Animal Farm 2.0

An imaginary book premise:

Animal Farm 2.0, A Nail-biting Sequel

Over a course of many years, an Americana family farm is gradually transformed into a corporate factory farm death camp, complete with an ersatz animist–fundamentalist theocracy that secretly serves the fascist corporate-person overlords. There will also be sinister, mad scientists doing recombinant genetic engineering on plants, animals and humans alike….

Too scary for young readers, you think? Don’t worry–it all comes right in the end!

Various animal and human characters will represent contemporary figures such as Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbo (seen on cover, left), Glen Beck, Bill Gates, Jr., Ralph Nader, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Alan Grayson, , etc., either as themselves or in animal or human character.

The story will be highly adaptable to “claymation” or Avatar-style 3-D animation.

Several of Orwell’s original Animal Farm characters (or their descendants or relatives), may show up in the tale.

One of the plot arcs will be the reverse of Nader’s “Only The Super-rich Can Save Us“.

Cover of "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!"

The human and animal heroes and their followers will eventually save the day by starting their own joint human/animal worker-owned co-operative farms on sustainable, eco-friendly principles including permaculture, eco-culture, and green energy.

The humans and animals will begin to practice and teach mindfulness, worker-ownership, non-violence to sentient life, egalitarian biodiversity, and the Theory of General Utility to the world around them.

Ultimately, global warming will be averted and the greatest good will be shared by all.

Happiness will abound, and every living thing will flourish, (except for incorrigible haters, who will be exiled to areas where the radiation level prevents fertility).

Poor Richard

Perrenial Wisdom vs Cultural Graffiti

Many of the earliest known teachings about wisdom and self-knowledge include methods of meditation and breathing. We find these teachings in every culture around the world, past and present. We can trace the teachings back to every dead culture that we have evidence for. It is possible that these teachings originate before writing, and perhaps before language itself. The wisdom teachings we know today as meditation and breathing methods may go back to our earliest cognitive experiences of  self-awareness, even before the dawn of Homo sapiens.

Although such ancient teachings may have had independent origins in many different times and places, I suspect that all these teachings about meditation and breathing may have a common source, and that source might actually be our own DNA.

There are numerous instinctive patterns of breathing and mental states that are suitable to different types of activity.

Although there is probably some cognitive “wisdom” correlated with all such possible states, here I only want to focus on the state of being at rest or repose or prior to sleep; and in particular the state of intentional self-calming and relaxation on a mental and physical level concurrently. This could be characterized as a process of progressive relaxation and breathing in a characteristic way. Although the optimal patterns, processes, and progressions are only vaguely defined, they include

• Synchronization of circulation, muscle action, organ functions, neural networks, etc.
• Process cycles, oscillators, timing and re-timing cascades
• Self-massage of internal organs and muscle sets. Optimizing circulation.
• Balance and equilibrium approached progressively, step by step, through repeated cycles of stretching (inhalation) and relaxing (exhalation).

Muscles are like taffy. They tend to stiffen into any long-held position. Stretch-relax cycles plasticize the tissue, allow stress and balance redistribution, equilibrium.

Three stages:

1. Beginning: The first step is mental, attention turns from thought to quiet observation of body, muscles, breath, etc.
2. Middle: as tensions are located and relaxed, the breathing pattern gradually gets deeper, larger, and more synchronized. The deep breathing creates passive mobilization of joints, alternate muscle sets, and organs. All gradually assume their ideal positions and orientation.
3. Ending: When all the tissues and organs have experienced a sufficient period of rhythmic flexing and have assumed their ideal configuration, the breathing gets shallower until motion becomes minimized at a level just adequate to provide sufficient blood/air material exchange in the lungs to support the resting, or idling, body and brain.

This type of meditation and breathing is ideal for introducing sleep but can also be practiced as a “tune up” in many other situations.

These three stages of progression probably have many subdivisions that could be teased out by subtle physiological measurements.

At each point along the progression of this process, with each breath, there may be an optimal rate of inhalation and exhalation, an optimal volume of expansion and contraction, and an optimal pause in transition. These parameters can not be prescribed by theory or taught in any exact, static, one-size-fits-all paradigm. It can only be anticipated that such optimums exist and that they can and must be directly sensed by each individual in each moment.

Each species presumably has it own distinctive set of patterns for this process of retuning or toning the brain and body.

These instinctive patterns have not been invented by us. They have been invented by evolution and are only crudely understood by the mind and by the traditions that attempt to “teach” them.

Our cognitive attempts to recognize, ponder, and practice this process consciously could possibly be the very first example of organic biology percolating up into mindfulness and ultimately taking shape as individual and collective human wisdom.

Cognitive models of these phenomena vary. Many are crude and take off in tangents influenced by many possible agendas. Most end up in “the weeds”. But as long as the core elements of calming thought, turning attention to finding and releasing tensions, and expanding breathing cycles remain, each individual has an opportunity to follow a gradient in these perceptual “tastes” towards the “zone” of equilibration and instinctive “master rhythm”. This process may involve not only joints, tissues and organs but perhaps even cellular and sub-cellular processes. It may also involve rerouting neural network/module inputs and outputs in novel ways that increase functional neural integration and/or re-order the functional dominance hierarchy of one area or network over another. One example would be new or increased mapping of the motor, parasympathetic, or proprioceptive neural networks onto the neocortex. The neocortex is the newest and outermost layer of the brain that seems to be all about integrating, organizing, and coordinating older brain areas in new ways. Practices such as yoga and tai chi may also help to increase brain integration in a similar way.

