Friends,
Here I am on Kauai, and we got through Labor Day without World War
III. Strange times these are when we need to thank our lucky stars
each week that the world still exists.
I'm in the process of setting up my itinerary for next month on the
West Coast. If you're interested in meeting, and we aren't already in
communication, now is the time to let me know.
Here's my cell # for while I'm on the road: 1 808 639 9300 (AT&T / Cingular)
So far I'm finding my visit frightening. Society here seems so
infantile. People spend time listening to podcasts from Disneyland,
when they aren't in Bible study. And this isn't even the Bible Belt.
The TV shows seem to be aimed at third graders. And this is the
nation with its itchy finger on the trigger!! (No offense guys, I'm
obviously over-generalizing -- a though job but somebody's got to do
it!)
I'm remembering why I moved to Ireland. ('God willing', as they say,
I'll make it back.)
rkm
--------------------------------------------------------
From: "Jim Bell" <•••@••.•••>
To: <•••@••.•••>
Subject: RE: John Michael Greer - Collapse: A Practical Response
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:29:41 -0700
One of the basic premises about the potential for renewable energy to
replace non-renewable energy resources in John's analysis is
incorrect. Here in San Diego County, we could become completely
renewable energy self-sufficient (replacing gasoline and other fuels,
natural gas and electricity) by covering 84% of our roofs and parking
lots with PV panels. If we increased efficient energy use by 40%
across the board we would only have to cover 51% of roofs and parking
lots. Even Seattle could be renewable energy self-sufficient, by
covering 90% of its roofs and parking lots with PV panels if it
increased efficient energy use by 40%. For the details, read pages
9-18 of "Jim's New Book" at http://www.jimbell.com. The book is free
to read on line or print out.
Jim 619 758 9020
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 06:50:14 -0700
From: Brian Hill <•••@••.•••>
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: Re: John Michael Greer - Collapse: A Practical Response
Richard -
You should listen to Guns and Roses on KPFA yesterday. The economic
historian seems to have a good fix on the immanent global economic
collapse. Time to head for the hills.
Brian
--------------------------------------------------------
Cc: •••@••.•••, •••@••.•••
From: Bill Ellis <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Re: John Michael Greer - Collapse: A Practical Response
Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2007 08:23:02 -0400
To: •••@••.•••
Source John M Greer
http://www.oilcrisis.com/whatToDo/DeindustrialAge.htm
.... The key to making sense of constructive action in a
situation of impending industrial collapse is to look at the
community, rather than the individual or society as a whole,
as the basic unit. ... [snip]
BE:
Yes, the community should become the basic unit of our actions as is
has been in all non-EuroAmerican Cultures. And it implied in Chaos,
Complexity and Gaian theories. But fundamental to that is change in
mindset from the 'dominator prardigm' to a "Gaian paradigm." That is
the recognition that the self-interest, competion, materialism
syndrome is a false ethic leading humanity to self-destruction. The
EuroAmican cultures have veered from human nature for over 2000
years. Other cultures as well as modern science have shown that
cooperartion, as well as a large brain have been the keys to human
survival. A few social innovation are restoring a safer path for
humanity. I would agree that the community is the base for that
path. But that society as a whole needs to recognize it.
IMHO
Bill Ellis
If you would like more on the GaianParadigm see:
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Bill_Ellis
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 00:58:31 -0500
From: "Kevin Carson" <•••@••.•••>
To: "Richard Moore" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Re: * 5 Day Martial Law Exercise *
On 9/5/07, Richard Moore <•••@••.•••> wrote to newslog:
> We got through Labor Day with no incident, and it turns out that the
> so-called 'False Flag Terror Warning' was a hoax.
You mean the warning about chatter re the SF area?
What about the options that count on a stock market crash by Sept.
21--are those real?
Kevin Carson
Mutualist.Org: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://www.mutualist.org
Mutualist Blog http://mutualist.blogspot.com
----------
Hi Kevin,
The only part that was a hoax, was the claim that those well-known
people signed a petition that said they had inside hard-evidence of a
false-flag event. Rather than 'hoax', 'psy-op' might be a better
term.
rkm
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2007 12:30:57 -0700
From: Gunther Ostermann <•••@••.•••>
Subject: You can share it if you like
To: •••@••.•••
This is an excellent article, On Behalf By Gunther Ostermann. You can
see this page at:
<http://www.countercurrents.org:80/ostermann190807.htm>
--------------------------------------------------------
From: "Jim Bell" <•••@••.•••>
To: <•••@••.•••>
Subject: RE: dialog + new website
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 22:17:51 -0700
Here's my latest news.
