Life on our little Wyoming Farm is settling down. We have put our tup in with all the girls which should yield some cute little lambs come 1 May or so if the estrus cycles converge. we have cut, split and stacked a bit over 4 cords of firewood and the two plows are on the vehicles. We are loaded for bear but we seem to be in a drought along with the entire West. It has been very warm with temps 20 to 30 degrees above average now for the last few weeks. Why would bears want to hibernate if the ground is bare? The mountain snowpack isn’t even deep enough to cover the grass let alone be enough meltwater to sustain our hayfields and we may have to forgo cutting hay for the 2nd year in a row. If drought becomes the norm it may be time to sell hay equipment
Trust in political leaders around the world seems to continue to ebb with authoritarian measures to contain, control and ignore large chunks of the population increasing dissent. The operative word has been polarization, a physics term relating to electron flow when the real meaning has been severe difference of opinion which has intensified to the point of resistance against authoritarian measures by the power elites as they seek to maintain the narrative of the machine by doubling down thrashing the populace with their cat o nines.
What we are seeing is a failure of the narrative as the social fabric unravels. In a real sense we are witnessing the dissolution of the Myth Of Progress as the dominant narrative of the Industrial Revolution. What must be understood as progress is that the progress of the past 250 years has been made possible by exponentially increasing combustion of oil, gas and coal running machines formerly run on human and animal muscle. With machines growing our food, making our products and harvesting our mineral and natural resources from timber to fisheries, our “human” resources” were freed to engage in a myriad of new professions and activities and most especially in the emerging fields of science and technology. The great bulk of new discoveries , inventions and scientific advancements in medicine and physics and chemistry have happened in the past 150 years, barely 2 lifetimes. But it hasn’t been made possible by machines. It has been made possible by the fossil energy turning those machines. In the process the society expanded exponentially as food production increased exponentially and no surprise energy use also expanded exponentially. The complexity of society increased as more energy driving more machines came into use. The last and possible final revolution was the computer and internet revolution which had the unforeseen result of accelerating all the previous activities of the industrial revolution but adding analysis and performance efficiencies in real time at the speed of electrons flowing through circuits which became integrated with Intels first IC in 1971. From that time on the Energy use exponential curve steepened sharply and as energy use increased so did the emissions. In fact 75% of all emissions since the Industrial revolution into the atmosphere have occurred in the past 65 years and the world is paying the price and will continue to do so as the half life of Atmospheric Co2’s effects lasts 10000 years. The dark side of the computer technology revolution is just now starting to be realized as instant connectivity between people has allowed instant surveillance of people and their habits and locations and thoughts and messages and with this surveillance came the attempted control of their thoughts and activities, particularly their economic activities which of course increased complexity of the economic system into what has been termed the superorganism by Nate Hagens. With the corporate control of human activity has come the political controls, all fostered by this technology driven by electrons from fossil energy. To say that we are now enslaved by the Technocracy is no exaggeration. The slaves may have been freed in 1865 but by 1965 the new enslavement had begun.
The technocracy is the new religion and is displacing democracy in what we have now as the last gaps of the progress myth. If you don’t think that Technocracy is viewed as the new religion, read this comment by Kevin Kelley, a Silicon Valley Vizier:“We can see more of God in a cell phone than a tree frog.” Technocracy is the perfect handmaiden of the authoritarian elites with now fabulously efficient command and control functions over what we do and how we think and where we can go.under mandates establish by the state. It is not just the CCP in China that is grading its citizens as worthy or obedient servants in the name of security but the so called developed West. Does this still seem like progress to you?
In future blogs I will continue discussions of these converging trends. Keep in mind my analytic bias is deeply grounded in energy thermodynamics and it is those thermodynamics that will drive the new as yet unnamed narrative.
Rendezvous Mountain Farm 