RUPPERTS NEW BOOK AND GARDEN STUFF

from Murph

We got a copy of the new Michael Ruppert book, “A Presidential Energy Policy” and I just finished reading it. The first 14 chapters are primarily concerned with recapping what has happened in the last 15 years, peak oil and discussions on alternative energy. He also emphasizes that he had been predicting since his book “Crossing the Rubicon” what has now manifested. He does admit that some of his timing was off.

I have to admit that Ruppert has been pretty much right on and his first book, “Crossing the Rubicon” which was a large influence on the decisions we have made. So far, we are satisfied with those decisions, that is; Getting out of a large population area, getting into a small community that has the potential for sustainability, getting our personal sustainability going, largely divorcing ourselves from the greater society, learning to live a post collapse life style, cutting way back on spending (out of necessity, SS is not a lot of money), getting out of debt, you know the drill.

One of the things that interested me in the book particularly is his discussion of alternative energy sources. He examines them pretty closely, not to the extent that some other writers have, but a good synopsis. I agree with him that the hydrogen substitute seems to be a stone cold dead end. He also talks about wind, wave and solar energy, all of which are not going to replace oil and gas. He talks about some of the more esoteric stuff too, but emphasizes that these are mostly on paper and scalability is an almost insurmountable problem, even if they work. Infrastructure for all the alternatives is also a huge problem. If we had diverted resources 30-40 years ago to these things, they would have had promises, but we laughed Carter out of office for broaching the subject. It sure appears that he was right about at least one thing during his presidency.

Ruppert goes into considerable discussion about peak oil and oil wars and sites a lot of research concerning this situation.

In chapter 11 he hits on localization pretty hard, insisting that this is going to be absolutely necessary.

One of the interesting aspects of the book is his tying money and energy together. He also sites how money has been used in the past and in some other societies. He insists that we have to change our method of using and distributing money in our changing society.

I was somewhat disappointed that he didn’t get into more of the ecological damage done by money and energy. Guess I can’t have it all.

Here are his 25 suggestions by title for the president without his elaborations.

1.Create a second strategic petroleum reserve of 750 million barrels of refined
products for state and local governments.
2.Create a new and uniform crude oil reserve accounting system for the U.S.
3.Enact the oil depletion protocol.
4.Immediately declassify the May, 2001 national energy policy development group
records (NEPDG)
5.Impose an immediate moratorium on all highway and airport expansion, including
NAFTA superhighways.
6.Completely rebuild and expand America’s rail system.
7.Implement a feed-in tariff.
8.Prohibit energy sources speculation.
9.Enact a national speed limit of 55 mph and strictly enforce it.
10.Eliminate all federal subsidies for ethanol and biofuel production.
11.Create feed-in tariffs for local food production point of origin labeling.
12.Stimulate and strengthen local food production through federal and local
governments, make vacant urban land available for cultivation.
13.Immediately make an agriculture soil assessment and restoration.
14.Create a federal clearing house to track and report on all state and local
initiatives/progress with respect to relocalization and energy use.
15.Draft and pass a new public utility holding company act
16.Rebuild the grid and energy infrastructure including oil and natural gas
pipelines.
17.Create a public energy oversight board to police and monitor advertising and
public dissemination of information about energy.
18.Redraft the tax code of the U.S.
19.Re-do nuclear power and take material from weapons.
20.Draft new federal building codes for home and office construction.
21.Re-do the educational system. More vocational training for one thing.
22.Reduce federal government energy use by 15%.
23.Drastically reduce overseas military deployment.
24.Decriminalize the hemp plant and encourage widespread domestic production.
25.Open a rational open and ethical domestic and global dialog on population growth
and reduction.

I have not, of course, included all the supporting arguments for each. Some are interesting rationales. I suppose there would be heavy debate of the wisdom of any of these. And no matter whether you agree with all of them or not, and no matter how rational they are, I try to imagine just how many of them would ever become implemented. I honestly can’t see any of them becoming policy, too may of them make too much sense and too many big money people would have to bite the bullet. I just don’t see them happening.

I also notice that they all increase the control by the federal government, which I think is a great deal of the problem to begin with. Just what we need, more elite control of more stuff. But, if you are of the liberal persuasion, I would imagine you might agree with most of this. Me, I bristle at more government control of anything.

It is a book worth reading though.

On to more domestic stuff. I have decided to record the progress of our attempt to grow our own food as it progresses with photos. Here is a few of them plus some photos of Montana’s neck of the woods and Belgium’s garden area.






Two pics of Montana's big sky area where he lives. Quite a valley there,beautiful isn't it.



What the garden looks like in the morning with the frost covers on the beds.



I think rhubarb could care less if it frosts at night.



Potato bed. 14 plants, experiment this year to see if we can keep them alive. Have special plastic film to cover them with every night and then frost blanket over that.



