ecosophia | Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 64

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Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 64

As we proceed through the second year of these open posts, it's pretty clear that the official narrative is cracking as the toll of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines rises steadily and the vaccines themselves demonstrate their total uselesness at preventing Covid infection or transmission. It's still important to keep watch over the mis-, mal- and nonfeasance of our self-proclaimed health gruppenfuehrers, and the disastrous results of the Covid mania, but I think it's also time to begin thinking about what might be possible as the existing medical industry reels under the impact of its own self-inflicted injuries.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.

3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.

4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

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Could we include for this class of objects features like "ability to influence the quarterly bottom line" or "ability to claim a patent" or "ability to increase research budgets" or "overlap with bioweapon research", etc etc etc? Or are these confounding factors? ;) (feature or bug?)

Murmuration

EXCELLENT question. And thank you for participating!

As I've said to Mark, one of the things I am trying to "plumb" is the murk behind the words people use when they fight over stakes that matter to them, but they don't say out loud what those stakes are.

So, from the marketing point of view, I can see all of those having an "obvious" place. But perhaps, not such an obvious place out here in the hinterlands where we ordinary folk live and argue... :)

The answer to all is "yes, and" ;-)

I think of Scotlyn's questions like ethnoecology. The classification scheme we used from the western science background was Linnaean - plants, animals and soil species based on morphology, DNA.

Mark's vaccine definition fits this most closely.

But the indigenous groups would have entirely different classification systems. Usually based on function, and cutting entirely through or across species as we knew them.

I could say Bebb's willow, and that was one species, with a cluster of traits distinct from Pacific willow, and the dozens of other willows. But they might call all willows "willow" because they have the same functions (baskets, medicine), or group those two "basket willow" because they are for baskets, then fifteen other species "weir willow" (non-salmon dependent people would lack this category entirely), another "pain willow", etc.

The men might call the species one name (bow willow), and the women another, or two: in spring, pain willow before bud, then after leaf out, basket willow.

This differentiation of knowledge based on function led in part to how westerners were able to assume everyone else was just a dumb savage. Anthropologists used to only talk to men, the men only had words for the half dozen plants they used, while the women had all the complex lore for hundreds (in soil science, since the women do farming or horticulture exclusively almost everywhere else, this was extremely stark - the world lost almost all indigenous soil knowledge during colonization this way.)

So the answer is really having to apply all the definitions depending on the situation at hand. If you're collecting seed and breeding, Linnaean definition is required, but if you need to use the plant, you need all the others.

This is fascinating, Hearthspirit. Thank you. A great deal to think about here that goes well beyond the immediate topic. How naming things relates to their use... and their namer. I will be thinking on this quite seriously.

"Anthropologists used to only talk to men, the men only had words for the half dozen plants they used, while the women had all the complex lore for hundreds (in soil science, since the women do farming or horticulture exclusively almost everywhere else, this was extremely stark - the world lost almost all indigenous soil knowledge during colonization this way.)"

could you point me to some sources of the indigenous women's knowledge of soil science? i'm trying to grow food in a pretty hostile (to most plants) environment, so any tips on soil amendments would be most welcome. most of what i have to work with comes from us accursed men.

Not the OP, but I have family who has heavily amended their soil with biochar, and after a few years, the results are as miraculous as advertised.

after doing a little research, i was surprised how easy biochar is to make. i am planning on doing it asap, although where i live we have almost constant no burn days. i'm not against "bending" the rules to make some small amounts, however!

Yeah, there are a lot of ways to make it, but it all boils down to this basically: you need to control the oxygen levels during the burn. The idea stemmed from the discovery of Terra Preta, which was made across the Amazon in as low tech a way as you can imagine. Now there are high tech retorts that will pump the stuff out. My sense is the feedstock doesn’t really matter. As long as it has carbon, you are good. (Note to mafiosos trying to get rid of bodies: invest in biochar production facilities!).

Once it’s made, mix with compost to activate. The gist of it is that biochar is covered in porous surface area, which microbes and mycelia love to inhabit. Much like ocean reserves, which pump fish out into the surrounding ocean, biochar does the same for soil. It’s also a fantastic sponge. It will retain water in the soil for longer, after nearby soil has dried out.

It really is a miraculous, low-tech technique. I have yet to see a downside. Of note: it takes a while being in the soil before the flywheel gets going. Maybe a couple years before you really see the effects. Also, biochar converts have the same vibe as crypto converts, so beware :)

Murmuration

OTOH, if being persnickety about oxygen levels makes it complicated enough that you won't get around to actually doing it... then it doesn't work!

I think at least some of that "optimizing" literature comes down to marketing for companies that manufacture the stuff. What my actual gardening-in-sand-in-the-humid-subtropics experience has been is, *any* charcoal can be used to improve sandy soil. And the charcoal I can make from fallen branches I gather myself for free and burn in a trench is the charcoal I can afford and will actually use, which makes it the best biochar... even if some fancy-schmancy charcoal retort would make better-quality charcoal. It's not like if you do it wrong, it'll be *bad* for soil ;) Like... maybe possibly not-quite-as-good. That's all.

