Thread by @homemadeguitars

I tweeted this donkey story earlier today. I'm going to spin it, a related donkey story, and some thoughts together here. I welcome y'all to come along, but it may be a bumpy ride.

https://twitter.com/homemadeguitars/status/1435992248739450883

Many of the gate and corner posts on our place are rotting off. Wood does that. Some woods are very resistant, but it doesn't suit our economy to grow them. We need morebiggerbetterfaster. So these were all treated posts or old railroad ties.
They rot off 6" under the ground.

3. Phone poles do too. Climbing telephone people are trained to probe a pole with a long screwdriver, downward at a slant from ground level.
If the screwdriver goes in, don't climb it.
I've climbed it, because I was self employed and needed the work, but that's another story.

4. So, out on one edge of the fenced and gated barn area, which is a core of an old style farm, one rotted off and fell down.
It's been too hot and dry to replace it. I dig holes with a posthole digger that has two handles and round blades. You've probably seen one.

5. The climate change clay on this place is harder than concrete right now. I'd have to start with dynamite.
It'll rain one day, harder than we want for longer than we want. Since we have chosen to live in this climate, I plan around it.
So after that, I'll buy a bunch of wood 🪵

6. But for now, the donkeys and I have agreed that this rope is a gate. This is entirely voluntary. It's only one step from a line painted on the ground. One rope, about mid thigh on me, a not very tall guy.

7. They could step over it. Clara could probably untie it. They honor it because they choose to. I say to them, you may eat the grass over here but do not go over there, please, and they accept that deal.
A Trumper never would honor a deal like that. Donkeys are better people.

9. I've got 8 or 10 rotted off posts that need to be replaced. But I'm 74, and I'm tired. And I can work around them.
This is where a genuine human community living in concert and cooperation with one another and Earth would work vastly better.
And yes it is too possible.

10. I can take you and show you some if you're doubtful.
Every industrial machine ever built was built for the express purpose of making some human being unnecessary. Redundant. In Britain that's the word for Fired, and it's better.

11. Millions of humans all over the world are are useless, bored, angry, with no productive activity available for them to do. Maybe they're not too bright. The bell curve is real. Half of everyone is below average. Maybe they're just unlucky. Maybe "the economy" isn't "growing."

12. Joe Biden wants to increase the US's energy throughput and GHG emissions, bulldoze tens of thousands to millions of acres of biosphere, and cover it with more industrial machinery to make more people redundant, while all the good climate concerned fret about overpopulation.

13. And praise Biden's plan to the high heavens.

14. Besides making people redundant and excess, or actually the objective of making people redundant and excess, industrial machinery, each individual machine from the first one to the next, was built to increase the gap between rich and poor. Make the rich richer, the poor more.

15. Every machine ever built was built with the objective of not paying somebody for what they were doing yesterday.
And it is considered cool to sneer at Luddites. Weavers.
This is why we have to have "growth."
To employ all the people we fired yesterday
Made redundant yesterday

16. People and machines run on the same thing: energy.
Everything runs on energy.
Earth is the source of energy.
I have never, ever, in my life heard someone say, or seen someone tweet, "We can't pave all that Infrastructure Plan, for crying out loud, there's too many people!"

17. If there's too many people, and Earth can't support them, by what possible justification besides cold blooded murder would anyone ever cover a square foot of otherwise arable Earth with concrete? Or solar panels? Or wind turbines? Or airports?
For God's sake, if there's too..

18. Oh, pardon me. You mean there's too many people for you to have the airports and the highways and the solar panels, so, given a choice, the humans have got to go. I understand.
But let's all be clear here.
330 million of those people are extracting and wasting more energy,

19. And more resources, and wasting more arable land, than any other two billion on Earth.
So if there's really too many of us, we'd get the most bang for the buck if we built a big wall around the United States, and flooded it and stocked it with fish.
Cause that's where the

20. Too many people are, for sure.

21. In a healthy human community my wife's farm, where I live and work, could easily support 3 families, with work donkeys, and include an 18 acre commons for grazing, haying, and nut and fruit gathering.
But we'd rather pile all the humans up in stinking teeming cities,

22. and waste untold billions and trillions of BTUs and material handling infrastructure hauling feed in to them and their shit out to sea, which is nearly a crime against humanity.
In return for which we have to kill the oceans with fertilizer.

23. And bitch because there's too many of them.
The girls and I hauled some hay today. Sydney was over, did their feet. We discussed how their hooves are handling the amount of road work they're doing, which is well, and options as it increases.
But that's another thread.
Later.