Three types of onions and garlic beds. They are doing real well. Strawberry bed in the back corner along with carrots and some other types of onions. The walking onions will be interesting to watch grow and reproduce.



Greenhouse starts. Doing well since put in the wood stove.



Belgium's new garden area.

Have a good week folks. The weather here has been all day clear sky (except for the chemtrails)and bright sunshine and down to freezing at night. Been fetching more firewood as I have time. Busy time.

THE GOADING OF A POPULATION

From Murph

I keep reading new stuff nearly every day concerning the government entities at nearly every level, but concentrated at the federal level, proposing what sure appears to me to be insane legislation. In our state alone, this year, there have been introductions into the state legislature of over 150 new taxes, including one specifically aimed at taxing bird seed. Just lately, the feds have introduced legislative action to take ownership of ALL surface water in the U.S. There are parts of the country where the states have installed water meters on private single family water wells, and collecting fees for usage. Some states and regions do not allow the collection of rain water for garden use. Did you read about the guy arrested by the state pigs for having a bumper sticker with the old “Don’t Tread On Me” rattlesnake. The no fly list just keeps on expanding, (seems like I’m on that one), the wanton display of raw power by the cop’s indiscriminant use of tazars. Or how about the naked power grab for absolute control of the food supply. And then there is the good old standby, gun control. God almighty!! The list grows daily.

Some of this stuff happening at governmental levels is so outrageous that it is hard to believe it is happening or being proposed. No sense in getting into denial on this. The problem for me is to try and speculate/understand why they would be doing it.

So, putting on my specially designed custom fitted foil hat to shield my brain from the mind control rays emanating from the eastern side of the country, I commence to thinking, which may get me into all kinds of unforeseen difficulties. I just can’t help myself.

Seems to me there are several reasons for these insane pieces of legislation;

1. The power hungry assholes figure that if they just take a piece at a time, the population won’t rebel. After all, this is what has been going on for a very long time now. If you ease into control with lots of fear and justification given, people tend to swallow most any restrictions on their lives.
2. The power hungry assholes figure that there isn’t a damned thing the population will do about any insane power grab because they are too stupid, too ignorant, to lazy, too scared, too insecure, or any combination of these.
3. The power hungry assholes figure that they have all the big guns and hi tech control shit that even if we poked our heads up above the ground and objected that they can suppress this uprising with ease.
4. AND HERE IS THE KICKER. They are doing this crap because they are purposely goading us in active rebellion. Then they will have the immediate excuse to incarcerate, kill and intimidate with a vengeance.

I suspect the first three are a pretty common elitist position, but the fourth is something else. It is hard to imagine wanting to provoke 350 million people into active rebellion. It would be a very dangerous proposition in my opinion. If dealt with successfully, it would speed up by generations the complete take over of the world, or at least this country, by a handful of elites. If unsuccessful, the commoners would be dining on the carcasses of a bunch of fat-ass elites in quick order.

The reason I propose #4 is because I suspect that the elites see a potential for control being taken away if they don’t do something fairly drastic pretty soon. It is a form of poker bet where the mortgage, diamond ring, the car and slavery of the wife are now in the pot and it is time to show all the cards. Win it all, or lose it all.

This wouldn’t be complete without mentioning a bit about who compromises the elites. I am using the term to group the relatively small amount of people that have enough money and power to force events to their liking. At a local level, the amount of money involved is quite small. At the international level, it is huge. So there are going to be these small groups of elites at every level of society, and as one investigates upward from the local level, it is seen that the power structure and the wealth involved increases dramatically. It also becomes a question of just how tight an organization the elites subscribe to. It appears to me that at each level, the groups are very tightly knit. So, who is at the very top of these elitist groups and what is their nature? We can read and speculate about that, but out of necessity, these groups are/have been very secretive. The internet abounds with information about the top of the pile being the Illuminati, and all the layers beneath this are elite minions in service to the very top. I still wonder if there is indeed the ability of the supposed 13 families to control that many layers of power. Rockpicker put up a link in the last post that insists that they can and do control it all. That article postulates that the Illuminati are at the final position and are now proceeding to depopulate the world by 80% and that would leave about 1 billion population world wide, and intend to own the complete world. Personally, I am unable to fathom why that would be desirable. One billion people are not going to be able to sustain a high technology society, it simply depends on way too much division of labor, in my opinion, that cannot be sustained with that few people scattered around the world. So I am left scratching my head over that one. If this is true, than the Illuminati must be figuring on going back to pre industrial and pre hi tech living. I find that hard to believe. Maybe they have dreams of being feudal kings in stone castles again?

