Regenerative agriculture, food forests, and the ancient redwoods of Nevada

I'm starting an agricultural collective in desert land in Nevada to employ people as co-owners of a business that will grow a wide variety of food inside and outside of greenhouses using the principles of regenerative agriculture and dryland farming. We will get the water we need by saving 95% of it from escaping in the greenhouses, and rainfall on the greenhouses gets added to the total, so if the land we buy is half greenhouse, we've effectively doubled the rainfall on the other half.

With that extra water, and since the part of desert I've built my tinyhouse in is only desert because the water flows away too quickly and the water table is quite close to the surface, I will replant the redwood forests that flourished here before the uplift of the Sierra Nevadas 5 million years ago. The current sagebrush habitat will not be supplanted, but enriched, getting 25% more water due to the redwood forests preventing evaporation losses alone, and more diverse animals and plants creating better soils. Plenty of carbon will also be stored in the redwood forests themselves, which will be kept thin enough to allow every level of the forest to get sufficient light to bloom.

A Rising segment about the long-running realignment of the working class.

Rising is my favorite news show on YouTube, by far. Neither host is a Marxist-Leninist; one is a democratic socialist Bernie voter, and the other is a populist-conservative Trump voter. Of the two, I think I like the populist-conservative, Saagar Enjeti, better. He is reasonably left on economic terms, and his closer connection with the working class on cultural issues compared to the Bernie voter Krystal Ball means that his economic left agenda has a better chance of coming to pass. They react to the real news, as well as whatever the liberal media's up to that day. Rising is a great way to keep the pulse of the actual working class, in the way that Politico is a great way to keep the pulse of the actual bourgeoisie. These two are better weathervanes of socialism than all of Leftbook combined, because socialism won't be possible until the Krystals and Saagars of the world see and report that it is.

The clip above shares the straightforward polling, which is what I wanted everyone to see. Since 1980, there has been a steady realignment of the richest 100 counties and the most educated people (another proxy for class) from the Republicans to the Democrats. Anyone hoping to kick off the revolution in the party of the slaveowners is going to have to get over these notions. Leftists must retrain our mental habits and begin to regard the GOP as the lesser evil. I will make a longer post about this soon, possibly even a bookshelf entry (I have the article mostly written). But I also wanted to show off my favorite TV show, because Rising is such a valuable resource.

Some charcoals I did back in Florida

I've done a lot of art throughout the years. Though I went to college for history, I had several people strongly suggest I go to art school instead. One of them was my dad, in an inversion of the trope. "Son, you're an artist, I'm an artist, and it's time for you to go on to the family business." "But I wanna measure the preponderance of clay tobacco pipes in sediment to establish population figures in colonial Maryland instead, Daddy!" So I did. But I never stopped being good at art, and I've sold pieces for real cash over the years.

Not gonna lie, I'm kinda hoping to do the same on here. Some of my more intricate originals are fairly expensive, because I'm not parting with something that literally took me a month to draw for ten bucks. I doubt there's a huge market for art in that price range these days, but in those instances I'm perfectly willing to sell high-quality prints for closer to ten bucks (depends on what exact kind of print one would want; prints themselves can also get intricate these days). I guess it all depends on the demand I find out there; if I find a lot of you buying art from me, I'll come up with a more standardized price list.

Saturday shitposting roundup, 11/28/2020

One of the things I like most about social media is the shitposts. Trying to move my online presense onto this blog means that I'll see less of it. But that can be dealt with by moving that onto here. This are srs blog, so I don't want to clog it with dank memes, so keeping it to one thread is probably for the best. It'll also be an interesting little window into this moment in time, and if I do it every week, every week will have such a window so we can remember what was going through our collective heads and when. I'm gonna cheat a bit this week and add stuff from earlier, but next week I'll just add the best stuff of that week as I run across it.

Pile of maymays after the jump.

Pictures from Nevada, and the stories behind them

Sitting here in Omaha for the winter, the past year of my life almost seems like a dream when I think about it. I went and built a road and a house and had all manner of adventures and hardships in the desert. It was a surreal ordeal, but I survived and adapted and can now help others do the same.

