Luxury Agriculture

I've always loved greenhouses. I like spending time in them rather than working in them, so maybe I really like botanical conservatories. Chicago has a gem in the Garfield Park Conservatory, especially now, when you can walk from arctic air into a lush tropical fern room.

I like the greenhouse look, panes of glass overhead, arrayed in minimalist or ornate splendor. I like the controlled chaos of greenery. I like the artisanal nature of horticulture, attempting quality rather than quantity. Sounds like I want a greenhouse.

It's starting to look like we will need greenhouses, as global warming takes a toll on our agriculture. More specifically luxury agriculture. Things like chocolate, coffee, vanilla, etc. Not only is it becoming a problem to grow them, but the industrial agriculture aproach destroys the environment.

Case in point: Brazil has destroyed 20% of the Amazon rain forest to grow vast monocultures of coffee, among other things. A similar thing happened in West Africa for cocoa. Sustainable agriculture of these crops work, but you have to have a forest to sustain them (coffee and cacao being under canopy plants). 

A few years ago I read a story about a greenhouse in Iceland growing bananas. I found a more current article and most greenhouses in Iceland are at the "greenhouse capitol" of Hveragerdi. They grow tropical things like bananas, coffee, cocoa, but they don't do so well. Probably being grown in isolation from their prefered habitat, with all their little forest pals and fungi and mushroom networks is not so good for them. Kind of like being raised on the Moon.

For all the land in Iceland they haven;t built many greenhouses. Maybe because of the elves. The huldrafolk, described as looking like us, only taller and thinner, want their volcanic wasteland just the way nature wanted it . And Icelanders agree. But it made we wonder who does have the most greenhouses? I'm gonna bet Canada even though I know it's China. Yeah, it's China, the Jupiter of the Solar Greenhouse system. Followed by Spain, Italy, Mexico. The Netherlands is interesting, at number 9, their Westland green house complexes make them the 2nd largest food producer in the world.

But I'm interested in the luxuries like coffee and chocolate/ And vanilla. I'd probably nned a Garfield Park sized conservatory for the rain forest I'd need for proper growth. And all the critters as well. Bees like coffee buds, but cacao is fertilized by a tiny biting fly no longer than a few millimeters. I don't know what fertilizes vanilla. Edmond Albius figured it out. Humans are now vanilla's pollinators.

China's Century, if it can keep it

My elder brother called Thanksgiving evening and at one point he asked "Is China kicking our ass?"

Short answer: yes, since around 2008. Longer answer: "It's China's century, if they can keep it. If they can get rich enough before they become old".

Item: During the Russo-Japanese war at the turn of the last century, Russia  naval forces suffered humiliating defeat at the hands of the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima, patially due to technology. The coal fired Imperial Russian Navy suffered an 18,000 mile journey from the Baltic sea. Lack of coaling stations often meant almost piling mountains of coal piled up on decks. The modern Japanese ships were oil burners. The Japanese fleet outnumbered the Russians, but their battleships were faster and more manuevarable than the lumbering Russian dreadnoughts.

Item: At the peak of the USA Empire, 1945, US manufacturing was producing one German Luftwaffe (an entire national air force) every 18 days. 

Item: Year upon year, China graduates 3-5 times the number of science and math students than the US does. This isn't just scale, China has a higher participation rate.

Item: US astronauts were stranded on the ISS for 9 months due to lack of trust in the Boeing manufactured space capsule. Chinese astronauts were picked up after their own capsule suffered a lack of trust due to space debris. The new, stranded, astronauts received a new capsule in 8 days.

Personal Item: Construction rehabbing the bridge on my route to and from work over Hwy 53 if it matters. Destruction began in April, and only now are they close to finishing. China would have built the bridge, had it collapse, and rebuilt it in half the time.

So, yeah, China is kicking our ass. It has hegemony over all of east Asia and is pushing pushing pushing the US Navy to move back one island chain at a time. They will succeed if current shipbuilding trends continue. Taiwan? All they have to do is wait. The USA is at the end of a long supply line in defense of Taiwan. We are not so global anymore, if we ever were, despite all the bases everywhere.

The USA still has advantages, imagination, improvisation, a pretty solid high tech research environment, good education institutions and R&D labs. And toys. All of this is being laid waste by xenophobic imbeciles. Science set back 25 years while China surges ahead. Immigration, the influx of new talent and ingenuity, is another US advantage, sadly being diminihsed by short dick thinkers and that xenophobia again.

