Vedic idea that the Universe evolves like a life form, and was not started by a sentient being, but over time, is becoming one. The notion confounds both atheists and deists. But as computer networks themselves evolve twards sentience, looks like a coming meme.

So- it dont really matter whether I put the ideas out there or not, they will come without my help.

YOu must live right, D/B. From today's Times.



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/busin ... ner=EXCITE

NEVADA, Iowa, Sept. 24 — The ethanol boom of recent years — which spurred a frenzy of distillery construction, record corn prices, rising food prices and hopes of a new future for rural America — may be fading.

On the rich get to live the way they want, the rest of us are just trying to make do. Thanx for the NYTIMES link. In addition to the output side, the input seems to be about 10 gallons of diesel at the drawbar/acre for corn if you dont havta irrigate it, plus the cost of the fertilizer or whatever else you put on the land.

So- that's like 30$ worth of diesel for 300 gallons of ethanol- again depending on what the weather is like. That looks like 500$/acre in ethanol, never mind what you can get for the sour mash as stock feed.

Even after you amortized the cost of the tractor, corn picker, plows, discs, etc, and the storage bins, thats still enuf to drive land prices dramatically up.

I've seen it posted that if the entire corn crop was converted to ethanol it'd be 6% of the gasoline needed. No wonder the price at the pump remains high. I worry that the genetic variation of the commercial crop is so small that we may see some kind of serious pest problem, and for that reason, I grew blue corn this year,

It was not a good year; the rains from the North petered out at the MO border, and those from the south at the Arkansas river. In between, we saw rain to the north and south of us all thru August that we never got. If I lived in the right place, it wouldda been 50 miles north or south. The next question is what global warming will do to that band next year;

If it doubles, the corn price will double again as well. That 100 mile band I live in from the Ozarks East, but for the delta by the Mississippi, is all hilly all the way across TN & KY to the Piedmont. They dont grow much corn on it. Move that 100 band 100 miles north, and you've got a major corn crop failure.

You'd think the reliance the Maya and Chaco Canyon had on corn would be a warning.