Going through my files, I found a bunch that I hadn't organized in any real way. It's as good a place as any to start. And while I'm doing officekeeping on the subject, I think I'm gonna have a division of labor on subjects between weekdays and weekends. I'll keep the dense and wordy theoryposting and historyposting for the weekdays, and blog about the collective and my art on the weekends, to sort of put things in a lower gear for everyone. That said, let's get on with it!

Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how, part IV: Molotov-Ribbentrippin'

One of the big things the ultraradicools like to throw in our faces about Stalin is that he signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler. It's absolutely true; this is a thing, and he did it. However, Stalin's adroit diplomatic maneuvering absolutely saved the world.

To begin with, in Mein Kampf, Hitler openly declared his intention to grab the Russian steppe as lebensraum for the German people. Stalin was not naive about Hitler's intentions. When Operation Barbarossa finally came, it came as a surprise not because Stalin didn't believe Hitler was incapable of duplicity, nor because Stalin was unaware of the contents of Mein Kampf. Barbarossa caught Stalin by surprise because he couldn't seriously believe that Hitler was actually stupid enough to open a front against Russia with Britain still fighting.

Knowing a Nazi invasion was imminent, Stalin first appealed to the liberal powers of Britain and France for an anti-Hitler alliance. He was rebuffed, as capitalist policymakers in the mid-30s entertained the thought of using Hitler against the Soviet Union. It was in this spirit of an unspoken liberal-fascist alliance that Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich and gave Hitler Czechoslovakia in exchange for sweet fuckall. The British weren't even actively rearming at this point (Robin Higham, A Guide to the Sources of British Military History, 453).

Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how, part III: the Conquest of Robert

Why am I talking so much about Stalin in the first place, you may reasonably wonder? Who my favorite dead Soviet is and why seemingly has nothing to do with the struggle against capitalism in the here and now, right? The answer is that I am forced by capitalist lies against Stalin's character to defend Stalin, because once they get you to believe lies about Stalin, they can then generalize those lies to the entire rest of the Marxist-Leninist movement, and from there to the rest of the communist movement, and from there to the rest of the socialist movement. And if the capitalists learn they can get away with this trick with Stalin, they will use it against any leader we dare advance just as readily. Surely some of you Bern-feelers have already seen this in action.

So what is their biggest line of attack against Stalin? "Communisasim sounds good on paper, but in reality it kills eleventy billion people! Just look at what Stalin did! Here, I've got a history book that proves it!" It's a very neat lie, because people are predisposed to trust experts, especially experts that agree with one another. But it doesn't work on historians, who are taught to look for evidence, for primary documents, for attribution to facts and figures cited.

Announcing the Bookshelf!

If you look over on the sidebar, there's a new section called the Bookshelf. This is where all writings longer and/or more important to me than a standard blog post will go, whether essays or full-length books. I've written or partly written several of these while out in the field in Nevada, when ideas came to me in a cannabinoid haze and I had to write them down. In many cases I would drive to town with a burning question to look up that would absolutely not leave me alone until I did. This blog is here in large part because I came to the conclusion that self-publishing this work was the only way I could guarantee that it would ever see the light of day.

Those of you who know me in real life will know that the only thing of any value I own is my book collection. I couldn't have assembled it all with the meager wages I've earned, but I was lucky enough that my academic career caught the interest of the leftist professors in my undergraduate years the way it didn't catch the interest of my liberal professors in my graduate years. As they died or retired, they left me their professional history and political science collections, and on those subjects I have a tiny little library that outshines most. It is the most bourgeois thing I have owned or will ever own, but I've put it to the service of humanity. The books I didn't need or could find copies of online, I sold so that I could finance the agricultural collective in Nevada. But I couldn't part with most of it, and if I did, I know I could never replace it. This collection belongs to the working class; I am merely its custodian for now. But I consider myself lucky for all that; books have brought me delight my whole life, and continue to now.

Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how, part II: crushing antisemitism

Well, I was going to just repost what I had posted on Facebook, but as it turns out the racist cretins running Facebook deleted it when they deleted the Marxist page that made it. So I'll do my best to explore the same issues that post did.

