Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Joined: Aug 24, 2005 Posts: 442 Location: Costa Geriatrica, Spain
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 2:21 pm Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
Ludi wrote:
I make things for a living. It's easier to learn practical skills from someone who has them, than from a book. Earlier someone cited the Bible as information passed down for thousands of years. I challenge anyone to present one piece of practical skills information they learned from reading the Bible.
What? The bible is stuffed full of useful practical information. For instance Leviticus 14:1-8 describes precisely how to cure leprosy by dipping a live dove in dead dove's blood. And if that doesn't work, try a sheep.
Or how about Deuteronomy 17:2-5 Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist? Stone them all to death.
How more practical can you get? The Bible is choc-full-o-nuts.
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 3:21 pm Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
Cloud9 wrote:
We are not going to run out of gun powder. I made it when I was 12 years old. The common ingredients of charcoal, sulfur and salt peter are too easy to come by.
A good substitute is made from sugar, salt peter and iron oxide. Unless you wipe out sugar cane and out houses, people will be turning out gun powder.
I have been turning out my own ammunition for thirty years. Black powder will function quite well in most modern fire arms. Bullets are made from wheel weights; it is just too easy. Bottom line ammunition is here to stay.
Where exactly did you get the salt peter?? I don't happen to have a vein of that running through may back yard. I've heard there used to be quite a bit in China but I don't know where the nearest sourse is in the USA. Also how are you at making primers or mixing up fulminate of mercury or are you planning to switch your m-16 to flint lock???
Joined: May 26, 2008 Posts: 1190 Location: Chicago, IL
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 4:22 pm Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
skeptik wrote:
Ludi wrote:
I make things for a living. It's easier to learn practical skills from someone who has them, than from a book. Earlier someone cited the Bible as information passed down for thousands of years. I challenge anyone to present one piece of practical skills information they learned from reading the Bible.
What? The bible is stuffed full of useful practical information. For instance Leviticus 14:1-8 describes precisely how to cure leprosy by dipping a live dove in dead dove's blood. And if that doesn't work, try a sheep.
Joined: Oct 23, 2005 Posts: 1851 Location: East of Eden
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 4:23 pm Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
outcast wrote:
No doubt he is good at what he does, but what's the story about a business that caters to people who are terrified the world is going to end soon?
It does not so cater in the slightest way. Tom's school is dedicated to the preservation of ancient skills because they are considered sacred, and because they would have been otherwise lost. People who take the classes are forever considered part of the family. And I've never heard Tom push his books. That's how wrong P&T was.
By the way, the activities they showed were a few from the Standard class, like survival 101. That's not the advanced knowledge that would have been lost. That's just the basic stuff Tom wants you to know before going on to the real material. I took Advanced Tracking and Awareness, and it was, as Tom would say, Epic. That was a level two class. There are nine levels. I've heard folks who have gotten to the upper levels refer to them as "Jedi training." _________________ "If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst." — Thomas Hardy
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 7:04 pm Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
vtsnowedin wrote:
Where exactly did you get the salt peter?? I don't happen to have a vein of that running through may back yard. I've heard there used to be quite a bit in China but I don't know where the nearest sourse is in the USA. Also how are you at making primers or mixing up fulminate of mercury or are you planning to switch your m-16 to flint lock???
You know, before you guys try makeing EVERYTHING into Peak Iron, Peak Salt Peter or Peak Mercury, you really need to study the history of chemistry and understand the composition of matter better. You are losing this argument big time.l You don;t know how to get a hold of Mercury? Alchemists did it back in the 17th Century this way:
"SALT OF URINE FOR MERCURY OF THE BODY.
Take of the urine of a man who continually drinks wine, and distil it
through the bath. Completely dry the faeces. Then you will have the salt of
urine. Then take two ounces of the water of life, four times rectified. In
this dissolve half-an-ounce of salt of urine and half-an-ounce of calcined Luna.
Pound the calx subtly with burnt salt, the more the better. Cleanse that calx
with hot water. Then you must put it into the aforesaid water of life. Let it
putrefy fourteen days in dung. Afterwards distil the water of life from the
calx. Pound with a little oil of tartar, and it will become Quicksilver."
Sorry to the Doomers here, no Matter does NOT disappear, it just needs energy and somebody with some BRAINS to turn it into useful stuff. The Energy is out there to get, the Matter is all over the place, its the BRAINS that are in short supply on Peak Oil. LOL.
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 13191 Location: naive idiot fantasy world
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 7:32 pm Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
I hope you'll post more in the Planning Forum about your personal experiences with producing these materials, Reverse Engineer.
Just because you can read about it in a book doesn't indicate you can actually do it.
Show us your BRAINS.
Otherwise, it's just not convincing.
