Underminers

Antibiotics

The finger is a lot better; I’ll spare you the detail. The irritating thing is, I took antibiotics: I don’t know if I had to take antibiotics, but in this case the pain was so great it was a choice between drastic manual action and tablets, neither of which I am entirely comfortable with. This leads to an interesting conundrum, because with the collapse of civilization we are most likely to see a rapid dwindling in the supply of modern medicines. The ones that will disappear first are likely to be those which make the least money for the pharmaceutical companies, followed by governments almost certainly trying to force the same companies to concentrate on drugs that help with acute conditions, such as asthma inhalers, anti-inflammatories, many vaccines, and antibiotics. This will be followed by a loss in the availability of those drugs which are technologically complex to make, and a return to both plant- and fungal-based medication, and an increase in more dramatic surgical intervention.

Oh dear, that doesn’t sound fun. But we should be careful in trotting out the same scare-stories as Big Pharma and the governments of the industrial world would encourage us to believe: for one, we know that with the loss of industrial output will be a reciprocal reduction in cancer rates; for two, the incidence of disease increases rapidly (possibly exponentially) with population density, the cities are most definitely not the place to be – but as we all know cities will not survive peak oil, water shortages and (in many cases) rising sea levels regardless of anything we do to make them “sustainable”; for three, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what is possible using non-synthetic medication, largely because the industrial world wants us to depend upon its own infrastructure.

I’m not saying that there is any truth in such junk web sites as Natural News and Mercola, but the moment we start Connecting – the focus of what I am currently writing – with even what’s in our own back yards, the idea of natural medication won’t seem anything like as daunting. It is certainly true that bacterial and parasitic infections are the most common causes of death in non-industrial cultures, but as I consider the wedge of blue cheese waiting to be eaten at some point today, the thought of even producing our own antibiotics doesn’t seem such a burden.

Subtitle

Titles are easy to come by, unless you have a publisher that insists they know better – and in the case of “Time’s Up!” actually did know better. Subtitles are a different matter entirely, because they are – in effect – the description of the book.

Have you noticed recently how book subtitles have turned into straplines – so while previously a book may have been called “Thin” and subtitled “Losing Weight Really Quickly”, it will probably now be subtitled “How to lose weight very quickly, with a minimum of fuss and not die in the process.” Admittedly it’s more descriptive, but is also submitting to the belief that people are incapable of reading any of the actual pages to see whether they want to commit to the book; rather they buy books based entirely on whether a marketing executive understands reader psychology well enough.

That’s just manipulation.

That’s the kind of thing that needs undermining.

Anyhow, yesterday this blog had the subtitle “Taking Our Lives Back”, which sounds far too ethereal. The subtitle – which incidentally, I rediscovered in an outline document – that I am now using is “A Practical Guide for Radical Change“, which will no doubt get me into trouble with all sorts of people, including potential publishers, but is far closer to the spirit of the book.

Underminers – What Is This All About?

Ok, here’s the plan. I have a book to write, and I am very keen to get it written – but it’s going to be a hard slog. I have a title: “Underminers” and a rough outline which I’ll be revealing in due course; but it’s the execution that matters, and when you are being pulled in all sorts of directions – domestically, socially, community-y(?) and all sorts of other writing (writingy?) ways – then sometimes you can only get as far as the title and rough outline.

Anyone who reads my blog “The Unsuitablog” will already have a fair idea of what an Underminer is; and anyone who has read my book “Time’s Up!” will know why Undermining (or Sabotage, as I called it in “A Matter of Scale”) is so critical to the survival of humanity. For a crash course in Undermining then there are two articles on The Earth Blog that I recommend you read:

1) Sabotage Is Not An Option, It Is A Necessity

2) 100 Ways To Undermine The Industrial Machine

I will go into a lot more detail about the genesis of the book that is to come in later blogs, but in a nutshell there is only so much that can be said in an article, such as the Monthly Undermining Tasks on The Unsuitablog, and published books still get far more serious coverage than websites in the wider world. That’s all for now.

This blog will be a public, and often very frank, record of everything related to the book “Underminers”, including the process of planning and researching; the writing itself; building a website for hosting the online version; getting published; publicising the book and the website; and finally being hoisted up by my own petard / neck for daring to write something so troublesome in the first place.

I will only post a blog when I have actually done something, but if I don’t post something at least once a week then you are welcome to harangue me.

Here goes…