What makes this authentic wisdom is that it is self-knowledge gained through a combination of self-observation and rational thought. It is a combination of instinctive biological activity with conscious cognitive functions in which each enhances the other. The instinctive pattern of breathing becomes associated with a passive but observant mental state and the conscious mind becomes able to initiate and facilitate the instinctive activity. Such combinations promote new and higher cognitive and biological integrations. I think this is the reality base and the functional nucleus of most forms of yoga, meditation, and other “spiritual” practices. Unfortunately, this core reality often gets obfuscated or entirely lost in inappropriate language, ideas, and extraneous associations. Then the potential for wisdom is perverted into its own opposite, magical thinking and folly.

I guess this is my non-mystical version of the “perennial philosophy“.  People in all cultures and all ages find a few common truths hidden in plain sight and proceed to embellish them with all sorts of extraneous associations drawn from the culture, natural history, and language of the respective place and time. This process further buries and obscures what was always hidden in plain sight under more and more layers of cultural graffiti.

The human brain is brilliant at connecting dots. List three facts on a blackboard and anybody can instantly make up a story about them. In fact, we can’t help it. We have to make up a story. Our brains are wired that way. The problem is that we go around spontaneously and compulsively connecting all kinds of dots that really shouldn’t be connected. Pretty soon we are all lost in the tall weeds of our own bullshit.

“Just the facts, Ma’am.”

Did Dragnet’s Sgt. Joe Friday really say that–or not?

Poor Richard

Related PRA 2010 posts:

• “The Beginning of Wisdom 3.0″
• “The Enlightenment 2.0″
• “The Inner Hunchback”
• “Is Spiritual the New Supernatural?”

Know Then Thyself

by Alexander Pope

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks to little, or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself, abus’d or disabus’d;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

Scan Thyself

For millenia philosophers have exhorted the seeker of wisdom to “Know thyself”. In the future when  functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Quantitative Electroencephalography (QEEG) are miniaturized enough to fit into an inexpensive helmet that pugs into a home computer, the best method to “know thyself” may be to “scan thyself”.

Now scientists read your mind better than you can

* Scan predicted 75 percent of behavior

* People were right about themselves just half the time

WASHINGTON, June 22, 2010 (Reuters) – Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself…

They found a way to interpret “real time” brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen would actually use sunscreen during the following week.

The scans were more accurate than the volunteers were, Emily Falk and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles reported in the Journal of Neuroscience.

“Many people ‘decide’ to do things, but then don’t do them,” Matthew Lieberman, a professor of psychology who led the study, added in a statement.

But with functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI, Falk and colleagues were able to go beyond good intentions to predict actual behavior.

fMRI Image

Falk’s team recruited 20 young men and women for their experiment. While in the fMRI scanner they read and listened to messages about the safe use of sunscreen, mixed in with other messages so they would not guess what the experiment was about.

“A week later we did a surprise follow up to find out whether they had used sunscreen,” Falk said in a telephone interview.

About half the volunteers had correctly predicted whether they would use sunscreen. The research team analyzed and re-analyzed the MRI scans to see if they could find any brain activity that would do better.

Activity in one area of the brain, a particular part of the medial prefrontal cortex, provided the best information.

“From this region of the brain, we can predict for about three-quarters of the people whether they will increase their use of sunscreen beyond what they say they will do,” Lieberman said.

“It is the one region of the prefrontal cortex that we know is disproportionately larger in humans than in other primates,” he added. “This region is associated with self-awareness, and seems to be critical for thinking about yourself and thinking about your preferences and values.”

Are you a Bigfoot, or a lightfoot?

Quick Carbon Footprint Calculator
My carbon footprint is about 3100 kg/year. What’s yours?

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It would take three earths for everyone to live at my level of resource consumption (ecological footprint).

Supernatural? No. SUPER NATURE!

“Browse through any respectable science journal and you may read some articles claiming benefits and others finding faults with organic food. There is no consensus about it. As a consequence, we cannot make strong statements about organic food being “superior” to conventionally grown food, at least as far as nutrition and consumer safety are concerned.”

I would not really bet on the comparative nutritional value or contaminant level of any given batch of “organic” vs “conventional” food because the variables are so site-specific, crop-specific, and season-specific. Cultivation, processing, handling and environmental conditions vary widely for both organic and standard products.

However, I have to tell a story.

I have never had a lab analysis done of the nutrient composition of my own organic produce. However, I have never seen or tasted better beets, corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, cabbages, carrots, etc. than my own bio-intensive organic garden once produced.

