All lives within an energy system.

Why NOMA is Soma - night time story for sleepy kids.My first piece not about a song.

Embodiment of foraging and hunting without the rest of your life using Oil from war zones.

I was washing dishes for the coin of the realm today, because, I’m a little confused about working for myself (I’m a permaculture designer/landscape gardener usually). Presently throwing my heart’s blood against the wall of music that wants to escape my flesh, leaving me stuffing about and basically going broke on my own time. When the opportunity to turn up and just work came (for less money), I jumped. I won’t jerk others around as much as myself it appears. Someone says work starts at 5 - I’m there. Say it to myself and I’m like ‘YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!’. Idiot.

Now I was thinking, as you do, when performing mindless tasks, that there is an attempt in hospitality and many other industries these days to minimise waste and/or recycle. This led me to consider for not the first time, the false economies going on. Things like being asked to save a small sheet of grease-paper by pre-washing it, running it through the dishwasher, air drying it on a tray high above the oven then folding it later and putting it away for re-use. The energy cost of all this purely in BTU’s (British thermal units - a measure of energy) is much higher than making the paper. Just heating the water in the dishwasher would do it, but all the labour and other costs just accumulate.

Now as boring as what I have said so far, it involves you on your screen, my dear reader and Tesla and the band Rage Against The Machine. And that gas field off the coast of Gaza. And Memecoins.

Everything lives in the energy system. The reason NOMA is the most famous restaurant in the world is because it sells to perfection the sweet Mary-Jane dream of being outside the Energy System. Good cook? Yes. Incredible work ethic? Tick. True story. Yeah Nah.

It thrives as an idea of Utopia. But it’s survival depends on massive unseen amounts of fossil fuel from the Energy System. We drink the cool aid, that locally sourced food that is only ‘foraged’ is the future and where we are headed - as good people who #care. But of course. Except for a few rather annoying details…

Every single chef, knife, customer, bench and structural component of the restaurant is made from fossil fuels. Yes the customers are made of fossil fuels. The Haber-Bosche process is the synthesising of natural gas and conversion into fertiliser. We eat oil. And thus, of oil we are made. The process is also the only thing that truly got the Germans any chance in World War 1. So the oil is the living and the dying it seems.

The UN, the WEF and all the other amazingly intelligent Brahmin dickheads out there are pushing some version of this NOMA idea within their cult. Although we get the bug version. I reckon a lot of them believe the fairly tale too - that we will save humanity by getting back to nature. Zero Carbon baybeeee, but don’t look at the mining and embodied energy cost of an EV or the energy bill at any restaurant. Just gotta kill more deplorables, ESG the bejeezus out of every business, get the enclosures act 2.0 under way via the Natural Asset Capital land grab and KEEP FLYING OUR PRIVATE JETS TO EAT AT NOMA.

This doesn’t end well. It’s based on lies about our energy system. Our system is now in Beast Mode. The harvesting of extremely dense energy sources over the last few hundred years, beginning with coal then going full spaz with light crude oil is about the projection of power in space and time. If you can harvest more energy from the environment then you can go from club to sword. Then from sword to gun, gun to drone and drone to AI commando robot.

What this means to little old you and me is potentially one personal drone-robot on your shoulder at all times making sure you are being a good citizen. Surely not? The reader doth protest. This is more dystopian chicken little rubbish from yet another hyper-vigilant nutter. I don’t think so. The whole reason for the mad rush in cryptocurrencies, the A.I. avalanche, the nueralinky-dink and the plethora of other tech is the tragedy of the commons writ large. I’ve said it once and I will say it again - the technosphere requires the biosphere to live. We need to destroy whole ecologies and whole mountains for copper ‘n’ cobalt. We need to strip-mine your attention for our algorithms. We need to mediate sexual endeavours with swipe right and credit cards. Saruman was cutting down the ancient woods to project power as does Elon with the mining and hegemonic force that provides the raw materials to feed the engine of his interstellar dreams. Which are always ‘out there’. Never ‘in here’.

Where we go now is onwards. We will mine more and more coal. We will expand more fronts in our 8 front war (hello Syria).

Our Optimus Robots will make shopping trips to feed the wagecuck. Our cars will become driverless. Our food is lab grown. Our music is AI augmented. We will get rare earth metals from Mars. Correction Rare Mars Metals. To do this we will take a giant dump in the nature toilet. Elon sees earth the way Britain saw the rainforests and estuaries of Sydney harbour - a place for a city. To get to Mars. If you imagine every city in the world. That was the yummiest most beautiful spot, AND most habitable, before automated toilets, storm water drains and billboards. It’s like yeast in sugar. Sure it makes booze but kills all the bacteria when the sugar is gone.