That article at; http://1984usa.com/higherlearning/?p=1417 does point out something I do really agree with. If we don’t want what is happening to proceed, what needs to take place is a mass movement of non compliance world wide. I don’t really expect to see that happen, but I dream too of a better world. It is interesting that the article also asserts that there is no world wide population problem. How they justify this assertion I find childish and unthinking. They break it down into a simple calculation of land mass to population acreage. Way too simplistic. Gives me pause to giving any validity to the article at all with that kind of nonsense. .


We all know that the class warfare in this country has been intensifying to almost unbearable tensions. We very well might be coming to an important crossroads on the question of distribution of wealth and the winner takes all situation. It is possible that there is a general awakening going on and the elites are concerned about losing some or all of the pie, and we know that they aren’t going to give in to this gracefully. In their view, they are very close to absolute control, and it is time now to go for the brass ring. It is now time to goad the general population into active rebellion and the use of overwhelming force to squash it for the final battle. Not a bad tactic if the strategy is well thought out. However, logistics are going to be a problem for them. If the elites can control the larger population centers, they have to deal with the very large land mass and the demographic dispersion of snarling, angry, well armed groups running guerilla operations against their military and police. Unless they are willing to do the mass murder/mass incarceration, salting of the earth trip, they could lose it all, including their precious fat asses.

Of course, the goading of the population into active rebellion might not work and they just continue to take piece meal everything that is left to loot while the population grovels at their feet, thanking them for every little scrap they throw out, which with a few notable exceptions, is exactly what history indicates has been going on for 5000 years. Will the American public in particular do it any different? The jury is still out in deliberation. Personally, I would hope we have the balls to stand up and win this class war once and for all. For that to happen, we would have to have some kind of mass understanding concerning just what the elites have been doing to us for those 5000 years and be willing to draw the line in the sand and mean it. A bluff isn’t going to win anything in this struggle. Perhaps that is what the mass consciousness change is really about, a desire for freedom from oppression and some form of an egalitarian society without elitist control.

I am of the opinion that the elitist class is in either denial or know something we don’t know concerning all of the supposed calamitous situations coming at us. I’m opting for denial. I think that they see resources, all of them, as their personal property and even with a drastically reduced world wide population and declining resources, there will be enough left for them to retain control and privilege. Climate change? What do you think they have all those underground cities are for? Pandemics? Again, those underground cities for isolation until it runs out. I truly believe that they see themselves, as a class, as invulnerable to any of this stuff or, they have an escape plan we don’t know about. Lots of SF stories around that theme. There will be individual casualties of course, but survival of the fittest and best prepared you know. The elitist class really do consider the rest of the population as ignorant useless eaters, fit only to serve their wishes and desires with the cost of just enough rewards to keep the subservient operational and relatively satisfied.


On a much smaller scale, we have the same situation where we are living. I have periodically written about our fight with the county elites for over two years now. Their attitude mirrors the elites that control almost everything, that is; we are too ignorant, stupid and unmotivated to resist. Well, a small group started by some pissed off women showed that there can be resistance and with some success.

My message to the elites; EXPECT RESISTANCE, BUT NOT ON YOUR TERMS!

Doubt

Those darned chickens got into the spray paint again!



These are the raised beds all ready to plant. Now, if the weather would cooperate...



It's nice to have fresh greens again.




The Greenhouse. Note the smoke stack.



This is the woodstove Murph put in the greenhouse

Doubt
By freeacre

I have been having a difficult time coming up with new posts lately. Thankfully, ras took up the slack last week. But, last night we watched the movie, “Doubt,” with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymore Hoffman, and it just came together for me. Funny how the Universe works, isn’t it? The movie, by the way, is well worth watching.

It seems that I am once again, in a state of doubt. I watched the interview with our Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, on Charlie Rose the other day. Although Mr. Geithner does have a rather disconcerting habit of leading with his furrowed forehead when he speaks, there didn’t appear to be any signs of sawed off horns on his head, and there was no spittle running down his face. He did not seem, in other words, like a reptilian cousin of Dick Chaney. Maybe he is actually trying to stop a total meltdown of the global economy, not just funnel all the possible money from the next two generations into the pockets of his friends on Wall Street. I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter much at this point.

Because, when I read the posts and links to articles on climate change from Survival Acres, we may have already added enough crap into the atmosphere that the tipping points may have already been reached. Here’s an example of a recent report:

“… New evidence not only suggest that we are headed for catastrophic climate impacts, with the near-extinction of most life on Earth, but that our only hope for survival is to reverse our past emissions.
Those studies showed a 550-p.p.m. world as warming quite a lot. In 1979, a panel of the US National Academy of Sciences led by Jule Charney, a prominent weather and climate researcher, estimated it would be 1.5 to 4.5 °C hotter. That estimate for what has become known as ‘climate sensitivity’ has stayed remarkably solid ever since: the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pegged the sensitivity as being between 2 and 4.5 °C, while adding that higher values could not be excluded.
Although early policy discussions focused on the 550 p.p.m. mark, researchers and politicians soon concluded that such warming would be too much. In 1996, the European Union declared that “global average temperatures should not exceed 2 °C above pre-industrial level and that therefore concentration levels lower than 550 p.p.m. CO2 should guide global limitation and reduction efforts”. Over the following decade, 450 p.p.m. became increasingly cited as a level to aim for, because some studies associated that concentration with 2 °C of warming.
In their 2008 paper, Hansen and his colleagues offer a number of reasons for arguing that even 450 p.p.m. is too high.
Hansen, though, sticks with the new low figure. He argues that realizing the world is already in dangerous climatic territory “completely changes the story. When you say 450 or 550, you’re talking about what rates of growth you are going to allow. When you say we have to get to 350, that means you have to phase down CO2 emissions in the next few decades.”
Failure to reverse past emissions can result in some very long lived, but unlivable results:
Solomon and her colleagues tested what would happen if CO2 emissions immediately ceased after concentrations peaked at various values, starting with 450 p.p.m. (ref. 3). What they found surprised them. CO2 levels subsided so slowly that they remained substantially above pre-industrial levels 1,000 years into the future. Global temperatures also stayed up, and had declined only slightly from their peak by the year 3000. In fact the simulations ended before temperatures dropped anywhere close to their starting point.
The take-home message from his and other studies, Lowe says, is this: “If you do end up somewhere you don’t want to be, it’s probably going to take you a long time to get back to lower temperature levels.”
Unstated in Climate Crunch is what it means for life on Earth to endure for a long time. But that’s been covered here before from other research. The sensitivity for Earth’s biodiversity (including humans) is such that we cannot endure for a long time, or even a short time, GMST increases of even 2C, let alone the probably higher estimates. The impacts upon species, food production, fresh water, sea level changes, catastrophic storms and such like are too severe for us to assume our civilization will remain even remotely intact.
James Lovelock is giving us a final warning — Final warning from a sceptical prophet
Lovelock argues that model projections of the climate a century ahead are of little use. The models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) extrapolate from a smooth trend of warming, yet the real climate system, complex and fully coupled to the biology of land and ocean, is unlikely to change in this simple way. It is more likely to flip from one state to another, with non-linear tipping points that the IPCC models are too simplistic to capture. Lovelock fears that the climate will shift to a new and considerably hotter regime, and that once underway, this shift will be irreversible.
This view is not officially sanctioned ‘IPCC-speak’, but he is fully within the envelope of scientific consensus when he warns of the possibility of rapid and irreversible change. Other climate scientists — notably Wally Broecker (see Nature 328, 123–126; 1987) — have said much the same for a long time, although Lovelock uses more graphic language and his popular voice will carry further. Palaeoclimate records show that rapid flips have happened before, so this must be a strong possibility for the future if we continue to force up the levels of greenhouse gases at the current rate.
What is controversial is Lovelock’s vision for humanity: rapid climate change will lead to the deaths of most people on the planet, and to mass migrations to those places that are still habitable. He does not spell out exactly how this might happen, but is convinced a hotter Earth will be able to sustain only a few per cent of the current human population. The implication is that Gaia and human society are close to a cliff-edge, and could unravel rapidly and catastrophically.”
SO…. Have we been wasting our time trying to “be the change we want to see?” Is it all for naught? Should we have just taken the money from the sale of our home and become urban apartment dwellers? We could have gone on a cruise. We could be sipping lattes at a streetside café in Portland and going to the theater. Damn! Sometimes that doesn’t sound half bad…
Who’s in charge here? Does the collective or individual consciousness of human beings have an effect on what manifests on this planet? If a whole bunch of us began meditating and visualizing and living the new paradigm of simple living in harmony with the earth, would it make a significant difference? Maybe there is something to that story about Noah and the Ark or Lot and his wife that got turned to a pillar of salt. Maybe this has happened before…
As the earth once again travels into the middle of the galaxy and encounters Hanab-Ku (sort of like “The Destructor” in Ghost Busters, only worse), it might become clear that the Universe is thoroughly in charge, and the stupid problems that we have created are all going to be wiped clean no matter what. It will be like we were never here. “Impermanence,” the Buddhists advise. “Get used to it.” (I’m paraphrasing here.)
So, once again, I find myself in doubt about the future and forced to deal with the here and now. Coming full circle from the 70’s when I first read Ram Dass’s book, “Be Here Now,” I find myself becoming quiet, and remembering one of the early lessons in “A Course in Miracles.” “My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.” And, another one, “I am determined to see things differently.”
“When in doubt,” the Hindus say, “chop wood and carry water.” Yeah. Murph is tending the rabbits. I am baking a loaf of bread. The sun is finally shining. The chicks are growing. Right here and right now, things are good.