What is calcined Luna anyway? What's oil of tartar? _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow." - jboogy
"Luna - the Moon in coniunctio; she has corresponding dark and watery characteristics, and her metal is silver or quicksilver. She is associated with the unconsious and the Anima in Jungian psychology." _________________ http://doomsteaddiary.blogspot.com/
Joined: Nov 24, 2007 Posts: 140 Location: Christchurch, New Zealand
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 8:35 pm Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
I know you're just trying to say "put your money where your mouth is" and prove that it's possible to learn things from books, but I think you're being a little petty here.
It doesn't matter if he himself personally can't read this information from a book and work out how to do it, the point is, that someone, somewhere will be able to, and will be able to revive the art/knowledge/tradition, if it is required.
Look at it this way: what is easier, working out how to make mercury yourself through complete trial and error, or reading a process from a book (even if it is vague and strange-sounding like the alchemists instructions)? I would suggest that reading about it from a book will enable you to make mercury far sooner than simple blind trial and error, and yet someone (or some people) managed to find out how to do it that way the first time. There's no reason to assume that all of sudden people aren't going to be able to read books and through trial and error re-create the old technologies and processes of the past.
Perhaps they won't be as elegant or expert at it, certainly at first they won't be. But given time there's no reason that the book-learned techniques can't match (or even given improved technology, understanding and methods, surpass) those of the past.
Note that I'm not trying to apply idea to the advanced sciences like biotechnology/nuclear physics etc, because those fields all require certain equipment to be available to make them possible, but certainly I don't see why technologies that were known about prior to the 1800's but no longer exist except in written form can't be re-created from those written forms. Yes it will take time, and effort, and perhaps the right brillient person to come along with some insight, but there's no reason that it shouldn't be possible.
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 8:55 pm Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
Ludi wrote:
I hope you'll post more in the Planning Forum about your personal experiences with producing these materials, Reverse Engineer.
Just because you can read about it in a book doesn't indicate you can actually do it.
Show us your BRAINS.
Otherwise, it's just not convincing.
What is calcined Luna anyway? What's oil of tartar?
Calcination is the process of baking a substance in a dish over an open flame until you cook the heck out of it. You grind whatever you want to cook with a mortar and pestle until its a fine powder. Luna is usually Silver, sometimes Antimony in some Alchemy texts.
Tartar is a salt largely composed of Sodium Bitartrate (NaHC6H4O6), you'll find it crystallizing on the inside of old bottles of Wine.
All of these chemicals are produced in biological processes, the chemistry of them was worked out in the Food Industry and the Pharmaceutical Industry over many years. Alchemists in the 16th century did not know what actually was in the stuff, they just experimented around to try to make Gold, which of course cannot be made through Chemical Process since its an Element, not a Compound.
Far as my experience with messing with this stuff goes, one of the subjects I taught was High School Chemistry, and in College I had a lot of fun with messing with a variety of synthetic processes, mainly revolving at the time around Psilocybin Mushrooms I grew in my Dorm Room. LOL. I did NOT experiment with boiling down a lot of Urine to isolate Mercury, but I suppose if I had to do it that way, I would. A lot EASIER way would be to dig up a few corpses and extract the amalgamated silver fillings from the teeth. LOL. With 5 Billion Dead People in the ground just 6 feet or so below the surface, your average cemetary of the future will be a great place to Scavenge. LOL.
You know, if you just think about this stuff a little bit you should realize that it was all done before in the absence of oil for hundreds of years. Now its all known and all written down. Certainly if you have some experience with messing with chemistry you will do a better job reading the texts, but really how many Chemists are out there these days? Dow Chemical employs them by the thousands, they will be out of work but they still do know their chemistry.
You clearly have a belief that EVERYTHING is "Peak" and its ALL going to disappear along with the Oil. I do not expect to be able to convince you otherwise. Read posts by others here including Blacksmith who explained how you find Magnetite in any sand anywhere, and Cloud9 who explained how you make Black Powder, you seem to ignore this stuff but its quite accurate and personal experience on their parts also. If you want to hold on to your belief that we are destined to return to the Stone Age because EVERYTHING is Peak and it ALL is going to just disappear, please be my guest. I am TRYING to make you aware that most of the stuff you THINK requires Oil does not in fact need it, its just to produce as much as we did in so short a time as we did you need the Energy that was saved in millions of years of Fossil Fuel collection by the earth.
The chemicals the Earth is composed of all remain right here, and actually much more of the useful stuff was already mined up, way more than we will ever need with much smaller populations in the future. Inorganic Chemistry proceeds always in the oceans, in the earth through Vulcanism at high temperatures, and Organic Chemistry proceeds as well as long as Grass Grows on the Land and Plankton grows in the Oceans. If we destroy the environment to such an extent we stop that from happenning, we are certainly Dead Men Walking, but right now the likelihood we do that seems small. Many of us will die before we do that.