Then there is always the potential for a massive depression I guess. Now I think of it, seeing that FartCoin is now market capping at 200 million US Dollars it’s possible.

Tulip bubbles are a much classier way to pop bubbles than FartCoin.

Realistically speaking nature does this as well. Hamlet knew it too. ‘A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.’ This is why we pray or meditate or contemplate. Somewhere we know it is forms, folding in on themselves in a type of fractal madness that is not the changeless spirit. At least I register that and they the closest words to the mysterious something that is Self watching the show.

What is the point of this post? I guess to just reflect on being real about the world not being saveable and to look out for bullshit - it is seemingly everywhere. I am always trying to save the world with actions (used to recycle everything for example) and #truth, but I think Jesus said two things with relevance to this.

1. You don’t water the desert. You leave.

2. Be in the world but not of the world.

There is much dualistic thinking about the state of the world, and I am a part of that no doubt, but I would like to look at some things which don’t seem immediately obvious to people - being where we are in the arc of ‘techno-progress’. Things that imply a time of more ‘oneness’ of experience for earlier peoples. The energy system that Aboriginal Australians existed within was different from the European and Chinese for example. The highly fertile and newly minted endowment of fresh soil (volcanic in the case of Japan and China etc and freshly ground mountains from glacial retreat for much of Europe and elsewhere) provided nutrient dense food. Added to that, and of more critical importance was the reliability of rain. In areas where rain was not reliable rivers made it so (in the case of Egypt where the Nile runs through at least 8 other countries and does not run dry). You can set up an agriculture with reliable rain. Then you can store seed and food at volume. Then you can stay where you are. Then you can make weapons to protect the booty. It continues up till now with the tech arms race.

But what if the largest rivers in the entire continent periodically stop running? What then, on a land where almost every conceivable plant burns so frequently under hot and dry conditions that their seed will not even germinate without burning? I’ll tell you what happens - co-operation and strict culture. Movement. Very frequent movement. No carrying swords for you. But most importantly, with regards to looking into reduced incentives for separated sense of self - a deep connection with the state of nature around us. Mushroom-tripping level pattern recognition. Continual response to cues.

You can’t have grain storage large enough to consciously stick around and build populations and structures that would tip the energy system into a cultural state change where you make castles and dungeons. There are cultural advantages to this that held for a long time - but like a double-edged sword - held you back, but only at the end. What I mean is Aboriginal Australians could trade if they wanted, even though Gondwana is harder to reach than Europe was to the Africans (just 15 kms to Spain). But Aboriginal culture was absolutely 100% totally and utterly impossible to conquer for tens of thousands of years. Think for a second, about the innumerable shifts of power, culture and language of the Northern Hemisphere. Then imagine NONE of that happened exogenously to Australians. Never. That we know of. But how could it? Blackfellas be like - ‘Sure come in and take it asshole - there it is. You take half the bay and the whole peninsula and we’ll just wait over here and see how you go. If you survive long enough to give us the shits AT ALL - you are toast’. Literal toast. No culture ever knew fire like indigenous Australians. That was the old energy system though. Pretty much every early explorer to Oz found the opposite that greeted the same in the US. Not liberty but Death in a desert. Probably underpins the deep cultural communism here. Rugged independence is not a thing here. We don’t have pecan, chestnut

wild paw paw, blue berries etc. Didn’t matter if you had 20 horses and 15 men and all the stored food you could handle. You just died. There is a giant monument to a bunch of racists in my town that didn’t think to ask the people who had lived here since well before the pyramids for advice or help. Guess what . Dead. Starvey-to-deathy. #soproud.

The old energy system had a smooth round eggshell protecting the life inside. The new one has cracked out of that shell and I fear it is a baby dragon - devourer of worlds. Or like Alien. Toxic blood running through it’s highly efficient and parasitic killing machine of a body.

The point of this post is just to be honest. I’m not telling people what to do. You do NOMA. You do Mars. Me I’ll use a few electronic instruments and a computer because I live in an energy system. I’m still gunna keep planting a shit load of trees and kiss my wife and two boys. Still gunna cook on my wood stove. Sill going to resist like the good luddite I am. Still gunna grow food and still gunna ponder this batshit crazy world we live in. I’m also still going to forage but not going to fly my private jet and employ an army workaholic chefs to eat here in my dirt and straw house. No I won’t be eating at NOMA unless someone shouts me.

Peace.

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