China has big problems just like us. The whole slavery thing is kind of moot. Their forced labor camps versus our treatment of immigrants and poors. But as long as they keep the money coming in, they have time before the population ages out. Ironic that China and India were the workshops of the world 500 years ago, and here they are now.

Here's a more comprehensive link to China's Century.

The thing about empires, are that empires eventually fall. Nothing lasts, but nothing ever really goes away. The imprint is there. I think that's a spooky action quantum thing maybe.

So if empires fall, maybe try being something besides an empire.  

Oh yeah I also got into the Little But Bold show. Titled Xenophile, but I'm open to better names. Catch might be a good one.

We Should Be Here

 In my last entry I said that Theia, the Mars sized planet that crashed into proto-Earth, was from outsaide the snow line, and formed with lots of water. Turns out, new chemical analysis indicates Theia was an inner solar system neighbor. So, I was wrong. We didn't get water from Theia. And we aren't the feak show planet I pictured.

Or maybe we are. Still a freak show of a planet. A glorious and magnificent one of a kind freak show. I'm good with that.

We had our first big snow and if you have never made a naked snow angel, well, you should at least once. My snow angels have spectacular manly buttocks. 90th percentile buttocks.

I have a feeling this is going to be a snowy winter, and so I have to adjust my enthusiasm towards that. Not that I have to. As a Northern Maritime Barbarian, I thrive in a winter wonderland. As I recall, the last big snowy Chicago winter, 2013, was a fucking blast.

We did another bronze pour. I include this picture because this is how you are supposed to pour , choking the cup, no old man piss trickle. Someone suggested I get a shirt that says that. I also want a shirt that says "Food! Where is food?" 

This was my post-pour meal. Yum.

We Shouldn't Be Here

More and better evidence suggests the Moon's origin was a collision event. The scenario is the proto-Earth was struck by a Mars-sized planetoid called Theia. I don't why proto-Earth doesn't have a name.

Large chunks of an alien material are found within the Earth. Rock samples with an entirely differeent chemistry, proto-Earth rocks, have been found. Not surprising the way the early solar system (or any system) has stuff flying everywhere. So, what about proto-Earth?

Find the mass of proto-Earth. Mass of  Proto-Earth + Theia = Earth + Moon. The Moon is 1/6 Earth's mass. Theia was theorized to be Mars sized and so 1/2 of Earth Mass. So, X +.5 = 1.666, subtract from both sides and the mass of Proto-Earth was 1.16, slightly heavier than Earth, heavier still due to a lot of debris escaped. Collisions models suggest not just one strike but multiples from debris before things settled down into what we got now.

If there had been no collision, what would be here? Well, let's talk about the snow line. Infant stars lighting up a baby solar system produce heat and light that keeps volatile chemical compounds and molecules from condensing, volatile things like water. Planets formed within the snow line have only chemically bound water. Planets formed outside the snow line have lots of water.

So a heavy metal planet like Mercury or Venus, a bigger sister to Venus, is what our old girl looks like. 

No life.

If I were an alien, I would not be expecting Earth to be there. Oh sure, it is not an abomination or anomaly, but still quite rare and easy to dismiss or overlook. We shouldn't be here at all.

Other things. I finally mounted a bronze piece I did about two or three years ago. My face sitting at the bottom of my locker. What I mean by that is I did a plaster cast of my face as a class demo, and then used it a few times in slip cast clay and wax-to-bronze before it fell apart. It didn't produce a very good likeness for a rushed demo so I had fun with the casts instead. 

Our Founder. 2025 Bronze. 

For reference, here I am currently.

The Gusto

Yesterday I go to the grocery store. I walk in the cart vestibule and I glance to my left to find a little old lady. She was trapped behind the electric scooters, no doubt tried to navigate in to get one and she trapped herself. 

"You need help. Here" I said and dragged a scooter forward so she could get out.

"I want to use one", she said. I unplugged and pushed out the scooter she wanted. Once she was in, she just stared at the scooter and then at me. I showed her where the power switch was, turned it on, and then showed her how to use the grip handles to steer. 

"Bless you!" she said.

"Off you go!"  I replied.

I didn't have the heart to tell her I am a heathen.

Here's a map of Pascal's dilemna but not really.

I am squarely in the Gusto. Life observation, deep reading, and taking hundreds of hits of acid have put me in the position of No God/ No Soul, the Gusto. Go for the gusto.