For those that remain alive, I am quite sure at least some will know something about Chemistry. I am sure at least some books will remain that explain chemical synthesis. Even if not, since we once bootstrapped ourselves up to this from the days we knapped stone tools out of Obsidian, I am quite certain we could do it again. I won't be here to do that, but I can do my best to make sure the knowledge isn't lost to the lives of those I touch directly. I will impress upon all those in my community the importance of Protecting our Libraries and our Textbooks. I hope they don't burn them for fuel someday, though of course that is possible.
Matter is NOT disappearing from the Earth Ludi, and neither is it getting any less acessible, in fact most of it is more accessible now since it already was mined up. It only needs to be transformed by Chemists and by Blacksmiths, and to do it all you need is some Energy you can gather from the Trees that grow or the Sedge Grass or directly from the Sun itself by focusing its energy with some shiny metal or a glass lens. The Sun rains this energy down on us every day, we just don't collect it very well right now and we wasted an opportunity to build an infrastructure that could using Big Oil, a legacy of milions of years of biological processes. And so because we wasted that opportunity, because we overshot the carrycapacity of humanity on the planet, many of us will have to die.
Some will be left standing though, and they CAN rebuild in a sustainable fashion to AT LEAST the technology available in 1750, and probably better than that. If you prefer to believe that Stone Knives and Bearskins are the inevitable outcome, this is your buisiness. At least to this point however, you have not convinced me either tha this is inevitable, and I don't see you refuting my arguments, Blacksmith's arguments or Cloud9's either. You just choose instead to question whether I have the Brains to be able to do this or not. That is irrelevant because I am not the one who will be doing it, in what is left of my lifetime its more about scavenign up the tons of stuff that is left around as people die off and homes go vacant. In my community half the houses have "For Sale" signs on them. Tons of stuff in those houses to use for the rest of my life for sure.
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 11:41 pm Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
There has been so much inspiration for me on this site. The people who "get it" tend to be pretty sharp- Past present and future leaders. Imagine your potential.
That was a dam good post RE, you rock.
Golem, another very important part of our community imo, understands alchemy. He could have quickly told you that tartar is a chiral compund, with a fascinating recent history. And not so quickly that we are dna/micro to milky way/macro electromagnetic beings- attuned to symbols, light, sound, and vibration.
My point is that there are things that you can learn about now, on this internet, that you will never be able to learn about again once its gone. The mysteries of the Ages. I'm pretty certain, since I've found the answers myself, that you can too. What is really important? How do we rebuild society? How can we make sure, thousands of years from now, that the new civilization doesnt make the same mistakes we did? Or is providing for the future of humanity beyond us? Have we fallen so far in the millenia of war and control?
There is one book, more than any other I have read, that will change your life for the better. It's not the Bible, although my respect for that book has grown greatly.
Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill.
No matter what happens tonight, or in October, or in 2012, or in 2050. Life your life the way you've realized it SHOULD be lived. Prepared. Learning. Anticipating change. _________________ "The future power is manpower"
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 13191 Location: naive idiot fantasy world
Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 5:24 am Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
ReverseEngineer wrote:
You clearly have a belief that EVERYTHING is "Peak" and its ALL going to disappear along with the Oil.
No, I don't actually. But it's ok if you think I do.
I'm not refuting your arguments because I'm not arguing with you. If I have any argument at all, it's that book knowledge is not the same as practical skills, but you seem to be saying practical skills are irrelevant since you won't be needing them. Yet you seem at the same time to be questioning our BRAINS because we don't know these things which are irrelevant to us since we won't be needing them. _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow." - jboogy
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 13191 Location: naive idiot fantasy world
Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 7:00 am Post subject: Re: Why Stone Age?
Lanthanide wrote:
I know you're just trying to say "put your money where your mouth is" and prove that it's possible to learn things from books, but I think you're being a little petty here.
Ok, maybe I am. But Reverse Engineer seems to be saying we're stupid for not knowing how to do these things, and then posts some information from an Alchemy text that we're apparently supposed to be able to use as reference for producing mercury. If he can't use the information in a practical way, how are we supposed to be able to? Yet he seems to be saying we're stupid because we don't know how to do something he hasn't done himself. Is it petty for me to ask him to demonstrate that the information from the alchemy text is of practical value?
BTW, if one needs some mercury in the near future, they might find it in fluorescent tubes, each of which contains a few milligrams of mercury, instead of mucking around in some corpses. "LOL"
Anyway, if RE's arguments are convincing to people, good. It's not important if he convinces me of whatever it is or not. _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow." - jboogy
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