JIM BELL FOR MAYOR
EXPLORATORY CAMPAIGN
Dear Friends,
I'm launching an exploratory campaign to run for Mayor of San Diego
in 2008. I plan to become an official candidate on February 6, 2008.
This is the first day to file as an official candidate.
To get right to the point, I'm going to need your help and money to
run a winning campaign. (See below for details on how you can help
with both.)
http://www.jimbell.com
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 10:29:36 +0100
From: Ian Hewitt <•••@••.•••>
To: Richard Moore <•••@••.•••>
Subject: PNAC Rebuilding America's Senses DL Lecture
Richard,
The Google video below is a lecture from April by PNAC - Project for
New American Citizen
Ian
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8545414779301935419&q=pnac&total=1226&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:40:33 -0400
From: "Mark Batten-Carew" <•••@••.•••>
To: "Richard K Moore" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Congratulations on your new blog and a suggestion
Hi Richard,
Very well done on your new blog " How We the People can change the world".
Excellent summary, and with references!
I have passed on a strong recommendation to my entire mailing list to
read your blog.
One suggestion/request.... With such an excellent reading list pulled
together in one place, would you please add the reference "The Grip
Of Death" by Michael Rowbotham. The Grip of Death is the best book
I've ever found describing the overall problem of "money as debt" AND
all its ramifications, and it is entertaining (gripping!) to read.
(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Grip-Death-Slavery-Destructive-Economics/dp/1897766408)
---
done!
rkm
------------------------------------------------------
From: "Tim Murphy" <•••@••.•••>
To: "Tim Murphy" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Michael Hudson on the Financial Crisis
Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2007 13:56:26 +0100
Guns and Butter on KPFA
http://www.kpfa.org
Two useful radio programs... very clear and concise.
Michael Hudson on the Financial Crisis
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
"From Cold War to Class War"
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=21767
From Cold War to Class War
Interview with financial economist and historian, Dr. Michael Hudson.
Liquidity crisis in the banking system; wiping out of credit; demise
of the dollar; stock volatility; hedge funds; sub- prime lending,
real estate tax versus labor tax, etc.
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007
The Plot to Shift Taxes Off Wealth Onto Wage Earners
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=21884
The Plot to Shift Taxes Off Wealth Onto Wage Earners
Interview with financial economist and historian, Dr. Michael Hudson.
AAA rating of subprime junk; inflation; mishandling of crookedness;
change in world order; privatization of banking system through the
Federal Reserve; Alan Greenspan, Social Security and junk economics;
windfall profits; the law of fraudulent conveyance.
--
Dr. Michael Hudson has been appointed Chief Economic Policy Advisor
for the Kucinich for President campaign, and is writing a new tax
policy for the United States. He is President of The Institute for
the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall Street Financial
Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the
University of Missouri, Kansas City.
He is the author of the book
"Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire"
Read it in full here:
http://www.michael-hudson.com/books/superimperialism.pdf
Visit Michael Hudson's website at www.michael-hudson.com
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:38:40 -0500
From: "Kevin Carson" <•••@••.•••>
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: Re: John Michael Greer - Collapse: A Practical Response
> We - and by this I mean people throughout the industrial world - have
> to make the transition to a Third World lifestyle. There's no way to
> sugar-coat that very unpalatable reality. Fossil fuels made it
> possible for most people in the industrial world to have a lifestyle
> that doesn't depend on hard physical labor, and to wallow in a flood
> of mostly unnecessary consumer goods and services.
This implies some innate connection between the present standard of
living and the amount of energy presently consumed to produce it.
I don't think that's correct. My own guesstimate is that we could
reduce present rates of energy consumption by 75% with no significant
decrease in the genuine standard of living. We currently have
astronomical ratios of energy consumption to standard of living
because the most energy-intensive forms of production and social
organization have been made artificially cheap by subsidies.
For example, we buy goods from giant factories thousands of miles
away instead of from more efficient small factories ten miles away,
because highways and truck fuel are subsidized, and because (thanks
to government subsidies and regulatory protections) big business is
protected from the market penalties for gross inefficiency. People
in rain-rich areas like New England buy vegetables grown in
California on giant plantation farms, because subsidized irrigation
water and subsidized highways make it profitable; if it weren't for
these subsidies, they'd all be buying them from local farmers.
Most Americans have two separate cities--the one they shop and work
in, and the bedroom community they "live" in--each with its own
complete power and sewer infrastructure, and a highway commute
between them. Simply returning to the pattern of mixed-use
communities that prevailed until the 1920s, with people living within
walking, bike, or streetcar distance of where they worked and
shopped, would entail no necessary reduction in standard of living.
These changes involve nothing but present levels of
transportation-intensiveness and population distribution patterns.