I am an atheist and aspiritus. There is no God and I have no soul. Nevertheless I hold in simultaneous knowledge that the univserse is alive. And though I may not have a personality beyond death, others might. So I do have holy and sacred things, things that I myself have chosen. And strangely enough my choices align with the universe. And that is why I call myself a heathen. 

The Big Squeeze continued: Vibe Decline

My brother mentioned to me he had been listening to old Neil Young records and it depressed him. I said, well, Neil did write some depressing stuff but you should recall the time when he wrote and recorded them. The 1970s. 

I've been reading about the British Raj in a book called The Anarchy. Dalrymple, the auhor, spoke about the sense of dread in England in 1780. The East India Company seemed on the verge of collapse in India, and the Crown had just lost the thirteen colonies. Parliament felt it was the decline of the British Empire, but it turned out to be vibe decline. The Empire still had a good 120 years left in it.

Back to the 1970s. Many thought it the end of American hegemony. The Long Boom was over. The Oil Embargo and Energy Crisis. Soviets surpassing us in space accomplishments. Manufacturing threats from rebuilt countries like Japan and Germany. Our own infrastructure mostly from the 19th century, despite the build out of WWII. Corruption and crisis in both big business and government. Stagflation. Sure looked depressing, but it was a vibe decline.The US empire probably has got another 20 years just on inertia alone.

The question is, is the US currently going through a vibe decline or a real decline?

Over at Economics From the Top Down, Blair Fix has an essay entitled The Half Life of  Empire that suggests, yes the US is in decline, and peaked in 1945. China overtook us in 2009, and soon India will join China in supremacy. According to Blair, the halcyon days are over, never to return.

Ironic, considering that in 1780, at the tipping point of the Industrial Revolution, China and India were two of the richest nations on Earth, manufacturing perhaps 40% of global product, most importantly textiles. Mass produced in parallel process cottage industries, and also textiles of the finest quality. Consider also that the bulk of the British Royal Navy's sailing ships were built (quite well!) in India.

The build out of satanic mills and power looms and spinning machines in England (funded by the spoils of India), soon wiped the Asian industries out; at least for the low end stuff.

And now China and India are again the workshops of the world. Does this bode a possible future for the US?

Pobably not. Given we may be in the Spike.

The Big Squeeze

Searching for title phrase in the old memory hut called this blog, I thought I had entitled an essay, but the earliest use of the term is from a January 4th 2013 entry: More 2013 Prognostications: A Lot of Negativity

I've expressed humanity's dismal chances before and this essay considers The Big Squeeze in terms of latitude loss of habitat in a warming world. We are heading for Hothouse Earth or are already in it. Hothouse weather sucks, Icehouse weather sucks, Interglacial Just Right. Well, we are out of the natural interglacial cycle now and the squeeze is coming from every direction.

Consider in Hothouse North America, we lose arable land to the north and south. Southern creeping desertification, and miasmic swamps with toxic metal streams and rivers to the north. Farming moves north but only so far.  Certainly not the scraped clean Canadian shield to plant crops, and the fertile valleys in the Canadian west are already at 100% use. So, a big squeeze.

It is fitting that Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The Gulf of Mexico was incredibly lush, vibrant and a great well of life. Sadly, most of the USA's fertile soils lie at the bottom of this gulf, agricultural runoff feuling dead zones of greater and greater size. Toxic industrial waste and every form of offal and filth has turned the lively and lovely Gulf of Mexico into the grisly dead Gulf of America.

Bug Apocalypse already in progress. Only our vermin survive nicely. Soylent Green overbudget and behind schedule. Another squeeze.

Fresh water, more specically fresh aquifer water is dangerously low throughout the Continental west and central plains. The best example of land subsidence is California's Central Valley with area drops of up to 40 feet. Meaning subsurface rock is getting squeezed like a sponge. The problem is the water is not replenished, and in fact goes to waste into a rising ocean. Many aquifers will be gone in five years

How many more squeezes? Science itself is creating more and more affluent people, with larger and larger appetites, so much so that just the past 10 years has used up more shit than the past 100, and the last 20 years equals the same amount of planetary devastation as the last ten thousand. And the next 20 years a million times faster still.

Can't really put the blame on Boomers for this one, huh kids? You complain about the state of the world we left you and yet you eat it in front of us. Cake of the world on petulant frowns, munching away