dialog thru 17 Jan 2010

by

2010-01-20

Richard Moore

Bcc: contributors and interested parties
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Greetings,

Sorry for yesterday’s forward from Tom Burghardt. That was intended for newslog, but I hit the wrong button. The article was a good one, but if I started posting every good article to cyberjournal, that’s all we’d ever see here.

I’m surprised at how few people have participated on our cyberjournal-forum blog. I never expected lots of people to participate, but I figured there’d be at least be a half dozen or so. I have received lots of comments over the years where people complain they have to go through me to get things posted. The forum gives everyone an opportunity to respond directly to these postings, or to bring up new topics, without being moderated. In particular, if you find I’ve skipped over your contribution in one of my postings, you might put your comment on the blog instead:

rkm
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From: John Rogers <•••@••.•••>
Date: 14 January 2010 17:40:57 GMT
Subject: Local Money Design Webinars

Join me and fellow community currency activists around the world, for just ONE HOUR, to get a *taste* of the five week ‘Let’s Make Money’ webinar coming soon.
This NO COST GIFT Introductory Teleseminar will take place on Feb 04, 2010. 
Find out about the content of the full webinar and meet others interested in currency design.
John Rogers
Value for People

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Hi John,

I don’t promote commercial ventures here, but since you’re doing the one hour seminar for free, I’m letting our readers know about it. I’d be interested in your feedback on my community-development model, which is based on a local currency. The model has known flaws, but the main point remains: a development scheme is needed in order to get the most out of a local currency:
rkm
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From: Kevin Carson <•••@••.•••>
Date: 14 January 2010 18:41:44 GMT
To: Richard Moore <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Re: Gates Foundation = Monsanto

[excerpted]
…the business model of Gates, Bono, Buffett et al–variously called “cognitive capitalism” or “green capitalism”–requires the use of strong IP laws to enable them to capture value from green technology and network culture.
Paul Romer, of “New Growth Theory,” emphasizes the growing role of innovation, efficiency and mindwork, rather than increased capital inputs, as a source of economic growth.
What he fails to acknowledge is that the normal course is for innovation and increased efficiency to *destroy* GDP and cause *negative* growth.  The reason is that GDP is just a measure of the inputs consumed to get a given output.  When you reduce the labor and capital inputs required to produce, you increase the real material standard of living–but you cause monetized metrics of “the economy” to implode.   The only way to stip this is by using IP and other legal privileges to create artificial scarcity, so that capitalists can capitalize the new efficiencies and collect rents from artificial property rights.
The good news is, copyrights and patents are rapidly becoming unenforceable.
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Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective

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Hi Kevin,
Thanks for your contribution. We don’t hear from free-market folks much here, and what you are saying above makes very good sense. The usurpation of creative innovation begins with the venture capitalists. They invest in lots of start-up ideas, and then they own a big chunk of the successful ones. Bill Gates avoided that with his coup over IBM, where he achieved a monopoly on the PC operating system for a measly $50K. And then there’s the story of Nikola Tesla, whose amazing research was funded by JP Morgan, and then buried when Morgan figured out there was no way to charge for free energy. Today of course IP laws have gotten totally ridiculous, where Monsanto claims to have invented rice and pigs. 
Unfortunately, I can’t share your optimism about copyrights and patents becoming unenforceable. I assume you are referring to the Internet, where copyrighted articles and videos are routinely republished willy nilly by all of us. There aren’t many examples other than the Internet that I know of. I’ve seen draft legislation that could put a quick end to this, by making server providers responsible for any copyright infringements on their sites. Since providers could not actually police the content of grassroots blogs, videos, etc, they’d need to disallow them altogether. We are the monkey to the elite weasel:
All around the mulberry bush,
the monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey thought it was all in fun,
Pop! goes the weasel.
I poked around one of you blogs and found this:
Political action may be useful, as one small part of our toolkit.  But its primary purpose is to run interference and shield us from violent attacks on our primary order of business:  building the kind of society we want, here and now, outside the state.  A character in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, describing the revolution that led to her future decentralist utopia, summed it up perfectly. Revolution, she said, was not uniformed parties, slogans, and mass-meetings. “It’s the people who worked out the labor-and-land intensive farming we do. It’s all the people who changed how people bought food, raised children, went to school! ….Who made new unions, withheld rent, refused to go to wars, wrote and educated and made speeches.”  Or as David Pollard put it, the new society wins through “incapacitation—rendering the old order unable to function by sapping what it needs to survive.”
The way to achieve victory is not by seizing the state, or violently overthrowing it, but quietly confronting it with a reality already on the ground:  the reality that a rapidly expanding share of its laws are either no longer enforceable or cost more to enforce than it’s worth.