So let's start with the obvious: this is one of those charges that gets levelled at Stalin from time to time, in the same way and for the same reasons as it gets levelled at Palestinians who like living in their own houses, or people who get upset that the Palestinians can't. In the current material conditions of occupied Palestine, the Zionists have power, the Palestinians do not, and they justify their oppression by dismissing all criticism as antisemitic. The Holocaust was a great evil, and in remembrance of that great evil our society now justifies other great evils. This has gone so far as to try to tarnish the guy that ended the Holocaust with its taint. Because the people that have power in our society (capitalists) have a need to discredit the most successful guy who did not (Stalin) and this is an easy weapon at hand for the lazy bourgeoisie.

Censorship? In MY Facebook? It's more likely than you think.

Facebook is preventing me from posting links to this blog. They are calling it spam. It's literally existed for two days, I posted it on my wall and in a total of one group, but yup. Spam.

I'm sure I don't need to explain to anyone why this is happening, it should be obvious. I'm not even incredibly surprised that it's happening, just surprised that it's happening so fast. It is obviously not in the Zuckerbourgeoisie's interests to permit communists to organize online, but making the censorship too obvious would just lead to a massive exodus. Anyway, so long as we're posting our dank maymays on their site, the Zuckerbourgeoisie can still harvest data about us, still market ads to us, still have the power to censor us when we say something they just can't abide.

But if we move our posts off Facebook, as I just began to do, the Zuckerbourgeoisie can't do that anymore. If we move it to a site without Facebook logins and plugins, the Zuckerbourgeoisie can't even harvest our data about it. This makes Mark a very, very sad little creep. Which is why Facebook is deliberately confusing this site with spam, because it's a kernel of off-Facebook communist organization. Even just a kernel of that is impermissible, apparently. It's like anti-antifa, but for real. Antifa attempts to shut down any and all Nazi organizing, because it inevitably leads to genocide, which is clearly against most people's class interests. Facebook therefore attempts to shut down any and all communist organizing, because communist organizing leads to socialism, which is clearly against the Zuckerbourgeoisie's class interests.

Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how: Part I

One of the things I did on Facebook was write a series of posts on Stalin's life. With my historian's background, I've got a special insight on the man's life, having gone through the weeds and read extensively about him, also with the training to tell truth from fiction in the sources I read.

I figure it's important to dedicate so much effort to debunking capitalist myths about his life in the first place, because Stalin is the first and foremost line of defense for capitalists of all stripes. Whether they're making imperialism weak again or they're ridin' with Biden, all capitalists can agree that the one true Uncle Joe was a Very Bad Man and that "Stalinists" (protip: we call ourselves Marxist-Leninists, the word "Stalinist" is as meaningless to us as the concept of "cultural Marxism") must be barred from public life. So while I would definitely much rather be talking about how I'd like to improve this country (and all countries) by empowering the working class, I first must deal with the life and record of this glorious dead Georgian because I'll be made to answer for his "crimes" the moment I try to improve society anyway.

Bloglaunch Day!

Hello all! My name, for the various and sundry purposes presented here, is Kent Chamberlain. Let me tell you about my life.

I was born into the middle class, with Republican-voting parents. My teenage rebellion made me a libertarian, until online liberals and socialists persuaded me that the unregulated market was a utopian fantasy, so I became a liberal in college. There I quickly realized that the liberals are the embodiment of every libertarian dystopia in practice, an unaccountable elite with money, and around the time Bernie launched his first campaign, I became a democrat socialist. But then after his first loss, I realized that democrat socialism can't change anything, because it's structurally wedded to the same shitlib monstrosities up top that make the world terrible to begin with. While hanging out in the Green Party for lack of a better option, I got radicalized in the "real commie hours" by some "watermelon" comrades there for just that purpose. It made sense; I was writing my history thesis, and Marxism-Leninism helped me make sense of some otherwise inexplicable historical facts.

But then as I delved further into this red new world, as I learned about the history of our heroes and the various revisionists who tried to stop them, I noticed that the revisionists all arose from the middle class, and advanced shitlib arguments in different times and places in an attempt to turn us aside from the class war. I then turned around to the modern day, and found much of my comrades doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same class reason. I confronted middle class identity politics everywhere I found it, both in the fascist chans and the bad-faith bad-haircut halls of Leftbook. I pissed off a lot of gender studies majors and a lot of "why the South should've won the Civil War" history majors.

I also came to the conclusion that the revolution in America would, by necessity, have to look a whole lot different than it looked in the Soviet Union.