The Digger

In the Face of Power Outages California Done With HAM Radio Repeater Stations In one of my earlier posting this year I wrote about the how population control in a bronze age society would be conducted by controlling who has access to water.  Likewise anthropologists in the 1970s were comparing this to modern fuel distribution and shortages. It was called flicking the switch. So most of you have heard about the power shut downs in California but what you may not have heard about is that California has dramatically raised fees for operating HAM radio repeat stations. Just at the time when people are losing phone and internet service in the State of California, it is coming for your short wave radios. Where your local power may be out you could still maintain communications with the outside world via a repeater station outside of the black out area. California has a different idea about this. HAM radio repeater stations are owned, maintained and operated by Ham radio ...

Cloud Atlas and Marvin Harris Memories of graduate level anthropology from the 1970’s seem now like they are from some parallel universe. Being like something from out of the Australian shaman dream time. It was a era full of Lorenz and Leaky and rational thought about human behavior based on biological observations and physical archeology. One of the books students were forced to buy was Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris. The book may have remained forgotten in my large collection had it not been for a movie called Cloud Atlas . After watching the movie I immediately started thinking about Marvin Harris. Thus stimulated I found myself digging out his book Cannibals and Kings and rereading it. So like real-life Cloud Atlas characters in a long chain of bearers of some ancestral wisdom let us rediscover Marvin Harris in the context of Cloud Atlas . The book Cloud Atlas was of course written by David Mitchell and he has mention little concerning his inspira...