Well said! Do you have any notions about how we can create the ‘reality on the ground’? How can that become a movement?
rkm
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From: “Sue Skidmore” 
Date: 17 January 2010 03:56:10 GMT
To: “‘Richard Moore'” <•••@••.•••>
Subject: RE: Rebuttals to Flawed National NAS Report–and Challenge to Battery Industry

Hi Richard—
Well, I hope that they can come up with a great mass transit system….Also, I hope that the Prius batteries can be charged by the sun.  Do you think it is wishful thinking that a roof top panel could charge the car batteries one day?  I know that they have a roof top charger now but it only charges the air conditioner not enough to power the car.
I think that alien technology is being studied to find an alternative at least for those in power—maybe not for the rest of us.
Did you know that?
~Sue

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Hi Sue,
There is no technical problem as regards mass transit. Indeed, it took considerable effort to dismantle the systems that were already in place at the end of World War 2. I still remember the Pacific Electric ‘red cars’ that connected all of Los Angeles for 50 cents a ride (memorialized in the film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). One line passed within a block of where I lived, and I used to put nickels on the tracks to flatten them. These systems, throughout the US, were dismantled in order to force people into cars and maximize petroleum consumption. This dovetailed with the creation of tract housing suburbs, and I remember the first of those in Los Angeles. Massive suburbs complicate the problem of returning to mass transit, but the problems are not insurmountable.
As regards trying to make cars green, it’s not just the per-ride energy that is unsustainable. There’s all the waste of giving everyone their own hi-tech vehicle, which spends 90% of its time sitting in a driveway or a parking space, and a good deal of the rest of the time in a traffic jam or waiting for a traffic signal. Then there’s the fact that cars need to be replaced regularly, and there’s all the resources used up in building and maintaining highway systems. Even the manufacture of a tire requires lots of petroleum. One billion tires a year are produced globally, and 280 million are discarded each year in the US alone, creating a massive disposal problem. And of course cars are the most dangerous form of transport one can imagine. Somehow we’ve come to accept 40,000 or so deaths a year from auto accidents as ‘normal’ in the US. 
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that we have been visited by aliens or that we need their technology. Tesla and others have tapped into free energy without the assistance of aliens. Again the problems aren’t technical but political. As long as we live in a political system designed to exploit us, we aren’t going to see good solutions to anything. 
rkm
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From: Howard Switzer
Date: 17 January 2010 00:57:59 GMT
Subject: re: Climate science: observations vs. models

rkm> While collapse, suffering, and die-offs of ‘marginal’ populations will be unpleasant for us, it will give our ‘powerful factions’ a blank canvas on which to construct their new world order, whatever that might be. 

We have a blank canvas too, for all practical purposes, so I’m going to go with the idea that communities respond by coming together, getting much closer to one another and their land  base, and figuring out what it takes to survive while creating a more loving, local and self-reliant economy.  Meanwhile the empire sputters to a stop, out of gas, out of money, out of support.

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Hi Howard,
Good point. We have a blank canvas as well. Bringing communities together is the answer, but why isn’t that happening on a sufficient scale? This is the critical question we need to investigate. 
No, the empire isn’t puttering to a stop. It is not out of gas, it prints money whenever it wants to, and it doesn’t give a damn about support. They can create support anytime they want by putting up a talking puppet like Obama, or by staging another 9/11. 
rkm
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From: “Claudia Woodward-Rice”
Date: 18 January 2010 02:48:54 GMT
Subject: Re: dialog

Hi Richard-
  It’s interesting that the “fats” (as Waldo calls them) seem to be on both sides of the Climate debate- corrupting efforts to limit pollution, exploiting Carbon Trading for land grabbing or casino opportunities  ( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newslog/message/2706 ) while also encouraging all and sundry to no longer support any institutions that might have some chance of thwarting the Corporate State as it continues to rape and pillage.  Seems to be a Win-Win effort (for them).
  In the meantime I have recently realized just how much I have internalized the idea that < if the mass media promotes it, it’s phony > as you put it. I had to consciously turn on my concern for people in Haiti after this earthquake. My resistance to media faddism has built a complete block to whatever issue-of-the-moment. I’m sure this is not particularly healthy, tho it may be useful.  Would be interesting to hear how you cope? 
  Perception management and issue control has become so sophisticated that few think to resist or have the strength to do so. And resisting seems to have its own problems……
 Claudia

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Hi Claudia,
Both sides is right. The warming fanatics are always talking about how oil companies are sending out propaganda against global warming, while in fact the oil companies are great supporters of the cap-and-trade / carbon-tax agenda. 
Another point about the media: whenever the media jumps full-time on an issue, then we’re being sold a load of crap about something, or else we’re being distracted from major events. For example, the  Columbine High School shootings were orchestrated by the CIA in order to distract attention from the most savage day of bombing in Serbia. The earthquake in Haiti, which was most likely caused by HAARP, is a cover-up for a long-planned military occupation and grabbing of Haiti’s oil. The US takeover of the ‘rescue operations’ is designed to allow as many people to die as possible, by blocking aid, just as in New Orleans. 

How do I cope? I figure we were privileged to be born at this time, when we are most needed by humanity, more than at any other time in history.
rkm

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