If you address the internal energy-intensiveness of production
processes themselves, you can achieve similar order of magnitude
reductions, as described by Amory Lovins et al in Natural Capitalism.
The present level of energy-intensiveness was produced by a
decades-long, top-down social engineering process: the reshaping of
the structure of the American economy by access to cheap, subsidized
fuel and transportation. The main structural change was the
artificial generation of distance between things.
The reversal of these structural changes, in the face of ever-higher
energy prices and the breakdown of the state's ability to subsidize
highway construction, will likewise take decades. Over that time,
the artificially generated distances will shrink drastically.
But Greer's remark below makes me think that such a transition over
several decades, entirely in response to the market price of energy
and fiscal constraints on the state, is quite plausible. It may well
be that civilization does not collapse--just the centralized state
capitalism of big government and big business that emerged in the
late 19th century.
There are some very creative ways of adapting, all quite feasible,
within the pattern of the local communities Greer describes.
Jane Jacobs describes the development of the Japanese bicycle
industry. Rather than following the typical neoliberal model of
industrialization--inviting a giant western corporation to colonize
them with a new bicycle factory on the western model, or import
technical advisors and hiring the building of such a factory under
native capitalist ownership, they built the industry from the bottom
up. Japanese bicycle repair shops, using small-scale powered
machinery, custom machined replacement parts for damaged bikes.
Gradually, individual shops began to specialize in machining
particular parts, and over time developed the ability to produce
entire, or nearly entire, new bicycles as a distributed network.
This distributed production network of small shops was something that
modern peer-production enthusiasts would easily recognize. P2P
enthusiasts spend considerable time speculating on whether the peer
model of producing digital information could be extended to the realm
of physical, industrial production, with small scale producers
networking to produce a single product on open-source design. The
fact is, it was already done a hundred years ago, as Jacobs described.
Jumping forward, most towns probably have several hobbyists with
well-stocked backyard machine shops who could (and will have to)
figure out how to machine parts to keep their appliances running when
the centralized industrial machine breaks down. I believe this could
well evolve into an economy of small-scale, distributed industrial
production for local markets--like Emilia-Romagna, but for the local
rather than the export market.
I've written extensively on the possibilities for decentralized
production technology in this draft chapter:
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/05/draft-chapter-decentralized-production.html
Likewise, the learning curve for intensive raised bed horticulture
isn't that steep. Jeavons and like-mided people have reduced the
process to writing pretty well; and with a few years of practice,
you've got it down. Jeavons could grow enough food to feed a single
person on 4000 square ft--less than half a quarter-acre suburban lot.
It was a carb-intensive diet of about 80% tubers, legumes, and cereal
grains; but considering the average amount of available space in the
typical suburb is a lot more than 4000 sq ft, there's plenty of room
to grow supplemental veggies, fruit and nut trees, and even a little
feed for chickens and rabbits or some goats for milk. A lot of those
big Brady Bunch-style lawns in the cul de sacs may be dug up.
More below.
> But the Hollywood notion of an overnight collapse is just
as much of a fantasy; it makes for great screenplays but
has nothing to do with the realities of how civilizations
fall. The disintegration of a complex society takes
decades, not days. Since fossil fuel production will
decline gradually, not simply come to a screeching halt,
the likely course of things is gradual descent rather than
freefall.
I accidentally cut out the relevant portion about fraternal lodges,
but if you want a vivid fictional depiction of a society evolving
from such a base, check out the Northwest Union in Poul Anderson's
Maurai stories (especially Orion Shall Rise, but also the Maurai
short stories collected in Maurai and Kith). The Northwestern Union,
which emerged in the Pacific Northwest and B.C. in the century or so
after a nuclear war, was apparently influenced by market anarchist
accounts of medieval Iceland. In the case of Anderson's story line,
the fraternal lodges were the agencies that initially organized food
production and barter on a local level, as well as police and fire
protection, support for the elderly and disabled, and so forth.
Eventually, the local communities coalesced into a Northwestern union
running from Alaska to northern California. The central government
was practically non-existent (sort of on the same pattern as the
state governments in northern New England in the 1780s being loose
federations of town meetings, with laws that could be effectively
annuled by the towns) except on paper, but the federated lodges were
a powerful cohesive force.
--
Kevin Carson
Mutualist.Org: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://www.mutualist.org
Mutualist Blog http://mutualist.blogspot.com
--
--------------------------------------------------------
Posting archives: http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/
Escaping the Matrix website: http://escapingthematrix.org/
cyberjournal website: http://cyberjournal.org
How We the People can change the world:
http://governourselves.blogspot.com/
Community Democracy Framework:
http://cyberjournal.org/DemocracyFramework.html
Moderator: •••@••.••• (comments welcome)
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