Lady Bug

Despite initial disappointments, in my third or fourth year of subsistence gardening I was producing satisfactory produce comparable to what I could get at market. I was experimenting with every known method of organic and biological cultivation. By the sixth or seventh year my vegetables were incredible. Unbelievable. People were often dumb-struck by the appearance, fragrance, texture, and taste of my crops. I am satisfied, without a lab analysis, that their nutritional value had become quite superior to anything money could buy.

It was known to me that epidemiological studies had shown that the local “Hillbilly” population on the Cumberland Plateau tended to be deficient in things like boron, manganese, magnesium and zinc and this was suspected to be caused by some corresponding soil deficiencies.

Supplementing the boron and manganese in my compost had an immediate and profound effect on my corn and potatoes. The corn leaves and stalks turned from yellowish green one year to a deep emerald color the next (the seed of the earlier crop was used for the following one) and they now towered above my head. The potatoes (also from the same parent stock) doubled in size above and below ground and were free of the “flea beetles” that turned the previous year’s top growth to green lace.

I gradually added additional trace minerals to my compost which was made mainly of mixed hardwood forest litter, wild herbs, garden wastes, and local manures. I didn’t turn, dig, hoe or rake my permanent raised beds, rows or hills after the third or fourth year but simply applied year-old compost to the top of the soil in quantities sufficient to smother most weeds until my intermixed crops closed ranks and created their own micro-climates in the private underworld between their foliage and the soil.

Living Soil

The life in the soil became my main preoccupation, and after several years I could plunge my arm straight down into the soil to the elbow. I cultivated the worm population to very high levels and introduced milky spore, ladybugs, preying mantis and parasitic wasps. I applied less and less rotenone, pyrethrin, etc. in order to avoid harming my beneficial insects, lizzards, toads, etc. Eventually the only insect problem I had was the squash stem borers but they were easy enough to remove “surgically” with my pen knife.

As the garden meshed all together into a sort of fruit, flower, herb and vegetable-bearing jungle paradise, the intense colors, textures, shapes and smells of the crowded, intermixed mass of plants created a sort of sensory pulsation or undulation that could be nearly overwhelming.

I am pretty sure that no satisfactory scientific studies have ever been done on a garden such as that and that agricultural scientists are profoundly ignorant (at least in first-hand knowledge), of such a climax ecosystem. Incredibly diverse and complex, self-maintaining, micro-climate generating ecosystems like this probably once existed in the “wild” before the fist ancient forests were felled and the first prairie sods were turned upside down. Now they are known only to a few of us old, gray-bearded naturalists whom nature initiated into some small mysteries of her occult world.

But my main point, which you probably will be unable to believe just on my say-so, unfortunately, is about nutrition.

As a result of living almost entirely from that garden and the wild plants in the area for a number of years I grew about an inch taller and gained enormous strength and vitality. I was transformed from a rather sickly, medium-statured weakling into a kind of big Paul Bunyan who could lift 400 lb logs onto my giant saw buck. Though I left those mountains 30 years ago and have spent most of the time since in cities and towns and corporate office suites and have never worked out in gyms or anything like that, I still have the near-miraculous state of health which that garden bestowed on me. Whereas before my gardening days neither I nor anyone else ever thought of me as a “big” man, since the garden period everyone calls me a “big guy” and I have to wear XXL clothes. Though I only weigh 190, my shoulders are very broad and my chest and neck are big despite my near-total lack of any exercise at all.

The explanation? I suspect that the super-nutrition which I no doubt received 30 years ago actually transformed something in my basic epi-genetic makeup.

Mad science experiments…

So there to your chemical engineers, lab-coated pundits, and science writers who think they know something about deep ecology and human nutrition.

Aside from the nutrition issues there are some important distinctions between 1) organic food (produced with natural, sustainable, and environmentally safe methods), 2) conventionally grown food (which almost always involves the application of synthetic chemicals to the soil, the air, the surrounding ecosystems, and to the food itself), and 3) genetically engineered food crops that are released into the natural ecosystem.  There is sufficient evidence to suggest that synthetic pesticides and other chemicals can harm the soil, the environment, and human health. The burden must fall on manufacturers to prove the safety of their products beyond a reasonable doubt, with research as rigorous and comprehensive as that required for pharmaceuticals, before they are placed on the market and introduced into the biosphere. This is especially true of genetically engineered products where chunks of DNA are cut and pasted between different species or even between animals and plants–plants which may then cast their new synthetic, hybrid DNA to the four winds to spread right around the planet.

These synthetic chemicals and DNA molecules can and do wind up in the blood, the guts, and the delicate brains of human infants and children.

Poor Richard

The end is nigh

I have five acres of clover and wildflowers and I’ve seen about two honeybees so far this year.

According to the Science News article Honeybee death mystery deepens:

“The latest nationwide survey, of 2009-2010 winter losses, revealed more than 30 percent of hives were lost for a variety of reasons.”

One third of all hives lost in a single year!

The wild bees are affected, too. I haven’t seen any press about it, but my clover used to be swarming with wild bees.

That means the end of human civilization is about three years away.

BTW there are two ponds adjoining my property and I’ve only seen two frogs and three salamanders this year. The birds, squirrels, and rabbits seem to be doing fine so far, though.

Furthermore, a thriving 15 year old hemlock died this spring for no apparent reason.

Poor Richard