How Farming Failed Humanity

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People, like other apes, used to roam the land and forage their food and water. Life in the jungle, for the experienced hunter, has all the comforts we need. Although most people live off farming culture - industrial-farming today, there are still many jungle-folk who keep the old ways, showing how it all works.

Farming has its benefits. Planting, harvesting, and storing food, give people security and abundance. Nature can be erratic, and farming lets people tolerate it better. Especially so in the drylands of the Middle-East, where agriculture became wide-spread.

On the other hand, the cost of stored foods is your freedom. Once a farmer, you must guard your storage, and continue working the fields. You could revert into a foraging lifestyle in theory, but in practice this is not possible, in most places.

Mushroom Foraging.
(Click the picture to see the workshop schedule.)

Not only are you unskilled in foraging, everyone around you are farmers, occupying all the lands near-by. Forests, which are crucial for foraging, are normally felled by farmers - in order to vacate new lands for farming.

(Look in Google Maps, Satellite view, and notice how many lands are squarish farms - useless to a forager.)

Also, storage allows taxation, which means that any attempt to revert into foraging, will leave you nontaxable. And a person who does not pay his taxes, gets treated very badly, indeed. Even an attempt at mixing the two lifestyles is likely to leave you without enough to pay taxes.

Vacant land has also become inaccessible, as it is either held by those who tax you, or they require great payments and taxes, for anyone to live on it. Even the raising of animals & grazing are now taxable, and require costly licensing, and so on.

You must not become dependent on the charity of those who have food, when you do not. The freedom of having your basic needs is at the core of all freedom.

Practice finding & eating edible plants around you. Learn how to process them, if necessary, and do it.

Practice some basic survival skills, like rope-making, and shelter building. Spend regular periods out in the wild, getting familiar with raw nature, removing false biases about being outdoors.

Nobody has to give up modern life, to become a good forager. It is a skill worth having, and a skill as fundamental to your freedom as much as reading & writing, or swimming.

Why City Societies Fail

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How often do you interact with wild animals? Wild forests? City life is about people. People all the time. Daily. Everywhere. No forests. No wild animals; excluding some few city-comfortable birds, and the small hardy bugs.

Delphi, Greece in ruins.
Click the photo to learn more about it.

A society centered around humans, ignoring other life, leads itself to detachment from nature, and soon-after collapse. Self-destruction. City-states thousands of years back had suffered from this same mistake, when they over-populated, relying on a local river. When that river dried up, the people had to disperse, trying to survive the chaos.

If not a natural disaster, then a collision of cities. Overpopulated societies become uncaring for the smaller part of their members, as people are in abundance, and become an easy sacrifice for further growth. Massacres ensue.

However, this does not mean that societies must be small and distant. A city is a lump of people under single rule. In contrast, a collection of independent towns can hold as many people, in a similar area of land, yet function entirely differently!

Societies can be endlessly vast, active, and benefiting. All that, without sacrificing nature. A town lush with trees. Streets that allow wild animals to roam. A daily life that does not lock people inside concrete boxes, or demand that they sit in tin boxes - driving for hours.

Next time you ponder about society or civilization, drop that city image off your mind. Instead, imagine a wild lush nature, with life-loving people, and an array of technology that only reinforces this.

Victims of the Internet

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You know who you are

Lingering in corners

Tweeting in the shower

In your head

4Chan makes you suffer

Facebook turns you on

You are the victims of the net

That grabs us all

Click the pic to see me read the poem!~

A bagful of a pill

Depression is your ill

Lusting for the click

That makes the trick

And you tick...

Victims of the net

Absurd what you forget

Your life is turning bleak

Will you have... no regret?

An Attachable Webcam Lens

It is not a widely known trick that all cameras, that means webcams and cell-phone cameras as well, can change their attributes with an extra lens. Yes! Just like a normal photography camera.

I am now very much enjoying a cheap & effective, and easy to setup, 0.67X wide-angle lens on my Logitech C310 webcam. It lets me locate the webcam close-up, yet show a nice wide view of my self and my surroundings. It uses a sticky circle part, which holds the lens itself with magnetic force. Perfect.

Click the image to see the item on eBay.

Very nice. Very recommended.