I had only looked at it as a student for African and Asian agricultural traditions, and that was ~20 years ago, so I don't know anything off the top off my head, and if I did, it wouldn't be applicable to North America. I know of a project for soil mapping using indigenous Coast Salish methods, but I don't know that would help in your biome, and I don't think she's published anything practically useful yet. A quick search shows me that there is a lot of published material correlating western and traditional soil classification and knowledge coming out, so I would not be surprised if you search for your region, you get something, or something useful for your biome. I'm also sure the info coming out of the organic and permaculture movements from the accursed men is just fine, now ;-)

Have you looked into biodynamics? Michael Pollan writes about when he tried it in Second Nature, and that it was the most bafflingly successful thing he tried, as he had to admit he could not explain why the weird stuff worked at all. I haven't tried it, myself, but if the conventional knowledge about organic amendments didn't seem to be helping, that's what I'd do.

thanks for the link. i will see what i can use.

When it comes to soil, be open to woo woo. A mentor was into biodynamics, burying the horn and all that. One summer we were trying to clear two dozen beds of nut grass. The devil made that plant. We double dug all the beds with spade and fork, carefully sifted all the soil, pulling all the grass we could find, by hand, and at the end, he had us burn all the nut sedge and sprinkle the ash around the edge of the garden. Damn if it didn’t work! I mean, the back breaking labor was part of it, I’m sure, but the juju was part of it too FOR SURE.

Murmuration

i have nut sedge to deal with, and agree wholeheartedly that the devil made it. i'm lucky enough to have an even more invasive and insidious grass whose name i don't know. whoever satan's boss is made that stuff.

the next time we sift the beds, i will insist on burning the results and sprinkling the ash under a full moon...

Aren't nutsedge roots edible?

What is that they say about eating your enemies?

Do you happen to have any references where I could read more about this technique?

Milkyway

I don’t off hand. He studied directly with Chadwick, and is into Steiner and Jung. It was all oral tradition and hands on learning for me. But let me dig around and see if I can’t find something written down.

Murmuration

From what I have seen of biodynamics, a lot of it seems to work on the basis that typical western countries' agricultural soils have a very poor level of microscopic soil biota (bacteria, funghi etc) for various reasons which then translates into poor levels of macroscopic soil biota like worms and unhealthy plants. However, you don't seem to need a lot of funghi etc to inoculate your soil to start rebuilding the soil web to feed the plants once you stop with the poisons and ploughing etc. Compost teas or burying a cow's horn full of manure in the right conditions gives you a large, active population of friendly soil microbes which you then dig up and massively multiply in well oxygenated water (the flow forms) and sprinkle over your land to kick things off. Or, get the same effect by crash grazing a mob of ruminants, but that is logistically harder for many farmers. There is also a spiritual dimension of course but I've seen some very non-woo farmers get pretty good results by mostly following the basic techniques.

You might want to look at Steve Solomon's work, 'The intelligent gardener' with Erica Reinheimer is a primer on proper analysis of soil and remineralising, he also wrote 'Gardening when it counts'.

I own "Gardening When it Counts." The years just ahead of us, it seems to me, are just the sort of scenario he wrote it for.

If I remember correctly, he often makes references to how your grandparents would garden-- not a lot of fancy infrastructure, wide spacings between plants to provide enough moisture without irrigation, etc. And a simple recipe for what he calls "Complete Organic Fertilizer." It uses simple things like seed meal, gypsum, kelp, and lime. Solomon is all about remineralizing depleted soil.

I just spent about a hundred bucks for six or seven bags of stuff at the hardware store. It will probably last me the rest of my life since you use so little, and my compost will help, too. I do think it's worth doing a soil test, since soils in the western part of the US are already quite alkaline, as a rule, and in the East, many soils can benefit from added calcium. I'm going to tinker, too, experimenting a little with things like a tiny bit of extra gypsum in the garlic bed for extra sulfur. Mostly, I deal with animals these days, but I really liked Solomon back when I gardened more. He made intuitive good sense to me.

*Ochre Harebrained Curmudgeon*

For those in the general Northwest region of the US, Concentrates is a good wholesale source for soil amendments at reasonable prices - particularly if you can get folks together to place a bulk order.
https://www.concentratesnw.com/

If you happen to be close to Corvallis, OR I organize a big nonprofit bulk purchase from them each winter for distribution in our community.

Soils in the arid west tend to be alkaline. Soils in the rainy northwest tend to be strongly acid due to leaching. Soil tests are definitely worthwhile. Sometimes there will be a serious deficiency of some micronutrient like boron, with remarkable results when it is corrected.

This thread seems to have changed direction significantly :-)

"This thread seems to have changed direction significantly :-)"

it's one of the reasons i value this community so much. you learn all sorts of things!

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Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 64

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